ACS Creative

Technorati is one of the oldest and most popular blog search engines that indexes, categorizes and tracks millions of blogs in the blogosphere. Since its launch in 2002, Technorati has become a leading authority as a real-time resource about what’s taking place in the blogosphere.

Technorati’s annual State of the Blogosphere (SOTB) research study has chronicled the growth, evolution and maturation of blogging since 2004, and provides perspectives on current and emerging trends. The 2009 study, which surveyed close to 3,000 bloggers nationwide during September of this year, presents some interesting findings about the motivations and habits of “professional” bloggers—those who blog for business purposes—vs. hobbyists, who blog for the fun of it or to keep their family and friends informed.

If you’ve ever wondered whether you’re on the right track with your business blog, take a few minutes to compare your efforts with those of the nearly 800 business-minded bloggers in the SOTB. You might be in for a pleasant surprise!

Who’s Who in the Study
The SOTB reports data for four audience segments with the following characteristics:

1. Hobbyists (72%)

• Blog for fun
• Don’t make money blogging—about half say they’d like to someday
•  Blog to express themselves (76%)

2. Professional Part-Timers (15%)

• Blog on a part-time basis to supplement their income; don’t consider blogging their full-time job
• Blog to share their expertise (75%)
• Blog to attract new clients for their business (72%)

3. Professional Self-Employeds (9%)

• Blog full-time for their own company or organization
• 70% are business owners who blog about their business
• 22% say their blog is their company
• 10% blog 40+ hours/week

4. Professional Corporate (4%)

• Blog full-time for a company
• 70% blog to share expertise
• 53% blog to attract new business for the company they work for

What Business-Minded Bloggers Do
One thing all bloggers seem to have in common—or need to have to be successful—is passion for what they’re writing about. But passion aside, professional bloggers and hobbyists follow very different paths.

Reasons to blog. For business-minded bloggers, the motivation for blogging often revolves around attracting new clients for the business—either their own or the company they work for. Sharing expertise and experience with others is also an important reason to blog. Hobbyists tend to blog primarily to speak their mind on areas of interest.

Time spent/week on blogging. The median time professionals spend per week on blogging is 3–5 hours vs. 1–3 hours for hobbyists. Almost half of the pros report that they’re blogging more often than they did when they started out, and they most typically blog 2–3 times per week.

Style. Expert, journalistic, motivational, sincere and conversational are the key styles professionals say they strive for in their blog. Sincere, conversational and humor are the key blogging styles for hobbyists.

Types of media used. Professional bloggers use a variety of media in their blogs. Most frequently, they include photos (average 83%), followed by video (59%), spoken audio (15%) and music (10%). Only about 11% use nothing but text in their posts. Hobbyists are less likely to use video and spoken audio and more likely to use music in their posts.

How to measure success. Business-minded bloggers use various metrics to measure the success of their blog. Tracking the number of unique visitors is the most favored means. But measuring the number and quality of new business leads; accolades from other media; and the number of subscribers, links and comments all are factors pros look at to determine their blog’s success. Hobbyists, by contrast, tend to measure success through personal satisfaction.

Benefits to your business or the business you work for. Probably the most important information for businesses to note are the benefits that blogging can bring to your company. As the following SOTB graph shows, the benefits are significant: Greater visibility, sales and thought-leadership are big winners, with very few reporting no impact on their business to date.



Put These Insights to Work for You
When it comes to depth of information in the SOTB, we’ve barely scratched the surface in this post. If you can find time to read the full report, you won’t be sorry. But in the meantime, compare how you approach your business blog with the pros in this study and use the information to guide you going forward.

When it comes to integrated marketing, email and social networking are complementary channels that you can easily pair up to deliver a knockout marketing punch for your business. The reasons to do so now couldn’t be stronger:

• Email is universal, and email use is on the rise among social media users (Nielsen)
• Email is efficient, producing almost twice the revenue share relative to share of budget (Direct Marketing Association)
• Social media is particularly effective at extending your email reach, improving the quality of your email communications and cultivating active advocates for your brand

If you want to boost your email marketing program or drive deeper engagement with your customers through their social networks, email–social integration is right for your business.

Email Wants to Be Social—Now It Can Be
If you deliver great content to your email subscribers, they’ll want to share it. Therefore, your job is to make sure that sharing your email content is easy to do. Historically, email has offered a social-sharing component to subscribers through forward-to-friends capabilities. But forward-to-friends hasn’t proved very successful in significantly extending reach nor in nurturing community engagement—and that’s where social networking can help.

Where forward-to-friends might extend the reach of your email message to 1 or 2 additional people per share, sharing-to-social networks can extend reach significantly: On average, your email will collect an additional 1% of views and realize an increase in reach of 24.3%, according to a new report from engagement-marketing provider Silverpop.

As for nurturing community engagement, forward-to-friends lacks an easy way for friends and colleagues to discuss your email content in a conversational manner. Because social networks are set up specifically to enable conversations, sharing-to-social provides email with that missing conversational component.

Fortunately, most email service providers now offer the capability to enable active social sharing in emails through direct-to-social sharing tools—so the mechanics are taken care of for you. Use the following 8 tips to help you take care of the rest of the details.

