Each market is different and has its own personality, culture and potential for growth. Your first impression needs to match what the market expects and requires. This involves preliminary travel, researching local market trends, making introductions to their equal to a chamber of commerce, local authorities, and government officials to determine how to proceed. Ensure you start test marketing your product or service to get a feel for how the market will respond. You may have to change your offering to fit local needs.
#2: Do Hire Local
While your senior staff can initially be foreign, taking advantage of talented local staff, mentoring them while providing them with support and training will provide them with the tools to enable the local staff to lead and grow their market best. Identify partners, cultural exchange specialists, agent, “introducers” who can facilitate meetings for you locally. They’re worth the price. Understand that a “marketing executive” in the U.S. means something totally different in markets like India and Myanmar – they’re usually “customer service representatives” in these countries.
#3: Do Trust Your Local Staff, But Maintain Strict Oversight, at Least at First
Communication and expectations need to be extremely clear. Talking to someone face-to-face, with a head bobble here, a bow there, a gift here, a “yes” meaning “no”… cultures talking English to each other is still a mine field. There will be a LOT of frustration at first. Even emails can be misconstrued, especially when you never get a response when the local staff don’t have anything good to tell you – they may avoid you to save face. You need to be open but not necessarily direct in your demands for reports, meeting sales quotas, etc. Some markets don’t work that way, others handle it well. It’s your job to find the right staff on your end to liaison with your overseas staff. Once the language is clear on both ends expectations are usually met.
#4: Don’t Expect Countries Next to Each Other to Do Business the Same Way
Three countries: India, Pakistan and Myanmar. All three are distinctly different. Brand activation, product marketing, and business styles are so different as to seem to be from different planets. Burmese are very direct, yet impeccably polite. They are facilitators and will go out of their way to help you build your business. They understand partnerships, and in my experience are extremely fair. Indians never do business directly and are only outmatched by the Chinese as negotiators. They can kill you on profit margin to the detriment of the relationship. Pakistani’s are primarily relationship-driven. They need to know everything about you as a person, and more about your company, before they’ll entertain a meeting with you (and far preferable that you be male).
#5: Don’t Be Arrogant and Think You “Know” the Place
You never, ever will. Expats, foreign MNCs – they all work separately from the culture. We can’t be “immersed”, no matter what anyone says, unless we spend our formative years here. This is absolutely true and I can share with you my own son’s experience. An average American living in the midwest until the age of 13, he came to adulthood in India, speak brilliantly fluent Hindi and counseled me on etiquette there. I made big mistakes in my communication. He’d function in India similarly to an Indian national. I never will be able to function here with that level of understanding.
With that in mind, emerging markets are changing where the money is right now and that will continue to evolve over the next twenty years. As global companies advance into new territories to take advantage of these markets, they need to act smart, face that the way they’ve done business in the past may not work in new markets, and stay open and nimble to adapt to developing markets. It’s how you’ll change the world.
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Recognizing star players in your organization seems like a simple process. Typically as boss, you make an announcement, everyone cheers and maybe pieces of cake are distributed. Then everyone goes back to their desks.
Some of your employees may have been upset and you may not have noticed. The person recognized may have been mortified and you may not have noticed. Others may not have wanted to clap or cheer, but merely went through the motions. Recognition can demotivate just as well as the lack of it in the first place.
Begin By Learning How to Recognize Your Star Players Their Way
Question: As a boss, have you ever asked your star players how they would prefer to be recognized? As part of building a genuine relationship with your employees, you may find that having 1:1 interviews with your star players will help you gain insight on what keeps them motivated in your organization, as well as what they like and dislike about their jobs, the company and… you. Yes, you. No boss is infallible. We’re human beings who have bad days, heavy workloads and sometimes we don’t take the time to really know and understand our team members.
Recognition should be matched to the preferences of the person who earned it. For example, one CEO I know loves to gives “high-fives” for placements. If a person earns additional placements, the “high-five dance” gets more complicated, including a final chest-bump. When a female employee earned five placements one month, the CEO mentioned that he’d never had to do the high-five dance with a woman before, and everyone laughed. The CEO suggested they do a hip-check instead, but the woman was still quite embarrassed. When I spoke to her, she said, “I’m never going to get five placements in a month again.” She would have preferred a nice email or personal call from the CEO instead.
