Marketing Automation Archives - Page 6 of 10

7 October 2015

Traditional Tweeting: The Merging of Traditional and SocialChannels

Marketers have long known advertising is no longer a one-way street. The social world has meshed with the so-called “real world,” with text conversations acting as bridges between in person meetings. However, in advertising, we still treat “social” and “traditional” as two separate channels.

Recent data indicates that the bridge between traditional and social has spread— at least when Twitter and TV is concerned. This means content strategies might be changing in the very near future to reflect consumers’ multiple screen habits.

In a world where personal video recorders, Netflix, and streaming are commonplace, it can be easy to think that TV is on rocky ground. However, there’s still nothing quite like watching an event the day it airs and talking about it with your friends. Twitter makes these conversations easy and real time, providing brands with a unique opportunity to engage with an influential audience.

Hashtag integration with live shows is slowly becoming commonplace. This season of So You Think You Can Dancedecided to give Twitter the power to save two dancers out of the bottom six, with the judges saving another two.Face Off, a competition reality show based around special effects makeup, has Twitter handles for the contestants. TLC often airs repeats of their programs with added Twitter commentary to show viewers’ reactions.

So what does this mean for brands? A lot, actually.

According to Adweek, 19% of people will consider trying a brand that engaged with them around a TV program. On top of this, 4 of 5 users active during primetime hours mention brands in their tweets.

Instead of simply having to rely on catchy commercials and jingles to gain traction, brands can now have genuine engagement between viewers around TV shows. Social media allows for unprecedented interaction, and conversations no longer have to rely around branded messages.

Facebook is catching on this trend, too. They’ve recently offered viewers three new ways to interact with their favourite TV shows, trying to compete with Twitter as being the go-to television social media. Whether or not these features pan out for companies is yet to be seen, but it could potentially further integrate traditional and social media into a single, indistinguishable whole.

Other media is almost certainly going to follow suit, with the availability of sharing and contributing to news articles online and augmented reality continuing to make strides. Marketers should think less in terms of “traditional” and “social,” instead viewing all media tools as complimentary tactics. The social world is here to stay and continues reinventing how we interact with the world around us. Those who ignore the shift will almost certainly be left behind.

29 September 2015

3 Tips for Using Stock Photography Appropriately

As of late, the use (or misuse) of stock photography has been much talked about in the media. The Conservative Party of Canada has come under attack for what some feel as an inappropriate and/or ill-informed use of stock photography.

So, aside from the legal aspects involved in using stock photography (including: licensing agreements and assigning credit to photographers) what are some important things to consider before using stock photography?

Credit: ThinkStock / tanjavashchuk / 479767450

Stock Photography Tip #1: Consider Your Audience and the Context of the Message

As with any marketing endeavour, in order to be effective, we must consider to whom we are speaking, what we are trying to get across, and how our market will interpret it. Visual storytelling works the same way, and you have to be particularly careful when using stock photography. As in the case above, you can end up offending your audience and casting yourself in a negative light.

In order to be successful, you must be sensitive to the needs, values, and beliefs of your audience. Take time to perform the research necessary on your audience and on the content you are planning on placing in your ad before allowing it to go live.

Lastly, if you have the resources, testing it against your market in a focus group or otherwise might be a wise final check.

Stock Photography Tip #2: Be Careful to Stay on Brand

It can be a challenge to stay on brand when using stock photography, as you are limited to the vision the photographer had at the time of taking the photograph. For example, you might find a photo that captures the right kind of person with the perfect expression, but the lighting in the background of the image is foreboding, while the message you’re trying to send about your brand is a cheery one.

Finding a piece of stock photography that fits in perfectly with your brand and message can be a challenge, but it is worth getting it right to maintain the integrity of your brand.

Stock Photography Tip #3: Strive to Maintain Authenticity

There is a lot of good stock photography out there. However, sometimes even the best stock photography can come off as less than authentic and genuine. People can appear too posed, with overly polished expressions, and are often found standing beneath unnatural, fluorescent lighting. If you want your current and potential customers to trust you, you need to establish and maintain a sense of authenticity.

