Have you checked out http://www.brandtags.net/? It is a very interesting concept where you are shown a logo, and then are asked to type in a word or phrase that describes the brand. There is also a feature where you can see a "word cloud" showing you the most popular words used to describe each brand. Now, certainly this is a biased sample of the world because the site has become popular with bloggers and online social media folks, but I still found it interesting to see how different brands were perceived.
Here are some of words associated with different brands, along with some of my own comments.
- Facebook: College, Friends, Social - Facebook would love to shed the college image as they are targeting a broader audience now. This shows that perceptions of your brand tend to lag reality.
- Google: Search, Everything, Awesome, Evil - I think that sums it up nicely. I find it interesting that the words advertising and software were barely used, even though they make all of their money from ads and have lots of software used by millions of people, like Gmail and Google Docs.
- Microsoft: Windows, Software, Monopoly, Evil, Computer - Similar to Google, I am surprised to see that no one used the word "Internet", even though Internet Explorer is the most popular browser and Microsoft has a top 5 search engine and a huge web presence.
- Twitter: Annoying, Pointless, Useless, Stupid - Wow. I was surprised by this given that I would have expected the audience using Brand Tags to be Twitter users. But, this does seem to be how a lot of people view Twitter. (If you want to waste time with this annoying service, you can follow me - Mike Volpe on Twitter.)
- Second Life: Virtual, Lame, Losers, Nerd - I guess this is not the time to give out my Second Life username? :)
- Audi: Expensive, Olympics - I am sure they would love to get rid of the "Olympics" perception, but it shows you that the 5 rings of the Olympics have a lot of brand that carries over to Audi even though Audi has four rings in a different arrangement.
- Best Buy: Cheap, Electronics - They would probably want to be known for good service or advice, rather than cheap, because it is hard to compete on price in the electronics business. But at least the biggest words were not negative.
- Starbucks: Expensive, Overpriced, Burnt, Coffee - I am not a Starbucks fan either. But I still go there. Is it possible people go there, but not for the coffee? I use Starbucks as a poor man's conference room, to meet entrepreneurs and other people all the time.
What 3-4 words would you want people to use to describe your brand? What do you think they would actually say? What are you doing to make it more likely that they will describe the brand you want to be? Or, what are you doing to make sure you actually are the brand that people describe?
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Closed Loop Marketing can be a powerful tool to help sales and marketing get along. But it starts as a process. First, marketing captures leads, and then should probably categorize and grade leads before sharing them with sales. Likewise for the final part of the process, sales should provide feedback to marketing about how the lead follow-up turned out.
In a perfect world, both Sales and Marketing are getting the information they needs to refine their activities and drive profits for the company. To get the gist of Closed Loop Marketing in a Web 2.0 world, let's imagine a number of prerequisites to a well-functioning process are already in place.
For starters, assume your business has perfected its inbound marketing. When your best prospects are looking online for products or services that you sell, they are finding your company in search engines, blogs and social media, and they are entering into your marketing funnel. Moreover, you've perfected your calls to action, offers and landing pages so that you convert a high percentage of these prospects into leads.
Marketing Data to Enable Closed Loop Marketing
Let's think about what pieces of marketing data you should want to track:
- Which campaign, program, keywords, and website brought the lead to your website
- What offers or landing pages the lead completed
- Some demographic information about the lead (size of company, title, etc.)
- The number of visits the lead made to your website and all the pages viewed, before and after becoming a lead
- Updates anytime the lead has returned to your website and viewed more pages or filled out another form
Sales Data to Enable Closed Loop Marketing
Now, let's think about what pieces of sales data you should want to track:
Where along the sales cycle the lead is currently
How far along in the sales process the lead ended up - including if it resulted in a closed deal and a new customer
Time elapsed between different stages of the sales process
The value of any closed deals - total revenue
Conclusion - Closed Loop Marketing
All of this information should seamlessly flow between your Marketing system and your CRM/Salesforce system, so that everyone has a complete view of what is going on in the Sales and Marketing Funnel.
With the right reports, process and closed loop marketing, both sales and marketing can work together to figure out what processes are working best, and how the company as a whole can get more customers at a faster pace and a cheaper cost.
Is your company using closed loop marketing? What have you found to be the key success factors?
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I got asked a question recently from a marketing executive about HubSpot's press releases and why our format was "non-traditional". For example, this press release about closed loop marketing is a list of facts, quotes and links, not the typical narrative that is written as if it could be cut and paste into a publication.
Let's back up and talk about the goals for doing press releases for the vast majority of small and medium sized businesses. For most companies in the world, very few people read your press releases. If you are Microsoft, Google or another huge company, then it is different, because everyone reads your press releases very carefully. But, for the other 99% of companies out there, just sending out a news release is not going to get you media coverage.
The two biggest reasons to do press releases for most companies:
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Brand and Positioning - Most growing companies like to use news releases as a way of showing the market you are a real, growing company because there are stories on third party websites about your company. Announcing news on a regular basis, usually at least once a month, is a great way to show you are growing as a company.
