The Dangerous Data Leak That Is Costing Marketers Their Jobs (And How to Fix It)

“Why did we hire you?”

This is one of the last questions a marketer wants to hear from their boss.

If they have to ask what contributions you’re making to the company, then you may want to prepare yourself for a summons to their office and an invitation to “shut the door.”

The ability to prove marketing value is important for job security — And it’s even more critical for campaign optimization.

But we can’t do this if we are unable to properly attribute the leads that our campaigns are generating.

So, how do we take credit for all of the leads that we are bringing in, increase ROI and demonstrate marketing value?

The Lead Source That You Can’t Afford to Overlook

Most marketers can get pretty fanatical about monitoring their web analytics data.

They want to know exactly how visitors are interacting with their websites, the path that led them to their destination and the power to zero in on any weak points in their conversion funnels.

Clicks are important – But what about phone calls?

• According to BIA/Kelsey, phone calls are considered to be the most valuable lead source by 86% of business.
• 70% of mobile searchers call businesses directly from search results.
• And approximately 29% of phone calls result in a conversion.

These stats represent a major opportunity for marketers, and highlight the need for more data around these types leads.

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If you aren’t tracking phone calls then you are basing your strategy on incomplete data AND failing to take credit for all the leads your campaigns are driving.

Phone calls as a lead source are something that the modern marketer can no longer ignore — especially when you consider the breakneck rise of mobile search.

Mobile Search = More Calls

The device in every prospect’s pocket has changed their search behavior, intent and expectations.

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Smartphones have not only transformed the way consumers access their information, they have also impacted the way that they connect with businesses. Mobile search has a much higher likelihood of triggering users to take action and this action is usually a phone call.

Declarations of an upcoming ‘mobile explosion’ have been trumpeted for years. Well, we can all stop holding our breath. It’s already happened.

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• Last year, mobile searches surpassed their desktop counterparts for the first time.
• Annual calls to businesses from smartphones are projected to hit 162 billion by 2019 — compared to 77 billion in 2014.
• According to a report from eMarketer, 85.9% of digital ad search dollars will go toward mobile by 2018.
• New ad formats, such as call-only AdWords campaigns, are being tailored to meet the growing business demands associated with mobile consumers.

If you want to take advantage of this trend, it’s critical to understand how mobile drives conversions. Follow-up actions on mobile devices have a tendency to happen very quickly. In fact, 55% of conversions (store visit, phone call or purchase) take place within an hour.

The nature of phone calls also present a different type of prospect and a unique engagement opportunity. A caller is someone that needs his or her questions answered and the immediacy of a phone call provides significantly higher conversion potential.

Calls often have a larger revenue value and involve big purchase decisions.

In order to accurately monitor and extract the value from this leads source, marketers need in-depth call data that can compete with their web analytics metrics.

Stemming The Flow of Leaking Data

Every lead needs to be correctly attributed to its source.

And if you want to prove marketing value, then you need to add phone calls to the equation. Failing to track the calls that your marketing is generating makes it impossible to optimize campaign performance and marketing spend.

By including call data, you can get a complete picture of your campaign results. This data can be used to distinguish the campaigns that are producing results from those that are not.

When you combine this information with the reports you are pulling from your web analytics platform you will finally have the data you need to modernize your marketing process.

So, what types of tools can be used to take advantage of calls as a lead source?

• Call Tracking: On a basic level, call tracking allows marketers to identify the precise ads, channels and marketing activities that are generating phone calls.
• Call Analytics: This speech recognition technology provides insight into the actual sales conversation, which can be used to assess lead quality, track conversions, evaluate sales performance and more.
• Bid Management: This software can be integrated with your call tracking and analytics platform to automatically adjust your bids to get the highest return from your ads.
• Marketing Automation: Your call data will not provide much value if you don’t follow it up with action. If you truly want to optimize your call marketing performance then you may want to explore the possibilities offered by automation tools.

When you can associate specific marketing strategies to leads and profit then you can focus your budget on the most rewarding channels and experience an immediate lift in ROI.

And the results are even more pronounced when you can see what takes place after the phone rings.

Moving Beyond the Size of Your Lead Pool

Even when you have the insight provided by both web and call data, you are still in danger of being fooled by the numbers.

As marketers assess their campaign performance, many of them are so focused on the numbers that they forget to dig into the quality of their leads.

Let’s say that you are running two different campaigns and you are at the point where you want to evaluate their performance. Campaign A has generated 38 phone calls and Campaign B has produced 66 calls. With only this data, it would appear as if Campaign B is the clear winner.

