Category Archives: Marketing Strategy

How to Allocate Online Marketing Budget

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Guest author Sammie Mauz is a blogger who enjoys writing about digital marketing, search, and everything in between.  He thinks the merger of tech and marketing is a beautiful thing and enjoys learning, reading and hypothesizing about its future.

In order to start allocating your online marketing budget, the first and most important step is to look back at last year’s performance.  Depending on what metric you used to gauge success (return on ad spend, cost per lead, gross leads, etc.) you’ll want to make sure you’re increasing the budget for the top performing channels.  That should be a no-brainer.  Whatever was working last year, do more of it!  If you don’t know what was performing well in 2011, then it is definitely time to invest in tracking and analytics.

If you are currently unable to track where leads/sales/activity are coming from, that is a valuable place to initially invest.   The advertising channels you are investing in won’t be as effective if you aren’t able to gauge the performance.   Whether you need to change how your website collects leads or simply install analytics, it is important to know what investments are paying off and what ones just aren’t working.

Now that past performance and tracking analytics are in place, now comes the evaluation of different marketing channels.

SEO

With the implementation of the Google Panda algorithm in 2011, Google wiped out a lot of businesses small and large by demoting them within search results.  With the constant push towards wanting to promote ‘quality’ in their search results, relying on organic search traffic from Google is becoming increasingly less stable if you’re not following best practices in SEO.  If the time and money you are investing in SEO are on “black hat” or even “gray hat” practices, Google made it clear that those efforts will do you more harm than good in the long run.

If Panda taught us anything, it’s that diversification is going to be critical to long term survival on the web.  This isn’t really anything new and is generally a smart business move.  You never want to have one customer that accounts for too much of your revenue because if that customer leaves, then your whole business tanks.  To put that in internet marketing terms, you never want to have one traffic source accounting for too much of your traffic, because if that source dries up, it could be very difficult to replace.

Branding/Public Relations

Investing in branding should be more top of mind these days than it ever was.  Publishing press releases and alerting relevant media members of your content are two quick wins that can help you quickly become more like a traditional brand.  Anything a company can do to increase the percentage of visitors that come from branded searches is a long term win.  This is something most big brands have and the more ways you can imitate a big brand online, the better it will be for the long term health of your business.

Paid Search

Unlike organic search, you don’t have to worry about waking up one day and not appearing in Google at all (unless your Adwords account gets banned, which is a totally different issue).  Paid search is not only a great way to attract new customers, but is also a very valuable competitive research tool.  Not only can you quickly find out which keywords generate the most traffic, but you can also find out how those keywords convert.  You can utilize this information in your organic search campaigns as well to determine what keywords you want to focus on targeting the most.    By investing in paid search, you can see immediately which terms are driving traffic and whether or not they’re converting.  If you’re not already investing in paid search, it’s definitely worthwhile as it will not only lead to more sales or leads but it will strengthen and reinforce all of your other marketing campaigns.

Display

Retargeting via display ads is a tactic that has started to gain popularity lately, and for good reason.  The opportunity to interact with potential customers after they’ve visited your site is extremely valuable.  There are many advanced tactics one can utilize with retargeting, but if you’re just getting started then at the very least create a campaign for people that have visited your sign up page or check out page and didn’t end up signing up or checking out.  Those visitors were so close to converting that it makes sense to do all you can to get back in front of them.

Another benefit of display advertising is that it helps pump branded searches.  If people see your ads all over the web, they’re more likely to keep you in mind when they’re looking for something in your industry.  Anything you can do to increase your brand’s visibility online is a good thing.

Content Creation & Social Media

These two can be lumped together as they go hand in hand.  Without great content, it’s tough to provide much value socially (there are actually a lot of great customer service benefits from using social media, although that usually comes out of a different budget, so for the purposes of this article I’ll exclude it).  Creating a white paper you can give away to collect leads and a webinar shouldn’t cost you too much and would be great content to publicize utilizing various social media outlets.  A bad idea would be investing time in social media without investing time in content.  Being on Facebook or Google Plus just for the sake of being on Facebook or Google Plus is a waste of time and hours that could be spent somewhere else.

