Manage Your Internet Marketing Campaigns with Raven Tools

An article by Trevor Merz, Analyst of BlitzLocal

I had the pleasure of using several tools from Raven, and spent more time playing with and using the features than writing this article.  Raven created a series of tools that research, analyze, and report based on links, paid search data, and ranking. Raven Tools also has a very nice social reputation management package that gives you complete control over your brand name through the dashboard.  Here are a few of my favorite features

• Keyword and Competitor Tools: Track brand related keywords, and those of your competitor.  Tracking data is relevant to AdWords  volume, ranking, and links.
• Research Assistant: One can easily research a domain, keyword, and page analysis using Raven’s research assistant.  There are also tools such as a keyword researcher and analyzer, an AdWords researcher, quality and design analyzer, Wordtracker, and SEMrush.
• Link Manager: Manage your links, organize leads, and make a directory of websites to better  keep track of important information.
• Content Manager: Measure the readability and density of links and keywords on the content you post to your website.  This tool can help anybody build meaningful content for their website.

Reporting:

User Manager: Similar to Google products, one can add accounts to share with whoever they want.  This is great for agency users in a company, so access can be shared across the board.

Brand Templating: Welcome to complete freedom reporting. For agencies, Raven Tools allows you to place your own logo on the front page, making it customizable and open for reporting.  For a test report I used a BlitzLocal logo to replace the Raven Tools logo.

Report Template: Even more in-depth than a brand template, Raven Tools has reporting templates where one can choose what metrics to include in the report.  Raven Tools has 360 degree coverage on AdWords, Analytics, Social Media, and Search Engine research.  Take a look at the options listed below. I will cover the basics of this reporting.

• Analytics: Raven Tools reporting pulls analytics data and organizes it by priority of visitor information, site referrals, search referrals, and top search engines, providing you with analyzed data in regards to each.
• Keyword Reporting: Know your top searched keywords that triggered your ad or website
• Summary Insertion: Have something to say about the metrics being reported? Raven Tools allows you to input your own summary via rich text box insertion. Any information you type will be inserted into the report.

Social Media Monitor: Raven Tools offers a simple yet complex data pull from a variety of different channels.

• Persona Manager: Log in to any of the 75 social media sites there are directly from the raven tools dashboard. Add in your information, and data will be pulled in regards to your persona. Here is an example of reporting for Twitter.
  

• Social Monitor: Similar to Google alerts, Raven Tools searches any or all sources you provide for mention of a brand or phrase.  Within the options one can mark sentiment, whether good or bad, or add the website to the link manager. Take a look at the buzz of the sites listed below.
  

• KnowEm – KnowEm checks the availability of your brand name, username or vanity URL on 300+ popular Social Media websites. This is built into the social tools that Raven has to offer, and great for brand name identity theft.
• Forum Searching – Find out what people are saying with a forum search powered by Omgili. Find all reputation management easy with a click of a button.
  

Raven Tools reporting simplifies and centralizes everything you need to know for your brand, and can truly give an advantage to anyone measuring web success. The best thing about Raven Tools is that everything is connected.  Without Raven Tools you could be spending too much time viewing many pages for one brand, but with Raven you have every vital reporting feature and it’s all through the one dashboard.

To view a full list of Raven’s features check out their Features page. If you are interested Raven offers a free 30 day trial, with no credit card required.  Raven Tools offers two tiers of services, pro and agency.   Pro services start at $79 a month, limiting two users and the agency services start at $199 a month capping at 6 users.  Take a free trial today, explore the excitement of simplified internet marketing tools.

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SMX Sydney 2010 – Dennis Yu Speaks

SMX Sydney 2010 will be attended by BlitzLocal CEO, Dennis Yu.  Dennis attended and presented at SMX Sydney 2009, and will be speaking again at the 2010 conference. Dennis will be speaking about Facebook Advertising, which has been the topic of popular articles featured in Time, Laptop Magazine, and Entrepreneur Magazine.

Also presenting at SMX Sydney 2010 is Gillian Muessig, Gillian is President of world renown SEO resource SEOmoz. Gillian has presented two years in a row at SMX Singapore, and will be presenting in 2010 in Sydney.

