Atlanta Online Marketing Agency

Innovation and Cost Drivers

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 by Jasdeep Jaitla

Intuition can guide you to the place of innovation, and analysis guides you to the method of innovation.

Driving down costs is the goal of every business in every industry. Identifying and nailing down Cost Drivers in a Interactive Media Agency is one of the most challenging aspects of Innovation due to the service model and diversity of projects. The more diverse the services and the more capabilities an organization has, the harder the cost drivers are to innovate. This is the challenge.

Create Measurability

In order to analyze data, you need to collect data. The first step is to establish a normalized set of information, and discover commonalities that you measure over time. It's difficult in service business models to identify measurable practices since commonality between projects may not exist. In contrast, it is much easier to find measurable actvities within consistent services. For example, in the realm of public service such as law enforcement, response times can be measured which can lead to innovation in terms of communication technologies, route mapping, and routine patrolling route generation to optimize the response times and measure improvements. In the same light, commonality and metrics need to be put in place so that you can innovate. Without this baseline set of metrics, most improvements are subjective and can be hit and miss.

Measurability and Interactive Marketing

Interactive marketing strategies and improved search engine optimization follow the same metaphorical principle. Because optimization is always a moving target, you have to establish a control on your marketing practices and only change a few independent variables at a time, such as keyword density, or keyword targeting in ads, in order to see their effect. In the case of organic search results, the effect of changes may take weeks or even months before they actually show results. To top it off, search algorithms and prioritization change "without notice." To discover these changes requires a scientific mindset for the search engine optimization consultants.

The cost drivers in Search Engine Marketing involve keyword market prices. Camping a commonly used keyword for PPC can cost you a fortune. Using longtail strategies and finding ways to effectively identify your product, service or company is the innovation point, and only good analysis and keyword research will get you there. Consistency is the rule of the game to establish and maintain hold of brand loyalty, market share, market segment, and also online in terms of keyword ownership, and search engine rankings.

Internet Application Development

With Internet Services, the identification of cost drivers needs to be built into the process by abstracting out parts of the process that show commonality and measurability. This should be the starting gate through which your innovation charges. Like online marketing, application development is a moving target. New technologies explode onto the marketplace on a regular basis, tempting you to change how you do business. Again by using a scientific approach, by controlling your process and making sure you change a few things at a time, you can drive changes from the right point of view rather than hype, and effectively make improvements on your cost drivers.

E-Commerce for Hispanics: Right and Wrong

Wednesday, August 12, 2009 by Lance King

I read an article on MediaPost that showed how 2 major retailers, The Home Depot and Best Buy, targeted the U.S. Hispanic community. One company failed while the other is gaining more sales. What is interesting to me is that it appears that they both took the same approach, got back the same unexpected results, and then went in two different directions.

Both companies created a "U.S. Spanish" website. Their target was U.S. Spanish speaking consumers. What they discovered was that they were getting a lot of non-U.S. Spanish speaking visitors to their websites. These visitors wanted to buy online just like U.S. consumers. In many cases, the non-U.S. consumers were either visiting relatives or friends in the U.S. or were Mexicans crossing the border to shop. The prices in the U.S. were cheaper than in their country and so they wanted to get their items in the U.S. and then bring them back home. So what is the problem with that?

For Home Depot, the problem is that they did not take the foreign credit cards on the U.S. Spanish site. Best Buy on the other hand embraced the additional and unexpected consumers and did allow the foreign credit cards. Best Buy is finding that, even though they don't ship overseas, people will order online and ship to friends or family where they will pick up the items later. They also have found that U.S. Hispanics are using the website to print out information before they go to the stores to purchase the items. In many cases it is easier for them to understand the information in Spanish.

One of the more interesting sides to this story is that The Home Depot has stores in Mexico, they have a Mexican website (in Spanish, of course), they have an English Canadian website and they have a French Canadian website. So they are marketing to everone across North America except the the growing number of Spanish speaking Hispanics in the U.S. and those Spanish speaking visitors who wish to purchase in the U.S.

