Search Engine Land has a post about the new data the Google keyword tool is providing. Now they’re giving users results based on local search and global search volume. Since the global search volume encompasses all countries, Barry and others found that the search volume for global was lower than local almost a majority of the time which doesn’t really make much sense.

The Google Analytics team gave out advice on how to track telephone leads and live chats using Google Analytics in a blog post today.

Google teams up with Mongoose Metrics to allow users to track offline phone calls. Mongoose Metrics provides toll free numbers extremely cheap. GA is able to track calls to the toll free number by assigning that number to a hidden web page on your site containing your GA tracking code. Jeff Gillis from the GA team explains how it works:

When a phone call to the tracking number is connected, the technology will place a web browser visit to your hidden tracking web page and in this way insert the phone call event back into your Google Analytics account. Each phone call generates a unique visit which is clearly labeled inside of Analytics

For tracking live chats, GA teams up with Live Person. Live Person allows Web site owners to interact with their customers via a chat system on their site. Live Person created a GA integration that allows users to track conversions after chat, and also the following GA data:

• Map Overlay Report which displays volume and quality metrics of live chat interactions by geographic region
• Search Engines Report: Reveals the sources and keywords that drive interactive chats (and resulting conversions)
• Reverse Goal Path Report: Lists the navigation paths that lead to the most chats

GA is a great free analytics platform, and these features demonstrate its effectiveness. For most businesses being able to get this level of detail from a free platform is phenomenal. Make sure you are always getting the most out of whatever analytics package you are using. Conversion tracking should always be a priority.

What other types of offline conversions would you like to see tracking for?

Google Analytics Integrates Telephone Leads and Live Chats

Giovanni Gallucci is a thought leader in social media and online buzz marketing – www.gallucci.net/

Marketing in 2008 became decidedly social — and 2009 will see the social elements of marketing accelerate. Social media went from being on the cutting edge, to approaching the mainstream. When I say “social” I mean marketing driven by word-of-mouth relationships.

As you go through each of the following small business marketing trends, you’ll see how powerful the social component is for getting and keeping your ideal customer. Just remember, your customers control your brand, so act accordingly.

1. AUTHENTICITY– In 2009, the focus is on “authenticity” and letting the real people behind your company be visible and show through — no more hiding behind a faceless website filled with the word “We.” Instead, it’s “I.” Consumers and B2B buyers expect to know who they are dealing with before hiring your company.

In the event of a problem with your products, consumers want a real person to reach out to, whether it’s AngelaAtHP or ComcastCares on Twitter, or the Web designer you want to hire who actively participates in Facebook and Plurk. Business people are connecting one-to-one through social media sites and this activity will continue.

How to take advantage of this trend:

• Set up a social media presence in your real name on sites like Twitter.com, and interact with customers and prospects, mixing in personal information as well as business information. Examples: @ShaneGoldberg (Shane Goldberg, founder of Extreme Member),  @TimBerry (Tim Berry, President of Palo Alto Software), and @pixily (Prasad Thammineni, CEO of Pixily).
• Set up profiles and groups on Facebook and start recruiting customers to join.
• Create at least one blog to keep customers educated either about your industry or your products and services.

2. DO IT YOURSELF MARKETING – A study by the Yellow Pages Association of America found that more than half of all small businesses say that getting and keeping customers is a challenge, yet nearly two-thirds say they will NOT get any outside help in marketing. The costs of traditional advertising is going up with newspaper ad rates growing 18%, while the effectiveness of traditional marketing is coming down with newspaper readership coming down. In 1992 it took three touches to reach your buyer — and today it takes more than eight!

