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Beyond SEO: 3 secrets to finding your real audience

by at 5:09 pm 8 Comments

painted window view“The game has changed in the SEO world. You’re not just looking at clicks; you must know the value of a visitor and start to quantify it.” 

That’s the message from Melanie Mitchell, Senior Vice President of Search Strategy and Marketing at Digitas, a global integrated brand agency. During our recent interview, Mitchell shared the following ways for businesses to create content and convert prospects into customers. 

1. Understand consumer behavior at its core. Businesses must know what the consumer is doing across content, social, mobile, and search. We can’t think about silos of search or social strategies. We have to look at where the consumer is and then make sure we’re intersecting that consumer at their point of interest.

2. Understand the search journey. We have to measure analytics at a deeper level that just clicks. Most people begin with a generic search and are led down a certain path as they gather information online. Fully understand the consumer’s journey. What tools are they using and what tools do you need as your paths intersect?

3. Understand how people use your content.  Are they engaging with you, sharing it, converting, and increasing your revenue?  You must determine if you have the right message. And if it’s not the right message and content, what do you have to do to course correct?

How does Mitchell bring it all together? ”It’s really about finding your audience. What’s their journey; how do you connect with them?”  

Recommended: Mitchell says she’s big fan of BrightEdge, a free measurement tool. ”You can cut and slice data in many interesting ways. You can look at what’s happening in your video, content, image, and shopping. But you can also look at the competitive space in social and who is winning in these areas. This will help you decide if you want to play in that space and find out if there’s an opportunity to cut through the noise. BrightEdge lets you track it, not just from a traffic standpoint, but at the conversion level.” 

PS: If you want hundreds of tips on content, blogging, marketing, and PR pitches, check out The Badass Book of Social Media and Business Communication. 

Filed Under: BrightEdge, Business, Business trends, content, Metrics, SEO, Social media measurement Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

5 signs that PR leaders are impacting business results

by at 3:44 am 2 Comments

Public relations is coming into its own and the industry appears more than ready to embrace a new level of respect.

How do I know this?

Consider the following points:   

1. PR is more strategic than ever. There’s an increased understanding that a broader view of business is required in today’s marketplace. PR pros who fully grasp how their work directly impacts sales and marketing are sitting at the table with the C-suite. Messaging and money go hand-in-hand. 

2. PR pros are communicating like project managers. We are tracking the minutiae in our assignments. We are in constant communication with team members. Our work is completed on time and under budget. That’s because we can course correct in the midst of a project instead of running out of time and resources. We’re using online spreadsheets, graphics, and images to track progress, next steps, and metrics. Communicators are getting better at this thing called communication.

3. PR pros—the good ones, anyway—are buying into the vision. These are the passionate ones; the folks who are curious and courageous. Those who lack passion, including managers, are crap magnets that are blind to the company vision. Passionate PR pros understand the work that needs to get done every day to achieve more and compete in a fierce market. They surround themselves with like-minded people, leaving no room for the mediocre.   

4. PR pros are well-versed in more than just one language.  The smart ones are able to speak to their clients in their own industry language. Whether it’s Software-as-a-Service, designer jewelry, healthcare, or aerospace engineering, PR stars shine brightest when they can hold their own and engage with niche clients.  These PR leaders exude the confidence and knowledge to not only be invited to sit at the proverbial table, but to actually offer ideas and insights as a valued member of the team. Courtesy seats with the C-suite rarely exist.  

5. PR pros recognize what is required to service business-to-business clients. Delving into the needs of the customer’s customer helps solidify B2B relationships. Creativity and projects move to deeper levels and vertical markets, which has customers coming back, and offering referrals. It’s simple.  You get it.    

Business and motivational speaker Denis Waitley said: ”Your success depends on how well you think. You are not paid to collect, sort, store or retrieve information, although you do these things every day. You are paid to interpret that information and create and implement new ideas.”

As we head into the last quarter of 2012, it’s clear that PR means business. Would you agree?

 

Filed Under: Business, Communication, Creativity, Leadership, Metrics, PR, sales Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

New jobs as Chief Digital Officers emerging

by at 9:19 pm 1 Comment

What do Gannett, New York City and Columbia University have in common? 

Each has a Chief Digital Officer, or CDO, to bring together strategic business practices, technology, skilled leadership and internal and external communications. Most CDOs can be found inside of media companies, sitting just a seat or two away from the CEO.

Two years ago, there were lively conversations that CDOs were those who didn’t get the coveted title of President. Others maintained organizations that supported the CDO position were advocating for silos, the curse in marketing and communications. Today, demand for CDOs is outpacing supply.  

A complex blend of talent and leadership

Chief Digital Officers are not self-described social media gurus or community managers. CDOs have competencies in the convergence of technology, business, boards, and organizational development. 

