June Boston SEO Meetup Recap
June 12, 2012 by Nick Stamoulis
The June Boston SEO Meetup was held Monday June 11, 2012 and featured guest speaker Casie Gillette. Casie is the Online Marketing Manager at Grasshopper, a virtual phone system located in Needham, MA. She has been in the search industry for over seven years. Her presentation focused on how to get people connecting with and talking about your brand.
Casie began her presentation by stating that search is no longer about 10 blue links. It is becoming more personalized. When you are logged in to your Google account and perform a search for “sushi” for example, there is only one traditional search result that appears, which is extremely difficult to achieve. In order to improve your personalized search result presence, it’s important to get other people to talk about you.
Casie provided the following ways to get people to talk about you:
Create for your Market
Market to your target audience as people. Focus on identifying with them when creating content. For example, Grasshopper found success creating fun videos that cater to entrepreneurs (their target audience). There were 0 mentions of virtual phones in the video. These videos lead to links and traffic and brand exposure. Create content that customers want to be a part of.
Give Customers Something to Talk About
Offline creative marketing tactics like sending handwritten thank you notes, gift cards, offering dinner with founders of the company, candy and book giveaways get customers talking about you in the online space.
Identify Influencers
Reach out to customers that you already have a relationship with that are brand advocates. Ask them for feedback, reviews. Ask about their lives and connect with them in social media. Ask them to recommend your company to someone that may need your services. “You never know until you ask.”
Talk to Other in the Industry
Find people who target the same market and brainstorm an idea for a partnership. Find the right person within the organization to pitch the idea to.
The main SEO takeaway from Casie’s presentation is that a part of being successful in search is engaging in relationship marketing that will help build personal links.
Brick Marketing was the food sponsor of the event.
