Are you on the right Digital Highway

So we are heading into September, month nine of the year. How is your Digital Marketing Strategy working? Are you achieving the desired result you were hoping for? Absent a solid  strategy, that blends and integrates your overall marketing plan for your business, measurement doesn’t mean much. But what if you do have a plan, but have drifted off the mark, now what?

Digital Channels perform Differently by Business Vertical

The good folks over at Hub Spot recently released a report titled On Line Marketing Opportunity Report. There are some great nuggets of information that may shed some light on ways to increase your On Line Marketing yield, and fast track the Digital Highway.

You have finite resources and nearly infinite possible online marketing channels. Where should your company put its marketing dollars and effort to work? Do you wonder if it is worth the effort to start a Twitter account or a Facebook page? Are you having trouble going beyond basic search engine optimization (SEO)? It can be difficult to know if it is worth the time and money to expand the online marketing for your business and even tougher to figure out where the conversation is happening.

Where are Folks Fishing

We have bantered about Fish Where the Fish Are, but where is that really. There may be a better leverage point for your Social Media Program than your current tack. As an example, according to the Hub Spot report, if you are in the real estate business, over 50% of your program shroud be aimed at Search Engines, 30% aimed at a Blog and 20% aimed at Social Media. So, if your resource allocation is not consistent with these numbers, you may want to make a shift.

When the topic of Digital Marketing comes up, people gravitate toward facebook and twitter, and while those platforms serve well to some business verticals, they may not be the best place for your marketing resources.

Blogs and Search Engines

The good news for Real Estate folks are that Blogs and Search Engines play well together. The company blog should be the cornerstone of your digital marketing plan, and with well crafted copy, can serve as a catalyst for enhanced SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

With that, perhaps a better question is, How is your Business Blogging going? That’s what we do here at Digital Sherpa, and we can help you and your business get on the Digital Highway to greater leads, increased web traffic and an overall enhanced Digital Footprint.

If you would like to discuss how Digital Sherpa can help your business get started on a digital marketing plan, heres how you can contact us, We look forward to chatting,

You can find Eric on twitter or ebrown@nci.com

You can find Adam on twitter or ajapko@nci.com

Hyper Local Focus to build your following and get people talking

Build a Local and Relevant Following

One of the many questions that surface from our clients as they begin to think about launching a Social Media Strategy for their business is targeted traffic and followers. A local design studio in Kansas City isn’t interested in twitter followers and blog readers from Birmingham, Alabama. And while building a strong twitter following and blog readership isn’t a perfect science, there are many tools, coupled with a little guerrilla marketing that can greatly enhance the overall quality of your digital footprint.

Business is About the Numbers

Business success is and has always been about the numbers, or said differently, results. Growing the size of your digital footprint doesn’t happen without a plan to do so. Can you get some general organic growth, yes, but likely only a trickle without a consistent aggregation method. There are also specific phases of an integrated digital marketing life cycle. We believe that the cornerstone your social media marketing plan is your business blog. As we begin to populate your business blog with quality, relevant posts we also reach out to local folks in the digital space that may have interest in becoming contributors

Where Are They Hiding

There are an array of tools in your digital toolbox to help sharpen your hunting skills. One such tool we use is the search function in tweetdeck to ferret out local, relevant followers and blog contributors. For example, we have an apartment client in downtown Chicago, Left Bank at K Station Apartments that we have created a custom sherpa digital marketing program for. We have launched a life style blog, Left Bank Life to help them drive traffic and rental leads to their web site. We set up search categories for “West Loop”, “Fulton River District” and several other local search strings. When you Fish Where the Fish Are, you catch fish, and we have a series of Guest Bloggers lined up.

Locals Expand Your Digital Footprint

The newspapers used local news and happenings effectively. Local people and stories get talked about. Not only do local folks help you expand your reach, they also bring into the mix their own following, which quickly begins to expand. While not everyone you come across will be suitable writers, many are and they love to tell and share their story. But with that, they also begin to tell your story, as your brand gets talked about. That is how buzz gets started, people talking about your brand, which is why social media works.

Let us help tell your story

With over a thousand digital sherpa clients in several different verticals, we are helping brands and businesses share their story, and expand their digital footprint. We can get people talking, by getting people talking.

