Inbound & Digital Marketing Blog

We were just looking at Performance Benchmarks and importance of having a clear purpose for the role. Now, let’s look at the other key parts — Results and Special Skills or Competencies.

Performance Results

The Results section is the most important part of a Performance Benchmark. It says what you want the employee to Get Done. Not what you want them to do or be responsible for. What Measurable Results do you want them to produce!

Usually, you’ll have four or five specific results. Maybe a couple more, but any more than seven is too many. Make each result clearly measurable, and have a specific time frame. Here are some example results for a Sales Executive:

• Close $400K in sales revenue within assigned territory in fiscal year 2007.
• Identify and close 6 new customers within assigned territory in fiscal year 2007.
• Respond to all inbound leads within 24 hours.

Of course you have to also have the ability to accurately track each result. The point is that anyone — Employee, Manager, Mail Clerk — Should be able to easily know whether the result was accomplished or not.

Special Skills & Competencies

This is the area for any special requirements. If your new employee needs to have experience in Outsourcing to Far East Manufacturers or Oracle Database Administration, this is where that information goes. If your company uses some standard competencies like Good Communicator, Persuasive, Team Player, put them here if they are important to the job. If it’s not important leave it out!

Do you know the two competencies most associated with top talent?

• Resourcefulness - The ability to find a way to get something done.
• Self Awareness - Accurate understanding of their strengths and weaknesses. They will also know how to leverage their strengths and compensate for their weaknesses.

The Performance Benchmark is the cornerstone for any company that is serious about great performance. Use it to evaluate both existing employees and potential candidates.

I've already told you about how important it is to have Performance Benchmarks to hire the right person.

How to create a Performance Benchmark

There are three key sections:

Purpose - Overall, why are your hiring a person for this role?

Results - What results do you expect a great employee to produce?

Skills & Competencies - What special skills or other characteristics would a great employee need?

Performance Benchmark - Purpose

Why are you hiring someone for this role? Answer like this: “The ROLE NAME at COMPANY exists to ________.”

As an example: “The CEO of MyCo exists to grow the company by 15% per year while maintaining 20% profitability.”

Keep it simple and don’t try to cram everything in there. Sure, you want your CEO to maintain compliance with relevant laws, avoid lawsuits, develop people, and a bunch of other stuff. But, what do you really care about? Be Straight! This isn’t the place to sound good or sell the candidate. Having a clear purpose sets the context for the job, creates clarity, and helps you get started defining the results you want.

Next, we’ll look at defining and specifying results.

The Performance Benchmark sets the standard for the job in terms of specific results!

To hire the right people, start with a good Performance Benchmark. If you don't know what results you want, you're much less likely to have a hiring failure.

With a good performance benchmark, you can double your hiring success!

• It’s work to think clearly. Muddled, imprecise thinking is easy. Clear, sharp thinking takes a little work. Not a lot, but enough that we don’t do it sometimes.
  
  
• Managers have to take responsibility for doing their job. What if all the employees meet their benchmarks, but the group doesn’t? That means the manager didn’t see to it that everything was assigned and communicated. It’s easier to leave things vauge, so you can always blame someone else for the lack of results.
  
  
• People sometimes resist being measured — At least at first. Employees quickly start to appreciate clear expectations. And they get a sense of accomplishment from beating the benchmark.
  
  
• What do you think? Please leave a comment if you know other reasons.

OK, hopefully you’re thinking “I’m convinced I should use Performance Benchmarks”!

Read on and learn how to Create a Performance Benchmark ...

Advanced Marketing Analytics (AZ501)

Interpreting your customers’ online buying behavior is not always obvious. Good sales results require an in depth understanding of their most pressing needs and wants. Some businesses focus so much on gorgeous website design, they overlook what’s most important – the data. A pretty page may be pleasing to the eyes, but if it lacks data that helps solve peoples’ problems, who cares? At the end of the day, building a website around the needs of your customers is what expands your customer base. What’s the key to knowing their needs? Knowing their intent. Web analytics tools will help you with this.

