You’ve probably heard of Viral Marketing. You may have heard of a Viral Video. Here’s an example and analysis of some brilliantly executed viral video marketing by LG for one of their flat panel TVs.
First, what is Viral Video?
According to Wikipedia,
A viral video is one that becomes popular through the process of Internet sharing, typically through video sharing websites, social media and email. Viral videos often contain humorous content and include televised comedy sketches, such as The Lonely Island‘s Lazy Sunday and Dick in a Box, amateur video clips like Star Wars Kid the Numa Numa videos, The Evolution of Dance, Chocolate Rain on YouTube; and web-only productions such as I Got a Crush… on Obama. Some eyewitness events have also been caught on video and have “gone viral” such as the Battle at Kruger.
I found a helpful image on the Music 3.0 blog that clearly shows the more common types of videos that go viral:
Now here’s the viral video:
While it is risky for a manufacturer to essentially advertise their product being stolen, this particular viral video marketing effort was effective – now when I think of a thin flat panel TV, LG is the first to come to mind.
So let’s look at what elements of the video make it an effective viral video marketing effort:
- The video looks realistic enough to be believable – it doesn’t appear to be a video marketing effort.
- The video is outlandish enough to be something you’d be likely to share – in fact, as of this writing the video has over 3.7 MILLION VIEWS.
- The video features the product in a way that’s subtle enough that most people probably don’t realize that the video is designed to promote the LG brand.
- It’s not obvious anywhere that it’s a commercial, or even intended to be associated with the brand. The YouTube account where this is uploaded has the name “anlishni” – which has no apparent connection with any corporate brand name I know of. There’s no indication of Video SEO or other tactics to maximize views, or even any other videos on that user’s channel that could connect the dots to other video marketing efforts.
- The video title is very simple, and isn’t even capitalized. “smart thief caught on cam” piques curiosity. This also furthers the perception that it’s a real security camera video uploaded by an average person.
- The video description is short & simple, as if some ordinary person uploaded the video to share – it didn’t try to sell the product or the brand, just the view. “Check out what this guy did in broad daylight!”
- The video title also uses a subtle psychological trigger to associate “smart” with LG, as if the thief was smart to choose an LG instead of another brand. This helps reinforce that LG is a “smart” choice.
- The thief is making eye contact with the camera – a little odd at first, but it helps you “connect” with him in an bizarre sort of way. This is one giveaway that it’s not a “real” security camera video but a marketing effort. Still, it’s like he’s got his eye on a store employee to try to make sure he’s not being watched. Walking backwards during part of the video, while still looking at the camera, also adds to the oddball nature of the video, subtly builds suspense and keeps the viewer watching to see what he’s going to do next.
- Since it doesn’t overtly show the product until the end, it encourages you to watch the video again to see if he really was carrying it the whole time. It’s visible but not noticeable until the last segment of the video.
- The very end of the video lingers on the store entrance with the LG poster in the window that advertises “The World’s Slimmest Television” with the LG logo. It’s the last thing you see, which helps reinforce LG’s presence in your mind. It also lingers a few extra seconds after the store employee runs after the thief, further building suspense – is someone else going to run after him, too? Is something else unexpected going to happen? That few extra seconds also gives the mind time to absorb what your eyes just saw, before the video ends and other suggested videos are shown. This also helps reinforce the message of the video as well as give you time to read the LG poster in the window.
Video marketing can be a powerful way to grow your business, build your brand, expand your brand awareness, and drive sales. Viral videos can be extremely effective, but not all videos will get past that tipping point and go viral, even if they’re intended to do so. Stay tuned for more marketing tips and strategies.
How can you use these insights, tactics and strategies to grow your business?
Popularity: 6% [?]
Posted in Social Media Video Marketing by .
Jan 12
4
I swim with sharks.
My company, W3 Group, provides services in an area that is, unfortunately, festering with swarms of sharks. That area is SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. These “sharks” I’m referring to aren’t literally fishes with sharp teeth, but they are man-eating (or at least budget-eating) predators.
What am I talking about? Well, if you’re a small business owner, particularly one seeking help with marketing, you’ve no doubt gotten their phone calls, spammy emails, or even met with these vicious creatures in person.
It’s simply the modern version of the snake-oil salesman, who in now sells you the dream of flooding your doors with more customers than you can shake a stick at.
What causes this? Well, done correctly, SEO can be a very powerful component of your customer acquisition strategy. It can get you great results. But there are a number of factors that attract these sharks and the bottom-feeders that accompany them.
SEO Factors that Attract the Sharks
1) SEO is relatively new. It barely existed 10 years ago, let alone 15 or 20.
