How does Definition 6 create stronger banner ads? We start by thinking smart. We use a compelling design and target smart placement - these are the two important things that we need to make banner advertisement succeed.

For quite some time, banner advertisements have been getting bad reviews because online marketers have shifted to pay-per-click strategies and other seemingly more attractive, higher return methods of increasing web traffic and sales.
Marketers and advertisers alike have been griping about how frustrated users tend to ignore all their marketing efforts completely. Searching for the close button on the banners as soon as they show up.

Thanks to the advancement of technology, the problems about loading and viewing ads have all but disappeared while new targeting technology is now within reach. The flexibility that PPC programs along with the brand of recognition building and the power of attention has been grabbing visual display recently.

If you are looking for some strategies on how to create and place your banner ads in strategic places that will help you save time and money as you build your brand and grow your business, here is a short list to cut your quest short. Here are some of the most effective ways that you can use to make your banner ads a sure win.

• Design customized banner advertisements for every website: If all your banner ads on all the websites that you put them on seem too identitcal, they will not stand out and will simply blend in to the background. You need differentiation in your media mix to catch a visitor's attention. If your design is too distracting or too loud, it will encourage a careless attitude from the viewer.
   
• Make sure that the colors, images and fonts are consistent - your designs should complement your site to maintain a consistent brand impression through the action. You don't need a flashy banner ad to make an impression - but sometimes rich media can be more effective for engagement.
   
• Make use of compelling designs and texts - Banner copywriting is actually a very daunting and time consuming task. Since it involves putting an entire company message into a few words or one very short sentence that will oblige the viewers to click, you should make sure that you choose the images carefully in such a way that they will be a logical match to the copy as much as possible.

Finding the optimal banner ad strategy for your campaign varies for each client. To learn more about media strategy and execution and how you can leverage it as part of your unified marketing strategy, please contact us.

Far too often agencies lose sight of what's really important. They become entrenched in the many details of just running a successful Paid Search campaign. That usually translates into weekly meetings where metrics like Impressions, Clicks and Average Cost-per-Click are heavily discussed. Don't get me wrong, these metrics indirectly indicate how your paid search campaign is tracking against your business goals but who has time to try and put those pieces together? When you have multiple stakeholders breathing down your back for various reports and executive summaries on those reports, do you really want to be bothered with figuring out how to make a 20% increase in clicks week over week sound important to those stakeholders?

Let me offer a little story to help drive the point home -

A bright recent college grad is considering investing. He calls on three highly recommended investors to have a meeting. In the meeting he reaches into his pocket and puts the change he finds on the table. He asks the first investor, “What do you see?”

The investor replies, “I see thirty-six cents.”

“You are very good with math, thank you.” says the college grad. He turns to the second investor and asks, “What do you see?” The investor thinking he has certainly outwitted the first investor replies, “I see a 2007 Quarter with George Washington’s portrait, a 1996 Dime with a portrait of Franklin Roosevelt and a 1943 Penny with a portrait of Abraham Lincoln.”

The college grad replies, “You are extremely observant and detail oriented. Thank you.” The college grad then turns to the third investor and asks the same question, “What do you see?”

The third investor replies without hesitation, “I see you paying off your college loans and buying a sports car.”
“You’re hired. Let’s meet again on Monday,” said the college grad.

After walking out of the room the two befuddled investors turn to the smiling investor and ask in unison, “What the hell was that?”

The smiling investor replied, “You see, in 1943 pennies were struck in silver. The pennies struck in copper were rare errors and are highly valuable. Being that he is a recent college graduate, he should put that money towards paying off his loans. I also noticed he was reading a sports car magazine when we entered. After a few investments, He will be able to use the left over money to invest in a little fun. That’s really the big picture.”


Most agencies are like the first investor. They get the math right. They understand tracking, reporting and all the intricacies of tactical execution but those agencies really have no clue what the larger corporate initiatives are of their client because they are too narrowly focused on making sure the campaigns they are running have excellent performance when judged by Paid Search KPI's.

