#40 The Future of Marketing is...Social.

Audiences today do not want to be talked at. They want to be engaged in conversation. Social media gives us the power to do this, allowing us to define and control our brand. There is a shift from corporations and institutions to individuals and communities. Here are a few tips to take advantage of social media.

• Facebook. To help spread the word about a new campaign, why not ask employees to change their Facebook status to announce your latest campaign? If you have 20,000 employees, most likely 10,000 of them have Facebook. With the average person having 100 friends, your announcement could receive over 1 million impressions for free. Ask employees to include their LinkedIn Profiles – now you have 2 million impressions for free


• YouTube. Create a YouTube channel dedicated to teaching people more about your industry. This channel would feature a series of short, focused videos that educate your audience on related topics that help position you as an industry expert. The videos could highlight benefits and features of your products.


• Twitter. To help build and establish your company as an industry expert, top executives should create Twitter accounts to help position your company’s executives as thought leaders in the industry. Tweets should be business-related topics that talk about industry trends and forecasts. Zappos CEO has 1.6 million followers and is following almost 400K people. A total of 430 Zappos Employees have Twitter accounts. This presence helps Zappos engage and participate in conversations about their company.


• Flickr. Flickr is a great way to help promote events that your company sponsors. Photos can be optimized to show up in search results and increase brand awareness. Using Flickr to increase branding opportunities for KeyBank’s sponsorship of a 10K race, the Key “Bank to Bay” gallery has alone received 6,000 views following the event.

W6M: People visit social media sites every day, why not join them in what they are already doing?

#28 The Decline of Traditional Advertising...What does that mean?

Forrester Research released its five year forecast that estimates interactive marketing spending from 2009 – 2014. Forrester predicts that interactive marketing in the US will near $55 billion and represent 21% of all marketing spend by 2014 and will include search marketing, display advertising, email marketing, social media, and mobile marketing.

W6M: A co-worker just passed along this article on how traditional advertising is on the decline. If you read it closely, this article applies to agencies that don't adapt. Lucky for us, we adapt well.

My job isn't traditional advertising. My job is to create solutions to business problems for my clients. In my experience, the best solutions are typically an integrated approach of the mediums that best reach my targeted audience. You tell me what your objective is. I recommend the best approach.

#17 Photo Booth - Event Marketing

I haven't had a chance to do this yet, but if you are looking for a cool idea for your clients next big event, you may want to try to set up a photo booth for attendees. The idea is to have people take pictures in a booth (perhaps provide them props to make it interesting) and have the photos appear on TVs or projectors through out the event. This is a great way to entertain guests.

W6M: If you want to do this right, set up a landing page to drive people online the next day. People will visit your website the next day and perhaps email their friends a link to their pictures. For a little extra branding, consider adding your logo or url to all the photos.

#16 Bank to Bay - Multichannel Communication

In 2000, KeyBank and the City of Tacoma partnered up to develop 10k/5k Run called Bank to Bay as a means to showcase the growth and development of downtown Tacoma and to promote good health, family fun, and community spirit. Key asked us to develop the marketing materials for this race which included print, radio, TV, online, direct mail, in-store merchandising, street banners, race signage and more.

This race has been an extremely popular event in the City of Tacoma. Over the past several years, race entrants has been steady around 1,800 runners. With the addition of a website and a MySpace page this year, we were able to increase entrants to over 2,000 runners. This was a substantial increase for us that we look to build on next year.

W6M: I included this example because Bank to Bay is a great example of an integrated campaign using multiple marketing channels. As mentioned above, we reach our audience through a variety of marketing channels. We realized that our print, radio and TV communications have reached as many people as we could. We now needed to try other mediums to help increase the number of runners for the race. I feel that a successful campaign should incorporate a consistent message, consistent design, frequency of message and multiple channels. You don't need to own each channel.

How do we plan to continue marketing the race?
Traditional marketing (print, radio and TV) will remain constant, however we would like to promote stronger online by adding a FaceBook page and seeding the site on related sites. The objective behind seeding is to find related running sites and have them link to your site (offering them a reciprocal link is always a nice gesture). If you do a quick search on Google you can currently see who links to your site. Your goal is to make sure people who already link to you have your updated info and to figure out who else should be linking to your site.

About the Design
I also wanted to take this opportunity to mention a little about the design. Our agency has been involved with this race for 8 years now. The challenge is to come up with something new and fresh each year. We also have to keep in mind that the race is for professional runners, as well as first time runners and families with kids. Creatively we have to make sure the design is appealing to all audiences.

