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Owners Guide to Managing an Expert Web Team

Trent is speaking today at VRM Intel in Wilmington, NC. He’s moving fast – here are the quick hits. Pay Attention!

Uncertainties
As an owner of a vacation rental company, it seems there’s never enough time in the day to manage every aspect of your business. Most of you have marketing teams managing your online properties. With that comes success and failure, as well as uncertainties. How do you know that your team is working as hard as they should?

  • Are my people doing the right thing?
  • Are they doing anything?
  • Are they making a difference?
  • What should I do?

TIP: Don’t ever spend more on PPC than you do on SEO – higher rankings are hard won.

Lesser Risks
How to you address the risks that affect your business?

  • Significant Marketing Budgets Involved
  • Not getting what you paid for
  • Is someone asleep at the wheel
  • People’s livelihood at risk?

Mitigate Turnover
Turnover creates events that can represent significant loss. If you are prepared, you can mitigate the damage.

  • Your agency
  • Your agency’s people
  • Your people

As an owner, these are your “must dos”
Make sure you are implementing, they will save your ass time and again.

  • Is google Analytics setup properly?
  • Is Google Search Console setup?
  • Are backups running and tested?
  • Is my domain registered properly?
  • Is uptime being monitored?
  • Is my WordPress setup correctly?

Everybody monitors results – BUT… they are backward looking.
Results are great, but at the point they are measurable, they are already history. They won’t help you increase revenues next month.

  • total revenue
  • # of bookings
  • source of bookings

Other non-revenue results

  • PM owners or real estate side of business
  • email signups

Instead, define and monitor a set of real-time “key indicators”
These indicators are a true test of real business, they can be measured and managed to affect future revenues.

  • website traffic
  • keywords rankings in google
  • fans and interactions in social media
  • email blasts and their and open/click rates
  • pay-per-click traffic and cost
  • site speed
  • site mobile usability

This is the REAL place to manage your web marketing team
Actions create new business, monitor & manage your marketing actions to affect change in your model.

  • New blog posts this month
  • social media posts this month
  • email blasts this month
  • new links added this month
  • reviews responded to this month
  • press releases, A/B Tests, Adwords tweaked, pages optimized, 404s fixed, etc

TIP: what gets measured, gets managed.

Have your own monitoring tools
Ownership is important – who owns your tools and access to your tools, you or your marketing agency? Always be aware and take ownership where it makes sense to do so.

Raven Tools – a great platform to manage all in one place.

  • user level access (to create your team)
  • pulls reports from Adwords, Google Analytics, Google Search Console and many, many more
  • competitive research
  • search engine ranking tracking
  • stores link and web directory
  • manage web content

TIP: check out www.alignable.com for some link love!

Tools WE LOVE!

BlizzardMetrics.com
Benchmark you data vs other websites. Trent built this tool – it’s free and AWESOME. Please check it out.

Google Docs/ Drive
Online file sharing. Home for all your docs, spreadsheets, etc.

Google Photos (Formerly Picasa)
Easy to share, edit and tag photos

Google Analytics
Benchmark your data vs other websites

Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools)
Some key reports are found here.

BrightLocal
Good tool to track citations and improve reviews.

Buffer, Hootsuite or Sprout Social
Manage your social media content creation. Get serious with Sprout Social.

SEMRush
Google doesn’t want you using this tool, but it’s awesome!

Moz and Majestic
Good link tracking data (get it in raven tools instead of buying it directly)

Headache yet? We understand, it’s a lot to think about and even more to manage. But in order to stay successful in an ever changing landscape, you need to be implementing these things, some how, some way.

Need help? Ask Trent about BlizzardMetrics concierge services. We want to be your system of checks and balances, helping you manage and measure the success of your in-house -or- out-of-house marketing teams! Give Trent a call – 970.930.1882, we are here to help.

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