8 Tips for Integrating Email and Social Networking

1. Determine the social networks your email audience frequents and shares content on. Survey your subscribers or collect social information wherever your company interacts with customers to identify the primary social networks they use. A narrow focus works best—enable email sharing to at most 4 or 5 social networks.
2. Leverage your email subscribers to help build your social media communities. Invite subscribers—and their friends—to become a fan of your Facebook page, join your LinkedIn group or follow you on Twitter.
3. Become an active member of your targeted networks. Create a profile, provide status updates, ask and answer questions, provide links to great content other than your own—in other words, participate authentically in the communities your subscribers frequent.
4. Educate your email subscribers about the how and why of sharing. Make it easy for them to share your content and include calls-to-action to prompt them to share. Make sharing worth the effort—give good reasons to share your emails with their friends and make links and buttons to their favorite sites obvious to use.
5. Create compelling content that subscribers want to share on their social networks. Use social network search tools (e.g., Twitter Search) to identify hot topics. Use social networks to test the engagement level of potential email topics. Repurpose email content for status updates on social networking sites. Repurpose social media interactions for expanded treatment in emails.
6. Promote your email newsletter through social networking channels. Once you’ve decided on content, inform your networks and include a link to subscribe. Remind your networks the day before your email goes out, again making it easy for them to subscribe. After it mails, mention highlights in your social network status updates and let them know how to subscribe.
7. Make it easy for social network members who see your email content to become subscribers. Include links to sign-up pages with every shareable piece of content and ensure those pages are clear and very simple to use.
8. Test, analyze and refine. Test everything, analyze the data you collect and refine your emails, landing pages and social interactions based on that data. Continue to monitor the social networks your customers use and be ready to move on when they do. Recognize that successful email–social integration is dynamic and be ready to adapt your efforts to keep up with your audience and continue to reach new prospects.

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


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):



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!

If you’re serious about your business, it’s time to get serious about LinkedIn! Maybe you don’t know what LinkedIn is or perhaps you’ve started a profile—personal or business—but you haven’t invested the time to build out your network or make working LinkedIn a habit.

Now’s your chance! Commit to taking just 15–30 minutes on each of the next 21 days to explore LinkedIn and get first-hand experience with the features and benefits it has to offer you and your business. You’ll be glad you did.

What Is LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site that launched in 2003 to enable and enhance professional networking. As of October 2009, LinkedIn boasts more than 50 million registered users worldwide, representing 170 industries. About half of LinkedIn users reside in the U.S.

LinkedIn helps registered users develop and maintain a detailed network of business contacts they know and trust. As a registered user, you can invite anyone (whether a LinkedIn member or not) to connect with you on LinkedIn and start the relationship-building process.

In a nutshell,

• Your LinkedIn network consists of the people you directly connect to (1st level connections), the people your direct connections connect to (2nd level connections) and all the people they connect to (3rd level connections)—so it’s big
• You can use this extensive network to gain an introduction to someone you want to know and connect with through a mutual, trusted contact
• You can use your network to find and recommend companies, business opportunities, people and jobs—just like you do with offline networks
• You can research companies—and your competitors—to learn about their employees, location, offices, important news and activity on LinkedIn
• You can ask and answer questions to engage with others, build community and enhance your professional reputation
• You can establish new business relationships through professional, industry, alumni and other types of groups
• You can list jobs and search for potential candidates
• You can manage virtual and offline events
• You can conduct market research, share interesting articles and resources with customers and prospects and post your professional presentations

As you can see, LinkedIn is a powerful social network that provides robust capabilities to benefit businesses. Through dedication and setting aside a manageable amount of time each day, you can establish a respectable presence on LinkedIn, check out its special features and begin to experience some of LinkedIn’s usefulness to businesses. Are you ready to take the challenge?

What to Do in the Next 21 Days
To help you take action over the next 21 days, here’s a suggested task list, starting with basic tasks then exploring additional features and functionality. Some of these tasks you’ll do once, some you’ll do frequently or even daily and some just occasionally.

These suggestions in no way exhaust all you can do with LinkedIn, but at the end of three weeks, you’ll understand the site’s capabilities, overcome the “overwhelming-ness” that new users often experience with LinkedIn and realize some of the important benefits to your business.

Your To Do List

1. Sign up for an account or revive your old one by signing in at LinkedIn.com.
2. Create or update your personal profile. Start by filling in essential information and plan to add more detail as you go along. The more detail you add to your profile, the more exposure and trust you’ll garner within the network.
3. Build connections—at least 10 each week: For starters, invite your colleagues, hook up with your existing contacts who are LinkedIn members, invite your customers and partners, ask your direct connections for introductions to your 2nd-level connections, search for others in your industry you’d like to connect to. LinkedIn provides tools to make this ongoing process relatively painless.
4. Create or update your company profile.
5. Get to know your way around the LinkedIn Learning Center.
6. Update your status every day with professional news about you or your business.
7. Share content and links to articles that your growing network will find interesting and useful.
8. Respond to emails that appear in your Inbox each day; send messages to touch base with select contacts.
9. Join one or more groups and engage in discussions and conversations.
10. Display your blog posts, Twitter comments or other social networking feeds on your profile.
11. Ask a question on LinkedIn Answers.
12. Use LinkedIn Answers Advanced Search to discover questions people are asking in your industry, identify unanswered questions that you can answer and determine how active your competitors are. Answering questions on LinkedIn Answers can be time-consuming, but the value of building your reputation as an industry leader is significant. LinkedIn Answers often show up in the results pages of major search engines.
13. Write a recommendation for a partner, vendor or supplier; request one from a satisfied client.
14. Upload a professional presentation to display in your profile.
15. Create a simple poll to engage people and gain insight; share the results with your network.

Don’t forget to visit the ACS Creative company page and feel free to invite me to join your network. Good luck with the challenge!

Unwieldy, disorderly, unrestrained, unruly, out of hand … beyond control. Are these the words that you—or worse yet, your customers—use to describe your Web site?

Never fear! Help is on the way in the form of a Web site redesign. With some careful planning and execution, you can reclaim control of your Web site—in particular, your content—to ensure that you provide meaningful user experiences whenever your customers visit you online.

