Visibility Magazine Summer 2012 Edition by Visibility Magazine

THE MAGAZINE FOR ONLINE MARKETING STRATEGIES

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Summer 2012 | $9.95

The Shareholders

Called Today.

They Hate Our Website! By Josh Dalton

Remarketing By Alex Cleanthous

What is your SEO really costing you? By Daniel Laws

How Ecommerce Drives In-Store Sales By Jennifer Dunphy

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departments

06 Editorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Note

Read all about the latest happenings with this growing magazine.

08 Featured CMO Marc Poirier, Co-Founder and CMO, Acquisio

With more than a decade of experience, Marc Poirier is all geared up to spread the word about how the search/online advertising environment is shaping up.

11 Quarterly Round-Up

Snapshots of all that is happening in the world of internet marketing. Get the scoop on all the news and views in the world of internet marketing. Latest news related to products, tools and strategies being unveiled.

20 Legal Corner

Featuring in the Legal Corner this edition, Travis Crabtree talks about who really owns your Twitter and LinkedIn followers.

28 Visi Book Club

Through the power of stories and branding strategies; comes a book by Jim Signorelli titled Storybranding, featured in this issue.

33 Product Review: HubSpot

Here is an all-in-one online marketing software that can be the solution for many a online marketer. Visibility takes a look at an interesting new software called Hubspot.

43 Vendor Spotlight: Telligent

As a leading enterprise social community and workforce collaboration software, Telligent is under the spotlight in this edition.

60 Upcoming Conferences

A guide to upcoming internet marketing related conferences around the globe. At these conferences, you can listen to the insightful experiences of the leading names from the internet marketing industry.

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features

16 A Guide to Understand App Tracking in the Mobile Space | Part One

Michael Dewhirst has some good news for Visibility readers. Read on to find solutions to the problems currently facing the mobile world in this first of a two part article.

22 Remarketing: The ‘Secret’ Strategy Online Marketers are Using to Dominate Their Market Alex Cleanthous explores the world of remarketing and how this powerful tool can be used for targeted marketing.

25 Local Mobile Optimization Key to Monetizing Consumers’ Mobile Fascination

Local mobile optimization, once analyzed and understood, can be of great value for businesses small and large, says Bill Dinan.

40 The Shareholders Called Today. They Hate Our Website! If you want your website to make an impact then you need to turn it into a moneymaking machine. Josh Dalton takes a look at how your website can be transformed to work in your favor.

44 What is Your SEO Really Costing You?

Is SEO as simple as people think it is? Apparently not! Daniel Laws delves into what SEO is really about and how marketers can tap into its true value.

50 How Ecommerce Drives In-Store Sales

Jennifer Dunphy discovers that the real potential of Ecommerce lies in figuring out the online behavior of buyers and what drives them to buy online.

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SUMMER 2012 www.visibilitymagazine.com

50 Summer 2012

Visibility

editor ’ s note Hello Readers, Would you believe it? Right before I sat down to write this note, I was on my phone. I finished half my chores for the day by just using my phone. That really got me thinking about the role that our phones play in our day to day lives. Rather the extent to which we use our phones these days. Those who have been part of this field know that the buzz words these days all have to do with mobile - be it mobile optimization, mobile advertising, or mobile apps. The advantage that mobile phones have over traditional computer-based internet marketing is that mobile phones are always in our hands or our pockets. It didn’t take marketers too long to figure out that if internet marketing is a success, then mobile marketing is only going to be more successful. Marketers, who struggle to tap into their customer base, are delighted to have a platform where they can be reached directly and with relatively less effort. So in this edition we decided to take a look at mobile marketing and what keeps this world ticking. Some insightful articles that will definitely get you into the groove are: Alex Cleathous’ “Remarketing: The ‘Secret’ Strategy Online Marketers are Using to Dominate Their Market”, Bill Dinan’s “Local Mobile Optimization Key to Monetizing Consumers’ Mobile Fascination”, Daniel Laws’ “What’s Your SEO Really Costing You?”, Jennifer Dunphy’s “How Ecommerce Drives In-Store Sales” and Josh Dalton’s “The Shareholders Called Today. They Hate Our Website!” amongst others. Don’t forget to check out our CMO Spotlight on Marc Poirier of Aquisio and Vendor Spotlight on Telligent. The product review on Hubspot would also be of interest to anyone looking to be more visible online. Our attempt with each edition of Visibility has always been to bring the best of the latest to you in a simple, interesting and useful manner. Our articles are geared, not only to arouse interest, but also to inform our readers with the latest news in the internet marketing realm. As always, we would love to hear what you have to say and if you have an article to submit to us then we’d love to take a look. Visit our website (www.visibilitymagazine.com) for more information.

Visibility EDITOR Julie Lynn EXECUTIVE EDITOR Jeev Trika SENIOR PROJECT EDITOR Neeraj Kumar ASSISTANT EDITOR Bonnie Hagen PRODUCTIONS ASSISTANT Cameron Kriss STAFF WRITER Ajay Govind SENIOR DESIGNER Armando Rangel CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Alex Cleanthous | Web Profits Travis Crabtree | Looper Reed & McGraw Josh Dalton | Netmark Miki DeHaven | Web Talent Marketing Michael Dewhirst | StrikeAd Bill Dinan | Telmetrics Jennifer Dunphy | Vayu Media Allie Gray Freeland | CollegeOnline.org Peter Hamilton | HasOffers Adam Heitzman | Higher Visibility Richard Kersey | RazorIT.com Kim Ann King | SiteSpect Daniel Laloggia | Walker Sands Communications Daniel Laury | LSD Network Daniel Laws | DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC

Enjoy!

Kaitlin Pike | Marketing Consultant

Julie Lynn, Editor

Geno Prussakov | AM Navigator Marcus Tober | Searchmetrics William Verbist | Verkuhl Visit us at WWW.VISIBILITYMAGAZINE.COM Mailing Address: P.O Box 1073, Plymouth, IN 46563 Editorial Department Phone: 800-380-4165 Editorial Department Fax: 888-559-8909 Letters to the Editor: editor@visibilitymagazine.com Visibility Magazine, LLC SHALL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL OR INDIRECT DAMAGES RESULTING FROM YOUR ACCESS TO, OR USE OF, OR INABILITY TO USE THE MAGAZINE AND THE MAGAZINE CONTENT, WHETHER BASED ON WARRANTY, CONTRACT, TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE) OR ANY OTHER LEGAL THEORY. Visibility Magazine, LLC WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY MISPRINTS.

Visibility

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The Global Event for

Real-Time Marketers

Oct. 13 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 18, 2012 | Mandalay Bay | Las Vegas

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featured cmo

Marc Poirier, Co-Founder And CMO M

arc Poirier has been in the search industry for more than a decade, starting out with a Ph. D. in Cognitive Science and a few entrepreneurial ventures later, helping launch a company called Acquisio. At Acquisio, his main goal is to spread the word about how the search/online advertising environment is changing and what agencies need to do to be ready for it.

What are your main services?

At Acquisio, our job is to help agency leaders become more successful. We focus on the COOs, the VPs of operations and

services and the people who are in charge of delivering results to the clients—we spend a lot of time working backward from their roles and responsibilities to give them the tools that they need to successfully do their jobs. Today we’re focusing on how we can help in terms of paid media, specifically helping agencies that focus on paid online advertising including search, Facebook and display.

What makes your firm different from other companies competing in your industry?

We work backward from the agency and its problems rather than focusing on the end client. Agencies have a specific set of problems that are radically different from the problems faced by their clients, the advertisers. We realize that in order for our clients to be successful, they need to make their clients more successful, and we ask ourselves as a technology provider how can we help companies like this?

Tell us more about your firm’s success story. We started off in 2003 as an agency, managing SEO and PPC campaigns for a number of Canadian blue chip companies, and it wasn’t long before we ran into some scaling issues. We were spending 2-3 weeks every month assembling reports and then doing it all

Visibility

Summer 2012

over again the next month. We knew we needed to be more efficient, and so we tried a few bid management platforms (some still on the market today!) and realized that they didn’t meet our needs—it could help us gather info, but left a big hole in the area of client communication. In going through all of this we realized that the problems we were having were a different set of problems that bid management software wasn’t solving. So we decided to build our own platform in 2006. At first we thought we could operate the agency and simultaneously develop the software, but then we realized that there was an opportunity to take this software to market and target agencies, so in 2007 we sold the agency and hired developers with the proceeds from the sale. In February 2008 we had our first two paying customers on the platform. And today we have more than 300 agencies, 10,000 brands and 4,000 users on the platform. We’ve also completed two rounds of financing, and have grown from 7-8 people to more than 100 today.

According to you, what are the most important questions a potential customer should ask a company before choosing a vendor like you?

They need to understand that it’s important to ask the vendor to show specifically how their solution maps against the customer’s problems. It’s not about listening to a sales pitch, but about asking them to show you how your platform/solution will help solve your problems and not break the bank.

What are some of the myths in your field?

People assume that they won’t be able to afford the type of product that we provide. Instead of focusing on how much our platform costs, we suggest that potential clients instead focus on identifying the issues that their company is facing, how big they are, and what those issues are costing the client every week, month, or year. So if your issue is the fact that you’re working on reports or trafficking URLs for 3 weeks out of every month, then

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there is a real dollar cost associated with that as well as the cost of being unable to bring additional value to your client campaigns, and the cost of being unable to successfully scale your business.

How do you develop your skills in this continuously changing environment?

I’m still somewhat hands on with campaigns, and with other tasks like organizing trade shows, selecting print advertising, helping to oversee the company’s image, PR and communications. I also continue to read a lot and write a lot.

What do you see as the future of the industry? What will be the challenges? Do you anticipate any drastic changes?

Right now, there’s this proliferation of channels, and the sheer number of channels that any marketer needs to manage can be a problem. First we had search—and search had tremendous growth. Now, mobile is growing faster than search, and faster than display. Mobile is a big deal and people need to understand how and why it is different and growing, and need to start devising campaigns and experiences specifically for the mobile channel.

and look where we are now. I anticipate television advertising will move to a real time bidding (RTB) model similar to display. We’ll be able to bid for TV spots based on who is watching it and also doing data-based retargeting. Rather than seeing the demise of the television as a relevant medium, we’ll see television advertising explode as soon as we can buy ads that focus on an individual. The ability to create dynamic, interactive for television will create a great branding channel. We’ll be able to continue direct marketing opportunities on television so that we’re actively moving people through the sales process. And when I say this, I’m literally thinking about something like being able to do more than just change channels with your remote control; soon you will be able to point the remote at the TV and order the product being shown to you in the ad. All of this speaks to the fact that we’ll have even more data from all channels to make sense of—and making sense of all of this stuff and how it affects brands and companies will create a tremendous opportunity for agencies to step in, help their clients sort the data, and handle all of their marketing and advertising needs for them across channels. Having the ability and the technology to handle all of this data across all of these channels will be key, and because of the proliferation of channels I think we’re going to see performance marketing agencies needing to start managing much more than their clients AdWords’ accounts if they want to take advantage of the opportunity.

I’m also helping coach students at the University of Montreal for the Google Challenge, helping them learn how to use Google AdWords, and how to become a good PPC manager, so that need to know what’s changing over time so I can pass it along to my students definitely keeps me current. We also have an agency (Clix Marketing) that manages Acquisio’s paid search accounts and I work closely with them to get insights on what they’re seeing. And last but not least I work with adCenter in a somewhat informal role to provide insights and thoughts. From the moment I get up until I go to bed, I read, write and think about Internet marketing --it’s in every minute of the day.

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In terms of the area where I see the opportunity for the most drastic change, that would be in the realm of television advertising. With interactive TVs, users will be able to be followed across different channels—what they access on their interactive TV can be tracked alongside what they interact with on their smartphone, and what they do online on their computer at work or their laptop at home. With this level of tracking, I anticipate advertisers being able to use this information to target people like me, and exclude the rest of the people watching the same program. It may seem like a difficult challenge to see how we’d manage television as a relevant ad channel, but remember just five years ago the same challenge applied to mobile marketing

Where do you see your firm in the next 5 years? What about you personally?

As far as Acquisio, I see us becoming the salesforce.com of the agency vertical. We really want to focus on empowering agencies across all of their activities, not just paid media and not just media in general. We want to be able to support all of the activities in their organizations. As far as me personally, in five year’s I’ll be happy to still be at Acquisio, evangelizing for what we do and spreading the word about how we can help agencies face their unique challenges. I’ll still be speaking, writing articles, and thinking of what we’re going to do next, and will be there to provide some insight and vision into where agencies are going and how we map our products against that. n

Summer 2012

Visibility

quarterly round up Dell Plans Business-Focused Windows Tablet

iPad 4G: The New Name for Video Games? It came as no surprise that when the iPad 4G released, it would make waves. It did. And as has been the case every time a new Apple product is launched, the long lines outside Apple stores is only an indication of the craze that these products are all over the world. But what has always been interesting to see are the changes in trends that new Apple products manage to bring about. The same has been the case with the new iPad 4G. This new, sleek iPad is getting much attention from the video game industry as game developers start looking towards making video games for the iPad. Many game developers are

putting their time and energy into figuring out ways to see how the latest graphic-intensive games can be migrated on to iPads. The fact of the matter is that iPads sell like hot cakes and it seems that they will soon be taking over the number of consoles that are selling in the market. It only makes sense that developers would be interested in seeing their games being played on as many devices as possible. Now the world is just waiting for the iPad to have the processing power of the Xbox 360 and for it to connect to the television, so that their iPad gaming experience will be the best it can.

The War for Top Smartphone With almost half the population of the United States already using a smart phone, the big fight to become the leader in the smart phone market is raging on and on. Smart phone companies are constantly trying to provide advanced computing power and connectivity. The better the services that a smart phone offers, the better the chances of wooing users. Now this war also extends to mobile platforms. Smart phone makers know that the way to keep ahead is to have the right platform on their side. Last year, Google was the unchallenged leader, reigning over more than half of the US smart phone market. Apple was a close second, with 30% market share. Another platform that had a sizeable market presence was Andriod phones.

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The advantage that Andriod phones had mostly had to do with pricing, as they were considered mass-market products. It is worth noting, however, that Andriod is the global leader when it comes to mobile operating systems.

Taking the growing market for iPads very seriously, Dell Inc has shared that the company is looking to develop tablets that can run the next version of Windows, in an attempt to retain corporate customers who are choosing the iPad over other devices. Dell has already started working on a tablet that will run with the Windows 8 and focus on making it business friendly. The company will also be ready with computers that will run the new Microsoft Corp (MSFT) software on the day that the software will be launched. It is true that Apple’s iPads are not designed for business customers and do not run Microsoft Office applications. The Dell tablets will be designed to connect securely to corporate networks. Dell has noted that the new iPad 4G has a faster processor, sharper screen and speedier wireless service. However, there still remains a gap for business users that Dell hopes to tap into. Currently, iPad is the undoubted leader with this year’s sales projection to be approximately 105.5 million devices. Apple also plans to sell around $10 billion worth of iPads to businesses this year. Suffice to say, it’s going to be a tough road ahead for Dell to catch up to these figures but Dell Chief Executive Officer, Micheal Dell, is confident that the Dell tablet would be the answer. “Having a secure Windows tablet that works with all the Windows applications -- we’re hearing a lot of demand for that and we think that will be quite attractive,” Dell said.

There is no denying that 2012 is going to be a year of many smart phone advancements. There are three things that will dictate mobile platform market share: strong ecosystem for apps, developers and content providers. The way things are headed so far this year, it seems Apple and Google are going to continue to dominate the world of smart phone platforms. But there is always space for surprises. And for that, we’ll just have to wait and watch.

Summer 2012

Visibility

mobile advertising

The Future of Mobile Apps and Affiliate Marketing

martphone usage is growing rapidly. According to StatsCounter Global Stats, mobile internet usage doubles every year. Mobile closed 2011 at 8.5 percent of global internet traffic and is on target to close 2012 at just under 20 percent of all global internet traffic. As I write this, Apple just surpassed 25 billion app downloads. The iTunes App Store and Android Market combine for a total of more than 1 billion apps. In 2011, mobile advertising represented a $1.4 billion dollar market. Clicks increased by 711% over 2010. Requests went up by 698%. Revenue from mobile advertising increased by 522%. Facebook mobile advertising isn’t live yet, but Facebook is predicted to represent $1.2 billion in mobile advertising on its own. All this adds up to mobile apps offering a promising new way to approach lead generation. Installing a free mobile app is the new lead. In-app purchases are the new sale. A user providing their phone number is the equivalent of collecting an email address. Sending real-time notifications to an app is the new email list.

