The holiday shopping season brings many rewards for eCommerce businesses, but over the past several years that brings a familiar seasonal challenge: Amazon. It’s no secret that Amazon ramps up its SEM competitive presence during the holiday shopping season – beginning heavily in November, through December. But just how big of a slice is Amazon taking from your holiday pie? And how on Earth can you even compete with the 800 pound holiday gorilla in the room?

Here are three things to look for to gauge Amazon’s competitive reach during the holiday season. And, three ways you can take action to compete more effectively.

Dramatic reenactment of an 800 pound holiday gorilla.

Gauging Amazon’s Competitive Reach in Your Market During the Holiday

Monitor Impression Share

Amazon spends more to compete against eComm businesses of all kinds during the holidays, be it brands or retail. No surprise here! The effects are most notable in their increased Impression Share. Take a look at your Auction Insights over time, and you will see their share of voice increase and get closer to your own during the holidays.

One of my eComm clients has seen Amazon’s Impression Share increase 3x this season compared to last year. No doubt Amazon is doing more of a push in 2017 because, well shucks, it’s worked well for them in the past. And we’ll likely see this trend continue.

While there’s not a magical formula for exactly when to act if you see Amazon surging relative to your own Impression Share, you should have an eye on your Auction Insights throughout the year. Plan and budget accordingly for 2018 if you’ve modeled the value Impression Share on your overall sales and you’re seeing the wrong numbers this holiday.

Top of Page Rate

One thing you simply cannot ignore is whether Amazon starts beating you in the auction. Compare Amazon’s Top of Page rate against your own. Since we know over 90% of clicks occur on Page 1 of Google, and over 30% of all clicks go to the ad in first position, we have to take notice.

If you hadn’t already done this months ago, you need to determine a good holiday adjusted ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) for your business, and then bid up the keywords with the best return for your business to compete with Amazon’s across-the-board avalanche. It may sting a little to compete with Amazon in a space where you held a top position before. But, the holiday returns are likely to outweigh the increased CPC. Just remember to lower your bids during your off-season.

Check for Brand Infringement

How often do you look up your brand name via search engine? Now’s a good time to do it if you don’t already do this regularly.

Is Amazon (or anyone else for that matter) using your brand name in their ad copy without your permission? It doesn’t matter whether this is dynamic or manual, if it’s happening it’s likely against AdWords policy. And you can easily submit a complaint via an online form through AdWords support. For next year, if you can get ahead of the holiday rush, there is usually a short turnaround time to resolve these complaints.

Bing Ads, on the other hand, will not help out in this case. The latest word we got on a similar trademark complaint against Amazon was that they will not serve as a third-party mediator and that their trademark policy deems it “lawful fair use.” So, pick your ad battles in this case.

Is all hope lost? Not at all. Here are some tips to beat Amazon during the holiday push.

Tips to Beat Amazon During the Holiday Push

Bid up on Brand

Do not shy away from bidding up on your branded keywords during the holidays. You will still pay the least amount per click of any business despite increased competition from Amazon. Google favors the brand, rightfully.

Also, don’t dismiss the concept of brand loyalty no matter what you’ve read about “brand agnostic” millennials’ buying habits. Imagine clicking on an Amazon ad (or any other retailer) in Position 1 when you expected to go straight to the brand. Mismatched expectation and results are a bad experience for the searcher, no matter the reason. And any lost business because of this misdirected click is a bad experience for you.

Unique Products

What products of yours is Amazon selling? Most likely they’re not offering your latest, in-season products, nor your entire inventory.

Keep these uniquely available products in mind when you are writing ad copy and optimizing your product feed and shopping campaigns.

Focus on Content

First, you can win with your Ad Content. Amazon doesn’t always optimize its paid search ad content beyond using basic keyword insertion in the headline. The 2nd headline and description line tends to be generic Amazon language. For example, in a recent search for a well-known beauty product brand, we observed that Amazon’s headline contained the relevant brand keyword, but the description was, “Shop Devices, Apparel, Books, Music & More. Free Shipping on Qualified Orders.”

Trust me, you can be more enticing and relevant than Amazon here.

Secondly, you can win with your landing pages and product content. You have probably spent years and lots of marketing dollars creating a unique brand experience for your customers. Amazon has not. Now is the time to rely on that content to help in the battle with Amazon for those hard-earned shopping dollars.

When a searcher lands on your site, they are presumably getting the best content experience possible. Beautiful product images, product stories, and don’t forget customer reviews and social sharing opportunities. This experience can be very valuable measured against the standard Amazon product landing page experience.

Never fear, dear Search Marketers. With research, preparation, and a little fearlessness in advance of the online holiday shopping season, you stand a good chance of competing with Amazon for some of that holiday pie.

The post How to compete with Amazon (and win) during the holiday shopping season appeared first on Portent.

Digital marketing is about lots of little things, not one big one. This list is half-list, half-procedure. If you go down these items in order it might give you a decent internet marketing plan for the next few months. If you have others, post ’em as comments:

