Database Marketing in the Social Networking age

Posted by Chris on March 28th, 2010

When I started LanSwitch ( which became Voyager ) in the early 90’s I set aside a bedroom for an office and on my desk I had a telephone, a fax machine and a laptop ( initially not connected to the Internet , later connected with a dial-up connection ) with Office and a Contact Manager application and a printer. Luxury, I thought because it was the same as I had at Fibernet and much better than I had at Memorex.

My target market was basically: Companies that had busy Local Area Networks; that were in either The Midlands ( where I lived ) or London ( where I could easily commute to and knew people ). So, I basically targeted a combination of London based Financials and other general companies in London and the Midlands. I think I bought the Computer Users Yearbook as my basic database. ( Actually a very comprehensive and detailed source of information ).

I went through the process of identifying a target market and building a database of prospects and suspects many times over during my sales and business start-up career.

Typically now I will segment by horizontal ( size of company ), vertical ( type of company ) and geographical ( location ) and then various other factors eg structure of company, people within that company eg IT Managers etc etc.

Then a database can be purchased which is targeted and therefore typically lower cost than purchasing 1000’s of contacts many of which are not within your target market.

There are many database suppliers these days so it is possible to get some great offers on targeted data.

The equipment side has obviously come on in 17 years but not incredibly so – broadband and wi-fi; scanning software and fax software; CRM versus Contact Management; softphones ( eg Skype ) and video conferencing ( Skype, Webex etc ); standalone traditional and IP phones;printers. 

Where there has been enormous progress has been in Internet search and Social Network Marketing.

If you know what vertical you want to concentrate on eg Lawyers in Staffordshire you will find much of the information that you need online via Google or some other search engine.

With great timing ( !! ) I have just been reading this article about Linkedin

 http://money.cnn.com/2010/03/24/technology/linkedin_social_networking.fortune/

that I picked up on Twitter ( posted by Jon Besag who is in sales at Linkedin 😉

This is well worth a read for many reasons. 

This article includes comments about in house and external recruiters using Linkedin to find the people that they/thier clients are looking for . There certainly are a lot of recruiters on Linkedin – in fact when I was talking to a friend of mine the other day who is a Linkedin trainer he told me that there were about 68,000 people on Linkedin who called themselves recruiters ( I just did a Linkedin search for ” Recruiters ” and got about 48,000 ) and that there were probably about 100,000 because a lot of recruiters did not call themselves recruiters.

I used this fact recently to help a company that I am working with, who are selling multi job board posting software, to target recruiters. From a small, personalised ” mailshot ” to selected Linkedin recruiters we got a few very positive responses and made a proposal to one within a week and got an order from it.

Recruitment is an obvious thing to do on Linkedin but  as said in the article ” The obvious one is jobs, but it’s not just jobs. It’s also clients and services.”

For me the goal is to make a ” personalised ” approach to potential clients and ” personalisation ” requires research. The difference between what you can do now and what you could do 17 years ago is that you can gather far more information on people and companies before you make any approach whatsoever.

If you combine a targeted database with internet and social media search then you have a fantastic tool to help you personalise your ” intelligent ” marketing and sales approach.

 

 

 

 

If you are a member of eg Ecademy, Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed,Skype or MSN then each of these have thier own search facilities – some more sophisticated than others.

Just today I was asking someone how they prospected on the Internet and they said Linkedin, Skype and MSN.

Using a combination of Internet search and Social/Business networks you can find out an awful lot about people and companies.

Social Networks are the key to High Google Rankings ??

Posted by Chris on December 30th, 2009

If I Google myself it’s mainly the social network entries that come to the top – LinkedIn, Facebook etc etc

Someone sent me this link today

http://viralso.com/linkedin.html

to people who reckon that they can SEO your LinkedIn profile page so that you come to the top of Google. ( Of course we all know that there are no guarantees on this front !! ).

I just thought that it was interesting and a sign of the times !!

The Great Internet & Social Media Marketing Experiment – Day Three

Posted by Chris on December 19th, 2009

Yes, well it may APPEAR as though nothing has happened but actually – in the background it has.