Mobile Apps and PPC Affiliate marketers who rely heavily on PPC should love mobile app marketing. Arbitrage is still a viable method of marketing in the mobile app world. You can still buy remnant traffic through DSPs. Apps provide a new avenue with the ability to buy app-to-app traffic from mobile ad networks. Some current desktop spends can likely be redirected to mobile campaigns to increase effectiveness. One key advantage of mobile app advertising is the greater ability to accurately target your desired market. Geo-targeting works on the desktop, but mobile makes it easier to target by local geography. Targeting by device and operating system provides further context for an advertising offer. For app-to-app marketing, you can effectively target offers related to the specific application being used, much like Amazon suggesting related products on their landing pages. This targeting improves the ability to avoid running ads for people who have no interest in your product.

Benefits for Mobile Affiliates Affiliates benefit from high conversion rates for mobile app offers. The marketing funnel is a more seamless experience because the affiliate sends the click directly to the app download. The average affiliate payout is higher in mobile affiliate conversions. Depending on the affiliate commission structure, affiliates can continue to receive compensations over the life of an install.

The average smartphone user downloads 65 apps, with each app session lasting 4.5 minutes. Users with an app installed are far more likely to make a future purchase, which allows for making lifetime value calculations when determining ad spends.

Opportunities in Mobile App Affiliate Marketing The affiliate market requires some reeducation as mobile continues to increase in importance. A majority of affiliates don’t know where to find mobile app offers, because the traditional networks either aren’t exposing them or aren’t offering mobile-specific campaigns. Affiliate networks specializing in mobile apps are just getting started. Few advertisers and affiliates understand the tracking process of mobile, which requires different methodologies from the cookie based systems that dominate the desktop. From our own data at HasOffers, we see mobile playing a significant role in affiliate marketing. Our servers process more than 10 million clicks per day, which translate to more than $1 million in daily payouts to affiliates. Nearly 20% of click traffic on HasOffers originates from a mobile device. Most affiliates already see some mobile traffic even if they aren’t targeting mobile. Mobile app offers convert better than desktop offers, but affiliates are still directing mobile traffic to traditional affiliate offers.

Challenges of Mobile App Affiliate Marketing Tracking on mobile is more complicated than cookie based systems. Third-party cookies are blocked by default in most mobile browsers. Sandboxing often prevents two apps from sharing information, even if the user is willing to give permission. Many solutions focused on the UDID for iOS devices early on and are having to retool now that Apple is closing off device IDs as a way to track. Even if Apple were to continue to allow UDID access for tracking purposes, it’s highly likely the FTC will define UDID as personally identifiable information and ban use by the end of 2012. To properly track mobile app affiliate campaigns, a finger printing solution is required.

The Future of Mobile Apps and Affiliate Marketing There’s no doubt mobile is here to stay. As I indicated earlier, mobile internet usage is expected to double again this year. New apps are downloaded daily and in-app purchases continue to increase. The opportunity for Facebook to further change affiliate app marketing is looming. The real question is who is going to lead the charge in taking advantage of this opportunity? n

Peter Hamilton joined HasOffers.com before the company launched their first product in 2009. With more than six years of experience in online marketing, Peter has a skilled knowledge of SEO, Display Advertising, PPC, CRO, Retargeting, Social Ads, Social Marketing, PR, Email Marketing, Design and Usability. As CMO at HasOffers, he overseas customer acquisition and retention, partnership development, content creation, web design and brand development. Follow Peter on twitter: @peterhamilton. To read more from Peter, visit www.HasOffers.com/blog.

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affiliate marketing

7 Effective Ways To Recruit Affiliates

ffiliate recruitment is probably the most important task of every affiliate program manager. After all, if there are no affiliates in the program, there is no point having the affiliate program itself. Affiliates are your main sales force, and the more quality affiliates you partner with, the more successful affiliate program you will have. There are numerous tools and techniques that you can use, but in this article I’d like us to focus on seven ways that I have seen to yield best result. To make things easier to remember, I have made each way’s name start with the letter S (just like “Seven”, the total of all points, does).

1. Software Software applications can help you find prospective affiliates that either already work with competing affiliate programs or run websites that target the traffic you’re after. Applications traditionally used for SEO link-building can be utilized for this purpose. Some of the more robust tools are Internet Business Promoter, SEO Quake, Raven SEO Tools, Citation Labs, and BuzzStream. They can be great when used wisely. They help you quickly search the Internet, pulling websites that may be good affiliate partners (either because they are working in the niche you’re working in or because they link/write about your competitors or maybe even already working as affiliates of your competitors), together with information on their website and their contact information. Improper use of such applications can also ruin your affiliate recruitment campaign. That is if you end up spamming those who should be treated as potential business partners.

merchant runs their own affiliate program support blog. Don’t forget about Twitter. It can also be excellent for affiliate recruitment. Merchants on both sides of the Atlantic (Amazon, Target, eBay, Argos, etc) are actively maintaining affiliates-oriented Twitter accounts, both for program support and recruitment. There are two rules to remember while marketing your affiliate program through social media: (i) Thou shalt not spam, and (ii) Thou shalt not take more than thee have given. The first rule is pretty self-explanatory. If you’re on a forum, play by forum’s rules. Do not start off by blatantly promoting your affiliate program. Most forums, blogs and social network groups will ban you in return. The second rule is also the secret of successful social-media usage; you cannot take more than you have contributed in the first place. If and when you are of genuine help to the community, blog, or forum, you will be warmly accepted and collaborated with.

3. Search Engines Although you certainly want to automate as much of the affiliate recruitment process as possible, do not forget about the good ol’ search engine ranking analysis. If you run across websites that rank high for relevant keywords, approach them. Coupon and rebates affiliates, for example, may be easily discovered by such keywords as coupon, coupons, rebates, cashback, and so on. Data feed affiliates may be found by typing in the name of any other merchant that also has an affiliate program, and so on.

2. Social Media

4. Second-Tier Affiliates

In addition to software, you should also dive into the social media of affiliate marketing. There are numerous blogs and forums, Facebook and Linkedin groups, and other online communities where affiliates “hang out.” Additionally, I recommend that every

Although I normally do not recommend having a second-tier commission and recommend paying as much as possible on the first tier, it makes sense to pay a bounty on new affiliate referrals. In fact, some “affiliates” are making this their main business. I am talking about affiliate program directories. These directories are the references that affiliates go to when searching for affiliate programs, and they are normally very well positioned in search engines. Most of them do not charge you anything for listing an affiliate program, but, for obvious reasons, they generally prefer listing affiliate programs that pay a bounty on every new affiliate sign-up. There are also quite a few mainstream affiliates that are interested in similar relationships with merchants.

5. Summits & Symposiums Any type of conference or convention attended by affiliates is a great place to recruit. Affiliate Summit is a must; and when you go, make sure you get at least a table at the Meet Market that is held on the first day of the conference. Many affiliate networks (LinkShare, Commission Junction, Google Affiliate Network, ShareASale, and AvantLink) have their own affiliate conferences. If your affiliate network

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has one, this is another great place to make contact with affiliates. Besides the Affiliate Summit, for connections with affiliates consider: ad:tech, PubCon, Search Marketing Expo (SMX), Internet Marketing Conference, eMetrics Summit, and Search Engine Strategies (SES) in the US; and a4uExpo in Europe.

6. Symbiotic Methods Webster’s Dictionary defines symbiosis as a “cooperative relationship (as between two persons or groups).” What I am referring to is promoting your affiliate program on a cross-program basis. You can form short- or long-term cross-program recruitment relationships with affiliate programs run by merchants that sell related products or services. You announce their affiliate program to your pool of affiliates, while they do the same for you in the circular sent out to their affiliates. If you go with cross-program promotions, remember to respect your affiliates’ privacy and not abuse their trust. When they agree to receive your affiliate newsletter, they agree to receive the information that will help them succeed with your program and may consider your aggressive pushing of some other affiliate program a spam. So, if you do a cross-program promo with another affiliate program, make sure to handle it gently. Additionally, prior to entering such partnerships, do check your affiliate network’s terms and conditions to ensure you’re not violating any of those.

7. Structure-Based Recruitment

Many affiliate networks also offer their merchants an array of internal affiliate recruitment options. Some of them are actually free if you have something truly interesting to offer to your affiliates. In the past, for example, I’ve had buy.at affiliate network in the UK agree to include unusual promotional offers in the weekly network newsletter that goes out to all affiliates in the network. ShareASale in the United States has included seasonal promos of some of my merchants in their newsletters too. Talk to the network reps to find out more about the recruitment opportunities that they may offer you. Of course, many affiliate networks also have an array of paid recruitment. Normally, these can be utilized right from within your merchant interface and are quite self-explanatory. Finally, whichever method(s) of affiliate recruitment you’re utilizing, make sure you continuously work on building your own affiliate list by cataloging contact information of affiliates (both current and prospective ones) and hosting a “subscribe to affiliate newsletter” form on your website. Even if an affiliate isn’t ready to work with you just yet, they may be open to staying updated on the life of your affiliate program. So, it doesn’t hurt to ask. Best of luck building your affiliate armies! n

Award-winning affiliate marketing expert Evgenii “Geno” Prussakov is the founder of AM Navigator, and chair of Affiliate Management Days conference -- the first and only professional forum on affiliate program management. He authored bestselling A Practical Guide to Affiliate Marketing (2007) and Affiliate Program Management: An Hour a Day (2011), and is an internationallyacclaimed speaker, consultant, and affiliate marketing evangelist.

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Summer 2012

Visibility

A Guide to Understand App Tracking in Part One Part One: Understanding Tracking with UDIDs and Cookies There are numerous problems that still need to be solved in the mobile advertising world: patchy cookie support (and understanding of how they actually work!); device identifiers (or as they’re otherwise known – UDIDs) inconsistency; and the lack of ad tracking information pass-through within the Apple App store, to name just a few. The good news? There are solutions on the market right now that allow advertisers and agencies to very precisely track and attribute downloads, conversions and even in-app events such as frequent use, purchases, game level completion and much more. In the first of two articles, Michael Dewhirst, CTO of StrikeAd, the mobile advertising specialist, takes a look at the problems facing the mobile world, and how they can be overcome.

the Mobile Space By Michael Dewhirst

time of day, day of the week, the site the ads are shown on and much more. When there are enough statistics for the events that the advertiser wants to buy (such as a download and install), the DSP will find the same recurring set of variable values and make a note of them. It will then bid higher for such traffic and buy more impressions with such a profile – all on an impression-by-impression basis. And we’re talking 10 thousand plus impressions per second here. That’s 20 billion plus impressions a month. A typical traffic “profile” might look something like this: iPhone or Samsung Galaxy S, Sunday and Saturday lunch time, on sites from publisher XYZ and apps from game maker ABC and so on. Think of this as a large number of criteria to distinguish between different people, such as personality, hobbies, height, weight,

eye color, hair color and so on, as used on a dating site. The more parameters you use, the more precisely you can identify a person that’s right for you. The result is then a much more focused buy, which has massively larger yields than that of a blind buy that is done in bulk and not on an impression by impression basis. This way, the advertiser knows exactly who drove the most effective traffic, and can adjust the spend in the right direction accordingly.

What if there is a “Missing Link”? How does a DSP – or anybody for that matter - track and attribute impressions and clicks to a download or subscription if there is “dead space” between the “entrance” and “exit” of the mobile app advertising workflow? The answer is not a single solution, but a combination of approaches and technical implementations, which together deliver the required result.

App download tracking and attribution is a reality right now - and the information is usable by media buyers to plug into automated or programmatic buying solutions such as Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) in order to understand and adjust their buying strategy.

The Goal and Benefits of Tracking By plugging app download tracking data into a DSP, its learning mechanisms can automatically adjust the buying strategy to buy more of the traffic that has the same profile as that which delivered the best results. The DSP effectively finds a “pattern” of the traffic that is most likely to result in a download, by looking at many variables such as device types, versions, location,

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UDIDs – Set up to Fail from the Start? Currently, when a DSP or an ad network buys a mobile banner that runs on a mobile media exchange (or a Supply Side Platform – aka SSP), the latter’s code in the app passes the UDID back, often one way encrypted (aka hashed). So, many ad networks quickly adopted a “match the ID” approach where they would record the UDID of the click and ask the advertiser to send the UDID of the device which installed the app to their server, where they would check to see if that UDID is in the click records – attributing the download if there was a match. But there are several problems here right off the bat... • Typically, an advertiser will use many different banners to advertise an app and the above approach does not precisely pin point which banner drove the download. And no, you can’t always argue that last view or last click won. • Secondly, the exchange may be sending the UDID hashed using one algorithm (e.g. SHA1) and the advertiser may be sending it hashed using another (e.g. MD5) – so there will never be any match. A bit like trying to match a phone number and a postcode. They’re just never going to match, even if they’re for exactly the same house. • Thirdly, the Android OS has several IDs available to app developers – AndroidID, IMEI, MEID or ESN. Exchanges and advertisers often will use and send different ones again. Combine that with different hashing algorithms and it’s a right mess! • Lastly, Apple is deprecating the UDID and it will no longer be available within apps to be pulled out by the SSP SDK so this free ride will end soon. There will be other IDs one can use on the device, such as the MAC address of the WIFI card, etc – but this may not be very reliable either for several reasons.

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There is often a lack of clarity when setting up a campaign between the advertisers, agency, media buyer and the exchange and again, the wrong IDs are often compared and therefore never match. Many attributions are missed and don’t go back into the mix – driving up cost of the download and reducing their number too.

There’s One More Reason Still to Ditch the UDID If this is not enough to convince you, the last and one of the main other problems with this approach is that only media that is running inside an app – and not media seen on mobile sites in a mobile web browser – can be bought if UDIDs are to be used for download attribution. This is because a UDID can only be obtained when you have access to the operating system API, i.e. you are some code running inside an app. If you’re a simple meat and potatoes HTML page or even a fancy one with some JavaScript, you just cannot get the UDID of the device you’re being shown on. It’s like arriving in a building blind folded and only being able to go into one room with no windows to the outside world. You won’t be able to work out where you are unless you can peek outside and glance at a street sign! This is a problem because there are a huge amount of mobile-optimized sites, which could be driving punters to the app store to download that app. 100% more, in fact, in addition to the app traffic. The net effect is that app inventory becomes more sought after and in turn the price, yield and cost of a download goes up. Yes, this keeps the app developers happy – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing – but doesn’t benefit anybody else. “But if the app stores are a dead end where advertising tracking dies, how do you tie an impression to a download without a device ID?!”, you ask.

Surprisingly it is back to the old veteran – the cookie!

Back to the Cookie! Cookies actually work fine on most mobile devices, especially on all the main ones that have app stores and apps, such as iPhones, iPads, Androids, BlackBerry phones, Nokias etc. If they didn’t, many sites where you have to log in, such as Gmail, eBay, Facebook etc. would be pretty hard to use as the site would not remember who you were from page to page. Those that don’t work are some feature phones, where you can’t install apps anyway, so who cares! So a cookie is a bit like that ultraviolet stamp that a bouncer would put on your hand so they know who you are after you pop out for some fresh air (or a cigarette!) and decide to go back in. The only issue that exists with cookies is on the Apple Operating system, iOS – but only with the setting – and not reading – of third party cookies. If you’re not sure what I mean by first and third party cookies, I simply refer to the domain of the page you look and the domain of the server where the tracking cookie was set from. For example, let’s say you’re looking at a page on amazon.com and there is a tracking pixel pointing to strikead.com, which tries to set a cookie. This strikead.com cookie will be classed as a third party one - as it’s not from the same domain as the page you’re on. Cookies from amazon.com, however, are first party since they’re from the same domain as the page. Setting a third party cookie in iOS Safari – the iPhone browser, won’t work. The attempt to set a cookie will be blocked by Safari. However, reading both first and third party cookies is just fine on iOS Safari on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

Summer 2012

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Getting to Cookies from an iPhone App That’s all fine and dandy, you say, but how do I read that cookie from inside the app? The simple answer is – you can’t, since Safari is just another app and apps on iOS cannot share data – for security reasons. The longer answer is – you can, but there are a few “workarounds” to be done. The problem with reading cookies from inside an app is that they are set in the device’s browser, and only it has access to them. You can, however, launch one app from another. For example, you could launch the device’s web browser, such as Safari, from inside the downloaded app. When you do so, you tell the server to go to the same tracking page where the cookie was set earlier during the click. You can also pass the server any necessary information for the download to be attributed to the click and this info gets passed to the server. The server then tells the browser to go back to the app it came from and the loop is complete. No more “dead space”. It may sound like magic, but this is possible and it works very well. The only negative effect of this process is a brief “flash” of the browser window whilst you are in the

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app. The StrikeAd SDK does this but only for a very brief moment – a few hundred milliseconds – blink and you definitely will miss it.

So for those advertisers who really cannot have a pop up in their app – at least on Android – there is a way.

Many advertisers are already using this method and have found that it does not affect user experience and only gives them much better insight into the app life. Think back to the desktop computer and the standard browser – pop ups are still common there and nobody really cares about them.

