One of the most important things business owners often fail to do is to make their website remarkable. It really doesn’t matter what industry you’re in or how many other websites you’re competing against, making your site stand out from the pack is absolutely essential.
Last week in this space, I posed the musical question, “Are You Optimizing for Search Engines or for Customers?” Then, on Friday, I continued this theme in my talk at Search Insider Summit by focusing on the choice between search engine optimization vs. customer connection. One reporter summed it up as “search marketers need an attitude adjustment,” which might be true, but I want to go a bit further.
Have you ever been sitting in a restaurant and heard someone utter something not so nice about one of their clients? I have. Way too often.
It’s easy to forget that you’re in a public place when you’re having a one on one chat with someone you trust. As you chatter on about what’s going on in your business and the latest client who you are doing business with, it’s important to remember that the world is very small.
No, I don’t mean to take them off the shelves, or rip up your catalog. Yes, I know that if we don’t sell things, we cease to make a living. I’m talking about a style of marketing that seems focused on nothing but the final sale, while missing all of the other steps of the process. You need to end this maniacal focus on the sale as being the only way you interact with your customers. Too many people have gotten the idea that search marketing is great for sales, but have forgotten everything else about search marketing, and maybe marketing in general. To succeed at marketing, even search marketing, you need to find a way to remember about the rest of the buying cycle.
I had an interesting conversation over the weekend with Marvin, who called me to discuss Network Marketing. Somehow we had become connected through Facebook or another social networking website and he thought that since we were tagged as being friends online he believed that that gave him permission to call me and try to sell me something. That’s a whole other blog post in itself, and a debate that could go on and on. My conversation with Marvin, a network marketer who is heavily involved in MLM (Multi Level Marketing) and network marketing, thought that he could sell me a domain name and website. Marvin and I talked about it, and I explained that buying a website wasn’t my thing: that it in fact was not a way to “get more leads” by simply buying someone else’s website content that they were selling. In fact, doing so is actually leaning towards search engine spam, and that simply copying someone else’s content was a no-no.
My checklist for optimizing the lead generation process so far has included six steps: the mindset of not pushing; repairing the rift between sales and marketing; creating the ideal customer profile (and the un-ideal customer profile as well); agreeing upon a universal lead definition that fits your company’s goals and culture; importance of a well maintained database; and, in step 6, I outlined a multi-modal approach and discussed its importance in the lead gen process. Today I’d like to discuss the aspects of an effective lead management process.
Just a quick note this morning on the idea of random numbers and productivity losses around the use of social networking, but other sacred cows like Fantasy Football we shrug at. Companies do not generally tend to block access to Fantasy Football sites, but the productivity loss playing the Fantasy Football game can amount to as much as you lose in a whole year with social networking. Then there is the American Side of the argument that Social Networking costs 2.25 billion in productivity costs, which is still much less than Fantasy Football.
And now for some numbers to support that claim, according to Findarticles.com the following numbers apply as of November 2008.
I had a healthy debate this past Friday with a number of EA colleagues on Twitter about EA and if it is only for large companies. Keep in mind that I have never worked in a large IT shop. Most of my career I have worked in IT shops ranging from 50-300 people. Currently I am in a startup and there are 5 IT people. So obviously, I have a different perspective than the typical EA advocate.
It all started when I sent out this tweet:
Just finished a great discussion about EA & small business with Forrester’s Jeff Scott. EA is not just for the big guys!
Jakob Nielsen is a guru on intranets. He recently posted an extensive piece on Social Networking on Intranets that addressed adoption issues for enterprise 2.0 so I felt the need to cross post from FastForward. Thanks to J.B.Holston at Newsgator for pointing it out to me. It is a summary of the key findings from a study of 14 companies in a much larger 168 page report. It begins with the subtitle, Ready or Not, Here Comes Enterprise 2.0, which sort of captures his approach. Jakob portrays enterprise 2.0 as something that younger workers are pushing on enterprises. If you go to slow you will lose good younger workers and if you go too fast you will run risks to overall corporate culture.
Local search, much like mobile marketing, always seemed poised to ‘break out’ and experience the growth that so many predict. Whether it’s a real trend or just a result of our un-stimulated economic climate, local businesses that have tried paid search to attract new customers through the search engines like Google and Yahoo are not sticking with it. A report from Borrell Associates as covered in the Wall Street Journal suggests that churn and burn is as much a part of local search as is anything else.