Not knowing the full details of the costs involved, it would be interesting to see the cost for Home Depot to maintain the U.S. Spanish site and the revenue the site could bring in (if they allowed foreign credit cards) and the revenue brought in by those in the U.S. who used the site to gain more information about products they wanted. It seems to me that 4 months of running the U.S. Spanish site is not enough time to determine its impact and that if Best Buy can make it work for them, The Home Depot should be able to make it work, too. Besides, if a French Canadian site can work for Canada, why can't a Spanish U.S. site work here? I wonder if Home Depot is looking for a way to recreate the U.S. Spanish site in a way that will embrace those consumers that liked having the site available.

Are you looking to build a website to market your products or services to the fast growing U.S. Hispanic community? Definition 6 is an Atlanta interactive marketing agency that can help you. Besides doing website development and web application development, we can manage your Search Engine Optimization, your Search Engine Marketing and your email marketing campaigns while providing web analytics that ties everything together. As we gather more and more valuable information about your consumers, we can tweak all methods of marketing to maximize your dollars. Contact us and let's get a plan in place for you.

All Things Social

Monday, February 16, 2009 by Michael Kogon

Definition 6 Business Development Exec, Ken Brantley, points out what search engine marketers should know about sorting through social media strategy fads and laying the groundwork for leveraging media and advertisting in the interactive space...

Jennifer Winners, Chief Operating Officer and Social Media Specialist of DISC, Inc., sums it up well in a recent article on VisibilityMagazine.com. She explains that, up until the era of Social Media,” the internet was largely impersonal, random, and largely intimidating. It was difficult to know which businesses were legitimate, which sources of information were accurate, and generally who could be trusted.”

There were some key points that I took from the article:
1. Social Media offers tools for people to behave online much as they do offline
2. It’s important to understand which social media tools are the best fit for communicating with your customers
3. Social Media is a loose term for all things “social” on the internet for example: blogs, wikis, video sharing, podcasts, social networking sites, picture sharing, social bookmarking. Social refers to the ability to interact, and Media refers to the tools.
4. Behave with your customers online as you would offline

At Definition 6 we certainly understand that in today’s world, marketing and technology strategies are interconnected. We leverage expertise in all interactive areas including social media marketing and strategy. Contact us today or check out some of our additional blog posts on social media to find out how we can help implement and manage your next digital business solution.

Local Search

Friday, October 24, 2008 by Michael Kogon

James MacAvoy, a Definition 6 Project Coordinator, conveyed his thoughts on an article about search engine marketing he recently read on ClickZ...

As opposed to just bidding on and optimizing for keyword pharases that get the largest number of searches, local companies can bid on highly specific phrases. This is not only cheaper when it comes to PPC bids but also allows for a higher conversion rate because users who search with these more specialized terms will help find content the user is seeking.

James brought up three key points from the article:

1. Most companies go for keyword phrases that get the largest number of hits, however this can be expensive and have a great amount of competition.
2. Long-tail terms do not get as many searches but since the searches are so specialized their conversion rate is generally higher.
3. Its all about keyword research. Think of specific terms your customer will be looking for, then specific locations and specific products or services you offer.

James's closing point to the group was that with overall industry declines in traffic it is now important to research alternatives to keep the traffic rising. Since budget has been a constant concern and many common keyword phrases are taken by portal sites, this may be a cost effective way to integrate keyword phrases that get a better return on investment. The full article about web search engine optimization can be viewed at: http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3630757

SEO Myths

Wednesday, October 8, 2008 by Michael Kogon

When it comes to a search engine optimization strategy, many of our clients are either puzzled by the ever changing algorithms or mislead by the differences between paid and organic search. Undoubtedly, there is a great deal of misinformation out there when it comes to search engine optimization marketing.

Lance King, a Definition 6 Technical Project Manager, researched the topic and came across an article written by Michael Estrin who addresses some of the most common misperceptions about search engine optimization marketing. A common thread that Lance sees when talking to his clients about search engine marketing is that they think that if it’s not paid search, that it’s free. Depending on the website and the campaign objectives, you will want to budget properly for an SEO program. Just as important, you need a seasoned SEO consultant on hand who not only understands the strategy behind internet search engine marketing but who also knows how to benchmark and measure your SEO successes. To read the article in its entirety, go to:
http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/19803.asp