Planting seeds for seasonal marketing

How does your marketing grow? The core should always be made up of a plan for the long-term view with evergreen and perennial content. Annuals should only be added as needed to meet current trends.

That sales and marketing should be aligned is indisputable. But that the sales department should dictate marketing is definitely disputable. 

My experience an SaaS startup for eCommerce businesses crystalized that recognition for me.  Initially, I worked on content planned with the CEO and produced some solid, evergreen pieces. However, when  a VP of marketing whose background was in sales and not in marketing came in, she pushed everything into a short term perspective.

This was manifested in constantly pushing content around coupons and discount codes to drive customers to purchase. Pushing promotions is the ultimate short-term marketing effort designed for immediate sales alone.

While discounts are definitely a big part of retail sales, they should not be the sole strategy used by sellers who want to cultivate long term relationships with customers. The goal of marketing is not just to convert customers based on sales for the week or occasion but to win loyal customers with a high customer lifetime value (CLV) who have your brand top-of-mind when they're ready to purchase even without a coupon as part of the deal. 

Perennial vs. annual planting 

Building a relationship with customers on the basis of marketing is like planting a garden. You can go for the quick wins of instant color and results for the season by planting annuals. That's the marketing done from the perspective of people who come from sales who always favor immediate results. 

But for real value, you plan perennials, which will deliver blooms of color year after year. That's what a true marketing perspective takes into account.

 
A perennial perspective doesn't mean ignoring seasonal opportunities. On the contrary, it sees the value of planning for repeated returns in all seasons with marketing messages and content that are relevant for that time of year and that occasion that will recur. 

Yearly holiday vs. pandemic holiday

Notice that I referred to an occasion that will recur as forming the core of your marketing. That doesn't mean that you ignore current trends altogether but that you recognize that they are transient. That means they they won't deliver the same bang for your marketing bucks as the perennial marketing you plan.

 Nothing illustrates that better than the mistake many businesses made in going all-in on pandemic messaging while ignoring their need for evergreen content. 

This is particularly striking in the content of the content marketing that the startup I worked for decided to feature for Halloween. There was no pre-existing content for that holiday's importance to the world of eCommerce on the site, so I created an evergreen holiday piece on different  possible approaches to fall and Halloween marking. 

Thinking only of the short-term, though, the VP demanded a different piece that explicitly centered around the pandemic's impact on Halloween. That's what was put on the site, and that bit of annual color is of  no interest to anyone today. 

For a business that already had created core content, including standard seasonal and holiday content, it would have been a strategic move to some pieces that centered around the impact of the pandemic on the industry and its customers in 2020-2021. In fact, it would have been smart to use some of that to link to their more traditional content to point out the need to adapt to the times with new strategies and approaches.

However, for businesses that were just building out their content, devoting all resources to pandemic-centered content with only masked people shown on their site was a mistake. If they failed to move that content off the main pages of their sites in the past year or two they were showing their own failure to adapt to the changing needs of the time. 
 

Put SEO in the picture

One aspect of putting SEO in the picture is thinking about the impact your pictures have on your site core vitals.

All content marketers know that it takes more than text to catch the eye. But those who are also aware of site loading issues realize that pictures can slow down a site.

Slow page loadings harm your core web vitals and your SEO.

So what should you do: give up the pictures or give up the better speed?

The answer is neither. You can have the best of both worlds -- attractively illustrated posts and good loading times when you optimize your pictures for web view.

In the past, I had to do this manually for each image, playing around a bit to find the size that would look good but does slow things down. I don't have to do that now.

I just discovered a great SaaS solution. Imagify optimizes your images for you in a snap. 

It enables you to fix all the ones you have on a page without having to upload them one by one. At the free level, you get up 200 images a month, though you have to be sure to download them within 24 hours.

I put it to the test with my site. As the screenshot here shows, it details how much memory space you can save for each compression.

For some of the pictures, the amount of memory gained was rather small, so I opted to skip those and only converted the ones for which the difference was more substantial. Imagify shows the amount of saved for all the compressed versions I selected in place of the original pictures.

While it's easy to use for any site, it's even easier if you use WordPress. You can use the Imagify plugin to automatically optimize the images and ensure that that they are not the cause of slow loading times on your site. Learn more about that by watching the video below.

Another aspect of SEO in the picture

Another way in which to consider SEO in the picture is labeling your pictures in a way that makes Google identify it with your topic and keywords. In addition to the SEO benefit, you would be  achieving ADA compliance(see Guidance on Web Accessibility and the ADA) in rendering your  pictures accessible to those who have to have content read to them because they can't view it themselves. 

The SEO boost of the labeling can sometimes manifest itself in surprising ways. I notice dthis wehn taking a closer look at Google Search Console on my Edison blog to prepare What Edison Can Teach Us About SEO. Some of the search queries were bringing up the caption I had on the picture that illustrates the blog as some people make a point of including Wikipedia in their query. 

