by Daniel Hadaway

If you’re planning to begin marketing your business online, there’s a chance you’ve got a plan laid out for all the different types of marketing you’d like to utilize. It’s important to note, however, that while most businesses will see success from all online marketing channels, different types of online marketing lend themselves more favorably to specific vertical markets.

Remember, that at the end of the day, the purpose of marketing is (most of the time) to generate sales for your business. The best way to do that is by finding users who may be already prepared to buy your product or service. With this in mind, we can look at how the behavior of consumers in specific verticals is uniquely influenced by online marketing and popular website formats.

Mashable recently posted an infographic called How to Influence Purchasing Decisions on the Web, which outlines how consumer behavior is affected by different online channels. For example, we can see that the top influencer in the automotive category is brand websites, followed by search results. So, if you’re an auto dealer you might want to consider focusing your initial efforts on creating an awesome website, optimizing it for SEO, and investing in paid search ads. The influence for baby products is much more social, with the top influencers being forum comments, Facebook, and blog posts. So if you’re ready to launch a new line of baby pacifiers, you might want to invest in reputation management, off-page SEO (inbound links, etc.), and Facebook advertising.

Your business category may not be listed in the infographic, but it’s important to start your marketing efforts armed with some knowledge of the buying behavior of your target audience. The best source for such knowledge will be an experienced digital marketing company (hint hint!) who is willing to help educate you based on their past experience in your vertical market.

Starting out your marketing efforts with thorough knowledge of your target audience, and then acting based on that knowledge is the best method to ensure success from your digital marketing efforts!

Consider this: When potential customers look up your business online and see your Google Maps listing, they’re hit with a promotional ad for your services. Genius, right? Well, maybe.

This hypothetical can easily become a reality as Google Adwords recently extended their reach to include their Google Maps service. It’s time to gather your marketing team because with the right approach, there’s a lot of potential here for your business. However, while you’re doing that, you might want to gather your public relations team, too.

So, what could possibly go wrong? The short answer is: everything.

While there is nothing stopping you from running an ad, there is also nothing stopping a competitor from doing the same. Since this service runs on their auction-based ad network, the best you can do is to set your ad placement for Google Maps, add the appropriate keywords and hope for the best. Strangely enough, all Google Maps listings are fair game – including memorials.

That said, if a competitor has a higher quality score, more relevance and a high bid, they’re going to appear in the ad spot under your listing. Imagine owning a small, local bookstore and having Amazon.com advertise on your listing – this is now possible. Worst of all, there doesn’t seem to be much that you can do about it (there is speculation that Google will allow you to pay them to remove unwanted ads, but nothing is in place yet). The first shots of reputation warfare are already echoing on the internet.

Blumenthals.com compiled a series of screenshots showing the new ads in action, including a completely tasteless advertisement for a tour company on the 9/11 Memorial listing.

Overall, from the small and medium-sized business owner, this service feels like a huge miss. It seems that the real winners will be Google (who will get your Adwords dollars) and large businesses that have the resources to advertise on your business listings.

by Daniel Hadaway

In September, Google announced a new factor for landing page quality score that they will be considering when serving up paid search ads. This new factor is whether or not the website for the advertiser is mobile-optimized.

If your website is mobile-optimized, Google is more likely to show your ad higher up in the paid search listings. Google will be determining the quality of your site’s mobile experience based on several factors including:

• Basic Site Navigability
• Prioritization on Content
• Minimal Flash
• Simple Layout
• Mobile-specific Features
• Touch-specific Features
• Landing Page Load Time

The thinking behind this change is that a poor mobile experience will negatively affect a user’s opinion of a brand or company. According to Google, 61% of users are unlikely to return to a website (on a computer or phone!) if they have a poor experience with the site on their mobile phone.

If your website isn’t mobile optimized, and you’re running paid search ads, you may want to consider hiring a professional team to optimize your site. It will lead to more conversions for your business, and a lower cost-per-lead over time!

by Daniel Hadaway

Search Engine Land just posted an infographic based on some research they recently wrapped. The 2011 State of Digital Marketing Report provides some key insights into how marketers are viewing the roles SEO, Search and Social Media play in effective marketing:

SEO currently has the biggest impact on lead generation. Marketers (both B2B and B2C) currently view SEO as the most effective tool for generating leads, which isn’t surprising considering the positive perception and emphasis the digital marketing world has placed on it during the past 5 years. But, the current emphasis and “trendiness” of social media as a marketing tool is driving change on this front…

Despite SEO currently generating more leads, social media will receive the biggest increases in spend next year. This marks a significant sea-change in the digital marketing world. Generally, marketers will find out what is generating leads, and plan on spending more on that next year. But in this case, almost as many marketers are planning to maintain their spend on SEO as are planning to increase. Compare this to 60% who are planning to increase spend on social media vs. 36% who are maintaining, and you’ll see an industry that believes social is the future of marketing.