Other channels

It’s a good idea to save 5-10% of your budget to explore new ad channels.  Facebook and LinkedIn have opened up their own respective ad networks and allow you to get very granular regarding the type of person you want to target.  You could also invest in YouTube videos if you think they might be a good way to grab attention.  Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube may perform very well, and while there is always the risk that they efforts may not work for you, the point is you need to test to find out for yourself.

So … Where Should I Spend My Money?

While I would love to be able to give a concrete answer, unfortunately like all things internet marketing, it’s all relative.  What may be a good strategy for a B2B company may be a horrible idea for B2C and vice versa.  What may work for a well-known brand may not work for a start-up.

If I had to trim this down to one key takeaway it would be this: Diversify and work towards becoming a brand.  Those two things make everything easier and make the business healthier.

What exactly is a bad website & how do you fix it?

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On my way into work this morning, I passed a local computer repair shop and they have one of those messaging signs. This one said “we fix bad websites”.  Obviously that got my attention, but I am always on the lookout for such things as a marketing executive.  It did however get me to thinking, “what exactly is a ‘bad’ website?”

Is a bad website something that looks like it was built in 2001?  Is a bad website something that is so overwhelming with content that you “click off” the moment you get there because you don’t know where to start?  Is a bad website something that drives you no traffic on its own?  Is a bad website something that nobody can find unless they search for your company name?  Is a bad website something that makes you click 4 times before you get to what you want?  Is it when you go to visit examples of their work and they look old or in some cases you can’t FIND the references they give as “testimonials or case studies”?  Just what does a “bad website” mean and look like?

I would have to say all of the above.  You website is your only resource working 24/7/365 for your company.  It is also a lot of times your only chance to make that all important “first impression”.  You have 7 seconds for them to determine if they will “click off”.  You have to make sure you provide enough and the right content on your business site so they feel comfortable in one of three things – buying something (if you sell), filling out your form to talk to someone – or picking up the phone and calling you.  If you don’t give them what they need to do any of those three (refer to your sales process for what information is needed to get them to make a buying decision) – then you have a “bad website”.  PERIOD.

In a day and age where everybody says they can build your website, search optimize it, handle your social media, and drive you traffic – execution of those strategies makes all the difference.  Just because they “know more than you” doesn’t make them an expert in web strategy – talking the talk is much different than walking the walk.  Make sure you check out their site and the references they give you.  If their site does not have the work done that they are proposing to you and/or you find references to work that you don’t like – run.  If you don’t like their website (and just because it’s better than your current one, doesn’t mean you have to like it) keep looking.  When they are willing to tell you how they will do the things that will drive your website’s return-on-investment (ROI) to new levels (which is beyond just traffic) with specific steps and tasks and give you a list of people to call – follow up with references and ask how much VALUE they received – value being ROI, data, sales, leads, qualified traffic and understanding to move their entire business forward – then you have found someone worth talking to when it comes to “fixing bad websites”.

Start Your First Blogger Outreach Campaign

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ConAgra Foods and their PR agency, Ketchum, recently found themselves with a bit of bad press after a blogger outreach strategy for Marie Callender’s, their line of frozen food, went wrong. Here’s what happened:

ConAgra invited food bloggers to an exclusive “four course meal” prepared by celebrity chef George Duran. The bloggers were told the event was intended to discuss trends in the food industry and sample fine wines over a dinner prepared by Duran. What really happened? The “four course dinner” (unbeknownst to the bloggers) was Marie Callender’s frozen lasagna. Despite the bloggers clearly positioning themselves against artificial ingredients and processed foods beforehand, they were still served exactly that. Not to mention ConAgra secretly taped the whole thing to capture their reactions. Bloggers were less than happy with the “bait-and-switch” event and returned to their blogs to let their readers know about it.

Where did ConAgra go wrong? Why didn’t their ruse go as planned like Pizza Hut’s “surprise reveal” commercial? Successful blogger outreach can have significant ROI if implemented strategically. However, there are two important components of working with bloggers that ConAgra failed to do; target the appropriate bloggers and build a relationship with them.  

