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The Connected CEO: Part 2

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Adrienne Wilkerson

Originally published on August 3, 2013. Updated on May 31, 2019.

So you want to be a connected CEO? You want to take the plunge?

Great! But where do you actually start?

Corporate social media 101

  1. Make sure your company has a social media policy that both the PR and HR can agree and live with. Then stick to it. This may seem obvious, but depending on your industry, there can be some tricky areas to navigate when communicating via social media.
  2. Decide which social media platforms you want to “own” as the company’s CEO. There is a lot out there and it’s easy to get burned out. We recommend picking three to focus on and master. We also recommend checking with your PR/Marketing department to find which ones they believe to be the most effective for your company and industry.
  3. Be consistent! It would be better to not do social media or only use one social media outlet than to be sporadic. Set up yourself on a schedule for posting and/or blogging. Some social media platforms like Twitter take a lot more time and should have multiple posts a day to be effective, others like a blog could have one post a week.
  4. Establish and maintain a voice. Social media is just that, social. It is all about conversations. Be yourself and communicate the way you would naturally do with a friend or colleague. People want to connect with the real you, they are looking to feel connected to you and therefore the company you lead.
  5. Finally, we highly recommend having a least one person who can be a second pair of eyes to double check content, basic typos, or other things we might miss composing material. After we take the time to actually post, the last thing we want are typos in our material. Twitter is a little more difficult since it is probably the most casual and spontaneous of the social media outlets. But even so, if you’re responding to a PR issue or posting a response to a national or international crisis for instance, it is better to take the time and get the post proofed prior to sending it out.

Have questions? Schedule a free consultation today.

Numbers Don’t Lie, It’s Why I Love Inbound Marketing!

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Jennifer Christensen

Friday was a great day for our business and one of our client’s business. The Inbound Marketing strategy we have put in place for this particular client has been paying off handsomely for their bottom line. In an industry that is ever changing, that is more about trial and error and a/b testing than proven formulas – wins that happen right off the bat are rare, but I’m noticing something interesting… they are becoming more common.

 We met with a relatively new client ( working together three months) to go over their stats. Here’s what we tend to look for in the area of meaningful numbers for our clients: 

1. Marketing efforts – How many people are we reaching through our marketing efforts? We had some great stats for that part of the conversation- About 18,000 a week through Facebook and Google targeted ads alone.

2. Click Throughs – How many of the targeted people we are reaching are clicking through to the landing pages? We also had some solid numbers on that as well – We had about 620 people clicking through to the landing pages on the website from those targeted ads per month.

3. Conversions – How many leads were being generated and how many are converting to new patients? Between their data and ours, we were able to verify an additional 20 new phone inquiries per week or 80 + per month.  Most of these calls were converting into new patients! 

4. Cost – What’s the cost per new patient generated, including ad costs and Beacon’s services? In this case, the ROI is staggering: $36 per new patient, each valued at over $1,300 annually. 

So how do great numbers like this happen in a short period of time and why am I seeing it happen more often? 

Based on our experience in working with over 100 digital and online campaigns in the past 3 years, all the stars need to line up for this to happen quickly. What are the key ingredients for the stars to line up? 

1.  Buyer Persona – The right message delivered to the right audience. Basically research, research and more research. Do we know who the target demographic is and what their pain points are? Have we accurately created the correct graphic and content in the right medium to send the right message to that targeted audience? *** Remember Inbound Marketing isn’t really about you, it’s about the audience for which you are providing a solution. 

2.  A great website –  Does the website have content that is meaningful, helpful and intuitive for the consumer? Will they actually want to do business with the client after clicking on the website? *** Your website is the foundation of your Inbound Marketing efforts. Without a solid website, you are wasting money to drive traffic there.

3. Conversion – Once you have reached the right target, provided the correct message and sent them to a solid landing page on your website – then what? Make it easy for them to do business with you. Provide good references and reviews that build credibility. Avoid long forms that require your potential client  to fill out just to communicate with you. Make sure your social feeds are connected to your website and that they can communicate with you there. Most importantly-that your phone number and map information is easy to find and accessible. Conversion is much more than a call to action. It’s about meeting the needs of your potential client, or patient in this case, before they even pick up the phone to call you. 

