Our simplified content plan could be based on any number of principles, usually a schedule of events and initiatives coupled to such things as formal market research into the interest of core prospect communities, intuition, observed interest at social marketing sites, or perhaps MBAs clutching focus group data to their chest. But you can probably already guess I’m going to say that Keywords are a critical component.

When I talk about using keywords to drive content most web-savvy people immediately assume I’m talking about sprinkling them through the content. While we certainly will pay some attention to that, we’ll try to make it very natural. But that isn’t the most important use for Keywords in my content plan. What we use Keywords for is deciding what content to create or how to re-purpose existing content..

Our content plan should consider all types of content, venues, and sources. Consider is not the same as include. I don’t mind rejecting an option as long as it has been considered. You might not be ready for crowdsourcing as a creative source, Facebook as a venue or Podcasts as a content type, but you should know and understand the options before you reject them.

For our example, Ke Nalu, we’re going to poke at almost everything. We’ll build our plan as a matrix to gain clarity. We’ll build it for popular keywords but we’ll also watch for long tail keywords that might fit upcoming events, or connect well to content I can easily create.

I’m also going to look hard at crowdsourcing some of the content that is most popular, since

However you stuff people into the funnel, there needs to be a process to move them along. Most people who are in your funnel are paying attention to your competition as well. You need to be the dominant voice if you are going to get more than your share of those sales.

Remember that mathematically you have to convert much more than your market share worth of prospects in the funnel in order to maintain your historic market share. There will inevitably be deals that you never get a chance at. The most effective way to move people through the funnel is with a disciplined maturation process.

Maturation (nurturing)
I think I invented lead nurturing–at least the web version of it. I certainly don’t remember anyone else talking about it back in the early 80’s, though probably plenty of people were. I called it lead maturation, but most consultants seem to have settled on Nurturing as the proper term. Email and other forms of web delivery made lead maturation much more effective, but it was feasible to do it with paper mail (we did!) and even telemarketing as long as you had some idea where a prospect stood in the sales cycle. But email and the web turned maturation into a highly successful and highly measurable strategy.

Maturation is simply staying in touch with a prospect, providing them with information they will find relevant to their progress through the sales cycle (so surely my belief that I invented it is pure hubris). Short surveys are a very useful maturation tool, both because surveys can be used to deliver a subtle marketing message, and because they provide an indication of progress through the sales cycle. In fact any touch of the prospect that can be recorded in the database which does not do damage I would call maturation.

Salespeople sometimes do a loose version of maturation, and CRM systems encourage it, but sales calls are not optimal for maturation. Neither are calls from a call center even if it’s a gentle followup. Calls are an interruption. You don’t like getting them, and neither do your prospects. They might move some people along the cycle, but they alienate more prospects than they progress. They used to make sense when our choices were limited, but now they don’t. We don’t need to interrupt prospects until they are ready to buy.

That last paragraph may be counter to your experience–if it is, you need to look deeper. It’s one of those very tricky spots where a little success masks a lot of failure. It’s hard to measure the negative effects unless you undertake a serious satisfaction survey effort, but here’s the mechanism. You generate 1000 leads–people who went to a web landing page and answered qualifying questions. You give them to a very dutiful sales force and they call all of them. Probably two percent are in the negotiating stage of the cycle and your sales force can close them–twenty sales. Ten percent are in the consideration stage, and the sales force will recognize them as leads–so that’s 100 leads and 20 sales. The remainder–880 prospects–are not ready to talk to your company. All of them–every blessed one–are irritated that some sales person called them when they were just browsing around. Probably half of them are irritated enough to remember the experience the next time you try to touch them. They will no longer respond to your marketing efforts–you have lost your permission to talk to them.

So for the sake of 20 sales and 100 leads that you could have had anyway if you used a reasonable qualification process, you have alienated 440 prospects and pushed them towards your competition.

Stores do this all the time. An active sales clerk approaches you while you browse and asks if they can “help you” which translates to “can I sell you something”. But it’s a human contact, and you are in their turf. If they are nice about it you have no real complaint. And yet you probably remember that people in that store are pretty aggressive about selling. We humans don’t really like to be sold, even if the experience is a good one.

Stores have no mechanism other than anecdotal information to inform them that they are driving customers away, all they see is that their aggressive salespeople close business once the customer enters the store, and that the average sale amount for real bully salespeople is higher than for the nicer folks. They can’t count how many people are avoiding walking through their door. Based on the results they encourage the sales force to be ever more aggressive, and they spiral downwards. How many people think Nordstrom’s is a fine store but will walk 200 feet out of their way to avoid the cosmetic section? Or no longer go there at all.

The outside edge of that experience is a used car lot, where white shoe, white belt piranhas circle and pounce. You drive the clunker you hate another 20,000 miles to avoid the experience. You can only be driven to that waterhole by extreme need, and when you do, you gird your loins and keep a firm grip on your keys. Any wonder that the internet eviscerated the car biz? Most dealerships now have a few meek and mild salespeople who fill out the paperwork after people transact for the car they want on the web. And yet we STILL hate to go to a car dealership.

Can timeshares shed their reputation for sleaze? Can mobile phone companies suddenly convince us their customer service is great? Once you have established a reputation for bad behavior you are constantly battling against it. You CAN overcome the results, as every mobile phone company demonstrates, but it is expensive and your customers are generally not willing ones. Given an effective alternative they depart, flipping you the bird as they leave.

Reputation is an instant thing on the web. Turn your white shoe sales force or some call center loose on a thousand un-matured prospects and they’ll be talking about it in forums and blogs in minutes. The multiplier is at least ten to one, and bad news travels much further and faster than good. And while it disseminates instantly it’s persistence is astounding. It’s NOT word of mouth, it’s written word, and it lasts for an amazingly long time–in fact it pretty much lasts forever. The web is archived.

This is a B&J self-promotion campaign website: www.iroi.com from 1999 that I opened using the wayback machine–the web archive project. If you just type that iROI URL into your browser you’ll get a page not found error. B&J still owns the URL, but hasn’t done much with it lately. But you can see every iteration of the site with the wayback machine. A lot of it still functions.

As you can see, we’ve been into this methodology for a long time.

We’ve also understood the very special relationship that Sales has to Marketing for a long time.

Here’s our website from 1997. In internet terms, the very dawn of time. I know, that’s only twelve years ago. It might be hard to believe, but the commercialization of the World Wide Web started in 1996. The first graphical browser–Mosaic–was completed in 1993. When we carved our first website out of hand-coded html there were only a handful of advertising agencies even considering the web as an interesting platform. We could have had almost any URL we wanted–even two letter ones. Consider all that when you’re thinking about how quickly technology changes the world.

The graphics didn’t survive but the text is still there–permanently. If you want to see just how geeky an agency can be, jump in the wayback machine and click on that DataDriver link.

I’ve digressed a bit, but the point is that the manner in which people’s perception of your company has been amplified on the web is absolutely frightening. You can’t afford to anger your prospects. And it’s simply stupid to go gather up a large array of the best prospects you can find, get them to give you permission to have a conversation with them, and then make half of them hate your company and avoid future conversations with you.

No.

Snide comments and character assassination aside, there are good reasons why sales and marketing are not that well aligned.  I’ve read dozens of articles explaining how much value there is in getting sales and marketing on the same page, ending the war. It sounds very sweet, but it also sounds like a good way to screw up two disparate functions.

The misalignment isn’t really about the usual war: Sales says marketing isn’t doing its job–the leads are junk and they need a lot more of them. Marketing says sales wouldn’t know a good lead if it bit them on the butt.

Consultants and pundits focus on the misalignment, and the different compensation models of sales and marketing, and come up with nice charts and graphs showing how lovely it will be if everyone plays nice. I am far more optimistic about peace in the Middle East. And I suspect companies that focus on having sales and marketing working hand in hand might be leaving business on the table by compromising either or both functions.

I know that there are success stories of companies that have dramatically improved close rates and increased revenue by getting sales and marketing to walk hand-in-hand. Just as there would be success stories that show the same increase a few years later if we tore those two lovebirds apart. These things don’t happen in a vacuum.  A company that is so concerned about sales and marketing alignment undoubtedly has a serious problem. Regardless of HOW you fix a problem, if you spend time and energy on an issue you will generally see some improvement for a while.

