 Clicking Inc. 5000 Badge returns to main Inc. page. |
Atlantic BT, Inc. 5000 And North Carolina Infographic We thought it would be fun to understand the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing companies by adding in interesting information from census and other sources. The infographic below focuses the Inc. 5000 on North Carolina and Atlantic BT’s 4th inclusion as a Fastest Growing Company. |
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| Top of the Inc. 5000 | Press Release | Inc. 5000 & NC | Infographic |
| Clicking Inc. 5000 Badge returns to main Inc. page. |
Top of the Inc. 5000 By State We thought it would be fun to see if we could find the magic formula. Hidden inside of a list like the Inc. 500 Fastest Growing Companies is a secret code. Crack the code and you might figure out how to consistently rank in the top of the list. To find the secret code, we matched public data about states to the Inc. 5000. Matching census data, mean temperature, education, income and health to the Inc. 5000 produced interesting results: |
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| Top of the Inc. 5000 | Press Release | Inc. 5000 & NC | Infographic |
Inc. Magazine’s Fastest Growing By State |
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| Rich Get Richer
18 states contribute 4003 companies, or 80% of Inc. 5000 (chart below). |
HOT or Cold
The annual mean temperature in those 18 states is 54 degrees. |
Population Matters
Biggest 4: CA, TX, |
Average Income Doesn’t CA is #13, TX #24, |
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| Rich Get Richer
Top 5 CA, TX, NY, FL and VA account for 40% of total companies in Inc. 5000. |
HOT or Cold
The annual mean temperature in top 5 states is 59 degrees. |
Population Matters
Top 5 states account for 35% of US Population. |
Average Income NY richest Top 5 avg annual income $48,821 6th overall. |
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| Rich Get Richer
Top 5 states have more firms, Only VA lags at #12. |
HOT or Cold
Sun shines on Top 5 states more than mean. |
Population Matters
Top 5 states Have more college students, only VA lags at 13th. |
Health Only FL and VA rank well in health gains, other top states may have already been healthy. |
| Inc. 5000 Main Page | Atlantic BT Named To Fastest Growing For 4th Year For a fourth year the software and web development company Jon Jordan started with a few friends in 1998 and that has grown to almost 70 employees is included in Inc. Magazine’s 5,000 Fastest Growth companies. Preparing a press release about the achievement I asked Jon about the fuel driving Atlantic BT’s growth. | ||
Inc. Magazine’s Fastest Growing 5000 Fun Facts | |||
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| Top of the Inc. 5000 | Press Release | Inc. 5000 & NC | Infographic |
| What does it take to rank in the top of the Inc. 5000? | Named to Inc. 5000 for 4th time. | NC Companies in Inc. 5000 by category. | Atlantic BT and North Carolina Inc. 5000. |
Triangle Business Journal (TBJ) announced 35 businesses yesterday as “Best Places to Work in the Triangle for 2012″. Best Places To Work is awarded based on an employee survey administered by Quantum Market Research and used by TBJ to determine the 35 best places to work in the Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill area of North Carolina.
“These awards are a testimony to the good work done by businesses in the Triangle that recognize employees are a company’s most valuable assets,” says Triangle Business Journal publisher Bryan Hamilton. “The emphasis on keeping workers happy and productive is clearly evident among these 35 winners.”
TBJ will honor the top ranked business in each category in a special Best Places To Work awards ceremony on October 4th with a special section scheduled for the October 5th print edition.
I asked Mark Foulkrod, Atlantic BT’s President, to share reactions and thoughts on the award:
“It is exciting to be recognized as one of the best places to work. Everyone was jumping up and down yesterday as I announced the news. Our employees and customers have helped Atlantic BT grow rapidly and consistently. Our team and great customers are the pillars of our better than 30% growth.
“You can see the bond our team members have in their amazing client work and at our cultural events such as our Egg Drop competition and recently completed Olympics. Processes such as Agile Development and our weekly Customer and Employee Quality Score (CQS and EQS) help us improve and make a Best Places To Work better and better. I’m very proud of every Atlantic BT employee and customer.”
Atlantic BT joins other leading Triangle businesses such as Accenture, BDO and ChannelAdvisor as one of 35 Best Places To work in the Triangle.
