Posted by: Janessa Seewald, Account Manager

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. read more »

Posted by: Rosemary Riley, Senior Copywriter

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.

Posted by: Christy Roth, Project Manager

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?

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90octane received a 2009 Silver Key Award from the Colorado Chapter of the Business Marketing Association’s Gold Key Awards program for a strategic pay-per-click (PPC) advertising program. The conversion-driven marketing agency executed the program for Atlas Copco Construction Mining Technique USA LLC, the US sales company of the world-leading provider of industrial productivity solutions.

The program effectively targeted equipment owner/operators and brokers interested in pre-owned water well drilling equipment. 90octane developed a microsite featuring an interactive rig locator to serve as the landing page for prospects who clicked the ads. In only eight months, the program generated hundreds of qualified leads at a very low cost per lead. Efforts also resulted in high-dollar rig sales.

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Posted by: Shannon Anderson, Project Manager

With the increasing competitiveness of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, marketers are looking for complementary advertising tactics that will help them stand out from the crowd. One way to differentiate your company is through contextual advertising where paid ads can be targeted to users based on the content they are viewing. The advantages of using this platform include:

• Targeting beyond search to hook users who are looking for related content
• Telling your story in a different way via images, rich media, video and text
• Diversifying  beyond search to increase your advertising reach and lower your cost per click (CPC)
• Advertising on sites your customers are likely to engage with and tailoring your messaging to apply to this content

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Posted by: Megan Amick, Marketing Coordinator

Google Analytics is an extremely effective tool for managing the performance of your online marketing (or search engine marketing) endeavors. There are numerous findings that can be generated within Analytics to look at each aspect of your website visibility and traffic. Below are some suggestions to consider while performing your Analytics analysis:

General/Basic Knowledge

• You can link your Google AdWords account to your Google Analytics account for better pay-per-click (PPC) campaign optimization and website performance.
• Tagging within your site helps to distinguish referrals (visits generated by other websites) vs. search engine visits.
• There are many goals that can be set up to see if users are completing a desired outcome, but you need to implement code on your website to monitor these goals in Analytics.

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Posted by: Kerry Houchin, Marketing Coordinator

It should come as no surprise that nonprofit donations are down. According to the Center for Nonprofit Management, 50.6% of nonprofit organizations are seeing a decrease in donations. Not only are organizations seeing fewer donors but also smaller donations from existing donors. To make matters worse, administration costs are on the rise.

Nonprofit workers clearly have their work cut out for them. My suggestion? Focus more efforts toward online marketing. Online giving worldwide hit the $10.44 billion mark in 2007, and it currently represents nearly half of all nonprofit donations.

Here are some tips on using the Internet to increase donations:

Stay in touch with donors via email. Send a monthly note reminding them to make a donation and show what donations are helping to accomplish.

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Posted by: Christy Roth, Project Manager

Most marketers are in the same spot: do more with less money. As you’re facing this challenge, here are three things that you can do to improve the efficiency and results of your lead generation program:

#1 – Stay Visible Even in a Tough Economy
Through these tough times it is more important than ever to stay visible to prospects whether or not your competitors are doing the same. There are many cost-effective and even free opportunities to help us accomplish this. Use social media and social networking sites to your advantage. Even though it may be out of your comfort zone, consider being present on tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, and more. In addition, if you are planning online media buys for 2009, work to negotiate tactics that include freebies such as e-newsletters and ad units. All of these things help keep you in front of potential leads.

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Posted by: Kayla Wagner, Account Manager

The search engine landscape is always changing and will continue to do so in 2009. But rather than going with the latest and greatest, take the new year to focus on the basics first and then build on top of them. Is the base of your SEM program serving as a strong foundation?

1. Recalibrate your keywords in your SEO and paid search (or PPC advertising) programs to match your goals. Often we start with terms that we’re used to using internally at our companies. But is this what your prospects are using to search for you? And aren’t those prospects at various points in the purchase cycle, ranging from completely unaware to aware and ready to buy? Make sure your terms and phrases account for the various segments of your audience.

Here are a few resources to help you create your strategic keyword list:
-    Google’s Search-based Keyword Tool
-    SEO Book.com
-    Microsoft adCenter Labs Keyword Forecast

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Posted by: Caitlin Diehl, Marketing Coordinator

With technology advancing as fast as ever and a new year upon us, marketers should expect a number of changes in Google and the other top search engines. In their attempts to stay at the forefront of innovation, these engines are going to be coming out with some new and enhanced features to keep searchers (and search engine marketers) coming back.

Google has been testing expandable paid search (or PPC) ads that allow a company to display not only their text ads, but also small product images and their locations. These ads are still being tested, but it’s a good bet that they will be formally introduced in upcoming months. If ads are expanded, marketers will be able to fight for that top position and the extra space that comes with the image areas.

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