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Over the past three years, I’ve had the honor of interviewing many brilliant marketers, including Laura Ries, bestselling author, blogger and TV personality; Mike Schultz, president of the Wellesley Hiils Group; and Janine Popick, co-founder and CEO of hosted email marketing platform VerticalResponse.

But last week, I had the unique pleasure of corresponding with Anne Holland, founder of MarketingSherpa and legendary marketing guruess. Though Anne announced her retirement on November 10, she graciously agreed to share some of her collected wisdom and plans for what’s next. Here’s our discussion.

WebMarketCentral (WMC): Thanks so much for your time today, Anne. First off, why do think MarketingSherpa has been so successful, over a long and turbulent period, in a market where so many paid content providers have failed?

Anne Holland (AH): We were always obsessed with market research. We focused on a single primary market (marketing professionals in corporate America with $3 million + year department budgets) and researched what practical information those folks wanted day in and day out. Then we built it for them. In business, it’s all about solving a target market’s pain points. Sherpa’s in an incredibly competitive space, but I suspect we were one of perhaps only two publishers, targeting marketers, who did this kind of ongoing intensive research before developing products and before picking taxonomy for copywriting. We spent hours on the phone with customers and prospects every week in interviews; we conducted multiple surveys every year to different slices; we studied our site’s internal search stat data; etc.

A lot of what businesspeople want is actually good old fashioned reporting. It’s not easy. You’re not rewriting press releases or dashing off opinion columns. Instead we conducted new research projects continually to present the data to readers. We also went out and dug up people to interview for our Case Studies. Every one of our now 900+ Case Studies were exclusive, requiring about $2,000 of staff time just in research, interviews and crafting. Our research reports contained 200-400 charts and tables, compared to about 50 for many fancy research firms. We even spent hours with speakers before our Summits, helping them craft every aspect of their presentations; we didn’t just assume whatever they came up with would be ok. If you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and really slog through that kind of hard work, you’ll please your audience. Very few people really want to work that hard I think though.

WMC: What are the two or three most important pieces of advice you would give to marketers today?

AH: In this economy, frankly your first concern has to be marketing to your boss and your boss’s boss. Few marketers are really comfortable with and savvy enough to market themselves internally in the corporation—I think sales pros are far better at it than we marketers are! Create personas of every person who has power over whether you get the budget you want and the power to execute campaigns the way you want; then figure out them as prospects and market to them. Do you know how to impress the CFO, the CIO and the CEO? Great, then make that happen.

Then focus on your marketplace. Don’t take anyone’s word for who your marketplace is or what they’re all about. Find out for yourself. Meet them in person. Survey them. Review recent demographic studies. Often you’ll find two or more unique demographics have been conflated into one by mistake (such as “the financial services industry” which is many separate demographics who must be targeted separately in campaigns). Or your company’s targeting is fuzzy. Or the taxonomy of your taglines, key benefit propositions, and/or headlines doesn’t match the wording your prospects would use.

The biggest question I get asked is about particular types of campaigns. “Does podcasting work?” “Should I be advertising on Facebook?” “Should I zero out my print ad budget?” Etc. This makes me nuts because marketing success is NOT about the tactic or the media channel, it’s about what will appeal to the prospect. What media do they like or use? What types of tactics do they respond to? Every prospect segment is different. Learn your prospect and they will lead you to the tactics and media channels you should use.

That said, sometimes what works is unexpected to everyone involved, prospect included. So you have to dedicate at least 10% of your budget (I’d prefer 20%) to an ongoing regular series of tests. Test media buys first, then test everything else about tactical execution. Set a schedule for testing—weekly, monthly, quarterly—whatever makes sense. But be sure to put it on the calendar or it won’t happen.

WMC: Anything you’d like to say about the future—either yours or MarketingSherpa’s?

AH: It’s been a great, amazing run for me; first 16 years in business media and then nine years founding and building MarketingSherpa. Everything I’ve been able to accomplish has been due to incredible support from the marketing and media communities. I’ve had so many mentors and friends, I’ve lost count. Now it’s time for me to redefine myself, to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.

Marketing and publishing were very, very good to me. But, I have to look outside my comfort zone and try new things. I’ll probably wind up in some field related to gardening and plant nurseries, but who knows? I feel a lot like I’ve just graduated from college all over again with a new liberal arts degree and a blank slate for a career. It’s scary and very, very exciting. If you’d like to keep up (or you’re considering early retirement yourself) I’ll continue blogging at http://anne-holland.blogspot.com.

250,000 (or so) marketing professionals say…thanks Anne.

*****

Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

The rest is here:
WMC Interviews: Anne Holland

Between the two of them, John McCain and Barack Obama will spend close to $400 million trying to convince you to vote for them next week. Four hundred million dollars. One would think, with that kind of money to spend, their marketing would be a whole lot better.

I decided to save all of the direct mail I received from one of the candidates for a while, just for the heck of it. This is three weeks’ worth of mailings. From one candidate. I sometimes got two or three letters in a single day. This isn’t environmentally friendly, it can’t be cheap, and worst of all, it’s not even effective.

Rather than wiping out our forests to produce more junk mail, here are a few ideas the political parties and candidates might want to consider (they work for businesses as well):

Be creative

Both sides have been spending a ton of money on video, both TV ads and online. Has any of it been memorable? Has anything from either campaign gone viral? Everything seems very standard, safe, formulaic and boring.