In his blog article about understanding consumer behavior with web analytics, Google’s analytics guru, Avinash Kaushik discusses how to identify customer intent. He poses 4 key questions you should answer about your website:

1. How did your visitors arrive?

Some visitors stumble upon your website by entering keywords in a search engine. Others enter via referral links. Web analytics provide you with a list of URLs that referred traffic to your site. Correlating conversions with specific referring URLs helps to identify which sites are sending you traffic with high conversion rates. Knowing which sites your customers are being referred from also helps you understand more about their interests and motivations.    

2. What are your visitors looking for?

Search engines now guard keyword data much more than in the past. Still, with a little detective work, you can get a good idea.

If you don't have Google Webmaster tools setup, go do it right now. It's the only way you can reliably get clues about what your visitors want. 

First, identify your high traffic pages. Then, look them up in webmaster tools and see which keywords are sending traffie to each page. You may be surprised and get ideas on how to tune your pages and your copy.

3. Where are visitors landing, bouncing, and viewing?

Visitors enter your website through many different entry points, not just your homepage. Analytics alert you to which landing pages visitors frequent most. If certain pages are popular with visitors, you may want to consider developing them further for even greater results. Similarly, isolating your most unpopular pages alerts you to the ones that require more optimization.  

Analytics also tell you which pages have the highest bounce rates – pages where visitors landed, looked around then left quickly. This is a clear sign that your page is not meeting customer expectations. Optimize it so it caters to their interests!

4. What are your website’s trends over time?     

Identifying performance trends is another valuable feature of analytics tools. They enable you to segment your data over timelines – you can pinpoint which days of the week or time intervals from which products sold best.

I've been reminding clients that trying to use tricks in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is at best a waste of time. Here's one reason why! Google just announced a crackdown on content farms that have a lot of poor or duplicated content.

Image By: warrantedarrest

Sites with meaty, original content are not affected by the changes in Google's algorithm. But, people who have been trying to use SEO tricks to manipulate the search results just lost out!

Google has an army of highly intelligent PhD's who spend all day, every day working to deliver the most relevant information to their customers -- People who are searching the web looking for information or answers to their problems.

I know some SEO companies claim to have secret methods for making a page rank highly on Google. These tricks may work for a little while, but ultimately just waste your time and money.

Simply, there's a better way. It's not as sexy as the tricks are, but will deliver a good ROI over the long term. The answer?  Consistently create relevant content that addresses the needs of your target persona.

Business blogging is a perfect way to regularly create the needed content. Over time, you'll build up a library of relevant, valuable articles that your target customers can find via Google.

Sure, you want to optimize your posts and build links, too. Just do it in the right way -- By adding value for your audience!

If you want to know more, there's plenty of information on the details of Google's change to eliminate low-quality content.

Have you been burned by trying to use SEO tricks? Please leave a comment and let me know.

Lately, I've answered several questions about how to select a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) vendor like this one from Ernest on LinkedIn. That's always a good cue to write about the topic.

SEO is a very broad topic, and many companies are better at one aspect than another. Here are the steps I recommend:

1. Define your business goals. I know you want traffic, but why and what kind of traffic? If this isn't clear, you can end up with pages ranked high on Google, but little new revenues. Your SEO suppliers did ask these questions -- Right?
   
   Search Engine Optimization results come over time, and you want to create a long-term relationship with a trusted advisor.
2. Go to WebsiteGrader and run a report on your website and some of your key competitors. It's free and it will make recommendations on where your problems are.
   
   Here's a trick. Run a Website Grader on your SEO vendor candidates to see if they have room for improvement!
3. Do you mostly need to expand your keywords, create more content, optimize existing content, or build inbound links? Are these the strengths of your SEO suppliers?
4. Pick a good framework for your website. This is often missed and it can put a drag on your efforts.
   
   Personally, I use Hubspot because it save me time and helps me get quick results.