Bottom line–your mileage WILL vary, and gains made during high effort are usually not sustainable day-to-day.

There are a host of reasons why Sales and Marketing don’t, and probably shouldn’t play nice. I think the most important one is that Sales is a transaction-based game, and Marketing is not. If you optimize the way that sales engages with prospects and closes transactions you widen the breach.

I say, so what. Make those sales. But if the sales force is knocking the quota ball out of the park, they will soon come to believe they are the only reason revenue happens. That’s okay, let them have their little delusions. But don’t let it spread. The danger is that management will become intoxicated with immediate success and fail to stay the course of building a platform that supports longer term goals of growth, profit and stability.

Management must recognize how narrowly focused and unique that transactional viewpoint has to be. Sales gains attention one person at a time, and their approach doesn’t change much–they try to sell, and it’s irritating as hell. Do YOU enjoy getting sales calls? It’s appropriate for sales and completely wrong for marketing.

It’s like herding sheep. If you let the dogs chase the sheep around all the time they get nervous, skinny, and some will run away. You want to minimize the interruptions while you are cultivating the prospects to the point they can be sold to, then you send in the dogs to round them up for shearing.  Very few of them come to be sheared on their own, you need the dogs to bring them in.

Marketing must take a far longer viewpoint, building a pipeline and going beyond the current transaction to turn customers into evangelists. They need to take a broad selection of approaches, and communicate with prospects according to where they are on the sales cycle.  A company can’t afford to piss the prospect off and lose permission to talk with them. They have to give the prospect the information they want and need. If marketing is driven by sales, the lead focus will be on prospects that can close very quickly or the elephants that take all year but yield the big wins. The only prospects you target will be the economic decision makers. All you need to do is look at how your company makes purchases to realize how wrong that is.

When people talk about getting the sales force and marketing aligned, they are generally speaking about forming a consensus about what an ideal customer and hence an ideal lead would be. They also look to some agreement about processes, handoffs, and follow up for leads. What that really means is brokering some compromise between what marketing believes they need to do and what sales wants. But the difference between what sales wants and marketing needs to do is not philosophical, it’s functional. Coming to some compromise makes both sides less effective.

The sales force may show success by intercepting a sales process that is already underway and outselling the competition. In fact that’s the kind of deal that sales loves best. But it’s not an approach that you can build into a platform, or that a company can use for long-term growth. It leaves big holes that your competition can claim as their own and eventually overrun you from. It is far better to find prospects when they are absolutely not ready to talk to a sales person. When all that they feel is some pain, and they are starting to look for a solution. Marketing can afford to enter and maintain a conversation with them and everyone like them. Sales cannot.

Achieving better alignment by focusing on processes and sharing a clearer view of the customer, agreeing on success metrics and the ideal lead is far less important than ensuring that marketing understand what sales needs. Build a platform that delivers those leads to them in as efficient a manner as possible and sales will be satisfied if not happy. Sales people are not going to take the time to understand and observe the processes that surround doing that well. If they do, they are probably not great salespeople. Lacking an understanding of the process they will say “give us all the leads, we’ll work them all” and then they’ll complain about the poor quality.

On the flip side, any marketer that gives the sales force unqualified leads that have not been matured to the point that they are sales-ready simply deserves what happens to them. You will lose credibility and the sales force will consider every lead you hand them to be a liability–a way for them to lose credit for closing sales. Especially when every “hot” lead they fail to close is a black mark against them.

So How Can You Work With Sales?

First of all, marketing doesn’t work WITH sales, we work FOR sales. That may make you twitch, it certainly does me, but it’s the simple truth. The only reason marketing exists is to support sales efforts. That sales effort may be a shopping cart, or a salesperson, but that’s what our work aims at. There may be a long interceding dance, but the purpose is always the same. That doesn’t mean marketing should take their marching orders from sales–they are not and should not be competent to form those orders.

The way to best work for sales is to keep every non-selling task off their desk. That’s equally true if your sales force is 500 lead-starved field sales professionals or an automated website. The work of sales is to sell. The work of marketing is to create and nurture awareness, pain and interest, convert that interest to consideration, cue up the sale, close the loop afterwards, and optimize the customer.

Here are the things that sales and marketing need to agree on:

• The outline of a lead definition, and the process for refining the lead definition
• The map of the sales cycle
• The points where sales gets involved

Everything else is marketing’s responsibility. Certainly you can get feedback from the sales force on the lead to sales conversion process. You can create reports on the market intelligence you’re gathering and offer them to sales. You can gather insights gained from customer feedback so the sales force at least knows about them.  But the most precious thing to the sales force is selling time. Optimize the time they can spend selling and you are doing your job brilliantly.

Sales is a microcosm of Pareto’s rule–80/20. Twenty precent of the sales force is doing great, and eighty precent is sucking wind. There are always superstars, and there is always dead meat struggling to keep their job. The superstars have no time for you, your processes, your bright ideas. They want good leads, but if you don’t supply them they’ll get the job done anyway. And they will succeed, the superstars always do. Respect them, but don’t build your platform around them. There are far too few of them and you can’t do that much to help them. Certainly don’t let them drive your marketing efforts–they have no comprehension of what the sales team needs, or how the entire funnel can or should be filled. Might as well ask Michael Jordan to teach high school gym, or Lewis Hamilton to teach driver’s ed.

The dead meat on the way out the door is only too happy to cooperate with marketing, especially if it might provide a stay of execution. Their problem can’t be solved by your process, in fact they will underperform on any leads you give them. They can’t sell your product. If they can’t do that, they can’t help you.

When you want to talk to someone in sales (and you should–frequently) talk to the middle folks. The ones that are doing a plodding job. The ones that struggle to make quota but generally do. They have more to gain from good leads and they generally know what to do with them. You can gain traction there because they will spare some time to work on things you ask them to–they need the help. On rare occasion you’ll find a superstar that has enough foresight to realize that better leads can make them more money, but superstars HAVE to believe that their success comes from their performance and nothing else. Sales is hard, being a sales superstar is extremely hard and requires talent. Believing in themselves above anything else is how they do what they do.

Enough about the interface between sales and marketing, you either believe me on this point or you don’t. Let’s talk about the sales funnel, how we fill it, and how we move prospects from the wide end where they should never talk to a salesperson to the pointy end where they must.

Its how you get to “show them the money”.

It’s also how you do the back end of cross-media analysis. I’ve seen and participated in a lot of attempts to do cross-media analysis, and most of it suffers from being a bit soft. You run a TV ad and measure a spike in web hits from people who remember the URL, in inbound calls from people who remember the phone number, and web search from people who don’t remember either. That’s swell, but how do you relate the value of that response?  Lead grade, pure and simple. Get the leads qualified and you can estimate the ultimate return on investment with good accuracy.

For pure web transactions it’s fairly easy to connect marketing effort to purchase, especially if the purchase also happens on the web. For shorter time-frame transactions likely to occur on the one computer it’s simple to place a cookie on the respondents machine that you pick back up when they complete the transaction. Failing that you also generally have a highly unique identifier available in the email address. This enables a precision in the connection between cause and effect that is both wonderful and dangerous. The danger is that only the efforts that result in immediate ROI are continued. That’s the small end of the funnel again. You can only gain limited traction there.

What happened to all the lead generation expertise? On the web people believe far too much in self service, direct metrics and the long tail. People clicked on this, and then later they bought. That’s great, now how do you expand that effort to people who aren’t looking for your product? An undisciplined marketing effort can be profitable only if it’s cheap. That’s just not good enough.

To truly optimize the results of marketing you need to address the entire funnel, and to optimize the funnel you need to perfect your hand off to sales. Let’s talk about how that should happen and the relationship you need to have with the sales force.

We’ve previously discussed the early scoring approach called BANT (Budget, Authority, Need and Timing). This extends as: Budget: Do you have money to spend–how much? Authority: Can you make the purchase decision? Need: How badly do you need my solution? and Timing: When will you buy?

With these criteria in hand your sales force can ignore at least 80 percent of your leads and give you no credit for your work. We can do a lot better.

