Digital Marketing Disaster? Hope You Have An Emergency Plan!

With 54 inches of snow so far in New York this year, we have officially broken into the top ten worst winters on record. It’s been one snow emergency after another. Enough already! That said, being prepared has definitely made this harsh winter much easier to handle.

The same goes for marketing disasters. Whether it’s a PR crisis, a search algorithm update or a major technology change, a marketing disaster can strike at any moment. Yet, few marketers are prepared for it. Instead, the response often looks like this:

…which is usually soon followed by something like this:

But you can do better than that. Much like FEMA recommends for other types of disasters, you need an emergency plan in place for potential marketing disasters — and in fact, many emergency preparedness tips are applicable to marketing disasters as well. Below is a quick list to help you get prepared for a marketing crisis. As a bonus, I’ve also thrown in some tips on how to prepare for other types of disasters!

Disaster Emergency Plan	Marketing Emergency Plan
Meet with household members to talk about disaster preparedness. It’s important to be ready for disaster BEFORE it strikes. Meet with your family/household members in advance. Discuss the dangers of fire, severe weather, earthquakes and other emergencies. Explain how to respond to each, and put a plan in place. Put together an emergency kit.	Meet with your team to talk about marketing disaster preparedness. When a marketing disaster happens, the disruption it causes can quickly cause chaos. It’s critical to be ready for a marketing crisis BEFORE it hits. Discuss how the group will respond to various marketing disasters like a CEO scandal, an offensive employee tweet, a product recall, etc. Be sure to also talk about important issues that could cause a marketing crisis such as a search algorithm change, SEO penalty, website outage, etc.
Discuss potential for power outages and injuries during a disaster situation. When disaster strikes, the electricity often goes out. It gets dark. And cold. And dangerous. Be prepared with candles, matches, flash lights, batteries, extra layers of clothing, blankets, and first aid supplies.	Discuss potential “power outages” with your team. A business can quickly have a potential marketing disaster on its hands from the sudden loss of a team member. Have a plan to deal with the situation if an employee leaves the company unexpectedly. You never know who might be considering a career change, a relocation, or taking time off to focus on family. Discuss what to do if an employee takes an unexpected leave of absence due to injury or illness, and how you will back-fill that role temporarily.
Make sure your family knows what to do. During a disaster situation, it is often necessary to shut off utilities at the main connections. Show family members where the water, gas, and electricity connections are, how to turn them off, and when it is necessary. Practice accessing these utilities in the dark. You might need a wrench or pliers to turn off the utilities.	Cross-train your team so everyone is ready. When a marketing disaster strikes, you can’t afford to let the situation get worse because a key team member is unavailable to do their part. Be sure to cross train employees so they are familiar with their colleagues’ core job skills. Establish a password protocol that ensures multiple individuals have important access codes. That way, if the main contact is unavailable, the backup can help you access important tools or information.
Post emergency contact numbers near telephones. When disaster strikes, it is important to have emergency contact numbers immediately available (beyond 911).	Collect multiple contact points for each team member. When marketing disasters happen, chances are you’ll need to communicate with the whole team. But these situations don’t always happen on a weekday, so be sure you can reach your team members in a variety of ways. Collect mobile numbers, email addresses, and instant messenger screen names in case you need them in an emergency.
Turn on the radio for emergency information. During a disaster situation, you need to know what is happening and how the situation is evolving. A radio may be your only source of information in an emergency. Be sure to have a radio on hand, and instruct family members to turn it on for important information. Remember to have plenty of batteries for the radio and flash lights during an emergency. And conserve their use.	Make sure your team uses various alert devices during a marketing crisis. When a marketing disaster strikes, it is critical to know how the situation is developing. Monitoring is key. Be sure to set up Google alerts, social alerts, and search ranking alerts for the team to stay on top of issues involved with your marketing crisis. Consider using a tool like ifttt.com to route alerts across different media to various team members. Be sure to develop an initial list of terms for your alerts that are potentially associated with your crisis. Create additional terms and alerts throughout the crisis as needed.
Take a basic first aid and CPR class. When disaster strikes, people are often injured and medical help is not immediately accessible. It is important to be able to provide first aid and to be able resuscitate someone. During an emergency disaster situation, you could make the difference between someone living or dying. Sign-up for a first aid course. Get CPR training.	Practice for a marketing disaster. You never know when a marketing disaster might strike. But when it does, you need to act immediately. You can’t afford to waste valuable time. You must be prepared for the unexpected. That means practice! Plan to have a quarterly mock marketing disaster scenario to work through with your team. Be sure to cover the situation from numerous angles. Write down the recommended response. You might want to refer to it during a real marketing crisis.