But once you actually examined the metrics from the content of the phone calls, you would see that although Campaign B generated more phone calls it resulted in fewer qualified sales opportunities and conversions.

The ability to delve into call conversations used to be dependent on human call scoring, but the development of call analytics technology has made it possible to access key metrics from calls in near real time.

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Instead of being forced to rely on weak call quality indicators, such as duration, marketers can now base their decisions on deep call data. With call analytics you can extract metrics like lead score, sales readiness, commitment to buy, appointments set and missed opportunities just to name a few.

Call tracking gives you the ability to track ALL of the leads produced by your campaigns. And with the addition of call analytics, you can also analyze the quality of these phone leads and even automate actions based on call content.

Your marketing is probably working better than you think it is. Get the data you need to prove it.

About the Author: Shemmah Al-Darweesh is the Content Marketing Specialist at Convirza, the first call marketing optimization platform. You can read more of her work on the Convirza blog or by connecting with her on LinkedIn.

The Death Of Search Marketing Expertise

Recently, I had dinner in Orlando with Bill and Ted (not their real names), some pretty successful digital agency owners. (By successful, I mean more than 50 employees and strong annual revenues.)

They’ve been friends of mine for a long time, so I assumed they’d be up for a little of the usual expert banter.

The first punch in the gut came when I casually explained about some PPC bidding methods we routinely use. My friends had no idea what I was talking about. Hyperventilating, I reminded myself they deliver SEO services, primarily.

So I told a story from the SEO world. As usual, it involved a chartered jet, a bottle of Scandinavian spirits, a spammer with a weird nickname and a senior Google evangelist who shall remain nameless. I was interrupted as I was just getting warmed up. The guys who run this SEO-first agency simply had not heard of the senior Googler — one of a handful of SEO evangelists Google has ever had in its history.

Talk turned to sports. The longevity of Jaromir Jagr’s mullet was debated.

Pardon the assumption, but I always thought the owners of professional services firms were more respected when they had “chops.” Granted, the owners or top execs of an agency may not need to get down in the weeds for their team to be successful. But you’d think we’d at least need to maintain a culture of expertise in agencies.

Less obvious — but no less important, if you ask me — is the need to keep up with an industry’s people, personalities and events. At some level, networks and connections matter. It’s hard to divorce the concept of maintaining relationships with key people (key experts) in a fast-moving industry from the very kernel of expertise itself. There are the “on paper” answers to tough problems, and there are the “real answers.” A great network provides shortcuts to the truth.

Many imperfections in agencies, of course, stem from low profit margins that stand in the way of learning opportunities, “20 percent time” and R&D.

Regardless, I’d like to challenge the related fiction that the only chances for agencies to climb out of the low-margin trap are those that “figure out scale” and deliver cookie-cutter services. The claim is demonstrably false. Take ReachLocal ($RLOC): have a good look at their financials and decide for yourself whether they’ve done well, even after raising all that money in an IPO.

Of note: ReachLocal’s once high-flying stock currently trades below book value. Flat to declining revenues may indicate that the cookie-cutter model, when applied outside of realms like sandwiches and oil changes, breeds client dissatisfaction.

An Aside About Awesomeness

David Ogilvy was brilliant. He also had good enough timing to be a co-founder, in 1948, of an ad agency that would soon win gargantuan accounts in an era when big brand ad spending was in its ascendancy.

Arguably, Ogilvy’s inspirational power at his own company was heightened by the fact that Ogilvy possessed what Seth Godin calls a “superpower” — no mere manager, bean-counter or big idea man, Ogilvy consistently wrote powerful advertising copy that made clients wealthy. Like several other early pioneers, he was also a champion of using data and research to improve targeting.

Ogilvy found his way to the top by rolling up his sleeves and doing a job he loved, not by planning a business model, raising “VC” or learning how to manage “key functions in a company of this type.”

Given his financial success, Ogilvy could be forgiven for enjoying the fruits of his labor in his later years, relaxing in his massive French chateau, Touffou.

It may simply be because the agency business is too competitive now, and upstarts face behemoths backed by decades of tradition and billions in revenue. Or maybe it’s because we’re facing a massive shift towards martech in the wake of the steady unraveling of the TV-industrial complex. But our world today doesn’t look much like Ogilvy’s.

It’s far tougher for agency owners and executives to get credit for maintaining “chops” nowadays, especially with the proliferation of media, technology, events and fields of expertise requiring attention. The pace of change is faster than it was in Ogilvy’s heyday; optimization is an hourly or daily activity. I get it. No one person, short of Mark Zuckerberg, is getting much mileage out of “keeping up.”

To paraphrase Bart Simpson: Gotcha. Can’t win, don’t try. Right?

