A Major Shift in SEO and Content Marketing: Keywords vs. Concepts

One of the key trends discussed at SMX West 2015 is something we have been increasingly noticing from search engines -- focus on concepts vs. keywords.

This paradigm change has been causing shifts in SERP rankings for the last several months and we have been adjusting our SEO and content marketing strategy to align with it.

Concepts vs. keywords change is pretty fundamental and will most likely be continuously impacting your search engine rankings.  This article examines more details behind this change, discusses how it can affect your rankings, and provides five strategies for taking advantage of this trend.

Keywords vs. concepts/themes.  For years we have been focused on specific keywords.  We have been identifying target keywords,  monitoring their performances, and creating campaigns to improve our rankings.

Hard to Manage.  You can easily see how this SEO approach can get overwhelming and unmanageable.  Each product can have hundreds of keywords to target.  If you have multiple products, you may need to be tracking and promoting thousands of keywords.

How do you accomplish that? Do you create thousands of content pieces a month to rank better?  That sounds like a daunting task.  However, many companies have been doing exactly that -- either manually or by using tools to automate the process of creating individual content pages for each keyword.

Poor content quality.  It's obvious that it's impossible to create unique and engaging content for thousands of related words every week without astronomic budgets and resources.  As a result, the content produced through this strategy has been highly repetitive and lacked value.

Search quality issues.  These tactics allowed companies manipulate search engines for a while, resulting in low quality search results.  However, Google has been catching up with such tactics and penalizing low quality and duplicate content with Penguin and Panda updates.

And now a more fundamental change is happening.

Semantic search.  With the semantic search becoming more prevalent, Google is increasingly ranking groups of related keywords vs. individual ones.  The grouping criteria is based on the word order, paid/organic search history, contextual meaning, word relationships, content relevance, domain authority, and other factors.

Good news!  This means that your SEO work for specific keywords may result in uplifting your rankings for related keywords as well, even the ones you have not been specifically targeting.

Less on-page SEO.  It also means less emphasis on the on-page SEO -- less counting how many times specific keywords should show up on your web pages.  The practice of creating a page for each specific (related) keyword becomes mostly irrelevant.

Unexpected results.  On a flip side, you may discover wild swings in your target keywords rankings because these specific searches are not as compartmentalized as before.
They are viewed in a wider content of keyword groups. 

As a result, your efforts on individual keywords may not be as effective as before.  This could be especially the case if you have a better established competitor that dominates related keywords in SERPs.



Here are five recommendations on embracing this change and making the best out of it:

• Do research and understand top keywords you want to focus on
• Do monitor your individual keywords so you know how they perform and which competitors to focus on
• Do try to understand how individual keywords are grouped in concepts / themes
• Do create good quality and unique content around the themes/groupings you want focus on
• Do use social channels to promote your content and generate high quality links

Also check out my blog on 5 steps to organize your keywords in groups for best SEO & content marketing results. 

5 Characters You Meet In Successful Modern Marketing Teams

What does a winning marketing team look like nowadays?

How different is it from 5 years ago?

There are many new challenges we face today.  There are also traditional marketing challenges that never went away.

- Create differentiated positioning
- Create & update messaging
- Establish thought leadership
- Establish a repeatable and scalable lead generation program
- Improve lead conversion rates  
- Decrease customer acquisition cost (CAC)
- Gain social and search visibility
- Support sales
- Build meaningful and accurate metrics 
- Collect and report daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly numbers  

Add all different programs, communication channels and angles that need to be built and maintained:
- SEO
- SEM
- Email nurturing
- Social media
- Industry communities
- Customer boards
- Gamification
- Blogs
- PR
- Analysts
... and much more

The process of addressing these challenges starts with an effective marketing team.  To build it, CMOs often have to reconstruct their existing teams.  Some skills are unchanged and are still in demand.  Others may not be needed anymore or may have morphed into new ones.  For example, marketing communications skill has transformed into product journalism and corporate reporting.  There are also brand new skills, like SEO Analytics & Messaging Manager.

Below are top 5 essential skills for today's marketing teams:

(NEW) Product Marketing++.  This skill is relatively unchanged. You still need somebody on your team that can develop in-depth product, customer and marketplace understanding.

This person has to be able to come up with clear product messaging, top differentiators -- things that none of your competitors can do and things that matter most to your customers.

This person will have to stay connected to your development team, as well as keep abreast of the market and competitive changes in order to update the core message as necessary.

The skill upgrade (the "++" component) comes in the ability to utilize the web, social media, hashtags, communities, SEO and other web tools to proactively conduct competitive research, industry trends analysis, message A/B testing, etc.


(NEW) Product Journalism and Corporate Reporting.  (f.k.a. Marketing Communications).

Yes, MarComm is dead.  The time of fluffy and meaningless collateral materials is gone.  In today's world, unique and engaging content is the king!   

