Ad Agency Washington

Attention Advertisers: Have You Added Brand Names to Your PPC Ads?

Saturday, November 7, 2009 by Matt Chamberlin

In mid-May 2009, Google relaxed its U.S. trademark policy and began letting resellers, review sites and sellers of compatible, complementary or replacement products include trademarked terms in ad text even if they don't own the trademark or have the owner’s approval to use it. Now, six months later, ACS Creative wants to know whether you’ve taken advantage of this policy change and, if so, how is it working for you?

What Was Then
Prior to the policy change, Google let companies other than the trademark-holder bid on trademarked terms (e.g., VAIO), but only the trademark owner (e.g., Sony or a Sony-authorized company) could use the term in the text of AdWords ads. So, for example, lots of companies that sold or serviced Sony VAIO laptops were out of luck: They might secure ad placement on the keyword “sony vaio laptops” but were forced to deliver a vague ad, something along the lines of

Brand Name Laptops
Deals on major brands.
Shop today! Free shipping.
www.brand-name-laptops.com

Needless to say, searchers looking for Sony VAIO laptops would most likely click on the most specific and relevant ad—one that mentioned “Sony VAIO.” Trademark-holders benefitted in two ways:

Their ads stood out because they (and authorized companies) were the only advertisers who could use the brand name in their AdWords ads
Click-through rates stayed generally low due to limited competition

What Is Now
Now, a reseller who advertises via AdWords can create specific ads for each of the brands that they sell—under certain conditions. Google believes this change helps both searchers and advertisers by reducing the number of overly generic ads that appear across its networks in the U.S.

Criteria. In the U.S., Google permits use of a trademark in ad text under the following circumstances:

Ads that use the term in a descriptive or generic way (e.g., Apple, if you sell the fruit)
Ads that use the trademark in a nominative manner to refer to the trademark or its owner, specifically—
- Resale of trademarked goods or services: The advertiser's site must sell (or clearly facilitate the sale of) the goods or services corresponding to the trademarked term. The ad’s landing page must clearly demonstrate that a user can purchase the trademarked goods or services from the advertiser.
- Sale of components, replacement parts or compatible products corresponding to a trademark: The advertiser’s site must sell (or clearly facilitate the sale of) the components, replacement parts or compatible products relating to the goods or services of the trademark. The advertiser’s landing page must clearly demonstrate that a user is able to purchase the components, parts or compatible products from the advertiser.
- Informational sites: Third-party providers of non-competitive and informative details about the goods or services corresponding to the trademarked term can use the term in ads. Such an advertiser may not sell or facilitate the sale of goods or services of a trademark owner’s competitor.

Google reviews ads that use trademarked terms plus their landing pages before the ads appear on Google search results pages (maybe a one-week delay). Finally, Google still prohibits competitors, counterfitters and critics from using trademarked terms to their advantage.

Results. The Google ad landscape has definitely changed since the policy shift—where you once found just an ad or two mentioning a brand name, now you're likely to see a brand-name search term appearing in most ads. For example, a recent Google search on “sony vaio laptops” produced the following PPC ads (top and right-column Sponsored Links):

Image of sample Google search results page for "sony vaio laptops"

Sony’s ad (Sony VAIO® Official Site) still holds the top position, but every ad in the right column contains the branded terms (Sony, VAIO, Sony VAIO) either in the ad’s headline or text (or both).

Who Wins? Who Loses?
In theory at least, trademark owners; searchers; resellers; sellers of compatible, complementary or replacement products and third-party information sites all seem to win in this situation:

Trademark owners maintain a top ad position because of their superior Quality Score
Searchers get relevant ads from more vendors
Resellers, service providers and sellers of compatible/complementary/replacement parts can present more specific, compelling ads and better compete for ad positions
Informational sites can market focused knowledge and recommendations

But, what’s actually taking place in practice? That’s what we want to know. ACS Creative invites you to share your experience with Google’s "looser" U.S. trademark policy for AdWords:

Have you noticed any increased click-through rates (CTRs) for your ads?
Has your conversion rate changed?
Are you spending more money on your PPC ads because you have to bid higher (i.e., there's more competition) for the same terms you used before?
Is your ROI increasing or decreasing for your AdWords campaigns?

Please share your comments directly in this post or email me at mattc@acscreative.com. Look forward to hearing from you!

Why Integrated Marketing Matters

Thursday, October 8, 2009 by Matt Chamberlin

Integrated marketing matters because—simply put—your customers and prospects lead integrated online and offline lives. They move seamlessly between online and offline venues and expect a unified, cohesive experience wherever and however they encounter your business.

So how do you ensure continuity for your customers and prospects? Through executing highly integrated marketing initiatives across specific channels that your customers frequent and ensuring that your company delivers complementary cross-channel experiences on the backend.

Choose the Right Communication Channels for Your Customers
Successfully communicating with your customers and prospects depends entirely on how well you understand them so that you can choose the most effective channels for your marketing campaigns. Do you know the habits, motivations and expectations of a “typical customer” in each of your audience segments? What do your customers watch, listen to, notice, read or participate in? Where do they go for information (e.g., search the Web, contact friends, read reviews, get on the phone, go to a store) when they want to purchase a product or service?

The ways that you might reach your audience are many—through your Web site; TV, radio or print advertising; direct mail; email; search ads; organic search; blogs; online ads; social networks; mobile messaging; outdoor media and more. But if you market through channels that your audience fails to access on a regular basis, you won’t, of course, reach them—no matter how creative your marketing campaign might be. So first understand your customers—inside and out—so that you can focus your efforts on the set of communication channels that provides the best chance of reaching and connecting with them to ultimately drive business.

Provide a Cohesive Experience Across Channels
Customers build trust through experiencing consistent and seamless interactions with a company over time. Regardless of whether they visit your store, access your Web site, read email, call customer service or engage with you through social media—or any combination thereof—they expect to encounter consistent messaging, a predictable company “personality” and complementary information and support across channels.

Delivering consistency starts with an integrated marketing plan that not only coordinates messaging and offers to customers across channels but also ensures that campaign information percolates throughout your organization. Everyone who might interact with customers and every place where your customers might interact with you—customer service, support forums, sales channels, your blog, social interactions—need to get on board and incorporate that information to provide a familiar, connected customer experience. Few things will undermine customer confidence in your company more than encountering contradictory information or experiences.

Finally, if you’re incorporating social media channels into your integrated marketing plan, be prepared to do preliminary work in those channels before you launch your campaign:

Listen
Learn the culture
Establish a presence
Spend time cultivating conversations and relationships
Build a reputation of helpfulness
Share relevant, meaningful content when appropriate to deepen understanding of your company, build trust in your brand and help more people find you through search

The key across these channels is still consistency—of message, intent and service—to reinforce your company as a trusted and reliable partner. Then, when you finally do deliver that compelling call to action, you’ll stand a much better chance of triggering a response because it comes from a familiar and trusted source.

No One Said It Would Be Easy
Building cohesive experiences is the hard part of integrated marketing, but it’s also the part that most influences customer trust in your business or brand. Your customers have integrated their online and offline worlds. Now it’s up to you to integrate your marketing campaigns to meet their needs and expectations—and align your business processes to ensure that you deliver a cohesive customer experience across all your marketing channels. Let me know how we can help.

Fine-Tune PPC Keyword Selection with Google Insights for Search (Part 1)

Saturday, October 3, 2009 by Matt Chamberlin

At the heart of any PPC advertising campaign are keywords, and finding the most relevant and productive keywords for your customer base needs to be an ongoing process for your business to ensure that your ads get in front of the people most interested in seeing them—and at the most opportune time.

But search habits and patterns can change over time, and keywords that performed successfully for you last year might not produce the same results today. Likewise, effective keywords in one region you serve might return lackluster results in another. Fortunately, help is at hand to make staying on top of your keyword strategy easier. Google Adwords’ powerful (and free) keyword research tool, Google Insights for Search, provides valuable data to help you analyze, refine and grow your keyword lists.

In this post, we’ll look at what kind of tool Insights for Search is and introduce an example to see how it works. Next time, we’ll look at additional features of the tool.

What Is Insights for Search?
Insights for Search is a tool that analyzes Google search data to compute the popularity of search terms relative to the total number of Google searches over time. The tool lets you see trends, top searches, related searches and searches that are rapidly gaining in popularity. You also can compare search trends across multiple terms, vertical markets (categories), geographic locations and time ranges. Let’s look at a few simple examples to see how you can use the tool to refine your keyword strategy.