Working “In The Business” — A Bad Thing?

Like most small business founders, agency founders have been led to believe that they should stop poking their noses into accounts, stop trying to achieve results directly for clients, stop holding technical conversations with clients and employees. That’s how you “stay small.” Don’t you want to get big?

According to business orthodoxy, the real problem would be if agency founders remained technicians. In The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work, and What to Do About It, Michael Gerber asserts that there are really three competing people fighting inside the body of a small business founder: the Technician, the Manager and the Entrepreneur. The Technician is greedy for the attention of the business, because the Technician just wants to work on stuff. If left to his own devices, the Technician will destroy the business. Balance is a must.

Fair enough. But as any critical reader might conclude, Gerber doesn’t just instill balance in the technician, he shoots the technician.

It’s important to remember that his entire book is constructed as a dialogue with the owner of a pie shop (not even a variety of baked goods!), and that saving this pie baker from the slow-growth future of always being in the shop baking pies comes across as cutting-edge business advice that should be widely applied.

The franchise model (and business process thinking) of companies like McDonald’s and Mrs. Fields’ Cookies are held up as models for how to save the business founder from having to work “in the business” instead of “on the business.”

For a professional services agency, that’s extreme advice. It explains why many clients of marketing agencies today feel like they’re being served up a plate of Mrs. Fields’ Cookies (literally: cookie-cutter services) instead of developing a relationship with an educated, connected, senior-level marketing professional and the team around them.

Beyond that, Gerber’s ideas predate the complex challenges and opportunities related to scaling businesses in a digital and interconnected world. The trends of the past 20 years have radically altered business culture, supply chain management and much else. Certain business functions (under the aegis of the all-important Manager lionized in Gerber’s book) are more accessible to small companies today with software and outsourcing. Communicating with third-party vendors of logistical and managerial functions is also easier, thanks to tools.

Like many founders, I’ve often longed to follow Gerber’s advice to log out for the last time and work full-time “on the business.” As an already-proven expert, I’d also love to skip out on the Google Partners exams they continually require experts to re-take.

But I sense it doesn’t work that way. Our field is a little like pro golf. Your PGA Tour exemption – unless you’re the proud winner of a major or two – lasts but a couple of years. Fall out of touch with the fundamentals because you’re too busy hobnobbing with sponsors and celebrities and meeting with your agent, lawyer and accountant, and you’ll find yourself literally “back in school” — the professional golf “qualifying school” events – if you want to rejoin the pro ranks.

Expertise Matters

Somehow, expertise is going to have to rub off on employees who work on complex digital marketing assignments. Once liftoff is achieved, it would help if some employees developed actual careers with a sense of professional direction, as opposed to being semi-competent in addressing a few odd tasks.

There are only so many ways for this to happen, and in many agency cultures, ownership has no game plan to allow this to happen.

First off, it may be time to drop the act. You know the one. “The company is so big now, I’ve grown distant from day-to-day operations.” “I’m a philanthropist/show horse breeder/angel investor/triathlete.” Nothing against charity, the equine arts, angels or exercise, but unless you’re the departing chairperson of a mysterious, privately held $50 billion insurance company, isn’t all that extracurricular activity just a shade pretentious?

Mentoring (in some form or fashion) is essential. Many agencies do more monitoring than mentoring, trying to squeeze every ounce of “work” out of new people.

Conferences and meetups are also invaluable sources of insight and learning. To be sure, with tight agency budgets, not everyone can go; hardly anyone can get out frequently or routinely. But agencies that shut themselves out from industry events entirely are relegating themselves to a kind of dogged toil increasingly devoid of insight.

“Agency Culture” Beyond Paintball And Snacks

Let’s be clear: this isn’t about paintball, or what kind of food is available at the office. It’s about a culture of expertise and a shared professional mission, as opposed to a culture of pure financial performance.

Some of the largest agencies in the world — ironically, those who can most afford to educate and inspire their people — are the ones skimping the most. The bean-counters have taken hold.

According to Michael Gerber, the genius of the “Turn-Key Revolution” is that a business can operate using “people with the lowest possible level of skill.” That’s fine for Mrs. Fields’ Cookies. Personally, I’ll take Gerber’s recipe with a grain of salt.

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Google Is Fixing The “Permanently Closed” Problem

I’ve heard many complaints in the last couple years from business owners who have issues with their listings showing up as “Permanently Closed” in the search results on Google.

Usually, it happens to businesses who have relocated, and their customers are seeing their old location with a big, ugly, red “Permanently closed” label instead of seeing the new location’s address.