If you would like to discuss how NCI can help your business get started on a social media marketing plan, heres how you can contact us, We look forward to chatting,

You can find Eric on twitter or ebrown@nci.com

You can find Adam on twitter or ajapko@nci.com

The Customer Experience Gap and How to Bridge It

Our  friend and customer service advocate, Becky Carroll penned an interesting post over on her blog, Customers Rock. The jest of the post is the significant disconnect with what companies think they are delivering relative to Customer Experience, and what their customers purport.

Understanding the principles of customer experience and actually delivering them do not necessarily go hand in hand. In 2008 Bain & Company found that while 80 percent of companies believe they deliver a superior experience to their customers, only 8 percent of those companies’ customers report having such an experience. Similarly, a CMO Council study found that fifty-six percent of technology vendors perceive themselves as being extremely customer-centric, compared with only 12% of their customers.

There is a clear disconnect between the experience companies think they deliver and what customers experience, perceive and – more importantly – desire. It’s not about what you think… it’s about what your customers think.

In order to determine whether you are disappointing, meeting or exceeding your customers’ expectations, you need to continuously listen. And it’s not as easy as it sounds. It goes far beyond monitoring the chatter on Twitter and other social media platforms or performing your annual customer satisfaction survey. It requires soliciting customer feedback on a regular, ongoing basis at multiple touch points, and closing the loop to address issues and understand root cause.

How to Bridge the Gap

I think part of the issue stems from confusing Customer Service with Customer Experience. It is much easier to Enhance the Customers Experience than to deliver stealer Customer Service. We confuse great customer service as being Ritz Carlton or Nordstrom, it isn’t, as customer service varies based on the product type, brand and product price point.

Folks can argue that if they want, but you simply do not expect the same level of customer service at McDonalds, a fast food chain as you do at Mortons, a high-end steakhouse. The problem with focusing on increased Customer Service is, irrespective of your product price point, folks always expect a little more “service” than your product offering is designed to deliver. Trying to out service your competitors is a race to eroding profits. I am not suggesting that a company only deliver minimal customer service, but am pointing out there are differences.

However, companies that shift their thinking toward Enhancing the Customers Experience should have a much easier time, and really speaks to shifts in your behavior to align with your brand. This was an epiphany moment for us at Urbane, as once we started behaving, consistent with our Brand, things became much easier and more clear, all of which centered around Enhancing the Residents Experience at each of the touch points throughout the resident life cycle.

What are your thoughts about this? Is there a difference between Customer Service and customer Experience?

Social Influencers Help You Sell More Stuff

Social Influence Marketing, as described in Social Media Marketing for Dummies, is a technique that employs Social Media (content created by everyday people using highly accessible and scalable technologies such as blogs, message boards, podcasts, microblogs, bookmarks, social networks, communities, wiki’s and vlogs) and Social Influencers, (everyday people who have an outsized influence on their peers by virtue of how much content they share on line) to achieve an organization’s marketing and business needs.

Social Media, which was likely one of the most hyped buzzwords in 2008, refers to content created and consumed by regular people for each other.

Social Media and its making now allows everyone in the world to be a content publisher and arbitrator.

Social Influencers are the everyday people who influence the consumer as he/she makes a purchasing decision. Simply, the people who influence a brand affinity and purchasing decisions are Social Influencers. Engagement is a Lost Art, are you targeting Social Influencers as part of your overall marketing objectives?

Social influence is the change in behavior that one person causes in another, intentionally or unintentionally, as a result of the way the changed person perceives themselves in relationship to the influencer, other people and society in general.

Christine Thompson describes Social Influencers in her post titled Social Influence Marketing;

Key influencers – people who have almost celebrity status in the social media world – in some cases can exercise considerable influence on purchase decisions throughout the consumer’s buying process. Rarely does the consumer actually know these key influencers in real life.

Social influencers are people whom the consumer follows on Twitter or FaceBook, or whose blogs and product reviews appeal to the consumer. Their influence is greatest during the earlier phase of the buying cycle: awareness and consideration, but wanes during the action phase. Although the social influencers are likely to be within the consumer’s social graph, they may not actually know each other.

