Forrester Research: Interactive Marketing Forecast 2009 - 2014

Forrester Research have come out with their forecast for Interactive Marketing for the next 5 years.

The table of contents is very relevant to online marketing:

• Interactive Will Cannibalize Traditional Media
• Interactive Marketing Spend Will Near $55 Billion By 2014
• Search Marketing Still Leads Interactive Spend
• Display Advertising Rebounds
• Email Marketing Continues Healthy Growth
• Social Media Fixes Itself In The Interactive Mix
• Mobile Marketing Matters - Post Recession
• WHAT IT MEANS - Interactive Trends Will Redefine Your Business

My colleague, Yves has pointed out some of the more salient points here:

When faced with budget cuts or the need for immediate sales, these marketers find that interactive tools are less expensive, more measurable, and better for direct response than traditional media.

Empowered consumers today expect a customized, interactive brand experience that goes way beyond a 30-second television spot or two-dimensional print ad. Forty-two percent of online adults and 55% of online youth want to engage with their favorite brands through social applications.

And last, even laggard industries feel that they have enough experience and data to prove interactive marketing’s worth. Online display spending by telecom companies in Q1 2009 grew 50% over Q1 2008.

Interactive marketing ad spend is still under represented and laggard compared to how much of sample media time is spent online.

You can sign up for a copy of the full report here, courtesy of DemandGen Report. More than ever, your marketing future may depend on it!

Labels: cannabilize traditional marketing, Interactive marketing, marketing spend, online display advertising, search marketing spend

posted by Fred @ 9:42 PM

                         

Google PageRank Fall Update 2009

At the end of October, Google released it's latest PageRank (PR) updates. Has your Google PR gone up or down on your website? One of our brand new websites has gone from PR0 to PR5 in just two months and we thought we'd give you some insight on how we did this.

As many of you may know, Google PageRank is based primarily on a link analysis algorithm that is similar to a ballot system. When one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important that page is assumed to be. It is also calculated on the quality of those links. A handful of links from authoritative, trustworthy, relevant pages far outweigh hundreds of links from so-so sites. Keep in mind, the Google algorithm doesn't solely rely on this, and has literally hundreds of factors, but that is a primary factor.

Here are our tips on improving your Google PageRank:

1) Create professional and useful content or applications on your website. When people find your content valuable, they will likely link and reference to your web content.

2) Provide client testimonials to your vendors. They will be happy to post your testimonial on their website and link to your website to show that its legitimate and credible (format the testimonial with a link).

3) Post insightful comments on blogs related to your industry (like this one!). Avoid simply commenting with just "good post". In your comment, demonstrate a shared experience or even challenge their idea with relevant sources. Make sure that in your profile, your name links back to your website.

4) Your partners and clients are also good sources of relevant inbound links. Work diligently at getting links from them.

5) Does your business have other websites. Make sure you create links to your website from your other web properties (but make sure these are not mirror sites).

There are many more ways to get credible inbound links, such as getting a link building campaign done by professionals. Building up Googe PageRank through a link building campaign requires creativity and hard work. The upside is once you've earned a good Google PageRank for your website, the payoff is long term. You'll get ongoing 'free' visitors from Google that you wouldn't have otherwise.

Labels: Google, SEO

posted by Fred @ 5:05 PM

                         

Google's Local Business Dashboard - Don't Do Local Search Without It!

Today, we'd like to show you how to take advantage of Google Local Business listings. The Google Maps team has just launched a new dashboard in its free Local Business Center that will provide you with information on how users interact with your local listing on Google Maps and Google Search.

This is very important as local listings has become an increasingly important part of the Google algorithm. Because the information is verified using humans or via phone book listing, Google gives strong weight to those who are listed. This will result in your listing being shown in more search results.

As you can see below, the dashboard will show you stats such as how many times your business comes up as a search result, how often people click through, which queries led customers to the business listing, as well as which zip codes customers are coming from when they request directions to your location. All you have to do is claim your listing in the Local Business Center and go through a quick verification process to get access to this information.