Web Site Content Strategy
A content strategy is a plan for creating, publishing and governing useful, accessible content for your company’s Web site, says Kristina Halvorson, who (literally) wrote the book on it. A good content strategy lays out the specific reasons why you want to publish content in the first place and identifies the types of customer-satisfying content you need to create to meet your goals.

Do you have too much existing content that you don’t know what to do with? A good content strategy provides for an inventory and analysis of your existing content to determine what still meets your customers’ needs, eliminate what doesn’t, identify any holes that remain and specify new content to add.

But content strategy doesn’t stop there. It also provides guidelines (e.g., style, voice, legal considerations, response policies) for all content to follow, an editorial calendar and schedule of content releases, oversight of search engine optimization (SEO) and metadata strategies and Web analytics tactics for measuring success and identifying revisions over time. Whew!

What Your Customers—and You—Have to Gain
First, if you’re feeling overwhelmed, recognize that you’re not alone. It’s not unusual at all for a company Web site to get out of hand over time—especially if you haven’t updated it in a while. Second, as tempting as it might be to avoid the content management issue altogether, set aside the time and resources to develop a robust content strategy (for now and the future) in the early stages of your redesign process. You'll be glad you did going forward.

Remember that your customers visit your site with the intent to do something, and they want that experience to be as simple and straightforward as possible. Adopt a strategy to help them easily find the specific content they need to solve a problem, evaluate a product or make a decision to work with you. If you provide the content and experiences your customers require and desire, you’ll benefit two-fold from repeat visitors and referrals.

What more do you have to gain? Plenty. With a good content strategy in place, you’ll have a manageable process for controlling new content flow, optimizing content for search, determining what happens to old or irrelevant content, keeping brand messaging consistent and evaluating the types of content that prove most effective for your audience.

Improved ROI on your Web site? You bet. But most of all, by developing and following a good content strategy, you'll ensure that your content will become a competitive advantage for your business, rather than an unwieldy problem you’d just as soon ignore.

More than two-thirds (67%) of Americans online have streamed or downloaded digital video content from the Internet, reports Ipsos MediaCT in its recent MOTION study. Furthermore, Nielsen reports a 25% year-over-year increase in total online video streams viewed and a matching increase in online video time per viewer.

With this high-level—and growing—interest in online video, chances are good that adding video content to your blog will help you reach a wider audience and raise awareness of your company and brand. Are you ready to give video a try?



Sample business how-to video from YouTube


You Have Options
Adding video to your blog sounds harder to do than it is. First, you need to decide on your source for video content. Do you have existing video that you’d like to repurpose for your blog? Have you discovered content on one of the hosting sites (e.g., YouTube, Hulu, Yahoo!) that your audience will find interesting or useful? Or, do you want to create an original video, either by producing it in house or by hiring a professional video production company?

By far, the easiest option (and what we’ll cover in this post) is to embed video content from one of the hosting sites into your blog, which is what I did to include the sample how-to video in this post. Let’s take a look at the few steps it takes to add a YouTube video to your blog.

How to Embed a Video
First, find the video that you’d like to include in your post. YouTube offers a search function, categories of videos that you can browse through and a Featured Videos list to help you find useful video content for your audience. You’ll know whether the creator permits the video to be embedded in other blogs and Web sites if you find a URL and Embed code alongside the video. (If you don’t see this information, don’t use the video.)

Most blogging platforms now include built-in functionality that lets you easily insert media. If that’s the case for you, simply click the insert-embedded-media icon (e.g., a “strip-of-film” icon), provide the requested information and click Insert.

If your blogging application doesn’t include this functionality, you’ll need to insert the Embed code into the HTML source code for your blog page. (Don’t fret—this isn’t hard to do!) Begin by selecting and copying the Embed code provided with the video. Next, in your blog editor, switch to the HTML source code view and paste the Embed code wherever you want the video to appear in your post.

That’s it! Most of the time, you’ll also want to include at least a short commentary about why your audience will be interested in this video—the story it tells, the problem it solves or who they’ll be watching. And, by including some text in your post, you’ll also be able to optimize your post for the search engines.

What Are the Benefits?
Including video in your blog isn’t the be-all, end-all, and it isn’t appropriate for every business. Whether to incorporate video into your blog really comes back to your audience and its preferences for receiving useful information. When used effectively, the benefits of adding video content to your blog are many. Video content lets you

• Educate your audience in a different way
• Reach different online channels than you ordinarily do
• Put a face on your business
• Appeal to a broad audience
• Raise awareness of your brand
• Stimulate comments and conversation
• Increase time spent on your blog and return visitors
• Differentiate yourself from your competition

So, what are you waiting for? Provide a company update, offer a virtual tour, tell your company story, interview an industry expert—or customer, include a demonstration or tutorial. So many ideas … so little time. Get going!

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.

In Fine-Tune PPC Keyword Selection with Google Insights for Search (Part 1), we started to look at some of the actionable insights that the Insights for Search tool helps you formulate about your keywords. This time, we’ll take our examples a few steps further to explore additional features of the tool.

Setting the Stage
Recall that for the sake of our examples, you own a plumbing, heating and air conditioning company in Maryland that serves the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. Some of the keywords you target include

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

Last time, we explored the search volume pattern for these terms from January 2004–present (remember “tankless water heater” came out on top?), and we took a look at the top related searches and rising searches for the “tankless” term. Last, we compared the long-term data with that from the most recent 12 months. Now let’s explore what happens when we filter the search data on geographic location and see what kinds of additional insights we get.

Filtering Data by Geographic Location
Filtering by geographic location lets you see search data from specific regions you serve vs. the whole nation (or world). The only drawback in using this feature is sometimes Insights for Search doesn’t have enough data to analyze, and you don’t get any results. So to see how this feature works, let’s compare results from the past 12 months for the more general term “water heater” for the Washington, D.C. subregion vs. the nation at large. Here are the results.







