December 23, 2014 By Carrie Gallagher

The Best Marketing Lesson I Learned This Christmas

Just a month ago I was writing a scroogy blog post about how to do holiday cards the right way. I’m surprised every day by how many people find it organically, but perhaps I should have also written a post about holiday email SPAM, because this month I’ve been pelted with it.

It starts with the Black Friday deals and snowballs from there — I’ve unsubscribed from more email lists this month than I have all year. I even unsubscribed from one of my favorite bloggers, Erika Napolitano, because she just happened to pick a bad month to do a blog-a-day campaign. I’ll probably go back to her later, but that was a bad idea.

The worst offender was Western Digital. I bought one of their external hard drives four years ago, but never hear from them (and I don’t want to!). They had the nerve to send me a Happy Holidays email with a video in it. At first I didn’t know who they were. Not only did I unsubscribe without watching the video, I replied to their generic “survey@wdc.com” address and let them have a piece of my mind.

At the Office

It’s even worse when the business you work for wants you to push out these horrible holiday emails. Our just-out-of-college inside sales guy came to me this month and said our illustrious leader told him to get my help crafting a “happy holidays” email to his contact list. I asked, “are these the same people you emailed right before Thanksgiving — people that you don’t have a relationship with and didn’t opt into any list?” He said yes. I asked, “how many replies did you get to that email blast?” He got 6 replies from 400 emails sent. Soapbox time.

Here’s the thing about holiday emails: everyone is trying to clear their inboxes. They’re gunning for “inbox zero” so they can get to their kid’s winter show, get the air mattresses out of the basement for house guests, and pick up extra wrapping paper … you get the idea. When you send these pointless “happy holidays” emails to people who have no idea who you are, you are messing with their day — their HOLIDAY — and they will hate you. Would you like me to explain that to our illustrious leader?

Yes, please.

I very calmly walked into the president’s office and explained my Inbound marketing position on holiday spam campaigns. The response went something like this: “I appreciate your opinion, but I want his (inside sales guy’s) name to get out there. The more they see his name, the better. Doing it after the new year is no good because that’s when I want him cold calling while they have their new budgets.”

OK then. I also don’t agree with cold calling because I’m constantly on the receiving end of bad cold calls, and I’ve heard our really bad cold call script. Here’s where the subject of this blog post comes into play.

Time to Let Go

The best lesson I’ve learned this Christmas is something I just realized since entering my 40’s: how to let go of things that don’t match my values. The most recent example being the freelance client I broke up with because he’s the definition of marketing insanity (I love him, but he is insane).

So today I resigned from my Director of Marketing position after 16 years. There’s a lot more backstory of course, and all will be revealed here and on my LinkedIn profile in mid-January. But “letting go” is the best marketing and life lesson I learned this Christmas, and I’m happier than I’ve been in years.

November 29, 2014 By Carrie Gallagher

The Biggest Marketing Fail in Your Holiday Email Campaign

I’m a sucker for Black Friday email deals, and this week I took advantage of two really good ones:

40% off a one-year membership to a very cool online training site for entrepreneurs
50% off a WordPress plugin that’s going to save me tons of time customizing themes for clients

Both deals won me over with clever emails — they each put a lot of thought into their design and copywriting, and I don’t know if it was on purpose, but the more expensive entrepreneur site emailed theirs later in the day. That’s smart considering some of us get a little grouchy during the holidays and might be having a glass of wine at the end of the work day … was I more inclined to pull out the credit card?

I spent $300 after the discounts, and I’m the type who loves to share deals like this on Twitter (I don’t do Facebook). Can you see the problem with the confirmation emails I received after my orders were placed?

Order Confirmations are a Missed Opportunity for Most Email Marketers

Transactional emails are undoubtedly the highest open rate you’ll ever get, because everyone wants to know their order was received correctly and their payment was processed. In the case of the second email example, there were files to download, so that’s an email I might need to come back to a few times. So where are the social sharing buttons? These emails should be encouraging me to tell everyone I know about the great Black Friday deals I just took advantage of.

The final stage of the Inbound marketing methodology is to delight customers and encourage social sharing. Let your customers help with your holiday email campaign, and send their friends into your sales funnel. Imagine how many more customers these two businesses could have gotten if they made it easy for me, a marketer, to spread their messages on Twitter or via email.

