How to deal with paid budget cuts

I've just realised that it's already been a month since my last post, I definitely need to make a better job of writing...but with xmas coming, not sure how this is gonna go...oh well, there are always new year's resolutions.

Alright, today's post is going to be about something that most marketers dealing with paid search campaigns will know, especially during a recession; budget cuts.
As you probably already know if you're running ppc campaigns with Google Adwords, Yahoo search marketing or Bing, changes in any elements of the campaigns can have a very big impact on results, so here are a few tips to make your reduced budgets go further:

• Whatever you do, do not pause your campaigns - Google especially likes consistency, so it is always best to avoid stopping campaigns as it could take you months to rebuild history and raise your quality score again. Even running a very minimal budget is better than stopping everything.
• Bid on brand terms - although many people may question the fact of bidding on your own name, results are very often showing that brand terms /keywords are some of the bets performing ones. And they are cheap, especially if you've trademarked your name, so go ahead and use your name. This will also help you display results in both paid and organic rankings for the same search, increasing customer confidence.
• Focus on top converting keywords - This is a bit of an obvious one, but if you lack budget, make sure you bid on keywords that have converted for you in the past (conversions being sales, sign ups or whatever other metric you use for performance).
• Look at visitors click path if available - I know this is not really easy to get, but if you can, find out which keywords your users have searched during their research. The keyword they converted from may not be the one they searched for the initial phase of their product research. Visitors may initially use a very generic keyword and as they learn about what they really want, they will tend to use more specific, long tail keywords. Knowing the click path will help you bid for these all important initial search terms.
• Optimise your landing pages - Again this should be standard practice, but make sure your campaigns are as optimised as possible, from keywords, to creatives to landing pages. The more relevant the search keyword is to your creative and your landing page, the higher your quality score will be. This in turn will have an impact on your ads rankings.
• Look at your competitors - look at what your competitors are bidding on and if need be, bid on their brand terms. Remember that you cannot use your competitors' brand in your creatives if they are trademarked, but nothing stops you from displaying a creative by bidding on their search terms.
• Use common sense - as in everything SEO related, use common sense when managing your paid campaigns, and as the market recovers, so will your budgets.

Enjoy your Sunday

Link building - revisited

Today's post is going to be about something I talked about before, link building.
After talking to a digital marketing agency in the past few weeks, I realised that while the basic principles of link building still apply, it was worth revisiting some of the elements that form a link building strategy.

Page rank still matters
Despite talks about Google dropping the page rank from its toolbar, regular updates are still being pushed, and it remains a very good tool to assess the quality of a website. So if you want to increase your link popularity, make sure you target sites with a high page rank and authority as it will definitely have an impact.
An analysis of the competitors of the PayPoint.net Online Payments website clearly displayed some very highly ranked sites, even though they were not necessarily relevant to the industry in question. So when looking at links, try getting some from top websites such as google, facebook, the bbc... This is obviously easier said than done, but it is well worth the effort. Most the these sites with high page rank will have blogs and forums where you can post and potentially add a link to your own site, so try it.

Website relevance
It is of course very important to target wesbites which are relevant to your business or somehow related to what you do, but it appears that Google's policy on relevance is somehow flawed as authority will sometimes play a more important role than relevance itself. Of course you should always aim to get links from a respected and relevant website, but sometimes PageRank alone can bring better results.

Anchor text
This rule hasn't changed recently, but I thought it was worth a quick reminder. When building links on websites, make sure to use anchor text rather that just your company name, logo or the traditional "click here". Choose the keywords you want to rank for and use them in the text of your links, and for even better results, link these keywords to specific pages of your site updated for them.

Where to get links from

• Your customers / partners
• Online directories
• Blogs / Forums
• Social media sites
• Articles submissions websites
• Link baiting (write link worthy articles and publish them on your website)
• Press releases
• Link exchange / reciprocal linking

This list is probably not exhaustive but it should form the basis of your link building strategy.

So for the best results, target websites relevant to your activity, with a high page rank and that will accept to put links containing your own keywords. As Aleksandr himself would put it, Simples! Enjoy your sunday.

Why customer service matters - even online!

After a few bad customer experiences in the past weeks (especially with South West Trains), I thought I'd take some time to talk about customer service and how important it is, even in a digital world.

What is customer service?
In my opinion, customer service is all the interactions between a business and its customers (or potential customers), whether it is at the research stage, during purchase or when the transaction is complete.

Why does it matter?
as the old sayings go, "the customer is king" or "the customer is always right". I do appreciate that these are very old fashioned sayings, but I think the same rules still apply today, albeit online rather than offline only. As a business, you have to realise that if you do not treat your customers well, they will not do business with you, an no customers means no business. So to sum it up...look after your customers!
A lot of new online business owners seem to assume that having a nice website is enough and very often neglect the customer service aspect of their operations. This is a mistake that can be very costly, especially in a market where customer loyalty is decreasing and shopping around is so easy.
Remember that a happy customer can turn into a loyal customer and an advocate for your brand, and it is cheaper for a business to retain customers rather than acquiring new ones. This obviously doesn't mean that you shouldn't have an acquisition strategy too, but that can be the topic of another post.

