BroadVision Marketing Blog

Today we are going to hear from Guest Blogger Jessica Scanlon talking about Yelp and how you handle a bad review. Yelp represents an opportunity to use inbound marketing skills to show how you as a business person deals with negative comments without deleting them or letting them stand. The purpose of inbound marketing is to become a part of the lives of your customers. Yelp gives you that chance. Take it away, Jessica.--Jaco

Keyword research. Words that cause the bravest business person to shudder. You, the client, want to know how your inbound marketing agency is going to get you on the first page of Google and you read somewhere that keyword research is the key. And you are right. But finding the right keywords can be difficult. The first hurtle both you and your agency need to work on is defining your target market. While that can be easy if you only sell pizza, it gets much more difficult if you are selling a complex menu to various groups of diners at different times of day. Where to begin?

If you have ever sat in front of a blank computer screen with a blog deadline hanging over your head like Poe’s raven while you think to yourself “never more” will I have a coherent thought let along some good blog post ideas, guess what—You are not alone. Some people can just write from their encyclopedic knowledge base concerning their field. They know their target market, the market’s pain points and how to help. But the rest of us need to do some serious work first and there is no shame in that.

(NOTE--This article is not a sales article masquerading as an informational one.) Your business is brand new and you want to find out about how to track your leads or what that even means. Don’t try to find an answer on the internet. Yes, I hope you found this article on the internet, but mostly all you will find when you search for “lead tracking” will be businesses selling software. And, of course, theirs is the best since sliced bread. However, how can you find out which software you need if you can’t figure out what lead tracking entails? Maybe you won’t need all the bells and whistles. Maybe you need a deluxe version.

Any business person not using social media to create awareness in his company’s products or services is not taking advantage of the best, low cost advertising tools on the market today. I hope you are not one of those lost souls. Demand generation strategy focuses on target marketing programs that result in customers. Social media marketing is one of the advanced generation programs that form lead generation which leads to those customers. So do you create the same approach for each social media? That won’t work. Before you can decide how you want to use demand generation strategies on social media you need to know who you are targeting.

Here’s an easy question for you. Which do most people do more—read or watch television. That was simple to answer. So why would you only invest your time writing blogs? Why not also make a 2 to 4 minute video about that same subject and have more clicks, referrals and clients? Oh, you say it’s too hard or too expensive? Think of this. You have been watching television your whole life. You probably know more about how to make a video than you think you do. As for too expensive, you can spend as little or as much as your budget allows. The result will be the same--you will have videos on the internet. While you probably won’t have a video go viral, your customers will learn about you and think of you as someone who can help them solve their problem.

I really enjoy using Twitter as a platform for social media inbound marketing; but I know that many business owners, especially baby boomers, don't. So I began looking for a way to help you write the perfect tweet. I found a perfect one that was similar to those ghastly sentence diagrams we had in school. The writer is Garry Moran, the head of social media in North American for SAP, a German software multinational that is one of the biggest companies in the world. I was impressed. Next I found an article that was totally opposed to the blueprint idea. My person opinion is that using a blueprint like Moran suggests is a good place to start if you are a Twitter novice, but afterwards you want to being to vary what you tweet and see what works for you using analytics.

Email was something I thought would not stand the test of time as social media like Facebook, Twitter and blogs bloomed. Little did I know that I would use my smart phone as much to keep up with my email and other social media as much as I use it as a phone. Email comes in several varieties: personal which is much like rapid firing snail mail and marketing email which has taken the place of home delivered ads. Email marketing is still the only medium to move prospects through what John Jantsch, in his book “Duct Tape Marketing,” called “the know, like, and trust funnel.” As I was preparing for this article, reading about email title “Do’s and Don’ts”, I looked at my email and was struck by the number of “Don’ts” in my Inbox. So I decided to talk about a few email internet marketing tips.

Do you know everything there is to know about YouTube? How many videos have you put out on your very own YouTube channel? Are they SEO optimized, using great tags, SEO in your title, professional grade? Did you go the expensive route or the do-it-yourself route? How has this worked out for you? Yes, well when it comes to the strengths of YouTube, I was struck by three major contradictions, or myths, if you will. I found these myths in my research and read a different angle in a SEOmoz article by Phil Nottingham, The Marketing Value of YouTube.

Myth 1:

YouTube belongs to Google, so they’re going to favor your site and the front page of Google will always look for a video regarding any subject of any keywords search for.

Myth 1 variation: YouTube can be a shortcut for those who want to get high rankings for free. Google owns YouTube and often automatically gives relevant YouTube videos first page ranking. If you have added your website URL in the video description section, chances are that YouTube can boost your site’s rankings dramatically and help you generate a lot of site traffic.

As you can see this myth and variation have to do with the fact that Google purchased YouTube. People have assumed that since that is true, Google will give a higher rank to a YouTube video. Therefore, if you have a YouTube video in your blog article, the Google will rank the article higher than if you did not have the video. Likewise if you have your URL link in your video, that fact will help your video pull more site traffic.

We started the topic of inbound marketing Facebook Fan Page strategies on Monday, April 15, 2013. If this is the first of the two articles you find, it might be a good idea to read that one first. We have been looking at information on Facebook Fan Page engagement and what is going on with it or not going on, I should say. Many people started out using Facebook Fan Pages expecting vast numbers of fans and much engagement. That didn't happened for them and it doesn’t usually happen unless you create a fan page with cute animals on it. I read three blogs from Cyber PR written by Jon Ostrow and Ariel Hyatt with enough statistics to you createa realistic way to look at your fan pages. One important statistic from the previous post is: