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How To Produce Content To Attract Clients or Customers

Every business must think of itself as a media producer in the age of digital marketing. But how do you become in effect a newspaper, magazine, or TV news station online.? What do you write about or feature in videos?

Produce Content That Goes Beyond The Surface To Seek Answers

In journalism we covered beats. A police beat reporter established relationships with detectives, desk sergeants, and patrol officers. A good reporter listened, asked questions, and broke stories.

Produce Content That Focuses On The Main Issues

The process is no different for companies. Your sales team and representatives have relationships with customers. Ask yourself, what do our customers or clients talk about? What’s always on their mind? What are their challenges or pain points? [Read more…] about How To Produce Content To Attract Clients or Customers

Did You Make The Mistake Of Creating An Accidental Brand?

by Brad Besancon

Accidental Branding or Intentional Branding?

We interview Bill Peel about the smart approach to branding your business.

Transcript

The Accidental Brand Versus The Intentional Brand

Robert Riggs: Hi, it’s Robert and Brad with the Clarity Digital Clip of the Week. And we’re talking to Bill Peel with 40 years of experience of marketing and branding experience.

Bill Peel: That’s correct.

Robert Riggs: So I know one of your favorite topics is the accidental brand. How does that happen?

Bill Peel: Well, it is my favorite topic, Robert, because I think if you’re not careful with the business and actually with your personal brand for that matter, and you don’t protect it and are not intentional with your decisions around your brand that you’re going to end up with whatever brand the marketplace assigns to you. And that can sometimes work in your favor and other times, it can be disastrous.

So the real message is, think very strategically and very intentionally about all your brand decisions, everything from the color, to the mark, to the name. And I know in today’s world, we’ve got a wide range of names that have popped up like Uber and Google and Amazon. It’s almost any name goes in today’s world. But I will say that you want to make very sure that you’re extremely about it, you understand all the implications.

And on an international level, how does it translate? There are words and there are marks that work very well in western culture. And when you go to Europe or you go to the Pacific Rim or you go to Latin America, and it takes on a whole entirely different connotation. So the message is to be very intentional about your brand.

Robert Riggs: Where do you start?

Bill Peel: Well, you start with a great name. And I think that you guys have a fabulous name. My mother should know. But you start with your name.

Brad Besancon: He helped us create it.

Robert Riggs: One day on a whiteboard.

Brad Besancon: One day on a whiteboard.

Bill Peel: Well, I think the key is that you have – your name should reflect what you do. Now, there are people that will look around and say, “Well, why does Amazon reflect a massive distribution company or what does Uber have to do with cars?”

Well, when you introduce a name like that, one of these new millennial type names, you really have to have a strong rationale behind it and explain what that means. So it’s really best if your name is reflective of what you do or more importantly, reflective of your value proposition. What are you delivering on the marketplace?

In your case, you’re adding clarity to people’s business. So I think you start with a good name. I think you can start with keeping it very simple. What I see more often is these brands are too heavily articulated. There are too many aligns, too many messages, too taglines. Sometimes you have a very simple and then the taglines, a sentence long trying explain. If you have to explain that much about the mark or about the name, you probably need to go back and revisit the name.

If You Will Let People Talk They Will Tell You What They Want

by Brad Besancon

Sean Jackson, CFO and Partner of Rainmaker Digital Says Don’t Interrupt Your Customers Online Conversations

Transcript

Robert: I’m Robert. We got Brad here, with Sean Jackson, the CFO of Rainmaker Digital and we’ve known each other way back to Pubcon and you were the President of the Dallas Ad League. You’ve done it all from old – what we like about you, you are old media.

Brad: Old school marketing.

Robert: Old school marketing and now digital.

Sean: There you go.

Robert: So Brad is going to tell you about one of the challenges we run into in a process we use called “Listen, think, speak,” and we’re going to talk to you about “Listen”.

Sean: OK.

Brad: Yeah. So one of the things we find, Sean, is that companies don’t take the time to listen. They just want to sell, sell, sell or promote, promote, promote and they don’t take the time to really listen first to say, “What is it about my audience or customers or prospects that I need to take and then develop a plan or marketing plan off this?”

Give us a little idea about how you’ve seen that in the digital world, how you see things work, how you see things that haven’t worked. Just give us some of your insights.

Sean: I’m sorry. I wasn’t listening. Oh, wait a minute! No. I think that is the toughest part. I think in a sales-driven culture especially, everyone is so excited to get out there selling, right?

Brad: It’s all about the money.

Sean: Yeah, that’s right. I need to sell you and even if somebody says, “Wait, wait, wait. I’m ready to buy,” it’s like, well, I haven’t sold you enough yet, right?

Brad: There’s more. I need to talk more.

Sean: And I think it’s because typically in sales organizations, you have dynamic people wanting to speak, et cetera. But I think we’ve always found over history, between all media, that when we take time to listen, the most successful sales technique is listening.

I think the digital age has actually made it easier for us to listen than it has been in the past. So with all that said, if you’re not prepared to really take the time and understand that if you let people talk, they will tell you exactly what they want.

