When I attended one of my first Search Engine Strategies meetings in Toronto a number of years ago, I remember Danny Sullivan (who now oversees Search Engine Land) standing up and saying something to the extent of, “Content will drive search in the future and you’ll have to know how to develop this content.”

I wanted to stand up in the crowded room, raise my hands in the air and do a booty dance right there. Woot!

You see, I’m a marketer who had to learn to think like an SEO — and now that content IS driving search, I feel like I’ve come home.

Because I know content inside and out, I am thrilled to be the featured speaker for SEMNE‘s (Search Engine Marketing New England) September meeting in the local Boston area.

The topic? Content Marketing for the SEO Professional.

I’m really excited about this session because I’m approaching it from a marketing versus SEO perspective. A few months ago Google’s Matt Cutts said (in either one of his talks or in one of his Google Buzz posts) that SEO professionals need to start thinking like marketers.

This means that in order to add significant value to client relationships, SEO professionals must now give recommendations for creating content that gets found in the search engines and passed around via social media.

Is this topic up my alley or what?

In my presentation, I’ll be covering:

* Answering site visitors’ unspoken questions through content

* Using Google Analytics, Alerts, and social media to develop content ideas

* Recommending the types of content that helps drive conversions

I’m really excited about this presentation and have already lined up all kinds of content examples for both B2B and B2C.

So please join me and lots of other SEO / search pros on Wednesday, September 15. I look forward to seeing you!

Meeting Details:
Location: Crown Plaza Hotel, Natick, MA
Date and time: Wednesday, September 15, 2010
6:30 – 7:30 Networking
7:30 – 9:00 Talk and questions

Visit SEMNE.org to register.

If you’re like me, you’re overwhelmed with the amount of marketing information being presented on an hourly basis. On top of that, keeping up with new technologies and terminologies is mind-boggling.

Quite frankly, my eyes have begun to permanently glaze over. So I was happy to hear that the marketing folks at Eloqua agree with me.

“You are correct,” says Joe Chernov, Director of Content for Eloqua, which provides marketing automation products and services. “People tune out when confronted with too much information. And, companies often use confusing concepts and jargon to explain what they do, especially when it comes to marketing automation. We wanted to turn our focus outward and get people’s attention through entertainment as well as substance.”

The result is Eloqua’s wonderful new Grande Guides campaign, complete with spokesperson Juan Eloqua, a “cheeky yet romantic” businessman who specializes in growing coffee — and revenue.

“Our CMO, Brian Kardon, came up with the idea for Juan Eloqua — it was one of those ‘lightning strikes’ type of ideas. Another idea was to film coffee barristas answering people’s questions, but we quickly realized that would be an execution nightmare.”

Campaign goal is more than just buzz

Casting, filming and editing the videos took eight weeks using a professional camera crew and a Screen Actors Guild (SAG) actor. Brian wrote the script; Joe was responsible for developing the Grande Guides.

“We had to go back and reshoot the videos because we wanted Juan to introduce the various Guides,” says Joe. “So that added to the execution time.”

The campaign launched August 24, 2010. “We put it out on various social media platforms and set it free,” says Joe. “However, we want more than buzz. We’re sending out over 100,000 emails asking people to subscribe to the content.

“And, because we’re always looking to add information to profiles in our database, we’ve put up forms to collect this information, which we’ll then use for our own lead scoring. We’re also hoping to reactivate inactive prospects.”

Grande Guides present one concept at a time

What I like best about this campaign is that Eloqua is seeking to educate people — the foundation of successful B2B marketing — while having some fun in the process. As such, the Grande Guides have been designed to look like a beloved moleskin notebook with valuable content . . . the kind you don’t want to throw away.

“The point with the Guides,” says Joe, “is to boil down complex concepts into a document someone can read in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee.”

The first in the series, The Grande Guide to Lead Scoring, for example, gives you a detailed overview of the topic, why it’s important, and how to do it. Information is presented in an easy-to-read format with lots of subheads, call outs, graphs — and coffee stains.

Be sure to check out the Guide. You can also follow Eloqua and the campaign via Twitter, Slideshare, and Facebook.

For a long time I had one type of bird feeder in my backyard, a feeder I kept filled with one type of food: black sunflower seeds.

The feeder attracted the typical birds you see in New England backyards: Blue Jays, Chickadees, and Cardinals, to name a few.

A few weeks ago, however, I added two new feeders, a nut feeder and a bowl feeder filled with millet in order to attract smaller birds.

Over night my backyard went from being the equivalent of a sleepy small town airstrip to a busy municipal airport.

Birds of all kinds flocked to my feeders — Woodpeckers, Titmice, Nuthatches, Rose Breasted Grosbeaks, Grackles, Finches, Mourning Doves, Sparrows and others I have yet to identify.