The Technology is Here Now

Furthermore, the StrikeAd SDK only does the pop-up once – on first launch. After this, the unique ID from the cookie, which drove the download is passed to the server in the background and completely seamlessly to the user.

What About the Android Market? Good old Google – being deeply steeped in advertising, understand that certain things need to happen for the advertising machine to keep turning its wheels and provide free app developers with a source of income. So, the Android Market actually has a mechanism, which allows variables to be passed to it from a click on a banner, and from there – to be passed to the app. The app can then pass this information back to the media buyer for attribution and optimization.

It’s clear that there are solutions out there to make mobile app advertising more successful and cost effective, but it will take the triumvirate of the advertiser, agency and media to adopt them. Without all three parties understanding the options and utilizing them, nothing will happen – or at least not easily and not quickly. n - Part Two of this article available in Fall 2012.

Michael Dewhirst is a veteran senior IT professional, entrepreneur and a pioneer in the mobile industry having worked in the sector since the early WAP days of 2000. Michael began his career in high tech development roles with British Aerospace, Deutschebank and JP Morgan, and worked on the launch of Vodafone Live! in 2002. Prior to joining StrikeAd, Michael was CTO of The Daily Mail Digital Property Group, driving the development of their real estate portals and apps, including an augmented reality property search mobile app. In 2003 Michael founded DevzeroG, a global advertising software company with clients such as News International, The Guardian and NTT and was sold to Adstream Pty in 2007. At StrikeAd Michael is responsible for all products, systems and integration with third parties.

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legal corner

Who Owns Your Twitter Followers or LinkedIn Connections?

Written by: Travis Crabtree

nternet marketing attracts social, mobile, innovative, well-connected people--types that jump from one job to the next either through choice or necessity. So what happens to the Twitter handle or the LinkedIn account once the employee leaves from one job to another? For most of us, it’s not really a concern because our social media presence just is not that impressive or important. Your company probably will not even want your Twitter followers who read what you had for lunch or your take on the politics of the day. Looper Reed doesn’t want @traviscrabtree if I leave because we are not in the business of promoting the law firm through Twitter. Some interactive marketers main job, however, is to tweet about companies or drive traffic to the company website. What about celebrities, media types and marketers who use their accounts to the benefit of their employers? Who do those accounts belong to? The easy answer is that you should take care of it contractually. Given several high profile cases, this advice should not be ground-breaking. This issue is not new for journalists. CNN and Rick Sanchez went through this in November of 2010 when CNN terminated him after he used @ricksanchezcnn and had 150,000 followers. CNN agreed to let him have @ricksancheznews. The New York Times settled its case against AOL recently. Lisa Belkin wrote a blog named “Motherlode” for the Times before she left for AOL’s Huffington Post and rebranded the blog as “Parentload.” The New York Times sued claiming the name was too similar and meant to confuse or steal its readers and Twitter followers. The Huffington Post decided to drop the name. By the time the company realizes the importance of a social media account, it is often too late to address it contractually. So, then what do you do? Because there is no developed law in the area, the answer is be logical about how you create and use the account. If you are the individual tweeting, then don’t put the company brand in your Twitter name. Even my law firm might have a problem if I left after acquiring a large following with the handle @bulldoglooperreedlawyer. If you are a company paying someone to bring you followers or connections, make them use a branded handle. As you can see from the CNN/Rick Sanchez example, the main problem was the inclusion of CNN in the name. Until there are more cases, the answer of whom owns the account will be very fact specific. The most important of those facts is whether the followers are there because of the brand or because of the individual. Factual issues often require trials. Trials are expensive. Therefore, factual issues can be expensive. Lawyers get rich over factual issues, but clients pay. Take care of it contractually and eliminate the factual issues.

The Twitter Case Unfortunately, the case law does not tell us much. The most

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prominent case is PhoneDog v. Kravitz where the parties are fighting over who owns the Twitter account Noah Kravitz used when he was employed by PhoneDog named @ PhoneDogNoah. Kravitz was hired as an independent contractor to use social media to promote PhoneDog. He amassed 17,000 followers. Kravitz simply changed the name of the account and went to work for a competitor promoting their products to his 17,000 faithful. PhoneDog said the followers were like a customer list and placed a value on each one of $2.50. The court first dismissed PhoneDog’s claims for economic interference for taking the Twitter account with him, but let the claims for conversion and misappropriation of trade secrets proceed. Since then, the court has allowed PhoneDog to replead the economic interference claim. PhoneDog is now claiming its traffic has decreased since Kravitz took the Twitter account and the court is now letting all of the claims proceed. That means it is expensive.

The LinkedIn Case The facts of the LinkedIn case are a little convoluted. Dr. Linda Eagle had a “personal” LinkedIn account with thousands of connections related to her field. She partnered with someone to form Edcomm. Sawabeh Information Services took over Edcomm. When Sawabeh fired Eagle, Eagle sued claiming the defendants continued to access her personal LinkedIn account. The defendants claimed Eagle misappropriated certain LinkedIn connections because defendants claimed they created and maintained the account. Defendants also claimed there was an unwritten policy that employees turned over their LinkedIn accounts when they left. Eagle admitted she provided her LinkedIn password to defendants and that they accessed it while times were good. The court said the LinkedIn connections were not a trade secret because anyone could see them as they were publicly displayed. The court, however, allowed the misappropriation of an idea claim to go forward based on a dispute about whose idea it was to generate the content on the LinkedIn account.

What Have We Learned Today? If you’re a company and you want the account, put it in the contract and make the employee provide you the password. If you’re an individual and you want the account, follow these guidelines: 1. Have the account under your name and don’t mix it with the company. 2. Set up the account yourself. 3. Populate the content yourself. 4. Don’t give out the password. For the individuals, in other words, be a little more like the majority of us who don’t have to worry about this. n

Do you have a legal question you want answered in the next column? Send your questions to legalcorner@visibilitymagazine.com.

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Remarketing:

The ‘Secret’ Strategy Online Marketers are Using to Dominate Their Market By Alex Cleanthous

ave you ever seen the same banner ads everywhere you go on the web and wondered how they could be so targeted to what you’re interested in? Have you ever wondered how some companies can afford to pay so much to advertise themselves on nearly all of the sites you visit? Well... there’s a secret that not many companies (or even agencies) know about. That secret is remarketing. Remarketing, also known as retargeting, is the process of advertising to your website visitors on other sites they visit around the web. With remarketing, when somebody lands on your website, you tag them with the cookie provided by the remarketing advertising network. Then, whenever that person visits a website that runs ads as part of the remarketing advertising network, your ad appears. Sounds simple, right? It’s very powerful.

How Does Remarketing Work? When somebody visits your website, they have landed there as a result of some form of marketing, intentional or not. They may have clicked on a search engine ad, they may have found you in the organic SEO listings, they may have clicked on a banner ad, they may have come from another website, or from a social media site. Whatever brought them to your website, they have landed there because they are interested in what you offer. The problem is, your visitors are all at different stages of the buying cycle. Some are ready to buy now, some in a month, some in a few months, some not at all. That’s where remarketing comes in. By implementing a remarketing campaign you can continually market to your visitors even after they’ve left your website, but one thing is different. Now, you know that you’re advertising to people that have already visited

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your website (rather than the general market). And this gives you an advantage. Because now you know that these people have already shown interest in your offering in the past and are more likely to buy from you. With this knowledge you can then design remarketing campaigns designed to convert those visitors into leads and sales. The best part about remarketing is that the cost-per-click for advertising to that audience is much lower than standard display campaigns because your ad is appearing on websites where there is little or no competition.

Setting Up Your Remarketing Campaign The first step in setting up your remarketing campaign is to identify the various conversion goals in your online marketing strategy. You might have one conversion goal where prospects subscribe to your email marketing database. You might have another goal where prospects contact you for a free consultation. And you may have another where prospects buy from you. Once you have identified your conversion goals, the next step is segmenting your website visitors. Segmentation is critical to the success of your remarketing campaign because segmentation allows you to target your remarketing to precisely what your audience is interested in - and the more targeted your messaging, the higher the response rate. You may offer a number of different services, you may have a number of different product categories, or you may have specific landing pages for specific campaigns. Whatever the case, you want to identify and segment your website visitors. Once you have segmented your website visitors, you then need to setup an account

with a remarketing advertising network (Google Adwords is by far the biggest). When you setup your campaigns there is an option to create ‘Audiences’ - setup a new audience for each one of your website visitor segments. The remarketing advertising network will then provide you with a remarketing script that you add to each page of your website where that segment visits. Make sure to add the remarketing script for each audience to only those pages that target that audience. When this process is complete, anybody who visits your website (except if they have chosen the ‘do not track’ option in their Internet browser) will be tagged with your remarketing cookie. The more traffic you receive, the faster your remarketing audience will grow.

An Example of How You Could Launch Your Remarketing Campaign The combinations of how you can run your remarketing campaign are endless but here’s an example of how it could run. Let’s say that you’re a printing company offering business card printing, flyer printing and poster printing (you would probably offer more than this but I’m keeping it simple for the purpose of the example). You would first setup a different remarketing audience for each service (eg business card printing) and ensure that you have a different page on your site for each service. You then add the remarketing script to each page, and probably a different one for the home page (as you don’t exactly know what they’re interested in on the home page). You run standard advertising campaigns to each page using Google Adwords, display advertising, Facebook ads, etc. The goal is still to convert visitors the first time they land on

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your website but even if you convert 10% of visitors (which is high), 90% are leaving your site without taking action on your offer. That’s where remarketing kicks in.

remarketing to the next level.

Let’s say that a visitor landed on your Business Card Printing page but didn’t convert. Now you start using banners to advertise to them whereever they are on the web (and there are millions of websites you can advertise on). But the advertising is now a little different. Instead of using your standard advertising messages you can tailor your messages to people that have already visited your site. For example, you could say in the banners “Still Looking For Business Cards? Click here”, or you could include messaging about why your company is different from the others, or specials you are running.

Up-selling You could setup a remarketing audience for visitors that have completed a specific conversion goal, such as purchasing a product online, and then use remarketing to upsell them a different product. Hint: offering a discount will increase your conversion rate.

The key to making your remarketing campaign successful, at least at the basic level, is to continually test new messaging in your banners to find an angle that works, and then to keep updating your creative so that your audience doesn’t get bored with your ads (which will affect your click-through-rate and how often your ads are shown).

Down-selling If the product you’re selling is quite expensive and a visitor leaves, you could use remarketing to sell a lower cost product and then upsell them to the higher priced product during the sales process. Hint: try advertising affiliate offers to your remarketing audience.

Taking Your Remarketing to the Next Level Setting up a remarketing campaign is quite simple but making it a roaring success takes a bit more effort. In this section I’ll share a few examples of how you can take your

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Cross-selling Using the same remarketing audience as you use for up-selling, you could market a different offer entirely, yet something similar to what they initially visited your website for.

Grow your email database You could run a remarketing campaign that gives away a free report or a free digital product to build up your email marketing database - and once they’re in your email database you can convert them using email marketing.

Increasing Facebook Fans You could create a remarketing audience of people that visited the Facebook landing tab you use to convert Facebook users into Fans. You could then launch a remarketing campaign to drive those Facebook users back to your Facebook landing tab. The various combinations of how you can setup your remarketing campaign are endless. The most important thing to remember is that someone who has visited your website is worth a lot more than someone who hasn’t. And someone who has completed one of your conversion funnels is worth even more. Remarketing allows you to leverage the relationship you have established with your website visitors to drive more conversions. n

Alex Cleanthous, Chief Strategist at Web Profits, lives at the cutting edge of online marketing. He is responsible for the testing, rapid implementation and enhancement of the latest online marketing strategies including social media, mobile, SEO, online advertising and conversion optimization. You can watch Alex at webprofits.tv or follow Web Profits at facebook. com/webprofits and twitter.com/webprofits.

Summer 2012

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Local Mobile Optimization Key

to Monetizing Consumers’ Mobile Fascination By Bill Dinan

he amount of time consumers spend on mobile devices has already surpassed their time spent on the web and advertisers are following suit to monetize the mobile dependence. Mobile advertising has been adopted faster than other media – much faster, in fact, than the Internet in the 90s. Consumers rely on their mobile devices more than any other piece of technology. And unlike the PC or cable TV, the mobile device is always with them. There is an immediacy factor in mobile that drives higher direct response rates – consumers using mobile devices are searching and making selection decisions in a much shorter time span than ever before. Often times, that means calling a business directly from your smartphone where you found the mobile ad and business and completing the search and purchase cycle within minutes or hours not days or weeks. With consumers spending a lot of their media time on their mobile device, advertisers are continuing to increase the allocation of their ad budgets going to mobile. In fact, 80 percent of SMBs are including mobile in their advertising plans. Mobile is a “must have” element in the overall marketing mix. A local mobile advertising strategy, however, can take many forms. Whether advertisers are utilizing local mobile search ads, a mobile ad network, banner ads or in-app ads, they want to know how their mobile programs are performing so they can monetize. That means employing effective measurement and establishing tangible metrics that are easily understood. Here are three best practice tips for evaluating and optimizing local mobile ad performance:

Measure Beyond the Click

More so than other digital channels, mobile offers an opportunity to measure and gain additional insight beyond the click. Clicks offer detail on how a mobile consumer arrived to a business, but advertisers should also analyze the resulting calls. The primary use of a smartphone is for calling and mobile consumers are typically ready to purchase, so calls are a natural next step in the purchase cycle. Mobile call tracking is crucial as valuable lead insights can be gleaned from detailed call data including whether the call connected, how long it lasted, the demographic profile of the caller, etc. Also, don’t forget to consider other ROI indicators and secondary actions such as direction downloads, QR codes and map views.

Use a Targeted Content Strategy

Mobile content can’t offer the same content breadth and depth as traditional or digital creative content so a targeted content strategy is key. You are dealing with smaller screens and the user’s need for immediate

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gratification, so mobile content must walk the fine line of being short but well defined and targeted. Content that is too general may not result in quality leads. As an example, while attorney calls typically have a longer average duration (compared to a pizza delivery company), mobile leads to one law firm were generating very short calls. The problem? Customers were calling about a practice area not offered by that attorney. This is an opportunity to tweak the content for more relevant leads. Evaluate your copy and distribution strategy to make sure there aren’t gaps in your demographic targeting.

Optimize Mobile Call Response

A natural extension to measuring mobile ad performance is to use mobile call response data/details to optimize your overall mobile campaigns. Advertisers can use call data to identify how the different mobile lead sources are performing and then feed that data back into the mobile ad program to improve the lead rate and quality. This is most effective with a concise measurement tool that clearly displays aggregate trending data. Call durations are a lead quality indicator and the longer a consumer stays on the line, the more likely they are to convert. Advertisers should compare the call durations each mobile lead source and ad type is generating and use that data to optimize mobile programs for quality leads. As all lead sources and mobile ad formats are not created equal, performance feedback is a key optimization tool to validate the quality of each mobile source being used in the advertising buy. Advertisers who want to take advantage of the mobile opportunity must measure the lead activity that is driven by their mobile ad campaigns. As calls are a de facto way mobile consumers connect with businesses, capturing and analyzing mobile call details is key to understanding how consumers are responding to mobile ads. The detail can provide visibility into specific keywords and trends that inform valuable modifications to the mobile ad strategy and tactics. Mobile measurement will provide advertisers the missing link to close the mobile ad spend gap and monetize the increasing mobile consumer audience. With any emerging marketing strategy, the first instinct is to take it to the highest reaches straight out of the gate. While Post-Search® retargeting is so effective in its ability to connect marketers with in-market consumers, there always lies the possibility of improper implementation. By following the above-mentioned four crucial steps, you will help ensure that your campaign is an effective one, and that your brand is seen as intelligent, courteous, thoughtful, and most importantly, one step ahead of the competition. n

Bill Dinan is president of Telmetrics, the leading provider of call measurement solutions, and joined the company in 1998. Since that time, Dinan has lead Telmetrics’ evolution from print-centric tools to multi-media, leads-based measurement solutions and was appointed president in May 2009. He can be reached at bill.dinan@telmetrics.com.

Summer 2012

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social media

Effective Social Media for Exhibitor Marketing

itching yourself to possible leads at large expo events isn’t what it used to be. It’s gone digital. It’s more social. And it’s also much more effective.

Yes, the gimmicky schwag, large signs, and dazzling attention-getters still work to a certain extent and are in full-force. But we’re firmly in the social media age. Much of the expo model we’re used to is being amplified through the use of Twitter, Facebook, exclusive online content and – above all else – simply listening to the online conversations about events and your brand. Effective exhibitor marketers integrate the old with the new. To be frank, if you haven’t employed social in your event strategy, you’re leaving money on the table. As many a wise marketer has noted, not having a social media presence today is like not having a website 12 years ago. Your customers expect it of you, and your competitors are certainly already there.

