Given the economic downturn, digital marketing tactics are shifting and businesses are being forced to take a hard look at which channels should be a part of their 2009 marketing plan, and to what extent.
According to a study put out by Marketing Sherpa last month, only Web 2.0 (social network marketing) and email marketing are expected to become a larger part of digital marketing plans moving into ‘09, while paid search marketing (PPC), display advertising, mobile marketing, and other forms of digital advertising will be phased out to a certain extent.
Marketing Sherpa goes on to explain that various channels may still experience overall growth as the study accounts for those that will receive more or less attention, but NOT the budget which will be allocated toward or away from that channel.
For example, about 1/3 of companies are expected to reduce PPC spending; however, it is estimated that their reduction in spend will be trumped by the amount of increased spend of the 27% of companies that plan to ramp up their PPC efforts in ‘09.
Regardless, though, of whether your marketing budget is increasing, being slashed or remaining static, given the times, every dollar spent in the coming year will likely come under much more scrutiny. While tactics may be shifted across the board, I want to talk briefly about paid search marketing given the inherent flexibility of this channel.
If you’re a part of one of the 33% of companies planning to cut your PPC budget, you or your agency may be in the midst of some serious analysis. What’s working? What’s not working? How do we best shift budget?
Many companies will no longer have the luxury of prospecting as much in this channel. Strategies will need to be more targeted to reduce wasted spend. If brand awareness was previously at the forefront, it may take a back seat to ROI moving forward. And while trial and error will still represent the foundation for campaign performance and efficiency, there may be fewer trials and less room for error.
More than ever, it’s going to be important to take a close look at every keyword and every ad, figure out what deserves the most attention, and how best to reach your audience.
For some, long tail will become a bigger part of their overall keyword strategy. For others, top-level keywords will still be an important part of their branding efforts. Rather than reaching your audience in all phases of their shopping experience, maybe you can only afford to try and capture those that have done the research and are ready to purchase.
The extent to which strategies need to be refined will vary from company to company; however, a commonality between all PPC marketers will be the need to adjust performance metrics on the fly. Despite whether or not your budget is changing, the factors driving the purchasing decisions of your target market likely are changing, and they need to be taken into account when formulating strategy and setting expectations.
Paid search represents an ideal marketing channel to exploit in order to prove much-needed value in today’s economy. The challenge moving forward, however, is figuring out how to get more with less.
Advertising Revenue: Providing content on your site, makes you a publisher. Publishers make money by selling name brand products and services that are related to the site’s content. Merchants with affiliate programs offer thousands of products and services for your site. From Bridal to Hot Sauce.
Big Brands:Smart marketing companies of major name brands are now buying “off-brand” domains to market their products and services. Do you have a domain that they might want? Congratulations, that domain is going up in value.
Brand: Develop your new domain name to feature your brand name products or services. All domain names are unique but there are only so many good ones relevant to your interests.
Competition: Buy related domain names so your competition can’t use them for their benefit and/or against you. What if they bought the domain names that you are thinking about buying? You may never have the opportunity to own them again. And now the domains names that you once liked are now being used against you. Don’t look back and regret not buying the domain names you want today.
Content: Use your new domain name for a blog, hobby site, specialty ecommerce site, community information, photo sharing, friends and family networking and more.
Cost Effective: Your cost is primarily the purchase price of the domain name. Annual renewal fees are less than $10 per year including the ICANN fee.
Credibility: Build sites or park pages so you are monetizing your investment. If you are opening an online business, start with a good domain name. Show your visitors/customers that you are serious about your online venture and, in a few years, the domain will probably appreciate in value even if your business does not take off.
Creative Domain Marketing: See our exclusive listof 2000+ domains that have been used by national brands yet the domain does not contain any brand name. Do you own any domains that a national brand name company might want to use?
Direct Navigation: When a user types YourDomainName.extension into their browser directly without even searching to find your site. Many of our keyword-specific domains enjoy Direct Navigation traffic.
Email: Use your new domain name to host email addresses. Create and use email addresses like sales@YourDomainName.extension or yourname@YourDomainName.extension. You will never have to change your email address again because your email provider/ISP changed.
