Community Service Lessons from the Boy Scouts

This year the Boy Scouts of America are commemorating their 100th Anniversary and, to celebrate, they have created a program that we all can learn from.

They have created a Centennial Award. It is a special patch with slots for 5 ribbons - each ribbon signifies completion of achievements in a particular category:

• Leadership
• Achievement
• Community Service
• Character
• Outdoors

To earn a ribbon, a scout (or adult leader) must complete 3 of 5 specific tasks.

So, how would this work at your institution?

You could create a program for your staff and for your customers/members. You can create any categories you like, but let's use Community Service, since it makes the most sense. How about outlining the following standards:

1. Participate in one American Red Cross or Habitat for Humanity project
2. Donate food or time to any local food bank
3. Volunteer at least 1 hour to any local high school function
4. Participate in or donate to the American Cancer Society Relay for Life
5. Organize a litter pick up in your neighborhood

After completing any 3 of the 5 activities above, your customer or staff member get honored in some way.

Don't make it too complicated, base the program on the honor system and take their word for it. The idea is simply to motivate people to participate, not to create a program-policing nightmare.

By creating standards in areas like Community Service, Leadership and Financial Fitness you can have a complete program that would surely effect your community for the better and provide your bank or credit union with unique and positive public relations.

And in this time of negative publicity for financial institutions, wouldn't now be a great time for some good-will in your neighborhood?

Take care,

Eric

Personalization Alone Doesn't Create Relevance

Today's B2B marketers have more ways to reach out to customers and prospects than ever before.  Digital technologies have created new marketing channels and enabled marketing techniques that would have been impractical, if not completely impossible, only a few years ago.

But despite the new marketing channels and technology tools, most B2B marketers are finding it more difficult to capture the attention of potential buyers and create the kind of engagement that leads to new business.  Easy access to information makes B2B buyers less dependent on sellers than in the past, and our environment is filled with advertising and marketing clutter.

As I've written before, the real solution to overcoming these hurdles is to use marketing messages that are relevant to the problems and issues B2B buyers are facing.

The good news is that B2B marketers now have an array of tools to improve the relevance of marketing communications.  Personalization technologies can enable marketers to create marketing messages that are customized for individual prospects.  For example, marketers can use variable data printing to create direct mail pieces that are customized for each recipient.  Other personalization technologies make it possible to create customized e-mail messages and Web pages.

The capabilities of personalization technologies are impressive, but it's important to remember that personalization alone does not necessarily create relevance.  For some time, marketers have been personalizing marketing messages by including specific facts about the recipient - her name, job title, or company affiliation, for example - in the message.  I call this explicit personalization, and the reality is that explicit personalization alone won't make an irrelevant message relevant.

Effective marketing can be defined as getting the right offer in front of a potential buyer at the right time.  Information about a potential buyer - particularly the buyer's behavior - can be a powerful tool for determining what the right offer should be and when that offer should be presented.  When personal information is used this way, the result is a personalized, customized, and relevant marketing message.  What makes this kind of message different from one based only on explicit personalization is that the personalization is embodied in what the offer is and how it is presented, rather than in a collection of "facts" about the recipient.

All relevant marketing messages are in a very real sense personalized, but not all personalized messages are relevant.

TGIM...

TGIM.

That's right...Thank God its MONDAY!

Changing my opinion of Mondays and making 2010 sing!

In case you have not read it, Thank God is Mondays, by Roxanne Emmerich is a quality read. It simply helps you refocus on the important little things that make the important big things easy.

Its all about making the environment in which you work the best it can be...positive, focused, constructive and engineered for team success.

Its kind of like the Staples "easy button"....that was easy!

With the full and complete knowledge that it IS that easy...and at the same time it is NOT that easy. The difference?  Attitude. Confidence. Team Focus.

At MarketMatch we are all about Focus. Momentum. Results. Three key words that sum up our mantra and keep us all working on the same goals with clients and rowing in the same direction.

I encourage you and your team to find that same type of razor sharp focus for you and your team.

It WILL make the difference and help to create a FUN/PRODUCTIVE/ENERGIZED working environment that will be creating great results along the way....

Cheers!

Bruce

The CMO's Guide to the Social Media Landscape

Here is a nice overview of the social media landscape that will help you understand how to best leverage major social media sites for your marketing. The guide lists the major social media platforms and rates their value for driving customer communication, brand exposure, traffic to your site, and SEO - check it out: http://bit.ly/aZrsox.

