Mobile | Small Business Marketing & Business Acceleration

Social Pros 15 – Marcus Sheridan, The Sales Lion

Posted on 10. May, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, Email Marketing, Google Analytics, mobile, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

This is Episode 15 of the Social Pros Podcast : Real People Doing Real Work in Social Media. This episode features Marcus Sheridan of The Sales Lion. Read on for insights from Marcus, and our Social Media Stat of the Week (this week: email opens on smartphones and tablets have grown by 82% in the last year).

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Please Support Our Sponsors

Huge thanks to data-driven social media management software company Argyle Social for their presenting sponsorship, as well as Infusionsoft, Janrain, and Jim Kukral at DigitalBookLaunch. We use Argyle Social for our social engagement; we use Infusionsoft for our email; Janrain is our crackerjack social integration company, and Jim is our guest host for the podcast (and a smart guy). Also

Social Pros Transcript For Your Reading Enjoyment, Thanks to Speechpad for the Transcription

Jay: Yes, indeed. That was a new introduction on the Social Pros podcast. We’re stepping it up here a little bit in episode 15. I am Jay Baer joined by my trusty sidekick, Eric Boggs from Argyle Social. Eric, how are you, my friend?

Eric: I’m doing just fine, Jay.

Jay: Glad to hear it. Amazing guest on the show today. Actually, sitting here with me in an undisclosed hotel room in New Orleans, Louisiana, Marcus Sheridan, The Sales Lion. He will be joining us in just a second on the show. He’s going to blow us away. We should’ve gotten a bigger hotel room.

Eric: So Marcus spoke at a conference, evidently, that a couple Argylers attended. And one of them sent me a text saying, “Do you know this guy, Marcus Sheridan? He is blowing the room away.”

Jay: That is his MO. In fact, one of the tweets this morning was, “Who needs bloody marys when you have The Sales Lion”. He is the antidote to what ails you in New Orleans.

Eric: Awesome.

Jay: So I want to just quick shout out to our fantastic sponsors here on Social Pros. Of course, Argyle Social, Eric’s company, data driven, social media management software. Our friend, Jim Kukral from DigitalBookLaunch.com. Infusionsoft, who we use for all of our email stylings. And a new sponsor joining the podcast this week, our friends at Janrain, who do social sign-in and a bunch of other like magical voodoo. We’ll talk more about them in a week or two.

Eric: Yeah, good guys at Janrain. I know a guy named Jamie Beckland that I guess went to work there from working at an agency.

Jay: Yes.

Eric: Good folks.

Jay: Yeah, great. Jamie’s super-smart. We should have him on the show sometime. He used to be at Whitehorse. Really smart guy,

Eric: Yep.

Jay’s Thought of the Week

Jay: So here’s my rant of the week. I actually wrote a blog post about it. And I was so mobilized by this, I wrote a post on Saturday and used it to ignore my in-laws, which is probably a bad call long term. But you know, it is what is.

Eric: Also a bad call to publicly acknowledge that you ignore your in-laws on a public podcast.

Jay: Yeah, I don’t know if they’re Social Pros listeners. They probably are now. Tristan, edit that out.

Eric: Yeah, cut that. Cut. I was with my in-laws in D.C. all weekend, so I feel your pain, Jay.

Jay: Did you write blog posts while they were there?

Eric: No, I didn’t.

Jay: You’re a suckup.

Eric: Yeah, I just keep my mouth shut.

Pinterest 101

Jay: So the premise of this post is that we spend a lot of time in social and in content marketing talking about eyeballs and how much traffic do we have and how many visitors do we have and how many unique visitors do we have and all this. And at the end of the day, that is a crappy metric. It is perhaps the most overrated metric in the history of math, because just because somebody shows up at your site doesn’t mean they do anything on your site that is inherently of value.

The reason I got on this soapbox initially is that there’s been a lot of reporting lately – in fact, I think we even talked about it here on the podcast a few weeks ago – about Pinterest’s power as a referring source, that Pinterest is sending more traffic than Facebook. Pinterest is sending more traffic from Twitter. The original source of that, I think – as you pointed out, Eric, or Tom Webster did – was a ShareThis study, which doesn’t necessarily mean everybody. It just means people who use ShareThis. But beyond that, my question is who cares? So what if Pinterest does send more traffic equivalently than Facebook to your site? Does that mean that people from Pinterest actually buy things from you? Does it mean they fill out a lead form? Does it mean they sign up for an email newsletter? Or does it mean that they look at one pretty picture, never to return again? And unless you know the answer to that question, you are fooling yourself. You do not understand how digital marketing works.

Traffic is actually an expense, not a benefit. You can break it down, right, but ultimately when you figure out your server costs, your amortized design costs, what it requires you to create content, etc., every person who comes to your site actually costs you money, doesn’t make you money unless you’re selling advertising. In that case, it’s a different story.