How to get it right?
So what can you do to make sure that your customers are looked after?

• Display contact details - make sure that your site includes a highly visible phone number on every page, as well as a chat functionality, call back request tool, email address....
• Train your staff (or yourself) - If you run your business alone, make sure you are aware of the basic customer service rules and be available for questions and assistance. If you happen to have a team of people working for you, make sure they are fully trained and understand the importance of good customer service. Put processes in place for pre and post sales enquiries, customer handling, refund policies....and all of the other steps involved in the purchasing process.
• After sales service/marketing - Once a customer has bought from you, why not try and convert them into loyal customers? Some simple and well targeted marketing campaigns can help you increase return rates and repeat purchase. For example, why not send your customers an email a month after their initial purchase to ask them how satisfied they are? You can also encourage people to leave feedback on your website, and if the comments are really positive, use them on your site as references. People are always looking at reviews, case studies and opinions before purchasing these days, so make sure your name and satisfied customers are out there.
  Monitor what is being said about you on social media sites, blogs, forums, and interact with your customers whenever possible.
• Get the right tools for the job - having a proper CRM (customer relationship management) software will help you achieve better results by storing details about your customers. The more you know about them, the easier it will be to satisfy them and build a customer profile.
• Good customer service starts inside your business - if you run a fairly large business with several departments involved with the customer experience, make sure that your staff apply the rules of customer service internally. After all, each department will have its own internal customers, and if they don't know how to serve them well, it is unlikely they do a good job of serving external customers, the ones that bring revenue.

Common sense and friendliness can go a long way when running a business, but rules, training and appropriate tools will get you a step closer to customer service excellence. Kano's model on customer needs is always an interesting read if you want to learn more.

Have a good weekend

SEO on a shoestring - the free tools that could save you a headache

You're a new business, you've got a shiny new website with all the bells and whistles and you're ready to do business online....it all sound great up until now, but how do you get people to your website??
Even though people are more and more internet savvy these days, it is still clear that Search Engine Optimisation, aka SEO, remains a bit of an unknown subject for a lot of companies (lucky for me, keeps me working :) )
So if your marketing budget doesn't allow you to use the services of a search marketing agency or SEO professional, where do you start? I thought I'd compile a quick list of tools that should get you started and put you on the right track. Many of the tools listed below are the ones that I use on a daily basis and even though they may not be the best, I find them really useful and I'm sure they can help you achieve some good results.

Google Webmaster Tools
Although I do not want this post to sound like a huge endorsement for Google, I have to admit that they offer some of the best free tools for SEO on the market. Webmaster tools allows you to verify your website with the biggest search engine in the world and gives you a rather impressive list of options to choose from to check that your site is being indexed properly, so it should definitely be on your SEO checklist.
And if you're completely new to SEO, reading the Google Search Optimization starter guide should give you all the basics in an easy to understand format.

Keyword Research / website trends
Staying with Google (I can see a theme building up here!), make sure to use Trends, Insights for search, and trends for websites to understand what keywords are being searched for across the world, seasonality, country specific searches and find out how websites perform. The keyword tools will help you decide which keywords to focus on for your business.
To help you decide which keywords to use for your business, use the Google Keyword Tool. Start with some core/generic keywords for your business and expand your list with suggestions made by the tool. Don't forget that long tail keywords (very specific search phrases with 2 or more keywords) can sometimes convert at a higher level than generic and very competitive keywords.
I'd suggest using more than one keyword research tool, and WordTracker is one of the best out there. Other options are keyword discovery and Bing webmaster tools

Web Analytics
Yes, you've guessed it, my tool of choice for analytics on a budget is.....Google Analytics. I'm sure I've talked about Analytics at length before, but despite its flaws, it is still the best free analytics tool out there, and it will give you great insights into your website when looking at search engine activity, keywords referrals and much more.

Link popularity
Because link popularity is such an important part of search engine rankings these days, you need to make sure that you increase your LP on a regular basis. While this remains largely a manual process, you need to check that what you're doing is working. I've been using MarketLeap for years now to check LP, but all the major search engines provide functions to check your incoming links.

Finally, now that you've got all the tools to get you started, make sure you read about SEO as there are a lot of blogs and forums that will provide you with a lot of information. Consider SEOmoz, search engine land and the Google blog amongst many others.

Happy optimising, and remember that as for many things, common sense prevails and always keep your customers in mind when doing SEO!

ROI metrics - web metrics part 2

Ok, first of all i've got to apologise as I haven't been posting for a month now, lazy me.
Things have been very busy at work and I did feel quite lazy during weekends, but enough excuses....and thanks Rochelle for nagging me and pushing me to write again.

Let's try and pick things where we left them, web metrics and how to choose the right metrics for your business. In the previous post we covered the basic metrics that any business should measure, but there is a potentially infinite number of metrics you could use for your own business, some of them more complicated than others.