You need to collect qualifying criteria that goes beyond scoring that will enable you to establish and continue a conversation that is highly relevant to every prospect and customer. Here are the elements that will enable that:

Pain (what challenge are they trying to solve). No pain, no point to the conversation. Pain doesn’t have to mean that they need an immediate fix, in fact Pain can just be that little unsettling notion that there might be a better way to do things. You can create pain–that’s what good advertising does. Pain begets interest. And that’s next.

Interest in your products (some identified need). In the sense we are using here, interest is the connection between Pain (a problem) and a solution. It’s something that you can cultivate, but you can also ask questions to determine if it’s already there. If the prospect has already connected their pain to a solution then they have moved along the timeframe.

Opportunity size (how big is the company, how many likely users). This is a really tricky issue, and salespeople get it’s value wrong all the time. If your product is only sold by salespeople you can probably find a weird hole in a graph of revenue vs. users. That hole comes from sales people misinterpreting opportunity as it relates to timing, and it’s a lot of lost money as well as a beachfront for your competition. That’s because salespeople like to sell to the largest deals they are allowed to sell to, and the smallest. The middle always gets under-served.  We could delve deeply into this–I spent a great amount of effort a few years ago analyzing this phenomenon, I found it in companies of all sizes–but I’m saving my take on the psychology of salespeople for my future book “Money For Nothing and Drinks For Free”.  I don’t really hate salespeople, I consider them a very necessary evil (emphasis on the evil). But I believe they are the least qualified people to influence marketing efforts They frequently get that opportunity–and wreak havoc.

Opportunity is best used as a decision point about what channel the sale will be directed to, and a way to measure how effective each channel is at living up to that potential. I have given clients analysis that showed the revenue they were getting from their channel leads was substantially less than optimal because they were feeding the channel leads with demonstrable and quantifiable opportunity for multiple sales to which the channel consistently sold a single unit.

Purchase influence (is the contact the decision-maker [economic or technical], an influencer, or just part of the mob). Again, salespeople tend to dismiss leads that are not the economic decision-maker. That’s fine, but you will not sell a complex product against the recommendation of the technical guru. Every influencer is important, and in the marketing platform we are building herein, they can be well served–nurtured with appropriate information and used to move the opportunity along. They are important, even if the sales force doesn’t want to talk to them.

Fit (how well do your solutions fit their challenge). Here’s a scoring parameter that sales people don’t care much about. But you should. An honest look at fit can prevent bad experiences and an angry customer. These days a righteously angry customer can be a huge liability. The parameter also identifies new opportunity–”we could go after 349 customers today if we implemented the glurp feature”.  To gauge fit you have to ask pain questions that relate to your product category but that you don’t have a solution for. Tricky stuff, but very valuable.

Intent to purchase (do they have a budget established, etc.). A critical bit for the sales force and a fine tool for putting a direct value on your win rate. If you want a little extra budget to try some maturation, then identifying and quantifying the intent to purchase is gold. “I have $31 million identified in Intent To Purchase. Our test campaign converted 30 percent. I can roll that out if you give me another $100K.” Translation: “Helllooo, I have found a very big pile of money over here. Should I pick it up for you?”

Timing (when are they going to buy). The sales force’s favorite, and the primary reason for that revenue hole. The $2 million opportunity that will close in eight months–yeah, they’ll work that. The 50 leads at a thousand bucks apiece that can close in 30 days–all over them, especially at the end of the quarter when they’re nervous about quota. The $100K lead that’s four month out–rots gently in the CRM system.

For you though, it’s a key indication of what information prospects need (even if you have directly asked). If they are one month out then they need implementation stories. Two months it might be success stories from your customers. Three months out they are probably still kicking tires–they need competitive comparisons. It forms the core of your maturation process. The maturation process is the key to filling in that hole the sales force leaves. It also can dramatically increase the close rate for leads, especially if your competition is not doing as good a job as you do. With a maturation process your sales people get to sell to people who have your stories in their heads, the competition has to sell against the stories. Nasty.

Buzz (have you deployed successfully in companies they care about). The sales force can be trained to like this criteria IF you have a library of success stories that can be selected appropriately. Generally this is a parameter you add to the record through data enhancement–perhaps through a google search or Hoover’s. If you build an effective maturation process, perhaps with a marketing automation tool or through an agency like B&J, those success stories can be sent to the prospect exactly when they will be most interested in them.

Reference ability (can they help you enter new business segments). This is more a matter of analysis than a scoring criteria, but it can be a very important parameter if you are looking for beachheads in new sectors. You can gain the information through direct question (what industry are you in?) or enhancement.

This yields the simple mnemonic PIOPFITBR.  We could rearrange it to PROFIT BIP but that would put the Reference-ability cart before the Opportunity horse.

Scores and Scoring

Whatever criteria a company chooses,  they typically apply opportunity size to select the appropriate sales organization, and then add a score that translates as “hot, warm, cold, useless”

Big mistake. What is a cold lead? Usually, it simply means the timing isn’t right. Then why are you giving it to the sales force? What will they do with it? What would you do with it if you were selling? What you are telling them is, “Here, ignore this.”

What’s the difference between a hot and a warm lead? Often, it is that the sales force HAS to report on every hot lead they fail to close. That makes hot leads a liability and the source of many arguments. “It wasn’t hot, it was warm at best. Took me months to close it. I had to go find the decision-maker.”

Would you like to eliminate the conversation entirely? Have an arcane scoring system that no one completely understands but you. What I really like are three digit numbers derived from an automated scoring process with most scores more than 100. You’ll never hear, “It wasn’t a 233, it was a 170 at best.” Sounds like a cheap trick, but it works wonderfully and you can use the scores in a matrix to really manage the leads and results.

Here’s one way to do it I call Paints. Pick your own range and multiplier to suit your sales cycle, but these work pretty well:

Pain  rank 1-5  multiplier 10
Authority rank 1-5 multiplier 10
Interest  rank 1-3 multiplier 5
Need   rank 1-5 multiplier 8
Timing rank 1-5 multiplier 10
Size  rank 1-5 multiplier 5

Here’s a sample:
P = 2 modest level of pain                    *10=20
A=5  Lots of authority–the economic decision maker    *10=50
I=1   Little interest                        *5=5
N=3  Substantial need–your solution would help        *8=24
T=2  Long time frame–far from a decision            *10=20
S=4  Big dog                            *5=20

Score = 139

Each element is numerically ranked which makes it easy to determine what should be done with the lead in the maturation process. As the lead moves through the process the score changes as parameters change–even only passively. If a lead has a timing of 2 because they said six months, then three months later it’s a 3.

Surveying leads or getting them to respond again is both a fine way to improve the score of leads and a powerful tool to measure the effectiveness of your programs at moving the cycle forward. For example, you send our 139 lead above a study reflecting how companies like his a recognizing the value of addressing the problem your product solves and you direct him to an online diagnostic center that will help him determine how bad the Glurp problem is at his company. The diagnostic tool will help you re-qualify the lead,  but for the sake of this example lets say you follow up with a survey. The survey questions ask mostly about the usefulness of the information you provided, but they also include new pain, interest and need questions. You probably don’t want to tip your hand too much by asking timing questions at that point.

Each respondents lead will be re-scored based on the new information, and the effectiveness of the materials and the diagnostic system can be determined by calculating the average difference in each lead parameter. Presto, your 139 is now a 170, and the value of your campaign can be directly computed by how much it moves the lead base forwards. Once you have enough history you can put a dollar value on every point gained. What a tool this is! A simple survey that previously would have been considered a pure expense can now show a return on investment, and you can show the relative merit of any campaign in directly in dollars.

That’s a direct feature of your platform. Build the platform properly, with this kind of strategic goal in mind.

Keep It Dynamic
The best scoring processes work backward from results. You start off by scoring and distributing by assumption, then you take the leads that made it to the informational meeting stage and see what factors show up most often (we don’t recommend using conversion to sales as the starting point—there are too many sales force variations that you don’t control). Increase the weighting of the dominant factors. Continue to do this on a quarterly basis and your scoring will become highly predictive and will accommodate to market shifts. Aim continuously at a direct correlation between dollars and lead points and you’ll get there.