In the last couple of months, I’ve noticed that Google My Business support is doing something different to solve these issues. Unknown to many, there is actually a “Moved” feature on Google Maps that solves this issue.

Why Is This A Problem?

When a business moves, Google instructs them to just update the address in their Google My Business dashboard. This is always the best option for a business when they move because it will keep all their followers, reviews and photos intact.

However, businesses often have duplicate listings and don’t realize it — and those listings don’t get updated. Also, businesses who don’t claim their listings via Google My Business would end up with a listing marked closed, since the Map Maker rules say to close a listing when a business moves.

How To Fix It

I needed to find an example for this article, and it took me less than two minutes to find one, since this is a pretty widespread issue. I searched for “State Farm Dallas TX,” and one of the first ones marked “permanently closed” was an insurance agent who had relocated his office.

This insurance agent had two listings — one at his new office, which was claimed/verified via Google My Business, and a second that was unclaimed and marked “Permanently closed.”

To fix it, I contacted Google My Business via Twitter Support (WAY better than phone support) and asked them to mark the old location as moved. There is actually a status called “Moved,” and it is very different from “Permanently closed.”

If you’re like me, you probably had no clue this status existed, since it only exists on Google Maps, not Google Map Maker, and it is referenced nowhere in the Google My Business help center.

What Happens When A Listing Is Marked Moved

About 24 to 72 hours after Google marks a listing “Moved,” you’ll see a few things happen:

1. The listing will completely vanish from Google Search and Google Maps, making it impossible for customers to accidentally see.
2. Since the listing doesn’t show up anywhere, the “Permanently closed” message won’t show up anywhere, either.
3. Google actually sets the Google Maps URL for the old location with a 302 HTTP status code, and when you load the Maps URL for the old location, it will forward to the new location.
4. Reviews from the closed listing will transfer to the new listing (double-check to make sure that happens).
5. The Map Maker listing for the old location doesn’t disappear but will be impossible to find without the direct URL that uses the CID number. It will remain with the “Permanently closed” status, since there is no such thing as a “Moved” status on Map Maker.

I believe Google is working on a solution to allow users to submit this edit via Google Maps so that you don’t have to contact Google My Business support every time you want it done.

Currently, there is a “Moved” button on Google Maps under “Suggest an Edit,” and there is supposed to be a box below it that allows you to insert the information for the new location. I asked dozens of people, and the only person who was able to see this was Mike Blumenthal, who was kind enough to send me a screenshot.

Simply pressing the “Moved elsewhere” button will not accomplish what I described above and won’t help the “Permanently closed” listing disappear. I believe pressing the button results in the little red “Relocated” message that you see in this picture in the Local Finder.

However, the listing itself on Google Maps and the search results still has that huge red closed label.

This is great news for those of you who have been struggling to get rid of these listings. Please reach out to me on Twitter or Google Plus if you have any questions.

The post Google Is Fixing The “Permanently Closed” Problem appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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Setting Local SEO Expectations: 3 Points To Hit Early And Often

A driving force behind my marketing career over the past few years has been “Help the world, one business owner at a time.”

So I’ve made it my mission to not only help businesses better their SEO practices, but also help the owners understand what SEO truly is.

Sadly, misinformation about the field of SEO is still being circulated. One way I’ve been able to effectively overcome some of the outdated or incorrect information still floating around out there is by talking about the “hard truths” or lesser known mechanics behind local SEO.

I try to do this as early into the campaign as I can and repeat myself many times over the course of it. I always like to tell clients what to truly expect when trying this type of a campaign; a lot of times, no other SEO company has offered up info like this.

There are three things in particular that I really try to drive home when it comes to local SEO. This sets a better expectation for clients moving forward and establishes an honest/transparent relationship from the get-go.

1. Google Giveth, And Google Taketh Away

SEO is always changing, and it always will be. What works this year may not work next year. The only constant is change, so it’s imperative to arm yourself with knowledge.

Knowing this helps me create a proactive approach to a client’s marketing campaign. A metaphor I like to use with clients is that SEO is a lot like the game of chess: You have to see three moves ahead while still actively moving one step forward. Your initial moves will affect your later moves, and sometimes you can get hurt through no fault of your own (For example, Google will roll out an update).

I tell small business owners to make sure their game plan is flexible, as they need to account for those constant changes that SEO is known to bear. 

A great example would be the recent changes to the Google local system — not only did they reduce the local results from seven businesses to three, but they also stripped away all of the social components tied to Google+ and streamlined the Google My Business dashboard. All this occurred just in the past year!