ROI metrics
Let's take a look at some ROI (return on investment) metrics. These metrics are often needed to justify marketing spend and understand which of your marketing channels are working the best.
If your a new business/start-up, then you'll want to make sure that your limited resources are used to their full potential, so ROI will be crucial to you.

• CPL - Cost per lead
  This is a measure of how much each lead that comes into your business costs you (a lead can be a quote request, a phone enquiry, an email or whatever you think could generate revenue for your business). To find out the cost per lead for your business, add the total of leads you're getting on a daily/weekly or monthly basis and compare it to your marketing costs for the same period: Cost / leads = CPL
  So for example if you received 20 leads in a week and spent £100 on marketing, then you CPL will be 100/20= £5
• CPA - cost per action / Cost per Click (CPC)
  This is very similar to the CPL but measurement is done on action (eg a click to a page). The formula is the same as CPL: Costs / Total actions= CPA. The CPC model is the one used in search engine advertising programmes such as Google Adwords.
  
• CPA - cost per acquisition / cost per conversion
  Once again the principles are very similar to CPL/CPA but the metric used here is conversion. As mentioned above for CPL, it is up to you to decide what a conversion is for your business. If you are an ecommerce shop, then a conversion could be a completed sale, but it could also be a completed questionnaire, a registration to an event... So the Cost per conversion formula is Costs/ total conversions= CPAcquisition

ROI metrics are vital in a business environment, especially if you work in a competitive industry with limited budgets. You need to make sure that you get as much impact from your marketing dollars as possible, more bang for your bucks!
Whatever business you're in, make sure to establish clear and accurate metrics from the beginning so that you don't lose track of what marketing activities work for you.

Have a good weekend!

Web metrics - back to basics

As it is an issue that seems to arise quite often nowadays when talking about the performance of websites, I thought I'd go back to basics with a post on web metrics.
If you're new to the web with little or no experience of monitoring a website, it is very easy to get confused with the amount of data available from the web analytics tool you're using, so how to know which data is useful and how to interpret it?

What are web metrics?
web metrics is the data relating to your website, whether it is visitors, page load time, referrals, time on site.....and the list goes on. One of the best advantages of working online is that pretty much everything is measurable and the web analytics tools get more and more sophisticated every day. But sometimes this can lead to information overload, especially if the data is not understood correctly, so it is important for every business to choose web metrics that are relevant to them and in line with their overall objectives.

How to choose the correct web metrics?
Just look at your overall business ovjectives and see how web activity relates to those. For example if your overall objective is to increase sales by 10% for the year, it'll be important to know how many customers have actually bought online, how many visitors turned into leads.
Web metrics need to be aligned with business and online marketing objectives.

Basic web metrics
the basic web metrics, the one that everybody refers to are:

• Unique visitors: the overall number of visitors to your website based on IP address. This is a crucial metric to assess the performance of your website over time as you'll want this number to increase.
• Visits: total number of visits to a website for a specific period. this differs from unique visitors as a unique visitor may be attributed several visits. The number of visits will always be equal or higher than the number of unique visitors.
• Time on site: amount of time each visitor spent on your site. for most businesses, the higher the better as the most time visitors spend, the more likely they are to find something of interest to them
• Page views: total number of page views across all visits. this metric is very useful if your site offers a lot of content such as news, articles....
• Average page views per visit: useful to judge the stickiness of your website, how good it is at retaining visitors.
• Bounce rate: number of visitors coming to the site and leaving without clicking on any link or visiting a second page. A high bounce rate usually reflects poor usability or irrelevant content.
• Hits: This is very often a misunderstood metric as it does not trully reflect performance. Each page of a website can return a lot of hits based on the elements present on it, so a high number of hits doesn't necessarily represent a healthy website.
• Referrals: which websites your traffic is coming from - search engines, partners, directories...this is very useful to target your activities and see which web channel is performing the best for you.

I realise that I have just covered the very basics here (and I know a lot are missing) but I hope it can help some people getting started with web analytics. Next week I'll cover some more advanced metrics and talk about the importance of setting up goals and ideal scenarios/paths/funnels to make the most of your website.

Search Engine Ranking Factors 2009

This is definitely worth a read if you're into SEO or if you want to learn more about search engine algorithms: SEOmoz SE ranking factors
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

Enjoy!

Microsites, what are they good for?

Ok, first of all I've got to apologise for not posting last week, I got distracted with other things, but I did feel bad for not doing it though!
Since this is something I'm currently dealing with in my job, I'd like to talk about microsites or sub sites and how useful they can be for a company, from an SEO and customer and brand standpoint.

What is a microsite?
In my opinion, a microsite is a product or advice driven site of 10-15 unique and optimised pages designed to work in conjuction with your corporate website. There can be many reasons for a business to build a new site and we're going to look at some of those below. In this post, I'm only going to talk about sites that are meant to stay live for a long period of time rather than temporary promotional sites.

