My homework for IMU course # 11

This would be a ‘dream’ client. I would love to see this come true..

Problem: A state’s office of small business development want to reach out to the small business community, including all kinds of small business: women-owned business, minority-owned business, small disadvantaged business, veteran owned, and more. The office mission is to assist, counsel and advise the small business community in procedures for contracting with the state. They think that the small business community in their state have not really utilized well what they have to offer.  They want to be proactive to spread out the word and generating interest from these communities.

Solution: Content strategy

Part of the outreach strategy, aka PR, we recommend them adding two pages within the website for a news room and blog. We talked about having designated employees knowledgeable with the process and procedures to start blogging, assigned a few employees familiar with the use of social media tools to be the community relations persons.

• content purpose: assist, counsel and advice.
• content topics – starting up, owning, running and managing a business; how to get a contract process and procedures; success stories; and more.
• content: text, data, graphics, video, and audio.
• the importance of SEO in the press releases.

Channels of (content) distribution

Distribution of content is divided into two groups: 1) public relations dealing with the public, and 2) media relations. The strategy is to go where the target groups are.

Public relations for the public

The recommendation is to go where the communities are. Recommendations include:

• bloggers relations: send PR to list of bloggers who covered around targeted topics of small business, women-owned, multicultural issues
• distribute content via popular social networking, social bookmarking, social publishing and sharing presentations sites.
• host live chat every month with business experts.
• syndicate video through tubemogul.
• would suggest to distribute content to the less popular social networking sites but targeted for small business audience, i.e. entreprenur connect.
• explore if major & local business newspapers in the state have online communities.
• build mailing list for updates on contracts, opportunities, events.
• monthly newsletters with essential information that direct the readers back to the site for more information.

Media relations

Maintain contact and relationship with business reporters and invite them to participate in events. Another suggestion would be to regularly send press releases out to local and major papers in the state.

I chose to use different channels of distributions to attract the audience my client wants to reach out.

My client agreed on my proposal and as they’re about to sign the dotted line… I woke up.

1. Twitter is your friend.
2. Keep it light – they use Tumblr for light weight blogging.
3. Guerilla-style customer service.
4. Small and scrappy marketing.
5. Show off your team.

[via Open Forum]

Read more details of growing your business here.

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Image via CrunchBase

Midway Inbound Marketing Review

My homework for IMU course #10

By now you should know that I’m attending Inbound Marketing University via Hubspot. Even though, I’ve been in the social space, i.e. blogging, etc. for a few years, I’m new to the field of inbound marketing. In the sense that this is part of my learning curve.

I’m going to share with you the 10 lessons I learned through inbound marketing:

#1. Know your audience.

Create your buyer persona (s). I started blogging in 2004. In the blogging world or blogosphere 5 years feel like a long time. I learned blogging by doing. Just do it. And ignore the noise. So I blogged without any target audience. My goal at the time was to differentiate my services from other professionals in the space. However, because I sort of wing it, the kind of audience the blog attracted was not the one I should have targeted.

#2. Inbound marketing is *not* about you.

Inbound is marketing 2.0. If you still do the traditional way, i.e. push your products/ services to whoever your target market – you are still doing ‘outbound’ marketing. People (B2C), business (if you do B2B) find you – most likely – through search engine. Talking about your services and products and ignore the rest of the internet world won’t help you with search. Because search engine like Google, Bing, Yahoo, would not be able to find you online if you are heavily promoting “you”, unless your business is “already a household name.” When people search they use keywords, phrases, to describe the things they’re looking before they get to your site. So leave your ego at the door.

# 3. Think like a publisher.

Create an editorial calendar for your blog/s, content, etc.

#4. Design a content strategy for your buyer persona (s).

I didn’t have strategy before. (I’m still working on it with my new business). My approach before was like all over the place. Whatever comes my way, which was okay at the time. But it doesn’t in the long run.

#5. Yes, you can optimize content.

There are different ways – on page, off page, to name a few techniques – that can help optimize your content. If it can be searched, it can be optimized. The thing with search engine optimization, it won’t help much if what you do is just inserting keyword, without the essentials. Can’t stuff your content with keyword alone. Writing quality and relevant content should always be the goal. Focus on long term.

