Good morning from Central New York State. My name is Eddie Bluff and I'm Co-Founder and Vice President of Key Accounts at SiteSeeker Incorporated. My brother and I started the business back in 2002-2003, so a long time ago. SiteSeeker is a digital marketing agency, which means that we do a lot of things to help businesses get found in search, convert website visitors to customers, and engage with their audience to enhance their brand and their business. So we design and we develop websites like millions of other people, but we do so with the sole purpose of driving targeted traffic to our clients' websites. Some of the services we provide would include website design and development, lead nurturing, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, email marketing, buyer persona development, and a lot more. We've been really involved with AED over the last year. We presented at your 2015 convention, your 2016 leadership conference, a webinar on social media assets just this past spring, and we've contributed to the CED magazine, and we're here today to talk about online marketing. You know, if we could see into the future, it would be a heck of a lot easier to know what channels our prospective customers favored. We'd know what kind of content they choose to consume, and if we knew all that, we could spend a lot more energy engaging with them instead of first trying to figure out who they are and to understand them. You know, short of time travel, all we can do is to understand the performance of our current methods, our current tactics, keep an eye on business conditions, predictions, and technology trends, and just try to make some informed decisions. So today, in this session, we're going to cover what's changed in internet marketing in recent years, where we think it's going, and how this impacts the distribution marketer, and how do you get there by positioning yourself to intercept targeted search traffic, to engage with your audience, and to position yourself as experts and increase leads in revenue. We're going to explore a number of different topics, including an effective approach to digital marketing. We'll talk about what's changed with the B2B buying process. We'll explore buyer personas and why we should be familiar with who our buyer personas are. We'll talk about how important the role of content is today and into the future. We'll talk about marketing automation, which is, you know, a hot topic in digital marketing today. It's also called drip marketing, lead nurturing. And we'll spend a few minutes at the end looking forward, looking at what we think the future holds for an effective digital marketing approach. Throughout the session, I've inserted a number of questions, and they're not meant to have you answer. They're just questions more like thought-provoking moments that correspond to the nature of the topic at that moment. So just consider them as we go through them. Okay, so let's move forward. You know, gone are the old days of a tactical approach to marketing today and into the future. You really need to have a systematic approach because the fact of the matter is that modern marketing, the complexity of modern marketing, is only going to increase. I mean, it's already complex. There's an awful lot going on. So tactics that we're all familiar with, like SEL, search engine optimization, SEM, search engine marketing, social media, email marketing, they're all common elements of what we call digital marketing. And all these tactics will produce valuable results on their own. But today, to be really successful, they need to be tied together in part of a plan. So I'd like to talk about that plan. At SiteSeeker, we've developed the ROC principle. You don't need to use this plan, but you have to have a plan. The ROC principle, it's an acronym. It says that every plan recognizes the need for a roadmap for ongoing online efforts and that everything that we do should be all about the customer. So the first point of reflection or question is, you know, with regard to your marketing efforts, what are the top three objectives of your intended program? Maybe you're looking for a defined and measurable growth in revenue from your online efforts. Maybe you want to increase the amount of traffic that you get by a certain percentage. Maybe you want to increase the number of leads you get. Maybe you want to sell a certain amount of product at a specific average sale or all of the above. And maybe there's other objectives, right? The point is, as you put together your roadmap, whatever that looks like, it's really important to have some measurable goals against an established baseline that you can monitor your progress and you can work towards those goals. Now a roadmap, as its name would imply, it's a formal plan that gets you from point A to point B and it always starts with the end in mind. It's methodical, meaning that the objectives are identified objectives and they're segmented in a chronological and logical fashion. The solutions that we choose should obviously be the best solutions, those that are proven to be successful and manageable, but all of this has to be tied together by a strategic plan. And there can be an awful lot involved as we're going to explore, so it's really important to have a plan that pulls it all together. It's important to fully understand what this picture might look like for your audience. Picture yourself in the middle here as the prospect. Today depending upon a number of factors, depending upon your job function, the industry that we work in, the problem that we're trying to solve, our own technical capabilities and our personal preferences, we may reach out to a variety of different online sources and platforms to gather information and to source solutions and vendors. So today's distribution marketer really needs to know what this picture looks like for their customer personas and to make sure that you have a strong presence in those platforms and that you provide value to your prospects. Next question or point of reflection, have you implemented or do you maintain a marketing calendar, something that dictates what's going to happen in your marketing world throughout the entire year? An editorial calendar which falls more in the lines of the different types of content that's going to be produced, a conversational calendar, a multi-year digital marketing vision or plan. You know and I bring these up because more so now than ever there's a ton going on. Marketing is much more complicated than it used to be and it's also a lot more effective and it's a lot more targeted but you've got to have processes in place that's going to define what's going to happen and when it's going to happen. So a successful roadmap defines exactly that, what's going to happen when and it recognizes the need for ongoing efforts. All of