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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

The trends are clear: as the economic malaise deepens, GDP growth heads into negative territory and unemployment rises, marketers are slamming the brakes on any program that is offline / branding and shifting whatever dollars they have left in their shrinking budgets to online / direct response.

Last week, MarketingSherpa published two charts showing the shift from offline to online spending, and from brand advertising to direct. Then yesterday, they released this chart, providing detail on the shift in tactics.

The temptation to move in this direction is obvious—but temptations can be dangerous. Shifting resources to social network interaction is smart, and likely would have occurred to some extent even without a recession. Emailing to house lists is another no brainer, though it has to be done with caution; if overdone, unsubscribes will increase and your house list will shrink.

As for the next two tactics on the list, paid search and telemarketing, the only surprise is that there isn’t a more pronounced shift toward these activities. They are highly measurable and meet the need for instant gratification.

So, if “everybody’s doing it”—shifting resources from branding to direct marketing—why should your company buck the tide? Here are four reasons.

Less clutter means more chance to stand out.

Fewer banner ads on websites, fewer print ads in magazines, and fewer pieces of direct mail in in-boxes mean that your ads and mailers have much less competition for attention.

It makes you look like the big dog.

Buyers figure that if your company is one of the few still willing and able to keep running print and online display ads when everyone else is cutting back, there must be a good reason for it. Success breeds success.

The slowdown gives you leverage.

Think about the people trying to sell online display, print, radio and TV advertising right now—they’re desperate. That not only means you can get more attractive pricing, but also that you can get creative in terms of what else goes into the mix: print advertorials, case studies or bylined articles; online editorial coverage, reduced-cost lead gen activities like webinars and white paper syndication; reduced pricing on newsletter sponsorships, etc. What else do you want? Now even moreso than in good times, it doesn’t hurt to ask.

Most importantly, branding supports direct response.

Prospective buyers are more willing to open a piece of mail, take a phone call, or click on a search ad if they are familiar with a vendor. By enhancing name recognition and credibility, brand advertising makes your direct marketing programs more effective.

Don’t neglect branding. While shifting some of your marketing dollars from offline to online programs certainly makes sense, there are compelling reasons to take advantage of the current climate to make some smart branding moves as well.

*****

Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

See the original post:
Four Reasons to Keep Branding During a Recession

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

Search marketing hub site SEOmoz recently released the results of a survey of more than 3,000 search marketers covering demographics, practices, tools used and other topics. Their article, The SEO Industry Survey Results, by SEOmoz staff members Nick Gerner, Rebecca Kelley, Jeff Pollard and Rand Fishkin, provides an excellent summary of the results, so I won’t rehash all of that here, but rather offer just a few observations on some of the more surprising findings.

You Can’t Win if You Don’t Play

More than half of respondents reported that their company either doesn’t use PPC advertising at all or spends less than than $500 per month on paid search advertising. That’s about what would be expected from a survey of the general business population, but considering that the respondents to this survey were all search marketing professionals, that figure is astounding. How can that many companies not understand the cost-effectiveness and inherent measurabilty of SEM?

You Get What You Pay For

At first glance, the income figures reported seem absurdly low, but this result is skewed by the global nature of the respondents. However, even when looking at the geographic breakout of income levels, it’s surprising to discover that even in the U.S., 10% of search marketers make $30,000 or less, nearly half earn less than $60,000 per year, and roughly 60% take home $75,000 or less annually.

Search marketing is strategic. Your website is very often the first, or at least the second, impression that your prospects get of your organization. A crappy website reflects poorly on a company. A website that can’t be found is even worse. I’ve seen (and been asked to fix) $30,000-per-year SEO; it isn’t pretty, and worse, it isn’t effective.

I Like Your Website, But Not Really

Most disturbing of all was that roughly 50% of respondents—both in-house and consultants—”recommend the use of the nofollow attribute for links.” The nofollow tag is possibly the most insidious bit of HTML code ever devised; it should be banished from the global standard for the language, or at the very least ignored by search engine algorithms.

Nofollow is the online equivalent of “I don’t want to date you, but can we still be friends?” No, it doesn’t work that way. Either give XYZ Company a real link from your website, or don’t bother.

Their tools may be elegant though overpriced, but the SEOmoz survey makes great and informative reading.

*****

Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

Go here to read the rest:
Surprises from the SEOmoz SEO Industry Survey