Re-score Constantly
Today’s cold lead is tomorrow’s hot (or better yet, today’s 134 is tomorrow’s 247). A cultivation process should be a constant attempt to re-score all leads. Not only specific lead enhancement approaches like our example above, but routine processes as well. Someone reads your eNewsletter and updates their profile. New score! Someone reads your newsletter for six months and never updates. BUT, they originally said they were a year away from making a decision; now it’s six months later and they’re still listening. New score! Your telemarketer gets back in touch and finds more information about their needs. New score! The score is really their position in the sales funnel. Once you get them where the sales force can effectively do something with them, they graduate to real leads.

Low score doesn’t mean low value
Too often we see people throwing away leads that have a “low score.” Except for the truly unqualified respondents (competitors, students and the purely curious), they are actually the most valuable leads you have. I know that sounds whacky, but bear with me.

Numerous times we surveyed leads belonging to our clients that were over a year old and asked them if they bought a solution (not just the client’s version, but all the competitors, too). In every survey we did but one, from 80 to 90 percent of the respondents bought a solution, regardless of their initial lead score. Now look at your lead score distribution from a typical campaign: 10% hot, 20% warm, 60% cold, 10% junk.

Where’s the money?

Worse yet, hot leads are ready to buy. If they aren’t already talking to your sales force what’s the chance that they will be willing to change a process that’s underway? If they are already talking to your sales force, taking credit for that lead will be a source of contention (to say the least).

It’s also a huge mistake to assume old leads are worthless. They are never dead by assumption, you should PROVE them dead before you ditch them unless doing so is demonstrably more expensive than any likely ROI. Years ago we did a big a database cleanup effort for Adobe using email and mail to re-qualify lead data. Our client wanted to toss out anything over two years old. We convinced her to test a sample of the data and actually got a marginally higher response rate and a better average qualification score than their new data. Considering that the leads cost them at least $100 each to acquire (probably more), the several hundred thousand “old leads” were even more valuable than the new ones and well worth the time and effort.

It’s relatively easy to re-qualify leads. A straightforward triage approach is often the most sensible. You start with all the leads that have email addresses that you directly gathered and therefore have at least a lightweight permission to contact (not some data enhancement approach). Craft a very short email with a very compelling offer and send it to everyone asking permission to stay in contact. Respondents click into a Webprofiler landing page to give you permission and answer additional qualifying questions. WebProfilers use an embedded PIN code in email to connect the recipient to their data record. We (B&J) patented that technology back when the web was new.

Anyone that responds gets removed from the cleanup database to a current lead. Anyone that requests removal gets deleted. You can decide what to do about bounced emails–if the database is big enough we usually parse the bounce message to try to remove folks that are no longer employed or companies that no longer exist. If it’s small enough you can do that by hand.

Take all the rest and run them through postal cleanup software that removes undeliverable records and duplicates. Build a direct mail piece with an equally compelling offer that sends respondents to your WebProfiler site. They enter the PIN code printed on the piece, are connected to their data record, and re-qualify themselves. Pay the post office to give you the database of undeliverable return mail. Clean that out of the database.

Move the respondents to current leads, take the rest and use a product like Zoominfo to look them up at their company. These tools are updated frequently so they should give you a good indication that they could still be a lead. There is a world of difference between someone who has responded to your marketing efforts–even long ago–and someone who shows up in a selling database. Take the list that results and turn it over to a telemarketer for re-contact.

Anything that remains is probably not worth much.

Cost per step, the size of your lead base, and the value of a lead determines how far you take this. For many companies, once you do the cost/benefit analysis you’d be likely to take the process all the way. The email aspect of the triage will probably be a fixed cost. An you can repeat the process later at even less cost. The postal mail will probably cost a buck or so per piece if you’re doing something very simple–like a double postcard. If you get ten percent response your cost per lead is $10-20. That’s pretty cheap.  Of course you can spend four bucks per piece in the mail, and get one percent response, which yields $400 per lead, which might suck, or might not.

Sales database verification and telemarketing will generally be the most expensive and labor intensive. If your leads are worth more than $100 each then they can be worth this effort.

Why don’t we just switch completely over to digital marketing–go all out with search, and social marketing, and all the other new, new things? Some organizations have, but for most it’s a big mistake. Approaches like search have a very important benefit, which is also a limitation–you only get to talk to people who are looking. Essentially, relying solely on search is like a car dealer relying solely on location. Some companies look at venues such as social marketing or advertising on popular sites as having the same characteristics as traditional marketing and therefore being a more measurable replacement. Also a mistake. There’s an online world and an offline world, and the intentions of the users are the most important separator. That’s why general site banner ads have fallen somewhat out of fashion–they interrupt in a place where interruptions are not well tolerated. Confining your marketing to either one limits your reach and reduces the overall power of your marketing. You give up too much flexibility by choosing one world over another. The optimal approach is to gain the best of both, and use the characteristics of each approach to increase the value of the other.

Don’t misunderstand my position–I don’t think all forms of old school marketing will be with us forever. The value of printing something on paper declines daily. Broadcast television is being marginalized. Radio is something you listen to when you forget your iPod. But there’s a huge audience currently extant, and even more important, a huge body of knowledge about how to influence them. Web marketing is tactic-heavy. People implement and execute with a strategy so shabby it would get them fired immediately if they applied it to traditional marketing. Strategies are hard, tactics are easy. Strategies are dangerous–you are predicting the outcome of an action. Tactics are safe–you’re just working hard at your job. But if you apply old school marketing discipline to build your overall marketing strategy, you’ll have a platform you can be successful from again and again.

There’s a bigger issue too. Online marketing is mechanistic, which suits geeky people like me, but severely limits it’s affect. No, I didn’t mean effect, I’m referring to how it influences, not how it works. In the heyday of advertising large amounts of time and money were spent on understanding how to motivate people. How to connect to the trends of the time and propel a product from it’s utilitarian purpose to a sort of social icon. The underlying psychology, the human desires and behavior elements were analyzed and the right strings were pulled. Spokesmodels selected by how a product was to be positioned, words and images chosen for how they connected to ambitions, or desires, or social trends.

I constantly make fun of focus groups, but really it’s shorthand–I’m making fun of the hollow way that marketers conduct them. When they were invented they were staffed by trained interviewers, overseen by psychologists, and carefully analyzed to separate motive from expressed preferences. No one does that now. Instead they ape the format of the focus group and think that asking consumers what they prefer is going to get straight answers.

Assuming you have the budget for it, the way to really propel a product forward is to combine the influencing aspects of traditional advertising and it’s great reach, with the conversational aspects of online marketing and its great ability to measure and refine. Do it all in a disciplined way and you have the platform we have been talking about.

Consider Apple vs. Amazon. I don’t know the degree of integration that Apple achieves between their television, print and online advertising, but I’d assume it’s substantial. Clearly their mix of TV, print and online works very well for them, they just completed their most profitable quarter ever, growing virtually unabated through the recession. Obviously there is more than just good marketing at work here, but the marketing is superb. It delivers a consistent message and leaves the entire audience convinced that Apple builds superior products in every category. They get away with an archly negative TV campaign by making us fond of BOTH characters, but we’re fond of “PC” as a hapless geek, while Mac is cool and makes everything look easy. The advertisements are actually about “PC” and his tribulations. They are never about Mac. They strongly reinforce the notion that PC’s are hopeless.  Could Apple accomplish what they have with a purely online campaign? Of course not.

This is a powerful example of traditional media’s ability to connect a product to social trends and personal desires. We don’t just find the advertisements funny and entertaining. We connect to them personally, and relate the essence of those personalities to the companies they represent. PC doesn’t even represent a single company, it represents Microsoft, Dell, HP, and every company that serves the overall PC market, meaning those products that descend from the original IBM PC and the MS-DOS operating system. It’s an interesting aside that the DNA of these two entities is so very different. Mac did not descend from the IBM PC and MS DOS. It did not even descend from PC’s prehistoric (1977) ancestor, the Intel 8080 chip and CPM. It used a MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor and a completely different operating system.

