Direct Mail Marketing, tips to make it work for you

What is Direct Mail Marketing? Direct mail marketing is a perfect opportunity to get your company's name in the hands of customers who want to hear about your latest products, services, and coupons.

SEO, Direct Mail and Web

Recently there have been huge improvements in the direct mail process. Increased research abilities to target businesses for b2b mailing is amazingly accurate. The USPS every door direct program allows businesses to target homeowners or perspective customers down to neighborhoods within zip codes. this type of targeted marketing can increase conversions for businesses with great accuracy.

1. Understanding Your Target Customers 

Knowing about your best customers is a key factor in targeted direct mail marketing. Knowing the customers' basic demographics, such as males 18 to 34 or females with children, is a start. However, a more complete understanding of your customer's profile like their shopping and purchasing behavior in other categories; their attitudes toward trends, products, marketing and media; or their lifestyle habits can help you become even more effective in both your lead selection and the messages you'll use in communicating with the leads.

2. Open With a Proposition

“Consumers have short attention spans. Instead of building excitement toward your value proposition, just open with it. This will attract the recipient’s attention and force you, the sender, to see if your value proposition is worth sending to potential customers.”

3. Provide Value 

“Most direct mail pieces deserve the moniker of “junk mail.” To make sure yours stands out from the crowd, you must deliver some kind of real value that transcends your brand message. There are so many creative things you can do that are cheap: Deliver curated content, use creative techniques (such as punch-outs or folds) to make something that consumers can use or write witty copy. Be boldly creative!” 

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4. Sell Solutions to Problems, Not Products

No one cares about your widgets. What they care about are their own needs and wants. Bob doesn’t want a drill, he wants a hole. Mary doesn’t want a dress, she wants to look thin at the party this Friday. Alice doesn’t want an investment newsletter, she wants to find a great investment that will let her retire at 45. Ted doesn’t want a recipe book, he wants new ways to impress his friends at dinner parties and generate the compliments he thrives on.

 5. Make your calls to action! Make 'em loud and often

With direct mail marketing it's vitally important to invite response with calls to action (CTA's). Call for action at least three times. Imply the CTA in the wording of the offer (e.g. Enter to Win); follow your body copy with a CTA (e.g. call or click Today!); and in the footer or 'PS' remind them to why they don't want to forget to do it today. Make your CTA's large, bold and bright and use ample exclamation marks! Give your reader every possible vehicle to respond such as 800 #, local #, fax #, email, reply card, website or personal URL (PURL)

If you are considering a direct mail campaign give me a call at Results Business Marketing. I have successfully implemented direct mail campaigns for several years and combined with an effective SEO campaign Direct Mail get can you results.

Results Business Marketing

SEO, Direct Mail and Web

Saint Paul-Minneapolis, Mn.

612-327-5756

SEO Services, Minneapolis SEO, Direct Mail Co's, Every Door Direct, USPS, Mpls SEO

Minneapolis SEO Results Business Marketing

Minneapolis has access to high quality SEO services with a trusted partner in, Results Business Marketing.

Minneapolis SEO

SEO, there is no longer a question of if you should utilize these techniques it's a matter of when are you going to start.

There has been a huge shift in the last 5 years to digital search when a customer is looking for your business. In the past it was acceptable to place ad's in the yellow pages or newspapers and sit back and wait for the phone to wring. Picked up a yellow book lately? Online search accounts for the majority of how businesses are found and it's only going to get stronger. 

Google currently accounts for 67% of online searches and recently has released more search standards for mobile search.

Mobile vs Desktop Search

Mobile search has recently passed desktop search and the curve is climbing as you can see in this graph.The explosion of mobile devices has been an obvious contributing factor in this example. Fact is if your site is not mobile friendly you are probably not getting the traffic and conversions you are looking for.


SEO is a key factor in making sure your site can be found by those searching for your products and services. SEO is the art of making a website search friendly. SEM is the art of promoting that site. You can spend a ton of time and money promoting a site that is not properly optimized.

If you are considering hiring a professional seo company consider Results Business Marketing. Minneapolis SEO that get's results.

Results Business Marketing
612-327-5756
www.resultsbusinessmarketing.com

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Improving Your Local SEO

Whether you have a single store front or a nationally based chain, a local SEO strategy is key to driving more prospects through your doors. By optimizing specific parts of your site, you increase your prospects' chances of finding you in local search results.