2) SEO is complex and technical, and not always easily understood. This makes it ripe for some slick sales shark to swoop in, and baffle you with the technical jargon while your eyes are glazed over with the money to be made with the results he’s promising.
3) SEO is not cheap. Pricing can range across the board, from hundreds of dollars to 5 figures or more per month. Done right, it truly is a valuable investment that should provide a positive return many times over.
4) SEO takes time to get results – usually. While there are ethical ways to get results quickly, in general it does take several months, often 3-6 months or even more, depending on competition, to start seeing real, measurable results.
When you put all these factors together, it’s no wonder the sharks are attracted.
How they’ll usually operate is they’ll share a slick presentation, quote a bunch of statistics and sell you the dream that by the time you’re 3-6 months into their contract, you’ll be seeing some amazing results and will have all the customers you can desire.
Now that’s not the bad part – good companies often have slick presentations, too, and statistics do help back up the talk. And setting goals of achieving great results is certainly normal for good companies, too.
The problem is that during this time, the shark’s companies do absolutely no work, not even lifting a finger to help your business, while they collect checks or charge your credit card each month until you finally realize you’re not seeing the results you expected and decide to cancel your contract.
But you’re still out of pocket all that money.
Meanwhile they’ve moved on to other innocent victims, repeating the feeding frenzy.
So how can you stay safe and not have your marketing and SEO budget eaten alive by these predators?
Since I can’t stop all these ripoff artists from calling you, emailing you, or trying to seduce you with their smooth sales pitches, what can I do? Well, I can help educate you on what they’re doing and what to look out for.
So subscribe in the box at the upper right of this page and I’ll send you a free report on How Not to Get Ripped Off by an SEO Firm.
Whether you do business with me or not, I don’t want you to throw your money away and I certainly don’t want any of those scammers to take your money. Hire a good marketing firm. One that plays by the rules (ethically and morally) and does the right things the right way. One that helps you get more business. After all, that’s what it’s all about.
My company, W3 Group, provides services in an area that is, unfortunately, festering with swarms of sharks. That area is SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. These “sharks” I’m referring to aren’t literally fishes with sharp teeth, but they are man-eating (or at least budget-eating) predators.
What am I talking about? Well, if you’re a small business owner, particularly one seeking help with marketing, you’ve no doubt gotten their phone calls, spammy emails, or even met with these vicious creatures in person.
It’s simply the modern version of the snake-oil salesman, who in now sells you the dream of flooding your doors with more customers than you can shake a stick at.
What causes this? Well, done correctly, SEO can be a very powerful component of your customer acquisition strategy. It can get you great results. But there are a number of factors that attract these sharks and the bottom-feeders that accompany them.
1) SEO is relatively new. It barely existed 10 years ago, let alone 15 or 20.
2) It’s complex and technical, and not always easily understood. This makes it ripe for some slick sales shark to swoop in, and baffle you with the technical jargon while your eyes are glazed over with the money to be made with the results he’s promising.
3) It’s not cheap. Pricing can range across the board, from hundreds of dollars to 5 figures or more per month. Done right, it truly is a valuable investment that should provide a positive return many times over.
4) It takes time to get results – usually. While there are ethical ways to get results quickly, in general it does take several months, often 3-6 months or even more, depending on competition, to start seeing real, measurable results.
When you put all these factors together, it’s no wonder the sharks are attracted.
How they’ll usually operate is they’ll share a slick presentation, quote a bunch of statistics and sell you the dream that by the time you’re 3-6 months into their contract, you’ll be seeing some amazing results and will have all the customers you can desire.
Now that’s not the bad part – good companies often have slick presentations, too, and statistics do help back up the talk. And setting goals of achieving great results is certainly normal for the good companies, too.
The problem is that during this time, the shark’s companies do no work, not even lifting a finger to help your business, while they collect checks or charge your credit card each month until you finally realize you’re not seeing the results you expected and decide to cancel your contract.
But you’re still out of pocket all that money.
Meanwhile they’ve moved on to other innocent victims, repeating the feeding frenzy.
So how can you stay safe and not have your marketing budget eaten alive by these predators?
Since I can’t stop all these ripoff artists from calling you, emailing you, or trying to seduce you with their smooth sales pitches, what can I do? Well, I can help educate you on what they’re doing and what to look out for.
So subscribe in the box at the upper right of this page and I’ll send you a free report on How Not to Get Ripped Off by an SEO Firm.
Whether you do business with me or not, I don’t want you to throw your money away and I certainly don’t want any of those scammers to take your money. Hire a good marketing firm. One that plays by the rules (ethically and morally) and does the right things the right way. One that helps you get more business. After all, that’s what it’s all about.