People (young people, in particular) have become incredibly savvy and are able to detect and then distrust and even ridicule what they feel to be phony, posed photography. There are even contemporary celebrities who make fun of the truly terrible stock photography out there.

Also consider: is it even authentic for your brand to use stock photography at all? Many brands, depending on a variety of factors such as their target demographic may eschew stock photography altogether. The Instagram Generation in particular (i.e. Millenials and Gen Z) is one for which you should exercise caution when opting to use stock photography. This generation expects to see and responds positively to natural, organic-looking photography. Further, they can often tell when stock photography is being used and might not respond the way you would hope.

BONUS: Hire a Professional Photographer

When the budget allows, it is of course ideal to use a professional photographer. You have a much greater chance of successfully communicating the message you want to get across to your audience and getting the response you want. A professional photographer will work with you to help ensure you reach your goals, ensuring every detail works together to achieve the intended results.

24 September 2015

Using Growth Driven Design to Make Existing Websites Perform

With consumers (B2C and B2B) using the Internet to research or validate purchase decisions, your website is a critical component to your marketing and sales process. Yet many companies are still treating it as a digital brochure — it is a passive information piece and not playing an active role in engaging with your market and converting leads. Just as you require ongoing reports and communication from your sales team, you should expect the same from your website. And just as you expect your sales team to adapt and respond accordingly to meet their goals, so too should your website.

Your Website is a Marketing Investment

Like every other business investment, you should have set goals and be measuring the ROI of your website. This process of ongoing stewardship and incremental changes in pursuit of realizing your goals is often referred to as Growth Driven Design. Like many buzz words or trends, it is simply common sense.

You don’t have to start with a whole new website (however, you aren’t going to get good results with a poor website, so consider starting from scratch). The first priority in putting your website to work is establishing what it can do for you. Determine how it fits into your marketing and sales process and what roles it can play to make that process more efficient and effective.

Then quantify those roles into achievable goals and determine what metrics you will track to monitor progress. You will, no doubt, have to upgrade parts of your website so it can do the job you expect of it. For example, if one of your goals is to gain 10 qualified leads per month, your website will need the tools to attract and engage your market. Such items would include strategically written content (for both engagement and SEO), relevant and compelling photos and videos, on-site call-to-actions, landing pages and forms, information and downloads with perceived value, etc.

Monitor activity on your website on a regular basis. (So if you haven’t already, set up Google analytics. Marketing automation software such as HubSpot and SharpSpring provide additional tracking information.) Plan on continuous (at least monthly) changes to add and fine-tune the items listed above to improve performance and build on your successes.

Growth Driven Design Structures Continuous Improvement

This ongoing process of attentive and responsive activity is the foundation of Growth Driven Design, and it works effectively on existing websites as well as new. Focusing on incremental change for steady gain is a strategic approach to increasing your website activity and developing sales.

Companies are typically slow to fully understand and effectively implement new technologies. The Internet has evolved at such a dramatic pace that playing catch-up every 3-5 years with a new website means you are perennially out-dated. That didn’t matter as much ten years ago, but now that your web presence is becoming one of your most valuable assets, you can’t afford not to pay continuous attention to your website.

What are your thoughts? How do you feel a website could profit from ongoing change?

8 September 2015

Back to School: Content Generation 101

While some schools started last week, it is today that the majority of our kids are headed back to school. In honour of this occasion, today’s blog post is all about continuous learning on how to create great content and how to ensure that your best content keeps working for you. So, whether this is new to you or you are simply seeking a refresher, let’s head back to school for Content Generation 101.

tablet surrounded by broken pencils with "back to school" written on it like a chalkboard — Photo: Thinkstock iStock / nito100 / 506210469

What are Content Generation and Content Marketing?

