Video- Francis Rooney's town hall in Fort Myers
U.S. Rep. Francis Rooney hosted a town hall on Thursday, Feb. 22, 2018, in Fort Myers. Many of his constituents focused their questions on school security and gun control.
B2B Marketers: Is Your Influencer Marketing Mechanical or Meaningful?
The post B2B Marketers: Is Your Influencer Marketing Mechanical or Meaningful? appeared first on Online Marketing Blog – TopRank®.
What Is a Center of Excellence and Why Do You Need One?
As organizations scale, they often have marketing functions sitting in many different areas. Perhaps there are social media people who work both locally and in the corporate office, like some of our hospitality clients. Or perhaps there are many different teams which produce content that should be used across digital properties, like a client of ours which is a trade organization.
In those situations, these organizations benefit from a structure that brings together various groups and sits outside of the regular reporting structure.
We work with clients to create short-term task forces, but in addition to those bodies, we also work with clients on defining and implementing long-term centers of excellence.
What is a center of excellence?
Sometimes called a “competency center” or “capability center” in academia, a center of excellence (COE) brings together people from different disciplines and provides shared facilities/resources. In business, and especially marketing, COEs should go further, in order to do what Gartner describes as, “concentrating existing expertise and resources in a discipline or capability to attain and sustain world-class performance and value.” These long-term groups combine learning and oversight around a specific area, driving the organization to shift across multiple disciplines together.
For instance, you may have the heads of various marketing-related functions from across different product lines gather in a COE around implementing best-in-class social customer care for your customers, with shared customer history, multiple types of customized content, and more relevant content production. Therefore, the COE would focus on providing training, best practices, and resources for all of these different teams, while also gathering the data and learnings from all of the teams to create a positive feedback loop.
Here are 4 best practices of effective COEs.
- Executive buy-in: To function well, COEs first need buy-in from the top to get them planned and implemented. Sometimes, this can be a challenge. As we’ve discovered as we’ve worked with various clients to implement these processes, sometimes it can take many conversations and hours to get buy-in from skeptical team leads who don’t want their independence encroached upon. However, if there is executive buy-in and clarity in terms of reporting functionality, it can be done smoothly.
- Cross-discipline team members: COEs also need to bring together people who are cross-discipline and whose experience touches the core area in multiple ways. For instance, a COE around content marketing might bring together a team that creates content for sales, a video content team, a customer service team, and a research team, all to create a more efficient and effective content marketing engine for your organization. Respecting and engaging the expertise of these different disciplines is key.
- Consistency and Governance: A consistency and governance plan are other key features of an effective COE. In working with our clients on implementing COEs, we often develop a cadence and structure for COE meetings and identify who in the group owns various responsibilities. For example, making sure that your COE has someone in charge of bringing in the analysis, and all team leads come prepped with an agenda may seem like a small thing, but it can make all the difference when your teams are extremely busy and time is a limited commodity.
- Shared resources: An important logistical consideration, COEs must have a system of shared resources. Templates, tools, calendars, and work standards must be accessible to everyone who is involved in the tasks at hand, and the organization must incentivize and monitor all participants’ adherence to these tools to ensure consistency. This process doesn’t work if only one or two people buy in. Everyone must use the system consistently.
What is the benefit of a COE?
As organizations get more complex, teams are often working in silos, not sharing their knowledge, despite the parallel evolution of various skills. COEs identify these areas and bring together internal resources so they can be shared among groups. This brings more organization efficiencies, but also creates more consistent customer experience across the organization, benefiting customers of both B2B and B2C companies.
Because COEs are designed to drive innovation and improvement, they also create an organizational structure that encourages the different members to measure, experiment, and push each other forward. By promoting more transparency and more shared results, they can be a powerful way for the organization to align around business goals, rather than individual departmental metrics.
How do you roll out a COE?
As with all good things, COEs take patience to implement. Time and dedication are key to creating a successful structure.
Here are four steps to rolling out a COE:
- Identify the team members: Once you’ve defined the scope and nature of the COE, identify who should be a part of it, how often it will meet, and what information needs to be shared and agreed upon in each meeting.
- Regular meetings: Schedule regular meetings and make sure that the agenda is shared with the entire group prior to the meetings. Be sure that reporting and data, pertinent to the conversation, is distributed ahead of time.
- Set goals and timelines: Within the COE, develop specific goals metrics and timelines upon which the COE will measure and evaluate success, so that there is a consistent drive towards improvement.
- Create your resource hub: Establish a resource hub to share tools, templates, and updates on the COE’s activities — whether that’s a Slack channel or part of your project management tool.
Remember: a COE should drive improvement and change within the organization. Don’t be afraid to challenge the group to get outside their comfort zone and be creative about solving problems together.
Related Podcast: How Hilton’s Social Media Center of Excellence Keeps Guests Coming Back
The post What Is a Center of Excellence and Why Do You Need One? appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.
Collaboration and user management in the new Search Console
As part of our reinvention of Search Console, we have been rethinking the models of facilitating cooperation and accountability for our users. We decided to redesign the product around cooperative team usage and transparency of action history. The new Search Console will gradually provide better history tracking to show who performed which significant property-affecting modifications, such as changing a setting, validating an issue or submitting a new sitemap. In that spirit we also plan to enable all users to see critical site messages.