There are many ways to recognize your star players and IMHO, never use money except as part of a company- or department-wide incentive plan that is shared by all team members. There are many issues to this: a) once you start giving to one, others will expect the same, b) there is the issue of diminishing returns, requiring upping the amount to continue momentum and excitement, and c) intrinsic gratification is far more durable and reinforcing than any extrinsic recognition you provide.
I once heard a story from Sherri Merbach, Managing Director of C-Suite Analytics, who shared the following story of when she asked one gent about how he liked to be recognized.
“He pulled out his wallet and extracted a frayed, worn and yellow scrap of paper and unfolded it. It was a hand-written note from his first boss who had been very happy with his work and said he expected great things from him. He’d had that piece of paper for over 20 years.”
Why Others Can Be Upset About Recognition
Sometimes when public recognition is announced, you may notice some people on the team reacting negatively to the announcement. You may want to have conversations with them as well in order to understand. Sometimes it is simple jealousy or lack of maturity, but other times, you may learn that the star player you’re recognizing publicly may not have actually earned it.
In my experience, I have also found that many star players may not have the social attributes that ally them easily to team play. They may be so focused on the goals that they don’t even realize that they have burned team members by forgetting to recognize their parts in their success or actually taking credit for other people’s work. (Even Jennifer Lawrence forgot to thank her director when accepting her Oscar.) If the project was a long and complicated program that required a number of people managing several different moving parts, you may want to recognize the entire group as whole instead of just its leader. You may also want to counsel your star players in how they accept recognition and how mentioning individual team members and their contribution would considerably improve any disengagement caused by previous events.
Now let’s address the cultural connotations of recognition. I recently read an article called “ Recognition: How it varies across 12 countries and their cultures”. While simplistic, we’ve noticed a few quirks in the dynamics working with cross-cultural teams. For example, we wanted to launch a new operational framework which would enable team members to grow their teams to a certain size and be automatically promoted in 45 days, without any manager approvals. We wanted to recognize the inventors of the project by making a statement. The Americans on the team thought the best way to make a statement was to line up all the managers in a row and cut their ties off in front of the entire company.
Well. You can imagine how our Indian managers reacted. It was considered a grossly unreasonable and insulting. A serious loss of respect. Without having discussed this with them, we would have created a real problem for our management team.
Creative Recognition Ideas
While getting up in front of the team or company and publicly announcing an achievement is great most of the time, here are a few more ways to recognize people and teams (and note — none of these cost much if anything other than time):
Company-Wide or Team-Wide Emails
A brief email explaining how the achievement affected the company and acknowledging the entire team and their efforts can be quite motivating. Cc:ing senior level staff can motivate them further.
Personal Emails
A brief personal email of thanks from a CEO can be extremely motivating, especially when it shows that the CEO is informed about the specifics of the achievement (no form letter will do). Personal is key.
Personal Phone Call
Picking up the phone and personally thanking someone can be the spark to a new relationship. Your star players may not need any recognition, but hearing from the CEO or other high level staff that they know and appreciate their work can go a very long way.
Handwritten Notes or Cards
As mentioned above, people will carry these with them. No one gets a hand-written note these days, except on a post-it-note. It doesn’t need to be fancy, the card doesn’t have to be expensive; it’s your words that count, so be inspirational and personal.
Printed Certificate
Some companies pass out milestone certificates for everything, from birthdays, work anniversaries, their wedding anniversaries, their spouse’s birthdays, children… the list goes on and on. However, for performance-related milestones, like certain number of widgets sold or achieving certain revenue targets, etc., producing and announcing them en masseduring a company meeting can reap wide benefits.
Coffee with the CEO or Other Leader
Depending on the size of your company, your CEO or another high-level leader on the team could take your star player for coffee. Having a seat at the table and providing your star players with a voice and a conduit to decision makers can be wildly successful.
How To Socialize Recognition Using the Internet
Does your organization have a Facebook Page? LinkedIn Page? Examine your web site to see if there is a place for recognizing your star players. (I’ve been told, however, that publicizing your star players only gets them poached. I disagree. Great people stay with great leaders. If your star players are leaving, look within your leadership.)
We have video walls which feature all sorts of employee recognition from clients, from team leads, even fellow team members. We celebrate their work anniversaries and birthdays as part of our daily news update. We celebrate when someone gets a new house, car or phone (or baby!).
We select two star sourcers and two star recruiters each month and while what is presented on our web site is minimal, the email and monthly company-wide Board Report presentation has more details on why they were selected. These are always announced by the COO.