1. If you have one of those nifty rotating preload things on your site, delete it. If you don’t agree, try this: Shove your head into a bucket of water. Stay in there, not breathing, for 5 seconds longer than is comfortable. That’s what you’re doing to your customers. Delete it, please.
2. If that’s impossible, make sure it shows for no more than 1-2 seconds.
3. Check the load speed of every page on your site. If any load in more than 3 seconds, fix it (1 second is far better). If your developer says they can’t, and they can’t point to another problem, fire them.
4. Check your site for broken links. You can use a tool like Screaming Frog. Fix those links. Do not pass this step until you’re done. If it takes your developer more than a week to do this step, again with the firing thing.
5. Make sure you have a user-friendly 404 error page, not the generically nasty PAGE NOT FOUND message.
6. Make sure you have a user-friendly 500 error page, too. A 500 error happens when some bit of database code you wrote late at night decides it’s had enough with this world, and takes your web site with it. That usually leads to something terribly informative like “500 Error Connection Timed Out”. Maybe you can do something better?
7. Remove any inline javascript longer than 20 or so lines to a separate .js include file. That will speed up page load times. Plus it appeals to code geeks like me, and we’re all that matter, right?
8. Set up Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. You’ll see your site from the search engine’s viewpoint, what folks use to find you, and whether there are any problems that might be hurting you in the search engines.
9. Set up an XML sitemap, too. Check out Sitemaps.org for an overview.
10. If you’re running an e-commerce site, hire a really good writer to rewrite all your product descriptions. Those descriptions matter more than you think.
11. Get analytics set up on your site. You can’t do internet marketing without it. Actually, you can, but you’ll suck at it. I recommend Google Analytics. Also, understand that “set up” means conversion tracking, attribution modeling, onsite search tracking, etc. If your developer says they can’t install anything, well, you know…
12. Review the onsite search tracking data you are now collecting. Make sure you provide clear answers to the top searches/questions on your home page. It’s an instant win.
13. Put your full address and phone number on each page. Use Schema markup to indicate this is your organization’s contact data.
14. Use one of many nifty keyword discovery tools to find the top keywords that folks use to find your products or services.
15. Now find the top ranking sites for those phrases.
16. Who links to them? Use Majestic or Moz’s Open Site Explorer to find links they have but you don’t. Now go out and get those links!
17. If five years ago some SEO hack advised you to put “SEO links” at the bottom of your pages, delete them. They’re not helping you, and they may be hurting you.
18. If five years ago that same SEO hack advised you to write title tags that read like this – “Wedding stuff and wedding things and weddings stuffs and weddings things with more wedding items and this is your place for weddings” – delete those too and write something that doesn’t sound like Elmer Fudd suffering a mental breakdown.
19. Delete the keywords tag.
20. Stop using nofollow in an attempt to “sculpt pagerank.” It never worked. It sure as hell doesn’t work now.
21. Write a high-quality meta description tag for each page of your site. That may not affect ranking but it’ll get more folks to click on your search listing.
22. Make sure your site uses correct structured markup. Your developer had better understand what that means. Don’t make me come over there…
23. Get your site totally standards compliant according to the W3C code validator. Well, maybe not totally, but as close as you can.
24. At the same time, make sure your site isn’t hideously ugly.
25. Run Google’s mobile friendly test
    on your site. Do what it recommends.
26. Learn to use Feedly. Subscribe to the top internet marketing blogs. Read them a lot. For a hint you can look at the AdAge 150 list.
27. Go to Google News search. Search for your own brand name. Then subscribe to that search result in Feedly (you’ll find a little RSS link on the search results page). That gives you a quick look at what folks are saying about your company.
28. Do the same thing for your own name.
29. Go to local directories like Yelp! and make sure you’re listed, with correct information.
30. Be sure your company information is up to date in Google and Bing’s local listings tools, too.
31. If you’re a local business, ask your customers to review you on one of the local sites: Either on the search engines or on the other sites. This will boost your ranking in local search results. And don’t worry if you get a few negative reviews, either.
32. Start doing Google My Business Posts! They’re almost certainly a local search ranking factor.
33. Invite people to subscribe to your house e-mail list. If you don’t have one, start one. This continues to be one of the most neglected facets of internet marketing.
34. Make sure there’s an easy way for folks to sign up for that list.
35. Remove any extra fields from your subscription form. All you need is their e-mail address.
36. If you require registration during checkout, get rid of it.
37. If you’re automatically opting folks in to your e-mail list, stop.
38. When you receive customer requests via e-mail, answer them. Fast.
39. Remember that house e-mail list I got you to start building? Start sending out a quality offer to that list, once a month. See how it works. Keep testing different types of subject lines, creative, offers and such. Always strive to beat your last best performance.
40. Now you’re ready for some real online marketing (yes, all this was a warm up). Create a landing page for the best offer you’ve got. Follow best practices.
41. Create 2-3 headlines for that page.
42. Write a few different versions of body text for the landing page.
43. And finally use a couple of different images.
44. Use that email list to do lookalike audiences on Adwords, Facebook, and other networks that allow it.
45. Then use a multivariate testing tool like Optimizely or Unbounce to test all those headlines, copy versions and images and find the best ‘recipe’.
46. Create 2-3 pay-per-click ads on Google Adwords and/or Bing. Point those ads at the landing page. Be sure to use whatever tagging mechanism your analytics software requires, so you’ll know which ad generates which clicks.
47. Now start that test!
48. Pick the 3 things you learned from that test, and apply them to the rest of your site. Did one call to action work best? Create a button to put everywhere on the site. One type of photography? Use that, too. You get the idea.
49. Did conversion rates go up? Cool! Now make sure you’re earning a good return on those PPC ads. Increase your spend and broaden your campaign, always watching out for ROI.
50. Now you can create landing pages for all those house e-mails you’re sending out. Since you already know which subjects work best, and which kinds of offers, you can start with a good foundation and find the best possible landing page.
51. Grab your smartphone. Put it on a tripod. Film yourself talking about one of your products, or explaining how to use one of them. Post it on YouTube and then embed it on your site. No, you’re not Scorcese. But it’s more exposure for you, in another venue.
52. Do the same thing on Facebook.
53. Learn a web typography.
54. Learn psychographic targeting on Facebook and Twitter.
55. Take all the cool stuff you’ve learned by testing offers, and newsletters, and keywords, and ads, and landing pages, and revamp your site. Then announce your new, improved site to all your customers, and subscribers, and MySpace friends, etc..
56. Whew! You’re done. Congrats! Now, go back to step 1, and repeat the process. Because let’s face it: Digital marketing is never “done.”

I wrote a book about Technical SEO. More recently than 2008. Have a look.

The post The Digital Marketing List: 56 Things You Should Be Doing But Probably Aren’t appeared first on Portent.

Alright, deep breath. It’s time to set up your business’s internet presence. And while you aren’t a Porg, that doesn’t mean you can’t make the internets love you too.

You win, Disney. I can't even with this thing.

1: HTTPS: Security and Trust for Prospective Customers

A question: “Should my site be HTTP or HTTPS?“
There are a number of compelling reasons to pick HTTPS. First, think of that extra “S” at the end as security in the mind of your customer. Your customers, just like you, want to be secure when they visit a website. Google, with its Chrome browser, overtly labels whether a website is secure or not both in the address bar and on SERPs.

If you have login functionality, accept credit cards, or even form submissions, HTTPS is essential. Google very publicly considers this a best practice, but really what do they know…oh right we want to rank there!

So Google likes it, it keeps your info private, it keeps your users’ info private, and it future-proofs your site. Winner, winner.

2: Robots.txt & Sitemap

Stick with me, we’re going to get a little technical. But don’t worry we’re not going to write code together, yet…maybe. Instead, you’re simply going to help search engines find your site.

Honestly, you’re just being really nice and giving them directions to where on the site they’re allowed to go. A handy little map of your site.

First, we’re going to create a file on your root domain (like a tree down in the roots). That map is going to tell search engines if we have any pages or areas on the site we don’t think they should go, so we minimize the search engine’s chance of getting lost. And we’re going to tell them where to find the map.

It will look something like this:

https://www.yoursite.com/robots.txt

We have a robots.txt guide with best practices and several common mistakes. This should help you troubleshoot any errors you find. Better yet, you might learn how to avoid the most common mistakes before making them.

Next up is the sitemap! There are a lot of free sitemap generator tools out ther. Most will only crawl 500 pages and generate a map from what they find. The xml sitemap file will live at the root just like the robots.txt file, but it will also be listed in your robots.txt:

https://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

And the location will be spelled out in your robots.txt file like so:

User-agent: *
Sitemap: https://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

3: Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools

Now you have a sitemap living on your site and recorded in your robots.txt file, so search engines will be falling all over themselves to get traffic to your site. Right??

