MarketingSherpa Blog

One of the most interesting things about life is that we change. Our interests change. Our habits change. Our jobs and locations change. So it goes without saying that our email subscribers will change. The question is whether you can change with them.

Now, I am not advocating that you launch a “singles” newsletter every time a subscriber gets a divorce. However, it can be helpful to make your email program flexible enough to accommodate subscribers’ changing needs.

How do you make your email program more flexible? You can start by having a good preference center that clearly explains your options. Here’s a good example from AAA (click this link to visit the full preferences page): Read more…

My first experience with a lead funnel was the IBM Signature Selling Methodology. I was struck with what a simple illustration this was to such a complex challenge – how do you get companies to buy expensive stuff and people to bet their careers on it?

While IBM’s SSM is essentially a sales tool, B2B marketers face the same challenges, and, because of the maddening complexity inherent in that simple question, a well thought-out funnel can be a useful planning tool to making sure you align all the many facets of sales and marketing you have to get right to close business.

Of course, once you map out your funnel, you’re not done. Like a good diet and exercise plan, you have to continue to optimize your funnel. To help you do just that, the MarketingSherpa team has put together the below infographic and has taken a funnel optimization approach to the content at B2B Summit 2011 in Boston and San Francisco.

“The infographic was developed from the results of our upcoming 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Study,” according to Jen Doyle, Senior Research Manager, MECLABS. “This study focused on identifying the most effective strategies and tactics for attracting and converting the modern B2B buyer, and benchmarking B2B marketing performance. It represents the scope of our study, which dissected all stages of the funnel, from lead generation to sales conversion.” Read more…

Lead nurturing is an important part of the longer B2B buying cycle. Not every lead generated is completely ready to become a customer.

Having a process in place that keeps that person in the buying cycle allows you stay visible and provides regular touch points for the nurtured lead. Most lead nurturing programs are very content-heavy and include phone calls and emails sent to the lead offering industry or company information they might find useful.

Lead nurturing by telephone is the more time-intensive effort. Phone calls also offer the opportunity to create a strong connection with the lead. It’s relatively easy to set up an automatic email send with a link to an interesting industry article, or with a white paper attached as a PDF. A phone call provides a great opportunity to discover more information about your lead’s buying cycle and what content they find most valuable.

When calling that lead, you may run into the same problem faced by any teleprospector conducting anything from cold call sales all the way to reaching out to customers — the gatekeeper.

That’s the person somewhere along the trail of that phone call takes that simply says, “No, you cannot speak with that person.”

So if you have a teleprospecting team making these nurturing calls for you, you must make sure that they have more than a great script. They must also have a successful process in place to actually get a hold of the decision maker or influencer.

Three tips to get past the gatekeeper

Facing that roadblock can be frustrating, but Brandon Stamschror, Senior Director of Operations for the Leads Group, MECLABS (the parent company of MarketingSherpa), has three tips to help you reach the person you want to speak with. As part of our Leads Group, he has plenty of experience picking up the phone and reaching out to prospects and leads. Read more…

Remember when you were a kid and thought your parents were getting you the greatest present in the world? Maybe you were expecting a BB gun or a pony, but they got you socks instead? Or some other lame present?

Think back to that exact moment when you saw the present and thought “How did they fit a pony into that tiny box?” Then you opened it, blew out your candles, and wished for new parents.

That feeling of crushing disappointment should remind you of what it is like to have your expectations overlooked. That memory can help you improve the quality of your email database.

When people opt-into your emails, they have expectations of what they will receive. Your subscribers will probably not throw a temper tantrum and hurl cake on the walls if you miss their expectations. However, they will be more inclined to ignore your emails and mark them as spam, which undermines your email marketing.

The solution is to very clearly explain your email program at the point of opt-in. This will correctly set people’s expectations. They can decide if your emails have something they want. If they want it, great; they can sign up and become active subscribers. If they don’t want it, great; they will not sign up and not add to the dead weight in your database.