Microsites & SEO
I know it may sound obvious, but whatever your reasons are for buidling a microsite, it should obviously never be only for search engines. As with everything in SEO, building something for spiders is very likely going to be at least grey hat and at worse it'll get you banned from google....
This of course doesn't mean that you should not build new sites without search engines in mind. A new site(s) for your business is a good way to be ranked for new keywords which may not be part of your main website. The fact that it has a new URL could also allow you to have 2 or more sites ranked for keywords or their derivatives (maybe long tail), meaning extra traffic and potential business leads.
In terms or URLs, you can either use a completely new one or create a subdomain such as http://xxxx.yourdomain.com. Search engines will treat this URL as a site on its own, and SEO recipes to be used should be the same as for any other site: onsite optimisation, link building and a pinch of social media for good measure.

Microsites & your customers
As mentioned before, you must have good reasons to buid a microsite and your customers are the main target for these new sites. You may come to a point in your business where your corporate site has grown enough and the width of your product range is preventing you from achieveing good results in SERPs because of keyword dilution. In this case, a microsite can help you focus on a specific product and target it at a very specific audience.
You may also build a new site to give more information to your visitors, be it for support, tips or even a company blog.
As with everything in a business, customers and their needs come first so there is no point investing resurces in new sites if you don't need them.

Microsites & branding
From a branding point of view, a microsite can be a very effective way to promote a brand extension, a new product range or a new venture. It is a safe way to experiment new online marketing techniques and target new audiences without affecting your core audience who can still go to your corporate site.
However, remember to keep some consistency with your umbrella brand in order not to send mixed messages to visitors and always have a brand strategy in mind.

Since i'm going through the process of build a network of microsites at the moment as part of the online strategy for my company, I'll keep you updated on progress and results.
Have a good weekend!

Online marketing planning - why? how? when?

Following on from my post on online marketing strategies, I thought I'd take some time to write a bit more about planning and why it is so important for businesses, especially during a recession when marketing budgets shrink every day.
This post was actually inspired to me by a good article in Marketing Week, and it made me think more about what I do on a daily basis.

Why plan?
First of all, I'll admit that to many marketers, planning is not the most exciting thing in the world. It is however a necessary evil and I actually quite enjoy this exercise as it allows me to focus my efforts and be more effective.
If you have a business, planning should be on your priority list as it will enable you to allocate your resources (human and financial) based on specific objectives set at the beginning on the year.
It will also help you decide which online marketing channels to use to achieve your targets.

Where to start?
I guess each marketer will have his/her own way of planning their online marketing activities, but I'll give you some examples of how I do it as it may help if you have no idea where to start.

1. Set clear online marketing objectives at the beginning of the year using overall business objectives as a starting point eg: if the aim of the business is to grow its customer base by 10% for the year, then an online marketing objective could be to increase online sales. The targets set will vary according to your business model, but remember that you need to set realistic expectations
   
2. Design your online marketing strategy - Now that you have targets, how do you achieve them? the role of the strategy is to identify the tools/marketing channels you're going to use to get results. Make sure to use tools that are suited to your target audience and always refer to your budget when doing so; there is no point including TV adverts in your strategy if you know you don't have a budget for it
   Once you have chosen the tools, set some timelines against them so that you know what needs to be done, when, and what resources will be required.
   
3. Create project plans for each specific task - Each part of your strategy can be individually turned into a specific project which needs planning. Include budget, resources needed, deliverables and objectives into your project plan as you may need to communicate details internally if you work for a large organisation. The individual plans will help you have a more detailed view of each activity.
4. Implement your strategy - Now that all the planning is done, all you need to do is start implementing your changes. it is sometimes useful to have an implementation plan at hand so that each person involved in the project knows which tasks have been assigned to them.
5. Measure and report - I know I talk about this pretty much every week, but make sure you measure the performance of your projects and report on them so that you know what's working, what's not working and how to improve in the future.

As my career in online marketing progresses, I find myself more involved in strategic marketing/planning and less with operational marketing, but this is something that I find fascinating. Granted, some of my colleagues will hate me for all my excel spreadsheets and the amount of documentation I produce for each project, but I don't think there's a better way to do it for now.
Actually, I'm considering using some online project management software like Huddle to try and get other people involved with my work so I'll let you know how that goes.

I hope the advice above can help some of you get a better understanding of planning, but as usual if you have questions or would like to see some templates, feel free to write!
Have a great sunny weekend if you're in London!

Bing...and the Google is gone!

Where have I heard a similar phrase before...ah yes, Barry Scott!
In the light of the Microsoft/Yahoo agreement this week, I thought I'd take some time to talk about Bing, Microsoft's "decision engine", and the implications of the agreement for SEO.