For Effective Content Marketing, "Form Follows Function"

When marketers decide to implement a content marketing program, there is a tendency to think first about content in terms of format.  You might, for example, hear a marketer say something like, "We're going to need a few articles, two or three white papers, at least four customer case studies, and a Webinar."

This approach misses the mark.  When you start planning the development of marketing content, the first thing to think about is the purpose or function of the content.  As a whole, your marketing content has to perform three basic functions.  I call these functions educate, demonstrate, and reassure.

Educate - This type of content is designed to help potential buyers understand the problem or issue they're facing and how the problem or issue can be addressed.  Educational content is factual and mostly non-promotional.  It focuses on your prospects' challenges and not on your company or your products or services.  Educational content includes content that:

• Explains the root cause of the problem/issue
• Describes the ramifications of the problem/issue
• Explains why it's important to address the problem/issue now
• Describes how other companies have successfully addressed the problem/issue
• Explains how to evaluate potential solutions

Demonstrate - Those of us who advocate content marketing stress the importance of providing content that is not self-promotional and not focused primarily on your company or your products or services.  But prospective buyers who reach a certain point in the buying cycle will want and need to learn about a prospective vendor's solutions.  So, you still need marketing content that "demonstrates" how your solution works and what specific benefits it provides.  This includes marketing content that:

• Describes the features/functionality of your solution
• Describes the unique or differentiated benefits that your solution provides
• Describes your company (history, values, etc.)
• Demonstrates the value of your solution

Reassure - This type of content is designed to alleviate the fear that always surrounds a major purchase decision.  In its groundbreaking BuyerSphere research project, Enquiro found that B2B buying decisions are usually driven by fear.  More specifically, B2B buying is all about minimizing fear by reducing or eliminating risk.  "Reassurance" content is content that helps buyers feel comfortable about purchasing your solution.  The best kind of reassurance content is content that involves third parties - customers, industry experts, industry analysts, etc.  Some examples are:

• Customer success stories that prove the value of your solution
• Customer success stories that validate ease of implementation and use
• Analyst reports that show the financial stability of your company

In general, educational content is most relevant for buyers who are in the early stages of the buying cycle, demonstration-oriented content becomes important for those in the middle stages of the buying cycle, and reassurance content takes center stage in the later stages of the buying cycle.

Once you're sure that your content plan includes content that performs all three of these functions, then you can focus on specific formats.

5 Easy Steps to Increase Website Traffic and Buzz

On the recent "Content 2.0" teleseminar I did with Bob Bly, I spoke about not having SEO on your website is similar to not having any contact information in your telephone book ad ... no one will find you, which defeats the purpose.

Many businesses, large and small, spend the time and effort to develop a website only to forget to take it one step further by incorporating SEO to the site as well as creating buzz about the site. And what happens is the end result is a nice, pretty site, but no visitors. No traffic. No point to having the site.

But that can all be avoided.

The below is an article I wrote while I was VP of Marketing at Agora Publishing/Early to Rise. I’m republishing it because unfortunately, I see many websites that have all the bells and whistles you can possibly ask for, but it’s lost in the “Internet black hole”.

Check it out…

###

Rescue Your Website From the Internet "Black Hole"
By Wendy Montes de Oca

Okay, so you have a website. You’ve spent time and money getting this thing up. You’ve used all your creative juices to get the words just right. And you added some nice graphics to make the site aesthetically pleasing. Now what?

A website is of little use if nobody can find it.

Mastering organic search ranking has proven to be a fundamental part of the online marketing mix. (By "organic," I mean the "natural," as opposed to "paid/PPC," listing that appears when someone conducts a search on Google or other search engines. Optimal placement is typically within the first 20 listings or three pages.)

Search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) – the ability to increase your site’s visibility in organic search listings and refine the content structure on the site itself – are critical for market awareness and customer acquisition. According to WebProNews, 66.3 percent of searchers click on organic listings before they click on a sponsored link. Even more important, a recent study by CreativeWebsiteMarketing.com indicates that most people who buy online start with a search engine.

Don’t let your site get lost in Internet obscurity. Here are five simple ways to help boost your website’s traffic and optimization.

1. Create online buzz about your site, product, or service.
You can do this by generating online press releases. There are services on the Web, such as PRWeb.com or Free-press-release.com, that do this for free or at a nominal cost. Another idea is to post comments to high-traffic blogs, bulletin boards, chat rooms, or forums.