the tactics in this example plan and these plans are tailored to every single effort right so your plan might not look like this but all of the tactics are listed down column A and we'll come back to those. Across the top from left to right are the months of the calendar and you can see by the shaded cells that some of these efforts are short term one time efforts right while others continue over a longer period of time and yet still some others are periodic. They start, they stop, they start, they stop. If we drill down a little bit we can see examples of some of the tactics that could be included in a plan. For this particular plan reading from top to bottom on the left column we'll want to include things like we'll want to make sure that the website has been recently updated and it's mobile friendly right. With the surges of mobile search and mobile devices Google is very particular about ranking websites that are not mobile friendly. We'll want to assure that we've defined our audience and we're going to talk an awful lot about that and define our audience through the development of buyer personas. The buyer persona process once we get into it and complete it is always going to lead to ongoing website development because we're going to learn an awful lot about our audience and we're going to take a look at our website and realize that there's some deficiencies. There's some room for improvement right. So those updates could be design updates, functional updates, content updates or all of the above. As we define our persona needs and we do some research to uncover opportunities that's going to always lead to content marketing and that activity has to be driven by something. It has to be driven by an editorial or a content calendar that defines the type of content. The blog posts, case studies, who's going to be responsible for them and when they're going to be published. The plan identifies all of the activities and identifies it in a sequential order and organizes your efforts so that there's continuous activity. It keeps us organized. Another thing to think about. So is your organization or business unit currently involved in search engine optimization? Do you participate in pay-per-click, maybe Google AdWords or on the social media platforms? Are you monitoring your website's performance through Google Analytics or some other web analytic platform? Are you involved in lead scoring and nurturing? Are you doing anything with video on YouTube or some other platform like WorkerBTV? How about email marketing? You've probably all got databases out there and when you think about that how about social media? Are you engaged in LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus or some other platform? Our efforts need to be customer-centric and they've got to be focused on what the customer needs today because technology and the availability of information has completely changed how we buy. And with that change there's been an enormous shift in power to the buyer. The steps in the buying process listed on the left side of the screen here, they haven't changed in forever. They're still the same. We still have to realize the need for a solution or a solution to a problem. We have to research the solutions and the vendors and narrow the field down, negotiate and eventually buy. But it's really how information is obtained and consumed has changed because today buyers don't need sellers to become educated and that takes the seller right out of the game from the start. Notice the gap right here in the top of the buying-selling process. In the past before the internet, if anybody can remember that time frame, there would be engagement on the seller, on the distributor or the manufacturer, the people selling the product services and capabilities would be involved right up here at the top. So I read a B2B report in Forbes called the disappearing sales process that said that industrial buyers will conduct 70% of the buying process themselves through online self-education before they ever talk to a direct sales rep. So unless you're found in search, unless you're branding yourself as an expert on the social platforms, the buyers are becoming educated by other people that are doing those things. I've got to tell you, if I'm talking to your prospects every day on social media, good luck on seeding me because I've become their go-to guy. They bookmarked me. They come back for advice. So it's really important to get in the game. Buyers are also being influenced by reviews, right? We see reviews everywhere we go. They're looking for reviews from other people that have purchased the same products and voiced their opinions on social platforms and that same Forbes report that I mentioned said that buyers rely heavily on content from unbiased peer advice, find the exact same information that they once learned from salespeople. So it's really critical today to fill these gaps. To do that, you have to position content that solves problems and answers questions that would be typical in each of the stages that we see on the left-hand side in the buying process. And it gets even more complicated because if we deal with more than one customer type or persona, which we're going to define in a second, they're likely to have different informational needs. So we have to provide content that's focused on the customer and not on us because we live in a world where we are all self-serving and we have to cater to that. And we have to do this in a way where we are educating and not overtly selling at this point in time. So an awful lot has changed, including the way that we search. You know, over time, and this reflects a 10-year period of time, search trends change. They just do. Here we see searches for used forklifts in blue has gone down while searches for forklifts for sale in red has gone up. So if you're a forklift dealer that sells used forklifts and you've always done really well with that term and you get good leads and people looking for used forklifts are looking for conversations with you and all of a sudden that slows down, you really need to know what's happening. You can't be all happy every morning going into the staff meeting reporting, hey, we're still number one for used forklifts even though traffic and interactions and leads continues to shrink. So the point here is that we need to monitor what's going on with search trends specific to our business focus and we need to make changes as appropriate. A tool tip here, the best way to take, there's a lot of trending tools out there. I like Google Trends and I also use Twitter a lot to find out how trends in search and conversation have changed. Beyond that change, Google's changed and you know, that's silly to say that Google always changes. Right on the heels of the Great Recession though, which from my recollection was