Interruption (or “Outbound”) Marketing vs. Permission (or “Inbound”) Marketing

A shift has occurred in business marketing.  Traditionally, businesses market using such outlets as tradeshows, cold-calling and print advertising.   This “interruption” marketing method (also called “outbound” marketing) is designed to spread the message as far and wide as possible, with the goal of reaching a few qualified individuals.

The problem interruption marketers face is that people are now overwhelmed with such outbound messages; and are getting better at blocking these interruption marketing messages by installing spam filters, using the internet to research products and services proactively, using caller ID, and other creative methods.  For example, people are becoming more inclined to search the internet for product and services information before making the effort (and paying the expense) of going to a tradeshow.

Permission-Based or “Inbound” Marketing

Today, more people are beginning their product or services earch by heading to the internet first.  This proactive step by comsumers means that businesses need to be “found” by these consumers when they conduct such a search.

Outbound – Interruption – Marketing: Tradeshows, print advertising, television & radio advertising, direct mail, unsolicited (and even solicited) email blasts, and telemarketing.

Inbound – Permission – Marketing: Search-engine marketing, use of social media outlets such as LinkedIn, Facebook, etc., and Blogging.

How is the webdesign philosophy impacted by which type of marketing is emphasized?

The easiest way to differentiate is that most “outbound” marketers are more concerned with how the website looks.  “Inbound” marketers are more concerned with their website being found on the internet and visitors then contacting them.

Of course, we are concerned with a good-looking website and being found.  However, we sincerely believe that all things being equal, more time should be spent on making the website “findable” then worrying if a shade of blue should be a little darker.

Spend Time and Money on a Strategy that Gets Visitors and Makes Them Stay Long Enough to Contact You.

This means that most people care about what you have to say then how you look.  Again, we love building really nice looking websites – and that can go a long ways towards sealing the deal …..  but what good is that if your visitor leaves abruptly because you have nothing to say.  If you have more content, on average you will have more website visitors and grow your business faster. A 100 page website will beat a 10 page website 90% of the time. And a 500 page website is even better. And if some of those web pages were written recently, that’s even better. So, build a strategy to continue to add more and more content to your website over time. Hint: Blogging makes creating content easy … if done right!

Enable Dynamic (or “Blogging”) Websites

A key to being able to develop effective content is to have a website that is dynamic.  A dynamic website will allow you to create content-rich landing pages on-the-fly 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  Practically speaking, if you build a static website, you will have to contact your webdesigner every time you want to create a new webpage or edit an existing one.  This can severly limit your effectiveness as you are dependent upon the turn-around speed of the webdesigner, as well as making quick edits of a draft.  We are firm believers in providing websites that permit you to log into your website and create new (or edit existing) pages without knowing any coding.

Any website built today should have a blogging platform as a basic or add-on feature.  Enabling websites to generate dynamic content through the use of such as platform will enable your content to be “pushed out” automatically to the major search engines, social bookmarking websites such as Technorati and Digg (just to name a few), as well as social networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook.

It highlights a few intriguing facts, such as that there are more than 100 million active Facebook() mobile users, and that those mobile users are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users. It also notes that 18-34 year olds account for about 50% of mobile social networking usage, with female usage higher than male usage.

While Facebook may still be the biggest social networking site, when it comes to business, Twitter seems to be the favorite among the Fortune 100 companies, with 65% owning a corporate Twitter account.

Fortune 100 Social Media Statistics: key takeaways

• 79% of the Fortune 100 are present and listening, using at least of one of the main social platforms to communicate with their customers.
• 20% of Companies are using all four of the main social technologies (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Blogs)
• 82% of the Fortune 100 update and engage with customers on their Twitter account per week.
•Fortune 100 Companies on average post 3.6 wall posts to their Facebook page per week
• 50% of the Fortune 100 have a YouTube account and upload 10 videos on average a month
The above infographic and stats shows that the Fortune 100 are actively using these platforms to engage with their target demographics

Source: http://www.istrategy2010.com/blog/social-media-in-business-fortune-100-statistics/

Backlinks (or back-links) are incoming links to a website or web page. In the search engine optimization (SEO) world, the number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page (though other measures, such as PageRank, are likely to be more important). Outside of SEO, the backlinks of a webpage may be of significant personal, cultural or semantic interest: they indicate who is paying attention to that page.

Here is a great resource in building said backlinks:

SocialMarker is a new bookmarking tool that lets you use a singular service for submitting links to more than 2 dozen social bookmarking sites. This is a Firefox plug-in, so you’ll need to be using a Firefox browser in order to enjoy the benefits of SocialMarker.

Once you’ve added the SocialMarker submission button to your browser toolbar, you can use it whenever you come across something you’d like to bookmark online. Highlight some text on your desired webpage, and click the SocialMarker button. You’ll be taken to SocialMarker’s site, and there you can edit the description, tags, title, URL, etc. Choose which social bookmarking sites you’d like to send this too (they’re all chosen by default, so really you’ll need to de-select the ones you don’t want it sent to), and hit submit. There are also options for you to select the Best, or only the News social bookmarking sites.