The website is also challenging because we don't want to have to do a complete redesign each year. We have therefore designed the site so color bars and photos can be easily updated each year to be consistent with the design of new materials each year.

#15 Online Marketing a Closer Look at Tracking Your Traffic

Learn more about where your visitors come from and how they interact with your site. Google Analytics is free to everyone, whether you are an advertiser, publisher, or site owner.

W6M: I recently added Google Analytics to help track visitors to my site. I am not really the HTML coding expert, but I did a quick Google search how to track traffic and I was able to find easy to follow instructions.

Once the code is added, you can track the number of visitors, what sites link to you, what keywords were used to find you site and even what city the visitors came from. You can also see how long people spent on your site and what pages they visited. With this data you can see what content people are reading and what content they are ignoring. This will be a useful tool for you to use when deciding what content to update. If anyone ever reads this blog I will make sure to pass along an update.

For your online marketing campaigns, you can also track the success of your campaign. Specifically, Pay Per Click and Banner Ad campaigns allow you to track impressions, clicks and conversions. I talked about this in an earlier post, but online conversion numbers may only be part of the story. That banner ad impression may have led to the in-store purchase, which does not get accounted for in your online conversion numbers. Any influence your online campaign ad may have had on the instroe purchase is ignored in your online conversion results.

Knowing the data and being able to understand it is important to being able to sell this offering to your client.

#14 Online Marketing a Closer Look at Behavioral Targeting

Behavioral targeting (BT) is an advertising methodology in which an advertiser’s creative is shown to users based on the sites they visit and/or what the user does on those sites. The network or publisher creates behavioral segments based on where the user has gone and/or what they have done on various web pages. These are typically broad based descriptions like “Travel Shoppers” or “Auto Enthusiasts”, but they can also be very specific to an advertiser like “Users who put items in their shopping cart, but did not check out”. Another example is a segment based on users who have searched for an advertiser’s company name or product name.

W6M: Banner Ads have terrible click through rates and even worse conversion rates. However, they are starting to grow on me. I always tell clients online is great because you can tracks results. Kind of.

An example that was presented to me was Corona. They spend money on print, radio, online and TV. Then a person goes into a bar and sees a neon sign that says Drink Corona. The neon sign then gets all the credit for closing the deal. Do you think Corona will stop print, radio, online and TV advertising and only focus on neon signs? Probably not. So although banners can track online conversion rates, this is only a part of the results. Also, I have seen reports that PPC in combination with Targeted Banner ads, helps increase the conversions of PPC substantially.

Now, back to Behavioral Targeting. If you are planning a trip to Vegas and you search for flights and hotels for a couple days. The next day you will notice banner ads popping up on Cleveland.com for a car rental in Vegas. Third parties use Cookies and Software to identify you for advertisers. Now, all the sudden I have Vegas companies reaching me where I live.

Next time your are working on a media recommendation, I definitely recommend taking a look at adding Behaviorally Targeted banner ads as part of your media mix.

#13 Online Marketing a Closer Look at Pay Per Click (PPC)

Online advertising payment model in which payment is based solely on qualifying click-throughs. In a PPC agreement, the advertiser only pays for qualifying clicks to the destination site based on a prearranged per-click rate. Popular PPC advertising options include per-click advertising networks, search engines, and affiliate programs.

W6M: Most marketers think no one clicks on the paid listings, this is not true. Most people prefer the natural organic listings, but data shows that people do click on paid links. Since getting ranked in the top organic results is often difficult, PPC is an easy way to get your site listed at the top of the search results right away.

If you look at "car insurance" and similar related insurance products/terms, Progressive always Ranks at the top. They have an army of employees and an endless budget. For certain terms they may spend $5, $10, and maybe $25 per word. If you are competing in this market, keep in mind that being 2nd, 3rd or 4th position will still get you a substantial amount of traffic. You might only pay a fraction of what the top bid is. Keep in mind that if they are spending $10 per bid and they have a $1,000 daily spend, their budget will run out quickly and you will move up in the rankings.

Also, know when and where your customers are buying. If you only sell products from 5 pm - 8 pm, then you should day part your campaign to only run during those hours. If your customers typically work all week and shop on the weekend, then only run your campaign on the weekend.

If you know where your customers are you can also GeoTarget with PPC. If you are a "Cleveland Pizza" place, PPC allows you to geographically target people close to your location.