Before you start building relationships, you need to ensure you are building relationships with the right people. Research the niche you are targeting and find the industry leaders in that niche. Plug into their inner circle and identify who has the most influence. Each blogger has their own point-of-view on things, and you need to spend a little bit of time uncovering whether or not their personality and blog align with your efforts.

Using a tool such as Technorati is a good way to start your search of uncovering highly influential blogs in your niche. Technorati’s blog directory contains over 1,275,000 blogs all ranked with their authority and influence and are also grouped by industry. The authority of any given blog rises and falls as the bloggers’ following changes, allowing you to find current leaders in the blogosphere. You can also compare the bloggers’ authority by running their link profile through a tool URL such as Open Site Explorer.

After you tap into these bloggers, you can continue to identify more leaders by utilizing their blogrolls. A blogroll is a list of that blogger’s favorite blogs to read and follow. The list can be as short or long as the blogger chooses. While you are analyzing blogs, you will start to recognize which blogs you have seen repeatedly on blogrolls; helping guide your search. Track the blogs you want to pursue along with their metrics and a short description of the blog, which will help you compare your findings later.

How did ConAgra choose the bloggers they chose? While it may seem obvious to go after food bloggers for a food product, the company did not think about who actually purchases their product. They invited bloggers to the event who clearly (if they had done their research) were not their target consumer. Several of the food bloggers prided themselves on using fresh, organic food in dishes that they prepare on their own. Did ConAgra and Ketchum think that their “surprise reveal” would be so influential that the bloggers would convert their lifestyles and endorse Marie Callender’s to their readers?

One blogger made her stance clear after the event, “I’m NOT their target consumer and they were totally off by thinking I would buy or promote their highly processed frozen foods after tricking me to taste it.”

The other important key to a successful blogger outreach campaign is to be genuine and honest with the bloggers from the beginning and build a relationship with them. Read their blog. Uncover what it is that they are passionate about. Determine how and if you can leverage that with your marketing efforts. If it is a good match, there will be no need for deceit. Influential bloggers receive invitations to review products regularly. They know that marketers are looking to promote their products; if it is a good product that aligns with their interests and blog, they are generally excited to share it with their readers.

Be transparent and do your research. ConAgra and Ketchum did neither of these things when promoting Marie Callender’s. If you keep these components at the forefront of your blogger outreach strategy, you will be much more successful.

Have you seen the results of a successful blogger outreach campaign in the blogs you read? Were you more likely to try out the product or service because the blogger you follow and trust recommended it?

Should your business try Groupon, Living Social, & Google Offers?

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Looks like the online promotions space is thriving. More and more special offers sites are being created. Google even went and developed their Google Offers product after they failed to buy Groupon for $6 Billion – that’s right $6 Billion. So there must be some value in these promotional tools right? Otherwise businesses would stop using them and Living Social sure has a large advertising budget for themselves.

Let’s look at Groupon.  So if you have a $50 product/service, that you sell for $25 – (it has to be a 50% discount so it is a “good deal” to get approved) and then you get 60% of the $25 and Groupon keeps 40% of the $25.  You are really selling a $50 product for $15 because of the discount and the Groupon percentage – but they are opening relationships for you – and for the most part giving you an opportunity for customer relationship.  So is a $35 acquisition cost on a $50 product/service worth it?  Only you can answer that, but you should run the numbers.  Based on that, I can tell you, it is going to perform close to what it would cost you with advertising dollars spent at that level (but you can optimize for performance over time with advertising).

You will have some instantaneous Branding and recognition, not to mention customer traffic over the 6 months the Groupon/Living Social is valid.  You will always have some existing clientele who will always buy this so it doesn’t reach only new people – unless you are just opening your doors in the market.  This is unbeatable for the new business.

However, I have yet to see a second offer from the same business so you only get to use this once – so pick your timing – if you are not a new business try to use it to boost a slower period and make sure you can handle the demand during the 6 months without losing your shirt.

There is also the FREE money aspect of this.  Like any rebate that is offered, you get a % that don’t use it. So if we use the first example again, you got $15 off each sale and that 25-30% don’t end up using it, that is FREE money for you to keep, which doesn’t hurt and softens the blow – but then you don’t get that all important “new” customer relationship either so it is kind of a double edge sword.