Do a Web search for top blogs or news forums that are related to whatever it is that you’re selling. Go to each site, one by one, and post a comment. (Start a new topic or reply to an existing one.) This helps in two ways: One, you create buzz in the marketplace. Depending on your tactics, your message can even go viral. Two, you get a "back-link" to your site that helps when the site is indexed by search engine spiders.

An important note: Your post should be relevant and genuine. Your comment should be relevant to the question you’re replying to, have some sort of value to the readers that view it, and be in the proper area/subject matter on the forum you’re posting to. Stay away from posts that are blatantly self-serving. These posts are viewed as spam by forum webmasters and could get you banned from the forum, or at least be deleted.

For example, MaryEllen Tribby (ETR’s Publisher) had the good fortune to interview Newt Gingrich in March. Immediately after the interview, we posted a press release to several online press distribution services. We also uploaded comments about the interview to news-aggregating services, blogs, and political forums (with a back-link to the release posted in our Investors Daily Edge archive).

Within the weeks following the initial interview, website visits and traffic ranking more than doubled and conversion also showed a spike. Three months later, this release is still being picked up by the media and through syndication… and the Investors Daily Edge website is enjoying residual traffic and back-links from this effort.

Year-to-date, these techniques and the others I’m about to go into have helped increase traffic nearly 80 percent with a monetization of more than 150 percent ROI.

Which leads me to my next strategy…

2. Initiate a relevant inbound link program.
Set up a reciprocal link page or blog roll (a listing of URLs on a blog, as opposed to a website) that can house links from industry sites. Contact these sites to see if they’d be willing to swap links with you – a link to your site for a link to theirs. Again, relevance is key. Search engines shun link harvesting (collecting links from random websites that have no relevance to your site), so these links should be from sites that are similar in nature to your business.

3. Give Web searchers great content and a link back to your site.
Upload relevant content to sites that make such information available to other sites that want to publish it, such as ArticleDashboard.com or ArticlesFactory.com. This is a great way to increase market awareness as well as establish an inbound link to your site. There is also a syndication opportunity, as third-party sites may come across your article when doing a Web search and republish your content on their own websites. As long as third-parties give your site editorial attribution and a link, getting them to republish your content is just another distribution channel for you to consider.

4. Website pages should be keyword rich and related to your business.
Make a list of your top 20 keywords and variations of those words, and incorporate them into the copy on your site (avoiding the obvious repetition of words). Search engine "spiders" crawl Web pages from top to bottom, so your strongest keywords should be in that order on your home page and sub-pages (the most relevant on the top, the least relevant on the bottom).
You’ll want to do the same for your tagging. Make sure your title tags (the descriptions at the top of each page) and meta tags are unique and chock full of keywords. And your alt tags (images) should have relevant descriptions as well.

5. List your site in online directories by related category or region.
This is an effective way to increase exposure and get found by prospects searching specifically for information on your product or service by keyword topic. Popular directories (like Business.com) typically have a nominal fee. But there are many other directories (like Dmoz.org, Info.com, and Superpages.com) that are free.

Most important, before you start your SEO initiatives, don’t forget to establish a baseline for your site so you can measure pre- vs. post-SEO tactics. Upload a site counter (which counts the number of visits to your website), obtain your site’s Alexa traffic ranking at Alexa.com, or get your site’s daily visit average (from Google Analytics or another application) – and then chart your weekly progress in Excel. Understand that it typically takes two to three months for a site to be optimized… so be patient. You will eventually see results.

[The above article appears courtesy of Early to Rise http://www.earlytorise.com/]

It's Time for March Madness!

College basketball fans all over are getting excited about the upcoming national college basketball championship referred to as "March Madness." I am no exception! The intensity and quality of play as teams are eliminated provides a great deal of entertainment.

Productivity drops as countless office pools surface and conversations around the copier, water cooler, etc. last longer. Although most only invest one dollar in the office pool, they probably spend more time researching and picking their teams than they spend researching and picking a stock for their portfolio.

March also signals an opportunity for community banks and credit unions. People are receiving their tax refunds and need a place to put those refunds that is safe and secure. The effects of winter has taken a toll on landscapes, property, etc.. People are returning to the showrooms to replace that automobile that they made last "just one more year." Consumer confidence is returning and people once again are thinking about and planning that much needed vacation.

In short, "March Madness" might also refer to the consumer loan demand that is out there!

Is you institution prepared to respond?

How long has it been since your institution took a hard look at whether your consumer loan product line is competitive?

Does your market recognize your institution as the "best place" to go for a consumer loan?

If you answered "no" to any of the above questions, the time to act is now!

Have a great week/weekend!

Mike