Archive for the ‘Book Reviews’ Category
Book Review: The Truth About Search Engine Optimization
Monday, March 1st, 2010Despite being a quick, almost breezy read (how often do you read that said about a book on SEO?), The Truth About Search Engine Optimization
What’s most notable about this book, however, is that it’s an SEO book written for a broad audience. Unlike typical “how to do SEO” tomes, this book is more about what SEO is and how it works, in plain business language. Though it certainly contains instructive content, it can be read by and provide value to everyone on a web development team: designers, copy writers and developers, along with the entire marketing team, as well as line of business managers who aren’t directly responsible for site optimization but can benefit from understanding how it works and why it’s important. Rebecca deftly weaves together all of the important elements of SEO, from keyword research and link building to the role of social media, without excessive insider jargon or getting into the weeds on topics like file naming conventions, PHP vs. Javascript, or canonicalization.
Why is it important for executives not directly involved in search to understand more about it? As Rebecca explains in the book’s foreword and introduction:
“SEO…is the foundation, the bedrock of online marketing. It isn’t just the foundation of search marketing; I submit to you that it is the foundation of all marketing. This is exactly because we live in a world where increasingly, Google dominates the search landscape and Google has taught people to love search…In the 12 years or so since search engine marketing has been in existence, we have learned this one truth: Al media, all marketing, and all communications have one thing in common—they all drive people to search. And in a recent study conducted by Jupiter Research, of all the people who were stimulated by an offline cause to go online and search, some 40 percent of them actually made a purchase…A well-optimized website, therefore, is something akin to the Holy Grail of marketing. It provides the right message to the right person at the right time…Search long ago became the second-largest online activity (after email). Search has evolved from merely providing answers to stated problems and queries. Today, it’s the way most people navigate the Web.”
In her chapter on “learning to do the Google Dance,” Rebecca notes the similarity between SEO and public relations: both can help you influence the information that prospects find about your company and its products or services, but not control that information. Maybe your news (or your website) will make the front page, or maybe it will be buried several pages in. As she notes, “If you want to guarantee that your message will appear (exactly)…the way you want it to and where you want it to be, buy an ad.” In other words, SEO, like PR, can be important in terms of influence, but it’s unreasonable to expect complete precision.
(Interestingly, on the topic of PR and SEO, Rebecca writes that “Although many PR professionals still don’t know about or understand the concept of SEO PR, a handful of SEO-savvy boutique PR agencies have sprung up recently. These PR agencies specialize in optimizing and releasing news for their clients with the goal of increasing search engine visibility.” Actually, KC Associates, the agency I work with, has been doing this for years, and though we focus on b2b technology clients, I’m not sure we qualify as “boutique.” And having been around since 1988, we certainly haven’t “sprung up recently!”)
To put the challenge of SEO into perspective for marketers, PR professionals and line of business managers who may not appreciate its difficulties, the author notes that “with hundreds of billions of sites out there—and more every day—no matter how obscure or arcane your website is, chances are you have more than a healthy amount of competition. Heck, more than 2 million page in Google’s index are about beekeeping.”
Though the book doesn’t specifically address web presence optimization, it does touch on elements important to SEO beyond meta tags and directory links. For example, email can play an important role (through maintaining an online archive of search-friendly archived newsletter content), as can personal and corporate reputation management, online advertising (ads are links!) and social media activities.
There is a wealth of wisdom packed into this compact book: search is something to consider from the very start of a website project, not as an afterthought. Companies can no longer afford to build static “brochureware” websites—to be successful in search, sites must “now be ever-growing, changing, and evolving platforms for publishing content, news, and information about products and services.” Search is no longer simply even about website content, but has fragmented into local search, video search, blog search, image search and news search among other categories. Search is an ongoing activity, not a one-time event: results aren’t achieved overnight, and developing quality links in particular is a process that happens over time. Although, as noted, the book isn’t overly technical, the importance of technology isn’t ignored: the author touches on the importance of being careful with drop-down menus, using CSS in place of tables where possible, maintaining a relatively flat file structure and utilizing breadcrumb navigation to help both search engines and human users better understand your site’s layout.
