Today we publish our e-book – the B2B leads research guide.
A quick look at how to find the name of the right person at the business you want to pitch. Using both free and paid-for resources, we illustrate good websites to use and the tools they offer new business development professionals who are trying to start conversations with prospects.
Enjoy and download your own copy here.
This is a guest blog by Larry Kim, Founder & VP of Product Development.
Over the past seven weeks I’ve covered six steps that can transform your search marketing campaigns into lead- and revenue-generating machines. We’ve come to the final step:
Step 7: Do it all over (and over) again!
SEO and PPC are ongoing endeavors. The more you put in, the more you get back. To see continuous improvement, you need to commit to continuous effort in the areas of:
- Keyword Discovery and Negative Keyword Discovery
- Keyword Grouping and Organization
- Keyword and Keyword Group Analysis
- Content Production, Content Optimization and Prioritization
- Search Campaign Refinement
It sounds overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. With one robust platform that handles all these keyword management tasks, you can create large-scale, high-performance search marketing campaigns without sacrificing productivity or blowing away your advertising budget.
If you want to start taking steps to build a better search campaign, contact us today to set up a live demonstration with one of our customer service representatives, or start a free, 14-day trial to see what WordStream Keyword Management can do for your business.
]]>This is a guest blog by Larry Kim, Founder & VP of Product Development.
He is outlining seven highly effective keyword research tactics that will help you generate more leads and sales from your search marketing campaigns.
Step 6: Clean up your Research with negative Keyword Discovery
Last week’s email covered the importance of prioritizing workflow based on your top-performing keywords. Now we need to talk about the keywords that aren’t working in your campaigns.
Focusing on top keywords is important, but it’s just as crucial to your long-term success to identify keywords that are hampering performance and filter them from your research.
This will save you time and money on both the paid and organic fronts. For PPC, negative keywords reduce wasteful spending on irrelevant impressions that drag down CTR and irrelevant clicks that don’t convert, ultimately boosting your Quality Scores. Eliminating those same keywords from your SEO research prevents time and money being wasted on optimizing content for the wrong audience.
So how do you go about finding negative keyword candidates?
- You can start by brainstorming. For example, if your business is cabinetry, your negative keywords should include “cabinet members” and other queries that reference the U.S. Cabinet. In addition, you can find negative keyword lists online for your industry.
- You can look at your search query reports and identify negatives on a case-by-case basis. This will help you catch negative keywords that wouldn’t have otherwise occurred to you.
- You can set up rules, or filters, that actually learn from your behavior and eliminate irrelevant PPC or SEO keywords from your research before you use them in your campaigns.
WordStream’s smart negative keyword tools do just that—it’s faster and easier than identifying negatives keyword by keyword, so you can start saving money faster. To try out our keyword tools with your own data, sign up for a free trial of WordStream Keyword Management for PPC or SEO.
Next week you’ll receive the last email in our “7 Steps to a Better Search Campaign” series. There’s just one more element that will bring everything we’ve talked about together for high-performance search marketing.
]]>This is a guest blog by Larry Kim, Founder & VP of Product Development.
He is outlining seven highly effective keyword research tactics that will help you generate more leads and sales from your search marketing campaigns.
Step 5: Focus on your top Keyword Performers
Web analytics are a window into your search campaigns’ performance, and integrating analytics with your keyword workbench enables you to act on that valuable data, as we discussed last week. The next step, of course, is to actually start taking action!
There’s no end to the number of activities you can carry out in search engine marketing. The trick to finding continued success lies in being able to determine where best to spend your time (and your money). The most powerful way to prioritize workflow? Use analytics to ensure you can closely follow your best performing keywords and recognize opportunities you’re not currently capitalizing on.
There are a couple of ways to approach this:
- Focus on the groups of keywords that drive the most traffic and spend. Remember, your top-performing keyword group may not be the same as the single top traffic-driving keyword. Target your ad campaigns and organic content at these groups first.
- Identify gaps in your PPC and SEO campaigns by analyzing them side by side and against potential traffic gains. With keyword source analysis, you can easily compare the performance of keywords from paid and organic search to each other and to traffic estimates from a keyword suggestion tool.
A great way to start identifying your most important keywords is to take advantage of a free trial of WordStream’s PPC Management Software or WordStream’s SEO Tools depending on your search focus.
All this positivity is good, but for fully optimized search campaigns, we need to spend some time on negatives too. Next time I’ll talk about how identifying negative keywords can reduce wasteful PPC spending and even save you time and money on the SEO side.
