I’ve been thinking a lot lately about internet marketing, online marketing, SEO – let’s just call it MARKETING. Google has all the SEO nerds running around like Chicken Little because the virtual sky is falling. Google Panda, Google Penguin, Google Hummingbird. Oh my! Links are out. Guest blogging is out. Blah blah blah. All this NOISE.
I’d like to step back from all of it for just a minute, and take a deep cleansing breath.
(Now exhale.)
The part that I’ve been thinking about is that business owners like you and me, don’t really give a crap about any of it. I’m betting that you don’t care about Page Rank, link bait, social signals, meta tags, or any of that. Please raise your hand if that stuff makes your eyes glaze over (or roll back in your head). Aren’t you just a little afraid of it, in case you do it wrong and get spanked by Google?
(OK, put your hands down.)
I think, and please tell me if I’m wrong (yes, you can comment below), the only thing you care about is your phone ringing. You want qualified leads coming to your shop – whether it’s virtual or brick and mortar – and either engaging with you or better yet, buying from you. Are you involved with a non-profit? You’ve really got the same issues as for-profits. You want people to know about you, engage with you, and be part of your community.
Am I getting warm here?
I say, “Throw all the ‘SEO’ nerd stuff out the window!” Go ahead. You’re tired of hearing about it, we’re all tired of being whipsawed around by the changes that Google puts in place, and we all just need a clear, easy-to-follow set of guidelines that anyone can do without worrying about if our stupid Title tag is right or not..
Five Core Principles of Online Marketing
I just saw a graphic today that said, there is no such thing as B2C (business to consumer) or B2B (business to business) any more. It’s all H2H. Human to Human. That’s it, and I’ve been saying it all along:
“People buy into you before they buy from you.”
If you aren’t building an online relationship with your human customers, they’re far less likely to purchase or engage with you. If you do build that relationship, you’re far more likely to succeed.
I just spoke with a Pastor at a church yesterday, encouraging her to do the pieces below. She wants to do videos, but is struggling to understand how to do it without sounding like she’s selling something. I said, “Just talk to me [through the camera] as if I am sitting on the couch in the room–like you’re talking to a friend one on one. Tell me about why this is significant to me, and why I should care.”
YOU can do this.
In my way of rethinking the whole big mess, business owners really need to focus on five core things. I’m calling them the Five Core Principles of Online Marketing. Four of the five are essentially free – maybe a little of someone’s time, but you hopefully already have the core pieces in place. Even better? ANYONE and I mean ANYONE can do this stuff. This isn’t dimly lit, back room, techno-geek nerdy html gobbledygook. It’s honest to God dirt simple to do.
I absolutely 100% guarantee that if you just do the first four items consistently, you will get better and better results.
What Does This Look Like?
Website – It should be well (professionally) designed, and make it easy for people to engage with you. But as I said in another post, no one cares about your website. They just want to find out if you can solve their problem. ALL searchers on Google and the other search engines want one thing: the solution to their problem. If you have the solution, make it EASY for them to figure it out, and make it easy for them to ask for help. Build the basics of SEO into the site, which I can teach you in about an hour, and be done with it. Google is getting pretty darned good about figuring it out without having to do all this other stuff.
Content – People (and the search engines) want content. Lots of it. This can be articles, blogs, press releases, videos, podcasts, white papers, or any combination of the above (a video embedded in a blog post for instance). The more you do this, the more people will see that you have the solution(s) to their problem(s).
Social Media – Promote that content on social media. Simple. With one click, you can post it to all your social media platforms at once. I’m talking the big four: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn. If you have others, that’s fine too. You can even pre-schedule your content to go live, and auto-post to your social media. This builds followers, eyeballs, clicks and likes.
E-mail Newsletter – All your content goes in your newsletter. Work at building the list of raving fans, and keep them coming back for more. Give them a taste of your content (intro paragraph) so it’s a quick read. Then link it to the full copy on your blog or website, so they can consume it there.
Paid Ads – This is the optional one, and it does cost money. You have to budget for it, but it’s a fantastic lead generation source. Work with someone who knows how to set it up properly with a good landing page, narrowly-focused target keywords, and test it.