Now let’s look at the Amazon Kindle. Another very successful product. If you have one, you probably like it a lot. I do, and I do. If you don’t have one you probably are not sure you want one. The idea seems useful, but it also seems a little clumsy. You don’t know that much about how it works. It seems less handy than a book. Objections form in your mind easily. Until you somehow become convinced you want one, you won’t go looking for one.

In other words, you haven’t been influenced to believe Kindles are cool.

Amazon’s campaigns for the Kindle are almost purely online. They only grab the people who are looking for one. They don’t form the concepts that would convince prospects to be interested. They cater to existing interest. They are a store in a good location.

While the Kindle is very successful, it’s obvious that it could be far more successful with a marketing strategy more like Apple. I’m not sure why Amazon chooses to limit their marketing as they have, they may have an excellent reason to be foot-dragging, but they clearly are not driving adoption with their marketing as Apple’s does.  They can market the kindle as aggressively as they choose online, but until they move to traditional venues it is clear to both you and I that they will not optimize their sales.

While your company may have little in common with these examples, they serve to make it very clear that traditional venues provide advantages and capabilities that online media does not, and it makes sense for you to consider them carefully before you reject them out of hand. If I were looking for a thumb rule for when traditional media makes sense it would be: Who benefits most from driving adoption? If my client would gain the most from driving adoption and interest for a particular product or niche then I would strongly advocate traditional marketing. If you have a minor market share your competition may gain more from your effort at driving adoption than you will. In that case you would benefit more from increasing your win rate for people looking to buy.

Adoption is not the only reason for choosing a traditional approach. If you want to gain market share or take over a niche left unguarded in an existing market, you will have to do better than just have a good location. You’ll have to drive people to it.

Let’s talk a little about integration of new technologies to old, because the traditional venues and methods have such great value to lend to the new–especially direct marketing. In fact most failed web initiatives would be improved if traditional DM (Direct Marketing) best practices were applied.

DM generally has a solid goal for interpreting results of a marketing campaign, and it’s usually to either sell something immediately or generate leads. Simply firming up web initiatives to that standard, and connecting them on a clear path to money would improve their performance in many cases. But there’s a lot more to learn.

Over the last 20 years DM improved how useful leads were by enhancing them with a lot of additional information. Early on, lead generation gathered enough information about the prospect to score the lead and place each one on the timeline of the sales cycle, enabling the sales force to cherry-pick leads that were more likely to be useful. As the data management processes improved, and companies like B&J started adding web interfaces to DM campaigns, lead scoring evolved  into richer information that enabled delivery of highly relevant information. This enabled companies to do effective lead maturation–staying in touch with prospects over the span of time that it took for them to move through the sales cycle, and beyond the traditional sales cycle into high value processes that increase the value of the customer.

Applying these techniques to all your marketing, including everything web-focused, provides a clear, clean, logical, customer-focused organizing principle. I’m going to show you how to establish the core. What tools you use to manage the data that results is your business. B&J generally favors a stand-alone database that can accept any kind of feed since it offers the greatest flexibility, but some people have success with either a marketing automation system or a CRM system. Both are far less flexible and ultimately may limit your capabilities, but you can deal with that later when you are rich and famous. Of course it will be incredibly painful and difficult to rip and replace, but it’s not a foolish choice.  Building a central stand-alone database is expensive and difficult any time you choose to do it.

Here are the best ways I know of. I use these approaches or elements of them almost every day:

Steal keywords from your competitors, especially the ones that are kicking your butt. I’ll assume you know who they are, but if you don’t, start with a guess at keywords. For Ke Nalu we’ll guess Stand Up Paddle surf, SUP surf, paddlesurf, stand up board. Now search Google for those terms:

This is a good time to explain a little about Google and search engine result pages (SERPs) in general. You probably know all this, but I’m committed to assuming very little. The left side of a Google page is like editorial content in a magazine–it’s the stuff they give you to get you to use the service. It’s called the organic search results and companies like Google have closely guarded secret ways of deciding who gets listed first.

It’s supposed to be in order of greatest relevance and popularity, but SEO (Search Engine Optimization) aims to defeat that purpose and game the SERP. That’s fine, Google and other search companies set the rules and enforce them, but they are far from perfect. Many sites with superior content languish with nearly no visitors because they haven’t done the dance according to Google. You may consider SEO to be sleazy snake oil (and a lot of it is) but you need to know the rules, and Goggle sure isn’t going to tell you. Their “SEO” instruction is certain to relegate you to page fifty.

I plan on doing several chapters just on doing research with Google, so this is just a taste.

You May Be Looking At The Web Through Beer Googles
Here’s an important sidebar. Your Goggle search results and mine may not be the same. You rush into your boss’ office to show that your efforts have somehow moved your website up to the #1 spot in Goggle for your most important keyword. She does a quick search on the keyword you gave her and your site shows up on page three. Why?

It’s the same reason that the screen shot above of a google search for Stand Up Paddle Surfing shows Ke Nalu at the top of the heap. Woo-Hoo! Not so fast, buckwheat. I was looking through beer googles.

It’s because you and I are logged into our Google account and have Google History turned on and she doesn’t. Her search is real, yours is wishful thinking (and so is mine). Some time ago Google added some interesting features for people who have the Google toolbar. They started keeping track of all your searches and modified the search results to reflect what you have been searching for previously. In theory this should make searches more relevant to you. In practice it means your searches are meaningless for determining your standing on search pages.

Here’s what my search history looks like:

You may not like this history feature running silently away, logging everything you do. I know I’m not enamored with it. Here’s how to clear your history. Click on Remove items, then click “clear entire web history”

Then click “clear history” and zap, it’s gone. Or is it?

Google doesn’t say too much about search history, the privacy advocates are tearing their hair over it. Google has moved it from a little surprise feature into a place of it’s own called Google History. But it might be active on your account. Go turn it off, and log out of your Google account when you’re doing searches that you want to reflect what the general population is seeing.

An interesting note is that you can clear your search history, and your beer googles remain. Your search will still reflect the searches you made before, and will show how often you seached for specific sites. Hmm, how could that be? But if you log out of your google account the search goes back to normal. Log back in and somehow it remembers your history.

Good thing these guys aren’t evil. Of course I suspect most people realize that Googles “don’t be evil” mantra really meant “don’t be Microsoft”.

So now our Google search shows no Ke Nalu on the first page. There is a fairly prominent listing for Ponohouse, which is also a blog I own. It was the first blog I started that included posts about stand up paddle surfing–it was one of the first SUP blogs on the web, and that history gives it some prominence that Ke Nalu doesn’t have.

In fact Ke Nalu is really relegated to page three. That’s very cool, we’ll be able to show the progress as we go. If it were page one I wouldn’t be able to show you how to do this magic. Or at least we wouldn’t have as clear a proof.  Ke Nalu used to be on the first page of Google for the keyword “Stand Up Paddle” but my inattention has let it slip.

All better, end of sidebar.

Google is encroaching more and more on the organic search with sponsored links on the top of the left column and “shopping results” on the bottom. Google gets affiliate money for the shopping links and is paid directly for the sponsored links at the top of the page and in the right column.

For our current purposes we are interested in all the results, because we can scalp keywords from everywhere. I make this sound underhanded, but it’s legitimately available information, I’m just going to show you how to get and use it.

We click on the top link and go to Supsurfmag.com, an incredibly cluttered site that does well because the founders work on Google position constantly and have a lot of backlinks and fresh content. I think it’s a pretty homely site, but on the web, beauty is as beauty does, though good design still delivers value. I’ll explain all that later in the creative section, but for now let’s concentrate on our search for Keywords.

At the top of the Firefox menu–my preferred browser–I select View>>page source to see the html code for the home page. I’m not going to show it all here on this page–you can look at it for yourself.

Near the top of this code are a lot of housekeeping and structural statements that tell your browser certain things about the page it is going to display. In particular a set called Meta code that describes the nature of the page, including this code:

The “Keywords” meta name includes keywords that the owners of the site believe are important. Historically some search engines used these keywords to find relevant content, but they are generally ignored now–Google categorically states that they don’t use them. But almost every site has them since you simply don’t know for sure if they might help. They might not help with the search engines, but they let us know what the site owners probably think are most important.