Have a supply of clean drinking water. You won’t survive long without drinking water, so be sure to have a supply of it on hand. Plan for one gallon of water per person, per day. Store water in sealed, unbreakable containers. Identify the storage date and replace it every six months.	Protect your point of sale. Your business won’t survive long without sales. During a marketing crisis, it is important that your point of sale — typically a website — remains open for business. Run nightly backups of your site, and store it on a separate server. Replicate your database on a secondary server. Use a CDN to ensure authorized users can access a cached copy of your site from anywhere in the world. Run load testing simulations to ensure servers can cope with traffic surges and denial-of-service attacks.
Have a supply of non-perishable and canned food on hand. If a disaster strikes, you may need to rely on canned goods and non-perishable food items. Keep a minimum of a three-day supply of non-perishable food items on hand. Be sure to have infant formula available if needed. Don’t forget to have a manual can opener available.	Have a supply of “non-perishable content” ready. Content is your marketing food — and you can’t risk running out of it during a marketing disaster. Even if you are too busy dealing with the crisis at hand, you still need to have that content available. Fortunately, you can stock up on it in advance. You can create “evergreen” content — material that is not time sensitive and will always be relevant. Create a small stockpile of articles, videos, images and tweets that you can fall back on if you run low on the resources to create new content for a few weeks. Need ideas? Think about broad topics. People will always be interested in ways to feel better, be more efficient, more comfortable, healthier, richer, and better looking.
Have a first aid kit and prescription medications. When disaster strikes, people are often injured. It is important to have a first aid kit on hand so you can treat them. Be sure household members know where it is located and how to use it. During a disaster, pharmacies may be closed and/or you might not be able to get to one. Be sure your first aid kit includes regular prescription medications for household members.	Have the right marketing tools available. When things go wrong, you need emergency marketing tools to help you identify the problems and stop things from getting worse. Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools give critical insight into what’s happening on your site. Conductor’s SearchLight orBrightEdge can help you gauge the impact on organic rankings and links. Enterprise startups likeBottlenose can help decipher social activity.
Have cash on hand! When disaster strikes, electrical systems can go down. That means you won’t be able to use your credit and debit cards. Be sure to have emergency cash on hand in case you need gas, food, water, or emergency travel.	Save some resources for marketing emergencies. Because you never know when a marketing disaster might hit, try to create a budget safety net for these situations. Ideally, set aside a little bit of money from each marketing channel. That way you’ll have some resources available in case something unexpected comes up. For example, a product recall may require new content, or even the development of a new microsite very quickly.
Have a security plan. Lots of frightening things can happen during an emergency situation that you need to be prepared for. This includes things that could put your personal safety at risk, such as rioting, looting, theft, and attacks. While you won’t find this item on FEMA’s list, it is important to have some sort of self-defense available during an emergency disaster situation. Hand-to-hand combat skills such as Krav Maga or Kickboxing can be handy in just about any situation. Lethal and non-lethal forms of self-defense such as pepper spray can also be useful during an extended disaster situation.	Have a security plan. A marketing disaster can come in all forms, including a security breach — something that is happening all too often today. For example, Kickstarter recently reported a security breech with stolen passwords and user information. And two months earlier, millions of passwords were stolen from Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo and LinkedIn through a sophisticated malware attack. To help prevent this from happening to your business, frequently update your social media passwords, and hold security training to make sure that employees are using secure passwords. As marketers, look at how some of the bigger companies (like Kickstarter) addressed the situation, so you have a plan in place in case your site gets breeched. As an Internet user, be sure to use a password manager like Dashlane to protect yourself when your information is stolen from sites you use.
Be prepared for the long haul. Disaster preparedness information indicates that you should try to be ready for three days. However, many disasters last much longer. Storm power outages, can last a week or more, especially in rural areas. A well-prepared home should be ready to survive for several weeks without electricity, gas, or heat.	Be prepared for the long haul. Some marketing disasters, such as a security breach, are relatively short lived. But bigger marketing disasters, such as JC Penney’s failed turnaround attempt last year, can linger on for years if not fixed. Marketing teams need to brace themselves for the possibility of ongoing challenges by adopting a lean marketing approach. This means thinking like a start-up. During a long-term marketing crisis, you may have to do away with the big budget TV ads and expensive enterprise tools. Instead, you might need to focus on grass-root marketing campaigns and use free tools. Recovery should come through innovation and creativity, not from throwing more money at tired tactics.

