• Google AdWords Keyword Tool
  This tool is free and you don’t have to be setting up a paid campaign to use it. Helps you identify keyword expressions that people are actually using in the searches. Does not include metrics which determine whether you have any chance of succeeding in ranking organically (natural or unpaid in the search results) for those terms.
• SEMRush.com
  9 queries per day for free once you register; paid subscription is very powerful; gives you strong insights into the terms driving traffic to your competitors’ sites.

However, even if you use these tools, you will have to sort out which expressions will actually be achievable by YOUR site.  Once, we spent HOURS manually researching the competitive data — but now have a tool that gives us all the info — and more — that you see on the chart below. We willingly spent some significant $$ for access to this software because it saves so much time. That allows us to go much deeper into the research, explore many more aspects of a client’s market, and produce a list of SEO keyword targets ranked using Evergreen’s proprietary algorithm. We hand over the resulting list confident that it will produce measurable results for the client.

The metrics that matter are:

Are YOU confident in your keyword research? Are you finding the SEO metrics that matter? This one part of your SEO effort is perhaps the most “modular”, easily outsourced and relatively inexpensive task. Let Evergreen Consulting Group help you produce results and improve the ROI on your entire Internet Marketing effort! Call Amanda at 802-310-5310 or write to amanda@evergreendirect.com to explore what we can do for you!

Today, we’ll focus on what social media can do for a Nurture Marketing effort. Social media is here to stay. Although the top players may not always be Facebook and Twitter, we can be sure that humans will continue to make use of the best platforms, tools, and vehicles for facilitating social connections. It’s simply human nature.

And you may be asking, “So what? How will this affect my business?” Our firm belief is that the best businesses interact constantly with their customers. The feedback customers offer tells you more about them, more about what changes you might need in your products and services, and helps improve your overall marketing effort.

So, the question is, have you committed any time to setting up profiles on any social media platforms?  Do you know WHERE you should be? Out of the dozens of platforms, here’s a Social Media Grid that might help makes sense of the clutter:

• Who “owns” your social media initiative within your firm?
• What departments, business units, or approval entities will engage your social media effort?
• Who is your best copy writer?
• Who “gets” web strategy on your team?
• Who knows your customers best?
• How will you integrate this with the rest of your marketing effort?

Get started today and get in touch if we can help you form your Nurture Marketing strategy.

Amanda and Bob

• Know who your customers are: their demographics, cohort groupings and life stages.
• What do you know about why they signed up? Does your database keep track of that?
• One way to think about your customer’s demographic is to understand what search engines they prefer
• If you receive an opt-out, look for patterns. Why did they sign up originally and from what source.  If one source or offer repeatedly generates the highest drop-out rate, then that marketing channel and message needs to be reconsidered or adjusted.

Nurture your Customers with Tactics Tailored to What You Know About Them

• Unexpected delights, e.g. new offers or surprise giveaways or premiums, can help improve retention. Consider testing new offers on an A/B split basis to see which ones improve retention, increase ROI, improve Lifetime Value, etc. One caveat:  don’t appear to being gratuitous or condescending and make sure what you “give” is relevant to each customer segment.
• Test the timing of any nurturing tactics. At what point in a customer’s tenure on your list should you offer those unexpected items? What engages the customer for both the short- and long-term? Test varying offers against each other during key times.
• Engage with your customers on a regular basis via one (or more) of the many Social Media tools at your disposal.  These platforms give you even more individualized insights into who they are, what they want, how happy they are with your company and its products or services.
• Based on past results and/or anecdotal information as to what has worked and what might work to keep them in the fold, develop a plan or matrix of possibilities going forward.
• Try surveys to identify build your knowledge base:
  • Surveying canceled clients can help  you learn what went wrong
  • Surveying active customers helps identify the greatest opportunities for payback
  • Assign targeted deliverable options to each of these segments.