Popularity: 22% [?]
Posted in SEO by .
Atlanta Video SEO mini case study
At W3 Group Marketing, we do a lot of experimentation on what it really takes to rank high on the search engines and to get more customers. Of course we’re learning from Google, Yahoo! Bing and others, plus lots of other SEO “gurus” but we don’t stop there – we come up with new ideas, tactics and strategies and put them to the test. Here’s a video SEO example for a company in Atlanta:
Video SEO Overview
We know that the search engines LOVE video. In fact, YouTube is now the second-most popular “search engine” out there behind Google. Since Google owns YouTube, one could argue otherwise, but the point is that people use YouTube as a search engine. Whatever you want to do, search YouTube for “How to” and whatever it is you want to do, and there’s probably a video on it.
Back to the point: We also know that Google indexes YouTube quickly, partly because they own it, partly because they just plain love video. Oh, we covered that second part already, didn’t we? No worries, they love it so much that it’s worth repeating. Which leads us to a video SEO experiment – actually more of a demo, since we’ve done this before quite a few times.
Atlanta Video SEO Experiment
One company wasn’t showing up at all for a key phrase that their prospective customers would frequently search for – but their competitors were all over page one, two, and more. They were somewhere deep on page 4 or 5 for this key phrase. So we looked into it and found that there were video results on page one of Google. Voila! Here’s an opening we can master. So we spent about 15 minutes putting together a simple PowerPoint presentation with their logo, contact info and key services (this company is a service provider, but the approach can work equally well for products).
Then we converted this into a video slideshow using some snazzy but simple video creation software that doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out.
Next, we optimized the various properties of the video that we could change, then uploaded it to YouTube. We then optimized every other element we could of this video for our target keywords. Then we hit “save changes” and went on about our business working on some other cool stuff to attract customers for our clients. (Did you like that subtle self-endorsement? Sure, you can use it. Go ahead.)
Video SEO Results
A few hours later, six to be exact, we searched Google for our key phrase. And guess what? Our shiny, brand-spanking-new video was on PAGE ONE on Google for that phrase. Then I checked again a week or so later, and it’s slightly higher on Page One than it was before. And this is for a very competitive phrase – over 210,000,000 results and Google AdSense going several pages deep into the results. Not bad! Further proof that video SEO works, and I’m willing to bet that most of your competitors either aren’t doing video SEO, or they’re not doing it right.
Contact us today if you’d like to see how we can help you.
Popularity: 53% [?]
Posted in SEO Video Marketing by .
You’ve probably seen press releases issued for all sorts of newsworthy events – a new CEO, major new account, research studies published, company mergers, IPOs, and more. And you’re no doubt well aware that these are released with the intention of getting the person or company (or companies) exposure in the news. But did you know there’s an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) value to press releases?
If your answer to this question was “yes,” you get a gold star. And if you’re already doing online press releases for SEO purposes, upgrade that star to platinum. But we’re guessing that even if you’re doing this as an ongoing part of your marketing strategy, you could be doing it better. Here’s an example of one thing we did for a recent client:
Atlanta Automotive SEO Press Release
This client is a car dealership specializing in high-end, luxury and sports cars. They sell lots of BMW, Mercedes, Porsche and others along with more exotic cars such as Ferrari, Lamborghini, Aston Martin, Maybach and more.
What we did with 2 SEO-maxed press releases
Technically, an event doesn’t have to be worthy of being a major story on CNN to be worthy of a press release. In this case, the car dealership had acquired a couple of beauties, along with quite a few others. So as an experiment, we wrote 2 very highly optimized press releases to get the SEO value from them.
We chose 2 cars that we knew were pretty competitive – Mercedes-Benz and BMW. We figured out our target keywords and used them appropriately (not too much, not too little – balance is important in everything) and then we submitted each of these 2 SEO-friendly press releases to 2 online press release distribution sites. We’d tell you which ones, but we’d have to kill you (just kidding, but we’re still not going to tell you).
Once all of this was done, we went on to other tasks, then retired for the night and checked back the next day.
SEO Press Release Results for Car Dealership
What did we find? Well, 20 hours later, that’s not even a full day, we had at least 30 new PAGE ONE results, for over 25 keywords that we weren’t even on page one before this happened. And these were pretty competitive keywords, though some were more “long-tail” than others.