Getting Started: Where to be Online for an Event and Why Running an effective social media strategy before, during, and after an event means you don’t have to rely on traditional media to write a story or create a TV show about what you’re doing. With social, you’re in the driver’s seat, and you can help steer the conversation about your brand. That online social presence can also drive significantly more traffic to your booth: One exhibitor at an event I worked on managed a 750% increase in lead gen when they included a social media strategy compared to previous shows. See the case study below for details. But with dozens of new social sites popping up every day, where should you be? Joshua Ross of Fleishman Hillard recently told me that several top brands have abandoned literally dozens of failed social sites since social media came into vogue. On a recent project, he found that a client had close to 150 Facebook pages, over 65 YouTube channels, and 100 Twitter feeds. You should avoid this mess at all costs. Instead of wasting time creating half-used accounts across the web, focus on a select few that work for you. I always recommend a hearty Twitter account as it’s the best way to quickly communicate with customers while on site at an event, but you also should consider a Facebook Fan Page (only if you’re going to keep up with it, however), a Flickr account for all those event pics, possibly a YouTube account if you have event videos and testimonials, and the old favorite, a blog. Linkedin is another great way to connect. Of course, Pinterest is increasingly (exponentially) popular with savvy digital marketers, and there are limitless ways to creatively interact with customers through the site. And don’t forget foursquare; many exhibitors set up their booths as places where attendees can check-in. At CES a few years back, Kodak offered a special prize to whichever attendee became Mayor of their booth.

hub for your potential customers. Make it easy for them to find your video content or pictures in just one click. A blog or Facebook Fan Page is one such way of curating your content. Additionally, you can check out sites that help you curate social stories such as Storify.com, one of my colleague’s favorites. The secret here isn’t to be everywhere – which is impossible and a stressful waste of time. The smart strategy is to be where your customers are and finding ways of bringing them back to your hub.

Generate Buzz Pre-Event and Collect Leads Long After Look at the expo as just one point in a stretched timeline of event marketing. Think of it this way: Many brands already engage in direct mail encouraging contacts to see them at an upcoming tradeshow. Using that same behavior online can be even more powerful. Take Cloud Connect Santa Clara, a show I worked on this past spring. In the weeks leading up to the event dozens of exhibitors used the event hashtag #ccevent – to keep track of what attendees were saying and looking forward to. These brands were able to directly communicate with possible leads they knew were coming to the show and encourage them to stop by their booth. They also told people how to find them during the show whether it was in the expo hall or at the after dark parties. Exhibitors can also use Twitter and other social sites to give out teasers of what they’ll have at an event. If you’re making a big announcement at an upcoming conference, you can Tweet about it using the event’s hashtag. This message is in turn seen by anyone following the hashtag, specifically the interested attendees. Remember: This one-on-one communication pre-event was nearly impossible just a few years ago, or would have cost a sponsor a significant amount of money to access the attendee list. Talking directly to customers via social media allows you to build great relationships even before you meet a contact in person. Take advantage of this pre-game strategy; your competitors likely are already.

More important than selecting a few sites versus many is creating a central

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#Sweettweets and How to Win Social Exhibitor Marketing At a Web 2.0 Expo event a couple years back, IBM brought a genius marketing idea into life. At the front of their booth, they had a decked out bar of candy options. By simply promising to tweet out about IBM’s booth using the #sweettweets hashtag and Web 2.0 Expo official hashtag (#w2e), attendees could get a bag of their choosing. From this delicious idea they got 1,500 qualified leads when they were only expecting 200. How did they do this? It wasn’t just the candy, I assure you. They took a common expo schwag item (candy) and melded it with social media. I should also note the intelligence of what happened post-candy bag: Once attracted to the booth by candy, the lead was asked if they’d like to see a live demo in exchange for getting a USB stick full of free white papers and downloads. This two-step process brought in fringe leads (those who might be too shy to stop by the booth) and then weeded down this larger pool to customers who got involved with the product. But the real magic here was how they got leads to market IBM to other attendees. The #w2e hashtag was bombarded with happy tweets about IBM and #sweettweets. This smart social strategy caused a rush to IBM’s booth. Central to this example, however, IBM’s three-pronged social strategy: They

promoted their booth and the #sweettweets candy bar before the expo event opened using the #w2e hashtag. (They also, wisely, asked colleagues to tweet about it, retweet it, and help generate some buzz.) They paid attention to what was happening during the event in the Twitter backchannel by tweeting at attendees who used #w2e. And they followed up with the digital contacts post event. As I said before – your social media event strategy should be a stretched timeline where the actual event is only one dot. Pumping up buzz before the event and staying engaged in the weeks after is crucial. Customers expect your social media communications to be more involved over time, not just one hit wonders. One final thought on this stretched out strategy: You can use these social media channels to reach out to people who didn’t even attend the event. Anyone who follows customers who post about you can immediately see what’s going on. You can easily reach out to these people just as you would an actual attendee. Once again, check the hashtag and monitor conversations online to see who’s talking about you, and be sure to engage them. n

Kaitlin Pike is a veteran event marketer and content producer. She’s worked with a range of clients from Fortune 50 companies to bootstrapped startups on their large and small-scale events as well as print and digital media. She can be reached via email at kcpike@gmail.com or on Twitter @kcpike.

SEPTEMBER 30 - OCTOBER 4 | 2012

Accelerate your business competitiveness through the successful adoption of analytics, voice-of-customer and online marketing best practices

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Spring 2012

Visibility

visi book club

Excerpt from StoryBranding™: Creating Stand-Out Brands Through the Power of Story By Jim Signorelli

Stories have been, and still are, the most persuasive tools in the arsenal of human communications. Why? Well, there are a lot of reasons that serve as the foundation of a process we now call StoryBranding™, and the best among them is that stories clothe truths by not getting in the way of truth. They get around our natural resistance to being sold by not pushing beliefs. Rather, they stimulate and resonate by inviting us to acknowledge beliefs that are already in place. They do this by fascinating us with identifiable characters and by inviting us to empathize with their experiences. Certainly all stories intend to sell us something. Whether it’s to demonstrate the importance of love, courage, or freedom, some human value always underlies the reason stories are told. But stories reveal truth, they don’t preach it. Brands have intentions, too. But often that intention is too raw, too blatant, and too often dismissed because the profit motive is transparent. If we look beyond the need for immediate sales, we start to see something that is far more appealing than the brand’s facts or opinions about why it’s the best, strongest, most durable, cheapest, etc. We start to see a belief, philosophy, or cause that defines who the brand is, not just what the brand is for. And much as we form an emotional bond with story characters, we start to relate to a brand in the same way. The brand’s importance goes beyond any functional advantage. When we buy a brand, in a sense we join it. In turn, we invite it into our lives to reinforce who we are while telling those around us what we believe is important. Admittedly, that’s a hard concept to get when we’ve been trained to believe that brands should do little more than boast benefits and urge buy now action. Certainly benefits are important. But we are humans first, consumers second. Certainly we want things that help us to do more, and/or to do it better, faster, or for less money. But above all, we are constantly striving for meaning. Brands perceived as stories to be told have a better chance of helping us find meaning than they do as products to be marketed. But to tell a brand’s story authentically, we have to know it first. We have to see, hear, and feel its reality because it’s there, not just because consumers tell

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Summer 2012

us they want it there. What’s real has to reveal itself not in what is promised, but in what is proven across every point of contact. StoryBranding is a process designed to help us know brands the way stories help us know characters. It’s a process that also helps us know a brand’s prospects in ways that will foster lasting relationships, immune from any competitive claim or coupon. There’s no magic trick to the StoryBranding method. There are no four-syllable words to learn, no ivory-tower theories to embrace. It’s intuitive and easily digested. It has been proven countless times to help solve marketing communication problems with solutions that more powerfully resonate shared meaning with audiences. It is easily understood because, without being fully aware, we already use it in our everyday communications. As its name implies, StoryBranding is rooted in the logic of stories, something psychologists have shown is part of our hardwiring. With awareness, we just rely on it more effectively. We learned about this process from principles that storytellers have been using since the beginning of language to reveal fundamental truths. And upon further investigation, we found ourselves borrowing techniques from successful brands that have, maybe unknowingly, relied upon its principles. Some may find what follows blasphemous, as it takes on a few age old marketing myths many of us have been saddled with since the so called disciplines of marketing were invented. But that’s okay. We didn’t discover the Truth. Just something we passionately believe in. n

Jim Signorelli is the founder and CEO of esw StoryLab, a Chicago-based marketing firm. Signorelli’s 30+ year career in advertising began as a “copy/contact” with Marsteller and soon expanded to account management with major agencies like N.W. Ayer, Frankel & Co. and W.B. Doner. Over the years, he has worked with a number of national consumer and business brands including Citibank, Kraft Foods, Burger King, Toshiba, Emerson Electric, and The American Marketing Association. Signorelli’s agency has been cited as one of the fastest growing independent companies in the U.S. by Inc. Magazine for three years running and, in 2010, he was the recipient of the “Smart Leader” award given by Smart Business Magazine and U.S. Bank. He resides in Evanston, IL with his wife.

www.visibilitymagazine.com

marketing

Marketing Diversification SEO is Icing on the Cake

nce upon a time there was a small destination website where almost all website traffic funneled through before going anywhere they didn’t already know... Google. They might still be around, but having not seen their home page in years, who knows. It’s almost like they disappeared by being merged right into my fingertips, or something. It is pretty much guaranteed, that in some way, you are going to interact with Google today. That company is so pervasive that it is nearly impossible to turn on any media at all, without meeting up with Google along the way. Web, email, phone, TV, and on and on. You might say the internet is putting all of its eggs in one basket. That may seem like it makes things easier. That you don’t need to go to 10+ different places to market your business, but anyone who does search optimization has experienced a Google reality check. One day you’re #1, living the good life. The next day you’re #450 with a substantial portion of your traffic gone. It might have even worked in reverse for you. Going up to page one out of nowhere, but that too should make you think.... “If my site went up quickly, is there a chance it could go down just as fast?” Okay, so before this turns into sounding like a rant against SEO, lets be clear. SEO is awesome! It not only can bring you a wealth of traffic but also sets you apart as an expert in your field before the user even comes to your website. If you’re #1 on Google you’re trustworthy before I even lay eyes on you. What this is a rant against, is the idea that Google is the only place where this traffic can come from, and even whether it is the most cost-effective for your business in your market. I don’t think this is the place to do, yet another, “SEO isn’t free” speech, but it is surely the place to discuss how to protect yourself from one 3rd party service, out of your control, holding all the marbles, so that they have the power to take their marbles and go home on a whim.

Diversify your Marketing Strategy This is where marketing becomes an art form. There are two competing ideas that have to be balanced, and it’s not entirely clear (unless you have the mountains of data that a Google or Facebook does) where to strike that

balance. #1... Focus. It does not pay to spread yourself thin and be distracted to the point where nothing gets done. #2... Safety. It does not pay to use one traffic source only to have that source removed by variables out of your control. How do we get to this balance? Well, I hate to say it, you do it with, “hard work”. • #1. Commit to a planning and evaluation schedule. • #2. To get the right balance, know your budget. All marketing planning starts here. If you don’t plan in advance what you have to spend on Christmas, you’re guaranteed to spend more than you should have. • #3. Know what your customer is worth. Not just today, but over the life time of that customer. Sure , your customer might spend $5.00 the first time, but if you have a $15,000 upsell on the back end it would sure make that customer worth losing $5.00 to get them in the door. • #3. Try new new marketing avenues lightly. Roll out successes big. Kill failures early. • #4. Use SEO as icing on the cake, but start icing that cake today, because it can take a long time before its ready for you to eat your first slice. SEO works, period! You can begin establishing your search engine reputation early with very little effort. Some good writing, once a month even, about something you’re an expert in, will be great seeds to plant. Before you put a real emphasis on SEO though, make sure you have a proven product or service that has real customers coming in from other sources, and only do real SEO making doubly sure you target the right keywords. SEO can reap huge rewards, no doubt. However, the amount of time & effort it takes to get to the top means that you can’t be wrong about what keywords you are going to target once you start putting real money into the effort. It’s one marketing puzzle piece that can’t be done using #3 from above. We already know it works, but you can’t try it lightly and succeed. You need real data about what your customers search for when they are in the market for your product or service. Only then will you know, that when you do reach that coveted page one position, that there will be people who were there, waiting for an expert like you, to fill their need, the whole time. Now, where do you get that data about which keywords to target? Hmm... sounds like another article is needed. In the meantime you could always find an expert like me to help. Ugh, don’t you feel dirty now? Like you were reading a marketing piece this whole time :)

Richard Kersey is the President & Founder of RazorIT.com. Richard started doing internet design & development back in 1999 while in college. After a brief stint in advertising and marketing for radio and a star- up internet company, he evolved into running his own design & development firm where he brings together the best designers, programmers and marketing experts to provide start-up businesses real growth by using and building cutting edge internet tools. If he ever gets time away from his 16 hour days he enjoys some sun, swimming, and playing piano and guitar with his large growing family.

www.visibilitymagazine.com

Summer 2012

Visibility

online video

Five Steps for a Killer YouTube Strategy

oogle. Bing. Yahoo. The battles for the hearts and minds of today’s consumers aren’t happening in boardrooms – they’re happening on search engines, the frontlines of brand warfare in the digital space. 2011 was an exciting year for online video, with innovation and growth throughout the industry and more change ahead in 2012. As issues of connectivity and speed have been overcome, many consumers have abandoned their TVs, preferring to watch all types of video on demand on their laptops, tablets, or smartphones. Consider these statistics for an average month in 2011: • 180 million U.S. Internet users (85.8%) watched online video for an average of 18 hours per viewer. • The total U.S. Internet audience engaged in a record 6.9 billion viewing sessions. • Video ads reached 50 percent of the total U.S. population an average of 37.6 times. • Video ads accounted for 13.4 percent of all videos viewed and 1.3 percent of all minutes spent viewing video online. Yet despite this huge shift in viewing habits, many marketers are not using online video in their digital mix. This article describes the value of video for online marketers and offers five steps to create a killer YouTube strategy.

Where are the Viewers? Google Sites, driven primarily by video viewing at YouTube.com, is the top online video content property with 162 million unique viewers each month. VEVO ranks second with 62.3 million and Facebook.com is #3 with 51.7 million viewers. Americans view more than 5.6 billion video ads each month, according to comScore, with Hulu generating the highest number of video ad impressions at 996 million. The implications of this growth for the digital advertising industry are huge, with many trying to understand the preferences and expectations of consumers. Increasingly, media planners are demanding tools that enable them to create and optimize campaigns across specific channels to reach desired target audiences.

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In response, comScore, a leader in measuring activity in the digital world, released its first comparison of viewership across thousands of YouTube partners and their channels. The Video Metrix [http://www.comscore.com/Products_Services/ Product_Index/Video_Metrix] separates video advertising and video content so advertisers can identify who is watching online video and the frequency of their viewing. And in September 2011, YouTube launched Google AdWords for video in beta. The tool aims to simplify online video ad campaigns and allow advertisers to use a dynamic, auction-based platform to place and manage ads on YouTube and the Google Display Network. These are just two of many developments that reinforce the importance of video marketing for advertisers in all industries.

Beauty TV Online video is one of the most effective and efficient ways to communicate your marketing message to your audience. This visual and dynamic format gives customers another way to interact with your brand, and gives you a great opportunity to introduce your product or service to a new audience or redefine an established brand’s personality. Video can be a buzz maker and the right campaign can quickly generate referrals, friends, fans, and followers. With little or no media expense, depending on where it’s posted, your video can drive customer action, generating qualified sales leads with a lower cost for customer acquisition and higher ROI. L’Oreal, for example, is leveraging video to connect with consumers in a new way, responding to a shift in consumers’ behavior as a growing number both research and buy products online. The wellknown beauty brand is dramatically increasing its digital spending in the U.S., boosting its outlay for original content development as it shifts some of its focus from brand and product awareness toward consumer evaluation and advocacy online. The beauty marketer hopes to add 70 million additional consumers in the U.S. over the next 10 years.

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Their strategy is to reach consumers online when they’re evaluating products, using a combination of sophisticated search marketing optimization and original online content aimed including thousands of videos focused on “long tail” searches for specific needs such as caring for blond hair or creating a smoky eye. Another L’Oreal digital effort, the Beauty TV YouTube channel introduced last year, has generated 22 million video views and is the largest partner channel on YouTube, delivering reach comparable to a cable TV network.