The greatest impact occurs through known peer influencers: colleagues, friends and family. How much impact these “known peers” exercise varies by product category and how much the consumer respects the person’s insight and expertise in that category. For example, a husband can influence the brand and model decisions when it comes to auto purchases or leases; however, he has no impact on purchase decisions for yoga classes, mats and accessories, or other yoga-related items. This is because I don’t believe he has an informed opinion in this arena.

1. Are you connecting with Social Influencers to drive your marketing needs and business needs?
2. Does your Digital Footprint have the required reach and inclusion of Social Influencers relevant to your brand?

Digital Marketing Starts with SEO

I attended my first Social Media Seminar a few years ago in Columbus OH. The conference was put on by Jennifer Laycock, editor of Search Engine Guide. After having attended all sorts of apartment related seminars and events, that basically said the same thing year in and year out surrounding Apartment Marketing, it was real treat to further dig into Social Media Marketing with folks who were doing it.

I was pretty flattered when Jennifer reached out a few weeks later and asked me to write for her at Search Engine Guide, from a small business perspective, and relating to the various things we were doing in our own boutique apartment management business at Urbane Apartments. Although my writing there has been off and on over the last couple of years , mostly because of time constraints of operating a small business, I have learned a lot from both Jennifer and several other contributors. You can peruse those articles here if you like. Search Engine Guide is in the top ten highest ranking blogs in it’s class, with a significant following. I have also joined Jennifer on a series of small business panels at places such as SES Chicago.

One of the top contributors and one worth following his work is Stony deGeyter, President of Pole Position Marketing, a leading search engine optimization and marketing firm helping businesses grow since 1998. Stoney is a frequent speaker at website marketing conferences and has published hundreds of helpful SEO, SEM and small business articles.

Stoney pioneered the concept of Destination Search Engine Marketing which is the driving philosophy of how Pole Position Marketing helps clients expand their online presence and grow their businesses. Stoney is Associate Editor at Search Engine Guide and has written several SEO and SEM e-books including E-Marketing Performance; The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist, Period!; Keyword Research and Selection, Destination Search Engine Marketing, and more.

Putting it all together

SEO isn’t especially difficult to do, but it does take time and enough knowledge to help you get started down the path to learn as you go. Many small businesses will try to save money by doing SEO on their own and they can be successful to a point, so long as they have the time needed to not only gain the knowledge but to implement it as well.

Here is Stoney’s series on the  basics of SEO. Read up on these and you will be well on your way!

Missed a part of this series?
Part 1: Everything You Need To Know About SEO
Part 2: Everything You Need To Know About Title Tags
Part 3: Everything You Need To Know About Meta Description and Keyword Tags
Part 4: Everything You Need To Know About Heading Tags and Alt Attributes
Part 5: Everything You Need To Know About Domain Names
Part 6: Everything You Need To Know About Search Engine Friendly URLs & Broken Links
Part 7: Everything You Need To Know About Site Architecture and Internal Linking
Part 8: Everything You Need To Know About Keywords
Part 9: Everything You Need To Know About Keyword Core Terms
Part 10: Everything You Need To Know About Keyword Qualifiers
Part 11: Everything You Need To Know About SEO Copywriting
Part 12: Everything You Need To Know About Page Content
Part 13: Everything You Need To Know About Links
Part 14: Everything You Need To Know About Link Anatomy
Part 15: Everything You Need To Know About Linking

B2B Social Media; Senior Marketing Executives Want Control

A Guest Post from HiveFire Marketing; Taariq Lewis

B2B Social Media; Senior Marketing Executives Want Control

While participating at the Online Marketing Conference, I heard a few comments from a few very hard-working working eMarketing managers.  These managers commented on their company’s leadership view of the growing importance of Social Media for their businesses.   In their view, most senior executives still don’t understand the need for all this focus on Social Media.  Sure, some bosses are willing to devote a little time and budget, but senior marketing executives see lots of fads in their lengthy careers.