The Press Release SEO takeaway
The great thing about press releases and SEO is that you can get results VERY fast, even for very competitive keywords. The drawback is that press releases are inherently news, and old news isn’t news anymore, so the results don’t have much “staying power” from an SEO standpoint. However, the links are still there, so it does have some residual value. Besides, this method can help you get some fast results while your other SEO efforts are kicking in. The bottom line: it’s well worth doing, and doing regularly. Just keep coming up with new reasons to send out press releases. Your SEO efforts will be rewarded.
Popularity: 51% [?]
Posted in Press Releases SEO by .
Jun 11
14
Small Business Marketing Tip
Here’s a simple marketing tip for small businesses (or bigger businesses, too) if you use a cash register.
Make your cash register make your cash register ring more.
What?
No, that’s not a typo. Your cash register can help you make more sales.
How?
Well, it’s pretty simple. Most modern cash registers allow you to customize what appears on the receipt. If your cash register looks like the one in the picture below, sorry, you’re probably not going to benefit much from this tip. Otherwise, read on:
Most businesses, probably over 90% of them, just have the basic information on their receipts, if they’ve even customized the receipts at all.
That means:
Company name, address, and phone number. Some will add their company’s website URL to the receipt, but most don’t even do this.
But what if you took one extra step that resulted in even 1% of your customers coming back one more time per month? How much would your annual sales increase?
It’s simple. Add a sentence to your cash register receipt that says “Join our FREE Discount Newsletter” or something like that. Then have an email or a website page where they can sign up. Then once they subscribe, send them special offers for the next time they shop. Coupons, closeout deals, clearance, regular sales, whatever.
I’m typing this at a Starbucks location, and as effective as they are at marketing, THEY aren’t even doing this. No facebook fan page, no twitter handle, not even a website URL on their receipt.
Of course not every customer is going to even pay attention to the receipt, let alone sign up, but some percentage will.
First, you’ll need an email autoresponder. I recommend (and use) AWeber, but there are lots of others out there – Constant Contact, MailChimp, and so on.
For the many of you that don’t know what an autoresponder is, it is an email subscription management program that allows you to email lots of people at once, and allows them to subscribe to your email list, newsletter, etc. We’ll cover more on that in a later blog post.
Then decide on how often you’re going to send out emails to your list. Add a task to your calendar to set up an email to go out regularly. Weekly is good for a retail store – maybe more often for really special deals or events. But weekly is a good start. Most shoppers are used to seeing weekly deals in the newspaper, online, and so on.
It doesn’t have to be fancy, it just has to go out. So try it out – test it, and see if it makes a difference in your business. You already know that there are 2 ways to increase your sales per customer: have them buy more per visit, and have them buy more often. This can help you encourage them to buy more often. I hope it helps!
We’ll cover more email marketing tips and small business marketing ideas in later posts to this blog, so be sure to subscribe, add it to your favorites, and share it with other business owners who could benefit from getting more customers and getting customers to buy more often.
And if you need help setting up your email marketing campaign, W3 Group can help. Just contact us at 404-669-6682 or email info at AtlantaSEOs.com.
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(FTC Disclaimer: some links in this blog are affiliate links and may result in a referral or commission paid to W3 group if you purchase a product. It doesn’t increase your price any.)
Popularity: 36% [?]
Posted in e-mail marketing Retail Business Marketing by .
If your business is geared towards getting local business, such as a retail store, restaurant, auto service center, car dealership, etc., one of the first things you’ll want to do once your website is up and running is to get it listed in all of the various local directories that you can.
If you’ve searched for anything on Google lately, you’ve probably noticed that local businesses are featured more prominently than ever before, and those local results are for the Google Places profiles for the businesses that have utilized Local SEO tactics to optimize their profiles.
This serves two purposes: One, each listing is another link to your site, which means that local directory listings help your SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Two, getting listed in these local directories helps you get found by your target customers, many of whom are searching on these local directories specifically to find local businesses that provide what they want to buy.
If you’re a family in Kalamazoo, and have a leaky pipe that’s flooding your basement, you want a plumber close to you, not one in Flagstaff. In the old days, people would start with the Yellow Pages to find local businesses. Nowadays, over 80% of people search online first, which makes the Yellow Pages almost obsolete. Though there are many online “Yellow Pages” sites, let me ask you – where do you look first? Yellowpages.com or Google?
When was the last time you saw TWO volumes for the Yellow Pages?
The odds are that you probably use Google or some other search engine first. In fact, most people don’t even know where their Yellow Page book is, if they haven’t thrown it away or taken it to the recycling center. The last one I saw was being used to elevate a computer monitor. At least that one was getting used for something!