Five Steps for a Killer YouTube Strategy YouTube, which draws about 40 percent of all online video visits and is challenging Google as the second largest search engine in the U.S., is a great place for marketers in all industries to reach and engage their target markets. Here are five things every digital marketer can do take advantage of video. 1. Make it search-engine friendly. Google has made video an integral part of search results. Companies can now gain visibility in the search engines quickly by providing video content that is search-engine friendly. YouTube Suggest is a keyword suggestion tool similar to the Google suggest tool. Use keywords and titles when naming your video files and surround them with keywordrich Web content. When you publish your videos on sites like YouTube, add tags to each video that put them in easily searchable categories. 2. Make it shareable. The best video starts conversations and spreads among friends and their social networks. Provide links and functionality to make it easy for people to email your video to friends, embed on Web pages and blogs, and post to their various social networking profiles. 3. Know your ad types. Aside from in-search and in-display, YouTube also added in-slate and in-stream. Advertisers can now define a target group, set bid amounts for each of the four formats, and search and set target suggestions by keywords. For example, the targets include topics like Art & Entertainment; Audiences, males from 18-24; and Interests, hiking & Camping. Advertisers also can target by content, such as

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Spanish-speaking content or sports. 4. Use a call to action. Your video should create a clear action path and the surrounding Web content should make executing that action easy. Create “buy” specific ad copy for use in YouTube overlay ads and include a direct call to action. Maximize conversion opportunities by clearly showing your offer and encouraging viewers to click. YouTube’s call-to-action overlay makes an offer to viewers, shares more information about businesses and drives traffic to Web sites. The overlay appears as a display ad over the TrueView in-search and in-display videos that play on YouTube. 5. Use In-stream video ads. It turns out that in-stream video ads boost brand recall. eMarketer noted a study that finds viewers not only remember seeing in-stream ads, but also recall the subject. Forty-seven percent said they remembered the brand or product advertised after viewing a pre-, mid- or post-roll video ad.

Value of Video Marketing As TV continues to travel everywhere, online video is becoming an increasingly effective and relevant medium to conveniently reach and engage audiences. Comprehensive viewing intelligence, combined with demographics, provide an invaluable platform for improved media planning. By applying these tips, marketers in all industries can successfully incorporate video into their online campaigns and see positive results in brand awareness, lead generation, and sales. n

As CEO of LSF Network, Daniel Laury’s international finance, marketing and technology backgrounds are a perfect match for continuously pioneering the way in performance oriented digital marketing. An Internet pioneer, Laury co-founded LuckySurf.com that became the 17th most visited site in the world by December 2000. In 2005, he founded LSF Interactive, an agency that has become one of the largest global digital marketing agencies. In 2007 and 2010, LSF was recognized as one of Inc. Magazine’s fastest growing private companies in America. LSF Network is now one of the largest independent agency groups with well-known digital agency brands; e-Visibility, 15miles, LSF Interactive and a large European presence.

Summer 2012

Visibility

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For a full list of upcoming events, please visit:

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New York City December 4, 2012

product review

HubSpot EDITOR RATING

Very Good

s the online marketing space gets bigger and stronger, it comes as no surprise that a number of software companies are making their products more useful and relevant so as to make it easier for their clients to drive up their sales in more and more efficient ways. One such product that has been designed precisely to do that, and a lot more, is HubSpot’s All-in-One Marketing Software. Now the keyword here is “all-in-one”. When you hear that phrase you should know that there is something interesting happening there. With the range of activities that online marketers engage in these days and with the various kinds of results they want by mixing and matching strategies, it is always a good idea to have a product by your side that is good at multi-tasking and meeting multiple ends. It is true that there are a number of softwares out there that can give you results, but what sets HubSpot apart from the rest is the range of tasks that it covers in an intuitive yet simple manner. HubSpot has been designed keeping in mind today’s online marketer and the requirements that would be top-of-mind for them. From helping your name being found online to converting browsers to buyers and then analyzing their online behavior to further strengthen your relationship with your client, HubSpot is a software that has the ability to give you multi-tiered data that you can turn into opportunities (read: sales). For example, HubSpot’s search engine optimization features allow you to pick the right keywords and find link-building opportunities through keyword analysis, link tracking and page-level SEO that increase your website’s search ranking. When you choose to use HubSpot, you can forget all about hiring an SEO expert, because this software will do all that and more for you. HubSpot works for online marketers because of the software’s understanding on the nature of online business. Making HubSpot part of your business strategy will allow you to better plan out the route through which you are going to reach your potential clients and will help you plan how you are going to maintain your existing ones. The software also understands that big, medium and small businesses have different requirements and allows users to tweak settings according to their preferences and their requirements. A unique edge that HubSpot offers is the ability to track your clients’ loyalty and encourage clients to stay loyal to your brand by offering them attractive business deals. Any marketer knows that it is important to convert a potential client into a sale but true success is if you convince the client to come back for their next purchase and keep coming back for your brand. HubSpot does this through in-depth analysis of the data that is collected about each client and analyzing what the client’s preferences are while matching it with their online behavior. These insights into what the client most liked about your brand will allow you to design attractive offers that they would want to keep coming back to. The bottom line is that HubSpot works. It has features that are easy to use and can be adapted and used for simple and complex marketing strategies; the software is ideal for big, medium and small agencies; and it is simple to use and can be used by any online marketer looking to increase their sales base. n

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Bottom Line HubSpot is an easy-to-use all-in-one marketing software. Visit www.hubspot.com.

Pricing • Basic packages start at $200/month, billed annually • Professional packages start at $400/ month, billed annually • Enterprise packages start at $700/ month, billed annually • For more information, visit www. hubspot.com/pricing

Features • Search Engine Optimization • Blogging and Social Media Tools • Landing Pages and Lead Capture Forms • Lead Intelligence and Scoring • Email Management • Marketing Automation • Marketing Analytics • CRM Integration and Closed Loop Reporting • 50+ optional marketing apps and integrations

Pros • Easy-to-use product that focuses on results • All-in-one software that brings together a marketing strategy • ROI tracking across multiple channels • Expanding marketplace of apps, integrations and services

Summer 2012

Visibility

seo

Guest Blogging Can Drastically Improve Your Website’s SEO

uest blogging is defined as the act of writing for another blog with the intent of getting quality backlinks, getting traffic, and gaining exposure for your brand. It is one of the least utilized but most beneficial tactics a company can do to improve their SEO. Utilizing guest blogging is an easy way to improve the quantity of backlinks from authoritative websites. In fact, this is why many companies have started looking for professional writers. Blog owners are always looking for new ways to create compelling content because that’s how they generate their traffic. Some blogs used to pay for great content, but now they can receive great content for nothing but a backlink in return. It is the companies who want the backlink that pay the writers.

from webpage to webpage. It is entirely in a company’s control to improve this aspect of SEO. Off-Page SEO is all about getting links to your website on other websites. Google assumes that if lots of other related authoritative websites across the Internet are linking to your site; your website must provide a lot of value to readers. While the rationale makes sense; this is difficult for a new company to accomplish. It is hard for other websites to know your website exists if you’re not at the top of a search engine, so how will they ever link back to your site?

In the end, everyone wins because the company is improving its SEO, writers are getting paid to write and improve their personal brand, and editors get great content for nothing but a link on their blog or website’s page in return.

The answer to that last question: Guest blogging. Guest blogging is great because it allows a new company to be able to compete with larger, more established companies. It allows you to get those backlinks from those authoritative sites. If you can offer them a great piece of content, why wouldn’t they give you credit by including a link back to your site?

For those who are unfamiliar, there are really only two types of SEO techniques:

How to Utilize Guest Posting in Three Easy Steps

On-Page SEO deals with the optimization of a company’s site. This means unique, quality content, easy navigation for readers, and internal linking

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If you’re a company looking to take advantage of guest posting, there are a few steps you will want to take: Step #1: Hire a great writer who feels comfortable speaking with editors.

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It’s extremely important that you hire a great writer. Because guest blogging is becoming so popular, editors have their pick of “free” articles. In other words, there is a good chance that a writer could get turned down when trying to contribute an article; therefore it is very important that they are a great writer. Many companies give writers a quick “write on this topic for 30 minutes” test before hiring to see if they have what it takes to write large volumes of content each day. It’s also important that you hire a writer who feels comfortable talking with editors so that your company can create a good reputation. If the writer doesn’t know much about SEO that is OK, but it is your job to teach them! Step #2: Complete keyword research so you know where you should be linking with each guest article, and communicate this with your writer. SEO is really just a way to help your company website rank highly on search engine results pages (SERPs). Once you start ranking well on SERPs, companies will be able to find you and link to your website on their own (although many still utilize guest posting for that extra push). You will want to research which keywords will give you the best chance to rank, and then have your writer’s link back to these keywords when writing. You can use several tools to perform your keyword research like WordTracker or SEMRush. Step #3: Have your writers find sites that accept guest posts, and then ask them to link back to the keywords and links you have provided. It is usually the job of the writers to look around the Internet for sites that accept guest posts. In general, it’s best if your writers write for sites that work with a similar niche as your company because your links will be more relevant. Writers can typically go to a blog and look for a “write for us” or a “guest post”

tab or link on the blog, read the requirements, write a piece of content, and then send it in to the editor. Make sure that the writers are either putting links within the copy of the article or in an author box. Most editors only want links within the copy if they are completely relevant to the story and can add value for a reader. Links back to your website within the copy hold a little bit more weight, but a link in an author box is much better than no link at all. Links in an author box work well because you can write about anything and your links do not have to be overly relevant to the story. For example, if John Doe wrote for a site that focuses on social media, yet his company was focusing heavily on the term “new cars.” He was still able to provide relevant content to the blog and able to provide the link his company needed. Overall, guest posting is one of the easiest ways to improve your SEO. Writers can usually produce quite a few articles in one day and get links on authoritative websites, so you aren’t going to find a much faster way to improve your SEO. n

Adam Heitzman is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner at HigherVisibility, an internet marketing agency located in Memphis, TN. Prior to starting HigherVisibility, Heitzman worked for several internet companies as a Chief Marketing Officer and Marketing Manager where he learned the many facets of the internet marketing world and the strategies it takes to succeed. Over the years he has consulted and worked with Fortune 500 companies to small businesses on how best to utilize the internet to achieve quantifiable results.

BOSTON | OCT 1- 2, 2012 DemandCon is the world’s first conference dedicated to managing the complete sales funnel, top to bottom. produced by

www.DemandCon.com

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Summer 2012

Visibility

SES Conference & Expo is the leading global event series that educates professionals in search and social marketing, putting a special focus on tactics and best practices. SES Events provide instructions from the industryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s top experts, including representatives from the Search Engines themselves.

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Summer 2012

Visibility

mobile optimization

Optimize Your Website for Mobile Devices

very company has a website, but do you have a mobile-optimized website? Mobile devices are an important, and growing, channel for business. Consider these statistics:

• According to mobiThinking there are now more than 1.2 billion mobile web users worldwide which account for more than 8% of web traffic. • comScore reports that mobile devices drove 10.8 percent of traffic to online retail sites on Cyber Monday 2011, more than double the previous year. • Interestingly, mobile devices accounted for even more online traffic on Black Friday – 14.3 percent! • The most popular device for mobile commerce? The iPad. Clearly, with the ongoing proliferation of browsers and devices that can access your content and commerce offerings, the mobile web opens up a vast new audience of potential visitors to your site. In fact, Gartner predicts mobile will be the number one Internet access device as early as next year. So the question becomes, what are you doing to optimize your mobile website? Your standard web site may be performing extremely well, but you’ll need to re-think what constitutes a successful site when you dive into the mobile web, because mobile is different. Analyses of consumer behavior have shown that mobile users have different needs and expectations than desktop users. The “on-the-go” environment, task-at-hand, and physical device constraints all differ, often dramatically.

Optimize Without Boundaries Where to start? The top priority for mobile must be to provide a compelling user experience. There is no magic bullet to creating a mobile site that attracts and converts traffic, so the best way to understand how to create a compelling mobile site is to experiment. Mobile optimization using A/B and multivariate testing has been proven to be one of the most effective and immediate experimentation

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methods to increase sales, enhance visitor engagement, and encourage content consumption. Common methods for running controlled experiments on both websites and mobile sites range from simple A/B testing to sophisticated multivariate testing. In A/B testing, one or more new versions of a page or single element compete against the original (control) version. For example, two new versions of a headline might compete against the original headline. Multivariate testing, on the other hand, is like running many A/B tests concurrently, where there are multiple elements being tested at the same time. For example, two alternate product images, plus two alternate headlines, plus two alternate product copy versions create a total of 27 possible combinations (including the original control versions). Think about using multivariate testing in your mobile marketing strategy for learning how to better influence and persuade visitors to: • • • • •

interact with your mobile brand, content, and functionality adopt mobile site features in order to get information on the go click-through to mobile ads and geo-aware offers, such as coupons register for mobile accounts download digital products such as ringtones, wallpapers, apps, etc.

Targeting Your Mobile Audience Since many organizations have not yet allocated specific budget for their mobile initiatives, testing a subset of existing, highly-trafficked content on a targeted mobile audience can provide a low-cost and low-risk stepping stone towards building a business case around making a deliberate investment in mobile optimization. Tests have proven that showing mobile users’ content that is specifically tailored for mobile devices improves the user experience, makes the site stickier and, ultimately, increases conversion rates. With mobile targeting, web marketers and analysts are able to test, measure and, ultimately, deliver the

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content, layout and promotional offers that are more effective for each mobile device category. These can include attributes such as: • • • • • •

Preferred markup language: HTML vs. WAP/WML Keyboard type: physical versus touch screen keyboard Screen dimensions and rotation support Browser capabilities: scaling, Flash and AJAX support Cellular network data speeds: 2.5G, 3G and 4G Mobile operating system: Apple iOS, Android, BlackBerry/Research In Motion, Windows Phone Mobile and Palm webOS

Technical Constraints…Or Not? While marketers can easily test what is working or not working on their standard websites and in their search engine optimization and pay-perclick campaigns, many mobile devices do not support JavaScript-based testing and targeting solutions or accept cookies to track users. Mobile site operators have estimated these devices to be as high as 50 percent of their audience, thus precluding pervasive JavaScript-based testing, targeting, and analytics for these mobile users. That means you want to look for a non-intrusive mobile testing and targeting platform that does not rely upon JavaScript operations for generating content variations, so you do not have to worry about what browser, version, or settings your users have. That way, you can test, target, and analyze users who have disabled JavaScript or cookies, have browsers that do not support cookies, or have chosen to only accept temporary session-based cookies.

Once you’ve chosen the right optimization platform, you’re ready to get started on the path to improving your site for mobile users. With relatively little in the way of best practices for the nascent mobile channel, it can be difficult to know beforehand which content, user interface element, or aesthetic will be most effective with your audience. That’s why it’s critical that you test your mobile offerings before launching them so you can discover which content your users prefer on their mobile devices. Discover what works by testing elements such as navigation, image size, image choice, specific words or phrases, placement, design, graphical elements, headlines, colors, variations in functionality, or dynamic content. What’s important to understand about mobile optimization is that it not only shows you which combination of elements your visitors prefer, but it reveals which individual elements influence visitor behavior vs. those that do not. For example, did variations in the product image influence visitor behavior more, less, or the same as the copy? Understanding how each mobile site element influences the visitor experience is the essence of a “test-learn-repeat” process that marketers can use to prove (or disprove) the effectiveness of new ideas and continually improve their mobile site’s ability to achieve — and exceed — their marketing goals. n

Kim Ann King is an award-winning marketing executive and has been a B2B software marketer for more than two decades. She currently serves as the Chief Marketing Officer of web and mobile optimization firm SiteSpect.

This is the ultimate event for decision makers and suppliers in the digital industry.

22nd-23rd October 2012 Hilton Brighton Metropole Hotel

Digital professionals will be able to meet new suppliers covering all products and services, plus attend high profile, interactive seminars covering key topics chaired by leading industry experts. Suppliers to the digital industry will have the opportunity to meet with pre-qualified decision makers and discuss current and future digital requirements in a private meeting booth.

“The 30 minute buzz sessions with suppliers have been effective introductions for areas of the business where new opportunities lie” ESPN “ My first time attendance at the event, great meetings, social event and gained new clients, will definitely be booking for next year” Click Consult

The event includes: • • • • • • •

A Personalised Itinerary Pre-agreed face to face meetings Unlimited networking opportunities Seminars lead by industry experts All meals and refreshments Overnight accomodation Gala Dinner plus evening entertainment

Delegate Contact: Lisa Slavin

Tel: 01992 374091

Email: l.slavin@forumevents.co.uk

Supplier Contact: Karl McLean

Tel: 01992 374055

Email: k.mclean@forumevents.co.uk

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www.forumevents.co.uk

Summer 2012

Visibility

The Shareholders

Called Today. They Hate Our Website!

ecause most websites convert visitors at a mere fraction of their potential, annual revenues and managerial bonuses were less than stellar in 2011. Many CEOs and CMOs are under the pressure to increase company revenues, while under additional pressure to buy their wife that big diamond. Sound familiar? If so, don’t worry. Recent studies show only 25% of website owners are satisfied with their website’s conversion rate.

an amazing looking website, and therein lies the problem. The sad reality is most designers don’t understand your company’s website visitors or why they buy from you. And frankly, most aren’t good salespeople. Yet these are the individuals commissioned to create your company’s best potential salesperson—your website. Does this decision make any sense to anyone?

