Your First Marketing Hire For A Startup

Your First Marketing Hire

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As many have written (most recently Jason Lemkin on Quora), B2B marketing contains at least four really discrete disciplines: demand generation, product marketing, positioning/strategy, and PR/communications/branding. Increasingly, marketing technologist & operations is being broken out separately, but it otherwise falls into the demand generation role.

When it comes time to hire a company’s first marketing person, most founders think they just need a director or experienced individual contributor to start doing demand generation and bring in leads. They think, “I’ve got to make sales productive with leads.” They invest in SEO, spend thousands on SEM, turn on email marketing, and crank out webinars. That is one approach, but I’ll argue it is the wrong one.

I recommend starting with a director or senior product marketing manager who is willing and ready to roll up her sleeves for three key reasons:

1. In the early stages, all marketing is product marketing.

The most important marketing milestones are to articulate the value proposition in your customer’s’ eyes, position it relative to competition and alternatives and help the company tell its story. If you’re spending money to amplify a bad or wrong story, it’s money down a drain.

2. Making sales productive is sales enablement not lead gen.

Making the company’s new sales people productive *is* critical, but what sales most needs is sales enablement tools rather than leads. Product marketing creates company presentations, case studies, ROI calculators, the website, and materials for a webinar or conference presentation. Product marketers are domain experts who can create content for lead gen and generate thought leadership.

3. Product marketers by definition are generalists with broad skill sets.

Someone who is exclusively really great at Demand Gen is not likely to be good at articulating a great story. They look for short-term clicks vs. playing the long game, which is what positioning is. On the other hand, product marketers tend to be “athletes” who play a productive role and stand up other marketing disciplines. A product marketer can build the website, write and disseminate articles, pick and manage PR agencies, run an analyst tour, optimize website for search, initiate and manage a competent SEM campaign, and pick the first basic marketing tools.

Companies who do not do the positioning work up front do not build the necessary foundation.

The risk of NOT doing the positioning work up front is you get customers, but they’re not the best or right ones. Your single best marketing asset as an early B2B company are early customers who love you.

For example, one major online backup company did all performance-based acquisition in its early days. They took anyone whose money was green. Only when they saturated their early markets did they start working on positioning, but at that point Dropbox already dominated the conversations in their categories. Shifting awareness at that point took millions instead of the thousands it would have taken to own their position in those markets up front.

There are plenty of companies that have experience on one side of this line or the other. But even though it’s contrary to today’s conventional wisdom, at Costanoa we feel leading with product marketing is the way to go.

https://medium.com/costanoa-venture-capital/your-first-marketing-hire-6b40553e97bb?_hsenc=p2ANqtz--jx0BqeeZxM9WD_NF4FEkAO0G1_cH7L_TLNOlEImjChUdzvenQbVN9whjenjpIil3rTuQdO2EXJZ0wWe9QGuLhroJwVQ&_hsmi=36789099#.3nregz1xs

Why your competitors are beating you online

Photo credit: 

Milca Mulders

Are you lost because your website is not showing up on search engines as the Number 1 result?

There are lots of discussions and articles on how to fix websites. But let’s make it easy by narrowing it down to the few key measurements that search engines consider to be the most important this year.

Before looking at your site---- it is important to look at your competitor’s site that is now on top and ask yourself :

Does it load quickly?

Do you trust the company/website/person based on a landing page?

Can you find the competitor’s website link on another trusted site?

Are they running online ads?

Now go to your website:

Does it load as quickly?  

If not, you can test your site on Google’s speed test that provides suggestions on what needs to be fix: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

If you’re not sure what the Google test results mean, then your site probably has some backend technical issues that need to be address.

Now try to find something on your site that you customer might really need to know--- For example how to return an item?

Can you find it quickly or is it buried somewhere on the site?

If it is buried--- make plans with your web team to put it on the first page with a link to find more info.

Next-- Do you believe the text that describes your company, your mission, and products or are the words fluffy?

(An example of fluffy—“Our mission is to be the best and truly serve our customers.”)

This is lazy text that needs to be improved to build trust, because how much time did you really spend on that mission statement?

If your site is full of  fluffy content, find someone to help you rewrite the text and eliminate the fluff with real examples of what you can really do for your customer --- such as –-- “We will reply to your email request within an hour.”

Can you find your website link on other trusted sites?

If not, you really need to find ways to get them on other sites as quickly as possible. Any industry or association site that list companies that offer your services is a great place to start. Then move on to vendors/partners, other blogs or ecommerce sites.

Are you running ads?

If not, you should explore some options to help generate visits to your site.

If yes, re-evaluate the ads and revamp your efforts.

If you fix these few issues you should see improvement in your website search engine rankings fairly quickly. If you still experience trouble with your rankings, there are deeper issues and you should turn to a local search engine optimization expert to help fix them.

