Here’s some ideas of ways to get over this barrier by appealing to your existing customerbase.  They know you, they know your brand and they also know their local area:

1. The English Cut – bespoke Savile Row suits – adding a ready to wear range

English Cut Savile Row suits

I have been on Tom Mahon’s email list for years – not because I buy from him (he only clothes men) but because of his promotional methods using social media and email marketing.  In the message I got today he links to a video in which he asks his readers for two things: Recommendations of stores local to their home who might stock his ready to wear range and secondly, introductions to Tailors who might want to make the suits.

The one mistake he made was not specifying ONE SINGLE PLACE for the replies – it came from a noreply email address and the video is both on his site and youtube – so he’ll have to collate answers from a range of sources.  I would have chosen to set up an unique email address for replies and mentioned it in the video – printed it on screen.

2. Global Culture wants to expand its retail stockists

The other is an iconic kiwi t-shirt brand who is keen to get new outlets in three cities in New Zealand.  Using a trade magazine, we helped them write a short article about the company and its recent growth which included the appeal for new locations.

Global Culture has its target audience in towns where there is a mix of both tourist visitors and locals and so is well-represented in New Zealand towns like Queenstown and Christchurch.  It is trying to get introductions to retailers in Gisborne, Napier, Wellington, Tauranga and around the Hawkes Bay region who might be willing to stock their range.

Idealog is the business magazine and website that features innovative businesses and new products or services and so getting the article about Global Culture published there and also included in their daily email news roundup to a recipient list of 5,000 business people was a good start to opening dialogues.

Any of you know of businesses who’ve succeeded in getting expansion plans promoted by customers?

Here’s how.

We had a client commission us to do a lovely campaign to promote a national holiday with “21 Things to do ….” type of activity.  Trouble was, the main focus was to build social media followers on Facebook.

Making a landing page on a website is easy.  Facebook was a challenge.

We like challenges.

Our first big discovery was the ebook How to Master Facebook Marketing in 10 Days.  Here we learnt that you can create custom welcome tabs with an iFrame application and set it as the default landing page for visitors who have yet to “like” your product.

A welcome tab fit right in line with our purpose, because it encourages liking and boosts followers while highlighting our clients creative holiday campaign.  But it had some shortcomings too.

As suggested in the ebook, we used the Wildfire iFrame app. For this clients’ needs, the welcome page was to be predominately made up of text, which meant that it was time to roll up our sleeves and do some coding.

Having to translate our text to HTML programming was doable, but a bit of a pain.  Ensuring that our page had the look and feel that we wanted required switching between the html backstage look, and the finished product, to check and recheck that our links were in fact opening in another tab, that the right words were bold and underlined, and that we approved of the overall look of the page. It was tedious, but we did it.

Our ‘hack’ here was to create the page in our WordPress blog and when we were satisfied with the look and feel, to then copy the HTML into Facebook.

Next step was to take it live.

To set the newly-created welcome tab as the default landing page, we (as admins of the page) hit the ‘Edit Page’ button in the top right hand corner, taking us to the Manage Permissions tab of the Page Dashboard.  Selecting the drop-down menu next to the Default Landing Tab section, we chose the name of our newly created welcome tab (which, unless you change the name yourself, will automatically show up as ‘Welcome’). Our page was up.

But the happy “ta-da” moment quickly wore off, when we refreshed and still ended up, by default, on the wall of our page, rather than our sparkly new welcome tab.

Did the hack fail?

By testing different accounts and comparing, we discovered that only viewers who have not yet liked our page will automatically land on the welcome tab.  Admins and consumers who have already liked your page will be taken directly to the wall, skipping the welcome tab altogether.

Well, that just wasn’t going to work for us.  To get around this unfortunate feature, for each post that we made about our list, we linked back to the welcome tab, which featured the list in whole. Although, something to note, each time we posted a link to the Welcome Tab, a preview of our ‘about’ section showed up.

But with all of the glitches, our Facebook welcome tab did just what we had hoped.  Before the welcome tab launch our client had under 50 followers, now, not even a week later, they have over 500.

It was a learning process, but a successful one.

Tell us about your experiences – ever tried something like this?

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.

WordStream Inc.

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.

WordStream Inc.

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.

WordStream Inc.

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.

WordStream Inc.

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.

WordStream Inc

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

WordStream Inc

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:

1. 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”).
2. Next, segment your top-level groups into narrower subgroups. Second-level groups often include a modifier that specifies the offering in question.
3. 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.

WordStream Inc.

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.