Category: ABT Culture

How do you explain a sand castle? The SEO fighter pilot from Miami used the absurdest question to answer our Chief Financial Officier’s question. Our CFO asked, “what do you fear?” We, the multi-channel retailer I worked for at the time, were in an unfamiliar cockpit. We’d just been taken for an amazing ride, a ride into a land of SEO arbitrage never experienced and only marginally understood now after lunch and a two hour meeting.

The three guys from Miami tried, tried hard, to explain how they viewed the world. Everything in their world was arbitrage. Make something for pennies sell it for dollars. Make something for nickels sell it for dollars. Make something for dimes sell it for dollars. Everything was arbitrage. I wasn’t sure the furniture in their offices weren’t on loan and capable of being bought by the highest bidder on some auction site.

How prescient a meeting was that? Internet marketing and search engine optimization looks more like pork bellies futures daily. Jeff Bezos, a former Wallstreeter, seems to have made the entire world after the street’s desire to buy and sell. David Meerman Scott in his book Real Time Marketing and PR declares our trading futures, a future that is happening now as today’s meeting with Radian6 and last week’s meeting with Argyle Social confirm.

Q: Do you think things are going to move faster or slower in the future?

Thinking like an Internet marketer on SEO means understanding Key Performance Indicators, being able to feel a trend and riff content almost before the feeling is over and arbitrage, arbitrage and arbitrage. Think like an Internet marketer means the next time your CFO asks about social, mobile or QR Code ROI ask if they can explain a sand castle (lol). Make sure your resume is up-to-date and remember Atlantic BT is hiring so be fearless :).

Think Like An Internet Marketer: What Would Steve Do?

Watch our Prezi / Video

Want to think like an Internet marketer? Let’s start with a story. Recently over lunches, phone calls, webinars and emails an important idea surfaced. Were Facebook LIKES becoming the new “link love”? Friends who run startups, large ecommerce sites and other Internet marketers I trust were seeing something in their web analytics, something new. Are Facebook LIKES the new link love?

The Facebook “LIKE” button was mentioned by Byron White, CEO of IdeaLuanch, Phil Buckley Interactive Media Director at Capstrat and entrepreneur and CEO of PointShops Eric Garrison. One friend mentioning “Likes are the new link love” has me reaching for a thinking cap, two friends saying  something similar creates a search for articles and links. Three smart friends = a new Internet marketing truth.

But we didn’t have confirming data, or nothing my friends would share :).

Hope you are as blessed with smart, smart friends since life is so much easier. My friends pay for their lives knowing statements such as “Likes are the new link love” mean our Internet marketing world is changing again. We lucky few Internet marketers must change or lose traction. Traction is life online. Traction is NEVER neutral. You always gain or lose traction.

Search Engine Optimization is the giant scorecard in the sky. The most immediate interim step, the thing before you earn money, is creating an ever expanding Google presence and why platforms beat web sites. Platforms, sites capable of putting up hundreds of thousands of pages (Amazon is on their way to a billion), win Google’s content marketing network race.

Google is always only an addictive environment. Take things away and pain ensues. Take away too much from Google all at one time and MONSTER pain ensues (been there, done that, burned the t-shirt and NEVER want to do it again). Since almost every Atlantic BT customer HAS a web site these days, our jobs are changing again. Back in the day we preached  search engine optimization (SEO), content network marketing and social media marketing.

We carried, new and so suspect Internet marketing messages to a mistrusting, skeptical mob. We rode a noisy old roller coaster clattering its way up a towering railed mountain hoping wheels held and no one moved suddenly. Reaching the top we threw our hands up in sheer joy as Newton’s roller coaster laws came into full force. In search of consistent absolutes we never find (or never find fast enough),”Facebook LIKES are the new link love,” sounds good.

We wait and wait for data. Reviewing NorthFace, Patagonia and Oakley for a prospective customer we found the data, the sword in the stone. Each major adventure sportswear brand finds a way to win with Internet marketing. How they win reinforces their branding. Web marketing is an accurate reflection of who you, your product, brand and company are. Here is how three different and competitive brands found blue oceans in the adventure sportswear online RED OCEAN:

• NorthFace rules Facebook with 1.4 million likes producing a magical PageRank of 7
• Patagonia has the most pages in Google, a great blog and link love also PR7
• Oakley’s page count is way down, but they are Twitter scrappy with a PR6

Each company creates a unique strategy. They find ways to win traffic and Google “Authority”. Each understands internal strengths and weaknesses. They know how to play poker with competitors avoiding strengths in favor of exploiting weaknesses. There MUST be weaknesses creating blue oceans somewhere.