We recognize and tag employees on social media as well when we recognize them. This enables friends of the employee to congratulate them, family members to share their pride with others, and hopefully improves our online brand while engaging our employees in a meaningful way.
Recognition is delicate and not a one-size fits all methodology. As you progress in management, you will find less and less time to do these activities, but finding the time to recognize your staff in the way they would prefer will reap enormous benefits in employee engagement, productivity, and internal recruiting (your star players will recommend you to their friends whom we hope will become star players as well).
What recognition strategies have you tried? What worked and what didn’t? Please share your thoughts in the comments below. Cheers.
My entire career has been focused on startups and small to medium-sized businesses that are anxious to take their company to the next level. IMHO, I have been quite successful in setting strategy to ensure that we take the necessary steps to take the company to the founder’s exit strategy, whether that be selling the business, going IPO, or just growing the business to the next level as a private concern. My strategies usually coincide with investor deadlines – three to five years.
Why Entrepreneurs Can Be Fun or Cause You to Have a Nervous Breakdown
Entrepreneurs are different from the rest of us. I’m not an entrepreneur, but I’ve co-founded a company and I understand their psyche. They’re risk takers and they’re willing to give up most of their life – family, reputation, and money, to make their concern viable. They’re focused on a particular idea that means something to them personally. Other entrepreneurs pick their moment, building a company in one direction, nimbly changing their entire strategy when they see things aren’t going to be successful. They make hard decisions, take calculated risks, rented out part of their office space in order to make payroll, anything to keep their business profitable. I admire these gentlemen (and they’ve always been gentlemen for me) because I’m not that type of risk taker and I’m jealous of that, because, while I have an entrepreneurial spirit, I prefer to work with my heroes throughout these long years. I’m a good partner for them because I’m completely in tune with them. I want to help them succeed and have the track record to prove it. Since 1991 or so. But you have to be flexible. You have to be able to work in chaos. I am sometimes called the Goddess of Chaos. I can handle it. A lot of people can’t. These guys can be ferocious, temperamental, and abusive, but also highly creative, engaging do-ers. It also helps if they have personal charm and a sense of humor. 🙂 They’ll need it to make it past Mistake #1.
#1: Dealing with Employees
I’ve worked with maybe 100 companies overall, in the U.S. and India, and there is a distinct juncture where I’ve seen them fail, and it has to do with employees. They started their companies by themselves and did everything. They think they know what they’re doing and feel they know best what is good for their company. But now that they have employees, it’s not just them anymore.
They fail when they don’t take the leash off their senior staff that they hire. They need to trust them to do their jobs effectively. Good entrepreneurs aren’t ego driven. They hire the best, and as my first CEO said to me, “You’ll get enough rope to hang yourself.” He threw me into a job I did not have much experience in and I learned while running. We did great work and he has always been the entrepreneur that I compare all the rest to. He was a serial entrepreneur. He wanted to sail the world with his family and I helped him get there. He wanted to sell the company in order to make this dream happen. We succeeded, but as all people know during an acquisition, your internal Finance and Marketing people go first. Everyone who buys a company wants control over finances and the marketing strategy. They always think they know better. I know, when this is the CEO’s exit strategy, that this is the death of my future for the company and it’s okay. He protected me and I survived another year beyond him. I love that guy to this day.
Entrepreneurs need to hire the best possible people as their second-in-commands across their company, Finance, Operations, R&D, Marketing. They need to trust these people, who typically are experts in their fields, with experience beyond the CEO’s companies, to provide strategies for growth and containment of costs while producing the maximum return on investment. They’ve learned best practices. They know how to hire the right people to meet objectives. Even with an MBA, an entrepreneur can be a fool. They can be total control freaks, focusing on small purchases instead of the big picture. Focusing on introducing new product lines that that don’t work with all the investment in branding done over the previous years.
#2: Focusing on Ego Instead of the Business
I’ve had CEOs who wanted speaking engagements on the world stage that could not speak proper English and that English was in a heavy accent. They did their presentations as sales engagements, angering the people I convinced to add him to their agenda. They were unfit for this limelight, yet insisted on being the voice of the company in spite of it consistently hurting the company’s image. What do you do with a boss, who was once described as “just a farmer in a fancy suit”? He’s your boss, he’s ego-driven, surrounded by sycophants who tell him he’s always right – there is no way to constructively discuss his personal issues.
