Online Marketing Strategy and Your Target Persona

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Whether you are planning a natural search targeting campaign, a paid search marketing strategy or a social media strategy it’s always best to know who you are targeting before implementing any of your campaign or strategy. But how do you know who you are targeting and how to target them?

The www.savethebreakfastsandwich.com (STBS) website was originally developed as a fun site after speaking with a colleague in February 2008 in finding out that Howard Schultz was planning on discontinuing them in October of 2008. The goal was to develop a website where breakfast sandwich lovers could join in support of keeping them with a discussion board with stories and discussions supporting the sandwiches.

In this website’s case my main goal was to encourage people to sign up and possibly join in on the discussions. The site isn’t a money maker, but rather a site that was to generate buzz and enough members to hopefully convince Starbucks that the Breakfast Sandwich is worth keeping. In order to determine who I would be targeting in my strategies I had to go back to the type of person that enjoys walking into Starbucks and ordering a breakfast sandwich, and then narrow it down to the type of person that would be upset enough to rally in support. From there this person had to be technically savvy and one who is involved in the internet (i.e. active in sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc.).

As I dug deeper into the personality of the STBS Persona I narrowed it down to a male between the age of 20-30 who is very active in the online community having Facebook profiles so that he would talk about the site and the story of the Breakfast Sandwich being discontinued creating awareness. He also has his own websites and/or Blog in which he would post a blurb about the story and link back to the website (generating awareness and linking credit for SEO). He is a very sarcastic individual and loves to mock the large corporations (what I like to call the conforming non-conformist). He also enjoys a good controversy (but only the obscure ones). Let’s call him Brian…

Now that I know I am targeting Brian, where he enjoys hanging out on the web, and what he does, as well as what will spark his interest it was time to determine a strategy. Every online marketing plan should have a basic strategy of 4 channels.

1) Search Engine Optimization – natural rankings on Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, and more

2) Paid Search Marketing – paid placements starting with bidding on key words and showing up in search results on the top sponsored or right side placements up to placements on other sites (per keyword bidding and/or placement targeting) to even banner ad placements(per keyword bidding and/or placement targeting)

3) Social Media Marketing – generating brand awareness and/or buzz about a website, company or product through social sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and more

4) Traditional Banners – with sites such as Adready in which your ads can appear across a network of sites generating awareness.

Depending on your budget and man power you should have a clear plan established before ever beginning any work or hiring of agencies to help you.

In the case of the STBS site I had no budget whatsoever, with limited amount of manpower since I was already marketing full time for Concur Technologies.

With a budget of nothing and limited manpower I set a plan that solely relied on the controversy of the Breakfast Sandwich being discontinued to trigger Brian to start talking immediately. I developed the site in 3 days keeping all search engine optimization in play with each page and across the entire site, and focused on promoting it as much as I could through social media sites.

Natural SEO

My main target was to rank for “Starbucks” of course, but second would be to show up naturally for “Breakfast Sandwich”, “Starbucks Breakfast”, “Starbucks breakfast sandwiches”, etc.

When targeting a persona and optimizing a website for that persona it’s always important to pay attention to the following 4 optimization techniques:

1) Landing Pages – focus on obscure terms (long tailed key phrases) that are 3-5 words in length that your persona might specifically be searching for and provide them with a landing page or 2-4 page microsite that gives them exactly what they are looking for.

2) Meta Tags – each landing page and page of your website should keep your persona in mind as you write the title and description. If a persona is looking for the “Starbucks breakfast sandwich” the result should explain what the site is about. Especially in the case of the STBS site. We don’t want a user searching for the actual sandwich to click the result and close out the website because they didn’t see the sandwiches. If they saw a result that talks about the demise and saving the sandwich and they choose to click the result then they are already aware of what the site is about and less likely to close out.

3) Internal Linking – when it comes to the persona the links pointing to other pages is very important. If you have a page seeded with links within the content the person might be compelled to click through to irrelevant pages and get lost within the site. Focus on the links that would be most important to them as they land on the pages that rank with clear calls to action (graphical buttons, banners, etc) and keep the linking to other pages in the sitemap or on pages that are more relevant.

4) External Linking – external linking is a great source for SEO credit. Encourage users to link to stories, landing pages, posts, etc. by adding “bookmark us” with the more popular bookmarking sites (Google, Digg, del.icio.us, etc) and encourage them to add links to their blogs or websites to specific pages with quick html they can copy and paste and talk about on their blog.

