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Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category
February’s Brand:Scan eNewsletter is complete.
Thursday, February 2nd, 2012Online or Offline? Customers Responding to a More Balanced Approach
Monday, September 12th, 2011The recession redefined many things during the past two years, and that included how we go to market. As with other downturns, print advertising spending was dramatically curtailed, as were investments in trade shows and some of the other more costly marketing programs.
Would spending in those areas return? Many were prepared to yet again write off traditional marketing channels as no longer relevant, that they would not return to be valued by customers in how they learn about products. Yet Goldstein Group research across a variety of clients are beginning to show that customers are relying on both digital and face-to-face methods of communication – particularly word of mouth and trade shows – as important elements of the buying process.
Even further, segmenting the data by age group is showing remarkably little difference in how customers find information about new products – and in what information sources they define as “most credible.”
One interesting side note is that social media appears at the bottom for every client survey we’ve done to date for “most credible” information channels. But there’s an interesting nugget in the data: for a small group, about 7% of respondents, they’re identifying social media as their single most credible method of learning about new companies and products. It’s a channel that clearly is in the early adopter stage, but one that marketers clearly shouldn’t neglect.
Google+1… Google Sitelinks… Google Remarketing… Google Places
Tuesday, September 6th, 2011Google has never had as many ideas for how we businesses should use them as a marketing platform. Here’s a summary of the flurry of announcements they’ve made recently that affect organic and paid search:
+1. The +1 button is shorthand for “this is pretty cool” or “you should check this out.” Click +1 to publicly give something your stamp of approval. Your +1s can help friends, contacts, and others on the web find the best stuff when they search. And it’s easy to add the code to your site. To see +1s, you have to have created a Google Profile for yourself. Click here to learn more.
Sitelink extensions. These are additional links within your paid search ad that allow a user to click once to go to a specific page on your website. These links might allow someone to request a handbook or go directly to the “Contact Us” page. Sitelinks help get the user closer to a conversion in fewer steps.
Remarketing. Remarketing allows you to show ads to users who’ve previously visited your website as they browse the Web and visit OTHER SITES! When you use remarketing, you’ll tag pages of your site that correspond to certain categories you want to promote. For example, you could add a tag on all of your site’s pages where you sell a particular product. You can then create an AdWords campaign to show highly relevant messages (such as ads displaying a special offer on that product category) to people who’ve visited these pages as they browse sites across the Google Display Network. Remarketing allows us to match the right people with the right message even when they’ve left your site. When you combine your keyword campaigns with remarketing, you might see higher conversions for your campaigns overall.
Google Places. One out of five searches on Google are related to location, so it’s important for storefront businesses and professional service firms to use free Google Places to show up at the top of the first page. Your competitors in many cases are already there! When optimized correctly, your website, physical mailing address, and your phone number are displayed in your listing, which allows customers to find you more quickly and get the information they need. And it’s ideal for all the mobile phone searches taking place today. By using citations and reviews, your Google Places will move up in ranking. With high ranking, within eight weeks, rather than eight months or eight years, your free advertising with Google Places will bring you more targeted customers faster than even traditional organic methods.
Adwords Express (formerly known as Google Boost) takes Google Places to online advertising. When you add Google Boost to your listing, you can advertise your business on Google and Google Maps (including mobile devices) and attract more visitors to your website or Place page. With Google Boost, simply set up a monthly budget for your ad, and Google determines what search keywords trigger your ad based on the categories that you select. You’ll only pay for the clicks that your ad actually receives.
Lead Generation: Who Gets the Credit?
Monday, August 29th, 2011One of the unsolved conundrums in marketing ROI lead tracking is, what REALLY led to the sale? Was it the trade show visit, the response to the email newsletter, a webcast – or did the salesperson’s two-year nurturing of the prospect finally pay off with an order?
The savvy b-to-b marketer knows it’s truthfully the combination of all of those, that no single event can be considered in isolation as the only factor leading to the sale. But marketing ROI calculations can’t work when you give credit to “all of the above.”
In fact, most marketers are throwing up their hands and giving credit to the “last marketing touchpoint,” an admittedly inexact and flawed decision, but one that’s being used by 44 percent, more marketers than any other method. The data comes from a survey on Lead Generation Marketing ROI published by emarketer.com:
44% — Credit the last marketing touchpoint as the lead source
21% — Split the credit for the lead across multiple touchpoints reaching that contact prior to converting to a lead
11% — Measure the incremental leads from a single marketing touchpoint across different response channels using techniques such as marketing testing
3% — Use modeling to identify the incremental leads
20% — Do not track leads to specific marketing touchpoints
Lead Generation Only Works When You Call Them Back
Monday, August 15th, 2011Marketing Automation would be a great thing, if only we could take the people out of the process! It seems that regardless of the tool, company, training regimen or industry, these valuable programs we’ve been installing for the past 20 years always are tripped up by human nature.