#6. Link building techniques.

Create great content that make ‘influencer’ websites within the space want to link to your content.

#7. Landing page is not your home page.

I always thought that a landing page is your home page. Wrong. A landing page is a page where your potential customers click on for more information. It is a lead generation page.

#8. Focus on quality and relevancy in the social space.

Ideally, numbers and quality, for building relationships. You’re whereabout in the social space is about building a better relationship.

#9. Email marketing is inbound marketing if it’s done effectively.

I used to send email without understanding what the buyers really want. Though at the time I used software from a reputable provider in real estate, which I paid big bucks for it, because of lack of education it leads to disaster. Longer sales cycle and lower sales conversions. Understanding of how, where are leads in the buying stages, can help you nurture the relationship that eventually will convert to sales.

#10. Inbound marketing is never about interrupting your prospective buyers.

This is the big difference between outbound marketing and inbound marketing.

My homework IMU course #9

Inbound marketing is about putting together strategy to help businesses get found online through different channels via social networking, blogging, content, SEO, and lead conversion.

The same is true with successful professional email marketing. According to Eric Groves, with Constant Contact, a successful email marketing is about..

delivering professional email communications to an interested audience containing online information they find valuable.

Effective email marketing has two important components: 1) interested audience and 2) valuable information. This is precisely why email marketing is considered inbound.

When a business is building the list for its email marketing, many times the list is build from the ground up, where email addresses are collected at different touch points with customers: customers attending events, downloading information on the website, asking for more information, at point-of-sale, etc. – depending on the type of business. Customers are asking for valuable information from products or services they have an interest for. So they expect that this business delivers what they’re promise through great informational, educational content. When business have this kind of relationship going, receiving information from customers point of view, is never an interruption. Vice versa, business can target the message more effectively through segmentation since they have the inside knowledge of what customers’ preferences are.

Conversely, when email marketing is not done ineffectively, this is like outbound marketing. The campaign is not targeted for an audience. Since customers don’t ask for it, they found that the information interrupt them. On the extreme case, it is considered spam.

Inbound Lead Nurturing (CV201)

My homework IMU course #8.

This is a hypothetical profile of ideal customer for a client of mine.  Client is in real estate business. The ideal customers would be move up home buyers for a specific neighborhood where home prices range north of $500k. Leads generated through different sources, i.e. ads in local paper directed to a specific landing page for request for more information.

The nature of this business is B2C in the sense that most real estate agents don’t have marketing department. Most of them work for themselves with some big producers have staffs on the payroll handling the sale. An agent typically handles both sides.

This client is a one person-shop realtor. Lead normally comes in with just email address, with no phone number. If she’s lucky, some leads provide with phone numbers. From the time a lead comes in to conversion to sale would probably takes place 3-12 months incubation.

When a buyer lead comes in, typically, they are either in one of four stages:

1. still early in the process, just researching.
2. relocation – ready to move
3. ready to move.
4. lurkers.

Building trust and loyalty from the beginning is very important to any real estate sale. There are so many agents out there in the space. One thing to note about real estate is about relationship business and relationship management.

Steps to inbound nurturing program:

• Leads in. Once lead is received, the lead will received an automated response email.
• The auto responder would for a specific questions, i.e. interested in short-sale only, foreclosures, or all types of homes. And time frame of purchase.
• Next follow up. Once response is received by agent, agent then will send another email based on lead’s information. Qualifying begins at this point.
• Qualifying. For example, potential homeowner with immediate needs. Immediate move, that is less than 3 months, will receive a notification that agent would send home listings within 24 hours, along with supporting data that shows homes recently sold and under contracts. In the meantime, they can check out her blog for more information. At the same time asking them if they already work with an agent, and if they would need help with financing. Financing it’s like qualifying a lead. Because it tells the agent whether this person is telling the truth and serious about buying or just curious
• Segmentation. After qualifying, agent would then segment the leads to put them into drip campaign based on needs and wants and time frame.
• Drip campaign, ties in offline and online campaign. Put together a editorial calendar for each type of lead with monthly follow up.
• Incubation. Leads that will need incubation time more than three months, will receive drip emails that include monthly comparable data of what’s recently sold, third-party articles that is related to specific situation of the lead. Some leads might end up in the incubation for more than a year.
• Part of the nurturing program, agent would send invitation to monthly home buying, financing seminars and open houses.