Recently I offered to help anyone in need of some Internet marketing or business consulting. I made this offer and then proceeded to get sick as a dog. But I was able to help my friend Bill apply Occam’s Razor to his website and business problem. Bill is on the board of a worthy cause in Cary. Life Experiences is a 501(c)(3) created out of a mother’s love for her daughter. Out of that love came a company dedicated to helping adults with disabilities. Life Experiences has created several businesses including selling buckwheat hulls and seeds for home craft fans like my friend Molly, who created CraftIdeasWeekly.com.
Great story, great cause, and something you want to know more about and support. The web does many things well, telling stories chief among them, but there is a problem. The web, for all of its magic, can’t change the paradox of choice. Barry Schwartz wrote a great book on this human problem: The Paradox of Choice: Why less is more explains the limits of our attention. I love the point of diminishing return idea. Anyone who spends a lot of time researching and then finally making a decision knows how the paradox can rob your life. You rob the one thing we can’t make more of, time, for the thing we can always make more of, money. Not a great trade as Schwartz points out.
The flip side of Schwartz’s argument is we, as Internet marketers, must use Occam’s Razor to narrow our choices. When I looked at the BuckwheatHull.com there were two sites fighting one another for visitor attention: the ecommerce site selling buckwheat hulls for pillows and the Life Experiences site about the love of a mother for her daughter and a worthy cause.
My friend Bill did a great job getting the Buckwheathull.com site up, live and taking orders, so be sure to understand my thoughts build on Bill’s work. Bill did the right thing. He created something with nothing to prove the web’s ability to help. He created a “lean startup” and got something up fast. I applaud all the Bills out there, since early and flawed beats late and perfect in Internet marketing. People used to take my websites apart too (once famously by Seth Godin).
My goal was to follow what Seth Godin taught when I spent a day hanging on his every word. Godin told me and about 20 other Internet marketers we should realize that to do one thing on a web page is monumental, to do two things almost impossible and to ask for 3 actions is beyond the pale. The interesting thing about my investigation was Buckwheathull.com had a page closer to important ecommerce conventions.
The BuckwheatHull.com Shop page used ecommerce convention and design to send a clear message – time to buy buckwheat hulls and seeds. I used that page as inspiration to build this draft of a new design for BuckwheatHull.com:
One other important caveat. I am NOT a graphic designer. I know enough about Photoshop and design to rough out ideas to be perfected by my betters, by pros. Caveat stated here is how I wanted to help Bill and Life Experiences:
The most confusing idea here might be #5. How does a web design do less and more? I’ve been discussing website “non-verbals” for years. More than justification for my expensive degree in psychology, the concept of how a website communicates with hidden messages is being supported by research (see my Conversion Conference liveblog notes for more on that research). When a site is hyper-organized, simple to navigate and seems like a clean, well-lighted space, trust endorphins fire and visitors become buyers, and buyers may become advocates (read Social Media’s Magic Feedback Loops for more on the real endgame of customer satisfaction – advocacy).
Bill sent me a nice note. Hope these thoughts helped. I’ve been an Internet marketer for a long time (12 years). There are few immutable truths. One is no matter how clear and simple the teams I managed thought we had everything, it could have been better, more simple. One of the keys to being good at this job is living with the pain that statement brings and being determined nonetheless.
Marty
If you would like to join our tribe of Internet marketers, please…
Follow @AtlanticBT
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Atlantic BT created a controversy with our 2009 post Experience vs. Internet Marketing Degree – Which is better?
There are several groups in the debate taking these sides:
Perhaps the debate is moot. The demand for Internet marketers is increasing as the core skills needed to be an Internet marketer widen. Attending the inbound marketing conference I overheard one Internet marketer lament, “How am I supposed to know PPC, SEO, Social Media Marketing, Facebook marketing, curation, video marketing, email marketing, content marketing and cause marketing all at the same time an in equal amounts of expertise.” Perhaps we can help.
Marty’s Internet Marketing Class & Consulting Offer“Teacher” or Consultant
Martin Marty Smith, 12 years IM experience with 7 as Director Ecommerce, 12 years branding experience with Consumer Packaged Goods companies and created 4 startups.
@ScentTrail Marketing Blog: ScentTrail Marketing and Curation Revolution on Scoop.it
Submission Deadline
Monday July 23 9:00 am (first come, first graded or served)
Want To Learn Internet Marketing?
If you want to learn Internet marketing send thoughts on the SEOSpecialists-A-Team case study outline below.
Need Free, No Obligation Internet Marketing Consulting?
If you have a site or business and need Free Internet marketing consulting outline your problem in an email. Please be sure to include your URL, business vertical, 2 to 4 competitors and your marketing question or questions.
