Promotional Items and Trade Shows

Promotional Items Attract Quality Leads At Trade Shows and Conferences.

Trade Shows are hard work. One of the hardest working contributors to B-to-B Trade Shows are "Cheap and Cheerful" promotional items. When used properly, carefully selected promotional give-aways boost lead counts and grow the number of quality leads produced from an exhibition, conference, or other industry event. You’ll get more visitors to your booth at minimal cost, expand your potential prospect contact list, and out-perform your competitors.

Well chosen promotional items are eye-candy and provide an element of entertainment. No matter how busy or how important a delegate walking down your exhibit aisle is, promotional items will get their attention.  These lowly "cheap and cheerful" booth workers are often noticed well before people pay attention to your carefully designed booth. Delegates and prospects are people, and people love novelties and freebies.

Deciding what promotional item to order can take some thought and deliberation. Choose items which fit the venue and focus of the conference. It's easy to keep costs under control, just don't go low quality or boring. In other words, cheap or boring give-aways which break or quickly stop working are worse than having nothing at all. Avoid branded items which are eaten or consumed (such as gum or candy). Better to give them something that has function or is 'fun' and a conversation starter. When people show other people their new company branded 'toy', you've won. Think out of the box.

At one key conference and exhibition, for example, we stopped VIP senior execs dead in their tracks with our 'secret weapon', a cleverly themed promotional item which fit the event perfectly. These men and women manage, own, and lease significant assets and usually would ignore the booths around them while engaged in their deep conversations. They would have strolled right by us with barely a look had we not put on the exhibit table our clever promotional item... and that is how we met many of these key contacts. They wanted multiple samples too.... for their kids, grand-kids, people in their office, and themselves.

Hard Working Booth Staff.

The promotional item created a face-to-face opportunity to meet, greet, and give them our slate of services and created golden opportunities with significant new potential accounts. These inexpensive company-logo give-aways will be happily found in their homes and offices…. providing great brand exposure for us. Call it "In-House Advertising". Needless to say, our global manager for that business niche now insists we have these giveaways on duty at his major worldwide trade-show events.

At another key European conference for another business line I used the same strategy, once again tailoring an inexpensive but eye-catching give-away item to the event. One of the country managers had been very skeptical of trade shows and promotional items, based his past experience. He was amazed at the sheer number of quality leads generated thanks to the promotional item working in tandem with a newly designed booth, literature, and a hand-picked team of experts. He also now insists that the same approach be used in the future. I can cite many more examples of how promotional items help drive in leads and spark conversations with valuable prospective customers.

Promo Item Going Viral.

There is also a viral marketing benefit to this. People who were given the cheap and cheerful giveaway item showed it to their colleagues and friends at the conference, and pointed them our way. They also post photos of the giveaways on social media and share them. We gained additional qualified leads as a consequence.

At a recent and massive trade show and conference, I gave every one of the hard-working people registering delegates one of our event themed promotional items as a thank you from us. They loved them, and they wore them while registering hundreds and hundreds of delegates! They even came back for more. We gained significant conference exposure as a consequence. When you are in a massive trade show with over 1,000 exhibitors and you're only a minnow in a very big sea, every bit of 'viral marketing' and 'guerrilla  marketing' helps.

Silly promotional item? Yes. Effective at the job of attracting leads? Yes.

There are advantages and disadvantages to various promotional item approaches. There is no single solution. In fact, each solution comes with its own set of challenges. Having a drawing for a big-ticket item is valid and can attract a lot of business cards and contacts, but only one person will win. Inexpensive giveaways make everyone who stops by a 'winner', and if a conversation is started and a contact is made and recorded, both sides win. If budget allows for it, it would be ideal to have both a 'raffle drawing' for a big ticket item and mass quantities of branded promotional items.

I can’t tell you how many times we've made important client contacts at trade shows because we had a ‘cheap and cheerful’ bauble on display…. too many to count.