By Josh Dalton

What attributes make them so outstanding? Most business owners are shocked to realize most of those same attributes don’t appear on their website. Would it surprise you to hear that people buy online for the same reasons they buy offline? Probably not. So why does

This article outlines a strategy to: (1) Transform your company’s website into a conversion machine; (2) Reduce your customer acquisition costs; (3) Increase your annual revenue; and (4) Increase your likelihood of buying that big diamond.

Where to Invest Your Marketing Dollars

Most business owners invest thousands of dollars every year in sales training to enhance their salespeople’s effectiveness when helping customers. These same business owners will also pay a top-notch design firm a comparable amount to create

Netmark’s philosophy is that your sales team understands more about your typical website visitor, and why they buy from you, than your design agency. So why not start the design process there. Don’t believe us? Think of your company’s best salespeople.

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Summer 2012

this get past so many people? Here are three common reasons: 1. Misconception: Most business owners don’t see their website as a salesperson. They view it as “just” a website, or worse yet, an expense. 2. Ignorance: Many business owners don’t realize that services exist to help transform websites into effective salespeople. This process is generally referred to as conversion rate optimization (CRO). 3. Experience: Some business owners have already spent years trying to run successful websites, only to experience mediocre success. Their past experiences have destroyed all hope that their website could ever be successful.

Where Does Conversion Rate Optimization Really Start?

You’d think that conversion rate optimization starts the moment a visitor lands on your website, but this is false. Seventy percent of your

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website’s ability to effectively convert website visitors happens BEFORE a visitor ever arrives on your website. A company must know their target audience before they can design a website that converts visitors into customers. Here are some common questions you can ask yourself to gage how well you know your customers: 1. Do you know the REAL problems your customers are experiencing? Why this is important —There is often a difference between a customer’s problems and what they perceive their problems to be. 2. Do you know how these problems are financially affecting their business or their personal lives? Why this is important— Most people make buying decisions because of the impact a problem has on them personally. 3. Do you know the priorities your customers have placed on solving their problems? Why this is important —Not all problems are of equal importance to your customers, nor should they all be given the same time and attention. 4. Are you familiar with your website visitors’ common concerns and objections to converting? Why this is important — Most business owners are afraid to counter a visitor’s concerns and objections for fear that they will create a new fear or objection. Two things: a. You are not going to trick someone into purchasing from you. b. If a fear or objection is overcome, it will no longer hinder your website’s ability to convert. 5. Do you know, and more importantly, do you understand the behavior of your typical website visitor? Why this is important —It’s an amazing revelation when you realize that analytics can do more than just count website stats. Analytics can introduce you to the psychology of your customers. All of these items must be well understood and quantified BEFORE a website can effectively convert visitors into customers. Knowing your customers will help you to qualify your website’s traffic by guiding your online advertising. But more importantly, it will help you cater the experience your website creates to those visitors that turn into customers. So here’s the takeaway: All of the questions asked above are designed to help you better understand your customer, but that’s not why they’re included in this article. They are here so that you understand that the most qualified people to answer them is your sales staff.

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“Houston, the Eagle Has Landed”

Let’s say a searcher goes to Google. They type in a search query. Your website pops up on page one (nice work by the way). They see your listing and click on the link. They then find themselves on one of your website pages. … Now what? Here is a check list of 10 time tested, best practices to make sure that your website can efficiently convert visitors: CRO Principle #1: Attention Please! You only have seconds to engage your visitor in a way that compels them to stick around to find out why they are there. We’ll get to why they are there later.

for them to purchase your products or services. Make it easy for them to contact you if necessary. CRO Principle #4: Create Value. Here is a simple mathematical equation Netmark lives by: Benefits – Costs = Value. As you can see, there are two ways to create additional value for your visitors: 1. Cut the prices of your products and services 2. Place a higher emphasis on the benefits of your products and services Cutting the price is easy to do, so it’s often the option website owners resort to. But placing a higher emphasis on your benefits is always the better option.

CRO Principle #2: Personalize It. Give the visitor an experience that works for them. If your visitors expect something, give it to them. If a lot of your visitors access your website from a smartphone, make sure your website works on a smartphone.

CRO Principle #5: Emotional Engagement. People buy emotionally; they only justify their decision intellectually. Some business owners think they can’t create emotion around products and services they sell, but we haven’t found one yet that can’t.

CRO Principle #3: Simplify Everything. Make it easy for the visitor to find the information they’re looking for. Make it easy for them to find your company’s value propositions. Make it easy

CRO Principle #6: Value Propositions. Gone are the days when people sit and read paragraph after paragraph on your website. Communicate your value propositions, and do it quickly. Your

Summer 2012

Visibility

visitors buy when they have the emotional drive to solve a personal problem, but they buy from you, and not the guy down the street, because of the unique value you provide. That’s why they are on your website, and not your competitor’s website. CRO Principle #7: Counter Objections. You must know what your customers concerns and objections are to buying. You must resolve them tactfully, leaving them with nothing to object to. CRO Principle #8: Create Urgency. When a visitor leaves your website, their excitement also leaves. You already know they’re probably not coming back. Give your visitors a compelling reason to act now or it’s probably never going to happen. CRO Principle #9: Ask for It. Invite your visitors to take action. Do so frequently in a variety of ways. Most visitors need to be asked several times before they make a decision to purchase. CRO Principle #10: Measure It. If you make a change to your website, measure the impact it has on your sales and the behavior of your visitors. If you don’t measure it, you don’t know.

So after reading this article, one last question needs addressed. Do you know your website’s conversion rate? If not, don’t feel bad. Most business owners have no idea. Our goal has been to help you realize that your website’s conversion rate might very well be the single most important number you need to know in 2012. You might be missing out on big opportunities RIGHT NOW that are personally costing you bonuses and costing your wife her new diamond. By focusing on increasing conversions, you can transform your company’s website into an amazing sales tool, reduce your company’s customer acquisition costs, and increase your company’s annual revenue. Good luck! Easter Eggs: Reread this article. See if you can find all 10 CRO principles used within the text to get you to this point—the end of the article. n

Josh Dalton and Terry Hansen consult with companies all over the world with respect to improving their website’s conversion rate. They work for Netmark.com, a top ranking internet marketing agency located in Idaho Falls, Idaho.

BARCElona affiliate conference 11th-14th October 2012 The Fira de Barcelona This event will bring you:  1600 Expected delegates  Over 100 Affiliate Programs  70% Affiliate attendees  Conference sessions that will increase your revenue  Amazing networking parties, in incredible venues, in a stunning city

And all this is FREE for afﬁliates

More details including sponsorship packages, conference schedule, the official hotel, all the parties and much more will be available soon on

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www.BarcelonaAffiliateConference.com

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vendor spotlight

Telligent Telligent is one of the pioneers in enterprise social community and workforce collaboration software. Founded in 2004 by technology visionary Rob Howard, Telligent helps companies worldwide to implement social communities for their employees, customers and partners. Built on top of Telligent’s innovative social platform, Telligent offers two core social applications that can be used to build internal and external communities. Telligent Enterprise is Telligent’s social community software designed for flexibility in building employee-facing communities that drive collaboration and accelerate innovation in the workplace. Employees enjoy modern social capabilities like blogs, discussion forums, wikis, and more in an interactive workspace.

Specifically, Telligent Enterprise helps to: • Boost productivity with modern systems that empower your workforce • Maximize the value of your investments in enterprise technology by providing a social layer that integrates, not replaces, your enterprise investments • Unite employees across geographical and organizational boundaries anytime, anywhere Telligent Community is Telligent’s social community software designed for flexibility in building customer-facing communities that achieve your business objective for improving customer support, building brand loyalty and strengthening member networks. The community suite boasts more than 50 features including social search and content discovery, smart content recommendations, social calendaring, and more.

Contact Information Telligent 17950 Preston Road Suite 310 Dallas, TX 75252

Core Values

• Customers come first. Period. • Honesty always. • Accountability for all we say and do.

Customers

mid-sized businesses to Fortune global companies

Client List

Over 3,000 companies, including: American Marketing Association, Dell, Microsoft, Psion, U.S. Department of Defense - All Partners Access Network (APAN) and more.

Specifically, Telligent Community helps to: • Energize customers, employees and partners by putting control into the hands of business users so that interactive marketers, customer service professionals and key stakeholders are at the forefront of customer engagement • Reflect your brand with communities that can be customized easily using our integrated design framework • Achieve measurable business results Cadbury is a great example of how a leading brand leverages Telligent Community for its external community. Think chocolate; think Cadbury, a brand craved by sweet lovers the world over. The Cadbury Dairy Milk Bar has been around since 1905 and is still going strong. In a market with intense competition, how do you continue to build brand loyalty and also engage your customers so you can learn more about them? Cadbury’s solution: create a marketing campaign that produces a new community of brand enthusiasts. Their Spots v Stripes campaign transforms customers into brand enthusiasts by inviting everyone in the United Kingdom and Ireland to divide into two teams and play any type of game in order to score points towards an overall, national team total. To meet such high levels of participation, the campaign website acts as a central hub for all Spots v Stripes activity, which allows participants to choose a team, sign up, claim points and keep track of scores. The communal space for both teams also provides opportunities for Spots v. Stripes players to upload their own content to the site. No matter whether a Spot or a Stripe, its clear Cadbury has proven that by combining a mix of entertainment and interaction, a brand can connect with its consumers, gain valuable insight and build brand loyalty. At Telligent, we don’t have a one-size-fits-all approach to communities; we give you control so your community is an accurate reflection of your brand and will also help you achieve your desired business objectives. n

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Company Executives • • • • • • •

Patrick Brandt, CEO Rob Howard, Founder & CTO Wendy Gibson, CMO Kristin Reichert, CFO Cecilia Edwards, SVP of Client Services Steve Poncini, SVP of Worldwide Sales Richard Zicchino, SVP of Product Development • John Rabara, VP of Customer Care

Services Offered:

Enterprise social community and workforce collaboration software

Recognitions

• Dallas Business Journal Best Places to Work in Dallas-Fort Worth Award • SMU Cox Caruth Institute for Entrepreneurship Dallas 100 Award • KMWorld’s Trend-Setting Products of the Year • Telligent worked with U.S. Department of Defense - All Partners Access Network (APAN) and won the Forrester Groundswell Award for Employee Social Application in the Management Category

Summer 2012

Visibility

What Is Your SEO Really Costing You?

e’ve heard everything from “SEO is dead” to “there’s no value in SEO” over the past year. By not engaging in SEO it is costing you or your client precious dollars of their marketing budget. Many people have the tendency to view SEO in a silo and not leverage our keyword, demographic and geographical research for other marketing tactics. If the keyword is relevant to your target audience and is generating conversions, why wouldn’t the same information be applicable to social media, email marketing, content development, or web design? In the long-run, the lack of SEO is costing you time, money, and marketing efficiencies.

Web Design for Your Personas or Target Audience Contrary to the beliefs of many business owners and marketing professionals, SEO doesn’t start when the website is in development. It should be a part of the initial planning stages and part of the concepts for the content outline, wireframes, and functional requirements as well as aligned to the personas your agency developed. A persona is fictional characters created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic, attitude and/ or behavior set that might use a site, brand or product in a similar way. The initial keyword research would have provided insights into what information customers were looking for, what functionality is needed to obtain the information easily, and the design that would resonate with the target audience best. In general, web designers or developers are not marketing professionals (although some of them are capable). There might be a disconnect between the marketing strategy and the strategic direction of the website. Aligning the marketing strategy with the web design process to focus on the personas, goals, and objectives is increasingly important as well as the integration of marketing tactics and the measurement of effectiveness. Sometimes the artistic and aesthetic value can overshadow the overall goals and objectives. If the marketing strategy and web design strategy are aligned with the business goals and objectives, it will reduce the possibility that the artistic value will overshadow and exclude valuable search engine optimization components. The overall impact should mean a better user experience, particularly for your core personas & target audience, increased user engagement, and relevant organic search traffic. The content has an increased probability of being relevant to the target audience and of being shared through social media. This increases referral traffic from social media, and the relevant organic search traffic should generate leads and reduce your overall cost-per-acquisition/cost-per-lead.

SEO’s Impact on Pay per Click (PPC), Quality Score, and Cost per Lead SEO is still important to Pay per Click advertising and the overall search engine strategy. If your website is optimized for relevant keywords, then your business may not need to allocate a PPC budget for those keywords

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By Daniel Laws, Jr.

and phrases. This allows the business to reallocate marketing dollars to alternative marketing tactics.

The Quality Score is the Great Equalizer Within the Pay per Click Space Most search engine ad systems are designed to match the users’ needs as closely as possible with the most relevant ads. Landing pages that implement SEO best practices will yield better landing pages which translates to lower cost per click, lower cost per conversions, and lower cost-per-impression. Not to mention the assumptions that good SEO generally leads to better navigation on your website and a better user experience for your customers or prospects. This should lead to improvements with the visitor metrics and the likelihood of a lead or conversion.

Keyword Targeting for Email Marketing Effectiveness Email Marketing is still an effective tactic which should include keywords that are consistent with your SEO campaign. By implementing relevant and targeted keywords that are not only consistent with your products/ services but also your demographics and geographic locations will help to improve open rates, click-through rates, sharing of emails, and generate leads. The most interesting opportunity for keyword insertion into Email Marketing is within the subject line and content for link building. The ability to implement keywords into the subject line should improve your open rates as long as the keywords are relevant to target audience. In some cases, email software providers can implement subject line testing to improve the open rates and test new keywords within the subject line. Keyword insertion within the body copy of email promotions generally increases traffic to other marketing assets such as YouTube, Blogs, etc. It also provides an opportunity to hyperlink to relevant content and develops link building. With increased open rates from subject line testing and relevant content, this will improve the effectiveness of your email marketing communication, reduce the cost per lead, and improve return-on-investment.

Get Quality Leads & Conversions with Keyword Research & Leverage Finding within Marketing Tactics With SEO and the consistent usage of keywords & phrases in the marketing communication lead generation and conversions will improve your marketing effectiveness and the ability to reduce cost. Effective SEO goes beyond the keywords and meta descriptions. It will reinforce the website design and make it easier for customers to navigate your website which will improve lead generation. If the keywords are generating organic search traffic with your target audience, it will also improve the CTR for email promotions, help to identify PPC and content development opportunities to drive prospects to your business. Keyword Tools such as Ad Intelligence will provide

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insight into demographics, geographic locations, and keyword search volume. You can leverage this information to improve SEO, email marketing, as well as search engine marketing (SEM). Similar tools will help to identify emerging trends in search behavior and opportunities to generate additional traffic. The keywords used will reinforce the terminology to your target audience. If implemented effectively, your prospective customers should increase their search queries for broad and long-tail your keywords. Research shows that prospective customers generally receive a piece of marketing materials and then search for additional information. An effective SEO campaign will position your product or service offerings well for this audience, reduce acquisition cost, and improve internal marketing efficiencies. Tables 2 & 3 demonstrations the difference in ROI for a campaign that included compared to a campaign that did not included SEO.

Conclusion As Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve always said, SEO is not just important from a keyword ranking prospective. Its value also lies in its ability to improve the website user experience and on-site metrics. You can leverage the insights from keyword research and apply them to other marketing tactics. The ability to take what has been learned via keyword research and testing and apply it to other marketing tactics is important for reducing cost and creating

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marketing efficiencies. Regardless of our marketing roles, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a necessity to demonstrate return-on-investment and the value of our work. The ability to communicate insights across various channels provides us with the opportunity beyond keyword ranking. It provides you with information to leverage online & through more traditional marketing tactics to generate leads and revenue growth for clients. By leveraging the keyword research from your SEO campaign, you will be able to generate more relevant search traffic. In addition, you can use the keyword findings to improve PPC campaign effectiveness. The implementation of A/B testing for PPC campaigns will reduce the costper-click and provide direction on landing page optimization. This will improve the effectiveness of your marketing budget, generate a higher ROI, and boost the ability to reallocate resources. n

Daniel Laws, Jr. is founder and president of DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC (www. dabrianmarketing.com), a leading Internet marketing company since 2008 that specializes in search engine marketing & web analytics in Reading, Pennsylvania. He has over 10 years of internet marketing experience in the Philadelphia area. He is a Google AdWords Certified Individual, Google Analytics Qualified Individual, member of SEMPO, and has his M.B.A. with an emphasis in Marketing.