Eric: I think I’ve used this gimmick before, but I’m going to use it again. Here comes the audible sigh, Jay. Yes, you are preaching to the choir. Yes, marketers are lazy. Clicks are the easy thing, and it’s often the easy way out in terms of justifying existence and justifying resources invested. You know, it’s something that we have been railing about at Argyle since the very beginning, and I imagine it’s something we’ll be railing about forever and ever and ever. As it relates to our listeners in social, this is sort of just a phenomenon that has existed with online advertising and email marketing that is now just being translated to social, which is sort of this inability to get over the hump in terms of mapping channel inputs to onsite outputs. And there are definitely some technology challenges around that, some of which we are working very hard to address at Argyle in terms of making these things possible. But it’s not rocket science, especially as it related to Pinterest. Mapping Pinterest referrals to onsite conversions is as simple as a custom report in Google Analytics. I would imagine everyone listening to this broadcast has Google Analytics on their website, and maybe a lot of these people even ask themselves whether or not Pinterest is moving the needle for their business. So what we’re asking people to do, it’s not impossible. And to me, that’s what’s the most frustrating bit about this kind of stuff.

Jay: I agree. But you know what’s weird about it? I don’t know that it’s always laziness. Sometimes I really believe that people think that traffic and visitors is, in fact, a reliable metric, that that has inherent value. Actually, there are a lot of comments on my blog post about people saying, “Oh, no. Traffic is good because that traffic will eventually create email subscriptions.” To which I say, “Nuh-uh. Not necessarily.”

Eric: Traffic is potentially a leading indicator. I will agree that it is potentially a leading indicator. But you can segment traffic in the same way that you can segment everything else. So traffic from Pinterest may not have the same value as traffic from LinkedIn or paid search or organic search.

Jay: Yeah, and I don’t have enough Pinterest traffic on my blog, although we have a Pinterest account, of course. I don’t have enough Pinterest referalls to really do much with it from an analytical perspective. But my hypothesis, and maybe there’ll be somebody who listens to the podcast who can comment on this on the blog post, my hypothesis is that Pinterest traffic will behave more like search traffic rather than social traffic because Pinterest, in my estimation, is more about discovery than it is about social sharing. It’s more about finding new things as opposed to voting for things that you already know about.

Eric: Yep.

Jay: So to me, I think Pinterest is more like Google than it is like Facebook. I could be wrong, but that’s how I see it.

Eric: I don’t disagree. You ready for some stat of the week?

Jay: I am. What is the social media stat of the week?

Eric: You did it again. That was good. I tease you for the ridiculous stat of the week intro. I guess I could…

Jay: We’re also supposed to do Angry Birds sounds this episode because I was going to do [makes sounds]. That’s the best I can do.

Eric’s Social Media Stat of the Week: Email Opens on Smart Phones and Tablets Have Grown by 82% in the Last Year

Eric: All right. Stat of the week comes from Return Path, which is an email marketing data company. They’ve been around for a while. I think they’re probably, gee, it’s probably 10 or 15 years old. So these guys have been in the business for a long time. They track broad email marketing data behavior from vendors to publishers to email recipients. They released a great report about email consumption and the big takeaway from this is that email opens on smart phones and tablets grew by 82 percent in the past year. So mobile devices are on track to be the dominant email platform over desktops and laptops by the end of this year. There’s a long report. We can link it up. The takeaway here is that marketers aren’t ready for this. Very few marketers are optimizing their email content for consumption on iPhones and iPads and mobile devices.

Jay: No question, especially if you’re in B2B, where you have smart phone penetration that’s upwards of 80 percent in most cases. If your content is not mobile friendly, that’s the first thing you should do. Quit talking about Facebook and Pinterest, and actually make your existing content available, not to mention your email, available on an iPhone and a BlackBerry and a Windows mobile device and any other flavor that you have. It’s just insane, but I understand how we got here. Because you’re right, we’ve been talking about mobile for a long time. Like we were talking about mobile’s going to be dominant, the preeminence of mobile. We were talking about that when I was a kid, and now I have kids. But now it feels like all of a sudden like, oh now it actually is true. It’s like the boy who cried mobile. Every year it’s like, “Mobile’s going to take over. Mobile’s going to take over.” And after you hear that eight years in a row, you’re like whatevs. And now all of a sudden, mobile is taking over, and I think people got caught flat-footed because they’re like, “Yeah, I’ve heard this story before.” But now, ultimately, it’s true.

Eric: Well the funny thing to me is people kind of got hung up on apps with the iPhone App Store gold rush. And now there’s this realization that, “Oh, you mean my website, not an iPhone app or a Droid app. Oh, I get it now.” You know, our website, I think, it’s written completely HTML5. There are parts of it that probably look wonky on an iPhone, but the main bits of ArgyleSocial.com are going to look really good on your iPad and your iPhone. And it’s not easy to do, especially if you’re invested in a custom website and really trying to do something kind of fancy pants. So this issue, I think, is a little different than what we were talking about with mapping traffic all the way to conversion. Mobilfying your online experience can be expensive and it can be time consuming, so it’s something that people should probably start sooner rather than later.

Jay: Yeah, and it’s certainly easier to do in a major construction project as opposed to slapdash after the fact, unless you have WordPress or something like that. So next time you do a website redesign is the time to go through and make sure it’s mobile friendly.

Eric: And next time you do website, a massive redesign, if the person that you’re working with doesn’t suggest a mobile optimized version, fire that person and find another person.

Jay: Yeah, get somebody else. Exactly. Yeah, I’m going to start a company that creates apps to help customers find your app. It’s just going to be a super-meta business.