Of course this is all in addition to the standard SEO such as xml sitemaps, robots.txt, etc.

Social Media

Keeping my persona Brian in mind as I looked to other sites to talk about the STBS site and spark controversy I started with other blogs that discussed Starbucks either by fans or had Starbucks coffee drinkers talking to one another. I particularly started with a comment to a blog post that was a few days old on the Starbucks Gossip Blog - http://starbucksgossip.typepad.com/_/2008/01/starbucks-to-ge.html

The comment was quickly picked up and blogged about http://starbucksgossip.typepad.com/_/2008/02/seven-people-ha.html. The site immediately took off from there with blog postings from local obscure publications such as Seattle’s own Stranger http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/02/save_the_starbucks_breakfast_sandwich , to the New York Times http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/25/blogtalk-burgled-in-the-burg/

From there the site took off for the first few weeks it was launched. People were buzzing about it faster than I could keep track. Knowing that this groundswell wouldn’t last long (as most controversies die off within weeks or even days) I had to keep the momentum going as well as implement an SEO strategy that would keep the awareness of the site prominent in the internet culture.

With regards to the social media I kept commenting on blogs and sending out emails to members that would be interesting enough for them to forward on. I also setup a Facebook page and occasionally promoted it through my profile, twitter tweet, etc.

The SEO strategy was focused on local targeting. I developed a database of every city in every state across the US and created a page for each state and then the city targeting individuals that would be searching for a Starbucks in their area. The beauty of SEO is that you don’t have to be as specific to the user since you aren’t paying for the ad. The goal with these pages was to mention the demise of the breakfast sandwich in the snippet itself. The user would be searching for Starbucks close to their home, work, hotel, etc (for example starbucks felton, CA) then see the result and read “Find the Starbucks in FELTON - CA for your favorite breakfast sandwich before they are discontinued.” The user would click the result out of curiosity (not a highly qualified referral – but SEO has next to $0 cost per click so it has room for less qualified click throughs) the user then sees a landing page that educates them more about the decision to discontinue the breakfast sandwich and encourages them to sign up to help support it. Signup is free and easy which makes that decision fairly easy (with a 40% conversion rate from those pages from natural traffic).

Of course if I had an ad placed the messaging, and landing page would be much different, but again, this is SEO so we have a bid of legroom to convince rather than just presenting as we would with paid advertising so that our return on investment would be higher.

Always remember your user with any marketing strategy - a banner ad should spark curiosity and educate before the user clicks so that it is not only noticed but the user knows what to expect before clicking through, whereas a PPC ad should be specific to the term you are bidding on with the ad and landing page giving the user exactly what they are looking for. Pay attention to who your user is, what they are looking for and where you are grabbing them from and you will be successful in your marketing.

Optimize Your Landing Pages Without Disturbing Your Tests

When I was first approached by Mark (CEO of Smartsheet) with the opportunity to work for them in marketing I was excited about the product and all that it has to offer. I was even more impressed while in the first week in my new position to find out that they had already implemented landing pages with a complete user flow. From paid search advertising that pointed to a landing page that then sent the user through a very simple registration process, then showing the user a template that helped them get started based on the landing page or ad they came from. The user experience was unique depending on what each user was interested in. How brilliant!

The VP of Marketing (Maria) had done an excellent job working with Widemile in optimizing the original landing pages. With over 40-50 landing pages they were able to take the results from a select few pages and apply them across the rest of the 40 to 50 pages that weren’t tested, resulting in an increase from a 4-5% conversion rate up to over 6-12% by redesigning a select few and testing the designs against the original. (read the article on btobonline.com here)
With the website going through a complete redesign and a new product rolling out I wasn’t sure if we were going to see the same results, or if I could try some of the strategies I had used in the past with Classmates or Concur to increase the conversions. Luckily I had 40+ landing pages to work with that all had templates associated with them. I started with the most popular based on the natural search traffic. A lot of the landing pages were indexed and had a pagerank of 4-6 (depending on the page). So I took the pages that were driving the most conversions naturally and applied three different designs across them. We launched the new site and our BETA product in July 2008 and thus the landing pages were setup for A/B testing (A being a design based off of winning combinations against 3 new design layouts) in 3 groups. I captured the paid search marketing campaigns that were setup before and split them up by content targeting, and search only instead of one lump in one campaign (difficult to track effectiveness of ads on content, vs. search). The first week of launch our paid search marketing campaigns were converting at 6%. Over the course of the few weeks I noticed that the content network was converting higher, and the landing pages were doing much better with the new designs. Over the course of the few weeks I optimized the campaigns and created banners to see if I could drive more traffic to the landing pages for testing. By the end of July 2008 I was able to get the overall conversion rate up to over 9%.

