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Top Rank Blog

• Moving from Fragmented to Segmented Online Marketing 1 July, 2010, 7:24 am
  Companies today have a virtual smörgåsbord of options when it comes to marketing their products and services online. Lack of expertise, numerous tactical options, pressure for sales in a down economy and the tendency to chase shiny objects cause many online marketing efforts to be fragmented. I really doubt that a significant waste of effort and disconnect with customers is part of any company’s online marketing strategy. But it’s happening. A lot. Marketers must prioritize what will work best and in the mix of online marketing tactics. According to eMarketer, SEO and PPC have been rated the most effective for conversions and ROI and while some companies are using software like PPC management tools to make things easier, there’s a lot more to consider for better segmentation. With any type of marketing, relevance is essential for achieving a profitable program.  When it comes to search marketing, understanding customers, the keyword searches they use and the offers they’re most likely to respond to are essential. In order to move your online marketing from fragmented to prioritized and more relevant through search, here are 3 key concepts search marketers should master. 1. Understand searcher personas It’s fundamental marketing to anticipate and understand customer needs. To really make a difference with more targeted online marketing, search marketers need to become more sophisticated in their understanding of customer profiles and developing personas to represent who they’re trying to attract via search. Delivering generic content to a searcher looking for a specific product is a common mistake that creates a disconnect for search engines and customers. “Searcher personas and search acquisition workflows are integral to the way I approach search strategy. Before you can start attracting visitors to your web site, you need to know who you are attracting and why.” Vanessa Fox Knowing what kind of content and types of digital assets your customers will respond to can improve effectiveness at driving “organic” search  traffic.  The same goes for designing Pay Per Click ads and landing pages that are relevant to the needs of customers you really want to reach. 2. Develop an ideal keyword mix Many companies start with a list of keywords they think are best for SEO and implement them with on-page optimization and link building.  According to MarketingSherpa’s 2011 Search Marketing Benchmark Report (SEO Edition), 67% of small businesses place more value on on-page optimization over keyword research. Don’t make the mistake of thinking your ideas about keywords are more important than those of your customers. Developing a keyword glossary is essential and starts by collecting a raw list of concepts, topics and phrases from sources like website content, interviews with front line employees and actual customers, competitor web sites and good old fashioned brainstorming.  That raw list is brought into a keyword research tool that will output provide a list of actual search phrases plus variations sorted by popularity. Understanding keywords from the perspective of the searcher and where they are in the buying process allows the search marketer to properly optimize content, landing pages and ads accordingly. Same goes for making the ads and landing pages more relevant because it leads to better performance with click through rates and conversions. From an organic perspective, specifically optimized pages that have attracted relevant links from other related web sites will result in higher rankings for keywords that are being targeted. Customers will self-segment themselves with the search terms they use. By developing an ideal keyword mix that is focused on customer needs and the solutions offered by your products and services, your search marketing efforts will better target customers in a relevant way and increase sales. 3. Optimize content for specifics Content can mean web pages, digital assets and any other documents that can be optimized for organic search.  Optimization also applies to landing pages used with pay per click advertising to improve quality score. If you read Online Marketing Blog with any frequency, you know my mantra: “If it can be searched, it can be optimized.” If you don’t have enough content to accommodate all the keywords you’re targeting, then you have an opportunity to create more content.  A common misconception is that updated content is important, when the reality is that adding new content that reflects the search needs of customers is what’s important. The addition of every new web page means another potential entry point to your web site via a link or search. Being focused helps search engines understand and rank pages so that customers get what they’re actually looking for. Delivering on the promise of a compelling search result is priceless for conversions. Wrap-up Fragmented marketing with search helps no one. Marketers would do well for themselves and the customers they’re tying to reach by paying attention to the development of searcher personas, developing quality keyword research and optimizing specific pages and digital assets for specific phrases according the searcher needs in the buying cycle. As a result, you’ll deliver a more relevant experience for both search engines and customers. Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to theTopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter. © Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Moving from Fragmented to Segmented Online Marketing | http://www.toprankblog.com
• 3 Essential Small Business Search Marketing Trends 30 June, 2010, 4:36 am
  “Qualified”, “showing intent to buy”, “high conversion rate” and many other phrases are used to describe search engine marketing.  As a $16 billion industry, Search Marketing including SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC ads (pay per click) represent a substantial opportunity for small businesses to connect with customers at the moment they are looking for products and services to buy. Even though Search Marketing presents an attractive opportunity to grow online sales, many businesses are too busy running their companies to stay on top of future trends. To that end, here are three search marketing trends worth paying attention to: 1.  Online & Offline Marketing Integration - Forrester Research estimates $917 billion worth of retail sales in 2009 were “Web-influenced” in contrast to $155 billion of consumer goods sold online in the same year.  Small businesses must pay attention to customer search online influencing offline purchases as well as the influence of the in-store experience on searching and purchasing online. 2.  Mobile Device and Local Search – Companies must recognize consumer trends towards mobile search with the proliferation of smart phones. The web experience has definitively extended beyond the personal computer to mobile devices such as iPhones, Blackberries and iPads.  