Even though the allocation of spend is shifting to different mediums, people are most interested in learning more about comprehensive, cross-promotional digital strategies- which is a great sign for the future of digital marketing! A comprehensive plan, spanning not only SEO, social media and paid search, but also landing pages, email marketing, display advertising and more is key to effective long-term marketing.

Based on the infographic, the state of digital marketing is as strong as ever- but look for social media to become a more prominent aspect of comprehensive marketing strategies moving into the future.

As crazy as it may seem, the holiday season is almost here. Right now, advertisers everywhere are getting ready to blast consumers from every angle, including online search campaigns. So, what does this mean for us?

The Skinny: It means that now is the time to optimize our campaigns to make sure that our ads aren’t lost in the impending barrage of our competitor’s campaigns. What has traditionally worked well in the past may not be good enough to compete during the holiday madness as the cost of bids are driven up, which can potentially push an ad’s page position down.

The Fatty: Saving a campaign begins and ends with smart campaign management and optimization. Here are some things to watch out for as well as some possible resolutions:

1. Low Click-Thru-Rate (CTR)

• Test multiple ads
• Make ad groups more focused
• Make ads more relevant to keywords and landing pages
• Add negative keywords

2. High Cost-Per-Click (CPC)

• Make sure landing pages are up-to-date and more importantly, make sure that they’re relevant
• Revise ad copy – mention special offers and use call-to-actions
• Lower bids
• Add negative keywords

3. Low Traffic

• Expand keywords
• Increase bids to improve page position
• Expand geographical targeting

4. Low Conversion Rate

• Use dynamic text in ads
• Revise landing pages to better match keywords and ad copy
• Increase bids on well-performing keywords

Keeping a close watch on the performance of running ads and making the appropriate adjustments is essential to having a healthy campaign. By using the above tips you can give yourself the edge over your competition by maintaining or even improving your page ranking and staying visible to your target audience!

The answer is behavioral targeting. Behavioral targeting is simply a method of customizing the content of ads shown to you, based on your past behavior online. The advertiser knows you’re interested in canine dental cleanliness because you searched on one of their network’s sites for ‘toothpaste for dogs’…

The advertiser keeps track of this and uses it to provide you with ads that you will find more relevant and useful. The upside for you is that ads become an actual useful tool for improving your quality of life. If you’re going to see an ad anyway, why not make it useful to you and your unique likes and dislikes?

As marketers, what excites us about behavioral targeting in advertising is that it is much more effective than standard display advertising. A recent study by the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI), and reported by eMarketer tells the story:

The study, which looked at ads run on member networks during 2009, showed that among users who clicked on a behaviorally targeted ad, 6.8% converted. That compared with only 2.8% of those who clicked on a run-of-network ad.

Behaviorally targeted ads are more than twice as effective! And they’re effective simply because they are simply more useful, thus more compelling, to the users.

So go ahead and buy that doggy toothpaste! That ad you see could be custom-tailored for you!

Here’s a great (and easy way) to fix that:

Solicit testomonials

Asking people for a few sentences about how satisfied they are with you, or why they continue to do business with you is a great way to get people thinking (thus talking) about what makes your company so great.

“But I already solicit testimonials”

If you’re already soliciting testimonials, we’ll share a secret to solicit testimonials that will turn a happy customer into a raving fan:

Time your solicitation right.

Every customer has a moment where they couldn’t possibly be any happier with your product or service. Marketing-types call this the “moment of maximum satisfaction”. It may be the first time they used your cleaning product and mopping the kitchen took half as long as it used to. It may be that someone used your tax software and saved $1,000 this year over last year.

Whatever that moment is, you need to identify it, and then ask for a testimonial immediately. This has two benefits:

First, you’ll have some great marketing material to use on your website, blog, radio ads, or other mediums. Countless studies show that testimonials from real, live, actual people are some of the most effective marketing tools available.

Second, you’re literally having people come up with a sales-pitch for your company in their own words! Then, you’re having them put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and actually write it down! Your customers will be thinking long and hard about why you’re awesome, and then articulating it! From that moment on, they’ll have an “elevator speech” in the back of their mind.