So, I mentioned above that we are seeing these types of fast results happen more often in the past 6-9 months then the last few years combined. I’m convinced the reason is twofold.

1.  Education- Business owners are becoming much more educated on the value of Inbound Marketing. There is an entirely different understanding in 2017 than even a few years ago. Instead of just budgeting for one of the stars to line up, like Facebook advertising or a new website- they are more willing than ever to put budget into their social media plans, websites and content management. They understand that meaningful results are based on a complete, Inbound marketing strategy, not just one piece. In fact, according to Forbes, 48% of national marketing budgets have shifted to Inbound efforts, from less than 20% 4 years ago.  

2.  Marketing Technologies – The rate in which digital media and targeted advertising has advanced in the past 6 months is mind blowing. Being able to target, on Facebook alone, people who are within 3 miles of your business, who have a certain income level, with interests that match your products etc. is a game changer – and that’s just ONE of the changes that we’ve seen. 

If your interested in the particular case study I’m referencing in this article, or if you want to build revenue from your website and social media presence- drop me a line at  [email protected], or check out our website .

Are the Yellow Pages Phone Book Obsolete?

Picture of Adrienne Wilkerson

Adrienne Wilkerson

We very frequently get asked by small and medium sized business owners if they should keep their ad in the Yellow Pages. 95% of the time our answer is no, there is really no legitimate reason to have an ad in the printed phone book. At one time the Yellow Pages was the go to place when you needed help and didn’t know who to call. In fact many of us still remember the popular phrase “Let your fingers do the walking!” Check out this commercial from 1970.

Phone books were a mainstay in every home in America and grew to be so huge that they could arguably be considered a lethal weapon and were frequently used to demonstrate feats of strength by tearing them in half! Until the mid 2000’s, if you wanted your business found, the Yellow Pages was one of the best methods for getting your business found. However the almost overnight phenomenon of the Apple iPhone in 2007 and then the Android version, the HTC in 2008 was the beginning of the end for printed phone book. According to recent PewCenter research over 90% of US adults have cell phones and their fingers are still doing the walking, but now they are typing search terms into Google.

But the question still comes up, should I advertise in the Yellow Pages? Honestly, every time I want to ask when was the last time you actually saw a Yellow Pages book outside of a strong man competition? Exactly!

So here are 5 reasons why you should drop your Yellow Pages ads like hot cakes.

  1. It’s Expensive! Yellow Pages used to have a strangle hold on businesses and convinced them their phone ringing depended on the size of their ad. After all, if you weren’t in the phone book, you weren’t credible. Honestly, when I started Beacon Publishing & Design, LLC in 2001, I had several well respected business people tell me this. They weren’t all wrong back then. The sad result of the Yellow Page’s self proclaimed monopoly was that they could charge outrageous prices for their ads. Now we have much, much better avenues open to us for our advertising dollars. Google AdWords, Facebook ads and promoted posts, and Twitter ads just to name a few.
  2. You are committed to a full year. Once that mammoth book is printed you are committed to that ad and the price tag that came with it for a full year. There is no opportunity to change, update or adjust any advertising you have invested in. In contrast, inbound marketing is flexible and adjusts on the fly, if needed, to the way your audience is responding. Not being locked into print means you have more capacity to adjust services, hours, products, staff and so much more. You don’t have to live with an ad that is outdated two months after it goes to press.
  3. The Yellow Pages system is outdated and does not work for most of today’s consumers. Now it’s more about our thumbs doing the walking and not through that huge book anymore. According to a recent study Google owns 89% of the US mobile organic search market and more than 1/2 of Google searches come from mobile. Why would and number of the 90% of Americans who have a smart phone, put it down to pick up the Yellow Pages? Unless they were actually competing in a strong man competition that is. We already have our mobile devices in our hands and we are going to use the tools at hand to search for things we want or need.
  4. The ROI (Return on Investment) on Yellow Pages is terrible! Most businesses struggle to track where their leads come from and having an ad in the phone book is just making the whole problem more difficult. When we use inbound marketing techniques, we can track exactly where leads come from and where they are going. Often we joke with clients that we can track the leads directly to their door. Using tools like Google Analytics, HubSpot, Facebook Analytics, Twitter Analytics, and Pinterest Analytics, we know exactly when a specific lead starts to interact with your company, when they visit your website, what they look at and when they fill out a contact form or click on the phone number button on your website. Those are some powerful tracking tools that take all of the guess work out of the ROI of inbound marketing!
  5. You can still get a FREE listing on YP.com. But Yellow Pages has evolved you say. They have YP.com and an app now you say! Shouldn’t I still advertise with them you ask? Don’t be fooled, a listing with YP.com that gets updated on their app is still free just like the old days when a single line phone number in the book was free when you signed up for a land line. It doesn’t hurt anything and can help some of your search engine rankings to be listed with YP.com, you just don’t have to buy a very expensive ad and be locked in for a long time anymore.

