Content is Still King - - Social Media Doesn't Change That.

Content is Still King - - A Classic Truth Worth Repeating.


Just like a whipped coffee latte, a foamy ice cold beer or a towering root beer float, to capture the maximum value in Social Media, one has to dig below the marketing 'froth' and 'fizz' to find the ultimate reward... Social Media Lead Generation.

Yesterday I attended a web marketing conference in Houston put on by the Online Marketing Institute. Social Media Marketing was emphasized, rightfully so, as the number of people using Social Media platforms explodes in the USA and the world. I came to learn more about applying social media tactics to my business.

But I also heard confirmation that what was true 3 years ago, 6 years ago, 9 years ago, is true today: Your Content Matters. Content is Still King. Without good Content on your websites and company blogs, all your Social Media tools and all your efforts will disappoint, or worse, backfire. Good Content that works for your business is needed before going 'crazy' with Facebook or Twitter.

And Blogs? They are, according to the experts I heard on Social Media yesterday, your most effective Social Media lead generation tool. Good old-fashioned, taken-for-granted, Blogs... your 'mini-websites'.

Social Media tactics will be very important to your success, but pay attention to your content... it is the foundation which will drive your success. Social Media should orbit your content like the planets around the sun.

I picked up great information at the OMI conference. The presenters were informative across all subjects. For me SEO and Usability were very useful. And there was considerable expertise on ideas and best practices for Facebook, Twitter, Blogs etc. Observations and predictions were made that Social Media will "change the world", "destroy traditional institutional hierarchies", and cause "marketing mayhem". Social media trends will accelerate as further adoption of mobile smart phone and 'tablet' technologies continues, and people under the age of 25 ("digital natives") move into the work force. I'm going to apply what we learned yesterday... to better exploit today's world and prepare for tomorrow's.

But I will remember this basic, classic, truth: Content is King. To which can be added: Company websites and blogs are the most important "Social Media" platform assets we have.

Regards; Erik Holladay

Learn more about Social Media, Web Marketing and applying it to your business:
Arnie Kuenn, President, Vertical Measures
Brad Kleinman, President, eMarketing Techniques
Thanh Nguyen, Senior Usability Engineer, BusinessOnline
Maria Pergolino, Director of Marketing, Marketo

Are You a (Marketing) Secret Weapon?

Be a Marketing Secret Weapon:

Be a Marketing Secret Weapon.

No matter what size your company, if you want to use web marketing to promote your business become a "Secret Weapon". 


I've been called a marketing and business development "Secret Weapon" many times by divisional senior and executive management. To be so described is an honor and a validation of the work I do. But what actions, exactly, am I taking which cause my activities to be associated with "secret" and "weapon"? 


The Secret of the Secret Weapon:
The real secret is using Search Engine Marketing effectively. Organic and Paid Search (Google, Bing) are my primary weapons of choice for lead generation and customer research, validation and 'mind-share'. Wielding this powerful marketing technique brings a tremendous combination of high-quality and high-volume lead generation to a B-to-B business, no matter how big the business is, no matter how small. 


When used with focused, pragmatic, expertise, attention to detail, and consistent follow-through, search engine marketing can literally transform your company or business unit's fortunes. Your main competition may never be aware, understand, nor appreciate how you did it, making your marketing success a stealthy "secret". 


The world is full of potential quality customers looking for solutions which your business offers. Those people go to Google or Bing to start researching. Write concise and precise content that is relevant to your target markets, with a goal to rank high in organic search. You need to be there when they start looking! 


In essence, this is the true "secret" of a marketing "Secret Weapon"... be there, at the right time, the right place, with the right message.


Targeting profitable service niches with organic and paid search, applying long-tail search principles, geo-targeting and language targeting is easy if you have search engine marketing expertise and tools. Do these things well, do them consistently, and you will likely see success. Depending upon the target market, a dependable tsunami of high-value leads can land at your door.... business enquiries that don't reach your competitors. You attracted the potential client's attention and made a positive impression, so they contacted you first.


There are other useful lead-gen marketing tactics, such as brochures, trade shows, advertising, email campaigns, physical mailers, and social media. But the superior business results, reach, and lower costs gained from search engine marketing dwarf all those other options, based upon my experience with technical B-to-B lead generation. If done right, search engine results keep coming, as search engine marketing works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, across industries, markets, nations, languages and cultures... always 'on-demand' for prospective customers and always certified 'spam-free'.