What Can Insights for Search Help You Do?
Suppose that you own a plumbing, heating and air conditioning company in Maryland that serves the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. Some of the keywords in one of your “plumbing” PPC campaigns include

hot water heater
gas water heater
electric water heater
tankless water heater

Interest over time. First, let’s check the search interest in these keywords over time. Insights for Search data goes back as far as January 2004, and is updated daily. Here are the results showing US interest in the keywords since January 2004.

Google Insights for Search web search interest in 4 water heater terms

Interest in the keywords has stayed fairly consistent over time, with “tankless water heater” and “hot water heater” showing higher search volume than “gas” or “electric.” You can also see that interest in “tankless” took off in December 2005 (where the dots are), and is continuing to grow. If Insights for Search has enough data, it will include a future prediction for the term. The dashed lines on the right end of the graph show predicted interest for next year for the four terms.

Top related searches and rising searches. Next, let’s view the top search terms related to “tankless water heater” to see whether we find other popular terms that we need to add to our “tankless” keyword set. Scrolling down the page and selecting “tankless water heater” from the Search terms drop-down menu brings up two lists: Top searches and Rising searches from January 2004 to the present.

Top searches and rising searches for tankless water heater Jan2004 to present

The Top searches list displays the most popular terms related to “tankless water heater.” These are terms that also have experienced a significant level of interest from “tankless water heater” searchers. You can scan this list to find keywords you might be missing, and you can drill down into each term to find additional suggestions.

Rising searches highlights terms that are growing in popularity at a fast pace (compared to a previous time period). These terms will give you an idea about what might get the highest volume of searches in the future, so you’ll also want to consider adding these terms to your keyword list. In this example, because we looked at the January 2004–present time period, we might not be getting the most up-to-date trending data for “right now,” so let’s see what happens when we look at the data from just the past 12 months.

Top and rising searches for tankless water heater past 12 months

The most notable difference in this current data is the appearance of the Rinnai keywords in the Top searches list. Likewise, in the Rising searches list, Navien is exhibiting rapid growth over the past 12 months compared with the preceding 12-month period. So, filtering on time really provides better information about which terms are hot right now that you might want to consider for your PPC campaign.

In addition to the “January 2004–present” and “Last 12 months” date-range filters, Insights for Search lets you filter on the past 7, 30 and 90 days and any of the calendar years 2004–2009. You also can set up custom date ranges to fit a particular situation.

Finally, it’s worth noting that the numbers you see on the Insights for Search graphs are not absolute search volume numbers. The numbers, which have been normalized and scaled, reflect how many searches have been done for a particular term, relative to the total number of searches on Google over time.

But Wait, There’s More!
Insights for Search also provides the capability to download your data as a CSV file so that you can access the data via a spreadsheet. When you download to a CSV, you get an expanded list of top and rising searches, so it’s well worth doing.

Had enough for one sitting? Next time, we’ll take the examples a few steps further to find out other nuggets of information that Insights for Search has to offer.

Internet Advertising Plays Key Role in Integrated Campaigns

Friday, September 4, 2009 by Matt Chamberlin

According to a recent LinkedIn Research Network/Harris Poll of 1,015 advertising decision-makers from agencies or corporations, advertisers continue to rely on a mix of media types for their marketing campaigns. But most important, the data also reveals that a compelling 80% of those surveyed say they use Internet advertising in an integrated campaign with other media at least some of the time. If you’re not already doing so, maybe it’s time to figure out how you can use Internet advertising in conjunction with the other campaigns your company runs to better meet your marketing objectives.

Putting Internet Advertising in Perspective
By far, Internet and print media draw the most favor from advertisers: About 9 in 10 advertisers say they use each type, the study reports. In contrast, about 5 in 10 advertisers say they use radio or television ads, and 4 in 10 use cell-phone digital ads.

Graph showing types of advertising media used

The study also reports that the use of Internet advertising and cell-phone digital advertising is on the rise: 74% of those who use Internet advertising say they’re using it more often than they did at this time last year; 69% of those who advertise on cell phones are using that tactic more frequently as well.

Internet Advertising Practices
In terms of how advertisers most typically use Internet advertising, more often than not advertisers are integrating it with the campaigns they run on other media.

Graph showing how advertisers use Internet advertising

Of all advertisers polled, 50% say they most typically use Internet advertising in integrated campaigns, and another 30% report they use Internet advertising in integrated campaigns as often as they use it in stand-alone campaigns. Just 13% report they use Internet advertising most typically in stand-alone campaigns, and a scant 8% of the participants don’t use Internet advertising at all.

What Internet Advertising Brings to Integrated Campaigns
Advertisers who use Internet advertising report that they do so to drive a variety of marketing initiatives: to build brand, trigger information-gathering in support of offline transactions, drive online transactions and promote community around their brand.

With these findings in mind, here are a few ideas about how you can use Internet advertising in conjunction with other campaigns that you might run to better serve your customers and prospects:

Build brand. Whether or not customers and prospects actually click on your Internet ads, your brand benefits from appearing where your customers are. And if your Internet ads coordinate with the ads your audience sees elsewhere, all the better: You send a consistent and reinforcing message about your brand that builds trust in your company. If you haven’t yet tried any Internet advertising, what do you have to lose? For greatest impact, be sure to supplement your efforts through other channels.

Trigger information gathering. With more and more customers using the Web to gather information before making a purchase, your company can couple Internet advertising with other campaigns to make information-gathering that much easier. Providing specific landing pages that present the information decision-makers need most before they make a purchase and promoting those landing pages across all your campaigns is a valued service to customers—and can make the difference between whether a customer chooses you or a competitor.

Drive online transactions. If your goal is to increase online transactions, integrating Internet ads with other media campaigns so that all lead to the same specialized landing page and transaction process takes away confusion for the customer. There’s nothing worse than going to a company Web site and not being able to find what an ad promises. And running stand-alone ads that send different messages most likely means customers will pass you by.

Promote community. Internet advertising is a great way to promote community—a forum, Twitter stream, Facebook fan page, LinkedIn group, specialized social network—around your company and brand. Running integrated campaigns wherever your customers frequent—online or offline—that invite and encourage them to participate is a great way to build up community.

To best serve your customers, your company needs a presence online and offline. Internet advertising provides a relatively easy way for you to begin integrating your online and offline efforts so that you send a strong, unified message to your audience wherever it might encounter you. Be sure to contact me at ACS Creative if you need help integrating your marketing efforts—there’s no time like the present to start taking advantage of the benefits integrated marketing can deliver to your business.

Don’t Overlook the Power of Local PPC Advertising

Friday, August 28, 2009 by Matt Chamberlin

If you’ve shied away from targeting your PPC advertising campaigns for local search because you want to reach as many potential customers as you possibly can, now might be the time to rethink your strategy. People typically use local search because they have a problem and they’re specifically looking for someone in a particular geographic area to solve it. Furthermore, according to SearchEngineWatch,

54% of Americans use Internet and local search instead of phone books
90% of online commercial searches result in offline transactions
61% of local searches result in a transaction

Isn’t it time to reconsider local PPC advertising?

Ideal Candidates for Local PPC Campaigns
Localizing PPC ad campaigns can prove useful for local businesses that don’t want to attract customers outside the region they service. For example, if you’re a plumbing, heating and air conditioning company in Washington DC, you might create a local PPC ad campaign based on a 25-mile radius from your office location. Anyone in that area (as determined by the location of their ISP) who searches for your keyword phrases would see your ad; people outside your service area would not. So, you get in front of the most relevant prospects with a specific (and likely immediate) need for your services.

Localizing also can be useful for national businesses that want to target specific geographic locations. For example, if you’re national coffee retailer that wants to run a special PPC campaign just for the World Series champion’s hometown, you can do that through local targeting. Your special ad will only display on search results pages of searchers in that hometown or those who include that city in their search queries.

3 Ways to “Go Local” in Google AdWords
Google AdWords offers three ways for you to address a local market through PPC advertising: geo-targeting via campaign-level settings, geographically modified keyword phrases and managed ad placements within the Google content network.

Campaign-level settings. Probably the simplest and fastest way to target a specific location (or bundle of locations) for your PPC ad campaign is through the campaign-level settings that you provide when you set up your campaign. You can target the audience for your ad by country, state, city, distance from a specific map point (e.g., your company address) or a customized region that you specify. These settings will affect all ad groups within the campaign, so you might find it useful to set up different campaigns for different target locations.

Modified keyword phrases. Modifying the keyword lists in your ad groups to include geographic descriptors is an effective—if not tedious—tactic in local PPC advertising. The advantage is that your ads can entice people who have taken the effort to search specifically on location and seed keyword (i.e., they’re highly qualified prospects who quite likely will respond to an ad that targets their long-tail query).