Marketers must understand their customers’ use of mobile search and what the marketing opportunities are. Companies that serve customers in specific regions or with geographically specific needs must be present in local search results, map results and specific geo-location queries. Segmenting potential customers through geo targeting with paid search advertisements will help focus the right ads on the right customers. 3.  Social Media Advertising – Savvy small business marketers are increasingly realizing that the opportunity to reach customers extends beyond traditional paid search into the booming social media space. Having surpassed Google as the most visited website for the week ending March 13, 2010 and with over 400 million registered users, Facebook offers a significant audience that shouldn’t be ignored.  Social networks like Facebook can provide online marketers hyper-targeted advertising opportunities that can tap into new customer segments and serve as a complement to other paid search programs. Whether it’s incorporating online and offline influences with search marketing, diversifying PPC advertising networks, leveraging local and mobile search marketing or extending advertising programs to include social media, small business marketers that capitalize on these trends will gain a competitive advantage. Of course, if they hire an online marketing agency like TopRank Marketing, that advantage may come even faster. This post was excerpted from my article that was originally published on American Express OPEN Forum. Be sure to visit 5 Search Engine Marketing Trends That Impact Your Business for the other 2 trends. Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to theTopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter. © Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 3 Essential Small Business Search Marketing Trends | http://www.toprankblog.com
• 10 Reasons Why Your Analytics Are Failing & 13 Tools To Help 29 June, 2010, 4:25 am
  Web Analytics are a key indicator to the health and performance of any website, but online marketers often get lost in the complexities and details, forgetting how important analytics actually are and why. Analytics can provide a wealth of information but marketers often look at high level indicators such as: top content, bounce rates, entrance sources and keywords without tying it all together. In most cases, there is a tremendous amount of insight that can be used to make smarter marketing decisions, but most companies barley scratch the surface. At the OMS Minneapolis event last week  Adam Proehl gave an excellent presentation on analytics failures and successes. I’ve taken my notes from that presentation and combined them with my own opinions to create this list. 10 reasons why your web analytics are failing: You speak numbers to non-number people. It takes a numbers person to dig though large amounts of analytics data, figure things out, and draw conclusions. However, most people aren’t “numbers” people. Many marketers like charts and clear, action orientated data. Charts are good, numbers in red and green help, and so does simplification. Don’t present tabular data just because it make sense to you. Try and think about who you’re presenting the information to and how they like to consume information. Some people like tables, others like graphs. As online marketers make an effort to understand the audience on the web they’re trying to reach, so should they understand the internal audiences that they report results to. The statistics are fuzzy. It’s easy to combine different pieces of data and come out with a great conclusion, even if they don’t go together. For example, did you know that Michael Jordan and I have a combined total of 6 NBA championships? While that statement is true, the conclusion is a bit skewed. Yes, Michale’s 6 plus my 0 do equal 6, the fact is that that I didn’t do any of the work for those championships, but I’m still getting the credit as I was included in the statement. In analytics it’s important to break out the data so that it makes sense, not just so it looks good. It’s easy to combine two pieces of information in ways that make things look really good, but in reality, is something being hidden? The averages are flawed. Averages are great unless there is a major spike or dip. Then they have a tendency to skew the data a bit too much. Based on the graph above, you could say that we’re averaging 1652 people from StumbleUpon a day. But in reality, most days there were less than 50. The big spike just screwed up the average.  As quickly as that spike came, it can also disappear and making decisions based on the daily average isn’t a best practice. Sometimes things just don’t work. There are lots of things that can go wrong with the analytics from a website and that has to be taken into account. The tracking code could be implemented incorrectly, maybe some special tagging was setup improperly, there could be issues with site architecture or maybe there are just things that are out of our control. Analytics isn’t perfect and the reporting is never going to be 100% accurate, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the numbers are wrong. The important thing is to fix the issues you can and work with the numbers you have. You don’t understand the customer. Why are people visiting our site? What are they doing while they are here? What stage of the buying cycle are they in? Thinking that you know your customers is one thing, but you really need to watch their behavior and see what they are actually doing. Maybe visitors are focused on research or maybe they can’t find what they’re looking for when they get to your site. These are things analytics can tell you if you look and once you know what your customer is doing, you can modify your site to fulfill their needs. You don’t connect the conversion dots. Getting visitors to the site is one step. The next step is making sure you have content that is going to satisfy their need. As stated above, analytics can help with this, but once prospects fill out the contact form, what happens next? How many decisions are made by looking at top level analytics alone? Someone has to tie leads back to the website to determine what is working and what isn’t. For example, in a B2B situation, a whitepaper download may be bringing in lots of leads, but none are qualified. Maybe there is a CTA (call to action) form that is bringing in few leads, but they convert very well. Analytics can’t tell you what happens with a lead after filling out a form, and connecting that data is very important. You don’t dig deep enough. Looking at one metric in analytics and making a decision seems like a good idea unless you’re not seeing the whole picture. A good example would be bounce rates to a landing page. Just because the bounce rates are high, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad. You need to dig into the data and find out the conversion rate as well.  