Every Internet marketer trades off gross # of site pages for winning on Twitter (Oakley), Facebook likes for blog posts (NorthFace) and Blog posts for Facebook Likes (Patagonia). Each brand’s character is visible in their Internet marketing choices. NorthFace is adventure, Patagonia community and Oakley adrenaline buzz.

Maybe your site sells high end audio like Moon Audio, is the leading construction M&A firm in the country such as FMI or your Informer application connects disparate databases for easy web reporting such as Entrinsik. Your business segment doesn’t matter. Somewhere there is a blue ocean. There is a blue ocean in every business, a piece of ocean not yet red with carnage. Watch the Prezi below to see how Oakley found Twitter, NorthFace cornered Facebook and Patagonia knitted strength from a  campaigns (1% for the Planet), blogs, social media and site strength (Patagonia had the largest number of pages in Google).

Are Facebook LIKES the new link love? YES, unquestionably.

On Monday, if your site doesn’t have Facebook’s LIKE button LARGE and IN CHARGE, think, “What would Steve do?” And, plaster the thumbs up all over your site in clear and present danger, make your customers trip over it, campaign on it (free something when you LIKE us on Facebook) and you will be doing what Steve would have done. You will be thinking like an Internet marketer.

Not convinced?

Watch this Prezi and then plan to walk over to your IT department, beg, plead and cajole to get Facebook LIKES all over your website as soon as possible.

Think Like An Internet Marketer Prezi – Watch the VIDEO NOW.

Ever meet someone and instantly like and respect them?

Meeting entrepreneur Leo Croes today was one of those moments. After a seven year turn in the Marines Leo worked for Pfizer until long road trips and too much time away from home helped him get in touch with life’s larger question – why am I doing this? Leo’s answer was to start Triangle Carpet Specialists and work hard, very hard. I know, after speaking with Leo for an hour, he works hard. He’s been working since he was thirteen. I was watching Leave It To Beaver when I was 13 how about you? I admire anyone who sacrificed so I can be an American.

Leo trained Marines. Think about that, the special man helping put down your new floor or clean carpets in your home (they are coming to clean mine at my house in Durham next week) TRAINED MARINES. How cool is that? You must be LARGE and IN CHARGE to be a Marine. Q: How large do you have to be to TRAIN Marines? A: LARGE AND IN CHARGE :). Leo is patient, listens intently, sets realistic goals and is a great Atlantic BT customer. If you were trapped in a foxhole in some strange place surrounded by people with hostile intent, you want Leo there.

My carpet isn’t a foxhole but it is full of “hostile intent” (lol). I didn’t know cleaning my carpets twice a year is a must to maintain carpet fibers and keep allergens at bay. Every morning I take medicine from Leo’s old company, Pfizer, to breathe. Breathing is something you get used too, something you immediately want whenever you can’t. Today Leo taught me how to think of carpets as highly influential investments. Investments in health (duh I’m a cancer survivor thanks to some amazing DUKE medical Marines) and my house’s value (should there ever be any again).

Having a Marine who trained Marines clean my carpets twice a year seems like a great idea and cheap against the cost of NOT doing so. I’m guilty of not cleaning my carpets 2x a year but am pleading ignorance. Paying Leo to help me stay out of Duke (no offense to my friends there) seems a good investment. I will sign a service contract with Leo and Triangle Carpet Specialists next week so I have one less pain in the butt thing to worry about every year.

Leo’s carpet cleaning and flooring business for homes and businesses is growing despite a lousy housing market and our “no one has any money” times. Leo knows something Atlantic BT understands. Leo bets his company, years of hard work and his beautiful children’s futures (daughter just graduated from Peace College with a business and Spanish degree and now works for dad in the office, son is headed to NC State) on quality, care, innovation and hard work. Leo’s children love their dad and the business they’ve built. Oh, let’s not forget Leo’s amazing wife. Guess what she does for a living? If you guessed nurse you are starting to get Leo and his very special family. I just spoke with his daughter Nina on the phone moments after filling out Triangle Carpet Specialists “Contact Us” form. Telling Nina how much I like her dad she laughed and admitted to liking him a little too.

