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10 Reasons To Replace Your Agency with a PR Consultant

generatepr — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 14:13:34 +0000

If you are a company looking to downsize your marketing and PR budgets, why not consider hiring a consultant to replace your current agency? Here are a few reasons why it might make sense for you:

1. Lots of highly qualified, seasoned professionals are on the market right now due to layoffs.

2. Some recently laid off consultants could be the people doing the day to day work on your accounts, so they are already ahead of the game in terms of knowing and understanding your business.

3. Why pay the overhead costs of an agency and markups, when you can pay one highly qualified consultant who charges you just the costs of services.

4. Most likely, you will probably be guaranteed better results than with your agency. Consultants are highly experienced and know how to work smarter and faster than the junior staff you may have working on your account at your agency.

5. The consultants terms and hours are flexible. Some may even come and work out of your office for a day or two if you would like them to. This gives you a chance to connect and involve them in your business at a greater level.

6. Most consultants will offer a free evaluation and/or marketing plan before you sign on. They are eager to demonstrate their understanding of your business, and freed from the vestiges of agency standard operating procedures, will probably offer you exciting, creative ideas that were overshadowed at the agency.

7. Consultants lack of job security raises the bar in the quality of work they do and the energy they devote to it.

8. Consultants fees are typically negotiable and flexible to your budget. You will get an honest appraisal of time necessary to accomplish your goals.

9. To find consultants in your area, simply use Google, check out LinkedIn, and/or place an ad on job sites such as Media Bistro or Craigslist, depending on your market niche.

10. I’m happy to offer you advice on your marketing strategy, the ins and outs of finding the right agency and or finding the right consultant for you. Feel free to contact me at wendy@generatepr.com.

Good luck!

Wendy DeFeudis

Founder, GeneratePR

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Tags: consultants, recession, pr consultant, marketing consultant

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Go Daddy Gets It

generatepr — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 13:13:55 +0000

Excellent Customer and Tech Support From An Unlikely Place

I’m not in the habit of extolling the virtues of web hosting and domain management companies, but Go Daddy has changed my mind. It’s not just Go Daddy’s incredibly reasonably priced products and services that I find appealing. I mean, really, how great and varied can web hosting be? It’s the way Go Daddy understands and interacts with its customers that sets them apart.

Go Daddy’s brand is cool as far as web domain hosting and products go. They’ve got hot rod beauty queen Danica Patrick as as spokesperson, and most recently added Jillian Michaels to the mix. With these femme fatales on their team, Go Daddy is building its brand to attract fun, hip, tech savvy consumers. They are doing things right. They have good products and services. Even more importantly, they understand what their customers want and need. They deliver an excellent customer experience.

Getting customer and technical support right can be the thorniest of issues. When it comes to building your brand and engaging with your potential customers, every interaction counts–from the way your website looks to the way your customer is responded to via email or interacted with on the phone. Each interaction either builds brand support or chips away at it.

I would make a bet that most of us dread calling customer service or tech support. It’s usually the last ditch effort made after other reasonable attempts at DIY problem solving. Whenever I am forced to call any vendor, Dell, Comcast, Apple, Verizon, etc… I’m often reminded of Malcom Gladwell’s Blink. I can tell just the way someone answers the phone how my experience will be and whether or not I will be able to get my problem resolved in a realistic time frame with a reasonable amount of patience or if I will be “asking for the supervisor” as I pull my hair out and practice my deep breathing.

Not my experience with Go Daddy. No meditation techniques necessary, just good old fashioned dialogue with an informed, helpful, interested support person. They know their products. They know why they are on the phone–to help you! And they do. Each and every time I’ve called in, my experience is the same. Problem resolved. No attitude, no language barriers. It is that easy. Consistently.

Thank you Go Daddy for doing customer service the right way. When it comes to perfecting the customer relationship experience, you’ve got it down.

How To Quickly Improve Your SEO with Hubspot’s Keyword Grader

generatepr — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 13:00:38 +0000

GeneratePR Evaluates Hubspot Key Word Grader

I really love Hubspot’s keyword grader seo tool as a quick and easy tool to improve On-Page SEO. It’s all about placing the right keywords in the right places on each of your web pages. Essentially, if there is a ranking war with you and another company to come up for a search on Google, you will win if you have your pages optimized better than your competition. So let’s get started and use Keyword Grader.

1. Find your keywords. You will need to populate a list of 200-500 key words that are relevant to your business. Ask yourself: what are the words that my prospects search for to find me? Google your competition. See what words they are using.

2. Now, begin to load those words into the Keyword grader. Keep adding as many words that you think make sense to your business. Use the keyword suggest tool to come up with variations. This is very helpful and a fast way to populate your list. Be sure to also add derivatives for words for singular, plural and geographic location if you are trying to reach local traffic as well.

