Shepard Morrow

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Location Traffic: What to look for in an Internet Marketing Consultant

Most potential clients I talk to are so caught up in optimizing their sites and ranking number one, or getting a lot of traffic, that they don’t take the time to understand how searchers behave, how to engage with them, and how to turn them into customers.

When a potential client tells me they are already working with an SEO consultant, and they describe only a PPC program, I tell them how they are wasting resources by not learning from organic search optimization, by not gaining the core competency of how to make informed business and product strategy decisions from interacting with the online customer. After working with Location Traffic for a period of time a savvy business person will understand the monthly SEO/Marketing fee is no different than paying an employee to do marketing for their company. Targeting a specific customer profile, starting a dialogue, and converting those prospects into customers is an ongoing process. Why stop if sales leads are increasing, and more of those leads are becoming customers?

Search provides amazingly useful data about customer behavior, needs, and motivations. Businesses can benefit from using Search, both as a powerful customer acquisition channel and a rich source of market research.
 
Before you can start attracting visitors to your web site, you need to know who you are attracting and why. I always start with asking what the goals of the business and the goals of the web site are. From there, we can work backwards to who the company wants to attract to help them meet those goals, and then define the goals of that audience. With that information, we can build searcher personas, that start with understanding what the audience wants to accomplish and what they are searching for. Then as part of our digital branding we develop a "brand persona" that can interact with our defined audiences.

Once a company sees the value of building search and social media into their organizational tool kit, they need to seriously consider integrating the expertise into their business to manage these valuable resources as more than tactical expenditures. This can be done either by hiring an employee dedicated to this process, or retaining an Internet Marketing Consultant.

Location Traffic can build business websites that generate local leads from people searching for local resources. But more than just a website design, we create a dynamic marketing strategy that utilizes the internet for learning about your customers, and making effective Marketing decisions. This combined with more traditional data sources, such as cash register receipts, enables us to advise clients on a range of business improvements from:

•     Product Strategy
•     Advertising: Online and Off-Line
•     Event Planning
•     Audience Aggregation: Niche Targeting
•     Internet Marketing
•     In-Store Display and Signage
•     Digital Branding

Shepard Morrow, heads up Location Traffic. After 15 years in the Internet space, he has a unique and "out of the box" view on Internet Marketing, audience aggregation, business strategy, and working with owner operators to build profitable businesses. He has experience in retail, wholesale, and internet marketing and is able to provide marketing services that specialize in utilizing the internet for a primary marketing tool.

 

Service Sector: Realtors

Recent Article from my new site: Location Traffic - Internet Marketing

The real estate industry is undergoing change. This dynamic change is facing many industries, not just real estate. However, industries with a service sector focus are most at risk. This change is being fuelled by greater reliance on the web as a direct channel between buyers and sellers; whether that is airline tickets, books, financial services or real estate. Buyers and sellers demand information to enable them to take a driving seat and have more control.

When it comes to real estate, the first wave of change happened in the early part of the decade as listings moved online and provided the perfect environment for searching and browsing to find the dream home. That early adoption has now accelerated exponentially to over 80% of all real estate searches occurring online, decimating the print media. The second wave of impact on this industry has now begun. This change concerns the critical issue of securing prospective future business for real estate agents, which involves the presentation and evaluation of personal reputation and respect — how to be found and how to build value online.

It is about content, participation and innovation. We believe that things are changing and that “agents will not be replaced by technology, they will be replaced by agents with technology”.

Put simply, if you want to be successful in real estate, regardless of sector, location or experience, and are passionate about how to harness the power of the web, we can talk. If you feel that leaflet drops and newspaper advertising is your future, then maybe we are not talking the same future.

Most service industries are in a constant state of evolution and changes every day with technology, regulation changes, and economic challenges, never experienced by most of us.  You can either bury your head in the sand or dig in and get in the flow of change. We believe that adapting and learning new ways to do business will help brokers, managers, and agents stay ahead of the knowledge curve and strengthen their ability to survive this paradigm shift.  

So where do we begin? 

Understanding these new trends, and adapting to a more complex industry are musts for brokers, sales managers, and real estate agents. This also includes ancillary businesses like appraisers, mortgage originators, and title companies that have experienced massive change. Adapting to new business strategies that give quality service, and meet the demands of the e-consumer are a must. Developing an edge in today’s market requires that real estate practitioners develop competency in Blogging, Social Media, search engine marketing (SEM), and how to work with the online consumer once they contact you.