In fact, the bowl feeder / millet proved so successful, I now have five to six Sparrows sitting in the bowl eating seed at any given time, others fighting for a position on the bowl and more milling around on the ground waiting for seed to drop.

Wow!

Attract more B2B buyers with multiple offers

Generally, companies offer people something in return for “raising their hand” to be identified. I ask people to give me their first name and email address in exchange for my monthly newsletter, for example.

Other companies ask for additional information when it comes to Webinars, white papers and the like.

Giving people free information is good. The problem, however, is that people respond to offers depending on where they are in the buying cycle.

• Someone just starting research will download white papers or checklists but definitely doesn’t want a sales person to call and isn’t ready for a demo.
• Someone who is narrowing down the vendor selection list has probably already read a half dozen white papers and now is now ready to participate in a Webinar and/or read case studies.
• And a team that’s ready to make a buying decision may want to talk to a sales person or have a demo.

Having just one type of offer, i.e. white papers, will attract some buyers, but these buyers will most likely not be ready to buy for months, which is why you need to include offers that attract buyers no matter where they are in the buying cycle.

Instead of attracting people who are “just looking,” you’ll also attract those who are serious about finding a vendor / partner and making a purchase.

As to my new found birding love, I’m now researching platform feeders. My buddy Mac McIntosh (who inspired this post) said to put out cut up oranges, grapes, and bread crusts. He also recommended suet feeders. What’s your recommendation?

(Photo credit: Liz Leyden)

“Our customers already know who we are.”

This is a line I’ve heard since starting my business 12 years ago this month. The reasons for the statement vary with the company and the product / service offered:

• “Our known universe of customers is small. They all know us and we know them.”
• “We’re a big company with a big name.”
• “We’ve been doing this for decades.”
• “No one else does what we do.”

But what “Our customers already know who are we are” really means is this: “We don’t want to go to the effort and cost of changing our marketing approach.”

This is why you see B2B Websites filled with hyperbolic fluff that says nothing and little in the way of high-value content that educates people (leads and prospects) on how the company can solve their business challenges.

It’s why B2B companies (large and small) continue to rely on marketing tactics from decades ago . . . the “old boys’ network,” the expensive print ads, the fruitless telemarketing calls.

Yes, yes, I know. These tactics still work somewhat. But what would happen if a B2B company approached its marketing this way:

“Lots and lots of men and women out there need our services / products but they don’t know who we are. How do we get the word out?”

• All of a sudden, marketing becomes an imperative, not a cost center that can be cut at whim.
• The Internet now becomes a tool for reaching many, not something to be feared.
• Marketing analytics and marketing automation become must-have tools that give knowledge and insight versus keeping a company in the dark.

Over time, the company increases sales and as sales increase, it hires someone fulltime to develop marketing campaigns and write content and use social media tools more effectively . . . which gets the word out even more . . . which increases sales.

Rinse, repeat.

In the old days, markets were relatively local. A business owner or marketer would might do business with people he or she knew outside of work. You found customers and vendors through your local Yellow Pages, Chamber of Commerce, or maybe even your Rotary meeting.

Now markets are “global.” Your competitor is no longer in the next town or state. Your competitors live and work all over the globe — and trust me, they aren’t resting on “Our customers already know who we are.”

No. They’re making sure your customers and prospects know who they are by pitching them. Every. Single. Day.

Thanks to the Internet, I can find and do business with a company in New Zealand just as easily as I can a company that’s a few towns over from me.

In fact, it might be easier to find the company in New Zealand.

Which is why B2B marketers and business owners really need to stop saying, “Our customers already know who we are.” Yes, yes they do because they’re doing business with you. Duh.

But what about all those people who don’t do business with you? Do they know who you are? No, they don’t. But they do know your competitors.

My lucky duck son got an iPhone 4 for his birthday and the day it arrived, a friend of our family eagerly asked if he could “FaceTime” us. (See Apple’s YouTube channel for some pretty cool video.)

After participating in the call, all I can say is “Coooool.” Real time video calling — an activity we’ve seen in futuristic movies and George Jetson cartoons — is here.

It took only a few seconds for me to grasp the marketing implications, and what I predict is that FaceTime or applications like it will totally and irrevocably change marketing.

Right now I regularly receive calls from really dumb telemarketers who work for clueless companies. These people call me pitching products and services . . . yet they have no idea who I am (something social media is supposed to solve).

I even had one telemarketer from a major company ask me, “So what exactly do you do anyway?” after pitching some kind of business product at me.

A simple two-second Internet search would have given her links to my Website, my blog, my Google, LinkedIn and Twitter profiles, and some of the articles I’ve written.

Once marketers start using video calls to reach prospects, however, things will start getting nasty.