2. Long-Tail Searches Can Be More Valuable Than Generic Phrases

Because local SEO largely revolves around local map packs, long-tail searches are often overlooked. Long-tail searching is a better indicator of user intent, which is an increasingly important factor in local SEO and leads to more engagement and higher rankings over time.

After a client understands more about user intent, I tell them that a good way to plan for these long-tail searches is by asking yourself questions. I try to have them put themselves in a customer’s shoes. From there, I can set a realistic expectation of how the online strategy will work and who/what keywords to target based on that intent.

Another fun exercise to do with clients is to have them create a “Jeopardy” game board. When it comes to long-tail searches, have them think like the popular game show — answer in the form of a question not only to gain keywords, but also to gauge user intent and discover blog topics for their website.

For example, when I started working with a local plumber, we began with the most basic questions — you know, the $200 ones — like, “What is a plumber?,”  “What is a drain?,” “What is a water heater?” and so on. Then we sprinkled in some of the more complex questions (the $1,000–$2,000 ones).

A hearty list of long-tail searches comes out of this practice, and your client has a better understanding of SEO, including what to expect from keyword reports and rankings.

3. SEO Is An Ongoing Investment — There Is No “Set It And Forget It”

Every website can benefit from SEO and needs continued optimization to obtain and maintain rankings for target key phrases. Just as any industry or marketplace evolves, so does search engine optimization. 

Consequently, SEO is not a one-time investment; constant cultivation is necessary to ensure that SEO becomes (and remains) an integrated part of a small business’s marketing plan.  

I like to tell clients this so they can begin thinking long-term and realize how many options SEO can provide them. Every time I reach out to a client for a report, I include a “what’s next” section. 

This helps me set campaign expectations month to month, and it seems to keep the client relationships going longer. Painting value early and often has been a helpful tactic in increasing our client retention.

SEO is more important (and more reputable) than ever before, especially for local small business owners. Driving home these three expectations through my client communications has helped me build better campaigns and better relationships — and help one small business owner at a time.

The post Setting Local SEO Expectations: 3 Points To Hit Early And Often appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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Google Explains How Search Console Reports Work

Google Webmaster Trends Analysts, John Mueller, wrote a detailed post on Google+ explaining how the Search Console reporting works and why it may seem delayed for some of the reports.

The short answer is that it takes time for the data to get to the Search Console because of (a) the time it takes Google to send the data from the crawling department to the search console department and (b) different URLs on a site can be crawled less or more frequently.

Here is how John Mueller put it, so it is crystal clear:

When it comes to the aggregated reports in Search Console, there are two time-elements involved that are good to be aware of:

• Latency from crawling to reporting. It takes a few days (to about a week) for Search Console to display data after it’s been crawled. There are various processes that run over the data, and Search Console tries to reflect the final state — which can take a bit of time to get. This is particularly visible with an abrupt change, such as going from “no AMP pages” to “lots of AMP pages”.
• Per-URL crawl rates differ. Some URLs are crawled every few minutes, others just every couple months, and many somewhere in between. If you go from “all URLs are broken” to “all URLs are fixed” (which is awesome if you have a way to do that!), it will take some time to drop to “zero errors” in the aggregated reports. This is probably too much, but I created a simple spreadsheet to show that, feel free to make a copy & play with it: https://goo.gl/1pToL8

Questions around why Google doesn’t show my site’s AMP errors or why hasn’t Google picked up that we fixed some of our crawl errors yesterday is simply because of time delays in crawl and report delivery.

Many webmasters already know that the Google Search Console data is delayed by at least two-days or more, this explains why that is the case.

The post Google Explains How Search Console Reports Work appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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SearchCap: Google AMP, Send Map To Phone & Ad Layout

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• Google’s New SERP Layout: The Biggest Winners & Losers
  Feb 24, 2016 by Larry Kim

  What has been the impact of Google’s new desktop ad layout thus far? Columnist Larry Kim uses data to show who has benefited and who has suffered from the change.

• How To Get Started With Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
  Feb 24, 2016 by Paul Shapiro

  Google is currently rolling out accelerated mobile pages in its mobile search results, but how can you get in on the action? Columnist Paul Shapiro explains how you can mark up your mobile pages for a better mobile user experience.

• Google’s AMP Top Stories Now Live In Mobile Search Results
  Feb 24, 2016 by Greg Sterling

  AMP’s objective is a faster, more engaging mobile web experience in an open ecosystem.

• Google “Send To Your Phone” Comes To Local Knowledge Graph Search Box
  Feb 24, 2016 by Barry Schwartz

  Now, you can use the “Send to your phone” feature directly in the Google web search results, not just in the Google map search results.