Here’s an example of a search for “Chiropractic Clinic”
Actual Google Page One results for one W3 Group Atlanta SEO Client
As you can see, the local listings dominate the page for this (and many other) search terms. If your company’s local profile shows up, this can bring in a tremendous amount of visitors to your website, depending of course on how man times people search for the keywords in your profiles. One W3 Group Client gets over 2,000 visitors per month through their Google Places profile – and it’s FREE to do!
So where do you start? First, go to Google Maps, Yahoo! Local, Kudzu.com, and Bing Local. Build profiles for your business on each of those directories. Unlike universal search, unique content is not required to rank highly for local search – in fact, for local search, duplicate content (such as your business description) helps the search engines know that your listings do, in fact, refer to the same business and therefore helps your ranking on local search.
Then you’ll want to find additional directories that you may have missed – one way to do this is to search for (Your Town) + “local directory.” Also check for local business associations where you can build your profile on their site as well. Be sure to include links to your website and blog on each of these.
Another tip: include not only your own ZIP code, but all the ZIP codes where you can provide your services. This helps you get found when people in nearby areas are searching for your business. These ZIP codes should also be listed somewhere on your site, perhaps in the meta tags. Do the same thing for neighboring cities, towns, counties, and metropolitan areas. Some people do search for a service or product plus the ZIP code, so you want to be sure you show up there, too.
Also make sure you list additional keywords in your listing that are appropriate for your products or services. You don’t want to go overboard by listing every single potential keyword, but make sure that you have the keywords you want most (link this to another article) in your descriptions. BUT HERE’S THE CATCH: You have to do this in the right way, otherwise you risk getting your profile removed, your account suspended, or even revoked.
Naturally, there’s a lot more to it than this, including optimizing your profile listings, and setting things up in the right way so your listings DO get approved.
For a free consultation on how W3 Group can help your business, contact us today!
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Popularity: 100% [?]
Posted in Local Search SEO by .
Jun 11
11
Marketing versus Sales on Facebook
What’s the difference between marketing on Facebook and selling on Facebook? Which is more effective and why? Here are a few insights to help you with your social media marketing strategy.
First of all, there is a difference between personal Facebook profile pages and Facebook pages for business. If you market using a personal profile page, you run the risk of having that profile get shut down without warning. So do the core of your marketing using a business page, and it’s OK to share links from your business page on your personal page, but keep the personal page more personal.
The fastest-growing demographic (if I must use marketing-speak when talking about real people) on Facebook is the over-55 crowd. Many are using Facebook primarily to connect with friends and family, but they can also be prospective clients or customers for a business, potential friends, and maybe even deeper relationships. And if they like a service or business, they tend to tell their friends, particularly if they’ve had an outstanding experience or got a great deal (or, even more so, if they had a really bad experience or felt ripped off or overcharged).
People on Facebook do spend money, but they don’t necessarily spend it on Facebook.
From my experience and what I’ve read in numerous studies, white papers, etc., social media is not the ideal place to sell – it’s a place to establish and/or deepen a relationship. Then, for those who are prospective clients: lead them to your website or some other more appropriate venue to sell. We’ve all seen companies and people shamelessly self-promoting and spreading the hard sell to everyone possible, like a farmer spreading manure across his fields. Sometimes this even takes place in that annoying all-caps style (oR wOrSe YeT, tHiS rEaLlY aNnOyIng MuTaNt CaPiTaLiZaTiOn). But that doesn’t work nearly as well as establishing a relationship and encouraging those who are interested to visit you outside of Facebook where the business relationship can take place in a more appropriate venue. I’ve made mistakes myself in being too “salesy” on Facebook and other venues, but I have learned from that. There is a very good reason why these are called SOCIAL networks and not Sales Pitch Networks.
Yes, Facebook is an easy, cost-effective way to reach a lot of people with little effort, but if you’re sending the same sales pitch to all of your friends, fans, group members and so on 3+ times a week, people quickly tire of this and will opt out by “de-friending” you, blocking you, or even reporting you as a spammer. So tone down the sales pitch and remember that these are real people you can connect with – not just faceless numbers in your sales funnel.
Particularly for those marketing a product or service, Facebook isn’t the destination. It is a way to connect. People really do tend to buy from those they know, like and trust. Facebook is one way to get to know people, decide whether you like them, and build trust, but the actual business does tend to take place elsewhere.
Facebook advertising has its advantages and disadvantages, and it is still evolving. One key advantage Facebook ads have over Google AdWords and many other pay-per-click (PPC) ads is targeting. Because Facebook has so much data on each user, advertisers have the ability to target their ads in a very granular way. For example, if you want to only show your ads to 45-55 year-old women who have cats and play tennis, you can do so. Or if you want to only advertise to 30-40 year old single men who like science fiction and video games, you can do that as well.
