What can you learn about marketing from South Pole explorers? Quite a bit actually!
In the early 1900s, both Roald Amundsen and Robert Scott lead separate teams to the South Pole – the first people to ever do so.
Even though both teams had similar experience, left within days of one another, and had to overcome similar obstacles, Amundsen’s party managed to reach the pole first. They subsequently returned to their base camp without loss of life.
Unfortunately, Scott and his four companions died on the return trip.
What differentiated their journeys? Why did one team make it faster and without loss of life, whereas the other did not?
When both expedition log books were examined, there were many reasons Scott’s team didn’t survive. Here are three of the main reasons.
Failure to Track Progress more Accurately
Amundsen built a six-foot cairn every three miles. Each cairn had a note inside recording the its position, the distance to the next depot, and direction to the next cairn. This was helpful to find the fastest journey there and back.
In contrast, Scott relied on depots much less frequently. For one distance where Amundsen laid seven depots, Scott laid only two.
Failure to Select the Right Tools for the Expedition
Scott chose to primarily use ponies on his journey to haul supplies. Amundsen used dogs. Not only are ponies not as efficient in the snow, but they also sweat through their skin. This required much more maintenance and warming up on the trip.
Dogs, however, don’t have sweat glands and cool themselves by panting, thus making them a better choice for traveling in the cold. This was one example of the many poor tool selections Scott made.
Failure to be Consistent
Amundsen did what later became known as the 20-mile march – consistently traveling 20 miles each day no matter what. Scott, on the other hand, often pushed his team to travel until exhaustion. It was useful early on in the trip but not sustainable for the long journey.
Your website marketing is no different…
In order to be successful with your marketing blog, you need these same ingredients:
- Proper tool selection, so you know you are doing the right things
- Frequent tracking of your progress, so you know that it’s working
- Consistency, so you give it time to work
Track Your Progress
Before you begin blogging, there are a couple things you should do.
First and foremost, setup a free analytics tool on your website. Your web designer should be able to do this in five minutes. Even if you don’t yet understand the data behind it, we recommend the free and very popular Google Analytics.
The other pre-blogging step we recommend is installing either your Facebook advertising and/or remarketing pixel. Admittedly, this is optional. But even if you have no intention to do Facebook or online advertising, we still highly recommend it. Here’s why:
Both of these tools take time and website visitors to build up a database. After a few months, you might be surprised to see hundreds – if not thousands – of people on these lists. Now, you have the ability to advertise or promote posts to these folks.
This is still some of the best marketing advice we have ever received.
An example of the compounding effect of a retargeting pixel
Select Your Tools Wisely
There are many great content management systems (CMS) out there. But we use and recommend WordPress-based systems.
First, this ensures that most of the technical search engine optimization (SEO) has been done out of the box.
Second, it is currently the most popular CMS with lots of designers, developers, plug-ins, and support.
Beyond that, we also recommend optimizing your article titles to natural language phrases and questions. Use “what is title insurance?” or “do I need title insurance?” instead of a page title that just reads “title insurance.”
It’s also important to utilize post categories and post tags when they are related to the article.
We see many people ignore this step. But a blog post or article without any tags gives you one landing page on your website. This is only one opportunity for someone to find your website in search.
The same blog post with three tags and three categories of the same keywords give you at least seven unique landing pages – one for the post, one for each of the tags, and one for each of the categories.
That’s seven opportunities for people to find you online – six more than if you posted without tags or categories.
Be Consistent
Like Amundsen’s consistent goal of 20 miles a day, you need to find your steady but attainable goal and stick to it.
Some businesses think that a new website by itself will yield many new relationships and orders. But unfortunately, this often isn’t true.
Our websites, net sheet apps, social marketing, and email marketing can increase customer loyalty and give businesses more relationship opportunities. And our branded video library and blogging service can help you mostly automate your blogging and save a ton of time and money on hiring writers and SEO firms.
If you do it yourself, it does require both know-how and elbow grease to make your website a marketing machine.
Bonus Tip
There’s one more thing Amundsen did that Scott did not that likely contributed to his success. He had a cross-functional team that included experts in multiple fields.
For example, four people on his team were expert navigators. Although everyone on his team had different skillsets, they had also skied since they were children.
Similar things can be said about your marketing.
Many think that once you publish a blog article or post something to Facebook you’re done. But blog posts actually can fuel many of your other marketing strategies. Consider sending a blog post out as an email marketing piece, posting that popular Facebook post several times throughout the month, or using the same blog post as the template to create a brochure or flyer.
Reusing and repurposing each piece of content or collateral into other marketing mediums is a great way to see a return on investment with your marketing. Just be sure to pick the right tools, track your progress, and stay consistent!
Do you need a new website for your Title Company or Law Firm but are not sure where to begin? Maybe you recently built a new website but are still ranked low on Google? If so request a free consultation today to see how our solutions might help you out.