• An Inside Look At The Upcoming MarTech Conference
  Feb 23, 2016 by Search Engine Land

  We’re four weeks away from the next MarTech conference in San Francisco. This will be the biggest and best one yet, and I wanted to give you a deeper preview of what to expect. If you haven’t registered yet, we are offering our low pre-conference rate discount, which is $200 off the on-site ticket price. […]

• Brand Bidding & PPC Optimization: Best Practices For Brand Bidding (Part 3 of 8)
  Feb 23, 2016 by Lori Weiman

  Columnist Lori Weiman continues her series on brand bidding by discussing best practices for creating and optimizing successful branded PPC campaigns.

• How Are You Managing Social Media Risk?
  Feb 24, 2016 by Digital Marketing Depot

  Today, the average enterprise manages more than 300 social media accounts and more than a half-million social media posts by users on branded pages — but not all of this activity is positive. There has been a sevenfold increase in spam messages. The number of unauthorized social media accounts has skyrocketed. Social media management costs […]

Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

• Adobe Launches App Creation & Management Tool For Marketers
• Save Our Search: 3 Reasons Not To Overreact About Losing Google Ads In The Right Rail
• Content Mapping, Search Optimization And The Buyer’s Journey
• Snapchat For Social Good
• What Google’s New Layout Means For Search Marketers
• How Google Is Inventing A “Near Me” Future
• Instagram Now Has More Advertisers Than Twitter
• Let’s Talk SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics & The Cloud)
• Data Danger: How The Wrong Campaign Metrics Can Break Your Mobile Strategy
• MarTech Today: Foursquare’s Offline Attribution, Google’s Autotrack & “Near Me” Future
• Facebook Launches Reactions Globally

Search News From Around The Web:

Industry

• Black Googler Network fuels inclusion at Google, Official Google Blog
• Google Confirms: We Don’t Have An SEO Partner Program, Search Engine Roundtable

Local & Maps

• Converting Shape files to KML with Google Earth Pro, Google Earth Blog

Link Building

• Don’t do Outreach like one of those PR types, do it like an SEO, Cornwall SEO
• Google Penguin: Still No Launch Date, Search Engine Roundtable

Searching

• Search Challenge (2/17/16): How to find compound concepts, SearchReSearch

SEO

• Ecommerce SEO: 116% Increase in Search Traffic & Google Penalty Recovery [2 case studies], ahrefs.com
• 26 Reasons Your Content Marketing is Hurting Your SEO, Ignite Visibility
• Google Panda Continuously Rolling But Gets Prepared Between Roll Outs?, Search Engine Roundtable
• Google: Internal Index Updates For Mobile Apps Only, Search Engine Roundtable
• Manual Actions on Subdomains Can Affect Entire Site, thesempost.com
• The Ultimate Guide to Recovering from a Google Penalty, performancein.com

SEM / Paid Search

• Why Asking “Why?” Will Sharpen Your PPC Skills, Metric Theory
• AdWords Self-Optimizing Accounts Are Live, PPC Hero
• Find out if your keywords are working in just one step, Bing Ads Blog
• Using Customer Match Lists in AdWords Campaigns Targeting YouTube, RKG Blog
• Writing effective PPC ad copy for a better ROI, Bing Ads Blog

The post SearchCap: Google AMP, Send Map To Phone & Ad Layout appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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3 Shortcuts to Double Customer Acquisition in Record Time

In school they teach you marketing from 30,000 feet, as if you have a brand everyone adores and plenty of cash in the bank to throw at a well rounded ‘media mix’ that magically makes numbers soar.

“Marketing is sooooo easy”, you think (already incorrectly equating marketing with advertising).

Cue champagne. Hot office parties complete with kegs and heavy petting. Kinda like The Wolf of Wall Street. Well, the fun parts at least.

Then you get a job. Or start a company. And reality hits.

Teams are stretched paper thin. Everything’s expected ASAP. Budgets are nonexistent.

The good news, is that with some ingenuity and good old fashioned hustle, you can scale customer acquisition despite – and often because of – your limited internal resources.

Here’s how, along with a few tips for each scenario to implement immediately.

How ‘Constraints’ Can Actually Help You Scale Customer Acquisition

Significant growth comes down to big wins that deliver outsized returns. That means you generally have 2-3 channels or tactics driving the bulk of your traffic and conversions.

Contrary to the financial world, diversification will kill a small organization trying to aggressively grow. You can’t compete on multiple fronts with your puny budget or tiny team. Instead, you need to get scrappy and throw everything you’ve got in one direction – all at the same time – in a single coordinated effort.

You do that by doubling down on one approach, avoiding all the time-sucking distractions along the way that prevent you from executing properly.

