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Blog your Way to Giving your Brand a Voice with some Personality and Enhance the Customer’s Experience with Teachable Moments

In the digital world that we live in today, it is a Digital Marketing Manager’s responsibility to make a brand stand out. By blogging, a Digital Marketing Manager can help their brand stand out and give their brand a voice with a personality. A blog not only educates the brand’s consumers, blogs make your brand credible and enhances the customer’s experience with your brand.

Another compelling reason to start a blog is that search engines love blogs. With Google’s Hummingbird, many Digital Marketing Managers are concerned about how to optimize their content to land on page one of a Google search results page.  Well, let your blog be your savior.

Hummingbird concentrates on the long-tail keyword searches, and blog content lends itself to including long-tail key word phrases naturally.  Therefore, if Digital Marketing Managers consistently post relevant content about your brand on a regular basis, Digital Marketing Managers can help their SEO as well.

8 components to include in your blog posts

  • A SEO optimized title
  • A long-tail search keyword phrase
  • Conversational tone
  • Format should include lists and whitespace
  • Length of post should be 500 words or less
  • Create a call to action
  • Don’t make a sales pitch
  • Lastly and most important, a Digital Marketing Manager must make sure the audience learns something from each post

As a school girl, my father asked me everyday what I learned in school, and I usually said nothing.  Then, one day, I asked my dad why he always asked me what I learned in school.  He told me that every day where I did not learn something was a day wasted. Therefore, every post where your audience does not learn something is a wasted post and a chance to alienate your audience which could cause a Digital Marketing Manager to have nightmares.

If you aren’t yet convinced to start a blog, consider the following statistics about blogs from Hubspot:

  •  B2B marketers who use blogs generate 67% more leads per month than those who do not.
  • B2C companies that blog generate 88% more leads per month than those who do not.
  • 92% of companies who blog multiple times per day have acquired a customer from their blog.
  • 57% of companies with a blog have acquired a customer from their blog.

Additional Blogging Resources

  1. The Definitive Guide to Corporate Blogging for Marketers
  2. How to Blog for Business Success with Google’s Hummingbird
  3. Blogging 101
  4. “The Make Sure Every Story is Compelling and Share-worthy” section at the end of the Coca-Cola’s Storytelling: Three Lessons on Content Marketing and Creativity article

What and when is next Digital Marketing Manager post?

SEO Monday

Until Monday, have a great weekend and think about how you can make each blog post a teachable moment for your audience!

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A Digital Marketing Manager’s Journey to Keep up with Technology Visits Day 1 of Salesforce’s Dreamforce 2013 Cloud Expo1

Technology is constantly changing and to stay up to date and discover the multitude of tools available to me as a Digital Marketing Manager, I spent part of yesterday walking around Salesforce’s Dreamforce ’13 at San Francisco’s Moscone Center meeting with different exhibitors to educate myself about strategizing, deploying, measuring, managing, analyzing with the latest technology.

As a marketer, it is important for me to stay on top of new marketing tools and technologies that can either engage customer experiences or improve marketing processes.  To deploy email marketing, social media, and other digital marketing efforts, finding the right technology that fits with your company and customers is important to maximize responses and revenue.  In an effort to reduce the length of this post, only a portion of the exhibitors that I met with are mentioned.  The companies mentioned below are no more important than the companies that I didn’t mention, and the companies not mentioned will appear in future posts.

In today’s digital marketing age, capturing data and analytics does not always happen in a timely fashion. However, waiting for analytics from digital marketing efforts may be a thing of the past with Birst, a Salesforce plugin.  Birst pulls all of your data from all of your digital marketing efforts in real time making it easier to calculate return on investment, ROI, make any changes if necessary, and make data driven decisions.

While Birst helps deliver real-time results of your digital marketing efforts, you need to develop objectives that your digital marketing efforts need to meet.  To help you develop those objectives, First Rain can assist you.  They can deliver real-time relevant knowledge and data about your market to help you design realistic objectives and market strategies for your business.