The most successful advertisements on Facebook are those that encourage you to join a group, attend an event, or “like” a page, which is a part of getting to know the advertiser. Lots of the ads directly selling something tend not to stay up for very long because they’re just not as in tune with what Facebook is really all about – connecting, not selling. That said, Facebook can be a great way to spread the word and grow initial interest about a topic, product or service, but the overt selling seems to work best elsewhere. Yes, there is a Facebook Marketplace, but I think that’s more of a tangential option than the real core of this, the world’s currently most popular social network.
For evidence of this, just look at what Facebook asks on your profile page: “what’s on your mind?” It doesn’t ask “what do you want to sell?” or “what do you want to buy?” or “who is your target market?” It’s about sharing. And the best sales take place when someone has something to offer that is of true benefit to what someone else needs. Maybe what one person has on their mind is “what’s the best solution to the problem I’m having?” and someone else has that perfect solution – connect and make it a win-win, but forcing your solutions on people who don’t even have the problem that it solves is a waste of time and effort.
So, what’s on your mind?
Popularity: 44% [?]
Posted in Social Media by .
This article originally appeared in Inc. Magazine and was published on May 11, 2011. David B. Wright of W3 Group is quoted in the article – his tip appears as #8 in the article. The article in its entirety is posted here, or you can view the original on Inc. Magazine’s site here.
(Update) The article has been picked up by The Wall Street Journal and dozens of blogs & social networks.
10 Tips on How to Research Your Competition
Keeping tabs on your competition is a great strategy for growing your business. Follow these tips, from fellow small business owners, on which tools are best and how to get started.
Competitors. Whether you want to admit it or not, they’re out there and they’re hungry for your customers. While it might seem unfair given everything else you need to keep on top of in building up your business, you might want to consider devoting the time and energy into keeping tabs on your competition. “By monitoring competitors on an on-going basis you get to know their behavior and so can start to anticipate what they will be likely to do next,” says Arthur Weiss, managing director of UK-based Aware, which helps businesses gain competitive intelligence. “You can then plan your own strategies so that you keep your customers and win (not steal) customers away from competitors.” In other words, keeping tabs on your competition is a great strategy for growing your business.
The good news is that while hiring someone like Weiss can save you or your employees from spending the time to conduct research on your competitors, you can also employ several techniques to get the job done virtually for free. Here are 10 tips from entrepreneurs and small business owners on how you can start gathering information on your competitors.
1. Go beyond a google search. There’s no doubt that any research project these days should begin with a simple Google search or visiting your competitor’s web page. But there are also a variety of tools either supplied by Google or that relate to Google’s search results and AdWords campaigns that might give you interesting insights into your competition. For example, Sheel Mohnot of FeeFighters, a comparison shopping website for credit card processing, says he uses the following tools to keep an eye on his competition:
- SpyFu: “A great resource to research what keywords and Adwords our competitors are buying,” says Mohnot.
- Google Trends: For Mohnot, it’s helpful when he wants “to stay on top of the latest in [his] industry, comparing [his company] to others, and seeing where people who come to [his] site go.”
- Google Alerts: “We keep alerts for ourselves but also for all of our competitors to know what they are up to,” says Mohnot. (P.S. Don’t forget to set up an alert on your own company to see if anyone else is talking about you.)
Dig Deeper: 6 Ways to Track Competitors Online
2. Do some reporting. There are great and inexpensive resources for checking up on your competitors online and offline. “I recommend routinely tracking what the industry analyst firms like Gartner are reporting about your industry, as well as trade associations and advocacy groups,” says Becky Sheetz-Runkle, author of Sun Tzu for Women: The Art of War for Winning in Business. “These organizations are doing research and studies that evaluate the people who are and should be your competitors. What are they telling you about where the industry is trending? Where are the unmet market needs that you can fill?”
Other resources you can use to dig up information on your competitors include: Alexa, Compete, Keyword Spy, Hoovers, and ReferenceUSA.
3. Tap the social network. Of course, given how companies are increasingly using social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter as marketing outlets these days, you might be able to pick up interesting facts about your competition—and maybe even your own company—just by tuning in. “We find that monitoring tweets, Facebook posts, blogs, and other new media mentions of our competition is an easy, cost-effective way to stay in tune with and in the know about the public’s sentiment about our competitors,” says Michael Meschures, the president of Spaphile.com, a weekly deals site that shares high-end spa and beauty offers. “In a similar vein, we track our competition by keeping a very close eye on review sites, such as Yelp and Citysearch. We scour through reviews to find mentions of our competitors’ deals, and then target that particular Yelper or Citysearcher’s other favorite businesses so we’re always one step ahead of the competition.” Even if your competition isn’t social media savvy, it’s a good bet that they produce newsletters—either e-mail or print varieties—that you can sign up for to get the latest and greatest news and updates on things like new products or services they are introducing and what events they might be attending.