SMX 2010 Conference:
April 22nd 9:00am – 6:30pm
April 23rd 9:00am – 5:30pm
Located at the Sydney Hilton

Event Links:
Satisfaction Guaranteed
Why SMX Sydney?
Testimonials
Great Networking

If you would like to attend SMX Sydney, tickets are 40% off before next week! Click this link for a direct discounted purchase

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How to sell local clients

If you’re an affiliate, you’ve heard a lot about local. Drive down the street and look at all those businesses– 40% of them don’t have websites, and of the ones that do, only 8% are doing PPC. Of those that are doing PPC, it’s highly unlikely they’re as good as you. But while setting up a PPC campaign for a Denver liposuction surgeon might be easy– you just choose a few keywords, make a couple ads, and send them to a landing page– getting the clients is where most local marketing companies fail. We’ll get to the secret in a bit– keep reading…

So let’s talk about how to actually get these businesses to become your clients, starting first by what NOT to do:

• Cold calling– Going door-to-door and walking into someone’s business is NOT cool. You are a stranger, they’re busy running their office– and most of the time you won’t even be able to get to the decision maker. The receptionist will stop you. Might as well sell magazines and charity chocolate bars, since you’re just going to get rejected. Rejection sucks– you want THEM to come to you. That allows you to set the price and puts you in a great spot. More on that in a sec.
• Spending money on PPC– Yeah, I know it’s hypocritical. You are selling PPC, but don’t do it to promote yourself. The reason you don’t is the same as cold calling– selling SUCKS. You spend money, waste your time, and have to deal with rejection. And that’s just more marketing cost you have to pass on to the clients.
• Building the most awesome, informative website about your services– Let me tell you something. You don’t even need to have a website! “But what if they want to see my website?”
  you ask. Tell them that you’re so busy serving clients first that your site is still in progress. Clients first, see?
• Giving away services for cheap or free: Someone probably told you that if you’re just getting started and don’t have a client list, then you need to do the first few for cheap to build up a portfolio. That’s complete nonsense. Most prospects won’t ask you, for example, about other Italian restaurants or veterinarians that you’ve done. Discounting your services devalues you in the client’s eyes, plus will make you unmotivated to work hard for so little money.
• Talking about how well you know PPC, SEO, social media, etc: Seems counter-intuitive, right? They’re a business owner, not another affiliate. The more you sprinkle acronyms into your language, the more you’re losing them. You’re not speaking their language. I almost never mention the word PPC to clients. Instead, I say “I couldn’t find your name on Google. But we can get you to show up if you let us advertise on Google for you.”

So those are the 5 most common ways to fail at selling and getting new clients. There are a few companies in the local space– VC-funded monsters that have tens or hundreds of millions of funding to blow on these techniques. But if we’re talking about YOUR money, then focus on what actually works.

And now the secret to how to sell local clients….

You ready?

…
…
…

The secret is that you don’t sell– you let others sell for you because of your reputation. So you get clients by building up your reputation.

Put on a seminar at the local chamber of commerce or networking event– if you can charge $15 each, even better. Not because you need the money, but because it makes folks who attend take you seriously. Every one of the 5 mistakes mentioned above degrades and devalues your offering– it turns you into a panderer instead of a highly sought after expert.

In the course of every day life, you will run into people who are small business owners. There’s 20 million of them– how can you not? And when you’re talking to friends about how Google works– which we do all the time to folks who don’t understand what we do– you’re equipping others to sell your services.

And each friend of yours has perhaps 100 friends that they talk to and will mention that you’re an expert on getting people on Google. So you should almost never take on a project from a friend– but you should definitely consider taking on a project from a friend of a friend. A friend will expect a “good friend” discount, while a “weak tie” (friend of a friend) will not. Plus the number of people that you are connected to 2 steps away is 100 times larger than those just 1 step away.

And when those people come knocking, because a friend told them that you’re a Google expert, then you run them through this process:

• What do you want to show up on Google for?
• Let’s do a search and see who is there now.
• It’s going to cost between $1,000 and $5,000 a month to advertise on Google– depending on how much market share you want. Shall we start with $1,000 a month for a couple months to see how we do?
• We can track exactly how our ads are doing- how many visitors click on the ads and then how many calls result from that. That allows us to calculate the cost per call. You’ll probably be between $40 and $100 a call, depending on the competition. We’ll have to test.
• And from there, we can adjust the ads based on what kinds of clients you want (more laser hair removal, and less botox? Sure).
• We will place a phone number on the website that is only on the web, just for tracking, which bounces to your regular number.
• No website? We can make a minisite for you.
• Sign here and gimme your credit card.

If they don’t get that, whine about cost, or complain, then don’t push the issue. You have a number of other interested clients that you have to get back to. You don’t want bad clients. There are so many local businesses out there that you can have your pick– and that includes the competitors of the guys who aren’t really interested in your online advertising service.

So there you have it. No need to deal with rejection. Don’t have to spend a lot of money or build a site. Just have to casually talk about getting onto Google with your friends, who then spread the word for you. And then you walk those friends of friends via the process I’ve just laid out.

