Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

“Noobs” apparently like detailed examples, my friend Bridget told me this morning. Right after that, I got an email from someone wondering about some basic steps to improve search results. So here’s a little (very high level) primer on SEO and SEM. As always, I welcome comments and clarifications from my friends in the SEM business.

Basically, there are two parts to search engine success. SEO and SEM.

SEO - Search Engine Optimization - are on-site activities to make your web site completely friendly to search engines, including:

• having a site map
• optimizing your web copy, and headlines
• adding title tags
• updating your meta descriptions

… using the keywords and phrases for which you want to be found. It’s tricky to write for people and spiders, but it can be really fun.

Do this first. Once that’s up and running, you can add SEM activities.

SEM - Search Engine Marketing - are activities you take outside of your web site to improve your search engine rankings, including:

• Google, Yahoo! MSN ad campaigns
• Directory submissions
• Link sharing, etc.

Once you have optimized your site, then you can look at SEM activities like online Google ads  - sometimes referred to as pay-per-click (PPC) ads - to draw people to your site.

When you’re ready to start your PPC campaigns, you’ll need to have keyword-rich ads that point to keyword-rich landing pages (generally ‘hidden’ pages that have special offers, white papers, etc.) to motivate browsers to contact you.

I always advise getting your house in order and your on-site SEO done first. Here’s why - if you have a nicely optimized site with relevant keywords in your copy, the Google spiders will give you a better ‘relevancy’ and ‘quality’ score when you start to advertise. When your quality score is high, you pay less for your ads…

I’d be happy to dig into any portion of this for noobs and people who love them… just let me know.

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Forget Google Analytics. Forget landing pages. Forget a fancy email system. Sorry all my agency friends - this post is all about guerrilla marketing!

For those of us who are lucky to have a blog, use our own email accounts, and Tweet or use Facebook for fun or business, there are some pretty cool, free tools to test messaging and user engagement for our products and services.

(Never has it been more important to break through the noise online with your messages, and never has it been more important to keep marketing during an economic downturn.)

Say you want to test messaging into several different market segments. You can do so quickly with some pretty simple tools.

Hypothetical Scenario: Reaching Moms during the Holidays:

You want to reach moms during this busy holiday season with a special offer of some lovely bath products just for them.

You recognize the differences in the motivations and life patterns among moms:

• some prefer to stay at home
• some work outside the home
• all work inside the home - some for profit, some volunteer, some run the family

Subtle differences in anyone’s lifestyle, attitude and preferences are best served with subtly different messages.

Consider these (unscientific, on the fly, illustrative) examples:

Message 1: Stay at home mom - “Escape inside your own home - even for 30 minutes - and refresh your attitude! http://smub.it/jlj/escape” 104 characters - Tweet worthy! (Twitter limits you to 140 characters)

Message 2: Stay at home mom volunteer - “You give so much to everyone else - take just 30 minutes - and be good to yourself… http://smub.it/jlj/ahhh” 103 characters - Another winner for Twitter!

Message 3: Mom working outside the home - “Relax in the comfort of your own home - take just 30 minutes - and find peace. http://smub.it/jlj/peace” 103 characters - yes!

So Tweet these (assuming you’re following your market - moms who Tweet) and you can see how many times people follow your links using Smub, a tool to personalize and share links. (disclaimer: Smub is a client of mine, and there are other URL shortening tools that allow you to track links, but not personalize them.)

Your personal, secure MySmubs page will show you the number of “hits” you get from people who follow your Smubs (see the right-most column, below):

As those of you with REALLY good eyesight might see, I can easily track the number of click-thrus on any Smub. 

Want to test these messages in your blog, or send these messages in an email, or post them on your Facebook page (or your mom group’s Facebook page?) Go ahead. You can see the results immediately, and watch them over time.

The messages that are resonating (or interesting or…) are going to show up quickly in clicks.

So go ahead… take this time to test some messaging. Spread the word simply, and see the results. Without help from a web programmer, an agency, your IT guy or anyone else, for that matter.

Your guerrilla (free) marketing will be more effective as a result.

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I got a response yesterday afternoon from my rants about HighBeam Research. I thought it deserved to be posted here for everyone, as I felt the response was prompt and fair. And this is a little lesson to marketers, Steve found my posts via RSS. Are you listening for mentions of your company and its products?

Here’s Steve’s response, unedited (I left off his direct line phone number, that’s it):

Janet,

I recently read your tweets and blog post about our service.  I am disappointed to read that we have not provided you with the experience that you expected.

I believe that your blog post makes some very good points, and you have pointed out some areas in our communication that need to be tightened up.  We try to be up front with our customers, and your post has pointed out some areas where we can improve.

There are two reasons for the apparent inconsistency:

-          Over the past year we have nearly doubled the content on the site, and in the past 5 years we have gone from about 15 Million total articles to 68 Million articles from over 5,000 sources.  We are offering ever more value to users, and because of this, we have recently made the decision to increase our price. We notify all annual customers about their renewal price, and we offer a very simple cancellation process if they do not wish to continue.  Though we are a small company, we offer an 800 number that is staffed 24/7, as well as on-site cancellation that is easy to find and available at any time.  While our 800 number communication could be better, if you do get billed, the 800 number does appear next to our charge on your credit card statement.