Here is a great case study.  We had a client use Groupon in December 2010 – a single location Hot Yoga Studio as part of launching their business and they sold almost 700 at $39 a pop.  That is incredible for a small business that is just getting going.  Now, it gave them some cash in the door and created some relationships.  They considered it a huge success.

My take, if you are opening a new business or want to launch a new product or want some quick cash – put an unbelievable offer out there through one of these and you should get some traction. Also learn from one before you try to do another – Set up some tracking on your website that sees what these people do that come to your website via this campaign and track their habits.

Be prepared to use it as a loss leader to get access to new customers and get “legs” underneath your new product or location. Also make sure your ongoing marketing turns those new relationships into repeat customers so you can make some money back and it creates success for the long term. That might take a second promo for them for another visit – but you don’t have to give Groupon their 40% this time.

Let us know if you have had success with one of these services – please give location and product/service sold and if it has been successful in generating repeat business.

Analyzing your audience’s web habits to improve website performance

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How much actionable information do you have about your web visitors? Can you predict their wants, goals, needs and behavior? Are you using analytic data to improve website performance? Do you utilize any re-targeting, ad networks, Search Engine Marketing (PPC and Display) and social media to be collecting data across multiple external sites and clickstreams? If so, the potential to deliver targeted content and offers based on their previous behavior and referring traffic source is possible.

You can construct detailed matrix that serve up content based on the family of sites they have visited and the predicted traits and interests that visitors to those sites demonstrate. However, if the first known point of contact with your visitors is their arrival at your site, then predicting their targeted area of interest is a much more tricky proposition, unless you study your own analytics and data (Sitecore, Webtrends, Quantcast, Google Analytics, etc) to come up with them and improve website performance.

Do you perform any A/B testing of two broader offers or content paths on your enterprise level site visitors and see which performs better (ie they look at more pages or end up as a conversion more often).  That is a good place to start, but more organizations have never consider split testing their own website. Doing this would ensure no audience gets excluded or misdirected–and it requires less historical data to drive the offer but allows you to profile how each “path” behaves.

Coming from purchased media like PPC or Facebook, can also shed light into keywords that have “special” needs to be effective, landing pages that get them to take desired actions and demographic profiles of who is visiting based on reporting. Again, this allows you the create a profile on each type of visitor and adjust the “path” accordingly – which will improve website performance .

You tie all of this data together to make the necessary changes to your website and content, navigation paths to drive more usability, click patterns, desired “conversions” that you have established for your website and/or campaigns.  Interpreting data is extremely important to ongoing web success – find a resource to work with that understands this to help set benchmarks and foundational strategy and it will help educate yourself and give you insights to things you could use across all mediums with your marketing and advertising.

Social Media Strategy – trigger interaction & response

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You do not have to be consumer oriented company to be able to use social media to advance your Brand, thoughts, products, and engagement with your audience. There are plenty of people professionally that look for helpful information for their jobs and will share valuable information with their peers when they find it. It some cases, it is even “cool” to be the first to find a great deal or share relevant information for others.

In the B2B world, you can also help aggregate content for your customers, clients, and prospects, by being a filter for them. You can share relevant information with them that has already “passed” your approval or relevance rating. This becomes almost like a value added service for them. They turn to you, a trusted resource first, before they go hunting on the Internet. You want them to say – “if they haven’t said anything about it yet, then I probably don’t need to pay attention to it yet.” And any savvy Internet person can tell you that just because it comes up “first” on Google, doesn’t make it accurate or right.

If you can get your people to interact with you, you can get valuable information about their habits, wants, desires, and interests. If you can get them to follow you or be involved, you can help your message get in front of thousands with a single click or post because it will not only reach your direct followers, but also post to their network of people because they are following you.

You can choose to have different message via each social medium (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, etc), or choose to broadcast your message, which will allow your audience to follow you via the medium they like to use the most and you still get your message out to the masses without requiring them to visitor you website. That is power and potentially all from a single article or click.