From a pure how-to standpoint, Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets
Still, these are minor quibbles. Overall, The Truth About Search Engine Optimization
NOTE: Still with me? Thanks! Here’s a reward: the publisher sent me an extra copy of this excellent book, so I will give it away to first person who tweets this review. Your tweet MUST include @TomPick, ad I’ll be the sole judge of the winner based on what shows up in my Twitter #replies feed. I’ll even pay the postage to send it you.
Book Review: eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale
Monday, February 15th, 2010Marketing automation systems—from vendors like Eloqua, Marketo, Genoo, Manticore and others—are great tools for moving prospective buyers along the path from interest to desire to action. But they’re just that: tools. Without a solid content strategy to support that movement through the marketing and sales cycle, all you’ve got is a nice email system. The brilliant Ardath Albee provides the missing piece, a reliable recipe marketing automation, demand generation and content marketing success in her new book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale
Some business books are mere “information snacks,” but Ardath provides much more here, a substantial three-course meal of marketing strategy: she covers the “why,” “what” and “how” of using compelling content, email, social media and microsites to turn prospects into buyers.
Divided into six sections, as an appetizer the book starts off with eMarketing Essentials, the “why” of using content marketing for complex sales. Here she expounds on the shift in technology buying processes I outlined in a previous post, How Social Media Changed the Sales Cycle into the Buying Cycle. Buyers today expect to be able to gather the vast majority of the information they need to make a purchasing decision without ever talking to a sales rep. They begin in most cases with some basic online research, which is why web presence optimization has become so critical. From there, they will “raise their hands,” looking for more information from specific vendors, most commonly by downloading a white paper or registering for a webinar. What happens next is critical; prospects at this stage are not usually ready to be “sold,” but they are open to being convinced, through compelling thought-leadership content, that your company is uniquely capable of solving their problems. In this first section, Ardath explains this shift, what it means for marketing and selling complex products, and how the vendors who understand and capitalize on this shift will benefit in increased sales and a stronger competitive position.
Sections two and three, Customer Consensus and Natural Nurturing, begin getting into the meat of the strategy. Here the author outlines the crucial preparatory steps to a successful lead nurturing strategy. Begin by creating buyer personas—who are your buyers? What problems do they face? What keeps them awake at night? What information do they need to make a decision? Just as importantly, what information do they need to be your advocate within their organization? It’s critical at this stage to recognize the different personas you’ll need to appeal to in crafting a content creation strategy. The primary buyer for a complex b2b product or service is often someone in operations seeking to solve a problem or perform a process faster/cheaper/better. However, the purchasing committee will generally include someone from IT, the CFO, and in smaller firms possibly even the CEO. You’ll need different messages to appeal to all of these groups, based on their concerns (technical simplicity, financial impact, high-level business benefits, etc.).
Sections four and five, Contagious Content and Persistent Progression (gotta love the alliteration of these titles), are the main course. With an understanding of who your buyers are and what problems they are focused on solving in place, the chapters in these two sections walk through the creation, development and tuning of thought-leadership content to attract buyers and move them through the decision process. The section begins an explanation of the three types of content you’ll need to provide to buyers: education (what buyers need to know in order to think strategically about solving a problem or taking advantage of a new opportunity), expertise (showing why your product or service is uniquely capable of addressing their issues) and evidence (proving through case studies, customer stories and third-party endorsements that your offering provides real business benefits).
This is followed by a critical chapter (one of the best in the book) on “catch factors”—which are, in Ardath’s words, “the preferences and aversions that form a lead’s ‘gut reaction’ to your communication.” These include urgency (why you message is important to prospects, now), impact (what’s in it for the reader?), effort (how much energy is required to absorb the information—is it straightforward and easily digestible, or full of meaningless gobbledygook?), reputation (what’s known about your company, its image and brand?) and intent (do readers perceive that you are sincerely trying to help them, or merely doing a “hard sell”?).
The section continues with guidance on designing marketing stories, organizing content to move prospects through the buying process, scoring leads, and managing the interaction between marketing and sales, all illustrated with pertinent case studies.