Content Generation is an essential step in generating online traffic to your website, and in nurturing prospects into becoming customers and advocates of your business. Content Marketing is the practice of creating content that people actively seek will out to help them, amuse entertain them, or otherwise provide value to them. Useful content will be shared, which further benefits your business by increasing its reach and extending your influence.

Develop a solid content strategy

As with any marketing effort, the best way to be successful at content generation is to start by developing a strategy.

Set objectives: What are you hoping to achieve? What are your business goals?
Identify your audience: Who are you trying to reach? What interests them the most? Which of their pain points can your business address?
Pinpoint the fit: How do your products or services fit the needs of your audience? What content can you create that will resonate with them?

Create a plan and editorial calendar

An effective content generation plan will start with the objectives and strategy you’ve set (see above), and set out the tactics and steps required to make it happen.

Aspects of the plan: Some of the most effective tactics includes blogs, search engine optimization (SEO), and social media.
Types of content: Create a range of content of varying depth, including blog posts, infographics, website content, newsletters, and white papers.
Develop an editorial calendar: Building a list of topics and ideas well in advance will help to make content generation less daunting and make it easier to keep up with a steady flow of blog posts and other marketing assets.
- Decide what your key messages are.
- Identify topics that reflect this message and that are consistent with your overall company brand and objectives.
- Monitor news and trends in your industry, and cover these topics in a way that is meaningful to your target market and pertinent to your business offering.
- Set a calendar identifying these planned topics and the dates you will publish posts on these topics. This will keep you organized and on track.

Focus on Quality

Once you have the content generation machine in motion, it is easy to veer off track in the quest to churn out frequent content. Don’t lose sight of your primary business objectives, your key message, or your value proposition. High quality, useful, relevant content is critical to steer a steady stream of prospects to your website, and to convert them into qualified leads, then into happy customers and advocates. Consider the things that will interest your audience, educate them, or make their lives easier, and marry those up with the benefits and unique features of the products or services you offer. Connect the dots for your prospects, and provide them with useful information.

Attract and Nurture your Audience

For a content marketing strategy to be effective, your content has to reach your audience, draw them into your website, and nurture them through your sales process. If you’ve followed our advice on creating and implementing an editorial calendar with frequent generation of useful content, the hard part is done. Our last recommendations focus on propagation of your content:

Make sharing effortless: Now that you are regularly creating terrific content, you want people to share it far and wide. Make this as easy as possible by:
- Publishing your content in accessible formats (for example, .pdf, .jpg, mobile-friendly web content, YouTube videos, etc.)
- Including social media sharing buttons, so that sharing your content is a simple click away.
But keep some of your deeper or more focused content “guarded” to guide people through your sales nurturing process. In other words, keep some content accessibly only by filling out a form on your website. This lets you see who has downloaded specific content and gives you an opportunity to collect a bit of information about them and their interests – knowledge that will allow you to continue to nurture the relationship.

Content Generation is something all businesses need to do in order to stay relevant, to continually draw new prospects to their website, and to convert them into loyal repeat customers. We hope our Content Generation 101 post has given you a head start on creating meaningful, interesting content for your business. And now, school’s out for today!

3 September 2015

Three Truths About Inbound Marketing (that they don’t want you to know)

With some of the claims being made by online marketers, you could be forgiven for thinking that you can ramp up your business quickly and easily. The truth is that marketing automation is not easy, success does not just happen, and unicorns don’t really exist. (Actually, I’m not totally sure about the last one, however, I have sufficient first-hand experience to attest to the first two.)

Can inbound marketing tactics gain new clients and grow your business? Absolutely. But, let’s take an honest look at the reality of inbound marketing.

Just because it’s online doesn’t make it cheap.

True, there is no print cost or physical distribution required. Definite cost savings. But there are hard costs involved in SEO, PPC, Google AdWords, etc. Keep in mind that a considerable amount of time is required to write strategic content and effectively implement a content marketing campaign (blogs, social media posts, white papers, infographics, video interviews, press releases, etc.). And, the knowledge and experience to develop and execute an inbound marketing strategic to attain your goals is most likely a skill set that you don’t have in-house.