I have been talking to Howard at Seventh Wave Media ( http://www.seventhwavemedia.co.uk/home ) and Nikki at Nikki Pilkington.com ( http://www.nikkipilkington.com/ ) about what we are doing and I have one more ” adviser ” that I want to involve in the experiment.

Obviously the companies that we are working with have loads of other things to do other than this.

The main tasks that we have set have been for them to produce initial lists of what they want to be found on the Internet for. We have also given them an appreciation of the fact that when we try and get them found for these things ( and any others that we come up with after discussion ) some of them will be harder to do than others. So we are looking for some flexibility and lateral thinking. We also asked then to think about thier main products and services and then prioritise the keywords/phrases in line with what is most important to them.

Nikki made a great point which was that we not only need to look at what they want to be found for but also what it is worth putting the effort into being found for  ( effort/reward ratio ?? ). This made me think about a Cisco chart I once saw where they plotted all the things that they wanted to do from an Internet presence perspective on a graph of ” How difficult to do and how costly ” to ” What benefit would be derived from it ” and then picked off all the easy to do and derived great benefit points first and then left the harder more expensive and lower return ones until last.

This went well with the fact that we gave advice on the fact that some things are much harder to rank for than others and we have various ways of finding out how easy it will be to rank for different things.  If we can find relevant, less competitive keywords it will be much easier to be found and rank for these than it will be  for competitive ones.

Anyway we have initial lists back from both companies now and we are looking at these. I did have a bit of a test yesterday using Ecademy posts to see if I could get a ranking for a couple of the terms and I did get a number one listing for one of the terms within an hour and a middle of page one ranking for another within 12 hours. So, both of these terms look doable.

We have also asked the companies to get Google Webmaster Tools ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Webmaster_Tools ) and Google Analytics (  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Analytics )    installed on thier websites so that we can look at the effect that all of our effort has on traffic to thier website.

Remember, at the end of the day we are interested in how much business they get out of all this but first we will look to improve visibility, findability and then visitors to them and thier websites. We will be looking for all forms of inbound enquiries – emails, posts, phone calls etc etc

We also had a discussion about email-shots with one of the companies and I have put up a few comments about this both here on this blog and elsewhere. It was quite interesting looking at various email-shot companies and looking at what other people were doing with thier own email-shots. This led to an emphasis on the fact that email-shots are connected into the New Media Marketing Whirlpool in a number of ways eg the email-shot will refer people back to the website, offer links to eg Twitter,Facebook etc pages and needs a url with a relevant decsription so that the email can be posted on various Social Network and Information sites.

KEYWORD EFFECTIVENESS INDEX (KEI)

Posted by Chris on December 18th, 2009

http://www.wordtracker.com/database_help/keihelp.html

It’s a bit techie but I have just been thinking about this area quite a bit. It’s fully explained in the link above.

So, simply we are talking about finding “achievable” keywords where achievable means that you have a chance of ranking high in Google for those keywords.

A simple way of finding keywords that are achievable is compiling a list of relevant keywords and then typing some of those keywords into Google and seeing how many results you get

The other day when I was very grateful to BMW Sytner High Wycombe ( for fixing my car )  I thought that I would say so publicly in a few places. I Googled ” BMW Sytner High Wycombe ” and saw that I got the following results:

  Results 110 of about 2,570 for bmw sytner high wycombe. (0.14 seconds)

Oh, ok I thought, so not that many then { ” BMW sytner ” gives Results 110 of about 30,600 for bmw sytner. (0.42 seconds) and ” BMW ” gives   Results 110 of about 183,000,000 for bmw. (0.21 seconds) }.

I wonder if I can get something to rank on the front page pretty quickly ???

I know ( because I have done it loads of times before and because it is a pretty highly ranked website to Google ) that I can post something on Ecademy and it will sometimes appear within 20 minutes or so ( Google index’s every 20 minutes ).

