Thursday, June 26, 2008

Pick up this week’s issue of the Denver Business Journal

Turn to page A18 to see the list of Denver-Area Advertising Agencies by gross income. We rank in at #20 - up five slots from last year.

While you’re flipping through, cruise over to A22 to read about the Rig Locator we’ve launched for Atlas Copco Construction Mining Technique USA LLC.

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

The most bang for your buck: Pay-Per-Click success metrics

Posted by: Shannon Denny, Senior Marketing Coordinator

You’ve implemented your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign and are thrilled to see users are clicking on your ads, but it is important to evaluate the metrics below to ensure you’re getting the most qualified users to your site and are seeing conversions from them too.

Clicks
When implementing a PPC campaign, one of your goals is to drive traffic to your site. If a user clicks on your ad, it means it stands out among your competitors and is relevant enough for the user to check it out, potentially driving a conversion. If your campaign isn’t seeing many clicks, you should evaluate the keywords you are bidding on and the messaging of your ad to make sure they are relevant. read more »

Friday, June 20, 2008

Stay competitive locally

Posted by: Kayla Wagner, Project Manager

Are you a business that needs to come up in local searches? Here are some tips to make sure you’re covered and competitive:

1. On your site, make sure your address and contact information are listed in an easy-to-find location (perhaps the footer of every page) – and in proper HCard format! HCard format allows the search engine spiders to crawl your address and see it in a standard, easy to read format and import it into their map tools.

2. Do you have your location in your site content? You should! If you want to come up in search results for “Denver plumbers” you should have “Denver plumbers” in your site content. Not just plumbers and not just Denver or Colorado. Include relevant keywords to all areas of your purchase cycle including general terms (dentist), general + regional (dentist in denver), business name (Dr. Peters dental), and services (root canal). read more »

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Where to use keywords for optimization (meta data, page copy and more)

Posted by: Sean Voorhies, Marketing Coordinator

Once you’ve set your keyword strategy, what do you do with all of those terms? Here’s your primer on putting keywords to work for website visibility.

Meta Data
Title, description and keyword tags (all part of your behind-the-scenes meta data) are valuable locations for keyword optimization. Place your most important keywords early in your tags rather than later. While each engine has different title and description character limits, it best to use the least common denominator to avoid having text cut off. Using the following guidelines for each tag can help make the most of your rankings across each engine: read more »

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Aiming to be #1: Basic SEO metrics

Posted by: Leslie Russell, Marketing Coordinator

Your search engine optimization (SEO) campaign is in place, but what are the metrics to measure its success? Are people really finding your site through organic listings? Are you bringing in new qualified visitors? Are your keywords the right keywords to optimize for? The success of your SEO campaign can be assessed in many ways:

Keyword Rankings
When you began your SEO campaign, you determined a list of keywords to optimize for. Before optimizing, conduct some searches on the top three engines – Google, Yahoo! and MSN – to see what sites are coming up within the first page of results. Throughout the SEO campaign, perform spot checks manually, or utilize tools (some of which are subscriber-based), to determine if your site’s rankings have improved.  read more »

Thursday, June 5, 2008

Assessing competitors with online tools

Posted by: Lauren Klostermann, Project Manager

In today’s saturated market, a competitor analysis provides an insightful and actionable look into your organization. Here’s how an analytical approach to assessing the other players in your field can begin with some basic ideas and readily available online tools.

Define the Competition
Start by choosing similar organizations in your industry by looking at each one’s size and functions. Also consider those deemed the “thought leaders” in the marketplace; they might demonstrate best practices you can learn from or mistakes you can avoid. After defining your list of competitors, assess their strengths and weaknesses, and compare those to your own.

read more »

Monday, June 2, 2008

Improving communication between marketing and sales

Posted by: Janessa Seewald, Project Manager

According to MarketingSherpa, approximately 53% of Salespeople agree that leads generated by Marketing have low credibility. In addition, a majority of the leads that are passed on to the Sales team from Marketing are not actually leads, but merely inquiries, which makes closing any leads a time-consuming and difficult process.

With Marketing under pressure to generate a large quantity of leads and Sales expected to close the deal, how can the communication process between the two teams be improved? Two key conversations must take place to ensure that the process starts on the right track:

1) Sales and Marketing must meet in order to discuss what defines a qualified lead.
2) Sales and Marketing must agree on sales-readiness of the leads before they are passed on. read more »