Every day, marketers utilize many types of media for various marketing efforts that drive customers to websites to take actions.  The different types of media include direct mail, email marketing, Social Media, online advertising, mobile, etc. As customers take action on your websites, they follow a path that originated from one of the types of media used.  Standard Register’s SMARTworks Connect solution with Salesforce, you can figure out which effort motivated your customer to take action and calculate return on investment by type of marketing effort.

If your product is subscription based, Kinetic Growth can assist you with renewal automation, billing, invoices, quotes, credit card payments, and account management.

All of these applications assist marketers in their jobs.  Just keep in mind, these applications plug in to Salesforce.com.

Dreamforce ’13 is a conference for marketers using Salesforce.com and developers of Salesforce.com applications to help keep you up with the tools and technologies to maximize your revenue.

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Social Media for Digital Marketing Managers – Marketo’s 7 Golden Rules of Social Marketing

Most of yesterday was spent thinking about the most effective way to organize a weekly Social Media post for the Digital Marketing Manager blog that the day was over before I could post something for you.

Since Social Media falls under the digital marketing umbrella, it is necessary for the Digital Marketing Manager blog to cover Social Media, but how can one blog posting per week contain everything that happens every week in the world of Social Media with 500 words or less.

Social Media has a high number of tactics within digital marketing that a whole separate blog could be dedicated to it.

After contemplating how to organize the Social Media post for the Digital Marketing Manager blog, I found a solution for the time being. However, nothing is set in stone, and I welcome your comments on what you think should be included in Social Media.

Since I believe the strategizing process behind implementing social media tactics is extremely important rather than just diving in head first, the weekly Social Media post will primarily discuss planning and strategy, and then, the post will include links to articles about individual Social Media sites news and tips. Now, for the stuff you have been waiting for.

Social Media for Digital Marketing Managers – Marketo’s 7 Golden Rules of Social Marketing

  1. Don’t take yourself too seriously – give your brand a good personality to make your brand likeable.
  2. Inbound Marketing is not enough – combine inbound and outbound marketing efforts into all aspects of your marketing.
  3. Good Content and Solid Offers – Need content to engage customers.
  4. Strong Call to Action – After your content is consumed, what do you want your audience to do?
  5. Always add value – Social Media doesn’t work if there is no value added to your brand.
  6. Social Media is a 2 way street – Social Media opens the line of communication with prospects and customers, so you need to respond quickly and sincerely.
  7. Peer-to-Peer sharing gets your messages heard.

When implementing your Social Media tactics, keep these rules in mind to help you create superior customer experiences.

Source: Marketo’s The Definitive Guide to Social Marketing

Additional Links to Social Media Sites News or Tips

Thanks for reading Social Media Wednesday on this Thursday evenings.

Tomorrow’s topic – Blogging

Call to Action

Does it make sense for Social Media Wednesday to primarily discuss Social Media strategizing process as well as include links to additional Social Media articles? Please send me your comments.

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Welcome to Email Marketing Tuesdays – Email Marketing is More Alive than Ever

Welcome to the 1st Email Marketing Tuesdays – Email Marketing is More Alive than Ever.

For a while now, the idea that email marketing is dead has been popping up. I beg to differ. You just have to re-think your Email Marketing practices by making them more personal and relevant.

In a survey from Act-On, 75% of the 19,464 marketers surveyed said Email Marketing is one of the top 3 most implemented campaigns, and 45% said Email Marketing activities are the top 2 marketing activities contributing to the sales pipeline. Given this information, it sounds like marketers use Email Marketing, and it sounds like Email Marketing activities are effective at getting customers to start the purchasing process.

In an article by Peter Yared called Email is Now Just Another Stream, he wrote, “Email has been especially important in e-commerce sales and customer re-engagement. For e-commerce in particular, email marketing exceeds the performance of social advertising.”

Also, if Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn deploy Email Marketing messages as a tactic to get you to their social media sites, I think it is safe to say that Digital Marketing Managers can use Email Marketing as one of their strategies to find customers and generate revenue.

With everything said and done, Email Marketing is still an effective digital marketing strategy. The new challenge is continuing to make Email Marketing effective today, tomorrow, and for the next following years.