So ( at the time of writing ) this Google

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=bmw+sytner+high+wycombe&meta=&aq=5&oq=bmw+sy

has this post

http://www.ecademy.com/module.php?mod=list&lid=197573

In the middle of the front page. Hopefully BMW Sytner will appreciate the thought !!

As you will find out in a following post we are asking a couple of companies that we are working with to write a list of all the keywords that they want to be found for and then we are going to prioritise those and look at what we think we can rank high for pretty quickly.

SEO is not important any more !!

Posted by Chris on December 17th, 2009

http://www.searchnewz.com/topstory/news/sn-2-200912162010TheYearSEOIsntImportantAnymore.html

How very interesting !!

The Great Internet & Social Media Marketing Experiment – Day Zero

Posted by Chris on December 17th, 2009

ok – so a big decision was made today by some friends and I but I have some more people to talk to that I would like to participate in this with us.

We have decided to work with a couple of companies to help them develop thier Internet & Social Media Marketing presence.We will tell you more about them as and when we and they are ready.

Ultimately our objective is going to be to increase thier sales. Initially we will focus on raising thier profile on Google for selected search terms and increasing the number of visitors and traffic to thier main website. ( We will do this in many and various ways ). Then we will be looking for actual conversations, enquiries and leads and then how many of those leads we can convert into sales.

Here is an interesting presentation about social media return on investment that will be relevant: 

http://www.slideshare.net/thebrandbuilder/olivier-blanchard-basics-of-social-media-roi

I have had a number of conversations with the parties that we are working with at the moment and the same view was coming out from them.

” Chris, all of this is very interesting but WHERE DO WE START ?? ”

Now THAT is a very good question !!!!

Indeed where DO you start ??? Well of course where you start depends on where you are….

We have decided that the Day Zero tasks for them are as follows:

First, they must decide what terms they want to be found for. What would a customer put into Google’s search box that would result in them being found ??? We have caveated this with an understanding that some search terms are much harder to rank for than others. For example if someone is searching for ” computer systems ” Google says ( on my search this time ) that there were 141 Million results. However, if someone searches for ” computer systems in Dorset ” there were ( this time ) 162 Thousand results. Therefore this is one way of saying that the first search term is much more “competitive” than the second. i.e. it is likely to be much harder to rank high on Google for the first term than the second. This leads to the idea of being flexible ( lateral thinking ) in terms of what you want to be found for and also to being ” niche ” and ” specific “. How about ” HP computer systems in Dorset ” ? – 17,100 results i.e. more niche and specific and probably easier to rank high for.

( There are considerable numbers of other ways of finding other, related search terms or keywords including the fact that as you start to type
” HP computer….. ” Google gives you suggestions as to what you might be looking for  e.g. ” HP computers for sale ” it suggests. You can also use sophisticated keyword analysis tools like Wordtracker –  http://www.wordtracker.com/ ).

We have also suggested that our companies consider all the potential products and services that they offer as possible search terms eg
”  asterisk based telephone systems “.

The companies that we are talking to have websites and we have looked at these.

We have asked that the companies ensure that Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools are installed on thier websites and if they are not installed the we will install them.

This is going to give us historical ( hopefully ) and baseline information that will guide us on things like correct structure of the website, keywords being used, inbound links, number of hits, traffic etc etc etc

We will be using our keyword analysis to guide us going forward on things like content and appropriate metatags and titles.

We have already looked at the websites source code and so we know that there are things that need addressing. We have also looked briefly at competitor sites and where they appear in the searches and how they are constructed. We think that even for some of the very competitive terms we have a chance of getting a good ranking.

We will also do our own list of keywords and phrases to compare with the lists  and  ( probably ) add to  what they have.

So, that’s Day Zero !!!

It was chatting to people today because the whole subject area kept coming up. I liked a couple of the comments that were made today:

A friend ” My daughter is the Twitter and Facebook expert for ( a very big computer company ). I don’t have a clue what she does “.

One of the companies ” xyz says we should have a YouTube channel. What ??? ”

It’s a very fast changing area that we are in and as I also discussed with someone today the one thing to realise is that it is never totally finished. There is always something else to do to ensure that you are found before someone else. It’s sort of scary but also sort of comforting as is the fact that you are not the only one to have a website that you don’t totally like and certainly has not been optimised. There are loads of people in the same boat !!