The final section of the book—the “dessert,” if you will—is Meaningful Metrics, which provides a framework for what and how to measure results, for purposes of reporting and continual improvement.
The book is a bit repetitive in places, but it’s repetition with a purpose; this is important stuff! eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale
Book Review: The Perfection of Marketing
Monday, January 18th, 2010Despite it’s ambitious title, The Perfection of Marketing
The book walks through three major steps in the author’s perfection of marketing process: positioning the brand through the sales moment; rolling out the brand consistently; and return on investment marketing. In the author’s parlance, the “sales moment” is that key value proposition that makes a prospect say “yes.” They’ve done their homework. They’ve identified several alternative products or services that will solve their problem. What is the key point that makes them choose to buy from your company above all others? That’s Connors’ key sales moment, and the value proposition around which to build the brand.
The first section walks through the four main elements of branding: a company’s name, logo, tagline, and campaignable image. Nike is used an example. The name Nike comes from the Greek goddess of victory (not a bad association for a company that produces sports apparel for competitive athletes at all levels). The swoosh logo invokes motion and speed. The tagline (which former spokesperson Tiger Woods clearly took a bit too literally), “Just do it,” is both immediately relevant and highly memorable. And the image—an athlete running—reflects the aspirations of the company’s target market. Few companies tie all the elements of branding together that ideally, but its a goal every company can pursue.
The second section, rolling out the brand, properly focuses on building the brand internally first, before taking it to the market. Before a brand image will be believable and accepted by prospects, it must be internalized by employees and partners. Messages must be consistent imbued into the company’s culture. Branding is next extended to the organization’s website and communicated to the media and other key influencers through PR and social media marketing, then to prospects through advertising and promotional activities.
The final section, one sure to be dear to CEOs and CFOs (and the marketers who need to communicate with them in the language of business), explains return on investment marketing. The first key is understanding the lifetime value of a customer; from this, ROI calculations can be performed on any marketing activity to help set budget levels appropriately. Two different strategies are presented: a slow growth strategy focused on conservative and modest marketing investments, and a more aggressive fast growth strategy, “spending ahead of sales” to gain a competitive foothold in the market or launch a disruptive new product.
The book is aimed at a wide audience; C-level executives will gain a greater understanding of the role of marketing and the business justification for various levels of investment. Corporate marketers will come away with clear guidelines for an over-arching strategy, and how and when an outside agency can be most helpful. And marketing agency people will get key insights into how to speak with clients at all levels of management, and position their services within a coherent and unified strategy for marketing success. (Incidentally, The Perfection of Marketing is actually highly aligned with the business practices of the agency I’m part of, KC Associates, though with some helpful enhancements.)
So does the book live up to it’s title? For the most part, yes. My only criticism of the book, albeit a minor one, is that in its brevity, the book does a much better job with the “what” of marketing than with the “how.” This relatively slim volume would have benefited from a bit more detail on specific steps or actions to accomplish some of the objectives presented. Readers will have look elsewhere, or fill in some of the blanks using their own creativity, in order to incorporate the overall strategy presented here.
Still, The Perfection of Marketing
Other reviews of this book:
The Perfection of Marketing, by James Connor – A Book Review
Brad Shorr
My Marketing Book of the Year
Douglas Karr
Book Review: Website Optimization – Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets
Thursday, January 14th, 2010Author Andrew King, president of Internet marketing firm Web Site Opimization, LLC has really done it. In Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets
Or at least almost any business. There are still some specialized skills required—it certainly helps to have some background in online marketing, web analytics and HTML coding—though King’s clear and concise prose removes a lot of the mystery.
The book is divided into two major sections: Search Engine Marketing Optimization and Web Performance Optimization. It pays for itself in the first 50 pages—two chapters covering natural search engine optimization and an organic search case study. While much of the material here is well-covered in blogs and other books, even experienced SEOs are likely to find a few new ideas here. For example, though I’ve used many keyword tools and even written about some of the best keyword research tools here and here, I somehow managed to overlook Wordtracker’s free keyword suggestion tool, which uses data from Dogpile and Metacrawler to estimate search volume across all search engines.