Thus, the brave eMarketing Managers, whom they employ, are usually pioneers, risking their careers, to launch and integrate Social Media plans into their corporate marketing efforts.  Not only do they have the smallest budgets, but they usually have the highest ROI proof requirements.  I am guilty of chuckling at the true story of one eMarketing Manager sneaking their company’s credit card to make a Social Media tool purchase.  They were only able to keep their job after showing the ROI on the tool!

It’s my view that senior marketing executives in large companies clearly understand and see progress in Social Media.  This is old news.  Many of the leading social media marketing technology companies have covered it here and elsewhere.  However, the problem, from my perspective, is one of control.  Who controls Social Media in the organization?  Does it fall under Corporate Marketing or Marketing Communications?  If Social Media ROI doesn’t deliver, as promised, who’s responsible, the eMarketing Manager or her boss?  Finally, if an eMarketing or Social Media Manager positively impacts revenue growth, how does the firm properly reward that individual and encourage the rest of the organization to support that success?

Social Media Marketing is not easy.  It’s not non-technical and it requires increasing understanding of analytics, software, and rapidly evolving Internet technology.  Although there’s sufficient education for eMarketers through organizations such as Online Marketing Institute, where’s the educational opportunity for Senior Marketing executives?  How will they learn about Social Media so that they can feel empowered to move their marketing organization, with confidence, in this rapidly emerging and highly effective direction?
In the absence of more education, tools must suffice and these tools need to get easier and give Senior Marketing executives more control and easier participation in Social Media marketing activities.  Information automation tools and social media dashboards are a start.  However, there’s more that can be done and I’d like to see more conversations around other possible solutions.  Unless our senior executives are encouraged to participate in B2B social media, we’ll miss out on their insights and support for this new customer engagement channel.

Your Blog Is Not a Brochure; Create Inbound Links for Increased Business Leads

If you operate a business, you have a much higher interest in Results than those who do not. Absent Results, the business doesn’t make money and will soon fail. As a business owner, you get to make as many mistakes as you have available capital to fund those miscues. There are a thousand and one clamoring social media marketers with lots of theory, and some of those ideas are good, some not so much. Here at Digital Sherpa, we like to test things, and see what works and what doesn’t. We think that gives our clients an edge when expanding their Digital Footprint. We also like to focus on driving business leads, which is the reason to advertise.

One thing we have learned from our own businesses we manage is that when our Digital Footprint expands, our web traffic increases. There is a direct correlation to increased web traffic verses actual, physical traffic, meaning customers in the door. At the end of the day, that IS the result we are all looking for, more traffic in the door, which increases our opportunity to sell more stuff to more people.

Your Business Blog Is Not a Company Brochure

When first starting a blog it is easy to get hung up on all of the details. Notwithstanding, details are important, but we often see clients getting stuck on certain details of the blog that have little to no overall value to what the goal of your business blog should be, which is to sell more stuff. Your business blog does provide an excellent opportunity for Inbound Marketing, which is really no more than providing content that your prospective customer, and customer base find interesting and useful. While it can be about your product, it typically is not.

The good folks over at Hub Spot continue to provide us with excellent case studies on the effects and results to your business when you apply inbound marketing.

Are you sitting on data that might be interesting to others?

Inbound marketing rests on the assumption that people seek out and want to consume remarkable content.  PR, historically, has been about getting a message, remarkable or not, in front of an audience.

Inbound marketing and its opposite outbound marketing have various meanings depending on the context.

Inbound marketing is a style of marketing that focuses on getting found by customers. This sense is related to relationship marketing and Seth Godin’s idea of permission marketing. David Meerman Scott recommends that marketers “earn their way in” (via publishing helpful information on a blog etc.) in contrast to outbound marketing where they used to have to “buy, beg, or bug their way in” (via paid advertisements, issuing press releases in the hope they get picked up by the trade press, or paying commissioned sales people, respectively).

Hub Spot said it well;

If you think your company doesn’t lend itself to creating interesting content, you may be mistaken.  Companies across various industries are blogging, reporting and creating remarkable content that matters to their target market.  Why?  Because it drives traffic and generates qualified leads.

What are some stories that your customers may find helpful or useful, we would love to hear about what is working, and what hasn’t worked so well.