Other entrepreneurs leave people in positions that they’re really not capable of accomplishing and this has to do with longevity and loyalty, which are probably the hardest aspects for a CEO. If a person comes on board as your first employee, sharing your risk, believes in you, wants to do their best, but doesn’t have the experience to take the company forward, it’s hard on all sides. CEOs are loathe to replace these people, but they have to consider it a business decision. Businesses have no emotions. They look at the numbers. They look at the skill sets. If the CEO doesn’t have that particular skill set to mentor them in the position and the person hasn’t taken formal training to move themselves forward, it’s time to part ways. Many people in traditional, large companies rely on this, and stay successful while impeding the progress of the company.
#3: Short Term Thinking
Entrepreneurs are best at making it happen and sometimes, when trying to make payroll for example, they’ll take on a customer that is not part of their core business. While in some instances, this can create a whole new revenue stream or radically change the company’s core business, it usually backfires in the long run. It ends up using valuable resources of the company in areas of expertise that may not be on par with customer expectations.
Whenever cash flow becomes an issue, many entrepreneurs cut back on marketing programs that support the sales staff. Sales is the life blood of the company. Without sales revenues no one has a job for long. Marketing needs to support that sales funnel and ensure a healthy flow of qualified prospects are coming in. Sometimes Marketing has to work smarter, think differently, approach prospects in a different way at a lower cost. Work with your marketing staff before canceling that trade show or that film piece. There may be compelling reasons to keep that in the mix, while discontinuing printing 100,000 40-page catalogs every year. Let the individual departments come up with ideas of ways to cut costs and increase return on investment.
When going IPO, CEOs can focus on the short term gains in order to “make their quarters”. In the States, going IPO means a series of quarterly growth showing continuing gains. I spent a lot of time convincing CEOs that we need to take a hit now and focus on the product development before we do another marketing thrust, because “you don’t want to invite people to dinner, in a dirty home with no food to offer.” These CEOs ended up in difficult situations, lots of bad press and reviews, SEC warnings about their communications during the “black period”, all considerably hurting their initial offering price. Sometimes they need to wait, fix what’s broken, then move forward, even if it means taking a bit longer to achieve their dream.
#4: Know-it-All Syndrome
As I said before, entrepreneurs started their companies by themselves and did everything. They think they know what they’re doing and feel they know best what is good for their company. At some point, with some companies, they’ve lost focus, started facing month-over-month decline, watched newcomers enter the market and gobble up market share, or the industry itself starts to change in unanticipated ways. Sometimes staffing is an issue – too many, not enough. They come to a point where they have no clear answer and they need outside help.
I come in as a game changer. It’s a tough job. Restructuring teams and companies is probably the most difficult job you can have in business. Entrepreneurs need outsiders, advisors, people not inside their company, that can look at their business without any emotion. The company will tell me their goals and challenges, which is what I have to work with, and I need to put the right people in place across the teams to ensure we meet those goals. It’s never pretty. It’s always tough saying goodbye to people you genuinely like and wish you had a place for. You have to thank those who accepted positions that were less than they had before and see them become stellar in those new positions. You have to strive to be the best and be that role model for your teams and respect your entrepreneur. He took the most risk. He made this happen. He’s responsible for your job. In the end, if he/she trusts you, it can be very, very successful. It’s all up to him (or her!).
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Many companies in emerging markets try, and some succeed, in developing markets overseas, but they face stiff competition and outdated stereotypes (sometimes not so outdated). Asian craftsmanship has made considerable improvements over the past few years. More and more companies are being certified as ISO-9000 companies. Their quality can be comparable to anything manufactured in […]
Backlinks from high quality web sites boost SEO rankings as as well as can potentially drive a very significant amount of traffic to your web site. All you may need is one Kardashian to dramatically change the traffic figures on your web site (But choose your Kardashian or Key Opinion Leader (KOL) carefully).
Exactly what is “Founder Exit Strategy”? Long ago, I discovered that being successful meant always planning all activities with a focus on what the entrepreneur plans to do with the business in the end. Does he want to take it public? Is she planning on a short exit through selling the organization? Do they plan to bequeath the business to their heirs? This is what I call founder exit strategy.