Here are several more key SEO insights provided by King:
- Wordtracker’s fee-based tool goes beyond free keyword tools by tracking what it calls a keyword effectiveness index. According to King, “The keyword effectiveness index, or KEI, is a comparison of the number of searches and the number of web page results. Targeting high KEI phrases with adequate search volume gives you the best chance to rank quickly on particular terms by going where others aren’t competing. Very Sun Tzu.”
- “Create your keywords tag using your master keyword list and the visible words in your page. Although you can separate keywords with a comma or space, omitting commas will give you more proximity hits between adjacet terms.” King recommends using up to 30 words, with specific key words repeated up to four times.
- “After title tags, headlines are the most important component of web pages for search engine rankings…Include the primary keyphrase of your web page in the first-level header…The main header should describe the content of the page succinctly in 40 to 60 characters.” Use real header tags (h1 through h6) rather than “fake” p-class tags in your CSS files. And keep in mind that h2-h6 tags are just as important, possibly even more important, than h1 title text.
- Bake in your most important key phrase to your home tab, so
Book Review: Marketing That Matters
Sunday, November 1st, 2009This review originally appeared on the WebMarketCental blog in July 2008.
In writing Marketing That Matters, authors Chip Conley and Eric Friedenwald-Fishman, not content merely to provide an above-average book on marketing strategy, instead wrote an impressive book on marketing strategy—with a point of view.
The book combines guidance on marketing strategy and tactics with a “socially responsible” orientation. The result is best described as an avocado of a book: a solid core of marketing strategy surrounded by a thick layer of politically liberal messaging. As with an avocado, some readers will find this outer layer delightfully tasty, while others will consider it disgusting green mush.
“Socially responsible” has become a charged term. It perhaps shouldn’t be; first off, who would want to run a “socially irresponsible” business? (According to the authors, Wal-Mart executives, of course.) Second, many of the management practices that the authors attribute to social responsibility—minimizing energy use, creating a positive work environment for employees, purchasing from local suppliers when possible—would simply be called good business by most entrepreneurs and managers. Keeping energy costs under control and employees happy is good for the bottom line, regardless of broader societal or political ramifications.
But, social responsibility or irresponsibility aside, the authors do provide an excellent treatise on marketing strategy. Some examples:
- Getting it: “Marketing is about creating relationships…people don’t want to be marketed to—they want to build a relationship with…New-school marketing is based upon satisfying needs. Pushing product doesn’t work anymore, especially in the era of the Internet, when savvy customers can connect with each other and trade stories about your product—and your company—and can easily find alternative choices.” This is precisely the message of The Cluetrain Manifesto
- Strategy starts with customer understanding: “Strategic marketing is acquiring a deep understanding of the needs and desires of your existing and potential customers and designing your business (products, services, delivery mechanisms, customer experience, branding, outreach, etc.) to meet and exceed their needs and desires. When energy bar leader Clif Bar developed the Luna bar, the core idea for creating the product—active women need an energy bar and have different nutritional needs than men—was a demonstration of the pure definition of strategic marketing. The strategic marketing decision to design an energy bar specifically for active women then led to many other strategic and tactical choices, regarding product design, branding and packaging, product distribution, community partnerships, and, ultimately, promotional and sales strategies.”
- Affinity matters: “Consider gathering your leadership team in a room and looking at…a particularly compelling customer experience that can be articulated to the world. Ask each person to talk to two loyal customers about how they describe the company, brand, product, or service to their friends. See what’s consistent in their messaging and start to build a story that you can use in all of your communications with the world: on your Web site, in your brochures, in your press releases, in your company orientation with new employees…In Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands
- Build a community: “Building a community of believers is one of the best pieces of marketing advice we can give to any businessperson…According to consulting giant McKinsey & Company (a company which does virtually no advertising, by the way; the company has an almost 100% referral and reputation-based business), about two-thirds of all economic activity in the U.S. is influenced by people’s shared opinions about a product, brand or service…What if you had to tell your story nine times before your best friend acknowledged what you were saying? For one, you’d probably pick a new best friend. But that’s a good way of looking at the inherent flaws in traditional advertising. Conventional wisdom suggests that it take nine impressions for a potential customer to retain the information in an ad. One good story from a friend far outweighs the potential of nine expensive ads…The Internet is the perfect medium for furthering the conversation between companies and their most enthusiastic customers. Check out any marketing-savvy…company’s eb site and we bet you’ll find many ways to engage with the community that orbits around that company or brand.”
