Marketingsherpa Blog

Search engine marketers have based entire careers on improving rankings. They fight tooth and nail to reach the top of the page, win more traffic, and push all their competitors down a notch.

But what if you could get more traffic by pushing your competitors down a few more notches? Or pushing them down on more keywords? By focusing on universal search, you can do just that.

Search engines do not strictly deliver links to webpages anymore. They deliver links to images, videos, products, news and more. This is called “universal search.” Just check out the results from this recent Bing search for “storage shed.”

Click to enlarge

This page links to five different types of content. If you become a master at creating and search-optimizing this content, then you can claim not just higher rankings — but more rankings.

Here are some key categories of content and tactics pulled from MarketingSherpa research: Read more…

At B2B Summit in Boston, I was having dinner with MarketingSherpa Research Analyst Jeff Rice, and I asked him, “What question did you receive most often on the LEAPS Certification Email Workshop tour?” I was expecting it would be about relevance or deliverability, list building or list segmentation. What he said really caught me off guard. …

“Our biggest question is from nonprofit marketers. They want to know what B2B and B2C tactics are effective for them.”

Excellent question. Here are a few tactics that B2B and consumer marketers use regularly that can work especially well for nonprofits. …

Read more…

I am going to take a shot at a B2B marketing taboo that I and my colleagues encounter on a regular basis. I certainly do not expect universal support, but I freely invite you to speak your mind in the comments.

While at the MarketingSherpa B2B Summit in Boston last month, Jay Baer tore the robes off of this taboo and forced the audience take a good look at it. Here’s what he said:

“I have done a fair amount of speaking at B2B conferences and every once in a while someone comes up to me … they say ‘well, that was great, but you use some examples that are B2C.’ Get over it! I’m going to use some examples in this presentation that are B2C. I am going to offend your territorial sensibilities. You’re making way too big a deal out of this.”

Baer was speaking about social media marketing. I agree with his sentiment (although “get over it” is not the exact phrase I’d use) and believe this concept applies to channels beyond social media. Read more…

Sure, the economy is a bit uncertain. But companies are still looking for high-performing marketing professionals. I know because they post these job openings almost daily on our marketing job listings page.

In fact, I recently came across a shocking bit of data in The Wall Street Journal. From my experience, jobs in advertising and marketing tend to be the most sensitive in an uncertain economy. In a recession, most CEOs seem to cut the marketing budget as step #1 (Step #12, corporate jet).

However, according to SimplyHired, marketing managers is “where the work is,” as it’s listed as one of the occupations listed as having many openings.

I’m not personally familiar with this metric, but marketing managers is listed as having 108 job openings for every 1,000 people employed. That is much more than the “few openings” for mental-health counselors and preschool teachers, with only two openings per 1,000 employed. It’s even more than registered nurses, which I always see recruitment ads for and is widely regarded as desperately in need of more talented people (82 per 1,000).

Intuit is one such company hiring marketing professionals right now. So, I sat down with Leslie Mason, a Senior Recruiter at the computer software company, to help give you an inside scoop about what companies are looking for when they fill these plentiful marketing job openings.

Read more…

You have likely experimented with social sharing buttons in your emails. You know, they’re the buttons readers click to share your emails on Facebook, Twitter or another social network.

And how’s that working for you?

All kidding aside, many email marketers struggle to get the audience to use these buttons. As you can see in the chart below from the MarketingSherpa 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, “social sharing buttons” are one of the least effective tactics you can use to build your list.

Read more…

Quick checklist, B2B marketers. Do you have:

• Customers?
• Prospective customers?
• Employees?
• Competitors?
• A story to tell?

Then, according to Jay Baer, “Congratulations, you have the raw materials for social media.” And he makes a good point. After all, some B2B marketers think of social media as more of a consumer marketing tactic, and many B2B marketers think they can’t learn anything from their B2C brethren.

