Marketing Strategy Turned Upside Down

Once upon a time, like in the post-War era depicted by the Mad Men TV series, clever people in marketing departments or an elegant advertising agency spent their time dreaming up catchy ways to lure consumers to their products.

They created demand for things people never knew they wanted, they sliced up the market and pored over their research data as they sought new ways to differentiate their products from competitors, often creating irrelevant and artificial distinctions. Does it really matter which cola you drink?

But that era is long gone as the one-way media funnel has been inverted and brand recognition has changed, well, beyond recognition.

It was easy to tell people what they wanted when they couldn’t respond or could only absorb the bombardment of messages on television screens and newspaper advertisements.

Now, through the two-way communications of blogs and social media, consumers can decide what they want and demand products that are tailored specifically for them.

Consumers will also make sure they inform their friends when their satisfied and they’ll make absolutely certain to tell everyone when they’re not happy – what else are all those status updates about?

There may still be smoke-filled boardroom plotting the behaviour of millions, but the emergence of a conversation, means only those engaged in a social networking dialogue will succeed.

Now, it’s the era of social marketing, where only the arrogant would think the boardroom is where a successful brand strategy can be created. It’s on the internet in the comment section of a blog or the response to a friend’s twitter.

Think of your social media strategy as a way to be part of the real chat and make sure you listen when your potential consumers tell you what they need, it’s the way to create your own cyber smoke-filled boardroom.

Tags: Advertising Agency, Brand Recognition, Brand Strategy, Marketing Strategy, social marketing, Social Media, social media strategy, social networking

PPC and Brand

In Google, search the term “Oil Spill” and many other similar phrases and in the top PPC section you will find a link to a BP landing page titled Gulf Of Mexico Response.

Where many companies use PPC search terms as a way to gain new clients and leads, BP is utilizing a PPC campaign to attempt to rebuild its public image. The oil company is receiving a very negative response to their recently launched PPC campaign with many people saying it’s unethical to use PPC to lessen the effect the Gulf Oil spill has had on their brand’s reputation.

With this said it seems BP is not the only company to purchase PPC terms around the words Oil Spill: Bloomberg, several charities, and even political campaigns are purchasing the terms Oil Spills. However where charities such as The Nature Conservancy and Dawn are using PPC to raise money for this horrible disaster BP is using PPC to rebuild it’s public image

Don’t Treat Facebook Fans like kids

Although Facebook started as a place for college students and younger, it has grown up a lot in the last few years and is now a network for everybody. In 2009 the fastest growing demographic on facebook was aged 55 and over, growing by 922%. The largest overall demographic was ages 35-54 which makes up 29% of all users.

Keep this is mind and write for all audiences not just Teenagers. Many companies make the mistake of assuming that the only people on Facebook are college age and younger. Branding toward only this younger demographic could easily turn away a large amount of users

Google's New SearchWiki

The introduction of Google’s New SearchWiki now allows you to customize your search by ranking content, anyone signed into a Google account automatically has use of this feature. What this all means is that Google now allows users to edit the results they see in a search engine results page by adding a star to an item. When searching a term or phrase Google presents the results and places a star directly to the right of each listing. By clicking the star you are ranking this result. If you search a phrase or term and the results show a useful link at position 5 and you click the star this link will automatically appear at the top of your results next time you do the same or similar search.

The only question is what will this do to SEO? There has been massive amount of writing both negative and positive about SearchWiki. How it will effect SEO is truly unknown, one thing is for certain though. SearchWiki is making first impressions more important than ever! Once someone adds a star to your competitor that listing is automatically placed in the number 1 search results position for that individual. With this said it also means that your company could very easily move from position 6to position 1 for certain individuals.

YouTube - The Second Biggest Search Engine

Did you know that YouTube is currently the 2nd largest search engine behind Google, with more than 3.5 billion queries a month. What that means is that there are more search queries on YouTube than on Yahoo! YouTube and other video sites can be a great vehicle to reach audiences who might not find you otherwise. Plus, you can create a branded YouTube channel and host your videos without incurring any costs.

This is of course not the only benefit of utilizing YouTube. The use of video can greatly affect your SEO ranking for several reasons. Search engines now display more and more videos in their results and weigh them more heavily. This gives you a great opportunity to increase your relevance in search results, and potentially achieve first page ranking of Google. In fact a video is 50 times more likely than plain text to appear at the top of search rankings.

Facebook Stats

It’s fair to say that facebook and social media in general have become a part of most people’s daily lives. The popularity of these social networking sites especially facebook is growing daily. With the number of users on facebook reaching over 400 million more than half of them use it on a daily basis. This is unlikely to decline, the creation of applications allowing users to log in from cell phone, has 100 million individuals logging in even when they aren’t at a computer. Lets take a look how long it took other forms of media to reach 50 million users:

Radio -38 year
TV – 13 years
Internet – 4 years
Ipod – 3 years
Facebook – added over 100 million users in less than 9 months

These statistics are no doubt impressive, but does facebook really help businesses gain exposure? This social networking site offers a means to easily connect to individuals outside the use, because more than 70% of facebook users are international. With that said it’s also important to know that more than 20 million users become fans of pages on facebook each year. With facebook becoming a regular part of most peoples lives the social networking site can be a great way to reach out to customers, and promote new products. Driving customers to your facebook site is now easier than ever. In December 2008 facebook implemented Facebook Connect, and since than over 80,000 websites have used it. Now that you have people at your facebook page why not customize it to look more like a website. Here are some companies that have done that well:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Treeno-Software/373560250513?ref=search&sid=1811962.3337906625..1

http://www.facebook.com/WhatsUpGold?ref=search&sid=1811962.83676371..1

Text Versus Links

We often get asked the question, how many links should I have on my website? Quality links are an important factor in getting your website ranked higher, but just adding random links can actually be detrimental to search. Links should be relevant to your content. If you are a technology company, linking to a car review site is probably not going to do much to elevate your search ranking. However, creating relevant links from your content to other content that adds to the user experience can increase your company's organic rankings. In general we like to see 90 percent content on a page and 10 percent links. This seems to be an optimal mix for the search engines.

Social Media News Rooms

As companies continue to put more resources into developing social media, tracking all fo those tweets, blog postings, videos and photos can be difficult. As a solution, we have been working on developing a number of social media news rooms. These "News rooms" give clients the ability to keep all of their social media in one central location. This keeps users on the site. In addition, all of this traffic staying on the site, helps your organic SEO by increasing traffic and keeping traffic longer on your site. A good example of a recent Social Media news room can be found at: http://www.pegasystems.com/blog/

Why are links important?

Linking to relevant sites is extremely important to your overall SEO ranking. If you are a maker fly rods and you have other relevant pages that link to the term fly rods linking to you then this is a good link. Search engines will confirm that "Fly rods" are in fact in the title, description and body content of your page and reward the page with rankability.

Guaranteed SEO

When talking with comapanies, I often hear that "Your competitors will guarantee 1# placement of my web site." In many cases this is true. What companies will do is focus on hyper specific keywords such as "Medical Manufacturer in Plastow, New Hampshire". By putting in hyper specific geographies into a search querry, SEO companies have eliminated the competition, thus making it very easy to rank a company 1# for that search term. The problem is that the general public does not search for services or products with that level of specificity. So, before you sign up for that guaranteed placement, it is important to understand the methodology. When we work with companies we spend a great deal of time on key word research, focusing on important words and phrases for that client that have low competition and high search volume. By doing this we are able to gain good placement for relevent word and phrases that actually drive traffic to their site.