Eric: There’s an app for that.

Special Guest: Marcus Sheridan, The Sales Lion

Jay: There is. There is. Well, I am excited about our guest today, who has been sitting here patiently. This is the longest I’ve ever heard him be quiet. It is Marcus Sheridan, The Sales Lion. He and I are both speaking at the Counselors Academy PRSA Conference here in beautiful New Orleans, Louisiana. He gave a rousing keynote – he gives no other kind – this morning to a bunch of PR firm owners. Mr. Sheridan, thank you for being on Social Pros.

marcus sheridan the sales lion Social Pros 15 Marcus Sheridan, The Sales Lion

Marcus Sheridan, The Sales Lion @thesaleslion

Marcus: Hey man, it’s a pleasure. But how do you hear somebody being quiet? That’s what I’m trying to figure out in my head right now, man.

Jay: It’s Vulcan.

Marcus: Okay. I got it.

Jay: It’s sort of a Vulcan skill.

Marcus: I’m feeling it.

Eric: I’ve heard you being quiet, Marcus. You’ve done a really good job.

Jay: So Marcus, in the unusual chance that somebody listening to Social Pros is not familiar with the now legendary Marcus Sheridan story, do you want to summarize your career in 60 seconds with regards to your background as a purveyor of swimming pools, etc.?

Marcus: Yeah, super quick story. Thanks, Jay. 2001 I started a swimming pool company with two other guys. And then in 2008 when the economy crashed, we were going to crash with it. We didn’t have any money for marketing. We had to maintain a lot of sales. We did about 75 in-ground fiberglass pool installations a year at that time. And so without having any money and going basically on the brink of bankruptcy, I was looking around and discovered this whole thing called inbound and content marketing. That’s when we decided to start a blog, and we really embraced the whole concept of let’s just be teachers. So we answered every single question on our blog that we had ever heard from a consumer. Within a year, we had the number one trafficked swimming pool website in the world. It really increased visitors, but more so, to what you were talking about earlier, it increased leads and ultimately customers. It saved our business, and we did it by cutting down drastically all of our advertising dollars.

About a year after we did this, I started another blog called The Sales Lion, and it teaches everything that I’ve ever done, all my ingredients to my secret sauce. It’s been a great ride, and now I teach other businesses how to embrace the power and the vision that is content, which I feel is the greatest sales tool in the world.

Jay: So you were sort of the swimming pool version of Gary Vaynerchuk, where he built his wine business just telling people what he thought about wine and creating tons of free content. You did the same thing in the swimming pool industry.

Marcus: You know, it’s really funny because when people hear me speak, the first time I ever spoke somewhere big, a bunch of people kept saying to me, “You’re like the Gary V of the swimming pool industry,” because we have a similar funky style. We’re really off the cuff and use wacky words and stuff. We come from these industries like how did that happen, type of stuff. But yeah, it’s similar to Gary, and I like Gary a lot. So I take that as a complement. But yeah, and for me it’s great because whenever I hear people talk about marketing, I can relate to it because I’ve been in the trenches. I still own the company, and I just have two business partners that run it. But for me now, it’s a playground where I can experiment all day long with content.

Jay: And you are a big proponent of HubSpot. I know you use HubSpot software. That’s kind of one of the backbones of the things that you use, and you’re familiar with that software. We talk a lot on this show about the difference between the wizard and the wand, and that right now, we’re in a weird space in content and social where a lot of companies believe that the software is their salvation. How do you feel about that?

Marcus: HubSpot has never saved any business. HubSpot certainly didn’t save me. HubSpot is as good as the person that’s swinging the hammer, because that’s really what HubSpot is. It’s a hammer that is effective when used properly. Unfortunately, just like anything else, you can take a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. Same thing with HubSpot. This is the thing about HubSpot. Ultimately its greatest value is the fact that I can sit here and say that because I’ve been blogging and I can track the leads that I have gotten specifically from my blog, my blog has made me over $2 million in sales. That’s why I like HubSpot, because we’re constantly having this ROI mystic debate thing going on, which drives me nuts. Usually we’re debating ROI because most people don’t have proper analytics. I know you use Infusionsoft and I know you have analytics there, too, because we want to be able to track the stuff that we’re doing. Just like somebody came to me today and said, “Yo, Marcus, is PPC good?” I’m like, “PPC is good if you’re making money with it. But if you’re not tracking it, you won’t know that. So the first thing is are you tracking your PPC? Can you tell me how many customers you’ve actually gotten from PPC?” If not, we’ve got to change something up here really, really soon because we have a major break in our ability to close that loop. And everybody’s got to be able to close that loop, man.

Jay: Yeah, and that is the nice thing about that particular platform is that you can get end-to-end analytics.

Marcus: Huge for me, man.

Jay: A lot of times I feel like the challenge for people who believe in the ROI of social and content and believe that ROI is possible is that unless you come out of a analytics background, the way Eric does and the way I do, you’ve got to be your own middleman a lot of times.

Marcus: Yeah, and here’s the thing that people have got to understand about Google. Google tells us traffic, but Google doesn’t tell us names of people.

