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Years ago I wrote a blog post about keyword research for SEO. The basic point is that you don’t want to be optimizing for content that people aren’t searching for. My favorite example is that people search for “car” and not “automobile”, it simply puts why keyword research is important. It’s why, in my opinion, it sets the tone for every thing you do in search marketing because you need to understand what your audience is looking for. It will set the the tone for your content, technical implementations and link building.

It’s been a long time since I wrote the last post, so I wanted to put a “refresher” out there and also update a few things that I’ve learned over the years. The one thing that I’ve learned as I’ve become a more mature marketer, is that every campaign needs to be holistic. I’ve always talked about SEO being holistic, but, it should reflect all of your online marketing efforts. Making SEO your only source of traffic or customer acquisition is a huge mistake. As a matter of fact, relying on a single channel of traffic is a huge mistake. For that reason, I ensure that every traffic source we use ties into each other. The research from search marketing helps both SEO and PPC, which also helps us understand categories of traffic in other paid media, and things to be looking for in social media. This helps us determine the content we write, create and deliver for direct response campaigns we are working on, which ties into email marketing. As you can see, in one way, shape or form, the marketing efforts all rely on each other to be successful. And, when you ensure that they benefit each other, they create that much greater impact.

What is your audience looking for?

That’s what this post was about right?! There is the traditional thought process of “What are they searching for?” But, let’s expand on that for a minute and think through things from a multi-channel perspective. Once you find out someone is searching for things like “corporate event space” OR “company holiday party location” you can determine that this person might be looking for content on “corporate event planning” or “planning corporate events”, which would lead to secondary keyword research. Now you’ve started developing keyword research geared towards a target customer. This lets you really understand who is searching for your content and lets you build out the types of personas. Simply put, who is visiting your site daily and why?

What are audience personas?

An audience persona is specific type of person that you are targeting when building out a marketing program. This helps you not only find out where to acquire traffic from, whether paid or earned media, but, allows you to also really understand how to speak to these customers.

I’ll use an example I know best right now, Eventup. We haven’t developed full on personas like “Sally Homemaker” or “Oprah Mom” like other companies I’ve worked for. (yes, these are actually names used by companies to talk about the people using their sites). I feel like that’s almost a waste of time, esp for a company of our size. Let’s face it, we need to be scrappy and I feel like just getting a small subset of data is fine. Knowing this, I want to understand who visits our site daily. I do this by looking at the type of people writing in:

• Event Planner
• Individual responsible for events at a company (e.g. HR Profession, Exec admin, PR)
• Event Organizers
• Bride-to-Be
• Parents planning childrens events
• Individuals throwing parties
• Producer for filming industry
• Location Scouts

The thing that you’ll notice if you dive into the research is that we’re not only speaking to various types of people, but, also our marketing efforts have to span both the B2C and B2B realms. The good thing is that we’ve learned company events are the most effective for us, so we target those customers most. The bad thing, it’s not like an HR person hangs out in specific places like coolhrblog.com like a soon to be bride would be researching DIY tips on sites like theknot or Style Me Pretty.

So you might be saying to yourself, “um, okay, so you basically are lost!?” Well, I was hoping you’d think that. This is where trying to understand what people are searching for and the content they want to consume is important. But, even more important is that we know that the persona related to people planning company events isn’t really an exact job function or role. It’s the 2nd or 3rd role added to an HR professional or an Executive Admins already busy schedule. We know these people don’t fully understand how to plan events or where to start, so they key is to build content tailored to them. I’ll keep you in suspense and get back to this in a minute.

What we discovered above lets us write copy in specific ways, build content tailored to these types of personas, and, allows us to really market to them in a way we couldn’t if we didn’t build this into our marketing efforts overall. It even goes further because when we develop this persona, we can build messaging that will not only help marketing efforts that generate inbound traffic and repeat traffic, but, we can also use this in the sales cycle. Again, just like marketing programs can intertwine and help each other out, the sales side is benefited greatly by determining audiences and the personas within them.

This will ultimately help you build out a clearer user experience that speaks to the right person and converts at higher rates. You can do this because you understand the most important thing in marketing, user intent.

Okay, I’ve made you wait long enough. Remember, that HR pro or Admin that hasn’t planned an event before? I eluded to how this all comes together. Well, like I mentioned, these people aren’t professional event planners, it’s a task already added to a fairly busy gaily workload. You have to think about the fact that they are going to look for help and will do this by searching for things like ”how to plan a company holiday party” or “company holiday party tips”. This is where we will (currently in progress) build campaigns that are holistic and drive them to our site via search marketing (SEO/SEM) and Social Media efforts. We collect email addresses in order to let them download our guides on corporate event planning, which will ask them to subscribe to our mailing list, which then turns into a lead for our sales team.

