What's Online

Check out the new Foursquare network which allows brick-and-mortar businesses to track visitor behavior the same way online businesses have become accustomed to doing with website stats. Here is an article on the service that is worth the read: Foursquare Introduces New Tools for Businesses.

Combining the Foursquare service with website and email promotions, as well as Twitter promotions and CRM data integration, seems like a great new marketing tool for businesses that serve an on foot clientele. This benefits the customer too, as businesses can more specifically cater to their needs and offer them promotions they are likely to value.

I am going to be looking into ways to bring the Foursquare data into CRM databases (SalesForce.com, etc.) in the coming days and invite input from anyone who has already researched the subject.

Labels: marketing, social_media

If Customer Relationship Management (CRM) was a revolutionary trend in business paradigms, Social CRM is the natural evolution that is upon us now. If you sell a product or service, or care about a cause you want to promote, you have simply got to be on Twitter. I have Twitter accounts both for my consulting business and for my non-profit volunteer work. I see dozens of new site visitors each day that arrive through tweets I post on Twitter, and you could too.

SalesForce.com CRM (SFDC) is the next part of that equation. With SFDC I can see which visitors submitted a form on the site and track them all the way through won opportunities if someone contracts for consulting services. I can then continue to service clients through a custom object I created called Projects and through Cases after service is provided. And of course, all of this is tracked in numerous ways by SFDC's campaign, reporting and dashboard features, so that I can increasingly make better decisions about how to most effectively let people who need what I offer know that they can get it here.

Toucan integrates these two powerful SaaS business technologies, so that you can not only take advantage of Twitter's marketing and PR power, but do so from within SalesForce.com. Just as you should be integrating your paid Google Adwords campaigns directly into SFDC, you should of course be integrating your free Twitter campaigns into SFDC also.

Of the tweets you've posted over the last month, which ones generated the most traffic to your website? Which tweets generated the most sales? Which tweets led to the shortest sales cycles? If you don't know the answers to these questions, you need Toucan and SalesForce. (If you don't already have SFDC, you can get a one month SalesForce.com Free trial here.)

Twitter is free, and Toucan is pretty close to free itself. If you have up to 25 SFDC users you can get a 1 year license for only $150. That's $150 for everyone, not per user, and not per month.

Instead of reiterating the same how-to material Toucan makes available themselves, I'll just point you to a couple helpful links:

2 minute Toucan intro video - Toucan for SalesForce Intro Video
Request the password for a 7 day free trial - email to
Get It Now link on AppExchange for after you receive the password - Get Toucan for SFDC

With the password you will receive a link to a two page configuration guide that includes helpful screenshots and step by step directions. I tried skipping that (rarely read directions on anything), but got stopped at my first step trying to just muddle through. So I suggest you take the 10 minutes to read the guide they send and just do it right the first time.

The only thing I found missing in the guide is that after you are done doing everything they list there you will want to add your Twitter ID under "Settings" within the Toucan app. That instruction is also not found within the user documentation they will send you a link to. You can't actually tweet anything through SFDC (like the initial message in a new campaign) until you enter your Twitter ID and password under Settings, as shown below:


The folks at Toucan are also very nice, and ready and willing to help at the drop of a hat. Give it a try and let me know what you think. I may also add to this post in another week, after playing with this longer and seeing the stats for the week.

Labels: CRM, Integration, marketing, PR, Recommended_Apps

Many businesses think of search engine optimization (SEO) as strictly a part of marketing, and in a way it is. The key understanding they miss, however, is that marketing doesn't wait to begin until you are at the stage of website promotion. It begins during the first stages of website design.

Think of your website as your business's public face. You get to pick the features you want on your face to create the most accurate impression you can for people who are first introduced to all you have to offer solely by looking at your face. What do you want your face to convey? And what if they could only find your face by searching for faces that have those specific features?

It is common to think of website architecture in terms of the content you want to share with visitors. You want them to see your products and services. You want them to know where you are. You may want to convey your pricing structure. Most websites out there are designed with these sorts of goals in mind. But no one searches for "products and services," so why name a page that way? What do people search for that would make it likely your products or services would fit the bill? Well that's what you need to name that page!

And likely we are talking about multiple pages, rather than a single "products and services" page, regardless of what you might name it. That will allow you to target your site's appearance for different possible searches even more, and attract more traffic.

Future articles will focus on how to discover the right search terms to structure your site's page around. For now I want to fully get across just how important it is that you structure your site around an SEO methodology from the ground up. In fact, we specialize in site redesign even when the graphics and user interface of a site are great, simply changing the architecture of the pages to be more search engine friendly.

Though there is debate in the SEO world as to whether Google and other major search engines still use page urls as part of their ranking criteria (we believe they don't), there is no doubt that they ALL use page content, particularly the page Title, as a major part of ranking criteria for any term. In other words, that page of your website is much more likely to come up in searches for a specific word or phrase if you put that word or phrase in the title of the page. This is why most search engine traffic comes in through pages other than the site's home page.

The home page is usually too general to attract the specific keyword orientation of search engines. Yet many companies continue to focus their marketing efforts on their home page, as if that was the most important page on the site. In terms of how pretty and attractive your "face" is, yes, the home page says the most about that, and you do want a visually appealing home page. But the home page needs to focus more on creating a favorable visual impression than in presenting substantial content. In terms of content, less is definitely more when it comes to the home page. But when it does come to conveying content, convincing a visitor that you have the products and/or expertise they seek, the secondary pages of the site are where the action is. And that is where SEO website architecture comes in.