Internet Video Marketing Journey

Posted by Chris on December 15th, 2009

If you have read a couple of my Marketing related posts here you will know that I consider Internet Video to be one of the  ” referrers ” of people and links back to your website and you.

My interest in Internet Video Marketing goes back some way. In fact I realised that I had a couple of timelines for this that I could check and I’ve surprised myself with how the time has flown by !!

In  December 2006 I produced ( or had produced ) a video for the Glan Yr Afon Inn. Here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1YGFgQHsno

and it comes up on Google alongside it’s Google Video version when you search on The Glan here:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=glan+yr+afon+inn&meta=&aq=f&oq=

Now, I think that the thing that sparked me off then was that I noticed how simple and high quality online videos had become. ( not all of them were simple and high quality but some were ).

I came across Mike Koenigs ( who I will talk about later as it is he that has sparked off the recent renewed interest ) and his ” Internet Video Marketing with Internet Infomercials “(  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5R660ePBuI )  and also came across Guy Massey of The Internet Video Company ( see examples of thier work here http://www.ivc4.com/ivn/ ) . There were other people and companies that influenced me at the time – I just don’t remember them all. 

I guess that it was probably Mike who made me decide to produce a video myself and get it online. Fortunately for me I had access to a professional filming and editing team that had been recommended to me and I hired them, gave them a brief and sent them up to The Glan for a couple of days.  A couple of weeks later I went to thier offices and they showed me the demo. of the film. We made a few tweaks, added some ( not expecially brilliant ) music and I had my film on a disc. One of the children ( young adults now ! ) ” ripped ” it off the cd and  put it up on YouTube  and Google ( before Google bought YouTube ) and the other integrated it into The Glan website. So, we had videos on YouTube,Google and the website. Hey!! – I was pretty proud of the whole team !! Although I did not do it all myself it was great to know that we had started from nothing and got to a video on the Internet.

Then we started on our ” biking videos ” , with a new filming and production team. Aberdare Park was our first video:

http://thebikechannel.ning.com/video/945189:Video:4

which we all thought was great and then we moved on to our ” bike upgrade videos ” e.g.

http://thebikechannel.ning.com/video/945189:Video:962

here

http://thebikechannel.ning.com/video/945189:Video:1945

and here

http://thebikechannel.ning.com/video/945189:Video:2222

What exactly were we doing – Hey !! we were just exploring and having fun – ok ??

By this stage I had experience of working with three filming and production crews !!!

Now to put it simply you could say that The Glan video was just about improving the experience of looking at The Glan website and nothing to do with search. Hopefully if people looked at the video they would be even more interested in visiting The Glan. 

The Aberdare Park video was about us starting to produce a programme or a channel of bike related films and the upgrade videos were about educating people as part of the channel content and also some product placement ( Mikuni Carbs and Kuryakyn Hypercharger ). Again not about search.

However, I knew that Mike Koenigs was focussed on using internet videos to get good search rankings. In many ways he worried less about content and quality of the video and more about getting it up there  to generate more traffic and leads.

I also knew that Mike was developing a product called Traffic Geyser whose basic purpose was to upload videos across multiple video platforms. I also knew that Google was ( apparently ) going to start taking more notice of pictures and video. 

Fast forward 4 years ( yes 4 years !!!! ). What’s changed ?? What happened ???

Well I signed up for Traffic Geyser for about 18 months but I didn’t use it ( I was not producing any videos and I did not need to upload them to one video site never mind multiple video sites ) so I let the license fee lapse. I was also off exploring various other way of getting good rankings on the Internet. Oh !! and of course I was busy learning about Social Networks. That’s how I have at this point thousands of connections on Facebook, Twitter, Ecademy and LinkedIn ( not as many as some but more than most ! ).