]]>This is a guest blog by Larry Kim, Founder & VP of Product Development.
He is outlining seven highly effective keyword research tactics that will help you generate more leads and sales from your search marketing campaigns.
Step 4: Monitor Your Results
You’ve done your research, and you’ve put your keywords to work on your website and in PPC campaigns. Now it’s time to drill down and analyze what’s working and what isn’t.
Here are some quick tips for honing your database down to your most effective and cost-efficient keywords:
- If you don’t already have one in place, start using a Web analytics application, stat! There are some great free marketing analytics tools available, such as Google Analytics.
- Where possible, integrate your analytics with your search marketing tools so that valuable data becomes actionable. This quick video demonstrates how WordStream syncs up with your analytics account to help you make more data-driven marketing decisions.
- Keep an eye on which keywords and keyword groups are driving the most traffic and conversions, as well as which ones aren’t pulling their weight.
If you’re ready to see what else actionable analytics can do for your business, request a free demo of WordStream’s keyword management solution—it’s an analytics dashboard and keyword workbench rolled into one, so you can track results and then take immediate action to improve them.
Next week, we’ll talk about how to make your best-performing keywords do even more work in your search campaigns.
]]>This is a guest blog by Larry Kim, Founder & VP of Product Development.
He will be outlining seven highly effective keyword research tactics that will help you generate more leads and sales from your search marketing campaigns.
Step 3: Build a smart keyword infrastructure.
A segmented list is smarter than a disorganized mess of keywords. Even smarter than that is a flexible, dynamic keyword structure that makes it easy to expand and improve on your list. This means taking your keyword list and transforming it into a keyword database.
A keyword database has a number of advantages over a keyword list:
- It’s private and proprietary, unlike lists generated by third-party tools.
- It’s easier to organize and manage than a static spreadsheet, supporting smart relationships among data sets.
- It’s easier to update, encouraging expansion over time so your campaigns can grow.
- It’s actionable, so you don’t just analyze your keywords, you take steps to get better results.
- It’s collaborative, so multiple members of your team can work simultaneously toward common goals.
We offer three great tools to help you create such an infrastructure:
- Our keyword management white paper (as mentioned in the first email in this series) provides you with 10 effective steps for building a better keyword list.
- If you’re trying to create a strong keyword foundation for paid search marketing, you’ll want to look at WordStream Keyword Management for PPC.
- If you’re interested in getting better SEO results, you can take WordStream Keyword Management for SEO for a spin for free.
Once you have a strong keyword infrastructure in place, you need to start monitoring your campaign performance.
Next week we’ll talk about tracking your search marketing success to the keyword level, and how it can help your bottom line.
]]>This is a guest blog by Larry Kim, Founder & VP of Product Development.
He will be outlining seven highly effective keyword research tactics that will help you generate more leads and sales from your search marketing campaigns.
Last week we covered the importance of keyword grouping for more efficient, organized keyword research. We’re getting closer to optimized search campaigns! What’s next?
Last week we talked about the importance of starting broad with your keyword research. That’s a tactic which allows you to evaluate a number of opportunities and determine which keywords truly have the potential to drive profit on your website.
Step 2: Refining Your Keyword List
However, keyword analysis will be a chore if you don’t impose a meaningful order and organization on your list.
The next step to better search campaigns is to segment your keyword list into small, tightly related groups. This will allow you to efficiently target a group of keywords with relevant PPC ads and landing page copy, as well as helping you determine the groups of keywords you should target via organic search (and how you should structure your site).
This means improved Quality Scores and increased conversion rates for paid search, as well as better rankings and more and better qualified organic (SEO) search traffic.
So what’s next? We know breaking down a large keyword list can be daunting. Here are three tips to get you started:
- Start with large, high-level groups. Some characteristics of good top-level keyword groups: usually one word (a noun), often corresponding to a product or service provided by your business (such as “cabinetry” or “pies”).
- Next, segment your top-level groups into narrower subgroups. Second-level groups often include a modifier that specifies the offering in question.
- Keyword grouping tools, like our Free Keyword Grouper and Free Keyword Niche Finder, can make quick work of what would otherwise be a cumbersome manual process.
If you want to dig deeper into keyword grouping best practices (and start getting more return from your SEO and PPC campaigns), we offer a free white paper that walks you through four simple steps to creating keyword groups that work for PPC and SEO. Also, our WordStream Keyword Management for SEO product offers powerful grouping functionality at a low price (available to try free for free, starting at $49 a month).