Dig Deeper: How to Conduct Qualitative Market Research
4. Ask your customers. When it comes to identifying sources of information about your competition, don’t skip over the obvious ones—like your customers. “Speaking to customers is one of the best (and cheapest) ways of gathering real information on competitors,” says Weiss. “Whenever you win a new customer, find out who they used before, and why they switched to you (i.e. The reason they were dissatisfied with their previous supplier). Do the same when you lose a customer—identify what they preferred about your competitor. If you gather enough of these stories you’ll get a very clear idea on what competitors are offering that customers view as preferable. You can then adjust your own offering to beat that of the competitor.”
5. Attend a conference. Attending industry trade shows and conferences—as well as joining industry associations—can be a great way to learn about who your competitors are and what they’re offering, says Amy Lewandowski, who heads up marketing at online retailer, PepWear. “We attend these conventions anyway so we make sure to visit competitors’ booths while we are there and observe their interactions with customers, pick up literature, and check out the quality of their products,” she says. “I am always shocked that most of them never visit our booth.”
Dig Deeper: How to Get the Most Out of a Conference
6. Check in with your suppliers. If you work in an industry where you share the same suppliers as your competitors, it could pay to ask them some simple questions. “Talk to your suppliers and spend time getting to know them,” says Zach Berning, co-owner of Overland Gourmet. “While they may not tell you what your competition ordered or their volume, ask better questions.” For example, if you ask them how many units of a certain product have been pre-ordered for the next month, you might find out not only what your competition might have ordered, but what other products your supplier might be bringing in as a result.
7. Hire your competition… Another strategy is to hire employees from competing firms—especially sales people—and team up with competitors’ partners, suggests Sheetz-Runkle. “No one knows more about the inside of those organizations than the employees,” she says. “Find out all that you can about how these companies operate, and more importantly, what’s on the horizon for them? Where are they taking their business? What markets are they venturing into? How are they leveraging innovation to cut costs and advance productivity? Where is the highest level of dissatisfaction with their products or services? No one has more and better intelligence when it comes to sales than disgruntled sales people.”
Dig Deeper: How to Poach an Employee From a Competitor
8. …And watch who they’re hiring. You can also learn something by studying the kinds of jobs your competitors are looking to fill, says David B. Wright, the chief marketing officer at W3 Group in Atlanta. “For example, if a company is hiring a programmer, they will include information about exactly what technologies the candidates need to know, which tells you what they use,” he says. “Also look at what positions they are hiring—if they’re looking for a patent attorney, they could be working on some big new inventions. If they’re hiring for several HR, they may be preparing to expand overall.”
9. Conduct a survey. If you’re interested in getting a comprehensive report of all the players in your industry, you might consider conducting a survey. “A year or so ago, I hired someone to e-mail several of our competitors and ask them the same questions about their services,” says Jeff Huckaby, CEO of RackAid, an IT management business in Jacksonville, Florida. “We looked at price, response time, how the sales request was handled, etc. By doing this, we learned how to clearly differentiate our sales process from that of our competition.” While Huckaby says he learned a lot from the process and plans on doing it again, he does have one caveat: “I am a big fan of outsourcing this. You don’t want to run into someone you were spying on at an industry conference.”
Dig Deeper: How to Write a Customer Survey
10. Call ‘em up! Once you have done enough research to identify who your competitors are, you might want to try an old school tactic to take it from there: Just call them up and ask away. “One of the best ways to research competition is to call them and ask whatever you’d like,” says Jordan Harbinger, the co-founder of The Art of Charm. “You’d be surprised how often companies will tell you everything you’d like to learn over the phone, especially if the question is phrased in a context that makes sense. For example, if you want to know how many people work there, you can say: ‘I’m looking for individualized attention, and my fear is that your organization is too large, and I’ll get lost in the shuffle. How many coaches do you have on staff? Oh, wow, that’s quite a few. How much support staff do you need for a team that size?’ This approach has served me very well.”
Dig Deeper: Become Friends With Your Competitors
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I was going through my SPAM folder this morning, and noticed an email so bad that violates so many principles of proper, effective (and legal) email marketing that I just had to share my take on it.
1) Email address: The sender used the name “Louis” but the email address was a string of 18 (yes, 18) seemingly random characters followed by @yahoo.com. Real businesses use a “normal”-looking email address and that email address should be on your own domain, not a free email account such as hotmail, yahoo, gmail, or (even worse) aol.