“Business strategies now must be seamlessly interwoven with ever-expanding digital strategies that address not only the web but also mobile, social, local and whatever innovation there may be around the corner,” write Rhys Grossman and Jana Rich of Russell Reynolds Associates, a global executive search firm. In their article titled, The Rise of the Chief Digital Officer, Grossman and Rich state: ”To help meet these challenges, companies are increasingly looking for a Chief Digital Officer who can oversee the full range of digital strategies and drive change across the organization.”

To lead a business through a technological transformation is no easy task. CDOs are innovators despite internal skeptics who whisper and rant about the pitfalls of social media.  

CDOs must have the following five competencies: 

1. They must be comfortable as a possible successor to the CEO. CDOs must be able to lead a global culture and drive an online presence. He or she must be experienced in business operations, management and recruiting and retaining top talent. A CDO is a visionary, especially in our technology-based world.  

2. They must act as agents of change and grasp the underlying psychology of consensus-building and conflict resolution.   

3. They must have Board experience and solid communication skills. After all, they are the conduit between stakeholders and the C-suite.

4.  They must know how to set sound business strategies have seasoned project managers to implement them.

5. They must possess deep knowledge of technology, e-commerce, consumer behavior, and social media. This is especially important for media organizations, as CDOs are often charged with transforming analog to digital. 

Where is this person?

You may be wondering: Does such a person exist? Where do organizations find one individual who encompasses this blend of talent? 

And if you work in PR, marketing or communications, you may be curious if you have what it takes to be a Chief Digital Officer. 

Grossman and Rich maintain that people considering CDO positions “may be reluctant to join established organizations, viewing them as old fashioned.” The co-authors note that “many candidates come from cutting-edge, entrepreneurial organizations.”

Here’s another solid point that Grossman and Rich offer. ”Companies … have to move very quickly when they find and meet talent that has potential. The current state of supply and demand almost guarantees that other opportunities will be available to talented candidates.”

The bottom line about the evolving role of CDOs brings us to the real bottom line in business. Chief Digital Officers are leading new revenue streams through digital channels that can leave many people and employees feeling uneasy. 

If the CDO is unable to succeed in brand management, e-commerce, transactions, and customer engagement efforts, his or her organization can be faced with a financial disaster.

 

Filed Under: Business, Digital, Leadership, media, Metrics, sales, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Not good with numbers? PR pros need to figure it out!

by at 2:02 pm 3 Comments

This is a guest post written by Gini Dietrich.

I was in a meeting a few weeks ago when a junior member of the client’s marketing team was asked to tell us the company’s goals, as they relate to the things we’re trying to accomplish.

Her response? 

I have to look at my notes. I’m not good with numbers.

This is something I hear a lot: I went into PR/marketing/communications because I don’t like numbers. 

And it’s no wonder. We’ve always gotten away with “measuring” our results in terms of media impressions, reach, and advertising equivalencies. After all, it’s hard to quantify brand awareness and credibility and reputation and thought leadership. You know whether or not you have it, but you can’t really put it in terms of numbers.

And those great big impression numbers? They feel good to a CEO who is looking for some way to show a return on your efforts.

But when the Web disrupted our industry we slowly began to see new and interesting ways to measure our efforts. Early on we looked at using unique URLs in our news releases and different 800 numbers at our events, but that wasn’t enough.

Running away from numbers

The Web has provided us a huge opportunity to measure our results directly to business goals, yet most of us still shy away.

Why? Because we don’t like numbers.

We’d like you to think about it differently. Call it data or information or goodies or, heck, call it chocolate. Just don’t call it numbers.

It’s fun to see results from your efforts…and now you have the opportunity to see them every day.

Start small. One of the things we discuss in Marketing in the Round is using a benchmark of zero as your first step. Find something — one campaign, one event, one project — and create the benchmarks, the dashboard, and the data points you’ll measure. Think beyond traffic and pageviews and bounce rate. Really think about what the goals are of the business and how you can affect change in those areas.

Three things to look for

For instance, in a for-profit business, you’ll want to look for ways to increase revenues, shorten the sales cycle, or improve margins. If you don’t know what all three of those things mean, go make friends with someone in the accounting department and learn it. Quickly.

Let’s use Pinterest as an example. It’s really easy to set up some boards and direct people back to your website or blog that way. Arment Dietrich has a client - Frank and Eileen - that makes high-end men’s and women’s shirts. The team created a Pinterest board for them, just to test and see what kinds of results could be achieved by pinning images of some of their shirts.

After only one month, Pinterest is the number eight referral source of traffic to the Frank and Eileen site. But remember we said to worry less about traffic and more on business results. So dig further. Pinterest sent three percent new visitors in April. Of that three percent, 83 percent bought a shirt. That represents $2,670 in new revenue for the business.

