Social networking means better engagement with your audience: two-way conversations that help build brand loyalty, improve customer satisfaction, and provide better input to product management.
Read MoreThe Work Behind Social Marketing
My previous mini-series on Search Engine Marketing got me thinking about some of the myths of other types of digital marketing, especially social media marketing. Some people think that social marketing is voodoo. Other think it’s a new broadcast medium. The truth is, it’s just the plain old hard work of maintaining a dialog with your community. I’ve written that digital marketing techniques like SEO and SEM take a roll-up-your-sleeves effort to make them effective; you don’t just throw money at keywords and wait for the sales come rolling in. This is especially true for social media marketing. There is no “if you build it they will come”; social media is a digital marketing channel, but it’s not just about delivering content. It’s about conversations. It’s about participating. The work is ongoing, and it’s work that pays off. No voodoo. It’s not even complex or high tech. The techniques of social media marketing revolve around creating and maintaining conversations. As a marketer, you need to find the voices within your company that your audience most wants to hear. And you need to make sure that those voices come across as professional, articulate, and in step with your company goals, while remaining authentic and sincere. But even more important is in hearing what you audience has to say, and in reacting to their thoughts. You need to direct their ideas like a traffic cop to all parts of your organization, where those groups can digest, synthesize, respond, and react appropriately. This is a magical opportunity to hear what customers (or donors), potential customers, press, investors, and members of your industry have to say about you. And you have to respond. It’s a way to let the voice of the customer touch all the places in your organization that it needs to touch, so that you can improve customer support, operational execution, quality, discover features and services that people want, respond to missteps, or dispel misconceptions. You are doing this publicly, with little safety net, in a forum that will recognize insincerity, and yet professionally and in a way that you don’t open up the potential for liability. (Easy, right?) This...
Read MoreSearch Engine Marketing (SEM) Tips: Analytics and Performance
John Wanamaker (1838-1922), considered by some at the father of modern advertising, is often quoted in marketing circles: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” A hundred years later, we no longer have that problem. In the age of digital marketing, with exceptional tracking systems (that stretch the very definitions of privacy), it’s no longer a matter of not knowing, but of investing the effort to find out. Today, savvy online marketers are saying “no campaigns without metrics.” SEM is a perfect example of this principle in action—a principle that can also be applied to email and social marketing. When you drive traffic to a web or mobile site using SEM, the basics of managing pay-per-click include an analysis of the costs for each keyword, deciding what to bid on, and then monitoring click-through reports to check performance and to see if you get out-bid on your keywords (in which case you may need to increase your bid or lose that keyword). But the basic reports in Google and Bing are about how much traffic you receive for what you spent. They don’t tell you how individual keywords are performing in terms of your business and organizational goals. What you don’t want to do is simply point to high SEM traffic and say you were successful. What if your top performing keywords are just draining your budget and delivering no value? You need to monitor what your visitors are doing, based on which keyword they came in on. A good analytics program will tell you not just which keywords get the most clicks (and thus cost you the most), but you’ll also gain insights into whether visitors are coming through but then immediately leaving (SEM cost with no value), or which pages they visit, in which order, and do they return to your site later (SEM cost with high value). About 10 years ago I developed a system for tracking campaign and keyword performance from Google AdWords and Overture (Overture was bought in 2003 by Yahoo, and Yahoo SEM is now merged with Bing). The idea was simple: if...