anything but great, Google went on a rampage with a lot of major changes that affected how they rank content. The first one to come along was Google Panda. They named these big changes after animals. So Google Panda punished websites for having poor quality content. That also included duplicate content, which is 100% pervasive in your world. It's 100% pervasive in the supply chain world because every good manufacturer will do whatever they can do to support their distributor, including providing content. The end result though is that every single distributor has the same exact content on their website. Google can't make sense out of that, so they'll punish websites that have duplicate content. Of course, most distributors don't have the internal resources or bandwidth to create unique content and you know, prior to this happening, prior to Google dropping the hammer on this, why would you, right? Distributors can also have huge number of SKUs, so therefore the effort required to create unique content is both monumental and expensive. Google also started to demote sites that have poor performing websites, low quality content, sites that have broken links or sloppy or excessive coding as an example, sites that don't conform to mobile search. Google Suggest came out, this is the first, this is a list of suggested keywords that drops down. We all see them all the time as we're entering in our search query and if you type like a lot of people do with one or two fingers, this suggested list can look pretty appealing and you find yourself selecting one of the suggested queries rather than complete your own query and it's particularly appealing and very common now with mobile devices simply because it's a lot harder to type a query on a smaller device. Paid search is another change, it's taken a lot of changes over the last few years. Before the paid ads had colored boxes around them, made them very visible, now they kind of blend in and just recently Google pulled all of the ads from the right hand side of the result page and now you only see the sponsored ads on the very top and the very bottom of the organic listings. So the ads are starting to look a lot more like the regular organic results and Google's becoming a lot more sophisticated in the way that they blend those in. So today we need to have better quality websites, we need to take time to write good, deep and unique content. The structure of our platforms has to be really sound, you can't have sloppy or bloated coding. The sites need to load fast because Google's extremely protective of us, the user and any time they see a website that provides a poor user experience, they're going to devalue or punish that website rather than risk disappointing a user, that's how they protect the revenue model. As long as we keep using Google, the advertisers continue to run to them with dollars in hand so they're very serious about this. What you're seeing on the bottom is this graph, it comes from a client that we worked with for a period of time and the bottom left right around the first quarter of 2013 you can see that the traffic was taking a nosedive, it was on a downward slide. So we got involved and we noticed a bunch of broken links, the things I was just talking about in sloppy code so the site wasn't performing well, it also wasn't mobile friendly. So in the June to July period of 2014 where you see these annotations down here, we launched a new website and as soon as we launched the site you can see that the traffic went back up. So they ran away, they had intentions of writing more content and doing other things and they didn't and the traffic went back down. It was around January of 2015 that they brought us back in, we started to write blog content and you can see the traffic went back up. So the point here is every time attention was paid to the website and we were proactively generating content and making things better, performing SEO, etc., the traffic went up but whenever attention was removed or the blogging stopped, we witnessed a slow decay. The point is this, you have to look at your website like a living breathing entity, you can't let it sit dormant, you need to exercise it, you need to continually add content to it and if you think back to the rock principle that we just covered in the beginning, this falls under the ongoing effort part. We strongly believe that all of your marketing efforts will produce a lot better results when you have an ongoing effort and it's really kind of like if you don't care enough about your site, maintain it and keep it up to speed, why should Google, right? Okay, so a lot of other changes, particularly in the mobile world, the smartphone is the number one possession that people have and according to that cool video we saw in the beginning, there's more smartphones than toothbrushes which is kind of weird to think about that so we won't. Our devices continue to change and screen sizes change with every phone. We passed the tipping point as you can see by this graph in the upper right hand side of desktop search versus mobile search a while ago folks, back in 2014 and Google recognized it and they've made changes accordingly. So mobile is today and it's going to continue to be a really big element in marketing into the future and as these devices change, new technologies are born as a result. So the initial shift to smaller devices prompted a rise in research into voice recognition which changed the way that we search. Now we search by voice and we search by voice very differently than we search by typing in a query because when we're voice searching, we expect our answers to be displayed as soon as the screen resolves. We want to get our hands involved because we're voice searching. So when we voice search, we start our query with words like who, what, where, why, how because that's the way that we pose questions when we talk which is different than the way we enter in a search phrase with our hands. Google's taken mobile and device usage very seriously. They can devalue your site if it's not mobile friendly. To see how your site stacks up if it complies to Google's algorithm for mobile friendly compliance which goes back to April of 2015, you can search Google mobile friendly test listed down here in the bottom of the screen or go to mobiltest.me and you can plug in your URL and it will give you a return image of how Google sees your website from a mobile perspective. Our focus needs to change folks. Your website's a funnel. It has input and it has output. It works at social media and in addition to the search engines and vertical websites drives traffic to your website. And once people are on your site, there's a number of things they can do. They can look at a piece of content, a single page and leave immediately. That's called a bounce. They can read a page or