How Are We Measured; Create Return Customers in Your Small Business

Good Morning, Hope everyone had a pleasant Valentine Weekend. We spent the weekend Up North (Northern Michigan) at a B & B in Traverse City. I love the drive up, about four hours, as it provides a lot of time to think about things.

I have been pondering lately the debate I am having in my head about Service verses Product. While I would never debate that customer service is ever so important, but does customer service secure the sale. Does great customer service outweigh deliverables?

One of the bloggers I follow, Jim Connolly who has worked in marketing for 23 years and had his own successful marketing business since the mid 1990’s, is best known worldwide for his ability to help businesses make massively more sales and boost their profits.

Jim’s recent post Superb Service, Average Marketing, strikes a similar cord, although he is comparing service to marketing.

I have lost count of how many outstanding businesses I have seen go broke, simply because they failed to market their services correctly.  They enjoy superb customer retention, because their services are so good that people just don’t want to leave.

However, because they win too few new customers, their revenues and profits stagnate and if they do lose a big account or have a large, unscheduled financial commitment pop up, they can suddenly be running at a loss.  If that loss goes on too long, they are in deep trouble.  If only they adopted better marketing, they could achieve great things.

How Are We Measured

It has always struck me as to why certain brands garnish significantly more money for their product or service than their counterpart. For instance, we were walking through downtown Traverse City this weekend and wandered in a Sun Glass Hut. I wanted a new pair of Oakley sunglasses They were priced at $130, which to me is a lot of dough for sunglasses. Although I am not a bling sort of guy, I made the purchase. However, there were sunglasses that were thousands of dollars, and folks were buying those too,

So how are we measured, what does create a return customer, a renewing resident, a long term client?

We would love to here your thoughts on the topic, and what moves you to renew with your vendor or service provider?

Who Took Away S & H Green Stamps? Is FourSqaure Digitally Recreating the Centennial Tradition?

In returning home from a recent trip from NYC this week, the driver taking me home from the airport was quite a character. His story was his trek with S & H Green Stamps, back in the day. I remember as a kid my folks glove box of our family car being stuffed with them, and my mom leafing through the catalogs on what the next purchase may be when the stamp books were full.

‘S&H Green Stamps’ (also called Green Shield Stamps) were a form of trading stamps popular in the United States from the 1930s until the late 1980s. They were distributed as part of a rewards program operated by the Sperry and Hutchinson company (S&H), founded during 1896 by Thomas Sperry and Shelly Hutchinson. During the 1960s, the rewards catalog printed by the company was the largest publication in the United States and the company issued three times as many stamps as the U.S. Postal Service. Customers would receive stamps at the checkout counter of supermarkets, department stores, and gasoline stations among other retailers, which could be redeemed for products in the catalog.

Where Do Things Go

So, for almost one hundred years a company and a certain culture, stamp collecting was popular, peaking in the 1960’s and dying out in the 1980’s, a pretty good and long run. So as we embrace this digital age, and Social Media is all the rage, what ideas of the past can we apply differently. Is Four Square today’s stamp collecting?

Our five year old granddaughter can very effectively navigate the web, what does that mean? We laugh about it, but what should marketers be focusing on. The floor is shifting, what are we doing, or not doing to sell to the buyers of tomorrow?

What is the value of Expanding Your Digital Foot Print?

What is the risk in ignoring the digital buzz?

What are your thoughts, or challenges or successes at making sense of the change.

Digital Marketing; Want More Business-Start Blogging

So, How much data do you need to start blogging?

I am a big fan of what the folks over at Hub Spot are doing, and they continue to provide actual results as to what is working for their clients. According to a study of 2,300 HubSpot customers revealed that businesses that blog witness their monthly leads rise by 126% more than those who don’t.

According to the folks at Hub Spot,

We compared leads last month with leads two months ago for 6 consecutive months, and the result shows that blogging businesses, whether or not they use the HubSpot platform, experience a 165% lead growth, a much larger increase than that of non-blogging businesses, which experience a 73% lead growth.

So, How long are going to wait to start a blog for your business? No time for that, let us here at Digital Sherpa help, we do blogging you, in a big way, and we can help you move the Google Needle! This stuff works, and IS how we grew our own small business, It will work for you too.