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The best PPC marketing managers are able to maintain a good level of communication with their clients, according to John Lee, writing for Search Engine Watch.
Lee suggests that all other elements of a PPC strategy are rendered null-and-void if there isn’t a good level of communication in place – regardless of the medium.
To achieve the best possible results he recommends the implementation of a communication plan. Here are just a few of Lee’s recommendations in a summarised form:
Schedule regular phone calls – A conversation over the phone can be great for building up a rapport and a significant level of trust; ideas can also be traded and issues raised.
For the first month of engagement, Lee recommends speaking on a weekly basis before then eventually moving towards a bi-weekly call. If your clients are comfortable with it, Skype and iMeet can provide the benefit of face to face video communication.
Responding the calls and emails – When one of your clients calls to register a concern or query, you should always try to ensure that you respond in a relatively quick manner.
If you choose to be tardy in your response you’ll most likely create a point of negativity in your relationship with your client.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, Pay Per Click Services, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
Once upon a time, a request for an email address was a sure fire way to be able to reach someone. Now, as recent research shows, email usage amongst the next generation has dropped by a staggering 59%, and for the vast majority of the rest of us, email has quite simply become a burden.
So, how do you get in touch and stay in touch?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems have been solving this problem for the last few years and we need to start learning, fast, from these solutions. But, that simple question: “How would you prefer to be contacted?” no longer has a simple three phase answer: email, snail mail or telephone.
What we need to consider now is far more complex. As social networks expand and people become more au fait with their smart phones, tablets, and alternative ways of communicating, you need to find the communication medium of choice for your customers and contacts. And you can pretty much bet your bottom dollar that for the vast majority of people – email is not IT.
Spam is not the only problem. The sheer deluge of emails into your average inbox each day means that many people are just ignoring email as a means for communication. And for instant communication, as the #blackberrycrumble showed this last week or so, even your smart phone cannot save you if something more major goes amiss with email servers.
People are relying on a variety of mechanisms to stay in contact and as a company, it is now down to you to learn and adapt to the chosen communication channels of choice for your users. Whether that is Twitter, Facebook, SMS, email, a phone call, or a visit. And then within each of those channels, you may need to understand more comprehensively how your user uses that channel to stay informed.
So, for instance, post something on Twitter as a reply to a tweet I have sent or as part of a conversation I was involved with, and I will only know if it includes @myhandle. I simply do not have time to constantly monitor Twitter so the only way you can reach me is a DM or a replytome. Start a conversation on Twitter with 3 or 4 other people and you will see how Twitter handles start to fall off quite quickly in 140 characters.
Post something on a Facebook page for a client and how will I know unless you tell me?
Understanding how each of those you contact uses social networking and communication channels is becoming a must. Look at those in your office and close family. Do you know the best method for contacting each of them, according to their preferences, which will raise an instant response? If so, then you need to start applying similar knowledge to your wider address book.
For instance, don’t leave me a voice message or expect me to spot an email in the several thousand which arrive each day. Instead, a DM on any of the social networks will arrive as an SMS to my mobile phone. However, you will never know how I set up my personal devices to receive my personal communications, so you need to guess until you know. And then when you know, you need to target me in the most effective manner possible.
Here are some examples:
x: will only answer emails. Thinks SMS are the spawn of satan and will not answer. Ever. The smartphone lives in a box waiting to be sold as a heritage item, like an Atari.
y: loves Twitter. Always picks them up within moments, even at the dead of night. Other than that….
z: checks email weekly. Chooses 10-20 emails to answer only. Facebook, LinkedIn, and social bookmark sites such as delicious and Digg are monitored constantly.
Worrying? It should be if you are relying on email to reach your target audience. It is time to get personal and understand how your audience wishes to communicate. A good CRM mechanism is essential and a full appreciation of the cost of NOT reaching your audience with your messages will force you to look into these solutions.
What does your company use?
For far too many years, too many people have believed that Search Engine Optimisation was the be all and end all of Internet Marketing. Millions of pounds have been spent (wasted?) on endeavouring to get to the top of the search engines; often without fully understanding, “WHY?”
However, Google has taken steps recently that should make many realise that even Google has spied the fact that no longer is search going to be the predominant method for finding your business.
RECOMMENDATION is.
WORD OF MOUSE.
And the sooner businesses see what Google has, understand what Google is doing, and adjust where they spend their marketing pounds, the better for the bottom line.
Even in-house it has been a struggle to get SEO and PPC people to understand the importance of social media, and the changes that was bringing to SEO. That importance and those changes began a few years ago, are becoming prevalent now, and stretche far into the future. Just like language changed the stone age world, so we are seeing similar changes now, online.
For many, this is disruptive and has been hard to grasp, mainly because the mantra of “SEO is great” has been around for so long that many in the SEO world could not cope with “SEO is DEAD”. People have become locked into the algorithms so deeply they have missed what is going on in the “outside world”
The introduction of more bandwidth into the online world has meant we have gone from simply broadcasting to COMMUNICATING. And no-one communicates more than a pro-active consumer. Many businesses have attempted to ignore this fact: by locking down access to social sites for their employees; by making comments unavailable on press releases, stories, blog posts etc; by not adding Chat buttons to the site to talk to passing trade; by pooh-poohing sites such as Facebook for as long as they dared until the noise could no longer be ignored. After all, in ye olde world, businesses had control over the messages that were carefully crafted to be released. That world has long gone.
All of this communication has come, not because Google existed (there were search engines and SEO practioners for more than 10 years before Google arrived on the scene), but because the way we all use the Internet is changing. And Google have realised this, and are taking steps to extend their dominance beyond a dying industry – search – to a growing one – communication.