In August I created adgroups for each landing page (20 of the top converting pages) complete with text ads, banners, and a template that the user would see once signed up. I implemented the winning test design on the pages, and added some new elements for multivariate testing in 2 groups. One group had an emphasis on “Free Account” and the other had an “easy as 1-2-3 to sign up” block to the right. Our conversion rate jumped up to over 11% (getting close to what we were at in the past). With the “Free Account” traffic we noticed that the users were less likely to stick around so we pulled the “Free Account” wording off of the pages. Since I was testing other elements on those pages and not the “Free Account” I grabbed a footprint of where the conversions were so I could see if removing the words would affect the conversion rate. At the same time I added a block with a list of our value props to some of the pages. Once again, since I didn’t have enough data to stop the test, and adding the block wasn’t a part of the tested elements I took a footprint of where the pages were at.
I did notice a drop in the conversions from the “Free Account” removal, with an increase on the pages I added the value props to.

I charted a few of our results below for you to see:






I am happy to say that as a result of the small changes I made (while keeping the tests going) I was able to increase our overall conversion rate to nearly 15% by the end of August 2008.
The lesson learned is that you don’t have to keep stopping and starting new tests just to make small changes, and the small changes you make can still be tracked if you just grab the data before you make the change. You do still want your tests to run long enough to collect enough data for the small changes you make, but the idea is to leave the multivariate testing for 1-2 elements (that way you get faster results with less combinations). Do remember that these are tests, and the data your are collecting through multivariate, and especiall A to B, shouldn't be manipulated too often otherwise your results could be skewed be all the changes you made along the way.

Just as I was able to get templates to show up when our users sign in, I took the time to setup the sheet that I keep track of my landing pages as a template - complete with tips on how to keep track of it all. Just click the link here, sign up and you should see the template once you have verified your email.
Happy Testing!

SEO Survey

After signing up for one of Google's beta testing applications through their form that posts directly to the google doc spreadsheet I thought I would give it a try and create an SEO survey through Google docs myself. The results are published directly to the doc as the survey is submitted.
Take a moment and fill out the survey yourself. The results will update automatically as people fill it out and submit it, and I will post the data in all its glory to the public with pie chart sand everything for all to see. It will be interesting to see what comes of the answers.

The form is no longer available

The Misinterpretation of the internet...

On Monday June 16, 2008 Gail Geronimos had posted an article on her blog about Brent Frei (co-founder and chairman of the board at smartsheet.com) summarizing his very informative article that was posted to Venturebeat.com on April 21, 2008. She starts by stating that the article "was written by Brent Frei, founder of Bellevue."
Now mind you - the Bellevue she is referring to is my hometown that is located across Lake Washington from the major metropolitan city Seattle, WA. A few of us in the office got a chuckle out of Brent being the founder of Bellevue, WA - but in actuality it was founded in 1869 by William Meydenbauer.
This to me is yet another example of how the internet can be the misinterpretation of facts. Given that Gail Geronimos is from Australia she would have had no idea that Brent wasn't the founder of Bellevue, or even that Bellevue is a city all it's own. Through no fault of her own she had misinterpreted what she had read for at the bottom of the article Brent had posted stating "Brent Frei is founder of Bellevue, Wash.-based Smartsheet.com, a privately-held Software as a Service (SaaS) provider."
Remember the old rumor game that we played where we would whisper a statement into someone's ear and that person would then whisper to the person next to them, and so on until the person at the end would then say what they had been whispered out loud and it would never be what the original statement was said? Could it be that the internet is becoming the rumor mill that we experienced in our younger days?
It's up to us marketing and PR people to keep track of not only our company as a whole, but the company's representatives as well as our own personal interpretations.
...and no - I am not actually a Goddess, I just play one on IT ;o)

More and more companies are hiring agencies or even in-house teams to monitor the rumors that fly on the internet as quickly as they become posted. But with today's technology it's becoming increasingly difficult to catch all that there is out there...

Jenn

Google and DoubleClick - what does it mean for PPC?

