The owner of a content-driven website in a technical industry approached Silver Beacon Marketing with a unique situation.

Our traffic is great, but we know that we can get much, much more. We have people who read our site daily and others who use us to make huge buying decisions.  But there are many more people searching for data, and we don’t know how to reach them.  We have videos, active social media and a terrific reputation.  How do we move from the technical buyers to the tech-savvy buyers?

Analyzing How To Get New Visitors

We had previously worked on this website and knew their writers were among the best in the industry. The content they produced was so good that other websites throughout the world linked to them, the industry’s manufacturers monitored their work and a couple of million people visited each month through search engines.

Although clearly a champion of their industry, this website needed direction in finding a new audience who would appreciate their expertise.

Silver Beacon Marketing’s Solution:  Content Management & Marketing Constructs

Marketing construct example

To reach a tech-savvy audience who would appreciate the content on this site first meant understanding the audience.  That meant their ages, gender, education, likes and dislikes and enough factors to create a series of characters that represented them.  Marketers call these characters “constructs”. Silver Beacon often creates them when helping a client improve their existing audience engagement or to find new audiences.  Constructs are especially important when first creating a website because the text on the website should be written for people in the target audience. That allows a marketer to write about things that will interest the target audience.

As in every part of marketing, art and science blend together when creating constructs.  Some are so elaborate that the marketer creates a two or three page biography!

Writers construct new content that appeals to constructs like the portion of the  Debra construct shown here.  Even analogies and cultural references used when writing have a greater impact because they resonate with the audience.

If your organization had a large segment of Debras in its target audience, you would create products and services that appealed to them to ensure that your website addressed their likes and dislikes.  

With our constructs firmly in place for our client, we researched new content opportunities every week.  The information was gathered using software that analyzes stories appearing on sites like Google News and scores the subject matter and its growth potential.  With this data, we suggested the appropriate topics and keywords while also identifying competitors. We provided our client with this data each week before their editorial calendar was created.  Each article recommendation allowed the author to understand the reader in ways not possible before the technology we use was created.

Content Management Success

We could see new visitors come to the website and stay longer so we all knew the content management program was successful. Google validated our analysis with an email one Thursday evening.

 

Google email about traffic increase

 

 

This is not the first time we have seen emails like this, and if you have never seen one before, you should talk with us about content management and your website’s traffic.

Google and The Cleveland Clinic each lost an opportunity to control a new domain name type that could have influenced the already low reputation of medical information published online.

Both organizations have had their applications overruled to run a new TLD (top-level domain) for .med according to industry site Domain Name Wire.

The Top Level Domain Name Rush

dot org typeA top-level domain, called a TLD by insiders, is the short term that appears after a dot in an Internet address. Everyday examples of approved TLDs are .com, .org, .edu and so on.  The international organization that monitors and allows these names is called ICANN, which is just a very long acronym.  ICANN last allowed new TLDs in 2004.  Those included .asia, .mobi and others.  Four years earlier, less commonly used TLDs like .info and .biz joined the ranks of available suffixes.

ICANN proposed that the traditional 3 and 4 letter suffixes could become almost anything at a contentious 2008 meeting.  Each application required at $185,000 evaluation fee.

And the land rush started.

A startup named Donuts spent $57 million on 307 TLDs.  Google, using a subsidiary called Charleston Road Registry, applied for its trademarked terms as well as generic terms like .ADS, .LOVE and .APP.

ICANN keeps the evaluation fee regardless of the award.  That means a company like Donuts sent along more than $50 million for its applications.

The Big Deal – Why Generic TLDs are Dangerous

An ICANN panel ruled that neither The Cleveland Clinic nor Google were allowed to obtain the TLD called .med.   While either company could have registered all diseases, conditions and devices and then sold those names at “market value”, there existed, as in every generic word instance, an opportunity to steer traffic to one organization or charge exorbitant sums for a domain registration.  As a business leader you need to be learning more about domain names that could be registered in your industry and implement a brand protection plan.   You will always be able to protect your trademarked terms, but your competitors may already be planning to get the inside track on location-based or similarly generic names in your industry.

 

Source: “Google’s and Cleveland Clinic’s .Med top level domains rejected“, Domain Name Wire, 1/2/14
Source:  “New Generic Top-Level Domains“, ICANN, retrieved 1/2/14
Source: “New GTLD Current Application Status“, ICANN retrieved 1/2/14
Image via Wikimedia Commons

Proactively monitoring customer satisfaction in your business improves everything.   We’ve touched on finding complaints in the past.  You can’t do enough of that work.

But how your organization reacts to customer complaints is even more important.   If you can’t get complaint resolution right, fold up your tents and quit or sell the company.  You must live by a culture of “every complaint properly handled every time”.  That does not mean robotic greetings and talk tracks that emphasize upsells.

Think of  a business version of The Golden Rule.

We recently saw both sides of the coin at our payroll company.  We love our payroll company.  They are always responsive, the price is reasonable and the service is easy to use.   But we apparently threw them for a loop when we hired an employee in another state.

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