two and then exit. They can look at some information, determine that you can solve the problem and they can take some steps, some action towards becoming closer to becoming a client. It's those steps that we call conversion actions and they vary. Depending upon the functionality of your website, the nature of your industry. But you know, common conversion actions could be they could place a phone call. That's a great conversion action because now they're identifying themselves. An even better one if you have an e-commerce platform on your site is they could purchase something. They could send you an email. They could fill out a form and submit that. They could download a PDF document. Now that's not as an aggressive or outward signal of interest but it's a soft conversion. It shows interest. If you have a live chat capability on your website, they could interact with you electronically. So it's the layout of your website that's going to determine what they do. The better you lay out your website, the more value you get. This is more important today than ever for the same reason I just mentioned a couple of slides ago, Google's very protective over the website. So they don't like over the user experience. They don't like websites that load slowly. They don't like broken links which I bet many of you have. It's very common. It's like inviting somebody to your house and telling them to come up the back steps when you know that three out of those five steps are broken, right? So it's important to make sure your house is in order. Now, not all of the data that I wanted to talk to next is on this slide but possibly it will pop in as I move forward. So let's talk about, let's pretend this website gets 10,000 visitors a month. And from those 10,000 visitors, 0.75% or three quarters of 1% of those convert. They take a conversion action. They've now entered your sales cycle. You're going to close some number of those leads and you're going to make some money. I'm going to click here and see if it, oh good, okay. So the most natural thing in the world would be to say, let's get more of that, right? Let's get more of that. Let's increase our efforts up here at the top of the funnel. Let's drive more traffic. And if we can increase that by 25%, we've made more money at the end of the day. We have more leads and we've made more money. We haven't done anything yet to the way that the website operates or increase the conversion actions by placing new calls to action. So we're still making, you know, having this 0.75% conversion action. The way that digital marketing really works beautifully though is you've got to start here. Start in the middle of this funnel, the middle of your website. Make sure that your house is in order. If you can remove friction points, if you can increase this funnel so that you get more output, add more value, more calls to action, that's where you're going to get better value out of the dollars and the efforts that you're putting into the top of the funnel here. And if you can even eat this up, this conversion rate from 0.75% to 1%, you can see how the numbers really work. That's how effective digital marketing works. One of the things that I love to do is fish. I love to fish more than anything. This is something that's called fishing upstream and it has to do with positioning content in front of people before they have any idea that your solution can solve the problem. And here's a case study to illustrate that. We built and we marketed a website for a company that builds these hydraulic nuts and bolts that couple a turbine to a shaft. It's a really technical product and it's important that each of those nuts can be torqued down very accurately. Two months after the site launched, we looked at the data and we could see a story. We could see that someone from ABB Power Generation, let's go across the top row here, very big company in Midlothian, Virginia, on 2 May at 1540 Greenwich Mean Time, went to Google and they searched the term Frame 9EC, which is a large capacity gas turbine. They found our client's website, they clicked on their listing, and they ended up on the site. The very next day, 3 May, somebody from the same company went to Google and they searched hydraulic nut. Once again, they found our client's website, they went into the client's website. Later that same day, a little bit over an hour later, somebody from ABB Power Generation went to Google and they went direct. A week later, somebody went to Google and they went direct to our client's website. So what's just happened is this. They were out there searching for symptoms of their problem. That's the top step in the buying and selling process, right? Evaluating a solution, looking for a solution. The Frame 9EC was the problem term that they searched. Then they went on the second search and they searched for hydraulic nut. Now they're evaluating different solutions. And finally, they went right to our client's website. At that point, they're evaluating their vendor. So here's the takeaway. Data tells a story. We need to analyze our Google Analytics data to understand how people use our website. The second thing is if you can create really engaging content that talks about the problem and not your service and not your solutions outwardly, then you have an opportunity to get out there in advance just like this fisherman would to the trout in the stream and you can steer people down a path. And that's what we call fishing upstream. It's important to understand how people search, right? In order to position content and to write content that provides value, you got to understand how people search. This is a screenshot from the Google Keyword Planner, tool tip number two. You identify a seed word. In this case, you can see right here the seed word I used for this example was heavy equipment distributor. Google then returns the number of times that that phrase was searched, how competitive it is, and if available, the amount, the dollar amount that you should plan to spend if you were to include that phrase in your pay-per-click program. The results page down beneath it provides a list of other related search queries, and there's lots of them. There's like 700 or 800 other phrases that Google considers to be related to the seed word that you put in there. And then you can export it. You can export all the data, all those search phrases that you felt were relevant to your mission, to your interest, you can export it into a spreadsheet. And this is really valuable research, and you can learn a lot from it. And then you can position your content to address the questions that these queries would ask. Here's an example of some of the research I did for the AED Leadership Conference in Las Vegas. And when you look at these search queries, think about your own website and how you can position