So it may well be cheaper than traditional methods that you’ve used in the past, but it is still an investment that needs to be budgeted for.

It’s not a quick fix.

Remember how you used to be able to buy a bunch of radio airtime and some newspaper ads and you’d see an immediate increase in interest and lift in business? That was exciting, and the cause and effect relationship was easy to understand. Traditional methods aren’t as effective anymore because buyers and their methodology have changed. They do their own research prompted by their own desire to buy when they are so inclined. Buyers often seem impervious to broad-based advertising and companies are having a hard time understanding that. (There are of course exceptions, consult your marketing physician to see if it may have application for you.)

Buyers are better informed and looking for guidance, even a relationship, to warrant their purchase. You earn their trust and loyalty by understanding your market and providing value-ridden content, quality service and solutions relevant to their needs. The tables have turned and consumers are now in control of determining and satisfying their desires. So simply broadcasting about your product/service and how wonderful it is falls on deaf ears unless they are ready and willing to listen.

Strategic content generation weaves keywords into compelling stories and informative articles so that those looking for your solution will find it and desire it. Doing this well gets a little complicated and there are myriad tactics and techniques used along the process to nurture these potential customers and earn their purchase. Rather than being a quick fix, it is more of a sophisticated, long-term approach to building sustainable business.

Having just explained that inbound marketing is not a quick fix to drive new business, I must acknowledge that online paid advertising can certainly create results quite quickly. SEM (Search Engine Marketing) does form part of the online marketing mix; however, to be effective it needs to be part of a strategic campaign that requires planning, research, as well as consistent and concerted effort to deliver successfully. Just sayin’ that it will take more time and money to provide actual sales than many online marketing companies claim.

Not anybody who can use Facebook is an inbound marketer.

Spending time online and understanding social media is a plus when it comes to online marketing tactics. However, familiarity only goes so far. My neighbour is a surgeon, but I’m not going to let his 20 year old son who “watches surgery shows on the Discovery Channel all the time” operate on me. I’ll choose his dad who spent years at university learning his skill and has lots of experience, thanks very much. You may be less fussy about the health of your company than your own, but I think you’ll agree that trusting experts makes more sense.

Inbound marketing involves understanding your market and their psychological make-up, creating keyword lists and fine-tuning SEO and SEM, paid advertising campaigns, developing and modifying strategy, writing different types of content, gathering and interpreting data… it’s a long list of skills and expertise and no one person could possibly master. It takes a team to stay up-to-date on many of these tools and have the wherewithal to plan and implement a successful strategy. Point is, don’t trust just anybody, even if the price is low and they promise so much. (Like really, how many times will you make this mistake?)

So yes, I obviously believe in the power of inbound marketing and feel that it is a necessary marketing component to grow your business. My caveat is that it is not a magic solution that brings results without spending time and money. Like any investment you should be wise and implement your online marketing in a strategic manner that will truly benefit your company. Look beyond marketers’ claims and ensure you are working with a qualified resource that is truly concerned with your long-term growth.

Further Reading:
3 Ways to Spring Clean Your Blog
How to Find Your Ideal Client
7 Common Dangers of Social Media Illiteracy to Your Business

1 September 2015

Inbound Selling: Connecting With Your Prospect

Selling has changed. Selling has changed because buying has changed. Specifically, the buying process is now buyer “centric” where the buyer has the power. In inbound sales, connecting with your prospect takes on a whole new meaning.

Sellers no longer control all the information around available products and services. Thanks to the Internet, buyers now have the power to research on their own terms and within their own timeline. Buyers now typically have made 60% of their purchase decision before talking to a sales rep.

With these changes in prospect’s buying habits, clearly, you must transform the way you sell. Connecting with your prospect is all about offering yourself as a trusted advisor to help facilitate their eventual purchase.

A phone call will ultimately be where the necessary relationship is struck, but there is some work to do before picking up the phone. Simply calling leads without any context is a waste of everyone’s time.