If you don’t know where to start or what you should be doing we have several tools on our website to help and we have created an great tool for measuring social media success and value of social media efforts to your organization. This will help you determine which social media efforts should be continued by your organization and give you some ways to help measure return-on-investment.

Social Media allows you to listen like never before & respond appropriately

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Social Media has made it easier than ever for consumers and business people to get their opinions heard and get them into circulation faster than ever before. It also creates challenges – like should you listen? or what should you respond or how do you get quality responses and exposure?

You have all heard the phrase that the “squeakiest wheel gets the grease”. These are the people who will be everywhere just posting about their experience – especially if it was not a good one. Does that make them less credible? If they are an active poster and only have “complaining” on their mind, they are already less credible and you cannot be worried about everything they say. You should also look to see if they have people agreeing, “liking”, or responding to their posts. If they do, then you have to take action.

If something positive happens, respond and ask for more by more people. If something negative happens, address it and find a way to take care of it – then ask them to post (or update the previous post) after you fix the problem about how you took care of it. Actually have your customer service people ask if you can share their experience with they solve or problem or get a rave from an interaction – it will go a long way to helping you have an unlimited supply of content to use for your blog, Facebook, or social media channels.

Build your brand around building your community of followers and dialogs – the ones utilizing social media are most likely to share experiences and they will be most likely to share – giving you further reach through their network and you definitely want them on your side.

Seven Steps for Social Media Strategy Integration for your Company

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I love this article from last summer about the 52 questions to ask when hiring a social media company. This article is spot on if you are serious about Social Media. It goes way in depth in some cases, especially for Small-to-Medium enterprises, but it does a good job in helping you determine what you should be asking a potential partner.

After talking to, working with and pitching dozens of companies and organizations on the principles of social media and why it works for more than just Business-to-Consumer Brands, I have realized that it is a much bigger commitment than just “another marketing or advertising campaign” of sorts.

Here is what you need to do to make sure your social media efforts get the Return-On-Investment (ROI) they could and also why playing around doesn’t really drive effective social media. All of these things really depend on who has what responsibilities within your organization and how it is structured but most are applicable in the larger, national and even global size companies. Even smaller organizations can take away some value as well.

First - Your various business units or divisions and partners should be all be looped in and asked if they participate in social media and how. They should all be informed somehow of what you are doing and why even potentially consulted on how they could improve their social media initiatives so you can have some Brand continuity across all of your channels.

Second - You need to look at your audience structure. Don’t be thinking that a “catch all” corporate Facebook page or blog is enough. People are smarter than that. Speak specifically to them, with content that is what they want – be specific in touching all your audience with content and experiences they can relate to. Don’t make it a “news” page. If you are updating them with content they don’t care about half of the time, they will start to ignore it ALL of the time and that is bad. If you have the resources and a large enough market share, you could consider “several” Blogs(or add filters when they follow so they can select what information they want) and multiple Facebook pages for segments that are big enough to warrant them and truly create a dialog/interaction with a specific customer base.

Third - You have to have some buy-in at the C-level. They should be involved in whats going on and even use them to help aggregate industry news, company news, white papers, blog postings, etc. It is important to help them buy into goals that established and measurement of success – in effect the ROI you want. This might also help you navigate any potential objections from “legal”. Speaking of legal, if you do use a third party source, make sure they can work with someone like Bevelwise to ensure no proverbial “lines” get crossed and they feel like you could get into any “trouble” resulting in ligitgation.

Fourth - offer out incentives of some sort to employees to touch customers (sales, customer service, customer care/support, etc) to help feed you good stories, testimonials, content, and things that make good social media posts. Anyone who touches a client could help generate content and drive the initiatives further – A customer service person that asks “are you following us on Facebook yet – we have specials we run for those fans on occasion” can go a long way to helping build your presence. These people can also get you content for posting MUCH faster and more often than most.

Fifth - all of your web resources, teams, should know what is going on and why. They don’t have to “agree” with it always, but aligning what is happening with the website (SEO/Content) resources, all of your marketing/advertising campaigns (email, online, offline, direct mail, etc) and initiatives and your PR team will help feed you more content and help the “big picture” work together. After all, if you are putting effort in, you want to maximize each effort.

