Jeff Bell

In our video blog series, Minds of MINDSCAPE, a member of our team will share a few words of wisdom about their particular area of expertise.more

Several weeks ago, I was invited to participate in the first ever Sales Services Kickstarter program hosted by HubSpot’s David Weinhaus and Dan Tyre. I have to admit, being an operations guy, I was somewhat hesitant because the last job on the planet I would ever consider myself to be qualified for, would be a sales job (Kudos to all you salespeople!) Nevertheless, my agency founders asked me to lead the initiative to build and grow our Sales Services so I accepted the offer and braced for what I expected to be a bumpy ride! After a five week online course, I’m happy to say that I not only made it through unscathed, I actually learned some things I’d love to share! 1. Sales Services are a natural fit for a marketing agency. Consumers are smarter and more empowered now than at any other time in history. According to Aligned to Achieve, 70% of a buyer’s research is complete before they reach out to sales. That’s a lot of research! And when that knowledgeable prospect reaches out to a salesperson and hears anything that doesn’t align with what they already believe they know to be true, that creates risk. And risk causes people to pause - that kills deals.more

Nearly every time we partner with a business on launching their site, we run into the same roadblock - they want everything to be perfect. Every word must be reviewed, every part and product entered, every page created.more

Remember the last time you redesigned your website? How long did that process take and how pleasant was it? If you're like most, chances are the project took far more time and money than you care to remember! Did the site perform better? Did it get you more leads, more sales or increase your margins? I sincerely hope it did, and congratulate you on being in the minority if that is the case!more

We often have the opportunity to work with many different agencies throughout our client partnerships. Sometimes we will do design work while another agency builds the site. Sometimes we build something that was designed by another agency. Those type of situations work very well because the functional behavior of the end product doesn’t depend upon the design work. In fact, in these situations, each agency can challenge the other to ultimately produce a better result.more

Let's be honest. Building a new website sucks! Sure, it starts out fun when you get to see new design concepts but that's typically where the fun stops abruptly. It can take months to build out the site and get it up on a content management system. After that, the hard part starts. And in our experience, this is the part that can literally take months to complete - getting content into the site. It sucks! A lot.more

Whether you’re creating a new site from scratch or just giving your site a facelift, content on the site can be a challenge to deal with. Inevitably, there is always either too much content or not nearly enough! In this blog post, we won’t be dealing with creating content as much as we’ll be dealing with how to go about organizing your existing content!more

Originally published on August 5, 2011 and continues to be relevant. Enjoy! As a service provider, we often have clients ask us to help them “increase awareness.” As one of the people responsible for wrapping this often undefined goal in some metrics, I’ve had to figure out what this really means. Often clients aren’t able to distill this goal down into something measurable. But, to gauge our effectiveness, it’s critical that we work together to do so. I’ll attempt to reveal some of the measures that CAN be used. However, as with all things like this, before adopting them for your awareness metrics, make sure these are really measuring what your specific goals are. When speaking of “awareness” what we usually mean is brand awareness. We want people to think of us when doing something related to our cause, our company, or our product. When defined in this way, it becomes a little clearer what things are important to measure.more

Have you seen this new interactive MotoX PRINT ad from Motorola? Mimicking the product’s website, the device changes color when you touch it. Here’s the link to the video for your reference: http://youtu.be/iMrZmSPpIRwmore

The other day I came across a great article on Search Engine Watch. Truth be told, I happened to see the article on Jim’s screen and the headline caught my attention. At any rate, I found it to be right on point and it supports a little phrase I’ve enjoyed using the last couple of months – SEO has become both bigger and smaller at the same time. Let me explain. SEO used to be all about tactics. SEOs could crawl into a corner, build links, create a solid foundation for a site, keyword stuff body copy and headlines, then sit back and watch their SERP position increase. There are, in fact, many agencies still doing this. SEO was very tactically driven with little strategy actually required. SEO could effectively be done inside of a silo.more

