(Part 4 of 6)
We’ve been using Ellemenopea.com as a hypothetical case study. In our last posts, we determined the following:

Vision:
To become the leader in the vinyl wall art business

Goals:
1. Drive targeted website traffic
2. Build brand loyalty
3. Use competitive intelligence for effective niche marketing

Critical Success Factors (for goal number 1, the only one we focused on in our last post)

• Improve overall traffic share by increasing visits per month from 500 to 10,000 in six months

• Improve conversion rate by increasing purchasers per month from 2% of site visitors to 10% within six months

Now, Ellemenopea must find a way to convert their goals into action. They know that they want more targeted site traffic and that they want to boost conversions. They also know that their competitors are attracting most of their potential clients, at least from the Internet. They decide to utilize search optimization and web analytics to achieve their goal.

Search Optimization

Search optimization is the science and art of getting to the top of the search engines naturally. Imagine Google as a massive filing system. Every website gets a unique folder with their name on it. Hence if you type in your company’s name, or even your own name, oftentimes you will show up at the very top of the search engine rankings. The disadvantage is that you have to spend a lot of time and money letting people know what your name is so they will search for you.

It’s far more beneficial to know how to attract site traffic from key search terms, rather than from your name. You not only want your website to have its own file, but also to be put in as many other relevant files as possible.

If a site’s content and structure is organized in such a way that it is deemed useful and relevant, Google or other search engines will put your folder at the top of each category. That’s what Ellemenopea decides to do.

Using Google Adwords as well as SEO Chat’s Difficulty Checker, Ellemenopea builds a spreadsheet of tons of key terms and analyzes them. They look for how high the monthly search volume is as well as how difficult it is to rank for each key word. The result looks like this:

Search Term Monthly Volume and Difficulty

This dashboard highlights several important pieces of information. Several terms exist that are fairly easy to rank for in searches, and these terms have high monthly search volumes. The box in the above chart encapsulates all the terms that Ellemenopea might want to rank for.

Search Term Monthly Volume and Advertiser Competition

This graphs shows that there are search terms with low advertiser competition, enabling Ellemenopea to become a heavy contender fairly quickly. It depicts selected keywords that have low levels of advertiser competition. The bluer the bar, the easier it is to have a pay-per-click ad show up at the very top.

Ellemenopea focuses on some key terms and organizes their site in such a way that it will optimize in the searches. They chose some terms that have very high monthly search volume that are moderately difficult to rank for, as well as some low volume words that are easy to rank for. They also run a pay-per-click campaign for terms that are hard to rank for naturally, but easy to get to the top with a paid ad. Within a matter of weeks, their site can start to generate much more business for them.

In this post we have shown how to set up a strategy to obtain the goals for one of the critical success factors that we have set up. If more detailed treatment of this topic would be helpful, let us know and we’ll write more on the subject. Otherwise, we will continue outlining the marketing analytics approach in our next post.

The importance of getting your business on the same page is paramount: from top management to business divisions to internal office processes to individual employees. Lack of a unifying direction can lead to unexpected consequences. Stephen Covey, in his book The 8th Habit, performed a survey of companies and employee engagement. He then compared the results to a soccer team. The results are chilling.

In a poll of 23,000 employees:

This then is what most organizations look like: One is focused, one is upset, most are confused; and while a few are excited to be there, they have no idea what’s going on. Scary.

Setting the Vision

A vision is an achievable ideal that both motivates as well as provides direction. It pulls the whole team together and gives them a common goal to strive toward. A shared vision rallies the organization together around a shared passion, which is a hallmark of truly innovative companies. When enough people understand where the organization is trying to get and are empowered enough to create and implement ideas, innovation happens.

Google is a great example. Their vision is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible.” 20% of Google employee time goes to whatever project an employee thinks will help achieve that vision. As a result, Google manages to innovate in their field at a ridiculous rate.

Some other examples include:
• American Express – “To be the world’s most respected service brand”
• Avis Rent-a-Car – “To become the world’s preeminent rent-a-car brand”
• IBM has 2: “To lead in the creation, development, and manufacture of the most advanced information technology” & “To translate advanced technologies into value for our customers as the world’s largest information services company”

For 300 more, you can check out this book.

Vision or Hallucination?

Most organizations create a vision that gets slapped on marketing materials or on the front desk or even on their websites, yet nothing is actually done. The employees are aware of it, but do not understand how their jobs relate to it. Covey’s survey proved this.

So how do you move from corporate hallucination to corporate vision? You link the vision all the way to the bottom-line, showing each person in your organization how their efforts contribute. This turns everyone into your organization into marketers, because each one is now more empowered to help promote the business.

In our next blog post in this series on utilizing marketing analytics to generate business leads and build brand loyalty, we’ll discuss how you can create this link to empower your organization and improve your marketing ROI. Thanks for reading.