Google closed it's acquisition with DoubleClick today. So what does it mean for Pay Per Click?
As Google continues to grow we are seeing the search marketing trend pull away from being just that: Search Marketing. With the introduction of image ads being placed on the content network (now placement targeting) and the addition of video ads, radio ads, newspaper advertising, etc. Google continues to stray away from being a search marketing network to an online marketing network.
Some say that Google took off when they revolutionized search by introducing the linking algorithm in order to bring it's users the most relevant results possible. I would say that the company itself experienced a growth when they revolutionized the online advertising industry by offering ads that were charged on a per click basis rather than a cost per impression. This new way of advertising made it easier and more affordable for small businesses to gain a presence on the internet without breaking their budgets.
Banner ads are now becoming a part of that revolution. I have already seen the results of this form of advertising on Google with the placement targeting campaigns. I am able to pick and choose where my ads appear rather than a plethora of pages. By choosing the specific pages that our ads are to appear I am able to bring the users from an article, blog posting, website, etc. that relates to a specific user with a banner ad that when clicked brings the user to a page which then presents them with a document or such information relating to what they were in the mindset for.
By doing this, there is less of a fall-out from the banner ads themselves and thus creating more conversions.
The user is presented with what they are looking for or researching more efficiently, and the company was able to get yet another lead.
It's a win/win situation!

Google Groove - San Jose, CA

The the moment we walked in I was in awe. In all the years I have worked in SEO I have never been to a Google party. I had heard about them, and how much fun the are, but haven't ever experienced it all first hand.
I ran into Carlos who had worked for me at Visible Technologies all those years ago. It was great to catch up and find out that he is doing really well. He is on his own now running his own consulting company specializing in Landing pages for PPC. Jeff Leach had attended with me, we have both stayed in touch over the years as he continues to grow his own consulting business managing those hard to reach Linking campaigns and creating great successes in optimizing for the most aggressive terms as always.

I have been struggling with finding a consulting company that is able to handle our European campaigns including the translation and localization as well as our US campaigns. I had met a couple of guys from the UK that were specializing in handle such campaigns and swapped cards with them.

I also ran into these guys -

The night continued to be a blast as we all stacked our glow int he dark cups while we slammed down the beers before they closed down the open bar at 10:00pm.

Check out their Video on YouTube

Inside AdWords: Meet our AdWords Evangelist in San Jose

Inside AdWords: Meet our AdWords Evangelist in San Jose

Since I have made the change from Classmates.com natural SEO Manager now working for Concur Technologies as a full search marketer, I am making he trip to Jan Jose for the SMX West conference next week.
My goal is to absorb as much as I can about search marketing for B2B, as well as learning more about managing campaigns overseas. Our search marketing has been very successful here in the US and with the company now expanding to Europe, the Middle East and Asia (EMEA) I am now driving our search marketing efforts there. My main focus has been in the UK, but now moving to Germany, and France as well. Our Australia campaigns have been struggling quite a bit, so am hoping to eventually focus my efforts there and gain some ground.
It's great to see that Google is going to be there, and am excited to get to pick their brains. Especially Fred Vallaeys AdWords Evangelist.

See you there!

Jenn

Remove URL from the Google Index

There has been repeated discussion about how and why you should remove a URL (whether it a whole website, directory or just one file) from the Google index.
The most common issue I have ran into is when two or more domains resolve to the same DNS resulting in more than one website with the exact same pages and content in the google index. I discuss this in one of my earlier posts "Problems with Multiple Domains".

Matt Cutts has presented us with a video explaining more scenarios and the best practices of how to remove URLs from the Google index even more in depth.

Ha! to all you Linking black hatters...

You know I have been talking about is for several years now. When I started as a full time SEO technician several years back, the company I worked for (Visible Technologies) used linking as their main strategy for rankings. While they obtained the rankings quickly, the search engines slowly started catching up to all those websites that used such sites at linkmarket, and linkworth in order to increase their rankings. Funny thing is that now I get to tell them "I told you so".

Does this mean that Google doesn't approve of linking? By all means, NO... Google supports linking in every way, in fact they encourage website owners to obtain external links in order to help their rankings. What they don't approve of is the purchasing of links in order to increase rankings.

The point of rankings within the search engine results pages (SERPs) is to help the user find what they are looking for efficiently. If a website has next to no relevant content and has rankings just because of a load of external links is that helping the user find what they need?

