Internet Marketing Is Dead, Social SEO Rules, Women Dominate

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Welcome to The New Social SEO Podcast. I’m your host Robert Dempsey, the CEO & Founder of Dempsey Marketing. If you’re not familiar this show it’s a weekly update on what’s new and working in the worlds of direct response marketing, social media and search engine optimization.

And speaking of search engine optimization, before I get into the news I want to extend a free offer to you. If you want to know where you rank for your #1 keyword, the one most important to your business, and see your ranking in relation to your competition, head on over to YourFreeSEOReport.com and get your free SEO report.

So, since the episode last week I’ve been curating content using Scoop.it. All the stories I talk about and more can be found under the topic Direct Response Social Media.

As I’ve been curating I’ve been thinking about how to structure the podcast and I look forward to your feedback. What I want to do is break the podcast up into a few segments.

We’ll start off with the big picture – the global scale of what’s going on out there and how it impacts business today. After that I’ll get into what’s been popular on the Dempsey Marketing blog as well as interviews and guest posts I’ve done. Rather than it be some purely self-promotional thing though I’ll be doing this first because I want you to know as quickly as possible what we see working out there in our business and that of our clients so you can implement those lessons yourself.

After that we’ll look at some of the stories I though were important in each of the following categories:

• Mobile marketing
• Social media
• Search engine optimization
• Direct response marketing

I’ll provide links to everything I mention on TheNewSocialSEO.com. I welcome your comments on the episode posts as well, and expect them. Please join in!

So without further ado let’s take go global!

Global Cultural Shift

First I want to tell you about a blog post by Jayme Soulati on the Higher & Higher blog titled “Social Media Makes The World Smaller.” I’ll link to the post so you can read it but what’s underlying this is what’s important to you as a business owner operating on the social web.

In 2007 when I started blogging I didn’t fully realize the massive global cultural shift that the Internet would bring about. I had traveled to a few countries and immersed myself in local culture but keeping in touch with those folks was less than easy, and it was slow. But that barrier has been gone for many years. And frankly we’re only in the beginning.

The effect on cultures at every level – the national and local levels is just starting to play out. Businesses operate in cultures, and while each business can have a culture of it’s own, it’s directly impacted by the culture of it’s employees. Those employees, those people, now have access to a vast amount of first-hand information of how it is for others. Ideas and ideals are being shared. This is the challenge, the opportunity that we all face today. It’s pretty heavy so we’ll talk more about that in future episodes. But just think about it and let me know what you think.

Now to what’s working.

What’s Working From Dempsey Marketing

Mark Schaefer published my guest post on his Businesses {grow} blog titled, “The Death of Internet Marketing and the Rise of Social SEO.” Aside from one anonymous troll who told me to wake up the response was positive. As I record this it’s gotten 252 retweets, 88 LinkedIn shares, 17 +1’s as well as some great comments. The lesson there is that traditional Internet Marketing tactics – pure emotional plays wrapped in big red headlines that urge purchase – are today a huge fail. Please read the post and leave a comment.

On the Dempsey Marketing blog my post “Does Your Blog Really Need Sidebars?” has caused a bit of a stir. Many blogs have a standard content-sidebar layout and recently I removed the sidebar from ours and redid the home page as well. So far all important metrics have improved – engagement metrics, average page views, time on site, etc. Before you remove the sidebar from your blog though read the post. I also have a video in the lead generation section showing three different website layouts that are generating leads. Long story short test, measure, tweak, and repeat.

That covers what’s new and working so let’s take a look at mobile marketing.

Mobile Marketing

Taking marketing campaign integration a step further with mobile commerce – Cynthia Fedor for Mobile Marketer

• Mobile commerce is expected to grow by 40% a year for the next 5 years
• Charities and large brands are testing out payments using SMS (text messaging)
• Starbucks now has an app that allows people to pay using their iPad or iPhone
• QR codes – something all over the place here in Thailand are showing up more and more in the US -> QR codes are a great way to track direct mail campaigns as well as in-store advertisements

Advice here is that at the very least your website needs to be optimized for mobile visitors. I suggest using a combination of analytics – we use Google Analytics and HitSniffer – to see how many of your visitors are using mobile devices. We found that in the past month mobile visitors have accounted for 6.57% of all visits and that number is going up. There’s a mobile website tutorial on our blog I’ll link to that shows how you can find these numbers and mobile-optimize your WordPress site.