Read MoreSearch Engine Marketing (SEM) Tips: Keyword Management
In my previous post I wrote about the importance of competitive analysis as part of a Search Engine Marketing campaign. This post will discuss tips for keyword management, including targeting, scheduling, negative keywords, and multivariate ads. (In part 3 we’ll discuss analytics and performance tuning, conversion monitoring, and weeding out expensive under-achievers.) Both Google AdWords and Bing enable you to run multiple campaigns, each targeted toward a different purpose, product, or demographic. Each campaign can have its own budget and targeting options, including options for time of day, language, geographic areas, and search publisher networks. The publisher network extends your reach beyond the main Google and Bing search sites, adding sites that also display pay-per-click results relevant to their content and audience. For Google, the search network includes Google sites like Gmail, YouTube, Blogger, and Google Finance; for Bing, it includes sites like Facebook and MSN. The extended networks include many thousands of independent publisher sites, including mobile. Each campaign contains individual ad groups, and ad groups can have multiple ads, in a few formats, with text ads being the most popular and familiar. The targeting options mentioned above can be set at the campaign or ad group level. I won’t give you a full tutorial on how to use AdWords and Bing (good ones are easily found), as I want to focus on the work of making your campaigns effective. I’ll be using examples from AdWords, a system I’ve used for 10 years, but Bing uses essentially the same terminology and paradigms. Once you create your ad campaign and ad group and set your campaign budget, remember to also set targeting options. These can improve the response rate of your campaigns and will dramatically improve how your SEM budget is spent. For example, my company iMedia Revenue sells newsroom systems in the US, Canada, Ireland, and the UK, so we only run ads in those countries. After all, why pay for clicks from places we don’t serve? If your target audience tends to search from work, then you can set the ads to run from 9am-5pm in your targeted geography. You can even target mobile. If you sell...
Read MoreSearch Engine Marketing (SEM) Tips: Competitive Analysis
For most organizations, search drives the bulk of traffic to their web and mobile sites. Even if you have a powerful brand and a loyal following, search traffic can represent 50% of your visitors (your site analytics system, such as Google Analytics, will give you a fairly precise accounting). Even in news sites with high traffic and loyalty, I have noted that up to 90% of the visitors are referral traffic, meaning they came via a link on another site, primarily a search channel, and not from a direct visit to the home page. (This is why I often say “Google is your real home page.”) I have written previously about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the way to improve your natural ranking in the search engine results, notably on Google and Bing. For many marketers, SEO is the most difficult and the most misunderstood. Countless search agencies make a living by peddling SEO voodoo tactics. But as I discussed in previous posts, the principles are actually fairly simple: the trick is to get the right people involved: content (editorial), marketing, and technology all need to work to make SEO a success. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) , also known as pay-per-click, is the paid search side. There is no voodoo here, right? What could be simpler than selecting your most important keywords and bidding on the traffic they bring? Well, here again, the principles are simple, but there is some real work involved to make effective use of your SEM campaign budget. There are two main players in paid search, and for most marketers, the first hurdle is in learning how to use their systems for managing the keyword buys. Google AdWords controls the proverbial 800 lb gorilla’s share of search marketing (I’ve been administering Google Adwords campaigns for 10 years, so many of my examples will be from Google). But Microsoft’s Bing is nevertheless important, in part because it is the paid search engine driving the new Facebook Graph Search. While the interfaces may seem daunting at first, there are plenty of tutorials and guides, so you should be up and running in an hour or two. Now, what...
Read MoreHow To Do SEO Right
In two previous posts I wrote about why you need to optimize for search engines and what that means. In this post I give a series of checklists for what editorial, marketing, and technology needs to do to boost readership using SEO. SEO Part 3: How To Do SEO Right SEO is often delegated to the technology team, with the instructions “just optimize the site for SEO.” There are certainly technology best practices in SEO, but they tend to be easily implemented by any reasonably good dev team. The bulk of SEO work is actually in marketing, content production, reporting, and analysis. You can’t just hand SEO over to developers expecting them to drive more search traffic to the site, or to magically raise the page rank. A lot of the responsibility belongs to marketing and editorial. Since this is a blog and not a book, I’ve broken out the “How to SEO” into three sets of simple checklists, for editorial, marketing, and technology: Editorial SEO Search engines use programs called “crawlers” or “robots” to analyze your site. These crawlers are not very smart; they don’t look for Pulitzer prize-winning stories. They only check for new pages, see what pages have been updated, and most important, they look for keywords and rank content by keyword relevance. Your stories have to be tagged; tags are your search keywords, and are important both for readers, who search using keywords, and for robots, who index you in a search engine using those same tags. Make sure that tags reflect actual page content. Remember all proper nouns (People, Places, Things, Events), synonyms, and even common permutations. Some clever taggers even include common misspellings (not necessarily a good idea when tags are prominently displayed in a list next to your story, like HuffPo does). Remember that keywords are the words a person might type into a search engine; don’t choose phrases no one would ever actually type, and don’t pick phrases that are popular but would cause them to be dismayed that they linked to you. So if the story isn’t really about Lady Gaga, don’t add her as a tag, even if it might...