Make SEO the framework of your site and you will find it is dependable, expandable, and able to accommodate your business's needs even as your business grows to include new offerings. The best marketing investment is the one you can make once and build on limitlessly for free, rather than having to pay for clicks for a lifetime. (However, pay-per-click marketing is an important adjunct to SEO, and we will also look at that in a future article.)

If you'd rather have someone who can apply their SEO website design expertise to your business's website immediately instead of waiting to develop that expertise yourself, visit our SEO Website Redesign page and learn more about what we do. Even if you choose to hire the help of a professional, you will still benefit from learning the basics of SEO yourself, if only so that you can understand the value and approach of the work you are contracting for.

Labels: marketing, SEO

Domain registrar EnCirca is offering not only a free .coop domain for a year, but a number of free promotional services for the site you host at that url.

Some of the goodies include a free listing in the geo-tagged dotCoop directory (Directory.coop) and widgets that can be used to promote the .coop site on social networks and member sites.

Labels: marketing

I've been comparing email marketing options and Predictive Response (PR) is looking like the best option for SalesForce.com users. The level of integration with the CRM simply can't be beat by such vendors as Vertical Response and BridgeMail. I am even more convinced PR must have a pretty tough package to beat given that earlier this week when I was exchanging messages with a BridgeMail representative the conversation abruptly came to an end when I politely asked him to clarify the business case for their service over PR. He has not responded back since.

On the other hand, PR's responsiveness in making the case for their service over BM was in keeping with my general experience of how they operate. These are people you can reach at 7pm on a Friday evening, and who will be happy to help however they can. Based in CA, with apparently all their tech support based there also, they offer a great product delivered with great support.

The two things I like most about PR are 1) the integration with SFDC, so that you don't have to maintain two sets of lists when SFDC is already a list management system; and 2) the ability to continually refine email marketing campaigns based on recipient behavior. You can see which links they follow in any email you send, which pages on your webite they then visit, which links on those pages they click, how long they watch any video, and so on. And it all funnels directly into SFDC, so that you can report on it right along with all your Opportunity data. And of course, it all feeds back to your campaigns' ROI as well.

Another element Kevin at PR pointed out to me is that PR is campaign based, not list based, in how it "thinks" about marketing. With a list based system like BridgeMail, if someone signs up for your newsletter mid-month, the only way you can send them that month's newsletter is to resend to the entire list. With PR, you simply add them to the campaign and SFDC keeps track of who within the campaign has or hasn't been sent which newsletters. So you then just send to the ones who haven't already received it.

The entire "drip campaign" approach of PR is a marketing winner. As you get feedback on what is working or not for given INDIVIDUALS, you refine your methods of marketing TO THEM. The system moves them from one campaign to another based on their behavior. Making it more and more likely they will like what they see enough to make a purchase or engage a sales rep about a possible purchase (i.e. convert to an Opportunity).

You may note that this review talks a lot about Predictive Response in comparison with BridgeMail, without mentioning Vertical Response. That is because VR merits an article all its own, which will follow next week. As a preview though, expect PR to stack up quite favorably in my view. It is simply the best email marketing package for SFDC users that I have come across. If you know a better one, please bring it to my attention.

Labels: CRM, marketing, Recommended_Apps

I get asked often why someone might Twitter. For most people my advice is, "No good reason." That's because they are private individuals who work 9-5 jobs and then go home to their families. Everyone who cares what they are doing (or what they have to say in a couple sentences) will get to ask them over dinner that evening.

But if your business would like to develop a dialogue with a public that follows a conversation with you, Twitter is a free and easy method to open up that dialogue.

Basically, the idea behind Twitter is that someone is curious about someone else, and on the other side, someone wants to nurture that fascination. A fan wants to know what the object of her adoration is up to in his casual moments and feel a personal connection. A famous person wants to satisfy millions of fans in just minutes a week and grow his fan base.

A business wants to control the dialogue about its products or services. It wants to make sure it is not only a part of the conversation thread, but the one leading it. It wants to present a friendly and personal face to the public with only the cost of the staff time for whoever writes it.

Twitter is a great PR tool for any business that caters to the public at large. It's a litle less useful for businesses that cater to other businesses, because realistically, what company would look to Twitter to find out what's up with a company they are thinking of purchasing services from? It's not exactly an official reference source. But I recently started a Twitter account for my consulting business anyway.

It's worth the time to me to get the name of my business in circulation and it doesn't take that much effort. I may only post on there when I update this blog, as many people do, summarizing the gist of a new post so that interested Twitter folks can find the blog when they use the Twitter Search feature to scan for certain topics. Or I may find myself getting more involved in the general dialogue, posting replies to others' Tweets, searching for topics and people I know, etc. We'll see.

For me it's a marginally beneficial PR service, but if your business does fall into that perfect category for which Twitter makes great PR sense, well you can't beat free PR. And on top of all that, just being on Twitter at all paints your brand with "new cool chic," which can be priceless and elusive with some audiences.

Getting started with Twitter is super easy. It literally takes about a minute. Getting a sense that something is actually happening however, can take considerably longer. But hang in there, and consider following AspiraTech -- I'm happy to follow you back as well.

Labels: marketing, PR, social_media