B2B content marketing challenges

Posted by Will Critchlow on May 21, 2012 in the Events category

It’s easy to get seduced by the latest shiny widget, to seek for the latest trick or to assume that our standard approaches will work for everyone.

Over the years, old-school B2B marketers have given me the hardest time of everyone I’ve met. They’ve constantly pushed me to find better arguments to support my views and have frequently challenged my assumptions about the true growth drivers in many offline businesses.

As web marketers, it’s also easy to get drawn into the tactics of advertising, PR, content etc. and forget the rounded marketing job of understanding who your customers are, who your customers should be, where you are strongest and where you are weakest.

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Launching #askdistilled – our answers to your questions

Posted by ed-tucker on May 20, 2012 in the Distilled category

The Distilled offices are interesting places to spend some time. With the continual flow of ideas around current client issues, slick visualisation of complicated data sets from the creative team or constant heated debates on the future of the industry, even a little time spent in this company will leave you with a buzz. It is true I write this as the Marketing Manager for Distilled, but I also write it from the view of an “outsider”. I’m not based in the offices themselves and only dip in every month for a week or so, something which affords me a bit of perspective (I would hope) on the whole matter.

One of the ways we’ve looked to differentiate ourselves as a company has been around the sharing of our knowledge. Whether it’s through helping everyone with advice when Google drops another update on us all, or building a set of leading industry Conferences or our soon-to-be-launched online training platform DistilledU. It’s the comprehensive knowledge of our team that sets us apart, and we firmly believe in the philosophy of sharing and discussing it with others to enable both ourselves and the industry to grow and get better.

So it’s in that vein that I am excited to announce our new campaign:

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SearchLove session agenda is now live!

Posted by Lauren Brady on May 18, 2012 in the Distilled category

With just over four weeks left until our first-ever SearchLove on the West Coast, we thought it was time to give you a little insight into what you can expect from this year’s awesome line-up!

As always we have been working closely with the speakers to ensure that we are bringing you the most diverse and up-to-date range of topics spread out over the two days. We’ve got everything from Pinterest to Video to CRO to link building so there’s sure to be something to get you furiously scribbling notes! Without further ado, the speakers are:

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SEO Diagnosis Dinosaur for non SEOs

Posted by David Sottimano on May 17, 2012 in the SEO category

Professional SEO agencies receive quite a few enquiries when something goes wrong. Maybe you’ve noticed a traffic drop or something funny in search results, then panic sets in, and you call an SEO agency for help.

A doctor could diagnose your illness much faster if you gave him specific information, the same goes for SEO consultants who might spend working hours figuring out something you should have told them from the start.

The SEO Diagnosis Dinosaur (the tool below in this post) will run through a sample set of questions and checks that you should be doing before you contact professionals. By going through the list of questions, and clicking on the output button – we’ll auto-magically give you the information you need to give to an SEO.

Instructions

  • Read the questions and click on the appropriate answer in the radio boxes (little circles)
  • You can press the Clear button at any time to start over
  • At the bottom of the form you can click on the Output button to get your information

Start the Dinosaur!

1. Did you notice a problem with your Analytics or Google

Did you see a drop in your Analytics platform, or did you notice a problem with rankings in Google search results?




Hopefully this helps a few people, thanks for reading. A special thanks to Naz who introduced me to JQUERY 36 hours ago, and Tom for saving me from dumb coding errors

 
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8 PPC Spring Cleaning Necessities

Posted by Jasmine Aye on May 16, 2012 in the PPC category

If you’ve just started running paid ads, or if even if you’ve been doing it for a while, there are always improvements that can be made: more keywords to target, bids to be changed, landing pages to be optimized. To help you get a fresh start on your account this spring, I’ve put together the most frequent recommendations I give during paid search audits. more >

 
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User feedback to improve Conversions

Posted by rob.millard on May 15, 2012 in the Conversion Rate Optimization, Marketing, Web Analytics category

Often when working on CRO projects, it’s tempting to jump straight in and set up tests based on your own ideas and suspicions. But, for me, a more effective and measured approach is to spend time finding out what users think of a particular feature, page or product, and address any issues that they come up with, or place further emphasis on the things that they like. They are more representative of the people using your site, and often consultants or client teams are too close to a site to be able to look at it objectively.

I’ve put together a few quick, easy, and free methods of gathering feedback that can give your CRO projects a more solid foundation rather than basing your tests on assumptions. more >

 
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What Might Be Next For (not provided)

Posted by Mike Pantoliano on May 11, 2012 in the SEO category

On May 7th, Mozilla announced that Aurora (Firefox’s public beta) is beginning to roll out their HTTPS-by-default Google search behavior. It won’t be long before this is default in Firefox. As their announcement states, the user will be none the wiser (save for that tiny ‘s’ after http, and the secure lock icon). Webmasters, on the hand – let’s just say (not provided) is not making any friends. more >

 
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SEO isn’t a Technical Problem, it’s a People Problem

Posted by Hannah on May 10, 2012 in the Marketing, SEO category

This post was prompted by a book I recently read – The Secrets of Consulting by Gerald M. Weinberg; I don’t want to talk too much about the book here, but I’d recommend you read it either if you are a consultant yourself (online marketing or otherwise) or if you hire consultants.

Weinburg talks about various ‘laws of consulting’ but the one which really hit home for me was this:

“No matter how it looks at first, it’s always a people problem.”

~ Gerald M. Weinburg

I think this was particularly interesting to me because we often get brought in to organisations to help with SEO ‘problems’. The sort of problems that at first glance ought to be easy to fix. However, it’s often harder than you might think.

“More often than not, SEO ‘problems’ are symptomatic of a larger people problem.”

~ Me

Let’s take a technical SEO issue as a starter for ten. Imagine an E-Commerce site suffering from duplicate content thanks to a poorly executed faceted navigation. From a technical perspective it’s pretty easy to figure out an appropriate solution; but how easy is it to actually get the problem fixed?

It’s a subtle difference, but an important one.

Writing up some documentation explaining how to fix the duplicate content issue is easy. But how do you get that documentation read? How do you go from the documentation being read to actually being actioned?

Those are people problems not technical problems.

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The Importance of Maintaining “Scent” for CRO

Posted by Mike Pantoliano on May 8, 2012 in the Conversion Rate Optimization category

You’ve probably seen the CRO case studies that have touted insane conversion lifts from simply changing the text on a button or the background color of a product page. This is not a blog post about that sort of test. I don’t doubt that the subconscious makes associations with colors and button text, and if your site has the traffic to play with these ideas, give it a go. But there’s a less subtle aspect of CRO that’s much easier to control and predict.

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