In inbound marketing results, not all leads are a good fit and not all leads will be ready to buy. This means that leads must be “filtered” to a degree before they are considered to be qualified leads.

Research Your Leads

The first step is to research the organization behind your lead. This will give the broader context needed to determine if their company is a good fit as a prospect. Websites are the best source for company info such as:

company location
company size
annual revenue
what they sell and who they sell to
recent company news

Now it’s time to research personal information about your lead. Social media is a good source for their:

position within the organization
posts and interactions on social media
problems and concerns within their position, organization, and industry

Wrap up your research by examining their engagement with your website – what have they downloaded and which web pages have they viewed?

All of this research and analysis should give you some context for a phone call. If everything points positively to an organization and person that could do business with you, it’s time to reach out.

What to do on the first phone call

There are four guidelines to follow for your first phone call:

1) Build Rapport

This doesn’t mean wasting time with needless small talk – stay focused on establishing trust by exhibiting interest in educating and helping.

2) Know Your Audience

Tailor your conversation to whom you are actually talking to.

3) Speak the Prospect’s Language

Use industry terms and relatable company names in your conversation. Show that you have done your homework before the call.

4) Be helpful

Have something ready such as a tip, an offer, or some form of content to give.

What not to do on the first phone call

Here is where the old way of calling prospects has really changed. The first conversation with a prospect should NOT be viewed as an opportunity to:

interrupt with an agenda or script
pitch your products and services
close the prospect aggressively

Summary

Calling an online prospect is an exercise in restraint and a chance to connect with a buyer on a human level. People buy from people that they trust, not from robots, recited scripts or sales people pushing their own agenda. Try to educate and provide help to those who you call. Treat them as you would any good friend.

28 August 2015

Why You Should Use Marketing Automation to Gather and Use Analytics

Analytics. For many business owners and marketers, the word comes with mixed feelings: both excitement at the opportunities it could present, and intimidation, for the seemingly endless breadth of knowledge available on the subject.

First, what are analytics, in the context of marketing for your business?

Analytics: a collection of online data from which meaningful information and insights can be derived that can help you make better marketing and business decisions.

If you’re doing it properly, you’re not just collecting any data, but actionable data. Actionable data is useful, relevant, meaningful information that can be used to make intelligent, real-life marketing and business decisions. This is where marketing automation platforms such as SharpSpring come in.

Photo: Thinkstock / iStock / pingingz / 473265020

The Power of Marketing Automation

One of the best ways to not only acquire useful analytics, but to act on them, is to invest in marketing automation. Marketing automation allows you to do so much more than simply accumulate and store analytics and look at graphs, it allows you to take the data and turn it into something useful that will help move your company forward!

For example, instead of simply sending out an e-newsletter to an email list and wondering how they responded to it, marketing automation platforms such as SharpSpring allows you to not only collect actionable data, but they allow you to act on it!

With SharpSpring:

You you get a real-time report on the amount of contacts who open the email and click on specific links, and finally, have the software automatically sort them into lists based on their behaviour and interests (i.e. what they click on)! Now, you’ve learned something about each contact that you can use in a variety of ways. Further, if certain links in the email haven’t performed well, you’ll know, and can adjust your tactics accordingly to improve engagement next time!

Perhaps some of these same contacts have visited certain landing pages on your website, that show further interest in your company and/or specific services you offer – this criteria could be added to your list(s), too!

For example, you might create a list called “People who are Interested in Vintage Fashion” and have it automatically populate with contacts who have clicked on links to blogs about vintage fashion from your e-newsletter and have also visited product pages on your site devoted to vintage fashion.

From there, when it’s time for the next e-newsletter to be sent out, you’ll be able to send each new list a version of the e-newsletter that is tailored to their interests, perhaps with a link to a form with a new offer that they’ll appreciate (e.g. a free resource on vintage fashion). Of course, you’ll be able to automatically track all of this too, and to automatically save it with your contact’s profile. The more you learn about your contacts, the better equipped you’ll be to give them what they want and to continue to nurture them along the sales process.