The bottom line is that the days of the Yellow Pages phone book being a viable option for current small and medium businesses are long gone. If you are a company looking for the best ROI for your budget inbound marketing is a much more effective marketing technique (60% cheaper than traditional methods). Give us a call at 907-563-6008 or send us an email for a free marketing evaluation or just a chat about a smarter, more effective marketing technique. We would love to hear from you!

Are you paying too much for your digital marketing?

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Jennifer Christensen

So, there’s the question. It’s one client rarely asks us out loud, but are often thinking about. “Am I paying too much for this online SEO stuff and how can I find out?”  To best answer that question, I want to explain my background a bit and why I am so fascinated by and love studying, learning and becoming an expert in this field.

My background in sales has given me a strong appreciation for performance and accountability. I started out in commission sales at 19 years old in the furniture and design industry. The commissions helped pay for college and provided a fantastic lifestyle for a 19-year-old student.  I loved the concept that my paycheck was directly related to my performance. There was no one else to blame if I didn’t close a sale and it was certainly a great feeling to be rewarded for providing a good solution for a client. At the same token, I was often suspicious of the marketing/advertising side of the equation in our industry. It seemed harder to measure the value of their performance.

When the ‘internet” age of digital marketing came into being my interest was peaked. Between pay per click advertising (PPC) and website ranking (SEO), I started to see a clearer path to measure performance and success for marketing efforts. It’s one of the reasons that I love digital marketing today. It’s performance based with incredible data provided for our clients and is easy to measure, adjust and improve month over month. For example, with A/B testing, we can measure the copy and style of our ads, website pages, and even graphic design. What language best appeals to a specific audience? For small businesses, where every dollar counts- this type of data and accountability is enormously important and helpful in growing their business.

In fact, for some of our top clients now, we are even using AI (artificial intelligence) to analyze the data results from their Google and social campaigns to provide an in-depth analysis. (You can imagine for a hardcore Star Trek geek in high school, how cool that is for me! )

Let me give you an example of what this means for our clients and how we can answer the question concerning what they are paying for digital marketing. Today provided a perfect real-life example of how we can measure this.

At 10 a.m this morning I had a pre-scheduled client meeting to go over their current digital marketing plan, PPC, social media, SEO, reputation management etc. We’ve been offering these services over the past year and have developed a good rapport and trust with our client.  We regularly go over the monthly reporting on web traffic, sources of clicks through and conversion rates from the generated traffic.

Today, we talked about an opportunity they were presented with to renew a contract outside of our services. They presented the numbers the vendor provided for the past year so that we could measure the effectiveness. The annual numbers showed 26,500 impressions for the advertising category, and 153 click-throughs to their website. We verified the 153 referrals from that source through Google Analytics. From the 153 referrals there was only 1 conversion ( click through to lead) The cost of the advertising placement was $900 per month/$10,800 annually. To determine to direct value of this particular digital advertising- we divided $10,800 by 153- That was an astonishing $70.82 per click through to their website, and with one conversion, $10,800 per lead.