Here’s a good example of how CIO, an IT-management publication, sets expectations for its newsletters (click the image for a larger view). Read more…

Reacting to an increasingly competitive marketing automation software field, last spring Eloqua created an independent content marketing department.

The idea was to bring the company into what VP of Content Marketing at Eloqua, Joe Chernov, described as the “marketing 2.0” world — the shift from transactional marketing to social/conversational marketing.

Early in the process of putting its content marketing strategy together, Eloqua decided to differentiate itself from the competition by putting a strong emphasis on visual appeal and design elements. This means releasing a steady diet of infographics, and putting more attention on design in live events and even the typically stodgy old white paper.

Build, buy or hire?

Because visual appeal was going to be a key aspect of all its content marketing efforts, getting the right people to execute the design work was very important to Eloqua. Typically two options are considered:

• Create from scratch or utilize an existing internal art/design department within the company
• Find a vendor and pay them by the piece for each design project.

Eloqua went a third direction. It found a design firm doing the work Eloqua was looking for and put them on retainer.

And even more unconventionally, Eloqua actually gives that firm — JESS3 — prominent credit for all its work.

Example of JESS3's work (click to enlarge)

Joe says, “We give them a shout-out for everything they create and I have gotten some pushback internally saying, ‘Look, we bought this.'”

He adds, “My view is, ‘Why not?’ JESS3 is a really hot company. And if somebody is putting their name on something, aren’t they going to do the very best work versus if their name wasn’t on it?”

Joe also says Eloqua is getting additional social media and other benefits by connecting their B2B brand to a design firm with a completely different following. When a content piece, blog post or press release goes out mentioning JESS3 alongside Eloqua, the design company’s fans share those links with an entirely new demographic. And that, Joe explains, gives Eloqua additional “top of the funnel” exposure.

Sometimes reality steps in …

And every once in a while something happens that puts an easy-to-see monetary value on taking the unconventional route. Unexpected changes in content marketing publishing plans can leave a team scrambling, and paying additional fees to contract-based creative talent.

I’ll let Joe explain just that occurrence with a recent major content piece, and how having JESS3 on retainer saved Eloqua time and money:

On June 28th the Social Media ProBook was declared final. Done. Complete.

The final version had been approved and it would be published the following day. I’d even made a quip to the team, “Not one more damn edit. I don’t care if there is a typo or two. We’ll survive. This project is ‘a wrap.’ It goes live tomorrow.”

Then, later that same day, Google+ launched. How could we go live with the “social media pro’s” book on social media without so much as mentioning Google’s long-awaited re-entry into the space? We couldn’t.

So I over-ruled myself, and we scrambled to insert a section on Google+, a section that had a major impact on page layout. Had JESS3 been paid by the project, this significant last-minute change may have been an “outside of scope” addition. After all, I had just emphatically declared the project complete. But given the retainer model, our relationship isn’t a series of discrete projects, but rather a constant hum of collaboration, output and refinement.

In the case of the Social Media ProBook, we refined it after it was “final” but before it was published, thanks, in large part, to the continuity that comes with a retainer.

Related Resources

Content Marketing: Four tactics that led to $2.5 million in annual contracts (Members library)

SEO Tactics Chart: Creating content is the most-effective tactic — here’s how to get started

Inbound Marketing: Unlock the content from your emails and social marketing

Content Marketing: Should you lure a journalist over to the “dark side?”

Content Marketing: Analytics drive relevant content, 26,000 new monthly visits to blog (Members library)

Content Marketing: Inbound strategy pulls in 25% more revenue, 70% more leads (Members library)

Marketing Strategy: Revenue-oriented approach leads to 700% two-year growth (Members library)

Lead Generation: A closer look at a B2B company’s cost-per-lead and prospect generation

Lead Generation: Testing form field length reduces cost-per-lead by $10.66

You’re in a meeting. The CEO asks the CFO what he thinks about something. The CFO tells the CEO what he thinks, and the CEO nods. He accepts the CFO’s answer.

The CEO then asks the head of product development about something, and the same thing happens. Acceptance. Respect.