The disadvantage is that generating the list of modified keywords (and quite likely modified ads and landing pages) can be tasking. For example, let’s say that you’re an Internet marketing firm located in Virginia, and you want to specifically target customers in Washington, DC. If your keyword list contained the phrase “Internet marketing,” you would need to add geographic descriptors in multiple ways to cover all the possibilities searchers might use in their queries:

internet marketing washington dc
internet marketing dc
internet marketing in washington dc
internet marketing in dc
washington dc internet marketing
dc internet marketing
internet marketing 20001
20001 internet marketing
internet marketing 20002
20002 internet marketing
.
.
.

While geo-targeting through campaign settings removes portions of a potential customer base, targeting through keyword modifications more assertively pinpoints prospects who stand a very good chance of becoming your customers.

Managed ad placements. The third way to take advantage of localized search is through manually identifying which content sites in the Google network you’d like your PPC ads to appear on. This tactic is particularly effective if there are certain sites in your community that your target audience frequents on a regular basis. These sites might include news sites, newspapers or magazines, sports sites or other highly trafficked sites—good places to advertise your local services.

Give Local PPC Ads a Try
If you haven’t tried out local PPC advertising, there’s no time like the present! As with all PPC advertising, you can start a campaign quickly and limit your spend to easily stay within your budget. Local PPC advertising can be more economical, too. Because the audience for your ad will be fewer in number than that of a US or global campaign, your CPC price will likely be lower. All in all, local PPC advertising just might provide the boost you need for your business.

Facebook’s PPC Advertising Program—Would it Help Your Business?

Thursday, July 23, 2009 by Matt Chamberlin

Earlier this month, MarketingSherpa released a chart showing search marketers’ use of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising programs. Perhaps surprisingly, not only did Facebook show up as a new provider this year, but it also garnered favor (21% usage) from search marketers along the lines of Yahoo!’s contextual ads program (25% usage).

PPC Advertising Program Usage, May 2009, MarketingSherpa

Facebook’s advertising program, Facebook Ads, lets you offer contextually-targeted PPC display ads in a way similar to the Google content network, with the added advantage that you can target Facebook community members—based on demographics and interests—that you’d like to display your ad to. With that capability in mind, might Facebook Ads be a boon to your business?

What Facebook Ads Offers
Facebook displays up to three ads down the right side of a Facebook page. The ads consist of a hyperlinked title (25 characters, including spaces), body text (135 characters, including spaces) and an optional image (110 pixels wide by 80 pixels tall). The title can link to a page on your corporate site or to another Facebook page, application, group or event. You also can elect to display interactions that friends of the person viewing your ad have with your brand. For example, if your ad appears on John Doe’s page, he might also see a picture of one of his friends with a mention that the friend is a fan of your page.

Facebook requires that you follow some specific rules for composing the title, body copy and image for your ad, and the company manually reviews your ad for compliance before it goes live. If Facebook rejects your ad or image, it provides reasons and lets you resubmit your ad after you correct the shortcomings.

Probably the most important feature of Facebook Ads is the capability to very specifically target the audience you want your ad to reach. You build a precise “audience profile” for your ad based on location, age, sex, education, workplace or college, relationship status or interests, languages and keywords. (Be sure to indicate broad keyword phrases because Facebook utilizes user profiles, which include interests, activities, books, movies, TV shows and the like, for keyword matching.) At each step along the way, Facebook provides a measure of the reach you can expect for your ad.

Another interesting feature of Facebook Ads is its pricing structure: You get to choose whether you want to be charged on a pay-for-clicks or pay-for-views basis. The pay-for-clicks option works like other PPC programs in which you indicate the maximum amount you’re willing to pay for each click, and position and cost is determined by an auction among competing advertisers. The pay-for-views option lets you indicate the maximum amount you’re willing to pay for 1000 impressions of your ad, like the common CPM model for other display advertising. In either case, you indicate a daily budget for your ad; the minimum spend is just $1/day. Because PPC rates are still reasonable for Facebook ads, starting with that pricing option is a good idea. You can always change your pricing option at a later date if you find it’s more economical to do so.

Finally, Facebook offers its Ads Manager tool to let you track and report on your ad, campaign or account performance, so it’s easy to keep up with how you’re doing and make necessary adjustments.

6 Ways Your Company Can Benefit
Because click-through rates for most display ad programs these days are so low (less than 1% is not unusual), you might wonder, “Why would I want to pay for display advertising on Facebook?” Here are six ways that your company might benefit from this advertising program:

You don’t have to have a Facebook profile or page to participate in Facebook Ads, so testing whether it’s a viable marketing channel for your business is quick and economical.
You have access to 250,000,000 active Facebook users.
You can target your audience very specifically to reach particular groups or niche markets.
You can include an image or logo with your ad for free, so each impression builds brand whether or not it’s clicked.
You can drive organic traffic virally through use of the friend interactions (aka social actions) option.
You have two pricing options to help you get the best return on your advertising investment over time.

So is Facebook Ads a good advertising option for your company? With the continued growth of Facebook’s audience, the program might provide you with the opportunity to connect with more and more people you haven’t reached through other means. Now might be a good time to check out the program before you need to finalize your marketing strategy—and budget—for 2010.

Put Twitter Search to Work for Your Business (Part 3/3)

Friday, July 17, 2009 by Matt Chamberlin

7 Practical Uses of Advanced Search Operators
What makes the search operators quicker to use than the Advanced Search page is that you can type them directly into the search box. You can also combine them in creative ways to find very useful information. Furthermore, Twitter Search lets you create ongoing searches that deliver results to your RSS feed reader (e.g., Google Reader) for review at your convenience.

Here are seven ways to use the Advanced Search operators to help your business capture useful information from the Twittersphere. Have fun experimenting to see what works best for your business!

(Note: Twitter Search is not case sensitive—you can enter everything in the search box in lowercase. In the following examples, the use of upper- and lowercase is only to improve readability.)

1. Eliminate “noise” from your search results
Often when you do a simple word/phrase search, you get back so many tweets that you can’t find the ones that are most useful to you. Excluding retweets (when users resend another Twitter user’s message) can help eliminate a lot of duplication. Simply search on the word/phrase and append –rt to your query:

“Internet marketing Washington DC” –rt

This query will return a list of messages that contain the exact phrase “Internet marketing Washington DC” but not any retweets of messages that contain that phrase.

2. Use hashtags to enhance your search capability
Hashtags are words or strings of letters and numbers that are preceded with the # symbol. Twitter users include a hashtag in a tweet to indicate that the tweet pertains to a particular subject grouping. Hashtags make it easy for you to search for tweets that might be applicable to a particular topic. By searching on hashtags instead of a simple term, you eliminate any tweets that might include the term yet not be relevant to the exact topic you had in mind.

For example, if your company runs a special event (e.g., the Virginia Web Designers Meet Up), you could start a hashtag (e.g., #VAdesignersMU) that everyone in the group can include in their tweets about your event. Then, to find all the comments pertaining to your group, you simply enter the hashtag in the Twitter Search box:

#VAdesignersMU

If you want to exclude any retweets, you enter

#VAdesignersMU –rt

If you just want to find comments (excluding retweets) from a certain date range, you can enter

#VAdesignersMU –rt since:2009-07-12 until:2009-07-16

3. Find tweets about your company
To find all the tweets that mention your company name, you might simply search as in the following example:

“ACS Creative” OR ACSCreative OR “Affordable Creative Services”

Using OR lets you check for several possibilities that people might use for your company name in their tweets. In this example, because acscreative is also our Twitter name, this type of search will return mentions as well as all the tweets we sent out and any replies to us. To find only the comments that mention your company and exclude those from you or to you, you can enter

“ACS Creative” OR ACSCreative OR “Affordable Creative Services” –from:acscreative –to:acscreative

4. View tweets to and from your competitor
If you want to monitor all the tweets to and from a competitor that’s on Twitter (e.g., Twitter name acmevisual), you can enter

to:acmevisual OR from:acmevisual

5. Find tweets that refer to both you and your competitor in the same tweet
If you want to find all the people who refer to your and your competitor’s Twitter name in the same post so that you can be sure to reply, you can search for

@acscreative @acmevisual

Note that when you enter terms consecutively in the search box separated by a space, Twitter Search returns all tweets that contain the first term and the second term (and so forth) somewhere within the tweet.

6. Start conversations with Twitter users who live near your business
Are you a local business that likes to connect with people in your community? Perhaps you’d like to invite newcomers to visit your business or even offer a special coupon or discount to new customers. Twitter Search provides two operators to help you discover Twitter users in your area to engage in conversation: near and within.