Hubspot actually does a great job of this with their B2B marketing efforts. Kudos to them for constantly pushing their ebooks via twitter, because they know it works for lead generation efforts.

Again, we’ve not only generated a one time visitor, we’ve developed a customer that might not be in the need for immediate purchase, but, needs tips in the interim. When they are ready, Eventup will be top of mind for their venue booking needs.

Building a holistic marketing program

I’ve beat you over the head by telling you how important it is to be holistic. I know because I’ve spent many years working on SEO and Social Media efforts as a means for driving organic and viral traffic channels to build audiences. It’s easy to get trapped into just thinking about how to optimize keywords and drive traffic against people intended to either read content and bounce or try to buy something immediately. But, at the end of the day, thinking about target audiences helps you truly understand your customer.

We determined our purchase cycle might not be immediate, unlike many other companies. This is crucial, because we know to grow a list and create lifecycle marketing programs so when they are ready to book, we are top of mind.

Putting it all together to deliver the most impact possible

It’s not just about driving one source of traffic or another. It’s about creating a sustainable marketing cycle that is going to win over the long haul. I could spam Facebook or search engines all day trying to drive traffic, but, if my audience isn’t there and it doesn’t help my holistic marketing plan, it will be short lived traffic that will flame out.

Start by thinking about what content you can create that is then shared in order to increase your SEO traffic for this audience. Then, thinking about how to leverage that SEO traffic or a sweepstakes to drive traffic to lead gen programs that then keeps them engaged via email marketing. Then closing the loop and using the whole program to drive lead generation for your product or service. For you, that might be instant sign ups for free trials, SaaS software, or purchases via e-commerce. For us, it’s leads that our sales team can then turn into bookings of event space.

Overall, if you’ve learned anything, it’s that you need to understand the persona of who to market to and let this be the backbone for a holistic marketing strategy at your organization.

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The heart and soul of an entrepreneur lies in two things: the need to solve problems and the desire to change the world. Now, that might seem like a very glamorous thing to many people, but, what people don’t realize is that it’s not. You have to be ready to give up your entire life and learn to live, eat, breathe, and sleep your endeavor.

I’ll be honest, every single day I’m stressed out, my personal life is almost completely gone. While I still maintain my work hard, play hard philosophy, it’s impossible to sustain. You have to give something up and most of the time it ends up being your health (I’ve put on about 15 pounds) and personal relationships.

But, there is a reason I do this. and that’s that I’ve always wanted to do something of consequence. I like solving problems, I like being creative, and I like building. It wasn’t about making a “shit load of money”, granted that is always a silent driver. If that was it, I’d be running an online marketing and customer acquisition agency and I’d do pretty damn well. The percentages are always favoring against you when you’re trying to change the world. But, those three worlds are the most important thing that drive me: “change the world.”

Again though, changing an industry forever isn’t easy. There are obstacles like extreme inefficiencies, corruption in government, the difficulty of working with industries untouched by technology. The chips are stacked and the only thing in your favor is a relentless motivation to actually solve a problem.

The reason I bring all of this up is because people should understand what they are up against. As an entrepreneur running his first venture backed company, I have learned a lot about what to expect. I have learned so much about how to pivot to challenges faced and how to deal with the emotional challenges of running a company. Because, truthfully, the most important thing when running a startup is mental toughness.

Being able to handle adversity and come out on the other side of it as a better company, and more importantly, a better person. Knowing that you might into trouble raising venture capital but then pulling it off. (Go Rand and SEOMoz team!) Knowing that you’re going to make mistakes and being okay with not being perfect from the start and adapting quickly. After all, perfection to me, is giving it your best and “leaving it all out on the field.” Remembering to test everything, try everything, and kill a lot of projects because they end up not being effective. Compare this to sports and athletes. specifically an NFL cornerback. They are basically told to have short term memory about your performance. If you get beat on a play, come back, and play better defense on the next down. In basketball, the same goes, get beat on a drive to the basket, man up on the next play. At the end of the day, it’s stepping up and going hard all the time. Every hour, of every day, of every week is important. Being able to test, have a short term memory about things that didn’t work, and gunning it after those that do is how you succeed.

