Archives for Online Strategies

Saturday, August 30th, 2008

The difference between SEO & PPC

There seems to be a lot of confusion between Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC). Both of these activities fall under the umbrella of Search Engine Marketing (SEM). However, they are very different activities and its the smart marketer that makes a point of learning the difference but embracing both. This is a Heat Map chart created by Google. A heat map is created by tracking where people actually LOOK on a website. This is done using some really cool technology that we’ll talk about on another post.

You use SEO best practices to make sure that your website appears in the “organic search” results of a Google page. That is the column on the left, and in this image, you can see how popular that column is to our search audience. This is the section that has the most credibility. Appearing on the first page, above the “fold” of a Google results page is the goal of all business marketers. However, the process of improving your organic rankings and moving up the food chain of Google (or Yahoo, or any search engine tool) is a laborious process. It takes a long-term commitment — it can sometimes take 6-8 months before you even start moving up the ranks. Read more

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Archives for Sales

Friday, August 22nd, 2008

Cliff Notes® For Selling

Most of our technology clients are involved in complex sales across several vertical markets. The sales cycles are often quite long, and there is a learning curve that goes along with each sale. So by the time the deal closes, the Account Executive and the Sales Engineer have built a lot of knowledge about all the aspects of selling the solution. The TRICK is keeping that knowledge in-house, and making sure that if the sales person leaves, that knowledge doesn’t go walking out the door with him. Additionally, our clients want to duplicate the successful sale across other geographies or verticals. To help enable this, we developed a process for writing up sales guides. The goal of these guides is to share the best selling practices and help our clients duplicate these wins. When a new sales person gets hired, reading these guides can help shorten the learning curve – anything that gets a sales person selling faster is a good thing, right? Here is the outline we follow, (with modifications for each client’s unique requirements.)

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Archives for Marketing

Friday, August 15th, 2008

Company Playbooks

Company PlaybooksHow much money did you spend last year to make sure your sales and marketing teams could articulate the value proposition of your company? Now, how much did you spend making sure the rest of the company could do the same? If you’re like most organizations, with the exception of what might be in an employee manual or on a corporate brochure, the remaining employees, which quite often make up over 80% of the staff, have been ignored. And so what is the result?

If you go into most mid-sized businesses and ask anyone outside of marketing and sales what the company does, you will get a different response from each person. There is no cohesiveness or understanding across the organization. But these are the people who are interfacing with your current and future customers on a daily basis. Read more

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