I have had many opportunities to help our client partners develop digital marketing strategies. One of the first things we require our partners to do is complete a Measurable Marketing Success workbook. It’s a pretty simple document that basically allows us to record our partners’ goals. It continues to surprise me how difficult a chore this can be for most companies. If a client partner engages MINDSCAPE the first step is to sit down and fill out this workbook. If the partner has never thought about goals or objectives before – this is a challenging document to complete. And it should be!more

In a recent strategy development session with all the creative folks here, I had asked a couple of the team members to take notes for me since my whiteboarding abilities are… well, not very structured. After our session, I asked a new team member to start putting together the findings in our standard format. He struggled a bit to pull everything together and it was at this point I realized we did not have a good way of thinking through strategies and documenting them in a way that could be easily understood.more

In the spirit of the new year, I’d love to see everyone resolve to make sure their website is working. No, I don’t mean I want to make sure you have a website that is functioning. I mean I want to make sure you’re getting value from it. I want to make sure it’s actually performing a function! If you have no idea how to do that or what I’m talking about, keep reading. What’s a goal, you ask? Well, in Google Analytics, a “goal” is the completion of some task on your site. Though goals can get pretty complicated, I’ll just cover the most basic and popular one here. Too often the optional complexity scares people off. I don’t want to scare you off, I want you to start measuring the effectiveness of your site!more

Recently I had the opportunity to look at the analytics for a potential client. I had been informed that their bounce rate was upwards of 66%! SIXTY SIX PERCENT? - Holy smokes! That means of all the visitors that come to the site, two thirds of them don’t find the content relative? As I looked at their site and the keywords driving traffic to it, I noticed that they had many branded keywords and even THOSE had a nearly 66% bounce rate. Something seemed really fishy to me – I mean, it was odd that someone would search for the brand name, land on the site and immediately leave.more

Link tagging is one ninja-like feature built into Google Analytics is surprisingly powerful and rarely used outside of AdWords campaigns. Link tagging allows you to tag nearly any link with some special values to gain some interesting insights into your traffic sources. To Tag or Not To Tag So, why on earth would someone want to use link tagging? Well, link tagging allows us to see visitors from a particular email campaign. It would help us to identify visitors from a specific tweet or Facebook post. It’s really a very simple thing to do, it’s easy to get started and it can provide a lot of insight into your traffic sources. The first thing to understand about link tagging is that you don’t need to tag everything and you can’t tag some stuff. Organic traffic is impossible to tag. No matter how much of an analytics ninja you are, you just can’t tag organic traffic. If you use Google AdWords, you don’t need to tag those because Google already does that for you. If, however, you are using a different paid advertising campaign or any email campaigns, you will definitely want to tag those.more

If you’ve been through the Mindscape Internet Marketing Academy, you know that it’s important to do your keyword research, filter the list based upon your research, and then start changing your on-page content elements to work in those keywords. However, after doing that, how do you know if you’re really gaining any traction? If you know the keywords you’re targeting, measuring the impact of your efforts is actually quite easy using Google Analytics!more

With Google’s latest Panda update and recent Google Account policy change, search results are becoming more and more customized to user’s individual habits. As a result, it’s becoming a little more difficult to know exactly what your Google search position is. You could be positioning 1 for yourself (c’mon, who doesn’t Google themselves often!?) and position 15 for someone else. As Google starts to merge some Webmaster Tools data into Google Analytics, they are quietly slipping in some cool new parameters that we can track. One the most recent ones that I came across allows us to track the position of the results that showed up for that user! It requires a little bit of set-up but any Ninja who has gone through the Mindscape Internet Marketing Academy will be able to make quick work of this!more

Have you ever had to graph or chart your search engine rank over time, only to find that the results looked less than impressive? By default, when trying to graph these things in Excel, the picture looks bleak because all of our trend lines go down – toward 1. We would all love to have our sites rank at position 1 but this chart certainly does not make that clear!more

Every once and a while there are reasons where you may have some site owners who want individual reports for themselves and then some other entity wants to measure each site against the others. This can often be the scenario in the case of a franchise.more