Equally important is the “description” meta name, since site owners still believe that this is searched, and the words in the description are often (but not always) the ones that appear in the abstract that the search result displays. Remember that Keywords aren’t just important to robots. The human looking at the result needs to see that the site they click on is likely to have relevant content.

If you do this step for all the significant competitive sites in the first few pages of the search results you’ll have a pretty nice collection going.

You should use a spreadsheet to organize these keywords. If you do that you can copy and paste directly from the page source, just as I did to place that meta data onto this page. Later you’ll be separating your keywords into segments like company, product, product interest, product evaluate, product buy, etc.  A fine place to start for your spreadsheet is to use the Export function of the Google Keywords tool and then add whatever you would like to it.  If you look at the bottom of the screenshot below you can see where the tool offers to export the information as text, CSV for Excel, or bare CSV (Comma separated values). These can be imported directly into a spreadsheet.

Look at the paid advertisements that show up in search results for any keyword. These folks are paying for clicks associated with these particular keywords. This gives you very strong clues about the value of the keywords you are finding, especially if established online companies are using them. I’ll show you how to get an even better idea by looking at what they are willing to pay for these ads later, but for now, relevant ads are good. Go ahead and click on them and do the basic keyword analysis you’re learning. Don’t get carried away–you’re costing them money and it’s underhanded and petty to do that for the pure purpose of harm. But the advertising is out in the public. You should use all the information you can gather to inform your marketing.

Now that you have some basic keywords and you know where your competitors’ sites are, use keyword tools like Wordtracker or Google’s free tools to expand your set and evaluate their popularity. Popular keywords are important, but once again I warn you to consider other characteristics. for example, Starboard is a popular maker of SUP boards. A prospect searching for Starboard SUP boards might be interesting, but a prospect searching for Starboard SUP Board Prices reveals something entirely different.

I find Google’s keyword tool particularly handy for locating hordes of keywords. If you are trying to do SEO only, then it’s not for you–Google clearly designed it to encourage you to buy lots of adwords. But if you’re building what we are building–a template for conversations, content, marketing, customer understanding, etc. , then it’s just great.

You can use the tool for expansion and evaluation of keywords you already know, and you can use it to fully evaluate the competition’s site for keywords.

Notice that some of the words relate only peripherally the search terms that we’ve examined so far–you’ll get some chaff with this tool. But look also at the interesting variations.

Analyze Similar Sites. Here’s some magic. Check the radio button for “Website Content” instead of “Descriptive words or phrases” and enter the URL for your own or your competitors sites. Bonanza. A valuable analysis of the keywords found on the website and the search volume.

This analysis is for www.surpsurfmag.com. It doesn’t take too much imagination to understand how helpful this is. Cooler yet, you can export the results as text, CSV (comma-separated variables) formatted for Excel, or just CSV so it can go straight into your spreadsheet.

As you can imagine, using this tool you can flesh out your spreadsheet quickly. You can eliminate duplicates as you go, or write a macro to do the elimination. For research purposes I like to retain the duplicated keywords on a worksheet dedicated to a specific site or characteristic, and then eliminate the duplicates on the master page.

Add specificity. Work your way through the keywords and add modifiers that make your keywords better fit your products, company, customers and prospects. For example, Women’s Stand Up Paddle Boards or Stand Up Paddle Shortboards are more specific. Then roll these more specific keywords back through the tools to to rate them for popularity and add variations you may not have considered.

Keywords and the Long Tail
The long tail is a reversal of the 80/20 or Pareto rule–interpreted for marketers as 20 percent of a market collects the vast majority of the customers, or twenty percent of products get eighty percent of the sales, or twenty percent of books attract eighty percent of readers. It’s certainly true, and companies have run their businesses aiming to be in that small group, offering those few products that sell the most. But now there’s an alternative strategy.

Chris Anderson looked at the power curve that results and realized businesses could thrive in that skinny long tail of the power curve if there were a large volume of prospects, and the distribution and inventory costs allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items.

In other words, the long tail is a viable strategy to do business on the internet. Businesses were evolving into that model before Mr. Anderson explicated it, but his article in Wired Magazine sparked a revolution in how business can be conducted and what strategies bear the greatest risk.

Keywords should follow a Long Tail approach, in fact one of the keys to world domination is to start with the small volume, 80 percent, more specific keywords and work your way up to the 20 percent big mommas. As your site gains in volume and links from traffic resulting from searches for long tail keywords, you are in a better position to compete for the higher volume ones. It’s like gaining a beachead, which I consider a primary concern in marketing–both taking them offensively and defending them.

Long tail keywords tend to be highly specific, like “Luxury Home In Portland Oregon” rather than “Home” or even “Luxury Home”. They might still face considerable competition, but it is relatively easy to move to the top of such mini-markets both because you will probably be one of the few making a strong effort and because your content will naturally support the keyword. We will play with this specific example because I’m building a website to sell my “luxury home in Portland Oregon” which gives me another nice dual purpose example.

Always update your keywords. Your analytics will show which words and phrases are having the most effect. You are doing all this work so that prospects looking for a specific product can find it at your company. But even more important is that you can cross the cultural divide and get them to buy. Keywords change more rapidly then you might expect, influenced by everything that is going on in the space. All of the conversations on the web are ephemeral to some degree, so committing your research to paper is not as valuable as you might expect, unless you’re interested in the history and trends for some reason.

Rank your Keywords. Now you have a seed list of highly relevant keyword phrases from all your efforts. You should have hundreds of keyword phrases in a column on a spreadsheet. All the Keywords that have gone through a tracking tool (Google, wordtracker, wordze, etc.) should have the search counts in an accompanying column. Now you do a Google search for each keyword and record how many pages return for each keyword in the next column on your spreadsheet. Take a look at the competitors that emerge. You will find a lot of surprises. I helped a friend with this approach and found a company that was knocking off his products, being supplied by his chinese manufacturer. An all-too common tale these days, but before we did the keyword research he had no idea it was going on.

Let’s Get Competitive
I hate hearing someone say they don’t really have competitors–I’ve been there myself. It only means one of three possible things. You’re too early to the market, or you don’t know the market or there is no market. Usually it’s simply that you don’t know the market and there’s no excuse for that today. You need market intelligence to know your competitors. It used to be expensive and difficult. Now it’s free and easy.

Good marketing these days calls for some highly organized competitive intel. And of course we’re going to use keywords to do it. I promise that pretty soon now we’ll talk about marketing tactics that don’t have much to do with keywords, but for now we’re stuck with them–we need them to get our baseline strategy in place.

Let’s find our toughest competitors. We’ll define this as people who are using a strategy similar to ours, and doing a good job of it. They will have found the keywords, or at least the concepts that prospects find their products with, and they will have optimized their entire site, or sections of it, for those keywords. We’re going to get a little esoteric in doing this, and I apologize for not explaining everything, but if I did this would quickly devolve into an SEO textbook, and the world doesn’t really need another of those right now. If you don’t understand what I’m doing just view this as a recipe.

Pick a set of the keywords that seem most relevant–both in connection to your products and in popularity. For our example for Ke Nalu it’s going to be just Stand Up Paddle which got 60,500 searches in August 2009.

We start off just doing a google search for that phrase enclosed in quotes. Remember to turn off search history. If you don’t, the results will be skewed by the searches you have made–your site will figure large, even though if you go to someone else’s computer it may not show up at all.

Now we’re going to do an intitle search, which means we’re going to add a parameter to our search to find sites that include that phrase in their titles. Google parameters are fussy, you can’t have spaces between the colon following the parameter and the keyword, but the keyword must be surrounded with quotes if it’s a phrase.

Lots of sites are optimized for “Stand Up Paddle” in their title. Now let’s see who is really working this keyword hard. We’ll do an inanchor search along with intitle

Still lots of results. These are the most formidable competitors for the keyword: People who have optimized both the title and anchor text for the keyword I care about.

Now it’s time to see how tough these competitors really are. One easy measure is the number of backlinks. Links to the site are one of the key ways that Google sets pagerank. I generally take everything on the first few pages of the Google search and use Yahoo’s Site Explorer to look at all their backlinks. Here’s the first one:

I wander off to all these links to look at their quality–by that I mean how relevant they are to the page they link to and what kind of keywords are in the text. While I’m looking I also note the pagerank of the referring pages. If they have a high pagerank the links are worth more.

