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!

by Marcus Snyder

The year is almost over and that can only mean one thing – list season. Every one who is anyone is busy creating their lists of 2011 and Facebook is no exception as they recently posted the 40 Most Shared Articles in 2011.

Most of the headlines jumped out as being extremely familiar. After all, who could forget the announcement of the 13th Zodiac Sign or the homeless man with a golden-voice? Not me.

As I browsed through the list, I noticed a not-surprising commonality to it all. Almost every story is a human interest story, chock full of emotion and highlights tragedies, social issues and unusual news. The fact is, people are inherently attracted to other people, and they’re very open about it.

That said, if you’re looking to improve your link-building campaign, or to promote shared content in general, your best bet is to write with a human interest slant. Not only are people more likely to read your content, but they’re much more likely to share your content with others. Perfect!

Consider this: the average user on Facebook has around 130 friends. By tapping into Facebook’s social graph, a single person can influence 130 other people. When one of their friends shares that same story, it’s pushed out to 130 more people. If the story is good, it won’t take long before it’s flooding news feeds everywhere, rapidly spreading your name/brand and content.

The next time you write something, keep this post in mind and let us know how it worked out for you – we’d love to hear about it!

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

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.

While most companies would love to show up higher in search-engines, can you imagine a situation where showing up first on Google is a bad thing?

This blog has an interesting article about a client that had this exact issue. Google was suggesting the company’s brand name + the word ’scam’ in their suggested results.

How would you feel about a company if when you typed in their name, the word ’scam’ was added to the brand name and suggested by Google?

While this function of Google is certainly useful for finding companies that truly ARE scams (and avoiding them), what happens when Google gets it wrong? Or more importantly: why is Google getting it wrong in the first place?

Let’s get this out of the way first: no one has a definitive answer about why Google gets it wrong sometimes. Google is very secretive about the algorithms and methods it employs to serve up search results, as well as suggested searches. However, there are two ideas floating about among search-intellectuals that may provide some insight:

1. There aren’t that many people searching for “brand name + scam” at first- but maybe just enough are searching for that term to make it appear low in the suggested results. Once it appears, people’s curiosity gets the better of them and they click just to see what’s out there. The user thinks “If Google is suggesting it’s a scam, I should at least check it out.”
2. Another, much-less fleshed-out hypothesis, is that Google is simply biased to serve up “scam”-related suggestions.

Neither of these seem to fully explain what’s going on, but that’s okay, because there is a simple solution.

While you can’t do much to remove any negative content on the web about your brand, you can make sure there’s plenty of positive content that is easily found by search engines. In fact, Google recommends this method for dealing with negative search results about a brand. It may not be immediate, but publishing positive content about your brand across the web, and then using SEO best-practices is a great way to push the negative search results further down the list, and keep your new positive article at the top of the list (and the top of your customers’ minds).

Consider implementing an online reputation management strategy, or at least a basic content strategy for your brand. Even if you aren’t experiencing any negative press or search-engine-woes, consistently publishing well-written, positive, and relevant content to the web is a great way to improve your off-page SEO. And if Google ever does suggest a negative term related to your brand, you’ll be ready!

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 are 3 strategies you can start using today to get more listening to what you have to say.

1. Give away information – If there’s one thing everyone loves, it’s free stuff. While you can’t give your product or service away for free (or can you?), you can give some information away for free.

Dan Miller is a successful career coach and author. Having multiple nationally published books, Dan isn’t afraid to give information away on his blog, website, or podcast. In fact if you listen and read his content long enough, you can basically figure out the content of his books before ever turning a page.

He’s very open about this and routinely mentions it to his audience. But that hasn’t stopped his success. In fact, he’ll be the first to tell you it has actually fueled his success.

2. Be controversial – This may not be for everyone, but if your goal is to get people talking there’s no better way than to say something controversial.

John C. Dvorak is a tech-journalist who makes his career out of being controversial. Whether he’s raising doubts about the aptitude of the U.S. CIO, or claiming Apple should’ve pulled the plug on the iPhone before it was released, John will say anything to get people talking… And it works. Millions read his blog every month and he’s a highly sought-after author and news-correspondent.

If you’re brave, get out there and speak your mind. Whether good or bad, people will be talking about you.

3. Make Mistakes – There’s a widely-held misconception that you have to be perfect in the eyes of your audience. While true in some arenas,in the arena of digital marketing this simply isn’t the case. The goal is to create dialogue. If you’re providing all of the answers, what is left for your audience to say?

ProBlogger has a great take on this subject:

Play dumb or make mistakes. If you write a fabulous, seamless post, you will likely get comments like “great post.” If you demonstrate that your knowledge is slightly lacking or ask a question of your readers directly or fumble around a bit, you will have people (women especially) clambering to help a poor soul out. There’s a reason women talk a lot… we like to give advice. Open yourself up to be the receiver of some advice, and you’ll get more comments.

Your audience won’t view your humility as a sign of ineptitude or weakness, but rather will see it as a strength that you’re willing to listen to what your customers have to save.

Keep these tips in mind and you’ll have more eyeballs viewing your marketing. Keep in mind, these strategies aren’t the end of your marketing, but only the beginning. Attracting an audience means nothing if you can’t turn them into happy customers. Stick with us and we’ll explore the rest of the marketing process in the coming months!