Well…not quite. Search engines are getting smarter but they still need a little help finding the front door. Or any door really. Just like making the map itself with robots.txt, you are going to be very kind and let the search engines know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you gave them a map.

Setting up Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools is the perfect nexus of easy and free. While both search engines provide guides to site owners on how to get started and fully set-up, they are best summed up as:

1. Sign up for free account
2. Submit your website
3. Use the free tools

Once you’ve signed up for both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, you’ll need to upload your sitemap to both as well. For Google you’ll use a separate, handy-dandy submission tool while Bing has you submit your site the same way that you submitted your robots.txt file above.

4: Make Sure Your Site is Blazing Fast

One of the most important and often-overlooked facets of your website’s performance is site speed. Site speed can make or break your website, and a slow website can be disastrous for both converting prospective customers, and convincing search engines to show you in their results.

But you don’t have to take our word for it alone. According to Kissmetrics, 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. Forty Percent. That is a massive amount of potential traffic lost to a single, solvable problem.

Some improvements are incredibly easy to do such as image compression. By compressing your images to be a smaller file size, there will be less to load on each page. Less to load = faster site. It’s that simple.

If you haven’t checked out any of the other links, we wrote a massive guide to site speed and page speed. That’s broken down into chapters depending on what kind of technical support you have on staff or on retainer.

5: Site Navigation

Time for another easy win. Well..mostly easy but definitely all win. Navigation is used by prospects, customers, and search engines to get around your site. The ultimate test: it should make it easier for users to find what they are looking for.

Navigation doesn’t just magically do that though!

Global Navigation which is at the top of each page sends really strong signals to both users and to search engines of what your site is about. What questions they could answer by visiting. If you use vague, interchangeable language that tells people little about what you offer or what makes your business special, you’re wasting a great opportunity to increase qualified traffic.

Order your navigation links and anchor text by importance from left to right. Ensure the text of the link is highlydescriptive. (Psst “Products” is not descriptive. However, “LandSpeeder Cars” is!)

6: Set Up Your Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Once you have your website ready to rock, it’s time to get it in front of the eagerly awaiting populace. But before your site’s going to show up on a Google results page, you’ll have to decide what you want that to look like, and what kinds of searches you want to show up for.

The different parts of the listing are called the title tag and the meta description.

Title Tags are exactly what they sound like: The title of the listing on the Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

The “meta description” is that brief description or preview of your site content that shows up under the clickable title. Title tags especially are incredibly important as they play a huge part in determining how your website ranks for any given Google search.

For example: say you’re making a website that sells lightsabers.

When writing the title tags and meta descriptions, you’ll want to make sure you include words that make it crystal clear what you are selling. Ideally, you’ll match the language and jargon of your title as closely as possible to the language your customers would use to search for your product.

For instance, your customers might head to Google and type something like “jedi lightsabers” or “sith lightsabers” more than “sith saber”. Using the terms that most align with your customers’ thinking and language is a great way to improve visibility and clicks.

An important distinction: While you want to be descriptive and clear, do not stuff your title tags and meta descriptions with the keywords just because you know that the word shows up in a lot of searches. Doing spammy things like this can reflect negatively on your brand to prospective customers. And Google’s been wise to this trick for many years, so there’s literally no upside to shoe-horning in a dozen instances of the same word.

7: N.A.P. in your schema

Remember when we said we weren’t writing code yet, but maybe later? Well we got there finally. Cringe away, but don’t stop reading.

It’s a truly teeny amount of code, and we’re going to use a tool to help you do it. (Tell no one and take all the credit!)

Put simply, “Structured Data” lets search engines understand your website better. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex agreed on a shared vocabulary to use a while back. We’re simply going to use that specific vocab to help them understand your site better.

This is where our secret weapon comes in, Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper (long name for such a helpful tool).

You’ll be given two different options for the output: Microdata (the tool defaults to this) and JSON-LD.

Microdata will be attached to your html. Google will give you back the html code and highlight it so you (or a helpful developer) can see exactly where it goes in the code for your site. If you use JSON-LD, the code is also provided and goes into the “head” section of your page.

(Pssst, we also have a guide to implementing JSON-LD on your site. What can we say, we like to be helpful too.)

I’m using my current restaurant obsession in Seattle’s International District as our example. (I have a serious dumpling addiction)

I’ll be giving you the JSON-LD code because it is smaller and easier honestly. We could fill the entire article with html code and just highlight where the microdata would go…

Looks scary, until you realize that it's all done for you in the tool. Copy & Paste time.

8: Google My business

One of the most important determinants of success with search engines is maximizing the amount of space you occupy on a results page. This sounds over-simple, but it’s true. Beyond giving more specific information to suit all the different questions users might have had from store hours to available inventory, the more space on a search results page that you occupy, the less space there is for the next competitor to show up.

One product that helps in this regard is Google My Business. Now, you may not recognize “Google My Business” by its formal tool name (I didn’t either), but you most certainly have seen it in the wild.

When you search for a business on Google, it’s powering that great big name and logo on the right side of the screen.

Taking the time to use this tool and effectively claim your business gives you much more real estate to work with than just traditional search listings, so it is incredibly helpful when setting up an internet presence. This is especially true for cases where people are already familiar enough to search for your business by name.

Fortunately, setting up a Google My Business account is incredibly easy. All you have to do is go to the My Business home page, create an account, enter your businesses information, and voila! You now have My Business Page.

People will now be able to see core information about your business right on the results page, which will help increase your visibility and qualified traffic.

9: Fully Set Up Social Media Accounts

After you’ve got your website setup and are heading down the path of optimization (SEO is a long game), it’s time to think about social if you haven’t already. If you ask a random sample of people what social media sites are “the best”, you may get a random sample of answers: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest.

We’d like to make this easy and effective for you, not to mention that this is a massive topic, so for now we’ll stick with just one recommendation: only use social media that you will actually use.

Social media can be a fantastic tool to help expand your reach and grow your business, but only when it is actually used as the communication tool that it is. Meaning if you don’t manage it, you’re creating just another empty space that can distract from channels where you’re keeping information current, engaging with customers, etc. You start to see how setting up a social media account for your business and not using it can actually take away from your bottom line.

10: Set-up Google Analytics

Once you have the raw material of your site, your social media accounts, and perhaps some paid search or other ads, it’s time to evaluate what’s paying off, and how much.

Maybe you notice your phone ringing a little more, but if you have many new promotional efforts running at once, it’s impossible to know which are working without the proper measurement tools. That’s where Google Analytics comes in.

Google Analytics is a free (!!) platform that allows you to track just about every aspect of your website. Did that spike in visitors come from an ad or an organic search engine result? What site referred that great customer to you? What did the rest of your visitors do once they hit your site?

Whether it’s pageviews, conversions, or referral source, Google Analytics tracks everything. This allows you to make much more informed decisions regarding your website, your marketing, and improving your results proactively.