Agencies that are like the second investor take pride in surface level knowledge and cool reporting gimmicks. They all too often skip over the actual math and performance. They are usually guilty of having flashy sales people in place of strategy driven Account Service team members.

The third investor is the agency you want to partner with. They won't bog you down with details of pay per click performance metrics that get in the way of you understanding what that performance means to your business objectives. They understand all of the tedious details in paid search marketing but provide summaries in a way that is meaningful to your business. Do you want to talk to your VP or CEO in terms of Click-Through-Rates or in terms of increases on efficiency in customer acquisition? The third investor also picked up on an interest the college grad did not mention. A good agency should note the goals you mention as well as ask for confirmation on the ones that may be implied.

When choosing your agency make sure they are asking the questions that show they are interested in not only displaying their paid search expertise but also helping your business grow.

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.

Lauren Romero wrote an article titled "Beyond Acculturation" that describes why simple "acculturation" is not good enough when considering your marketing plan for the Hispanic community.  Just like you would create U.S. English websites based on your consumer behaviors, you can't simply create a website based on consumers being Hispanic.  Hispanics have different characteristics just like everyone else.  The acculturation technique may have been good for a while because the Hispanic community is complex and it was an easy way to start addressing their needs.  But now there is a lot of information that has been gathered that should be used to do better segmentation, based on behavior, not just demographics.  Lauren's article mentions a term that was created by Diano Rios and Federico Suberi called "Situational Latinidad".  Its basic idea is that "each Latino in the U.S. experiences the Latino identity in different ways, in different situations. Acculturation labels sum up general types and levels of such individual identification based on language use and media consumption, but they miss what matters to most marketers -- behavior related to their category."

As an interactive marketing agency, Definition 6 can help you gather information about your consumers to help you create websites, email campaigns, pay per click campaigns, etc. that reach out to the growing Hispanic population.

In my previous post regarding the need to include auto-generated emails within a email marketing strategy, I reflected on the lack of love given to emails automatically generated through end-user website activity. It's time to give benchmarking some love too!

The promise of a new web project or marketing initiative leaves stakeholders dreaming of online success, higher conversion rates, higher traffic volumes and positive bottom line results. Quite often, the strategy for measuring success gets lost in the shuffle.

Some of you reading this might be thinking, "Why waste the time? Higher conversion equals success." In some cases you may be right on track with that thought, but most of you probably know it's more than that. Success can be measured in many ways, I'll get into that in second. But understand that it's worth a deeper dive into the metrics that are important to you, your company or your industry, before you start on a new initiative. Ask yourself what data you'll be reviewing a week after a website launch to determine if you're on your way towards a positive ROI. It might be PPC reporting, website analytics, email marketing, CRM comparison or another set of metrics that is specific to your industry. I've seen it before, 2 months after redesign and stakeholders are trying to figure out what to measure. By that point, you're probably not going to have the baseline data needed to show a comparison. Solution? Benchmark. And do it early. The strategy and planning phase of any project is the perfect time to start thinking about it.

So what metrics should you benchmark? There is no perfect answer. Sally, who manages an online retail business will have different success factors than Frank, the owner of a property management services company. Sally cares about online sales and revenue generation, but Frank wants to see an increase in online lead generation. It can be a daunting task, so here are a few good places to start:

1. Website analytics - If your initiative includes the enhancement or redesign of a website, start the project with an examination of your existing analytics data. If you don't have any, stop reading this and go get it. Figure out what will be important to you later. It may be as simple as traffic volume, visit duration, cost per ad spend or conversion rates. But you may find a need to collect custom data as well. Almost every analytics package out there has that capability.
2. External data - In this context, external data is performance data obtained through your CRM package or 3rd party sources. Call center volumes or in-store data would fall into this category. You need an adequate way to access it and you need historical references.
3. Email marketing - If your initiative includes modifications to email marketing programs, make sure your provider is collecting meaningful data on open and click-through rates. And make sure you'll have access to historical data to create a trending analysis.

There are plenty of other data sources to benchmark against to determine success. The main goal is to ensure you have the data you'll need to measure success after you've spent time and money to get there. And do it early. Your ROI calculation will depend on it.