I’ve locked and loaded my carpet and flooring needs for life because I’ve had bad, bad experiences with national companies who franchise this area. Finding someone who LOVES cleaning carpets and laying new floors isn’t easy. Cleaning carpets is hard, hard work (especially in my house were walking upstairs is climbing Everest). I would trust Leo with my house and car keys and know he and anyone he hires to help will take care, show respect and protect me like a friend (even though we’ve just met). Some people are just like that and you know them when you meet them.

Leo has a goal to triple his business and our amazing Brian, the Atlantic BT marketing team, our great programmers, graphic and UX designers, my boss Mark Foulkrod and our owner Jon Jordan will help. Least we can do. How can we repay the unrepayable? My thought is no one ever helps with my flooring needs (thinking about hardwoods upstairs) or carpet cleaning whose last name isn’t Croes ever again.

If I still owned Found Objects or any other business, Leo would be the person I trust with my company’s security codes and who I call to get an impossible job done in an absurd amount of time. “Did you work all night,” I asked about just such a business flooring job. “Yes, we worked for four days and nights straight,” he explained. How can you even FIND people willing to live on a job for 4 days in order to meet an impossible deadline? I have friends who work on computers that hard, but put them flat on a floor and they cry FOUL and go home (fast).

Leo didn’t accomplish that impossible business flooring job alone, but you know he helped, supported, coached and trained. Leo doesn’t phone in his life. He is present every moment and that is why you hire Triangle Carpet Specialists. That is why you want a Marine trainer and former Pfizer manager cleaning your carpets and laying down new floors in your home or business. We honor Triangle Carpet Specialists as the first Atlantic BT Customer of the Week. We say THANK YOU to Leo, his family and every Marine or service man and woman. Leo you help us be Americans. The world is a strange and hostile place, we live here and are who we are on the strong backs of people like you, on the steady backs of Marines who train Marines.

Thanks.

Contact Triangle Carpet Specialists
Telephone: (919)906-2218
Web: Triangle Carpet Specialists
Contact Triangle Carpet Specialists

Not an Atlantic BT customer but want us to talk about your cool business? We are building a “Startup of the Week” feature too, and we are always interested in cool stuff our clients or other Triangle business are doing. Even if you don’t work with us we’re still interested in your story. Come by the Atlantic BT Center outside Macy’s Crabtree Valley Mall to chat or we can grab lunch across the street. There are always five ways we can work together. Let’s find them :).

Want to become an Atlantic BT customer? Here is a link to our Contact form, my direct line and cell are below.

Thanks,

Martin

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Martin Smith
Martin.Smith(at)AtlanticBT(dot)com
T: 919.256.4145
C: 919.360.1224

Cold, rain? We didn’t notice. We had a huge tent, a fire pit, hot burgers, crazy-creatively carved pumpkins, quality beverages and a great view to cheer on hurled pumpkins. If you missed out, bet you won’t next year. Check out the video and pictures…

http://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/blog/2011/10/slideshow-triangle-web-design-firm.html

Martin’s Top 5 Holiday Ecommerce Sales Tips
Less than 30 days from Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving and one of the biggest online sales days of the year,  it feels appropriate to share Five Ecommerce Sales Building Tips. My bona fides is growing topline and bottom line sales every year for seven years at a multimillion-dollar ecommerce site from 2003 to 2010. Here are a few tips my team and I learned during seven years of trench holiday ecommerce warfare:

Holiday Ecommerce Tip 1: Email More
A magical thing happens every year after Halloween. Traffic and visitors turn into shoppers. Change expressed itself in web analytics in several ways. Sales from our most profitable channel, email marketing, increased along with opens and clickthroughs. Number of visits over sales goes down (you want this number to go down since it means more people are buying faster). In the summer people might visit three or four times before buying. In November average visits before purchase are half with a larger group of customers buying on one visit especially if your special is great, time stamped and on a HOT product. Make the right offer at this time of year and people BUY NOW.

Everyone worries about email unsubscribe trends when you mail more frequently. We managed a list of 60,000 and never exceeded 1% unsubscribes no matter how often we mailed. We mailed almost daily in November and at least daily in December. When you mail that often your aggregate unsubscribes, the real number of people leaving your list, is going up but new people are coming on fast too. I always felt unsubscribes vs. new was a wash at this time of year.