That’s mobile. Now let’s move to one of my favorite topics – social media.

Social Media

In the world of social media there’s always a lot going on. Mark Schaefer who I mentioned earlier wrote a post about why Klout matters. Klout measures your online social influence. Many people including myself has talked quite poorly about it and I’ll say that I was wrong to do so. Metrics are important, and while Klout like anything can be gamed to a certain extent, the fact of the matter is that companies and people are using the score to determine who to invite to special events, who to give gifts too and more. Definitely check out Mark’s post and let me know what you think of Klout.

Jeff Bullas wrote a post this week on the 10 Intriguing Insights on the State of Social Media and Blogging. Some of the stats aren’t surprising:

• Facebook being the top web brand and the site with the most unique visitors
• Men liking LinkedIn
• Mobile social media is booming

But some of the more surprising stats are:

• Social network apps are growing at 30%
• People over 55 are using social media on mobile phones
• Social media users are influential online – this one stat is EXTREMELY important for your business; and finally
• Women dominate – the majority of visitors to social networks and blogs are women between the ages of 18 and 34

A quick side trip here. I work with a lot of women. A large number of my clients, referral partners and people I speak with are women. This week I heard from one of them yet another story of being talked to like she was an idiot by a guy. Now I’m not psychic and perhaps this guy was just being a jerk, but that’s not how she took it.

My father was a civil rights attorney for the U.S. Justice Department for 31 years, so you can imagine how I was raised – to treat people equally. I’ll say this right now and then get off my soap box – and I’m talking to all the guys listening – treat women with respect. Treat the women you work with in business with an equal amount of respect. We’re not living in an episode of Mad Men here. Note the trends, but don’t act right merely because of the trends.

All right that’s it I’m off my soap box. Let me calm down and move on to our next topic – SEO.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

By far one of the best online resources for SEO information is SEOmoz. This week they had a post about tracking the KPIs of social media. In the post they talk about how social media helps with the discovery phase of content and they discuss how it happens in many of the social networks. A worthy read for sure. So how does this fit into SEO? Here’s a story.

With one of the projects I’m working on the client wants to rank in the search engines to get people to her site but she doesn’t want to blog for her customers, rather she wants her blog to attract colleagues. This is the opposite of what we agreed to at the beginning of the project. But long story short I did the keyword research, we built out the landing pages, started building links and writing blog posts. But here’s the catch – the blog is hidden, there’s no way to get to the blog from the main website. Also the posts aren’t being shared in social media.

It goes back to the cliche about a tree falling in the woods. If a blog post is published but never shared, will it be ranked in the search engines? Most likely it will be buried with the millions of other posts, and that’s what we see happening.

Content doesn’t market itself. You need people to know about the content, share the content, link to the content, and have others come and read it too. That’s part of SEO, not just writing stuff and hoping for the best.

Now for our last topic – direct response marketing.

Direct Response Marketing

Direct marketing news had a great article on digital marketing hubs for multichannel integration. That’s a fancy way of saying you need a home base for all of your online and offline marketing. The advantage of having a home base is that you have a single point of metrics collection across all online and offline marketing channels. The story goes into detail so be sure to give it a read.

The main lesson is this – there is no longer a separation between offline and online marketing. A print ad could have a unique web address or a QR code that sends the read to a landing page. That in turn tells you the effectiveness of the ad and how much ROI you received. Gone are the days of the old adage: “I know I’m wasting 50% of my ad dollars I just don’t know which 50%” or whatever that saying was. You can now integrate offline and online, and with that integration comes measurement.

The point of using direct response marketing is to measure response. And now for everything offline we can. But you need to be smart about it:

• Use custom URLs in your print ads
• Use QR codes that send visitors to a unique landing page
• On every landing page have a call to action
• Track everything
• Measure ROI

If you aren’t doing that then you are wasting your money.

That’s it for this week’s show.

Remember to head over to YourFreeSEOReport.com for your free SEO report. Also please do leave thoughts and feedback on the post at TheNewSocialSEO.com site and let me know if you have any questions I can answer on a future podcast.

I’m Robert Dempsey of Dempsey Marketing, and I will see you next time. Thanks for yours.

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