Click fraud in Pay-Per-Click campaigns is on the rise as the economy tanks and firms look for ways to thwart their competitors.  A recent article on NewYorkTimes.com states that click fraud can represent anywhere from 1% to 15% of Pay-Per-Click costs and clicks.  Click Forensics, a click fraud detection business in Austin, Texas also discovered that in the 4th quarter of 2008,  17% of all online ad clicks were fraudulent.

If Pay-Per-Click is part of your Interactive Marketing Plan, be sure that you are actively reviewing web analytics and Pay-Per-Click reports to spot suspicious behaviour before your funds are depleted -- or make sure that you have a reputable Interactive Marketing Agency that can analyze the data for you.

I was recently doing some research for a client presentation on interactive marketing and decided to check out their My Space and Face Book pages.  I Googled "company XYZ at My Space" and was delighted to get a link to what appeared to be the client's official My Space page.  Once inside My Space, I used their internal search tool to confirm that I was on the correct page.  Yep, looks like both My Space and Google were directing me to the same page, so it must be the correct one.  Only it wasn't.  Problem was, I didn't find out until I was well into my client presentation.  So that raised a simple question, how does a fan/user/prospect find a firm's "official" social networking properties?

In my case, performing an in-site or Google search yielded a false sense of security.  Now I know better.  But how many prospects out there had the same experience as me, i.e. logging into what appeared to be an "official" page, being underwhelmed with the experience, and moving on.  All without ever realizing that we never in fact reached our desired destination.  The easiest, most obvious way for a firm to prevent this experience is to put a link on their website directly to their social media pages.  This would remove all confusion.  Problem is, many firms do not do this.

And to compound the issue, I learned that many "fan" pages have more interesting, updated and relevant content than a firm's official page may have.  Again, adding to the confusion as to which is the actual "official" page.  I would posit that firms need to start addressing this issue seriously before an inordinate number of prospects begin to think that 12 year old Billy's My Space page is the public voice of their brand.

So, other than having links directly on their corporate websites to Face Book and My Space pages, what can a firm do to ensure users find their "official" social media pages?  Here are a few ideas:

1 - Somewhere on the page, state plainly that is is the "Official My Space Page of Company XYZ."  That will remove all doubt.
2 - Monitor the social network to identify fan pages, and post content or communications that will alert other users to the fact that the given page is a fan site and not the firm's official page.
3 - Ensure that your firm makes frequent updates to your official pages.  One way a prospect might realize they are on the wrong page is if the last post is 6 months old, or discusses "upcoming" events that happened last year.
4 - Where the law allows, link from the social networking page back to your official site.  This should confirm users found the correct page.
5 - Perform your SEO due-diligence to ensure your social media pages come up in the first page of search results.
6 - Put a little skin in the game and do some PPC (pay per click) to ensure your pages come up after the appropriate user search.

Companies should also include links to these official pages in their email and other correspondences.  In this way, businesses can ensure that the efforts they make in the social networking space will bear fruit, and that the fruit will be what they planted, not a knock-off of by an eager fan.

I just got a call from a strategic business partner, and as an Interactive Advertising Agency we stay up to speed on most things in the marketplace, and he was calling me from a break at a conference for his company.  As he said hello, I congratulated him on their company raising another round of VC dollars.  He said "Wow, how did you know that?!"  I told him simple; Twitter!  I was a follower of his company's partner account and at the same time they told the company they tweeted about it.  Interactive communications is so fast, that in less than 5 minutes the word was out!  Now this is a great story because they are an eMail marketing partner of ours, he is a long time friend and the news was good.  We talked about what the investment meant to his company and our partnership, we discussed how online ad agency business was continuing to see good growth this year and that 2010 was going to be a great year, and hung up smiling.

Now what if the news had been bad?  What if they had a meeting that was altering the relationship with partners and it was negative?  And someone had tweeted about it? I suspect our call wouldn't have been the same. 