One of my favorite Email Marketing Strategies is segmenting my customers and tailoring the content for each segment. By tailoring the content of emails, you can make your email messages personal and relevant. I’ve test this strategy several times, and it always performs better than a generic email message.  Don’t take my word for it, test it on your next email marketing effort. You can test tailoring the email message, the email subject line, or both.  Just look at your database and discover how you can segment your email list.

So, it is safe to say that Email Marketing Managers aren’t going any where.  Just like all other aspects of Digital Marketing, marketers need to adapt to their customers needs and deliver engaging, relevant, and personal Email Marketing campaigns to generate results. I look forward to delivering you strategies and ideas on how to deploy effective email marketing campaigns.

Topics you will see from Email Marketing Tuesdays include:

  • Ideas to Test
  • Email List
  • Content including subject lines, from lines, and email copy
  • Different types of Email Marketing efforts like reactivation, shopping cart abandonment, welcome, and thank you emails efforts
  • Deliverability
  • Automation
  • Segmentation

What’s next up on CindyPlough’s Digital Marketing Manager Blog

Weekday Topic
Tomorrow Social Media
Thursday Content Marketing
Friday Mobile Marketing
Next Monday SEO
Next Tuesday More Email Marketing

Have a great day.

Resources:
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SEO Mondays: Preparing your Keyword Analysis for your Website’s SEO

Welcome to the 1st SEO Monday: Preparing your Keyword Analysis for your Website’s SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the ability for your website to appear in the top position when your keywords or phrases are entered as search terms in Search Engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. The components involved in landing the top position include:

  • Keyword Analysis
  • Optimizing Content
  • Link Building
  • Making Content Easy to Share

Today’s Focus: How to complete a Keyword Analysis?

The Keyword Analysis process will generate the highest return in your SEO activities, and help you get your target audience to your website via search engines. Let your potential customers find you rather than you spending time and money to find potential customers by completing a Keyword Analysis.

The process of conducting a keyword analysis consists of three parts. The purpose is to determine what keyword phrases will help you appear on the first pages of the search engine results page, and then, you want to use these keyword phrases in your marketing copy, editorial content, any titles, and html tags used on your website.

To keep generating positive results from your SEO activities, your Keyword Analysis needs to be conducted on a regular basis as potential customers change the words they use to search for your products/services or how Google tweaks their algorithm.

Part 1 – Generate a list of your Website’s Keyword Phrases

Knowing that the average number of words entered into the search box on search engines are 3 to 4 words, your keywords are more like Keyword Phrases where each Keyword Phrase should be no more than 4 words. By including key phrases instead of keywords on your list, you decrease your competition for your keywords.

To help determine your keyword phrases talk to your sales teams and customers to see what search terms or phrases they use when looking for your products and services.

Part 2 – Determine the Competition for your Keyword Phrases

For each and every  keyword phrase on your list, enter it into Google.com with quotes around each keyword phrase . Look for the “About … results” in grey in the upper left hand section of the screen, and this will tell you how many pages contain your keyword phrase.

Why do we use quotes for this search?
Because Google will give us results with the exact match to what you searched for. Let’s say we are searching for SEO Management. If we use quotes around the phrase, we will get results where SEO Management appear next to each other. If you entered SEO Management without the quotes, you will get results where SEO and Management appear on the page, but SEO and Management don’t appear together. Using the quotes gives you an accurate picture of your competition.

Part 3 – Determine the Search Volume for your Keyword Phrases

  1. Create a list of your Keyword Phrases into Excel and Save the file as a CSV file (make sure the file only contains your Keyword Phrases)
  2. Login to your Google Adwords Account
  3. Under Tools and Analysis select Keyword Planner
  4. Click “Get Search Volume for a list of Keywords or group them into ad groups”
  5. Upload the CSV file with your keyword phrases
  6. Click “Get Search Volume”
  7. Select the “Keyword Ideas” Tab to see your results

After completing parts 1, 2, and 3, you may end up with an excel spreadsheet that looks similar to what you see below if you were looking for a Keyword Phrase about SEO for your website:

Keyword Phrase Google results with Quotes Average Monthly Searches Competition
SEO 191,000,000 90,500 High
SEO Management 207,000 480 High
Starting SEO 10,400 10 Medium
Planning SEO 17,600 10 Low

Given the data in the above table for potential keyword phrases about SEO, I many continue to play around with the words for my SEO Keyword Phrase until I find a SEO phrase that generates about 10,000 Google results and an average monthly searches around 400 with a Low to Medium Competition.