Eric: So we’ve been working on some content at Argyle about two types of marketers – oceanographers and fishermen. Some marketers are oceanographers that track ocean currents and tidal patterns and things of that nature and other marketers don’t really care about. They care about the fish that they’re trying to catch. You just sort of said exactly that, Marcus, in that Google Analytics is going to tell you how much the water’s rising and falling, but it’s not going to tell you if the big fish is in your neck of the woods or not.

Marcus: Oh, you’re so right. There’s a magic behind writing a blog article and being able to say definitively I know this one article in the last two years has made me at least $150,000 in sales. Until companies catch that vision and they’re starting to use some type of software that allows them to do that, I think content marketing in social media is going to get a bad name, because I can sit here right now and say how much money I have made, minimum, that I’ve been able to track because I can’t track it unless somebody’s filled out the form. But once they have filled out a form, then I can track everything from that point on. And I can sit here and say from the swimming pool perspective or from The Sales Lion or anything else like that, I can say, okay, PPC has made me this much. Organic search has made me this. In fact, breaking down organic, this blog article has made me this because this keyword is what it ranks for and thus I know it goes back to that particular blog article on and on Facebook, Twitter. All those things, I can say how much money they’ve made my particular company at a minimum, because what we can’t track is phone calls to the office. That’s the one thing we can’t really track and say, okay, they called me…

Jay: Well, you could. You could put a phone number on there.

Marcus: Right. The problem is… yes, you can. That’s a very good point. Most companies don’t do that, and that is the other way to deal with that, Jay. But most don’t do that. And sometimes when we ask them on the phone, “How’d you hear about us,” they give us the wrong information.

Eric: Yeah, I don’t know.

Marcus: Yeah. They say the radio and I haven’t been on the radio in eight years. You know what I mean?

Jay: Right, right. Precisely. I’m glad you mentioned keywords. You are very straightforward about creating content that answers customer questions and sort of giving away what you know and things of that nature. Basically, taking the sum total of your expertise and giving it away for free one post at a time has been very successful. How much do you think about high efficacy search terms and SEO and rankings before you create posts?

Marcus: I do think about it, but I think about it in this: Has somebody ever asked me the question? Okay, that’s about the extent of it. And as soon as I know that they’ve asked me the question, then I know that merits being a title to a blog post. Because if somebody’s asked you the question, a thousand people have searched that very same question online. It used to be 10 years ago when we were figuring out search, Jay, it was “pools”. And then five years into it, we might have typed in “fiberglass pools,” and now we type in stuff like “what is the best type of fiberglass swimming pool if you live in Virginia”, right. So we’ve learned how to search differently. And so all I did, my only strategy-and for the first two years, I never used a keyword suggestion tool, because I very, very passionately feel that if we are great listeners, our customers are the best keyword tool that we could every possible use.

Here’s the thing. If people are asking you the question in your business and that answer is not on your website, I think you’re very, very flawed because we have been trained by Google that if we go to a site and we’re searching for something, Jay, and it ain’t there, we’re gone, dude. If I’ve got a question I can’t find, I’m gone. And basically, it’s almost like the teacher that’s not calling on the student in class that keeps raising his hand. It’s crazy to me that we see that everywhere. So SEO works well when you are specifically answering specific questions the way that your specific consumers ask those things. Not like we think them, not with our silly acronyms, but exactly like they say them. Then I think, honestly, I think we make SEO out to be much more of a science than it is. I think truly giving those great specific answers is the only long-term solution to every single Google update from now until the end of time.

Jay: Well and they’ve certainly said that their direction, and the last two or three updates have pushed them this way, is that search needs to be conversational. It used to be you have to do search for Google and, by the way, also for people. But Google has very much moved in the direction of rewarding natural language and rewarding natural content, which I think is a boon for everybody. Eric, you’d agree, I presume?

Eric: Yes, indeed.

Marcus: Well, I see this all the time and people get on me like I’m talking Matrix language, but I feel like Google is going to be smarter that humans in terms of creating search quality, content quality down the road. Now I don’t know how they’re going to do it. But my feeling is that they are going to be able to do that, and so when I write, that’s the only thing I think about. I’m not thinking about all these other things that we see so many SEOs or content marketers think about. Because I think, although it might work for the next six months or it might work for the next six years, there’s going to be a day when that junk I was doing that wasn’t really legitimate, it’s going to come back and bite me. Just like we see all the time these companies freaking out. It’s just like with the recent update and you saw all these people that had been using these link building tools that were supposedly white hat. I mean, come on people. I mean, if it’s a link building tool, automatically it’s black.

Jay: By definition, not white.

Marcus: Yes. It’s black. Let’s call a spade a spade here.

Jay: Well, let me ask you this. Being an old school sort of SEO myself and Eric has done a lot of online direct marketing as well, what would you say to people who posit the notion that Google and the nature of search is going to wane in importance and our relationships will bridge that gap? So that eventually, let’s fast forward three years, Google drives a heck of a lot less traffic than it ever did and Facebook now drives a heck of a lot more because instead of asking Google who’s the best builder of swimming pools in Virginia for fiberglass, we’re going to ask our friends.

Marcus: I don’t think that’s going to happen, personally. Here’s what I see. This is just me, and I’m going to write about this here soon. I see a future of two types of search engines. I see a search engine that is social driven like Google and where it’s going, and I see somebody else that’s going to come up and be old Google, which is not going to be so social, which is going to be purely just great content based on the algorithm. That might sound very unromantic. But see, it bugs me. I’m the type of guy, I actually don’t want to see what all my friends are choosing when I do searches.