2) The first line stated: “You are receiving this email because we wish you to use our 3D/2D animation services.” This is entirely backwards – you should focus on what the reader should want, not what you want. They might as well have said “You’re receiving this email because we want you to give us your money for something you may not even need.”
3) The next paragraph had 4 sentences. ALL 4 SENTENCES started with “We” – not a single “You.” While that’s slightly better than “I” since “We” could potentially include the reader, in this case it didn’t.
4) This was followed by a list of services with inconsistent formatting (some lines had one service per line, others had 5 or more services on the same line) and was riddled with spelling errors such as “Aanimation.” This was particularly ironic because one would think that an animation company would be more conscious about visual aesthetics. Furthermore, they listed 49 services in about 34 lines of text. There’s no focus there – it’s the regurgitation approach to sales where the person just spews out everything they can and will do, without regard to what the other person really wants.
5) There was absolutely nothing compelling about the email. There was no sense of urgency, no clearly outlined benefit, and no call to action of any kind.
6) The email address in the signature didn’t even match the yahoo address that sent the email. This tells me they likely use lots of throwaway free email accounts to spam out thousands of unsuspecting, unqualified prospects in the hopes that volume will make up for lack of strategic targeting and effective email marketing technique.
7) There were no instructions on how to unsubscribe, no physical address, or anything else that makes an email FTC-compliant. Had this been a US-based firm, they could be fined thousands of dollars PER EMAIL.
How can you make email marketing work for you? It’s simple enough on the surface, but there’s more to it than meets the eye.
1) Make sure the recipient wants to receive your email if you’re taking the mass email approach. Have them opt-in through a form on your website, or otherwise confirm that they do want to receive information from you.
2) Use a professional, compelling subject line. The purpose of the subject line is to get them to open the email. If they don’t do that, the email is wasted effort. Make it appropriate for your audience. If you’re targeting professionals, a professional subject line is important, particularly if they don’t (yet) know, like and trust you.
3) Customize it with the recipient’s name where possible. Most autoresponders can do this.
4) Make it about the reader – what are their problems that you can help them solve? What do they want? At least learn the basics of writing effective sales copy, or hire someone who understands this. Give them a reason to take action – this could be a free report giveaway, a free trial, free consultation, discount on service, coupon, or other incentive.
5) Use a proper signature – include the company name, address, website URL, other contact info, and any disclaimers or notices that apply to your business.
6) And remember, the email is not where the sale takes place. So use the email for what it is – a tool for moving the reader to take action and go to the next step in the sales process. If you do a lot of business by phone (such as taking appointments by phone), make sure your phone number is prominent. The same goes for web URLs. Include the http:// to make them clickable links in more email readers.
There’s much more, but we hope this helps you get a better handle on what not to do and what to do in email marketing.
If you’d like to see how we at W 3 Group marketing can specifically help your business get more customers, more sales, and more profits, call us today at 404-669-6682.
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Optimizing Social Media Content for Search Engines: What Works Best? That’s the title of an article that came out on GigCoin today.
The article looks in particular at 5 social media sites and their impact on SEO: Flickr, YouTube, Digg, StumbleUpon, and Tumblr. Others are addressed as well, and there are some useful tips from several experts on how to use social media for SEO benefit.
Here are a couple of excerpts:
…most links from YouTube videos are “nofollow” links, so they don’t help so much in Google, Yahoo! or Bing. Many of the smaller search engines ignore the “nofollow” tag to a link, so links from YouTube do help with SEO for those search engines. That said, it is definitely worth putting a link in the first line of your video description, elsewhere in the description, and on your channel page. The reason to put a link on the first line of the video description is that when people watch a video, only the first line or two of the description is shown by default. Put a link there, and viewers will be more likely to click on it and visit your site. If it’s not visible unless you expand the description, far fewer viewers will see it and you’ll get less traffic from it.
Digg, Stumbleupon, and other social bookmarking sites are a quick, easy way to build links to a website. This is also a “trick” to avoid having to pay fees to submit a site to the search engines. Search engine submission is an old-school way to get your site into the search engines, and can still be helpful, but these days building a few links to the site by using Digg, Stumbleupon and others tells the search engines the page exists, and when the spiders crawl the links to that page, they’ll see the other pages of your site as well. Some search engines charged a fee to submit a site, others didn’t. I don’t know whether any still do or not but if so, there’s no point to paying them when you can easily build a few links and let the search engine spiders will do the rest.”
Happy reading and we hope this is useful for your marketing strategy! Please share and comment on what works for you or what doesn’t.
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