How to take advantage of this trend:

• Do some market research. Use free online survey tools like SurveyMonkey or QuestionPro to find out what’s really important to your customers.
• Invest in direct marketing. Take the time to build your customer lists and start sending direct messages to your customers whenever possible. Use the information you learned from your surveys to target your message. If you can’t afford direct snail mail, then do email marketing, which is cheaper.
• Post videos and slide shows on your web site and/or blog. Video a demonstration or collect testimonials from customers. Google likes video content, increasing your chances of being found online. By posting slide shows on your site and on SlideShare, you can reach two audiences – those on social sites like Slideshare and those that come to your site directly. And you make your existing presentations and documents do double duty by posting them online.

3. TECH-DRIVEN WORD OF MOUTH MARKETING – 68% of your customers will leave you because they don’t see the difference between you and the other guy. This is why word-of-mouth-marketing will become even more popular in 2009. Loyal customers tell their friends and family WHY to choose you. With so much advertising around us. small businesses will have to penetrate deep “firewalls” of resistance to get to their ideal customers.

How to take advantage of this trend:

• Put a forum section on your web site and run ongoing Q&As with your customers. This will give you the REAL reasons that they choose you.
• Start a referral or affiliate program. It’s as simple as approaching those businesses who serve your customers BEFORE they get to you. A good example is car dealers can refer insurance agents. Clothing retailers can recommend dry cleaners. Look ahead of you in the supply chain and behind you in the supply chain and start referring and collecting referrals.
• Measure your Net Promoter Score. Fred Reicheld wrote a book called “The Ultimate Question” that discovered that this single greatest predictor of profitability was the answer to the question “How likely are you to refer [this company] to friends and family?”

4. ECO AND SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY – “Green” has gone mainstream. It’s not just a trendy thing to say anymore. In 2009, letting your customers know that your product or service is eco-and socially responsible is literally a feature you want to communicate. A BBDO (Ad Agency) study recently showed that younger consumers made purchasing decisions based on how what “difference you made in the world.” Whether you’re into this trend or not — many consumers have put this on their criteria list.

How to take advantage of this trend:

• Promote whatever community programs or ecologically friendly projects or practices that you have. Don’t think that any effort at environmental-friendly activity is too small. If you are replacing all your light bulbs in your offices to the new fluorescent — then say so. If you are recycling paper — say so.
• If you’re a local business that does business locally — show your customers how you re-cycle and grow the money they spend with you back into the community.

5. BOOTSTRAPPING AND SIMPLICITY – We’ve been moving away from excess for a few years now. But in 2009, being resourceful and bootstrapping is officially cool. This year brings a terrific opportunity to cut out products and services that have little value. Simplifying your offerings gives you the opportunity to differentiate yourself and maintain (if not increase) your price points for products or services that you do best.

How to take advantage of this trend:

• Run a report of your products and services sold to each customer and check out the margins. Highlight the low-margin offerings and see if you can move your customers to a more profitable alternative.
• Look at your bills and statements and ask yourself the question ‘In what ways does this expense get and keep my ideal customers?’ If you don’t come up with a good answer — it may be time to cut that expense out.

6. MARKETING TO THE “BUY BUTTON” – Neuromarketing is the study of how our brains respond to messages. Neuromarketing is becoming the standard baseline for copywriting and advertising. Learning how your customers’ “buy button” works will save you time effort and money.

How to take advantage of this trend:

• Read the books Buyology and Neuromarketing to understand exactly how your brain is influenced to choose one product over another.
• Find ways to attach positive emotions to your product or service.
• Show your customer that you trust THEM by making a trial period available or quickly approving credit.

7. PAID MEMBERSHIPS — Membership sites are a new trend that make the Internet a terrific money-making opportunity for all kinds of entrepreneurs. Combine the trend of creating a niche, and a membership site, and you will have yourself a winning formula in 2009.

Offering memberships is not restricted to the Internet alone. Restaurants have used memberships successfully to even out cash flow and consistently bring in customers. Financial service providers have used memberships to educate their clients and provide special events and services.

How to take advantage of this trend:

• Think of ways to offer a regular benefit to members: product or service of the month, research, e-books, designs and templates. If you have a niche, you have the makings of a membership opportunity.
• Can you call your customers members? What could you offer them on a regular basis as a benefit of membership?
• Some examples of membership sites: Artella Words and Art, Artistic Thread Works, The Biz Web Coach.