-          We do offer a “stay and save” offer for our customers, as is common in the industry.  As you know, the cost of retaining a customer is much lower than the cost of finding a new customer, so, we offer the lower price here to help retain users.  I think the insight to draw from your experience is that it has the appearance of being inequitable and we can improve that.  We appreciate your comments, and will be working on this area in the immediate future.

We are working to make some improvements to our communications for all of our customers.  I think that our service is still an incredible bargain relative to the offerings of our competitors and we are hopeful that you will reconsider us in the future when you have a research need.

Thank you
Steve Weir
…………………………………………………….
Steven R. Weir
Director of Subscription Marketing
HighBeam Research, Inc.

I asked Steve if he’d mind me doing this, and he gave me permission to do so. He also noted that he’d let me know when they’re able to synch all of their systems to be consistent. End of rant.

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This morning I got an email from HighBeam Research letting me know my year-long subscription was almost up. In the note, it politely let me know exactly what would happen if I took no action:

I had found it to be a good research tool especially for clients in the health or biotech space, as it had catalogued many esoteric medical journals, etc. But not for $299.95. I decided to cancel my subscription. The friendly email reminder told me exactly how to do so, by clicking the customer service link in my account.

Imagine my surprise when I was made a special offer for those about to cancel:

I wasn’t surprised to see the special offer, that made sense. But see that last sentence there?

“…your annual membership will automatically return to the regular rate of $199.95 a year after one year.”

Having just been told my credit card would be automatically charged $299.95 for my next year, you can bet my next action was to say, “No thanks. Cancel my membership.”

Have I mentioned that nowhere on the Customer Service page was there an option to either speak with or chat with a representative?  (I could submit a form that would be answered within one business day. Never mind.)

I was a little nervous that canceling my membership early would shut down my account today (rather than waiting until Jan. 3) but was so irritated by their marketing and pricing inconsistencies that I took the chance. It would have been nice for them to spell that out on the cancellation page.

I was happy to find that I still had use of my subscription and a link on the cancellation confirmation page to a “billing questions” email form. So I sent them just a little feedback there… And Twittered about it, and am now blogging about it. I wonder which of my rants (if any) will get a response?

To try to milk people with accounts set up to auto-renew is appalling. I know many companies bank on auto-renew as their main source of recurring revenue… (how many of us ignore these messages/forget to call to cancel, etc.)

But to have your marketing be so out of touch with your billing policies (perhaps they submit forms to each other as feedback) in this day and age, is simply absurd.

I hear Google Book Search is now indexing magazine content. Undoubtedly, even the esoteric medical journals.

I think I’ll be just fine or now without HighBeam Research.

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Since I learned Monday how to take screen shots on my iPhone, I’m now ready to show the mobile side of me. I’m not particularly good at leveraging my iPhone to the hilt. Mostly, I use it for mundane things (compared to many I know), I:

• Talk on the phone sometimes
• Read CNN mobile at airports over dinners
• Take photos of my food from the airports to send home

(This is my new favorite dinner from the Go! Bistro at SFO where they proudly serve Japanese Curry with German Knockwurst for $12.99. No, thank you, I’ll have the spicy wontons and a Stella, please.)

• Send texts home from afield - “je suis ici and safe.“
• Tweet when the mood serves me
• Mostly, I keep connected to my work via email
  • Peeved that my old Comcast email account is POP, not IMAP, since nothing syncs and I have to manually delete messages by hand
  • Frustrated that I have to manually delete messages one at a time, Apple

Actually working online from my iPhone has been relegated to approving blog comments (thank you when you do! It’s always such a joy, even after four years of this, to get comments!), and occasionally searching for information I’ve been meaning to find “when I have a minute.”

The Mobile Clincher

Two things have happened to me recently (if you don’t count the cool iPhone screen shot lesson from @cowperthwait) that make me rethink how I use my iPhone.

1. As a result of my mention of my favorite mobile tools in ReadWriteWeb, a company called Mippin transformed my blog for mobile phones. And I have to say, it’s pretty cool. It looks increadibly readable, kind of like an RSS feed of my blog in a nice, mobile friendly format. To see it in action on your smartphone, go here (when you’re on your smartphone, please.) This isn’t entirely narcissistic, really. It just got me thinking about how mobile data should be, and there are plenty of companies working on that very problem.

Now, the second thing is best told in relation to the first. Mippin gave me a special URL to access my blog from my phone:

http://mippin.com/mippin44571

…Which is fairly unwieldy and pretty impossible to remember for a 51 year old woman from Oregon. Let’s face it, my brain doesn’t keep numbers in storage quite the way that it used to. Curious, I went to my blog via Mippin, and the actual URL is worse yet! It was something like this:

http://mippin.com/mip/prev/list.jsp?id=44571&z=1@1228436219855252

Uh huh… thank goodness they shortened it for me in the first place!

To be fair, the Mippin folks also provided a bar code for me to access my blog. (I had to ask them wtf? and they were very kind to ‘enlighten’ me with the bar code concept. Apparently I’m not the only one… Doh!)

Well, you just know I had to Smub that. (There it is, the second thing to happen to me recently that changed the way I use my phone. And I’ve told plenty of stories about Smub lately.) Now, if you want to see how my blog looks on your mobile you can go to:

http://smub.it/janet/moblog

But I won’t make you wait - with thanks to Cowperthwait - here it is:

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