All of this is a lot of work, but it can really fill in the competitive landscape for you. If your business is new, or new to this space, it gives you a good idea of what you will need to do to be successful. Who the prospects and customers are, who the major secondary players are–the consultants, resellers, value-added resellers and dealers, etc.. And it can show you where all the influential editorial comes from, which pundits are active, where the blogs and forums are.

If you’re too pressed to do this kind of work, and it IS a great deal of work–the lists grow geometrically–your agency might be able to do it for you. B&J certainly can. It’s not inexpensive, but compared to old school competitive intel it is infinitely more actionable, infinitely more accurate, and much cheaper.

If you play around with these tools in your space you will probably be terrified initially. Even if you are the industry leader and a Fortune 500 or Russell 2000 company you may be getting your butt kicked online. The online world can look like you’re standing knee deep in Piranhas. Don’t sweat it too much, a lot of those Piranhas are toothless. If you bang away at things and build a plan you can do well in almost any space. I’m going to stop saying “we’ll cover that later” because I’m getting quite a backlog, but that’s pretty much the plan.

What we are fundamentally doing is the first steps in building a marketing platform. The platform is not just a website, or just a set of tools, it is the combination of all your marketing efforts once they have been integrated. TV, print, direct mail, and all your web stuff along with how you interact with the sales force and/or customers as prospects. You can build it all into a robust environment, or you can hold it together with string, duct tape and a lot of manual labor. You can leave out the components of your marketing that are tough to integrate, or get some good help and stitch it all together seamlessly.

But in the end, the better and more robust your platform is, the better your marketing will be. It’s not cheap, and its not easy, but it’s worth the cost and effort because you can run with it for a very long time.

Seth Godin wrote a post in his blog recently about this notion that really resonated with me. He said modern marketers don’t rent, they own. Generations of marketers rented attention–a magazine, a TV network, a billboard, a direct mail campaign mailed to rented lists–every advertising venue or media company developed an audience that they could rent to you. We didn’t care about the long term value or health of that media venue, we just wanted to know how many eyeballs we could attract to our brand or products.

Now the rules are different. We’re building our own audience and that means they are a long term asset. There are two important elements to this difference–the audience and the platform. If we are really smart we care about both and invest in both. We gain value both by making the platform more sticky, useful, engaging and by keeping the audience satisfied and involved.

Depending on your business and it’s sales model the value of either element can be higher. But the place to invest first and foremost is in the platform. The quality of the platform and it’s ability to bridge the cultural divide is the primary tool for maintaining and extending the audience. Your sales cycle can live in your platform, attracting, nurturing (maturing), converting and extending the prospects into customers and advocates.

As Seth Godin says: “If you don’t invest in the platform, you’ll be at a disadvantage, now and forever. The smart way to build a brand today is to invest in the elements of the platform… the product, the technology, the websites (plural) and the systems you need to make it easy for people to show up at your very own trade show. And then embrace these people and shoot for 90% conversion, not .5%. Like most good investments, it’s expensive and worth more than it costs.”

In the grand scheme, I plan to show you how to become a thought leader in topics and markets that are important to you. That’s mostly related to content, and I’m going to cover that issue to the brink of tedium in the Creativity section.

Then I’m going to show how to translate that leadership into exposure and how to measure every aspect of what you are doing. We’ll track efforts online and off all the way to the money.  That, of course, will be in the Measurement section.

Finally I plan to show you how to take action on everything we’ve built. How to plan your costs, buy advertising in the new and emerging auction markets, create, morph and use your budget to improve your company, your products and your market share. Naturally that will be in the Advertising Inventories (Media) section.

I’m amazed that companies seem to be so slow on the uptake of what to do with Twitter. Most decide it’s just a great big market and they should spam it. Dumb, and pointless. Twitter conversations have the life expectancy of mayflies.

I’m certain that I’m missing dozens of uses for Twitter, but I’m focused on conversations and market intelligence, and Twitter is amazing for that. It can give you maore market intelligence in an afternoon than a fleet of consultants could deliver in a week. You can put your keywords into Twitter and see who is talking about your company, products, market, competitors and world. The volume of conversation on Twitter is so large that you can find tweets about nearly anything.

Of course Twitter is also a place to put your own tweets about what “you” are up to. Ke Nalu automatically sends it’s posts to Twitter, Facebook, and many other social sites.

Consistent with my assumption that you know little or nothing about this weird online world, here’s a quick and dirty Twitter primer.

You sign up for a free Twitter account by going to http://www.twitter.com. The signup page is a great model for how registration should be done on the web. Quick, easy, and unfriendly to webbots.

You get a username (like @ponobill) and can set up a profile page. Then you can use twitter on both your computer and your mobile phone. You can post a 140 character “tweet” to your page as often as you like, about anything. If you want to send a message to a particular person you preface it with their username, like @ponobill. With phone companies charging ridiculous amounts for text messaging that requires almost no bandwidth, people are using twitter as a more convenient, multi-device replacement for SMS.

You can find friends, groups, brands, companies, and twitter stars to “follow”–meaning you’ll have their tweets delivered to your page. That sounds odd, but play with it and you’ll see the utility. When you follow someone, Twitter will send them an email notifying them. Sometimes they will reciprocate by following you.

Twitter search, as shown here, is not as complete as some of the third party applications. There are LOTS of add-on applications that use the twitter platform. Many of them make it easier to write and follow tweets by tracking multiple pages. Some automatically shrink the URL links you place since long links eat up too much of the 140 character limit. Some allow you to share other content such as video and pictures.

Twitter also has some conventions that people have adopted that are not really part of the original design. One such convention is hashtags, such as #kenalu. The hash mark (pound sign) indicates that this word is a tag, much like the metatags that can applied to other web content. But Twitter has no facility for tagging, so a simple inline convention was established by the users. There are no real rules for using hashtags, but if you are writing some post that references a common topic you can gain readers by adding a hashtag, such as #marketing.

When you search for the hashtag #marketing you find everyone that has recently posted to twitter that included that hashtag. You can see that Twitter notified me that 5 more people posted tweets with the hashtag #marketing between the time I made the search and the time I captured this screenshot–perhaps fifteen seconds! Half an hour later it was over 200.

Twitter is fast becoming the hub for all kinds of information dissemination, in part because of this feature which isn’t a feature. Excuse me for going on and on about the genesis of hastags, but it’s an example of the value of crowdsourcing–developing elements of your marketing and even your product through the freely given efforts of your customers. We have a couple of chapters about crowdsourcing, it has amazing potential.

You can make up a keyed hashtag to coordinate an event or enable discussion with anyone that uses that hashtag. For example if I were doing a web presentation I might offer the hashtag #preskenalu to my participants, which would allow them to interact via their mobile phone or computer during the presentation via twitter. I use the hashtag convention to make what I’m up to more searchable. I could just as easily use any nonsensical combination of symbols and letters to make a searchable entry. The hash mark is just a convention, not a rule.

I’m getting sidetracked–welcome to my world. Time to go take some Concerta(tm). Where I was headed originally was explaining how you can use these social platforms actively, for pushing people to your site and interacting directly with consumers, critics, pundits, etc.. They are powerful for initiating and participating in conversations, for monitoring attitudes about your products. We’re going to get much deeper into the hows and why of social sites later.

Here’s an example of how I use twitter directly from Ke Nalu to post abstracts from the e-magazine. This is NOT an optimal approach, I’m being very lazy. There should be real tweets interspersed between these automated extracts. But it makes a good example, and these do show up nicely on searches for keywords I care about as long as I’m careful to include the keywords in the first few words of the article–which I rarely do. We’ll fix that so you can see how the site will benefit.

My laziness is paying great dividends–we’re going to be able to show excellent progress by simply doing the stuff I know I should have been doing all along.

What’s In It For Me

Well, let’s see. I’ve shown you how to locate, stimulate, monitor and join conversations about your company. We have a lot more work to do on those topics.