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SEO (search engine optimization) - Publishing more content about your company on the web and building more links back to your website help increase the chances that people searching for products and services like yours will find your company.
The old days when people would cut and paste your release as a story are over. Today, I think people want the facts quickly (in bullet points) along with some links to related information and maybe some files to download to use in the blog article they are writing.
At HubSpot, generally we have been using our own version of the Social Media News Release Template. The idea behind the "SMNR" is to do a few things to make the format of a press release more relevant to the way news releases are used today.
Benefits of a Social Media News Release Format:
- Embrace Multimedia - The web is the major distribution point for news releases now, and multimedia is a great tool for the web. Unlike the typical press release, this format is a bit easier to add different pieces of multimedia. For instance, Guy Kawasaki downloaded the logo from our Website Grader press release for his blog post about Website Grader. NOTE: We currently don't add a lot of multimedia in the press releases we send on the wire - it is expensive and I do not like how the services post the files. I recommend you post the multimedia on your own website (free!) and then link to it from the press release you send on the wire.
- Enable a Dialog - The Internet has become a medium based on interaction and conversation, so the SMNR and using a blog engine to post news releases on your own website allow you to better stimulate discussion and follow the conversations that result. If your news release starts getting a lot of coverage and conversations started, the features like the Delicious page can be useful, since you can update those in real time. NOTE: We have not used these features much in the releases we send on the wire, because we have this blog that gets a lot more traffic, few people actually read our news releases on the wire services, and we would prefer if the conversations happened here.
- Enable Sharing and Re-Mixing - All of the elements of the SMNR are easily downloaded and copied, so people on the Internet can use all the pieces to create other content. For instance, a blogger can easily write an article using an image, plus a quote from an executive, without talking to anyone at the company. The old format made it sort of hard to boil the story down to its key elements, in my opinion.
I am not sold on every element of the Social Media News Release, especially if you plan on sending a release with all of these factors over a news wire service. It is expensive and I think it encourages conversations to happen on the wire service website, rather than your own website. But, I do think that there are some benefits to the format, and posting news releases in that format to your website can be a great idea.
What do you think about press release formats? Have you considered switching to the Social Media News Release ("SMNR") format? Leave a comment so we can discuss.
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Here are some great articles from links.hubspot from the past week:
How to Handle Negative Comments
"But what happens when you get a negative comment? One that throws you
off, crosses the line or just generally seems like the person made an
appearance to stir the pot? Let’s discuss."
8 Effective Link Building Strategies
"By valuable content, I don't mean simply writing about things that
people find interesting or useful- your content must also be considered
more valuable than what most other blogs in your niche are providing."
Targeting Conversions and Traffic with Long Tail Writing
"In practical terms, targeting the long tail is about adding descriptive
words to your content. If you're targeting widgets, you already know
you want to work the word widgets into your content. But have you
thought about making sure you are adding words to describe things like
size, color and price or actions like buy, review and sample? Good SEO
writing is no longer just about creatively and subtly working keywords
into your content. Now it's about targeting the long tail by adding
less-searched for, yet still important qualifiers to your content."
Also, here are some useful reads from the HubSpot blog archives:
Free Advertising on Google
GoDaddy's 16-Step Checkout: Brainless Marketing At Its Finest?
Have a happy Friday!
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So, you're doing a website redesign?
"Why?" is the question I always ask. Unfortunately, I usually get the wrong answer.
However, if you're doing a website redesign in order to increase traffic and generate more leads and sales from your internet marketing activities, than you should continue reading.
The other day I argued that most web design firms don't design and develop websites with business goals in mind. The biggest area where these firms *generally* lack know-how is how to do a website redesign with SEO in mind. If done wrong, here's what happens:
- You could lose your rank for keywords you are already ranking for. Whether you've put much effort into SEO already or not, most websites generate a good portion of their traffic from their organic search listings. Don't screw it up.
- You could be rewriting content for no strategic reason. If you have an existing website, chances are that you're *almost* ranking for at least a handful of relevant keywords. When you're rewriting content, you should find out what those keywords are and then use them to guide your content creation.
- You could lose the value of your inbound links. Existing links from other sites usually point to different pages on your site. They drive direct traffic and support your SEO. Make sure you map and redirect old pages to new ones.
- You could do a lot of things that need to be redone again. SEO affects how you organize the pages on your site, your navigation, the words you use to name your pages and many more things that are more expensive and time consuming to change after you build your site.
So, if you're a marketing manager or a business owner relaunching your website, it's important for you to understand this process. Since this process requires thorough keyword research and since keyword research requires knowledge of the business, this should be a very collaborative process. The company you hire should have these skills and collaborate with you, or you should find someone that will. As I mentioned in my last post, there are parts of your internet marketing strategy where you need to be intimately involved. This is one of them.
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