Summer 2012

Visibility

mobile optimization

Why Mobile Deserves a Seat at the Adult Table

or many organizations, the mobile channel is an afterthought – a second-tier player in the company’s efforts to connect with consumers in the digital space.

But current mobile traffic figures demonstrate that mobile has earned a place at the adult table, and needs to be more thoroughly incorporated into your organization’s marketing and overall business strategies.

Current Trends in Mobile Traffic

The sense that mobile is capturing a larger share of web browsing and online traffic is more than a hunch. According to Walker Sands’ Q4 2011 Mobile Traffic Report, mobile traffic now accounts for nearly 13% of total web traffic for companies, more than double the Q4 2010 figure of 6%. The Q4 Mobile Traffic Report also found: • In 2011, Android passed iPhone in browsing frequency. Approximately half of all traffic currently originates from Android devices, up from just 27% in 2010. • Although small screen devices still account for the largest portion (81%) of mobile traffic, tablet browsing increased to 16%, up from 10% in Q4 2010. • While mobile web traffic originating from iPhones dropped 17% from Q4 2010, growth in tablet browsing from the iPad allowed Apple’s iOS mobile platform (iPhone and iPad) to remain the largest source of total traffic from mobile -- maintaining a slim 1% lead over Android. The leap in Android traffic is likely rooted in several different factors, including accessibility and affordability. Since Android offers mobile products at nearly every price point, the platform has appeal for a broad base of consumers. Likewise, an increase in tablet penetration among consumers has contributed to the significant rise in tablet traffic in 2011. This trend is expected to continue as a recent report by Digitimes Research predicts tablet shipments will grow 60%, reaching 95 million units this year. However, the big news for 2011 was the rise of midsize tablet devices like the Kindle Fire. Unlike the iPad, the Kindle Fire and other smaller tablets require mobile-friendly sites for optimized viewing and navigation.

Mobile Optimization: Tips and Best Practices

The integration of mobile as a full partner in marketing and business strategies doesn’t happen overnight. To achieve maximum traction with mobile consumers, companies need to develop a long-term mindset and consistently prioritize mobile channel investments. As a critical first step, websites should be optimized for mobile audiences and equipped with the ability to detect each user’s mobile platform. In most instances, it’s possible to create a stripped down, mobile optimized version of the site that eliminates frills, streamlines navigation and conversion, and creates a much smoother experience for mobile users.

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Leveraging insights from the most recent trends in mobile traffic and device usage, there are several other tips and best practices companies can implement to optimize digital assets for mobile audiences. • Localization. When it comes to mobile, users are frequently searching for localized search results. For the purposes of mobile search, Google, Apple’s digital voice assistant Siri and other applications are hyper localized, so it’s important to make sure your company’s location listings are current. If not, you could severely limit your visibility to mobile consumers. • HTML5. Apple’s longstanding resistance to flash technology has been well documented. But now that other platforms no longer support flash, HTML5 has become the preferred way to display video on the web. From a mobile perspective, companies should audit their existing video resources to remove flash content and target HTML5 on a go-forward basis. • Mobile Apps. Mobile apps are expensive and platform specific. Consequently, most companies should steer clear of mobile app development unless they are sure the app will substantially enhance the user experience. Combined with the time and effort it takes for users to download apps, the cost barriers associated with app development and maintenance make it more sensible to focus on the creation of a mobile optimized site capable of delivering functionality to a range of mobile platforms. • Tablets. Until now, tablets devices like the iPad haven’t required mobile optimization because they facilitate the same view and user experiences as desktops. But as consumers flock to midsize, 5”x7” screen tablets (the Kindle Fire raked in $6 million in sales in December 2011 alone), it’s becomingly important to optimize websites for smaller tablet devices.

A Look Ahead

The growth of Android and the rising influence of midsize tablet devices will undoubtedly drive the development of new strategies by companies and marketers interested in capturing their fair share of the mobile marketplace. At the same time, the fluidity of the mobile landscape calls for companies to maintain a nimble and agile stance toward the mobile channel. Windows 8 tablets, Chrome Beta for Android and other developments will introduce new challenges into the mobile mix, creating opportunities for companies that are willing to give mobile a larger role in their digital strategies. n

Daniel Laloggia is a Digital Marketing Manager at Walker Sands Communications, where he develops and implements search marketing strategies for clients.

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THE

21 – 22 November 2012 Sydney Convention & Exhibition Centre www.internetshow.com.au/sydney

Show

www.internetshow.com.au/sydney

• • • • •

Digital advertising and marketing Social media e-Commerce and payments Content management and streaming Hosting and infrastructure

Organised by:

Australia’s largest internet business show Sponsorship and exhibition opportunities are now available. Contact Layal Wehbe at +61 02 9021 8828 or email layal.wehbe@terrapinn.com.

marketing

Top Tools for Digital PR Outreach

e live in an over-communicated world, which makes it difficult as marketers to have a resonating message that effect our bottom line. The Union of Concerned Scientists stated that the average American is bombarded by about 3,000 advertising messages a day. Fifteen years ago, DMNews cited “Each of us sees more ads alone in one year than people of 50 years ago saw in an entire lifetime.” Think about how the Internet has exponentially grown the exposure to information over the last decade and a half... As messages become more competitive to our end user’s (journalist, target market, et. all) share of mind, as a digital PR specialist, we must be that much more strategic and smart with our outreach. As we work daily to create meaningful content through articles, infographics, press releases, media alerts, and even multimedia - we must select the right medium for us to maximize our effort and time spent. Here are a few of the best tools for digital PR outreach.

Finding a home for your content My Blog Guest When once public relations professionals’ gold medal was print coverage, now a guest byline blog placements is a digital PR professional’s bread and butter. Which is why social media pioneer, Ann Smarty began My Blog Guest, a fully online system created to serve as a platform for guest posts. My Blog Guest understands the power of a guest post - and that’s why they offer a system for publishers around the globe to share infographics and unique guest blog posts.

My News Deck Founded in 2003, Mynewsdesk remains a Bona fide pioneer in digital PR. The service, which is also web-based, connects content submitted from PR professionals to journalists and professional bloggers. With the system, PR professionals can upload press releases, guest posts, multimedia, and video to journalists and bloggers who are in need of relevant and timely content, who can then take the content and republish it as they please. PR professionals can also start following companies directly on Mynewsdesk, engage with the news content, and become part of a network of influencers. PRWeb Though there are multiple press release wire services, PRWeb distributes press releases to exclusively online channels - making it the optimal newswire service for measurement and search engine optimization (SEO). PRWeb can send any given release to 30,000+ journalists and more than 250,000 PRWeb opt-in news subscribers. Once your release is published, PRWeb hosts your release on their site, a service that provides traffic generation and search engine optimization. Plus, you can optimize your release to include video, multimedia, and keyword-rich words.

Master analytic and outreach system iAcquire iAcquire is a membership-based “digital PR” system that serves as a bible for web analytics, qualifying online outreach prospects, and an allencompassing tracking system. iAcquire continuously crawls the web through 10 million websites and 40 billion links and facilitates targeting and filtering through SEO metrics like page relevancy, site traffic, and search engine rankings. Then, the technology extends into a proprietary system to manage communications to online publishers. Basically, this system serves as a one-stop shop for digital outreach.

Qualifying your content Compete.com This web analysis service serves up visitor data for the top 1,000,000 web sites in the world. This website can be used when qualifying specific websites for PR outreach. Alexa.com Another web analytics tool, Alexa is used to discover the websites by keyword, category, or location. The analytics can be used for competitive analysis, benchmarking, market research, and quantifying prospective media targets. n

Allie Gray Freeland is the Director of Marketing Communications of CollegeOnline.org, a guide to online schools and a learning resource for distance education. Allie earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Minnesota. Connect with her via LinkedIn.

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How Ecommerce Drives By Jennifer E. Dunphy

espite a massive recession, Ecommerce growth has been skyrocketing over the last ten years. Online sales have steadily continued to grow and over 150 million people in the U.S. have bought something online (67% of the online population). Gone are the days of sitting around and waiting for customers to walk through the front door to make a purchase. In this day and age, there is no reason why every single brick and mortar business shouldn’t have an Ecommerce website enabling them to open their doors not only to the local community but to the entire world. In order to succeed in sales, both online and offline, businesses need to develop and leverage a tactful Ecommerce strategy. Retail therapy is no longer an in store only adventure. While it can be fun to walk around a physical store, see and touch all of your desired items, the convenience of online shopping is unsurpassed. Over 83% of consumers in North America have shopped online. Even more important is that data showing that Ecommerce sales are growing by more than 10% each year and are projected to reach 278 billion dollars by 2015 according to Forrester Research. With numbers like that, businesses cannot afford to miss out on the opportunity to capitalize on this rapidly expanding market. Most businesses entering

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the Ecommerce game may wonder; what role does their website play in driving sales to their physical retail location. The important factor to consider is: What do consumers do online prior to making a purchase and how can businesses leverage that information to better reach them during key stages of their decision making process? This will not only drive more in store purchases, but it will also drive Ecommerce purchases. Even brick-and-mortar businesses can leverage their web presence for greater sales.

Leveraging Ecommerce to Increase B & M Revenue One such example of a brick and mortar business successfully expanding into the Ecommerce game is that of Floor and Décor Outlets of America, who serve do-it-yourself consumers and professional contractors, focusing on the residential remodeling and home improvement segment. Floor and Décor Outlets was a traditional brick and mortar business with 27 physical store locations in 10 different states when they decided to enter the Ecommerce playing field and expand their opportunity to sell to a larger audience. Within a year and a half, they had created a multimillion dollar new store; an Ecommerce store! Not only did their new Ecommerce website generate millions of

In-Store Sales

dollars in revenue for their new Ecommerce division, but it also increased their in store traffic as well. They have since opened new physical store locations as well as continue to grow their Ecommerce division. They are now up to 30 store locations and continue to open additional brick and mortar locations throughout the U.S. Now, if Floor & Décor can sell hardwood flooring and tile online, what products are off limits? How did they achieve such tremendous success in such a short period of time? They hired an Atlanta SEO company, Vayu Media, to assist them with their online marketing goals. They successfully implemented a SEO, PPC, and a social media strategy, that not only drove Ecommerce sales, but in store sales alike. Floor & Décor’s website now boast over 2 million visitors a year and this number is growing. Their organic search revenue has grown over 200% in the last six months. But the company doesn’t want to stop there. The number of keywords that consumers are searching for on Google, BING or Yahoo is basically limitless and offers a lot of opportunity to go after many niches. With every dollar Floor & Décor invested in SEO, they brought in over $12 in revenue. Now that is an ROI that I can get behind. This same level of success with Ecommerce is available to all brick and mortar businesses.

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Integrating Social and Mobile Commerce With the growing Ecommerce landscape, there are more ways than ever for businesses to get into the game. Facebook Ecommerce, commonly referred to as F Commerce, without doubt, is something that businesses should consider testing out to support their website. 90% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know . Furthermore, 90% of all purchases are subject to social influence. Although Facebook commerce thus far has been a lot about experimentation for retailers, social commerce revenue is projected to reach an astounding $30 billion in annual revenue by 2015, and F Commerce is likely to be a big piece of this development. Food for thought, Living Social had over 42,000 Facebook shares for their $20 Amazon voucher. Ticketmaster touts $5.30 of direct ticket sales every time a

user posts an event to Facebook. The power of social commerce is tremendous. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s really quite simple; shares, fans, friends, followers and connections all boil down to one thingâ&#x20AC;Ś Sales, both in store and online! With the technology advancements in smart phones, we are now poised for another huge leap in Ecommerce growth; mobile commerce, commonly referred to as M Commerce. Consumers are embracing mobile commerce more than ever

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and mobile is now strategically important for all retailers. Mobile commerce growth is set to quintuple over the next five years, resulting in $31 billion worth of annual sales by 2016. Research has shown that web retailers could increase consumer engagement by 85% with a mobile-specific website. Consider this, There are 3x more smart phones being activated every minute around the world than there are babies being born. Mobile commerce solutions could see a shift from apps to m-sites in 2012, as statistics show that shoppers prefer mobile sites vs. apps. As with traditional Ecommerce websites, the ease of navigation and the speed of a mobile site is crucial. 58% of mobile phone users expect mobile sites to load as quickly, or faster than desktop sites and 38% of users are willing to wait 30 seconds or less to complete a simple transaction. Mobile users expect quick and consistent transactions every time.

Taking the Dive If you think that your business may be ready to dive head first into the Ecommerce playing field, here are a few things to consider. Retailers are experts in the art of persuasion when it comes to their physical stores, but there are new factors that come into play with Ecommerce. The visual cues become increasingly more important because there is no sales associate present to address a consumers questions and concerns or to offer guidance. The visuals need to be

appealing enough to evoke emotions and entice the consumers to complete the transaction. 80% of shoppers place color as a primary reason for why they buy a particular product. Color has a unique ability to captivate shoppers and change their shopping behaviors. If you have the same item in numerous colors, make sure that your website displays all of the variation of the product and you will likely increase your sales. Color is not the only item that influences consumers behavior. For online consumers design, buzz words and ease of navigation affect their buying habits. 42% of online shoppers base their opinion of a website on the overall design alone and 52% of shoppers are not likely to return to a site with poor aesthetics. So, if you are going to invest in an Ecommerce website for your business, you want to make sure that you can not only get consumers to your site, but keep them there and have them complete the buying process. Just as important as the aesthetics is the speed of the website. Having a website that runs even 5 seconds slower than your competitors website could be the difference in getting a sale or losing the sale to your competitor. 64% of online shoppers have stated that they have abandoned an Ecommerce shopping cart because of a slow website. Ecommerce success metrics should not be solely measured by conversions rates and average order value, but engagement frequency, duration, and quality as well. Engagement Matters Most In Digital Commerce of all types, whether it is traditional Ecommerce, F-commerce, or M-commerce. Your main objective should be to create a seamless customer experience on your website, Facebook page and mobile site. In 2012 U.S. retail Ecommerce sales are projected to ring in at 209 billion dollars, this is an opportunity that you do not want to miss out on! n

Jennifer E. Dunphy is the founder and marketing executive of the Internet Marketing Firm Vayu Media. Under Jenniferâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s leadership the firm has become the leading SEO firm in Atlanta and is regarded as the most reputable Search Firm in the South Eastern United States. Jennifer has been a featured speaker on the subject of SEO at the Digital Summit 2011 and most recently was selected to speak at the eMarketing Association conference in San Francisco. Jennifer has been nominated for the distinguished Atlanta Business Leaders 40 Under 40 award by The Atlanta Business Chronicle, TAG Marketing Awards and LEAD Atlanta 2012, as well as Entrepreneur of the year three years standing with the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce. She has consistently proven her talents in marketing innovation and leadership.

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Visibility

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marketing

Webolutionary Thinking:

Maximizing Your Digital Marketing Dollars with a Website Realignment

he evolution of the internet has taken us all on a high-speed thrill-ride, and the fun’s only just begun – so keep that seatbelt buckled and hang on. Today’s brand managers have to position their online destinations to be ready for anything –because we can’t always predict whether the next great advance will quickly turn into the next great historical footnote. Remember the dotcom bubble? You’ll recall it burst, quickly dragging the weak and ill-prepared down with it. Anyone getting giddy over Geocities back when an increasingly visual web began to emerge knows this dynamic webolution has its share of historical phases and fads. But without the legacy solutions in the rear view mirror, we wouldn’t be where we are today. Everywhere you look, the web is pulsing with user-generated content. Content

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strategy and optimization are vital. The mobile space is expanding. The blogosphere is exploding. Coupled with the social media revolution, these factors are the fuel that’s powering today’s digital growth and tomorrow’s innovative ideas. Now, web content truly is king. As a result, users have endless options for not only what information they want to access, but how they access it, when they access it, and where they access it.

As this evolution continues, brand managers have two big questions to answer. First, how can I position my brand’s online presence to keep my business on track – and yes, do it cost effectively? And second, how can I keep my web site aligned with long-term business goals as well

as current brand and marketing initiatives? The solution is to step back, look at your online presence in an objective new way, and let what you see drive a website realignment.

Unlike a redesign or re-skin, a realignment is strategically planned and built to accommodate growth. Similar-sounding processes focus on one specific area of your site—say, revamping the visual design or tweaking interaction patterns. But a realignment reconfigures your site from the ground up to become an extension of your brand vision and business goals – while allowing future updates to do the same with minimal time and expense. It does mean more work and costs up front, but it saves you substantial work, hours and dollars in the long run. And here’s how it works.

Summer 2012

Visibility

It starts with an audit: What’s here? What’s working? What missing? In a successful web strategy, multiple elements have to work in synergy -- content, information architecture, visual design, user experience, technology, branding and marketing. To expose the truth about each, the realignment process begins with a holistic audit. For instance, the visuals from each page are collected and put into a bucket. All user experiences and interactions are logged and thrown in, too. Copy is pared down to a list of pure messages, and those are collected as well. Piece by piece, an organized library of content is amassed. These are the building blocks of your site, and they’re all laid out, naked on the table, for everyone to see.