This is just one example of the many ways in which marketing automation can enhance the value of your analytics and your ability to use analytics intelligently and profitably. Check out our other recent blog on what questions to ask when putting together an analytics report.

21 August 2015

Three Questions to Maximize Your Analytics

The importance of monitoring your online properties is not understated. By monitoring, you learn where your ad dollars are going and can see exactly how you’re improving.

However, figuring out what to report on can be just as difficult. Most tools at your disposal have more than you could ever need, and determining what those metrics actually measure can be complicated.

Ineffective reporting is almost as bad as no reporting. When you don’t know what’s going on, you make choices based on incomplete information. Here are three questions to ask about your metrics before writing a report:

Image Credit: violetkaipa / iStock / ThinkStock

1- What Does This Mean?

The single most basic question is often the most important. Even industry professionals ask the exact parameters for every tool they’re working with, on every single campaign.

Each tool measures slightly different things, and they often update their guidelines to reflect changes in the Internet. As a result, this should be the absolute first thing you ask about your monitoring tools.

You can’t have any effective report unless you know exactly what you’re reporting on, and what surprisingly vague word such as “visits” or “unique visitors” are actually measuring. For example, a visit could simply be clicking the page, or it could be when somebody has spent three minutes on the site. You could also have control over the definition, meaning it needs to be set before you get solid numbers.

Once you know what your metrics mean, you can begin to grasp your campaign performance.

2- Why Do I Need It?

Another important question, this one to keep your reports down to a manageable length. There are hundreds of metrics available for your website, and if you implement every single one, you’ll be drowning in data.

Sticking to a few key metrics means you can really drill down on how to improve them. What you monitor should tie in to the goals for your online strategy, with everything else simply being a distraction. If you’re only interested in increasing the number of prospects that visit your site, the number of shares your blog post got is less important than the percentage of new unique visitors.

Asking why you’re measuring something means you only get relevant data, allowing you to spend as little time reading reports as possible, and more time working on your company.

3- How Do I Use It?

In order to get the most out of your metrics, it’s important to know how to get the most out of it. Sometimes each page you’re monitoring needs a tracking cookie, while others automatically gather data. You could need to configure settings for what to include and exclude, to keep out non human users in your data.

Getting at least a basic understanding of what your tools can do is important for knowing what their limits are and what you can expect from reports. It also makes sure you’re maximizing your investments in analytics.

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While nobody can tell you exactly what to report, keeping these three questions in mind when you set up analytics helps you get the most out of it. SharpSpring offers quality, simple to use analytics tools that make it easy to spend more time working on your business.

18 August 2015

Internet Dating With Online Lead Generation

There is much hoopla in online marketing about the process of lead generation. Leads can be turned into sales, which is what we all seek, but what actually is lead generation? How literal is the “generation” part – can inbound marketing actually create leads? Can marketing tactics actually transform someone into a buyer? As in affairs of the heart, can you push someone to act before they are ready?

Thinkstock/iStock

The short and evasive answer is “we can nurture interest to a positive outcome”. Let’s expand on this and hopefully clarify what lead generation is and what it isn’t. And while we are at it, let’s talk a little bit about online (business) relationships.

Lead generation is…

Lead generation is a process of moving potential clients/customers along a line to a condition where they are ready to buy.

Most online visitors start out as strangers to you and your company so they need some good ol’ fashioned courtin’. As with starting any new online relationship, it’s important to find out what they’re all about before asking for their heart.

Lead generation tactics involve an exchange of information from both parties, buyer and seller, to get to know each other enough to trust one another and move the relationship forward. A classic example of such is the buyer exchanging his or her contact info for something valuable that the seller may offer, such as a whitepaper or a webinar.

The important point is that leads come from those that have a problem, need or want. They eventually need to make a buying decision and lead generation facilitates their buyer’s journey.