So here's the general rule for thinking about SEO for pictures: you want to minimize the file size but maximize your label.

Related: 

Make Your Content as Accessible as Possible
7 Ways to Grab Customer Attention in Subject Lines
CRO is Like Basketball
Think Marathon Rather Than Sprint When Planning Content Marketing

Security through sharing

On December 18, 2015, President Obama signed off on the 2,000 plus page omnibus budget bill, that amounted to spending $1.8 trillion in a combination of government allocation and tax breaks. Among the items packed into this gargantuan package is the Cybersecurity Act of 2015, also known as the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA). Set to stay in effect until September 30, 2025, it's a bill that will keep on giving for a decade. But not all regard it as a gift.

The bill had some vociferous opposition, most notably from the group called Fight for the Future. As late as December 16, the organization appealed for a veto on the law. Its campaign director, Evan Greer, declared that the bill is "a disingenuous attempt to quietly expand the U.S. government's surveillance programs, and it will inevitably lead to law enforcement agencies using the data they collect from companies through this program to investigate, prosecute, and incarcerate more people, deepening injustices in our society while failing to improve security."

The part that critics of the bill are most uncomfortable with is the permission granted to monitor networks. That makes up the first of three components of the bill's effects that comes under the heading "Authorizations for Preventing, Detecting, Analyzing, and Mitigating Cybersecurity Threats," presented in the analysis of the bill by Orin Kerr, Research Professor at The George Washington University Law School. He sums it up as: "First, network operators can monitor; second, they can operate defensive measures; and third, they can share information with others."

The third part of the mitigation formula is the equation of forewarned is forearmed. The idea is that putting out updates about the latest cyber threats in real (or very near real) time would give a heads up to other organizations that can take preventative action to avert attacks. The same assumption underlies IBM X-Force Exchange (XFE), a cloud-based platform for accessing information about cyber threats.

Read more in: 

Cyber Security: Share & Share Alike

Not everyone believes the new cyver security law passed on December 18 as part of the omnibus bill will prove effective. What do you think? 

SaaS cuts down on sick visits

onically, seeking out healthcare can actually spread germs contained in a room packed with patients. If you've recently been in such a situation, and been forced to wait an hour or even longer to be seen, you might have thought, as I did, "there has to be a better way." There is, thanks to SaaS.

SaaS makes it possible for patients to use any web-enabled device to access convenient and affordable healthcare. It does not just give information like you'd find on WebMD, but a  personalized diagnosis and even a prescription--if warranted--at a cost that is just slightly higher than standard insurance copayments

Minneapolis-based Zipnosis is the company that developed the SaaS platform. It promises "online diagnosis and treatment in minutes" for $25. 

Read more in 

SaaS Replaces Sick Visits

SaaS for smoother college applications

Students have just gone back to school, but seniors already have to start thinking about the next step: applying for college. One of the newest programs in the space is Edswell, which publicly launched its platform early in September. It can help students and those who guide them through every step of the application process, including the dreaded essay.

I contacted the company's founder and CEO, Alex Thaler, to get the inside story on this SaaS platform, which is currently used in by students in a number of cities, including Beijing, Los Angeles, and Detroit. Thaler explains that, although there are already SaaS programs designed for college counselors available, such as Naviance and Career Cruising, Edswell is unique in offering "support for the application essay, the most time-intensive and anxiety-provoking part of the application process."

Read more in 

Cities Smooth the College Application Process

Better together

Some things are good on their own but really great when paired with something complementary -- like cookies and milk, wine and cheese, or perhaps a firewall and SaaS security. Read more in 

Cloud-Based Risk Assessment Meets the Firewall

SaaS for Clinical Studies

"As a single system made up of many components, iMedNet EDC "can be configured [any] way you want." It offers drag and drop options for setting up dashboards and to-do lists that help users keep their studies on track. It also has options for individualized levels of access; each user gets his or her own ID and password that can be specified to a very detailed level for what the user can access and upload."
Read more in 

Seeding SaaS to Speed Up Clinical Studies

Getting to really know your customer requires managing a lot of data

Socrates considered "know thyself" the objective of wisdom, but in business, the key to success is knowing your customer.

A customer's relationship with a brand is much more complex than some people assume. As shoppers, we don't just come on to a site and buy what it sells out of the blue. We may get there by clicking on an ad, clicking on a promotion in an email, or by remembering a positive experience we had with the business when we called and chatted about an order. There are many different channels involved, and each one only shows one aspect of the total customer experience. So how do you really get to know what your customer is responding to?

This past June, Israel-based, NICE Systems introduced the NICE Customer Journey Optimization solution to just that problem.  Read more here: 

Location, location, location moves to the cloud

Location, location, location. That's the answer always offered for the three key components of real estate.

When it comes to managing information on the business end, the same formula for success calls for a SaaS solution that allows information from all other sources -- lead generation, CRM, website activity, and mobile apps -- to come together to yield optimum insight and predictive analytics.

Read more in 

Case Study: SaaS for Home Sales