Next week, we’ll talk about going beyond high-level keyword groups to create a smart keyword infrastructure that can scale along with your search engine marketing campaigns.
]]>This is a guest blog by Larry Kim, Founder & VP of Product Development.
Over the next seven weeks, he will be outlining seven highly effective keyword research tactics that will help you generate more leads and sales from your search marketing campaigns.
Step One: Start Broad.
Whether you’re launching a new website or optimizing the one you’ve got, it’s a good idea to start broad and develop an extensive keyword list.
This puts you in a position to target a variety of keywords, so you can see which terms actually drive the most traffic and revenue for your business. Generally, the most critical part of keyword research is refining your targets, focusing your time and paid search spend on the best performers. You’ll never know which pocket of keywords works best if you don’t start broad!
So how do you generate an extensive list of keywords? Look to your company’s:
- Past – You can use a free analytics package like Google Analytics or a custom keyword analytics package to get a better idea of the way people are reaching your website and which keywords perform best.
- Present – Talk to friends and colleagues. Look at your competitors’ sites. Find out what your customers are saying when they talk about you.
- Future – You can also use free keyword research tools like Google’s or WordStream’s to get an idea of how much traffic a potential keyword opportunity might drive to your site. To dig deeper into a series of queries and export thousands of keywords for your research, you can leverage a WordStream Free Keyword Tool account to really broaden your research.
A strong keyword base is the first step to building a better search campaign.
What’s next? Now you need to refine your keyword list and to make it actionable. The next email in this series will deal with effective keyword grouping, filtering, and organization. But if you can’t wait to learn how to better manage your keywords, you can get a hold of our free white paper on the benefits of profitable keyword management right now.
]]>
This is a guest post by Kath Pay from The Email Academy. She will publish another 3 articles over the next few weeks.
For most companies, your database is essential and list growth is one of your key aims. Ideally the subscription process needs to be as easy as possible – my mantra for building a quality list is: ‘Make it easy – and they will subscribe’ (with thanks to the movie, Field of Dreams for inspiration). So let’s have a look at some of the most common barriers which can prevent your list from growing at a healthy rate.
1. Assuming that your all signup procedures are still working and in place. When was the last time you actually went through the entire signup procedure? Not just to reassure yourself that all the links work correctly (it’s surprising how many sites I’ve visited that have this problem), but also to check on the ‘Friendliness’ of the procedure. It’s advisable to schedule a 3 monthly check up with all of your points of subscription and make sure all function as they should.
2. Only advertising your signup on your website. Don’t forget there are many other places and mediums which lend themselves to promoting your newsletter or email sign up. Some of them include:
- Social media pages such as Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook etc
- Company blog
- Transactional process
- Customer Service/support
- POS (Point of Sale) customer forms
- POS registration by salespeople
- Events, Trade Shows, Networking Events, Webinars etc
- Also – Don’t forget to add FTAF (Forward to Friend) and SWYN (Share with Your Network) tools to your email communications.
3. Not having explicit permission. Ok -so legally you may be covered (depending upon the legislation of the country you’re sending from and mailing to) and your list growth may zoom, but using methods such as pre-ticked checkboxes and ‘conjunction’ acquisition (subtly adding a clause to your T&C’s or Privacy Policy) methods will generally only result in a short term list growth and possibly cause deliverability problems due to the number of spam complaints you receive.
4. Not stating the benefits. Why should they sign up to receive email communications from you? State these benefits clearly and up front. Write the copy with the subscriber in mind. They will be looking to see ‘What’s in it for me? Think of it as a value exchange. What are you giving them in exchange for their valuable data? If you don’t have the available room to do this at the point of subscription consider linking to a page which provides you with more room to fully state the benefits.
5. Not providing enough value within the value exchange. If your subscription form tends to look like an insurance form, chances are that you’re asking for too much information. If your aim is to grow the list, you may have to consider which is more valuable to you – fewer subscribers with more data or more subscribers with less data? A nice compromise is a two-step form. On the first page you simply ask for their email address and possibly their name (or whatever data is absolutely essential) and then after they click subscribe, they are then taken to a landing page which could be their Preference Centre. Using some wonderful copy i.e. ‘ in order to enhance your experience, we’d love to find out some more about you….’ you then incentivise them to fill in the empty fields – however, make it clear that this is not compulsory and that it is for the subscribers benefit and you may be surprisingly pleased with the results.
6. Using a stereotypical, bland Call-To-Action (CTA). What’s wrong with standing out in a crowd? The below example comes from www.whichtestwon.com, with the results being that Version A increased signups by 23%. Test your CTA and find out what works best for you and your product/offering.