Then, the CEO asks you something. You answer. The CEO starts questioning you, listens half-heartedly to your answer, then turns to others in the room and asks their opinion – about a marketing issue!

Why does this happen? Why don’t you just “get the nod?”

Because you are making a fundamental mistake. You are basing your advice – and staking your reputation – on what you know about marketing, rather than how well you know your customer.

Who is your customer? How did that customer find you, and why did he buy from you? What does that customer tell others about you? Even more important, what does the customer wish your company would do for him? That knowledge is your only true source of power. You may think you know these things, but in my experience, you’re probably missing the mark. Everyone else does.

I’m going to teach you how to change this “no nod” dynamic for good, in my keynotes at the B2B Summit in Boston and San Francisco. I’m going to teach you how to get the information you need from customers, present it to management so they “get it,” and make the kinds of decisions – strategic and tactical – that will not only give you the nod, but give you the kinds of results that every marketer wishes they could deliver.

But before I put these presentations together, I am going to “eat my own dog food” as we used to say in Silicon Valley. I practice what I preach.

I want to interview you

If you’re coming to a B2B Summit, I want to talk to you to make sure that what I present will address your very specific concerns, and will give you practical, take-it-back-to-the-office-and-make-it-work advice.

As I interview you, you will have the chance to experience a proven, customer-intelligence-gathering interviewing process first-hand, as the customer. This will help you when you start to put those new, “get the nod” practices into action in your own company – and in your career.

I will only need to talk to about ten of you, so if you want to be part of this process, let MarketingSherpa know now. I only need your name and email address; I’ll contact you to set up a phone appointment.

Thanks, and I am looking forward to our conversation.

Related Resources

Marketing Career: How to become an indispensable asset to your company (even in a bad economy)

The Indefensible Blog Post: Forget Charlie Sheen, here are 5 marketing lessons from marketers

The Data Vs Creativity Debate: Is successful marketing driven by analytics or art?

Guided by Buyers: Four tactics to create a customer-centric sales and marketing strategy (Members-Only Library)

We reported in MarketingSherpa’s 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report that the biggest challenge marketers’ face is targeting recipients with highly relevant content. I do not foresee this moving out of top tier of challenges due to the complexity of reaching a unique subscriber with the exact information they need to help he or she succeed

Crafting an email message that connects with the reader at the moment he or she choose to open the email is difficult. Nevertheless, the alternative of sending irrelevant emails puts a brand’s image, reputation and subscriber relationships at risk.

Relevancy is #1 Challenge

Today, some 70 million US consumers access their email inboxes through a mobile device, and subscribers’ bottomless appetites for multi-tasking, whether it be on a phone, tablet, or laptop during office meetings or in front of the television, make it impossible for companies to capture a reader’s full attention. To break through the clutter, email messages must be easy to engage with, relevant and clear.

A company that sends timely email messages with pinpoint accuracy will not only stand out from the competition, but may be the only brand to make it to their subscribers’ inboxes.

Webmail clients Hotmail and Gmail are using engagement metrics (open, delete, reply, etc.) to determine when and where email is delivered. B2B marketers also need to keep these trends in mind when planning their email campaigns. HubSpot found that 88 percent of email users do not have a separate work and home address. Many employees like to use webmail addressesto have the ability to share larger files over corporate email.

To meet customers’ rising demands for relevant and engaging communications, marketers can focus on three key elements:

• Content
• Segmentation
• Time

All three are essential. If one element is missing, the email can become irrelevant to the reader. Let me show you a recent first-rate email series that fell just short of the goal for my family.

Moving beyond a single data point for determining relevancy

A year ago, my wife joined the Chuck E. Cheese’s email club to receive coupons and free tokens for our kids. In exchange for her email address and dates of our children’s birthdays, we receive emails twice a month promoting their latest coupons or specials. The emails nicely tie into holidays, school calendars, or kid activities, like receiving a bonus of tokens for cleaning their rooms.