yourself in your content, right? If backhoe for sale, or if you're a cat company, if those are important phrases, if you wanna talk to people who are searching like that, if you don't have corresponding content, dedicated page content on your website, you can't be found for it, it just can't happen. So you can really also gain an understanding of where people are, where they are in their heads within the buying process by the words that they use, like excavator. That's a very general term, right? So here's a story to sort of illustrate this. About 12 years ago, I had to go to New York City, and this is the days before GPS units, and I had to drive alone. My assistant couldn't go with me. So my festival of stress, I live in the country, my festival of stress kicked in when I thought about driving into the city, and I'm gonna get lost, potholes, cab drivers flipping me off, et cetera. So I said, I'm gonna break down, I'm gonna buy a GPS unit. I got onto Google, I searched GPS. By the results, I quickly realized that I didn't have enough information because I was reading results that talked about GPS units for sailing and GPS units for hiking, and I realized that that's what they were traditionally used for back then. So I searched again, I said GPS automobile, and I recognized the name TomTom, and I recognized the name Garmin from some offline advertisement, TV commercials. I searched again, I looked a little bit, and I said, I want a Garmin. I didn't know if I wanted the Garmin NUVI 450 or 350, so I searched, I said Garmin NUVI 450 versus 350. I read the results, I determined I wanted the 450. So I searched one more time, I said Garmin NUVI 450, cheap. I saw Amazon, I saw Garmin, I saw a bunch of other distributors. I searched one final time, I said Garmin NUVI 450, cheap, free shipping. So what's just happened is I started by searching for something like Excavator. I searched for GPS. Now if I'm Garmin, I do want to be found for GPS, but I really, really, really want to be found for Garmin NUVI 450, cheap, free shipping, because through my chronology, through my experience, I've educated myself, I've started at the top of the sales funnel, I've moved down to the bottom of the sales funnel. So by looking at tools like this, you will find and you will understand where people are in the buying process by the words that they use. And you have to think inwardly. Do I finance heavy equipment financing? Well, if I finance, do I talk about financing? Do I use the words that my audience is using when they search? Am I building upon the questions that I believe that they're asking, right? So it's really important to take a look at these tools, that's the Google Keyword Planner, and understand how people are interacting. Question and reflection time. Is your website currently ranking well for important keywords? Do you know that? Is it generating sufficient leads? Is it mobile-friendly? So we've alluded to these things called buyer personas, let's talk about them. It's extremely important to understand who our customer personas are, and to develop content both in form and in medium that's gonna ring true to those that are most influential in the buying process. Creating a personalized experience is really important today, and it's gonna continue to be important. We live in a world today where music streaming services like Spotify and Pandora, they allow us to create personal playlists, right? And stations, right? And Amazon provides shoppers with personalized purchase suggestions. So the old approach, one size fits all, isn't working now, and it's certainly not gonna work in the future. Smart content isn't one of the new buzzwords out there, and it's becoming important today. Smart content is when you target what you're gonna display based upon what you know about your visitors, from their location and referral source to where they might be in the buying process. But to do any of that, you've gotta go through and develop your buyer personas, and it's a process. So what is a buyer persona? It's a fictitious archetype. It's a set of characteristics that relate to the people that we deal with in the buying process, an engineer, a facilities manager, a purchasing agent, anybody, and usually we define them by title. So it could be Bob the business owner. Anybody that's involved in buying our products and services. So in order to accomplish their jobs, these personas that we have to influence, they're gonna have different informational needs, and very possibly, they're gonna need to or prefer to consume that information in different media forms. And depending upon what we sell, the size of the deal, into what industry, there could be a lot of different personas that we have to interact with and influence. Let's take a look at an example. Well, before we do that, so think about the people or the personas that you most commonly deal with in the sales process by job title. When you think about them, think about are they visual, creative people? Or are they more likely to buy something based upon data and facts? My brother Brian, extremely technical. He's an engineer. He always moved. When he was a kid, he was making, using erector sets to build things and all this other stuff. So he loves data. He loves charts. Me, I'm very different. Data and charts blind me. They send me into bits. I prefer text and video. Here's how two personas in one sales transaction might interact, and this could help to add some clarity to the whole point in the discussion about personas. This is Joe, the R&D engineer. This is Jackie, the buyer. They both work for Panasonic. Panasonic's coming out with a new TV in two years' time. This TV's gonna be different. It's gonna be thinner, so there's gonna be a lot more heat generated in that thinner cabinetry. Joe, the R&D engineer, has put on this project years in advance because he's got a lot of work to do. He's gotta find and rate and source all of the componentry that's gonna go within this new framework, and he's gotta make sure it can withstand the harsh environment. One of the things that Joe's gonna be looking for is an electronic solder paste. So if Joe finds his way to your website, he's gonna need some information, and the information he's gonna need is going to include a lot of technical data. He's also gonna wanna have access to talk to your engineers because this is a huge decision. Joe's next on the line. Joe can't afford to source the wrong products, right? So he wants to talk to somebody he can trust. He wants to talk to another engineer. He doesn't wanna talk to a salesperson. Joe's also gonna wanna get a sample of your solder products so that he can try them out and test them. As Joe goes through this process, he's gonna narrow down the potential list of vendors. He's going to refine the buying requirements, and he's gonna take that packet, walk