In my previous blog entry I talked about the heroes and zeroes of content marketing.  You definitely want to be looking for a hero -- somebody that has a very creative way of telling your story.  This person will break down the higher-level message into many engaging, shareable and (when possible) viral product, customer and industry stories.

Once developed, these stories will have to be further modified, enhanced and formatted to fit well into different channels, e.g. blog entries, press releases, TTL+description, social media blurbs, community posts, emails (or series of emails), etc.

In an essence, each story becomes a mini-launch of content that drives your SEO, improves your thought leadership position, engages your prospects and customers, and generates high quality leads.

It took me a while to figure out the core skill set requirements and find the right fit for this position.  I interviewed lots of candidates with marketing communications and product marketing backgrounds, but none of them fit the bill. However, I had a really good luck with finding and hiring people with journalistic experience that have been writing to the audience we are marketing to.


(NEW) SEO Analytics & Messaging.

For many CMOs SEO remains a black box.  Yet, there is no dark magic in using SEO to maximize results and generate revenue.  No shady practice of buying links.  No figuring out how many times a certain keyword has to appear on a page.

There are essentially two important skills here:

1.  Ability to find & utilize tools to find relevant information, like numbers, keywords, content utilization, etc.

2.  Making sense out of these numbers in order to identify trends, provide actionable suggestions on keywords, landing pages, content needs, inbound lead generation opportunities and lead hacks.

The ideal SEO analytics person will have both analytical and creative skills.  There is an increasing number of marketing tools that generate lots of interesting data.  But it takes a skill to translate numbers into actionable suggestions.  For example, Google Analytics gives you tons of data on site visits.  Yet, most of it is buried and is accessible only through custom reporting.  A good SEO analytics person will figure out how to make sense out of this data and find relevant and meaningful trends that could show the flow of most valuable visitors, pages and assets, as well as how they change overtime.

A great SEO analytics person will work with your SEO agency to research the latest trends, explore different tools to give you an edge against competition in defining the most valuable keywords, reference sites, competitive moves, link building and PR opportunities (that your PR team / agency has most likely missed).

Ultimately, 80% of your inbound marketing success depends on the right messaging and whether or not you are focusing on the right keywords.  Use shortcuts here and you can spend millions on your inbound efforts and not get any meaningful results.




Marketing Automation & SFDC Black Belt.  

Marketing automation tools have been around for a while. There are many ways you can use them - from a rudimentary bulk email sending to sophisticated lead scoring, establishing and capturing new types of leads, customer flows, and generating in-depth metrics and powerful dashboards.

Every single one of these areas can get really complex, really quickly.  Yet, it can make a huge difference in your bottom line results.

For example, email marketing is a seemingly simple concept, but it has quite a few complexities that can generate results anywhere from no leads to hundreds of leads.

Some of these factors include the ability to create mobile-friendly content, come up with effective subject lines, pick conversion-friendly calls to action, A/B test 5-10 variables, decide on HTML vs. Text vs. Video, pick the most optimal colors, frequency, days of week and times of the day, figure out how to categorize and break down your database, etc.

There is also lots of data that exists in sales and marketing automation tools.  It is important to understand and establish a regular flow of critical metrics, such as conversion rates (lead to oppty; oppty to deal), conversion times, numbers of touches, lead sources breakdown, lead lifecycles, etc.

It will bring a complete transparency to marketing activities, as well as a clear understanding of which marketing campaigns do work and which don't.  It will allow to shift priorities and marketing budgets to the programs with the best ROI.

For this role, you may want to find a person that has strong skills in analytics, data visualization, presentation, multi-tasking and project management.



Employee vs. Outsourcing.  Project Management.  

Use contractors in as many areas as possible.  Avoid the team bloat and racking up costs that unnecessarily increase your CAC .

However, blindly outsourcing can be a mistake as well.  The key thing is finding a working balance for each of critical marketing micro-skills.

For example, SEO and PPC have a very technical component, as well as creative one.

For the technical component, it is almost impossible to match the depth of a good SEO or PPC agency that spends 100% of their time on learning technical details as well as keeping up with the latest trends and changes from Google.  It is clearly a good idea to outsource that part.

However, no agency is ever going to develop an intimate understanding of your customer base and your industry.  They will never be able to completely nail down your keywords.  You may want to have your SEO and content person (people) working closely with the SEO agency for the best results.

That approach works well with other areas too, such as content creation, graphics design, landing page coding, etc.

Needless to say, the more contractors you have, the harder it is to manage them.  So it is important to have a team member with strong project management skills to keep all the trains moving and on track.  Since the marketing automation person has to be a good project manager too, you may want to combine these two roles in one.


Not a Recipe.  Naturally, each company and industry is different.  There is no one size fits all recipe for building a winning marketing team.  While the skills above are critical and often essential, you will have to assess your specific needs and scale requirements.  That may call for adding other skills and team members, e.g. channel marketing, event coordination, lead qualification, etc.