Changing a landing page because the bounce rate is higher than normal but that also has a higher than normal conversion rate may result in lost sales. You don’t tie in outside data. Marketers should be looking at other online and offline marketing efforts and tie them into web analytics wherever they can.  Ideally, an online marketing program should track different sources for different outcomes such as: people from Twitter to conversion, knowing which conversions came from email campaigns and what offsite marketing tactics are working. You don’t take the time. Analytics isn’t easy. It’s not something anyone can do in an hour a day (except maybe those that read this book of course). If website marketers really want to get valuable information out of analytics, they need to invest time and resources into talent that can make that happen. Analytics can seem complex and yes, it takes time and talent to make sense of them, but in the end analytics can paint a picture of how users are interacting with a site, what the user behavior is, and point out ways to make your site more successful and profitable. Bonus: 13 analytics tools to help you out. ShareThis – Social sharing button that can tie data into Goggle Analytics. Snip and Tag – Firefox extension that allows you to easily copy a URL and tag it with Google Analytics code. GA? – Firefox extension that quickly shows if Google Analytics is installed on the page or not. Better Google Analytics – Firefox extension that enhances Google Analytics. Enhanced Google Analytics – Another Firefox extension that enhances Google Analytics. Twitalyzer – Analytics for social relationships. Bit.ly – URL shortening with analytics. Google URL Builder – A way of tagging URLs with Google Analytics code so they can be tracked on external sites. Excellent Analytics – Microsoft Excel plugin to pull Google Analytics data directly into Excel. Site Scan GA – Scans a website to find out what pages have analytics installed and which ones don’t. Web Analytics Solution Profiler/Debugger (WASP) – Firefox plugin that debugs analytics. Crazy Egg – Heat mapping tools that allow you to visually understand user behavior. ClickTail – Heat mapping tools that also track where uses are when they bail on a form. What are some of your favorite web analytics tools? Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to theTopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter. © Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 10 Reasons Why Your Analytics Are Failing & 13 Tools To Help | http://www.toprankblog.com
• Lee Odden On SEO And The Social Web – OMS Minneapolis Keynote 25 June, 2010, 9:14 am
  Lee Odden, TopRank Online Marketing CEO gave the opening keynote of Online Marketing Summit Minneapolis.  Lee spoke on the intersection of SEO and social media and provided key takeaways for companies on achieving success. As the social web and search engines integrate and innovate tighter, the intersection between search and social is growing more meaningful daily.  Following is a summation of this info-packed presentation: What would happen if your Google traffic disappeared tomorrow?  What impact would that have on your marketing and your business?  For many, this could be disastrous.  This highlights the importance of diversifying your brand’s referring sources and share of voice around the web. Search and social are intersecting in many ways:  when you look at a comparison of the top search engines, more and more of the engines themselves are on social platforms, and more of the results on the big engines are social. Think about amplifying the results you are getting from natural SEO by amplifying your content through social channels. Google dominates search, but should it dominate your marketing? Lee shared some stats that help support the diversification of your traffic and digital influence: 90% of consumers trust peer recommendations, according to Nielsen, but only 14% trust advertisements according to Larry Weber Facebook added more than 200 million users in less than a year according to the Facebook timeline Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the US 2nd most popular search engine isn’t Yahoo, it’s YouTube according to comScore 80% of companies use social media for recruitment, 95% of those are LinkedIn The stats paint a clear picture:  that social is vital to integrate with search and your marketing program overall.  According to SEMPO, 35% of B2B companies integrate social media and search engine marketing programs – is your brand? HubSpot is a great social/SEO example – they receive 20,000 leads a month from inbound efforts. What about search and social as it integrates with PR and media relations?  To research stories: 89% of journalists use blogs 65% use social networks 52% use Twitter Jon Gordon from NPR noted: I use search engines on almost every story.  I use social networks to find additional sources as well as for the story idea generation and story feedback. How to leverage SEO for marketing and PR: If you already have a keyword glossary, that can be shared with PR to leverage for their content creation to be optimized for journalists. How do SEO and social media intersect? Add a layer of search to your social activity:  are you leveraging keywords across your social web participation?  If not, you should be.  Give your keyword glossaries to your social media marketing and PR team to use across marketing efforts.  Cumulatively this leads to better visibility not just in Google but in social search as well. One of the problems of social media and SEO is that they are usually put in silos within an organization.  But, you can bring them together to amplify results.  You can’t afford not to combine social and SEO.  In fact, if you are in a competitive category, it’s difficult to compete if you aren’t engaged.  As just one example, it’s difficult to acquire lots of high quality, organic links unless you can promote great content to a significant number of people. Ecommerce is social Target, 1-800 Flowers, and other e-commerce brands are going social.  They are integrating their online purchasing with social sites in order to tap into networks along with purchasing.  Companies that are doing this type of activity are training their customers to make social a part of the purchasing process. Customer service is social Large brands are leveraging social tools for CRM purposes and sales opportunities.  All you need to do to see the opportunity is query a topic customers are seeking information on and you can be the one to respond. Most importantly, people are social and people search.  As long as there is content that can be sorted, there is an opportunity to optimize it. Is social a threat to search?  No – search isn’t going anywhere.  Social sites are popular but according to both consumer data and the nature of the web they are not a threat to search. 4 keys to Social SEO: Listening, content, socialize, measurement Listening – understand the channels so you can make smart decisions about your tactics.  Listening also provides you social keyword research to mine data from your target audience.  