No

If the website has relevant content to what the user is looking for, then chances are the user isn't only going to find what they need, but the user is going to be so excited about the site that they are going to either blog it, or tell others about the site by adding a link to it.

This was the whole basis to Google's algorithms from the beginning. The problem is that SEO's have been using black hat techniques in order to increase rankings quickly (linking, doorway pages, duplicate content, etc) leaving Google and the other search engines having to adjust the algorithms in order to bring the most relevant results.

When optimizing a website, always be sure to provide your user with relevant content, and landing pages that reflect what each user would be looking for. For example, if someone is looking to start dating online they would want a website that offers advice for those wanting to date online. Thus when a user types in "Online Dating Advice" They would find a website and a webpage that reflects the online dating advice.

Google talks more about this and Matt also adds a bit about how Google made some algorithmic changes recently which resulted in a lot of websites loosing pagerank and search results - Purchasing Links is  BAD -

Read it and memorize it well...

Always remember that if you have to adjust because your site lost rankings, then you aren't optimizing correctly.

Google snippets

Matt Cutts visited us here in Seattle by heading to Google Kirkland office. They had decided to make a few videos of Matt while he was there and post it to the Google Webmaster Blog - Anatomy of a Search Result. Matt's video explains the snippets (title and description that shows up in your search results). He used Starbucks as an example. The Starbucks site is a good one since it has limited content on the page, but uses meta descriptions in their code.

Matt mentioned in the video that we have no control over the site links presented underneath the snippet which isn't entirely true. While we are unable to pay for the extra sitelinks within the snippet, we are able to control them through the webmaster tools. Under the "links" and then "sitelinks" within webmaster tool, if Google has generated sitelinks for your website, you are able to control them from there.

Always remember how the snippet works:

1. If the search term is within the meta description of the web page then the description will appear in the snippet (with the term highlighted in bold).


2. If the term isn't in the meta description or there isn't a meta description then the words around the content within the body of the page will be displayed (with the term highlighted in bold).


3. If the page does not have content and does not have a meta description, then the description is generally pulled from the open directory project


4. If there isn't any content on the page, no description in the meta tags, and the site hasn't been submitted to the open directory project then the descriptiontion will be blank.

A great example of the fourth scenario is a client I have been working on that came to me with his website that was created entirely in graphics. The website was a great design, and had a lot of great information on it, but the text was put in images and placed on the site that way. The website wasn't even ranking for the name. The only way to pull it up int he results was to do a site: search to see that the pages were getting indexed, but the content wasn't getting recognized (because of the images).

I am currently in the process of pulling out the text from the images and the html is recoded to keep the design the same while keeping the text still recognizable. I also added a webmap for more efficient indexing, and landing pages for the terms that the client wanted to rank for. There is an xml sitemap submitted to the webmaster tools, and a Google analytics account setup for tracking conversions.
The client should start to see better results soon after we get the new site launched.

Classmates is getting rankings

I was asked for the Classmates.com address the other day and since I hadn't been there in a while I went to Google and typed "classmates renton". I was surprised to see that registration form page for the "classmates test high school"
I hate to say this but the fact that tis page is ranking is wrong on so many levels.
From a usability standpoint - most people looking for the classmates address (such as myself) while Google ha it on the map, to see this page i the results is very confusing. How many of these pages are ranking? I have come across the final form page on several occasions while searching schools, or other such affiliations (researching schools for the kids). The problem is that a user coming to this page for any other reason than to sign up for classmates.com is very confused as to what they should do. This page is meant to be the last in a 5 page registration process in which a user starts from www.classmates.com and then flows through to the school they attended when they graduated. I had mentioned this while the SEO Manager at classmates.com but they chose to keep the pages as is, and decided not to make the fix in order to get the actual landing pages that we had designed and launched in December 2006. The pages were designed to recognize who would be landing on these pages, give the user a clear understanding as to why they were there, and what we would like them to do once there (The target audience, value proposition, and call to action). Those pages went from a 10% conversion rate (that's being nice) to a 50% to often 60% conversion rate.
It's a shame that the registration form page is ranking higher than the intended landing page.

The second reason why it's a bad thing to see this page listed is that the page is the test high school that the QA department uses in order to ensure there are no bugs in the registration process.
If it were me, I would remove it from the index through the webmaster tools, and then add it to the robots.txt to ensure that it wouldn't ever rank again.

Maybe even suggest that we not let it go to prod, and leep it on the QA servers just for testing.