7. Not asking the subscriber to whitelist. Requesting that the subscriber whitelist you or add you to their contacts used to be beneficial, but now with the Gmail’s Priority Inbox and Hotmail’s inbox changes and with the other ISPs soon to follow suit, it will soon be an essential element to your subscription process. Ideally it should be requested on the Thank you page after subscribing, the Welcome email, as well as within all future emails. The trick is to make it easy for them and give them full instructions on how to do it (taking them to a landing page). It could look something like:
Please add name@companyname.com to your email address book or safe senders list. Click here for instructions how to do this.
8. Not setting expectations. What are you going to be sending them? Can you show them an example? How often will they be hearing from you? These are all questions the subscriber will be looking to find answers for. Again – if space is limited, link to a page which outlines all of these, along with an example of an email they can look forward to be receiving and/or past archives if it’s a newsletter.
9. Hiding the subscribe form on your homepage and not having the subscribe form on every page of your website. We all know that the website’s homepage is prime real estate and you have to fight for space within it, however, having the subscribe link/form below the fold isn’t doing anyone any favours – least of all your aim to grow your list. Ideally the subscribe form/link needs to be placed above the fold on the homepage and don’t stop there – add it to every page. Remember our mantra – ‘Make it easy – and they will subscribe’.
10. Not flaunting your Privacy Policy. Reassure your potential subscribers. Spell it out in plain English. Be transparent. If you aren’t going to share their data with a third party – then flaunt it! State this right next to the email field. It could look something like this: ‘Don’t worry – we respect your data and won’t share it with anyone else. Read our Privacy Policy’. Be sure to link to your Privacy Policy again on the Thank you page as well as within every email that is sent.
11. Not optimising your Landing/Thank you Page. Your landing page is an often neglected afterthought in the subscription process. However, it can make or break a relationship with a new subscriber. Continue as you started – make it easy. Have everything your subscriber needs for a wonderful experience with your brand within reach on this landing page. Don’t let it become a dead end. Where would they like to go next? Suggest something to them. Maximise this opportunity to delight and help them.
12. Not testing. Testing is essential for your subscribe form(s)and landing page(s). Don’t just accept that the ‘norm’ works for you and your company. Your company’s subscribers are the best people to judge as to what works. Test factors such as; placement, copy, number of fields, one page form VS two page form, landing page elements etc. This can be easily achieved by using Google’s Optimizer which allows you to set up multiple forms/landing pages and will disperse the different pages to your readers. You can then check the reports to see which form/page succeeded in more conversions.
T: @kathpay
E: @ kpay @ theemailacademy.com
I think businesses should take new year resolutions as seriously as business planning.
Many of us have track records of starting something that is life-improving with great enthusiasm as a new year resolutions only for it to fizzle out and fade during the first 60 days.
Organisations could do well to think up their own new year resolutions.
How to do business new year resolutions
- send out an email to your favourite colleagues who are innovative thinkers. Ask them for a top 3 wish list for the company’s new year resolutions
- Open the list to the rest of the staff – use the innovators’ top 3 lists as pump priming suggestions
- Have a public vote on what to impelment. Keep the voting timeframe short – 3 days.
- Announce the winning top 3. Reward those who suggested them.
- Fortnightly report on success keeping the new suggestions alive and continuously implemented.
- Keep a ‘secret list’ from the thinkers and work privately with them to try some skunk works changes. Go public when you have proof of concept later in the year.
Invest in yourself
Or maybe you prefer to treat education and training as an investment in your own team’s learning.
There are several 30 day programmes that you may like to consider as a learning tool for self-education that you can also put into practice as you go.
The first one I found is the ProBlogger 31 days to a better blog programme – download and pay for an e-book.
The Social Path team are running a 30 days to a better social media makeover. Tips for Day 1 (yesterday) are for your Linked In profile, today for Posterous. A handy summary page is provided daily.
And if you missed it the CAS team did a short series on Reverse IP Mapping which all B2B organisations should implement during 2010.
Why not write your own 30 day programme?
and release it to your clients and prospects as a biz dev tool? It doesn’t need to start in January. Remember to offer serveral different ways of receiving the material. I recommend
- RSS
- Blog (private page if you prefer)
- SMS
- Weekly podcast summary
Remember that giving away your advice and guidance is a fabulous new business tool. And if you are a truely creatively-led business coming up with new ideas and staying fresh means that what you give away free will act as a guide to what a paying client can get from working with you. It won’t be wasted creativity.