Top searches seem to be fairly consistent for DC and the nation, but Rising searches are notably different. Local rising searches center on Rinnai, while nationwide, there’s growing interest in Navien, hybrid, vertex and thermocouple water heaters. So you can use this information to see what’s hot today for your region and what might become hot down the road.

To decide whether to add “navien water heater” to your keyword list, you can use Insights for Search to find out where in the U.S. the interest is high. To do that, you can use the tool to produce a heat map of the U.S. for the “navien water heater” term, which uses color to indicate relative search volumes for each state: Darker colors indicate higher relative search volume. Here’s the heat map that Insights for Search generates for “navien water heater.”



Because neighboring Virginia shows a high search volume index for “navien water heater,” you might decide to add the keyword to your PPC campaign and test how it performs over the next few months. Similarly, you could check out some of the other terms in the national list to see whether they might be good options for your region as well.

Add Insights for Search to Your Keyword Research Toolkit
Insights for Search is a powerful tool for analyzing your keyword selections, and the examples we’ve looked at in this post and the last really only hint at how useful the tool can be. Like most other keyword research tools, the more time you spend using it, the easier and more valuable it will become. Try it today and see what actionable insights you discover about your keywords. Be prepared, though, it can be addictive!

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.



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.



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.



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.

According to the 2009 Marketing Industry Trends study conducted by Equation Research in June of this year, 59% of brands surveyed reported that social media is part of their current marketing activity, and another 23% said they plan to implement social media within the next year. But the path to adoption isn’t always smooth—brands also revealed barriers they’ve encountered along the way:

• “We don’t know enough about social media to know where to begin”
• “There’s no established way to measure the effectiveness of social media”
• “There’s no funding for social media in our budget”
• “We just don’t have time to invest in starting a social media program right now”
• “Social media is not a proven/tested strategy”
• “We have legal constraints/corporate policies that prevent us from undertaking these types of marketing activities”
• “Social media is not a good use of employee time”

Is your business still on the fence about social media because of barriers? Here are a few suggestions to help you break through those barriers to take advantage of the benefits social media has to offer.

Start Learning
There’s no time like the present to start learning about social media—and no lack of traditional and online resources, either. Try this three-step plan to jumpstart your company’s social media learning process:

1. Chances are some of your employees already participate in one or more forms of social media, so provide opportunities for them to share their knowledge and opinions.
2. Share good online resources to provide a basic understanding of the key types of social media services: social networking (Facebook, LinkedIn), Twitter, blogging, online video/photo sharing (YouTube, Flickr), forums, podcasting, widgets and wikis.
3. Seek insights and recommendations from marketing professionals (e.g., ACS Creative) who know your industry and have experience planning and implementing social media strategies.

Collect a Variety of Data to Measure Effectiveness
Businesses that incorporate social media in their marketing programs measure effectiveness in a variety of ways. Tracking traffic, links, mentions, new leads, conversions and sales; monitoring comments, feedback and sentiments; and measuring “buzz” are a few of the ways businesses collect data to evaluate their social media efforts. Set up a plan for measuring success as you develop your social media initiative to ensure that you collect data for evaluation.

Revise Your Existing Budget to Fund Social Media
Even in 2009’s challenging economy, businesses are finding ways to fund social media marketing, and more often than not, they divert funds from traditional marketing channels. According to the Equation Research study, brands that embrace social media marketing currently allocate about 8% of their marketing budget and indicate that they plan to increase that allocation in 2010. The good news is that social media campaigns often are much less expensive to run than traditional campaigns (e.g., print/TV ads, events/tradeshows, direct mail marketing), so reassessing existing traditional programs might free up all the dollars you need to fund your social media efforts.

Distribute Responsibilities to Find Time for Social Media
Make time for social media by enlisting the help of everyone in the company in ways that make sense for their job. Approach social media in the same way that you approach email or phone calls: as a fact-of-life of doing business. Customer service reps might feel right at home monitoring and contributing to Twitter; the CEO might best contribute by writing a blog post on a regular basis. Your tech team might opt to monitor your forums, while your sales team focuses on cultivating leads. Coupling social media responsibilities with things your employees already do keeps the time commitment under control.

Seek Out Case Studies and Anecdotal Information
Not being a “proven/tested strategy” yet doesn’t mean that your business won’t reap a lot of benefits in the meantime from participating in social media activities. It’s still early days for social media, but the anecdotal evidence that’s mounting up is impressive. Search the Web to find case studies of successful use of social media in your industry to support your case. Two good sources for examples of social media that works include the Business Blogging Blog from the Social Media Business Council and Peter Kim’s Wiki of Social Media Marketing Examples.

Work with—Not Against—Legal Counsel
Rest assured, you’re not the only company to face a legal barrier, and it doesn’t need to mark the end of your social media aspirations. In a Social Media Today post about a recent event addressing social media’s legal risks and limitations, Vanessa DiMauro echoes the sentiment of one speaker that the goal is to help legal move away from saying "no, because ..." to saying "yes, if ..." when it comes to social media policy. Her advice for getting beyond the legal barrier:

• Legal needs to be well-versed in social media rewards, opportunities, rules and tools to really be able to help the company succeed. Seek out counsel “in the know” about social media.
• Legal needs to be involved in the social media business planning life cycle early on as a trusted adviser. Involve legal “up front” in your social media projects to avoid delays and setbacks.

Rethink “Good Use of Employee Time”
Is building better customer relationships good use of employee time? Because ultimately, that’s what social media helps a company do more effectively. It’s all about creating ways to have conversations with your customers and prospects—answering questions, addressing concerns, correcting misconceptions, offering insights that help solve problems and pointing out other good resources—to make the life of your customer better. Who can argue against that?

