Get More from Search - Your Concentrated Serving of Search

The social media hype continues and is enticing companies of every shape and size to dabble in creating new networks. To facilitate the craze, dozens of open source social networking platforms have launched. Jeremiah Owyyang’s blog lists over 60 brandable software platforms that can plug into your existing domain, allowing you to create your very own social network.  But should any company build a social network?

In a Deloitte study of 100 businesses with online communities, Ed Moran found that 35% of these communities have less than 100 members and less than 25% have 1000 members. 6% of the businesses studied spent over $1 million on their social networks. Sadly, all too many fail at their attempts to connect customers to their brand because instead of focusing on the community itself, businesses are focusing on the value that social community could provide for their business.

Despite the failures, there are definitely industries that DO have ready-made communities with well-established brand alliance, and have a greater chance of building successful online communities. These verticals might include: local television networks (daily news watchers), radio (listening audiences), niche local communities (apartment renters, child-safe search) and education (school districts, private schools, universities).

Clark County School District, the 5th largest school district in the nation with nearly 300,000 students, was a few years back, reportedly the largest user of bandwidth in the Las Vegas valley. Schools are instant communities – not just in the “will you be my friend” sense of students, but in the student to teacher, student to parent and teacher to parent and relationships. Because they already have distinguishable groups in these necessary and long-standing relationships, Clark County can foster those relationships through a community network, which they’ve begun to explore with the CCSD website.  Feedback mechanisms aren’t yet extant, but Homework Hotline, a public television program, gives students an outlet during the week to call in and ask teachers their tough homework assignment questions. Their content management system, my.CCSD.net reach the three main constituents in these ways: 1) teachers can create personalized websites to communicate with students and parents; 2) students can access to homework resources and assignments; 3) parents can locate their children’s classroom and assignment information online without involving the child or teachers. A cursory look at some teacher sites didn’t provide a lot in the way of content or personalization, but it is summer after all – the start of the school year should light this online community back up.

Another example where community exists is the multifamily industry. Most multifamily companies have a couple clear-cut missions in life (e.g. collecting rents and driving occupancy rates), and one of those is to establish and promote their brand for longer-term connection with an increasingly transient population.  Before signing a rental contract, an individual needs to identify with what that apartment provides. Thus, the rental market is now driven by amenities. “Lifestyle” is the buzzword for providing more than a roof over people’s heads at the right price and location. Now, apartment companies need to provide online services ranging from rent pay to pet sitting to VIP concierge services and customized local search while hosting real live social activities such as community pool parties, golf instruction classes and more. While it may sound exhausting (and it probably is), apartment companies are finally optimizing their built-in community of residents and finding creative ways to connect the residents together, along with meaningful lifestyle amenities that cement the value of their brand, while gaining loyalty in the minds of renters.

Riverstone Residential, the nation’s third largest apartment management company representing around 340,000 residents, offers a moving program, Riverstone-to-Riverstone. This amenity helps transfer residents to another Riverstone community within a metro or across the country, sans application process and deposit fees. Combined with their Living Made Easy features, including “Your Neighborhood Directory,” a local search engine launched in three metros, where users can find “just down the street” local businesses via a true search results format (e.g. not just Yellow Page data), residents benefit from buying into the Riverstone community and the value it provides to their daily lives.

Morals of the story:

• If you don’t have a pre-existing community, don’t assume that you can create one (and don’t spend a lot of money trying to create one).
• If you do have a pre-existing community (and they already visit your website regularly), focus on the value that your social network will provide to your users.

Are mainstream online marketing services the answer to helping small businesses increase their online exposure and profits? Sam’s Club seems to think so. But does that make it so?

Sam’s Club’s LeadConnect offers online advertising services packages starting at $25/month that include submitting the local business’ profile to search engines and Yellow Page directories.

Those in the search industry know that good search engine optimization and marketing techniques include a substantial education cycle and far more action than “hand submissions” to the major search engines and directories. While we’re all for local businesses giving online a chance, it probably isn’t in their best interest to market this type of service without educating on what will really drive results.

Even pay-per-click advertising isn’t the end of a dedicated SEO campaign. Your website has to feature relevant, well-organized content that speaks your customer’s language and provides a 2-way feedback loop between business and customer. Being found because you submitted to the search engines is a long shot, and even if searchers do find you, you still have to engage and support their discovery process.

What local businesses need is education – not a laborious SEO university education – but some cursory knowledge of what constitutes a results-driven online initiative. Then, they need help in taking the appropriate actions for their budget and specialty.