Success Story Example:

We used this service and we were able to get 1st page ranking for one of our clients — www.saltoftheearthinc.com — for one of their highly sought after key terms: “westchester seawalls”.

An Employee Landing Page in its simplest form is:

• A Biography Page for that employee highlighting their respective talents and communication information (phone, email, etc.)
• May include their photo
• May include an on-line form

Creating a landing page for key employees or each sales person allows them to build a page that is authentic and allows them to feel like they are a part of the marketing process. When they send out emails they can have a URL or bit.ly that points right to their own landing page.

This will encourage employees and sales people to help engage the company as a whole. If you really want to have fun, create a short 1 to 3 minute video profile for that key employee or sales person and put a name with a face as part of the prospecting process, sales process or follow up process.

Another great benefit is that you are setting up a system where you are leveraging their knowledge into the form of search-engine-friendly content.

Technical Tips:

1. An effective format and system is to setup this Landing Page as a Mini-Blog, thereby letting the Employee to access their Page’s back-office, and post relevant articles or content whenever they can.
2. Of course, as the Employer, you will want to monitor the Employee’s postings before they are published on-line. This can be done easily by automatically setting their postings to “draft”. Then, as the Employer, you will receive an automatic email letting you know that Employee posted a draft article. You then review the article and edit it if need be; then through your own back-office environment, “publish” the post.
3. Employees can be contacted directly through their respective Landing Pages Contact form — that again you, as the Employer, monitor and approve.

[Branded] Twitter Pages

For More Information On Creating Branded Landing & Twitter Pages

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One of the goals for any professional (e.g., accountants and lawyers, architects to some degree) in any online marketing campaign should be to gain “expert status.” Because we as service professionals deal in the intangible — information and knowledge — it is crucial to “package” ourselves in a way that relates to current and potential clients.

One of the best ways to do this is to provide guidance, or as I would prefer to express it, “shed SOME light on the subject without giving away the complete answer.” After all, knowledge is power money. You, after all don’t want to give away the cow, just some milk.

LinkedIn has provided an opportunity to do just that with their Questions and Answers area

You can browse through Open Questions as well as through different categories — such as Finance and Accounting. It is important to note that many of the questions are asked by folks who are already in your general industry. However, the questions usually focus on some specific area within that industry … an expert’s area.

Some of the questions include:

• If annual reports contained EEOC statistics, what would we learn about most companies?
• Know a good accountant in St. Louis, MO who has experience working with early-stage start-ups?
• I would like some information on how to do accounting for businesses out of my geographic reach, can i log in onto the client’s computer to update / maintain their accounting records?
• Can you help me to connect with CPAs or other financial services professionals in the New York metro area or Florida that service small business clients?

By participating in such an envoronment, you are connecting with othe like-minded people, creating a network of contacts, and perhaps getting some great information for your own website (see 8 Reasons Why Client Questions Make Great Blog Content by the Blog Squad).

A good strategy is to look at questions in related industries. for example, a corporate attorney may want to look at questions in a business owner related category where legal questions come up. Of course, there will always need to be a disclaimer for most professions to saeek out competent advice, etc.

Wendy Maynard @ Kinetic Ideas makes an excellent point:

People don’t buy things. They buy solutions to problems; they want to fulfill a desire or meet a need. To market your business effectively, you have to KNOW your target audience and what problems they face. In your marketing efforts – whether written, online, or in person – you should be able to provide your audience with a solution that is specific and directly benefits them…AND you should care about their problem.

Case Study on the Accounting Profession:
(I use Accounting as an example, but just insert your business or profession here)

Sites such as AccountingWEB.com have created specific areas of their website to feature guest or contributing blog authors which feature accounting/tax articles. AccountingWeb.com’s “Blogger Crew” features accountant blogs such as

Dave Burt’s “The Shirtsleeve Accountant’s Blog”, Jerry Davis’ “Construction Practice Insider”, and Michelle Golden’s “Golden Practices”.

This is a great example of how existing blog writers and their own content contribute to the fortune of another website while also reaping benefits of their own, including elevating themselves to the level of “expert”.

Take Jerry Davis’ “Construction Practice Insider”. This is a GREAT example of how and where a niche tax practice area can benefit from blogging. Not only does Jerry provide great content for AccountingWeb, but he also gathers exposure and expert status at the same time. Jerry also is able to have that same content appear on his own site Kirschner & Associates, P.C at the same time, getting more bang for the buck. His article “Quick Facts About the Construction Industry” is an example.