4 Key Inbound Marketing Takeways from MozCon 2013

Me with Rand Fishkin

I finally found a little time to write about MozCon 2013.

2,500 attendees.  First of all, I was blown away by the number of people at the conference.  It was estimated to be around 2,500 people.  Kudos to Rand and the Moz team with their ability to build a great company, solid product and a strong community around it.

Inbound Marketing vs. SEO.  I think it is symbolic that SEOMoz has changed its name to just Moz.  With each Google algorythm change, SEO is transforming from standalone tweaks to a major component of every aspect of core marketing.  

SEO-influenced Marketing Areas.  Below are a few of strategies where SEO is merging with traditional marketing and transforming it into inbound marketing.

- Keyword definition, and updates <SEO-driven>

- Messaging <SEO-optimized>

- Content strategy <SEO-driven>

- Web page building + on-page optimization<SEO-defined>

- SEO-optimized PR and AR

- Social and community activities

- Link building

Agencies vs. In-House Teams.  Lacking official statistics, I would say 95% of attendees at MozCon were agencies.  Very few in-house teams.  I see two trends in that area:

• Agency-centric.  Many companies are outsourcing SEO, PPC and other inbound marketing activities to agencies.  I don't think it is a smart model since agencies usually don't have the core market expertise, since they typically don't interact with their customers' customers.  This limits their effectiveness and significantly reduces results.
• Agency-fication. Companies with more advanced inbound teams are going deeper into SEO, PPC, content marketing, etc.  In a nutshell, they are building agency-type expertise, often leapfrogging their competitors who rely on the first model.  They just use agencies for technical advice.  This model can produce significantly better results, but requires a completely different Marketing team DNA.
   

Tools and New Practices.  What was really cool about MozCon -- you discover new tools and best practices for improving inbound marketing.  These can make a huge difference in generating leads and conversion ratios.  

Four best tracks from the conference:

• 1. Win Through Optimization and Testing.
     Kyle Rush had practical advice for planning, implementing and updating A/B testing in many aspects of online marketing.
  2. How to Be a One Person Link Building Army
     Mike Arnesen went over some extremely efficient techniques and tools for building high quality (and Penguin-safe) links with limited resources and budgets.
  3. 2013 Ranking Factors
     Very technical presentation for advanced SEOs.  Good data based on the research done by Moz.
  4.  Simplifying Complexity: Three Ideas For Higher ROI.  Really interesting and meaningful content about various inbound marketing channels, attribution and visualized ROI for complex marketing campaigns.  I personally didn't care about the presentation style with lots of profanity and posturing, but the underlying content was great.

Finally, an advice for fellow marketing executives.  I would highly recommend personally attending the next MozCon show and/or sending a team member responsible for lead generation or online marketing.

 

SMX West 2013: Where are the Big Cheeses?

Here is to another great SMX conference!  This time in San Jose, CA.

For me, SMX is a great venue to get up to speed with the latest inbound marketing developments  -- from SEO to Content Marketing to PPC.

This is my second SMX after the one in NY.  In both cases, I left with interesting new ideas, strategies and techniques.  Some of these have made a difference for us, helping to get an unfair advantage against much bigger competitors in terms of high quality leads and as a result, in a higher  number of closed deals.


Here are some of my key observations from SMX 2013:

1. Morphing Inbound marketing .  Once upon a time, it was as simple as just having good content and a decent landing page. With more and more companies generating lots of content (both good and bad), effective inbound marketing is getting really complex and demands more and more resources.  At this point, it requires pretty sophisticated SEO, dedicated content marketing, SEO-optimized, PR, metrics, tools, graphics designers and web coders.

Each element is a science to itself.  And many of them are morphing and merging, opening new opportunities and creating new complexities.

For example, traditional PR is becoming an SEO-optimized PR that is turbocharged with smart content marketing, delivered using social and community marketing, using social network-fueled journalist and blogger targeting and "help a reporter" tools.

Sounds complicated?  It really is.  It requires the right talent, experience and budgets to succeed.

Does it work?  Absolutely.  Done right, it is a high quality lead generation machine.



2.  SEM- what is the right balance?  

Are you still managing PPC yourself without an agency help?  PPC is getting more sophisticated and complex every month.  If you are in an industry with many competitors, you have to pay lots of attention on technical things like bidding, grouping, segmenting, mobile vs. desktop, etc.

You have to manage other things as well, e.g. messaging, ad writing, designing / coding / updating landing pages, A/B testing, competitive analysis, etc.

Can in it be done in-house?  Yes, if you have a sizable, dedicated and experienced team.

For most of us...- get a good agency!  ... And have team member that will focus on messaging, copy, A/B testing, design, etc.

Why?  Because the agency doesn't know your industry.  It may waste lots of time and money with no results, if you outsource that part.


3.  Where are the the Big Cheeses?  With the way marketing is evolving, one would think more CMOs and Vice Presidents would come to SMX to learn about the inbound / content / web / search engine marketing.  Yet, there were very few executives.