It’s not just about submitting listings or buying placement – it’s about how you represent online and whether your online presence is as worthwhile to visit as your offline location. And if SMBs don’t understand this, they’ll spend that $25 or $100 a month and not see adequate results. They could become bitter about the Internet and search marketing in general.

Making SEO mainstream sends a message that brands are built by hands-off methods. Truth is, it’s going to take more than $25/month and a one-time web form to make it online. Education and a little manageable action are the keys to using the power of the online community to a small business’ advantage.

If ever there was a time to engage and reach out to your customers, it’s now. There are so many ways of letting your good customer practices shine. Yes, social media and customer-centric practices can be uncomfortable to step into, but the end product can mean loyal customer partners for life.

Take in this real-life story about a company with heart – and get some inspiration for your own sincerely driven efforts to positively impact the lives of your customers. Zappos’ uncalled for sympathy, as reported by Zaz Lamarr in her personal blog, “Writing, Cooking, Life,” has sparked a lot of publicity online. We doubt that was the end intention of Zappos, but rather that it was a random act of kindness. There were people at the company thinking from the heart rather than the head who went beyond the rules to let a customer know they really care.

I Heart Zappos

I really do.

One bright, extraordinary note in all of the sad stuff of the last few weeks - in May we had ordered several pairs of shoes from Zappos for my mom. She’d lost a lot of weight, and her old shoes were all too big. She had a whole new wardrobe of clothes in pretty colors, that fit, so I wanted her to have some pretty shoes that fit, too, when I took her up to Oregon to stay where her sister is. Out of seven pairs, only two fit. Not bad considering she’d never been this thin, so I was winging it, and the return shipping is free.

The rest were here waiting to be returned. Because of various circumstances - lost label, my mom being hospitalized and me being away, the shoes were never sent back. There’s a time limit on the return of 15 days. Remember this. When you do a return to them, they pay the shipping, but you have to get the shoes to UPS yourself. Remember this, also.

When I came home this last time, I had an email from Zappos asking about the shoes, since they hadn’t received them. I was just back and not ready to deal with that, so I replied that my mom had died but that I’d send the shoes as soon as I could. They emailed back that they had arranged with UPS to pick up the shoes, so I wouldn’t have to take the time to do it myself. I was so touched. That’s going against corporate policy.

Yesterday, when I came home from town, a florist delivery man was just leaving. It was a beautiful arrangement in a basket with white lilies and roses and carnations. Big and lush and fragrant. I opened the card, and it was from Zappos. I burst into tears. I’m a sucker for kindness, and if that isn’t one of the nicest things I’ve ever had happen to me, I don’t know what is. So…

IF YOU BUY SHOES ONLINE, GET THEM FROM ZAPPOS.

With hearts like theirs, you know they’re good to do business with.

You’ve inspired us all, Zappos. We encourage all companies to think outside the sometimes stuffy lines of corporate-to-consumer relations and think like a human, with heart.

Author: Mark Morris

Search Engine Marketing, has frustrated even the most technically savvy marketers. A necessary part to the online marketing area, including affiliate programs, email marketing, online placement, and sponsorships, requires that a smart marketer not only understand business objectives but then applies them to the major components of Search Engine Marketing.

1. TRACKING YOUR R.O.I. SEM (Search Engine Marketing) can be tracked far better than some other forms of advertising. You track success of campaigns right down to the exact keyword or phrase a searcher typed in to find you. With the proper implementation of analytics software you can tweak your ROI more easily.

2. TESTING YOUR PERFORMANCE In general, testing online advertising is easier than offline. But in the case of SEM it’s even better. Test things on the fly and see what performed better.

3. PRE-QUALIFIED Most searchers have ALREADY MADE A BUYING DECISION. They are using search engines to research vendors and products. Prospects from search are usually more qualified.

4. CONTROL Because SEM is so flexibel you have more control over you message. YOu can create a more relevant message to each of your targets.

5. INFORMATION WEALTH Because there is such a big boom in SEM right now, there is a wealth of information to be found. SEM is not as mysterious as it used to be and much easier to jump in to.

About the author:

We cracked the code to making a fortune on the Internet, and we can teach anyone how to do this. Will it take work? Yes. Is there a small learning curve? Yes. But can you do it? YES!

www.CashWaveTraffic.com

Assuming you are already into an affiliate program, what would be the next thing you would want to do? Double, or even triple, your commissions, right? How do you do that?

www.Netprofits.PRomoBlackBox.com

Our attention spans are shorter these days. With the immediate answers available from search engines, we’ve come to expect more from the websites we visit. As such, we’re all guilty of nibbling on site after site, looking for the right combination of design, content and product that will stop us in our tracks and engage our busy minds.

