Setting goals for a new search engine marketing (SEM) program and developing the strategy that will achieve them are your first steps toward high ROI. There are several important factors that arise when you go through this process, ranging from qualitative considerations such as the audience’s awareness of your brand to quantitative considerations including your initial budget.

Let’s take a look at a few of these factors more closely:

• Brand Awareness – Knowing how familiar your target audience is with your brand plays a large role in goal setting and strategy development. This will help you define what tactics to consider as part of your program and what metrics you define as important in achieving your goals. For example, contextual advertising is a great way to generate brand awareness by targeting prospects that are searching for content related to your product/service offerings. However, since this is often primarily a branding tactic, you should expect a much lower click-through rate (CTR) than you might from tactics such as email or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
• Budget & Seasonality - Within virtually every industry, it’s possible to pinpoint seasonal trends in the customers’ buying cycle or consumer demand. A best practice is making sure your media budget reflects this seasonality. This is particularly important to consider when setting your goals, as each should be tied to the amount of media you are spending as well as the actual length of the purchase cycle.
• Offer & Messaging – Considering these elements is important when setting goals as some offers and messaging may be geared more toward low-involvement activities while others require higher involvement. For example, if you are encouraging people to request a brochure (which is relatively low involvement), you can expect to see a much higher conversion rate than if you are urging them to take a high-involvement action such as making an actual purchase.

By considering these factors when planning a new SEM campaign, you’re ensuring a successful start, but it’s always important to remember to review your past results, making informed decisions based on what has worked and what hasn’t, and to optimize your search engine marketing program while it’s live to ensure that success is maintained.

There is no clear best practice, or set-in-stone rule, as to when to send an email broadcast. That’s because it all depends on your specific audience. Every audience’s email-checking habits are different. For example, a B2B audience might check mail throughout the day while stay-at-home moms might only check email at night. There are, however, different steps you can take to zero in on your audience’s preferred send time.

Get Started: Check your site analytics and note the busiest times. You can use this information to tell when your customers are their most active or are more engaged at their computers. This may be easier to nail down for a business audience, given that you know the work day’s approximate start time, lunch hour and end time.

Dig Deeper: Take a look at the basics of your send list. Are they in different time zones? If so, you should be thinking about each time zone separately. You probably don’t want to be sending overseas and locally at the same time. What are their demographics? Are there more males or females, and what is the age range you are targeting? Chances are you have a pretty good idea of this basic info about your general audience and should be able to infer some of their preferences.

Test: Whether you know a lot or a little about your audience, you should be testing different times with them. Compare opens (or click-throughs) on different days of the week and different times of day. Just because you’ve always sent your emails at 9 a.m. on a Tuesday doesn’t mean that’s your audience’s preference. A quick way to learn a bit more about your audience’s behavior is to look at the data you already have from past sends and see when most people opened or clicked hour by hour.

The great thing about email is you can track what your users are doing and learn how to better meet their needs.

Last month, Google launched a search filtering tool called Search Options which allows users to filter their search results to show only videos, forums or reviews over a specified time frame. By selecting the “Show Options” feature in the blue bar under the search field, users can access these filtering options to bring up more relevant and useful listings.

Google’s Search Options also allows users to select “Wonder Wheel” to display other relevant searches that might be of interest. The example below shows related searches to the term “summer olympics.”

Search Options also offers a “Timeline” feature where users can view relative search popularity over a specified timeframe. The timeline feature is an effective tool in identifying online visibility trends in a particular industry or for a certain brand name. An example of a timeline search on the keyword “Google” is shown below.

While these advances in search are creating a more relevant and personalized search experience for users, it will be important to evaluate any impact on your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.

As it turns out, we learned more from the recent swine flu scare than we thought. And not just that we needed to limit travel to Mexico or wash our hands more frequently. An article on WebProNews used the flu as an example of why we should be paying attention to the types of searches people are conducting on the Web.

According to the article, the website stats of a blog posting discussing the swine flu prove that people are now using more long-tailed search queries to find the information they need. In fact, the author claims that the days of focusing search engine optimization (SEO) efforts exclusively on short keyword phrases are gone. Search marketers should now target longer keyword phrases in order to try and capture exactly what someone is searching for. The top search phrase used by visitors to the particular swine flu posting was, “How do you know if you have swine flu?” Nine-word phrases like these are coined “money keywords” and are expected to bring in a targeted audience to your website.

Usually, people begin their search with short phrases, and as they see the thousands of results generated, the search queries become more specific and detailed in nature. With this in mind, SEO (and pay-per-click advertising) experts should explore various constructions of long-tailed keyword phrases. This will create a competitive edge as many competitors aren’t tapping into that pool of possibilities yet. Also, be sure to include content on the site that reflects these phrases. In the swine flu example, the blog’s content could have listed and responded to common questions being asked in search queries, for example. This will ultimately lead to more traffic and conversions.

Check out the full article at WebProNews for more information.

Microsoft has recently launched its new search engine called Bing. Bing was designed to be easy to use and efficiently return simple results. In addition, it’s also being promoted as a decision-making tool.  For example, if you’re unsure about where you’d like to eat out, Bing can help you find the right restaurant.

This new product launch from Microsoft joins various other search engine products that have been released recently, including the Wolfram|Alpha search engine. But Bing is also another attempt, once again, by Microsoft to steal market share back from Google. (Google’s share of searches keeps growing and is now over 70%.) Bing is promising that this time the product is different.

With this promise many online marketers are testing Bing, and there is quite a bit of online buzz about the new search engine’s performance. The advantages that advertisers are discovering is that Bing offers an updated look, features categorical listings, saves your search history, and is returning innovative results. I’ve performed some of my own searches on Bing and found it to return results that Google doesn’t list and are very useful, relevant, and informative. However, there are disadvantages that Bing faces, mostly that it’s difficult to contend with the Google brand. Plus, it changes how you search, and many searchers might not want change. With all of this in mind, Bing is worth checking out to discover if you prefer it.