Your assignment is to take the lame little list of keywords you have generated and use them in the same manner I did here: Go find the blogs and forums that talk about your business. Join the most important ones and start establishing yourself as a contributor. DO NOT talk about your company and it’s products, though it’s perfectly fine, and even important to your long-term credibility to reveal your affiliation. Then do a Twitter search on your keywords to see what people are saying there. Most likely you’ll find some startling things.

The good news about all the tools I’m going to show you is that they are pretty much the leading edge. The bad news is that these things age faster than crab salad. In a year this book will look as current as the goofballs dancing the Frug in a 70’s movie. I can live with that if you remember that what we are doing is looking at HOW things are done, not what tools we use and how they look today. I’m not teaching you how to use these tools, I’m teaching you the conceptual aspects of marketing. That will age pretty quick too, but nothing lasts forever.

Ke Nalu is a highly modified WordPress blog that uses a special theme, a host of plugins, and a lot of custom programming that I did in PHP and CSS to make it look the way I wanted it to. Or I should say as Diane Jenkins wanted it to since I asked her to design the look and feel. Diane was an excellent graphic designer when we started our company 17 years ago. She’s also my wife: We got married 14 years ago.

When it comes to programming skills, I make a great marketer. I’m a hack, in the old sense of the word, but I get by.

Of course you should go to http://www.kenalu.com and play around on the site, but here’s what the site looks like–fundamentally like the table of contents of a magazine. Each article abstract leads to the pages that comprise the full article. No one ever really sees the full page without scrolling unless they have a larger monitor than my huge Apple display, but you get the idea.

The purple tabs across the top open other feature articles. The green header across the top contains other navigation to the site’s archive, a book on Stand Up Paddle Surfing that I’m theoretically writing, equipment reviews (a popular feature) and housekeeping stuff.

We’ll be talking about navigation choices and how keywords work on pages other than the home page. That’s an important issue in frequently changed and expanding web assets, so it’s useful that you understand that this site is pretty deep.

The short abstracts down the right side contain the abstracts for all the feature articles that are accessed by the purple tabs. Whizzy organizing features (like those purple tabs) can have a negative effect on how both people and search robots view your content. This is as important in print as it is on the web. We need to make people (and robots) recognize quickly that the page they are looking at contains information relevant to their interest. Keywords are how we do that.

Translate the term “keywords” into the phrase “words and images that connect immediately to the prospect’s interest” and you’d find this quick recognition concept in the writings of any of the sages of direct marketing, particularly Herschel Gordon Lewis, and in any good web design book. Indeed the fundamental concept of a Johnson Box in direct marketing and the design philosophies of myriad agencies building successful advertisements, or any designer building a magazine cover are exactly summed up in the idea of keywords and keyword placement.

Let’s set up and examine some of our tools for starting to play with these ideas.

In order to participate effectively in the conversations you need to know which ones are important, and that means Web analytics. I’m using Google Analytics for three reasons–it’s adequate for my purposes, it’s simple to set up, and it’s free.

WordPress (the blog software I use for Ke Nalu) has it’s own implementation of analytics available on it’s dashboard page. This gives me a pretty good idea of progress, and the interest level in particular posts. But it doesn’t do everything I want and need for the sake of this book. It has the benefit of requiring no setup, but we’re not afraid of a little configuration work, are we.

From the WordPress dashboard graph you can see that Ke Nalu waxes and wanes in popularity. The big dip at the end is a graphing error–the month of September isn’t over yet–it’s a partial data point. But it most likely will be down from June and July because in the summer I do a lot more vintage car racing than standup surfing, and Ke Nalu goes semi-dormant–it’s pretty much a one-man band. It takes time for the visitor count to change–lots of momentum on the web–so both the peaks and valleys are substantially delayed.

Thirty thousand views sound kind of impressive until you do the math. On average each visitor views three pages so it’s just 10,000 visitors per month. There are simple blogs that receive a hundred times that number of visitors. But that’s a good thing, it gives us a base to work from and an easy way to measure results. If Ke Nalu was already at a million visitors we’d have a tougher time showing clear progress.

While this dashboard view is helpful, there are far more powerful analytical tools available on the web, and the surprising thing is that many of the very best are free. Like Google Analytics for example.

As you can see from the Google Analytics dashboard, a lot of people showing up at Ke Nalu are typing the URLs directly into their browser or clicking links in a referring site. The site is getting about 150 unique visitors a day who on average look at 3-6 pages depending on the day they visit and what it was that drew them to the site.

At the time of this particular snapshot, 29 percent are direct traffic (they typed Ke Nalu directly into their web browser) 25 percent are coming from particular forums or other referring sites (more about that later) and 45 percent come from search engines like Google. What are they searching for?

Google analytics will show me, but we have so little data on this site yet that it’s not very accurate–I reset Google Analytics on this site so I would have a clean slate for the examples in this book. From prior analysis I can tell you that it’s mostly “Stand Up Paddle” and variations on that keyword. The keywords shown in this report are just from the last two weeks. Google Analytics works best when you have at least a few months worth of data.

We’re going to show you a lot of ways to derive and evaluate Keywords, but analyzing the search terms terms that bring people to your websites is a decent start.

Analytical tools also tell you what’s popular on your site and what isn’t, as well as delivering a wealth of information on bounce rates (the percentage of people who view only the target page and then navigate away), the amount of time people spend on each page or each element of the page, and other related prospect data.

You can cross-tab and fiddle with this information to great effect. But as I said, we’re going to take a very shallow dive into this very deep pool, because this isn’t a book on web analytics. I’m going to have to keep saying those kind of things, as much to remind myself where I’m going as well as to focus you, because we can easily wander away from the premise of the book and spend too much time in an attractive niche.

If you want to compare the use frequency of a number of keywords there is a powerful new tool called Google trends. It’s one of the neat things Google has buried in it’s Lab. To use Trends you enter a set of keywords, separated by commas, and Google provides a graph of the use of the words over the last few years, along with web events that may have sparked upticks in use.

When you are using a tool like this it’s important to eliminate or mitigate the effect of terms that might be in more general use. For example, if I added the word “surf” to the list it would generate a huge trend line that would reduce all the other keyword trends to a squiggle at the baseline. In fact when I first did this example I included the term “SUP”, an acronym stand up folks use as “Stand Up Paddle”. Including SUP blanketed the results because SUP is used in many other ways (including goofy beer commercials), so I modified it to SUP Surf and got better results.

So now we know a little about what people are talking about and where they are coming from. We have some idea how to separate the important conversations from the trivial by looking at what content is popular and how much time people spend with it.

Let’s join some conversations. We’ll start with our top key phrase, stand up paddle and just add the word “forum” or “blog”. We could also use Google’s new Blog Search tool, and we will later.

Here’s where some of the conversations are taking place. Once you join them you’ll find others. The people you talk to (and more important, listen to) will guide you there.

The #1 organic result is StandupZone. Here’s where you have to use your imagination. If you’re running marketing for a big telecom equipment company, what you’re going to be looking for are conversations about your company, your equipment, your competitors, your customer service. You want to go where those conversations are already taking place and join them. I’m also going to stimulate further conversation and get people to visit my blog. Do it right and you’re adding to the community, do it poorly and you’re just a spammer, or a troll, and you’re trying to steal visitors.

That means walk before you run. Ask questions, have a conversation, offer up some knowledge. Make it clear who you are and establish some credibility. In other words, be human–a courteous one.

So I join the conversation. Note that my signature line includes both the URLs for my blogs and the RSS feed links. And you can be a little more blatant if you like, but restraint is called for. forums are peopled by true believers, and they can be very prickly.

PonoBill, huh. This guy looks familiar. Two thousand posts!?! Hey, get a life buddy.

Well, I told you I was into Stand Up Paddle surfing. Pono is Hawaiian, meaning basically “striving for excellence”. I am, but the name really comes from the road my house in Maui is on.

In this case I’ve started a new topic and a new conversation. This topic quickly expanded to eleven people responding and 266 people viewing the posts.

A good number of people come to my blogs because I participate in this forum and other similar ones. I don’t participate in all the forums and blogs that I could–this is just an experiment. But when you do this kind of thing for your company you must make sure there’s representation everywhere that’s important.