The reason I believe sports is so similar to building companies is the best athletes in the world have three characteristics they share with entrepreneurs: work ethic, mental toughness, and ability to handle adversity.  

At your core, you need to believe that it’s not about the money, not about the ownership % (one day I’ll share that story), but rather, about the ability to build something that makes a difference. Rome wasn’t built in a day and your startup won’t be either.

Work as if every single day could be your last. Remember you are solving problems that no one has before. And, most importantly, you are changing the world.

The reason being, I feel like my experiences over the last 10 years or so have lead me to where I am today. I’m more confident in my abilities professionally, and, in who I am personally. I believe that life is a “beautiful struggle” to quote Talib Kweli and that our experiences help shape who we are as people, they’ve certainly made me a stronger, harder working, and extremely passionate, in all walks of life.

I’ve learned a few things, but, this year, I know I’ve grown so much, again, personally and professionally. Over the years I’ve learned how to harness my passion towards my entrepreneurial endeavors and personal goals/challenges. I know I will always fight for things I believe in. And, I’ve learned about who I am as a person and I won’t sell myself short for anyone or anything, like I have in the past. This is a big deal. 

You see, hitting 30 to me isn’t a milestone of “shit, I’m getting old”, to me, it’s the realization that I’ve become a smarter, wiser, and more aware human being. As long as I’ve known, I’ve wanted to be respect professionally and want to make an impact on the world. I want to change industries, I want to help people, I want to be the catalyst for job creation and giving people graduating college an opportunity I didn’t have, that I had to fight for.

Most importantly, I have realized none of this matters if I don’t have people in my life to share those experiences, my growth, my struggles, and to celebrate victories with. I care deeply about the people in my life and who I spend those moments with.

As I start this next phase of life, I know that I am going to fight for everything important to me and work harder than ever to achieve goals. I won’t settle for anything because I know what I deserve. I will always stand true to my work hard, play hard lifestyle because it provides me balance and the ability to live in the moments of those I care about.

I have been doubted, told I wouldn’t amount to anything, been given the short end of the stick, sold my self short in so many occasions, laughed at, disregarded, passed up, and spent years alone.

To take a quote from one of my favorite scenes in the most recent Rocky movie, “it ain’t about how hard you hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward, how much you can take, and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done!”

This is why life is such a beautiful struggle because you live and learn. It’s the catalyst for who I am and who I will become. I remember a conversation in church about nothing being perfect, not to god, not to anyone, because we all have a different view of what perfection is. But, I’ve realized that I now know what being perfect is: It’s about fighting back from adversity even after you’ve got nothing left and knowing that you’ve done everything you can in your career, for your family, and for your friends. The outcome is not the definition of perfect, it’s the road that is truly defined by perfection. Being able to look everyone in the eye and saying you did everything you could, that is perfect.

Keep moving forward my friends, keep fighting, because, that truly is how winning is done and the only way to be perfect. I will always fight for how great I believe I am. Will you?

Sales process automation:
So, the first problem we had to solve was getting locations (venues) signed up, but, at first this was painful. I was getting on calls, I was knocking on doors, attending mixers and at most getting 10 places signed up. We hired sales reps to do this and we still had trouble. We kept adjusting scripts, talked to friends, and got things moving a little quicker. Increase volume by 5 venues a day to 15 a day on average! Amazing right?

The key thing we learned was that because we offer free listings and only make money when a venue does, it was important to communicate this to venue owners. But, we weren’t done there, I still felt like there was room to automate further. Luckily we had a sales rep that created some automated scripts for email mail marges that allowed us to save time on communication and we decided as a team that we could outsource tasks that took us away from the important task at hand, closing. 

Now, our team has reps confirming 25+ venues daily. Also, they’ve developed into hybrid roles working on further process automation and figuring out further revenue challenge. The team is now working on processes to further add accelerant to the venue acquisition process.

Product Automation:
When we pushed what I’m calling “Eventup 1.0″ live mid January, we we’re inquiry based. I wanted to test out theories and assumptions we had made before building product, attempting to be a bit methodical about the products we build. I wanted to know what every customer wanted and was going to ask about. That’s where I learned a few things:

1. The wedding lifecycle is extremely long. Inquiries came in for June 2013 and trying to plan around that was difficult.
2. There were lots of questions. We were the middle man to questions like “does this location have a dinner table for 20 people?”
3. People wanted to visit the location. I would say 75% of people wanted to visit a location and had to adjust for this.