The good news is that there were many bright and innovative junior and mid-level marketing professionals.  I think these folks are shaping their future, obtaining and perfecting skills that would make them really successful as next-generation marketing executives.  

Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing: 7 Decision Factors

How do you find the right mix between inbound and outbound marketing.  I have seen the wrong model  bring down marketing efforts, jobs and even entire companies.

Here are a few examples:

Example 1:  Two years ago I was having a lunch with a CMO of a small company claiming to generate 90% of leads of his company from trade shows.  They were working at 2-3 trade shows a week.  It is obvious why that model didn't scale - CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) was way too high. It required too many resources and time-to-revenue was too long.  A year later, that CMO was gone and now the company is almost dead.

Example 2:  A company called Intronis decides on the outbound-driven lead generation model.  It hires lots of cold callers and does tons of trade shows.  The lead generation model fails.  The whole company has to go through painful layoffs.  Here is a quote from an article that appeared yesterday:  "Marketing is non existent…..sales team gets axed…engineer in the drivers seat. Sounds and smells like a sellout…Keep the barebones to support the product but not the partners…not so channel focused anymore. "


Example 3:  On the opposite side of the spectrum, another small company I knew was generating most of their sales from blog entries.  The CEO was a Blog Black Belt.  It worked really well for a while.  Good news - his company got acquired.  The larger company added some outbound efforts.  Not so good news - they are currently having hard times with the number of leads, quality and customer acquisition costs - not being able to scale neither of models.

So, how do you find the right answer?

Before giving up to inbound marketing zealots or caving in to outbound lead generation agencies, you may want to take several factors into consideration:

1.  Your target buyer's persona.
    - Who are the decision makers for your product / service?
    - Who are the influencers?
     - What are their job titles?
     - What are the key challenges they are trying to address?

2.  Where do they fit on the innovation curve?
Are your target buyers innovators, early adopters, or laggards?  This will define to a large degree how to approach them.

Example: If you are marketing a revolutionary new product to innovators, you may want to start with an outbound networking-type campaign through your industry contacts to recruit your first customers.  Later, you can integrate a targeted social media-driven PR component, as well as an inbound campaign focused on people who are looking for relevant solutions.

3.  Channels where your customers find information and get influenced
Where do they look for information relevant to your offering?  Is it trade shows, industry forums, search engines, communities, newsletters, etc?

Example: If you are marketing to decision-makers that don't spend much time online or you are in an industry where the phone is still a more traditional communication method, an outbound model may be the appropriate one.  Conversely, if you are marketing to an audience that relies on social media and online communities for research, contracting a call center to generate leads would be an absurd idea! 

4.  The value of each sale and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
At the end of the day, marketing is an economic tool.  If a certain lead generation model is working really well, but costs too much, then it is doomed to fail.  You have to find the model that works best for you - in terms of BOTH conversion rates AND costs.

Example: We were using PPC for lead gen and it was generating high quality leads that regularly converted into sales.  But the cost of each sale (the marketing part) was about 200% over our target.  And after trying to bring it down for a few months, we had to pause it.

Outbound call center leads generated sales that costed 500% over the goal.  So, we focused on the inbound marketing leads - search engines, communities, social-driven PR, etc.  This proved to be the right model, bringing down our costs significantly -- even below the target CAC.  

Eventually, we revamped the messaging, did complete keyword map revamp, rebuilt landing pages, and changed 3 PPC agencies (before we found the right one)-- and "voila!" CAC is tracking right around the target!
  

5.  Your sales team readiness
No matter how many good leads you bring, you have to make sure your sales team and channel partners are capable of converting these lead types into sales.  I have seen a mismatch here causing many failures.

Example: At one of my previous companies, we started generating lots of inbound leads that needed a moderate amount of follow-up before they closed.  However, our sales team had only channel experience - they did not have the skills or desire to follow-up directly with the prospects.  Result = failure.  Until we upgraded the sales team.

6.  How easy is it to scale?
Some programs can be scaled easily.  Others may require a major upgrade to scale, putting CAC out of whack, at least for a while.

Example: You may be able to scale PPC.  But to substantially scale search engine-generated leads, you may need a sizable investment and patience.  However, longer term results can be huge! 

7.  Mix and change.
My final suggestion is to constantly experiment.  Marketing has been undergoing a major change over the last 3-4 years.  What works today may not work tomorrow at all .  So it is critical to always look for new lead channels.

First, create the foundation with the proven channels.  Then, experiment with 2-3 new ones at a time. By the time one of your foundational channels stops working, you will have 2 new ones that generate even better leads!

And with that... Happy Hunting!

Inbound Marketing - Lead Generation, Metrics and Growth Hacking

Marketing and Sales have been growing closer together in many areas over the past few years.  One such area is lead generation.

Lead Generation itself has recently morphed into growth hacking -- finding new sources and channels for high quality leads and nurturing lower quality ones into opportunities that indicate "near-buying" behavior.