There is much, much more lucid and valuable strategic advice on topics such as branding, customer-centricity, empowering employees to spread your brand message, the role of emotion in decision making, and the importance of capturing and properly utilizing marketing metrics.
Again, however, these morsels of strategic marketing wisdom are drenched here in copious amounts of social responsibility sauce which won’t appeal to all tastes. For example:
- Would you really want to work with people who have no sense of humor (or worse, no sense period)? “We’ve seen SRBs (socially responsible businesses) with poor marketing campaigns that came about as a result of choosing process over impact. What we mean by this is that they were so tied to their do’s (always include all the facts and details, spend your advertising dollars only in publications that support your politics and point of view, only market products and services that are critical to human survival, etc.) and don’ts (never print in full color, never use humor in your marketing, etc.) that they forgot to ask, ‘Does this marketing approach have an impact on our customer?’”
- Strange watercoolers. “In media stories, comments on blogs, and discussions at office watercoolers, it’s not uncommon to read or hear comments like ‘Why wouldn’t you pay twenty-five cents more per pound to know that farmers are making a living, that your food is healthy, and that yhour tomato didn’t contribute to global warming by flying across the world?’ All good questions.” First, such conversations are far less common in most of the country that the authors may realize. And second, many readers are likely to feel that anyone who seriously believes that flying tomatoes cause global warming really needs to be reading Bjorn Lomborg
- Government good, markets bad. Considering that marketing is the subject of the book, the authors are at times bizarrely anti-markets. “In fact, when we think of companies taking a stand, we usually think of industry-funded campaigns or individual company-sponsored ads, in which business voice has been used to fight health-care reform, limit tougher air and water quality standards, fight living wage laws…or limit liability for products such as guns.”
Again, the authors seem to ignore the likelihood that many business people (the audience for this book) legitimately believe that more competition and less regulation is a better path to reducing health care costs and improving quality than a government takeover and exclusion of the private sector would be; that environmental standards should pass reasonable cost/benefits analysis before implementation; that raising costs on small business owners and reducing employment opportunities for entry level and marginally skilled workers isn’t a great idea; and that we’re better off without laws designed to enrich trial lawyers while making self defense more difficult and expensive.
- Confusing community involvement with controversy. The authors advise putting “philanthropy at the center of your value/values proposition,” and highlight companies that support causes such as finding a cure for breast cancer, helping women escape the international sex trade, and keeping kids safe—all worthy and non-controversial causes.
But when the authors praise the work of groups like the Sierra Club, they are going to alienate readers who place affordable food for developing nations, American jobs, and relief for families from record-high gas prices above enriching thugocratic Middle Eastern despots and avoiding any inconvenience to Alaskan caribou. Even the writers’ own local newspaper has picked up on the folly of substituting biofuels for petroleum, noting that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
Conley and Friedenwald-Fishman are from San Francisco, and their city’s offbeat, left-of-center leanings are clearly on display here. While this book is likely to sell well in a line from Los Angeles to Seattle, its prospects anywhere to the right of the left coast—geographically or politically—are less clear. Perhaps the authors don’t care. But it does seem incongruous to write a book about marketing (which is the art of persuasion) while being so enamored with government regulation (pure brute force).
It’s unfortunate that the authors have chosen to imply that anyone who believes strongly in supporting philanthropic causes or sensible environmental protection must also be enamored with gun control and socialized healthcare. In placing so much emphasis on controversial political positions, the book needlessly alienates (at least) half of its potential audience. If your political leanings are left of center, you’ll like (most of) this book. But if not, you’ll have decide if getting to the solid core of worthwhile marketing strategy here is worth the effort of mentally scraping away the thick coating of green mush.