#12 Online Marketing a Closer Look at Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it "ranks," the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

W6M: Search Engines are basically modern day phone book. If I needed a bank back in the day, you would have opened up the yellow pages and looked under "bank". Now a days, people go on on Search Engines like Google and search for the term or keyword "bank".

This may change by the time you read this, but Bank of America currently comes up first on the left hand side in what they call the natural listings (these are the non-paid listings). Basically, BofA did a good job of optimizing their site to come up first and Google granted them the #1 spot telling people that BofA is the most relevant website to your term.

How did BofA get to be #1 on Google?
That's are hard one. Google like other search engines, uses advanced algorithms that are proprietary to their companies. However, there are a few known variables that search engines consider when ranking you in their results. Here are some quick tips.

• Submit your site: You should submit your site to the major search engines to let them know you are around. They can't find you if they don't know you are there. Search for "Submit site to Google" and they will tell you how.


• DMOZ: This is the Open Directory Project. I always submit my sites here first. Read up how to suggest a URL and it will be worth your time.


• Content is King: If you continue to add relevant useful content to your site, search engines will notice and reward you for it.


• Keyword density: When adding copy to your site, it should focus on specific topics and repeat the keyword you are targeting. If you the BoA homepage has "bank" on the page a number of times, but keep in mind if you just repeat the word "bank" 50 times on your site they may consider you a spammer and knock you out of their results for good.


• Meta Tags: I have been told search engines don't look at these too much anymore, but I would add them on anyways. The Title Tag and Description Tags are used in the search engine results so these are helpful in getting people to click on your link when they do appear in the results. Keyword tags are they other tags that I like to include.


• Inbound Links: If a popular site considers you a good reference for their readers, they will link to you. Search Engines take this into account and will rank you higher the more time legit sites link to you. Sites with .edu, .org and .gov will help you rank even higher.


• Outbound Links: Offering a reciprocal link is a good way to get other sites to link to your site. If you promise to link to their site, often sites are willing to link to you. Not always the case though. Nike loves when you link to them, but as you will notice, they don't link to many external sites.

In Summary

There is a lot to learn about online advertising. You don't need to be an expert on everything, but you should be familiar with the basics. Staying on top of current trends is also important.

#11 Online Marketing

Online Marketing is defined as using the interactive technologies available via the Internet to further create a dialog with potential customers by connecting with them with good educational content about your company's products or service offerings.

W6M: Online Marketing includes using Search Engine Optimization, Pay Per Click, Banner Advertising, Facebook, YouTube, Banner Ads and more. I will get into more details with the following posts on SEO, PPC and Social Media, but I just wanted to be clear that Online Marketing is basically the umbrella for all these efforts. The following posts have high level explanations, so the average marketer can understand what they will need to know to sell online marketing to their client.

#8 Running From Camera

The rules are simple: Muggezifter puts the self-timer on 2 seconds, push the button and try to get as far from the camera as he can.

W6M: I had to include my man Muggezifter on my blog. I found his site a couple years ago and keep returning to check out new pictures. He has a unique style and it works. When you are working on projects for your clients, try to keep Muggezifter in mind. Not suggesting you copy his style, he likes to call those people out "It ain't me babe". But rather do something unique that makes you stand out against the crowd. You will know you made it when people start to copy you.

#7 The 2008 Presidential Election Goes Viral

The election has come and gone. The results are in and Obama crushed the web. From the Obama Sneaker to the Obama Girl he was every where. One of the founders of Facebook teamed up with Obama to help spread the word online. I am guessing that like me, about 100 of your Facebook friends posted this on their profile status:

W6M is the 1,357,978th person to donate their status to get out the vote for Barack Obama today. Donate yours: causes.com/election.

Whoever was in charge of online for McCain, was a little less successful. I did not see one McCain comment on anyone's Facebook page. However, I did see some great SNL skits and a few great photoshopped images of Palin.

W6M: Try to take advantage of all mediums. Print and TV advertising is great mass marketing, but niche marketing on Facebook, YouTube, blogs and other areas is a great opportunity to reach a highly targeted audience.

If there are any politicians reading this, feel free to steal this idea. Start A Blog. People don't really know what you do all day and what types of decisions you have to make. Tell me what decisions you are making and why. Even you have to make a decision on my behalf just tell me you voted this way because and I will vote for you the next time. Politics has too many smoke and mirrors, how about some transparency and honesty?