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You've got to make it easy for people and search engines to find you. To do this, set up your NAP, which stands for name, address, and phone number (with area code). This should be included as crawlable HTML text on your site. Avoid the common mistake of only including the NAP within an image -- images can’t be crawled from search engines like HTML text. The most common location for the NAP is in the footer or header of the site. 

Create location pages if you have more than one brick and mortar location. Location pages provide readers with your NAP, store hours, unique store descriptions, parking/transit information, promotions, testimonials from happy customers, and more. It's also important you avoid duplicating content across multiple location pages

Be the local authority for your industry -- I'd recommend going about it through regularly publishing blog content. (And setting up a business blog if you don't already have one.) Promote local industry gatherings, news, employees, and other educational content on your blog. Think of top-of-the-funnel content that goes beyond what your business sells.

Local Profile Pages

• Google+ Local

• Remove duplicate listings using Google Mapmaker.

• Develop a system for building customer reviews.

• Optimize your business categories.

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Build these directory citations.

• Express Update
• Neustar Localeze
• My Business Listing Manager
• Factual

Verify that your citations are consistent and complete across these four data aggregators. Remove any duplicate listings you find. 

This  is intended to be alocal SEO jumpstart for your business. Some of the tips are one-off activities where you can set it and forget it (i.e. making sure your NAP is clearly written on your site). On the other hand, building reviews and publishing locally relevant content is an activity your organization needs to do on an ongoing basis for long term local SEO success

If you are struggling to get noticed online contact Results Business Marketing Get Results Today!

Results Business Marketing
Saint Paul, Mn
612-327-5756

Minneapolis SEO, Mpls SEO, SEO Services, Direct Mail Marketing

SEO: Getting Basic With The Basics

What's the point of writing good content if no one can ever find it?   

 Results Business Marketing, May 12th 2015

What matters more in SEO than content? Nothing.

Content is King Once Again

And, while ranking high in serp's is a high priority for most businesses, when it comes to having a well-optimized Web presence content is the A++ and A+ of those efforts — more specifically, written content. Search engines can only crawl, index and understand text — not images, videos, podcasts, photos or any other type of graphic or multimedia content.
That’s not to say you can’t optimize non-text content marketing elements, but that is for another story.

What is the Key to Content Writing? Keywords

Strong, optimized and well written content is the most critical part of any SEO initiative.
However before any sentences, taglines or headlines are written, you must venture into the land of search optimization by researching keywords and key phrases your target audience is likely to use when searching for your website, articles, blog entries or other content initiatives, as well as for individual pages or specific pieces of content within a website or blog.

The first step in the keyword research process is simply to brainstorm a list of the words and phrases a searcher might use to find your site or business.

The task here is to be specific. Forget broad terms like “pants.” Focus instead on “dress pants” or “casual dress pants” or “bets prices on dress pants” or “Calvin Kline dress pants.” It can be helpful to ask  friends, family, clients or colleagues what terms come to mind.

Don’t completely eliminate very broad terms such as “pants” — this helps searchers get a general feel for the content. But it’s the very specific, targeted terms (“dark blue business casual dress pants”) that attract the targeted traffic at the bottom of the purchase or conversion funnel.

Once you’ve determined which keywords to target, both for an overall content marketing initiative as well as for specific, smaller campaigns, it’s time to build content around those terms.

 
Using those keyword terms in well structured sentences is important. In the past may a page full of keywords worked to get search engine attention but not any more.

Optimize Images And Multimedia Content

As stated above, search engines can not “read” anything other than plain old text.

What all these file types have in common is a need for clear, descriptive names or titles. These are not by all means the default name churned out by audio, video or image software. File names should be very descriptive and match what that file represents.

Optimized keywords get results

If you’ve got an image of a ball, for example, call it a “World Series Baseball” or “replica baseball from 1938,” not just plain old “ball.” Be descriptive and give the search engines a chance to rank your content.

These descriptive terms are not only found by search engine spiders, but often have the added advantage of appearing above, below or by the image itself, enhancing the user experience as well. Beyond any other optimization tactics, file names are accorded the most weight by search engines when it comes to ranking.

It should therefore come as no surprise that websites that regularly use multiple media files require a naming strategy or protocol to ensure consistency in the names used for graphics, audio or video.
After giving media files clear, descriptive names, don’t forget to add more descriptive text (or meta data) to the “alt” attribute in the file’s tag. Make it short and to the point, like the file name.
This is an opportunity to go a little bit broader.