down the hallway, he's gonna knock on the door, and he's gonna hand it to Jackie, the buyer. Jackie, the buyer, understands the technicalities of the project, but it's at a very high level. Unlike Joe, Jackie doesn't have the time, the need, or the vaguest desire to talk to anybody at your company. She's very, very busy. She's got a pile of papers that keeps growing on her desk. Jackie's interested in warranty terms, terms and conditions, on-time delivery, testimonials, getting the best product for the best price. So as you consider that story, think inwardly about your sales scenarios. Who is your Joe, the R&D engineer? And do you have the information in the form and in the medium that you need to get beyond Joe? Because if you don't get beyond Joe, you're not going to Jackie. If you make it to Joe's short list, do you have the information that you need to complete and move further down the sales and buying process through Jackie? That's why it's really important today to make sure that we understand who our personas are, where they are in the buying process, and we need to make them successful and make it easy, because it's too easy for them to just click back and go to somebody else on the list. Let's see how this actually looks when we put it into practice. So this slide takes a look at a pay-per-click program that we have with a client. It compares two 90-day back-to-back periods. We identified a number of goals that we wanted to achieve, and we placed a value against each. We said that every time we sent a visitor into this landing page, and that visitor filled out a form and submitted that form to our client, that was worth some dollars. So we placed a fictitious dollar value of 150 on that action. Every time we sent a visitor and they downloaded a PDF document that was worth less, because it's a softer conversion, but it was still worth something, it was worth $25. Every phone call was worth $50, and we were able to track those phone calls because we used the phone tracking service. Going back to the slide, you can see that we did a much better job obtaining our goals in the second period in blue than we did in the first period in orange, and the only difference between those two efforts is that in the second timeframe, we customized the landing page to the specific persona needs after we did the buyer persona process. So, and the results were obviously dramatic. In the first period in orange, the cumulative value of all of those conversion actions was 171,000, whereas in the second period of time, it was close to a million dollars. So, going back to the ROC principle, this effort was customer-centric, and through that personalization of messaging, the results were tremendously, tremendously better. Okay. One of the most common objections that we get about creating content, which is hugely important, is I don't know what to write about. And that comes from people I really respect in business, business leaders, business marketing professionals, sales professionals. It seems like we have writer's blocks, so we need to start to think about what we do and realize that there's value because every single day, we're thinking and we're solving problems and we're learning and we're teaching. And all of these actions take energy and they produce valuable results. So, when we work to solve one customer's problem, what are the chances in reality of that being a one-off problem, right? So, we should take that experience and turn it into a blog or a video blog. How often do you spend a lot of time putting together the perfect email or a good presentation? Why not repurpose that work? If you write a case study on the top 10 reasons to do anything, there's 10 blog posts right there. So, we have a real opportunity to take advantage of what we do every day. And with a small amount of additional work, we can turn that into valuable content. And then we need to use, lower right-hand side here, we need to use the social platforms as a force multiplier. I need to use SlideShare to publish and share this PowerPoint presentation. It took me a long time to put this together and format it. You know, my expectation is certainly not that I'm gonna get 10,000 views or 1,000 leads, no way. You know, but I put hours into this and why not spend an extra five minutes to put it out there and maybe in two months or three months from now, somebody sees it and they call me and they ask me to talk to this topic or, you know. So, it's well worth the effort. We need to use Twitter and the other platforms as a delivery device for our blog content. And if you're gonna write a blog, reach for your smart device, hand it to somebody and take a one-minute clip out of that and post that on YouTube. Okay, so we've talked about traffic coming into our website from a variety of sources, including SEO, including social media efforts. The question becomes, what does it look like when people engage with our content and which of those types of content has more value and has longest life? The top example here, it looks at traffic to our website for about a seven-month period of time to our blog pages. Our blog resides on our website, by the way. You can see that as we've written more, the traffic continues to go up, right? And it's steadily increased and it's performed quite well. What's really remarkable, though, and the whole point of saying this is that 2,558 different keywords, different search queries resulted in 6,053 visits to our blog content. This is a very good example of how good optimized content can be counted on to continuously provide a steady stream of traffic. Now, social media traffic looks very different, right? It's dramatic, it's short-lived, and it's generally spiky, very spikes of traffic. So on the left, we posted a blog, and the blog, as I mentioned, resides on our website. We tweeted it, meaning we included a link to the blog within the tweet along with a short description. These spikes represent visitors to that blog content as a result of our initial tweet and other people's subsequent retweets. On the right-hand side, we can see examples of LinkedIn traffic, same scenario. We started a LinkedIn discussion. We attached that same blog article. The initial spike in traffic that you see is generated from the original discussion activity, and the additional smaller spikes after happen when group updates are emailed to the group members. All right, the group members see the discussion, they read it, and they click onto the blog article. The point of this is social media creates streams of conversation. They're immediate, they're short-lived. Our job as marketers is to overlay these two. You should do both, right? But if you can put these two sawtooth graphs on top of this, you're gonna benefit by having traffic that comes in from your search engine optimization and content