This week’s BtoB Magazine, The Magazine for Marketing Strategists, features a story on 5 trends worth watching regarding marketing technology. The “big five Web/tech trends worth watching” include:
- Widgets
- Social Feeds
- Data Portability
- Mashups
- Open Mobile
So how much should most professional services marketers pay attention to these trends? For most firms, not much.
I can think of examples of how you might use them, but for the majority of services firms the opportunity is to take advantage of Web/tech trends…from years past. Here are four areas regarding marketing technologies and Internet marketing I’d like to see services firms employ before they start using Data Portability and Open Mobile…
Basics: In 2004 and 2005, we published two articles Services Marketing is Moving Online – Are You? and Five Effects of a Website on a Service Business Brand. These articles cover basics such as how professional services buyers are influenced by websites, how what you put on your website and how up-to-date you keep it affects both lead generation and brand, how websites affect referral patterns, and how websites affect the results of all your online and offline marketing activities.
These articles also cover common web marketing pitfalls firms should avoid. I’ve been pleased to see a number of firms over the past several years get better on the basics, but there’s still a lot more work to do, and a lot of firms haven’t yet caught on.
Value: Service firm leaders are proud of the value they add to their clients’ businesses and typically aren’t shy to talk about it. What they should do more of is demonstrate the value. It takes little technology effort to produce articles, podcasts, blogs, white papers, research, webinars, etc. on your website. The hard work lies in committing dollars and people to the regular production of high quality content. Should you commit here, well established web and email technologies can be your best friends in disseminating the value.
SEO and Online PR: If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, did it really make a sound? If your website is live on the web, and nobody sees it, does it really make a difference?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process by which you get found in the natural search results in Google and other search engines. A major misconception in SEO is that you need to simply put the right keywords on your site, build in the right “metatags”, and submit the site to search engines to be indexed. If you think this will work, you’re right! Assuming it’s still 1996. Today, not only is this not enough, much of it isn’t even that helpful anymore.
Big picture, the three keys to SEO are having the strongest 1) Keywording, 2) Site Technology, and 3) Site Popularity, that you possibly can. With help from a good search engine marketing consultant, you can get your site keyworded fairly easily and get your website on the right technology so it’s spiderable by Google. Once you’re there, you’re just getting started.
Now you must get other reputable sites to put links on their site and point them to yours! To do that, you’ve got to have a compelling reason for them to do so, and you’ve got to work hard to get them to do it. One compelling reason to get other sites to link to you is valuable content (see previous point). Just having the content won’t get them to link to you, but if you have it and do the work of Online PR, you can get them to link to it. Your online PR success will drive traffic and improve your site popularity…so critical to get Google to give you good search rankings.
Segmentation, Targeting, and Communication: Here’s what we know: the more specific and customized you can get with communications for individual buyers, targeting their areas of interest, specific need sets, geographies, industries, or any other segmentable areas, the more you can interest them in engaging (or re-engaging) your firm for services. CRM technology available today (and last year, and two years ago) can allow us to get this done and get it done well.
There are lots more technologies out there that you can take advantage of. Have a look at www.vtrenz.com, www.eloqua.com, www.exacttarget.com, www.plurapage.com, and www.nimblefish.com. It would be easy to fill a page with more…all different types of technologies and web applications to help you market and grow your firm.
All you need to do to take advantage of them is understand what you want to do from a strategy perspective, understand the landscape of technologies available to help you put your strategy into action, and then get it done.
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