An honest look at the naked truth: When you peel away the branding, what does your site actually say? This is where you find out what it’s really saying to customers – literally, as well as subliminally. Are those messages effective? Are they aligned with your brand and business goals? It’s an eye-opening exercise. Because when you view your site broken out this way, something interesting happens. Strengths are obvious. Weaknesses are clear. And gaps are absolutely glaring. Without the compensating cover of

stronger elements, any component that isn’t pulling its weight – that is, isn’t furthering your short term business objectives or long term brand goals -- jumps out and screams, “Fix me now!” But only if you aren’t afraid to be critical, even brutal.

This final step is about doing what’s realistic for you based on your timeframe, budget and manpower. Remember, the quality of your site is far more important than quantity. Saying the right thing well is more important than saying everything.

These elements are the foundation of all your marketing and digital communications and it’s imperative that they’re right. Or everything you do on the site moving forward just becomes a waste of your time and money.

As with any web project, you’ll need to set milestones for information architecture, content strategy and visual design. While these steps are no small undertaking, they’re vital because they lead directly to the creation of page templates and a detailed style guide for development that will streamline everything you do moving forward. With these templates in line, your development and testing–the heavy lifting that goes on quietly behind the scenes–get’s your new site revved up and ready for final deployment.

After the audit and assessment: What do the site analytics say about users, and what exactly are they doing? The next vital step in a realignment is comparing your audit findings with the site’s most recent online metrics. And if you don’t have back-end analytics, don’t worry. Google Analytics is a free, simple way to monitor a site for weekly or monthly check-ups—and no, I’m not paid to say that. The analytics will give you the inarguable facts about who’s reading what, who the top referring sites are, what sections are most often clicked through, and much more. Having this historical analytic perspective lets you clarify the long-term trends – good, bad and ugly – for a true, objective view of site performance down to the smallest detail. Armed with this information and the results of your audit, your path to realignment becomes clear. You have facts driving your decisions, and can move to the implementation phase with consensus, confidence and purpose.

The proof is in the process: The final roadmap to implementation The site has been pulled apart, a strategy’s in line to put it back together, and there’s plenty of analytic research to back you up. Now to get the job done, a roadmap is created and a construction plan set in motion.

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Can you feel the goosebumps? The key here is that with every iteration of a realignment, your process becomes increasingly efficient, and so does your output. Your end goal is to create the most efficient workflow possible—allowing pure ideation to drive your ongoing digital strategy—so you can avoid getting sucked into the destructive cycle of layering bandaid solutions on top of band-aid solutions. As your site adds new content in the future, growth is organic because every revision fits neatly within the strategic and style decisions you’ve already made. All experiences flow to the user from the same brand voice. And the changes themselves become easier for your staff to implement. Will realignment solve every online marketing challenge? Of course not. But it gives you the power to lock your brand’s online presence in step with your long-term business goals as well as your current brand and marketing initiatives—and do this important job cost-effectively. The hardest part is taking the step that gets you started. n

William Verbist is Managing Partner and Creative Director of Digital Experience at Verkuhl, a fullservice digital agency. He’s crafted engaging digital experiences for some of the world’s largest and most recognized brands, and shares his insights as a teacher of Digital Media at Pratt Institute. Bill is active in the New York and International interactive and design communities. www.verkuhl.com

www.visibilitymagazine.com

seo

Ranking Factors for International SEO: 2012 Research

arlier this year, we analyzed 10,000 top keywords, 300,000 domains and several million backlinks, shares and tweets to see what drives Germany’s Google rankings - one of Europe’s toughest SEO markets. Many of the usual factors one would suspect do indeed impact rankings, but there are also some surprises. We believe these factors to be Google-specific and that savvy SEOs will see them as the minimum threshold of international SEO in 2012 and beyond. In order to determine the relationship between various factors and rankings, we computed Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient for each of sixteen factors. Factors are listed in the below chart and range from social – e.g. Facebook shares; to links – e.g. number of links; to keywords – e.g. keyword in domain name; to Adsense; image count; and word count. The x-axis represents the correlation coefficient for each factor; the longer the bar, the higher the correlation. Higher figures on the x-axis have a positive correlation with the highest being Facebook shares at 0.31. Lower numbers (the length of the title at -0.03) have a negative correlation with the lowest being “position of keyword in the title” (at -0.03). So, what can we aggregate from this information? Here is what we see as the most important findings:

Finding #1: Social has arrived in international markets

Social networking site activity correlates very well with good rankings, just like they have been doing in the U.S. for the past year. The various Facebook metrics have the highest values; Shares seem to have the strongest connection - even higher than the aggregate value of Shares, Likes and Comments. Twitter is much lower correlated - but is still the sixth most powerful metric in our

analysis - behind Facebook and the number of backlinks. Note to those interested in Google Plus: Not enough data was available to do any meaningful analysis. Although Facebook Shares, Tweets, etc., are not necessarily definitively ranking factors, it looks like as a kind of user feedback they are very important and they should take part in SEO strategy.

Finding #2: Ads could be a handicap

In January 2012 Google publicly stated that too many commercials above the fold can have a negative impact on the site’s ranking. And the negative correlation between ad integrations and good rankings could be evidence of that. Interestingly enough, this negative correlation only persists for Adsense ads. Pages with ads from other networks, such as CJ and local powerhouses Affilinet and Zanox did not have a negative correlation. In addition, these results seem only to be relevant for the top 10 rankings below, which we find many more Adsense implementations ranking well.

Finding #3: Backlinks are still a key factor for SEO, but with caveats

Backlinks are still very important for rankings, but must vary between keyword links, no follow links, and “organic” links with stopwords (e.g. “as”,“the,”…) in them.

Finding #4: Become a brand, it’s important

Some unexpected correlations (e.g. a slightly negative correlation with having a keyword in the title) could be explained by brands and their good ranking on long tail keywords. Apparently some of the classic ranking factors like having keywords in the title and more keywords in the content don’t apply to well-known brands.

Finding #5: Keywords in domains stay a huge factor

Although Google has often said that keyword domains today are not as important as in the past, we found many domains in top positions that have keywords in them. Of course, your results will vary; our analysis is a very broad look at the effect of complicated, unknown algorithms across hundreds of thousands of domains in one country. In order to make the data useful for any particular domain or client, the reader will need to determine which of the elements apply to their particular sites and markets. n

Marcus Tober brings pioneering experience in SEO to Searchmetrics. As chief technology officer, Marcus is responsible for advanced technology research, product development, and SEO consulting programs. While studying media design and computer science in Berlin, Marcus was already focused on search engine optimization, and he quickly became one of the leading SEO experts in Germany. Seeing the need for an integrated and professional SEO software solution led Marcus to found Searchmetrics GmbH jointly with Holtzbrinck eLab in 2007. You can reach him at: m.tober@searchmetrics.com.

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Summer 2012

Visibility

Building Social BuSineSS

June 18–21, 2012 | Hynes convention center | Boston

Join community managers, sales, marketing, people and culture, business and IT professionals at Enterprise 2.0 Boston to learn how collaboration can support your business strategy.

Why Attend Enterprise 2.0? In-depth education. Half-day Tutorials dive deep into key areas— including the tools and techniques of Enterprise 2.0, customer engagement through social media and innovation management. See all the best tools in one place. You will be able to meet with more established leaders and creative start ups to find the right tools and technologies for your business in the Expo Pavilion. Stay ahead of the curve. Leaders who understand how to be collaborative, flexible and transparent will be the most sought-after leaders of tomorrow. Competitive advantage. You need to figure out how to evolve your business and this is the largest and most important gathering for people like you — get a road map for transforming your business at Enterprise 2.0. Save Money. Moving your infrastructure to the cloud, leveraging social tools and supporting online collaboration add up to huge savings for your organization. Find out how to make them work here. Talk to the experts. Only at Enterprise 2.0 Conference will you be able to learn and network side by side with Enterprise 2.0 visionaries, including expert speakers, advisory board members and early adopter attendees. Exhibitors include: www.e2conf.com/twitter www.e2conf.com/facebook www.e2conf.com/linkedin www.e2conf.com/blog Sponsors include:

FREE EXPO PASS or save 30%* on a Conference Pass with Priority Code VISIBILITY * 30% off discount applies to Full and 3-Day Conference Passes only. Discount calculated based on the on-site price and not combinable with other offers. Offer good on new registrations only. Proof of industry involvement required. Prices after discount applied: Mega: $1,746.50 // Conference: $1,536.50

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marketing

Remarketing: Keep Them Coming Back For More!

lose your eyes and imagine yourself in your ideal business market. In this market, your product is readily accessible to your perfect demographic and they are aware that you are the very best provider for that particular product. They recommend you to all their friends and family and you don’t need to run expensive advertising campaigns because your word-of-mouth business is sufficiently strong enough to keep your business running smoothly. Now open your eyes and welcome back to reality. In the real world, you have many competitors who provide similar if not the exact same products and services that your company provides. You may have stellar customer service and great low pricing models, but how do you stand out against the mass of other businesses? If your company does any sort of business online, or if you only have a website, setting up a remarketing campaign can be the most profitable addition to both paid and organic campaigns. Remarketing campaigns work by tracking the customers that visit your website, either through paid advertising via pay-per-click advertising models like Google Adwords, or through organic traffic that reaches your site either directly or through search engines. It tracks your visitors by depositing a tracking cookie in their

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browser and follows them to other websites they visit and shows them an ad of your choosing. Now, before we get too far down the Big Brother tunnel here, searchers have the option to disallow cookies from websites used in such a manner. Searchers can clear their cache, and you as the advertiser have the option to weed out specific searchers at set the number of days these searchers are followed. There are many options for people to disallow this cookie, so do not worry about invading someone’s privacy. They can unsubscribe at any time. Within the Google Adwords platform, you build your remarketing campaign like you would build any other advertising campaign, with a few slight variations. Remarketing works with lists of audiences. The audiences that it includes are entirely based on the end goal of your ad and how far down the purchase funnel your audience has gone. Here are a few examples: Homepage – if the customer has only made it to your homepage but bounced off before learning anything specific about your brand or converted in any way, you should consider this person in the awareness stage of the purchase funnel. This is a great opportunity to build your business name in the mind of someone who is already looking for something you can readily provide. The next time

they see your ad while they are searching through another website, they will be more likely to follow through because they know you have what they need. Serve them an ad with just your logo and your name to build brand awareness. Inner Pages – if your customer made it past your homepage, and have traveled through one or two inner pages searching for more information, they are within the interest stage of the purchase funnel. You can customize this remarketing campaign to show specific products to customers depending on what page they landed on. Build a remarketing campaign with ads specific to each product page (if you only provide a few) or one ad per category (if you provide hundreds of different products). This reminds your potential customer that you have all sorts of products, but also the exact product they were looking for, and at a great price too! Specific Pages – If you provide a specialized product or service, and your average potential customer has a really low bounce rate from those specific pages, you should consider those customers to be in the evaluation stage of the purchase funnel. They know the product they want, they know how much they are willing to spend on it, and they are looking for the perfect company to provide it to them. If you think that

Summer 2012

Visibility

you are the perfect company for them, respond to these searches with ads that answer a question. Show them you are the company they should convert with by showing ads that toot your own business horn. Show awards you have won, brag

about warranties on your products. Anything that shows your customer that you are hands-down a better choice than your competitors will help you convert at this particular juncture of the funnel. Shopping Cart/Form Page – If your customer made it as far as your shopping cart or form

pages but abandoned these pages to take off to parts unknown, they have done most of the work for you and are within the decision phase of the purchase funnel. If you don’t know where to track these things, visit your Google Analytics account and check out your Funnels page. These potential customers need to be reminded why they almost chose you to begin with. Show them ads with promotions that can be applied to the product they almost purchased. This could be the very thing that tips them over the edge from an almost to a full-on conversion.

problems they didn’t know they had by converting on your site again and again.

Purchase – Customers who have already made a purchase on your website are all the way through the purchase funnel, but should never be neglected. They already know the benefits of shopping with your company, and if you are doing your job, they are happy and have no problem working with you again. Now is an excellent time to show them ads with similar products that they may also enjoy in addition to what they have recently purchased. If they bought bindings for a snowboard, show them ads for boarding goggles, beanies, gloves, or great discounts on lift tickets if you provide these products. Don’t worry about bugging people who have already converted. They may thank you for offering them solutions to

Constantly rotate the creative in your ads and have multiple variations of your ad active at the same time. This helps to keep your marketing fresh in the eyes of your customer and also allows you to split test wording, coloring, and many other ad variations to figure out what message is working best towards your bottom line. n

A Few Tips – if you are worried about customers finding your ads annoying, set a cap on the number of impressions, or number of times your ad is shown. This will limit exposure so customers do not feel harassed by your company, and also has the great side benefit of controlling some of your advertising costs. Customers may see your ad and click on it a few times before they convert, and those clicks can really add up.

Miki DeHaven is an SEM Specialist at the Internet Marketing Company Web Talent. Based in central Pennsylvania, Web Talent Marketing offers search engine-marketing services to clients nationwide. For more information visit www.webtalentmarketing.com.

NORTHEASTS #1 B2B CONFERENCE FOR SMALL BUSINESSES

Presented by

FOR MORE INFORMATION VISIT: www.EventManagement.org

40 SEMINARS

SPECIAL EVENTS

200 B2B EXHIBITS

UNLIMITED NETWORKING LET’S GET SOCIAL!

Conference: 10 - 13 September 2012 Exhibition: 11 - 12 September 2012 Sandton Convention Centre, Johannesburg, South Africa

• Social Media • Content Management & Streamiing • Digital Advertising & Marketing • eCommerce & Payments

Produced by:

• Cloud Computing www.terrapinn.com/2012/internet-show-africa

The Internet Show is a series of conferences and seminars as well as a showcase presented throughout the globe. NOW join The Internet Show Africa 2012 for a sales and profit solution that will generate new business leads!

SPONSOR NOW! Call: Kim Geller on +27 (0)11 516 4076 Email: kim.geller@terrapinn.com Blog: blogs.terrapinn.com/internetshow

Reply form Yes! I am interested in The Internet Show Africa 2012 c My company would like to sponsor / exhibit – please contact me c I would like to attend the conference – please contact me

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This show will bring you face to face with key customers & prospects!

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upcoming conferences Refer to this guide for upcoming internet marketing conferences from across the globe.

July 9 - 10, 2012 | Social Media in the Pharmaceutical Industry London

The pharmaceutical industry has been waiting for guidance from the FDA and now they have finally shed some light with their ‘Off-Label Use’ with some mention regarding social media. With this industry moving at a rapid pace, and with more patients and healthcare professionals becoming more tech-savvy, the pharmaceuticals industry need to embrace social media.

September 5 – 7, 2012 | World Telecom Summit 2012 Singapore

The second annual World Telecom Summit will return even bigger and better! Expect even more high quality discussion and sharing sessions with similar C-level keynotes, panels and more. World Telecom Summit 2012 will encompass a 3-day exhibition presenting forefront telecommunications products and technologies and feature two full days of presentations in the Telecom Leaders Summit, CEM Summit, Mobile Apps Show, and the CTIO Summit.

Building on the tremendous success of SMi’s first three Social Media in Pharmaceuticals conference, this is the fourth event in the series; focused on keeping our audience up-to-date with developments in the ever-changing social media sphere.

September 25 - 27, 2012 | The Marketing Show 2012 Singapore

The Marketing Show 2012 will convene the region’s largest gathering of marketing professionals to innovate & envision the future of customer engagement through strategies in CRM, analytics, loyalty, social media to achieve greater customer retention.

July 12 - 13, 2012 | The 2nd Big Data World Forum (BDWF 2012) Beijing

The 2nd Big Data World Forum (BDWF 2012) coming up July 12 in Beijing is specially designed for data-driven decision makers, managers, and data practitioners, who are shaping the future of the big data. The event will address big data technology challenges and provide insights into how to make big data work for business now.

August 13 - 17, 2012 | SES San Francisco

October 04 - 05, 2012 | All Things Software 2012

Marketers and SEO professionals attend SES San Francisco each year to network and learn about topics such as PPC management, keyword research, SEO, social media, local, mobile, link building, duplicate content, multiple site issues, video optimization, site optimization, usability and more.

BE PART OF CHANGE OR BE LEFT BEHIND! All Things Software 2012 will attract over 5,000 Corporate and Institutional Buyers, 2000 Channel & Distribution Buyers, featuring over 180 industry players from across the globe and is guaranteed to deliver thousands of qualified trade buyers.

San Francisco, California

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Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

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Visibility

Summer 2012

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PubCon Las Vegas October 15-19, 2012 Las Vegas Convention Center Search * Social Media * Affiliates