When exhibiting at trade show or conference, include an appropriate give-away item. It can be quality, it can be classy, it can be silly, it can be clever. But include one.

More on Trade Shows, Conferences, and Marketing Tactics:

• Trade Shows Still Work
• Success with International Trade Shows

Negative is Still Positive with Google Adwords, and BING too.

Embrace Your Negative Side When Managing Paid Search Campaigns.

Five years ago I wrote a popular blog article on the use of negative keywords for Adwords, entitled Negative is Positive with Google Adwords.

Guess what? Negativity, in the form of negative search terms, is still a very useful tactic for refining your paid search campaigns, lowering your costs, and improving your conversions.

Both Adwords and BING provide easy-to-use tools to research and add negative terms to your campaigns and individual adword groups. Negative keyword search tactics are often ignored and underutilized, based upon my observations over the years... leading to large amounts of wasted effort and spending.

Negative is Positive with Paid Search

Why use Negative Search Terms?

Negative search terms help filter out people searching for things not relevant to your business.

One of the the challenges with paid search is that very different people may use identical or very similar search terms to access very different information and business solutions. Also called 'indirect search engine competitors', many bad things can happen to your search campaign if you find yourself inadvertently competing against indirect competitors.

For example, if your company sells 'brake shoe liners' to B-to-B industrial and mass transportation clients, your attempts to use paid search ads using search terms such as 'brake shoe' or 'shoe liner' may result in your ads competing against totally unrelated businesses selling 'shoes', 'brakes', 'liners', and variations of these keyword search terms. Not only will you pay more to be higher up in the rankings, but you may get clicks and 'leads' from confused or irrelevant visitors. You'll waste time, money, and harm your reputation as you attract 'garbage leads'.

Besides using more long-tail search terms, adding negative search terms will help cut back on the clutter and waste. If a potential searcher is looking for a search term which includes your negative keyword, your ad will not show. You just saved time, money, and reputation. Negative search terms to combat 'brake shoe liners' could include 'store', 'women's', 'sale', 'car', 'autoparts', etc. Your click through rate will climb, your quality score will climb, your conversion rate will climb, and more.

A well designed paid search campaign may, in fact, have more negative search terms than positive.

Google Adwords in particular has some great tools you can use to research both potential and actual search terms related to your keywords and your ads. You can actually review real Adwords search history for your adwords groups, select search terms which are not desirable, add and/or modify them to ensure there is no unintended problem with your positive search terms, and then load them as negative terms. You've just enhanced the performance of your campaigns.

One important word of advice regarding negative search terms... choose wisely, selectively, and sparingly. Try to keep to one-word negative keyword lists, as this will reduce the risk of accidentally filtering for good keywords. Better to use 'automobile' as negative term than 'automobile research', if your company conducts research for clients, for example.

Lessons Learned from Ten Years with Google Adwords

FEED Your Website. FEED IT.

Use SEO to Feed your Website. Feed it with valuable B-to-B leads.

Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the number one, proven, effective, technique to feed quality visitors to a website and produce valuable leads as a consequence. Just like a lawn, a website needs to be fed in order to be healthy. SEO acts as a powerful 'fertilizer', feeding your website with a constant stream of quality business leads.

Using SEO as the key foundation for a productive lead-generating website is equivalent to one of nature's laws... ignore or downplay SEO at your peril.

Your Website With SEO:

This Website Used Search Engine Optimization and THRIVED.

A website well-fed with effective SEO will produce leads and quality visitors. SEO is a constant process, however, and needs to be conducted on a routine basis. Search Engines and Competitors mean that content is constantly being updated on Search Engine Results, so good SEO means regular "weed and feed" practices are in order.

Your Website Without SEO:

This Website Didn't Use Search Engine Optimization and WILTED.

I am constantly surprised when encountering people who deliberately take actions to harm their website's SEO effectiveness. Such SEO self-saboteurs can be a bit delusional. They often don't comprehend how SEO works, or try 'shortcuts' a fly-by-night agency has suggested (spammy link-building or keyword stuffing, anyone?), or they'll reject the dedicated work-ethic needed to be successful with long-tail search success. The result? An ugly website full of dead pages, barren pages, weedy pages, and poor lead generation.