For a platform that can show you so much, and which costs literally $0.00, it takes next to nothing to get it set up. After setting yourself up with a Google Analytics account, there are only three broad but basic steps remaining:

1. On the Admin page, under the Properties tab, click on “Create a New Property”
2. Enter all of your website data to get your custom GA tracking code
3. Paste the following snippet right after the head tag on each page you would like to track.

Do make sure to replace “GA_Tracking_ID” with the custom ID you got in step two above. And if you’d like a more detailed walkthrough, Moz provides a great 101-level intro to Google Analytics including sample business questions you might want to answer.

Where to From Here?

You’ve got a site that’s far more visible than it was when you started. Your site is loading in half the time it was before. You’ve picked out a social media platform that fits your style and your schedule. And you know where the heck all that traffic is coming from, not to mention which parts of the traffic is converting into leads or customers.

When you’re ready to lean into that faster, more effective site, looking at how to advertise successfully in paid search (PPC) or paid social media is a great way to show up at the moments your prospective customers are considering a product or service like yours.

Until next time, happy Marketing from all of us here at Portent!

The Portent team, if were were George Lucas characters.

The post 10 Things to Check When Setting up an Internet Presence for a Small Business appeared first on Portent.

At Portent, we often get asked to advise on the ideal marketing team structure. The answer is almost always ‘it depends.’ Today though, we’re talking about something almost universally true for the mindset of successful marketing teams. Whether you see one person in each role here, or ten, this approach will make any team work more cohesively. For instance, you can have a number of specialists that work in defined hierarchies, silos, or you may have teams that are relatively flat.

Here at Portent, I’m always amazed at how collaborative and encouraging our client teams are. Team dynamics hit home with me. In my spare time, I coach a team of outrigger canoe paddlers.

I’ll use this to outline some of the lessons about how to run an effective marketing team, even when you’re not in charge. If you’re Thalassophobic, you can always skip to the takeaways.

(The Seattle Outrigger crew. Also, new Portent theme-song, anyone??)

So, what the heck is an outrigger canoe?

If you’re a fan of “how-many-times-has-McGarret-been-shot?” cop dramas, then you might have seen one on Hawaii 5-0. If you’ve spent time on any of the Hawaiian islands, you’ve likely encountered one. The Polynesian wa’a or va’a go way back in history. Canoe racing is the state sport of Hawai’i, and its popularity is gaining. There are racing clubs across the U.S., from Washington D.C. to L.A, with stops in places like Austin in between. There are major races in Sydney and Hong Kong. It’s crazy fun, and it’s a heck of a lot better workout than paddleboarding.

So how do you get a team of individuals to race 40 miles in the ocean consistently well, when the ocean itself is incredibly inconsistent, and what does this have to do with marketing leadership?

In a six-person outrigger canoe, each seat has a responsibility based on that person’s skill level and experience. Some roles are better suited to generalists, while some are decidedly more specialized. It’s important to note that much like a flat organization of people with T-shaped skillsets, everyone here at least knows how to paddle. When a paddler first begins the sport, it may seem that all they have to do is get in a seat and move the boat forward. However, as they grow with the sport, they find that each seat has responsibilities that go beyond individual effort.

More importantly, each seat has a set of eyes and ears. Input here is key. While a boat full of people yelling at one another is a bad thing, a collaborative, communicative canoe that knows the right way to use individual skills and collective awareness will thrive.

Below you’ll find a few things that can help your digital marketing team run like a fast outrigger canoe!

Seat One – The Stroke

While not necessarily the leader of the boat, the stroke sets the pace. Keenly aware, this person can feel how the boat is running, and can often see the big obstacles before anyone else. He or she will receive input from others on the team and is empowered to make pacing decisions that will affect everyone’s outcome. This person is an individual contributor, though it is very important that this person have a feel for the pulse of the boat. And while they may ultimately defer to a rate set by a steersman or captain, this person is quick to communicate clearly and loudly to the team behind him when there is danger or a better way forward.

There are times when you will have to lead your boat even when you’re not in charge of it. Be aware of the conditions, listen to your team, and find the right pace. They’ll get you where you want to go.

Seat Two

Balance and timing are critical to a smooth-running canoe. Balance is attained by having paddlers stagger the side they’re paddling on. Odd-numbered seats follow seat one, and even numbers follow two. Therefore, seat two must transmit the rate exactly as she sees it. This effectively makes seat two the stroke for her side of the boat. Yes, she has to follow the lead from seat one, but you had best believe that this person is providing constant feedback on what is working and what isn’t. A stroke can get caught up in a runaway rate or even paddle too slow at times. Seat two will offer actionable feedback.

Everyone has a hand in leading their part of the project. Individual contributors have their own deadlines and may need to solicit help from or offer feedback to other teammates. This can help with project pacing and a killer end result.

Seat Three – The Captain in the Middle?

Depending on who you talk to, the captain of the boat is usually the steersperson who sits all the way in the back. This person plots the course, calls for sprints, and generally encourages the boat. However, there are teams that are now offloading some of these tasks to another I.C.: Seat Three. Previously, this person was often tasked with shouting out a command that notified paddlers when to switch sides. Now the role has expanded to include rate increases based on competitive and environmental conditions. This increase in responsibility means that the steersperson can concentrate on where the boat is going rather than worrying that the boat is keeping up with the conditions. A veteran boat with a seasoned seat three will instinctively speed up to catch a wave.

When you have a well-trained and savvy team, you can start assigning out additional responsibilities to individual contributors. With an eye to the strategy, these team members challenge themselves to work smarter and more efficiently.

Seat Four

Seat four is known as one of the ‘power positions.’ Power positions are typically seats three and four (and sometimes five). While this individual contributor may be tasked with heavy lifting, a nose-down, get-it-done type of role, their input is invaluable. The work these people output cannot be overlooked, so periodic check-in is suggested. Make sure they’re not burning out and that they have what they need to sustain all the way to the finish line.

There are many challenges in each race to the finish. Even the most stalwart contributor can encounter project fatigue or other blockers. Be sure to know when you need to check-in.

Seat Five

Growth is good, and planning for the future is vital for continued success. In an outrigger canoe, some seats are better suited for beginners or promising understudies. Seat five is a prime example. If you had a boat full of experienced paddlers and needed to integrate a novice, you might consider placing that person here. He or she doesn’t need to pass the rate along, by virtue of their spot. This person also sits right near the steersperson / captain who can give direct input. However, for bigger undertakings seat five should ideally be a budding or experienced steersman himself. You want this person to be able to assist in a pinch.

In big waves (as with major projects), it can help to have another steersman who can assist with keeping the boat balanced and, frankly, upright. If a project is big enough, having an assistant project manager along to assist with steering at critical moments is essential. Your five-seat knows the leader’s role as well as his own, and the minute the boat is off-balance he knows it and shifts seamlessly from strong individual contributor to a second steersman.