Emailing more means you need more and better creative. Use the season’s natural rhythm and timing to help. Start your “pre-Holiday Sale” on 11.1 and end it a few days before Thanksgiving. People travel on Thanksgiving so the five days before are throw away. End your pre-holiday sale five days out from Thanksgiving (say on the previous Friday or so). Set up a cool little interim sale to end on Thanksgiving day. This gives you a “last day” offer on Thanksgiving when site traffic will be low. Don’t waste a great offer then. My direct marketing boss taught me the “best offers, best times of year” rule and Thanksgiving day isn’t one of them so don’t waste the bullet.

Black Friday, the Friday AFTER Thanksgiving is another story. Some ecommerce sites create a one day only Black Friday deal flow with timed sequences (early bird, middle of the day and almost done). If you have a large Internet marketing team that kind of creative works. My little 3-person team and I created Black Friday sales that ended on Sunday night giving way to one day only Cyber Monday offer that was among the best of the season. You want to shoot LARGE bullets on Black Friday and Cyber Monday because they set a tone for the entire holiday sales season. If you have the best offer on either day your traffic will be supported by thousands of Facebook links, Tweets and mobile emails so go all out on those two days despite the noise.

Each day from 11.1 to about 12.20 needs careful choreography with Fast, Medium and Slow contingencies. If the holiday sales season is robust stay with FAST. If things are slow up the ante and throw in your bench offers. As my P&G boss taught, pre-planning prevents piss poor performance – never more true than ecommerce during November and December. Leave room for what is happening, don’t over plan, but be sure to create a flexible ecommerce strategy for the major touch points of the holiday sales season.

Holiday Ecommere Tip 2: More Promotional Social Media
If you’ve been a good curator the rest of the year by sharing great links and mentioning helpful articles the fourth quarter is when your harvest good will by increasing your Tweet frequency to at least 1x per hour (use a tool like Bufferapp to help schedule Tweets ahead making sure to leave room for reactions and thank you you tweets). Putt new content on Facebook at least 1x a day and 3x isn’t out of the question. Facebook should be able to feed itself with customers talking to each other. Make sure and post clear Facebook guidelines and monitor the heck out of it.

Facebook is the cocktail party the night before the big sale. Arm your guests with plenty to talk about and be specific. If your sale is breaking records, and you always should be, in discount levels or numbers of items on sale lead with that headline. If you are being helped by customer feedback share it and ask for more. Create special Facebook and Twitter only deals and links to reinforce the tribal nature of both spaces. Give “Friend” or “Supporter” codes in Facebook. Give hair curling discounts on Twitter. Ask for feedback. Ask for feedback and ask for feedback. If you get stumped on what to put on sale create a poll on Facebook and in your email. Be prepared to do whatever the poll tells you since there is nothing worse than asking for input and then not taking it.

Holiday Ecommerce Tip 3: Create A Flexible Promotion Calendar With Free Shipping
Choreography is so critical at this time of year, but you don’t know how things are going to shake out. Expect Free Shipping to be the cost of holiday sales ecommerce poker, but experiment with triggers such as Free Shipping on purchases over $50. $50 may be a reach at other times of the year but low for your business during the Holidays. I’ve done a lot of Free Shipping testing and my best advice is put Free Shipping on all orders starting, at the latest, 11.1. You will reward some who would have reached to make a trigger, but I NEVER saw a free shipping trigger we didn’t beat by at least 50%. If we said “Free Shipping For Purchases Over $50” then our average would go to $90. Once the shipping concern is over people BUY and that is what you want at this time of year. Don’t fall over the $1,000 bills to pick up nickels and dimes just GO, GO, GO.

Holiday Shipping Calendars = Very Important
Be sure to add a Holiday Shipping calendar feature no latter than 11.1. People forget how close Holiday dates are and how long it takes to get stuff. They expect what they are thinking about to be on their porch tomorrow. Gently reminding your customers of your picking and packing schedules, days your staff is off and weather contingencies are a great way to create holiday deadlines, deadlines that reinforce your merchandising. I’m a strong believer in DEADLINES. Our rhythm was to alert customers to a sale (email #1), highlight things popping in the sale and provide alerts to any out-of-stocks on the horizon (email #2), warn about the sale ending (email #3), last warning usually the day or Friday before a Monday close (email #4) and then last day (email #5). Sometimes we cut out the middle and went with “SALE IS HERE”, “SALE IS ALMOST OVER” AND “SALE IS OVER”. You see this language every stroll through any mall in America this time of year for a reason – IT WORKS. Deadlines force action and this time of year is rife with deadlines (Thank God).