In comparison to their other digital efforts: Facebook, Pinterest, PPC, and blogging are producing clicks through to their website at an average of $1.61 per click with conversions at $40-$82. Being able to measure and understand the numbers allowed them to track their success, compare results from different sources and make good marketing decisions. In this case, they decided the $10,800 was far too much to pay for that digital advertising plan. The monies would be better spent in an area that is getting over a 1000% better return.

This real-life example provides a solid foundation for answering the question “Are you paying too much for your digital marketing” The great thing about numbers is they don’t lie. If you know what you are looking for: cost per impression, cost per click and cost per conversion, then you can evaluate the effectiveness of this type of digital marketing for your business. For every business it’s different, a lead could be worth $200, $2,000 or $20,000. Now you have a way to measure the effectiveness of the money you spend to get the lead.

One note of caution, measuring clicks through to your website and conversions is just one part of your digital marketing plan. There is a strong value of creating a community on Facebook, generating a strong referral source, and reputation management where you ask clients to review your services on Google. I used the example that I did today because it is one very clear metric that you can use as a solid foundation for measuring your effectiveness in digital marketing campaigns.

Our goal, at Beacon Media + Marketing, is that all of our clients would understand the metrics and feel confident that they can make good decisions in spending their hard earned marketing dollars. If you want an independent analysis of your current digital marketing efforts- contact us for a free evaluation and an 8-12 page report provided by a Google Certifed team member. www.www.beaconmm.com or call 907-563-6008 and ask for Jennifer.

 

 

What is Google Authorship? Is it Important for my Business?

Picture of Adrienne Wilkerson

Adrienne Wilkerson

Google rolled out their Authorship program a few years back, but it seems a bit slow to catch on with mainstream businesses. This is really too bad considering some of the great ranking benefits with Google.

What is Google Authorship you ask? It is a way to connect the blogs you write and publish online to your Google+ account. Personally, I believe it is yet another way Google is trying to get us to use Google+ since it pretty much bombed after they launched it. But the important thing is that increasingly connecting the two is figuring into Google’s search algorithm!

As a business professional, you have taken valuable time to craft and post a blog on your company’s website. Congrats! You’re ahead of the game! So, what happens if someone plagiarizes your hard work? Google makes the case that if you have signed up for their Authorship program, then your original article will show up before the stolen one since you have already established yourself as the author!

Another interesting feature is that you can add a face to your work with Google Authorship. After you have signed up and Google verifies your work, your Google+ image will be proudly displayed beside the search results. We all know that search results with images grab people’s eyes and have higher click rates. This in turn can lead to more traffic back to your site, which is a big part of any content marketing strategy. It seems like a great win-win situation.

Connecting everything is very simple and only takes about five minutes. You can follow this link directly to the Google+ page to get started. Click Here.

I just recently signed up, and am keeping an eye on the ranking for my blogs to see if they increase. If you do decide to connect with Google Authorship, let me know what you think of it. I would really enjoy hearing your thoughts.

Organic SEO: The New Face of Change

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Adrienne Wilkerson

There is an old saying “nothing is as constant as change,” and this is perhaps never more true than with SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Google is constant adjusting and improving their highly secretive SEO algorithm to improve the transparency of the user online experience. Then you have the other four top search engines working to keep up with Google and give users a reason to switch: Bing, Yahoo, Ask, and AOL. But considering Google has 900,000,000 (estimated) unique visitors per month and it’s closest competitor, Bing, has 165,000,000, we are going to focus on Google first.

There are big changes afoot in the world of SEO, and have been for several years. It is no longer just a “simple” case of paying for link-building and not having to worry about quality content if your website was overly optimized on the backend. As with social media, most of this change centers around the end user. Now content is king, so it is more important than ever to have dynamic content. This way people want to “backlink” from their website to material on your website. There are some pretty specific ways you can go about doing this, and one company Raka Creative calls it the Inbound Marketing Trifecta. The way they summarize this is fantastic, so I’m not going to reinvent the wheel. Instead I’m going to recognize them as thought leaders in this and put a “backlink”.