November 27, 2014 By Carrie Gallagher

Should Your Company Send Holiday Cards to Clients?

(Disclaimer: this was posted several years ago and I’m now my own boss. Not nearly as grouchy now, but I still stand by these tips for holiday card giving!)

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It seems I’ve developed a reputation for being the office Scrooge. In my defense, I’ve been managing our holiday gift giving and cards for so long that I never gave it much thought — it’s just another thing I put on the calendar and auto-pilot like every other December obligation.

When I started to wonder why this time of year makes me so grumpy, I realized it’s because the holidays are the most outboundy time of the year for marketers. Regressing to traditional, intrusive holiday marketing tactics, when Inbound works so well, makes me sick to my stomach.

E-cards are a topic all their own — I have a love/hate relationship with them because a few companies knock them out of the park, while most use them as a seasonal SPAM outlet.

But the paper cards you might consider ordering for your sales team to send to clients are another beast. As someone who’s been sending and receiving holiday cards at the same company for over a decade (not by choice), here are my thoughts on how to make client card giving more lovable.

Your Sales Team Must Hand-Write Them

Cards delivered to me at home or the office with a printed address label are usually tossed into the trash without being opened. A printed address label means one or more of the following to the person on the receiving end of your holiday card:

you were in a hurry to get cards out the door
you’re having an assistant do it for you
they’re just another contact in your CRM

Once you get sales to buy into the fact that they have to hand-write envelopes, they’ll pare down their list (next section). They’re also responsible for writing a salutation inside the card and signing it (no signature stamps allowed!). Even better if they go the extra mile to include a longer personal message.

Only Send Cards to People You Know

Do you like getting mail from people you don’t know? Every year my husband and I get a card from the law firm that handled our mortgage closing five years ago. They clearly spend a lot of money on high quality cards, but it goes straight into the garbage because it means nothing to our family. The lawyer we dealt with doesn’t even bother to sign it, so why would I put it on our mantle?

Maybe if they had kept in touch and tried to nurture a relationship with us outside of Christmas I’d feel different about it, but now I think they’re lame (marketing snob, my husband says) and wouldn’t recommend them to anyone.

So before you put someone on your list, ask yourself a Seth Godin question: would this person miss my card if I didn’t send it?

Invest in Quality

Every year, marketing departments are inundated with stacks of uninspiring holiday card catalogues. The fact that those printing companies stay in business tells me that a lot of people are simply phoning it in and ordering crap. If you’re reading this, hopefully you want to be better than crap!

Here are some of my favorite places to order high-quality holiday cards online (I don’t have relationships with these companies, but I’ve ordered from each of them in the past):

Before you place an order from any of these retailers, make sure you Google coupon codes — I’ve gotten some great deals during the holidays that way.

For God’s Sake, Skip the God Stuff

Unless your company is a religious organization, you’re likely sending cards to people of many faiths (or none at all). You probably don’t put your religious beliefs all over your LinkedIn profile, so keep your holiday cards agnostic and “wintery,” especially if you want clients to proudly display your card at their desks.

Don’t Put Envelopes Through the Office Stamp Machine!

If you’re liking this advice so far, then I’m sure you’ll agree it just wouldn’t look cool to have a handwritten envelope accompanied by a big ugly machine stamp. So mosey on down to the post office or your local Costco, and get some holiday “forever” stamps.

Bonus Points if You Lick the Envelopes

I’ve been known to lick my way through a stack of business envelopes. And then I saw that episode of Seinfeld where George’s fiance dies, so I don’t do that anymore. But those envelopes have to get closed somehow and you’re not putting them through the stamp machine, so get a sponge or something and close those suckers personally.

November 26, 2014 By Carrie Gallagher

How My Company Outranks Competitors on Google With No Budget

I’d like to share a little story about how my “day job” went from page 13 to page 1 on Google for our market three years ago, and how we continue to outrank competitors with no advertising budget. I’m not an SEO expert, but I’ve learned a few things along the way.

In late 2011 I stumbled upon HubSpot, because I needed to know how to create a Facebook business page. I went to Google with my problem, and HubSpot had a great blog post on how to get it done. I didn’t even need to talk to a sales person … it was fast and perfect.

I started devouring HubSpot’s ebooks, and they emailed me helpful information (as if they could read my mind about what was going on with my job at the time) about business blogging and making sense of B2B social media. In February 2012 they called and asked if I wanted to know what our “marketing grade” was. My heart started pounding because I wasn’t sure I wanted to know — I hate being graded!