One of the advantages of email and web-based communications is that it can create strong customer loyalty by reassuring the customer every step of the way. Before the customer even has time to wonder whether something has been taken care of properly, send an email notification that it has. You will find this step especially important when marketing to the many segments of the boomer and senior demographic.

Bottom line: Test, test, test. Until you try variations on each marketing tactic in a systematic way, you won’t know what to do with the demographic information you’ve gathered. You need the demographics to segment your tactics, and you need the tests to impact your ROI.

One of the most important places to manage your reputation: your Google Local business account

Online reputation management, often referred to as SERM for Search Engine Reputation Management, should be part of every company’s business plan.  Online comments and content by competitors or angry customers (and admit it, everyone has had a few) can severely impact your business if you are not staying on top of your online reputation.  Your profits and sales can change for better or worse in a very short period of time, yet you can be part of this change–for the better–if you know what and how to do so.

At Evergreen Consulting Group, we realize that all businesses will have a mixture of customer experiences posted on the Internet. Our approach to managing your Internet Reputation is to make your positive results move up in the search engines while letting the negative results fall back to the second and third pages (often well beyond). Since the majority of people only view the first page of search results, these negative results just tend to ‘fade away’. Again, when done properly, this means that YOU can control this part of your overall profit picture better than ever before!

We use various reputation management techniques to accomplish our clients’ goals. Our techniques may including claiming company profiles on important sites, creation of blog posts, articles, press releases, corporate site content, or using social media for reputation management. In addition, we have tactics to improve the relevance of third-party sites that carry positive information.

We encourage all our clients to design a plan to enter and engage in the social networking arena– Twitter, FaceBook, and LinkedIn to name a few. These new marketing channel(s)  capture an ever-growing percentage of your audience’s attention. These new platforms can’t be ignored and require more than a half-hearted effort. Contact us to learn how we can help you plan and enter this new marketing arena!

Amanda and Bob

However, do you really know enough about your audience to make sure you’re even targeting the right search engine or social media platform? Are you doing more than simply viewing “traffic” to your site?

“Audience insights eclipse audience measurement, providing new views into “who” and “what impact,” versus simply counting “how many.” Stephen DiMarco of Compete.com

If you’ve got Google Analytics installed and are regularly digging deep into that data, you may have some broad audience insights. You know their geographic location, perhaps even which Corporate network they were using at the time (see figure to the right). Now it’s time to combine the insights you’re getting from your Analytics data with information from some additional sources. Essentially, you’re going to triangulate audience data to create a more credible profile. Mr. DiMarco recommends four different online sites/tools/service providers to assist in this process, mentioning that “some are free“. I did some digging and took some screen caps to save you some time.

Quantcast: a tool to understand your own site’s visitor demographics in great detail.

Another free tool: Quantcast Audience Segments

Google Ad Planner: helps you identify websites your audience is likely to visit.

Google's free tool for discovering where your audience "hangs out" online.

Just as I use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool more often for researching keywords to target in my on-site optimization work, I recommend you use the Google Ad Planner for more than ad planning:

• Define audiences by demographics and interests.
• Search for websites relevant to your audience.
• Access aggregated statistics on the number of unique visitors, page views, and other data for millions of websites from over 40 countries.
• Generate aggregated website statistics.

Check these out — and if you need some help using these tools or making sense of all the data, please get in touch!

Psst… Pass It On… and Get a New Customer for Less!

How many of us can resist sharing a good deal with friends?  That’s the premise behind pass-along offers and discounts. Quite simply, you offer current owners of your product a pass-along discount that the owner can use or pass along to friends, neighbors, relatives or good social marketing contacts. If the discount is greater than anything offered to the general public, your customer will be doing friends a favor by passing on the discount. And, you’ll have a delighted new customer at significantly less acquisition cost than you would normally incur.

There are other advantages to this strategy as well. Friends of the customer are able to see your product in use or hear firsthand from someone they trust about, say, the great job the new mower does on their lawn. As long as you’ve taken the time to build a good relationship with your customer, the only added incentive (read: marketing cost) it takes is a special pass-along discount cost.