NO MORE COLD CALLING!  Today, marketing can completely relieve the sales team from majority of lead gen tasks, such as cold calling, dialing for leads, "pounding the phones," etc.  The idea is to get prospects educated and sold online - before they even speak with a sales rep.

Unlike the interrupt-driven outbound model, by implementing inbound marketing, you are reaching a completely different type of prospects.  These prospects are more qualified, since they have a specific need and they are actively looking for a solution.  By providing them a variety of relevant tools and information, you are helping in their decision-making process.  By the time they decide to contact you, they are well educated on the product and are most likely willing to take the next step.  Contrast that with a sales rep cold calling and trying to pitch a product to people that don't have a problem they are trying to solve in the first place.

Implementation.  This approach significantly shortens sales cycles, increases conversion rates and drives down cost of each sale.  But how do you implement it?  The first step is lead classification -- understanding what are the most and least desirable leads, as well as all types in between.  Here are some recommendations:



1. Lead Types.  Find out what kind of leads are you getting today.  For example:

- Demo Requests
- Free Trials
- Phone calls
- White paper downloads
- Email contact requests

Brainstorm with your sales team to see what works for them best and worst, as well as what other types of leads you may want to be getting moving forward.

2. Analytics.  Look at your metrics for the last 12 or 24 months.  Even though you can build some very complex models, I would start with basics:
     - Conversion rates - lead to opportunity, opportunity to deal, lead to deal
     - Time to conversion - same as above
     - Costs -  per lead, per opportunity and per closed deal
     - Effort - how much time does your sales team invest in converting these leads?

3. Trends and scalability.  How did these numbers change over time?  Can you grow them easily? Would scaling costs be linear or would they require a significant investment -- to take to the next level? Can your marketing team handle the growth (team size, budgets, skills)?

4.  Pyramid Map.  Next, build a pyramid like the one on the left, as a visual representation of types of leads you are going after.

5.  Lead Inclusion / Exclusion.  Decide on which types of leads you are going to focus moving forward.  At this point, you may decide that some types of leads are too expensive.  You may find out that some low quality leads are even not worth pursuing due to the effort required. 

For example, after this type of analysis, we have decided that leads generated by an outsourced lead generation agency were too expensive and required too much effort from our sales team, making them completely ineffective in comparison with other lead types.  Instead, we shifted our focus on higher quality leads that required significantly less effort from our sales team.


6.  Planning.  Once you have the lead metrics, analysis, lead map and your sales plan, it is very easy to put together weekly, monthly and quarterly plan of how many and what type of leads you need.  Knowing the cost per lead and conversion percentages will help you accurately forecast marketing budgets - in terms of their size and timing.

7.  Metrics.  Finally, I suggest monitoring lead metrics daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually - to measure how you are executing against the plan.  Sometimes, you may need to to adjust activities - due to market changes, competitive moves, opportunities, etc.

You can add more advanced metrics later, like lead scoring, heat map, etc. But it is critical to intimately understand the effectiveness of each lead type before implementing these, otherwise lead scores are useless and the sales team will stop taking them seriously.

We have created a daily lead generation report that gets emailed to marketing, sales and relevant executives at the end of each business day.  This report covers number of leads in each category, broken down by source, type, relevant lead details, etc.  The same group of people receives a weekly lead composite report that looks not just at weekly numbers, but weekly and monthly trends in each category, enabling us to discover very interesting and useful micro and sometimes macro trends.



In my next blog entry in CMO Guide to Inbound Marketing, I will discuss the lead gen mix: outbound vs. inbound.

CMO Guide to Inbound Marketing - Overview

One of my observations from SMX 2012 was the disconnect between marketing executives and their marketing teams around the importance of online marketing and SEO.

It was interesting to see hundreds of marketing managers and directors struggle with selling the true value of SEO, PPC, rich content and inbound marketing to their executives.

Looking back at the path I traveled from brick and mortar to online / inbound marketing in the last 3-4 years, I thought it may be useful to put together a series of blogs for fellow marketing executives that are starting this journey.

Here are the key elements I will cover in my subsequent posts:

--------
1.  Inbound Marketing (vs. Outbound) 

2.  Keyword strategy

3.  Messaging

4.  Content and editorial strategy

5.  SEO

6.  PR

7.  Social and Community Marketing

8.  PPC

9.  Online Brand Building 

10.  Growth Hacking

11. Offline marketing

12.  Metrics and attribution

13.  A/B testing   

14.  Marketing team building / mix / talent acquisition 
-------

Just to give you an idea on the results so far, this approach has helped us to bring down lead and account acquisition costs by more than 70% and significantly decrease conversion times.  Today, high quality inbound leads constitute over 90% of all leads, enabling sales people to focus on converting prospects into customers instead of wasting all their time on cold calling.
   

5 Tips On Selecting a PR Agency

  PR is dead, right?  Not really.  It has just morphed into something with much stronger social media and inbound marketing components.  