Counterintuitively, your existing internal constraints can help. Tough decisions become blindingly obvious when you’re drastically short in specific resources. Typically that comes in the form of either time, labor, or money.

• Time: You need results – fast! Priority number one is moving the needle, as fast as possible, by doing whatever it takes.
• Labor: You’re short on bodies, but as a result have a little extra cash and can afford to invest in long-term solutions (because realistically you can’t deliver results tomorrow).
• Money: You’re cash-strapped, or on a short runway, and can’t afford to splash on flashy trade show booths or ad campaigns.

The good news is that you can use this constraint to your advantage, by helping you figure out which route to take and focus on.

Constraint #1. Time

Maybe you have a board meeting in 6 months and need to show traction.

Or maybe your runway is disappearing faster than the horizon on a hot summer day. (That was the most poetic thing I’ve ever written.)

People short on time have one option. And only one option. Advertising.

Most small or inexperienced organizations incorrectly assume that advertising is a waste of precious capital. But you’d be surprised if you had proper tracking in place to compare your advertising results (which is a flexible, variable cost) with astronomically expensive overhead costs like payroll (which are rigid, fixed costs).

Basic time tracking can help, and Toggl is a great, simple option. The problem, of course, is getting everyone to actually use it. And then having to manually cross-reference results.

Time Doctor is a perfect option to avoid this, because it runs automatically in the background while people work. It can help you keep track of where time might be slipping away, which activities are the most distracting or tedious, while also highlighting new ways to optimize performance of remote teams.

When you actually compare the data, you’ll see that advertising can present a more affordable option for scaling growth, on a cadence that’s difficult to match.

Tip #1. Paid Acquisition

Paid acquisition is the ONLY option that has the power to deliver instant, consistent results. You spend $100, bring in $120, and continue reinvesting that original amount.

The most popular options for this ‘direct-response’ style include AdWords, Facebook or LinkedIn. But don’t hesitate to try new platforms which typically have less competition, meaning your starting budget can be less too. For example, this in-depth (and visual – yay pictures!) guide on Instagram ad best practices is incredibly useful. You can even do media buying on a broader, yet affordable scale through an independent network like BuySellAds.com.

But before spending a single dime, you need to figure out an expected budget. I like to walk clients through a simple ad model (below), showcase how you can iterate based on early results while starting a paid campaign for the first time.

Tip #2. Retarget Everyone

Try not to waste a single visit by retargeting ads to previous site visitors. That means everyone that hits your site will see something for a few days (or weeks) after that might just get them to return and take action. (Retargeting also tends to be pretty affordable because of how targeted your audience becomes.)

AdWords remarketing is fairly straightforward, allowing you to run campaigns based on a list of users, people who’ve visited specific parts of your site, or visitors who complete some type of transaction goal.

Facebook also provides some really interesting options because of the ability to use custom audiences. For example, you can get a little more sophisticated and target people by ‘buying cycle’ stage. Here’s a guide on optimizing your Facebook sales funnel by using different types of ads for people in each stage.

Tip #3. Optimize Your Funnel

While most of the attention has been focused on advertising so far, it’s critical that your lead gen funnel – the place your traffic is going – has been optimized properly as well.

That means your ‘message match’ is perfect. Landing pages are optimized for best practices. You’re testing… something. And marketing automation is tied together so that every single lead receives the right message at the right time.

Breaking down a larger transaction into a series of ‘micro-conversions’, and then measuring each, can help you spot the problem areas where breakdowns occur.

Constraint #2. Labor

Most organizations have small marketing teams. Or they’re ill-equipped with great ‘brand’ people, but not many ‘performance’ or ‘growth’-oriented ones. Your ‘team’ might even just be you and a buddy.

Regardless, it’s tough to get important things accomplished when you’re having to juggle multiple tasks, wear different hats, or other corny metaphors for multitasking.

Realistically that means (a) results won’t come overnight, and (b) your best growth strategy needs to emphasize scale.

Advertising (previously mentioned) is a decent potential option, because it scales very effectively without a ton of involvement from people (assuming everything’s up-and-running, and you’re just tweaking here and there).

However, the best scaling tactic is organic search (or SEO). Today’s SEO involves all facets of inbound marketing, from content creation to promotion, that means a single investment of time and effort provides compounding results.

New blog posts create fodder for social and email. Those social and email campaigns help drive PR. Those PR referrals help drive new editorial links back to the original content, which now achieves greater search visibility – repeating the process to infinite with new links, traffic, leads and customers.

Cue the God light and angels softly strumming harps.

So where to start with organic search?