Based on this we made adjustments to the product for our initial launch and realized that from a revenue perspective, certain things just couldn’t be accommodated to start with, but we’d work to adjust for over time. But, that said, the goal was to automate things that didn’t need to be handled by Eventup staff. So, we built features we were pondering based on some of these use cases.

1. Messaging: We built in-site messaging based on consumer demand to handle the obvious need of simple questions like the above. There has been unbelievable activity through the messaging product which validated it’s necessity.
2. Site Visit Scheduling: People wanted to do walk through’s, so we decided to build this into the book product. We’re still working on ways to further reduce friction and increase efficiency between customers, ourselves, and venue owners. Looking to remove us completely.
3. Favorites: Since we knew that things like weddings had long purchase cycles, we decided to build this so people just browsing for now could create a list of their favorite locations that they could come back to when ready.

Everything we do as a company is focused on reducing friction for people looking to book locations while giving our sales teams automation tools to increase efficiency.

Marketplaces are difficult to build but are also the most fun when it comes to challenges and problem solving. You have to account for so much, but, the key is to be really thoughtful about the problems your trying to solve and who you are solving them for. I like feeling the pain of the process and going through it manually before building product to address it.

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Last July I made a conscious decision to stop going to conferences and start focusing on building businesses. I was tired of flying to different conferences that felt like it netted no return for me. Currently, it doesn’t help me one bit to attend a conference, let alone speak at one because my primary focus is building my company, Eventup.

I made the decision not to attend SXSW this year for this very reason, to focus on building something that delivers an amazing consumer experience, not just talking about it all. Frankly, it is so hard to find nuggets of real information at conferences anyways. When I pay attention to twitter feeds of conferences, you’ll notice it’s the same old things I’ve heard since 2002. “You need to be faster than the next company” and “description tags help click through rates in search” (hat tip to @brandonfritz for pointing that one out to me). It doesn’t help to hear the same thing twelve times, to be honest, if you need to hear it that many times before you implement it, there is a problem.

I’m not saying conferences are bad, because that would be a huge injustice to the entire industry. Furthermore, it would be like shitting on what I learned from for so many years and it would be unthankful of me because it helped build my brand in a way. And just like me, it is extremely important to those just starting who are there to hear things for the first time and I love passing my experiences on to them. I’ve never claimed to be an expert, I’ve never claimed to be the most knowledgeable – I just like sharing my experiences in the hopes that people learn from it. That’s what conferences should be for, to help educate and evangelize knowledge from those with experience to those just getting their start, trying to solve problems creatively, or to talk to others and share tips.

What I am saying is that if you’re spending year after year attending conference series after conference series, speaking 10-15 times a year, it’s time to rethink that strategy if you’re trying to build a business or a career for that matter. I’m saying that it’s time people stopped trying to spend their days and nights building a “brand” or stroking their own egos and start focusing on doing what our industry is about, innovating. Again, do what you need to, to learn, to educate, to get what you need out of it, but, at a certain point, you need to focus on winning, not just talking about it.

The primary reason I switched from a community college and majoring in Psychology, to attending a little known tech school, Mt. Sierra College, and going after a technology degree was that main reason. I wanted to be a part of the innovation. I wanted to innovate and wanted to build. Sure, I realized that I wasn’t the best technologist, I was probably sub-par at best. But I knew that I still wanted to be a part of creating something that would hopefully change the world.

Right now, we’re in a period where we’re not only innovating on industries, but innovating on our own industry. Adding a new and much needed layer to E-Commerce with the subscription commerce market that is now booming with BeachMint and new entrants into the space like WittleBee (Science backed company by my good friend Sean Percival).

But, it doesn’t end there, the industry is re-inventing itself in a way with companies like Airbnb leading the “collaborative consumption” or “shared economy” charge and turning the listings business on their heads. Watching fledging giants like Yahoo! turn to patent trolling because of a lack of innovation also leaves room for other business to take over what they once owned.

This all takes me back to my original point, talk is cheap. Steve Jobs once said that ”Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” I fully believe in that. The question is, are you going to be a leader and take part in a time of massive growth where forms of commerce are being innovated upon daily? Or, are you going to sit there and talk about marketing in 15 different ways until your blue in the face but realize that marketing is still, well, marketing.

For me, it’s a no brainer. I’ve decided that I want to spend my days and nights trying to solve real world problems, provide consumers with better experiences online, and taking a part in the innovation of an industry that I know, love, and cannot live without.