Let's talk about your online interactive marketing and message management.  Do you have a twitter monitoring policy?  Do you have an account?  Do you follow your partners, customers, employees, competitors?  I do, you should too. Website Development is a very small part of being digital, search engine optimization is only a part as is eMail or even PPC. The big parts are listening, monitoring, and watching the ecosystem and being informed as quickly as possible to make decisions as rapidly as possible.  So next time you are with your Interactive Ad Agency, ask them what they know and when they learned it.  You will be amazed at how fast Digital has become.

 

At our Interactive Ad Agency we continually help our clients make good decisions regarding their online media usage. Social Media, eMail Marketing, PPC/Paid Search, Search Engine Optimization, Display, Mobile and Video are just the headers of the variety of options available to us. But recently Twitter has been owning the headlines.

 

David Martin, vice president, primary research, Nielsen Online, wrote in a blog post: "People are signing up in droves, and Twitter's unique audience is up over 100% in March."

 

But today I was sent a great article from MediaPost about an online / microblogging / SMS option to reach the masses that might not be the techno elite, but make up the mainstay of consumer America. More spending power and more of the participants in creating UGC for all our social media sites. The company is called Predicto and it is very focused on the celebrity world, think People, US, The View, TMZ, etc. http://www.predicto.com/

 

Between October and December 2008, Twitter had approximately 812,000 unique SMS users, but Predicto Mobile interacted with more than 2.3 million unique users. "We have a mainstream audience, which can help us grow faster," Kathein said. "Our members aren't necessarily the early adopters. Our customer base isn't made up of heavy iPhone users."  The full article can be found at http://bit.ly/M1QQy

 

I think this a great example of how Interactive Marketing is very niche and how you shouldn't fall in love with one channel, because your users might be better served with another channel.

Definition 6 has a great role as an Interactive Ad Agency that provides a wide array of services, most notably the surge in interest in Interactive Media.  I found this chart at Silicon Valley Insider and felt was a great picture about what is happening to media spending.


As newspaper ad spending continues to decline and digital media spending rises, we see the growth of the digital consumer. If our grandparents settled into the paper on Sunday's and evenings to learn about the world; Our generation uses our mobile devices, computers, gaming consoles and each other to learn about what is going on in the world.  And this is the most important part of Interactive Marketing, we use lots of channels to get information, but more and more of it is digital.

So if you are selling to the under 65 consumer and business executive, you need to look at SEO, PPC, Social Media Marketing, email and Websites to communicate and connect with your digital customer. Overtime, next 2-3 years, Interactive Advertising will take over newspaper spending and that is when Media and Advertising will look digital and "traditional" will no longer be the same ever again!

An interactive advertising agency is in business to help its customers make more money at a lower cost than they did yesterday!  This meshes nicely with a Peter Drucker thought: "Because it is the purpose to create a customer, any business enterprise has two-and only two-basic functions: marketing and innovation." So if those of us in Interactive Marketing buy into this mindset, we are are at the epicenter of business. We are innovative marketers.

Let me give an example of what I mean. Let's say you come to your agency with the problem of losing sales leads when your customers come into contact with your retail partners floor sales staff. You have tried training programs, spiff, even eMail marketing Newsletters to stay top of mind with your partners. Unfortunately, they still often dislodge your customer from buying your brand and direct them to another brand. (you should confirm that you don't have a pricing or quality problem) How should you expect your Interactive advertising agency to solve this problem?

Some agencies will give you a better PPC plan, others will try on-line coupons, some might even talk about lifestyle content around your product via eNewsletters, but this is more of the same. An innovative partner will start with the simple question: "Why isn't your customer loyalty to your brand when the get to the store?" so they will solve the problem; "How to make our customers loyal before reaching the sales person". This is where innovation comes from, asking the root cause questions and not simply slapping tactic against the wall and hoping for results.

An Interactive Media Agency has to pay a lot of attention to a lot of things. So we tend to read, digest, synthesize and retransmit a ton of information. As a result, we get pretty good at dissecting information and applying it against our own customers, lessons learned and next assignments. I found that Matt Cutt's makes some good points and I agree with everything he said with the exception of point 1 about natural search. I think SEO will be something of critical importance and in growing importance in the years to come. Aside from that, I think he is spot on with his comments.

