Front Office Box Users » inbound marketing

Is Infotainment The New Sales Strategy

stevensreeves — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:52:19 +0000

As far back as I can remember selling has always been a combination of information and entertainment – with different emphasis on each depending on the circumstances.

Back in the 70′s

sales reps would have a cigarette allowance. They were expected to provide the “social glue” during meetings and expensed the cost. Later, in the 80′s and 90′s lunch was the big deal. Depending on the account this would be a pint and sandwich in the pub, or even three courses in an exclusive restaurant. Then of course there were the golf trips.

The information passed between the parties, in subtle ways. We didn’t recognise it but that was Infotainment.

Now

We have the same thing going on still. Only now it’s not cigarettes, or lunches, or golf games. It’s social media, networks, blogs, tweets, friends, followers, images, video, games, downloads, podcasts. When people talk about social media marketing they’re describing this paradigm where we get people’s attention with entertainment, and quietly pass on the information.

The big difference

between the old days and now is we no longer go out looking for prospects. They won’t see us, take our calls or read anything we send. We have to attract them to us. Just like store keepers we need to be where the customer is, with our wares displayed out front. And we need to talk about the weather, the sports, the news – entertaining the prospect while s/he quietly decides to do business with us.

Now we have to use a blog to impart the information. It’s our store front. We have to deliver our information in short sound bytes, and we have to entertain, with video and pictures and maybe games. Just having pages with even quality content isn’t enough anymore. We have to make the visit entertaining as well.

It seems to me every business, but especially the smaller kind, needs to offer that type of experience.

The more things change, the more they stay the same!

Enjoy the Movie.

Check Your Web Site Grade

stevensreeves — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 15:44:22 +0000

How does your site stand up against the competition?
How serious does Mr. Google treat it?
Is it doing everything it could for you?

Web sites are personal things. We all have our own perspective on what we want them to do, how much we’ll spend, and how good a job they’re doing. So how a site is performing probably only counts in the opinion of the owner.

Having said that some sites dramatically out-perform others in every metric – visits, page views, time on site, conversions, influence etc. The guys who run these sites work their socks off in a process of continuous improvement – a sort of Kaizen or Six Sigma. They’re doing that because they know every site can do better, regardless of its success.

Anybody who hasn’t paid a lot of attention to their site can get a fast, simple, free evaluation at Website Grader. All they need to do is submit a URL and an email address. In no time at all Website Grader comes back with a comprehensive report on the site with indications of how it’s performance might be improved.

I just ran an update on the Front Office Box site. Here’s a selection from the report:

” A website grade of 95/100 for frontofficebox.com means that of the hundreds of thousands of websites that have previously been evaluated, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 95% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness. The algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over 50 different variables, including search engine data , website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others. The website frontofficebox.com ranks 89,550 of the 1,702,408 websites that have been ranked so far. “

Website Grader is a free, on-line service provided by Hubspot, the company defining Inbound Marketing so the rest of us can do a better job.

We aren’t using their software but do plan to, just as soon as we can free up some budget. In the meantime we have to do it the hard way.

The one disappointing part of the report is the criticism the readability of my content is poor –

“E. Readability Level : Advanced / Doctoral Degree
This score measures the approximate level of education necessary to read and understand the web page content. In most cases, the content should be made to be simple so that a majority of the target audience can understand it.”

I need to work harder at that

Authority Rules – It Certainly Does

stevensreeves — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 13:45:06 +0000

Rule Two: Don’t Sell… Teach

Many people think the main barrier to online marketing success is a lack of traffic. But it’s really a lack of trust. People love to buy stuff, but they hate to feel sold. So despite the fact that you’re building a website that will build your business, you need to concentrate on delivering value that builds authority.

Educational, tutorial-style content works online. It attracts links, it brings traffic, it builds trust, and it causes you to rank for relevant keyword-phrases in search engines. And all the while, you’re decreasing sales resistance, because after all… what is effective selling?

Selling is simply educating people about the benefits of doing business with you.

class=”posterous_quote_citation”>via authorityrules.com

For the newbie getting up to speed with Internet Marketing when the outer limits are accelerating is a daunting prospect.

The whole thing is moving from Keywords and Adwords to Content, Context, Influence and who knows what next.

Luckily there are people who generously share their experience. Unluckily there are also pretenders who claim expertise. The unhappy lot of the beginner is the hard yards of following both lots and, over time, figuring out who to believe on which topics.