New features
- User management is now an integral part of Search Console.
- The new Search Console enables you to share a read-only view of many reports, including Index coverage, AMP, and Mobile Usability. Learn more.
- A new user management interface that enables all users to see and (if appropriate), manage user roles for all property users.
New Role definition
- In order to provide a simpler permission model, we are planning to limit the “restricted” user role to read-only status. While being able to see all information, read-only users will no longer be able to perform any state-changing actions, including starting a fix validation or sharing an issue.
Best practices
As a reminder, here are some best practices for managing user permissions in Search Console:
- Grant users only the permission level that they need to do their work. See the permissions descriptions.
- If you need to share an issue details report, click the Share link on that page.
- Revoke permissions from users who no longer work on a property.
- When removing a previous verified owner, be sure to remove all verification tokens for that user.
- Regularly audit and update the user permissions using the Users & Permissions page in new Search Console.
User feedback
As part of our Beta exploration, we released visibility of the user management interface to all user roles. Some users reached out to request more time to prepare for the updated user management model, including the ability of restricted and full users to easily see a list of other collaborators on the site. We’ve taken that feedback and will hold off on that part of the launch. Stay tuned for more updates relating to collaboration tools and changes on our permission models.
As always, we love to hear feedback from our users. Feel free to use the feedback form within Search Console, and we welcome your discussions in our help forums as well!
Leoma Lovegrove plans to give back after Hurricane Irma
Leoma Lovegrove talks about the series of small paintings of Hurricane Irma that she did while she was evacuated.
How to get more clients online
One of the most important questions you can ask when you start or run your business is how to get clients online. We can’t say that it’s impossible to run the business without an online presence, but you definitely leave a lot of money on the table by not driving sales online. There is no magic with online sales, and you need to be patient to get your first clients on the Internet. To become successful with online sales you need to build the strategy and set a smaller goal along your way to get more clients. Today we prepared 5 actionable tips you can use to get better sales.
1 Offer free consultation
It applies to businesses, which sell services. If you are good at something, you can sell your skills or knowledge. If you already figured out how to promote your services you need to convert prospects into leads. A free consultation will help you achieve this goal. It helps to reduce the funnel friction and get qualified leads. You can convert them to clients later. It’s easier to try something for free, which provides you with a higher chance to get the inquiry from the client. You know that the lead base you are building by providing free consultations has the problem which can be solved with your service. It creates a great opportunity for the upsell in the future.
If you use WordPress, you can create the landing page, where you can place WordPress booking plugin like Bookly or other online booking systems to automate the process of appointment scheduling.
2 Start blogging
You need visitors on your website to get clients or even leads online. You can’t optimize conversions if nobody visits your website. Blogging in combination with SEO is one of the proven ways to increase your website traffic. It takes time to see the results, but if you write regularly and you cover topics which are interesting for your potential clients, it will pay off. But don’t put quantity over quality. It’s much better to write one or two articles per month, which will be interesting and will share some news, or will explain how to solve the problem. Don’t forget about SEO, use Google Keyword Planner or tools like Semrush or Ahrefs to find keywords people use when they search the topic you are writing about. You need to use those keywords in heading, title and in the article itself. Keep writing, and you’ll see more visitors and clients in some time.
3 Run an ad campaign
This method requires a budget, but it’s definitely worth testing. It’s the fastest way to address the message to your potential audience and gather the market feedback. Once you find your audience, you will get more clients online. Nowadays there are plenty of options you can choose from to advertise your product or service. You can test more traditional ways of advertising by placing banners on websites, where you think you could find some clients. For such purposes, you can use the service like BuySell ads to agree with website owners directly. You could try programmatic advertising with Google Adwords, Bing when it comes to contextual ads or even banner ads available across their display networks. Programmatic advertising provides you with targeting options, which allow you to define the audience, who should see your ads, which will lead to better ROI and conversion rates. Programmatic advertising is also available within Social networks, but when it comes to social, you can also try influence marketing. And don’t forget to use tracking to analyze which channels work best for you to optimize ad campaign and budget for better results.
4 Write a case study
If you already have clients, you can write a case study with them. Once it’s ready, you can use it to attract new visitors and improve conversion rate. With a case study, you can describe the problem the client had and how you helped to solve it. It creates social proof and trust because your clients speak for you and they show the results they managed to achieve working with you. Besides you can use sase studies to create more content like a blog, social posts, infographics, etc..
5 Build partnerships
Build partnerships with other companies and brands you don’t compete. By doing that you will leverage their marketing activities to promote your brand. For example, if you are a professional photographer you could partner with wedding consultants, some photo studios, Instagram bloggers, etc. to promote your services. Typically it’s a mutual partnership and you can even agree on some sort of commission.
It’s not an ultimate list of things you could do to get more sales online. But it’s a good starting point. The good thing about these tips is that you can start implementing them right away. Share how you get clients online in the comments.
Original post: How to get more clients online
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