A certain group of consumers has been gaining attention from marketers recently, because of the strong role they play in the purchasing decision; these power purchasers are known as Generation Y. Whether they're part of the target audience to which you sell or not, this group is worth considering as part of your inbound marketing strategy because there's a strong likelihood they either will become part of your target audience in the future, or because they already influence your target audience now.

Let's break down who these power purchasers are, some of the interesting demographics and inclinations research has uncovered about their role in the buying process, and see how we can align our marketing strategy to better leverage their influence.

Generation Y as a Power Purchaser

Also known as Millennials, this group refers to those born between 1977 and 1994, and it accounts for 25% of the US population. That may not seem like a lot (or maybe it does), but Generation Y is estimated to be the largest consumer group in US history. According to MarketingProfs via a Bazaarvoice survey, Millennials' annual spending power of over $200 billion will eclipse Baby Boomers' by 2017. With that kind of purchasing power, what should we as marketers know about this huge demographic of power purchasers, and how do we alter our marketing strategy to align with their purchasing habits?

Many marketers think the recommendation of a friend or family member is the ultimate green light for consumers, but it turns out that Gen Y cares about recommendations from strangers more. More than 8 in 10 say user-generated content from people they don't know influences what they buy and indicates brand quality, while 51% say it is actually more important than the opinions of their friends and family, and far more trustworthy than website content.

So what are Millennials buying based off all this user-generated content? The top purchases they will not make without first consulting others' opinions run the gamut:

How to Target the Largest Consumer Group Ever in the US

Knowing user-generated content is important to Millennials, what should marketers be doing to align our strategies with the way they prefer to research and execute purchases?

65% of users aged 18-24 considered information shared on social networks when making a purchasing decision (source: eMarketer). On top of that, 2/3 of consumers use search engines to help them research and make purchase decisions (source: eConsultancy). So if you haven't already, get your brand visibility in the social sphere and in search engines, and get control over your online reputation.

When you consider how much more closely social media and search have been aligning over the past year, it makes sense that integrating them both in your marketing strategy will help you achieve more visibility with this crowd that cares what others have to say about you more than what you have to say about you. In fact, Socialnomics reports that if you take a look at the world's largest brands, 25% of their search results return user-generated content from review sites, blogs, and social media updates. Millennials have integrated social media into their day to day lives, making access to the opinions of others easier than ever. With so much knowledge at their hands, you need to ensure information about your business is easy to find -- whether from you, their network, or total strangers.

Getting Started With User-Generated Content

It's strange to say you need to get started with user-generated content...it's your users that need to get started, right? Well, you have to make it easy for them to do, and sometimes a little nudge in the right direction on top of ease of use doesn't hurt, either. Here's the secret sauce for getting your customers, fans, and followers to sing your praises online so you can get the kind of influence you need over Gen Y -- whether they're your target customer today or years down the road.

1.) Make reviews easy to give on your website.73% of Millennials say that consumers care more about customer opinions than companies themselves do. They also think companies don't offer enough ways to share feedback. Be the company that proves them wrong and gives them what they want. Enable comment functions, provide star rating systems for your products, and create forums for people to easily discuss what they love about your company. Moderate these areas of your site so when issues crop up, you're able to provide a timely response to problems that might otherwise harm your reputation.

2.) Take control over your online reputation.Speaking of harming your reputation, people are probably talking about you online in places other than your website. Namely, their own blogs and online review sites. You can't ask people to take down a negative blog post about you, but you can take control of online review sites that frequently rank in the top of search engine results pages anyway. Claim your listing on review sites, determine whether your presence is positive, negative, or absent, and become an active participant in guiding a positive conversation about your brand on those sites. Our next tip will tell you how.

3.) Solicit reviews from your best customers. You can make your presence on online review sites and your own website positive by soliciting positive reviews from your best customers. There's nothing wrong with asking happy customers to write a review. Think about getting customer reviews like getting inbound links: you can't pay for it, but there's nothing wrong with asking for one from the appropriate people. Consider adding a request for reviews in the bottom of your email marketing messages targeted at current customers. Get your sales and support team in in the action, too -- as the front lines of your organization, they are poised to identify those who are willing to evangelize your brand. Incentivize them to solicit positive reviews whenever they're speaking to a happy customer, making their volume of positive reviews part of a bonus program.