Brad: Exactly what they want. Yes. So you spoke the digital age makes it easier to listen. Tell us how you’ve seen that in real life. What is it in the digital world that makes it easier to listen? I’m not talking about software. Let’s get to a better level.

Sean: Sure.

Brad: We all have little buttons we can push. Let’s talk on a deeper level. What are some of the things you’ve seen that help you listen better?

Sean: Well, I think when it comes to businesses, certainly a lot of people now are feeling comfortable asking questions on the internet. So let’s go through the very basics. Google, right? Google Trends will tell you what type of topics seem to be trending or not, right? That’s a very informal way of seeing where a topic is and how it is –

Brad: Speaking of Google.

Sean: You know, basically how in Google Trends you can see how people are talking in an indirect way. But then even more intimate is all of our social media channels, right? When you’re looking on LinkedIn, you’re looking on Quora, you’re looking on Facebook, people are posting things out there and asking questions or they’re responding to questions that come up.

So I think from an observation standpoint, there are many, many ways out there. One of my favorite tools for listening is actually Quora because Quora, people are asking questions and people are giving responses.

Brad: Yeah.

Sean: So I think we have a way to be a little bit more sophisticated in how we hear people at a broad level. But then of course at a business level, there are different techniques that are needed.

[End of transcript]

3 Tips For Business Owners To Make Their Websites Mobile Friendly

by Brad Besancon

Mobile Friendly Websites – Interacting With Your Brand

Transcript

Transcript

Brad: You better be thinking mobile first with website design. You better be thinking mobile first with photography, content. How is your social media?

You know, 60 something percent of our time online now is in social media. So how are you using this to better your brand and your connection?

Mobile Friendly Design

Robert: You have to first look, “Well, what does that look like on the mobile phone?”

Brad: On the phone, on a 4.5, 5-inch screen, not a 27-inch desktop anymore.

Robert: You as the executive and business owner, you might be still looking at the desktop. But I got to tell you something. You’re not your customer. That’s not the way they experience the world. It’s not the way they’re going to experience your product or your service.

AudienceSpeak

Brad: Yeah, it’s right back to audience speak. What is the people you’re trying to target doing? How are they interacting with your brand? How are they interacting with life? Which now we interact with life right here now.

Robert: Yeah.

Brad: We don’t just come to a mall anymore and hang out. We’ve got to show on Instagram. We got to check in. We got to do all this stuff. That’s the screen between life we’re now seeing.

Robert: So here are some questions for you as a business owner. If you’re wondering what those kids downstairs are doing with your brand and social media and all, well, first off – and the developers, because you don’t speak their language. But here are some simple things that will equip you to ask the right questions.

Mobile Friendly = Mobile First

One, is it mobile first? Go look at your own website on the phone. Does it stack up? Does everything look right to you on the phone? Secondly –

Brad: I got another one. Call your customer service department and see how it works.

Mobile Friendly – Touch to Call

Robert: Yeah, yeah. So on the phone. Can I touch the phone number and call your office? Can I touch the address and it takes me –?

Mobile Friendly – Maps

Brad: Get the map.

Mobile Friendly – Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP Pages)

Robert: Immediately to the map. You would be surprised how much this is not going on. Another question I ask them is that – developers, “Are we on AMP? Are we AMP-ed? AMP-ed up?” Well, what does that mean? That means accelerated mobile pages.

Everything online –

Brad: Download.

Mobile Friendly = Pleasing Google

Robert: Yes. Everything online these days is about pleasing Google, kissing up to Google and as much as you might dislike that, they own it.

Brad: It’s the way it is.

Robert: So they’re big on a thing called “AMP” and what this means is there’s a code put on every one of the pages of your website. That’s going to mean they load on the phone, they load mobile much, much faster. Why is that important? Well, it’s because you want to please Google and you know that somewhere down the line, if I haven’t done that, well, and my competitor has, then they have an advantage on us.

Brad: Well then again, people aren’t experiencing who you are or what you’re about or anything about you on a desktop anymore.

Robert: Right.

Brad: In that scenario where I asked Robert for a recommendation, guess what Brad is going to do the minute after Robert says, “Call Bob Jones,” or whatever.

Robert: Yeah.

Brad: I’m going to go look at Bob Jones right there. It’s right here now. Everything is right here that I need.

Mobile Friendly – Page Speed

Robert: So you go there. What if it just takes forever to load? The pages are not coming up and all. Well, you as the business owner/executive, hey, we’re going to give you a tip down in the bottom of the notes here of how you can go check up on the developers into doing their job. There’s a page speed test. It’s available to all developers. Obviously there’s a lot not using it.

Brad: Yeah.

Robert: But it’s going to tell you. It’s going to rate your website, the mobile experience and the speed because Google is measuring how fast your page opens in milliseconds. It’s a race. But what it is about is that – do you want to frustrate your customer? It’s almost the equivalent –

Brad: It may not even be a customer.

Robert: Yeah, your prospect.

Brad: It may not even be a customer there.

Robert: It’s like leaving someone on hold when you call.

Brad: Yeah.

Robert: That is the way it is.

Brad: Good start [0:03:19] [Phonetic].

Robert: That’s our Clarity Clip of the week. We will see you here in the next couple of weeks.