In fact, I love Jerry’s firm blog which beautifully states what I think should be the mission statement for every accounting/tax blog:

My name is Jerry Davis (PUT YOUR NAME HERE) and I am a partner in Kirschner & Associates, P.C. (PUT YOUR FIRM NAME HERE). We are a CPA firm in the Atlanta (PUT YOUR LOCATION HERE) area that specializes in the construction (PUT YOUR INDUSTRY HERE) industry. I have started this blog for the following reasons:

• share answers to frequently asked questions from our clients
• post things that I read and want to communicate to others
• link to information on the internet that will interest participants in the construction (PUT YOUR INDUSTRY HERE) industry
• Another example of this appears on CPA-Resource.com. Under the site’s Community section is a Blog Sub-Section, that features various accountant and tax pros (10 at this time). Each author provides well-written articles that, again, provide great content for CPA-Resource and give the blog author’s audience the sense that they know what they are talking about. Entries range from 1031 Exchange discussions to Depreciation Reductions. In some of the cases, the blog author cross-populates the content onto their own website.

Going back to Jerry: By providing fresh and relevant information, and without him saying so himself, Jerry has created the real perception that he is in fact an expert in construction tax accounting. If you notice, his blog entries are not necessarily long dissertations on obscure tax laws. Often they are short, perhaps two or three paragraphs. But he writes them, and he writes them consistently. By being consistent, the perception is also that he is vested in what he does; that he cares about the construction tax industry.

These are important lessons to be learned.

For over a decade, Atticus Webdesign has been helping small businesses make big things happen. So we know that whether you have one employee or 100, whether you work in an office or in your living room, taking your business online can bring tremendous reward.

2.  We Create Search Engine Friendly Websites That Look Good.

We understand that having a nice looking website is … well, “nice.”  But the ultimate goal often is to turn your website into a high-traffic area for keywords and phrases specific to your industry.  We do that.

3.  Client Service & Support.

Our need to understand your business, how it fits into your overall marketing plan, and how we help you execute it with the website we design is crucial to us meeting our Company Mission of providing customer service above-and-beyond your expectations.

4.  Up-To-Date Technology.

It’s just the geeks in us.  We love technology; love seeing what new tools are out their to make your site more effective, and have your potential customers or clients find you easier.

5.  Affordable.

We believe our prices are very reasonable and work with companies and businesses to create a web presence that both meets budgets and marketing needs.  We never slip in hidden costs and are always up-front on what a design project will cost.

6.  We Love What We Do.

We absolutely enjoy bringing either a dormant web presence to life, or creating an entirely new online presence from scratch.  Whether its a good size corporation with 100′s of employees, or just a “mom-and-pop” store; there is nothing like seeing your business jump in sales and services as a result of our collaborating with you on your website.

While over the years we have evolved to working with other industries, such as accounting, architecture, energy, executive recruiting, medical (including physician and hospital groups) and other segments in the corporate world, we still have a “soft spot” for attorney website design.

Creating an effective attorney website can be a very different and very challenging. Trying to meld the traditional format of an attorney website that features individual attorney biographies and segmented practice area descriptions — with today’s technology and social media platforms and channels can both open up whole new worlds of online marketing, as well as create strategy and session planning headaches.

We have proven success in doing the both.

We are there to assist you through the entire process. First we establish your goals and then create an online marketing strategy to help you achieve them. Once your website and other marketing tools are live, we stay by your side, helping to continuously improve their performance so you can focus on growing your practice. From custom websites to search optimization to online advertising to the unmatched lead-generating power of AtticusWebdesign.com.

NEW! We will install code between your business website and each of these social networking websites that will automatically pull content from the main website into each of these social networking websites — and vice versa.

Brand your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, YouTube and other social media pages to match your website’s look-and-feel. As part of our Social Branding Program, we will design and install a variety of functions designed to take advantage of the power that social media and networking can have on your internet presence.

From Twitter to Facebook to LinkedIn, our team of savvy, social networkers know the ins and outs of social media. With a focus on increasing your brand awareness and generating traffic back to your website, we will learn which social networks will work best and generate the most awareness for your company.

Our Social Media Branding Plan includes:

• Create various social network accounts on your behalf, such as LinkedIN, Business Facebook (much different than an individual Facebook account), Twitter, YouTube and other effective networks to further promote your site.
• BRAND each social networking website to match your main website’s look-and-feel.
• NEW! We will install code between your business website and each of these social networking websites that will automatically pull content from the main website into each of these social networking websites — and vice versa.
• Insert a “Twitter Icon” on the main website.
• Insert a “LinkedIn Icon” on the main website.
• Insert a “Facebook Icon” on the main website.
• Insert a “YouTube Icon” on the main website.
• Provide training and tips on effectively “tweeting”, getting a Facebook following, and Connecting on LinkedIn.

Some of the advantages of creating a social networking site or account:

• Create a “buzz” about your business, product or services.
• Create effective backlinks to your website. This has been found to be a highly effective means of search engine optimization

For more information on getting started with a Social Media Program, call us at 561.450-7265, or complete the form below and we will get right with you:

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