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April 25th, 2012 by Cyndi Friedel
AdWords “To Do” list
Recently, Google offered some advice to agencies managing
multiple AdWords accounts. We are always willing to learn and listen to Google.
Steve, our Google rep, recommended a few tips that all agencies should have in
place on all their AdWords accounts, which I will share with you.
Google AdWords programs have become increasingly complex, as
marketers have become uber-sophisticated about crafting ads, campaigns and
strategies to make the greatest use of their paid search budgets. From sitelink
extensions to accelerated delivery schedules to remarketing campaigns (one of
our favorites), Google provides a wide range of methods for getting extra value
from an AdWords budget.
One technique we see growing in popularity – but which is
still too often overlooked – is the effectiveness of including “negative”
keywords in a campaign. We all focus on what keywords we should run for clients
but forget to think about those negative keywords that really should be added
to the account. For example, we have a client that manufactures portable batteries
but their marketing efforts are only targeted to OEMs, not consumers. Buying
“laptop” as a negative term dramatically improved our efforts to avoid casual
consumer shoppers for replacement laptop batteries. Another example was the
diode manufacturer that marketed a product called Avalanche, which certainly
called for negative keywords to minimize snow avalanche traffic.
Tags: google, PPC, Search Engines, SEM
Posted in Pay-Per-Click |
April 4th, 2012 by Joel Goldstein
Our agency saw a dramatic increase in our online video production last year, and many clients have recognized that video offers and content often generate the strongest response to web and email programs. However, one company recently took the video concept too far when it emailed a news release to editors that consisted ONLY of a video! No text, nothing for the editor to review, revise, and edit. They expected the editor to listen to the video, type a transcript while listening to the audio, and create a new product news item. Sometimes marketers do the darndest things!
Tags: Marketing, news release, online video
Posted in Marketing |
March 27th, 2012 by Joel Goldstein
 Alignment is a challenge for every organization. From our experience as marketers, we all know that alignment between the B-to-B sales and marketing departments is rarer than a snorkeling vacation in Lake Erie.
Forrester Research recently studied the problem and gave us some data to back up our anecdotal evidence. In its report, “B2B Sales and Marketing Alignment,” only 8% of companies said they have “tight alignment” between sales and marketing.
What’s the barrier? The greatest obstacles, survey respondents said, was long-term thinking by marketing vs. short-term thinking by sales (58%); different goals and measurements (46%); and not enough time (45%).
Posted in Marketing |
March 14th, 2012 by Joel Goldstein
It’s sometimes common for executives today to diagnose themselves as having ADD, or Attention Deficit Disorder, when they appear forgetful or impatient. But the truth is, particularly with young people, we live in a world that is increasingly based on doing two things at once. We do email during meetings. Talk on the phone while driving. Read something else when we should be listening to a speaker. Some even (gasp) can’t resist texting while driving!
As communicators, we have to accept that giving someone your “undivided attention” is rapidly becoming a thing of the past – and that communications are often better packaged in short, scannable, “Twitter-sized” bursts and videos rather than in longer blocks of prose, no matter how beautifully crafted. The explosion of online video isn’t necessarily due to us becoming too intellectually lazy to read. It’s just a reflection of the way we’re being conditioned to communicate – short, fast, to the point, and with the understanding that there will be something else distracting our audience from the message we’re trying to share.
Posted in Uncategorized |
March 5th, 2012 by Joel Goldstein
My daughters gave me the book Scorecasting for a birthday present, which talks about the surprising patterns that determine who wins games – applying a bit of the Freakonomics approach to sports. In the book’s first few pages, the authors identify four themes that drive sports, and they are amazingly similar to the same success factors behind most businesses:
- That which is recognizable or apparent is often given too much credit, whereas the real answer often lies concealed.
- Incentives are powerful motivators and predictors of how athletes, coaches, owners, and fans behave – sometimes with undesirable consequences.
- Human biases and behavior play a pivotal role in almost every aspect of life, and sports are no exception.