Now imagine that a mom is talking to a friend, who is complaining about how long kitchen cleanup takes- or, an exasperated, overworked employee is complaining to a coworker about how much he owes in taxes this year. The mom and the coworker will have sales pitches ready to go when they are made aware that someone else needs your product or service.

It’s hard to imagine a more effective sales situation than this – and it’s as simple as paying attention to your customers and asking for a testimonial!

*Did we mention this method is FREE?!

Google recently added the ability to search by location to its ever-growing list of search-sorting options. This will be a groundbreaking shift for local business owners taking part in paid-search.

Consider the following scenario:

You’re a dry-cleaner serving a metropolitan city and its surrounding areas, including suburbs, 2 or 3 counties, and countless incorporated town names. If you wanted to only advertise to people living in those areas who are searching for the term “dry-cleaner”, you’d have to guess what else they might type in (as it relates to their location). If your shop is in the city limits, and your customers are j

ust across the county line, they may not see your paid-search advertising.

But thanks to the change Google recently made, it won’t matter anymore.

Now, Google knows where someone is (via their IP address) when they submit a search and can return results based on their location, even if they didn’t type a location as part of their search. So someone searching for “dry-cleaner” can see results local to them whether they typed in a city name, or not.

Studies consistently show that the more custom-tailored an ad is to a searcher’s specific situation, the higher the click-through rate. Which means better results for you and your business.

We’ll be keeping a close eye on location-based search and the exciting opportunities it brings with it.

After reading through the article, we realized that many of the principles driving these best practices are excellent principles for your business to follow in its online presence.

Here are a few of the best practices discussed and how they relate to an effective web presence:

Links should indicate where they will take the user.

People like to know where a road will take them before turning onto it. Think about how you would feel if you got on an interstate and followed the signs to Indianapolis, but at the end of your trip ended up in Dallas. Now, Dallas is a fine city, but it isn’t where you expected or wanted to go. That’s why it’s important to set proper expectations for your customers.

>Your website is the very first impression most people will get of your business. It’s important that what you present sets a realistic yet flattering expectation of your service or product offering.

Take a few minutes to look over your web site. Better yet, ask a few friends or colleagues to look at your site and tell you what they might expect. Then compare that to your real business offerings. Exercises like these can be invaluable to your business and the results you’re getting from your website.

Ensure Contrast – Links should stand out.

Are you truly standing out from your competition online? Ignoring colors and general layout, is your site all that different from your competition? Are you saying something different or more compelling than others?

Take a look through the lens of an outsider at a few competitors’ websites. If you aren’t sure your’s is standing out, take some steps to change that. It may be as simple as taking a look at what your company really does well and stating that boldly on your home page. Or perhaps it’s even as simple as stating exactly what it is that sets you apart. Don’t be afraid to tell your customers exactly why you’re the best!

Don’t Forget About Visited Links

Once your website has converted prospects into customers, make sure you don’t leave them out in the cold!

Many businesses think of their websites solely as a sales tool, or as a method for converting prospects. While this is a big part of an effective web presence, it isn’t all there is.

No matter how big or small, any company can benefit from offering some type of ongoing interaction with their customers. While there are many ways this ongoing interaction can positively impact your bottom line, one of the most compelling is maintaining top of mind positioning with your customers. If you can stay in touch with your best customers, you can turn satisfied patrons into raving fanatics!

Of course all of these ideas are based just around best practices in link styling on web pages. But it’s a great example of taking concepts from one arena and using them as inspiration for making a business or product better.

What inspires you to constantly improve?

Read on to find out how…

In the early days of digital marketing, online display advertising was virtually the only kind of advertising being used on the internet. As time went on, many sizes and formats have provided additional creative opportunities for advertisers looking to create awareness, build brand and generate response.  The problem for most small and medium sized businesses is that buying advertising on any one website provides minimal opportunity to reach their best prospects.

People spend enormous amounts of time on the Internet, but there isn’t one website they spend a majority of their time on.  This is a problem for online display advertising because space for such ads is generally sold by the individual websites. If you’re an advertiser, you simply don’t have the time to go to multiple websites and make deals to place ads individually on each one. And then of course, there is the need to design and develop compelling creative. This is where South Central Media provides a solution.

In addition to developing effective creative, South Central Media simplifies the media buying process by forging relationships with the largest advertising networks powered by Google and Yahoo in order to reach over one million websites that collectively reach 90% of all Internet users. Through a real-time auction process, online publishers bid to accept advertising from South Central Media clients. Layer on top of that the ability to target advertising based on user interests within a geographic area and you’ve got the most cost efficient way to buy online display advertising.