4.) Create case studies.Case studies are an ideal content format to supplement user-generated content, because it highlights a customer's opinion like Millennials love but gives you control over how the information is presented. This content can also take on multiple formats -- video, PDF, slideshow, blog post -- all of which are easy to share and disseminate online.

5.) Encourage social discussion. Social posts are showing up in search results, so use your social media presence to encourage discussion from your fans and followers. Ask for their opinion about your products and services, highlight customer success stories, and ask them to share their experiences using your products or services. Whether these posts are indexed or not, many Millennials will visit your social media accounts to assess how much they like and trust you while they make a purchasing decision. Seeing your social network engaging with you on those accounts will paint you in a very positive light.

Sometimes marketers are reticent of pursuing user-generated content because it forces them to relinquish control. But remember that Millennials have spent the better part of their lives on the internet and were the first wave of blogging and social media adopters. As such, they are better at parsing through fluff on the web and can distinguish between critical content and that which is an unfounded rant or rave. That means content you publish, content you solicit from others, reviews posted to blogs and review sites, and social media comments all go through a sniff test that's ingrained in how Gen Y consumes information online. If the content being published by you -- or by others about you -- isn't quality, these folks are good at filtering it out of their purchase decision-making process.

How important is Gen Y to your marketing? Do you target them directly, or as influencers of your target audience?

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In marketing, offers are the gateways to lead generation. Without them, site visitors have no way of getting converted into leads. They are also a critical tool for nurturing existing leads into a position that makes them more sales-ready. But gosh, isn't the word 'offer' so utterly vague and abstract? What the heck is a marketing offer, and what are the qualities of a goodone?

Because we see so many marketers get tripped up on this concept, let's discuss exactly what a marketing offer can be, highlight the characteristics of an effective offer, and explain how you can start using them the right way.

What an Offer Isn't

Sometimes the best way to explain what something is, is to first identify what it isn't.Unfortunately, many of the things marketers sometimes consider to be marketing offers aren't actually offers at all. First, let's clarify. What marketers should classify as an offer is something of value that a website visitor must complete a form to get access to. And yeah, sure -- you can put just about anything behind a form. But there are certain things that, when put behind a form, just won't contribute much of anything for your lead gen or lead nurturing initiatives. We're not saying you shouldn't bother with these types of content. What we're saying is that you shouldn't put them behind forms or rely on them to effectively generate and nurture leads.

Here are some great examples of things you should never consider to be a marketing offer:

• 'Contact Us!' Okay, so you can put this one behind a form if it's one that allows site visitors to email you. But this will never bring in leads as effectively as true offers will.
• Product-Centric Content: We're talking brochures, product videos, etc. Yes, these can be great tools to introduce to leads who are close to making a purchasing decision, but there's no reason they should be gated behind a form. You should want your site visitors to be able to access this type of content freely and frictionlessly. And if site visitors are looking at this type of content, they're likely already in your sales funnel and much closer to making a purchasing decision.
• Customer Case Studies:Just like product-centric content, customer case studies are likely something you want to make it very easy for visitors to access. Making a visitor or lead fill out a form is unnecessary.
• Fact Sheets:Simply put, fact sheets and other company-focused content is not lead generation material. 

What an Offer Is 

The good news is, you have quite a few great options at your disposal in terms of the types of offers you can, well, offer your target audience...

• Ebooks
• Guides
• Webinars (Live & Archived)
• Slideshows
• Kits
• Industry Case Studies
• New Industry Research
• Templates
• Free Tools
• Free Trials
• Product Demos
• Consultations
• Coupons

What Makes an Offer a Good One?

