Category: The Marketeer

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SEO and Paid Search

Do you need SEO or a copywriter?

So I’m still considering what the biggest news of the year is on the Marketing front (specifically, tactics). Boldly claiming the death of SEO, I have to admit it’s more of a “SEO is Dead, Long Live SEO”. The game is changing from cheap tricks over to master copywriting and this requires a different set of people with different talents.

It’s amazing when I talk to people who are trying to make headway in search results and they don’t even realize that their keyword density is zero. Kind of hard to rank for a term that’s not even on your site…

A lot of this also leads into another theory I am working on about how the best products really require very little marketing as they tend to spread rapidly on their own. You could argue that the best Martketeers are those who are successfully selling products that are excruciatingly boring commodities. Sometimes the marketeer can be the completely uncoordinated kid and still end up on the World Champion Little League team. Sometimes they can lead the team there. I’m not really sure where I’m going with this besides trying to rationalize why I haven’t retired already after some viral campaign that I made go berzerk.

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Productivity Booster The Marketeer

The 10 Biggest Changes in Marketing Strategy – 2007

I’m trying to do a “Year in Review” and I’m thinking about what has had the most impact in the past 12 months. We’re talking about things that will change your front line marketing tactics. Here’s my rough list:

  1. Email is not dying
  2. Print is dying
  3. Google AdWords Price Explosion
  4. Blogging
  5. Every organization is a publishing organization (a la, David Scott)
  6. Online Video
  7. RSS Feeds
  8. WikiPedia
  9. SalesForce.com and other SAAS offerings
  10. SEO is dying

I’d really like to hear what you have to say about this list and what would be on your list. Anyone that provides useful feedback will be acknowledged in the final report with a link at the bare minimum. There are a couple of large brains that I am going to call out by name, but don’t let my link baiting discourage you from giving your opinion:

Christopher Penn, Mitch Joel, C.C. Chapman, Joseph Jaffe, Ron Ploof

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Podcasting The Marketeer

More Marketing Over Coffee

The return to normal life (before the 4th) continues with the latest Marketing Over Coffee. Have you checked out the best Marketing Podcast yet?

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The Marketeer

Des Moines Register Gets It

Regardless of your politics you might be interested to take a look at how they are handling the news at The Des Moines Register. They are doing original work and they have the comments open to the public. I think that this type of hybrid blog/news is the future of the newspaper. I’ve always said that good newspaper people have nothing to fear from blogging, they are well trained to be the best of the bloggers – they just have to get the nerve to try and pull the sword from the stone. I have no doubt, as soon as they grab hold, they’ll know they are on to something big.

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Lead Generation The Marketeer

Last day on the show floor

The conference is wrapping up today (at least the expo floor). As usual my feet and back are ready for a break – conferences all come down to good shoes.

We’ve been using greeters to scan badges, that has proven to be at least 20% more effective in getting names.

One interesting thing – for lead gen collection most shows use a mag stripe card reader. For this one we were given a pocket PC with a barcode scanner. The lead comes up on the screen and we can rank them hot/warm/cold. There’s also a box for text entry from the blackberry-style keyboard, and better yet a record button to take a voice memo. Pretty impressive, now the next step is to try and talk other shows into using the same thing.

Back to the shop for tomorrow…

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Lead Generation The Marketeer

Trade Show Wars

I’m off to set up the booth. This is like the lottery in reverse – you go to the show floor and open the cases and see what’s broken or missing. Best case scenario is that everything is there and working and you breathe a sigh of relief. In a lot of ways it’s a pain but it does get to test your MacGuyver skills to the fullest.

Last year at this show I opened the case and found that the wrong lights had been shipped and they wouldn’t fit into the booth. Thanks to GPS I was at the nearest Home Depot in about 15 minutes buying an assortment of plumbing supplies, tools and a hacksaw to make my own parts. I wouldn’t want to repeat that experience, but it does make for a funny story. Let’s see what today has to offer…

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Lead Generation Productivity Booster

These leads are crap

As a marketeer, I have never heard these words.