Jay: You don’t want +1 s.

Marcus: I log out on specific searches. I see the day when we have two types of search engines, and I think what, in many ways, is Google’s greatest advance right now could be their biggest downfall for inviting a potential second party-which we don’t have a two-party system right now in search. I think we will have a two-party system for general search engines, because Yahoo and Bing don’t count to me. They haven’t made enough ground.

Eric: So Marcus, there is a company called DuckDuckGo, kind of like Duck Duck Goose, but DuckDuckGo. And they just raised a ton of money from Union Square Ventures, and their entire premise is we don’t track you. It’s a high quality search engine you don’t login to. There’s no bubble of sort of tailored results for you. It’s just old school Google.

Marcus: That’s really cool Eric. And I’m glad you bring that up because, honestly, that’s how I like to roll online when I’m researching. Not everybody’s like that. If I really want to know what my friends think, then I am going to go to Facebook. I am. But there’s always going to be certain things, I think-in my opinion-that we don’t do so socially online. Like I have articles on swimming pools that have been read hundreds of thousands of times, but they’ve been tweeted twice and liked once or twice. It’s like people look at them, and they think just based on those share numbers that the articles stink and they’ve made me hundreds of thousands of dollars because…

Jay: You need to go back and get the old school hit counter on the bottom.

Marcus: Yeah, right. Hit counter on the bottom. Classic.

Jay: That’s social proof 1.0, baby.

Marcus: It’s different for everybody. I’m not saying social’s not important. But for certain industries, I don’t think it’s a huge metric.

Jay: In certain categories, crowds are not wise. Other than you, the number of friends that I have who could tell me anything about swimming pools numbers one -you and one other guy. So I could ask all the people I know on Facebook, and I’m going to get not a lot of good information back.

Marcus: Because we don’t practice buying pools until we actually own a pool, right? So most people, they don’t have anything to say about it and we’re not exactly bragging to our friends, I just spent 50K on a pool. So we don’t tweet it out, “Yo, I just dropped 50 grand but I own a swimming pool now.” Most people, unless we’re a professional athlete trying to show our crib, we just don’t do it that way, and that’s why it’s not a very social industry yet. It’s more of a search industry, old school style. And I think there’s always going to be a place for that. But honestly, I’m saying all this stuff, dude. Three weeks from now, I could change my mind because that’s how fast we’re developing, and I think we’re all idiots, kind of.

Jay: You’re going to shut your blog down. You’re going to have a Lion Pinterest board and that’s it. Just different lions, that’s it.

Marcus: Oh man. Going off about that whole traffic thing you were talking about earlier. I’m like Pinterest has become way worse than StumbleUpon in terms of, you know, I have friends that hate it when they get stumbled because it just means that they got a huge…

Jay: A bunch of traffic they can’t convert?

Marcus: …that they can’t convert and drives them crazy and it kills like all their bounce rates and stuff like that. Pinterest, in a lot of ways, potentially does that. Not that I don’t see the value for it, but it’s clearly not the end all. And the quality right today of the Pinterest visitors, so far for many companies, hasn’t been that strong. I mean, let’s just be real. It might be at some point, not right now.

Jay: Awesome. Eric, any questions from you, or are we going to Social Pros shout outs?

Eric: No, man. I’m interested to hear what Marcus reads.

Jay: Social Pros shout outs.

Eric: Shout outs.

Jay: From Mr. Marcus Sheridan. Go.

Social Pros Shoutout

Marcus: Okay. I’m just going to mention two for you that nobody’s ever heard of probably.

Eric: Google and Pinterest.

Marcus: Yeah, Google, who clearly love me now, right? Okay, this is outside of the box. There is a company called Block Imaging. All right. And I don’t even have the URL. Just type in Block Imaging blog. They sell refurbished medical imaging equipment. Here’s what’s special about this company. They have about 70 employees, and 40 of those employees are active on their blog. So they have a true culture of blogging within the company. I think that’s beautiful. And they’re Block Imaging – I know about them, they’re one of my clients. But I think they’re so amazing and I love their story. And to me, they get this whole idea of what it is a culture of content marketing.

There’s another one that most people probably haven’t heard of. I think he’s a big up and comer and his name is Ryan Hanley. He comes from the insurance industry. He is passionate. He is a great guy and he is now starting to talk about marketing. So kind of like Gary V of wine, he is a passionate guy from the insurance industry.

Jay: He’s the Marcus Sheridan of insurance.

Marcus: In some ways, yeah, he is. I think he’s a great young guy, and I think he’s going to be big time because he has the passion to carry the day.

Jay: Awesome. Good shout outs.

Marcus: Thank you.

Jay: Thank you very much for being here. Good stuff. Awesome. That’ll do it for Social Pros. Who do we have next week, Eric Boggs?

Eric: Next week on Social Pros, Maria from Marketo.