From what I can see, it looks like Bing is now going to power Yahoo's search results, and to be honest, I'm far from convinced this is a good thing for the seo industry.
I've been working in SEO and online marketing for a number of years now, and MSN/Live/Bing has always been the most unpredictable search engine. I dont know if it's because of the companies I worked for, but I've always struggled to achieve decent rankings in MSN's SERPs for my core keywords even though the same keywords were delivering great results in Google and Yahoo.
Now that I've had a bit of time to look at Bing. it still looks to me like the results are based on the old Live algorithm and do not give me what I expect to find, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one to feel that way. So excuse me Mr Microsoft, but I need more than a slick looking interface to convince me (yes, Bing does look very nice and clean, shall we just call it Bling then??).
On the plus side, Bing offers some webmaster and keyword tools (thanks Rochelle for the post suggestion!) and until I test them further I'll reserve judgement. One can only hope they'll be as good as Google Webmaster tools....but very unlikely. Maybe they'll help SEOs understand how the algorithm works, but I'm still worried that the transition from Yahoo to Bing is going to hurt a lot of websites in terms of organic traffic.
It'll also be interesting to look at paid results as a lot of advertisers (including me) have already heard the rumours that click through rates in Bing are higher than in Google (less ads displayed)

If I were Google, I wouldn't be really worried about this new alliance yet, and as an online marketer, I'll still focus most of my efforts on Google while keeping an eye on what's going on on the other side, but until I can see some tangible results for my sites in Bing results, I'll remain unconvinced.

Email marketing - getting the metrics right

So, you've got a brand new website, you've done your SEO and you're ready to do some email marketing campaigns to drive more business online....that's a great start, but have you thought about what you want from your campaigns , ROI and how you're going to measure results?
It's all well and good to want to generate some leads, but your efforts will be wasted if you don't know how effective your marketing is, and while it may sound really boring to some people, reporting is vital.

Here are some of the metrics you should analyse when doing email marketing, whether it is for in-house created campaigns or sponsored campaigns:

• Campaign name
• Date sent
• Distribution / total emails sent
• Bounce back rate:
  bounce backs/total emails sent (BB/Sent)*100
  If you want to go more granular (my favourite buzz word at the moment :) ) you can break down bounce backs by soft and hard bounces -
  soft bounce=out of office message, inbox full
  hard bounce=spam, email address does not exist, contact has moved
  
• Receipt rate:
  Total emails received/Total sent (received/sent)*100
• Open rate:
  Opened emails/Total sent (opened/sent)*100
  One point to remember here is that this number may include people who have the automatic preview pane activated in their email client, so this should not be used as a 100% accurate number but more as a trend.
• Unsubscribe rate:
  Unsubscribe requests/Total sent (unsubscribe/sent)*100
• Click through rate (CTR):
  Number of click within the email/Total emails received (clicks/received)*100
  You can apply a CTR to all clicks within an email or to each individual link if you have the ability to track them as this will help refine the content in future campaigns
• Conversion rate:
  Conversions/Total emails received (conversions/received)*100
  Once again you can do this as an overall number for the email or go link specific. Conversions can be any goal you've set for your website, whether it is a newsletter subscription, a sale or a request for information/quote
• Cost per acquisition (CPA):
  Conversions/Cost of the campaign (conversions/cost)*100
  This shouldallow you to target your campaigns more effectively going forward and make sure you get the best ROI for your activities
  

Some of these metrics will only be available to you if you've set up some web analytics tool, but most email marketing software will give you essential information straight out of the box.
This should help you get started with your campaigns but as ever if you need help or would like to see some templates, contact me.
Have a great weekend.

Getting started in PPC - Make the most of your paid campaigns

Ok, atfer a few weeks talking only about social media, I thought it was time for a change...so today we're going back to one of best online marketing channels in terms of ROI: Paid search.
There's very often a debate as to whether companies should focus on organic or paid search...and the answer is that to make the most of your marketing efforts, you should use both.
Paid and organic channels complement each other and in the long term can bring you a regular amount of leads and business.

So how do you get started if you've never been into the paid search world before? here are some simple tips that should put you on the right track:

1. Before attempting to launch paid campaigns, make sure you have clear and measurable objectives for you site: sign ups, sales, document requests....
   Remember that paid campaigns are all about return on investment, so measuring /reporting is crucial.
   
2. Optimise the conversion channel/ sales funnel on your site: the 3 clicks rule applies here - visitors should be able to get to the content they want in 3 clicks, so make sure that your site is clear and directs visitors in the right direction
3. Look at what your competitors are doing and benchmark your business against theirs. If their ideas work, why not take inspiration from them (I did not say copy, ok!?)
4. Do some keyword research to identify core keywords and long tail keywords for your target market
5. Choose which paid programme you want to go for. I guess at this point everybody's thinking Google Adwords, and there's a reason for that. The google tool is the most comprehensive out there a will give you the widest coverage. However, it is also worth looking at Yahoo Search marketing and MSN/Bing.
6. Allocate a budget to your campaigns and stick to it.
   