Brian Clark and the team at Copyblogger just impress the hell out of me.

When it comes to explaining the new phenomena of selling through blogging with authority reinforced through engagement in social media these guys are the REAL THING.

This is a tiny extract from Brian’s free white paper Authority Rules. Having just read the extracts in the site I’ll happily confirm that authority does indeed rule – a fact which is self evident when you read Brian’s rules.

Posted via web from stevensreeves

Social Search Great News for Bloggers and Friends

stevensreeves — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:33:49 +0000

n the Front Office Box blog this morning we posted Not Google Social CRM referring to the announcement of Google’s Social Search. Google has also announced an agreement with Twitter to incorporate tweets in it’s Search results.

Now our Google profile will be connected to Twitter and Friendfeed activity (Friendfeed brings in just about everything including Facebook). When we Search Google we’ll also be searching our email contacts, “following” lists and “friends” plus the Twitter Firehose. Somehow our Google Profile will be like our Facebook Wall, plus the usual Search results.

It seems to me this is great news for those of us feeding Google’s content library, and bad news for the SEO types who’ve spent years trying to blindside the Search engine. Spammers don’t survive long in social media space. Quality contributions get recognised and promoted. Google gets to add a new level of quality control, real time news and trending topics to results for searchers. Anybody contributing to the good stuff will get more visibility to the same. And because Microhoo is chasing the game, Bing will offer the same.

To an extent it will also answer the “content” versus “engagement” debate.

With gurus like Gary Vaynerchuck and Mari Smith favouring the Facebook, Twitter engagement side and Chris Brogan, John Jantsch and Jason Falls leaning toward the content side, novices like me have been torn between the two.

Personally I’ve tended to concentrate on content, whilst maintaining a lower level of activity with engagement. That seems to suit our needs. But I can see lots of reasons for others to do the reverse, especially when their interest is consumer rather than business focused.

Now with Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed and a bunch of others offering search across all the places we might contribute ideas, or opinion, or news the argument is less relevant.

As long as we’re there, the guys will have us covered.

Forget Meta Keywords – Matt Cutts

stevensreeves — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:34:02 +0000

Maybe We Should Target Viral Instead

stevensreeves — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 18:23:11 +0000

You might be interested in today’s post over at Widespread Solutions – Learning from Going Viral

It tells the story of how a previously unsuccessful article suddenly went viral (in our terms at least).

Happily this may have solved a number of problems for me. Maybe I should target viral instead?

I’m getting a little stale writing about management/sales/systems – a change is as good as a rest they say.
I can explore ways social media allows somebody to build a presence in two dimensions – e..g Facebook Profile and Facebook Pages.
I can spend a little less time worrying about Mr Google.
I get to buy a new toy – a video camera.

And I’ll encourage all Front Office Box users to do the same, and do it here.

Let me know if you’d like to post something here – it’s a community resource and all contributions are welcome.

With Content Leading Sales in My Front Office

stevensreeves — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 14:20:01 +0000

We all know business isn’t like it used to be – more competition, more demanding customers, and less interest in our marketing. These all stem from the Internet.

Nowadays customers are more informed and more able to decide for themselves what they want. Old style power selling won’t work when the customer knows more than the sales guy.

Competition isn’t limited to businesses in the same town anymore. Anybody can do business anywhere. Our customers can find our competitors and vice versa.

Prospects have less time and are less open to interrupt marketing. Cold calls on the phone, door knocking, email blasts, snail mail brochures, networking – they all get us nowhere.

So what’s a guy to do? We still have to find people who need what we do, so they can pay us for doing it. My answer is Content Led Sales, but that’ll need some explanation. It’s a development on the concept of consulting led sales, adapting lessons learned from article marketing.

Consulting led sales worked well for us in the 90’s. We’d understand the prospects issues, define the requirement, explain how we’d use our resources to deliver that requirement and our experience to manage the client’s risk. The big advantage of the approach was it moved the conversation on from the product features/price comparison. The problem today with consulting led sales is access. If we can’t get to meet and engage the client we have no way of understanding the requirement.

Article Marketing – with articles attracting visitors to a site, where we’re displaying adverts – solves the problem of access. Visitors come to the site for information in the articles and get to see our targeted adverts. The limitations are a) this can be horribly expensive and unproductive at the same time and b) most people have an aversion to clicking sponsored ads. They’re searching the web for genuine insight, not adverts.