Tip #1. Clean Up Crawl Errors ASAP

All of the links in the world won’t help if your site’s riddled with 404 errors and duplicate content. Fire up Screaming Frog or use Moz to help you spot all of these inconsistencies and get them cleaned up ASAP.

Search engines have also started factoring in usage data like site traffic and engagement metrics (think bounce rates, time on site, and more). Sites with more traffic and better engagement rates tend to see better rankings too.

Login to Google Analytics, find the landing pages with the most visits AND highest bounce rate, and start addressing those first.

Tip #2. Create Unbranded Content

Everyone knows ‘content is important’. Every two-bit, social media hack journalist has said it over the past few years.

But what they neglect to mention is that there are over 2 million posts published each day. Mediocrity, therefore, is a waste of time (and effort). If you only have the resources to do ONE awesome guide or resource, do that, and promote the hell out of it.

This should be ‘unbranded content’, primarily focused on audience pain points, and entertaining to some degree. Perhaps no company has done more with less, than PayScale who regularly pumps out interesting resources that get featured by Mashable and other huge media sites.

Tip #3. ‘Spy’ on Your Competition

Last but not least, use a tool like Open Site Explorer to ‘spy’ on the competition.

The point isn’t to copy the competition. It’s to reverse-engineer.

HOW are they getting those links? What’s the broader strategy, or specific campaigns they’re running? And how can you take a similar approach, but leverage your strengths to 10x the quality?

For example, the Hard Rock San Diego has run holiday promotions and been featured in these publications in the past. Now how can you extrapolate that for next year’s promotion and outreach?

Constraint #3. Money

Everyone’s tight on money. But if you’re ESPECIALLY strapped, you should leverage child labor and elbow grease.

Specifically, you need to hunt down and develop as many partnerships as possible. And as these will take a bit of time to develop organically, you’ll need to have realistic expectations to know they won’t payoff tomorrow or next week. But the future payoff years from now will be astronomical if done properly.

In each case, you’re looking for existing audiences or communities of like-minded people (whether that’s potential customers or partners), and doing your best to expose yourself to them. (Maybe I should re-phrase that last part?)

Hope you’re ready to hustle.

Tip #1. Cross Promotion

Cross-promotions are boring, tired, and… effective if done correctly.

The trick is to find complementary businesses, who aren’t obviously competitive, but target similar customer segments with similar value propositions.

That means a law firm might be the perfect partner for an accountant if you’re looking for high net worth people who invest in real estate. Except, you know, then you have to deal with boring lawyers who just talk about boring cases all day.

Start by researching local associations to find a list of members, or upcoming events you might be able to attend (more on that in a second). You can also try LinkedIn, using the prospecting list features to get updates on potential partners to reach out to.

Tip #2. Targeted Outreach

The best use of social media is to assist broader PR efforts, not just sit around wasting hours in a Twitter chat.

Instead, you can use it to find, research and contact journalists or bloggers who might be interested in what you have to say. The broader goal here isn’t one-to-one communication, but one-to-many (with help from the people who can put you in front of huge audiences).

PR agencies are paid for access to their list of journalists and bloggers. But you can manually build your own by outsourcing to Upwork (or similar) at a tiny fraction of the cost (remember that whole Toggl and Time Doctor discussion?).

You can also use a tool like Followerwonk, which is like Google Analytics for Twitter, to get a list of socially active bloggers to collaborate on promotions.

Tip #3. Events & Networking

If the goal is to piggyback on these larger communities to gain access to customers or other potential partners, don’t just attend events. Get involved.

Help them set up and take down. Try to speak, host, or sit on a panel. Volunteer for behind-the-scenes meetings or contribute your expertise on particular topics. Whatever it takes to get an in-road, and thus more leverage or influence within that community.

One clever approach by Hakka Labs involved them recording audio sessions from various dev-focused meetups and then providing it as a helpful podcast to all the attendees for free. In exchange, group organizers were more than happy to help promote this link and resource to their audience.

Conclusion

The best way to grow significantly is through doubling down on big wins.

Surprisingly, embracing your constraints can help by focusing the limited resources you do have in a single direction.

The good news is that all of these tactics listed here have a single thing in common… they’re all insanely simple. There’s no clever ‘growth hacking’ techniques required.

That’s because the most difficult thing to do properly, is execute.

Complexity often means things take longer, require more people, and cost more.

While keeping it simple (stupid) is the easiest way to prioritize results over theory.

About the Author: Brad Smith is a founding partner at Codeless Interactive, a digital agency specializing in creating personalized customer experiences. Brad’s blog also features more marketing thoughts, opinions and the occasional insight.