Read MoreWhat is SEO?
In my previous post I discussed why you need to optimize for search. In this next installment of the SEO series, I explain a bit about what SEO really is. SEO Part 2: So what is SEO? Search engine optimization is the art and science of making your web pages rank as high in the natural search rankings as possible. Google is the largest search engine, with Microsoft’s Bing a distant second. Your placement on a search engine, or “page rank,” is a complex algorithm generally based on these attributes: Age of site (time since the site was established) Number of hits to the site (overall site traffic) Popularity (number of unique visitors and repeat visitors) Number of inbound links (links to your site from other sites) Quality of inbound links (high page rank sites will increase your page rank; low page rank sites not so much) Keyword density (based on keyword relevance as discovered by search crawlers, aka robots) Secondary characteristics like media, type, source, and domain Page rank is a measurement of the relative importance of your site according to the search engines. Like the Richter scale, it is a logarithmic scale, meaning that a rank of 5 is ten times higher than a rank of 4. For example, here are the page ranks of several major news sites: The New York Times: 9 The Wall Street Journal: 8 The Guardian: 7 Irish Independent: 7 The top 100 bloggers range from page rank 8 for blogs like The Huffington Post, Gawker, and The Onion (all 3 use a blogging platform for their CMS and are considered blogs) to page rank 6 for today’s #100 spot, a popular fashion blog. These are updated daily on http://technorati.com/blogs/top100. Secondary characteristics are very important, and include: Media: Search engines like rich media, especially video. As we’ll discuss in an upcoming posting, video and images can increase your “Google juice.” Type: News itself gets special treatment in a search engine; blogs and social networking also increase Google juice. Source: Official news agency sites (especially government and community sites) typically get higher rankings as trusted sources. Domain: Your domain name (including your subdomain and...
Read MoreTrusted Advertising: The Value of Newspaper Web Sites
In 2010 comShare published a study titled “Site Matters: The Value of Local Newspaper Web sites” (sponsored by the Newspaper Association of America, representing some 2000 US newspapers) that “measured consumer attitudes and behaviors regarding local newspaper Web sites and content compared with other online sources of local news and information.” While the study discussed which types of online content consumers most trusted for local information, one remarkable fact emerged that bears discussion in this blog: Newspaper web sites ranked highest in terms of the credibility and trustworthiness of their advertising. This is an important fact missed by many newspapers; the fact that their web sites are more capable of selling than any other local sites. Someone please alert the newspaper sales department! Newspapers are not only themselves trusted brands, as discussed in my previous post. They are also purveyors of trust: some of the faith that people have in the reliability of local news rubs off on the newspaper’s advertising as well. Place an ad in your newspaper’s web site and people will more likely believe the message. When you add to this the fact that local news consumers are also well-qualified leads–they live, work, and make purchase decisions in the same market area as the newspaper advertiser, you start to realize the extremely high value of newspaper advertising. In other words, newspaper consumers are also, demographically, the most likely consumers of the advertiser’s goods and services. It is great news for newspapers that their web sites are the most trusted sources of advertising. But they now need to (1) market this message to their advertisers, (2) position themselves as a high-end advertising solution, and (3) price themselves accordingly. This means using a “page sponsorship” model, not cheap banner ads. Sponsorship is an old and well-tested model. Newspaper web sites can charge advertisers a fixed fee, not based on ad impressions, but on visibility to the highly qualified local consumer community, for a range of sponsorship placements. These placements can be anything from a logo appearing beside the mast, to co-branding the daily email newsletter, to display ads that follow standard IAB banner sizes but are not sold by ad impressions. Sponsorship ads...
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