This is not the time to cut back on costs. Make the offer a worthwhile proposition for both the existing and new customer. When you consider that your customer is doing all the advertising and selling work for you, and that your promotional costs are slashed as a result, you can afford a significant discount.

Where Do I Do This?

Choose just about any channel or vehicle for your pass-along offer. Your web site, a letter or postcard, newsletter, blog, Facebook or Twitter … all are good choices. Just be sure to explain the concept of your program in clear and honest copy and repeat this concept often! Results seem to improve when you give some believable reason for any discounts, premiums or incentive.

To add further believability to your pass-alongs, provide a space for the owner to endorse the discount on behalf of a friend. And don’t forget to let your customer know that the discount may be kept for personal use. Just be sure to time your pass-along offers correctly, e.g. you don’t want to send a customer an offer for a discount on a product that he or she just purchased!

Tell ‘Em Joe Sent Ya — or Getting More (Qualified Leads)

It’s crucial to maintain good relations with your current customers, but list-building is still a vital part of any marketing plan. One of the most effective ways to gain qualified leads is through member-get-a-member and friend-get-friend referral offers.

In a future post we will discuss more about how this is best done — for low cost and without alienating your customers. If you’d like some immediate coaching, get in touch for a quick consult.

Why Yahoo appeals to the 50+ demographic:

• It’s a true, old-fashioned (in Internet years) “portal” site that is a “gateway” to all sorts of content on the web.
• As a home page, it is more “set-up” in advance for its users and doesn’t push or require customization
• People over 50 who were “leading edge” Internet users 10-15 years ago set up a Yahoo email account when Yahoo was THE dominant search engine and they still have and use that account today.
• In a 2009 study by Cowan & Co, fifty-seven percent of respondents listed Yahoo Mail as the primary reason they visit the Yahoo homepage. Yahoo’s engagement with users remains high; 64% of respondents go to Yahoo.com at least once per week. In addition, Yahoo Mail is still growing (although Gmail has a much greater share of new personal email accounts).
• People over 60 are more often using the Internet for community and entertainment — they aren’t using the web to “search” for data and information to support their career.

Google: a dominant “search” engine and online toolbox

• Google is still the dominant search engine with 67.3% market share in December 2009 across all demographics.
• Google is primarily about “search”: finding the information and data one needs, often for work or career development.
• Google has dozens of customizable features and tools (iGoogle, Google Docs, Gmail, Google Reader, etc.).
• In the same 2009 study by Cowan & Co cited above, they found that “Seventy-nine percent of 22- to 25-year-olds use Google as their primary search engine, compared to 63% of total respondents. Google usage is skewed toward younger demographics, high-income households, users with college and graduate degrees, and mobile Internet users.”

Bing: uncertain waters yet strong possibilities for the 50+ demographic

• According to the Cowan & Co study, Bing was chosen as a primary search engine by just 1% of 18- to 25-year-olds and 4% of 26- to 34-year-olds. Bing’s highest penetration rate is in the 55-and-over demographic at 10%.
• About 40% of respondents are not aware of the Bing brand. They are simply finding the tool because it is the default search engine in Internet Explorer which as of December 2009 is still the browser of choice (or default) of 50% of Internet surfers. Older users are much more likely to stick with the default browser than to seek out alternative software.
• Even after the huge media-blitz by Microsoft to promote Bing (spending perhaps as much as $100 million), its market share dropped in December 2009 to 9.9% from a high of 10.7% the previous month.

The question is, even if Yahoo and Bing have a smaller piece of the pie — if their user base matches your customer base, you’ll want to make sure you have a presence in their text and image indexes, directories, and perhaps even paid search. There are specific tactics you will need to take to accomplish this. Evergreen Consulting Group is ready to offer you the guidance and coaching you need – just get in touch!