If you would like to read more about news, updates, and critiques on Microsoft’s Bing, visit the following links:
MediaPost – Have You Ever Binged Yourself?
New York Post – Microsoft ‘Bing’ing It on Google
MediaPost – Microsoft Faces Bing Challenge
The Business Insider – It’s Time for Microsoft to Face Reality About Search and the Internet
MediaPost – Crossing Google’s Chasm: Three Bing Blunders

]]> http://blog.90octane.com/06122009/microsofts-new-search-engine-bing-it-on/feed/ http://blog.90octane.com/06082009/greater-seo-visibility-for-local-businesses/ http://blog.90octane.com/06082009/greater-seo-visibility-for-local-businesses/#comments Mon, 08 Jun 2009 20:56:08 +0000 90octane http://blog.90octane.com/?p=684 Posted by: Kerry Houchin, Marketing Coordinator

Your pizza search just got easier. Thanks to new local search results from Google, you no longer have to type in the name of your city when looking for a local pizza joint or other local business results. Google now shows local results for generic keywords based on IP address even when the location is not specified in the query.

What does this mean for small local shops? The potential for generating business from generic keywords (and SEO) has gone through the roof! First-page results are attainable for even your most basic keywords if the search originated in your region. The local search results are displayed in the center of the search results page instead of at the top of the page when there is no location specified, but a first page listing is still far more valuable than no top 30 result at all.

There is some search engine optimization to be done, however, if you want to fully capitalize on Google’s new local search. An accurate, up-to-date Google Local listing is a must! If you haven’t already, visit http://www.google.com/local/add, and add or update your listing. Pay special attention to having the correct phone number listed, especially if you have multiple store locations, since it appears directly on the search page.  Also, be sure to tell search engines exactly where you are located. This is as simple as putting your street address and phone number in text format on every page of your site. Encouraging customer reviews may also help, considering the fact that businesses listed in local search results tend to have several reviews.

Forbes has just released the results of its “Ad Effectiveness Survey,” conducted among senior marketing executives during February and March 2009. The survey delved into behaviors and beliefs around digital marketing and forecasts areas of growth and weakness over the next six months.

Highlights include:

• When it comes to influencing brand perception, the most effective tactics were site sponsorships and pay-per-impression programs on digital publications.
• For garnering conversions, search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and email were seen as the three most effective tools.
• 82% of marketers are using conversions or sales data.
• 55% use registrations.
• Over the next six months, respondents plan to allocate a higher percentage of digital media dollars to viral marketing (42%) and SEO (40%), while 53% stated they would spend less on Ad Networks.

View the complete survey results.

When setting lead generation goals for a new program, there are many important considerations to keep in mind. To start, you need to realistically evaluate your team and resources. It’s important to have an idea of what type of lead volume your sales force can handle. You want the users to have the best experience possible, including receiving timely follow-up if they are requesting contact. In addition, it’s helpful in planning to talk to the sales team about what types of leads they receive the most value from, which could be dependent on the type of offer(s) the user registered for, the type of online event they attended, whether or not they raised their hand for contact, etc.

Another key part of starting the lead generation program is knowing what products or campaigns will be the focus of the lead generation push. When embarking on a lead generation launch, you need to keep in mind what you’ve done with past products and how your brand is perceived. Will users understand that this is your product? Do they already trust your brand?

The next step is locking in your tactical mix – where and how will you advertise? The right combination of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, external media campaigns, email broadcasts, vertical search engine programs, and social media, for example, can be invaluable. When looking into these tactics, be aware of where your competitors are advertising and how you can differentiate yourself to the targeted user.

Of course, you’ll want to establish from the outset what performance metrics you’ll use to measure the program and set quantitative goals for what you hope to achieve.

All of these factors help in planning a successful lead generation campaign. Always remember to review your past results, making decisions based on what has performed and what hasn’t, and to optimize your lead generation program while it’s in effect.

We’ve always known that banner ads provide good overall branding exposure for a company, but what we really need to know is how effective they are in driving click-throughs for lead generation. And it seems in the past year we’ve witnessed a decline in users clicking through on ads intended to drive conversions.

This is due in part to the lack of targeting techniques available in early 2008, and I also think that banner blindness set in when the users’ need for information was not being met by 90% of the ad units served to them. However, with the integration of more useful targeting techniques, such as behavioral and demographic targeting, perhaps we’re seeing the beginning of an upward trend in click-though rates for banner ads. Take a look at these results from the “Search Engine Marketing and Online Display Advertising Study” recently posted to eMarketer.com:

As people begin to find ad units served more relevant and actually find value in them, they’ll begin to pay attention and be more likely to respond again. I have already witnessed an increase in click-through rates on niche websites that are able to contextually target ad units, and I look forward to following this new trend as we progress through 2009.

In a stunning turnaround from our previous seasons, Swift Kick in the Grass, the 90octane sponsored kickball team, won its spring kickball league. It has been an uphill battle for Swift Kick in the Grass, coming in dead last the previous two seasons.

After some intense practice and serious recruiting we were able to turn around the previous losing streak and enter playoffs in first place with an amazing 7-2 record. In the semifinal round, we narrowly escaped VASpa in an 11-inning grudge match, with a score of 14-13. Moving into the championship game we were pitted against Smack My Pitch Up, the number two team. The game was a defensive battle, but we were able to hold them off for a 0-1 victory.

The upcoming season starts in June, and we hope to hold onto our title. Stay tuned…

2009 Spring Champs