Ecommerce: Build a storefront and sell your home made salsa or arts and crafts. Point your domain name to your eBay® seller’s page and then give it out to potential customers. A domain name is much easier to put on a business card or advertisement in a newspaper or magazine than a crazy eBay® seller’s list or storefront.
Forwarding: Forward your new domain name to your existing website or any other web site/web page you wish. Buy all the related domain names that you can and point them all (masked to prevent duplicate content) to your existing site thus giving your main domain more reach.
Gas Prices:I don’t have any research to back this up but I would guess that people might be driving a little less and staying home a little more. What do people do when they stay home? Check the Internet of course. So, more people online means more people using domain names to get to web sites or parked pages.
Gifts: Buy a domain name for your mother’s hobby or your brother’s business and give it to them as a gift. Give domains to friends, family, co-workers, charities and good causes. See if they will give you a receipt for the value of the donation. Maybe the gift is tax deductible? Ask them for a permanent link back to your site of choice in return.
Grouping: Buy groups of domains when you can, especially if one seller has many that you want. You can probably get a nice package deal and all in one transaction. Buy the plural, the …ed, the …ing, the dash version and others in the keyword, category or industry that interests you.
Hosting: You can host your new domain at dozens of reliable hosts for less than $10 per month. You can change the nameservers (DNS) and hosts as often as you like and your visitors never have to know the difference.
Investment: Hold for price appreciation. Read aboutrecent domain sales, updated each week. Bill Gates said it best: “Domains have and will continue to go up in value faster than any other commodity ever known to man.“
Yahtzee!!!: If you have enough quality domain names (say one hundred or more) the day will probably come when someone will buy just one that will pay for all the rest. Example - If you have one hundred domains that cost you $10 each per year to renew then sell just one domain for $2000, that’s a 200 times return on your money. I sell 4-5 names a year, that revenue pays for a good chunk of my portfolio.
Keywords: If you bid on keywords at Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing Y!SM or MSN AD Center advertise your existing website, you should own domain names that include those same keywords that are important to your business.
Limited supply: I always find new opportunities to register good domain names. However, If you have a portfolio of domains from years of investing, you are happy knowing prices are continually rising. If you don’t have a good domain portfolio, you had better focus on where you want to be in three years and buy up the domains you think you will be using.
Location, Location, Location: I like dot com’s. more than any other extension or TLD ccTLD but I also really like Geo targeted domains BostonForRENT.com is a perfect example of where and what.
Marketing: YourDomainName.extension is much easier to say, spell and read than geocites.com/whatever/whatever. Looks much better in print too. Keep it short and sweet, nor more than 3 words, stay away from nonsense phrases.
Minipreneurs: No. We didn’t make up this word, Trendwatching.com coined the term. Read their article about “minipreneurs”and how masses of people are getting online to sell items to supplement their income. Trendwatching.com doesn’t really talk about domain names but you can be assured that all these new economy entrepreneurs are going to need domain names, web design and hosting.
Mobility:Consumers are more mobile than ever and now have easy access to the Internet via their cellphones so there are more opportunities for people to use the Internet and visit your domain name or web site. I am not a huge proponent of the .mobi extension. Will this mobile Internet go to the next level thus creating even more demand for domain names? see our post on .mobi tools.
Niche: entrepreneurs, investors and developers settle into a niche, they buy, hold and/or develop the domains they own. Smart domain investors will try to buy more domain names in their niche. You better start buying the domains you want tomorrow or they may not be available again.
Online Advertising Spending: A quick internet search for this term will provide you with plenty of proof that online advertising spending has risen every year for many years and will continue to rise. In 2008 online advertising outstripped newspaper advertising spends for the first time ever.
Today’s domain boom is being fueled primarily by the advertising dollars spent on traffic provided by domain owners. A July report from Jupiter Research predicted that online ad spending will soar to $25.9 billion by 2011. Approximately $12 billion was spent online last year according to figures from the Interactive Advertising Bureau. The report predicts continued gains for search marketing which surpassed display advertising last year with 41% of overall spending (display ads took 34% of the pie). Jupiter Research predicts online ad spending will jump 21% this year. Others expect an even higher growth rate for 2006. Universal McCann forecasts a 25% rise while research firm eMarketer says the number will be over 33%.