To see tweets from people in your area, you can enter something similar to the following phrase in the search box:

near:WashingtonDC within:25mi

Note that if your city name has two or more words, enter them without any spaces between words. You also can enter a zip code or airport code in place of the city name. Twitter bases its search on locality information provided by users in their profile.

7. Become a local resource
Twitter Search also lets you discover tweets that satisfy certain conditions—for example, tweets that ask a question, those that have a positive or negative tone and those that contain links. By answering questions in your industry area, you can engage current and potential customers, help your community and establish your business as a resource.

For example, we’ve found that people have lots of questions about pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Here’s one way we can find Twitter users in our locale who have questions that pertain to that particular topic:

near:DC within:25mi “PPC ads” ?

This search would return tweets that contain the exact phrase PPC ads and ask a question, from people within 25 miles of Washington, DC.

You can use a similar tactic to find people who might be having a problem that you can solve [if they indicate so by including a frowny :( symbol in their tweet]:

near:DC within:25mi “PPC ads” :(

So, it's easy to see how you can quickly build some interesting search queries with the Advanced Search operators. Be sure to drop me a line about your successes!

Social Media Marketing or Viral Marketing...Which one is best? (Part 1 of 2)

Monday, July 13, 2009 by Matt Chamberlin

As a strategic graphic design and marketing agency, I get asked this question quite often by some of our best clients. And as someone who believes in the holistic approach towards online marketing / digital advertising...I tend to answer with the 'ol "well both...but like most marketing efforts, they have to be done with a purpose and they must be used correctly."

Let me expand a bit deeper....
First off - Yes, I'm one of those "your marketing needs to have a purpose" types. Whether collaboratively with those clients wanting to be involved (preferred method!!) or within our own creative group, I always start the marketing planning process by establishing (from the top-down) the:

Horizon 1: GOAL
Horizon 2: OBJECTIVE
Horizon 3: STRATEGY
Horizon 4: TACTICS

Soo....regarding Social Media Marketing and Viral Marketing, these are both effective marketing strategies (Horizon 3), that if they are applicable in supporting the marketing campaigns Horizons 1 & 2 (i.e. the campaigns goal and objective)...then they both can serve an effective purpose.

However, there's definitely a lot more to consider before we're able to jump head-first (I know, I know, I'm such a "buzzkill" (no pun intended :) )

In part 2, we'll take a look at some of 'em...Stay tuned :)

***ACS Creative - Located in the Virginia, Maryland, Washington, D.C. Area***

What PPC Ads Excel At—and Why

Thursday, June 11, 2009 by Matt Chamberlin

Online advertising has evolved dramatically over the past 10 years, from a predominance of often-garish display banners to the profusion of ad tactics available today, including darling-of-the-industry search advertising. But how does search advertising, particularly pay-per-click (PPC) advertising (with its reliance on tiny text ads), stack up against other forms of online advertising that let you be more creative in how you entice potential buyers?

Like other marketing tactics, PPC advertising excels at some tasks, but falls short at others. So how can you best use PPC advertising? Which strategic marketing goals will PPC help you meet or exceed? Fortunately, data from Rhode Island–based research firm MarketingSherpa sheds some light on what PPC advertising does best.

Unsurpassed at Lead Generation and Direct Sales
Marketers like PPC advertising because it’s quick to implement, it’s easy to test and refine ad copy and it provides excellent feedback on performance. Most important (and this can’t be emphasized too much), when executed well, PPC advertising delivers highly qualified leads and drives direct sales. In fact, compared with other forms of online advertising, PPC advertising (the bottom entry in the graph) is unparalleled in these areas:

Every Ad Has a Purpose-A Look at Strategy vs. Online Ad Tactice

Why PPC Is So Good at What It Does
Why does PPC excel at lead generation and direct sales? Perhaps it’s obvious, but it’s worth stating again: When people search, they are seeking solutions—general education, specific information or the means to make a purchase in your product or service area. Because PPC ads are directly attached to specific keywords, when you target those keywords with your ad, you are selecting exactly the type of buyer you want to attract—those who are actively “in the hunt” for your product or service. Target marketing doesn’t get any better.

The lesson here is to use PPC advertising, which can be kind of pricey (a downside), for what it does best: to drive lead generation and direct sales. Yes, long-term PPC ad campaigns can add to brand awareness, but if that’s your goal, you’ll find other tactics better suited. Isn't it time to consider how PPC advertising can help you grow your business?

Many Hands Make Light (and Better) Work When It Comes to Your Blog (Part 1 of 2)

Wednesday, May 20, 2009 by Matt Chamberlin

You might have noticed that several of my colleagues contributed posts to the ACS Creative blog over the past several weeks, and maybe that gave you an idea:

“Hey, we could do that and really spread the blogging workload around!”

While that’s certainly one benefit of team blogging, it only seems appropriate to highlight some of the many other pluses that come into play when you decide to give team blogging a try.

How Your Readers Benefit
First and foremost, you need to think about the benefits to your readers—presumably, your target audience of customers and prospects. How will their experience improve? Will your readers welcome a broad selection of writers and topics vs. a single voice? If you have a loyal following already, how will they handle the change? Fortunately, from a reader’s perspective, the benefits of team blogging usually outweigh any potential drawbacks.

One of the key reasons for writing a company blog is to reach out and build relationships with your target audience. And team blogging helps you do just that—in fact, many times over because the variety of personalities, perspectives, experiences and points of view that your blog can include will appeal to a wide variety of readers. For example, if your company produces technical products, some of your readers might be very interested in getting the inside scoop on the nitty-gritty, technical details and capabilities of a product, while others might seek basic how-to information about using the product, and still others might want only high-level news and updates. By including writers that regularly address these different viewpoints, you’ll attract and satisfy a broader audience than you might reach through one writer alone.

Another big plus of team blogging is that by involving numerous writers with specific strengths or specializations, your readers get the best knowledge and expertise your company has to offer.

Here at our Ad Agency we have many talented folks. Most all of the designers have formal training in graphic design and/or website design....however, most of the folks in our creative group have further nurtured their skill into becoming experts in digital advertising and online marketing. Sharing their knowledge, with their unique creative perspective is of priceless value for us and for some of our clients.

Another example would be, large companies that produce many product lines (e.g., Microsoft comes to mind) often organize their blogging efforts around a network of team blogs that address individual products or product families. The benefit to readers is in-depth knowledge from a team of passionate experts with a vested interest in the product they’re writing about.

Finally, using a team of writers means your blog will be updated more often, which results in a livelier, more dynamic experience for your followers (not to mention better traction with any of your online marketing and/or search engine efforts). Maybe your readers have requested more frequent posts from your company, but you don’t think your current blogger has the bandwidth to supply them and complete his “real” job as well. By taking a team approach, you can satisfy your customer wishes and inject additional energy into your blog without overwhelming any single member of your staff.

Stay tuned for Part 2 (where we explore further benefits for your company)

***ACS Creative - Located in the Virginia, Maryland, Washington, D.C. Area***

Search + Offline Marketing = Competitive Advantage for Your Business

Tuesday, May 12, 2009 by Matt Chamberlin

You’ve got a nifty new Website with plenty of content that’s optimized for organic search, you’ve started utilizing pay-per-click advertising and you always run great offline marketing campaigns. So, you should be all set to do business in today’s world, right?

Well, not necessarily—not if your search and offline efforts work against each other instead of together toward a common goal. To reap the most reward from your search and offline marketing efforts, you need to coordinate the two and ensure that they work in tandem to capitalize on what each does best and multiply what either can do alone.

The good news? iProspect reports that just 1 of every 2 companies (55%) that use search-marketing tactics coordinates or integrates its search marketing with offline channels—and that spells opportunity and competitive advantage for your company. Take a few simple steps to ensure that your search and offline marketing teams work together for your customers—and your business.

What Search Marketing Brings to the Table
The search-marketing side of your business has a lot to offer to your offline marketing team. In particular, keyword research and the ability to quickly and easily track and test messaging, offers, calls to action and conversion funnels are the two most valuable contributions your search-marketing team can make to your online/offline integration efforts.

Use keyword research to benefit your offline campaigns. At the heart of search marketing—whether you’re optimizing content for organic search or conducting pay-per-click advertising campaigns—are relevant keywords, that is, the words and phrases that your customers and prospects enter into the search engines to find your business or the types of solutions you offer. Because searchers often use very different terms than what you or others in your business or the industry in general might use to describe what you do, conducting keyword research to discover the most effective language is essential to rank well within the search listings and drive traffic to your site.