What do you have to look forward to for the rest of the week from Cindy Plough’s Digital Marketing Manager Blog?

Weekday Topic
Tomorrow Email Marketing
Wednesday Social Media
Thursday Content Marketing
Friday Mobile Marketing
Next Monday More SEO

I look forward to writing about email marketing tomorrow, so ta ta for now.

Resources for Keyword Analysis:

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Potential Vendors to Assist Digital Marketing Managers Achieve Objectives

To help facilitate the Digital Marketing Manager’s job in creating superior experiences for customers, we hire multiple vendors to conduct multiple marketing functions for us, so we can concentrate on making sure our marketing programs are achieving objectives and increasing revenue.

Last weeks Salesforce.com Dreamforce 13 expo featured hundreds of vendors to assist marketing departments. Below you can learn about my visits with Adroll, DocuSign, Dropbox, ReliableCoders, and Twillo, and how they can assist digital marketing managers achieve objectives.

Two of many digital marketing objectives are to increase revenues for your ecommerce site and to attract potential customers to visit your website.  AdRoll can help Digital Marketing Mangers achieve both of these objectives. Adroll’s retargeting platform displays advertisements on the websites that potential customers visit after they left your site without making a purchase.

Each digital marketing effort has multiple components, and some components require a signature for approval. Providing an actual signature requires, you to print and sign a form, and then, you have to fax the form some where. With DocuSign, Digital Marketing Managers can provide their signature for approvals via desktops or smartphones allowing the launch of digital marketing efforts faster.

Dropbox may not provide a solution that directly assists you in reaching your objectives, but Dropbox allows you to access your files at anytime if you are working from a location other than the office. As the role of the Digital Marketing Manager evolves, we can’t always be at the office. Even though you may not be at the office, you can still access your files via Dropbox and work on your digital marketing efforts anywhere on any device.

Recently, I attended a San Francisco American Marketing Association, sfAMA, event where one of the panelists, Brian Solis, said that companies are creating mobile applications for smartphones to create superior customer experiences because companies mobile websites aren’t sufficient in meeting customers needs. Also, the starting point for many customers product research begins with a search on their smartphones indicating the importance for companies to have  functioning mobile websites or mobile applications. Digital Marketing Managers can hire ReliableCoders to create innovative mobile websites that enhance customer experiences. If your company chooses to go the mobile application route, ReliableCoders can also create mobile applications for your organization.

In our digital world, customers want to connect whenever or wherever. Twillo can assist your organization to provide the access your customers demand.  Twillo enables phone, VoIP, and SMS messaging to be embedded into web, desktops, and mobile software allowing customers to receive the access they want allowing you to provide customers with an excellent experience.

All of the vendors mentioned above can assist Digital Marketing Managers achieve objectives in a variety of ways. I hope you reach out to one or more of these vendors to help you create superior experiences for your customers and reach your objectives.

Tomorrow, I’m traveling to Reno, NV, to be with my family for Thanksgiving.  If time allows, I will write a post tomorrow about more exhibitors at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce 13, but if I’m not able to make a post tomorrow, please forgive me and visit the Digital Marketing Manager blog again.

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When and What Digital Marketing topics can you Expect from the Digital Marketing Manager Blog

Thank you to everyone who is following my blog, and I look forward to bringing you digital marketing news and tips.  Starting next Monday December 1st, a new editorial schedule will start.  Here is what you can come to expect from Cindy Plough’s Digital Markeing Manager Blog:

Weekday Topic
Monday SEO
Tuesday Email Marketing
Wednesday Social Media
Thursday Content Marketing
Friday Potpourri topics will can vary between Mobile Marketing, Digital Advertising, SEM/PPC, Analytics, and Affiliate Marketing

Until next Monday, my blog posts will include additional Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce 13 exhibitor visits. Each day will cover 4 of my visits.