Lead generation is not…

This may be fairly obvious, but it should be said for clarity. Leads do not appear out of “thin air” especially in B2B selling. Impulse and emotion are minimal in most business decisions – business folks go that extra mile to be responsible shoppers.

It also must be said that people go to your website for many fact-finding reasons; some may be doing research from the other side of the planet and some may be your ideal customers, ready to buy soon. (Some may actually be trying to sell YOU something.) It’s the Internet and you may have to kiss a few frogs to find those you have an actual chance to do business with.

You will attract potential buyers — it’s a numbers game and you have a wide audience. The reality is that seductive web pages, magic emails, or pushy advertising will likely not turn fact-finding into “buy now”. In B2B, buyers are ready to buy when they feel ready to buy. No amount of push is going to influence their decision or timetable — especially nowadays.

In conclusion…

Lead generation is not a recipe for spitting out qualified leads at the touch of a mouse click. It’s damn hard work attracting the right buyers and then building relationships and trust. You set the stage, answer all the questions and provide the best info.

Inbound marketing methods, powered by marketing automation, gives you a process and the tools to generate leads. The leads come from an Internet full of people searching your product and services at different stages of fact-finding.

The trick is to have eventual buyers find your company just at the right time in their buyer’s journey. Early enough so they can appreciate that your product or service is the right choice but committed enough that they are actually going to buy something.

Really, lead generation is more like lead qualification. The tactics that result in lead generation are not “magically” creating leads from thin air. Nor are they, in reality, taking casual interest and converting in into burning need or desire. As they say, you can’t make someone love you.

Someone has a problem, need or a want. You just need to find each other. Call it lead generation, lead qualification, or just finding that perfect match over the Internet.

13 August 2015

Is there Too Much “Con” in Your Content?

Any professional writer understands that the art of communicating effectively lies in the structure of the information, how points are stated and the selection of appropriate words. A good marketer would add the importance of understanding your audience and positively positioning your solution (and brand). An experienced SEO consultant would delve even deeper to determine what specific keywords your audience would search for to find the solution they seek.

This is a simplistic view of the process, but it illustrates the necessity of using the right terms in order to attract the right audience to your website. And most companies understand this, in a rather simplistic manner. In fact, many SEO companies have a superficial understanding of the role of content on your website, and that can cost you dearly.

Many companies spend a lot of money each month in defining, monitoring, researching, testing, tweaking and tailoring their keywords to increase relevant traffic to their website. This can be a very strategic and effective means to attract prospects. (Actually, I should have used the term ”leads” as that ranks much higher than “prospects” as a keyword.) So we are getting very sophisticated in determining the magic terms to lure leads to our lair. And that is a good thing: leading our market to find the solutions they seek is helpful for all concerned.

The problem, as I see it, is that an intense focus on keywords often seems to hijack the underlying intent. Getting relevant leads to your website is not the end game; effectively communicating your message to your target market is your goal. And too many websites are written to attract the reader, not to engage and inform the reader once they are on your website.

This is the potential “con” in content, attracting visitors with the promise of a solution, and providing an empty experience devoid of any substance or valuable information. When the primary intent is on keywords, websites tend to be repetitive and focus on claims and positioning statements. Ironically, many superficial and sensational terms rate well in SEO. Not because people are searching for empty promises, they simply don’t know enough about the subject to know what they should be looking for. So “top results for PPC,” despite sounding rather spammy or too good to be true, is possibly a good term to attract desperate companies in need of SEO guidance. Let’s assume it is: once the SEO prospect is guided to your website, there should be some information and depth that goes beyond empty terms, promises or slogans. However, if most of your website text is geared to attracting visitors, your content may be superficial and lacking the substance required to convert new leads to customers.

Focusing on keywords to attract new leads is a smart tactic. However you’ll only reap rewards if it is part of an overall content strategy that considers your message and how effectively it is communicated. And that will help you stand apart from much of your competition. Don’t be alarmed by their regurgitation of pre-digested slop or the lack of any new information, insight or constructive value… simply Stay Calm and Content On.