3. Once the words are loaded, rate each word according to relevance to your business. Keyword Grader asks you to rate them from 1 to 5 in importance. Once you have those marked, mark all of your 5′s as your favorites.

4. Now that you have your words loaded and ranked according to relevance, it’s time to review the metrics of the Keyword Grader to see how you can use this information to your advantage. Keyword Grader tells you how many searches were made per month on each word you selected; how difficult this word is to rank for on the first 10 pages of Google; if your site is currently being found for this key word; and the approximate Cost Per Click of each word.

If you’ve loaded your competitors’ website into the mix already, you can see where they are ranking as well. Wow! This is really powerful information if used correctly!

5. Now that you have your Keyword Grader loaded, sort by your favorites. Examine these words you selected based on the above criteria discussed. Ultimately, you are looking for words that are highly relevant to your business, but also not exceedingly difficult to rank for.

6. Here’s where long tail words come into play. If you’ve got a long tail phrase (lower search volume but more targeted to your business), make this one of your favorites. If you see insanely competitive terms, you may want to retool your list and remove them, or make them lower in relevance. The idea here is to focus your campaign on key words that you can optimize your content and pages around that will increase your SEO.

7. Great, now that you have the list, you will need to use it to optimize your website pages. Create a document for yourself for quick review. Hubspot makes this easy with an export into Excel or Word. Using this document, you will begin to make changes to your website. It’s easy if you are using Hubspot’s CMS. Just log in and go to Page Manager. There you will see where to add in Page name, title, url, keywords and description. Take your keyword list and add those words here. If you aren’t using Hubspot’s CMS, you can still do the work in the Marketer version and direct your web master to implement the changes.

8. Quick note: This can be a tedious process based on the number of pages you have on your site. Don’t get bogged down and overwhelmed. Just prioritize your pages and do them one by one. Remember, the more pages you have, the better. Google will crawl your site more often if you have consistently fresh and updated content. And if the web pages aren’t optimized, no one is going to find you. So this is a really critical step!

9. Now that you’ve optimized your pages, you can still continue to use Keyword Grader on a regular basis. Check back to search for new keywords before you launch a new inbound marketing campaign and/or add new pages to your site.

10. Congratulations! You have successfully used the Keyword Grader. Now it’s time to build links so you can improve your rankings for those competitive keywords. But that’s for another day and another blog post. Stay tuned for “How to Rank for Competitive Keyword Phrases with HubSpot’s Link Grader Research Tool” in my next article.

And finally, if you love Hubspot Keyword Grader and Inbound Marketing concepts, but don’t have the time to do it yourself, geneatePR is here to help. Outsource your Inbound Marketing efforts. We’ll help you make your campaigns successful!

Wendy DeFeudis

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5 Ways to Optimize Search Engine Ranking

generatepr — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 18:02:09 +0000

So, you’ve heard a lot about improving your SEO and you would like to get started on your own, but are not sure how? Here, GeneratePR offers you a few tips to get you started.

Review Key Words: You can begin your SEO optimization with a key word analysis. Determine which key words your customers are searching for. Ask yourself, what are the words and phrases that your potential leads are typing into Google to find you? Compile a list of about 10 words and phrases.

Review Your Competitors’ Key Words: Conduct a search of your competitors. Review their page descriptions, headers and titles to see which key words and phrases they are using. Modify your list accordingly.

Analyze Your On-Page SEO: Now that you have a nice key word list, review and edit your own website. See if you are using those words on each of your web pages. Placing these key words in the right places on your web pages is critical for improving your SEO. Change your metadata tags– page titles, headings, content and URLs to include your new key words and phrases. This will help the search engine spiders find you for the key words you have chosen.

Optimize Your Images: Visual images make your website come alive and tell your story. However, they can sometimes be an impediment to SEO, so make sure to include image optimization in your SEO strategy. In order for search engines to “recognize” your images and give you credit for them, it is necessary to assign an “alt attribute” (additional text) to the image. By doing this, you have changed your image into content that can now be “seen” by web crawlers. Another point to keep in mind regarding image optimization is that large files take a long time to download and your potential leads may be too impatient to wait. Reducing the image size decreases the download time.

Create Transactional Landing Pages: Add transactional landing pages to your website. These carefully crafted, call to action pages persuade a visitor to leave personal information (email address, job title, phone number, etc.) in exchange for information you are providing them (free eBook, video download, whitepapers, etc.). Transactional landing pages not only allow you to capture qualified leads, but they also allow you to track and measure the effectiveness of your online marketing campaigns. You can easily determine this by looking at your conversion rates. Your success can be measured by seeing how many leads hit your landing page and completed your call to action.

These are just a few steps to get you started in SEO. If you have additional questions about search engine consulting, please feel free to email me or call 646.522.0604.

Wendy DeFeudis