Marketing on the Internet has been quite a hot topic for some time. That means different things to different people—Banner advertising, pay-per-click ads, email newsletters, direct marketing via email, affiliate marketing, Electronic Press Releases, etc. Any and all of these may be an important part of your optimal online marketing mix, depending upon the specifics of your business and resources.

However, there is one online marketing method that nearly EVERYONE should be pursuing. In my consulting practice at PJM Consulting, I find that too many technology companies are not actively utilizing this marketing method, and it’s very surprising to me. I’m referring to Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO is the practice of modifying the content and infrastructure of your website, to ensure that the Search Engines find it, when someone enters a keyword search that is highly relevant to your site. This just doesn’t happen automatically—unfortunately.

Offline Marketing Analogies

Most of you are familiar with the use of Press Releases and magazine advertising as “staples” of technology marketing. Of the two, Press Releases are the “free”, and more credible method of publicizing your products or services. There is no guarantee that a press release or a story derived from it will actually be published, but if it is, the credibility is very high with the reader—and of course the expense may have been very low to garner this exposure. Magazine advertising, on the other hand, is guaranteed to give you exposure, but is much more expensive, and somewhat less credible with the reader, than PR is on the same topic.

I like to use an analogy from offline marketing to explain the importance and relative position that SEO should take in your marketing mix. In the online world, you can think of SEO as the PR of the Internet, while Pay-per-Click advertising such as Google Adwords or Overture is analogous to the magazine advertising that appears in the offline media (more on pay-per-click advertising in a future column). SEO appears in the “Organic” listing when doing a search in an engine like Google or Yahoo, and as a result it is highly credible. Tremendous amounts of targeted potential customers can be driven to your site via Search Engines. This is a competitive issue as well—I guarantee that your savvy competitors are investing in this area.

As long as I’m using analogies, here’s another way of looking at this topic: Would you build a beautiful retailer store out in the middle of a cornfield, 50 miles from the nearest consumer? I hope that any business person reading this would answer “No”. Yet, I find many senior executives in High Tech companies are oblivious to the strategic importance of having a website highly optimized for Search—which is the Internet equivalent to “Location, Location, Location” in the retail business world. Websites are usually built by Graphics Designers who put great effort into the “look and feel” of the site (the beautiful retail store)—and NO effort into enabling someone to find the site through search engines (built in a cornfield).

The most recent research on SEO says that appearing among the first six sites in the results of a search can lead to enormous increases in traffic to your site. For searches containing the targeted keywords specific to your business, getting your site to appear in the top six sites of the results should be your goal. If you are able to accomplish this, the visibility among your target customer will increase substantially—possibly exponentially.

Now, I don’t want to pretend that maximizing your results is easy. But at least the initial steps that you should take are not that hard. I believe that this important topic doesn’t get the play it should in executive suites, because of a “fear factor.” SEO is viewed as a highly technical field, understandable only to “geeks.” A lot of times, people just don’t know where to start. But once you delve into it, most of the steps are pretty straightforward.

So how should you go about enhancing SEO on your website? Just like most other things in technology marketing, it depends upon the skills within your company, the competitiveness of your marketplace, and the company’s financial resources.

It’s Important

To go back to our example in the offline marketing world, how people conduct their press relations varies widely. Companies with large financial resources, as well as fast-moving & competitive markets, often hire external PR firms to spearhead their campaigns, with retainers of $10-15K/month or more. For these companies, having outside experts focus on this important activity is viewed as critical, and isn’t a problem within the budget. Other companies feel more comfortable hiring an in-house PR person, both from a productivity and budget perspective. And smaller companies can’t hire PR expertise at all—but they know they need press coverage, and still find a way to write press releases and promote them to the important editors in their vertical market. Because they realize that it’s IMPORTANT.

SEO is the same. If you are in a highly competitive market and are flush with money, it may make sense to hire one of the hundreds of agencies focused specifically on search engine marketing, to optimize your site. Or you may have a webmaster in-house that has the skills and interest to take on the task. But even if you have no in-house expertise, and can’t afford to hire any—by all means, do it yourself. Buy an SEO book or one of the modestly priced SEO software packages available to walk you through it. Do it because it’s IMPORTANT.

What NOT to do

The one thing I DON’T recommend is to just “throw money at it,” and walk away. SEO is an on-going, critical activity that needs to be managed for the long haul. It is important that someone at a senior level in-house gain enough knowledge about what is important, to be able to monitor it from a management perspective. Otherwise, you risk really going off track, regardless how you decide to handle the implementation. In particular, there is a tendency to simply “outsource” activities that management isn’t comfortable with. The problem is that there are a number of “quick fix” artists in SEO, who claim to bring you a lot of traffic fast. They use questionable practices that can get you in trouble with the Search Engines, and in the long run have the opposite effect from what you are seeking. If you don’t have a senior manager that understands the implications of what’s being done, you can get burned.

Recommendations

So let’s say that you’ve decided to “do it yourself”, or at least want to get a basic understanding of the SEO process. Where do you start?

