Online Marketing Blog

While there is still a debate over the effect of the recession we are in, or even if we are in a recession at all, it seems most companies and individuals are preparing for it the best they can. Talks of budget cuts and conserving resources are on everyone’s minds these days.

So where does search marketing fit in to all of this?

Our expert panel this morning at SMX Advanced – consisting of Jon Miller from Marketo (a TopRank client), Russ Mann of Covario , Dave Davies of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning and Andrew Beckman of Location3 Media – gave great advice and opinions in how to come out of this recession thriving.

While I am presently an offline/online media relations guy, my background spans a variety of media and tactics. As such, I have always been fascinated with the phenomena of SuperBowl advertisements. What other event allows you to generate buzz simply by making a media buy?

When it comes to search, it is nearly useless to play Monday morning quarterback with SuperBowl advertisements. Whether Budweiser had a funnier ad than FedEx is not necessarily relevant to our world. But in order to determine whether companies maximized their $2.7 million investment, it is important to assess the lasting impact on searches for their products.

In a trend that is sure to continue, many companies endeavored to drive traffic to their website in hopes of generating online buzz. Godaddy.com was certainly the most explicit about this tactic, sending viewers online to catch a racy “forbidden” ad featuring NASCAR sensation Danica Patrick.

Today’s Orion panel at SES NY really took a different spin on the topic of universal search. I went in expecting to hear the same info  about what it is, how info is gathered and how to optimize for universal search. Which, if you are interested, can be read about in a previous SES Chicago post regarding universal search.

This session was moderated by Kevin Ryan and Mike Grehan. The session was lively and engaging. Panelists included:
John Battelle from Federated Media, James Lamberti from comScore, Lyndsay Menzies from Big Mouth Media and Jack Menzel from Google.

James led the group by presenting not-seen-before data about universal search from a study comScore recently conducted.

Of the 1.2 billion queries studied, 220 million contained a universal result, categorized as news, video, images etc.

This week we did a bit of house cleaning and removed 37 blogs from the BIGLIST of SEO blogs – some of them from well known SEOs. One of the quality measures we use for inclusion on the BIGLIST is frequency of posting. If a blog gets stale, we say bye bye for now. Get your BIGLIST updates via Twitter.

This week’s update includes several SEO blogs new to our list and a few re-inclusions. Enjoy!

• John W. Ellis SEM Blog – John writes mostly about PPC, analytics, SEO and social media marketing with a bit of sports, travel and Nashville sneaking in from time to time.

• SEM Geek – Besides contributing at SMG, Greg Meyers writes an awful lot about paid search marketing including specific PPC platforms, analytics and overall marketing on the internet.

Just as with Leverage Your Brand Lovers, the “Branding and Search” session gave the SMX West audience much to think about.

Bob Tripathi, Search Marketing Specialist at Discover Financial, reinforced the need to understand your brand as it relates to SEO/SEM.

Brand Recognition: Do searchers recognize your brand?
–ex. McDonalds’ arches are recognized worldwide

Brand Perception: Do searchers know what you do?
–ex. Discover Financial doesn’t just offer credit cards, but they offer a slew of other financial services

Brand Loyalty: Are searchers loyal to your brand?
–ex. Google and its VERY loyal followers

Brand Affinity: Are searchers aspiring to be part of your brand and culture?
–ex. Mercedes and the status associated with the brand

Day 1 of SMX West wrapped up with a tailgating party and the SMX Search Bowl which pinned the search engines, the search marketers and Microsoft against one another in a game of industry-related trivia.

Tailgating party at SMX West

More tailgating

and more tailgating, but this time people were paying attention

The SMX Search Bowl contestants, with host Danny Sullivan

Matt Cutts getting ready to play

A packed house for ‘kick off’

Look – I’m one of the contestants!!!….sort of

Check out all of the photos at TopRank’s SMX West Flickr set.

The personas session, today at SMX, reminded me so much of psychology classes in college. A large group of people discussing why other people behave the way they do.