That’s it. I don’t care if you’re an attorney, a hair stylist, car mechanic, a Pastor at a church, a virtual store owner or a restaurateur. These basic, fundamental tools are relatively easy to set up, cheap or even free, easy to automate, and do them consistently. Hire a virtual assistant to build this stuff out and feed it. I guarantee that ANYONE can do all five of these, and not worry about all the little nit-picky things that SEO pundits are telling you that you have to do.
We’ll be fleshing these five core pieces out more in future articles, and I’m going to step you through them one by one. So stay tuned for more.
In the mean time, please tell me below if this seems like a manageable list that you could tackle without all the nerdy stuff – if only someone would just show you how. What is your biggest barrier to doing any of them?
What a breath of fresh air! All the “SEO hijinks” have got to go.
I’d go one step farther – forget about Google. If you begin getting traffic from real people, the Google issue will take care of itself.
Great post, Mr Petty.
Thanks, my friend. That’s exactly the point. 🙂
To me, it just makes sense. People talking to people. What a novel idea. I’m a copywriter and have been studying SEO for nearly 5 years now. I love to “get into my client’s heads” to find out what their product or service is really all about and then present that information to their readers. My sites have ranked well while doing traditional SEO, and I think they will still stand because of their beneficial content.
Thanks for your help, Tom.
Thanks, Debra. You’re spot on. This is the lesson Google is trying to “teach” us. I’m a huge fan of David Meerman Scott (author of best seller “The New Rules of Marketing and PR”). And he’s been saying the same thing for years now. Forget about all the other stuff. Just build a following and all the other nonsense no longer matters.
I feel better already! Thanks Tom!
That is exactly the philosophy I have resigned myself too this year. I get some very pushy people phoning about directory submissions and how not paying hundreds of pounds to get a featured listing is going to affect my rankings – ye right!! Customers are who we want to drive business forward so that is the SEO focus as you have so rightly said, thank you!
Great article Tom. I especially liked the part about H2H. Whether you are marketing directly to consumers or marketing to businesses, we always need to remember, it’s people that decide to contact you or do business with you.
Great post Tom! Just wanted to add to your comment about: “People (and the search engines) want content. Lots of it.” This one fact has been widely misunderstood and misinterpreted to mean that quantity is more important than quality. And that, is probably the biggest change Google wants to see…and is making every effort to make it happen. Not only Google, but the real audience, the H2H community you talked about is becoming smarter at weeding out meaningless reams of content that is of no use. So unless organizations start producing relevant, interesting and useful content, it’s likely they will soon be penalized by Google and it is CERTAIN they will be abandoned by their target audience.
Hi Sheetal! Thanks so much. You are absolutely correct! I’m teaching my SEO class this week, and we’re discussing that very thing. Matt Cutts from Google even says, “Focus on quality, and don’t worry so much about the SEO stuff.” [paraphrasing]. Glad to see you here online with me.
Love it, Thomas. I would add a little something, and maybe this is because I’m not a business owner, but rather I do the marketing for a business (yes, they hired a full time marketer rather than trying to do it on their own or with interns and part time workers).
I would suggest that businesses need to add analytics to the mix. It’s a great thought to just set and forget a website, create great content and share on social and hope that it all works. However, it’s another step to go back an analyze what works, what doesn’t, and capitalize on your findings.
This is why I see a full-time marketing person, dedicated to content, promotion and analytics as an important member of a business.
With that said, I love the idea of taking a step back, breathing and going at it with a fresh perspective and holistic approach. Good stuff!
Dan Moyle
Thanks, Dan, I appreciate your addition, and totally agree. The downside is getting too hung up in the data. It’s easy to say that visits = sales. They don’t. I don’t care if 1000 people visit my site. If no one is engaging with me, then it’s worthless. I’d rather have a few people who engage, comment, and come back for more, than just driving raw traffic. With busy business owners, it’s hard to focus on the data because you have 100 other things you have to do. If you can afford someone who knows how to make the data talk, awesome. If not, I’d say get team members who can engage with people who are talking online in social media, blogs & comments (like here – but this is really me, Tom, speaking 🙂 ), and that’s going to own the day in the end.