Marketing conference notes

General notes from Marketing conference:
1. SEO success Pyramid
a. The foundation
i. Commitment- team must be fully engaged in executing your plan.
b. Planning-
i. What’s your goals, how will you meet them
c. Product/service
i. Have a unique product
d. Education- always keeping up with the changing methods.
e. Patience- Things aren’t going to happen overnight
f. Design & usability-User friendly website
g. Analytics
i. Google
h. Tools- Knowing how to interpret the data analytics
i. Social local findability- Viral marketing and networking
j. Reputation management- shaping the consumers ideas and minds
k. Buzz word/word of mouth- Getting attention
l. Trust- search engine build trust etc.
2. SEO
a. The goals of SEO
i. Get more qualified visitors to your website. i.e. targeting the right prospects and not marketing to the masses.
ii. ROI-SEO increased ROI by 140%, Usability 180%, Analytics 900%
3. Destination SEO
a. About going somewhere, it is the objective for your company’s website.
b. Exposure-allows more traffic and interest
c. Seven building blocks of destination
i. Expert information
1. Actual information that the person wants to know about relevant to your company
ii. Types of information
1. Sales & marketing
2. Non-marketing information
a. Product comparison
b. Product reviews
c. Tutorials
d. Company information
iii. Usability
1. Making sure that your website doesn’t have excessive confusing information. The user should be able to know where to go next where to click.
iv. Website design
v. Unique value proposition
1. What makes you different from everyone else that is in your market
2. Answers for the prospective customer the question why you?
3. Find something that puts you out there
vi. Time presence
1. Search look for how long you have been in the business and also looks at your rankings.
2. Getting testimonials
vii. Voice
1. Being able to set yourself apart. Be a unique person that people will respond to don’t be the whole will make your business better. (Make sure that you are consistent)
viii. All these blocks display trust and credibility.
ix. Always have to be essential to the customer in order to be on top.
4. Social networking (Sagerock.com) Sage Lewis
a. Ning- is a social networking website, that he likes using that is a good website for social networking
b. It is like a myspace or facebook but on the micro level.
c. The idea is to put a twist and make your product into something that is interesting.
d. Ning, maybe something that we may want to look into as far as making it into a marketing tool
e. linked in, check this website. (www.linkedin.com)
f. Use videos host them on youtube.com and put links into them to the website to increase overall traffic and interest.
g. Check the website Sage, also. Speaker a huge emphasis on this site.
h. Possibilities of putting customer video testimonies on the website possibly also on the newsletters
i. Also check out twitter website building a community, zappos
5. Creating great content
a. Leading professionals say that creating great content is the best way to SEO
b. 2-3 Key phrases per page,
c. around 250 words per page, depending on the page and content
d. Place key phrases in headlines, subheadlines, and hyperlinks
e. Sprinkle the keyphrases through the copy where they fit and make sense.
6. Blogging for business
a. Ideally the largest users are the younger age group.
b. Older individuals are not doing as much blogging.
c. 2 main characteristics
i. create & publish content
ii. feedback and collection of feedback
d. build awareness
e. establishing your expertise
i. search engine friendly
ii. Linking
iii. Create the conversation
f. Linking is a huge way of getting your blog exposure.
g. Identifying your target market and then finding a way of getting into the eyes of those people. Being able to relate with our customers will help us get more traffic, leads, interest and sales revenues.
i. In having identifiable ways of measuring success and having known ROI will be a must. We must know that investing the money in this will be worth it i.e. ROI.
ii.
h. Creating blogs will help to bring attention interest to the company
i. Using blog as an instant damage control
7. Impact branding for small businesses
a. Branding is not aboutn getting your prospects to choose you over the competition. But about getting you to be viewed as the only viable solution.
i. Having a brand means being the strongest product service available in the industry.
ii. Branding for small businesses needs to focus on market niches.
iii. Your company doesn’t have to be big but the idea does.
iv. Highlight the value and not the company
v. Don’t well what you do but why it would be valuable to the customer
vi. A lot of the branding has major possibilities for us but there will be big mental obstacles to actually implement.