In a typical internet lead to sale process, once prospects are ready to take the move, they would take the initiative to pick up the phone and meet with the agent.

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Okay, here’s what the homework is about. I’m suppose to take a screenshot of one of my website landing page(s) and have a write-up on what changes I could make to decrease friction and increase conversion.

First of all, I don’t have a landing page. I have a blog and in that blog I have no landing pages. I never have a website. For a niche market, this blog is on Google PR 10 for DC real estate blog. No small bean there. However, there are some things that “I could’ve, would’ve,” done it to improve it.

This is the biggest mistakes I’ve ever done! Of: 1) not having a landing page, 2) not asking people who visit my blog to take action, 3) not thinking about buyer persona(s) – who my audience is. And I’m paying the price for that. Oh well, maybe it’s good in a way, because I found the thing that I love doing it. So in a way, there’s a reason to it.

Take a look at this screenshot..(click here for site)

Now that I’ve taken this course on page landing and take action – it got me thinking. There is a number of things that I can do to improve the sales, etc. I meant, because there’s no action form per se, most of my prospects ended up either picking up the phone or email me.

The blog it’s too noisy. There’s too many things going there. Not clear. There’s no clarity of what is the intent. Kinda lost.

Blog makeover

Since my blog doesn’t have a landing page. Here are the list things that I would do to tweak the blog, to reduce friction and improve conversions:

1. Change the layout. Less is more.
2. The feedback that I got from the readers is they like reading the blog because it’s very educational. Educational still going to be the theme.
3. The goal is to have prospects to a) either contact me by email, or b) by phone.
4. Trust is important. So I would continue my focus on education. Create a page resource center with previous posts divided by category, third-party information that is relevant and from quality sources.
5. Optimize it with on page, and off page keyword.
6. Have a contact me page/ link.

Let’s see how it goes. I’ll follow up on this in a couple of months.

My homework for IMU course #6

From what I learned in this course there are ways that I could use on and off page SEO to rank specific keyword to help my inbound marketing efforts.

The first thing to do is to come up with sets of target audience, or buyer persona (s). From here, we could then work on the different buying stages our audience is in and the kind of words, phrases they use to search. The results will be the keyword that most people to use in order to get to the information or the search page. For example, if I’m in energy efficiency business and people use phrase ‘save money on energy’ to find information. That will be the keyword, phrase that I would use for on page and off page SEO.

On page SEO

There are a couple different things that we can do to – by inserting the keyword on:

• on title page
• on body content
• meta keywords
• meta description
• anywhere in title tag
• anywhere in first word(s) title tag
• link with popular pages within the domain name itself

Off page SEO

Off page SEO would be through link building strategy. We’re going to use blogging to communicate directly with our audience. So we would work, link with bloggers who shares relevant content to what we’d write about andget  excited about the content that we’d be writing, which in turn motivate them to share our content with their audience.

In addition to writing valuable content, we have other channel for distribution of content via social networking, social sharing, bookmarking and other community sites, i.e. YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Delicious, Stumble, Scribd, Lunch, etc.

To top it off, I think e-book and customer educational hub pack with info that link back to various articles that we have written and relevant, quality third-party freebies, would be a good investment to complement all that we’re doing.

How is this going to help with our inbound marketing efforts?

According to HubSpot, the most successful inbound marketing have three key components:

1. content
2. search engine optimization
3. social media

Our inbound marketing efforts does have the three key components. Having on and off page SEO for specific keyword and ties in to the blogs, social media tools – that  includes producing valuable, educational content along with social networking, sharing, bookmarking and communities – would help with our inbound marketing efforts.

My homework course #5

Okay, this one homework is very challenging, in my opinion. Because it forced me to think hard to come up with not just an idea – but a something along the line of ‘remarkable’ idea. With the big plan of how will I launch that idea around my business.