But at last week’s MarketingSherpa B2B Summit in Boston, Jay made a very convincing argument for B2B social media. But he didn’t just aim to shift the audience’s paradigm; his keynote was replete with actionable advice, including ideas on how to tackle one of the most daunting tasks of all, measuring social media ROI.

He also talked about search and social going together like peanut butter and jelly. Jay gave the audience examples on how they could be a “digital dandelion,” spreading their content through the digital world like dandelion seeds on a windy day.

After his keynote (and once he was finished signing books for his marketing groupies), videographer Luke Thorpe and I cornered Jay on the expo floor and peppered him with a few questions about some of his more eye-opening ideas …

Read more…

My reporter antenna was humming during the presentation yesterday from Jay Baer, President, Convince & Convert, at the MarketingSherpa B2B Summit in Boston. I could write a blog post everyday for two weeks based on Baer’s advice — and it encompassed only a single hour of the day packed with insights.

Baer methodically destroyed “the seven myths of B2B social media,” the first two of which directly addressed why B2B companies need to care about social media. Read more…

Like many marketers, I am not a lawyer. So when I see terms and conditions, my eyes glaze over and I shoot an email to our excellent in-house counsel.

However, if you conduct a campaign on a third-party site, you are at the mercy of their rules.

Take Facebook, for example. According to a recent whitepaper from Bulbstorm, “Run afoul of the guidelines, and your page could be shut down by Facebook at a moment’s notice … Facebook accepts reports of violations, and no one watches your page more closely than your competitors. They’d love nothing more than to see your campaign fail. So, follow the guidelines and don’t give Brand X a reason to tattle.”

But if you’re not a lawyer, following these guidelines to the letter is easier said than done. So, to help you avoid the LSAT, I grabbed Matt Simpson, Director, Interactive & Client Services at Bulbstorm, a developer of Facebook applications, and asked him a few questions that will keep you on the sunny side of Mark Zuckerberg and his team …

Read more…

Back in my agency days, my art director, Steve Moran, and I penned a tongue-in-cheek ode to stock photography books that went something along the lines of …

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I want to live a stock photo lifestyle
Attend meetings with happy people smiling around obsolete computers
And then jet off home to page 157
To laugh with my family during the golden hour

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While a songwriter I am not, we were joking about how unlike reality the stock photo images are. And, while search on a stock image website has replaced stock photo books [Historical note for young marketers: Books were like websites printed on paper], one thing hasn’t changed – stock photos still seem phony.

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Who are these people?

Especially in an age of social media. So while marketers might have gotten away with stock photos in print ads and on billboards for many years, we’ve become so accustomed to seeing real people on the same platform you are communicating your marketing messages.

In fact, I’m always momentarily surprised when I see my own picture on a website in the comments section – because I’m still logged into Facebook and that site uses Facebook Connect.

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Phony stock photo people raise a red flag since we are all now on the Social Web.

- Read more…

“Leaders establish the vision for the future and set the strategy for getting there; they cause change. They motivate and inspire others to go in the right direction and they, along with everyone else, sacrifice to get there.”

– John Kotter, professor, Harvard Business School

Are you a true marketing leader?

Does your marketing department have a well thought-out strategy with clear marching orders? Hopefully that question is a gimme, but here’s a harder one…

Have you set the strategy for your social media marketing?

Developing an effective and methodical social marketing strategy was the most frustrating challenge to social marketing effectiveness, according to the Marketing Sherpa 2011 Social Marketing Benchmark Report.

And for good reason. Social media marketing is a huge paradigm shift for most marketers. It is a change from the command-and-control days when marketers owned the airwaves and printing presses because they had the power of the purse.

Social media has democratized the means of communication. Now, every customer is also a publisher. And the best you can hope to do, as overused as this saying may be, is to join the conversation.

Social media strategy planning tool

Of course, that doesn’t mean that creating an effective social media strategy is impossible. And anything you invest resources in, even if you’re just incurring a soft cost like your own time, should have a plan of action designed to achieve a goal.

If you don’t know where you’re trying to get and what you need to do to get there, then why even bother? Read more…