Jay: Oh, fantastic. Our friend, Maria from Marketo. That’s going to be great. Talk about content marketing, they’re all about the content marketing over there. Thanks as always to our sponsors, Eric’s company Argyle Social, data-driven social media management software used by none other than me, Jay Baer. Our friends at Infusionsoft, Jim Kukral from DigitalBookLaunch.com, and a big Social Pros welcome to our new sponsor Janrain, social sign-in and a bunch of other wizardry. That’s it for this week. We’ll see you next time.

About the Jay Baer: Jay Baer is a hype-free social media strategist & speaker, tequila guy, and co-author of The NOW Revolution. Jay is the founder of http://convinceandconvert.com and host of the Social Pros podcast.

Social Pros 15 – Marcus Sheridan, The Sales Lion is a post from: Convince and Convert Blog: Social Media Strategy and Social Media Consulting

Is Your Local Optimization Landing You New Customers or Leaving Them Lukewarm? – #SESNY

Posted on 21. Mar, 2012 by Ashley Zeckman in Blog, Local SEO, mobile, Search Engine Strategies, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

google places optimization This afternoon I attended the panel presentation titled ” Local Myth Busters – Local Optimization Facts Proven or Debunked” which featured four very knowledgable panelists who provided a great mix of instruction and high level tactics. This session was very focused on Google Places and finding a way to stand out from your competition.

If you are responsible for local marketing or would like to begin implementing a local/mobile marketing strategy these are some tips you don’t want to miss. Below I have included what I considered to be highlights from the presentations.

Traditional SEO & Citations: Andrew Beckman (@Andrew_Beckman)

When implementing traditional SEO you’re on the hunt for backlinks. When deploying a local search strategy you want to populate your “place” data among different channels in a cohesive way. Citations (or mentions of your business) are key for ranking algorithms from search engines like Google. How can you determine the value of a particular citation?

Page rank of the sub domain citation
Content and keyword density on the page
Back links to the page
Frequency of crawl on the sub URL where citation exists

Traditional SEO tactics are becoming a more important signal for local universal results. When deploying a local strategy its important that you properly optimize the following:

URL structure
Title tags
Internal citation contact info)
Targeted phrases in content
Back links with anchor text
Deep linking to location pages

Categories, Ratings and Reviews, Microdata: Benu Aggarwal (@MilestoneMktg)

Consistency is key when optimizing local pages and listings across the Internet. According to Benu the 7 most important fields to optimize include:

Site URL
Categories
Business details
Reviews on third party sites
Ratings on Google Places
Photos and videos
Events and coupons

User generated content in the form of reviews can have a very positive or negative effect on a company place page. Don’t think that reviews have a significant impact? Reviews can affect your content in the following ways:

Encourages user interaction
Supplies fresh content to search engines
Reviews signal trust to search engines
Enables users to recommend your business on any channel

Optimizing Images & Videos: Steve Yeich (@localsplash)

Steve provided a great series of tactics and instructions for easily optimizing your images and videos on the Internet. By optimizing your photos before uploading to Google Places you will improve your local SEO efforts.

Photo Optimization Tips

Add all 10 photos allowed on Google Places
Update these photos periodically
Save your photo with a file name that includes your business name and a keyword

Google Coupons

Implementing Google Coupons will translate into specials for your company appearing in search results. Along with improved SEO there are other benefits to implementing a Google Coupon strategy such as:

Creating more complete business information
Helps your business stand out in SERP
Facilitates more precise tracking of ROI

Mobile vs. deskptop ranking factors: Jeff Cambbell (@CJeffCampbell)

Optimizing your business for local search can be a lot of work all in its own. On top of that you also have to consider the fact that many of your customers are using a mobile device to find your information. There are some attributes specific to mobile search which include:

Users must be in close proximity to the location in order to effectively interact
The completeness of your Google Places page is essential (especially for those using Google Maps on the iPhone)

According to Campbell there are very strong correlations between rankings in Google smartphone search results. By properly optimizing your place page you will encourage more repeat visits.

Key Takaways

Optimize your place profile
Find out relevant unique categories
Optimize content on your website social network links
Facilitate your customer in leaving revewis on your site and third party sites
Optimize and maximize your use of photos and videos for Google Places
Consider the device your customers are using

What do you think? Have you fully maximized the use of your Google Places page as part of a local strategy? What have you found has worked really well, and what hasn’t? Be sure to follow us for information during the conference: @toprank, @leeodden, @azeckman, @bslarsonmn.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. |
Is Your Local Optimization Landing You New Customers or Leaving Them Lukewarm? – #SESNY | http://www.toprankblog.com

Voice Computing Puts the Words Back in Your Mouth

Posted on 13. Mar, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, Guest Posts, mobile, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

Guest post by Tim Hayden, co-founder and CMO of 44Doors, a mobile SaaS and consulting firm based in Austin, Texas.

As tens of thousands of technophiles rolled into Austin last week, many of them pondered the possibilities of voice search and interactive voice response. The week prior in New York, I had a number of Inbound Marketing Summit attendees awarding a victory to Apple, telling me that SIRI obviously is the clear winner by putting such technology into iPhone 4S users’ hands in late 2011 (and now the iPad, in version 3). If playing with your phone to gain answers to questions such as, “where do we bury the bodies?” and “which restaurant is best for a Catholic on Fridays during Lent?” means game-over, then maybe they have a point.