As you might expect, with the information of my children’s birthdays, Chuck E. Cheese’s sends a few emails leading up to the big day. About thirty days before my son’s birthday we received this email with the personalized subject line “[Parent’s name], Get 100 Bonus Birthday Tokens for [Child’s name].” I did not speak with Chuck E. Cheese’s, but from the numerous party invitations my kids have received from their classmates starting in preschool, these emails are very successful at enticing parents to book birthday parties at Chuck E. Cheese’s locations.

The week of my son’s birthday, my wife received an email with the subject line “Happy Birthday to [Child’s name] from Chuck E. Cheese’s..” The principle message was to wish my son a happy birthday and encourage us to stop in and play some games with complimentary tokens.

Close behind and at the top of the email was the copy “Haven’t planned a party yet for [Child’s name]? No worries, it’s never too late to reserve a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese’s. Last minute walk-in parties are always welcome, so come on in and celebrate!”

As you might agree, these are excellent emails containing personalized and relevant information, and are delivered at appropriate times leading up to a child’s birthday.

So why did they fall short of relevancy for my family? Well, I guess you would classify us as outliers; we planned our son’s birthday 90 days out at an indoor gymnasium. (Full disclosure: Chuck E. Cheese’s does send half-birthday email cards, but we are not that organized, and yes, in the copy, Chuck E. Cheese’s promotes walk-in half-birthday celebrations).

I am confident Chuck E. Cheese’s identified two groups of parents/guardians with their internal sales data: a profile of party purchasers that plan within 30 days and another that plans the week leading up to the event. Combined with the child’s birthdates collected during email registration, Chuck E. Cheese’s sends highly relevant and targeted communications with these two types of buyers.

Moving forward, Chuck E. Cheese’s may choose to expand their email program to cater to “overly-organized” parents. An email message sent 90 days prior to the celebration, with more highlights on specific cake, food, and party favor options may appeal to this customer profile who enjoy delving into the details of the planning process.

Mining for data

For marketers, the quest for relevancy and engagement is not complete until a one-to-one relationship is established. Due to budget and resource constraints, this is an unrealistic goal for most companies. That should not discourage marketers from moving towards one-to-fewer, even if their budget doesn’t allow for a true one-to-one relationship to develop. Remember, with each successful email campaign targeted to a select customer profile, brands can expand their reach and look at new segments of their customer base to exploit, such as outliers like my family.

To do that, organizations need to go beyond traditional demographics like birthdates to understand their customer’s motivations. I do not think you would ever want to have an email preference center with a checkbox to identify your customers as an early bird, prompt, or fashionably late party planner. But that doesn’t mean such valuable information is out of your reach.

In addition to your email database, mining all of the in-house data found inside CRM, sCRM, web analytics or financial software systems may be beneficial. When you begin, search four categories of data; endemic, transactional, behavioral and computed.

Endemic data is data unique to a particular record. Examples are contact and demographic information commonly collected during registration or  in a brands preference center.

Transactional data consists of data captured during any transaction a customer has with an organization. Financial software is the most common source of transactional data, but transactional data can also encompass a subscriber’s IP address.

Behavioral data is perhaps the most actionable of all database information and can come from a wide variety of both online and offline sources. Website clicks, email opens, calls to customer service, and redemption of coupons at store locations are all examples of behavioral data.

Computed data is the outcome when one or more variables are used to create a third variable.

For example, the variable of “number of miles from a retail store” is computed data, and is the difference of the distance between the customer and store’s address.

Mining these four types of data will uncover insights into your customers and understand the steps they take to make a purchase. At MarketingSherpa, we recently launched our annual Email Marketing Benchmark Survey to identify the barriers that exist in preventing subscriber engagement and the best practices to increase the velocity and accuracy of email communications. I encourage you to participate to help us learn more from marketers like you who are in the trenches, battling for relevancy every day. In exchange for your valuable time, we will provide you a complimentary copy of our Special Report: CMO Perspectives on Email Deliverability.