Social Media—Worth the Extra Effort
If you run up against barriers in your efforts to introduce social media into your company’s marketing strategy, whatever you do, don’t give up. The benefits of social media are worth the extra effort to find a solution that works for your particular company. Listening, understanding, educating and problem solving are your tools. Put them to good use for social media.

ca ter vi.  to supply what is required or desired

“Technology is changing your customer, and your customer will change your company,” reports Forrester Research CEO George Colony in a recent blog post. “The 2009 customer is unrecognizable from the 1999 customer. … If your business looks the same now as it did in 1999, you are risking irrelevancy.”

How different is your business today than it was in 1999? And more specifically, how different is your Web site now than a decade ago? Because online technologies and consumer use of them has grown rapidly in the past several years, if your Web site looks and acts the same as it did even just a few years ago, you might not be supplying what your customers require—or what they desire—to do business with you. It’s a good time to revisit exactly how well you’re catering to your customers online.

What Customers Require
You might be tempted to think that what customers require from a Web site today isn’t much different than what they required 10 years ago—but that’s certainly not the case! The development and adoption of new (and superior) Web technologies since 1999 has escalated customer expectations—and often customers are quick to reject a business that doesn’t provide the functionality that they’re accustomed to using.

Here’s a short list of requirements that today’s customers expect a business Web site to deliver:

• Easy “findability” through search
• Valuable content that presents objective information to help with purchasing decisions
• A direct and clear path for completing specific tasks and actions as quickly and painlessly as possible
• A secure, easy-to-use interface for online purchases
• Interaction with you and others in brand-based and industry communities
• Experiences (e.g., authoritative content, authentic engagement) that build trust
• Compatibility with major browsers (e.g., Chrome, FireFox, IE, Safari)
• Accessibility in all screen resolutions
• Consistent messaging and seamless experience with offline channels
• Easy accessibility to your presence in social networks

What Customers Desire
Desirable Web site features are many and frequently focus on factors that help customers save time. Some desirables, though, are unique to specific types of businesses or industries. For example, if you’re an online retailer (think Amazon.com), customers might desire a custom, “smart” checkout system that takes advantage of personalization and past-purchase history over a basic shopping-cart system.

With that in mind, here are typical desirables that customers want today’s business Web sites to deliver:

• Readable text (e.g., large font size, dark text on light background)
• Professional design that supports and enhances task completion
• Easy-to-find information (e.g., onsite search functionality)
• Familiar, intuitive navigation
• Quickly scannable content (e.g., short paragraphs, bulleted lists)
• Obvious access to a corporate blog and social networks (e.g., large, easy-to-find tabs, links, buttons)
• Fast-loading pages
• Content and features (e.g., blog, tool, game) that spark and sustain interest and encourage exploration, engagement and visitor contributions
• Enhancements for mobile accessibility

Become a Caterer
So, how well does your Web site cater to today’s customers? If you’re like most businesses, on close inspection you’ll likely find there’s room for improvement. Perhaps you’re very good at meeting basic customer requirements, and for that reason, you’ve been content to maintain the status quo. But keep in mind that if you’re not taking strides to evolve with your customers online—and your competitors are—you won’t retain or grow your market share. Take time to determine how your Web site can better serve your customers. They—and you—will be glad you did.

Sometimes businesses get caught up in the day-to-day mechanics of blogging—writing posts, promoting them through social networks, responding to comments—and forget to check how successful those efforts have been. Does that sound like your business? Now is a great time to review the status and effectiveness of your blog to help you set goals for 2010.

Check Purpose
Businesses start a blog for a variety of reasons:

• To build community around the business or brand
• To improve visibility in the search engines
• To build authority or thought leadership within an industry
• To personalize or “put a face on” the business
• To enhance understanding of products and services
• To increase leads or sales efficiency
• To increase brand recognition

Over time a blog evolves, so it’s a good idea to check whether your blog is still meeting your initial purpose and identify other ways it benefits your business. For example, suppose your initial goal was to improve your visibility within the search engines. You might find that you’re seeing only a little improvement in search, but because you’re providing relevant and valuable content on a regular basis, you’re developing a growing community that’s helping you provide better service to your customers—and you’re gaining brand recognition in your industry. Use observations in this area to refine your overall blog strategy going forward.

Check Content
When it comes to evaluating your content efforts, quantity, consistency and quality are informative checkpoints. Have you met your goals for the number of posts or amount of content you planned to generate through your blog? Keeping an eye on metrics such as number of posts/month, average words/post, number of posts /topic and the number of indexed pages on your site are useful productivity measures to help you uncover any deficiencies you need to address.

Consistency means setting a schedule for your posts—then sticking to it. How consistent is your blogging? Are there times when you struggle to maintain a consistent presence? What adjustments can you make to improve the regularity of your posts?

Evaluating the quality of your content really involves just one thing: How well are you meeting the needs of your audience through the topics you cover, the mix of posts you write and your ability to capture reader interest? Asking the following questions can help you determine the effectiveness of your content and identify tweaks you might need to make in your content strategy:

• What topics did you set out to cover and how well have you covered them?
• Do readers find topics and posts relevant, valuable and interesting (e.g., are page views and number of subscribers on the rise)?
• Are there topics or types of posts that don’t resonate at all with your audience? (Eliminate them!)
• Have you tried incorporating different types of media (e.g., graphics, audio, video) within your posts to spark interest and attract new readers?
• Do you monitor customer questions and feedback to improve your content’s relevancy?

Check Engagement
The third important characteristic of a healthy blog is the level of engagement readers have with it, which you can measure through comments and links from outside sources. For example, how many comments do you typically receive per post? Do you actively monitor and respond to comments—that is, are you proactive in developing and nurturing conversations around your blog? Don’t be alarmed if you receive relatively few comments initially. Building an engaged readership takes time and effort, and you’ll likely need to make improving engagement an ongoing goal.