Giving up some of the responsibility to an up and coming leader not only provides stability, but gives them fantastic room to grow and train.

Seat Six – The Steersman / Captain / Project Manager / The Guy in the Back / Strategist

The “steersman” is tasked with getting the boat from point A to point B, and plots course and plan of action in advance. Just like any leader, she will likely encounter many obstacles or barriers that will need her attention. Winds change, currents shift, and people in her boat might find themselves fatigued or distracted. In addition, seat six is also a paddler.

If her boat is completely out-of-whack, she’ll need to make frequent course corrections (different, less-powerful adjustment strokes or drag-inducing pokes), and these keep her from actually paddling. The steersman must look at the boat as a whole, the factors affecting it and take corrective action. A smart steersman lets her paddlers know what’s going on, encourages those that need it, and relies on input from them. This synergy of information flow makes for a smooth-running boat that can go hard for miles and finish strong.

Takeaway – Marketing team leaders know what’s happening and where the boat is going. They will guide the team with encouragement and by soliciting feedback from the team

Where to from here?

Your team is smart, and they’re even smarter as a whole. They can collectively see when they’re biting off too much or moving too fast to be successful over the long-term. Be demanding as a leader, or as a highly skilled and highly collaborative I.C., but listen to the natural feedback. You can lead in any number of ways, but before you start shouting caution, direction, or pace, get in sync with your team. They’ll appreciate it, and you’ll win together for years.

The post How to Lead in Marketing When You’re Not the Captain of the Boat appeared first on Portent.

Image credit: ChiefMarTec.com

As the hype around marketing automation fades and evolves into a regular part of the marketer’s job description, evaluation and adoption of automated technology and platforms (“Martech”) is growing to become a competency requirement for marketers across our industry.

88% of companies are already using marketing automation or plan to use some form of automated tech over the next two years. That’s at a clip of 31% growth over last year.

Marketing automation is here (it’s been here for a while) and it’s not going anywhere. As the number of tools, platforms, and opportunities grow for marketers, we must change how we think, how we work, and how we communicate as our potential reach spreads even further through automation opportunities.

A few thoughts on how digital marketers must change as automation grows in our industry.

The need for intellectual curiosity is as strong as ever

As the already enormous marketing automation and overall Martech space continue to grow, we as marketers not only have to learn how to rapidly evaluate the potential value and viability of new options but also how to operate our shiny new platforms and toys once we do say “yes”. How should we be thinking about evaluating every piece of new technology and every nice-to-have feature, from new data, to new lead scoring, to new bot-based messaging?

This all starts with clear, strategic goals.

Marketers must know what they want to get out of their automated technology before exploring and learning about what’s out there. Simply put, you have to have a north star. Only once that’s established does it become all about tactical tool evaluation, deployment, and execution. As Unbounce put it in a great podcast interview with the VP of marketing from Uberflip last year: “A fool with a tool is still a fool.”

What’s imperative is that we not try to learn the ins and outs of every single new thing that hits the market. That’s simply not going to happen.

What’s vital is the ability to quickly identify what’s needed based on your strategic goals, what’s going to get you there, and what’s not going to get the job done.

Waste and repetition are bad. Failing to plan your communication is worse.

While automated marketing platforms take away much of the repetitive, tactical work previously making up much of our day to day, marketers must begin to think more strategically at every step before they scale up message distribution.

For many marketers, we now have the ability to streamline a lot of everyday tactical to do’s of communicating with prospects and customers through automated platforms. Programmatic media buying, customer relationship management, email outreach, social publishing, and even social listening for automating community management are areas where marketing automation can be effectively leveraged. (We’ll hold comment on chatbot driven customer service for now.)

Effective deployment of these tools can mean a lot more time for all the bigger projects we want to tackle that have been held hostage by the pressing demand of day-to-day tactical tasks.

As those everyday tasks and time requirements are slowly and surely reduced through Martech, we can and should shift to a more strategic mindset. To beat this point into the ground: you didn’t download the 7 productivity apps on your phone (not judging) so that you could spend more time fiddling with apps. You did it so that you could have more time to do the things that were more important to you, and would make a meaningful difference in your work and life.

Market analysis, competitive differentiation, customer persona mapping, and personalization of messaging based on deep segmentation. This is where we need to live and, if we’re successful, the way that we use these automation tools themselves should become even more effective. It’s a virtuous circle.

Those strategic pieces, which can commonly be passed over in favor of ever more tinkering with tools, should become the mainstay of your work and can be the difference in what sets you apart from your competitors. There’s a great article on Medium by Graham Gnall about how and why to automate yourself out of a job that makes this point perfectly.

Data literacy for marketers is no longer optional

Farfetch CMO John Veichmanis (among many others) put it perfectly in an interview with Digiday: “Data is the New Marketer’s Currency”.

Regardless of specialty within our industry, marketers must understand how to collect and read data available to them. Most importantly, the interpretation of that data from raw numbers into insightful, actionable decisions is what brings all of this together.

Veichmanis goes on to say in the Digiday interview:

I’m definitely not a data scientist. But there’s a huge appreciation of what that team can do and deliver… Our job is to build meaning around the data to serve our customer more appropriately. That goes back to the basics of what marketing is: understanding consumer preferences… Ten years from now, any marketing team at any level will have those capabilities.

As a rule, platform-centric numbers and statistics are great for their convenience and reporting tailored to whatever the tool does. However, I will challenge that those pre-packaged dashboards and tool sets are built to highlight platform wins and in the worst case to sneakily hide potential pitfalls.

Marketers must be able to tag a website and pull their own data outside of any automated platforms they are using, whether you’re a giant with a 20 person analytics team, or working in a startup and wearing every marketing hat imaginable.

If you’re on the latter end of the spectrum, Google Analytics is the best free tool out there for this.

From the information available within Google Analytics (again, for free), every marketer needs to be able to find data, understand what it means post hoc (what pattern of behavior do the numbers indicate), and be able to turn that data into actionable, clear insights that can guide proactive decisions.

Those insights and actions should come full circle to drive evolving strategy within your automated platforms.

Proliferation of Martech is not without risk

Considering for a moment the incredible wave of entrants into marketing technology over recent years: if we look hard, there are probably at least a few dozen ways to achieve every single part of our digital communication plan. For some of the more common tasks, there could easily be a hundred or more tools that offer a particular feature.

That can be dangerous.

Go back to that north star of clear business goals. We have to learn to cut through the clutter of bells and whistles and look clear-eyed at what’s most important to driving your strategy, meeting your business goals, and ultimately what’s a distraction.