Every great Secret Weapon has a visionary who predicted its future. For search engine marketing, that visionary for me is Seth Godin. Seth's then radical but now classic book Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers became a prime inspiration for my priority focus on search engine marketing. History has proven me right, overcoming skeptics over and over again. And I thank my competitors who still don't get it... read my blog A Thank You Note to My Competitors .


Secret Weapons require quality craftsmanship and engineering to make them a success. Here is where your Webmaster comes in. Your webmaster is literally your Secret Weapon mechanic and right-hand man. To win at search engine marketing, your Website must be designed to be friendly for search engines, with an easy to use content management system. Follow best practices for web-design and navigation. The entire site should be extremely friendly and usable for prospective clients.

Search Engine Marketing is Industrial Strength Lead Generation (Or Should Be). 

Meet Your USA Adwords Competition: All 1,500,000 of them.

Google ads used by 1.5M US marketers, websites.
Google's Internet advertising network attracts more than 1.5 million US marketers, websites.  

Associated Press, Tuesday May 25, 2010 

So, now you know. A lot of people are using Adwords in the USA for lead generation, sales and branding. And many of them want the same search terms you want.

With Adwords and other paid search tools like BING, your real competition isn't just your real direct and indirect competitors for goods and services in your markets. Not at all. When it comes to paid search, especially Adwords, your ads appear and compete in a vast, virtual universe where competition for your search terms and keywords can be intense and costly.

Companies in entirely different markets with completely different target audiences can target the same keywords you want. For example, the search term "Lab" can mean many different things - - R&D laboratory, clinical laboratory, math class, puppy dog, etc.? Very broad terms, if used, mean that you'll compete against many others and attract many clicks from casual or confused visitors who will not be your customers.

This ad 'clutter' and 'noise' can frustrate your efforts to reach your audience, unless you take intelligent steps to focus on your market niches and filter out the rest. There are many resources to help you acheive this and reduce or even eliminate competition for money-making search terms. These include using negative search terms, long-tail search phrases, avoiding search terms that are too broad, use of technical vocabulary, selective ad showing by schedule, location and language, analytics and more.

Useful Research and Article on the Value of Google Result Positioning

This is great information for people who strive for Search Engine Optimization. If your using Search Engines for lead generation these two articles are a must read!

1. The Value of Google Result Positioning:

"How much is the top spot on Google actually worth? According to data from the Chitika network, it’s worth a ton – double the traffic of the #2 spot, to be precise."

http://chitika.com/research/2010/the-value-of-google-result-positioning/

Daniel Ruby, Research Director, Online Insights, Chitika, Inc.

Search Engine Watch article: http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/100525-160427.

A special thanks to Brian Geddes of  http://www.bgtheory.com/ for posting this valuable information on LinkedIn. By the way, Brian teaches an excellent set of classes devoted to advanced Adwords training. If you can ever take one of his classes, I highly recommend it. http://www.linkedin.com/in/ewhisper

Take Advantage of Google Adwords Local Search Features

Google has added some very useful campaign setting options for localized ad targeting. This can be effective for campaigns where you want only local leads. "Local" targeting can be as large as a country or state, or as small as a town or city.

I'm using both local and multinational campaigns (where appropriate, as I run global campaigns which target multiple countries), but one local search option that really caught my eye is the "Phone Extensions" feature in the "Ad Extensions" section of each Adwords campaign settings page.

With "Phone Extensions", you can add a 'click to call' feature for smart phone users. As more and more people use their smart phones for web browsing, our search engine marketing efforts need to be in synch with this trend.

Depending upon how your campaigns are set up (Country, State, City), Google allows you to list a local telephone number a visitor simply has to click on their smartphone to call you with a business leads.

Directions are straightforward:

1. Go to your Campaign Settings page.

2. Go to Ad Extensions   >   then go to Phone Extensions.

3. See "Display click-to-call phone number on iPhones and other mobile devices with full Internet browsers:"

Add Your Numeric Telephone Number Here.

Google allows only numeric number listings for now, no alpha 'vanity' alternatives allowed yet.
This works for me, as alpha phone listings can be irritating to the caller compared to simple numeric dialing.

I've just started to use this Phone Extension feature. It is best for targeted campaigns where one phone number can be listed. Like anything else with Adwords, it will take some time and experimentation to see if the new click-to-call helps bring in leads. I suspect it will.


Best Regards;

Erik Holladay

Trade Shows Still Work - -

Trade Shows and Conferences can bring great value in the Age of the Internet - -
Ignore them at your Peril.