Your search-marketing team knows precisely the language that resonates with your audience and is most profitable in driving traffic to your company site. Sharing that keyword knowledge with your offline marketing team and ensuring that the language they use in offline campaigns is consistent with online campaigns is a very effective way to concentrate your efforts across all channels on messaging that works. Your customers win because the language they see offline is familiar with what they see online and reinforces what they naturally search on. Your business wins because you can focus your offline campaigns on what’s already proved to work online, rather than spending money on campaigns that might not attract purchasers because the language isn’t quite right.

Use Web analytics and testing to guide offline campaigns. Today’s Web analytics applications (e.g., Google Analytics) let you determine how visitors come to your Web site, what they do while they’re there and the paths they follow that lead to some type of action—a call, a download, a registration, a purchase. Not only can you see which search terms they use most often to navigate to your site, but you can also determine the effectiveness of a specific message, offer, call-to-action or conversion process. And, you can readily get this information much more quickly and cost-effectively than you might through offline methods.

So, offline marketers can benefit from search marketing’s capability to easily track and test. Have a new offline campaign you’d like to run? Check it out online first, where you have the capability to quickly establish a baseline, fine-tune the wording, test and repeat until you find the best combination of message, offer and call to action. Then use the improved version in your offline campaign.

What Offline Channels Bring to the Table
The offline marketing side of your business likewise has much to offer your search-marketing team. The variety of offline channels and their established appeal to customers cannot be underrated. Your offline team holds the diverse, specialized knowledge to get the most out of those channels to benefit your business, regardless of how your customers choose to complete their purchase. How your customers react to and use the information you provide through TV, direct mail, newspapers, magazines, event displays and outdoor signage influences their decision to work with your company—online or offline.

Use the unique features of offline media to reach your customers in all the ways they expect and prefer to interact with you. Your offline team knows the types of initiatives they need to run in different channels to be most effective with your customers. By interacting with the search team early on in the development process, specific strategies, messaging and timing can be worked out so that the online team can provide the most relevant search-marketing campaigns to support your offline initiatives—and ultimately convert prospects to customers.

Use the added opportunity of offline channels to provide options for customers. People like options for making purchases. Some like to interact face-to-face with a salesperson; others want more distance and order via phone; still others opt for the anonymity that online transactions offer. Your offline channels provide numerous opportunities to inform and reinforce all the ways customers can interact with you to do business—including going online. Today’s customers move back and forth between online and offline channels and expect seamless transitions and support wherever they might be. Communicating consistent options across all channels builds trust and means customers always can select what works best for them wherever and however they engage with your company.

How You Capitalize from an Integrated Approach
The bottom line? Both the search-marketing and offline sides of your business have much to offer each other when they work in tandem to integrate marketing across all channels for your company. By promoting collaboration and the sharing of knowledge and strengths that each brings to the table, rather than letting each work in isolation (which in effect means they’re competing with each other for your customers), your company stands to gain the most against your competition.

Take advantage of the unique appeal that each marketing channel brings to your customers and ensure that the campaigns you run send a consistent and proven message across those channels. The reassurance that customers gain from seeing familiar and consistent messages about your company as they move from channel to channel goes a long way toward influencing their purchasing behavior.

Old (Graphic Design) Dogs Can Learn New Tricks

Wednesday, April 29, 2009 by Jill Artman-Boehm

How does a graphic designer with 30 plus years of experience compete in the web-based, oh so young world of the 21st century?

Being a graphic designer is tough at any age. In your 20s it is tough to get people to take a chance on you unless you have experience. Most times you are knocking on a lot of ad agency doors showing a design portfolio filled with school projects that thrilled and delighted your instructors and fellow students. Filled with pride, you go into interviews only to be deflated by an art or creative director that says, "What have you done in the real world? Come back when you have a year or two of agency experience". Getting that first job to get that experience is all about convincing someone you are or have the potential to be an asset to their business.

In your 30s with some experience under your belt you start to feel invincible. You keep learning new things, computers start to become a mysterious part of your daily life. You start to mentor other poor 20 somethings trying to get noticed. You even get a few graphic design awards. You must be pretty hot stuff.

In your 40s you start to realize that you have been a graphic designer for nearly 20 years. You have seen a lot and done a lot and you have learned to smile politely when your client tries to art direct your work. You start to realize you need to sharpen your skill sets in order to stay relevant. All those 20 somethings are starting to look younger and are using all those fancy web design computer programs they learned in kindergarten. You tell them of the days of paste-up, art boards, waxers and stat cameras and just watch their eyes glaze over. They have no idea what you are talking about. They start talking about rapid interactive prototyping with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and you think it's time you start thinking about selling bead necklaces at craft shows. This is the time when you start searching out the new technologies and learning anything you can. Talk to those 20 somethings, they were practically born on the internet. They know where to find the resources and how to find the latest in web design techniques and programs. Realize that with your knowledge and experience you can really go farther than you ever dreamed. You still have things you can teach the youngsters about the real world of design.

In your 50s you start to get scared. Working as a Wal-Mart greeter is starting to look more attractive. You wonder if you can ever compete in the ever-changing world of web design. Management may pass you over for those new web design jobs thinking your ideas are not as fresh as the younger crowd. Then your instincts kick in, you realize you do have something to teach these folks. You know what your clients want and what they need to make their business stand out and be competitive in today's ever-changing marketplace. Graphic design is in your blood. You realize that this is why you got into the graphic design business in the first place. The thrill of competing with other designers to win that one big project is still with you. And wait a minute, one of my favorite sayings is: the old girl, er graphic designer, still has it!

Being a graphic designer is a tough ego-busting profession. Keep searching, keep learning and keep current and you will be able to enjoy your work at any age. Embrace each new technology with a fresh outlook and you will never feel old or outdated. An old dog can learn new tricks, you just have to work a little harder.

Interview with Jill Artman Boehm

Wednesday, April 29, 2009 by Michelle Lana

Next up from Team ACS is Jill Artman Boehm, Art Director/Graphic Designer and an awesome Catalog Queen. From brochures to catalog production to logos and identity, Jill brings compelling designs to the table and always delivers high quality work that exceeds expectations.

1. What do you most enjoy about being a graphic designer?

I enjoy the constant changes that occur during any given week. I might work on a logo, a brochure, a tradeshow booth and a website. It keeps your "design mind" fresh and it challenges you to come up with new ideas.

2. Can you tell me a little bit about yourself and how you got started in graphic design?

I have always liked ads and advertising. One of my earliest memories is of getting a scrapbook for Christmas when I was five. I drew a few pictures but it is mostly filled with ads from magazines. I picked out anything that was interesting or really eye-catching. The Speedy Alka-Seltzer ads were a big favorite of mine. I always knew I wanted to be an artist of some kind. When it came time to go to college, I picked the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale. Partly because of the weather (I grew up in Indiana) and partly because they have extensive training in Advertising, Typography, Design and Photography.

3. What is the most challenging part of your work and can you share a project that you are working on right now?

The most challenging part of any design is interpreting what the client wants and needs. We worked with an established hair salon in Virginia who was moving to a new location. Their signage on the overhang of the shopping center had to match the others in the center, so it didn't really match the design aesthetics we had created for them. When they moved in, a lot of their clients didn't know they were open because the windows were tinted and it didn't look like the space was occupied. We created a look that matched their aesthetic and created collateral materials to support that aesthetic. The window design incorporated their logo, the website and phone number and we used part of the brick wall to showcase photos of the inside of the salon to show how beautifully renovated it was on the inside. Now the eye-catching graphics make people stop and take note of what they had to offer.

4. How do you stay creative when you are working under pressure?

This business is all about deadlines. Sometimes those deadlines can create stress but sometimes they can spark a great idea. It is hard, but you have to stay focused on the end product. I work on a sportswear catalog project that is several months long and has many different aspects and variables. You have to make a schedule and delegate different tasks associated with the project, all the while keeping your vision for what the end product will be.

If you have any questions or if you would like Jill to work on your next project, please do not hesitate to give Team ACS a call! You can visit us at www.acscreative.com.

...Next up will be Ed Ruff for our Thursday interview. Stay tuned!