Inbound links provide a good measure of how much people are talking about your blog and sending people your way. There are numerous ways to keep tabs on inbound links. Yahoo! Site Explorer not only reports the number of inbound links to your blog, it also provides some information about the links. LinkDiagnosis is another tool that provides in-depth information about inbound links, and if you use Hubspot’s BlogGrader, you’ll get a summary that reports the number of inbound links, the number of Diggs and Delicious bookmarks and ranking information comparing your blog to the rest of the blogosphere.

Keep Your Blog in Tip-Top Shape
Checking the health of your blog is important to ensure that your business gets the most benefit from your efforts. Checkups are relatively quick and easy to do through a little tracking and the use of some simple tools. If you haven’t already done so, plan now to establish a baseline for your blog’s health during Q4 of this year. Then, schedule regular checkups throughout 2010 to keep your blog in tip-top shape.

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.



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.



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.

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:
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.

When we create new websites, we don't utilize templates. Our goal is to create an online identity that will reflect who you are, and more importantly how you want to be perceived. If you have plans to grow and don't want to appear as though you're working out of your basement (even if you are), we can definitely help you look the part.

 

We're always happy to talk to you, where ever you are in your process, but to get the best value from your dollar, we strongly encourage you to spend some time pondering the following items.

 

#1: Important information to ensure that you Outshine Your Competitors

• Who are they? 
• What's good or bad about their sites?
• What can YOU offer customers that your competitors can't?
• Try to objectively look at their sites (and ask your friends and family) and be very honest with yourself about what the strengths and weaknesses are.
• Who is your target audience
• What other sites do you react positively to? or negatively?
• Always keep in mind that on the web, less is usually more, and as compelling as your story is, you probably can't (and shouldn't) try to tell the whole ball-of-wax on the home page.
   

These are just few of the topics that we cover during our initial "Discovery" process. By thinking about them ahead of time, you're three steps ahead of the game.

In July 2009, the Altimeter Group and Wetpaint released the results of a new study ranking the BusinessWeek/Interbrand top 100 global brands in terms of the breadth and depth of their social media engagement. The study looked at each company’s involvement in more than 10 distinct social media channels (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, forums, social bookmarking sites, branded communities) and scored its depth of engagement in each.

While it’s fascinating to see how the leading worldwide brands stacked up overall, what’s most useful are the half-dozen or so takeaways from their experience that can help you build a successful social media strategy.

Takeaways Add Up to Your Success
The study highlighted four companies (Starbucks, Toyota, SAP, Dell) that engage in unique ways with their customers. The best practices of these companies, together with the key findings from the overall study, provide sound advice for incorporating social media into your marketing mix.

Plan before you jump in. Tie your strategy to your company philosophy, personality and culture. For example, SAP’s commitment is to make their customers more successful. Their buy-in of “Talk with us—we want to learn” provides the drive to support social engagement as an extension of their culture.

Part of your plan needs to address how “open” you’ll be in terms of content creation (e.g., will you let customers and partners contribute blog posts, will you review/edit comments), where you can draw content from around the company, who can help in various channels, appropriate guidelines for posting and responding, training for those who need it and similar decisions.

Understand the different social media channels and their strengths/weaknesses. Different channels provide different kinds of engagement experiences with customers. For example, a customer might turn to Twitter with a customer service issue, which (if your company is monitoring Twitter) you can address and solve quickly. Another customer might seek the collective knowledge of a forum thread to make a difficult decision. By identifying the types of services your customers need and matching them to the most suitable types of social media channels, you can focus your social media strategy on the most effective channels for your business.

Centralize management. Successful companies identify a dedicated team (however large or small) to lead and coordinate their efforts. Some of these social media management teams manage more tightly than others, but the benefits of organization (vs. chaos) are numerous: consistency of message, best use of each channel, synchronization among channels and assurance that engagement happens deeply within each channel.

Identify champions. Finding the person (or persons) within your organization that “gets it” is important. This person is your best ally for explaining, educating and evangelizing social media to the rest of the company. Some of the best champions are upper-management-types with a core belief in the importance of customer engagement—and the clout to help you secure resources for social media initiatives.

Distribute responsibilities throughout the organization. The most successful companies make social media part of everyone’s job—just like phone calls and email. But that doesn’t mean everyone needs to participate in every channel. You’ll see most success by involving people in the channels that make the most sense to their job. For example, customer service representatives might be most at home in monitoring and responding to customer concerns that surface on Twitter. Your CEO might best participate by contributing a blog post or commenting on your Facebook page.

Integrate with traditional marketing channels. For greatest impact, ensure that you have cross-channel communication and synchronization of engagement. Customers typically skip from channel to channel in their interactions with a company. Consistency of engagement across channels reinforces your brand and builds trust with your customers.

Engage fully and consistently in the channels you invest in. According to the study, companies that thrive are those that participate in a wide variety of social media channels at a deep level (Mavens) and those that participate in just a few channels at a deep level (Selectives). The message here is that it doesn’t pay to spread yourself too thin.

Once you commit to a channel, you need to be there—and provide consistent activity and authentic engagement. Companies such as Cisco, Panasonic, Nintendo and Hyundai (Butterflies) have a high presence but low engagement level across social media channels (they dabble in numerous channels) and don’t rank as well as they could in the study. If participating in a broad selection of social media platforms doesn’t make sense for your company, you’re much better off participating very well in the few you do choose.

Commit to the long haul. Social media isn’t like other marketing campaigns. To be successful, once you commit to a channel, you need to be there consistently. You can’t just be on again–off again, and you can’t walk away from it like you might from other types of marketing campaigns. So, be thoughtful in selecting the channels you choose to participate in and commit wholeheartedly over the long term to those you decide are a good fit for your audience.