Related sources

Email Deliverability: How a marketing vendor with 99 percent delivery rates treats single opt-in lists vs. double opt-in lists

Email List Growth: Finding low-cost and no-cost ways to grow your database

Email Marketing: Three lessons learned at the MarketingSherpa Email Marketing LEAPS Advanced Practices Workshop

New Chart: Most effective email list growth tactics

B2B marketers are increasing their investments in inbound tactics. Don’t just take my word for it. When we surveyed 935 of your peers for the MarketingSherpa 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, 60% said they were increasing investment in virtual events and webinars.

But what does it take to produce an effective webinar? A virtual event that will grab people’s attention and encourage them to leap into your funnel, as opposed to check their email while you ramble on?

At MECLABS, we produce some pretty popular webinars. I’m not trying to brag about our crazy webinar skills. The truth is, we invest a lot of resources in these. And that’s why they’re good.

So when webinar director, Austin McCraw, presented me with an org chart of the roles that we fill during the average webinar, I thought it could be very useful to the MarketingSherpa audience.

Now, when I saw we invest a lot in these webinars, these are not full-time employees dedicated solely to webinars. Webinar director is not Austin’s official title. And on one webinar or another, I’ve filled every role we’re about to discuss. You will very likely have one person fill more than one role.

But I think this org chart may be helpful to you because it gives you an idea of all the bases you should consider covering for a successful, interactive webinar with your audience.

Producers

In Hollywood, the producer is the money man. The one investing in the film, but also ensuring it makes money (or, in Mel Brooks’ “The Producers,” loses money).

In the marketing world, the producers are likely marketing managers, product managers, and business leaders that fund the webinars with their marketing budgets, and seek to generate profitable leads or valuable lead nurturing from the webinars.

It is crucial to ensure producers are involved in the entire webinar process, so everyone is clear on the goal for the webinar and the value your company expects to derive from it.

Director

You don’t need Spielberg, but you do need one central decision maker. Webinars are live productions, and as with any live event, (even when it is virtual) things can and do go wrong. You need someone who is quick on their feet and has the guts to be able to call the tough shots. Your Internet connection died. The slides aren’t advancing. The audio isn’t working. What do you do? Quick, you have 12 seconds to decide before your audience starts dropping off the webinar.

Writer/Stage Director

A good webinar is filled with well-thought out content that guides your audience through a logical thought sequence, much like a film or story would. You need to not only create that content, but prep your presenters for exactly how to deliver it. Virtual stage blocking, if you will.

Technical Director

You can’t host a webinar without technology. And as with any technology, it helps to actually know how to use it. You’re far less likely to have a Skype chat pop-up that reveals company secrets live to the audience if you actually know what you’re doing and don’t have to ask “what does that red button do?”

Our setup for the MarketingExperiments Web clinic is quite complex, complete with a mixing board, handheld and wireless microphones, and an Apple computer running Final Cut Pro to capture the live audio for our Web clinic replays.

You don’t need to go to this level. But you do need to know, or have someone who knows, how to actually use the webinar platform.

Audience Supervisor

Sure, you could drone on for an hour about all the features and benefits of your product. Or, you could actually respect your audience (and capture their attention), by including them as much as possible in the webinar. That is, after all, the benefit to your audience of taking an hour from their busy day and actually attending a live event.

The audience supervisor not only tries to maximize interaction points with the audience, but also monitors the audience’s feedback and reactions to constantly make the course corrections needed to optimize the performance while the webinar is being conducted.

A good speaker naturally does this before a live audience, gauging the reaction – from boredom to engagement – and changing the presentation as she goes. This is harder, but not in possible, in a virtual event, so your presenters are going to need a little help and guidance.

Main Presenter

The main presenter is essentially a moderator. Someone who can act as an advocate for the audience. He’s Ed Sullivan, Johnny Carson, Oprah Winfrey, Terry Gross, Bill Maher, Ira Glass. The kind of person that can relate what a technical expert is saying to novice listeners.

Another important skill is the ability to tie disparate parts of the presentation together into a natural flow with well thought-out segues. And, with the audience supervisor’s help, tie in audience comments, questions, and other interaction.

All very naturally. All part of the flow. All part of the show.