Here’s what I recommend:

• Buy and read a popular Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine Marketing book to become conversant
• Purchase one of the Search Engine Optimization Software Packages which are available for a few hundred dollars—I use Web Position from Webtrends

Once you’ve become familiar, here are the important basic steps that you’ll want to make sure that you understand:

1. Select keywords to optimize you site for, ones that are important to your potential clients and your business. Look at your own website and other marketing materials, look at your competitor’s sites, and use tools like WordTracker and the Overture and Google Adwords Keyword tools. This is a critical part of the process—you need to select keywords that are both relevant, and not so competitive that you are still able to “own them”—in other words, appear in the top 6 listings when they are searched.
2. Make sure that your Page titles and Page URLs are rich with the selected
   keywords. This is very important, and is why new websites should be optimized for search, when they are initially built (which usually doesn’t’ happen, unfortunately).
3. Include keyword-rich “link text” in your content, and make sure to label all images with keyword-rich text.
4. Make your main body text keyword rich—and probably more text intensive than your graphics designers would like. Even though the designers (and senior executives) may think its ugly, search engines love—and only understand—text. Some engines will even completely ignore pages with less than 300 words. If your pages appear too “clean and pretty”, there’s a good chance they will be ignored by the search engine bots when they do their indexing. So you need to make some compromises between SEO and look and feel.
5. Start a “never-ending” campaign to get external websites to create links into your site. This is also critical, because search engines use this is a measure of how “important” your site is, relative to your competitors. The more relevant and popular the linking site is, the better, but any link is better than no link. PR is a great way to build relevant links—but you can also have a clerk trolling for simple opportunities to list your company’s website, in the myriad directories available on the Internet.

SEO is actually a very complex field with lots of important, but mundane technical details. Much more can be done past this process to optimize your site. But these are the basics—if you run through this process, you will as a senior manager, be much better prepared to buy external SEO services, or hire people for your internal staff. As a C-level manager, you wouldn’t feel comfortable being ignorant as to how the PR process works, would you?

In the Internet age, neither can you afford to be ignorant about SEO!

As always, your feedback is welcomed.

Phil Morettini
PJM Consulting
http://www.pjmconsult.com/

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I’ve discussed many topics related to High Technology companies over the last several months. One fundamental subject I haven’t explored in detail is the promotion of High Tech products.

This is a favorite topic of mine, since I tend to become heavily involved with promotional activities with clients, as part of my consulting practice. Many of my clients are at a stage where gaining (or regaining) market traction is crucial to moving the company forward. So finding successful, profitable promotional programs is quite often one of the key activities that we’re concentrating on early in a consulting engagement.

Same old, same old doesn’t work

So what’s the best way to promote software and other technology products? If you’re asking that question, thinking there’s an actual answer, you are likely on a path to failure. One-size-fits-all promotional programs rarely work, and if they do, it’s probably just lucky. The most important thing to remember about promotion (and marketing in general) is that each company and product line is a unique situation. Even with the exact same company and product line, a promotional program that worked 12 months ago has a high chance of failure today. Markets are not static, particularly fast moving, high growth technology markets. And there is a wide range of market types within the high technology business sector. The proper promotional approach for a $100,000 software package with 1000 potential customers is far different from the best approach for a $49 software package with 5 million potential targets. If you find yourself falling back on some tried and true formula, you’re thinking “behind” the market, not “ahead” of it. I always chuckle a bit when I see ads for a new VP Marketing that is seeking candidates only from 10 specific software companies that have had recent success in a particular market. It’s very likely that one of those candidates will bring along the “formula” that made “Giant Software Company C” a huge success. Unfortunately, the strategy may be terribly inappropriate for their new company, particularly at a new time/market stage. This is an example of “shooting behind the market”—and with promotional programs, thinking ahead of the market is required.

The reason is what usually works in promotions are novel new approaches (or new spins on old approaches, or approaches from other markets). Once something works, others in the market take notice, and the copy-cat campaigns flood the communication channels, and greatly reduce a successful program’s effectiveness. Nothing works forever, so you need to constantly being trying to find the next new promotional program—again, out ahead of the market. It’s similar to when the coach of a sports team installs a new system for his team—it throws the competition off balance for a time, but they eventually adjust, and match or counteract what is providing the advantage.

First Art

So how do you approach finding a successful promotional program for your company—do you just guess? Well, not quite. I always say that promotion is a combination of “Art” and “Science”—with unfortunately, the Art coming first. The thing is, you will NEVER know with any level of certainty whether a promotional approach will be successful, until you do it. So there is a bit of Art in formulating the initial “test programs”. But of course you don’t guess. The initial program is put together utilizing the experience of the marketer, their past experience with programs in similar market conditions, a snapshot reading of the market conditions and product position currently, the amount of budget available, and of course the goals of the company. So up front, the key is to make small, intelligent bets.

Then Science

The key word in the above paragraph is “test”. This may be the most important concept in the whole topic of promotion—and unfortunately, one that is dramatically underutilized.