What You Will Get
I will give every new to Internet marketing “student” a “grade” and share my notes for how to improve your grade if improvement is possible.
Businesses with Internet marketing problems will receive copies of research and recommendations.
Offer Limit: First 5 Will Receive Fastest Response
The first five assignments will be graded and problems vetted by Monday July 30th.
I will spend at least an hour and probably two or three on the first 5 assignments or Internet marketing problems received. The value of this offer is between $100 and $500 (I billed out at $150 an hour on consulting work back when I had the time to do consulting work LOL). I know my 1:10:89 rule pretty well, so chances of receiving more than 5 assignments or problems will be rare. If I do receive more than 5 I will respond to every note, question or problem by no later than the middle of August. I will respond in the order assignments, questions or requests for free consulting come in.
Sharing With Internet Marketing Friends & Wisdom of Crowds
I would never publish YOUR content to OUR sites without permission, but would like to use anything we receive possibly in another blog post or in a voting round to create engagement and promote wisdom of crowds. I know one very important Internet marketing rule – no one knows it all. I love to collaborate and ask smart friends what they think too, so I will assume I can freely share with friends and will ask permission and share a draft before republishing.
If sharing your assignment isn’t possible, please note CONFIDENTIAL in large letters at the top of the email. I will treat any request with CONFIDENTIAL at the top as if we have a mutual Nondisclosure Agreement (NDA) in place. If you need me to sign a NDA our fax is 919.719.0834 (attention Marty Smith).
No Obligation
I make this offer without limit or obligation. Free really means free and if you guessed I will be spending my weekend “grading papers” you would be correct.
Guarantee
It is easy to guarantee that you will receive more than you paid (lol), but my guarantee goes deeper. You have costs associated with sending an email, so I must create positive ROI on your opportunity cost (a pretty good rule of thumb for any Internet marketing). My guarantee is if, after reviewing my suggestions, you don’t understand Internet marketing better or make more money from my (or our if I use a bunch of friends) recommendations then I owe you one. If All I can do is admire your content, community, campaigns and conversion plan then I will help spread the word (something I would do anyway) and you get to teach the next class (lol).
References
There are more than 10 recommendations on my Martin Marty Smith LinkedIn page. Here is what one of my Internet marketing friends who runs a very cool company in Charlotte called mailVU.com just tweeted:
RT @scenttrail: Internet Marketing Class & Free Consulting Offer via @atlanticbt [link was here] Highly recommend – Marty is awesome!
Alan Fitzpatrick, CEO mailVU
– Case Study
I’ve come down firmly on how impossible it is to simulate the speed and competitive environment of Internet marketing (Internet Marketing Degree: Do I Need One?). I even tried to create a too complicated Internet Marketing Summer School. Let’s put aside the debate and DO some Internet marketing and see if it is helpful or we learn anything.
Assignment
If a B2B client wants to create as many inbound marketing leads in August as they would normally generate in six months on their current rhythm, or 300 qualified leads in a month how would you do it?
Questions To Ask
Client’s URL: SEOSpecialists-A-Team.com
Does the site have PageRank? A: Yes, PR4
Is the site on social media? Yes, but only recently and mostly on Twitter and G+ (no Facebook)
How Go To Market Now: Word-of-Mouth (WOM), PPC ($5,000 year), some ranked content on blog.
What is the client’s business? A: SEO keyword research, site optimization and content development.
Does the client’s site rank organically for SEO in their location? A: Yes.
Does the client’s site rank organically for SEO nationally? A: No
What is the clients Unique Selling Proposition (USP)? Best Value in SEO
Does client have testimonials and references from trusted sources reinforcing their USP? A: Yes
What do you do?
Hint: I start a journey like this with research. Research into:
Internet Marketing’s 4 C’s
Internet marketing can be boiled down to 4 words that start with C: Content, Community, Campaigns and Conversion. There is no magic order, but I tend to do these steps sequentially like this:
Content
Keyword research looking for the magic bullet (high searches on few documents published). Since you NEVER find major keywords with NO or even little competition, I also look for “long tail” terms. Long tail keywords are away from the most competitive and so are searched less, but long tail keywords may convert better since people looking for Facebook or video SEO may be less competitive and so easier to achieve a page 1 listing.
KEY IDEA: Page 1 organic Listings on Google (or Bing or Yahoo) RULE. I would rather have 10 listings on long tail keywords on Page 1 than 1 listing on page 5 for a major term UNLESS the major term is trending in my favor and I can break the logjam. Best way to break a logjam? Have a bunch of #1 listings on long tail terms.