7. Build your campaigns within Google making sure to have a wide range of keywords, creatives and landing pages. There is no magic formula to get it right so getting your hands dirty and testing is vital. Always give some time for your campaigns to run before making changes.
8. Optimise your landing pages - build ppc specific landing pages on your site using the same keywords as your creatives and clear calls to action. Google uses a quality score for landing pages so consistency in messaging and optimisation matters.
9. Track, measure and report on your campaigns. Review results on a regular basis and updates campaigns accordingly. Bidding high on keywords is not always the best strategy, so you need to aim for high click through rates (CTR) and low cost per acquisition (CPA)
10. Make sure you website is organically optimised too and is ranked for your core keywords, as a presence in both paid and organic results will boost customers confidence.

Paid search can take a lot of resources from a business so make sure that you plan accordingly, and if you have a sufficient budget, going with a reputable search marketing agency to manage your campaigns is always a good option.

As always, if you need help planning your online marketing activities, let me know!
Have a great weekend

Social Media Optimisation- what to include in your strategy

As mentioned in the past few weeks, I've recently been working on a social media strategy and I'd like to share what I think are some essential elements to include for any business wanting to enter this vastly complex and ever changing area of online marketing. I don't intend this to be a definitive list, the be all end all of social media, but I think it represents a good mix of activities:

1 - Push strategy:

• Publish articles / content syndication: distribute your keyword rich content as widely as possible across the web through online article submission websites such as amazines, e-articles....
• Social bookmarking: encourage people to bookmark your content in websites such as digg, reddit, delicious, twitter....you can achieve this by publishing link worthy content on your site and add social bookmark buttons (explanations here)
  Create your own social bookmark accounts and tag your own articles to increase distribution
• RSS feeds: Create an RSS feed for your site and update it as regularly as possible. Distribute your feed and encourage signups with buttons on site.
  It is also advisable to link your feed to social media sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook
• Content distribution automation: try and automate as much of the processes as possible by developing website apps that will automatically sync your website with your social media tools (rss, twitter, social bookmakrs, blogs...)
• Social networking: it seems obvious, but you need to create individual accounts on each of the social media main sites (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace) The sites you regsiter on will depend on your tagret audience and its demographics
• Microblogging: Tweet as often as possible!
• Blogs: Build relationships with influential bloggers in your industry and try and publish your content on the blogs whenever possible as this will giv eyou some authority in the market
  
• Rich media: Use rich media such as videos to widen your appeal and distribute video content such as tutorials, guides on sites such as youtube

2 - Pull strategy:

• Link baiting: create link worthy contenton your site to attract visitors and increase your link popularity and make it as easy to syndicate as possible (buttons, feed...)
• Widgets: If you have the budget, create a downloadable widget for your site but be creative!
• Blogs: a blog is the perfect way to demonstrate what you do in a less formal environment that a corporate website. It can also become the hub of all your social media activities (and also help you search engine rankings)
• Forums: Engage and respond on a regular basis. If people talk about you in a forum ,whether it is negative or positive, make sure that you're there to respond.
  Use the forums to advise people and don't be too pushy, remember that customers like to talk, so listen!
• Viral campaigns / buzz marketing: viral marketing is a very tricky art to master, but if you get it right it could be worthwhile.

As you can see there are a lot of things to take into account when doing SMO (and I'm sure i've missed some too) but one thing to remember is that a good social media strategy will only work as a aprt of an overall integrated online marketing strategy. And as usual, tracking and reporting is key as you need to put your resources towards the most effective channel, so measure, measure and measure results to make sure you do the right thing.

Social media optimisation - helpful tools

Since I've been working on a social media strategy recently (I'll post more details soon), I thought I'd share some tools which I think could be useful to anybody managing their own SMO.

The first one is a social boomarking tool called Social Marker (http://www.socialmarker.com/). While some people may not think of social bookmarks sites as part of a social media strategy, they are a great way to syndicate your content using your own tags, especially when combined with buttons on your site.
The best feature of Social Marker is that it allows you to bookmark your content on all of the main social bookmarks sites at the click of a button (including delicious, reddit, digg, stumble upon...). Initial set up may take a while as you need to register individually on each of the sites, but once this is done, everything will be very straightforward.
When used with free social buttons (www.addthis.com), your social bookmarking efforts will never be the same again!

The next tool is a video upload service that allows you to upload your rich media on a wide range of video sites at the click of a button. The principle is the same as social marker with a slightly long initial setup (need to register on sites such as youtube, dailymotion...) and simplicity afterwards. Tube Mogul (http://www.tubemogul.com/) also gives you in depth analysis for each of your videos, allowing you to understand users behaviour across the sites.

Because social media can be extremely time consuming, it is becoming essential for any internet marketeer to automate a lot of the tasks. This can be a simple link between a blog/rss feed and twitter (http://twitterfeed.com/) but it can also mean developing apps that will automatically distribute new content from a website to sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Blogs, Twitter....I'm sure a few tools are readily available online, but bespoke solutions can be ideal if you have the web development resources.

Ok, so now you have the right tools to start implementing your strategy, but how do you measure it? While it is hard to find any free integrated social media effectiveness reporting tools, a few tips can help you measure basics fairly easily.
If you use google analytics, you can create a new segment to compare social media results with other marketing channels (paid, organic..) Instructions here. Being a bit of a Google Analytics fan myself, I can only highly recommend Brian Clifton's blog, Measuring Success.