Some of the worst offenders don't like nor understand SEO and think it is a messy process. They want it all stopped, now. SEO gives them a headache. Make it go away. This mentality always provides a gift to their competitors who do understand and exploit SEO.

The simple mantra "Feed Your Website. Feed It." using good search engine optimization practices will ultimately produce a beautiful, lush, website sprouting vigorous growth full of quality business leads.

Want Good Web Leads? Then SEO Matters.

Want More Local Web Leads? Target Local + Country Search Content.

Localizing Content Can Bring Lead Generation and Search Engine Success.

Focusing SEO and PPC into optimizing key local country search campaigns can be effective and very profitable.

So why localize webpage content, when appropriate? Because it works... really well. The quality leads I see generated every day on a global basis generated from localized webpages tell me we're on the right track, and getting leads we may have missed otherwise.

Localized Search Optimization
will produce additional quality leads.

Targeting localized search is another example of using long-tail search marketing tactics. There is extra work ahead in order to succeed and dominate in location focused search results. Adding localized content also means thinking through how to harmonize such pages with more global, "generic" content pages which are located on the same website. Assuming the website is global and one language (English), webpage duplication must be minimized, and cross-linking must be logical.

This article will focus on localized content on webpages for localized SEO in English.

There are very effective localization tools which will not be discussed in this article, such as Geo-targeting call-to-actions and using Google's Local Search Listings. These SEO tools deserve their own time.

Another extremely powerful technique to dominate local search, not covered here, is the creation of additional language (Spanish, French, German, Chinese, etc) and language specific country websites (Mexico, Spain, France, Germany, China, etc). This tactic also deserves separate time and attention.

So, how does localized search work, and when should you create local content webpages in addition to generic content pages?

First, be aware that Google operates different search engine websites for different countries. The results on those national search engines will serve up different results than Google.com, in English and especially in the local language. In English, don't assume that if your page is doing well with organic SERP on www.google.com, that the page will also do as well on www.google.co.uk!

It really doesn't matter if your business is global (like mine), or national, regional, and local. People will search for goods and services millions of different ways. Adding location to a search query is a common search tactic, and using location in a search may indicate a high quality prospect is looking for a vendor. That global vendor may as well be you.

For example, I may have a global generic-content webpage focused on "Turbo Ionic Cleaners". The page is global in scope, and any visitor will see content geared to a global audience. It works really well on www.google.com.

But what about a potential customer in India who wants to know more about "Turbo Ionic Cleaners in India"? If all goes well, my generic page will hopefully rank on www.google.co.in. But if that market is big enough, a competitor may feel it worth building a webpage all about "Turbo Ionic Cleaners in India", and their webpage will have specific references to India and the Indian market. I suspect their India focused webpage will easily outrank mine on search results. In fact, my generic page may not even appear in organic listings, depending upon the search query.

This makes complete sense. Google wants to serve up the most relevant results possible. If a searcher adds local information like country, state, city, even street, Google will ruthlessly sort out results which fall outside those search terms.

So adding local content to a localized webpage designed to target locally focused search can be successful and expand the potential market audience you can reach. The trick is to make sure the page is not duplicating a generic webpage, but is rather complementing the generic page and 'orbiting' it in terms of hierarchy.

Once a new webpage is developed which meets localized country-specific content criteria, consider launching niche Adwords and BING campaigns to further support this page in the country or market being targeted.

Local search content is a variant of long-tail content search. If you want quality leads, go long-tail.

Even with English being commonly used across the world for technical search term queries, adding local intent into search terms can greatly impact search result rankings. Becoming aware of these variations and exploiting for local markets can make a big difference in lead generation.

Focus On Your Paid Search Landing Pages

Focus: Enhance Paid Search Success by Paying Attention to the Landing Page.