Google's Matt Cutts cited the decreasing importance of rank for any given phrase and other implications. To be successful in 2009, marketers must strive for relevance in paid and natural search. Marketers should also keep these points in mind:

• Natural search ranking reports will tell less of the story and become less important
• Relevancy in PPC ads becomes more important than ever: keywords, ad copy and landing pages should match to boost quality scores and attract attention
• Other ways to instantly boost relevance on the SERPs include:
• Geotargeting for multichannel and local advertisers
• Natural search landing pages, targeting specific people with specific keywords

Key recommendation: Improve relevance in PPC advertising, keyword research and other efforts to dominate SERPs.

As interactive marketing continues to grow in importance, the recommendations above will grow in impact and your interactive ad agency will need to focus on making the dollars you spend, more effective and revenue supporting. I particularly love the recommendations about " keywords, ad copy and landing pages should match to boost quality scores and attract attention" - I think this is a great point of reference for everyone to think about - what happens, before, during and after the click.

As the CEO of an Interactive Ad Agency, I have been in the digital marketing arena for about 14 years now and it still boggles my mind when I read an article that highlights the lack of metrics use in the world. I have included a link to the full article at the end of the post but I wanted to highlight this particular quote: "Less than half (47%) of marketing professionals in North America and the U.K. recently surveyed by Alterian reported that they currently use analytics to measure on-line campaign results." Are you kidding me, how can you not use web analytics? It is like not having a scoreboard at a game or a speedometer on a car. Driving traffic to your web site without a control panel is stupid! Sorry to offend those of you that are in the majority, non web analytic users. Why would you spend money on SEO, email marketing, interactive advertising or even hosting services if you are not tracking what is happening on-line and on your site?

I guess maybe it is because it cost so much to implement analytics when doing website development! I barely could type that sentence without laughing - it can be Free and done in less than 5 hours! So I understand that a full blown deployment maybe more than you can handle, but no software cost, no usage fee and less than 1 day of effort to track what is happening on your website, seems like a no brain-er to me.  Check out Goggle Analytics if you are part of the 53% that are doing nothing. If you are part of the 47% that are, what do you do with the information?

A good Interactive Agency should be making monthly or quarterly recommendations to improve conversion and a weekly adjustment to PPC spends (or even hourly) and a good Media and Advertising partner would be accountable to you for the results. Of course if you don't care about management, then I'm sure your agency is very happy to charge you without accountability. 

Sorry about the rant, I was just blown away.

Fewer Than Half Of Marketers Use On-line Metrics

by Karlene Lukovitz, Friday, February 20, 2009, 2:02 PM

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=100692

As an Interactive Advertising Agency executive one of the things that we have learned is to talk about how "things are different" on the internet.  Certianly interactions in the social medai space are different and web analtics allows us to track differently than traditional advertising.



And from a cost perspective email marketing is very different than direct mail. But it isn't about us, it is about the users. I found these stats interesting.

Generation X (ages 33-44) continues to lead in online shopping:

• 80% of Generation X (33-44) internet users buy products online
• 71% of internet users ages 18- 32 buy products online
• 38% of online teens buy products online
• 56% of internet users ages 64-72 do  
• 47% of internet users age 73 and older buy online

This is According to surveys through 2008 by the Pew Internet and American Life Project and can be found at: www.pewinternet.org

I find these nubmers to indicate that if you are 18 or older you are always more than 50% likely to buy on-line than not and in your peak earning years 80% likely to buy on-line. That to me says that the consumer will buy on line if you make it avaliable - at least better than half the time. Think about that, is a consumer likely to buy from your retail store 50% time if you are in one mall, town, or corner?  Probably, if they see your store, it has things they want and the price is decent (a good reputation helps).

So if you have good search engine optimization, ppc plans, the right amount of online information to engage a buyer and a good reputation witin the social sphere - then you have a 50/50 shot or better. Digital doesn't seem so different at all.

Definition 6 Account Coordinator, Jeremy Bromwell, on how consumer response to personalized ads...

A February 5 article sent by MediaPost discussed the 2008 Personalization Survey from ChoiceStream.  The survey found that overall 39% of consumers are more likely to click on a personalized ad, and of those individuals that shop online more frequently the number rises to 58%.