Truth be known, there is something much more transformational happening with smartphone proliferation than a quirky mobile search and voice-to-text functionality. At large, we are moving away from traditional computing and typing, and we are regaining our voice.

Can You Hear Me Now?

Our push-button lives on touchscreen devices have us typing less already. We can navigate our way through directional information and answers in our favorite mobile apps, and through a simple Bluetooth connection we can dial a number and send a text just by “talking to” our cars. Just think about the other 50% of Americans who will purchase their first smartphone over the next two years, who will be liberated to leave their desks and enjoy a day on-the-go in physical meetings and doing as they wish with spare time gained beyond the office.

The evidence is all around us that voice and face-to-face communication are the natural, preferred ways for us to communicate. I can all but guarantee that this shift back to a more “human” way of communication will surely disrupt social media and everything we know today about marketing…faster than we can plan around it.

5 Trends in Voice Computing

Here are five developing trends in technology that will shape the next leap in real human communication:

Face-to-face mobile conversations: while Apple’s FaceTime may have been the torchbearer, you will be hard-pressed to find a smartphone without a camera on each side to ensure you don’t blink when telling your wife you are working late.
Web Meetings: whether you’ve hung out on Google+ or used your webcam to pitch a client with GoToMeeting, it has never been easier to switch a simple chat to a “look me in the eyes” conversation.
“In-Person” Experiences: whether it is a full wall or a large format monitor, Cisco TelePresence is changing the way remote board meetings, court depositions and daily huddles are being hosted, many times thousands of miles separating attendees.
The rise of the “undevice”: if you thought Microsoft Xbox 360 was all about games, fitness and Netflix, just wait until you are running Windows 8 on that same console with Kinect, and only your voice and your gestures can dial up Grandma and share videos of the family dog without holding a handset, remote or keyboard (Remember that Microsoft shell out ~$9B USD for Skype, the first to master video over IP?).
Future-tense social media: What began as predictive analytics to help advertisers intercept your next Facebook check-in has now become a new form of accountability between friends to be where they state they will be at the time they said they’d be there. The active practice of proving you’re good on your word with apps such as Forecast actually encourages physical exchanges and experiences. After all, isn’t that what make social media truly social?

The first typewriter landed on a desk in the late 1800s, and we have been upright and walking for more than 4,000,000 years. Our “evolution” to stop typing, and dare I predict we almost stop text conversations entirely, should come as no surprise to any of us over the next decade.

What have you noticed recently that shows you are regaining your voice?

The Key to Social Media Success is Understanding Your Audience

Posted on 21. Feb, 2012 by Ashley Zeckman in Blog, content marketing, mobile, Online Marketing Summit, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media, social media monitoring

What are customers saying about your brand?

I recently attended a great presentation by Taylor Pratt (@taylorpratt) of Raven Tools at OMS in San Diego. He focused on the importance of using content marketing for improved social engagement.

TopRank has been a long time and well-recognized advocate for the notion of customer centric content marketing. Over the years we have seen SEO, social media, and content marketing industry change and grow at a rapid rate, so now more than ever marketers must create content to meet customer needs in order to execute a successful online strategy. The social media game is not only evolving but the way that our audience consumes this information is constantly changing.

In fact, a study by NM Incite (a Nielsen/McKinsey Company) found that 2 in 5 social media users are accessing their social platforms from their mobile devices.

As additional devices are released on the market content marketers should be aware of these trends and create optimized content not only for computers, and Internet enabled devices, but for their customers as well.

How Do Your Customers Access Social Media?

Pratt also provided some valuable information on the different cycles that content marketers should go through in order to effectively target new customers.

Discovery

Any time that you launch a new client what is your first step? I’m going to bet that discovery is typically your first step post sale (or pre-sale). It is essential that you take a similar approach with your own company when launching a new social media campaign. Some of the key items you should be looking for when running your initial discovery might include:

Brand mentions
Product mentions
Keyword mentions
Competitor mentions
Influencer mentions

It is also recommended that you begin determining which social sites you should participate in, key influencers you want to get in front of, and topics that are trending or popular.

Listening

After you have discovered what is currently being said about your brand and your industry it’s time to really begin listening. Attempting to jump head first into the deep end will not produce the results you are looking for. Begin by tracking how your customers are using social media. Are they sharing particular pain points or problems? Are they looking for tips or advice in a certain way? It is imperative that you interact with your customers in the same way that they interact with everyone else. You may also want to determine:

Where are they participating?
What are they already saying about you?
What is their activity level on each social network?

Planning

Pratt shared a very insightful formula for the Planning phase of the process. First you want to identify your business objectives. This could be anything from improving your customer service to generating more sales. Other objectives might include:

Improve brand sentiment
Generate brand advocates
Increase your brand reach
Reduce your sales cycles
Improve your product reviews or ratings

The second step involves identifying your organization’s value add. Work to determine what sort of words your customers or potential customers are using when they mention your company.

Finally you need to define your level of commitment. How often do you plan on interacting? What steps must you take in order to create an engaging social media strategy?

Execution

When implementing your social media campaign it is very important that you as marketers consider how it will align with your other online marketing strategies. The convergence of SEO, social media, and content marketing is no longer an option, it is a necessity.

Measurement

When beginning to measure your brand awareness there are four particular KPI’s to keep in mind.