Marketing promotional programs are all too often put together haphazardly, without much analysis of the specific situation. Often they are designed in a certain way because the VP Marketing or CEO has always done it that way, or are comfortable with it. Executives without much marketing experience like to see print ads, because in their minds, that’s marketing promotion. Of if the VP Sales is involved, Trade shows might be what he’s used to. Or seminar promotions might be preferred, if the executive comes from a market with high price points. While all of these methods may be very applicable to an individual situation, they are, on average, some of the higher cost, lower return activities in the promotion bag of tricks. I see thousands (and sometimes millions) of dollars wasted on programs that have been given very little thought, prior to large execution expenditures. Worse yet, these programs are often approved and implemented with no ability to judge whether or not the chosen programs end up being a good investment for the company. This brings me to the measurement part of promotional marketing.

I’ve never been a big fan of marketing programs which aren’t measurable. When measurement doesn’t occur, it’s often because program implementation just isn’t thought through well enough, and accurate measures could have been put in place—but aren’t. Some programs however, such as “Image Advertising”, just don’t lend itself to correlating the program results to the corporation’s performance. While there is, again, a place for such programs, I recommend that they be left to those monster corporations who can afford ambiguous results within some segment of a very large budget. For the preponderance of companies out there for which every nickel counts, I highly recommend that you stubbornly stick to programs with results you can easily measure.

Formulate, Test & Measure

So the formula uses some judgment to place your initial bets. Always make sure that you objectively test different key elements(such as price) of your offer with several controlled options, and measure the results. Good marketing programs are always testing and measuring new versions of each key element, which allows you to continuously improve, and refresh, a campaign. Also remember, measurability doesn’t just happen—it needs to be “designed in” upfront. If you don’t think about measurability for a specific program until after the fact, you’ll likely have lost the opportunity to measure it at all—or at least as well as you could have, with some simple planning prior to program execution.

Top 5 Bets

As I stated above, every promotional marketing program needs to be individualized for the current time, market, product line and budget. You’ve got to start placing your bets somewhere (the “art” segment of finding great promo programs, as discussed above). For someone out there just getting started, or trying to evaluate where to go next, here are some great programs to consider first:

Press Relations (PR)—generally my favorite marketing program for most high tech companies. This activity is intended to provide your products and company with reviews and publicity in high tech trade journals, and depending upon the product, possibly general circulation newspapers and magazines, as well. If you have a good product that fills a need, getting positive reviews will provide your company with tremendous leverage and credibility, filling the prospect pipeline with eager potential customers. Depending upon your particular market, hiring a PR firm or a “do it yourself” approach might be most appropriate. But nearly every company with a real solution for a particular market needs to have an active PR program of some sort.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)—unless you’re selling a $1,000,000
product with a potential customer universe numbering less than 100, this is something almost every company should be doing. SEO is the activity which helps your website be found “higher up” in the results of a search conducted by someone using a search engine such as Google, Yahoo or MSN. No time to go into the details here, but it is a high return activity. A little investment of time or money upfront can yield a strong return in revenue and profit gains. Much like PR above, even with no budget to outsource this to an expert, you can conduct an SEO review and make improvements to your website on your own.

Direct Email to House Lists—if you’re not doing a good job of capturing contact information on your customers and prospects, shame on you! Lack of doing a good job in this area is one of the more striking deficits that I see in the marketing efforts of high tech companies, particularly the early stage variety. It’s especially critical to capture email addresses, and do it in such a manner that the customer or prospect grants you explicit permission to contact them by email. You’ve spent a lot of money making contact with each of these prospects or customers, and a well-executed direct email campaign to sell them additional products and services can a bring quick boost to your revenue, with nearly zero incremental costs. Every High Tech company should strive to have an active direct email campaign of some sort, to allow your brand to maintain mindshare within your target audience.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising—while this area has gotten quite a bit more competitive over the last year or so, I still highly recommend it as a preferred marketing program, for a great majority of high tech companies. These are the small “text ads” that appear next to organic Search Engine results and are labeled typically as “Sponsored Links”. Pay-Per-Click programs are the internet advertising analogy to prints ads in the printed media world, much like organic search engine results are the online analogy to editorial placements in the print world. The two best known Pay per Click services are Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture). Particularly for companies with highly target-able or niche markets, this can be a very cost-effective and rewarding activity.

Direct Email to Rented Opt-in Lists—this is also an activity that has taken a hit in popularity over the last couple of years, due to the problem of SPAM, and over-saturation of email in general. But if you’ve done a good job in target marketing overall, and you have been successful with emailing to house lists and Pay-Per-Click advertising programs, focused direct email programs to targeted lists may still be quite successful. Shot-gunning almost never works, and can harm your brand if poorly done. B2B is much more viable than B2C email marketing. Just remember, direct marketing in every medium is all about the offer and the list. So if you have a strong offer, and are able to rent a list that fits closely with your target audience, email to outside lists can be a strong contributor within your overall promotional plan.

I hope that this is has been a useful outline of the basics of high tech promotion. As always, I’m very interested in your feedback. Happy Holidays!

Phil Morettini
PJM Consulting
http://www.pjmconsult.com/

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