Other than the 83 percent who bought the shirt, all of the data for that particular test came from Google analytics (which are free!). The client also provides access to the e-commerce site, which shares the information needed to find out how many of the visitors from Pinterest bought a shirt.

This is a very simple way to look at measurement, but it gives you a starting point. Once you get this down, you can begin to advance and become more sophisticated in your measurement.

Companies that fully understand how they are being talked about and what levers work online can use this data to make informed future marketing decisions.  Also, strategic intelligence gleaned from measurement can help uncover new opportunities for products and services.

Your clients or executive team will be ecstatic to finally have a real ROI on your efforts.

Gini Dietrich is the founder and CEO of Arment Dietrich, a Chicago-based integrated marketing communication firm. She also is the founder of the professional development site for PR and marketing pros, Spin Sucks Pro, blogger at Spin Sucks, and co-author of Marketing in the Round.

 

 

 

Filed Under: Business, Metrics, Public Relations, sales Tagged With: , , , , ,

How communicators overcome their fear of social media measurement

by at 11:32 pm 3 Comments

“I’m a writer; not a numbers person.” 

“I was never strong in math.” 

This ‘non-numbers mentality’ doesn’t serve PR and social media pros like us well. Especially when it means our seats at the proverbial C-suite table are empty.

Randall Bolten views numbers and measurement in a different light. 

Bolten is the author of Painting with Numbers: Presenting Financials and Other Numbers So People Will Understand You. I recently interviewed him want to share his insights with you. By the way, Bolten is CEO of Lucidity, a consultancy that specializes in financial management and information presentation. He has spent 30 years working in Silicon Valley.

Ready? It’s time to get past your fear of social media metrics.

SY: PR practitioners have always been pressured to show tangible results and return on investment. Clients and employers are looking for the impact PR —and now social media —has on the bottom line. They don’t particularly care about the number of media impressions or page opens. They want specific numbers and proof of how business is impacted. When communicators fail to provide this information, they aren’t included in high level meetings.

RB: Presenting numbers is a communication skill.  It is not a math skill; it’s not an aptitude that is accessible only by the ‘numbers guys.’ It’s simply a communication skill.

It’s very similar to best practices in grammar, sentence structure, vocabulary, paragraph organization and all those other skills that you spend years learning in an effort to become a good writer or speaker.  Strunk and White didn’t tell you how to articulate a political position more effectively; they tell you how to articulate anything more effectively. 

SY: Why are so many communicators intimidated by numbers?

RB:  The ability to understand mathematics is not the same as the ability to communicate information that has numbers. The good news about the skill of presenting numbers is that it’s no harder or no easier than the ability to stand up and be articulate with words and speaking or to write a clear effective business memo or position paper.

SY: You say that the C-suite and clients don’t expect us to be mathematicians. That removes a lot of pressure.  

RB:  You really can present numbers. Is anyone asking you to calculate the square root of revenues or take the first derivative of the expense trend or something like that? No. All they want you to do is to look at a bunch of numbers as if they were a bunch of words and ask yourself: Are they more or less than I suspected, or are they more or less than last year, how does it compare to the completion, etc.  There’s relatively little real mathematics involved.

SY:  As social media continues to enthrall many (and confuse some), communicators often have to answer executive naysayers wanting to know why seven employees spent 40 hours dealing with an online complaint. When you struggle to explain soft communication skills in hard numbers, the gap (and respect) between communicators and senior execs widens.  How can PR and digital staffers address this?

RB: This is not a new problem, Susan. Numbers and financial information are the language of business communication. When radio and TV were new, you had to explain how many people were listening to the commercials.  Then you had to provide back-up information on how many people who heard the ads actually went into the store. Then research was conducted to determine who bought the product and where they heard about it in the first place. Eventually the message got across that radio and TV advertising worked.

The success has always lied in demonstrating that the marketing department understands the underlying business problem.  This is not easy, but the only way to get across that threshold is to find a metric that your audience can relate to. The comparisons may not be exact, but we’re still talking about getting people’s attention. Whatever metrics get widely used to validate other marketing programs, like traditional advertising or trade shows, can be used for social metrics. At least you’ll be using language the C-level executives already understand and base decisions on.

SY: Final thoughts?

RB: One of the challenges that you face when marketing social media is to figure out what is the quantifiable result you can point to where the C-level executives actually understand that that result does lead to more business or more profitable business.

SY: Thank you, Randall. It’s been a pleasure. 

 

 

 

Filed Under: Business, Communicators, Leadership, Marketing, Metrics, Social Media, Social media measurement Tagged With: , , , ,