While the types of offers we mentioned above are all great options for marketing offers, there are a number of qualities that an offer should possess in order for it to be effective for lead generation and nurturing. Here are our top three:

1. Is High Quality/Premium and Valuable to Your Target Audience

The important thing to remember is that, if you're requiring a site visitor to complete a form in order to obtain your offer, the value of that offer needs to be compelling enough to convince those visitors to fill out the form. People don't like to give up their contact information freely, and your lead-capture form will create some friction. So if you start putting mediocre, low-value offers behind your forms, your business will start to get known for bad offers that aren't worth the form completion, seriously hurting your lead generation and nurturing goals.

In the simplest sense, an offer is valuable if it addresses the problems, needs, and interests of your target audience. This value could also mean different things for offers used in different stages of the sales process. For example, an offer you're promoting to generate net new leads at the top of your funnel (like, say, an educational ebook or a webinar) is likely valuable because it educates your prospects and fulfills a need. A free product trial, on the other hand, may not be as educational in nature, but it's still a very valuable offer for existing leads you're trying to nurture and who are closer to making a purchasing decision.

2. Aligns With Your Business and the Products/Services You Offer

A great marketing offer complements the products and services your business sells. That educational ebook is probably not very focused on how awesome your products and services are, but it shouldaddress concepts that align with your paid offerings. For example, HubSpot sells inbound marketing software, so our offers focus on helping prospects with their marketing challenges. These offers help set HubSpot apart as an industry thought leader and educate prospects about the problems our software helps to solve.

3. Targeted to the Right Buyer Persona at the Right Time

As we hinted at before, a truly great marketing offer also takes into account a person's point in the sales process as well as that buyer persona's specific interests and needs. How this really comes into play is in lead nurturing campaigns and how you decide which calls-to-action (CTAs) to place where on your website.

If you use lead management software, you can easily collect key pieces of information (AKA lead intelligence) about your prospects that will help you segment your leads into nurturing campaigns based on their buyer persona, their point in the sales process, and what you can determine their interests are based on their activity on your website. Sending them offers that appeal to those interests as well as how close they are to making a purchasing decision can help you better qualify a lead before he/she gets handed off to sales. For example, if your business is in plumbing and a first-time visitor comes to your site and downloads an ebook on how to unclog a minor plumbing backup, you might enter them into a lead nurturing campaign that then invites them to also attend a webinar about common plumbing problems and how to fix them. As they move further through the sales cycle, you could then offer them a coupon that discounts your services for that (apparently) not-so-minor drain problem they're having.

The same concept applies to how you choose which calls-to-action should be placed on different pages of your website. For example, if you conduct analysis that shows that your blog is typically how new visitors find you (whether through social media, search engines, or another referrer), you can infer that many people who land on your blog are first-time visitors to your website. Therefore, on your blog, you should probably place CTAs for offers that appeal to people who are just entering the top of your funnel and know little about your company (like an educational webinar, ebook, or kit, for example). On the other hand, a visitor on something like a product page probably indicates someone who is much closer to a purchasing decision. What might be more valuable to those types of visitors is a CTA for something like a free product trial, or a demo if you're a software vendor.

How to Leverage Your Offers Effectively

Now that you have a much clearer understanding of what makes a good marketing offer (and what doesn't), let's dive into some offer best practices. After all, you can create a ton of great offers, but if you're not using them to your best advantage, they're not going to do much good to generate and nurture leads.

1. Create a lot of targeted offers. First things first. With all that talk about targeting and segmenting the right offers to the right buyer persona (at the right time), you can probably guess that what all that translates to is a need for a variety of offers. Building up an arsenal of offers is the toughest part of the whole process, but it can mean the difference between good results and awesome results. Create a spreadsheet that allows you to list the offers you currently have, highlight the holes in your group of offers (for what topic are you missing an offer that your audience would appreciate?), and map offers to the various points in your business' sales process. Then slowly work through your offer to-do list, gradually filling in those gaps.

2. Put offers behind lead-capture forms.If offers are the gateways to lead generation, lead-capture forms (AKA conversion forms) are the gateways to your offers. Always place your offers on landing pages, gated by forms. This allows you to collect information that helps you qualify a new or reconverting lead and track what they've downloaded from you throughout the sales cycle.