Community
My community research is around who already owns what. If a competitor has a million Facebook fans then I would probably not focus on Facebook. Facebook is important to SEO, so SEOSpecialists-A-Team can’t be absent any longer, but if a competitor owns the high ground I may want to do the minimal work needed to shore up other assets. The other research I want to discover is WHERE is community forming. Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm changes are freaking web managers and Internet marketers out, so community is forming looking for answers and reassurance. A finding like the Penguin and Panda finding may feed back into Content Creation and social media marketing strategies.
KEY IDEA: Every C is connected to its brother and sister Cs. No C stands alone. As you review, research and THINK your plan should become richer in each quadrant (Content, Community, Campaigns and Conversion).
Campaigns
A campaign is a time limited OFFER relevant for some group within your current or desired marketing segments or personas. Marketing personas create archetypes for the buyers you want to reach. Personas help think LIKE your customers instead of talking to them. Personas provide a sense of NEED and possible TRIGGERS you can use to cut through the clutter of contemporary Internet enabled life.
Offers are something special locked by a deadline. Deadlines are very important online. Deadlines motivate, cut through clutter and are of the utmost importance. Amy Africa gave one of the best presentations I’ve seen about the importance of things like deadlines at the Conversion Conference in Chicago Liveblog Notes. Something special can be anything of value including free content, a free review or free iPad sweepstakes. FREE is the key word. I’ve tested thousands of offers always trying to beat the use of the word FREE and it can be done, but it is TOUGH. Free can cause some pain in email marketing and PPC. Ever noticed this subject on an email: “Offer 1 & Shipping Is On Us”? The Internet marketer mailing you that offer didn’t want to say FREE because it can increase their spam score. Example SEO Offers:
Free Social Media SEO Evaluation, a $740 value, until noon Friday July 20th.
Free Social Media SEO Evaluation, a $740 value, for the first 10 requests before noon Friday July 20th.
Good idea to have an example of the $740 SEO review (be sure to use dummy data not live client stats). Once you put a thermometer on an offer (first 10 requests), be sure to create a visible counter and remove when the offer is complete.
You can always lower the intensity of the offer. Instead of a SEO Review you can give a SEO Guide or a special SEO Report. Typically these kinds of offers help build your list. Once someone requests your SEO Report they’ve opted into your list and you can begin to create relevant communication as you get to know their needs better. This is where an inbound marketing tool such as Marketo or Eloqua or HubSpot can really help.
KEY IDEA: Create Marketing Personas – If you’ve never created working personas for your marketing groups I recommend Managing Content Marketing by David Rose and Joe Pulizzi. The book is a fast and important read.
Conversion
Internet marketing is informed by the fastest feedback loops marketing has ever known. Within moments of doing something online there are metrics telling you how your idea or offer is performing. Create 3 to 5 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to help define success. For our SEO Specialists we might want a KPI for traffic increase, lower level conversions such as into our list and ultimately how many new clients results from our new Internet marketing efforts.
Key Idea: Common KPIs include site heuristics (Time On Site, Pages Viewed, Repeat Visitors and Bounce Rates), Conversion % (B2C) or Cost Per Conversion (B2B), Social Reach (Twitter, Facebook, G+ Followers, Likes and Mentions), Social Engagement (RTs, FB Shares, Stumble Upons, Comments). Inbound Links = Critically important to SEO.
Since the goal is aggressive I would create an “umbrella campaign”. Umbrella campaigns tie offers, content and metrics together in a 4 week plan. If I had the time I would create alternative “What If” scenarios to be deployed if I was ahead or behind my 150 new leads a week goal. I tend to worry more about being behind since being ahead is usually a good thing, but money is involved so I may slow the PPC train if we crushed 200 leads the first week.
I would create at least 8 – 12 unique offers all addressed at what is happening NOW in the space (gained from research). I wold look to create offers across a variety of campaign channels such as:
Hope this gives you an idea about where I would start. Internet marketing is best created by TEAMS of people since wisdom of crowds applies (you are always smarter as a group than alone). Even if you don’t send us an assignment or ask for free Internet marketing consulting, we hope you will JOIN our Atlantic BT tribe of Internet marketers by:
Following @Atlanticbt on Twitter
Liking and Sharing Atlantic BT on Facebook
Including us in your G+ Circles
Want to GET STARTED creating great Internet marketing today? Call us at 919.518.0670 or visit our Contact Atlantic BT page
Thanks,
Marty