Quality Matters. So Does Specificity

It’s not just content that reigns supreme in SEO — it’s quality content. Google’s own published guidelines on the topic say in essence that anyone hoping to rank well in search should write for their own visitors and users, not for the search engines themselves. The company is putting its algorithms solidly behind this recommendation.

There are plenty of good reasons to keep content interesting, informative, entertaining, engaging, witty, useful, well-written and well-presented. There are dozens of reasons to have a strong taxonomy, descriptive and compelling headlines, tags and other organizational attributes. Now you can add search engine optimization to that list, too.

If you are seeking out a professional and respected SEO, (content marketing company) contact Results Business Marketing, Our Business Marketing Strategies get Results

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Results Business Marketing
Saint Paul Mn.
Serving Businesses Nationwide
612-327-5756

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Common SEO Mistakes

Your business may be one of many businesses making common SEO mistakes today. 

Google and other major search engine’s are on a mission to give relevance to their search queries,  getting these mistakes under control will help boost your SEO rankings.

SEO Mistakes are not always easy to fix

Below we will cover the changes search engines have recently made that can have a very large impact on a sites rankings in SERP's (search engine results pages). These changes are what keeps search engine marketing companies like ours scrathing our heads and wondering what's next? In the same context as more companies get online and marketing is less paper based and more digital we see the concerns search engines have in giving users quality content.

1. Poor or Duplicate Content - With it's recent update Panda Google is pressuring companies to provide quality and original content. It was easy not too long ago to just copy content that was similar to yours and paste it in your information center change some links and wallah you have seo marketable content. Not so much anymore you have to be original and you have to provide quality information.

2. Targeting the Wrong Keywords - This may seem like a very basic rule of thumb making su. It may sound good to you but if the people looking for your products and services don't use them they are a waste. Google keyword tool is free and helps you to define what searchers are looking for.
re your keywords match your content but as a professional seo firm we see it all the time it is an often ignored

SEO not just one but many pieces of the puzzle

3. Keyword Stuffing - Stuffing is great for Thanksgiving but not so much for search engines. Overstuffing your content or trying to hide keywords is a big no no. It may be hard to believe but too much of something even in seo is not a good thing. While this technique of over repeating relevant keywords had worked in the past it is a frowned upon technique in this day and considered brown or black hat seo

4. Using the Same Title on Multiple Pages - Repeating the same title tags on multiple pages is a lazy practice and shows a lack of creativity on the part of web designers. Web site designers are typically not very good at seo. They are graphics artists and designers they make pretty websites. SEO experts are more like mathematicians. You need to utilize each pages titles to get to searchers seeking relevant content.

5. Not utilizing Alt tags when possible - Alt tags can be used in a variety of ways the typical alt tags are image related. Images must utilize these tags to give search engine spiders an indication of relevancy to your content. You should use hyphens in between keywords and keep the tags relevant to your content. For instance if you have a picture of a website about trees you should tag it Pinetree - Forest - Redwood - etc.

There is much to learn regarding how to utilize seo best practices when promoting your business to search engines and obtaining quality page rankings with major search engines. If you are interested in hiring a professional business marketing company contact Results Business Marketing, with many years of experience we can get you Results.

Results Business Marketing

St Paul, Minneapolis Mn

612-327-5756

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For great seo results it is widely known, that content is king,

SEO or Search Engine Optimization as it is known is an ever changing science. However there are a few philosophies that are consistent nad although they too may change they are still as relevant today as they were 5-7 years ago.

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For great seo results it is widely known, that content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written, and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for a site to link to you, you don’t want the link. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.

Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines. Don’t design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won’t cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.

When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.

The bottom line in SEO is Text, Links, Popularity and Reputation.

SEO Mythbusting, 3 Myths busted

If You Build it, They Will Come
This is a favorite mantra of the content marketing. Just build an amazing website with even more amazing content and watch the traffic roll on in.

Link Building is Dead
Matt Cutts said Google has tried excluding links from the algorithm and the results were "much worse." So while I don't think it will stay forever this way, we have years before it potentially could go away, according to Cutts.

Social is the New Link Building No. Can you get links from social, yes, once they leave the walled garden, but not from sharing itself (Google+ excluded here). The reason is simple. There is a negative history with Facebook and Google and Google and Twitter. Neither company is willing to give Google consistent access to their fire hose, so Google simply can't factor them into the algorithm.