No argument, when it comes to lead generation and filling the sales pipeline, trade shows can have a reputation for being inefficient, wasteful, and costly... with high-cost-per-lead when compared to effective online marketing. When web-marketing is done right, every day is a successful and global 24/7 trade show, and million dollar leads may just cost pennies to acquire!

But trade shows still have tremendous value. If done right, with strong planning and guidelines, companies can still greatly benefit with face-to-face trade shows and conferences. These industry events are an important way to meet potentially valuable customers face-to-face and get the pulse of the industry. Trade Shows spark conversations that otherwise would never have happened, develop new business relationships, and reveal latent business needs during extended discussions. Business needs which your company can fill at a nice profit. On-site trade shows help fill out B-to-B marketing and business development campaigns. We need them. Depending upon the venue and the clientele  capturing even one good lead may result in business which will more than justify the investment made in a trade show.

My major complaint about trade shows is the risk from waste and low productivity. Trade shows, if done in a casual way, really waste people's time, resources, budget (money), and impose the penalty of high opportunity costs (i.e., I could have been doing something else which was far more productive with my time.).

BUT if one manages the time, goals and costs, and maximizes the opportunities, then trade shows can have a strong positive bottom-line effect on business. It can even be game-changing, such are the strategic business development opportunities available. You can strike gold at a trade conference. For smaller business in particular, it is vital to choose and manage trade shows very carefully, your budget and your limited resources cannot handle too many 'waste of time' conferences.

Trade Show Exhibiting captures new high value prospects and
allows valuable opportunities  to re-connect with
old and loyal customers. 

Here is some advice on Trade Shows, based upon my years of successful experience in planning, managing, working and manning exhibits at conferences, large and small, on three continents and across a multitude of cultural, regional and industry niches.

Choose Conferences and Trade Shows Wisely:

Determine if your customers and potential customers will attend the event. Ask clients and your industry peers about the event, and industry events they like to attend (and why). If your potential customers are going to these events, then these conferences are candidates for consideration. 

Be careful with your budget... and prioritize. Trade shows can suck up a huge amount of costs (show space, rentals, power, construction, booth design and fabrication, booth transport and assembly, customs and brokerage fees, graphics, hotels, meals, travel, client entertainment, promotional items, etc). Whatever you do, don't let trade shows steal funding from your web marketing efforts... this would be self-destructive to your lead generation on balance, and very harmful.

Pick Your Trade Show Team Carefully:

1. Pick personable, outgoing and knowledgeable staff. Pick professionals who have high-energy, are team players, know how to apply consultative selling techniques, follow directions, don't mind putting in marathon 16 hour days or worse, and can stand being on their feet all day.

2. Take a select team and limit participation - - avoid over-staffing, and don't bring people who treat a trade show like it was a semi-vacation. Bring the focused talent appropriate for a specific event. Even if you have to fly the right person to that conference, instead of using a local person, the ultimate lead generation results produced and the subsequent ROI is worth it.

3. Train your team and cross-train them. Have 'cheat-sheets' available for all team members. They should be familiar with the range of services and products on display - - not just select niches.

4. Work the Conference:
Keep the 'off-duty' team members out of the booth to avoid a crowd. The booth 'off-duty' folks can a play an extremely important role - - roving the conference and making additional contacts. Some of the best trade show leads come from prospective clients escorted to your booth by your 'off-duty' people.

Promote Your Participation at the Event:

Companies benefit from promoting before, during, and after an event to let clients and potential clients know they will be exhibiting at a targeted conference. If you have personnel presenting papers or are on panel discussions, this is important news you'll want to share with your potential and current clients.

Promotional tools which can be used include:

a. Webpage promotion (at least one month ahead - - get listed in search engines)
b. Adwords and paid search promotion (at least one month ahead)
c. Targeted email promotion before the event (the week before). Consider a print mail promo as well.
d. Press release (just before, or the first day of the event)
e. Targeted email promotion after the event (Obtain or buy the conferee attendee list)
f. Effective and decent promotional items for giveaway - - pick things that will be used by the prospective client, things not thrown away, not easily broken and not given away. (Look at novel items which will be popular and create a 'buzz' at the event and beyond. Also look at functional items like calculators, timers, pens, memory sticks, etc. Include your logo and website domain on the giveaway.)
g. Have a conference promotional give-away for a higher value item, with booth visitors having to register to have a chance to win.
h. Booth Graphics, Layout, and Multimedia should be optimized to grab a conference attendee's attention. Customize your booth to fit the event, if possible. Target your audience. Don't use 'generic' unchanging vague booth messages and images. Having your booth tailored to that event is more effective at getting people to stop at your booth.
i. Exploit the Conference Event's website and print program as much as you can. Make sure your company name, description and booth location are listed. Use every available show online tool available. Some conferences are getting more aggressive with social media type applications... use them also ahead of the event to connect with attendees and even set up meetings.
j. Use social media to broadcast your participation at an event. Sites like LinkedIn and Twitter can be effective for this. Some conferences are starting to 'tweet' on-site during the event.

