Marketing isn’t the first department that comes to mind when you think of revenue.  However, innovative companies are now finding new ways to make marketing increase revenue and save costs by energizing, supporting, and embracing communities of customers.

One way that marketing can make money is that it can drive sales directly.  Traditional forms of marketing advertise the benefits and why consumers need certain products.  A company called Sneakpeeq has taken a new spin on this idea, changing the way customers shop and discover new brands by energizing and supporting users.    Sneakpeeq uses gamification to attract and retain long-term customers.  Users gain points for performing various tasks for brands and products they like, energizing advocates of certain products.

Some of the tasks users can perform to gain points are:

• SHARE – On Facebook or Twitter
• PEEQ – Users can “peeq” to see a special price.
• LOVE – Users can curate products they “love” and showcase them on their user profiles.

1.5 million “peeqers’ currently use the website.

The great thing about this website is that it enables customers to amplify their own person positive reviews of products and positive opinions at nearly no cost to companies that are selling the products.  This allows companies to save costs on advertising.  Moreover, the opinions that are being shared by users are more legitimate and relevant to consumers then a more broad paid media advertisement paid for by companies.

Another example is Apple’s Support Community.  Apple is energizing, supporting, and embracing communities of customers by creating an online community where users can ask other users questions about Apple products.  Moreover, users are energized by gaining points and levels every time they answer other user’s questions, giving them an incentive to continue to answer questions.

This website benefits Apple because post-purchase product support is shifted onto product advocates saving money on support services without compromising quality of service.  In many cases, the answers users receive are more personalized because the questions are being answered by users who have struggled with similar problems.  I was reading a blog post by Kyna Ng .  She mentions that Apple should get their customers to evangelize products more online.  I think the Apple Support Community is one example of how apple is accomplishing this.

Energizing, supporting, and embracing communities of customers can not only lead to increases in revenue and decreases in operational costs, but also providing a better, faster, and more personalized service to your customers.

Ten years ago creating a website that would rank high in Google wasn’t as hard as it is today.  You learned some basic HTML or purchased a template, find some keywords, and add a few title tags and meta tags and you were done.

With Google updating the way that they index and rank websites, many people have made a whole career surrounding search engine optimization (SEO).  The main problem is that many employees at companies don’t know how to make Google SEO work for them.  More specifically, employees at companies don’t know how pages are ranked, can’t keep up with the changes to Google SEO, and they can’t find opportunities to make Google SEO work for them.  If you don’t know much about SEO here is a quick video to bring you up to speed.

Luckily I have created a brief introduction to Google SEO with lots of pointers to external links for further reading.  This summary will cover and introduction to how pages are ranked in Google SEO, some of the recent updates to Google SEO, and one example of how local businesses owners can use Google+ to increase their ranking in Google SEO.  These topics are covered throughout the 3 posts below.

How Pages Are Ranked in Google SEO

Page Rank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is.  You can find more information about the complex formula here and here.

The main to ways to get your website to rank higher on Google are:

1. Make sure that you have content that is engaging and relevant to your users on your website that is compelling to read
2. Get links pointing into and out of your website

Below are a few questions you can ask yourself to check if your content is engaging:

1. What are your areas of expertise?
2. What differentiates you from other websites?
3. Why should customers care about your website?
4. Who is your competition?

Social media is another great way to create backlinks and distribute your content to many potential customers.  Social media is especially in industries where it plays a major role in communicating with customers and businesses.

Google + is also growing in importance in terms of increasing the speed that your page gets indexed on Google.  After all customers can’t find your website if it hasn’t been indexed yet.

Hummingbird probably the biggest update to Google SEO since Google’s Caffeine update in 2010.  As stated by Goodwin, Google quietly made a huge change to its core search technology in the past month, one that affects about 90 percent of searches worldwide. Calling it Hummingbird, the technological update of Google search is designed to handle more complex queries.  Caffeine, which rolled out in 2010, was designed to improve indexing speed and provide users with fresher results.  Here is a great article explaining more about Google’s Caffeine Update.

Panda and Penguin are two other major updates to the way Google searches content.  Some of the changes caused by Penguin and Panda are outlined in this infographics taken from visual.ly .

Updates like Penguin can negatively affect some websites ranking in Google.  For example, this business talked about on searchenginewatch.com lost 65% of their Google organic traffic overnight.

It may seem like a burden for business owners to keep up with all of the updates related to Google SEO.  However, there are many benefits to the updates.  See the next post to see how local businesses owners can use Google+ Local to increase their ranking in Google SEO.

According to searchenginewatch.com , Google+ Local is a new feature that allows, “small businesses targeting local customers because it combines customer reviews and local search into one platform. Yet, many small businesses still aren’t sure how to take advantage of Google+ Local.”

There are two ways that users can search for Google+ Pages.  The first is that when Google knows that a search query is looking for a local business, it will include Google+ Local pages in the search results.  The second way that users can search for Google+ Pages is that they can search from within Google+ itself.  This way Google+ Pages only compete against each other for visibility as other websites are ignored during the search.

It’s important that businesses make use Google+ Local because According to Google, “20 percent of all Google searches have local intent and 40 percent of Google mobile searches have local intent. “

The number of people searching on Google is steadily increasing.  According to Statisticbrain.com, there were 22,000,000,000 Google searches in the year 2000 and 1,873,910,000,000 Google searches in the year 2012.

According to Canadian Internet monitoring firm Sandvine, Netflix and YouTube dominate over half of downstream Internet traffic in North America showing that not all Google searches are related to consumers looking to buy goods.  However, many customers do according to Google, “Combined with the fact that 97 percent of consumers search online for local businesses, it’s easy to see why it’s essential for small businesses to have high local search visibility.”   With so many customers searching for products and services online, companies must also move online in order to increase awareness, articulate the benefits of their products to spur consumer interest in the product, and drive consumers to take action by purchasing products.  These concepts are illustrated by the Google purchasing funnel shown below.