Portfolio: Stay diversified! Owning a diverse portfolio of domain names will increase your opportunities to monetize faster and easier. Develop as many of the names as you can and generate as much revenue as you can. A name that has traffic and revenue will sell for far more than just a “good name”. If you have a nice portfolio of domain names, you will be able to pick the domain that’s right for your next online venture… and your next… and your next.
Print Advertisements: If you do any advertising in magazines or newspapers, you want a domain name that will catch the readers’ eye. Also, think about what you pay for one month’s print ad. Spend that amount to buy a good domain. So, if you spend $500 a month in advertising, get yourself a $500 domain name. If your advertising budget for one month is $10,000, there really is no reason that you shouldn’t own and be using a great domain name. MANY great domain names can be purchased for under $10,000.
Professionalism: Don’t dread giving out your web address or your AOL email address. Give them YourDomainName.com and me@YourDomainName.com.
Return on Investment: Most domains cost less than $10 per year for registration at many registrars. If you can make $.03 a day in revenue, you are profitable. Figure 2 cents for the name and 1 cent for the hosting per day. If you can make $.06 a day, you are doubling your money. Imagine if you had a couple hundred domains making $1.00 a day. Sounds like a great job to me!
Pay Per Click Revenue: If you choose to park your domain with a “pay-per-click” revenue provider, they will optimize your domain’s parked page with keywords and links so visitors will find your domain and then click on an advertiser’s link. Each time a visitor clicks on an advertisement, you get paid! Caution though, revenue for paked domains had been on the decline for several years. Google just announced their own parked domain name program. I do not know how well the service works yet. Caveat Emptor
Search Engine Results: Many webmasters argue that having a keyword rich domain will help your site show up better in search engine results. I tend to agree and have hundresd of sites to prove the theory.
Small Annual Renewal fee: Regardless of what you pay to acquire any domain, the following year’s renewal fee will be less than $10. (.tv domains and other country extensions have higher annual renewal fees.)
Supply and Demand: There is obviously a limited supply of quality or unique brand domain names. As Internet use continues to explode around the world and among future generations, good domains will only increase in value.
Think ahead: Wayne Gretsky said he skated to where the puck was going to be, not to where the puck was at the time. Buy domain names that will be popular one to three years out and be patient. Wait for the industry and the market to develop then your investment should appreciate in value substantially. I personally have banked on nano technology.
Viral Marketing: Buy a memorable (brand or keyword) domain name and use it so others can easily pass it along to others so you can enjoy the power of viral marketing.
Visitor Experience: As potential visitors use search engines to find web sites, they are more likely to click on a site with a relevant domain name more than some keyword-keyword-keyword.biz spammy looking domain name.
Don’t Put Your All Your Advertising Eggs In One Basket
If you have spent any time promoting a Website online, you have no doubt encountered Google Adwords, Yahoo (formerly Overture) Search Marketing and MSN Ad center. I have been advertising products and services using their networks successfully, for many years.
If familiar with these pay per click advertising networks, you are probably thinking to yourself there is no reason to advertise on second-tier networks, you get all the traffic you need from the top tier. There is nothing that a smaller PPC ad network can offer me that the services I currently use cannot. However, why be satisfied with 80 percent of the market, second and third tier ad networks and portals such as Miva, ABC Search and 7Search provide a vast array of opportunities for your advertisements.
Most small and medium sized business (SMB) advertisers often do not realize these networks exist and provide a comparable if not better return on investment (ROI) than either Yahoo! or Google Adwords. I am currently testing AdKnowledge and am pleased to report we are having positive ROI results. Up until two weeks ago I was not even familiar with them.