It was 23 out of 100.

Clearly this wasn’t acceptable, but I explained that I had no marketing budget — our trading software division had been sold to Thomson Reuters two years earlier, and I was left with nothing. I’m not even allowed to expense my Adobe Creative Suite.

But I was determined to fix that grade, so I scheduled a meeting with our CEO, downloaded HubSpot’s “how to convince your boss” PowerPoint template, and spent the weekend customizing it (making it a LOT shorter). He was indeed convinced that we needed to transform our marketing, and I couldn’t wait to get started.

The HubSpot CMS & Keyword Tool

Our old website was a piece of crap built in Dreamweaver. It was ugly, and I’m sure the source code was giving Google a headache. Not that Google ever had a reason to come back and index our site, since nothing was happening and there were so few pages to crawl.

Once our contract was signed, HubSpot’s migration team moved us to their content management system (CMS). The look didn’t change much, but it was a lot easier to change page layouts and add a variety of “modules” to sidebars and footers.

When we went live on the HubSpot CMS, I went straight to the Keywords tool and entered the phrases we wanted to be found for in search engines. With this done, the software was able to point out “low hanging fruit” SEO fixes to help improve our rankings: page titles, URLs, meta descriptions, heading tags, image ALT text, and body content.

Evergreen Blog Posts

Anyone who uses HubSpot knows their training is outstanding. For me the most valuable section was on blogging, because I learned that when done right, business blogs are the most cost-effective and best sales person you’ll ever have. They educate website visitors 24/7, never take a sick day, and they’ll never ask you for a raise (I hope it goes without saying, please pay your content creators well!).

Blogging also has a huge effect on search rankings, because the more often you post, the more content you give Google to index. The more pages Google can index, the more they think you’ve got going on. The more they think you have going on, the more often they’re going to come back to your site.

As a one-person marketing department, I knew we needed as much “evergreen” blog content as possible — content that would keep working for us during the weeks and months that I was pulled away for other projects.

So we started an “Ask the Super Recruiter” campaign. It was a simple call to action (CTA) with a masked/caped recruiter that when clicked, job candidates were directed to a form where they could ask for advice on anything.

We made up our own questions for the most part (always related to our target keyword phrases), but we did get a few good ones from real job seekers. The point is that every blog post was posed in the form of a question, which is how people search online.

The Results

My boss didn’t think we would generate revenue from HubSpot or blogging. After all, candidates don’t pay the bills, so how could blogging about them help generate client traffic to our site?

We did reach the clients. When we started out with that embarrassing 23/100 grade from HubSpot, we were on page 13 of Google for IT staffing firms in NYC. Within six months we moved to page 1, and we’re still there today. Oh, and in the same amount of time our marketing grade went from 23 to 85.

I haven’t had time to blog lately, but our posts are so evergreen — how to write an IT resume summary is one that’s viewed every day around the world — that I can be pulled away for a project and know that our search ranking is safe.

We regularly get cold calls from hiring managers who say they found us on Google, and we’re outranking some of the biggest staffing firms in New York City, all of whom have marketing budgets that I can only dream of. But that’s not all …

Within 6 months of using HubSpot, we generated enough new business from organic search traffic to pay my full time salary for the year.

HubSpot is the gift that keeps on giving.

October 30, 2014 By Carrie Gallagher

Be the Wikipedia of Your Industry

In May 2013 I attended a HubSpot webinar hosted by Marcus Sheridan, the former owner of a Virginia-based in-ground pool company and now a TED speaker and content marketing specialist. The webinar, titled “The Honest Economy & Instructional Selling,” centered on Mr. Sheridan’s story about how trying to make payroll when the economy tanked in 2008 shifted his marketing strategy forever.

With homeowners suddenly upside down on their mortgages and skittish about luxury purchases, he had to do something drastic to see his pool company through the recession. He and his partners started a blog full of honest answers to every question they’d ever received from prospects — even laying bare the negative aspects of their products.

By adding this educational value to their website, they were able to cut their annual $250,000 marketing budget by 90% and generate over $2,000,000 in sales. The idea that transparent, educational content could yield results like that fundamentally changed my view of marketing, and the line that pulled it all together was “be the Wikipedia of your industry.”

marcus-and-me