Unfortunately, many PR agencies / pros did not evolve, which makes it hard for marketing executives to decide whether their agency is effective or not, as well as picking the right one to partner with.

As we revamped our messaging and had several major announcements coming up, we decided to shake things up a little and went through the process of finding a new PR agency.  Here are tips that worked well for us.

1.  Set your goals.  What is the primary reason behind PR efforts in your company?  Is it to bring new business?  Raise money?  Get acquired?  Get noticed?  The primary reason will define the type of agency you will go after.  

In our case, the primary reason was business expansion.  We had over 500% growth last year and we are gearing up for more this year!  We wanted to augment our SEO and inbound marketing activities with increased social media, relevant industry press, blogger and vertical community campaigns.  We have also a major launch coming up.  All that made it a good time to look for the right PR / social marketing agency.

2.  Understand your target markets.  Who is your buyer and how do they find products / services like yours.  If you are marketing to SMB segment, it probably is not the most effective strategy to go heavily after top industry analysts and major publications.  A better strategy may be going to after tier 2 / 3 analysts that blog a lot, as well as vertical communities, bloggers, etc.   

3.  Define success criteria.  How do you recognize the right PR agency when you come across them?  Here is my high-level checklist:

- Industry experience.  It is much easier to work with an agency that has experience in your market segment.  They typically know your sub-segments, market trends and competitors.  They would probably  have have ideas what worked and what didn't in terms of messaging and launch / marketing strategies.  They would most likely have relationships and a database of contacts with key industry figures, analysts, bloggers, and journalists.

Otherwise, you may find yourself spending lots of time bringing your PR agency up to speed in all these areas.  It would take time for them to build a database of contacts, build relationships, etc. 

- Inbound marketing / social media experience.   You would be surprised how few agencies "really" have these skills.  Most claim they do.  70% of the ones we looked at, did not have these skills.  20% thought we would win if only we could be active on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.  Clearly, we don't need a PR agency for that level of social media presence.  Finally, 10% really understood what it took to win the "inbound marketing battle" with detailed plans and tools that went far beyond the typical social media efforts.

- Track Record.  We wanted to see previous success stories with other clients.  In all fairness, there is only certain level of success even the best PR agency can bring to a company.  However, you can look at their past / current clients' press releases, media coverage, SEO rankings, and messaging and get an idea on how creative is the agency.

- Available Resources.  If a great PR agency is slammed with work and more clients than they can handle, you may not get the attention you need for your success.  So, it is critical to find an agency with enough resources and time to dedicate to your success.  It is also important to find out who specifically will work on your project.  You would want to be comfortable with that person's background, attitude, availability, etc. 

- Proximity.  In this day and age, proximity seems to be not important.  There is Skype, email, IM, and social media for effective remote communications.  That is mostly true.  

All other factors being the same, I much rather work with an agency that is local.  For example, we have spent two days with our new PR agency in person to kick off our upcoming launch planning.  I can't imagine having the same interaction quality, chemistry and results via Skype, con call or email.  

- Attitude. It is critical to find a PR agency that REALLY wants your business.  There  are plenty of stuck up, unfriendly agencies out there.  It will be very ineffective and frustrating to work with them.  

For example, one of the finalists presented really well at the first pass.  However, during the second meeting their attitude turned into, "we get enough business without you" and "you should feel lucky that we are taking you as a client," "sign the agreement now and don't waste our time."

There is no place for an attitude like that.  If they are acting this way before getting the contract, imagine how difficult would be to work with them through the launch when you need their presence most.

- Budget. There is a wide spectrum of prices - from a few thousand dollars a month (typically from PR contractors) to tens of thousands dollars per month (from "high end" PR agencies.)  More expensive does not necessarily mean better quality.  It could mean overhead, bloated infrastructure or just arrogance.

The "stuck up" PR agency was double the price of its competitors.  They "justified" it by more services they provide.  However, after looking in-depth, they were offering half of what others were providing.  

This said, I would warn against the "nickel and dime" approach.  You have to recognize a good deal and know when to stop the bargaining process.  PR agencies are in business to make money as well.  If we are not being fair to them, the relationship may not last.   

4.  RFI. After you know approximately what you are looking for, try to obtain a list of PR agencies that are active in your segment, as well as the ones you have worked with before.  Send out an RFI (request for information) outlining things you are trying to accomplish and what kind of help you are looking for.  You can easily find templates online.

5.  Proposal / Selection.  We ended up with around 50 RFIs sent out.  We got 12 responses.  Picked 3 finalists.  We invited each one of them to pitch the final proposal with expected results, resources, dates, plans, etc.  This step brought some surprises too.  The strongest candidate at the RFI stage turned out to be a "fluff" agency. 

However, #2 agency came in very strong.  We were very impressed with every single attribute of their final proposal.  And we made our selection.