If you are in need of a Professional SEO Service  contact Minneapolis SEO, SEO Martian. Professional seo with many years of proven experience

Results Business Marketing
St Paul, Minneapolis
612-327-5756

Minneapolis SEO, Mpls SEO, Minneapolis SEO Company, SEO Services, B2B Direct Mail, Website Design Services

SEO Success Starts With Keyword Research

SEO Success Starts With Keyword Research

Keyword research is the first step in the SEO process.  It is also one of the most important parts of the search engine optimization process. If you target the wrong keywords, you’ll be wasting your time and money. 

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3 Keyword Selection Considerations

When doing keyword research, there are three components to consider before selecting the keywords you want to target. They are:

1. Number of Searches
2. Competition
3. Search Intent

You want keywords that get a decent amount of searches without a lot of competition where the intent of the search matches the goals of the web page you are trying to rank for. With this combination, you’ll be able to rank more easily and much quicker and you’ll have better conversions.

How Many Searches? More Is NOT Always Better

If you are a chiropractor in Minneapolis who has just started your own practice, what keyword do you think you should target – “chiropractor” or “chiropractor minneapolis”? Let’s use the Google Keyword Tool and see how many exact searches each one gets every month. Here is what we see:

“Chiropractor” gets 110,000 searches while “chiropractor Minneapolis” gets 320 searches. It’s obvious “chiropractor” is what you should target, right? Not so fast.

“Chiropractor” gets significantly more searches but which one is more targeted to your potential customer base and which one is likely to be easier to rank for? I’ll give you a hint: “chiropractor Minneapolis”

If you have a lot of money and time to commit to getting ranked for “chiropractor” it could be done, but would it be worth it? Sure you might get a lot of traffic but what kind of conversions would you have? After all, how many people searching for the generic term, “chiropractor,” are actually looking for chiropractic care? And how many of them live in the Minneapolis area?

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When using the Google Keyword Tool there are three different keyword match types that Google returns data for. They are broad, exact, and phrase match. You want to look at the exact and phrase match data when selecting keywords to target. That is why we looked at the exact match data in our example.

How Much Competition Is There?

There are several things to look at when sizing up the competition, but the primary things you’re looking at are domain age, page rank (PR), and the number of backlinks to a site. The older the domain, the higher the PR, and the more backlinks – the stiffer the competition.

Using our favorite SEO tool, we search for “chiropractor Minneapolis” to see what the SEO competition looks like for the websites on the first page of Google for that keyword. Here is what we see:

The results are a little hard to see but the average age of the domains is 7 years and most of the sites have a PR between 1 and 3. The website with the most backlinks has 2,149 backlinks while the website with the least backlinks has 0! Just looking at this data, the competition isn’t that bad at all.

If you properly optimized a web page for this keyword and did the monthly SEO required (i.e. obtained backlinks every month), you could rank on Google (the first page specifically) within a few months. Contrast that with the competition for just “chiropractor”:

There are a few websites that are 12 years old with a PR as high as 5. A handful of websites have more than 10,000 backlinks with one having as many as 62,619 backlinks! As you can expect, a very broad keyword like this has lots of competition. It would take several months and a lot of time and effort (and money) to get ranked for this keyword!

Search Intent

Another consideration of the keyword selection process is the search intent. You want to make sure that the intent of the search matches the goals you have for the web page you’re trying to rank for. If the intent matches the goals, you’ll get better conversions.

For example, if you are trying to get a page on your website to rank for “sports chiropractor” and your practice is located in Minneapolis, then you want to research and target keywords specifically about “sports chiropractor” and not “family chiropractor” or “child chiropractor” etc. In addition, you want to rank for those keywords with Minneapolis as part of the keyword. Instead of “sports chiropractor,” you’d want to consider, “sports chiropractor Minneapolis” instead.

Bonus Tips on Keyword Selection

Here are a few bonus tips when doing your keyword research and selection:

Think like your customer! Just because you know your industry, don’t assume everyone else does. Don’t just think of the keywords you’d use to find your products or services. If this is difficult for you to do, just ask a family member or friend who’s not in your industry what they’d search for to find your products and services. 

Think like an industry expert. O.K, this totally contradicts the first tip but there are people in your industry that may be looking for your products and services so consider keywords that are specific to your industry.

Don’t target too many keywords for each page on your website. This is a common mistake. Keep your keywords laser focused. We like to target no more than 1-3 keywords per page and we keep the keywords closely related.

SEO takes time if you would lke to hire an SEO Professional contact SEO Martian, a leading minneapolis seo company, providing seo to businesses Nationwide.

Results Business Marketing

St Paul, Minneapolis, Mn

612-327-5756

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