Presenters

Your practitioners and subject matter experts are why people tune in to being with. But they’re not necessarily expert presenters. And that’s one reason why you have everybody else in this org chart. To support these guys…your well-coddled stars.

The main presenter may certainly well be one of your subject matter experts or practitioners, but it takes the right set of skills and the right personality to pull both roles off well.

Monitors

The monitors support the audience supervisor and, based on your resources, they all may be one and the same. They engage with your audience using virtual platforms – responding to questions, probing the audience for feedback and interaction, providing supplementary resources, and solving problems. We’ve found that the Q&A function in the webinar platform, along with a hashtag on Twitter, are good platforms for interacting with our audience.

You should also have a technical monitor making sure the audio and slides of the webinar are streaming well and actually working. It could be someone in a different room or even a different city. Your other monitors should pick up on this if they’re listening to audience feedback, but it never hurts to know something isn’t working before your audience starts complaining.

Related resources

Marketing Webinar Optimization: Five questions to ask yourself about webinars

New to B2B Webinars? Learn 6 steps for creating an effective webinar strategy

Free webinar, Wednesday, July 20 — Copywriting on Tight Deadlines: How ordinary marketers are achieving 200% gains with a step-by-step framework (educational funding provided by HubSpot)

Free webinar, Thursday, July 28 — How to create engaging content for successful lead generation

Update: All MarketingSherpa newsletter articles are now permanently open access.

Several weeks ago I had the chance to speak with Jon Miller, Marketo‘s Vice President, Marketing, and co-founder of the company. Our talk was extensive and covered Marketo’s entire marketing process and philosophy, and the main result was a MarketingSherpa B2B newsletter case study (members library).

Even though the story was extremely in-depth and revealing in covering the marketing automation company’s practices — so much so that when my editor tweeted the story he wrote, “#B2B Marketing Strategy: Revenue-oriented approach leads to 700% two-year growth http://j.mp/lWT7PS @jonmiller2 opens up the kimono” — not everything Jon and I discussed made it into the case study.

One result of the extra material I have on hand was a popular MarketingExperiments blog post on testing form field length, and a second result is today’s SherpaBlog post going into more detail about Marketo’s cost-per-lead across its prospect generation efforts.

It’s a prospect, not a lead

Even though “lead generation” and “cost-per-lead” are something of industry terms of art, Jon explained to me that Marketo has a rigorous naming system for its eight-stage buying cycle, or what it calls a “revenue cycle:”

1. Awareness

2. Names

3. Engaged

4. Prospect

5. Lead

6. Sales lead

7. Opportunity

8. Customer

For someone to move from “engaged” to “prospect,” they must visit Marketo’s website and either fill out a form or download content. At this point they undergo demographic lead scoring. Using this scoring, Jon says a prospect is, “the right kind of person at the right company.”

Marketo defines a “lead” how most companies might identify a marketing-qualified lead, so at Marketo “prospects” are in effect its traditionally defined leads. Confused yet?

This chart takes a look at Marketo’s prospect generation metrics for the last two quarters of 2010. You will notice above the line are efforts Jon pays some marginal cost for and each includes its cost-per-lead. Below the line are Marketo’s non-marginal-cost inbound marketing efforts.

Click to enlarge

Virtual beats traditional in trade shows

Virtual trade shows stand out in this list because they create the most prospects at the lowest cost-per-lead. In fact, the figure on the far right of this chart, lead-to-opportunity index, is calibrated to the virtual trade show statistics.

“For us, virtual trade shows work great,” Jon says. “You get the database really cheap and they become leads, too.”

He adds that pay-per-click advertising has a fairly high cost-per-lead, but they also convert to opportunities at a high level at the highest velocity (in terms of least days), and they almost double the closest conversion-to-lead figure. It is worth it to Marketo to spend the extra cost-per-lead money on PPC ads.

The worst overall performing tactic on the chart is the traditional trade show. These events have the highest cost-per-lead by a long shot and don’t offer a strong conversion-to-lead number, and the strong lead-to-opportunity conversion ratio doesn’t offset the weaker stats.