Once the selection process was over and we signed the contract, the winning PR agency came into our office the following week for a 2 days kick-off session.  We refined out social media / inbound marketing plan,  brainstormed on the messaging,  and assigned specific action items.  So far, we are very happy with our choice.  

The proof will be, as everything in Hack Marketing approach, in our launch success and the delta in the overall metrics we have identified.

It's all about content... and metrics

How important is content quality in your marketing efforts?  Lip service aside, many organizations treat it  secondary at best.  Yet, in the modern world of online marketing, content is one of the most important components of your success.

Let's take an example of email nurturing.  Last week we were planning an email campaign with a very strong article written by an expert and a decent landing page.

We wrote the email and were thinking about the subject line.  My team member had it as "7 ways to ..."  To me, it seemed a little too "fluffy."  So after some more brainstorming we came up with another line that was more informative (at least IMO), like "xx  xx failure rates."

The theory behind it was that the "email receiver" would click on it because it would appear to be more of an informative email vs. "push my products" one.  We spent about an hour on the subject line debate.  Most organizations I know would have considered this as wasted time.  Was it though?

We conducted A/B test during the next few days.  Same email, same call to action, same landing page.   Different subject lines.

Results:

Subject Line 1: "7 ways..."   Open rate: 4.4%, click through rate: 0.2%
Subject Line 2: "...rates"  Open rate: 7.0%, click through rate: 0.5%

As you can see, there is a huge difference in these rates, which translated to 12 (SL1) leads against 50+ (SL2).  This is one of the best demonstrations (supported by metrics) of the difference that content quality makes.

The next A/B test will be this week.  We are going to be testing the email text.  We tuned it on Friday.  Given we see interesting results, I will blog about it later.

8 Key Elements for SMB Marketing (Part 1)

Mysterious SMB market.  For many years, I have been hearing the same story, "SMB market is lucrative and really fragmented.  It represents a tremendous opportunity for us."   Yet, I have witnessed many companies enter this space over and over, just to fall short of their expectations.  So, what gives?

The challenge is that neither enterprise, nor consumer programs alone are effective in this market.  I spent last 1,5 years on finding effective approaches for marketing and selling IT products and services into SMB.  Here are my findings:

1. Market Definition.   First, how do you define SMB?  I break it down into 4 segments:
     
           a. Small Office / Home Office (1 - 5 employees)  Consumer-like buying behavior.
           b. Very Small Business (6-30 employees).  No dedicated IT.  Use of consultants.
           c. Small Business (31 - 250 employees).  1-3 IT employees.
           d. Medium Business (251 - 1,000 employees).  1-5 IT employees.  More sophisticated network / apps.  Elements of the enterprise IT.


2.  Analyzing Strengths.  If you already have presence in this space and analyze your historic sales, you probably will discover that sales have been coming from one or two of the sub-segments above.  This exercise will point to success in certain types of your activities or channels.  And, visa versa, you may see opportunities in sub-segments that are not performing well.  You can also define which of these sub-segments are best matched for your product / sales force / channel presence.  This is critical, because even if you have the best product, but lack the right sales force type, your efforts may stumble.


3. Different Target Audience.  IT folks in SMB find, purchase and consume products differently than their peers in large enterprises.  SMB IT employees are typically generalists.  Having to compete with much larger companies, IT departments with only a few people have to take care of everything from fixing computers to maintaining the network infrastructure and deploying applications.  This often means no time for a deep dive into any area.  This also means no time to read fancy white papers, or try every product feature, or attend industry IT mega shows.  These characteristics make enterprise-type marketing fairly ineffective.


4.  Product Approach.   Ease of use is the name of the game here.  I have seen many simple and easy-to-use cloud services beat out complex, difficult-to-use and deploy, yet feature-rich products.  When building a product or a service for SMB market, it is critical to keep ease of use in mind.  It is a somewhat difficult concept for enterprise software vendors, who customize products to the needs of very large customers.  For these vendors, it may make sense to have a simpler and cheaper offering with reduced functionality that is easy to use, fast to deploy and doesn't require lots of support.  That is one of the reasons behind success of many cloud services in SMB space.  It is a worthwhile exercise for product managers, especially the ones with little SMB experience, to hold several focus groups to understand the simplicity requirements.

5. Messaging.  Since simplicity is so important, most of the enterprise (complicated and long) messaging approaches won't work.  SMB IT folks have absolutely no time to translate complicated technology of fluffy marketing messages into benefits.  Product Marketing has to create a message that connects quickly and uses their target market's language.  The reward can be huge - quick decision-making process and faster time to revenue.  A successful example of such messaging is what we did for Panda Security: www.forgetsecurity.com


More... Not to bore you with too long of a post, I broke it down in two entries.  In the second part, I  discuss lead generation, lead sorting and nurturing, sales approach and channels, and marketing / sales tools.

Is "Good Enough" marketing good enough?