If you have ever created a social listening report, you know it’s keyword-based and the value of understanding the language audiences use. Content – The thing that makes social or SEO fantastic is content.  If you don’t have a great message, you don’t have anything.  Take stock of content assets in order to be able to maintain consistency with communications.  After inventory, you can sync that up with an editorial plan.  Skipping this step can lead to failure:  for example, many create blogs and run out of things to say quite quickly.  Without a plan, it’s easy to get stuck.  Next, map your content to those social keywords developed to maximize visibility in search. Socialize – give to get, and grow a network of relevant people.  Even if you have great content, no one will know to link to it or share it unless you promote it. Distribution channels are essential – create content around the needs of your customers and send through distribution channels that are independent of Google – for example, RSS, email, social, media/PR and contributed articles.  The kicker is if done effectively, your performance in Google skyrockets. Cycle of social and SEO: Measure – get social monitoring tools and social analytics in place in order to understand and get feedback on your content and participation.  Look at the performance of your content and your competition’s content in order to provide insight. Marketo (a TopRank client) as an example created a social SEO strategy that focused on keywords and content their customer finds valuable as opposed to limiting themselves purely to keywords describing the product. 3 things you can do now: 1) Establish a listening program 2) Implement a content marketing strategy 3) Leverage social media marketing campaign management tools (which will be explored in a future post at TopRank Blog). Be sure to check out the OMS video interview (in a phone booth!) with Lee, Rick Burnes from HubSpot, Joe Pulizzi from Junta 42 and Aaron Kahlow of Online Marketing Summit. We cover what tactics marketers should put a hold on, which big brands are not to be trusted (Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft or Google). Guess which brand no one voted for? And the best thing about OMS. Click the image below to see the video. Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to theTopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter. © Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Lee Odden On SEO And The Social Web – OMS Minneapolis Keynote | http://www.toprankblog.com
• Thank You To Our Web Hosting Sponsor VISI 24 June, 2010, 4:31 am
  For the past 3 plus years, TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog has been hosted by Minneapolis based website hosting provider, VISI.  When our past host shut us down without warning for getting too much traffic, VISI and Online Marketing Blog connected and worked out a sponsorship. VISI is the only company with an ongoing “ad” on this blog. Uptime for Online Marketing Blog has been amazing since we moved to VISI and customer service has been exceptional. With web site hosting, the ideal situation is to forget about them, to not even know they are there because things are working so smoothly. But when situations arise, and a site goes down, you remember pretty quickly who your hosting company is. VISI was good about working with us when we had a major problem earlier this year and get the right equipment to meet our needs. As our traffic has increased, there hasn’t been a blip of downtime. Our relationship with VISI has gone well enough that when they launched a tier one cloud computing/cloud hosting service called ReliaCloud, they came to TopRank for Social SEO consulting services. I’d like to thank Gary Elfert and the team at VISI for being “invisible” 99.99% of the time and being on the spot when we needed them.  If your company is in need of high availability website hosting, check out VISI.com.   If cloud computing or hosting is your thing, then check out their service ReliaCloud. Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to theTopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter. © Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Thank You To Our Web Hosting Sponsor VISI | http://www.toprankblog.com
• Win a Free Pass to Online Marketing Summit Minneapolis 23 June, 2010, 3:35 am
  It’s that time of year again and the ClickZ Online Marketing Summit will arrive shortly to the Minneapple, Friday June 25th. The conference organizer has generously donated a free pass to the 1 day workshop for us to give away here on Online Marketing Blog. The agenda covers everything from Social to SEO to B2B Blogging to Email Marketing. You’ll be able to learn from a mix of client side marketers and agency subject matter experts on cutting edge strategies for more successful online marketing programs. Companies presenting include HubSpot, Cargill, Exact Target and many others. I’ll be giving the opening keynote presentation on SEO and the Social Web: Core to many search marketing strategies is “Fish where the fish are” and the fish are decidedly hanging out on Google. YouTube, Gmail, Blogger.com and other online services from Google make its presence ubiquitous in the online marketing world. Now imagine if your website disappeared from Google tomorrow. What would that do to your marketing, your business? Google and search engines present a tremendous opportunity to attract new business, but it’s important to diversify online marketing in a way that also benefits overall search marketing. For many companies, a relationship with customers is worth a lot more than a click, pageview or inbound link. In this presentation you’ll learn the value of diversification from the development of channels of distribution for optimized social content that is independent of, yet complimentary to search engines. Social SEO enables companies to realize search engine marketing benefits as well as long term, meaningful connections with a community of customers. The cost for the 1 day event is $369 but we’ll give a pass away today to the most compelling Tweet that links to this post or comment below explaining why they should attend. The cutoff for making your tweet or comment is 4pm CST June 23rd and the winner will be announced at 5pm CST or after the same day. Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to theTopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter. © Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Win a Free Pass to Online Marketing Summit Minneapolis | http://www.toprankblog.com
• Content Marketing: Definitions of Curation & Context 22 June, 2010, 4:14 am