Follow-up on the Leads:

Extremely important. It seems obvious but very often busy or distracted people jump into the next big thing and let these contacts become stale with age. Don't let the priority contacts made at the event grow old, follow-up immediately. Use the attendee lists obtained at the booth and from the event management, put them to good use. Follow-up with 'thank you' emails with key links to services the visitor has interest in. Make phone calls. Business Development should own the promising contacts that justify additional follow-up. Track and nurture the leads, to help determine if the event is worth returning to the next year.

Trade Shows are a Work in Progress:

Successful trade show management is a constant challenge... there are hundreds of books and many experts out there who make a living training their clients how to optimize trade shows for better results, and with good reason! Every trade show is a learning experience, with lessons learned, opportunities sighted and improvements identified for the next time.

Don't sacrifice your online marketing budget in favor of trade shows, but exploiting industry trade shows can enhance your online efforts, and help ensure you capture as much business as possible. You need both.

For more resources on trade shows, go to Google and search for "Trade Show Consultant" and "Trade Show Coach".... there are plenty of resources out there.

Managing International Trade Shows bring special challenges, which can be managed with success.

Don't forget 'cheap and cheerful' promotional give-away items. Promotional Items Attract Quality Leads At Trade Shows and Conferences. They work hard for lead generation! 

Big Lead Generation using a Small Budget.

Lead Generation on a small budget can be a very effective way to feed your business with profitable top-line revenue.

If I had a small B-to-B business, aside from having good personal referrals and leads, having an effective web marketing program would be next big marketing action I would take.

If you want to have a business website or blog that will give you genuine revenue generating leads, here are proven some ideas that can help give you a big presence on the web and let your business grow.


Content: Define Your Business Goals

Prioritize the most profitable bits of your business for which you want to generate leads. Really define the service or product niche you provide, in order to improve your chances of lead gen success. Then work on those high value/high reward areas first. Use 'long-tail' tactics to create category killers for search. Webpage content should be concise, precise and with an obvious call-to-action. Use more pages to better niche your services, products or solutions.


Make it Easy to Contact Your Business:

Place your Business phone number and email on each webpage, and a link to a web-form if you have one. Make contacting your business easy.


Target Organic Search:

Make sure you have a cluster of coordinated webpages on your website describing those products or services. Create a combination of SEO friendly pages and then more in-depth pages to help sell the qualified visitor to contact you. Then test for organic search ranking after a few weeks, adjust and continue testing and revising until you are on the first page up high in search engine rankings.


Exploit Sensible Paid Search:

This can be very inexpensive if you micro-target and avoid broad search terms. Set you daily budget. Limit the geography and language options. Use long-tail and narrow search-terms to start, you can expand as you see what your real spend is. Use negative search terms to filter out unwanted clicks.


Create Professional Blogs:

Create a few relevant blogs that people will want to read and bring value. LINK those blogs to your website, and cross-link back to the Blogs. You will increase your visitor rate and hopefully your lead gen rate as well.

The Sum is greater than the parts when it comes to Search Engine Marketing. Add up all the steps above, and you will improve your opportunities for attracting great, quality business enquiries.

Want Good Web Leads? Then SEO Matters.

Life without SEO would be Tough for B-to-B Marketers.

SEO Central, Mountain View.

Life without Search Engine Optimization would make attracting quality business enquiries a whole lot tougher. SEO is such an effective weapon for web-marketing lead generation that it is a very top priority for me, exploiting organic, long-tail and paid search options with success.

Thanks to SEO, we’ve been able to generate thousands and thousands of B-to-B enquiries and bring in millions of dollars in high margin revenue... all from having a laser-sharp focus on SEO. SEO has helped transform our business almost beyond recognition compared to when I started managing web marketing in 2003. Without SEO, I’d be handicapped. I can’t image not using SEO as my top lead-gen tool. 