marketing efforts, as well as traffic that comes in from your social media efforts. It's like telling a joke at a party. You get the most laughs right after you've told the story. Some people are gonna go home, lay awake in bed and giggle and think about the joke. Other people will wait a few weeks and then tell their friends, hey, Eddie told me this great joke, and the same joke's gonna generate more laughs. But in the end, 95% of all those laughs are generated immediately following the joke delivery. Talk about measuring. Measuring has always been important. It's gonna continue to be important in the future. To the right is a snapshot from Google Analytics showing conversions. These are form submissions, request a quote, contact us, ask the expert. The types of conversions that we love because people have identified themselves and they've submitted something, they wanna have contact. At the very top of this, though, you're gonna see a large number. That's from phone calls, and we've always struggled. Marketers have struggled measuring offline conversions that are a result of online efforts. But today, by using call tracking technology, we can measure calls. In this particular case, the number of phone calls that came in was four times greater than all of the forms submitted. So this is why measuring's important because without that data, any decision, any decision I would make about my ability, the ability of my website, I should say, to convert would be a wrong decision. So measuring allows us to stay focused. It allows us to make decisions based upon fact, test our efforts, remain accountable and effective, and it allows us to identify an opportunity. Knowing that my audience chooses to call rather than submit electronically, I might decide to place calls to action, including images of smiling customer service people waiting to take your call. I've mentioned repeatedly how much is going on around us. The value of great content has never been lower. The importance has never been higher. There's so much content out there, we're bombarded with it all the time. Everybody's publishing case studies, they're blogging, they're publishing video. The question becomes, how do you stand out in a world with so much clutter out there when we're overwhelmed by content? If you want to become known as an expert, you have to create content. You absolutely have no choice about it, but you just need to do it differently. Inbound marketing is all about pulling people to your brand and providing value, and you do that by understanding your personas and then truly adapting a customer-centric focus. Possibly some of you have e-newsletters. The problem with e-newsletters is that, for the most part, we're sending the same content to our whole list, and we're sending it all at once. We really should be segmenting our list because if we know a certain group of people are interested in a particular product, let's say, we should be sending a different email, a different message to that group that's interested in product A versus product B. So that's part of lead nurturing, creating targeted messaging based upon needs. But there's another part. Lead nurturing also includes the ability to send messages or emails to people based upon an action that they take. The actions that they take allow us to understand where they are in the buying process. So this is where this phrase, user behavior triggers workflow. If you've ever filled out a form to attend a webinar or obtain an e-book, and then you get an email thanking you, and then over the course of a couple of weeks, you get a couple more emails related to what you downloaded. Maybe you get a phone call. That's all part of drip marketing, lead nurturing. Based upon an action that a visitor takes, predefined workflows, which are really just a series of steps, take place. So you create content offers. They could be white papers, case studies, e-books, videos, and you make them available to the people on your list through email marketing. Then for every action a visitor takes on a website or in response to your emails, they accumulate points. You give them points, and you call that a lead score. Once they've accumulated enough points, they're moved from what's called a marketing qualified lead to a sales qualified lead. They make that transaction when they cross a predefined point threshold based upon the information that they've consumed and the actions that they've taken. So here's an example. If I'm filling out a form on your website, maybe you assign five points for my first name, five points for my last name, 15 points each for my email and my phone number because they're actionable, they're worth more. So now I've got 40 points. But if you notice, and I've got, you've dropped cookies on my website so you're able to track my visits. If you've noticed that I've been to your product availability page three times, that might indicate to you, wow, this guy's low in the buying process. He's about to make a decision, so you give me 25 points for that action. That brings me to 65 points, and that's the threshold, let's say, in this example. So that qualifies me as a sales qualified lead. You throw it over to sales, and they get involved. So this reference up here in the upper right-hand side that says, leads nurtured with targeted content produce an increase in sales opportunities of more than 20% is really a well-made. Because you're focusing your sales team's efforts on those people that have provided signals based upon the actions that they've taken and the information that they've consumed. So we're driving our cost of sales down and giving sales some very qualified leads. There's lots of different solutions. They're listed across the bottom here. Some of them are expensive. Marketo and HubSpot, they can run you anywhere from 12 to $20,000 a year, and that doesn't even account for the setup fee. You certainly have Constant Contact or other email service providers, but they can certainly do the monthly newsletters, but they don't have the advanced functionality that I spoke of. We find that Sharpspring is well-suited for the B2B audience because it's really affordable, and their development path has them catching up to some of the more advanced functions here. If there's an interest out there, we can demo either HubSpot or Sharpspring. We're a partner of both. So let's quickly take a look at campaign flow. Campaign workflows are just logical if-then statements. If someone takes this action, you'll do this. This is a small piece of a much larger workflow that we created for one of our clients. It aligns to the part of the buying process where the prospects are exploring options, and therefore, it's named up here the Explore Options Campaign. We created a number of emails that would address questions that someone in this phase might have, like