Let’s just say, this is something that I’ve been thinking for a while. Our mission is to change the world. Well, not really. Maybe in some way. I wanted to help those currently unemployed to get employed again. By creating jobs for creative professionals. The idea is to create a network of out-of-work professionals so when eventually we have projects, they’ll be working on these projects as part of the team, regardless of location. I think by helping to create jobs for those out-of-work regardless of their previous employment background so long as 1) they are creative, 2) open mind, and 3) willing to learn – this – will make a difference.

So instead of crafting something that is coming from us, we’ll do the reverse. We’ll do a contest: create the funniest 2 minutes video on how you keep your life going when you’re unemployed.

Launching

We’ll identify bloggers who cover the economy, startup, jobs, and politics, and job sites. Then we’ll work on promotion plan that includes:

• blog posting optimized with SEO, send press releases to not only bloggers but also mainstream media.
• we’ll make the best of social networking tools, social sharing, news sharing and more.

And we’ll see how it works from there. If we didn’t get the response we wanted, then we’ll adjust it. Till it works.

My homework for course #4.

–

3 Benefits of a Facebook Fan Page

1. It personalizes (humanizes) business. Creating a Facebook fan page actually would help a business to humanize the communication with its constituents, be it buyers or users.

2. The page have tools that can help the business to create their community. They can post news, article of interests, events, discussion wall, forum, and communicate directly with their fans. Furthermore, images, such as photos and videos can be part of the page. Transparency is an opportunity. So when a business post or share more valuable content on their fan page because the page is available technically to anyone – you don’t have to be a member to access it ..

the conversation is…

3. Indexed by search engine. You can track visitors statistics via insights. By looking at the stats, it can help put together social ads in Facebook.

3 Benefits of LinkedIn Group

1. Builds a thought leadership. Based on perception alone, whoever creates a group is seen as someone with leadership qualities. It gives the impression that you are a thought leader for that particular group, so long as it provides a place for quality content, positive group management and feedback. Successful owner of a group, may also get 1st degree invitation to connect. Thus, further the relationship down the line. And helps build, expand personal network.

2. Build a thriving community. You can build your tribe, sharing the space with like-minded people. People who shared the interests, values, mutual goals or causes. When you are the owner/ administrator of the community, you have the ability to send updates, welcoming new members, etc. And every time you send a welcome email to new members, they’ll see your name and your website – the name recognition alone – create awareness.

3. Ask/ Answer. It helps build your credibility. By participating, it shows that you are knowledgeable. The discussion helps build relationships. Every time you have questions or answer questions, everyone can see it on your profile page. So, it is also good branding.

Since the two networking sites, Facebook and Linkedin, have different culture, theme and audience, I would include both in my marketing plan. Just by the numbers, Facebook right now has more than 350 million members and LinkedIn around 50 million – these numbers are staggering – this is something that we can’t ignore. Moreover, the two sites complement each other.

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Social Media and Building Community (GF201)

To build customer centric community at the site of our choice, we’ll break down the process into three stages:

1. Listening
2. Review and analysis
3. Connect and engage

#1 Listening

During the listening period, we’ll do the following:

• plug in, go to where they congregate.
• follow conversation off-site.
• take note of what the conversation is about.
• exchange idea: ask the community to share what their needs and wants are and share ours.

#2 Reviews and analysis

• refine community needs and wants.
• support and programming of content will be around community needs and wants.
• explore ideas on how to motivate our customers to become active participant of the community, such as competition, customer of the week/mo, advertising ideas, etc.
• set what communication tools we want to use to support our community members, i.e. live chat with our employees, twitter, wiki, webminars, forum, etc.
• sets company procedures to let employees create blog and communicate directly with customers via off-site social networking sites.

#3 Connect and engage

• create sharing tools for community members.
• set up educational events where customers can meetup and interact with company’s employees and connect to other customers.
• begin the journey..
• repeat the process..

Community building is a process. This is something that we will continue doing to build, nurture, and manage relationships with our customers in an open and transparent way.