Once you’ve made the commitment to a new platform that has the features and functionality that can drive the results you need, we have to know when it’s working and when it’s not. And we have to be able to evaluate that based on data available to us outside of these marketing platforms. Again, whether it’s an analytics team that’s in lock-step with your marketing group or your own review of carefully tagged Google Analytics data, you must be able to answer without hesitation:

Where to from here?
When the marketing technology roadmap and the results are both running like clockwork, it’s time to get back to the essence of what makes great marketing. Whether that’s taking a look at your positioning, your brand pillars, your content strategy, or anything in between, getting to this higher leverage work and letting it guide your (wonderfully automated) day-to-day execution is where we need to live.

That’s when the fun starts.

The post How the Digital Marketer Must Change as Automation Grows appeared first on Portent.

The Links

More links coming later, but for now:

AnswerThePublic.com is the standard for questions and interests research.

Buzzsumo question search is kick ass

Canva is my new favorite fancy-schmancy charts tool

Grammarly will save you from philsophy massacres

My original article about worldbuilding

Practical typography is an amazing primer for making great places.

The post Marketing as Worldbuilding: The Slides & Links appeared first on Portent.

Disclaimer: this post is fairly focused on local businesses. The approaches here are tailored to small businesses with tighter marketing budgets. That said, they apply to nearly any business and most scale up or can be repeated as your business expands its footprint.

Own your local listings

For local businesses, your local listing can often be the primary way people learn about you. Some small businesses don’t even have a website, but instead rely on directories like:

1. Google My Business
2. Bing Places
3. Yelp
4. Yahoo Local
5. Facebook
6. Yellowpages

In addition to these major directories, most industries have more specific communities that are often even more important to your prospective customers than the big platforms. The more focused and relevant, the better.

Showing up on these directories prominently and consistently doesn’t happen on its own, though. You have to claim your business.

Owning your business means gaining control over the information that is provided by the directory. Many of your potential customers are searching on these directories so being clear, consistent, and accurate can help them find you.

For small business owners and marketers, this is about as easy as it gets in terms of a learning curve.

Local SEO

When a potential customer searches for a florist to buy a bouquet of flowers, how can you ensure that your flower shop shows up first in search engines instead of your competition? Moving out of the small pond of niche directories into the wider ocean of search engines can be daunting. If you weren’t already, you’re suddenly competing with every giant in your industry, local or not.

But there are some basic things you can do to signify that you’re the most relevant option for a local human being in need of your product or service. Own your listing on all directories (not just Google), be consistent with the information provided, link your listing to your website (if you have one), and get more local links from other sites in the area. Links from local chambers of commerce, local press, businesses in your city, all of these say to both prospective customers and search engines: “I’m a great option in this city.”

And if you do want to spend a little, you can use Moz Local to give you an edge, track progress, and save time finding opportunities to improve. It’s a fairly inexpensive tool and helps with everything here, except for the legwork of building the links themselves.

You should still have a website

No matter how you slice it, it’s still incredibly valuable to the overall health of your business to have a website that people can link to, learn more about you, and share. There are plenty of tools out there to create basic template websites like Wix.com and WebsiteBuilder.com. They cost a bit, but the value of a site is well worth it.

To make this an even easier decision, Google recently created their own free website building tool built with small businesses in mind. It makes the entire site building process easy and free. Translation: we’re all out of excuses not to have a website.

Collect reviews from happy customers

For most businesses, customer testimonials go a long way towards building trust and winning that next sale. This is especially true for local businesses. In the example below, which of the three options are you going to choose if you need to order flowers for your upcoming anniversary?

Not a trick question: the obvious choice is C. Not only does Florist C have the best star rating on Google, but they also have the most reviews. I can take one look at this, see their phone number, and make a call right away. Instant customer at no additional cost to the business.

So how do you model your online presence after the winner here? Just “ask.”

You have customers who know and love you already. There is no shame in finding ways to encourage them to speak out and share about their positive experiences with you. It’s quick and easy to send a follow up email with links asking for them to share or even ask verbally when you know you know you have a happy customer.

While you can’t push people to give you five star reviews, we know of one business that turned this process into a win-win. At the end of a day-long excursion, they prompted users to give a review at a kiosk. Instead of telling them how to rate the business, they prompted with a single question:

We hope you had an amazing time with us. If there was anything about your experience that was less than five star, what was it? We’d love to make it right for you, and improve that for all of our passengers.

Feel the difference? Now get out there and let people show the love. It costs nothing but the time to ask, and hopefully you’ll get the same kind of valuable feedback in the process.

Create great content and share it

Content can mean a lot of things. It may mean the information you have on your website, blog posts, video tutorials, social posts, the list goes on. Having a comprehensive and well considered content strategy is an important part of an effective internet marketing program.

For local businesses this is true as well, but even though great content takes time and effort, it doesn’t have to be a huge financial investment. How’s that you ask?

You know your business better than anyone. Meaning you know your market just as well as anyone, even if that means a specific market in just your city. So who better to show it, and answer prospective customer questions about the right solution to their need, by creating great content? Here are some easy options that everyone can tackle:

Blogging

If you don’t have a blog on your website, start one. Producing even a blog post or two per month about the things your customers care about isn’t asking much, but it will help people find you. It will also build trust so you have something to back you up when you say you are an industry expert.

One easy way to get started: think about the informational questions your customers ask most often and answer them in posts.

Need help creating interesting ideas about your industry? Try the Portent Content Idea Generator.

Social sharing

As you produce quality content, share it. Most people are on social sites like Facebook so posting about your business and engaging with your customers will help keep people coming back. Social sites are a great place to let your customers know about upcoming deals and events too.

Bonus: Use Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free tool. It’s also very easy to set up. One small snippet of code in the header across the site and you can have full visibility into how people interact with your website, where they are finding you, how long they interact with your site, where they drop off, whether they convert, etc. This is very powerful information that should inform business and marketing decisions.

Go make it happen

The digital marketing world is vast, but not everything has to cost an arm and leg. What they will cost is some time and effort. If you prioritize what to tackle first and get to work, over time you will build a stronger online presence. And if you need help or have questions, ask us (or read more of the content we produce to help prospective customers). We do this for a living.

The post 3 Digital Marketing Strategies That Won’t Cost You a Dime appeared first on Portent.

The most important skill for either a writer or a marketer is being empathic. A true writer needs to be able to write with empathy for any and all characters that exist in their world.

The same is true for marketers. Simply put, marketing is understanding your customer and providing effective content to get them to take action. Without really understanding your customer, you’re shooting in the dark and wasting marketing dollars. That’s where personas come in.

A marketing persona is a representation of your customer based on research and data that outlines behavior patterns, attitudes, goals and anything else that might inform you on how they engage with products and content. But as Stefanie Owens notes, “Personas in this space are, first and foremost, all about building empathy.”

If you’re reading this article, there’s a really good chance you’re familiar with personas already. But I’ve been shocked by the number of times we’ve asked clients for personas and they need to dig them up from the archives like some sort of lost artifact. It makes me doubt that they’ve been created effectively or are be used in any meaningful way.