  Companies are realizing the value in “brands as publishers” and are making real commitments to the creation of content in their online marketing mix. It’s no longer enough to provide fundamental features and benefits information about products and services to succeed competitively online. Consumers and of course, business buyers, seek additional information, resources and others to connect with on the topics of interest to them.  Some companies choose a pure creation strategy and find it to be a formidable undertaking, especially creating unique and valuable content over a long period of time. Within the field of content marketing, curation is becoming a popular topic of discussion. Blending a mix of new content with the filtering and management of other useful information streams is a productive and manageable solution for providing prospective customers a steady stream of high quality and relevant content.  Pure creation is demanding. Pure automation doesn’t engage. Content curation can provide the best of both. As I am prone to do with topics of interest, I reached out to a few industry thought leaders to get their take on defining Content Curation and where it fits within the mix in an online marketing program: Rebecca Lieb – @lieblink Vice President, North America at Econsultancy and author of The Truth About Search Engine Optimization As an editor, journalist and marketer….what a great question! Content curation, which can be defined as a highly proactive and selective approach to finding, collecting, presenting and displaying digital content around predefined sets of criteria and subject matter, has become essential to marketing, branding, journalism, reporting and social media – often, to mash-ups of all these different and disparate channels. Content curation can takes many forms: feeds, “channels” (such as on YouTube), it can appear on blogs, or even be the links you upload to social media sites such as Facebook. It can be an online newsroom, a collection of links, an assortment of RSS feeds, or a Twitter list. Whatever form content curation does take, it’s around a topic, or a subject, or even a sensibility that speaks to the knowledge, expertise, taste, refinement, brand message or persona of the person, brand or company that has created the particular channel or source of content. Why bother? Tons of reasons. It’s a big web out there. More and more, people rely on trusted sources: friends, family, brands, companies, experts, you-name-it, to help keep them informed, educated and even amused. Need proof? Take bOINGbOING.net, one of the web’s most popular blogs whose traffic often exceeds that of NYTimes.com. This group blog is nothing more (or less), that curated content; items its contributors and often its readers find and share with others. Channels of content can be as specific as bee keeping equipment, or as amorphous as “what’s cool.” But they all serve multiple purposes, ranging from informing to engaging to entertaining. In an era where marketing is supplanting advertising and storytelling is an ever-more essential part of the marketing message, carefully curated content – well presented – is an immense brand asset, be it to a humble, over-caffeinated individual blogger or a Fortune 100 company. David Meerman Scott @dmscott Author, New Rules of Marketing & PR and World Wide Rave I’ve been working with what I call syndication for 25 years. My first job when I got out of school was a bond trading desk and right after that started working with companies in the financial information space. I worked with Knight Ridder for 6 years and at a company at News Edge for 6 years as president of marketing. News Edge was the first, real serious aggregator of news in the corporate, financial and government spaces. So news syndication, news aggregation has been going on literally for decades. What is Expedia, for example? It’s an aggregation of airline and hotel feeds that then get aggregated to create content. What’s Google? Google is an aggregation of a whole bunch of content. I’m a fan of doing that but the challenge is how can you do it in a way that’s interesting. You have to make a decision: Do you let the machines do the aggregation and the selection or do you let humans do the selection. It’s a huge decision, humans or machines. You also need to think about, how do you create the taxonomy and the folksonomy of how to turn that content into categories? That becomes a really big issue with content curation. If you’re a big company and trying to do this, and you have a B2B section, a B2C section, 15 products in 25 markets, in 58 countries, what do we do? Do we have 58 feeds for each country, do we have 25 different things for each category? It really becomes a big issue. I’m a huge fan of content syndication, great stuff. Been going on for decades. But the two challenges for people that want to embark on a strategy like that is A: Humans or Technology and B: What’s the taxonomy or folksonomy to put it together. Brian Solis – @briansolis President Future Works and Author of Engage! The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web & Co-Author of Putting the Public Back in Public Relations Marketing in general, which can be content marketing, public relations or communications has a tendency to try and automate things to the point of obscurity or mediocrity. There is a value in curation and a value in creation. But when you start to think of things in terms of automation, I think that we’re just feeding the system for the sake of feeding the system. Now I think there’s value in both and I believe that in order to garner some thought leadership, you have to become a thought leader. You can’t do that through aggregating the thoughts and words and ideas of others. Obviously you (as a company) have something to contribute, something to say, something of value to offer which is mostly likely why you’re in business. I need to hear about that. I need to understand why I should consider you as a partner or whatever it is you’ve created. Is there something I can use, something I couldn’t do before I came into contact with you? Now in terms of curation, where it gets really interesting is that those thoughts, words and ideas of others can be helpful to establish yourself as a value added resource and as a place or destination for information. Ann Handley – @marketingprofs Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs and Co-Author of the upcoming book, Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business Defined as it applies to online publishing: Content curation is the act of continually identifying, selecting and sharing the best and most relevant online content and other online resources (and by that I mean articles, blog posts, videos, photos, tools, tweets, or whatever) on a specific subject to match the needs of a specific audience. What role should it play: All organizations are now publishers — meaning, the company with the most engaging and interesting content is the one who wins. Content curation isn’t necessarily anything new (finding the best stuff to share is what so many of us do on Twitter already, and what bloggers have long done, or what sites like Alltop or Digg have been doing). But recently, it’s getting a little more attention as an emerging field of its own. It can fit into an organization’s content strategy nicely. How? It’s a way for organizations to further their role as a resource to their audience. Sifting through the mountain of web content and finding the tastiest, choicest bits for your readers is a great way to build trust and authority with them, and to become a valuable resource for them on any particular topic. What’s more, for organizations just getting into publishing online — for those just starting a blog, say, or a microsite — curated content can allow them to ramp up quickly, both from an SEO as well as content perspective. That said, I have two cautionary pieces of advice: 1. Don’t rely exclusively on automated content curation services to feed your own belly (to fulfill your content needs). I see content services like HiveFire as providing an intelligent stream of curated stuff, but you still need a real, live human editor to pick and choose and order the best stuff for your own audience. Warm-blooded humans still required, in other words. 