I was also developing my ideas for the equivalent of the ” great universal connection theory ” or something, latterly known as the ” Marketing Whirlpool ” !! So, I have just expounded my theory when this   

http://www.trafficgeyser.com/poweredby/?p=3

lands in my inbox. Now Mike is also very good at email marketing and obviously tends his database with loving care 🙂 so, despite the fact that I let my Traffic Geyser account lapse I am still on his mailing list. ( I just have not taken any notice of his emails for the last couple of years I guess ! )

After viewing his first videos and having a bit of ( very interesting ) email discussion with him he ends up sending out another email and video here

http://www.trafficgeyser.com/poweredby/?p=160

Now, what you’ll notice here ( and Mike pointed this out ) is that in the first video case study Brian was clearly not very experienced but managed to pull in some good business really quickly whereas Valerie was clearly a pretty switched on and experienced lady ( let’s ignore the ” stay at home mom ” disguise shall we 😉  ) who had developed her business out of another business. Really focussed and niche.

Ok – so what’s the issue here then ??

Well, it’s sort of the old quality versus quantity debate:

Is it better to produce high quality videos and content that are distributed in single or small numbers and are optimised carefully OR is it sufficient and indeed effective to produce loads of  mediocre videos that rank highly in Google – at least for a while ???

Stay tuned while I explore – and please let me have your thoughts !!

The New Media Marketing Whirlpool

Posted by Chris on December 9th, 2009

I am always searching for ways to describe how new media marketing works to the business people that I talk to.

My latest thought was that you could describe it’s implementation as a sort of whirlpool effect where your potential customers are out on the calm sea and you want to catch thier attention at  the outer influence of the whirlpool and then draw them gently in and then steadily down towards you – the supplier of products, services or information.

One of the main features of this type of marketing is that it is about ” Pull Marketing ” and not ” Push Marketing “. You are drawing potential clients very gently into the whirlpool and not pushing them in !!

We live in an increasingly self service world: We like to be in charge of who we buy from and deal with and we don’t much like things being pushed at us or people being pushy.

The numbers of people using the Internet to find what they want are increasing all the time. The types of things that they search for are growing all the time.

The old ways of marketing are not necessarily dead but they are suffering from a terminal disease.

Traditional ( Push ) marketing is still happening – advertising, PR, mailshots, telemarketing – it’s all still going on and it’s all still effective to some extent but more and more and every day Internet and Word of Mouth Marketing ( accelerated by the Internet ) are rising to the ascendancy.

I also think that in catching peoples attention at the periphery of the new media whirlpool you think more about people’s problems, needs, desires, objectives and questions and you lead them gently to solutions, fulfillment, destinations and answers. There is tremendous subtlety, patience, intelligence, kindness and humour in this new media whirlpool approach. Generally speaking the ladies are good at it because they often have these traits in spades. It is natural for them to deal with people in that way.

Thinking about the old Features, Advantages, Benefits sales approach you are again thinking about the potential benefits and advantages to people rather than hitting them with almost meaningless features.

You certainly need to have thought through what your core offerings are and who your target markets are. However then, you need to think laterally about what people might be thinking about or searching the Internet for and what might strike a chord with your target market. Definately you need to put yourself in the mind of the person who might be your client.

So, the way that you might attract people at the very edges of your whirlpool might be by posting a video on YouTube. Maybe something funny or shocking or maybe something informative. You might also post thoughts and useful information in  your blog. You might post a Press Release on an Internet Press Release site. ( By the way all the time that you are doing these things you have at the back of your mind the key words and phrases that your target market will be using to find someone like you ). You post things on Social Networks like Facebook and Twitter and again some are funny, some light hearted, some are informative and some are serious. Of course you still try to get into various publications and press ( many of these have online variants now ).  You list on relevant directories. You publish white papers ( as you did before ). You make your products and services clear ( as you did before ). You maintain a clear and consistent brand ( as you did before ).

Floating out at the edges of the whirlpool each of things are having thier own effect in terms of attracting peoples attention and drawing them closer to you. The YouTube video gets it’s own YouTube audience but also signposts the way back to you or your company. The blogs, PR’s, Social Networks etc all do the same.