Start—You Must
Still not convinced your company needs to get involved with social media? Groundswell author and Altimeter Group partner Charlene Li best sums up the situation you face:

“If your organization is resistant to engagement in [social media] channels, you will have to start slower and smaller. But start you must, or risk falling far behind other brands, not only in your industry but across your customers’ general online experience.”

What social media channels make the most sense for your company?

Over the past decade, the most notable change in business marketing has been the emergence of the company Web site in a starring role, from its humble beginnings as part of the supporting cast. The evidence is staggering:

• 92% of technology buyers turn to vendor Web sites for information (MarketingSherpa)
• 89% of US Internet users go online to research (Ruder Finn); 71% of consumers research a business online before making a purchase
• 85% of B2B buyers go online at some point during the purchasing cycle; 83% go online specifically to find a vendor (Enquiro Research)
• US online sales will reach $145 billion in 2010 (eMarketer)
• Online or offline, vendor Web sites are the single most influential factor for B2B buyers in making a purchasing decision (Enquiro Research)

With such a spotlight on your corporate Web site, what do you have to lose if you don’t redesign it and keep it up to date? In a nutshell: plenty.

An outdated Web site creates many problems for a business and its prospects and customers. Slow-loading pages, difficult navigation, error pages, buried content, accessibility issues and barriers to completing desired actions all cause visitors to move on to more desirable sites—like those of your competition. Here are 8 ways an outdated Web site can affect your business.

1. Your target audience can’t find you.
Small Business Brief reports that 80% of online purchases begin with search. If your site hasn’t yet been optimized for the search engines, you’re missing out on important traffic to your site. You need to help your target audience find you, and that means appearing in the first couple of pages of search results, which takes some special tactics (SEO). Older sites often aren’t easy for search engines to traverse and index their Web pages, which makes it even harder for searchers to find you compared with updated, optimized sites.

2. Bounce rate is high—few leads.
Visitors take just a few seconds to decide whether to spend time on your site. In fact, Carleton University's HOT Lab (Ottawa) reported that human brains can make flash judgments about visual appeal of a Web page in as little as 50 milliseconds (about 1/20th of a second). Furthermore, these initial impressions carry over to other characteristics of your Web site and your company (e.g., credibility, trustworthiness) via a “halo effect.” A high bounce rate with little time spent on your site resulting from a lack of appeal and functionality that your target audience expects means few leads and, subsequently, fewer conversions.

3. Conversions are subpar.
Web sites that have grown uncontrollably, are poorly organized, are hard to navigate, bury their content, have non-specific landing pages or have no clear conversion path are destined to drive visitors away from completing a desired action. Their solution? Escape to another site that’s easier and less frustrating to navigate.

4. Customer retention declines.
Internet users today seek valuable, relevant information on an ongoing basis from sources they trust to help them solve problems or make decisions. They will choose to engage with you on a continuing basis if you provide fresh content that objectively informs, helps them and is easy to find in all the ways they like to receive and interact with that information. A site with static, outdated content, no support for RSS or social media platforms and a lack of vibrancy and “life” sends the unfortunate message that you don’t care enough about customers to provide what they expect and need. Customers will look elsewhere.

5. You lose business to your competitors.
If your site isn’t optimized for search and a competitor’s is, you’ll lose traffic and potential business. If your site loads too slowly, searchers and visitors will jump ship—perhaps again to your competitors. If your competitors offer opportunities for your target audience to engage and interact with them in a variety of ways (e.g., through forums, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, LinkedIn) and you don’t, you’ll likely lose their interest. In short, today’s company Web sites and online presence need to work hand-in-hand to better serve customers and prospects than their competition does. Taking the lead and ensuring that your site is attractive, up-to-date, search-friendly and socially savvy is more important than ever.

6. Can’t “grow” your authority in the industry.
The best way to become more of an authority in your industry is to provide meaningful content that gets read and virally promoted (authentically) on a regular basis. Authority doesn’t “happen overnight,” and unless you’re able to easily add content to your site on a regular basis (e.g., via a content management system), you’ve got an uphill battle. By redesigning your site, you can add capabilities to make it easy to publish new information—and notify interested parties—to help establish a presence in your industry.

7. Your brand is at risk.
Your brand is more than your logo, and your Web site sends a loud-and-clear message of how you value and respect your visitors, prospects and customers (not to mention your company). Many sites were previously designed to serve the company rather than the customer. Build your brand by providing a Web site experience that your target audience will recognize, value, promote and come back to again and again.

8. Profitability declines as Web site maintenance expands.
Web sites cost money, and as they become more and more complex over time, the cost of maintaining them creeps up and up. Fortunately, a Web site redesign can turn that trend around. With today’s technologies and tools, you’ll find you often spend less on basic maintenance—with better results—and keep your site easy to upgrade in the future. Yes, you probably will still need a Web master for implementing the greater variety of functionality on your site, but that person won’t be spending time making minor changes and updates that your staff can handle. Efficiency and a well-designed “back end” go a long way to saving money in the long term.

Do You Need to Update Your Web Site?
Now more than ever, you need to send a strong, clear message about your company and brand to build confidence and trust and to show where you’re heading in 2010 and beyond. How better to take center stage away from your competition and put the spotlight on you than through a redesigned Web site that awesomely serves your target audience and demonstrates your leadership moving forward?

Let me know how ACS Creative can help you.