which is better, solution A or solution B, or what's the effectiveness of this product, or what's the long-term cost of this product? We'll send them an email that contains a link to a white paper that addresses one of those questions. Their reaction to that email determines what's gonna happen next. Did they open it, yes or no? If they didn't, and we've sent that email less than three times, then we'll continue to send it. If they ignore it or take no action, then we'll just move them up, and out of this process, we'll add them to our monthly newsletter. We won't bother them anymore. If they open the email, we increment the lead score. Sales is notified to call them. Sales will call three times. If they're unsuccessful after three attempts, then, again, we move them up. We add them to our monthly newsletter. But if there is a conversation, and that conversation confirms that there's an opportunity, then they're moved into the sales process. So, again, there's a number of different triggers that can move prospects through a workflow. They can click on a link, fill out a form, take some action that indicates that they have a level of interest that warrants further engagement. How do you start? Well, you've gotta begin with the end in mind, like anything else. You've gotta determine a goal. A goal might be to awaken a cold lead, or to increase lead quality by moving them through the sales funnel. Or maybe it's to generate new leads, to find people that are high in the buying funnel. You wanna set a timeline, and in the B2B world that we live in, 75% of leads buy within 18 to 24 months. So you'll have to think through how long each stage of the sales process is, and try to move them through the process. Where do you start with all this, this whole process? I would start right here. You've gotta get your house in order. That's your website, that number one. Are you meeting the needs of your personas, the people that are already on your site? If not, you've gotta get the house in order. Remember that funnel diagram. If we widen the middle of the funnel by making sure the website operates well, processes visitors and provides value, by doing that you're gonna benefit by taking care of low-hanging fruit, and you'll immediately get some return for that effort alone. Once you've accomplished that, move up to step number two. Prospects are looking for your products and services every single day. Let's focus on the top of the funnel. Is your website, is your content aligned to intercept that traffic? This is search engine optimization and content creation. Once you've got that in line, you need to start building up more content. So you move down to number three. This represents a blog. You need to increase your visibility for a wider range of keywords. If you exercise that Google Keyword Planner, you'll find all of the different ways that people look for things that you do or describe problems that they have that you might be able to solve. Once you've got new content, pull out the smartphone, create a short video, short, one minute, a little bit over a minute. We love video, the search engines love videos. Finally, step five, you need to use the social platforms as a force multiplier. You've done the hard work, creating the content, thinking is unbearably hard sometimes, putting together content. Once you've got that content, do the easy work and share it out to your specific audience. I'm not suggesting just share it willy nilly out there to a general audience. Remember the targeted personas that you want to share it with and find them and interact with them. Looking forward. Your messaging, your content, everything that you do has to be developed with your personas in mind. We're self-serving people, so we need to cater to that. You have to go mobile. The world has gone mobile. Look at your Google Analytics to understand what your particular situation is, what percentage of your visitors to your website are currently coming to you from a mobile device. It's only gonna grow, right? So if you're not there, you're gonna need to get there. Number three, there's much to do, so much to do in so little time, right? We need to become more efficient. Creating content once and repurposing it is the way to do that. Existing content, dust it off, it deserves a new life. Use it on the social platforms, distribute it. Lead nurturing. So much of the buying process is accomplished online. Outside of positioning content to align with the various steps, we should be looking to smart systems like lead nurturing solutions to keep our prospects engaged and to drive down the cost. Number five, you gotta measure. Anything worth doing is worth measuring, and unless you measure, you can't deem anything a success or a failure or anything in between, and you're gonna learn an awful lot. And measurement is gonna become, it's gonna be demanded in the future of marketers. It really is. Roadmap, you've gotta have a plan. There's too many moving pieces. Use the ROC principle. Talks to the need for a roadmap that begins with the end in mind, recognizes the need for ongoing efforts to assure multiple customer touchpoints, and the ability to remain current. But all efforts have gotta be customer-centric, right? It can't be inward. It's gotta be outward facing. Finally, you gotta get in the game to win, and this is the game. What got you where you are now is not gonna take you to where you wanna go in the future. That beginning slide said that 50% of the world's population, or maybe it said more, are millennials. The millennials have entered the workforce. They are our customers. They are our emerging leaders, and this is the way of the world, and this is the way that our customers are looking for information and looking for potential partners. So I wanna thank you folks for visiting today and for sitting in on the session. If there's any questions, please feel free to send them to me at eddiebluff at site-seeker.com. I'll offer, as I do whenever I speak to the AED audience, a free 30-minute session, which could include a website audit if you want me to take a look at your website from the perspective of Google, perspective of the visitors, and to reference it back to the points that we talked about today. I'm happy to do that. I'll put about two hours of effort into it, and then we'll have a 30-minute consultation. If you wanna talk about developing a strategic plan for your business, I'm happy to do that. Really, the nature of the topic is up to you. If you wanna talk about your social media platforms and engagement or lead nurturing, either way, get ahold of me, and I'd be happy to talk to you. Thanks so much, and have a great day.

digital marketing

reaching customers online

systematic approach

targeted traffic

ROC principle

measurable goals

mobile search

customer personas

content marketing