Holiday Ecommerce Tip 4: Mobile Commerce
There is one exception to my “never greater than 1%” email unsubscribe rule – not sniffing and sending properly formatted mobile emails. A sniffer is a piece of code that knows the platform about to receive an email. Sniffers are very important since much of your list, possibly unknown to you, receive your emails on cell phones, iPhones, iPads or BlackBerries. Sending poorly formatted emails to mobile bumps unsubscribes well above 1%.

Your ecommerce site also looks untrustworthy when you aren’t sophisticated enough to sniff so you damage your main site in incalculable ways. Add a sniffer or pay someone to do it for you and make sure you are sniffing before you mail your next email.

Email marketing should be mobile-friendly anyway. If you have 100 words of copy on an email at this time of year you should be shot. Great subject lines, less than 20 words total text (include any text in images), large calls to action and no more than ten link points (and less than 7 is better) should be the kinds of billboard-y emails you create at this time of year. Your customers should see a compelling image, decide between a few Calls To Action, read a little story and then get out of the way. Those kinds of emails play well on any device. Hemingway won a drinking game once when challenged to tell a complete story in six words. His story was, “Baby shoes, hardly worn, for sale.” Telling complete stories in as few words as possible this time of year is an e-commerce MUST.

I didn’t cover list segmentation in Tip 1 because if you aren’t segmenting already don’t even try now. Blast away and work on segmentation in January (or March if Valentine’s day looms large for your business). Segmenting is the real gold of email marketing (and all Internet marketing if you ask me) and we will be sharing tips on how to segment customers soon. Don’t attempt to create segmentation during the holidays, keep your emails design mobile-friendly and use a sniffer.

Holiday Ecommerce Tip 5: Metrics And Web Analytics
Key Performance Indicators and web analytics are never more important than right now (during the holiday sales period from Back To School in September through Valentine’s Day in February). I lowered my “deep dive” criteria starting about now (Halloween) from a + or – 5% standard KPI deviation to less than 2%. The crucial idea, and one I can’t emphasize enough, is you must watch positive and negative trends. “Positive trends are all good,” you may incorrectly be thinking. One year a competitor started a Google storm, spamming tweets from the third world, at this time of year trying to take our site out of the Google game by Christmas.

We saw the storm because we were +10% over our traffic KPI while conversions didn’t move. If we sat back and were happy about the attack (it would have been easy to make such an incorrect assumption) we couldn’t have reported the links as spam and the damage would have been worse (it still hurt). Watch anything + or – 2% in your top 5 KPI’s at this time of year. When you see something out of the norm dive and find out why immediately since time is truly of the essence.

Holiday web metrics are also different. Not only do people get serious about buying they want shorter and sharper paths to popular products. Refine your merchandising emphasizing the 20% of stuff controlling 80% of your gross sales. Create special landing pages from your internal search tool (this is the time of year an Enedca or Fast Search really earns their money). Remember to keep Google’s spider OUT of your seasonal landing pages to avoid duplicate content penalties. Watch for trends like a hawk watching a field for dinner. When you see a little known product pop, have sales greater than 2% above expectation, feed it with better placement in search, advertise the product on interior banners, feature the hot product on your site and mention the trend in an email. Anything popping above 15% should be on your home page until it calms down. If it doesn’t calm down figure a way to increase its real estate on your home page and consider creating a special landing environment (several pages of content all dedicated to the HOT item).

Put BUY NOW buttons on anything and everything you do at this time of year. Favor buy now over “READ MORE”, “LEARN MORE” and other less forceful CTA’s (calls to action).

See the immediacy of what is happening at this time of year? Planning everything to the nth degree online is crazy. Plan 25% of your promotions, let your traffic determine another 25% and then react 50% of the time. Over planning kills your ability to feed or put out fires. How to know what fires to feed and the ones to put out is another post for another time, today just focus on creating a flexible merchandising plan and watch your site’s Key Performance Indicator numbers like a hawk on a wire.

Summary

I’ve lived through and can share the stories of seven holiday sales seasons working on a B2C web site (B2B has seasonality too but that is for another post). Our site made more money each holiday than the one before even as doing so became harder each year. We got better at the special frenzy that is this time of year. I never felt more alive, challenged or exhausted by my birthday (New Year’s Day). Ecommerce at this time of year is about as much fun as you can have without riding a bicycle across America (and I’ve done both :), so enjoy and let us know if we can help in any way.

Martin

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Martin Smith
Director of Marketing
Atlantic BT
Martin(dot)Smith(at)AtlanticBT(dot)com