8. MOBILITY — Accessing the Internet via mobile device or smart phone is a given. The sites that are mobile friendly will be the sites of choice for consumers looking for information on the go. Another common occurrence is receiving updates on your order or any information that you request via text message.

How to take advantage of this trend:

• Check out these services for sending text messages to customers from the Web: ClearSMS.com, Group2Call.com
• Talk to your technical expert to see what it would take to convert your web site or blog to be viewed easily on the web.

9. WISDOM OF CROWDS — Your customers will want more say in how you improve your product or service. Internet tools like UserVoice, Get Satisfaction and IdeaScale will gain more popularity in 2009 and will be common platforms for gathering customer feedback and ideas on product improvements. Using these feedback tools helps to build customer community and loyalty.

How to take advantage of this trend:

• Sign up for a free version of UserVoice, GetSatisfaction or IdeaScale and put a Feedback widget on your web site or blog. Tell your customers to contribute ideas.
• Be sure to monitor (or have your employees monitor) the feedback on such sites and participate in it. Then as you implement suggestions – communicate that to your customers.

10. PERSONAL BRANDING– Personal Branding will become more important than a killer resume or bio. Your personal brand is your public identity. It’s what you are known for within and outside your network. It has never been more important to differentiate yourself and focus on what sets you apart from the crowd.

Good personal brands give people an immediate sense of knowing you and the experience your business offers. What do these names conjure up for you? Donald Trump, Oprah, Richard Branson? Each of these individuals have focused on a defining idea or element of who they are that is immediately recognizable. For example “You’re Fired” would not be Oprah and “Live your best life” would not be Donald Trump

How to take advantage of this trend:

• Make sure you are using a photo on the web. It doesn’t need to be professional, in fact, a candid and authentically-you shot is best. Use the same pictures everywhere until your brand is established. @GuyKawasaki has his standard picture – but he also changes it around now and then. @JenniferLaycock from SearchEngine Guide uses her company’s puppy logo as her brand.
• Register your name as your domain name. Also register extensions of your name on popular social media sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Slideshare, and others. This serves a defensive purpose, too, as it prevent squatters from profiting off of your personal brand.

About the Author: Ivana Taylor is CEO of Third Force, a strategic firm that helps small businesses get and keep their ideal customer.  She’s the co-author of the book “Excel for Marketing Managers” and proprietor of DIYMarketers, a subscription site for in-house marketers.  Her blog is Strategy Stew.

by Michael Pinto

Nearly a day goes by on Twitter without yet another social media “expert” choosing to stalk me. At first it started innocently — back in the day (about a year ago) various techie friends started to declare themselves social media gurus because they decided to hang out on Twitter and Facebook all day. And now an army of their offspring monitor Summize in search of human flesh.

Now the first symptom of this disease was what I call “social media deafness”, a state that occurs when a person’s social graph exceeds 500+ virtual friends. The result is that the person is a mile wide, but an inch deep. Suddenly the friend you use to know develops amnesia like symptoms and starts ignoring your direct messages — what was first simple Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder becomes full blown zombie like state.

The zombies then seek each other: You’ll always notice that of the 5,000 followers that a social media expert has that all 5,000 of them are also social media “experts”. Their only form of conversation is to quote each other and live tweet conferences where they gather. Like any good Ponzi scheme the lead zombies can make a good living feeding the hopes and aspirations of the worker level drones who parrot their every blog entry.

But that’s where the problem starts with us civilians: The drone level zombies then start to stalk any innocent Twitter user they can find. They don’t care who it is or what that person is interested in because their first prize is the “auto-follow”. By finding enough folks who don’t have auto-follow turned off they artificially inflate their number of followers which inflates their “expertise” in the field. Most start out by doing this to each other, but before long they need to prey on the flesh of the living.