Your website visitors follow this same pattern. If, for instance, your website takes too long to load, they’ll just continue onto another site. Your goal as a website owner is to slow visitors down, giving them time to absorb your message and let your product or service make a lasting impression. So how do you capture their attention without frustrating them?

Simple is better. If you give people too many choices they will become overwhelmed and will go to a site that will make it easier for them to choose. Even if your company prides itself on a plethora of products and services, your bottom line will be better served by putting the spotlight on a few timely, best-selling products and guiding visitors to learn more about those products. A little bit of information can go a long way. Don’t overwhelm users with the details. Instead, focus on the information that is important to them – often the key benefits and purchase-critical information (shipping, privacy, guarantees, customer service, etc.). If you provide them with too much information it will confuse them instead of clarifying the offering.

Relevant content is great, but too much or the wrong content is great at driving people away. You’re the expert in your field, but don’t expect your visitors to read protracted discourses on your company’s virtues. Those are better left for business plans, not for websites. Remember the simple is better philosophy and always be relevant. Strive for engaging, succinct editorial that invites an action. Try call-outs in the sidebars with various call to action items to cater to various personalities – make sure that your visitors can get to know and get in touch with your company in the method they’re most comfortable with.

Limit distractions. There’s always the potential that an engaged visitor one second will become another site’s visitor or customer the next. Incorporating third-party ads can be a great income generator, but they can also invite site hopping. Go for ad serving technologies where you can control the ad content and disable competitive messaging whenever possible. Your goal is to keep visitors on your site as long as possible because the longer they stay; the more likely they are to purchase a product or service.

Remove the stumbling blocks. Leaving the prospect with the potential for too many decisions will send a 90% closed sale into a missed opportunity. Once a visitor turns into a prospect, you’ve got to make absolutely certain that they have all the decision making pieces in full view (i.e. price) or within one pop-up window away of “Buy now” or “Contact us.”  Abandonment is often due to not enough of the right information and that’s just an unnecessary faux pas.   

Design for easy navigation. Keep your page design fairly consistent to minimize confusion. Site visitors look for critical information in the top menu of a website – so make sure the most important pages and action items are always visible.

Not driving visitors away from your site means slowing them down long enough to understand your message and learn why they should buy your product or service. To do this, incorporate these principles:  keep it simple, relevant, non-distracting, decision-making friendly and easily navigable. By doing this, you’ll convert visitors who really want to learn and enter into a purchase. The people who are just nibbling aren’t ready to convert – but your site will be memorable and who knows, they just might come back when they’re ready to stay.

We know that search is the #1 tool that consumers use when researching products and services but it’s interesting to see that other media continues to facilitate the motivation to search.  

In a survey conducted by BIGresearch for the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association, it was found that consumers are often motivated to search after interacting with other media outlets including magazines (47.2%), reading an article (43.7%), watching television (42.8%) and reading a newspaper (42.3%). Men are more likely than women to start a search after listening to the radio (34.4% vs. 24.9%) while women are more likely to respond to receiving coupons than men (41.8% vs. 29.0%).

Which outlet deserves more attention from your budget? It depends on your audience’s media patterns. Market research and studies will help you drill down the particular areas you need to focus on, but the new purchase pattern of consumers and businesses involves a multiple media approach – and that means that your business must adopt the same pattern for your marketing campaigns.

While many forms of advertising are beneficial, such as product reviews in magazines, radio ads, and relevant TV commercials, it is unlikely that the prospect will act on that information immediately. Over time, repeated exposure or a genuine need will drive your customers to a search engine where they’ll begin their decision-making process in earnest.

While we’ve been reading about this paradigm shift for a few years now, the connection is still far from seamless in the minds of so many marketers. Yet, the new reality is that advertising is a means to drive traffic to your website or to vertical sites that foster the research/purchase cycle - and that actuality can take some getting used to.

Crossing the chasm to capture the purchase cycle interest requires that you always feature online activities (search, website, communities) in the call to action in all ad campaigns. Based on the knowledge that the majority of your customers are going to look in search engines for you or visit your site directly when you’ve caught their attention, then you must gear everything you do toward that behavior.