On the other hand, there’s the McCain-Obama dance off video. It wasn’t produced by any campaign and won’t sway any votes but is extremely funny, creative, original, and viral, having been emailed prodigiously. (Thanks to Mike Keliher at Provident Partners for Twittering this link.)

For $400 million, how about stepping outside the box? Give a few thousand bucks to some college kids who are passionate about your ideas and see what they produce.

If you’re going to use direct mail, do something interesting

Postal mail doesn’t have to be flat (literally or figuratively). Instead of sending a dozen letters, all slight variations on a theme, to the same person over a two-week period, send one big, lumpy, memorable piece.

Create and send out a construction game that lets people “build a better world.” Or borrow an idea from business like the supply chain superhero mailing. Yes it was expensive, but it was very effective. Such ideas aren’t much of a stretch for a $400 million budget.

Follow The New Rules of Marketing and PR, and Reduce Interruption Marketing

Most of the candidates’ marketing expenditures are still being spent either interrupting your favorite TV show with commercials, or worse, interrupting your dinner with phone calls. Has any candidate, ever, annoyed voters into pledging their support?

Instead of producing expensive commercials which are going to be TiVo’d or making phone calls that will be caller ID’d into uselessness, how about focusing more on building relationships with your most passionate supporters and giving them the tools to influence their social network?

Make Data-Driven Decisions

Considering how much of that $400 million supposedly goes to polling, focus groups and the like, you’d think the candidates would know that sending blizzards of junk mail is an expensive waste of time. They’ve got 50 states to experiment in, and the budget to figure out what works and replicate it.

In the famous words of MarketingSherpa’s Anne Holland, “test, test, TEST.”

Buy, and Use, a CRM System

Much of the wasteful spending on direct mail and phone calls could be avoided by proper use of CRM (and it’s not only political candidates who need one; businesses such as Internet service providers are notorious for screwing up their own promotions).

Knowing, for example, that Chris responds best to direct mailings sent every couple of weeks, while Fran always takes phone calls and Pat doesn’t mind being emailed, could save a lot of money, and trees, while solidfying their support.

As a final benefit: if politicians spent their campaign funds a bit more wisely, voters just might trust them a bit more not to squander our tax dollars once they’re elected.

*****

Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

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McCain, Obama, and Marketing

MarketingSherpa yesterday published an article titled Long-Tail Keywords Dead? We Answer This Question and 14 Others on SEO (open access on their site until September 25). Without summarizing the entire 5-page (at 9-point font size!) article, here are a few highlights and observations:

Paid vs. Organic Search

The article states that 95% of search clicks go to organic results, and only 5% to paid links. While there’s no question that organic search results get more clicks than the associated ads, the contrast isn’t quite that extreme. Lee Odden puts this breakout at closer to 60/40, HubSpot has it at 75/25, and Dynamic Digital says…a lot of things, but basically that organic results get 70-80% while paid links receive 20-30%.

Because organic links perform better, Sherpa advises focusing on SEO, then “only when you see natural search traffic going down should you look to paid search links to supplement that organic traffic.” That’s just plain wrong!

The first question you have to ask yourself is: what’s the value of paid search to you? The closer your product is to the low-cost, tactical, single-decision maker end of the scale (e.g. computer network hardware), the better pay-per-click advertising works. For products that are very expensive, strategic and involve multiple decision makers (e.g. post-merger consulting services), the less effective search engine advertising is.

Second, there’s an excellent argument to be made for using paid search first. It will show you which terms most successfully drive profitable traffic to your site much more quickly than natural SEO can. Then you can focus your SEO efforts on high-value terms that are easy to optimize for, and continue to use paid search for those terms which are very difficult to SEO.

Third, as Anne Holland always advises when faced with any question like this, the answer is to “test, test, test.”

Average cost per click varies considerably by industry and product type.

Long-Tail Keywords rock. “The majority of searches (67%) are made up of one to three keywords. However, 82% of searchers said that they are likely to enter a few more words when they can’t find what they are looking for in a search. Phrases of four or more words are often used to deliver the targeted results that most searchers aren’t seeing with broader-based search terms. These terms can offer you higher conversion rates at a lower cost per click” when used in SEM campaigns, and are far easier to SEO than two-word or even three-word phrases.

Questionable advice on professional SEO: “If you’re a marketer who doesn’t have a good foundation in Web design, try to find a member of your IT or Web design team willing to undertake your SEO projects.” Actually, that sentence would be fine if they had used the phrase “collaborate with you on” in place of the word “undertake.” SEO is a mix of art and science. And I’d argue that its easier to teach a marketer the science than it is to teach at IT person the art.

SEO Frequency: The majority of your SEO work should happen up-front, during the website design phase. After that, you need to enact a policy of steadily adding to that framework with small pieces of new, optimized content…Aim to add at least one new element that builds on your SEO strategy every few days.” Just need to add: the majority of the ongoing effort is link building, not onsite changes.

Blogging for SEO: “Blogs can be a tremendous piece of your search marketing strategy. Blog posts create an ongoing stream of new, keyword-rich content that often generates links from other sites back to your website.” As long as the blogging team follows a few simple guidelines and avoids the seven deadly sins of blogging, then absolutely!

*****

Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

Read more from the original source:
Sherpa Answers 15 Common SEO Questions