Keep these three things in mind when strategizing your SEO:

Dynamic Content

Make sure the story of your buyers is driving the content you are creating and publishing, both on your website and in your blogs. Claim Google Authorship to build trust and thought leader status.

Social Signals

Engage consistently in a conversational and meaningful way with clients, buyers, and other experts in your industry.

Clean Linking

It is important to reach out to vendors, clients, and colleagues and offer to link their quality material on your website and other social media outlets.

Implementing these three areas on a consistent basis strategically positions your website to dominate organic searches in your market. Organic SEO will continue to bring you leads long after the material is posted, unlike paid SEO that will cut off the leads at the same time the payments stop.

So, take some time and identify the keywords you believe people could use to search for you, and weave them into your content, engage on social media, and practice clean linking. These three will be a rock solid foundation for your ongoing, lead-producing, organic SEO strategy.

3 steps that will create lead generating websites

Picture of Adrienne Wilkerson

Adrienne Wilkerson

We @ Beacon really love everything about Social Media: We love the strategy, the contests and excitement generated with every post.  Social Media is exciting, fast paced and challenging. Take a look at our client, Kaleidoscape. Her Facebook page has generated a substantial following in less than 3 months. She has 754 fans, growing every day, and her business isn’t even open yet!  Social Media might be the new bright and shiny tool in our marketing toolbox, but a sparkly new tool can’t replace the basic importance of a hammer or wrench.

The central piece of our client’s online marketing game plan for 2013 still includes the same basic tool that was central in 2012…The website. In fact, for 2013, a top notch website is even more important than last year. A website that generates leads, converts to sales and creates long-term revenue, that’s the meat of the meal. That’s the marketing piece that makes the sales staff AND the accounting staff of a company cheer. It’s a return on investment that grows the company.  Where as social media can have a huge impact on branding, client relations and customer service and certainly should be an important part of your marketing plan; the bottom line is that if your website is lacking you are certainly losing sales.

Let’s take a look at three steps that will create lead generating web sites:

1. Make Contacting You EASY.

Make it easy to call, email or instant chat with you from every page. Prospective/ current customers have less and less patience searching sites. Since 40% are most likely accessing your website through a mobile or ipad device- it’s up to you to make sure they can click and contact. Even if your customers don’t actually call, the presence of a phone number gives credibility and trust. Check out what we designed for IMIG AV. There’s contact information on the right side of almost every page.

2. Avoid Common Website Templates

There are some great templates out there, and we’ve even used them from time to time when a client needs nothing more than an online brochure and has a very limited budget. Making a lead generating website takes investment and strategy. Invest in the best possible website you can afford, and make sure your page’s purpose is clear and the design complements the function. We suggest using Word Press for great form and function. Lastly, common website templates often don’t allow easy social share functions, landing pages and blogs. These items are key components to creating lead generation. Obviously, having a well-designed site can also increase trust and confidence in a prospective client.

3. Measure And Test Results

The best lead generation tactics in the world will not truly benefit your bottom line unless you are able to test and measure your content, call to actions and landing pages. Google Analytics offers free measuring tools. Your content, sources and even demographics of users can be measured and tested throughout the process. The amount of information provided can help you tailor your landing pages, offers and content shared.  There are also various software options to help you automate responses to those possible leads that are visiting your website.

Hopefully we’ve given a few good suggestions on creating more leads from your website. If you have questions on landing pages, blogs or more give us a shout!

beacon mm media

The Connected CEO: Part 2

Read More
Numbers Don't Lie! It's Why I Love Inbound Marketing

Numbers Don’t Lie, It’s Why I Love Inbound Marketing!

Read More
beacon mm media

Are the Yellow Pages Phone Book Obsolete?

Read More
beacon mm media

Are you paying too much for your digital marketing?

Read More
beacon mm media

What is Google Authorship? Is it Important for my Business?

Read More
beacon mm media

Organic SEO: The New Face of Change

Read More
beacon mm media

3 steps that will create lead generating websites

Read More