For the local business who relies on Google in helping customers find the business, you can now measure the impact of search, especially the top search queries that result in your business showing up in the listings. Once you see these search queries, you’ll want to have your listing show up more often in searches. This will lead you into assessing whether you should move forward and buy the keywords in the Google AdWords campaign. You’ll also want to think about optimizing your website to get more inbound traffic from natural search results who are LOOKING for your product or service.

If you are interested in knowing more, go to the Office Google Blog to learn more details about Google's new Local Business Center Dashboard.

Labels: google local business center, search engine marketing

posted by Fred @ 10:11 PM

                         

Google Local Business Listings

If you're like most SMB's, you probably do a substantial amount of your business locally. Traditionally, people used local phone books or yellow pages to find services like yours. However, people are now turning to Google to find local service providers, and therefore you're at risk of losing to your competitors if your business is not listed in the Google Local Business Listings.

Google Local Business Listings typically show up when the user types a service oriented business followed by the city for their search. A Google Map appears alongside with up to ten URLs including phone numbers for each business. Google’s Local Business Listings are becoming even more important since they are being displayed more often in search before organic listings even start. As a result, they often get most of the clicks from users.

Google uses Yellow Pages and other business directory information from third party providers to generate the basic local search results. If your business is already in Yellow Pages, it'd likely be listed in Google local business listings. However, the information is often limited and usually does not take advantage of the new features that are available on Google.

Go to Google Local Business Center to create your free listing or claim ownership of an existing listing and update your business information. Remember to review your local listings from time to time. Google continues to add new features to the local listing, like the ability to integrate YouTube videos. Using Google Local Business Listings and its features will keep your listing exciting and attract more visitors to your website.

Labels: b2b search engine marketing, web marketing, yellow pages

posted by Ray Yip @ 9:47 AM

                         

Online Press Releases - SEO Food

One of the best and easiest ways to get PR is to issue online press releases. There are a number of outlets such as PRweb or PRLeap. In addition to getting the word out to thousands of news and blog outlets quickly and at low cost, SEO'ed press releases have the additional value of getting indexed almost immediately. They also enjoy the benefit of being fresh and new, and can get high rankings for the keywords it is using.

A search engine optimized press release can reach thousands of people if handled correctly. Google and Yahoo search engines and news is how today's journalists and reporters get their sources and facts. Here are some stats from PRWeb's website that press (pun intended) home this point:

• 98% of journalists go online daily
• 92% for article research
• 81% to do searching
• 76% to find new sources, experts
• 73% to find press releases

On an average day, 68 million American adults go online

• 30% use a search engine to find information
• 27% get news.

As you can see, the Internet is or is fast becoming the source for news and a properly SEO optimized press release can get you noticed far eaiser than traditonal press release outlets. This is because your release will be keyworded, so that can be much more easily found by journalists who are LOOKING for your content and news!

Online news outlets that are hungry for new content, along with bloggers who are looking for news, will quickly publish your release in the hopes of attracting visitors.

There's a modest cost for this, and in addition to get your 'news' out there, it will give your website some Google 'juice' if the content is properly linked back to your website. This will increase your website's visibility temporarily. All this will result in more traffic to your website, which usually isn't a bad thing.

Be sure to also put the press release on your website to get even more bang for your buck. More info on online press releases can be found here.

Labels: online press releases, prleap, prweb, seo-pr

posted by Fred @ 10:46 PM

                         

Free SEO Tools at FoundPages

With SEO and SEM becoming more common and understood, there appears to be an upsurge in interest in tools for improving Google PageRank and traffic. For most websites, most visitors come via search engines (even if they know your name) than any other way. Something we don't promote but you should use are the free SEO tools available on this website.

Use it freely, as there is no cost, but keep in mind that they are tools. Tools that can help you analyze and measure your current situation, but they don't improve your website - only you can do that! There are many other resources on this website to help you with doing that.

One of the easiest things, is to update your website regularly. Updating content and adding more pages will get your website noticed by search engine crawlers, and new pages will add to the number of pages you will get indexed by the search engines. You don't need specialists to do this, and no one knows your business better than you do.