Each of these things link back to your main website and to your email, phone number, fax number and ultimately to you.

Literally as people come within the sphere of your whirlpool the current gets steadier and stronger. Not in an unpleasant or imposing way but in a friendly and helpful way.

By the time they meet you they know quite a bit about you. They know what you believe, what you stand for and what you believe. They have, to some extent, a relationship with you.  They may even have exchanged Facebook messages with you briefly before they have spoken to you.

Then we consider that when there was only Traditional Sales and Marketing we always did our best to empathise with our potential clients – to make our advertising relevant; to make our telemarketing about creating a relationship; to tailor our mailshots and letters to our target audience; to have our salespeople ask questions and listen.

It always was and is about walking in thier shoes and understanding how they they think and feel and what they are likely to want and need. It is just that now we have this amazing thing called the Internet to communicate with our potential customers in words, pictures and videos.

The Christmas Blog Success

Posted by Chris on December 8th, 2009

I just thought that I would have a quick look to see how The Glan was doing for people that searched for Christmas and New Year in Holywell.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=christmas+in+holywell&btnG=Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=

I am pleased to say that thanks to NikkiP and her team we have good representation in this and related searches with the Glan blog featuring well

Christmas meal in Holywell – Eat Christmas dinner at The Glan!

and also an old Ecademy blog that I did making a reappearance in 2009/10 clothing

http://www.ecademy.com/module.php?mod=list&lid=73858

Nice to see !!

Creating the best, high ranking website – the Vesuvius Project

Posted by Chris on November 7th, 2009

Sometimes the solution just turns up !!

Just recently we have been discussing how to create websites that not only look good and are easy to use but are also search engine optimised.

My past experience of having websites built is that you typically get website designers who are either creative and artistic or programmers. Simplistically the arty types don’t understand coding, databases and SEO and the programming types don’t understand art, aesthetics and ease of use.  In fairness you do get more that have an appreciation of both now.

However, you still get websites designed today without an appreciation of SEO. Some website customers don’t really think that this is an issue but my bet is that most of them will – one day. The days of un-SEO’d websites are long gone in my view.

Website designers often have to deal with customers who don’t understand that they need to do some thinking about what they would want to be ranked for if thier website was to be SEO’d. They also don’t appreciate that some things just take time and steady effort. Many of them also do not know what they want thier websites to look like or criticise designs without being able to say why it is not right for them.

There are a couple of things that modern websites really need that are often not provided.

One of these things is called a statistics monitor – enabling you to see the source of the people that come and visit your website and it’s various pages. One of the reasons for this is that today it is quite common to drive traffic to your website from e.g. a blogsite like this or from social network sites, press release sites. Google Adwords etc etc You need to know which of them is more effective at driving traffic to your website.

The other thing that you really need to be able to do is to be able to update the content on your website quickly and easily, with text and images and even video. Since I have had this blog I have been amazed at how easy it is for me to update it quickly. I am not doing anything clever with it at the moment – not using images and video for example. However I don’t have to get hold of my website designer and explain what I want to do – I just do it with a blog. A good website has to have regularly updated content though so not being able to update it easily is a problem.

So, because I tend to look for a process that will make a business proposition replicatable and scalable I have been thinking about the process for producing an effective website that incorporated things like SEO, statistics and content management.

Amazingly a business contact turned up here today with a system for making the production of websites easier and quicker ( deskilling some elements ) whilst at the same time ensuring that they were SEO’d and that they incorporated things like statistics and content management.

Now, for all I know there are loads of these systems around and more research is required but for now, as I said to my contact, I have a tool which allows me to follow and recommend a much more comprehensive website building process. 

We talked briefly about target market for this and to me it was ideal for businesses that were producing multiple, somewhat tailored but perhaps not exactly the same, websites. The thing was that I could reel off a couple of prospects ( suspects )  for this straight away.

Well I have put the system out for review to a couple of people I know and will get some feedback from them soon. Watch this space !!

Oh, it’s called the Vesuvius Project because I think that when we have the right solution it will explode 🙂


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