Content Led Sales combines both concepts, using articles published in web pages to answer generic customer issues and demonstrate how the associated product can be implemented to address them.

Lets look at a simple example, based on some personal experience of mine.

Some years ago I spent time working as a Caddie at Royal Dornoch Golf Club. The experience taught me a great deal about how golfers of different abilities could get the most enjoyment from their round. Obviously a twenty five year old scratch player would want different challenges to those sought by a seventy year old senior.

In my example of Content Led Sales I could write a series of blog posts about the course, the experience, the history, with some fun stories, and sell a download of my Caddie notes the player could carry with him/her on the course.

There are some interesting benefits to the customer:

They can anticipate their round with some fun reading.

They can get expert guidance tailored to their abilities during the round.

They can rent a cart with GPS yardage calculator and save the $75 regular Caddie fee.

They’d have something to add to their photos and other souvenirs for a richer memory of their round.

Convinced?

I am. I’d better start writing those Caddie notes and take the photos.

via frontofficebox.com

It seems to me this is the way everybody will need to sell in the future but I’d really like to get others views on the subject.

What do you think? Have I missed something?

Posted via web from stevensreeves

Don’t Pay for SEO Watch Mr Google Instead

stevensreeves — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 18:05:51 +0000

Search Engine Optimization used to be the secret sauce known only to a few magicians who understood the inner workings of the Google machine.

There’s an awful lot of rubbish talked by people trying to scam their way into our budgets, offering to get us Google Page 1 in twenty four hours.

But both Google and the publishing services have evolved making the SEO of yesteryear irrelevant.

If you’ve already bought the concept of selling by blogging, this video is going to be extremely valuable to you – Must Watch.

If you’re not yet into blogging it will at least arm you with lots of questions for when your web site company wants to charge you for SEO.

Enjoy the video.

Posted via email from stevensreeves

Bloggers Need To Engage Not Preach

stevensreeves — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 18:27:19 +0000

There are some places on the web, and usually the more popular ones, that leave me feeling somewhat uncomfortable. Some heavyweight thinking about why they do that eventually led me to conclude there’s far too much pontification and preaching going on.

The people I know run their own businesses. Most are consultants. They know about communicating with people, and know it isn’t with pontification and preaching. They aren’t going to waste their time being preached at.

The other thing is most of the stuff written by grown ups reads far too much like college dissertations. These might be grammatically correct, and might explain in detail every argument – but reading them is hard work.

The really engaging stuff is written by a small number of highly regarded individuals. One of those is Chris Brogan. In his post What Makes a Story Work he explains his own golden rules for publishing.

In the article Chris paints the background to his rules – the why and hows. As always the best way to understand is visit the post from the link, above.

You’ll want to visit the real thing when you’ve understood his golden rules:

Let them feel smart and included. Stories where we are introduced as “part of the group” or “in the know” help us get over our initial discomfort.
Give them a solid map. The only time readers shouldn’t know where they’re going is if they’re reading a mystery (or a Chuck Palahniuk novel). The rest of the time, start people off with a sense of where you’re going, how you’re going to get there, and tips on how they’ll know they’re done.
Reward them. If you’re producing material that’s longer in form, give your audience some kind of reward. This might be a checklist that lets them run off and do something with their partial knowledge. It might be some kind of acknowledgment that they’ve reached a next step. Whatever the case, if you’re challenging your readers, reward them. (Works in video games; works in other media.)
Respect their time. Brevity, friends. I point it out all the time. If you can say something with fewer words, do it. Okay?
Write about them, not you. Or, if you have to write about you (memoirs or biographies come to mind), give them something they can do to make meaning of what you’ve shared. One reason I loved WINNING by Jack Welch was that I felt I could use the stories as a better perspective of how corporations work. Make sure your media empowers your audience instead of toots your own horn. It’s how you make superheroes.

I’ll be embedding them in my own thinking from now on.

Why Blog When You’ve Got Facebook? (buildabetterblog.com)

Search Marketing Advice From Google

stevensreeves — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 17:39:50 +0000

In this video Matt Cutts is interviewed on a range of questions about ways small businesses can provide Google with quality information it can use in the search results it offers to users.

It’s great value for anybody new to the subject and re-sets a number of misconceptions more experienced might have.

Matt Cutts IS Google (smtusa.com)
Google AdSense With Matt Cutts Banners (seroundtable.com)