- The role of luck is underappreciated and often misunderstood.
Go Tribe!
Posted in Uncategorized |
February 21st, 2012 by Joel Goldstein
We all intuitively sense Google’s presence in our daily (computing) lives, and this infographic does a tremendous job of conveying Google’s online dominance graphically. http://www.wordstream.com/articles/google-earnings
Tags: google
Posted in Marketing |
February 14th, 2012 by Joel Goldstein
B-to-B marketers are paying more and more attention to the stats and data coming from HubSpot and other marketing automation tools. In fact, more of our clients are planning marketing automation reviews or implementations in 2012 than ever before, with most using or leaning toward HubSpot and Pardot.
Recently, one of our clients took some of the results of HubSpot’s A/B testing to heart on a basic question many of us face: What web button text is most likely to lead someone to click? Is it Submit? Register? Or does it even matter? HubSpot’s advice to us, based on their clients’ testing, is that Click Here generates the highest clicks and lead conversions. And, in one instance, it was true: one client boosted clicks on an offer by 31% in a month – just by changing the button text to Click Here.
Tags: B-to-B, Goldstein Group Communications, HubSpot, Marketing
Posted in Marketing |
February 2nd, 2012 by Cyndi Friedel
Read it now for valuable marketing news, ideas and tips:
http://www.ggcomm.com/BrandScan/Feb12/index.htm
Posted in Marketing |
September 26th, 2011 by Joel Goldstein
The way b-to-b marketers are using social media is evolving but gaining steady acceptance and growing budgets, according to a new study by B2B Magazine. We’re still in the early adopter stages of social media, in most cases, and few are able to measure impact and sales conversions from the new tools. However, companies have recognized that it’s an important marketing channel that deserves the growing investment it’s receiving. Key findings from the study:
- LinkedIn and Facebook are the “platform” sites for social media marketing for b-to-b companies. Twitter follows as a close third.
- When the question is changed to “what’s the one MOST IMPORTANT method used,” blogging rises to the #3 ranking (followed by LinkedIn and Facebook). Blogging assumes an even higher priority among tech companies than b-to-b companies as a whole.
- Branding, website traffic and the promotion of products or events are currently the three most common uses of social media marketing. The main metric that marketers look for in gauging the performance of a social campaign is website traffic.
- YouTube reached “effectiveness” faster than any other social media channel. Forty-two percent of marketers using YouTube said it achieved effectiveness within a quick two- to six-month period.
A side note from another piece of research: we’re all getting older, and that includes the people using Facebook. A Pew Research report shows the average age of a Facebook user is now 38 years, and half are 35 and older. Fifty-six percent are female. Teens and young adults concerned about being friended or followed by parents have every right to be worried! (Facebook is now up to 750 million users, rapidly approaching the billion-user mark.)
Posted in Uncategorized |
September 21st, 2011 by Joel Goldstein
One client told us recently that search engines and online marketing weren’t effective for reaching the C-Suite. That thinking is soooo 2000’s, according to our own intuition. And now, thanks to a Forbes report on CEO usage of the Internet, we have some data to back up our opinions.
Now that CEOs are typically in their 40s and early 50s, they grew up as a PC generation of executives familiar with search tools and the web as part of their information-gathering process. And while executives under 40 are most likely to use online tools, it’s not limited to that age cohort. In fact, the study showed that six out of ten executives are conducting more than six searches a day for information.
Significantly, while delegating research may be part of the stereotype, it is not the reality. More than half of C-level respondents said they prefer to locate information themselves, making them more self-sufficient in their information gathering than non-C-suite executives.
The study described CEOs as belonging to one of three digital generations: Generation Wang, Generation PC and Generation Netscape. And beginning with Generation PC, those who began their working careers during the mid-1980s, they’re online all the time, with 81% accessing the Internet on a daily basis. And those executives under 50 years old are 3 times more likely to access information from videos, a mobile device, or an online professional community.
Posted in Internet |
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