As hard to believe as this sounds in 2014, there are still marketers out there who point niche service and product paid search online ads in blanket carpet bombing style to their company homepage. Just this week I learned about an otherwise talented marketer who directs virtually all of their Adwords ads for a range of complex instruments and services to their company homepage. They wanted to "promote their brand", but they ended up harming the lead generation needed to support "the brand". This sort of behavior is not uncommon.

This less-than-brilliant-behavior can be frequently spotted, especially with Google Adwords. If a competitor engages in such foolishness (and they do) I silently chuckle and thank them for their misdirected efforts. One competitor ran a niche ad for a very specific service, but splashed the ad across an extensive shotgun range of search terms. That poor ad appeared for wide range of non-relevant services for years, equivalent to advertising neon soccer balls to searchers who were looking for canoes, baseballs, and basketballs. This effort was a waste of time and money for my competitor, and for potential clients searching for solutions.

In another recent landing page fiasco, I informed some colleagues that major a competitor was running an ad in Adwords for a key search term they coveted. This caused some initial consternation until I pointed out that the competitor had screwed-up.... they were directing their hard-fought (and expensive to click) ad to their homepage, and there was no link to the service their ad was promoting! Any visitor was in effect stranded and marooned in that situation.... and likely bounced right out of that website. Any clicks bought by that ad were wasted.

This sort of PPC self-inflicted sabotage should remind folks that blindly directing limited paid search ad money to the homepage can be self-defeating and a waste of budget. Chose your landing pages wisely!

Precise landing page targeting matters for paid search:

The beauty of search engines are that people (your potential customers) can find long-tail niche services, products, and information quickly. They want relevant, precise, concise, results in their search results. They don't want to waste their time. So don't waste their time by giving them lousy landing pages!

Your paid ad content and landing page should reflect the same level of precision as the prospect's search. To keep the implicit promise given in your ad content for user relevancy (which is why your ad was clicked), a landing page should be relevant and targeted.

The problem with Homepage as Landing Page:

Using your homepage for a landing page will usually frustrate and vex most paid search visitors. Homepages carry a lot of general information, navigation options, and branding. If someone wants to learn more about your company, then using the homepage as a landing page is fine.

But if someone wants to learn more about a niche techno-widget, for example, that your company sells for determining the ultra-trace analysis of stray protons in parabolic hydrocarbons, then your landing page had better focus on your techno-widget! The less clicks needed to find your product or service the better.

Don't make your landing page visitor work too much to find what they are seeking. You'll lose many of them before they get to the 'money page'. Make it easy for them by landing right on the page which appears to be the most precise and relevant.

By the way, having such an focused long-tail webpage will also work wonders for your organic search engine optimization. Building targeted landing pages for Paid Search can help you win at both paid and organic search rankings and lead generation.

Learn more about Google Adwords and Paid Search:

• Lessons Learned from Ten Years with Google Adwords
• Negative is Positive with Google Adwords

Matt Cutts Answers "When will Google stop updating its search results?" Uh..... Never?

Google's Matt Cutts Answers "The Question".... The Question to Life, The Universe, and Everything SEO.*

 

Matt also slips in a great line from 2001, A Space Odyssey into his talk. HAL would be proud.

*The real answer is 42.

Feed your Website. Feed It.

Aggressive Link Building for B2B SEO is a Fool's Game

Artificial link-building for short-term B2B SEO advantage is a mirage and an affliction. 
Don't do it. 

You don't need to engage in artificial and risky attempts to build links to boost your webpage's B2B SEO success.

My SEO philosophy is to build quality content, target and exploite long-tail-search opportunities, and network those pages into cohesive and related clusters of relevant content. Then let the search engines rank these pages, ideally getting to page one results. When done correctly, this will encourage the proactive creation of quality, natural, inbound links from other websites which find my material relevant and worthy.

Inbound links are valuable if they are organic, have natural fit, are mostly unsolicited, and come from quality sources. Call this the 'white hat' laissez faire school of 'let them come' link SEO.