Gord Hotchkiss, President and CEO of Enquiro, kicked things off by helping the audience understand the factors impacting how humans make decisions, including:

• explicit, implicit memories
• past interactions with a brand
• current interactions with the brand
• emotions

Additional panelists included:
Brian Bond, VP Marketing and Products, Future Now, Inc
Ian Lurie, President, Portent Interactive

As Ian put it, personas are our brand’s imaginary friends.

I think the advantage of personas is really in the research it takes to get there. In order to develop personas, you must dive deeply into what’s behind prospects’ decision making, something that companies may not always invest the time in understanding.

Search Marketing is well documented as one of the most effective marketing strategies a business can employ regardless of the economic environment. Now more then ever companies recognize search as an essential element to their businesses bottom line and are seeking out the help of professional SEO firms.

Finding the right search marketing agency is no doubt a daunting task. But what happens once you’ve done your due diligence and chosen an SEO firm that best suits your style and philosophy?

Below are 5 ways to ensure you’re getting the best return on your search marketing dollars from your SEO invrestment:

1. Have Realistic Expectations

Monday night, Jessica and I represented TopRank at a Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) Event in Minneapolis.

In the first of a series entitled ‘Conversations About the Future of Advertising’, Jan Leth from Ogilvy & Mather gave a presentation entitled ‘Dada, Data, Alpha and Beta’ in which he highlighted how marketers can take advantage of the digital age.

In particular I found interesting, the idea of momentgraphics versus demographics. Marketing of years past would have concluded that we need to know the age, race, income and interests of each of our prospects.

Momentgraphics focuses on the periods of time in which we need to target prospects. For example, someone searching for the phrase ‘cold medicine that works in less time’ is the prime target for a company producing cold medicine. The demographics of that person are irrelevant because we know they are in a ‘target moment’ making them the target market.

9:45am: Managing Search in an Uncertain Economy with:
LeeAnn Prescott, Director, Research & Communications, Efficient Frontier
Roger Barnette, President, SearchIgnite
Joe Charlson, CMO, EDMC
Moderator, Cam Balzer from DoubleClick Performics

Cam: “What uncertain economy?”. Panel will offer two perspectives: Agency (LeeAnn and Roger) and a client side marketer or CMO perspective (Joe).

LeeAnn from Efficient Frontier, manages 300-400 million in paid search management. EFF has seen an increase in spend of 35% over the past year.

Roger from SearchIgnite explains their technology platform and says they haven’t had that much fluctuation.

Joe from EDMC gives a client perspective. EDMC is a parent company, direct response. 70& of students from marketing, lead gen. Sees search spend rates to continue. In the past took a leap of faith and spent more without the data tracking and now that they have that, they’ll continue.

9:00am: Keynote address – FaceOff: Will Agencies Ever “Get” Search? with:
Gord Hotchkiss, CEO & President, Enquiro
Mike Margolin, VP, Interactive Marketing Director, RPA

To present his point about whether agencies “get” search or not, Gord started things out by telling a story. He brings up John from MediaPost to be a human map of Ontario, points out some factual information about Ontario.

Gord asks the audience, “Based on that, would you want to visit?”  Not really. To find out more about Ontario, what would you do? Search.

Using broad topics and search phrases, what sorts of sites would you expect to find? Official Tourism board. Unfortunately, that site isn’t going to get found. What the OTB bid via paid search was all long tail phrases and only from April – July. Doing so misses out on all the investigative search and off season search from people planning vacations.

Search Marketing within large organizations, often presents a unique set of problems back to the search marketer/marketing firm.

It’s nothing that’s does on purpose (for the most part), but rather it simply comes along with large, complex organizations.

The panel for this session outlined what they see as the most frustrating components of working for large organizations and how search marketers can adapt to reach the end objectives.

The panels’ top frustrations include:
1. Uneducated individuals
2. Resistant individuals
3. IT Departments that say NO