If you’re running a magazine ad for a new high-tech add-on to an existing product, prominently feature a micro-site for that product. That micro-site can do more for conversions than 1000 full-page ads ever could. It’s about delivering the complete decision-making package to the prospect instantly: text, video demonstrations, customer testimonials, and if applicable, outgoing links to retailers/reviews/social networks that support your product. And don’t stop with creating micro-sites, practice best SEO techniques to get the most relevant content into the search engines ASAP.

Additionally, you should customize the online destination for each campaign for the audience and the product. Sometimes, a favorable product review might be the best landing page for a campaign. Or, if you have an active blog community that engages a loyal readership and creates a transparency with your brand, that might be the best scenario for a buyer demographic that thrives on casual but intelligent repartee. 

Another important realization is that your consumers will communicate with each other after they have purchased your product.

Joe Pilotta, Vice President of BIGresearch says, “Retailers must realize that online communities are now producers and through their stories are able to extend the distribution of traditional media with a trust and truth not even approximated by mass media.”

Word of mouth is a powerful tool and even online consumers are most likely to communicate about a product or service face-to-face (68.9%), but bear in mind that consumers do utilize other methods for communicating their experiences: email (53.1%), telephone (50.9%), and cell phones (30.0%). Young adults are more apt to use new media sources to communicate about products and services they have purchased, including instant messaging (37.5%), text messaging (23.7%), and online communities (20.6%).

In summary, a diverse advertising strategy is important, but it has to: 1) communicate to your audience within the media that they’re most likely to interact with; 2) drive potential customers to the Web where they will search for your brand, make their decisions and communicate with other consumers post-purchase.

Online video is the rising star in the advertising community. Why then do so many large companies continue to advertise with display ads? According to data from TNS Media Intelligence Vonage, AT&T and Dell spent a combined $489 million on display ads in 2006. Display ads hold 21% of the market share with US online advertisers while online video only holds 8% of the market share. That places display ads with triple the amount of market share over online video. This doesn’t mean that marketers are dissing online video, however. While advertising spending for display ads will remain flat over the next few years, online video will steadily increase until by 2011 they will have 17% of the market share for online advertisers.

Companies are finding that the more diversified you make your advertising the more effective your campaign will be. A study was released in December 2006 by comScore Networks that determined that if companies utilize both search and display advertising their campaign will be more engaging and effective than companies that use a single type of advertising campaign. Per the study, online users who were exposed to both display and search advertising increased their page views compared to competing sites by 68% and increased their time on the sites by 66%. Among those exposed also increased their purchases of the advertisers products and services by 244% online and 89% offline when compared to online users with similar behavior who didn’t view the ads.

Diversifying your marketing campaigns take planning, but an engaging multimedia campaign will pay you back with better ROI and make you look like the company rock star. All advertising is important; you just have to research what truly works best for your company and utilize the outlets that best connect with and influence your future customers.

How did you develop the information at your website? Did you use offline material or spin off content from press releases, news items or your internal communications? Then, did you layer on some graphics, maybe a little Flash animation to jazz it up some programming and think that your audience would get the message?

In actuality, your website may be failing to communicate the message you really intend to offer to your visitors. You need to open a dialog to effectively communicate - and you can start by thinking of your visitors as an audience that gives feedback, instead of just customers with credit cards in hand. Doing so can create a more enjoyable user experience, and will keep them at your site longer, engaged with your brand. This in turn creates the end goal you desire: more sales from a more loyal customer base.

The question begs, “how do I go about creating an interesting website that will engage my precious site visitors, turn them into an audience and then into customers?  A very successful method is to create a website that blends information, entertainment and community.

While the written word is the foundation for your website – it’s necessary for search engine optimization and it engages the reader types among your audience – some Web 2.0 tools are within reach for most companies and offer so much benefit for the investment.

One tool that can help do that is web video.  Video has a lot going for it, providing a platform to showcase your products, employees, customers or affiliated events in a rich media experience that is becoming commonplace. Video presentations need to have enough value to them that people want to share them with others and both the presentations and content must create a memorable experience that entertains the individual.

Video is not the place to lay on the sales pitch - your audience is looking to be entertained, not hit over the head with a self-serving show. Instead, create short videos that work together in creating a subtle brand campaign – engaging enough to keep their interest – and fresh enough to keep them coming back to find out what happens next. The underlying theme is your product, but the consumer is being entertained in the process. Buy-ready consumers are more likely to remember brands that entertained them.

Look to the Internet for other successful campaigns, Video sharing sites (i.e. www.youtube.com) and Web advertising awards (i.e. www.webbyawards.com) are a great place to start for what’s viral and what’s got the attention of consumers and brand marketers alike.