The relationship of media and advertising is continually evolving, particularly in the social media space.  73% of respondents are interested in the online distribution of personalized advertising and 78% are interested in receiving personalized content.  Clearly consumers have an appetitie for personalized content and it is being viewed by many as time a time-saving activity.

As an interactive marketing agency, Definition 6 can help you develop and implement a social media strategy for advertising.  This is a great time to also examine personalized pay-per-click advertising and as Google’s Latitude gains traction look specifically at geo-targeted and mobile advertising to help your product or service maximize exposure and returns.

Project Manager Lisa Seals presented an article to our Client Services group on the effectiveness of optimzing PPC campaigns through targeted email marketing -geotargeting.  The article reinforces the importance of geotargeting to deliver relevant customized keywords, ad copy and offers to searchers in specific geographic locations.

And according to MarketingSherpa’s 2009 Search Marketing Benchmark Guide, marketers agree that geotargeting is an effective tactic that delivers high ROI.

 

Lisa highlighted three major points from the report:

 

1.     In addition to targeting PPC campaigns to searchers in specific locations, ecommerce sites (or other national search advertisers) should also consider geotargeting to optimize their overall search strategy.

2.     Shifting resources to regions that deliver the best performing traffic, or highlight brands based on regional popularity, will deliver the highest ROI.

3.      Always remember to test.  As a geotargeted ad group demonstrates its effectiveness, you can move on to a new region or increase spending in those areas to maximize results.

 

Check out the full article on MarketingSherpa.com to learn how a national jeans company developed a comprehensive search marketing strategy that included geotargeting to advertise a popular apparel of brands in major metropolitan areas.

 

Check out our some of our blogs for information about Definition 6's search engine optimization solutions.

 

 

At this Interactive Advertising Agency, we have been writing about how traditional media spending is moving on line. We have not been alone and we do believe that it is a good action to take if you are in Interactive Adversing. However, Pat LaPointe makes a good point last Friday in the article "Fools Rush In -- In Search of Magic ROI", by Pat LaPointe , Friday, December 12, 2008 "....beware: nearly EVERYONE ELSE HAS THE SAME IDEA. .....But the laws of marketing physics suggest that more marketers and marketing dollars will rush in to the arena than proven executional avenues can accommodate in the short term. And most of them will NOT bring breakthrough new creativity with them. That will create lots of failure and un-delivered expectations, which in turn may slow adoption of otherwise valuable marketing options." Full Article at: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.san&art_aid=96614#comments.

So it got me thinking...what about Email marketing?  The more the idea soaked in the more I liked it. Targeted Email Marketing is a wonderful way to shift ad dollars into digital and avoid being overwhelmed by the clutter. It is your list, your relationships and your message. It might be better than an over priced PPC campaign and a weak display campaign. It certainly will be faster and cheaper to do!

At the same time, if your Interactive Adversing Agency is good at creative, good at media planning and optimization and good at conversion techniques, you might just be someone who can break through the clutter, gain market share and then use Email to crush your competition.

Blogs are proven tools to convert prospects as the reader becomes engaged with your content.  Even more, blogging is an excellent way to drive additional traffic to your site without engaging in expensive pay-per-click campaigns.

What We Deliver:
• Quick setup of a hosted/SaaS model for a branded blogging solution that leverages “compended blogs” and has significant impact on your overall SEO strategy
• A branded compended blog site for up to 5 corporate bloggers along with the associated interfaces and admin tools
• 2 hours of training on how to use the system

Estimated timeframe for delivery is 1-2 weeks.  Contact us today for more information.


 

Rapid SEO is a quick, low cost solution for driving traffic to your website as a means to increase revenue without incurring costs typically associated with SEM/PPC and Media campaigns.

What We Deliver:
• Keyword analysis, recommendations and benchmark report
• Strategies and tactics on how to modify your existing site content and code to rank higher with the major search engines
• 20 hours of SEO-related site adjustments

Estimated timeframe for delivery is 1-2 weeks.  Contact us today for more information. 

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