February 18, 2019 – YANGON, MYANMAR: ibuildcompanies.com is very pleased to announce that they will be moving their headquarters to Singapore. With 15 years of experience in the U.S., 10 years in India and nearly two years in Myanmar assisting companies as they scale and achieve their founders’ exit strategies, moving to Singapore uniquely positions ibuildcompanies.com with a broader reach for their expansion plans.
Jeanne Heydecker, Founder and CEO of ibuildcompanies.com, said, “We took this decision to facilitate a closer, more centralized working relationship amongst the team, provide easier travel and visa issues for employees and clients, and have regular meetups.” She went on to say, “The entrepreneurial spirit found in Singapore matches more closely with ibuildcompanies.com’s mission and the business infrastructure suits our consulting services in a way we could not achieve as successfully in emerging markets. While we will continue to focus on emerging markets as their leaders develop and learn the importance of timely and efficient management consulting, we feel well positioned to continue to support our existing clients while expanding into other emerging markets as they become ready for our proprietary innovation, leadership development, and change management programs”.
Jeanne went on to say, “Our goal is to become the “in-house” creative agency for tech incubators and accelerators supporting their funded companies across Southeast Asia. With a monthly retainer fee from the incubator/accelerator, all their funded companies can seek business advice, design and writing services as well as assistance in planning their product launches, create memorable events, and more at very affordable prices. We believe our business model is unique and creates a real win-win for both the incubator/accelerator and their investments. We bring quality and innovation to everything we do and it shows.”
About ibuildcompanies.com
Our passion is to build effective, responsive and productive teams that maximize your profits. We specialize in taking companies to the next level through digital transformation, traditional and internet marketing, and business consulting services. We can design anything from buildings to business cards. We can write anything from blog posts and press releases to technical manuals and sales catalogs. We are experts with Adobe InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop, and also know our way around Google’s office applications along with Microsoft Office 365/Live. We build web sites with WordPress and Shopify. We are an affordable one-stop shop.
The following services are available for startups and small businesses across India, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore:
Corporate Strategy: We can provide stakeholder surveys/focus groups and audits to build your business to achieve corporate goals – from cutting costs and maximizing revenues to creating new sales channels, new applications for existing products or services, to developing new value-add services/products to extend inventory potential, and strategic alliances and partnerships that facilitate symbiotic sales relationships within complementary industries.
Talent Acquisition Consulting: Upgrade your candidate experience to hire better people more quickly and retain employees longer. We can review your talent acquisition process and create a quality program that includes training interviewers, standardized interview processes and scoring rubrics, suggestions on new benefits, and on-boarding programs. We also have experience in using social media to create an insider’s view of your company to attract new recruits.
Leadership Development Program: ibuildcompanies.com offers a16-hour program with a one-month business idea planning and presentation for C-level staff to assess and invest in prototypes. The final month is an intensive program that requires a team of four to present a pitch, SWOT, financial projections, and a launch plan. Once funded, the team has one year to create a a proof-of-concept and show profit. During that time frame, the team has weekly meetings with the Mentor to go over what’s working and what’s not and create solutions to stay the course to success.
Launch Strategy: Got-to-Market strategy and launch execution of companies and products/services. ibuildcompanies surveys the existing landscape and assists in determining your unique sales proposition, the alerting the press and key opinion leaders as to the launch of the product or service. The plan to attract buyers is created with your team using traditional and online marketing based on your marketing budget. We will train your marketing team in social media, create web sites, and corporate social media pages and email campaigns to get your company or product/service launched.
Brand Management: From logo design and brand guidelines to visual imagery and web components, we can ensure all visuals and your content’s “voice” reflect your brand properly.
Events Management: Concept creation, venue selection, budgeting, promotion, build and strike, as well as media, and key opinion leader/social media influencer management to create memorable events for employees, clients, media and key opinion leaders.
Design: Building office interiors, billboards, bus wraps, print ads, merchandising, sales and marketing collateral to business cards. Seriously, we can design anything.
Writing: Blogs, advertising and case studies to white papers, technical writing and books. Most of this content typically requires a fluent native English speaker to create content. Most companies in Asia typically don’t have that person. We do. We can hire translators to translate the content into any number of languages you require.
Web Design: We are highly skilled in building web sites, specializing in user interfaces and user experience design in WordPress and Shopify. We’ll write the content, create the imagery, execute photo sessions – everything you need to get a web site up fast.
Social Media Management: ibuildcompanies can create and maintain social media company pages, develop content strategy, post updates, escalation matrices and a standardized “voice” and content for frequently asked questions. We can also train your team in how to do this themselves after working with us for a few months.