Buying links, joining link networks and participating in link-farms are blatant attempts to unnaturally and artificially circumvent search engine organic ranking systems. Search Engines hate these 'black hat' tactics because they can pollute organic search results with spammy pages of poor quality, pushing more deserving webpages down in rankings. Such tactics can create manipulated results which strike at the core consumer value of Google and BING. That's why Matt Cutts and Google have declared war on unnatural link-builders attempting to "game" SERP results.

I've witnessed various in-house marketers and agencies proclaim that acquiring links was their primary tactic. It didn't seem to matter that their webpages content was ageing, verbose, too broad, and too long. Nor did it matter that their webpage organization and hierarchy was poor. Never mind that their webpages violated the principles of long-tail-search and the content was not concise, not precise, nor relevant. None of that mattered. Chasing links would do the heavy lifting for SEO success, wouldn't it? No, not really. Especially not if you are in for the long-haul.

Play to Win, without buying Links.

In my 12+ years of search engine marketing and lead generation success, I've never engaged in a systematic attempt to increase the number of inbound links to my websites. Not once. I'm too busy optimizing niche content, focusing on long-tail-search, and enhancing website structure and hierarchy. In other words, I am focused on providing a superior, quality, product for humans (my potential customers) and search engines.

During a recent presentation I gave on Search Engine Marketing, during Q&A someone asked why I had not brought up link-building. When I told them that my success has come without link-building projects, there was an audible gasp from several people in the audience. I was apparently committing a form of SEO Linking blasphemy, in their link-loving minds at least.

Link-building hurts the innocent, too. I've met a some poor souls recently whose company websites were hit hard by recent Google updates and actions. Their pages dropped out of vital page one search results. Their company websites, built invariably by some hired, local SEO agency and/or 'seo expert', were set-up for disaster because a major part of the SEO strategy was to buy links. Once Google's anti-spam filters caught up with these sites, they were severely punished. Now these companies are scrambling to rebuild their sites, disavow links, and petition Google to give them another chance.

Matt Cutts video on "Unnatural Links to Site":



Creating a B2B search engine optimization programs based on aggressive link-building is fraught with danger, risk, and ultimate failure. "Black Hat" link-building may look like a short-cut to SEO success, but in the end such link-building tactics can, and will, backfire.

Focus on precise content, relevant content, webpage organization, and long-tail-search instead. You'll be amply rewarded.

Feed Your Website. Feed IT.

Revive Stagnant Paid Search Campaigns: Brian Geddes @ SMX West 2014

Brad Geddes is one of the acknowledged experts in paid search marketing. I've had the pleasure, and the competitive advantage, of taking his Google Adwords classes in the past. Brad Geddes's presentation "Breathing New Life Into A Tired Paid Search Campaign" at SMX West 2014 is worth a serious look and review, especially for those of us who have been running Adwords campaigns for years. In my case, for over 11 years. Paid Search is too effective for lead generation to be taken for granted, or allowed to wallow on extended auto-pilot mode!

Breathing New Life Into A Tired Paid Search Campaign from Search Marketing Expo - SMX

SMX West 2014: Blog Coverage Recap

What happened at SMX 2014?

This informative posting on Search Engine Land by Barry Schwartz provides a quick but detailed listing and links to the major topics and highlights presented at SMX West (Search Marketing Expo West) for 2014 in San Jose. For any serious search engine marketer, this SMX West post is worth a digging into!

Google Search Amit Singhal At SMX West 2014

Amit Singhal, the top manager of Google Search, was interviewed by Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan during SMX 2014 in San Jose. Here is a link to that interview. For anyone who is exploiting search engine marketing for leads, revenue, and ecommerce, this interview is worth a quick read.

Live Blog: Head Of Google Search Amit Singhal Keynote At SMX West 2014

There is also a surprise appearance from another famous Google Employee.

A partial video feed can be seen on YouTube.