Just kidding, I get it at least twice a month. This is the age old struggle between sales and marketing, and with marketing being the creative side there are thousands of responses: “The sale begins at ‘No’, you order taking monkey”, “I give the good leads to closers” etc.

It’s all in good fun, kind of like complaining about cafeteria food, you do it regardless of whether the food is from the best chef or a can. If you are hitting your numbers everyone is happy, if not everyone is pissed off.

But there are things you can do to improve your leads. I’ve been working on our process to screen leads via a survey on SurveyMonkey (a web-based survey tool), and it’s working wonderfully. You get a new list, send them a few questions and you manage to filter out maybe 20%: 5% look a lot better than average and 15% is crap the sales guys don’t have to eat.

Keep in mind I can give a sales guy a hard time, but that’s because I share their goal – they should be able to blow their number out before the 3rd month of the quarter so they don’t have to come in to the office for the last month if they don’t want to (and I don’t have to listen to them). They should really never have to work Fridays, and Mondays should be exclusively for golf. This is the path to a happy workplace.

For more great info on lead gen I turn to Brian Carroll, he’s a thought leader in this space. Here’s some more info on Sales and Marketing playing well together.

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Brain Buster The Marketeer

Can you skip the chasm?

So yesterday I was saying that I thought the newest Palm hardware was a waste of time. Over on engadget a lot of people were saying the same type of thing. If you don’t have the backstory – they are selling a mini laptop, it connects to the phone and you get web, email and some other programs with the benefit of a big screen and keyboard.

All the card-carrying members of team propeller head took off our taped glasses and sneered at it (myself included). They had an interesting pitch though – “Geekboys, this is not for you, you must have your multimedia laptops, this is for the rest of the world.” I paused for a moment and had a flash of inspiration – you could give this to a salesperson and they would have a phone and access to Salesforce.com, all they really need. You could even include audio instructions since they usually don’t read too well (an old joke, not mine by the way).

This got me to thinking further – is it possible to skip the chasm? Crossing the Chasm is standard reading for anyone in the software industry, for the uninitiated – for all tech stuff you usually get acceptance from the geeks if it’s cool but then there’s a period of time where the geeks take it for granted but the rest of the world still hasn’t found out about it or figured it out. If you need more you should really get the book.

My gut is telling me no, it’s not possible. You need the geeks on your side because they are the evangelists, they help you further develop the product for the mainstream audience (basically by making it easier to use and error free). If you don’t get the geeks the product remains relatively unknown and never sees mainstream light of day. I’d be interested if anyone has any examples of skipping the chasm, or opinions as to whether it’s possible or not.

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Daily Life Gaming Geek Stuff Graphic Design Productivity Booster

Virtual Yard Sale

The purchase and sale agreement has been signed so it looks like we are off to a new home! I’ve already begun going through stuff to try and ease the move, and I thought it would be fun to throw my own virtual yard sale. Actually the stuff is on eBay, but I thought it would be interesting to see if any readers were interested. If anybody reading this buys any of the stuff I’ll waive the shipping fees.

Three items for sale:

A Netgear Wired 5-Port Switch, if you are going to wire up some machines for gaming or just want more wired ports at your desk (perfect for trade shows booths or conference rooms).

A Linksys Wired Router, same deal as above but with more features (but I’ve had some trouble getting Apple TV and the XBox 360 extender to work with it, LOL).

And the best for last: A Wacom drawing tablet. Drawing with a mouse is like trying to draw with a potato, a must for illustrators.

Enough with the commercial break, a post about marketing in 20 minutes…

Categories
Daily Life SalesForce.com SEO and Paid Search

Still off the grid

Home inspection tomorrow so things are still moving. Some quick things you may be interested in:

Google is cracking down on search arbitrage

I was unable to hit the WebInno event yesterday so I’m looking for a good writeup on what I missed.

Some rumors about Google acquiring Salesforce.com but I think those are just rumors.

A new Marketing Over Coffee will be out tonight.