The hardest part is the first few weeks to build your reputation. You might feel like an imposter if you haven’t done it before. Take heart that local PPC is not the hard part, nor is listing clients with Google and BING Local Business Center. Just remember that you’re competing against the other local dentists and massage therapists- not thousands of affiliates worldwide.

And once you have a few of them down, then these clients tell their friends— and soon you have a thriving business of people who are seeking you out. You just have to sit back, take the calls, and decide which of them you want. Doesn’t sound like selling does it?

Now managing clients, building sites, setting up call tracking, billing credit cards automatically, and so forth is a whole different set of issues– I’ll write another post on that if people want to hear it. But as for selling, it’s easy when you let others sell for you.

Tags: affiliate, how to sell, local clients, PPC, sales, seo, Social media
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Meet Facebook Marketing Gurus in San Francisco in 2 Weeks

Learn About Marketing on Facebook From The Best

Event information here.

Covered Co. has assembled a group of top experts on Facebook for their next event in a continuing series on social media marketing, “Social Media Matters”. The event will teach how any company can leverage Facebook to grow their brand and feature talks from Involver, SocialMedia.com, RockYou, and Facebook.

At over 300 million users, Facebook has become a new and influential way to reach consumers and build your brand. Facebook fan pages, social ads, applications, events, and notifications. Facebook has a whole collection of tools you can use to build your brand, but what’s the best way to use them? The two hour event will host talks from experts on marketing on Facebook with a mixer following after the event. Come mingle and learn!

Who are the gurus?

Julia French is the Founder and Managing Director of Covered Communications. A seasoned marketing and business development strategist, Julia has a track record of success in business development, event strategy, marketing, and public relations.

Before starting Covered Communications, Julia was the Director of Marketing at Blue Lithium (now acquired by Yahoo), where she managed media relations and site messaging for a social networking site, MingleNow. Previously, Julia worked at Socialtext, bringing together product management, engineering and sales teams to collaboratively execute strategic projects including the acquisition of WikiCalc and the launch and release of Socialtext Open. Before joining Socialtext, Julia held management and individual contributor positions at LEWIS PR, Trainer Communications, Amazon, and IBD Network (now Deal Maker Media).

Julia is a member of the leading blogger group within enterprise/Office 2.0 “The Enterprise Irregulars.” She was one of the creators of the Office 2.0 conference, the first conference to seriously assess web-based office applications. Julia is a founding member of “She’s Geeky,” an organization that encourages collaboration among women in technology, and she sits on the marketing and communications board for Entrepreneurs Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing corporate giving into technology start-ups.

She earned a BA in International Business from the University of Puget Sound. Julia has lived in the US, UK, and Germany and speaks fluent English and German and conversational French.

Nick Gonzalez is a partner at Covered Co., a marketing consultancy helping technology companies with product and promotional strategies.Nick has spent the last half-decade at the center of silicon valley. As a blogger, marketer, and programmer, Nick brings an editorial eye and technological understanding to all of his work.

Prior to Covered Co. Nick managed publisher relations and marketing for advertising startup SocialMedia.com. During his tenure, Nick built the publisher network to its highest profitability in the companies 2 years or operation. While at SocialMedia.com, Nick gained insight into the latest tools companies were using to market and brand themselves online. In fact he literally wrote the book on running social media campaigns for the company.

Nick was the first hire and right hand man at the valley’s information hub, TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, Nick broke news covering hundreds of startups ranging from mobile to web applications and was instrumental in uncovering the new wave of small capital startups from incubators such as Y Combinator. His commitment to getting stories first and writing posts that got Dugg, helped grow the RSS subscriptions from 20,000 to well over 3 million subscribers today.

Nick is heavily involved in the valley as a guest writer and speaker at industry events including Web 2.0, PRSA T3, and Graphing Social Patterns. He is also an advisor to the FB Rev fund and several of its companies.

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Webinar: 7 Effective Facebook Advertising Techniques

Dennis Yu of BlitzLocal will be giving his second webinar, presented by the American Marketing Association and ReadyTalk, on Facebook Advertising Techniques. His presentation, titled, 7 Effective Facebook Advertising Techniques for Brands and Direct Marketers, will focus on how Social PPC advertising is different than traditional PPC and will answer questions such as:

• What ads are most effective?
• What is the optimal bid strategy?
• How do you best target against keywords and demographic targets?
• How do you measure performance?
• What are the primary mistakes newcomers make on the Facebook platform?

The free webinar will be held Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 2pm EST. Register for the Facebook Advertising Techniques webinar today!

This webinar is targeted at an intermediate audience with some basic familiarity of PPC concepts. An essential presentation if you’d like to increase your current knowledge of online advertising related subject matter & the most efficient practices that will bring your brand to the forefront of qualified prospects.

Tags: events, facebook advertising, press release, webinar
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