Email Marketing: We can create email campaigns, use A/B testing and build out landing pages to maximize your prospect list’s engagement. We are capable of building out a web site, that automatically updates your social media pages, and then sends out a weekly or monthly email newsletter that shows snippets of all your new blog posts. All you need do, once set up, is write the blog posts (we’d be happy to do that too).
Internet Marketing: ibuildcompanies is highly skilled at online advertising, programmatic advertising native advertising, advertorials, link exchange, affiliate programs and videos.
About Jeanne Heydecker, Founder and CEO
Jeanne Heydecker has 25+ years as an entrepreneurial marketing and technology executive. With a sound understanding of general management and a global mindset, along with strong creative and conceptual abilities, Jeanne moved from Chicago to India in 2007 to work with a number of Indian firms marketing to the West, including a ComScore 1000 web site.
Jeanne is an American citizen who has worked full-time in India for the past ten years with marketing, talent acquisition, professional development, and operations teams to help ensure local firms meet international quality levels. She has become an expert on international business and training international teams, with significant expertise in setting strategic direction and proven effective execution especially in the startup stage.
Ms. Heydecker has worked Myanmar since 2011, a fast moving greenfield market, to develop their telecom industry while at the Shyam Group of Telecom Companies. She moved permanently to Myanmar in 2017 to continue taking companies to the next level. With the company now headquartering in Singapore, Jeanne will be moving there full-time with an expectation to be traveling across the region to service our customers.
Jeanne has successfully launched new companies, products, and services. She executed the launch of the first unified CTI messaging software for small business which was sold to Nokia for US $56M in 1998. Jeanne was instrumental in executing the launch of the world’s smallest closed loop motion control system, which eventually sold to the GSI Group for US $54M. Her first mission in India was to facilitate US investment and upgrade 123greetings.com to take the company to IPO on the Bombay Stock Exchange. Her latest major launch was introducing the world to the first entirely solar-powered mobile telecom and broadband internet network for India’s Shyam Telecom Group that now has systems deployed on five continents. She is am exemplary leader and mentor that identifies the gold in her team members and is able to make it shine. For recommendations about her work, please review her recommendations on LinkedIn.
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Internet marketing includes all sorts of components and the complexities of understanding your target audiences, trends, new technologies, new ways to engage online… it can be exhausting to any internet marketer.
Internet Marketing encompasses a number of discrete disciplines ranging from SEO (Search Engine Optimization), SEM (Search Engine Marketing), Link Exchange, Blog Marketing, SMM (Social Media Marketing), and Online Advertising, among others. Before anyone embarks on this effort, your existing web site and social media pages should be carefully evaluated to see if tweaks to the existing sites are enough or if your sites will require a complete redesign to maximize the return on investment.
Imagine you’re having a dinner party. You’re investing in invitations, calls, maybe follow up calls and reminders to ensure your guests will arrive. But once they arrive, there’s nothing for them to do, there’s no food or liquor (the horrors!), and maybe they keep trying to open doors that go nowhere. Not a nice experience. Are you doing this to your prospects when they visit your internet properties?
As part of this process, establish a baseline of analytics. Big word – basically just means data. You don’t need a lot, but these are pretty important to establish before you launch anything new.
Important Baseline Data to Collect:
TRAFFIC: Total unique visitors
TIME ON SITE: This is the metric that Facebook is famous for. Time on Site shows visitors are reading and engaging. You want this as high as possible.
% LOCATIONS: % of visitors from specific regions – base this on where your business focus is.You may want to create certain regions, countries, states, cities and follow their growth separately.
% BOUNCEBACKS: To determine the amount of traffic that showed up, realized your site wasn’t what the were searching for and left.
KEYWORDS: Self-determined. Where do you rank when searching for your SEO keyword terms via google, bing, yahoo? Cross match this with what organic searches are actually driving traffic, but eliminate all keywords built on brand or company names (for this purpose).
FACEBOOK FANS: # fans who’ve liked your Facebook Page. You could also mention #messages by non employees to measure engagement.
LINKEDIN MEMBERS: # members to your Linkedin Company Page and/or Group.
TWITTER FOLLOWERS: # members to your Twitter Profile, and sweet fancy moses, make sure you get some sort of twitter verification service to keep spammers out of your follower list. You want real traffic from real people.