In this article, I’m not going to explain why personas are useful or provide a guide on how to create them. My goal here is to give you some tips on how to make your personas better. Here 6 things that every screen-writer answers to create well defined characters that every marketer should copy to create kick-ass personas.

What time do they go to bed and wake up?

Screenplay example:
In American Psycho, Patrick Bateman works at an investment firm in Wall Street and happens to be a psychopath serial murderer by night. You’d think that’d tucker him out and he’d sleep in a bit, however, his need to be seen and revered by others causes him to go through an extensive early morning wake-up ritual full of grooming and exercise.

Why it’s important to a marketing persona:
Defining whether your customer is a night owl or early morning riser can have a lot of implications for not only when you provide marketing materials to them (ex: early morning eblast) but also where. Although it’s a traditional medium, infomercials still pull in a ton of dough – almost $250 billion dollars in 2015. What time is best for infomercials? Yup – night owl territory.

What is their routine when first getting to work?

Screenplay example:
In Stranger Things, Police Chief Hopper’s morning routine is to saunter in (often late) with a cigarette, trade insults with some of the other officers, grab coffee and a donut and postpone any police business until he has a chance to wake up. As he dismissively reminds his secretary, “Mornings are for coffee and contemplation.” This behavior perfectly illustrates him as apathetic and, as we eventually find out, emotionally damaged. This is the perfect starting point for an arc that leads to redemption and purpose.

Why it’s important to a marketing persona:
Email campaigns are tricky because of mobile devices. A higher percentage of people review their emails before work hours during a commute. However, there’s still a high percentage that cap their day with a giant email sweep.

On top of that, some customer types might be more likely to discard email promotions first thing in the morning, but be more responsive in the afternoon. Does your customer prefer to relax first thing in the morning or are they ready to make decisions and learn more about what you have to offer?

Are they set in their ways?

Screenplay example:
In Fight Club, the two main characters, The Narrator and Tyler Durden, are opposites when it comes to conformity. The Narrator’s need for order is at total odds with Tyler’s preference for chaos. The entire movie is about The Narrator’s slow slide into chaos and his transformation into liberation. As soon as he realizes he has gone too far, he pulls himself back to where he finds his strongest self.

Why it’s important to a marketing persona:
One of the most basic and important characteristics of your customer is where they sit on the technology adoption curve. Defining whether they’re an early adopter or laggard is crucial when deciding how to market to them.

Each of the groups on this curve has preset characteristics just like generational groups. You’re not going to want to run a marketing campaign that requires an Oculus Rift if your customer base are laggards. Nor will you want to run flash banners if your customers are innovators. Actually, don’t use flash. Just don’t.

Do they need a face or a name?

Screenplay example:
In Kill Bill: Volume 1, the main character’s name is never mentioned. In the screenplay, she is referred to as “The Bride.” Quentin Tarantino makes it a point to hide the name. In fact, during the movie, another character refers to her by name and it’s bleeped out. It’s never explained exactly why this is, but it’s most likely to help the viewer empathize with her. Tarantino wants us to not focus on her label, but understand who she is as a character and why she is intent on revenge.

Why it’s important to a marketing persona:
Although eventually having a great photo or name is effective for personalizing your persona, it should not drive the process. It’s critical to have a fully fleshed out written persona before slapping a name on it and providing imagery.

Stefanie Owens makes a compelling argument against using stock photos, cartoon-ish artwork, or useless demographic information in your personas. She provides this example of an excellent persona set that uses only relevant imagery and resists the urge to artificially put a face to a name:

Personas created by Virginia Honig, Hala Shih, Leila Johannesen and Caroline Law from IBM

What kind of environment do they need?

Screenplay example:
In As Good As It Gets, Melvin Udall is a neurotic novelist with a terrible case of O.C.D who hates any interaction with other people. Any sort of noise, including cracks in a sidewalk, totally disrupts his life and leads to stress.

His way of life is turned upside down when he’s forced to take care of his neighbor’s dog and deal with people that he’d never dreamed of holding a conversation with before. The storyline revolves around his fight to become “a better man.”

Why it’s important to a marketing persona:
Understanding how your customer reacts to different forms of exposure can change everything in marketing, from web design choices to the pacing of a nurture campaign. Likewise, if your touch points are too frequent in something like paid remarketing or any other nurture method, you can lose trust and may do more harm than good.

What do they fear?

Screenplay example:
In Jerry Maguire, Jerry is a high-rolling sports agent who resists all personal connection and gets self-worth only from his business accolades. The thought of losing any of his business relationships is devastating to him which is evident when we see the expression of shock on his face as he’s effortlessly fired. His (seemingly) worst fear comes to fruition, leading to his breakdown. But ultimately, he learns that his real fear is living and dying alone.

Why it’s important to a marketing persona:
I’ve put the question of “fear” last because it’s one that generally isn’t addressed with most personas. And yet, it’s potentially the most important question to answer when it comes to understanding what drives your customer.

I would argue that the nature of business is identifying fear (whether that’s fear of missing out on something wonderful, or actual avoidance of a negative outcome) and using that information to solve problems. In advertising for instance, that could be highlighting and accentuating a fear, only to follow it up with the end-all, be-all solution. In content marketing, it’s educating customers on the issues surrounding their fears and problems and providing them with the beginnings of a solution.

As an account manager, a large portion of my job is to hear KPI-based symptoms and translate that to understand a client’s underlying worry. Ultimately, it’s to address that fear with a clear solution in mind. Many times that may look different than what we were hired to do at a surface-level. The mark of a quality agency, and a quality marketer, is whether they can look beneath the observed symptoms and get at the more meaningful underlying issues that ultimately drive the plot.

There are many different ways to put together a potent marketing persona —a text heavy persona with minimal imagery, an infographic with mostly icons and figures, or even a video persona. The important thing is that, given all the data and research you’ve done, you become an empath and that your documented personas help to bring others into the same story.

The post 6 Ways to Build Blockbuster-worthy Marketing Personas appeared first on Portent.

Time tracking task by task isn’t fun. It can seem trivial for some and scary for others. But with effective time tracking and analysis, the payoffs in identifying bottlenecks in current work processes can be game-changing for your team.

I’ll show you how we used this practice at Portent a little later, but first I have a confession to make: I hate the hourly billing model.

It turns great marketing work into a commodity. It creates a fallacy that the number of hours spent to complete a task is somehow more valuable than the level of quality and value represented in the outcome.

The fundamental question here: Is a project more or less valuable based on how many hours were needed to complete it?

I don’t believe so.

Does the raw number of hours that someone on my team spends (and then bills) on a deliverable take into account the investment they put into learning the skills required to do it well? To do it efficiently?

Of course not.

[Rant over.]

What Time Tracking Does for You

My challenge to you as a marketer and a leader: If you’re managing a team, you should absolutely try tracking your and everyone on your team’s hours for one month. Record down to the individual task level in 15-minute increments.