3. Create calls-to-action, and place them appropriately. We mentioned this above, but it's an important one. Create CTAs for each of your offers, and align them with the pages on your website. In other words, if you're that plumber we mentioned above and you just wrote a blog post about the best and worst products to unclog a drain, you might place a CTA for your free guide to the best plumbing products of 2012. Once you have created awesome-looking CTA buttons for your site and you're moving onto ninja status, you can also test different versions of your CTAs to determine which ones generate the best click-through rate.

4. Create blog content around your offers.Take that last best practice one step further, and create content specifically around your new offers to help launch and promote them. So if you just created that 'Best Plumbing Products of 2012' guide, why not write a blog article that highlights the top 5 products mentioned in the guide and couple that with your CTA, explaining that readers can learn more by downloading the new guide? Excerpts make for easy blog content, so you'll be killing two birds with one stone!

5. Promote your offers in social media. The promotion of your offers shouldn't have to remain on your website. Use social media as a promotional vehicle by sharing links to the landing pages for your offers and briefly explaining their value in your tweets, Facebook/Google+/LinkedIn posts. Spend some time to build your social media reach so you can expose your offers to as large an audience as possible.

6. Use them in email marketing and lead nurturing. As we mentioned above, offers are critical to a business' lead nurturing efforts, but you can also promote them using general email marketing as dedicated sends. Promote your new offer in a dedicated email send that only highlights that one offer and conveys its value. If it's a very general offer that every buyer persona in your audience would enjoy regardless of their point in the sales cycle, send it to your entire list. If it's a more targeted offer, segment your list, and send it only to the people to whom it will appeal.

7. Align offers with prospects' point in the sales process.This is another one we've already talked about, but it's worth emphasizing. Aligning the offers you use in your lead nurturing campaigns and in the CTAs on your website with a prospect's likely position in the sales cycle will not only help to better qualify a lead, but it may also shorten the sales cycle, as a prospect will be much closer to a purchasing decision with a ton of knowledge about your business before he/she even talks to a sales person.

8. Track performance with your analytics software.Measure the performance of your offers. This will help you identify which types and topics of offers are successful in generating leads and customers so you can create more offers around those topics or in those formats, helping you become a much more effective marketer. Do your prospects prefer webinars to ebooks? Do they only care about certain topics that your offers are addressing? Use what you know to improve your lead generation and lead nurturing efforts in the future.

How many offers are in your back pocket? How much do they factor into your business' lead generation and nurturing efforts?

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Posted by Stephanie Chang

One of the biggest challenges many of my clients face is building the right  SEO processes in place, so that any problems are quickly accounted for before they lead to bigger issues. Below are three things you should consider when trying to create a more streamlined process for making sure the technical foundation of the site is solid. Though none are considered "quick" or necessarily easy wins and can initially take a significant amount of time, ultimately in the long-run, they will help make monitoring the SEO on your site more efficient. This means less time spent identifying and fixing site issues and more time focusing on other aspects of SEO, like linkbuilding, developing a content strategy, etc... Overtime, the impact this will have on your site can result in high rewards. 

1) Technical Annotations in Google Analytics

Currently, many of my clients with Google Analytics accounts either don't include any annotations in Google Analytics, annotate only their email, PPC, social campaigns or use it to keep track of search engine algorithm changes (like Panda updates). However, the value of annotating any technical changes made to the site in Google Analytics creates a more efficient internal process. 

Scenario 1: Let's say that you have set up Google Alerts to alert you of any spikes and drops in traffic. Then, having technical changes annotated in Google Analytics makes it quicker and easier for you to specifically determine the cause of this spike or drop, instead of investing hours later on trying to determine the cause of these changes in traffic. In addition, any major technical issue runs the risk of being implemented improperly (in terms of SEO considerations), simply because there are so many issues to take into account. 

Here is more information on how to setup a Google Alert. 