So It's been a couple weeks since Part 1, so just-in-case you need a refresh....check out Part 1 here

Okay, so as I stated in Part 1, Social Media Marketing and Viral Marketing can be very effective marketing strategies...BUT, effective execution and implementation can vary from company-to-company. Let's take a look at a couple examples:

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    Company: Higher-End Manufacturer Car-Dealership

        Key Facts:
            - Currently they do NOT participate (not active) in any form of social marketing and/or viral marketing
            - Have an existing customer base of around 5,000
            - Roughly 25% of existing customers use their service department for recommended tune-ups
       
After initial analysis, their desired marketing-breakdown is as follows:

        Horizon 1: GOAL = To Increase Yearly Revenue
        Horizon 2: OBJECTIVES =
                    A) To Increase # of Cars Sold (Used & New)
                    B) To Increase the # of Customers Utilizing the Dealerships Service
                    Department for Scheduled Tune-ups
        Horizon 3: STRATEGY = Hmm, let's see...

Given the scenario above, what strategy(s) would better support their goals and objects:
            (A) Social Media Marketing?
            (B) Viral Marketing Campaign?
            (C) Both?
            (D) None of the Above? (....bet you're thinking right now; "man I miss school" :) )

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Although many-professionals could prove to you that all-4 are correct...however, within the context of this discussion, I like (A); Social Media Marketing the best!

Here's why...

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Earlier this year, marketing strategist David Meerman Scott blogged about the latest version of the Air Force Public Affairs Agency’s Web Posting Response Assessment. This easy-to-follow flowchart provides guidelines for Air Force personnel to follow when responding to blog posts, comments and other online postings that pertain to the Air Force. Let’s look at some of the particulars of this common-sense approach that are easily adaptable to a corporate setting.



To Respond or Not to Respond
One of the best features of the flowchart is that it sets criteria for deciding whether to respond to a post. If the post is balanced or positive in its presentation, you might choose to respond if you can add value to the conversation; otherwise, you might choose to let the post stand without further comment. If the post is negative toward your company, the flow chart identifies when it’s advantageous to respond (e.g., the post contains erroneous information or results from an unhappy customer) and when monitoring without a response might be a better tactic (e.g., the post is from a basher or ranter). What criteria for responding make the most sense for your company?

Negative Comments—PR Opportunities
If a negative comment or post occurs due to factual errors or a bad experience with your company, you have the opportunity to correct the situation and create positive PR through your response. If you choose to “fix the facts,” be sure to do so in such a way that the poster “saves face.” For an unhappy customer, how you “rectify the problem” will go a long way in influencing others that your company really cares about its customers.

Response Considerations
Finally, the flowchart provides some tips to keep in mind when constructing an online response:

• Transparency—be sure to identify your role/connection to the company
• Cite Sources—include links and references in your response, especially if you’re “fixing facts”
• Timeliness—take time to construct a good response—quality trumps immediacy most of the time
• Tone—make sure the tone of your response is in keeping with the “personality” of your company
• Influence—whenever appropriate, include in your response links and references to other useful resources your company offers

Take It from Here
As your company increases its online presence and more and more employees assume social networking responsibilities, chances are you’ll need to provide some type of guidance for responding to various types of posts that relate to your company. This Air Force flowchart might be a good conversation-starter for devising a specific plan that works for your company.

Without a doubt, offline marketing channels—TV, radio, newspapers and magazines, billboards, direct mail, catalogs, word-of-mouth—highly influence purchasing decisions, whether a customer actually makes the purchase online via your website or offline via a call center or a local store. But if a purchase is made online, how can you determine the offline channels’ marketing contribution to the transaction?

Fortunately, with a little advance preparation and coordination, you can track the effectiveness of your offline campaigns in driving online conversions.

Customize URLs and Landing Pages
To measure the effect of an offline campaign, incorporate custom URLs and landing pages into your marketing tactics, then use your Web analytics tool (e.g., Google Analytics) to track the online activity resulting from the offline channel. For example, let’s say you decide to run a campaign for a cool new gadget you’re introducing through TV, radio and magazine ads in addition to your online marketing efforts. Where do you begin?

First, choose a unique, “friendly” URL (aka a vanity URL) for each offline channel in your campaign. A vanity URL needs to be easy for a viewer/listener/reader to remember (and spell), and you need to feature it prominently in the corresponding offline ad along with an enticing call to action. The vanity URL will redirect visitors (via a 301 permanent redirect—ask your Web master to set this up) to a custom, quick-to-load landing page on your website that will enable visitors to complete the action initiated by your ad. Although the messaging on the landing pages of the various media might be similar, each landing page needs to echo the specific look-and-feel, language and information of the ad designed for a particular medium.

For example, the vanity URL that appears prominently in your TV ad for the new gadget might be something as simple as www.coolgadget.com/tv. This URL will seamlessly redirect visitors to a page on your site identified by a lengthier “trackable” URL that includes campaign parameters that your Web analytics program can work with. (Google Analytics provides the URL Builder tool to help you generate this trackable URL.) You’ll be able to determine which visitors are coming to your landing page as a result of your TV ad because your analytics report will break out those who entered directly by typing the vanity URL into their Web browser vs. those who arrived via referrals/links from other websites (e.g., Twitter) that might mention your special URL. You can drill down further to find out other information about these visitors.

The corresponding landing page for your TV ad should immediately engage the visitor and reflect the precise information and offer expressed in the ad—with no distractions—to help the visitor find what he is looking for and complete the action he set out to do in response to your ad. Your goal is for the visitor to experience continuity and identity between what the ad portrayed and what appears on your landing page.

Bonus Advantage of Using This Technique
In addition to being able to track and monitor the influence of your offline campaigns on online conversions in the same way that you track your online campaigns, you can also determine your customers’ preference for different marketing channels. Over time, you’ll be able to collect specific data about the best target audience for certain types of offline messaging and communications channels, thus not only improving your customers’ experience but also providing better ROI on your integrated marketing campaigns.