If you’re unlucky enough to be followed that’s when the real problems begin: Before long every little quip you put out is met with a useless unsolicited recommendation. At first you might tease the zombie about their hard sell technique, but alas zombies have no sense of humor. Worst yet is that zombies don’t know how to take a hint — and that when my little buddy “the Block button” comes in handy!

Above: Social media and SEO “experts” aren’t human anymore (i.e. they’re undead) so you should feel no guilt at all in shooting them — in fact it can be an act of pleasure once your get use to it.

Now I know what you’re all thinking: Can’t these pitiful creatures be saved? The answer is NO!

My proof of my concept: Recently on a News Gang podcast I witnessed an attempt at zombie intervention and the result was a huge sad failure. Sweet Robert Scoble (now known by his borg name “teh Scobleizer”) had been sucked into some sort of fringe aspect of this cult called Friend Feed. So industry vet Steve Gillmor and action hero Mike Arrington tried to lead a brave (but futile) effort to lead an intervention to save poor Robert, but alas their rational pleas for sanity were ignored. Within minutes Scobleizer was back on the tweets, and this time he was disseminating Amazon affiliate links into his chirps in order to monetize his affliction.

Above: Robert Scoble is the second zombie on the left.

Like drugs, social media can be a good thing in the right hands. But there are too many people out there who don’t know what they’re doing and just get carried away. Sadly most people just lack the good old fashioned discipline to keep their worse instincts in check.

On a related note there’s also a related clan of zombies which are the SEO “experts” — these creatures are a blue collar variation of the social media experts and usually have the term “web master” in their bio. Sometimes the social media and SEO zombies can mate to produce a marketing strategy monster, but most of these are harmless as they don’t use the auto-follow technique.

In closing I’ve given this problem a great deal of thought trying to come up with a solution. At first I had a great idea about trying to have an automated script that would detect the zombies and block them as soon as they spot you. But like Spam I realized that any software solution was useless as the flesh eaters always manage to stay one step ahead of you. But then it hit me! Being a fanboy and having watched too many monster movies I realized that the only solution is to lure the entire population of social media and SEO experts to an island and for President Obama to authorize the dropping of a nuclear weapon.

Above: I know one is tempted to be cheap and just use an atomic bomb, but having watched so many of these movies I know that it won’t be strong enough.

The end?

Daniel was visibly excited – Monday was the day that he had pencilled in for the launch of a blog that he hoped would be the mainstay on his online presence, designed to help develop his business.

While Monday was the day when the wheels were starting to turn in earnest, it had been some 4 weeks since Daniel had first decided that his business really needed a blog. He’d been noticing a drop off in prospect calls over the previous weeks (perhaps a factor of the credit crunch and the current economic situation) and had begun to feel that he didn’t have as much contact with his customers as he would have liked.

What was certain was that he was determined that his would not be one of those businesses that didn’t make it through – that much he was very clear about.

He’d also noticed that blogs were cropping up in lots of different places. Sure he’d seen that the BBC and The Guardian had lots of blogs and he particularly liked reading the comments that other people left on the articles. “You get a sense of what people really think rather than relying one person’s opinion”, he had explained to friends. “It’s more like taking part in a conversation than listening to a speech.” And he preferred that.

More importantly, he had noticed a couple of his competitors had started blogs and were clearly getting attention because of them. One had even been featured in the main trade magazine which he had been trying to get a mention in! People were also leaving comments on them so clearly they were spending more time on his competitors’ sites than on his own.

It was this that had swung it for him. He was just as much of an expert as they were, perhaps more so, and yet they were getting all the attention. He needed to make sure that more came his way and so it had been key to find the best way to get that information out in front of his prospective companies. He’d also been reading that it was important for sites to be “sticky” and have ways to encourage people to spend more time on them and he’d been advised a little about optimising his website for Search Engines.

Lots to do, but a blog seemed to have a key role to play in all of these areas and Daniel was looking forward to see the results it could achieve for him and, more importantly, his business.