Scenario 2: Often times SEO is not a technical priority for the development team, mostly because it is difficult to measure the ROI of what is often times, a significant amount of invested time and effort. Creating annotations in Google Analytics could help with this process- for example, if a spike in traffic were to occur and the team was somehow able to attribute this to a technical implementation on the site, the technical team could be properly recognized as being the cause of this change. 

2) Sitemaps- Google/Bing Webmaster Tools

SEOs should create an internal process where Google Webmaster Tools is checked at least once a month to ensure there are no major issues with the sitemaps or with bots crawling the site. Sitemaps are only useful if they are kept up to date and well-maintained.

Why is this important? Duane Forrester of Bing has stated that "Your Sitemap must be clean. We have a 1% allowance for dirt in a sitemap." His definition of dirt includes 404 or 500 status code errors and redirects. He continues by saying "If we see more than a 1% level of dirt, we begin losing trust in the Sitemap."

Best practices include submitting a new Sitemap regularly, depending on how often new content is generated on the site. A publishing site might need to update every few hours, an e-commerce site every week, and a relatively static site every month. 

Sitemaps should be checked at least on a monthly basis in Webmaster Tools to ensure there are no issues with the Sitemap.

These include:

• Checking for error messages
• Checking number of pages submitted versus indexed
• Checking for malware (and address these immediately!)
• Checking for crawl errors (like 4xx and 5xx issues)

Using Screaming Frog

If you do have a Screaming Frog account, you can also use it to verify Google Webmaster Tools errors, especially because Google Webmaster Tools do not always update their errors. Thus, you don't want to be looking for 404s that have already been fixed. You can also use it to check your sitemap for errors. To do so, simply upload the XML sitemap into Screaming Frog and crawl it. Craig Bradford of Distliled work a fantastic blog post on how to use Screaming Frog to accomplish these tasks and more. 

If Google Webmaster Tools is not periodically checked, the number of errors can seem overwhelming. Joe Robison wrote a fantastic SEOmoz post on fixing an overwhelming number of errors in Google Webmaster Tools.

3) Creating Automated Scripts 

404 Pages Returning Status 200 Codes:

Barry Schwartz wrote a blog poston how 404 pages should not return status 200 codes. The reasoning being that it could be confusing to spiders as they see a page that exists technically have no content. This can affect rankings over time because it is creates massive duplicate content as bots are crawling through the same content over and over again across several URLs. 

He also suggests creating automated scripts to check for this type of issue.

However, to initially help you determine the extent of this problem on your site and provide an estimation of the number of 404 pages that return status 200 codes, plug a site search query into Google. See example below:  

site:example.com/ "page not found"

If the query returns results, you know your site is returning status 200 codes for 404 pages and that this issue needs to be fixed. 

SEO Score Card:

I've talked about creating an SEO score cardbefore. I've also recently recommended another version of this to another client who had hundreds of thousands of URLs. In this specific instance, they had difficulty making sure that only high-quality, non-duplicate content would be indexed. Being an e-commerce client, the site also had tons of products that were very similar (resulting in identical product descriptions and content on the site). 

I suggested creating an internal score sheet that would automatically be re-run every month to make sure that all currently indexed pages are still considered high-quality, while also offer an opportunity for pages that were once deemed low-quality to reviewed regularly. Once those low-quality pages became high-quality, they will become automatically indexed. 

This process could be used to generate the sitemaps - but the goal is to future-proof the site against future search engine algorithmic changes while improving the overall domain authority of the site. 

There are caveats that need to be addressed when creating an SEO score sheet- we want to be careful about noindexing pages, especially as overtime, this could result in less and less of the site being indexed. Once the initial script is written, check the results and see if these are actually pages that you want noindexed. If not, the script might have to be rewritten. 

The ultimate goal is to make sure that only quality pages are indexed, while also keeping tabs on how many more pages on the site need unique content. This type of knowledge can prove useful when creating the site's linkbuilding/content strategy. 

Conclusion

The overall goal is to build a streamlined process for technically auditing a site that can be described and thus, communicated internally. Creating a more efficient process means more time invested in other important elements- compiling quality content, building an online community, and social media to name a few. 

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