Granted, relatively few people have an iPhone 4. However, given the rate of technological advances, video calls will be commonplace in a few years. FaceTime will migrate from iPhones to iPads and other smart mobile devices.

Say I’m reading the Wall Street Journal on my iPad over breakfast and in comes a FaceTime call from a telemarketer trying to sell me something and like most telemarketers, he has no clue who I am.

Can you imagine the amount of ill-will this company will have created with one simple call? Forget negative Tweets — let’s talk about posting actual dumb FaceTime marketing calls on YouTube, Facebook, and blogs.

As marketers, myself included, we talk about how social media will help us get to know our customers / prospects — even as they get to know us.

Although you the marketer have “joined the conversation” and work hard to not use social media to push you-focused content, lots of other companies / marketers / consultants use social media as another one-to-many broadcast medium.

Just witness the number of self-serving DMs you receive when you follow people, the self-promotional spam posts on LinkedIn Groups, and the companies that use blogs and social media to push press releases and other corporate dreck.

FaceTime and apps like it will change this scenario.

FaceTime, I predict, will force companies and organizations to really think about how they market to people and what they want to accomplish — or face extreme opposition and blowback.

This is already happening with social media as evidenced when the moderator of the Nestle Facebook page talked smack with its Fans — an event that became fodder for major online media pundents. (See Michelle Tripp’s excellent write-up about how this went down.)

What do you think? Will marketers abuse FaceTime the way they’ve abused social media, direct mail, and the telephone? Or will it force them to change their ways?

In the last month or so I’ve written a few blog posts for other blogs — original content that you won’t find on this blog. I’ve included links to this content below.

Content Marketing Institute
One question I’m asked frequently is how to to generate ideas for Web content. I’ve written frequently about this topic, see here and here. One tactic I haven’t talked about, but use all the time when dealing with clients, is trolling through Web analytics keyword reports.

You can learn more about the nuggets of gold you can find in your own reports by reading, “How to Find Content Ideas in Your Web Analytics Reports.”

Be sure to check out the rest of the blog — you’ll find some really great content and ideas!

NetLine’s Blog Notions Marketers Blog
Do you think small businesses can still effectively do their own marketing? I don’t — and I explain why in my article, “DIY Marketing No Longer Cuts the Mustard.”

I also wrote “Is Your Website Short on Content and Long on ‘Blah’?” where I discuss how to answer the unspoken questions posed by site visitors.

The Wealthy Freelancer Blog
For this blog I’ve written two parts of a three-part article on Web marketing for freelancers and consultants. Check out “Three Penny-Wise, Pound Foolish Marketing Mistakes” and “Three Tips for Developing a Kick-Butt Website on a Budget.”

The Wealthy Freelancer is a fabulous site full of great content on how to create a thriving freelance business AND have a life, too.

Also be sure to check out my other blog — The Profitable Consultant. During the month of June I challenged myself to work on my own marketing one hour a day. Obviously it paid off!

I get lots of email from people asking if they can write guest blog posts for me. If the request fits my audience, I do reply to people — but they never respond back.

Marc Gordon, who does a video blog, is one of the people who emailed me about doing a video blog post, which I found intriguing.

Instead of writing about marketing, Marc talks about it at his blog,
marctv.net. He’s getting about 50,000 views per video these days, so I’m thrilled to feature him here on my blog.

I love how he took my blog post about Intuit and made it into a pretty cool marketing lesson. Now you can see the power of video — and now I see I need to go buy a Flip.

Marc, thanks for the great video and guest blog post — I love it!

A Quiet Mistake Everyone Heard from marc gordon on Vimeo.

I deleted my Facebook profile months ago because I don’t trust the company or how it handles people’s personal data. My entire business life is online and it made me uncomfortable to add my personal life to the mix.

And too, I’m not egotistical enough to think you all care when I’m at the gym or what kind of Jane Austen heroine I’d be based on some personality test (for the record, I love Elizabeth Bennett, but then again, who doesn’t?).

HOWEVER! So many companies ask me about Facebook and how to use it for business, that I realized I had to bite the bullet and get back into it. So I made a compromise: I’m not accepting any Friend requests and am instead focusing on building a Fan page.

So here is the deal: I’d love to to use my own Fan page as a mini lab on how to build effective Fan pages for B2B.

If you have a great example of a B2B Fan page, post it in the comments below and/or add it to my DH Communications Fan Page Wall.

If you have ideas on how B2B companies should or should not use Fan pages, let me know that, too.

Let’s get a dialogue going from which all of us can benefit.

HubSpot’s Fan page is terrific. I especially like its Discussion tab where people can post questions and someone from HubSpot answers them. This type of direct engagement is exactly why a company should be practicing social media.

Network Solutions has been running a radio spot advertising $4.99 Websites, an ad that makes me want to scream.