It is imperative that those real estate professionals who have come through this challenging market be fully prepared to take advantage of new steady growth that will be forthcoming. Consumers drive the industry and have always driven it, however today they are looking online first. Are they finding you when they go to Google, Yahoo or Bing? If not, you owe it to your family, company, and yourself to get on board and learn this business all over again.

These are several opportunities for realtors to use technology:

• Enhanced listings for sellers that list with you
• “Hub” website to promote or "brand" yourself
• Use of social media to participate, and build reputation
• iPad and cell phone apps to access real time info
• Good Customer Relationship Management for repeat business

You have to have an online presence, or hub, that is reflective of whom you are and your business practice. If an agent isn’t representing themselves online, where their potential clients are, certainly those potential clients are finding agents that are online.

All this said there are no silver bullets, no canned solutions. Anyone who says there are is misinformed. Our solutions are based on analysis of industry trends in a specific industry sector, definition of goals for a business, and knowing how to apply technology creatively to accomplish those goals.

Evolution of Publishing

Got a good laugh at this clever video that really describes the "New" consumer and the future of publishing.

The question that keeps resonating for me is one of timing, and to what extent technology and the advantage of cost reductions are leading this charge:

The technology and business models are new and changing rapidly. Take for example the Kindle (Amazon), the Nook (B&N), The reader (Sony), IPad-IPhone (Apple)... relatively new technologies with many improvements and standards still to come. Even the end product is evolving rapidly from straight text to a more interactive multimedia format.

Interesting how the consumer is willing to buy/test these devices, that become obsolete within a year. It is in the end a self fulfilling evolution. Certainly I have seen younger people and even the 50+ crowd try and love e-readers. These are indeed platforms that as we acclimate to them have a huge potential to deliver rich and varied content.

So what is the consumer going to respond to? Great content will test the edges of creativity, and technology. How we use the technology to create an engaging experience: part entertainment, highly relevant to the consumers immediate interest/need, and seamlessly available, will be the formula...

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TOC 2010: Tim O'Reilly, "The Future of Digital Distribution and Ebook Marketing"

This was a video keynote that describes the role of a publisher in this wave of technology change.

Concepts of Social Media, social intelligence, publishers and Authors.

"Create more Value than you Capture". Tim O'Reilly

"Your job as a publisher is to do things for Authors that they can't do for themselves". "More visibility for Authors than they can get themselves". Tim O'Reilly

"It is about the distribution channel to customers, that publishers create, manage, and make accessible to authors." Shepard Morrow

Publishing Industry Conference

Attended the “Tools of Change Publishing Conference” produced by O’Reilly in NYC last week. Probably the most exciting confirmation, and insight into the changes influencing the publishing industry, I have experienced. I came away asking myself “what is Tapestry Books”:

• Publisher? SAS
• Retailer?
• Producer? MAKE

Tremendous overlap, publishers running two businesses, one print one digital. New players that are developing software platforms for publishers to upload metadata, then provide access to consumers with a social component. Pricing models where these platforms charge publishers a % of sales, and a per product fee.

• Do publishers need/value access to niches and marketing they used to provide authors?
• Are those niches changing so rapidly that they MUST be in the hands of the social consumer to control?
• A niche as defined by a group of people with common interests that share like content.
• Is adoption, just a subset of parenting, large enough- probably NOT? But parenting is!

There is a strong call for author involvement in marketing their books. As publishers focus on repeat authors that have an existing mass audience, they are abdicating marketing and interest in publishing newer authors, and even second tier authors. Also the tools that authors need to be using are new to authors and they need to be taught how to use them. That was echoed at several workshops.

As producer selection of projects to be published needs a strategic plan across 3-5 years and to span different mediums, Transmedia storytelling. Web, TV, Movie, video games, iPhone …

“Entertainment that you want, with people you care about, and where ever you are.” Wow, that says it exactly.

“Deep media, persistent narrative, immersive storytelling, transmedia: right now, we are experiencing a moment of radical technological change, with seismic shifts in the way that entertainment is conceived, produced and distributed. Savvy companies and producers… are incubating concepts that are designed to captivate and interact with audiences across an array of media platforms.”

According to Henry Jenkins, author of the seminal text, Convergence Culture: "Transmedia storytelling is storytelling by a number of decentralized authors who share and create content for distribution across multiple forms of media. Transmedia immerses an audience in a story’s universe through a number of dispersed entry points, providing a comprehensive and coordinated experience of a complex story."

Greatest "fear" of most publishers was the backward integration of retailers into publishing.Why? Can you imagine the threat Amazon imposes? They have the relationship with the customer, not the publisher.