You will be amazed at how much this seemingly distasteful practice uncovers actionable opportunities to take bottlenecks out of the way for your team, to streamline process, and to get them working on the most impactful parts of their jobs.

Learn from the agency model: It starts with where your team spends their time. It’s tedious, it’s the scariest part for people worried about their jobs, and it can require major behavioral change. But it all starts here.

Collecting that data is important.

Understanding, analyzing, and acting on that data is critical.

Here’s an example of what we found and did with some of that data at Portent.

Looking through months and months of time tracking entries, we found a few places where more time than we might have expected was spent across our teams:

• Meeting with clients
• Collecting raw data from the same platforms over and over again
• Manually compiling reports from that data

What did we do with that information?

Client Meetings

Cutting down facetime with clients is going to be a tough sell to anyone.

We love working directly with our clients. It helps us get a better understanding of their goals, opportunities, and constraints, as well as what’s going on in their business and industry. It helps them get a better understanding of exactly what we’re working on and why we’re doing it.

We’re not touching that. Meeting with our clients is too valuable to decrease our time investment there.

Collecting and Compiling Data

On the data gathering and reporting side, we found our team spending a ton of time. That’s not necessarily problematic because the analysis we do around what’s working and what’s not is a huge part of the value clients get in working with an experienced agency.

But the numbers still seemed too high.

By tracking and analyzing time entries down to the individual task level, we identified that a significant recurring amount of time was going into manual data gathering across multiple platforms.

Not only was our team spending time gathering that one-off data, they spent time again and again formatting and reformatting clunky data tables so our clients could see a complete picture of their performance.

I expect this is a common theme for anyone who’s ever had to prepare management reports, marketing or otherwise.

So what did we do?

We dove into every data platform and source we routinely pulled for clients. We looked for alternatives to get that data into a report format that we could drive with our current automation. And when we weren’t satisfied with the remaining level of manual labor, we searched for new reporting formats.

We abandoned practices and tools that had been in place for years, based on what was possible at the time of their creation, and migrated all our data and reporting into Google Data Studio.

It was a major investment of time—and by extension money—but it was worth it for our team’s sanity, their effectiveness, and for our long-term bottom line.

Equally important, our new reporting system wasn’t only better for us, it was better for our clients as well.

We were able to provide our clients with a more intuitive and actionable work product in the report itself and freed our time to focus on execution instead of data collection in our client work.

The Takeaway

What would happen if you took the time and effort to do a similar analysis of the bottlenecks in your team’s processes?

Are there things you’ve taken for granted because that’s the way you’ve always done them? Those things may have been innovative when you put them in place a few years back, but tools and platforms are always changing and new ways of working become possible.

What would you find?

What would you improve if you had data to quantify the scope of your inefficiencies?

Time tracking won’t give you the answers to fix what’s broken, but it sure as heck can give you both the direction and the ammo you need to get things moving.

I hope you give it a try, and we’d love to hear what you find.

The post Why Every Marketer Should Spend a Month Time Tracking appeared first on Portent.

We’re all busy, which means we’re all occasionally guilty of relying on executive summaries and best practices guides to get things done.

Give me a quick guide to optimizing landing pages?

Can you send best practices for social media at events?

What template should I use for our site’s metadata?

How frequently should keywords be incorporated on a page?

Best practices are not all bad. But they can lead to and affirm bad behavior – focusing on keyword rankings over site content, writing blog posts of only one length, or optimizing for the wrong audience. And even worse, after everyone flocks around the new industry standard and gets comfortable, the channel or conversation becomes saturated with that approach and users start to tune out.

As agencies, it’s easy to write best practices blog posts and guides for clients. These lists are requested and well received. And we’re hired by busy clients because we’re experts, so it makes sense to impart our knowledge in short form rather than explaining why an approach is important and customizing it to the situation. But as an industry we risk creating major problems for clients when we only give them a to-do list as a gold standard and leave out the context and coaching for their product or audience.

As a digital marketing manager, these guides are helpful in setting priorities and sharing opportunities across teams and with leadership. And they’re great to reference when your boss tries to poke holes in a new strategy.

Here are a few tips for how to use best practices, while maintaining the integrity of your marketing program and avoiding complacency.

1. Engage and get to know your users

This should already be one of your priorities. If you’re don’t care about adding value for your users, then you might as well close up shop now, as you’ll continue to lose not only traffic but your user’s interest. There’s no hack or shortcut in the world that can stop this.

Digital marketing, now more than ever, demands that you research and seek to understand who your audience is, what they are looking for, and how and when they are searching.

For example, new clients often ask us: how many times should a keyword should appear on a page for us to rank? Deep sigh. There is no right answer to this question, it’s missing the point, and it comes from following hugely outdated best practices.

You should be creating content on topics that matter to your users, then assessing how they engage with that content (e.g. A/B testing, heat mapping, etc.). Writing in natural language about relevant topics, in a way that demonstrates more than superficial understanding of both the topic and the audience, will help you stand out and remain relevant more than adhering to any formula.

2. Be proactive

You’re much less likely to get stuck with an outdated site and marketing strategy and lost in the crowd if you proactively test campaigns with new content types and try new channels. Or you could just assume the best practices you read last year are still fine, rinse and repeat the same format over and over, and fade slowly into the crowd.

For example, when was the last time you heard that ”600-800 words was a good length for a blog article”? Because guess what, it’s official, we collectively ruined the 400-800 word blog post.

If I were to compare this to software installation, I’d be telling you to choose the “Custom (Advanced)” approach instead of the “Default (Recommended)” option. You should know your audience better than anyone else. Don’t let a talking head tell you otherwise. Again, I’m not condemning the use of best practices and templates, but adapt them, test them and trust your instincts to continue seeking new approaches.

3. Improve your distance from perfect

Algorithms are always changing, new channels are gaining attention, and success really is a moving target. How’s that for definitive next steps?! But try this on for size: we have a phrase at Portent that our CEO Ian has written about for years called “distance from perfect.” For Portent, and for our clients, this means continuous striving and optimizing to improve your site and user engagement across channels. It’s looking for all those seemingly little things that don’t feel or work quite right, and taking the time to fix it. To shape it, and make it yours. And the sum total of all those little tweaks, to make your site and your communication the best they can be, can’t help but put you in a far better place.

If you take the time to run a campaign, to write a piece of content that’s true to what you offer customers and you’ve done good up-front audience alignment work, they’ll reward you with attention, connection, and ultimately some dollars. Do that enough, and you’ll actually be able to sway the almighty Google, by virtue of it’s own machine learning around deep reading and engagement.

So, next time you read a best practices guide, think twice about taking it at face value. First, is it relevant to your business and audience? Second, how can you adapt the recommendations to stand out from instead of keep up with the industry standard?

I hope this not-best-practices post gives you some helpful food for thought.

And if you’d like to explore this idea further, our CEO Ian Lurie wrote a great post on the perils of marketing survivorship bias.

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