Next Instalment: Part 2 – Planning the Blog

Tags: Business Blogging, Blog Diary, Reasons for blogging

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The standard email marketing rule is that shorter subject lines are usually better than longer ones. But like all rules, this one has its caveats and exceptions.

A new white paper from marketing services firm Epsilon analyzed subject lines from more than 568 million client emails to determine the influence of length, word order and content on open rates and clicks. The major takeaway:

- While it is important to keep subject lines as short as possible to convey your message, the choice of words and the order in which you place them is just as important to boosting response rates.

In fact, one of Epsilon’s conclusions – that marketers should front-load subject lines with the most important information – is precisely what we discovered in an analysis of our own email newsletter subject lines conducted last year. Here are a few of the trends we uncovered among our best-performing subject lines.

- Convey the benefit readers will receive from the email within the first two words of the subject line, such as:

o “Top 12 Email Newsletter Mistakes”

o “Best Time to Send Email: Test Results”

o “How to Conduct Email Audits”

- Use the right “trigger words” early in the subject line. Trigger words can be numbers or hot-button industry terms, such as:

o “CAN-SPAM – Must-Know Updates”

- Hot brand names in subject lines can improve open rates. For example, some of our top performing subject lines included:

o Google AdWords: 8 Tips to Lift ROI

o Use Facebook to Market Yourself & Your Company

So, while keeping your subject lines short is important, focusing solely on length without paying attention to word choice and word placement won’t deliver optimum results. And don’t forget to conduct your own tests with your own audience to find the right approach.

Epsilon white paper: Rethinking the Relationship between Subject Line Length and Email Performance: A New Perspective on Subject Line Design http://www.epsilon.com/Epsilon_SubjectLine_WhitePaper.pdf

Previous MarketingSherpa article: 4 Takeaways from MarketingSherpa’s Newsletter Subject-Line Analysis

https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=30938

H/T to Tamara Gielen, who blogged about this white paper:

http://www.b2bemailmarketing.com/2009/01/subject-line-research-reveals-content-is-as-important-as-length.html

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Daniel was visibly excited – Monday was the day that he had pencilled in for the launch of a blog that he hoped would be the mainstay on his online presence, designed to help develop his business.

While Monday was the day when the wheels were starting to turn in earnest, it had been some 4 weeks since Daniel had first decided that his business really needed a blog. He’d been noticing a drop off in prospect calls over the previous weeks (perhaps a factor of the credit crunch and the current economic situation) and had begun to feel that he didn’t have as much contact with his customers as he would have liked.

What was certain was that he was determined that his would not be one of those businesses that didn’t make it through – that much he was very clear about.

He’d also noticed that blogs were cropping up in lots of different places. Sure he’d seen that the BBC and The Guardian had lots of blogs and he particularly liked reading the comments that other people left on the articles. “You get a sense of what people really think rather than relying one person’s opinion”, he had explained to friends. “It’s more like taking part in a conversation than listening to a speech.” And he preferred that.

More importantly, he had noticed a couple of his competitors had started blogs and were clearly getting attention because of them. One had even been featured in the main trade magazine which he had been trying to get a mention in! People were also leaving comments on them so clearly they were spending more time on his competitors’ sites than on his own.

It was this that had swung it for him. He was just as much of an expert as they were, perhaps more so, and yet they were getting all the attention. He needed to make sure that more came his way and so it had been key to find the best way to get that information out in front of his prospective companies. He’d also been reading that it was important for sites to be “sticky” and have ways to encourage people to spend more time on them and he’d been advised a little about optimising his website for Search Engines.

Lots to do, but a blog seemed to have a key role to play in all of these areas and Daniel was looking forward to see the results it could achieve for him and, more importantly, his business.

Next Instalment: Part 2 – Planning the Blog

Tags: Business Blogging, Blog Diary, Reasons for blogging

Was this post useful? Then please share it!

Go to Source