Based on this information from last year, Jon told me he plans on cutting back on traditional trade shows this year and is spending that money on traveling to captive event road shows.

Inbound rising …

One very interesting aspect of Marketo’s prospect generation chart is the performance of its non-marginal cost inbound marketing tactics. Across the board they meet, and often greatly exceed, the baseline lead-to-opportunity index. Velocity and conversion-to-lead also compare very favorably for most tactics.

And the cost-per-lead for these inbound efforts? Effectively zero.

What lead generation tactics do you find successful? Do you track the success rate and bottom-line impact of your inbound efforts? Let us, and your peers, know what you think in the comments section.

Related resources

Lead Gen Overhaul: 4 Strategies to Boost Response Rates, Reduce Cost-per-Lead

Custom Landing Pages for PPC: 4 Steps to 88% More Leads, Lower Costs

Lead Generation: How to get funding to improve your lead gen

Social Media Marketing: You value (and earn ROI on) what you pay for

Lead Marketing: Cost-per-lead and lead nurturing ROI

Search Engine Marketing: Finding appeal for your PPC Ads

Social Media Marketing Research: Rolling up my sleeves and getting social

I’ve been thumbing through the just-published MarketingSherpa 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report – SEO Edition. This thing is so hot-off-the-press that my fingers hurt.

There is a massive amount of analysis in this book, but one theme immediately jumped out at me: SEO thrives on content, and content does not come easily.

Below we have some great advice for jump-starting your content creation, but first let’s look at a chart ranking the top SEO tactics used today.

As you can see, content creation sits comfortably on the top with 92% of SEO marketers saying it is at least somewhat effective and 50% saying it is very effective. Keyword research comes in second with 87% saying it’s at least somewhat effective.

The other side of the content-coin is that it is also one of the most difficult tactics to execute. Here (pulled from another chart in the report) are the three most-difficult SEO tactics:
1. External link building
2. Content creation
3. Blogging

These three tactics are as intertwined as DNA. Nothing I know of will generate more high-quality links on a consistent basis than good content that is published regularly. And more than 50% of SEO marketers use blogs to create content, according to the report.

Blogging results in six months

Even though creating content is the most effective SEO tactic, it comes in sixth in terms of popularity with 60% of marketers using it. This disconnection could be due to the difficulty of creating content, and I recently heard a great example of how to simplify the process and get started.

Marcus Sheridan, Co-Owner at River Pools & Spas, had some great advice at our recent Optimization Summit on how to dive into content creation (Dive! Get it?). Sheridan outlined the simple tactics he used to blog his company’s website into the world’s most popular swimming pool site in terms of traffic.

Here are tactics he suggested for establishing a traffic-building blog:

Tactic #1. Answer prospects’ questions

First, gather everyone in your company and ask them to list the top questions they’ve received from prospective customers. Write down a list of 50. Those questions are the titles of your first 50 blog posts.

“As a pool guy, as soon as someone calls us on the phone, what do they ask? What do they ask in every industry? — How much does it cost? That’s the first question all the time,” Sheridan said.

So Sheridan’s first blog read: “How Much Does a Fiberglass Pool Cost?“.

Tactic #2. No, really answer their questions

Some companies are afraid to answer questions about price or to directly compare their products to alternatives (which is another popular question). Sheridan urged companies to overcome their discomfort. Prospective customers are asking these questions, regardless. Who would you rather have answering them?

“We can’t be afraid to talk about anything that the customer wants to talk about; the good, the bad and the ugly,” he said.

Tactic #3. Two posts per week for six months

Once you gather questions from your team — keep everyone involved. Get them excited about writing a blog post to answer a question. Divide the work across the company and set a strict schedule.

“If you set 50 titles and you do two per week, then you have 25 weeks’ worth of blog content. Within that six months time, everything will start to change for that company and that business and the traffic they’re starting to get on their website,” Sheridan said.

Related resources

MarketingSherpa 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report – SEO Edition

Optimization Summit: Tests with poor results can improve your marketing

Members Library – Optimization Summit 2011 Wrap-up: 6 takeaways to improve your tests and results