[End of transcript]

Dot This & Dot That: What’s The Scoop On New TLD’s? We Asked SEO Expert Bill Hartzner.

by Brad Besancon

Can your business get a sudden boost in search results by switching to one of the nearly 400 new Top Level Domains (TLD’s). We have answers from the expert.

Transcript

Brad Besancon: Well, hello, everyone it’s Brad and Robert with our Clairiti clip of the week again and we’re standing here by the Newton cabin in old town, small town America, in Midlothian, my new home. I just recently built a house down here and moved down here, and got out of the hustle and bustle of the northern, really Southern Kansas, Prosper. And we’ve been having a lot of discussions and seeing a lot out there online about these new Top Line Domains or TLDs, and we’ve had a lot of discussions about–I mean, I know there’s a lot of confusion out there and really give us the rundown, kind of where these things started and why now, everybody seems to be all in uproar about it.

Robert Riggs: So these new top-level domains are .horse or .dentist, .news, so there’s–good Lord, there must be 400 of them and they’re all aimed at business: .attorney, .lawyer, .legal, so whatever your business, that’s there. So one of the things we know, it will help Google in their indexing of trying to determine what is your website about. There is a little advantage there, and then what we’ve seen and we’ve talked with Bill Hartzer, and what Bill, he’s been doing domain sales and auctions since 1996, and so what Bill is seeing is that, this also gives you some new real estate for keywords. You might want Dallas-Fort Worth plumber, well, you can’t get that in a dotcom but in these news, and there’s a .plumber, you can go get it. It’s going to cost you some money but Bill explains here what the advantage is, what he’s done on one of his studies.

Bill Hartzer: The idea is that there’s a keywords in the endings and they really describe what your website is about or your business is about, and that allows you to really have that branding opportunity to show users and visitors and the search engines in Fort Worth that that’s what your company is about, that particular keyword. There’s a lot of really good opportunities there.

Besancon: Well, I think one of the interesting things that we heard from Bill just end-wise, it’s really about keywords but not keywords that you’re going out there for Google ad search and paying for it, it’s a little different approach.

Riggs: Well, just because you went out there and buy a .attorney doesn’t mean you’re going to automatically rank, but if you get the right keywords in there, you’re going to be more competitive in those search results. And he’s got two case studies that he talked about where that has worked, so.

I mean, one of the unique ones was, just real quick, just kind of put in perspective is, he took an attorney in Jacksonville, Florida who was not ranking at all; had the standard so-and-so law.com kind of deal. He put Jacksonville.attorney and he immediately ranked on the first page within a small, a very minute period of time.

If you are in a particular region like a city, in one particular city, and it is fairly competitive, if you can show everybody, by having your city name, Dallas.attorney, Jacksonville.attorney, Denver.attorney, and you are the attorney in that city, and you have the premiere domain name for–you are the Denver attorney, and when people do search for Denver attorney, if you move from your dotcom to your Denver.attorney and you use, you change your address to where you literally move your website from that dotcom to .attorney, I do think you’re going to see a lot of better results by using a .attorney domain name.

Let’s say I’m in national practice as an attorney. Am I better off leaving my firm name there? Or should I do a specificity of what practice I specialize in?

Yes, if you have the option, if you have the option to, and that name is available, if you are a criminal defense attorney and you go get to criminaldefense.attorney, if you are, if there is a generic word that you can pair with that perfectly describes your business, then that just as buying criminaldefense.com, criminaldefense.attorney really perfectly describes your business and that is a great opportunity for not only just search engine rankings but overall branding, and you’re showing all of your visitors, you’re showing your customer base and potential customers, your potential clients that you are the criminal defense attorney or you are the Denver attorney, or you are describing your business right at the beginning, even before they even click on your website, they will know what you do. And whether they see it in an offline ad in the newspaper or an online ad, or they see it in the search results, they will see that domain name. That’s the first thing they see before they click your website.

And when you think about that, that makes sense because what are people searching for? Jacksonville attorney, so he automatically gets that. It’s that little pop

But you have to think this through and also, some of these domains, they’re difficult to get. It might cost you $3,000 to $4,000 on somebody’s–they’re premium. But it looks like they’ll pay dividends particularly if you’re in a paying business.

What do you think about that compared to ad budget? It’s the way you got to look at it. I mean, that’s the way–

That’s a good way.

And you still have to do–everybody talks about, “Oh, you mean I can just–” No, there’s no shortcuts online; you still have to build the content, you still have to drive people to your site, you still have to have the links, you still have to do all the normal things that you need to be doing with the website. The difference is, you’re just taking a little different approach with keywords in your actual URL.

One key takeaway he advices everyone too, if you’re a big company, big business, make sure you’re trademarked, otherwise, somebody can go hijack your domain and be out there using it. You have a way to contest things if they’re violating your trademarks.

That’s a good point.

And there are some companies, went out and trademarked without checking for domains and somebody already had the domain.

That’s a no-no.

And there’re not a lot because if you got into domain before the trademark was applied for it, that’s yours.

That’s right.

Yup.

That’s correct.

That’s our Clairiti clip don’t forget to get out there and keep hustling.