For more assistance visit our website: www.nsgconsultinginc.com

Why your competitors are beating you online

Photo credit: 

Milca Mulders

Are you lost because your website is not showing up on search engines as the Number 1 result?

There are lots of discussions and articles on how to fix websites. But let’s make it easy by narrowing it down to the few key measurements that search engines consider to be the most important this year.

Before looking at your site---- it is important to look at your competitor’s site that is now on top and ask yourself :

Does it load quickly?

Do you trust the company/website/person based on a landing page?

Can you find the competitor’s website link on another trusted site?

Are they running online ads?

Now go to your website:

Does it load as quickly?  

If not, you can test your site on Google’s speed test that provides suggestions on what needs to be fix: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

If you’re not sure what the Google test results mean, then your site probably has some backend technical issues that need to be address.

Now try to find something on your site that you customer might really need to know--- For example how to return an item?

Can you find it quickly or is it buried somewhere on the site?

If it is buried--- make plans with your web team to put it on the first page with a link to find more info.

Next-- Do you believe the text that describes your company, your mission, and products or are the words fluffy?

(An example of fluffy—“Our mission is to be the best and truly serve our customers.”)

This is lazy text that needs to be improved to build trust, because how much time did you really spend on that mission statement?

If your site is full of  fluffy content, find someone to help you rewrite the text and eliminate the fluff with real examples of what you can really do for your customer --- such as –-- “We will reply to your email request within an hour.”

Can you find your website link on other trusted sites?

If not, you really need to find ways to get them on other sites as quickly as possible. Any industry or association site that list companies that offer your services is a great place to start. Then move on to vendors/partners, other blogs or ecommerce sites.

Are you running ads?

If not, you should explore some options to help generate visits to your site.

If yes, re-evaluate the ads and revamp your efforts.

If you fix these few issues you should see improvement in your website search engine rankings fairly quickly. If you still experience trouble with your rankings, there are deeper issues and you should turn to a local search engine optimization expert to help fix them.

LinkedIn's Creative URL's Seem Designed for Organic SEO

This link for a LinkedIn download of a hiring .pdf is a great example of a very selective and creative URL that shows just how detailed LinkedIn is with their landing pages and how you get to it.

 "https://business.linkedin.com/content/dam/business/talent-solutions/global/en_us/c/pdfs/The-Ultimate-Hiring-Toolbox-v03.07.pdf" 

There are key words, title of content, and the word business TWICE! When have you ever had two key words in your URL? And they both mean something different as categorization is concerned. Having creativity in your team is a must, and LinkedIn has that covered well

Instagram's Newest Updates Cuts Time Between Clients and Streamlines with Facebook Company Pages

Logging in and out of more than 5 accounts throughout the week on Instagram is very annoying.

But I do it because I have to.

I've been struggling with having to choose which client I need to be logged into during each day. Between a handful of social media clients, it's easy to miss comments, new interactions, and sales opportunities when you're the only one managing accounts like these that need to be very social in order to sell. Then throw in when your client is active on the company Instagram account and checks the notifications in the morning before you wake up but doesn't reply to comments of potential sales?!?!?!

I may not be logged in for a couple of days, and by the time I come back; we have just witnessed a moment in the twilight hour where business opportunities are missed and sales are down. LOL

Now with Instagram's new update, managing every account through what feels like 1 account now, I am cutting approximately 1 hr a week out of my reports that I can use to take a break, or work that extra hour and bill for it accordingly.

But for real, the hour a week that this new update physically saves me, is more than just physical time. It streamlines my work schedule to have less stress, a shorter thinking process, and a more effective use of my time.

Also with Instagram's newer updates, advertising has become streamlined with Facebook advertising. Merging your Facebook Company Page with the brands Instagram is a necessity now and you need to make sure that your Instagram in settings is linked to your other social accounts.

You are also now assured that your Facebook/Twitter/etc. share button during your Instagram post creation, there will now be the text of your other social accounts page names, which is reassuring.

Thank you #Instagram!

#marketing #marketingtips

Improving your internal linking strategy

Is an internal linking strategy paying off for Mail Online?

SEO 08 Jul 16 | Graham Charlton

 
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Combining hub pages for key topics with well-planned internal linking can be a very effective strategy to secure consistent search rankings for target keywords. 

It’s become an essential tactic for publishers and others, especially when you are regularlycreating content around a particular topic.

The risk of producing a lot of content around the same topic is that you can end up with multiple pages which have similar keywords which compete against each other in Google for the same search terms.

For example, USA Today has ten different articles ranking for the term ‘Kylie Jenner’ during a six month period last year. As each new one comes along, it battles with the existing article, with the end result being a very inconsistent search performance.