(Image Source: Mashable.com)
Google are making a huge number of changes, and these have already begun. Google+ is one, but Google is endeavouring, and will undoubtedly succeed, to make the whole of Google’s multiplex of products work together seamlessly, or (better than they have) alone, should that be the choice of the consumer.
Google Calendar has already changed and Gmail has new profiles that are on Preview at the moment, but are shortly to be rolled out. (Click on Settings, Themes, Preview and Preview (Dense) for a ….preview!).
There are changes coming to Youtube as Google begins to hire people as citizen journalists in US cities to possibly threaten the big bad media. And search-based ads have been under threat by Facebook’s huge amount of personal data offering advertisers granular targeting, so Google is working on that too – not just through Google+, but also with the +1 button for personalised search within their own engine.
Google appears to be about to bid for Hulu as well, which will take Google into the world of Hollywood. And increase users’ time online. Which is where the purpose of Google’s trip into the world of fibre networks to the home becomes a serious threat to telcos. Particularly if Google pursues open access models which could turn the world of companies such as BT on its head, forcing them to find alternative revenue streams which Google has not already mopped up.
Recommendation engines are another big thing that has been coming at us, slowly but surely, and Google isn’t slow on getting involved in this either. One example is Hotpot is a beta recommendation engine for places you and your friends recommend, and Google+ Mobile has launched with Places in-built, which will give them a running start on gathering info, particularly as Maps is an integral part of the Google+ toolbar.
The +1 button on its own should have made SEO people conscious that the days of knowing what will show in a searcher’s SERPS are limited, of not already gone. The addition of the huge amount of slicing and dicing possible with news, discussions, realtime, shopping etc on the left hand side of the SERPS was also an indication that to optimise a web page for that level of granularity was now getting difficult, if not impossible. No longer is it an option to sit down and create profiles for users based on whether they were likely to be conducting research, or shopping.
Those days of that simplicity of search are long gone. And hence so is SEO as most agencies and SEO experts think of it. Whilst there has long been debates about where the blurry lines of SEO activity begin and end – does it include PPC, or posting to fora, or article marketing, for instance – now that debate is defunct. SEO is dead. You cannot optimise for the search engines any more and justify it. You must optimise for the consumers. After all, they are the ones who buy your products, who seek the information you offer, and who are increasingly unlikely to use a search engine to do so.
Major companies block access to it, many poo-poo it as the haunt of the shallow-minded seeking to share their everyday trivia with the world, and many marketers just haven’t adapted it into their social media strategy. (Usually for at least the above reasons – there are more).
And yet, Facebook is now the number 1 communications tool according to a survey by Prompt Communications. Netimperative state in their article:
When consumers were asked which method they used most frequently to communicate, 37 percent said SMS followed by Facebook and the phone at 28 percent. Respondents feel that email is now less important than social media, but only 20 percent said they could live without it entirely.
So, are you giving your potential and existing customers every opportunity to communicate with you using the method fo their choice? Also, just before you ramp up a new email marketing campaign, think about who your target audience are and which methods they might respond best to. Do you need to be looking at integrated marketing media rather than sticking to the same old techniques?
Having spent much time over the years in forums, it strikes me that forums are being ignored by many in their internet marketing mix with the dash to incorporate Twitter and other social media.
However, there is much value in forums, which cannot be replicated in such depth using the likes of Twitter or Facebook. It all seems to hang around community and the level of engagement that occurs in forums, which is difficult to maintain in other noisy and fast-moving environments.
Additionally, for many people, forums have become a place where they hang out regularly, recognise old faces, welcome new ones, and get to know and respect (or not) each other’s views and thinking over a period of time.
There are obviously forums which struggle to achieve this ambience and sense of community, often not helped when forums are inundated, as the UK ones are, by people from other countries seeking to promote to the UK market rather than use the forums for their primary purpose – sharing and communication.
For the many who operate small businesses, SOHOs or one man bands, forums can become a social scene as much as a place to seek expert advice, and threats or dilution of that environment are often taken badly. Beware the guard dogs!
When you need an SEO or SEM answer or an opinion in a timely manner, do you head to:
a) Twitter
b) Yahoo Answers
c) your favourite forum – which?
d) a forum from a search result
e) offline eg colleagues via mobile, phone, email etc
f) somewhere else? Where?
Let us know!!
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It’s strange but even in 2009, some companies seem determined to hold their customers and site visitors at arm’s length, making it nigh on impossible to contact or communicate with them.
Whether the customer has an enquiry, a complaint, a business proposal, or just wants to say how fab the product is, if you do not provide multiple routes to communicate, and then MONITOR points of contact and respond to anyone and everyone endeavouring to reach you, you are going to lose business.
Obviously, if you are a major brand, the damage to reputation caused by a single person whingeing on a forum about the fact they can’t reach anyone at your company may have a minimal impact on your branding. But when people type onto forums, Twitter, Facebook etc and that comment is then pushed out to multiple, interlinked sites, asking “Does anyone have an email address for a real person at XYZ?”, the implication there is that you have little interest in your potential and actual customers.
The facts need not even be known.
How many attempts at contact have already been made? How important is the query? Is it life or death? Have repeated attempts to reach a human been met only by automated messages sent by autoresponder? Are the phones not being answered?
None of us in reading the request for an email address need to know the answer to any of those questions. The implication is clear. XYZ company are difficult, nay impossible, to get hold of by the normal routes. So, Mr Desperate of Acacia Avenue has decided to put it out on to the blogosphere, twittersphere, to everyone he can think of to find a way to reach XYZ.
Whether it was a completely trivial reason to ask, or a vitally important one threatening a multi-million pound business venture, none of us are likely to ever know. But, when any of us think of XYZ company in the future, our perception is likely to be tainted by that one question. And the assumption which goes with it, which is that XYZ don’t know how to operate a business where customers matter.
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