I want to scream because I get so many calls from small business owners who are pulling out their hair. They’re not getting any traffic, they can’t find their site in Google, and no one is calling them.

Half the time it’s because they’ve fallen prey to these sales pitches.

People, here is the simple truth: Go with a $4.99 Website and you’ll get $4.99 worth of results.

Think about that for a minute. If you’re a manufacturing company with over $1 million in revenues each year, you need to generate XX number of calls and emails to generate that $1 million (or more) year after year.

People are online searching, interacting, reading, emailing, chatting, Tweeting, blogging, video watching, and Facebooking.

Doesn’t it make sense to put your money where your customers are?

Yet I meet people all the time who will spend more money on a daily cup of coffee than they will developing a Website that attracts new customers.

Spending the equivalent of a Grande Iced Caramel Macchiato isn’t going to get you a site that helps you generate $1 million in business — or even a few hundred thousand.

That’s because a $4.99 Website doesn’t even begin to cover the costs associated with successfully marketing your business online, including:

1. Custom Web design — The problem with using those templated, one-size-fits-all Websites offered by all-in-one “Web solutions providers” is that you end up with a a cheap ugly site that looks just like all the other businesses using that cheap ugly template.

Your business is unique and as such, your site should incorporate your brand, your message, and even your own photographs.

Your Website is also your virtual storefront. I don’t know about you, but when I’m out in the real world, I can tell instantly whether or not a business is doing well — I just look at its store front. Either I want to walk in — or I walk away.

Your Website is the same. Don’t scare people away with crappy design.

For great design, you can call Rachel Cunliffe at Cre8d Design who specializes in WordPress, Jim Somers at Sonora DesignWorks, Matthew Nelson at Digital Marketing Frontier, or Mike Smith, a Web developer.

2. Search engine optimization — Forget all the crap you’ve heard about putting keywords in a “meta tag.” Google is constantly changing and adjusting to marketplace revolutions, including Twitter, Facebook, and video, and what was true yesterday isn’t true today.

If you want people to find your site in the search engines, you’ll need to hire an SEO firm who knows what it’s doing. You can call someone like me, or Jill Whalen at High Rankings, Andy Komack or Derek Edmond at Komarketing Associates, or Susan O’Neill at @Website Publicity. (I know all of these people and how they work and *highly* recommend them.)

3. Content, content, content — Your Website is a dynamic entity that needs to breathe and grow. You help it grow by constantly creating new content: blogs, e-books, white papers, reports, guides, videos, podcasts, e-newsletters, articles, Webinars, etc.

Ignore this step and you are hosed. It’s that simple.

4. Social media — You use social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, YouTube, Google Buzz, etc. to alert your customers, fans, followers, influencers, and others that you have new content.

These people pass your content on their fans, followers, influencers and others — driving traffic and building links to your site.

Ignore this step — and step #1 — and your site will wither and die no matter how much great content you have.

5. Time — Whether you do all of this yourself, hire an experienced online marketing person for your team or outsource it, marketing your Website takes time. Lots of time.

Web marketing is changing constantly. Last year at this time we didn’t have Google Buzz or Facebook’s new “I like” feature. Matt Cutts hadn’t yet said that Google is looking to see if sites have video — and ranking them accordingly. Smart phones were cool but marketers didn’t really see that mobile marketing is dramatically changing how we all approach the Web.

Sure, you can spend $4.99 and build yourself a cheap Website. But if had the same $4.99, I’d buy a cup of coffee and then sit down to write my resume — because relying on a cheap Website to grow my business would essentially mean I’d be out of business.

In a December 2009 CNN article, Pete Cashmore, CEO of Mashable, stated that content curation would be one of the top Web trends to watch in 2010.

“The Web’s biggest challenge of recent years,” Cashmore, states, “is that content creation is outpacing our ability to consume it: ‘Information overload’ has become an increasingly common complaint.”

Indeed, if you’re like me, you read a dozen or more blogs, you follow hundreds of people on Twitter, and you participate on LinkedIn and/or Facebook. In addition, you may read books, newspapers, and magazines.

I have some days where I feel like my brain is so crammed with information that I can’t squeeze in another fact.

Yet, to be successful online, B2B companies must continually create new content and constantly promote content others produce.

HiveFire is a new company that offers an automated content curation service — and they just produced their first e-book: Content Curation: Taming the Flood in B2B Social Media.

The e-book outlines three steps for successful content curation:

• Identify — Search and filter information
• Organize — Tag, summarize and rank content
• Share — Publish information consistently and frequently

The e-book authors also explain why B2B needs to pay attention to and practice consistent content curation coupled with content creation:

You draw prospects in with third-party curated content and then expose these people to your ideas via your original content. You do this through blogs, e-newsletters, a Learning Center, Webinars, etc.

The e-book is available via free download — meaning you don’t have to register for it. Read it and pass it on!