Ploked.com also gives some really good info on which metrics you should use when measuring social media activities.

While I'm sure most of you enjoy spending time using social media, I think it is very important for any business to make the most out of this wonderful internet marketing channel by planning its growth and carefully measuring results.
Enjoy your weekend!

Social Media - what's the verdict?

Ah social media....everybody's talking about it, every company knows it needs to be in the social media sphere, but how do you approach it to make the most of it from a marketing point of view?
Well this is one the issues I'm facing right now thanks to budget cuts and limited resources!
Even though I've been working in online marketing for 7 years now, social media is still something I have to learn about as it changes every day, and the need for SMO (social media optimisation) is becoming critical to improve search engine rankings and customer interaction.
So where to start?

• I guess the first thing you need to do is be organised and have clear objectives.
• Tracking / reporting: decide on how you're going to measure you social media effectiveness and manage your online reputation (ORM - online reputation management)
• Start with the basics: get involved in relevant blogs and forums for your business as they could be a good source of leads and will allow customers to interact with you
• Create a Twitter (www.twitter.com) account only if you have resources to dedicate to it. The whole point of social marketing is responsiveness, so if you don't have the resources, don't do it. Microblogging is great but time consuming
  
• Target social networking sites if you have resources: Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace. Make sure you choose the right ones based on your target audience
  
• Create content/articles for syndication and link baiting - make sure that what you offer/talk about is interesting and link worthy. utlimately, you want to establish yourself as an authority in your field
• Social bookmarking: target social bookmarking sites like digg, delicious, stumble upon to broadcast your content/news/posts as widely as possible. an RSS feed can help here.
• If you have budget, widgets can also be helpful, without forgetting viral marketing campaigns
  
• Above all, keep control of what is happening and integrate your social media strategy within your overall online marketing strategy to get results
  

I know i'm probably missing a lot of things here, but this is just a start and I'll keep posting as I go along. Thankfully, my colleague Rochelle (www.rochelledancel.com) will be at hand to help me so hopefully I'll be able to come back with a good recipe for a perfect social media strategy!

Choosing a search marketing agency - a quick checklist

Since I'm currently trying to choose a search marketing agency for my company to help with our SEO/SMO strategy, I though it may be useful to give a quick reminder of what you should expect from a good agency before hiring one:

• A comprehensive content and technical audit to identify potential problems
• A level of support and consultancy adapted to your needs: since many agencies charge quite a significant amount per hour, it is worth having clear requirements before signing a contract
• An integrated strategy: all elements of the strategy should be working together
• Beware of companies offering top rankings, no self respecting agency would ever promise number 1 SE rankings for specific keywords
• Good reporting: since you're likely to spend large parts of your marketing of your budget on SEO/SMO and PPC, make sure you're provided with the right reporting tools as you'll need to measure ROI going forward
• Check for references, see who the agency is currently working with
• Remember, you may not need all of the bells and whistles on offer, so make sure you get the basics right (onsite optimisation / link building) before signing for complicated and expensive social media activities
• Always negotiate rates and never let an agency treat you like a small customer, no matter what your budget is
• Don't be afraid to ask questions if you're not sure about some of the terms mentioned
  
• Whichever agency you choose, responsiveness is key, so a good account manager needs to be available for you when you need

These are just some pointers to get you started and I'll go more into details of strategies in a future post.
If you want to know more, feel free to ask!
see you next, have a good weekend

Google Analytics for Blogger - How to

Hey again
Since I just wrote a long post about web analytics, thought it'd be worth adding a quick link on how to setup Google Analytics on a Blogger account
Here's an easy guide - http://www.eblogtemplates.com/how-to-install-google-analytics-on-blogger/

Let me know if you have questions, I'll be happy to help!

It's all about tracking - top tips to make the most of your web analytics tool

As you may know if you read my posts, I'm usually quite keen when it comes to web analytics. One of the main reasons why I work in online marketing is because everything is measurable, and there's nothing better than knowing that your marketing efforts are working (or if not, discover what's wrong).

• Which analytics tool?

While some products like WebTrends provide you with a huge amount of data, they can be tricky to set up, especially if you go for a server side installation. There are dozens of reporting tools available on the market, and the choice usually lies on bugdets and resources.
However, we can all thank Google for giving us Google Analytics. Although this free system has its limitations (only 4 goals per profile), it is really straightforward to use and will allow any internet enthusiast to find out more about what's happening on their website in an almost real time basis. it is a tried and tested product based on the old Urchin platform and is a great tool to get started in web analytics.