Fear Not Google AdWords’ Quality Score (Part 2)

Friday, April 24, 2009 by Matt Chamberlin

Part 2 of 2:

Let’s Get Specific
But enough background. Here are the factors Google identifies that most impact a keyword’s Quality Score and what that means to you:

The historical click-through rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on Google. This makes sense: If a particular ad has performed well (i.e., people clicked it) in the past for a particular keyword, it stands to reason that it might work effectively this time. But what if you’re just starting out (i.e., your ads have no CTR history) or you have a unique keyword (like a new product name)? In the first case, Google may consider how the keyword has performed for other advertisers and use that in your Quality Score. In the second case, Google may simply assign a low Quality Score, which means a high minimum bid rate for that term. Rather than introduce a whole set of keywords related to the new product name (which could be costly), you might want to pause campaign activity for all but the most promising new keywords to establish a healthy track record first, then introduce other keywords over a period of time.
Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account. Yes, the performance of your entire account over time comes into play. So if you’re new, be aggressive in getting some good performance under your belt early on.
The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group. A display URL is the Web address that searchers see in your ad (on the bottom line of the ad text) and provides a general idea of where they’ll be going if they click. Google considers how well that address has performed in the past.
The quality of your landing page. From a searcher’s perspective, an ad that displays the keyword prominently plus a landing page that is specific to the search term, provides relevant information and is easy to navigate all adds up to a satisfying experience. Google rewards advertisers for creating that soup-to-nuts good experience.
The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group. Google rewards advertisers for good campaign organization. That means creating tightly structured ad groups with very focused, related keywords and ads that use those keywords.
The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query. Keyword selection is important, so make sure your ad groups contain keywords that people actually search on. The AdWords Keyword Tool and other search engine optimization (SEO) tools (e.g., Wordtracker) can help you identify the terms that are your best bet. Then, make sure you use those terms in the text of your ads so that you have the best chance of improving your Quality Score. Also, it’s a good idea to use the “Exact Match” option vs. “Broad Match” (which is the default) to specify how AdWords will determine a match between a search term and your keyword. With “Exact Match” your keyword has to exactly match the search term as it was typed in before your ad will be displayed. So you usually get fewer “eyes” in this case, but with a good ad that uses that specific term, your relevance will likely be higher.
Your account's performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown. If you target your ads for a particular geographic region, Google also takes into account how well you’ve performed there.
Other relevance factors. This set of unrevealed factors serves as a means to prevent short-cutting advertisers from gaming the system. Google frequently changes or refines its algorithm in search of (no pun intended) better user search experience.

Just How Effective Are Your Keywords?
In 2007, Google began providing feedback about how well your keywords are performing. If you go to the Quality Score column of the Ad Group Details page in your account, under the Keywords tab you can see how Google rates each keyword for your account: Poor, OK or Great. While this information doesn’t identify your exact Quality Score or what you’re doing right or wrong, it does provide a starting point for testing and improving the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Whew! That’s a lot of information to keep up with. So if this process proves to be too overwhelming, complicated or time-consuming for your liking, you can find many excellent PPC consults and firms who can help you launch and manage your AdWords PPC advertising program. Don’t give up! Like other advertising programs, learning the rules and applying them effectively over time makes all the difference between successful and lackluster campaigns.

Fear Not Google AdWords’ Quality Score (Part 1)

Thursday, April 23, 2009 by Matt Chamberlin

If you’ve spent any time at all reading up on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising through Google AdWords, you’ve probably come to realize that to conduct an effective campaign you need to pay attention to something called Quality Score. But what exactly is Quality Score—and more important—how do you ensure that you get a good one?

Although Google keeps its exact algorithm (or formula) for calculating a Quality Score under wraps, if you understand the key factors that go into a Quality Score and apply some basic best practices, you’ll reap the benefits (lower cost, better ad position) and run a more successful campaign.

What Is a Quality Score?
At the heart of an AdWords campaign are its ad groups. An ad group is made up of a set of tightly related keywords and one or more ads that will direct searchers to a particular landing page on your site whenever their search term matches a keyword in the ad group and they click your ad. The interplay of the components in a particular keyword–ad–landing page unit, its historical performance and effectiveness, and the performance of your AdWords account as a whole are at the heart of a Quality Score.

With that in mind, here’s the definition of Quality Score that you’ll find on the Google AdWords site:

“Quality Score … is a dynamic metric assigned to each of your keywords. It's calculated using a variety of factors and measures how relevant your keyword is to your ad group and to a user's search query. The higher a keyword's Quality Score, the lower its cost-per-clicks (CPCs) and the better its ad position.”

The two key take-aways in this definition are

AdWords calculates a Quality Score for each keyword based on two kinds of relevance.
A Quality Score is dynamic, which means its value adjusts and updates frequently (in fact, every time your keyword matches a search query and has the potential to trigger an ad) in response to a variety of factors in your ad campaign that relate to the general concept of performance.

It’s also worth noting that

Google calculates Quality Scores differently for ads that will appear on Google search, its search network and its content network. (In this post, we focus on Google search.)
Google makes a few adjustments when it calculates the Quality Score for top-positioned ads vs. side ads. For example, ad position top #1 gets the most clicks of any ad on a search results page, but some of those clicks are strictly “impulse” clicks; Google compensates for that factor.
Other PPC advertising programs you might be familiar with also use a Quality Score–type metric: Yahoo! Search Marketing calculates a Quality Index; Microsoft adCenter uses Quality Based Ranking.

Google’s Mantra: Improve the Search Experience
Google’s primary goal—always—is to enhance the searcher’s experience (which ultimately puts money in Google’s pockets because satisfied searchers will continue to use the search engine over its competitors). So for AdWords, that means serving up the most relevant, enticing and fulfilling ads (and indirectly landing pages) for a particular search term. This need spawned the Quality Score ranking process that incentivizes advertisers and rewards those that provide highly relevant ads and landing pages. Before launching the Quality Score model in 2005, AdWords (and others) tried less-effective cost-per-thousand (CPM) pricing (like print advertising does) and simpler cost-per-click bidding processes.

Stay tuned until the next post, when we dig-in to some specifics....

Advertising’s Role in a Conversational-Marketing World

Thursday, April 16, 2009 by Matt Chamberlin

"Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation."
—Mark Twain

Several months ago, we wrote about the importance of embracing social media and joining online conversations that are going on—whether you like it or not—about your company, your products and services and your competitors. But nowhere in that post (or ensuing posts) have we talked about advertising, which might be one of your business’s primary means of marketing today.

So in this new era of conversational marketing through social media channels such as blogs, social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn), micro-blogging platforms (Twitter) and content-sharing sites (Flickr, YouTube, SlideShare), where does advertising fit in—if anywhere?

Advertising’s Historical Role
From a historical perspective, traditional one-way advertising (from a company to the masses) played an important role in communicating with potential buyers and delivering important information that couldn’t be found elsewhere. In fact, according to BusinessWeek,

“For the past 100 years of the industrial era, most or all the information a consumer was likely to have about a product came from a company’s (or its competition’s) advertising. Advertising would inform, engage, entertain, and even create aspirations. This communication was one-way, defined by the media that carried the ads. As consumers, we had little ability to question the content, or the companies, or gather independent perspectives.”

But today, that’s obviously not the case. The Internet, and the tools and platforms it’s spawned, let us seek huge quantities of information from multiple, independent sources: company and competitor websites, people we trust, industry experts and even strangers we sometimes trust more than the company itself.

Advertising’s New Role
So what is the new role of advertising? We’re beginning to understand that the role we’re most familiar with isn’t it. One-to-the-masses communications that interrupt, announce, dominate and arrive at an inopportune time, when a customer could care less, are an annoyance, and those types of messages are likely to be ignored by the very people they were designed to attract and engage.

Instead, advertising’s new role is that of guide and enabler: pointing the way to important content and conversations that are taking place and your company’s participation in such, which in turn enable clients and potential clients to better understand the marketplace and find valuable information that will help them vs. sell them.

And for new advertising to be effective, your business must first participate authentically and become a trusted part of ongoing conversations and communities. And that means sharing content that’s compelling to your audience, participating regularly and consistently in conversations and connecting one-on-one with constituents and influencers. You can’t just pop into a community, blast out an old-style message and pop out—you need to become a reliable part of the community that contributes meaningful content over time without a selling proposition. You don’t dominate the conversation—you listen authentically and participate in the way “regular people” do in conversations:

Respond one to one
Answer questions
Address concerns
Correct misconceptions
Offer insights
Point to other good sources of information

Case in Point
One example of this new breed of advertising is the type of ads that income-tax reporting solution TurboTax ran leading up to Tax Day.

With the goal of putting a human face on TurboTax that would “help taxpayers get the biggest refund possible” (according to the company’s Twitter bio) by providing information useful to lots of people and addressing one-on-one questions, TurboTax started a Twitter account. But they needed to get the word out quickly and effectively to help people find them and grow their community, so they turned to advertising for help. Google offered a new advertising option that provides ad units that display a company’s five most recent tweets for delivery across Google’s AdSense network. TurboTax signed up.