It’s All About the ROI
Essentially, more traffic in no way correlates to a better return on investment (ROI). I have had several firms look into our current setup wondering why traffic is down by 50% from a year ago. I explain that traffic does not equate to ROI and then they get it. These are professional search firms looking to get our business and no one ever asks about ROI. If smaller pay per click advertising networks provide an equal return on investment (and in some business verticals they do) these companies can not only survive but thrive in the competitive online advertising landscape.
I personally do not like RON or run of network. This approach may work for some people but I prefer a self serve network where I can fine tune either GEO targeting or partners-websites my ads will show up on. By tracking the referrers I am able to acurately trace the click through (we use fired pixel tracking).
It is important to note that popular keywords performed very poorly for some second tier networks. A popular keyword is one that is searched for very frequently by consumers and, hence, sought after by advertisers. Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, 7Search, and MIVA have excellent ROI for even the most competitive keywords.
While the benefits provided by both Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing are large, it is important for pay per click advertisers to utilize second tier networks to supplement traffic generated from the larger networks, as long as those second and third tier networks can provide a positive ROI.
I was doing some research on the top domain name sales of 2008 and found something very interesting. Forty percent of the top domains sold are not developed.
The following information was compiled using sales reported on DNJournal.
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One Link
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Nothing
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Inactive WP Site
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Matt Cutts is on the record as saying that exact-match domain names get a rankings boost. You may not have known, but exact-match domain names get their own search volume. People use Google like the address bar, and type in things like Homes.com or Travel.com. The correlation between search volume and boosts for exact match domains may be a coincidence, or maybe not. I mention this to explain why you might see a ranking boost for an exact match domain name with little or no search volume of its own - it’s part of a larger group that do have that user satisfaction and search volume.
A favicon (favorites icon) is an icon associated with a blog/site. Most popular browsers display favicons as 16×16 pixel icons next to the URL in the address bar, next to the title in tabs, and next to the title as well in bookmarks.
How to create a favicon?
Create a 16×16 pixel icon using a graphics editor . Save it as favicon.ico or save it in another format and use an online favicon generator to do the conversion to .ico.
If I were to pack a SEO picnic lunch box this is what I would put in;
Analytics
Blogging
Content Development
Keyword Research
Link Building
Local Search Engine Marketing
Online Reputation Management
PageRank
Search Engines
Search Marketing
SEO
SEO Books
SEO Events
SEO Videos
SEO Webinars
Social & Viral Marketing
Webmaster Tools
The search engine optimization (SEO) community is at it again claiming that Google had changed its algorithms to increase the results of brands. Wrong! Google’s Matt Cutt’s squashed the rumour and role of brands in SERP’s and the importance of branding in search.
Twitter was a buzz and the cloud tags filling up with rain on this debate with search engine optimization (SEO) experts concluding in recent weeks that a change from Google gave brands better rankings in Google search. Stop the press and all the hype, on Wednesday via YouTube, @MattCutts acknowledged that some changes, small, had been made which would change SERP results.
However, Matt Cutts also said that recent changes should not be considered an update and Google does not put more weight on brands.
For Brands looking to increase their SERP’s (search engine reaults) and search engine optimization (SEO), Cutts said what worked several months ago, before the algo changes should still be useful.
“What you should be doing doesn’t change - try to make a great site, try to make a site that is so fantastic that you become known as an authority in your niche … those are the sort of sites - the experts - that we want to bring back,” said Matt Cutt’s Google’s Search evangalist.
Organic Listings (also referred to as “natural” or “free” listings), and Paid Advertisements bought on a “Pay Per Click” basis (PPC) or Cost Per Thousand (CPM).
When you think of SERP’s think organic results, where 80 percent of the internet users click first.
Most searchers decide in a matter of seconds which search listings to click on. 36% of internet users think that if your website is top in the SERP’s you are the top brand in your field, (iProspect 2006) and 92% higher click through rate when paid and organic search are done together.
When looking at your site’s rankings in top search engines, what you really want to see is:
1. the most relevant page from your site (for a given search query),
2. high on the organic search results (SERP’s),
3. clear and concise site description (the NOSNIPPET meta tag tells Google not to show a snippet (desc) on SERP’s),
4. pages that relate to the query
Dominating the SERP’s has everything to do with connections! Not showing up in the results you query? Then you need to develop better content and links.