2. Mix curated content with original content, and don’t rely on the curated stuff alone. Content curating is a perfectly good way to extend the content of your own site, but only “in addition to” and not “instead of” your original content. Joe Pulizzi – @juntajoe Founder Junta42 and Content Marketing Institute, Co-Author of Get Content, Get Customers. Content curation is editing on steroids. In actuality, content curation has been around since the dawn of the publishing industry. The job of the editor was to take the best information from around their industry and present that information in a manner that makes sense to readers. The web’s first crack at this was content aggregation, or having computers pull the best links and information automatically to make the “reader’s” experience more fulfilling. But as we have learned, search is not perfect. Enter the content curation specialist. As more content floods through all aspects of the web (as well as print and online), we’ll need more brands stepping up to make sense of what we really should be paying attention to. Content curation is as important in the content marketing toolbox as is creation. We need both…and curation doesn’t work without creation (much like Google trying to save the newspapers because they need great news to survive, but that is for another story). For some brands, curation may be enough. You can’t find the resources to develop the most valuable, most compelling content in your industry? Then just tap into your network that does, and package that content to present you as the trusted industry leader. It’s still a needed service, just a bit different from creation. Where it will go, no one knows…but I’ve heard from smarter people than me that content curation is the future (even present) of media. I’d rather say curation and creation go together like Macaroni & Cheese…a splendid combination. Paul Gillin – @pgillin Consultant. Author of The New Influencers and Secrets of Social Media Marketing I define content curation as the process of assembling, summarizing and categorizing and interpreting information from multiple sources in a context that is relevant to a particular audience. I think this discipline will be absolutely essential to content marketing in the future because of changes in the media landscape. Just a few years ago, audiences were starved for information and the role of media was to create it. Today, we are drowning in information and the emerging role for media is to filter and organize it. This is being handled accomplished on an ad hoc basis by social news sites like Digg and Sphinn; social bookmarking sites like Delicious and Reddit; news aggregators like Drudge Report; link blogs like Metafilter and Slashdot; friends networks like Twitter and Facebook; and even self-curated RSS aggregations. In fact, much of what goes on in social media is various forms of content curation. Marketers can build trust with their constituencies by providing focused curation in areas that matter to their constituents. Original content will always have value, but curation is coming to have nearly equal value. The key is to stake out unique topic areas and to become the most trusted source in those areas. You don’t need a lot of money to do this. You just need to know the subject matter very well. Erik Qualman, @equalman Author of Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business and MBA Professor at the Hult International Business School Today, everyone is a potential media outlet. A curator understands their audience and is able to package created content in a digestible manner for them. Creators need to view curators as distribution points for their content rather than as pirates. Content creators and curators that will thrive in this new world understand the importance of this symbiotic relationship. But is it symbiotic? In the end, almost every person is a little of both (creator & curator). After all, there is no such thing as a new idea and imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. These clichés symbolize the irony of the topic being discussed. Valeria Maltoni – @conversationage Director of Strategy, Powered, Inc., Conversation Agent Content curation is one of the keystones in a content marketing strategy. It’s like museum curation — harvesting, researching, tagging, organizing, and sharing — only two-way, because of the digital medium. Thanks to technology it also includes in an out feeds, and moderation and escalation, where necessary. To maximize its impact, you want to integrate curation within a canvas of brand generated content and promotions in a forum that also highlights the best brand-related content from your own community of fans. The curator monitors conversations for opportunities to align the voice of the brand with the voice of the customer, to engage outside content creators, to highlight the best third party content within the brand’s sharing strategy, and inspire action. Pawan Deshpande – @TweetsFromPawan CEO, HiveFire (TopRank Client) Content curation is the cure for a broken content marketing strategy. Content marketing is about a brand producing valuable content, and prospects being educated with that content. It’s valuable, it works and it’s not going away. But the only problem is that day by day, it’s less effective as everyone produces more and more content. Brands are increasingly competing to get their content noticed. At the same time, prospects are increasingly spending more time searching for relevant content. Content curation has emerged as a new and powerful way for marketers to seamlessly sift through the flood of content available to prospects. Like the owner of a high-end art gallery, you have to sift through the information from across the web and “curate” it to ensure that it is relevant to the customer. You will be navigating your prospects through this sea of content by leading them to the most relevant important information. It’s already happened in the consumer world: Sites like Digg (social curation) which have little or no original content have become key resources for information. Similarly we are seeing leading businesses take a similar approach to become the experts for their respective areas. (Note: HiveFire