SMM TRAFFIC: By reading your analytics, you can determine the source for traffic by searching for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and the rest of the social media and web sites. Break these out by site. You can also see what type device people are accessing your pages from, since most social media has separate sites for mobile, tablets, and apps.
BACKLINKS: You want to know who and what quality sites are linking back to your site. This gives you credibility to search engines.
Establish Measurable Goals:
Examples:
Drive traffic to the web site, increasing unique visitors by 10% each month. (EX: Month 1=100, Month 2=110, Month 3=121)
Drive international traffic to the sites, to ultimately eclipse domestic traffic. Increase international traffic by 10% each month.
Decrease the bounceback from 78% to 45% of visitors within six months.
Increase the search keyword universe to include organic search terms beyond branding – 2 additional non-brand keywords or phrases added to top 100 search terms each month.
Increase fans/members/followers to social media sites by 5% each month.
Demonstrate traffic increases from social media efforts – increase traffic sources from social sites by 5% each month.
Increase backlinks by 20 per month.
Phase One:
Get your house in order. Fix your web site to include add-ons that enable the company to offer interactive content and engagement activities for visitors to your web site. Any redesign should focus on the user experience, facilitating the user’s need to fulfill their information requirements and enable ease in communicating with you.
Search Engine Optimization:
Search engine specialists optimize sites for specific keywords and engines so that the sites will rise through the ranks and appear on the first page of search results on Google and Yahoo!.You can either hire an external SEO firm to ensure that our sites can be found on high-ranking relevant web sites all over the Internet, hire an in-house expert if you plan to drive most of your revenue from your site, or try it yourself. You’ll figure out that one or the other will probably suit your needs best in the long run.
Incorporating search engine friendly design and content strategies will improve search engine rankings and drive more traffic to your web site. Optimization is the practice of refining and reworking the content and tags on individual pages and graphic files in order to facilitate a search engine’s spider software to evaluate the web sites’ contents as more applicable to certain keywords and categories.
This includes optimizing titles, meta tags, alt tags, keyword tags, comments, and file names to add an increase in rankings. Individual pages are tweaked for more specific phrases. Keyword density is measured and improved where possible. Site architecture is structured to assist the spiders in listing every page of your site. Many other tasks are done, all with the achievement of a higher-ranking score as the goal. All pages will be optimized for search engine ranking and include google analytics for web site traffic analysis.
When stakeholders are satisfied with work, work with your ISP to relaunch the site. You may want to submit your site to google with an .xml file of your content. It may get your site reviewed more quickly.
After this, the real work starts. The next post will introduce some basic Internet Marketing principles. See you then.
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Most SEO companies you hire will demand content, and lots of it, in order to generate the high SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) you demand. You can buy content, or hire freelancers or full time staff, but are your long term goals being met by all this content being spread across the “interwebs”? What exactly are you accomplishing?
In the short term, this plan can be effective, but in the long term, you may end up driving untargeted traffic that only wastes bandwidth. For example, one company I worked for targeted the keywords, “signal enhancement” and a majority of the content generated focused on these keywords. Because “enhancement” can be paired with other words, most notably “pen*s”, we drove a lot of traffic from the search engines for “pen*s enhancement”.
Watch for any keywords that may be paired with porn or gambling casinos, as they can unfairly keep you from generating the rankings you desire. Most blackhat SEO companies utilize similar word pairings as clickbait to drive traffic to their sites from unsuspecting surfers.
To battle this, a company should put in place a content strategy plan, along with an editorial calendar, that focuses on your entire set of keywords, from top ten to long tail, to ensure that your content is written FOR the user, not the search engines. It should meet BOTH criteria – keyword frequency and information for the reader that is engaging, informative and serves their needs. Creating content is time consuming but good quality content is worth the time and effort. It establishes you as an expert in your field. It showcases the depth of your company’s experience and knowledge.
A typical methodology is to have one person write the content with a user focus, a second person optimizing the content for a select keyword set, and an editor to ensure your content meets both needs.
Ultimately, it’s your visitors that are important. You need them to pick up the phone or place an order online in order to drive revenue. Keep this in mind as you build your content and your content will drive the right traffic to your site, keep them engaged, and act.
Do you want to outsource this type of work so that you can focus on higher level activities?Subscribe today to learn more about building your business and receive a free PDF “Process Plan for Creating Your Own Innovation Program”. Feel free to email us to learn more about how we can help you grow your business.