It is most efficacious to look at social and viral marketing on a campaign level, evaluating viral marketing campaigns as a whole instead of each individual component. Viral marketing science is all about figuring out what and how things spread, as opposed to the more general “how communities interact online,” and so the science comes in when various elements are interacting with each other and with the audience.
It is important to note that this does not mean that viral marketing is purely tactical; on the contrary, there is a great deal of strategy present in how these campaigns fit into a brand’s overall marketing mix. The science is in hitting the sweet spot between viral tactical elements and overarching marketing strategy.
The fields viral marketing most commonly draws from include sociology, neurology, statistics, history, psychology (especially evolutionary), economics, biology and memetics. Metaphors and epidemiology models or terms also serve as useful tools when communicating about viral marketing, as these are much more commonly understood.
Much of the information currently available about social and viral marketing is comprised of two distinct types: conjecture-driven and data-driven. The former is the majority, a formulation of advice based on anecdotal evidence and “what seems right.” Work with multivariate testing, combined with research from The Tipping Point and Freakonomics, has shown that the actual data often disproves the conclusions drawn purely from gut-feelings. Recent efforts have focused on creating content that is backed by facts, not feelings, and falls into the data-driven bucket. This is called viral marketing science.
One of the first literary works to expose the potential power of scientific viral marketing was, surprisingly, a work of fiction: Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. In it, the villain creates a biolingusitic virus based on a prototypical, brain-stem related Sumerian language. He uses the virus to practically enslave a large segment of people in a world domination plot.
There is also room for art in viral marketing; the creativity, intuition and improvisation involved in a successful campaign often come from a deep understanding of the data involved. But the brute creative genius most people assume is the core of contagious campaigns can make the entire exercise seem like entirely unpredictable black magic. However, using scientific methods, it is possible for mere mortals to create repeatably viral campaigns.
Content can be broken down into two components: code and copy. To achieve this, you’ll need and expert for each.
Hire an expert in UI (User Interface) design and a lead developer with a formal CS degree. If you can find someone with both skill sets, even better. Achieving high organic search results for your target keywords is the first step. The second step in winning the traffic over with your value proposition, aka conversion.
1) Code quality - must be w3c compliant and error free. This allows search engines to access your site as well as make the content interoperable (consistency across all browsers). w3c is based out of MIT and has a free tool to validate web pages http://validator.w3.org/
2) Semantic markup - optimizes content so that search engines index and categorize your site according to your content. You can also use http://validator.w3.org/ to see the content outline of a web page.
3) Page titles and descriptions - these must be unique for each page but relevant to the subject of each page.
4) Usability - apply best practices and a good starting point is Jakob Nielsen’s usability heuristics http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html
5) Value - identify and concisely articulate your core competencies. What are they and how will they benefit your consumer?
6) Differentiate - clearly state factors that make you stand apart from your competitors. Identify something that prevents your competition from doing what you do as a competitive barrier (barriers from entry).
7) Measure - use Google Analytics in combination with several popular server site tracking and reporting apps such as URCHIN to track performance.
Marketing - viral campaigns that touch on social networks tend to be most effective. One of the best is http://tremor.com/index.html (it’s a P&G company).
Once you’ve establish the baseline that I listed above, then you should approach a digital/online marketing agency for help with paid search. Before then, I wouldn’t do so because you’ll end up dependent on the ads/campaigns and your site will never be “organically” relevant to your industry and target keywords.
There is nothing that a smaller PPC ad network can offer me that the services I currently use cannot. However, why be satisfied with 80 percent of the market, second and third tier ad networks and portals such as Miva, ABC Search and 7Search provide a vast array of opportunities for your advertisements.
I explain that traffic does not equate to ROI and then they get it. These are professional search firms looking to get our business and no one ever asks about ROI. If smaller pay per click advertising networks provide an equal return on investment (and in some business verticals they do) these companies can not only survive but thrive in the competitive online advertising landscape.