Disaster Emergency Plan

Marketing Emergency Plan

Meet with household members to talk about disaster preparedness.

It’s important to be ready for disaster BEFORE it strikes. Meet with your family/household members in advance.
Discuss the dangers of fire, severe weather, earthquakes and other emergencies.
Explain how to respond to each, and put a plan in place.
Put together an emergency kit.

Meet with your team to talk about marketing disaster preparedness.

When a marketing disaster happens, the disruption it causes can quickly cause chaos. It’s critical to be ready for a marketing crisis BEFORE it hits.
Discuss how the group will respond to various marketing disasters like a CEO scandal, an offensive employee tweet, a product recall, etc.
Be sure to also talk about important issues that could cause a marketing crisis such as a search algorithm change, SEO penalty, website outage, etc.

Discuss potential for power outages and injuries during a disaster situation.

When disaster strikes, the electricity often goes out. It gets dark. And cold. And dangerous.
Be prepared with candles, matches, flash lights, batteries, extra layers of clothing, blankets, and first aid supplies.

Discuss potential “power outages” with your team.

A business can quickly have a potential marketing disaster on its hands from the sudden loss of a team member.
Have a plan to deal with the situation if an employee leaves the company unexpectedly. You never know who might be considering a career change, a relocation, or taking time off to focus on family.
Discuss what to do if an employee takes an unexpected leave of absence due to injury or illness, and how you will back-fill that role temporarily.

Make sure your family knows what to do.

During a disaster situation, it is often necessary to shut off utilities at the main connections.
Show family members where the water, gas, and electricity connections are, how to turn them off, and when it is necessary.
Practice accessing these utilities in the dark.
You might need a wrench or pliers to turn off the utilities.

Cross-train your team so everyone is ready.

When a marketing disaster strikes, you can’t afford to let the situation get worse because a key team member is unavailable to do their part.
Be sure to cross train employees so they are familiar with their colleagues’ core job skills.
Establish a password protocol that ensures multiple individuals have important access codes. That way, if the main contact is unavailable, the backup can help you access important tools or information.

Post emergency contact numbers near telephones.

When disaster strikes, it is important to have emergency contact numbers immediately available (beyond 911).

Collect multiple contact points for each team member.

When marketing disasters happen, chances are you’ll need to communicate with the whole team. But these situations don’t always happen on a weekday, so be sure you can reach your team members in a variety of ways.
Collect mobile numbers, email addresses, and instant messenger screen names in case you need them in an emergency.

Turn on the radio for emergency information.

During a disaster situation, you need to know what is happening and how the situation is evolving. A radio may be your only source of information in an emergency.
Be sure to have a radio on hand, and instruct family members to turn it on for important information.
Remember to have plenty of batteries for the radio and flash lights during an emergency. And conserve their use.

Make sure your team uses various alert devices during a marketing crisis.

When a marketing disaster strikes, it is critical to know how the situation is developing.
Monitoring is key. Be sure to set up Google alerts, social alerts, and search ranking alerts for the team to stay on top of issues involved with your marketing crisis.
Consider using a tool like ifttt.com to route alerts across different media to various team members.
Be sure to develop an initial list of terms for your alerts that are potentially associated with your crisis. Create additional terms and alerts throughout the crisis as needed.

Take a basic first aid and CPR class.

When disaster strikes, people are often injured and medical help is not immediately accessible.
It is important to be able to provide first aid and to be able resuscitate someone.
During an emergency disaster situation, you could make the difference between someone living or dying.
Sign-up for a first aid course.
Get CPR training.

Practice for a marketing disaster.

You never know when a marketing disaster might strike. But when it does, you need to act immediately. You can’t afford to waste valuable time. You must be prepared for the unexpected. That means practice!
Plan to have a quarterly mock marketing disaster scenario to work through with your team. Be sure to cover the situation from numerous angles.
Write down the recommended response. You might want to refer to it during a real marketing crisis.