All comes down to the time it will take for large traditional publishers to adjust their legacy systems, refocus their mindset on the consumer, and reorganize their organizational structure VS. the rapid pace of competition and changing customer preferences.

There will be a lag... Inevitable that a buy VS. create decision is coming for many... Question of what will the business model look like in 3-5 years? I will go out on a limb and say that publishers will evolve to be more like media companies, creating multiple revenue streams from collaboratively developed content between publisher, and author.

Digital Media: winds of change in Publishing and Retail

The winds of change are sweeping through the publishing and media industries.  “In five years there will be no printed newspapers, nor printed books.” You can hear the murmur growing to a roar, just listen.

As a retail business selling books, Tapestry Books is in the center of this hurricane, feeling change all around, even as there is momentary quiet on the spot we sit. So what is it that is happening and why is it affecting so many industries? More important where are the next tunnels for Retail, Publishing, and Advertising?

It makes increasingly less sense to think about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solved, the complex, and expensive task of making information and content available to the public has stopped being a problem. Digital media has lowered the cost of content creation, and the internet has all but eliminated the costs and removed the barriers to entry of distributing the data, thus causing a shift in the organizational requirements away from those developed for industrial production, and mandating structures optimized for digital.

When the symbiotic nature of the relationship between advertisers, publishers and journalists is considered, one can begin to understand why these changes are having such an economically disruptive effect on many industries. Publisher content that has been advertising supported, is fragmenting as content creation and distribution becomes commoditized and highly targeted. The “targeted” or concentrated nature of the digital content is based in part on the consumption preferences of a population whose educational norm is towards specialization. As well, the journalistic value creation process that was once inspired by the knowledge that advertisers were supportive of the effort is now becoming available to everyone with access to the internet and the motivation to be heard.

• How can bookstores compete with online booksellers like Amazon, which practically give books away to achieve volume and sell other items? The answer appears to be that they can't. Bookstores across the country have been shutting down – and others may be near bankruptcy. Among publishing houses, the crisis is also building.

• In 2004, Google began scanning books from libraries all around the world, and making the texts available, for free, on the Internet. It has now scanned more than seven million books. At some point in the relatively near future, Googlebooks.com could become the largest library-and the largest bookstore-in the world. As recently as September 2009 Google announced a partnership to make those books, whose copyrights have expired, available through local print-on-demand kiosks.

• The market for e-books, although growing rapidly, is still less than one percent of the total publishing business: the introduction of the Kindle has raised fears among many booksellers that in the future, far fewer physical books are going to be printed. Digital books will probably never eclipse their physical counterparts. Still, the book business is being fragmented to such an extent that it will soon be difficult for large, independent, general interest bookstores to stay in business.

• With the growth of online it is no longer necessary to visit a physical store weekly to see what new products have been released. The shifting retail landscape, which once served as known distribution outlets through which publishers sold books and retailers offered shopping experiences, is being replaced by online retailers seeking channel control such as Amazon.

Digital, in some form, needs to be added to any retail mix, as it is becoming a required distribution medium; whether for a mobile device or for reasonably priced print-to-order capability.

Retail growth will depend on understanding how to serve a customer who, increasingly, includes digital shopping, digital discovery, and digital consumption in their lives.

Digital distribution over the internet is strengthening, rather than weakening, the ability of niches of specialized interest to organize, communicate and build membership through creating content and publishing. This is perhaps the single most exciting opportunity for companies with creative and technical intelligence to participate in for building their brand…

Niche Market Publishing

How a Book Retailer serves Visitors

Tapestry Books started as a catalog mail order business catering to the niche market for families that were formed  through Adopting a child. Today the online eCommerce business uses a Social Media model to identify and publish niche content for it's audience. Here is a nickle tour.

• From the online catalog of titles, that cover Adoption and Parenting topics, Tapestry mines orders, category views, and inquiries to identify potential topics where there is not enough current literature compared to interest.
• This then leads to queries and research on Facebook, Twitter, blogs or through a company  eNewsletter about a potential topic, or for possible writers on a topic.
• After articles are tested on a blog by letting readers vote and comment, Tapestry publishes a digital eBooklet, which again is measured for the number of readers interested.
• Finally Tapestry works with an author to bring a printed book to market.
• Not stopping there, Tapestry leverages its' marketing experience to brand and optimize the web platforms that the author uses to communicate about their topic.

Books themselves are nothing more than content in printed form. Tapestry can sell books, but today the goal is to provide Educational viewpoints by sponsoring interactions, or dialogues with moderators that can share experience, with the companies niche audience.