The result? Ads that delivered concise content and snapshots of conversations that linked directly to TurboTax’s Twitter feed. That’s right—not to the TurboTax website, not to a special landing page to sell TurboTax, not anywhere except to real-time content and conversations of interest and value to those filing taxes, regardless of their interest in TurboTax.

Advertising Is Dead. Long Live Advertising
So it’s not a matter of advertising dying; it’s a matter of advertising as we’ve experienced it morphing into something new. Broadcasting a message still has value, depending on the message. But if we’ve learned anything so far from conversational marketing, it’s that people will choose to engage with us if we provide valuable content that objectively informs, helps them and is easy to find in places they frequent and from sources they trust.

Advertising isn’t dead. It’s cycling back to the pre-advertising era when friends, family and the recommendations of people held in high regard influenced the purchasing decision. It’s about moving away from “communicating” to “having conversations.”

How Do Your B2B Customers Use Search?

Wednesday, March 18, 2009 by Matt Chamberlin

Search engine marketing (SEM) can be a remarkably effective channel for connecting with potential customers. But as is the case with other marketing channels you use, SEM’s effectiveness will depend on how your prospective customers use the channel—search in this case—to research and purchase the types of products and services your business offers. The more you know about how your B2B customers use search, the more successful SEM will be for your business.

Online’s Role in B2B Buying
Two years ago, B2B search-marketing company Enquiro Search Solutions conducted a survey of 1,086 B2B buyers to pinpoint exactly how buyers use online resources at various stages (awareness, research, negotiation, purchase) of the buying cycle. A full 85% of respondents reported that they go online at some time during the buying cycle, with 83% saying that they go online to find a vendor. Furthermore, across purchase categories (supplies, software, hardware, business services, equipment, parts and components), 1 in 2 respondents reported that in addition to researching vendors, products and services, they also purchase online.

Search’s Role in B2B Buying
For B2B buyers, search plays an important role in all stages of the buying cycle. Two out of three buyers report that search is where they start their online activity:

51% claim they start from a general search engine such as Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft Live Search
12% say they start from a vertical search engine, such as KnowledgeStorm, Business.com or ThomasNet
36% start at a particular vendor or distributor site, and those who do so say they frequently use search on the vendor site to find what they’re looking for

Not surprisingly, of the general search sites, Google dominates, with 77% of respondents saying they start there, followed by Yahoo! (14%), Microsoft Live Search (7%), and other search engines (2%).

The primary task that B2B customers turn to search for is information gathering: More than 70% use search to learn about a product/service (e.g., pricing, availability, requirements, features, specifications), compare products/services or read reviews about a product/service.

SEM’s Role in B2B Buying
The likelihood that your B2B customers will find you through search is directly dependent on whether—and how well—you optimize your Web content for search (SEO) and you participate in PPC advertising programs. Both determine your company’s chance of appearing on the coveted first page of the search results.

But if potential customers do find you there, what is your best chance—PPC ad or organic search listing—to get a click through? Enquiro’s study reports that overall, paid ads get about 25% of the clicks on a search engine results page (SERP); organic results draw the other 75%.

Drilling down even further within a SERP, Enquiro looked at specific positions. The graph that follows shows how various organic and paid positions rank for clicks on a SERP. Of the clicks that go to PPC ads, about half go to PPC ads that appear at the top of the SERP and a quarter go to the ads that appear to the right. For PPC ads that appear at the bottom of the organic results (as on Yahoo! or Microsoft Live Search), searchers click a mere 0.2% of the time.

What to Make of It All
When it comes to SEO and PPC advertising (or, more likely, some combination thereof), it all comes down to what your customers will use most and how able you are to deliver the goods. Where do your best leads come from now? How do your customers use search? How well is your site currently optimized for search? How soon do you want to see results? How much money can you really afford to spend?

Most clicks will come through ranking highly in the organic results, but a high rank takes time to grow through well-executed, consistent SEO practices and valuable link-building. PPC advertising is a much faster way to make a page-1 appearance—you can be advertising within a few minutes after signing up for an account—but bidding for specific positions might be very costly. Whether you decide to experiment with SEO, PPC or both, or you decide to consult with an expert, remember that your SEM strategy will only be effective if it meets the needs of your customers. So, how do your B2B customers use search?

Build a Better PPC Ad Strategy

Monday, February 16, 2009 by Matt Chamberlin

Starting a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising program can be intimidating, especially if the concept is new to you. But with a little foresight, discipline and persistence, you can build a network of sustainable campaigns that will serve as a solid foundation for your PPC strategy.

How PPC Advertising Works
Regardless of whether you use Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing or Microsoft AdCenter to drive your PPC ad program, the basic principles are essentially the same:

A potential customer types a search term (aka a keyword or keyword phrase) into a search engine.
The search engine holds an auction for that term among you and all the other advertisers who have bid on that term to determine ad placement on the search results pages. (Your ad position is based on what you’ve bid for the term plus the quality of your keyword-ad-landing page unit compared with that of other bidders; a new auction is held each time someone searches on the term.)
If your ad resonates with the searcher, he clicks through to a landing page on your Web site. If your landing page (and other supporting pages) provides what he needs, he might convert to a lead or customer.

Now, how do you get started? Here’s what it takes in Google AdWords.

Start with a Well-Planned Structure
Within an AdWords account, you can create up to 25 campaigns, each of which can contain as many as 100 ad groups, which in turn can contain up to 2000 keywords and 25 ads.

“Whoa!” you might say, “That sounds pretty complicated.”

Fortunately, just because you have that many options to work with doesn’t mean you need to use them all. You can start small with just one or two campaigns and a few ad groups. What’s most important is to plan your initial strategy well enough so that you can manage your program easily and adapt and grow it as you determine what works most effectively for your business.

AdWords offers the following hierarchical structure of “campaigns” and “ad groups” around which you organize your ad strategy:

When you create an account, you provide an email address and password for accessing the account and billing information for your ad-spend. You next set up your individual campaigns, establishing global properties such as the daily maximum spend, geographic targeting, and an end date for each campaign. At the ad group level, you create ads, choose keywords to trigger those ads and set your bid levels.

Let’s look at a simple example of how to use this structure to organize a PPC ad program around a set of services that a company might offer.

Think About Your Business
Suppose you own a marketing company that offers both traditional and Internet marketing services, and you want to promote specific services in each area through PPC advertising. In particular, you want to tackle your traditional marketing services first: advertising, logo design, brochures and similar services. Here’s one way you might plan your AdWords strategy:

I. Campaign1: Traditional Marketing Services

    A. AdGroup1: Advertising
        i. Keyword variations: advertising agency, advertising agencies, print advertising agency, print advertising agencies, advertising agency in washington dc, advertising agencies in washington dc, …
       ii. Ad:
           Advertising That Works!
           Advertising Agency—DC, VA & MD
           View our work—then call for a bid!
           www.yourcompany.com/adsamples

        B. AdGroup2: Logo design
        i. Keyword variations: logo design, logo designs, modern logo design, modern logo designs, corporate logo design, corporate logo designs, logo design washington dc, logo designs washington dc, …
       ii. Ad1:
           Fabulous New Logo Designs
           5 design concepts—fast delivery.
           Call for a Free Consultation!
           www.yourcompany.com/logodesign
      iii. Ad2:
           Logo Design Washington DC
           5 design concepts—fast delivery.
           Call for a Free Consultation!
           www.yourcompany.com/logodesign

C. AdGroup3: Brochures

[ ... ]

II. Campaign2: Internet Marketing Services

    A. AdGroup1: Web site design
        i. Keyword variations relating to Web site design
       ii. Ad(s) relating specifically to Web site design

[ ... ]

About Your Plan
Within your ad groups, be sure to group similar keyword terms together, write tightly aligned ads for those terms and keep your lists compact. You’ll find it much more effective to manage, say, 10 lists of 20 highly related terms with very targeted ads than 2 broader lists of 100 terms and more general ads.

Two- or three-word keyword phrases tend to draw in a good quantity of targeted traffic; more specific terms draw in lower numbers but higher-converting traffic. (Searchers tend to use more specific terms when they’re further along in the buying cycle.) Be sure to use a tool such as the AdWords Keyword Tool to research highly relevant keyword phrases and identify those with good traffic volume and low competition to place in your ad groups.

For each keyword term in an ad group, one of the associated ads will be displayed. So in our example, for every keyword in the Advertising group (AdGroup1), AdWords will display the same ad. But how does AdWords decide which ad to display if an ad group has multiple ads? Let’s say you do well enough in an auction for the term logo design washington dc (a keyword in AdGroup2) that AdWords places your ad at the top of the right-hand column on the search results page. Which ad will appear?