The "good enough" concept is valid and important in many areas, including product management.  There is never a perfect product, so a good product manager knows when the product is "good enough" and ready.  This is based on many factors, such as customer feedback, quality, R&D reality, roadmaps, competitive data, etc.  This subject is taught  in Pragmatic Marketing and is widely used in most PM organizations today.

But does this principle work in other marketing areas?  Not in my experience.  For example, the difference between "good enough" and great for PPC and SEO is drastic.  Lots of PPC campaigns never work and exec teams stop believing in these as valid lead gen tools because marketing never puts the right level of effort on finding out what are the exact keywords their prospects use at different buying stages, from the research to purchase.  This is not an easy process.  And good enough usually = failure.  This is where you use "Hack Marketing" to find the right keywords.  The results of these extra steps are the difference between success and failure of PPC and SEO.

The same goes with the rest of messaging.  It really pays to conduct research and understand what are the exact words customers and prospects use.  There is no "good enough" here.  For example, we changed one word describing how the product category is referred based on customer feedback.  Lead gen campaign results shot up 67% in one week.

Finally, "good enough" marketing materials in my experience are useless.  I rather have a great web site with all the right messaging and use it as the major marketing tool instead of  tens of mediocre white papers just because it is "the right thing to do" and "everybody does it."

So is "good enough" marketing good enough?

Google+... Why does it matter to marketing professionals?

Google+ means duopoly.  Facebook's honeymoon is over.  It has a real competitor now.  The "social media" industry took another step to its maturity.  It is now Google+ vs. Facebook.  Just like Microsoft vs. Apple.  Or Toyota vs. Honda.  USA vs. USSR.

Google+ can put an end to the fragmentation in social networks.  Until now, we had Facebook for personal connections and LinkedIn for professional ones.  And most people have been separating personal and business contacts.

Google+ allows combining all your contacts in one place, organized in various "circles", like family, friends, soccer teammates, fraternity buddies, security community, blog audiences, etc.  Then you can communicate with all these circles from one command and control center.

Google+ gives us a new way to simplify and unite connections, social networking, as well as conducting business, e.g. creating user communities, doing research, managing forums, blogs, etc.  It also becomes another way to market - reach target markets, customers, partners, communicate with remote teams, generate leads / demand.

Given Google+ adoption rate stays high, it would be critical for business and marketing professionals  embracing and using it.  The exciting part is that it gives new and creative ways of reaching our audiences, which can turn into a competitive advantage for early adopters.

6 Ways To Avoid Fluff in Your Marketing Materials

FLUFF is one of my pet peeves. Why use complicated words that add up into phrases that mean nothing?  Words like leverage, easy, flexible, scaleable, secure, ROI, TCO.   They demonstrate lack of subject knowledge and discourage the target audience from reading these documents / web sites / blogs.

Here is an example I just found on a web site of a well known vendor.  "...(product) is the foundation for the CIO's and IT leadership team's performance system. It features a cascaded optimization system, the industry's deepest and broadest insight into IT-controlled assets, and a secure, comprehensive, operational environment for a hybrid world."

What?  A "hybrid world?"  Wasted words.  I counted 19 words that are just fluff and mean nothing.  Wasted space.  Wasted time and budgets.  There are better and more practical ways of writing marketing materials that people understand and read.  My suggestions are below:

1.  Know your audience.  Understand who exactly is your audience.  Which industry?  What is the main function of your target reader?  What are their pressures and challenges?  What are their titles and reporting structures?  Their internal customers.  Demographics.  Internal politics, etc.

2.  Understand the lingo your audience uses.  Talk to your customers directly.  Ask how are they using your product.  Don't assume you know the words they use.  For example, you would fail if you used "IT words" with process engineers in Electric Power companies.  When marketing cyber security to Power and Energy, we had to change about 80% of our marketing materials.  But the results were amazing - almost every IT department we contacted, wanted to talk to us.  Even at the meetings, we were treated like peers rather than vendors.

3.  Simplify.  Read what you wrote out loud.  Pretend you are presenting in person to your target audience.  Keep on rewriting until the text flows easily and you would have no problem verbally presenting it.

4.  Be brief.  Less is more.  Remember, the goal of most marketing materials is not to close the deal, but rather get the prospect interested enough to contact sales or try the product.  Longer texts tend to discourage busy viewers from reading.

5.  Avoid fluff.  Avoid generic words, like flexible or leverage.  Try quantifying or using proof points.  For example, "the industry's deepest and broadest insight into IT-controlled assets" is fluff.  However, something like, "a system covering 95% of the industry's IT-controlled assets" is much more credible and easier to understand.

6.  Test.  Most of us, marketers, don't work in the functional area of our target buyers.  It may be a good idea to test the text with your target audience.  This can be a very revealing exercise.  In my experience, this step has revealed some gems that turned into new marketing tools and lead generation approaches that we never knew existed.  For example, from our customer conversations we discovered an IT community called Spiceworks, that turned out to be one of the best lead  generation sources for SMB markets.