Have a supply of clean drinking water.

You won’t survive long without drinking water, so be sure to have a supply of it on hand.
Plan for one gallon of water per person, per day.
Store water in sealed, unbreakable containers.
Identify the storage date and replace it every six months.

Protect your point of sale.

Your business won’t survive long without sales. During a marketing crisis, it is important that your point of sale — typically a website — remains open for business.
Run nightly backups of your site, and store it on a separate server.
Replicate your database on a secondary server.
Use a CDN to ensure authorized users can access a cached copy of your site from anywhere in the world.
Run load testing simulations to ensure servers can cope with traffic surges and denial-of-service attacks.

Have a supply of non-perishable and canned food on hand.

If a disaster strikes, you may need to rely on canned goods and non-perishable food items.
Keep a minimum of a three-day supply of non-perishable food items on hand.
Be sure to have infant formula available if needed.
Don’t forget to have a manual can opener available.

Have a supply of “non-perishable content” ready.

Content is your marketing food — and you can’t risk running out of it during a marketing disaster. Even if you are too busy dealing with the crisis at hand, you still need to have that content available.
Fortunately, you can stock up on it in advance. You can create “evergreen” content — material that is not time sensitive and will always be relevant.
Create a small stockpile of articles, videos, images and tweets that you can fall back on if you run low on the resources to create new content for a few weeks.
Need ideas? Think about broad topics. People will always be interested in ways to feel better, be more efficient, more comfortable, healthier, richer, and better looking.

Have a first aid kit and prescription medications.

When disaster strikes, people are often injured. It is important to have a first aid kit on hand so you can treat them.
Be sure household members know where it is located and how to use it.
During a disaster, pharmacies may be closed and/or you might not be able to get to one. Be sure your first aid kit includes regular prescription medications for household members.

Have the right marketing tools available.

When things go wrong, you need emergency marketing tools to help you identify the problems and stop things from getting worse.
Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools give critical insight into what’s happening on your site.
Conductor’s SearchLight orBrightEdge can help you gauge the impact on organic rankings and links.
Enterprise startups likeBottlenose can help decipher social activity.

Have cash on hand!

When disaster strikes, electrical systems can go down. That means you won’t be able to use your credit and debit cards.
Be sure to have emergency cash on hand in case you need gas, food, water, or emergency travel.

Save some resources for marketing emergencies.

Because you never know when a marketing disaster might hit, try to create a budget safety net for these situations.
Ideally, set aside a little bit of money from each marketing channel. That way you’ll have some resources available in case something unexpected comes up.
For example, a product recall may require new content, or even the development of a new microsite very quickly.

Have a security plan.

Lots of frightening things can happen during an emergency situation that you need to be prepared for. This includes things that could put your personal safety at risk, such as rioting, looting, theft, and attacks.
While you won’t find this item on FEMA’s list, it is important to have some sort of self-defense available during an emergency disaster situation.
Hand-to-hand combat skills such as Krav Maga or Kickboxing can be handy in just about any situation.
Lethal and non-lethal forms of self-defense such as pepper spray can also be useful during an extended disaster situation.

Have a security plan.

A marketing disaster can come in all forms, including a security breach — something that is happening all too often today.
For example, Kickstarter recently reported a security breech with stolen passwords and user information. And two months earlier, millions of passwords were stolen from Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo and LinkedIn through a sophisticated malware attack.
To help prevent this from happening to your business, frequently update your social media passwords, and hold security training to make sure that employees are using secure passwords.
As marketers, look at how some of the bigger companies (like Kickstarter) addressed the situation, so you have a plan in place in case your site gets breeched.
As an Internet user, be sure to use a password manager like Dashlane to protect yourself when your information is stolen from sites you use.

Be prepared for the long haul.

Disaster preparedness information indicates that you should try to be ready for three days. However, many disasters last much longer.
Storm power outages, can last a week or more, especially in rural areas. A well-prepared home should be ready to survive for several weeks without electricity, gas, or heat.

Be prepared for the long haul.

Some marketing disasters, such as a security breach, are relatively short lived. But bigger marketing disasters, such as JC Penney’s failed turnaround attempt last year, can linger on for years if not fixed.
Marketing teams need to brace themselves for the possibility of ongoing challenges by adopting a lean marketing approach. This means thinking like a start-up.
During a long-term marketing crisis, you may have to do away with the big budget TV ads and expensive enterprise tools. Instead, you might need to focus on grass-root marketing campaigns and use free tools.
Recovery should come through innovation and creativity, not from throwing more money at tired tactics.