The most recent reminder of that was a June 2011 study by a b-to-b sales organization called InsideSales.com. In its review of the effectiveness of lead management systems, they found that 55.3 percent of the companies in its survey, 159 firms, NEVER RESPONDED to any web leads they generated. This is despite the fact that web leads tend to be the highest quality of any lead source companies typically generate.
Lead follow-up is never easy, and automated email response tools can simplify the process at least with a cursory response. But it’s shocking to see so many b-to-b companies completely disregard the money they’re spending pushing people to their websites in order to engage and generate a response – only to have those customer inquiries fall on deaf ears.
QR Codes: Marketing Force or Fad?
Wednesday, August 10th, 2011All the marketing innovation in recent years has taken place in the digital world. From social media to web site engagement to “cloud-based” marketing automation tools, there aren’t many things coming along that capture people’s excitement in the print domain. So that’s partially why the explosive growth of “QR codes” has captured everyone’s imagination. The powerful little squares that look a bit like bar codes are showing up everyone, limited only by marketers’ imaginations:
- On ads that link to a video
- On roadside real estate signs that link to a video tour of the home’s interior
- On trade show displays that link to demos or web locations
- On brochures that automatically dial a phone number
- On the back of business cards that load contact information into your Outlook database
There are already hundreds of clever applications, but perhaps the best example we’ve seen are actually mounted on gravestones! The QR code can link to a video remembrance of the deceased, or perhaps even the deceased himself, a voice from beyond the grave!
The rule for B-to-B marketers? Make sure it links somewhere optimized for mobile display, and that whatever link you provide adds value in moving the sales process along. Avoid ideas that mean little: putting a QR code on a webpage that just links to another web page, or putting it on an ad that links only to a home page already listed in the ad.
We’ve been able to monitor click traffic on web pages for a while now by using Google Analytics. But where do a visitor’s eyes go? Where are the dead spots on your web design, and exactly how far down are people scrolling on each of your main pages? We’re answering those questions with a new tool called ClickTale, which provides fascinating “heat maps” that identify where the mouse travels on a web page (but may not click). Why track mouse movement? Because there’s an 80 percent correlation between your eye movement and where the mouse travels. Quick hit: with one client, we learned that the unusual placement of its all-important “quote” button, even though it was at the top of the page, rendered it nearly invisible.
“WikiBranding” — Something New to Learn
Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011We just came across a really interesting article on a new concept of co-branding, called “Wikibranding,” in which your customers help shape your message. The old-world days of the marketing department controlling the message is, sigh, in our rearview mirror. Find the article on our blog, BrandBlog, at www.ggcomm.com/blog.
Jennifer Jackson
Monday, April 25th, 2011We’re so excited to welcome Jennifer Jackson as the agency’s newest Account Manager. Jennifer brings us a wealth of online and web marketing savvy from her prior positions as Cleveland Clinic’s Communications Manager, Internet Marketing and as an Interactive Account Executive/Digital Media Buyer at one of Cleveland’s larger ad agencies. Jennifer will handle a variety of the agency’s larger accounts, including those in its growing medical/healthcare portfolio.
Mongoose is Calling
Tuesday, April 19th, 2011Another break in the lead-tracking chain has fallen! Marketers have sensed for some time that many inbound calls were actually preceded by a Google search or visit to the company’s web site. Now, we have the data to show it. Mongoose Metrics software, added to a site as easily as Google Analytics, is able to trace the source of incoming phone calls, so you’ll know if the call was made after receiving an e-newsletter or after a search. It will even tell you what search engine was used, and whether it was an organic or paid search result. In one instance, Mongoose showed us, for instance, that paid search on Yahoo! was more likely to lead to a phone call than Google paid search. Hmmm.
Well THAT Was Unexpected
Monday, April 11th, 2011We’re closely tracking the changing ways b-to-b decision-makers are finding and evaluating products. One new “media consumption” study we conducted last month revealed a few surprises, such as when we asked how buyers find information, and what information they find most credible. Frankly, we didn’t expect we’d find this:
* Top sources for finding information: Company web sites, search engines, shows and white papers.
* Top sources for credibility: Company web sites, colleagues, articles, online trade magazines, shows and white papers.
* It’s astounding that company web sites score so highly in both questions. We would have assumed that they would be discounted as biased information sources, but that’s not the case. OUR TAKEAWAY: your site needs to be deep and detailed.
* We were surprised to see relatively little difference in the ways people in different age groups gather information and what they believe. We expected greater disparity.
* We were surprised to see both print and online magazines continue to be ranked so highly as a prime information source.