To improve your website, start the thought process from scratch – how can you best communicate with your online audience? Web users form an opinion about your company within seconds of reaching a website. Capture them with fresh content and keep them coming back with engagement tools like video. Stop talking (about your company) – instead, start communicating.

How do you create ongoing buzz about your company and speak directly to your buyers? The answer is press releases. The online environment provides an ideal canvas for distributing the news that your customers and prospects need to know about you.  And you don’t necessarily need a PR agency to write or distribute them for you. Online distribution outlets such as PRWeb, allow any size business to create and maintain an active press release campaign with little cost. Online press releases can give you more exposure with little cost and can drive quality traffic to your site. As a communication strategy, it is important to distribute releases on a regular basis to help keep your company in the front view of your consumers.

Random content won’t do though: you’ll need to set down some guidelines for your campaign. These include what you are going to include in your press releases, how you are going to create brand awareness and how you are going to get and maintain quality exposure for your company. Online press releases aren’t a license to be self-serving in your message; the content needs to be news-worthy first and foremost.  Focus on the customer, write about the benefits they’ll receive because of your new product development or how your latest partnership will yield them a better/faster/cheaper experience. PRWeb’s guidelines provide an excellent mental checklist as you develop copy. David Meerman Scott’s “New Rules of PR”  ebook is a must-read for anyone delving into the online press distribution space. You’ll understand how to write to your audience, what outlets to use and how to strategize a release schedule for consistent exposure. 

Some of the items you need to include in your press releases are the same things you need to include on your website, which include links and keywords. When you are constructing your campaign your goal is to create in-bound links to your site. You manage this through creating a press release that is rich in keywords that relate to your site, but you want to be careful to not over saturate your press release. Incorporating a good balance of two to three keywords is optimal, with a primary keyword and two secondary keywords. It is essential to research your keyword selections to make sure your keywords are geared toward your target audience and subject matter.

Brand awareness is important when working on your press release. You can optimize your press releases by utilizing media portals such as PRWeb and Internet News Bureau. Both websites will help you syndicate your press release to thousands of news outlets. It is imperative to include back links to a relevant landing page as it will provide valuable traffic to your site. 

As always, when creating any type of content for your site, whether it is press releases, blogs, articles or general product information, it is important to maintain a consistent voice and strategy in order to maximize the potential for long-term exposure for your business. If you provide great content with optimization you should be able to yield good results for your press release campaign.

Once you’ve created your blog and added intriguing content, you might think that the visitors will just start flowing in. Not necessarily so. Relevant content is just the beginning: you have to attract visitors to your site to complete the loop. Then, to engage them on an ongoing basis, you’ll need to maintain fresh content so that inbound links and bookmarks keep the repeat and new visitors coming.

But how do you get the online community interested in your company enough that they’ll share links and bookmark your site? Creating buzz, or more simply, word-of-mouth, takes some serious planning, but with the plethora of social media sites now popular, you can pick and choose which sites will best serve your brand.

What makes your company buzzworthy? Is it superior customer service, beautiful products, new or improved facilities, being environmentally conscious, solving an age-old dilemma, being featured in a slew of unsolicitied press, or passionate community-oriented customers? What’s intriguing about social media is that it relies on user-generated content (UGC). That means that you can create an interactive environment to annouce the buzz and let the conversation begin.

To locate and maintain new site visitors, identify which social media sites best complement your site, products and services. Then, join as many as make sense from a content, audience and campaign maintenance standpoint so that you reach the broadest audience. The most popular UGC sites include MySpace, YouTube, del.icio.us, Wikipedia, Digg and Squidoo. Because these are such popular sites with excellent page ranks, your contributions can get you noticed by major search engines very quickly.

For instance, if your company has made a commitment to preserving the environment, creat a MySpace page that highlights a particular environmental issue and subtly note that your company donates a protion of its revenues to this cause. Invite other MySpace users to comment on the issue; you might be surprised at the passionate response engendered by people far and wide. You’ll create awareness for the issue and for your company. These types of impressions stick long after the social media site is viewed. You’re creating a community that identifies with your company which means that the next time you MySpace friends need what you offer, they’ll most likely think of your website. But don’t disappoint - make sure that your website is prepared for this focused traffic. Update your home page with links to subpages that relate to these user-generated campaigns. Generating traffic via engaged users can mean loyal, long-term customers - something no business can ever get enough of.