Sixth - If you are big enough, try to find a champion from each internal department, especially those that touch customers, so they can farm for content, feedback and other things you can share through your social media channels. They can work with your social media agency or potentially be trained on making posts – You want to make sure you are feeding the content to touch all of your vertical markets, products, services, audiences etc-especially if you have the resources or need for content specific social media. Internal folks live and breathe your strategy 24/7 – they can be VERY beneficial to an outside resource because of that.

Finally - if you are choosing a partner to help, choose a partner that has understanding across all marketing mediums, but with a specialty in the online channels like Search Engine Optimization (SEO), website usability, online marketing – (banners/PPC, e-mail marketing, and especially analytics. That should mean they know how to set up goals and measure results across the many different channels and mediums that are being used for your overall advertising strategy.

We welcome your social media strategy questions.

What are your company’s value propositions and differentiators?

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Just re-reading a great article from Jeffrey Gitomer in the local business journal. It resonated with me because we preach this to all of our clients when talking strategy for their marketing and sales efforts. Everyone needs to know their value propositions & differentiators because if you don’t then you are just another product or service that you will market as a “commodity”. A better question is do you know what your value proposition is?

Everybody has their set of products and/or services. Most have spent some time coming up with “differentiators” so they can tell why they are different. But true value combines what the client or prospect perceives to be in favor of them combined with what you perceive is in favor of them – hence the value proposition.

Are your Brand and marketing strategy reaching beyond the product or service itself to a relationship with your clients? Where are the areas where the most value you provide is perceived by your clients? Whether you consult Fortune 500 clients or sell shoes, you need to craft, create, and control the perception of value your product or service. Social media is exploding because it helps create this value and gives businesses more access to each customer relationship and therefore the ability add more value and integrate themselves with a client. In the case of services, your presence out in the web channels can add to building trust, in the case of shoes – how many people they can see are talking about them will add “perceived value” to your shoe or Brand of shoes.

Perceived value can also far outweigh the actual price paid. That value can actually help justify the price in a client’s mind. Everything you do needs to drive the prospect/customer to perceive value and the value you give provide to them. Price objections are typically more about them not perceiving enough value – it also you just need to change their perception and your content, messaging, and social media strategy can all help you change that perception.

Work on developing these propositions and you will see your revenue grow. Here are some helpful marketing toolsto help you craft your marketing and web strategies.

Google Adwords Extends Ad Titles To Test And Improve CTR

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Google is always making changes and testing the way they display results and ads. We all know about the change from a while back when they stopped calling ads “Sponsored Results” and starting call them “Ads”. This made a big impact, even though it was just a simple change. Well they’re at it again and this time they are testing extending the Ad Title’s of text ads. What they are doing is taking the first line of the ad copy and appending it to the title. This has a variety of things to take into account with this change:

  • Ad Titles are the clickable area of an ad, and extending it gives users a larger area to click and make the text appear as a hyperlink.
  • It will increase CTR and drive more traffic through paid search.
  • As PPC managers we will need to alter the way we write ad copy taking into account the mix of ad titles and ad copy.

To see Google’s post about this topic you can visit the Google Adwords Blog where they describe how they rolled this out and how your ad needs to be formatted to receive this change. You’ll need to end your line 1 ad copy with a form of punctuation. A period or question mark will need to be used to imply your ad has actual sentence structure. The example that the Adwords blog used to illustrate the difference in ads can be seen here.

The implication of this could be huge from a CTR stand point and the volume of traffic that can be driven to your site through paid search. We like when changes like this are made because when you know how to manage and optimize campaigns we can maximize results for our clients. If you’re not actively managing your Adwords campaign then you’ll miss the boat when big changes like this can affect results on a large scale. This is a good reason to have a professional manager of your campaigns that will stay up to date for you. The scarier thing may be that your competitors could be using this to their advantage, which will give them the better CTR and overtake your ads position with a higher quality score. You may be left in the dust.If you have seen this in your own campaigns and have noticed the differences in performance leave a comment and tell us how this has affected your results and strategy. If you haven’t made adjustments that take this into account… go make them now and measure the results for yourself.