makes a content curation product called Curata, that blends creation with curation automation.) Marc Meyer – @marc_meyer Dir.of Social Media and Search, Principal at DRMG Content today is not your father’s content… Hell, it’s not even the content from 10 years ago. It’s so much more now. So much so, it should be its own country. Curation for us, is part art and part science. At its core, it has as much to do with maintaining and preserving what has been digitally “created”-as it does in making sure that it lasts longer than a cup of coffee. And that’s the challenge. Loosely defined, the curation of content is a company’s ability to create and then manifest digital assets that drive and maintain at the least, awareness. Content Curation holistically speaking, refers to a person’s or company’s ability to stay in front of the digital curve by managing those assets across the board. Its role in a content marketing strategy is primary and cannot be downgraded to a perfunctory responsibility. Curation feeds the beast and thus it contributes greatly to a company’s overall digital strategy. Have you added a curation component to your content marketing mix? If so, are you doing it manually, automatically or somewhere in between? Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to theTopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter. © Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Content Marketing: Definitions of Curation & Context | http://www.toprankblog.com
• Thinking Critically About Web Video 21 June, 2010, 5:34 am
  Web video is hot. Some say your chance to be a pioneer. How hot, and how much of an opportunity? Recent reports from comScore, consistently say more than 80% of the total U.S. Internet audience views online video in a given month. YouTube’s fact sheet states every minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded to the network and 2 billion videos are being watched per day. All this popularity has of course been driving a trend with marketers: the desire to create video as part of their digital marketing mix. Except sadly, it’s almost never approached strategically. Agency-side marketing/PR/digital pros: how many times have you had a client approach you after creating a web video and said “hey, we made this video, now make it go viral!” Client-side marketing professionals: how many of you have had a CMO suddenly discover web video, only to enthusiastically push the team to concept something “because our competitors are doing it.” Due to these mistakes (and many others) most companies get web video dead wrong. Their content is too advertorial, there is a lack of genuine reason anyone would want to watch it, let alone pass it on. It doesn’t pass the all important “so what” test of web content and feels contrived or lacks creativity. And these are actually just surface level problems, it goes deeper than that. The real question you need to ask yourself is why am I making web video? What marketing problem does it answer, and how does it answer it? How does it feed digital marketing KPI/objective metrics? Am I doing it because I read an article about it in AdAge or because it’s an elegant way to express my brand’s story to the world? “Let’s make something viral” vs. let’s create an ongoing dialogue By now, most companies understand blogging. And everyone knows you’d never create just one (even great) blog post and be done with it. No matter how popular that post was, just one blog post is not likely to provide long term value for your brand. You need to continue creating posts over time until you have a large opt-in audience that’s consistently spreading your content organically. Consider the fact that a web video is not too different than a blog post. Successful text and video are both content formats that can be passed on socially, and successful archetypes of each share similar qualities. Yet, the business world seems to place web video up on a pedestal as if it’s some magic animal that plays by different rules merely because it’s video. The rules are not all that different, and apply for both formats of content for it to spread socially. Creating one video that catches on may be nice, but this does not take advantage of the larger opportunity the web affords: to build up an audience of true fans who genuinely want to follow your every word carefully. Poorly conceptualized content has no chance Short of advertising and interrupting users, there’s not much you can do to create awareness for a poorly conceptualized video lacking the proper hooks. On the web, advertising is content – there is no captive audience and viewers can and will ignore your promotions if your videos aren’t worthwhile. It has to be interesting, relevant and sticky if it has any chance of getting passed on. And with a firehose of content being uploaded to to the web, most web video is likely to be lost in perpetual obscurity, perhaps given some life from search engines. Unless you’re a massive brand with deep pockets that can work with a high-paid creative team to concept some remarkable content, you’re likely better off using video as you would any other social content. In other words: use it to connect with your audiences in a genuine, meaningful way that follows your larger content strategy. The best part about treating video as you would any other digital content, is just like text: if you produce lots of it and experiment, you can begin to discover video content archetypes that work for you. Then, and only then, can you start to get agile with your video content production and iteratively get better until you can consistently create stuff that catches on. With that said…you still need a community Web video by itself is tactical. If you’re serious about influencing the social web you still need a community that’s interested in receiving all types of your content being published in a channel agnostic fashion. Simply put, you need to build up a group who has affinity for your brand, its team members and ideas. Without this you’re not feeding something larger. Even if you have a popular video with hundreds of thousands or millions of views, what’s the point if you’re not continuing the dialogue over time and nurturing those relationships? Conclusion Ignoring the “viral video” bug many have been bitten by, web video is an opportunity for your brand and should likely be a part of your content marketing mix. But think critically about how it plays into your larger content strategy, and understand your reason for being with creating digital content in the first place. Placing web video on a pedestal, as if it’s so different from any other digital content, is the wrong approach. It has to be just as sharp, creative and relevant as your text-based content. Perhaps more so since we can’t just scan a video and get the gist of it. And just like your written content you will need to build an audience before you can have consistent success. For long term results, experiment and play around with presentation, formatting and ideas. Work to discover what it is your audiences react to and ensure that video is created in a way that benefits your larger social and SEO programs. Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to theTopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter. © Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Thinking Critically About Web Video | http://www.toprankblog.com