Brand recognition
Share of voice
Engagement
Reach

A recent report by the Altimeter Group provides specific formulas for calculating each of the KPI’s listed above.

Although there are quite a few steps involved in creating a customer centric social media strategy it is well worth the effort. Have to fear, there are many reputation management and social media engagement tools at your disposal. Some require a monthly cost while others are at no charge. Some of the tools available on the market today include:

Brands Eye
Sysomos
Trackur
Social Mention
UberVU (Raven Tools offers monitoring using UberVU)
Sprout Social
Radian6

Remember, one of the keys to a successful social media campaign is asking questions. The more you know about your current and potential customers, the easier it will be to engage them online.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. |
The Key to Social Media Success is Understanding Your Audience | http://www.toprankblog.com

Top Online Marketing Books for 2012

Posted on 28. Dec, 2011 by AHall in B2B, Blog, Book Reviews, content marketing, mobile, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media

The New Year will soon be here and we are looking forward to continuing to learn from some of the top marketing minds on the web about the strategies and tactics that will shape online marketing efforts in 2012 and beyond. To help you get a jump start, I have compiled a list of books coming out in 2012 that cover a range of online marketing topics including: mobile, social media, content and search engine marketing. Enjoy.

[Note from Lee: We didn't include second editions, re-releases in paperback or books that didn't have cover images uploaded yet.]

Mobile, Local, Location Based Marketing

Mobile Marketing Book

Mobilized Marketing: Drive Sales, Engagement, and Loyalty Through Mobile Marketing (Wiley) by Jeff Hasen

Jeff Hasen, CMO of mobile marketing forerunner Hipcricket, provides timely mobile strategies and tactics leveraging his experience from more than 130,000 past campaigns. As mobile marketing continues to move to the forefront of the marketing world, the insight Hasen provides into mobile optimization, budgeting, and measurement should prove to be indispensable in 2012.

Location Based Marketing Book

Go Mobile: Location-Based Marketing, Apps, Mobile Optimized Ad Campaigns, 2D Codes and Other Mobile Strategies to Grow Your Business (Wiley) by Jeanne Hopkins and Jamie Turner

Go Mobile offers a step by step guide for mobile marketing in 2012. It includes practical campaign instructions in order to develop a mobile website, deploy SMS for business, utilize QR codes, leverage mobile apps and more. One can also benefit from strategic instructions to use location based marketing in order to build your customers base and how to integrate social media into mobile campaigns.

Search & Social Media Marketing

Social Media Intelligence: Extracting Knowledge from the Fire Hose of Conversations (Que) by Sally Falkow

Upcoming in June of 2012, Social Media Intelligence illustrates how to use the leading social media analytics tools in order to gauge the effectiveness of social media marketing and make strategic decisions. Sally Falkow will guide you in moving from reactive brand monitoring to proactive information gathering in order to take advantage of business opportunities. This is a great read for those looking to progress from just doing social media to using it as an effective piece of their marketing strategy.

Google+ for Business: How Google’s Social Network Changes Everything (Que) by Chris Brogan

The much buzzed about Google+ seems likely to have a big impact on search in 2012. Author, Chris Brogan, discusses how businesses should be taking advantage of the newest social network and defines those strategies and tactics to use for business.

Content Marketing

Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customer by Integrating SEO, Social Media, and Content Marketing (Wiley) by Lee Odden

TopRank Online Marketing CEO Lee Odden helps companies develop an optimized and socialized content marketing strategy to attain new levels of customer acquisition and engagement in 2012. Balancing the practical with the innovative, Optimize is ideal for those marketers that want a more effective content marketing strategy that wins and retains more customers, builds thought leadership and dominates the competition. Scheduled for release mid-March 2012.

Content is Currency - Content Marketing Book 2012

Content is Currency: Developing Powder Content for Web and Mobile (Nicholas Brealey Publishing) by Jon Wuebben

Already receiving great reviews, Content is Currency, by Jon Wuebben delivers practical instructions and step by step guides to manage content through four key phases: Creation, Optimization, Distribution and Curation. This book is a great opportunity for business owners and marketers to understand how to create content which will engage their audience and drive results.

B2B Marketing

The B2B Social Media Book: Become a Marketing Superstar by Generating Leads with Blogging, LinkedIN, Twitter, Facebook, Email, and More (Wiley) by Kipp Bodnar and Jeffrey L. Cohen

The B2B Social Media Book is the ultimate reference guide for B2B marketers looking to expand their knowledge of social media strategy and contribute to their business growth. Readers will discover actionable items for leveraging blogs, LinkedIN, Facebook, Twitter and more to form the cornerstone of their B2B marketing strategies.

B2B Digital Marketing

B2B Digital Marketing: Using the Web to Market Directly to Businesses (Que) by Michael Miler

B2B Digital Marketing looks to be a great resource for B2B marketers interested in learning how to sell directly to other businesses using digital marketing. Leading with a broad summary and then diving into individual channel tactics for strategy, implementation and measurement, B2B Digital Marketing is another good guide for those looking for a B2B marketing overview.

There are many books publishing in 2012 that promise to introduce us to new ways to strategize, develop online marketing plans and deploy campaigns across a variety of channels. What books are you anxiously awaiting in 2012?

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