Domo – Develops easy to use dashboards that contains your data in one single view to facilitate decision making. Domo’s business intelligence platform delivers analytics in real time to help marketers become more efficient and track revenue streams.

Pitcher – As Marketers, we prepare many materials to assist our sales departments.  With Pitcher’s application, we can monitor how often Sales Managers use these marketing materials.  If Sales Managers aren’t using our marketing material, we can work with our sales departments to create marketing materials that will help the sales team generate revenue.

Tenrox – As we move forward in Digital Marketing, the ultimate goal for marketers will be to engage our customers. With Tenrox, we can manage digital marking efforts, monitor expenses, and manage resources to ensure our efforts deploy on time and on budget.

ThousandEyes – We work tirelessly to implement our digital marketing efforts.  Each effort consists of an infrastructure that operates behind the scene to bring our digital marketing efforts to life. No matter how often we test the infrastructure before our efforts go live, you never know when something might go wrong. ThousandEyes comes to the rescue.  When our digital marketing efforts go live, ThousandEyes moniors the infrastructure and indicates if and when a component of the infrastructure is broken.

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A Digital Marketing Managers Takeaways from Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce 13

While the last day of Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce 13 wasn’t as busy as the previous days, I still had to forge my way through some crowds to see the exhibitors that I wanted to visit before the conference came to a close. In an effort to reduce the length of my blog post, today’s post will include my takeaways from Dreamforce 13, one exhibitor highlight, and links to additional information about the conference.

Recap of Dreamforce 13
As a Digital Marketing Manager, the main takeaway from Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce 13 is that there are a plethora of tools and data centers that operate in the cloud to interface with CRM systems giving Digital Marketing Managers the ability to manage and analyze digital marketing efforts. While you can hire a multitude of vendors to create, manage, and provide analytics for digital marketing efforts, it is up to the Digital Marketing Manager to develop objectives, strategize on which tactics can achieve those objectives, and manage all vendor activities are achieving your objectives.  In this digital world, an additional role for the Digital Marketing Manager is to continuously look for ways to extend the organizations brand awareness, increase revenue, and create unique experiences for customers.

Dreamforce 13 Exhibitor Highlight: GoodData
GoodData provides business intelligence dashboards for CRM data to help marketing, sales, and customer service departments.  For the marketing department, GoodData builds dashboards for marketers to gain insights into demand, advertising, social media, SEM/PPC, and eCommerce. With GoodData, you can gather all the data you need to see how your individual digital marketing efforts can help you build stronger agile marketing campaigns. Don’t use Salesforce, no worries, GoodData can work with other CRM systems, but the setup timeframe takes longer than it would with Salesforce.

Additional Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce 13 resources:

Starting Monday, each blogpost will include a Dreamforce 13 exhibitor highlight, some digital marketing tips, and a must read article that might help you in your digital marketing efforts.

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Isolating Results from Inividual Digital Marketing Efforts: Part of a Marketing Managers Perspective on Dreamforce 13 Exhibitors Contributions to Marketing Departments

Between SEO, social media, blogs, online advertising, websites, lead nurturing, and many other digital marketing tactics, the reach of these tactics crossover making it difficult to pinpoint the origination of each website sale to calculate return on investment, ROI. To discover how to simplify the process of calculating ROI, I learned that with the help of cloud technology, Saleforce.com, and it’s many plugins, you can retrieve better analytics to calculate conversions and ROI.

Welcome back to the Marketing Mangers blog to find out other companies that I met with on Day 1 of Saleforce.com’s Dreamforce 13.  Today’s post includes information from more exhibitors that I visited on Monday, November 18th.

Before we continue, I want to mention that the companies mentioned in today’s post have applications and solutions that plugin into Salesforce.com, a CRM software.  However, if you don’t use Salesforce.com, you may still benefit from the solutions mentioned below because they can interact with CRM systems in addition to Salesforce.

Below, I discuss my visits to the following exhibitors’ boohs: Jitterbit, Scribe Software, Vocus, and ifbyphone.

Jitterbit utilizes cloud technology which makes obtaining data from the multitude of access points from your digital marketing efforts to your websites seamless. They provide fast agile solutions that puts you in control of your data. Not only can you isolate results of individual efforts, Jitterbit allows you to capture tons of data to help you understand what drives consumer purchases by integrating with your website, social media, and your CRM tools.