Hopefully, there won’t be many more winter storms to deal with this year — but online marketing disasters can happen at any time. Be smart; get prepared. Think about worst case marketing scenarios and build a plan of action. When the algorithm shifts, budgets get cut or your site goes down, you’ll be ready — and you’ll emerge a stronger, wiser marketer.

Digital Marketing Excellence Drives Traffic and Results!

Posted by Mansoor Bhanpurawala

Digital Marketing Excellence Drives Traffic and Results!

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) uses a holistic approach to provide a full range of Digital Marketing services. Examples of these are:

Strategic Business Planning – STC will help you define the right online strategy for your business
Content Marketing – We define and drive successful content marketing strategies
On Page SEO – Our SEO audits will increase organic search traffic to your site
Link Building – STC will get you the links that drive search engine rankings & traffic
Social Media Optimization – STC will drive your strategies across Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter, and much, much more.

Get the Big Picture

Before embarking on an online marketing strategy it’s critical to get the big picture. There are many key questions to ask, such as:

What is the purpose of my web site?
What are we selling?
What are our customers buying?
What resources do we have to deploy content and tools on our site?
What resources do we have to implement architectural improvements to the site?
Why would someone link to it?
What can we do to make the site a more valuable resource so more people will link to the site?

Answering these questions, and more like them, is critical to success in any web marketing strategy. STC can help you focus on the right questions, and answer them, to ensure your online marketing strategy makes sense. We have the breadth ofmarketing and technical experience and expertise to make sure that your web marketing strategy is:

Focused to provide optimum results
Synchronized with your global business and marketing strategy
Actionable
Achievable with your budget and resource constraints

The Stone Temple Consulting Approach

STC is committed to assisting its clients with the development of new traffic to their web sites from the web. Our holistic techniques are designed to be acceptable to search engines and the online community at large. Like all people looking to increase the traffic you receive to your web site, you will hear of tricks and gimmicks that are designed to get you traffic. This is not what we do.

If you are trying to build a long term business, one where the business itself is an asset to be nurtured and grown, you do not want the value of that asset to be dependent on a revenue stream that can evaporate with the very next search engine algorithm update or the negative reaction of the Internet community. You want to use an approach that consistently and steadily builds value over time. This is what we do.

We have spent years running our own sites and managing those of others. This experience, regular attendance and speaking at search engine industry conferences, and scores of conversations with search engine engineers and social media pioneers, has taught us how to work with the web community and the search engines. We can guide you through the process to certain, steady growth of your web based business.

Digital Marketer Planning for 2014

Posted by Mansoor Bhanpurawala

According to the surveyed over 500 marketers about their digital goals and challenges, as what is working, what’s not and what they are planning for 2014 is here in digital marketer planning for 2014. The result say that 41% of B2B marketers will be generated top objectives in 2014, while 40% of B2C marketers say that driving sales is their top objective. Also B2B marketers will generate 27% in drive sales and 17% improve awareness, while in B2C marketers 18% generates leads and 27% in improving awareness in the global market. This digital marketing gets high, but only 25% digital marketers are planning to invest their budget online and 75% planning to invest through offline.

In 2012, there are few people know about digital marketing, as in 2013 50% of people knows about outsource search marketing and on the other side 63% plan to spend on contents.

As well as they are planning to target 75% mobile and their users.

The biggest top challenges in 2014, in B2B 21%, generating enough leads, 19%, producing enough quality content as well as 18% converting leads to customers. As in B2C, there are 25%, generating, measuring ROI, 22% converting leads to customers and 14% integrating content across the channel.

Today, some marketers are still struggling to measure return on investment, in different online marketers like SEO, SEM, Display, Social and email with their percentages are 17%, 29%, 16%, 12% and 36% according to market ratio.

The best thing is this, there are 26% people in the world who have no idea about which channel deliver the best leads, and only 33% people really don’t know about which channel generates the most revenue.

Last but not least, for online marketers there are some drop words from their vocab, are “Best-in-class, Thought Leadership, Viral, KPI, ROI, Synergy and many more.

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Digital marketing

Digital Marketing Disaster? Hope You Have An Emergency Plan!