Yes, the page content must be relevant to the actual human visitor, and must have an effective call-to-action. But if one doesn't also apply SEO principles to webpages, those pages most likely will not make page one on search engine results.

Page one Search Engine Result Page (SERP) is where your B-to-B services and products need to be ranked. There is too much competition for the limited space available... publishing a webpage without applying search optimization is like opening a fancy new retail store and failing to put signs on the building. Potential customers will have a hard time finding you or the products you sell.

Of what use is a lowly ranking webpage for search engine lead generation? 
Not much use at all. 

A poorly ranked webpage becomes invisible and may as will not exist for organic search engine marketing.

A great looking webpage, if one measures by ROI and productivity, is not the one that gets design kudos, recognitions or awards from hordes of marketing and advertising 'creatives' meeting at annual conferences. No, a great looking webpage is one that ranks in the top five organic search listings in Google for a key search phrase. This is SEO Bliss. When combined with relevant content and an effective call-to-action, such a SEO'd webpage is a profitable B-toB lead-generation work of high art.

FEED Your Website. FEED IT.

Adwords Tune-up

Google Adwords is a powerful tool for search engine lead generation and branding, but it can be easy to waste money, clicks and therefore lead generation opportunities if it is not managed to run at optimal effectiveness, speed and efficiency.

This Adwords Check List comes from a B-to-B perspective, where we're going after niche-services leads and clients.

1. Google Ad Optimization:

a. Is your ad written in a way that best attracts the people you are wanting to capture.

b. Is the ad clear and concise, so you can better filter out the rest of the audience you don't want to attract.

c. Does the ad have an implied call-to-action (given the limited ad space).

d. Are you using enough Negative Keyword Terms to help filter out low quality clicks?

Learn more about the importance of negative keywords at:
http://erikholladay.blogspot.com/2009/06/negative-is-positive-with-google.html

2. Google Ad Position:

a. Being in the top position is not always a good thing - - those ads get more clicks but at a lower quality and higher price.

b. Placement at the 3 or 4 spots mean less visitors but higher visitor quality, and less cost.

3. Define what are the desired "Goals" for your Campaigns:

a. Total Clicks, Leads, Sales?

b. Click Rate (CTR) versus Conversion Rates?

For me, high conversion rates for lead generation are much more important than CTR.

Optimizing any paid search campaigns like Adwords is an ongoing process. Being successful with paid search is not unlike being an active stock trader. The search engine "search-term market" is never ending, and always dynamic and changing.

Victory goes to the methodical, alert, nimble and opportunistic. Victory can be defined in many ways, but the points above give an idea of the creativity, research and work required to make it happen.

Greg Statal has posted an excellent article entitled "What to do when Adwords doesn't get results" on his blog Digital Tonto. He goes into more detail with ideas one should consider in order to make an Adwords campaign more effective.

Best Regards; Erik Holladay

Freedom of Choice: Give Potential Customers Easy Options for Contacting your Company from your Website.

I have for some years allowed enquries to contact our divisional website through Telephone, Email and Contact Us Form. Adding a Chat option eventually will round things out. The primary goal for B-to-B marketing is make it very easy for a potential or returning customer to contact us! Let them chose the method, as long as we get the lead.

From my experience over the last 5 years, there is a clear pattern of contact preferences from enquiries:

The largest enquiry group uses and prefers the Telephone, and the quality of these leads is on average higher than the other options and often time-sensitive.

Next are Emails, this option is easy and convenient for people to use, and we can often capture complete contact details and attached project information along with the email. We receive very high value enquiries from Executives as emails, for example.

Last are Contact Us Form enquiries. This is not to say these forms are of little value, we also receive high quality leads this way. However, from my experience, using a Contact Us Form is the least popular way our B-to-B clients have wanted to contact us, if given the choice.

Yet, there are significant internal advantages with Contact Us Forms for CRM data capture, analytics, etc. And a Contact Form can be tweaked and optimized to encourage more people to use it.

But the Bottom line for us is the Telephone first, then Email, then Web Form in terms of enquiry options chosen by visitors.

Designing a webform long enough to capture the contact information Bus Dev and Marketing want, but short enough to encourage someone to fill the Contact Us form out and send, involves compromise, flexibility, experimentation and an open-mind.

A special thanks to Howard Sewell, President of Connect Direct, for posting the question
"Contact Us" Forms - Do They Work?" in LinkedIn... this question motivated me to share my experience with Contact Forms, Phone and Email.