• Tips for web analytics beginners
  

Nowadays, it is crucial for any online business to understand visitors behaviour in order to achieve marketing objectives and improve user experience. One of the common pitfalls is to collect too much data and not knowing what to do with it, so here are a few tips to get you started:

1. Establish clear business/marketing objectives for the website
2. Select the right web analytics tool for your business
3. Define internet metrics based on these objectives
4. Set up your web analytics tool to capture data for these specific metrics
5. Gather data and present it in a simple, easy to understand format (build a web dashboard)
6. Review performance against marketing targets and change website accordingly
7. Go back to step 4 and repeat the process as regularly as possible
   

That's it for today, have a good weekend!

What makes a good online marketing strategy

Web marketing is a constantly evolving discipline and never has this been more obvious than now with the rise of social media and user generated content. I've worked in the online marketing/SEO industry for more than 7 years now and I still learn something new every day.
I worked on the online marketing strategy for my company the other day and thought I'd share what I think are fundamentals in any good strategy:

Search engine marketing

• Search engine optimisation:
  - on the page (metadata, content, alt tags, H tags, internal linking, keyword density, technical analysis) never forget that content is king!
  - off the page (link building, link baiting)
• Social media strategy:
  - Blogs/ forums
  - RSS feeds, social bookmarks, content aggregation sites
  - Social networking / microblogging (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn....)
  - Online reputation management
  
• Paid search:
  - Pay per click campaigns (Adwords, Yahoo search marketing, MSN)

Email marketing / Advertising

• internal campaigns for retention (existing customers, prospects/leads, lifecycle emails)
• Display advertising for acquisition (banners, sponsored emails, solus emails/3rd party emails)
• List rental for acquisition (targeted emails to key decision makers/ key sectors)

Web development

• Usability / User experience
• Copywriting
• Regular design review
• other business relevant projects (product launches, special offers....)
• Technical infrastructure
  

All of the above elements will only be effective if used in an integrated manner and as part of an overall marketing strategy.
And of course, I cannot finish this post without mentioning web analytics, the key to success for any marketeer! The strategy has to be implemented based on measurable business objectives and targets.
Well, that was a long post so hopefully somebody will read it and maybe benefit from it. Contact me if you would like to know more, I'm always happy to help.

Is Google's monopoly making life easier for internet marketers?

I was thinking this morning (yes, it happens!)...is Google's monopoly on the SE market such a bad thing? I've got to admit that it is sometimes frustrating as an online marketer to have only one point of reference for SEO, Google! That means that if you dont get your optimisation right, you could be missing out on 90% of potential traffic and business on your website.
However, from a reporting/tracking standpoint, this supremacy makes life a whole lot easier. I'm quite keen on web analytics, and I've got to say that having google as a benchmark for all marketing activities allows you to focus more.
This of course doesn't mean that you should neglect the other SE players such as Yahoo, Live (now Bing), Ask and others, as genuine business may come out of them, but Google always leads the way. I dont know of any business owner who would complain for his website not doing well in Yahoo...however, not seeing a website on the first SERP in google is a major drama in many companies.
I still hope though that the times when you had to understand several search engine algorithms come back as it would secure our jobs!

A new Wave

Yes, you've guessed it, we're talking about Google Wave...
and yes, Google has done it again. how do they manage to generate so much buzz each time they launch a new product? Reminds me of Apple each time they launch a new gadget. Let's hope they don't disappoint and give us something that can be useful in an online marketing environment

Who's next? Bing to replace Live

In the race to catch google, MSN is replacing Live with Bing....now, I've got 2 questions about this move: can anyone really catch google? don't get me wrong, I'd love to see more competition in the SE market, but it doesnt look like anyone's even close to matching google. Question 2: Bing?? seriously, if people are to use a search engine, do you really want to use bing as a name? http://www.bild.de/BILD/news/bild-english/home/regularieninhalte/world-news-ticker/world/2009/05/29/microsoft-announce-bing-search-engine-to-tackle-google-monopoly.html

On a more personal note, I finished writing the online marketing strategy for www.paypoint.net this week, and it took me much longer than expected. The more SEO and online marketing goes, the more complex it gets....and having met a social media strategist yesterday, I can see that there's a lot more to do! But I also get more and more passionate about what I do and I'd love to use my skills to help SMEs learn more about internet marketing....I really need to start marketing myself.
Have a good weekend everybody

Is Yahoo still in the search engine game?

Looks like Yahoo is willing to invest in social media start-ups...too little too late? and to be honest, I don't really think Twitter can be judged as a start up anymore http://www.businessinsider.com/five-startups-yahoo-could-buy-2009-5

Online marketing consulting services

I'm wondering at the moment...do I have the right skills to do some online marketing consultancy? I think this could be good for my future so if anybody needs an experienced online marketer, I'm your man! Ideally I'd like to work with SME's who are just getting started online and want to know more about online marketing strategies, SEO, PPC management, online advertising, and web analytics as it is one of my favourite subjects at the moment.
Let's see how it goes

Twitterfeed...it's about time!

Ok, time for me to get into the social media age....today, I'm trying Twitterfeed with my blog. I've got to admit that a post was long overdue, but hey I've been busy getting married, working hard on SEO, PPC, web analytics and other marketing fun recently