And, avoid the tricky SEO guys -- You know the ones who focus on gimmicks and other ways to make pages rank highly. Effective SEO isn't complex, but it takes real work! There are a lot of details to get right.

On LinkedIn,  Simran Gupta asked about strategies to increase conversion rates on a website. Unfortunately, when you ask the question this way, people start thinking about eBooks, opt-in forms, email marketing, and all the other tactics that live in the world of online marketing.

Image By: HikingArtist.com

Serve Your Prospects to Increase Conversion

What I see all the time, is that effective online lead generation isn't about the tactics - Chat panels, inquiry forms, or any of the web widgets you might put on your site.

Instead, focus on your prospects. What are they really looking for? How do they define their problem? Show that you care and are available to help and the opt-ins will flow in.

Steps to Increase Conversion Rates

1. Develop a persona that personalizes and describes your ideal prospect. Give your persona a name and a personality.
2. Research keywords to have a great idea what keywords your target persona would use when searching for a solution.
3. Create valuable web content that educates your target persona, and helps them solve their problems. Blogging is an excellent way to create content and get found on the Internet.
4. Create relevant offers for your visitors - Report downloads, eBooks, etc. The important thing is not the tactic of having a PDF download. What is important is having valuable and relevant information to download.
5. Add relevant Call To Action opt-in buttons to your content so your visitors can provide their email address and learn more.
6. Continue to follow-up to add value and educate.

Takeaways

• Add value and help your prospects and the opt-ins will follow.
• Focus on knowing your prospects and helping them solve their problems.
• Don't worry about the specific technologies

Do you agree or disagree? Leave a comment and let me know.

Research shows that images help your blog post attract comments. They also give you another way to get found through search engines. In a previous article, I showed you how to find images on Flickr for your business blog. 

After you find an interesting image, you still need to manage it correctly to maximize the inbound marketing benefits.

To download the image from Flickr and add it to a blog post:

1. Find an image on Flickr as we did before.
2. Still in Flickr, click the Actions button, and select View all sizes.

1. Click the size that fits your situation. I picked Medium - 375 x 500.
2. Click Download the Medium size of this photo and save it somewhere convenient.
3. Rename the image file like this: put-your-keywords-here.jpg. Of course, you'll use your keywords.
4. Upload the image to your blog and insert the image into a post.
5. Make sure to place your keywords in the Alt text for the image. Depending on the look you want float the image to the left, right, or center.

WARNING: Don't try to overstuff your keywords either in the image file name or in the Alt text. Keep it simple; just use the one or two relevant keywords.

Here's a video showing the best ways to upload the image to your Hubspot or other blog for maximum Inbound Marketing benefit.

Do you have other tips on using images in blogs? Leave an idea in the comments!

Make Your Business Blog More Interesting Images make your blog much more interesting. Having Images in your business blog is a best practice both for the entertainment of your readers and to improve your inbound marketing and obtain a better search engine position. Look at this image. Doesn't it add color and interest to this blog post? The right image will be both beautiful and interesting for readers and will help emphasize your message.

Photo By tiarescott

1. Visit the Attributions License search page to find a suitable image. This license means that you can use the image as long as you provide attribution through a link. Thanks to HubSpot, here are some other great sources of free images.
2. Always identify your target keywords first, before writing your post. Then, search for an image that emphasizes the key point of your blog post.
3. I started with a search for "freedom," and ended up with a search for "island sail" before finding an image I liked.
4. Watch the video, and then learn how to add the image to your blog.

What's your best idea for finding images for your blog post?

Blogging, when done consistently, delivers SEO magic. Google and the other search engines love relevant content. A blog with regular posts will move you up in the search engines and get your company found.

How to Blog Effectively for Business (GF101):

• Know your audience, their needs, problems, and pain.
• Develop a persona that represents your audience. More on: How to Create Personas.
• Be the Expert for solving your audience's problems.
• Ask for comments in your blog post & start a conversation.
• Use social networks to listen and see what people want to talk about.

Professors: Ann Handley & Mack Collier, MarketingProfs