The pages don't have to be about your product or service. For example, if you sell cargo nets (like one of our customers), it can be about the legislation and laws surrounding the requirements. Or a page on how to install it properly on a truck. All this can get indexed, and help you with the 'long tail' in search. Just remember to add unique tags to them, and to add the page to the sitemap.

The long tail refers the keywords that are not searched a lot, but the many searches for various unique phrases that are very detailed and relevant for a searcher. For example, 'cargo net law' is a long tail search, that would bring visitors interested in cargo nets regulations, that then might interested in purchasing a cargo net that complies.

I'll have more on the SEO tools in the next few blogs, on what the benchmarks mean and how to improve them. These tools should be part of every online marketer's toolkit today. If you are a small to medium size business (SMB), you ignore search engine marketing metrics at your own peril.

Labels: FoundPages, free seo tools, Google rankings, online marketing, SMB

posted by Fred @ 3:14 PM

                         

Lower Bounce Rates Mean More Leads

Among web analytic statistics, the bounce rate is one of the metrics often overlooked by many marketers. A bounce rate is the percentage of single page visitors to your website that left your website quickly after arriving. Some advanced systems also use visit duration to calculate bounce rate which treat visitors as bounces if they stay on the site for less than 5 seconds.

Bounce rate can also be defined as negative statistic. It measures how engaging your website is to your visitors and how it relates to the intention of them. It also measures how effective and 'sticky' your landing page is when it's used with a campaign. Lack of relevancy is a major cause of bounces, and solving this will increase lead generation by an order of magnitude sometimes.

A high bounce rate usually indicates something wrong with your website's landing pages. However, the problem can also be caused by where you acquire your traffic. Let's look at a few things you can do to reduce bounce rates (lower is better).

Analyze the bounce rate for your traffic sources
Many inbound marketers use social media as part of their marketing campaigns. However, many of these referrers are low-value. These visitors aren't "looking" when they arrive at your website so they tend to leave immediately. You don't have to worry too much about bounce rates from these traffic sources but you should know which referrers contribute to the high bounce rates. If you are using social media advertising like Facebook ads, you should have a specific landing pages to create demand and guide your visitors to whatever you're advertising.

Not giving the banana to the monkey
This is a classic conversion problem. When people arrive at your website and can't find what they want, they would leave right away and go to your competitors websites instead. You only have a few seconds to let the visitors know that they are at the right place so "give the banana to the monkey." Make sure you have clear and obvious conversion points for your visitors. These conversion points should also tailor to the different interests of the visitors such as home buyers vs home sellers at a realtors website. While home buyers want to see what listings are available, the home sellers want to know why they should use the provided services to advertise their homes.

Match interests to the sales cycle
This is mainly related to organic search engine traffic. A website might rank highly on certain keywords but these keywords are often irrelevant. Similar to the previous point, when people don't find what they are looking for, they leave. Many 'content' websites with high search visibility often receives high traffic for irrelevant search terms. You should understand the Search Buying Cycle and adjust your content to use keywords according to different phases of the buying cycle. Also avoid having too much unrelated content, like too much profile information on every client.

Improve landing pages
Pay-Per-Click campaigns often have high bounce rates. Simple landing pages with only one call to action are often the issue. Email marketing campaign can possibly cause high bounce rate too if the subject line is misleading or the links take recipients to an unrelated page. It might also be the offer that's too aggressive (eg buy now) on the landing page. Consider having micro-conversions on the landing pages. A micro-conversion doesn't turn the visits into sales but it turns visitors into leads so that you can nurture them into sales. This is particularly effective for B2B.

B2B websites typically have average bounce rate of 10-30%. If your bounce rate is higher than that, you should flag it and find out why. Having high bounce rates doesn't mean the end of the world if you understand what's causing it and take actions to improve it. It might take a few round of tests to nail it down but the effort you put in will turn you website into one that's relevant for your visitors. They will engage if it fits their needs.

Labels: b2b search engine marketing, online marketing

posted by Ray Yip @ 5:22 PM