• Take the 2011 Digital Marketing Poll 17 June, 2010, 4:35 am
  It’s safe to say 2009 and 2010 were breakout years for social media. Our last Digital Marketing poll showed 6 of the top 10 tactics as social media complemented by search engine marketing and email.  Slimmer marketing budgets and mass media attention have inspired a rush to many types social media marketing tactics bringing a certain over-optimism about what the social web can do for a company’s bottom line. With the economy recovering slowly, what will 2011 bring? Are social media and content marketing the glue that brings multi channel marketing together? Is 2011 finally the year for mobile? Will companies focus on more holistic online marketing? We’d love to hear your opinions in the 2011 TopRank Digital Marketing Poll.  Please take the poll here and share it, post it, bookmark it and help us reach over 200 responses: Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll. Thank you for taking the poll and we’d sincerely appreciate your help promoting it.  We even have an awesome short URL for you to share: http://tprk.us/dm2011 We realize there are a lot of choices in this poll and appreciate your time and participation a great deal. Our last digital marketing poll was of great benefit to many of our readers and we hope to tap into your expertise and opinion on a topic of interest to every digital marketing professional. We are absolutely interested in your comments about this poll and about your opinion on the future of digital marketing. Did we leave any tactics out? Should we have? Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to theTopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter. © Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Take the 2011 Digital Marketing Poll | http://www.toprankblog.com
• The Power of Blogs & Social Media in B2B Marketing 16 June, 2010, 4:30 am
  54 Billion. That’s what Forrester Research predicts for US B2B Social Media Marketing spending by 2014. As a living example of a B2B company that fully leverages blogging and social media in our online marketing, TopRank Marketing has a lot of first-hand insight that we can share with clients. I know there are many B2B marketers that are uncertain about their place on the social web and over 6 1/2 years of B2B blogging experience can provide the companies we work with a unique perspective. Working smarter with developing and implementing blogging strategy, content planning, promotion, SEO and the intersection with other on communications channels such as PR and social networking saves time, resources and improves results. Am I biased towards blogging as part of a B2B marketing strategy? Absolutely. Is blogging appropriate for every B2B company? Not by a long shot. According to the 2010 SEMPO Study, 35% of B2B companies integrate social media marketing with search marketing. At this stage of the Social SEO game, that percentage shows a lot of opportunity for growth.  However, companies we’ve worked with like Marketo have made substantial progress towards dominating their industry and experiencing explosive business growth, in part, due to the effects of blogging and SEO. Deciding whether to start a B2B blog or have an existing blogging effort audited is worth thoughtful consideration. Did you start a blog because the competition is blogging? Are interns managing the blog content and promotion? Are your blog contributors experiencing burnout or boredom?  Are there a lack of comments and engagement?  There are many reasons B2B blogs fail, but that doesn’t mean a blog isn’t right for your company. Get insight from companies that are successful to see what you missed or if blogging really isn’t a good fit. For the businesses that are getting mileage out of blogging and social media, the Business.com Benchmark Study shares the most popular metrics used to measure B2B Social Media Success: Website Traffic – 68% Brand Awareness – 61% Engagement with Prospects – 60% Engagement with Customers – 52% Brand Reputation – 47% Prospect Lead Quality – 40% Revenue – 38% Prospect Lead Volume – 37% Useful Product Feedback – 26% With the right plan and guidance, affecting these KPIs as well as lead generation is a reasonable expectation through B2B blogging and social media. Three things B2B Marketers can do to get the ball rolling with social media: 1. Establish a Listening Program: Brand monitoring is the most common dimension social media monitoring efforts focus on, but extend your efforts to Audience Analysis and Social Keyword Research as well to get a handle on the community you’re trying to engage with. Trending keywords can facilitate real-time marketing or longer term editorial planning and SEO. 2.  Give to Get with Content: Commit to aligning content with searcher personas that also meets your marketing objectives. Information and education have their place with B2B marketing. Understand those needs of your target audience and develop content (optimized for keywords of course) that meets those needs but also facilitate your prospecting pipeline. 3. Leverage Social Media Marketing campaign tools across channels to promote optimized social content. Creating multiple media and content for a single promotion to a mix of social destinations is very time consuming and inefficient unless you use tools. Examples of social media marketing campaign management tools with corresponding analytics include: Awareness, SWIX, Sprout, Pop.to, WildFire, Objective Marketer, Spredfast and Socialtalk. Many B2B marketers go through the motions with social media, but they’re not really being social.  Adam Singer and I were just talking yesterday about the world of difference between content produced by a copywriter that’s good at writing and someone that knows an industry, writes well and especially has experience as a participant with that industry’s social networking and blogging community. B2B marketers don’t need to “do social”, they need to “be social” and that means time and resources for participation, analysis and action. Customers can tell the difference and everything from measures of engagement to leads generated will show the difference as well. Event: B2B Search Summit June 23rd San Francisco I will be speaking at this event on why Blogs and Social Media should be part of every B2B Marketers toolkit and why it might be the easiest way to generate customer ambassadors and gain more quality leads. Register using the code TOPRANK and you’ll get $300 off. Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to theTopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter. © Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | The Power of Blogs & Social Media in B2B Marketing | http://www.toprankblog.com