Google’s goal is always to have the best ads display when a searcher searches on a particular term, so by default, AdWords is set to “optimize,” which means it will display your best-performing ad based on its historical data. But you can also set up AdWords to rotate through your ads for a particular term. You’ll find this option useful when you want to test different ads to see which is more effective for a particular ad group.

Just the Tip of the Iceberg
Understanding how AdWords and other PPC programs work and planning how you’ll organize your PPC strategy are two big first steps to getting your PPC campaigns off the ground. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. The more you learn about PPC advertising, the more confident you’ll feel when you take the plunge—and you’ll be better prepared to use the tool to your best advantage. Google provides some great information and tutorials on its Adwords Web site, and be sure to watch for future posts about PPC in this blog.

Your Corporate Blog--Super Bowl Style!

Sunday, January 25, 2009 by Matt Chamberlin

Whatever your opinion of the Super Bowl might be, one thing you can’t deny: The event succeeds in attracting and engaging a wide range of viewers (aka customers)—regardless of the teams that are playing or the location of the event itself.

And despite the quality of the game or whether the viewers are fans of the respective teams, those viewers are engaged and entertained; they discuss the game with their friends before, during and after the event; and they often convert from spectators to purchasers—of team products, food and beverage items, advertised technologies and services and so forth.

So, what lessons does the Super Bowl hold for corporate bloggers?

Super Lessons for Corporate Bloggers
A corporate blog is an excellent way for a business to attract and engage existing and potential customers on a more personal basis than through broadcast media (e.g., traditional advertising). But a corporate blog is only successful if it creates dialogue among its readers and a community around the company’s brand, products and services. Let’s look at a few Super Bowl lessons that can help you build community around your blog—and subsequently your company.

1. Identify your target audience.
According to the San Jose Mecury News, roughly 167 million U.S. viewers will watch Super Bowl XLIII on February 1, 2009. In a study conducted by BIGresearch for the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association, about 27% will tune in specifically for the commercials, 7% for the halftime show and 20% to get together with friends; only 46% will tune in to actually watch the game.

What’s the lesson here? What you write about in your blog depends on who you want to attract and engage—and their reasons for following your blog might vary greatly. Decide who you want to target with each post, and do your best to meet their expectations and needs.

2. Choose topics that will resonate with your target audience.
We all know how popular the commercials are for any given Super Bowl. What—exactly—is that popular with your target audience? For example, is your target audience primarily looking for content that …

... Interests or entertains them?

Trivia
Historical information
Statistical facts
Anecdotes/stories
Expert perspectives
Industry predictions
Creative/fun (like the commercials)

... Adds value to their knowledge base?
... Helps them solve a specific problem?
... Provides information about the industry or its leaders?

3. Present your content in an engaging manner.
So maybe your budget can’t spring for anything as cool as a Super Bowl commercial, but incorporating meaningful text, links, pictures, a presentation via SlideShare, a podcast or a short YouTube video might make all the difference in terms of the success of your blog.

4. Optimize your content for search.
Super Bowl coverage—and commercials—make use of timely and popular language, images and themes. What resonates with your customer base? Use a tool such as the Google Keyword Tool, WordTracker or Keyword Discovery to determine high-response, low-competition keyword phrases that you can optimize your blog posts around that will help you rank on the first couple of pages of the primary search engines.

5. Cultivate inbound links.
Another phase of any keyword optimization program is securing inbound links to your post. Google’s PageRank measurement (higher is better) takes into account the number of high-quality sites that link back to your post. There are several ways to get the word out about your blog posts to cultivate inbound links:

Comment on other blogs and link back to your blog
Make an announcement (140 characters or less) on Twitter and other micro-blogging platforms
Comment on social networks (e.g., LinkedIn, Facebook)
Bookmark your posts on sites such as Delicious or StumbleUpon
Email an invitation (“You don’t want to miss this post”) to your newsletter subscribers
Issue an online press release (e.g., via PRWeb) and use other traditional promotional channels for noteworthy posts

6. Follow up with “post-event” comments and posts.
Regardless of the outcome of the Super Bowl, discussion always ensues, along with analysis over numerous days and highlights the rest of the year. The same thing happens with a good blog post. Be sure to follow the comments to your blog posts and follow up with another post—or two—to extend the discussion.

7. Revisit hot topics on a periodic basis.
The Super Bowl is an annual event that evokes anticipation the rest of the year. So can a particular topic of your blog that touches a nerve with your target audience. Measure the effectiveness of your posts (e.g., with Google Analytics), and keep track of those posts that resonate most highly with your target audience. You might revisit these topics annually (e.g., with a research study) or quarterly or monthly—whatever timeframe makes the most sense for your business or industry.

So, next Sunday, enjoy Super Bowl XLIII. And while you’re watching the event, be on the lookout for ideas that you can use to help your corporate blog elicit the same type of appeal to your target audience.

3 Steps to Successful PPC Advertising

Friday, January 16, 2009 by Matt Chamberlin

So, you’ve decided to give pay-per-click (PPC) advertising a try. Now what? Just sign up for Google AdWords, pick a few terms that you use to describe your products and services, enter your bids and ad text and wait for the leads and sales to roll in. That’s pretty simple!

Although that’s one way to approach PPC advertising, chances are you won’t meet your desired outcome—and you might spend a lot of money in the process for very few results. What’s a more sensible, effective way to approach PPC advertising? Read on …

Step 1: Seek Out Search-Effective Keywords
You might think that you know the terms that people use to find products and services like the ones you offer. But, do you really know for a fact which terms and variations bring in high traffic and which ones people don’t use at all?

For example, it seems obvious that a business in the greater Washington, D.C. area that’s looking for a local company to help it with traditional and Internet advertising would naturally search on advertising agencies in washington dc. But according to Google data, people search on all kinds of related terms:

advertising agency washington dc
advertising companies dc
advertising firms dc
advertising services dc
ad agencies washington dc
print advertising dc area
washington dc internet advertising

The variations can be astounding! You might be surprised to find out that the terms people actually use to find businesses like yours are quite different from the terms you think they use.

Fortunately, it’s easy to discover the most search-effective terms for your PPC campaign. The free Google AdWords Keyword Tool lets you view the average search volume per month for your suggested (and related) terms based on Google data from the past 12 months. You can quickly determine whether you’ll get more traffic from ad agency washington dc or washington dc ad agency, for example.

Step 2: Create Specific, Focused Ads
Writing effective ad copy for a PPC campaign is an art, and many companies turn to professional copywriters for help. Not only do you need to follow Google’s guidelines for content and format to the letter, but you also need to make sure the ad will appeal to your target audience and compel them to click through to your landing page.

In a PPC ad, you have just four lines of text to work with:

A title (at most, 25 characters, including spaces)
A line of ad copy (at 35 characters)
Another line of ad copy (at 35 characters)
A display URL (also 35 characters max)

It’s a good idea to include the target search term within your ad because that makes the ad more relevant to exactly what the person is searching for. For example, if a potential customer searches on ad agency washington dc, he’s more likely to click an ad that addresses that specific criteria. The more focused you make your ad for a particular term, the better chance you have of a searcher clicking your ad over competing ads that appear on the search results page.

Something like this ad might be a good starting point for a baseline test:

Full-Service Ad Agency                    [22 characters]
Washington DC, Virginia & Maryland:     [35 characters]
Inspired Web/print/multimedia ads        [33 characters]
www.AffordableCreativeServices.com    [34 characters]

Step 3: Sync Up Your Landing Page
The third component of any PPC campaign is the landing page: that is, the page of your Web site where the searcher will end up after clicking your ad. Perhaps contrary to what you might think, sending the searcher to your home page is not necessarily the best tactic. Instead, send them to a custom landing page that’s in sync with both your ad and your target search term, and is effective in motivating the searcher to take action. You can then track these “conversions” to help you measure just how successful your keyword–ad–landing page unit is over time.

What makes a good landing page?

Keep it simple, short and relevant
Provide unique content that engages the searcher
Keep it in sync with what your ad promises
Prominently display and use the targeted search term
Provide a form, something to download or a link to additional information that will convert the visitor from a searcher to a qualified lead—or paying customer—for your company

Google calculates a landing page quality score for the landing page of each search term you target to encourage advertisers to provide optimal search experiences for searchers—not to mention better results for you and Google. Creating high-scoring landing pages benefits you by lowering your costs per click and improving your ad positions.

More Than Meets the Eye
Although there’s more to PPC advertising than you might think at first glance, approaching it with a well-thought-out strategy and deliberate testing will help you reap the rewards it can offer.

Not enough time to do it right? Consider hiring a company that specializes in managing PPC campaigns. The expertise and project-management services a good company provides lets you stay focused on what you know best: your business.