Scribe Software collects data from multiple applications across multiple devices that display your digital marketing campaigns. An additional capability of Scribe includes isolating the IP addresses of your website’s visitors. By capturing your visitors’ IP address, you can understand the physical locations of your visitors, and this allows you to capture additional demographic information like economic data.

Through the course of your day, you are executing multiple campaign efforts that utilize SEO, SEM, social media, email marketing, and other digital marketing strategies to drive sales on your website. All of these strategies generate data and analytics for each individual digital marketing effort that you deploy. When you go to calculate ROI for each effort, you have access to lots of numbers making it difficult to sift through all the numbers to determine the number of sales per effort. To reduce the amount of time sifting through data, you can plugin Vocus into Salesforce to drilldown and pinpoint which effort brought a customer into your website for a purchase making the ROI calculation easier.

The purpose of your marketing efforts might be to generate leads in Salesforce for your company’s sales department. Potential leads come from your SEO, SEM, social media, print advertising, online advertising, email marketing, direct marketing, or affiliate marketing strategies. By using the ifbyphone plugin to Salesforce, you can pinpoint which marketing tactic generated each lead. Therefore, ifbyphone gives you the capability to determine which of your marketing strategies produces the highest number of leads, and it allows you to calculate your acquisition cost per lead.

As marketers expand the number of digital marketing strategies they use to deploy marketing efforts, the companies mentioned above can help you simplify calculating ROI and analyzing the effectiveness of each marketing effort.

For additional information or updates from Day 2 at Dreamforce 13 you go straight to Dreamforce 13’s website.  If you desire information from another source, you can check out Marketo’s Blog.

Tomorrow, I’ll be going back to the Expo to talk to other exhibitors.  Come back on Friday to find out what I discover.

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A Digital Marketing Manager’s Journey to keep up with Technology on Day 1 of Salesforce’s Dreamforce 2013 Cloud Expo

Technology is constantly changing. To keep my digital marketing tool box filled with a multitude of the latest marketing solutions, I spent part of yesterday walking around meeting with different exhibitors at Salesforce’s Dreamforce ’13 in San Francisco’s Moscone Center .

As a marketer, there are many technologies and tools available to deploy, measure, manage, and analyze email marketing, online advertising, social media, and other online marketing efforts.  It is my responsibilities to discover the new tools and technologies that can engage customers, maximize responses, increase revenues, and operate efficiently.

In today’s digital marketing age, capturing data and analytics does not always happen in a timely fashion. However, waiting for analytics from digital marketing efforts may be a thing of the past with Birst, a Salesforce plugin.  Birst pulls all of your data from all of your digital marketing efforts in real time making it easier to calculate return on investment, ROI, make any changes if necessary, and make data driven decisions.

While Birst helps deliver real-time results of your digital marketing efforts, you need to develop objectives for your digital marketing efforts need to meet.  To help you develop your objectives, First Rain can assist you.  They can deliver real-time relevant knowledge and data about your market to help you design realistic objectives and market strategies for your business.

Every day, marketers utilize many types of media at the same time for various marketing efforts that drive customers to websites to take actions.  The different types of media include direct mail, email, Social Media, online advertising, mobile, etc. As customers take action on your websites, they follow a path that originated from one of the types of media used. Standard Register’s SMARTworks Connect solution with Salesforce, you can understand which effort motivated your customer to take action and calculate return on investment by type of media used.

If your product is subscription based, Kinetic Growth can assist you with renewal automation, billing, invoices, quotes, credit card payments, and account management.

All of these applications assist marketers in their jobs.  Just keep in mind, these applications plug in to Salesforce.com.

Dreamforce ’13 is a conference for marketers using Salesforce.com and developers of Salesforce.com applications to help keep you up with the tools and technologies to maximize your revenue.

In an effort to reduce the length of this post, only a portion of the exhibitors that I met with are mentioned.  The companies mentioned below are no more important than the companies that I didn’t mention, and the companies not mentioned will appear in future posts.

Learn More about Digital Marketing Manager, Cindy Plough