The answer to this problem is to decide on a page that you want your site to rank for a given keyword or phrase, and concentrate on that. This hub, category or landing page (however you want to describe it) can then be the page that ranks for the term.

Sites can then consistently link to that page from new articles on the topic, eventually creating a useful resource, and one that stands a better chance of gaining high rankings than lots of individual pages.

One such example is the BBC’s Euro 2016 category page. Here it is:

It’s a repository for all of the site’s content around the tournament, and it ranks consistently.

It should also be noted that the groundwork for this was carried out well in advance of the start of Euro 2016 in early June so that, when the spike in interest around the term happened, the BBC was in position to attract plenty of traffic.

This is the BBC’s search rankings for the term ‘Euro 2016’ for the five months up to the start of the tournament. Nice and consistent.

This well planned use of hub pages along with consistent internal linking can really pay off. In the BBC’s case, it has ensured that its Euro 2016 page is in a great position to capitalise in increased interest from searchers around the tournament.

Of course, other factors have to be in place too. The BBC is an authority site with some excellent content and a formidable number of backlinks. Effective linking and theming will help any site, but other factors have to be in place to achieve high rankings for competitive search terms.

That said, it should not be beyond major publishers to profit from this strategy, and the example I’m going to use here is Mail Online. It is, by some accounts, the most visited English-language newspaper site on the web. Make of that what you will.

Mail Online and internal linking

Mail Online, until late last year, hadn’t been implementing a hub page / internal linking strategy at all.

We know this thanks to Dan Barker (@danbarker on Twitter) who pointed this out. He estimates that Mail started this strategy around October 25 last year.

Mail Online creates and publishes huge quantities of articles about celebrities and news. While each new article performs relatively well in search, they do so for a limited time only. So the article becomes old and search positions drop until the original article is usurped by a new article, and so on. This is where the proper strategy can help.

As we can see from the example below for the term ‘chelsea news’, ranking was inconsistent until early November 2015.

The chart shows search results for this term across the entire Daily Mail domain.

The consistent results post-November are for this hub page, which collates all the articles around that term.

Essentially, Mail Online has sent clear signals to Google, through (relatively) consistent internal linking, that this is the page it wants to rank for the term in question.

The hub page had existed before, but without the right linking strategy to promote it. Here we can seethe difference in performance before and after the Mail improved its linking strategy. 

The charts above (all charts are from PI Datametrics btw) shows performance up to January 2016, but we can also see how it performed in the last six months.

The chart below shows the Daily Mail’s Chelsea landing page performance for the term ‘Chelsea news’.

Since January, there have only been 26 URL changes, and a lot steadier performance. The visibility for this page has improved as a result by 33.28% and this URL is visible for 98.1% of the time.

The chart below shows the hub / landing page’s performance. It’s mainly consistent, but shows that for the odd day or two, the page wasn’t visible.

This landing page hasn’t beaten its previous ranking of number five on Google.

The reason? Inconsistent linking. For maximum effectiveness, all mentions of the term on new articles should be linked back to the hub page. If this is not implemented, then newer pages can end up competing with the hub page for rankings. This is why it was visible for 98.1%, not 100% of the period shown.

Here’s another example, for the search term ‘David Cameron’. As the British PM (though not for much longer) he obviously attracts a lot of searches and mentions in the news.

This is the Daily Mail domain view for ‘David Cameron’. As with ‘chelsea news’, performance is inconsistent until November 2015.

After November, the Mail is linking to a landing /hub page more consistently (maybe the result of a staff training day on SEO?) and it has led to steadier rankings.

Here’s one example. It’s easy enough to implement.

However, as was the case with the previous example term, inconsistent linking means that Mail Online isn’t getting the full benefit.

Here’s a recent article mentioning David Cameron. No internal links.

Here’s the view of the David Cameron landing page for the past (almost) 12 months.

There’s been an increased number of URL changes, as newer pages compete with the hub page,but the overall visibility of this URL has improved and the ranking has increased by two positions.

Thanks to the EU referendum, there has obviously been a lot more content produced about David Cameron recently. Had the Mail  linked consistently back to the landing page, this content would have been a lot more visible.

In summary: could do better

These examples show how effective the use of linking and hub pages can be, and demonstrate its value, especially for sites that produce a lot of content around the same themes.

They also demonstrate how quickly sites can achieve results with this strategy. However, consistent implementation is key for maximum effect.

That said, we can see how effective this strategy can be. When applied consistently across a range of popular terms, the result is higher and steadier rankings, putting the site in a position to attract more search traffic.

Graham Charlton is Editor in Chief at ClickZ Global.

https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/07/08/is-an-internal-linking-strategy-paying-off-for-mail-online/?ce_b4=*|EMAIL_B64|*&utm_source=Search+Engine+Watch&utm_campaign=89c1a56892-11_07_2016_NL&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e118661359-89c1a56892-17106041