Out of the Fog Marketing

A recent article from Website Magazine addresses the design trends for pay-per-click landing pages. The piece, entitled “Five PPC Landing Page Design Trends,” stresses the importance of having landing pages that can convert impressions if you are paying for clicks.

According the the article, it is best to start with competitive terms while focusing your keywords to determine what PPC landing page design works for you. By comparing multiple landing pages, applying different techniques and testing your own landing pages, you will find the most successful ways convert your consumers to buyers and maybe even know how to influence the quality score of individual listings.

Here are the top five design trends that have been seen on PPC landing pages:

1. Limited path for users
2. Prominent images
3. Strong call to action
4. Data collection
5. Content teasing or registration

For access to the full Website Magazine article, please click here http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2009/06/18/five-ppc-landing-page-design-trends.aspx

Having spent over 80 million dollars in advertising, it’s not surprising that everyone is starting ask about Bing.com and whether or not it could really replace Google as the premier search engine for all things internet.

Bing is Microsoft’s latest web search engine, or “decision engine” as it is being advertised. It was unveiled on May 28, 2009 by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at the All Things Digital Conference in San Diego, California, replacing Microsoft’s Live Search.
By marketing Bing as a “decision engine,” Microsoft affirms that its search functions produce more relevant results and organizes the results in a way that makes more sense. Bing provides tabs for different searches similar to Google including “images,” “videos,” “news” and “shopping” but, Microsoft has also crafted some intuitive search features to narrow Bing search results by related topics. As an example, searching for “Microsoft” on Bing will provide the user with the typical links to Microsoft’s website, the Wikipedia entry, etc.; but in addition Bing will give the user "smart" tabs that sort through links for subjects particular to Microsoft such as its products, online services, investor relations, jobs at Microsoft and the like. In some ways, these “smart” tabs represent a successful spin-off of Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, which nearly no one uses.

For those online marketers that want to know how to receive high SEO rankings, or maybe we should be calling them DEO rankings (decision engine optimization) with Bing, they should know that Bing puts emphasis on elements of web pages that Google does not, and vice versa.


Here are some tips important SEO tips from bizzia.com, a business news and commentary website, to ranking well with Bing:

1. Importance of Domain Age
Bing appears to put a lot of stock into how long ago a domain was registered. For marketers, this means that you may look to purchase older domains if you want to get on good position in Bing.

2. Bring on the Text
On most search engines the amount of text on the page usually isn’t usually a huge factor. However, Bing seems to really like pages with at least 300 words of text.

3. Linking Out
With Google especially, some marketers are scared to link out to other websites because they don’t want their Page Rank to be lowered. On Bing, linking out actually appears to be smiled upon.

4. The Blogging Blues
Google seems to appreciate the blogosphere more than Bing. This is especially true when recent news events occur and bloggers battle with major websites for space on the search engine results page.
5. Bing Loves Titles
It is important for marketers that are wanting to make it to the top of Bing to have a title tag and header that correlates to the subject at hand.
Although Bing does offer s some new features for users to explore, Microsoft dos not anticipate Bing replacing Google. Instead, Microsoft hopes that the changes being made are just a start to future improvements on their search engine, but even now it is definitely a useful tool for online marketers to explore and use to their advantage.

So what should you do if you want to rank well on both engine ranking pages? Well Google is still the dominant player, however, we have closed a good deal of business off Yahoo! search rankings, and I suspect we will off Bing as well. The lesson is to make sure you have backlinks from a variety of sites including article banks, public relations wires, print publication, e-publications, blogs and videos. You truly do have to be everywhere to rank well on all the engines.

New York Times reporter, Claire Cain Miller, published a story on the New York Times Bits Blog stating that on Thursday night Twitter revealed Twitter 101, a downloadable tutorial for companies to learn how to use Twitter for their business. Twitter 101 also includes case studies of well-know companies that are currently using Twitter such as JetBlue and Dell as well as small businesses like Teuser Wines and CoffeeGroundz.

The inception of Twitter 101 is taking Twitter a step closer to offering commercial products for businesses to use on Twitter with the goal being to introduce these paid services later this year. Services would include allowing businesses to verify their accounts and analyze the traffic to their Twitter profiles.

However, Twitter still holds to the belief that the biggest advantage for companies using Twitter is “being able to build relationships and listen to and responding to comments about your company. It is also a way to ask questions and float ideas in real time,” the company says.

Link to full blog post from the New York Times
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/twitter-takes-a-step-toward-commercial-accounts/index.html

Flickr is fast-becoming a popular online marketing tool, especially for companies hoping to make a bigger impact using social media marketing. It allows companies to be creative and take advantage of marketing opportunities that are often overlooked in favor of costly online marketing tools. For those that are willing to take advantage of it, Flickr will create marketing opportunities where few exist.

Flickr is a web site community owned by Yahoo! But beyond just being another social networking site, Flickr offers its users free photo sharing and a host of related services. According to Nielsen/NetRatings, Flickr is the fastest-growing photo sharing site on the web, and the 7th most trafficked social media site overall, giving it some marketing clout for companies looking to expand in this shaky economy.

Given that Flickr is a photo sharing site, the companies that have found it to be most effectively have a visual element to their business, or a product and/or service to sell. Nikon has served as the benchmark for a company marketing with Flickr by using it as an extension of their Nikon School and their Nikon Digital Learning Center website. Their Nikon’s Digital Learning Center on Flickr is an “online resource (that) provides Flickr members with tutorials, practical photography tips and advice from Nikon photo professionals to assist them in taking photos.” By using Flickr Nikon has been able to generate 8,527 members, 23,440 photos, and 669 discussions, all for free using Flickr.

There are other large and small companies alike using Flickr to creatively market their business ranging from companies as dissimilar as 7-11 using Flickr to market their Simpson’s Kwik-E-Mart campaign pictures to Purina dog food catering to dog lovers. There is even a Facebook Flickr application so that companies can link their social media sites together. A number of opportunities exist for brands to engage in Flickr but they seem to break into three basic categories:

1. Spreading content
Unique visual content like 7-11’s Kwik-E-Mart photos that have received over 800,000 views after being distributed around the web from using Flickr.

2. Hosting online competitions
Flickr allows companies to create image-based competitions without the cost of creating their own infrastructure for the project.

3. Creating a community while providing customer support
Flickr can serve as a venue for fans to give insight to products and provide feedback while connecting with other company fans. This can be effective for technology marketing such as software vendors who want to show solutions or promote new products using screenshots.

When used effectively, Flickr has definitely shown that it has marketing potential for companies. Flickr can show any company, large or small, how to visually engage their customers using free social media, while creating an online community to disseminate their company message over the web.

Labels: ann arbor marketing, marketing technology, social media

Starbucks is remodeling 3 stores in Seattle attempting to rebrand itself to upscale clientele by offering not only coffee, but live music and alcohol. Read about it in Ad Age. About time...my local coffee shop in Oregon, My Coffee, already has wine tasting nights and live music on Friday. I think it's the first good move Starbucks has made in a long time. Now they just have to get themselves out of lower-end retail chains. It always amazed me they didn't use a different brand name in those lower-end locations.

Your thoughts?

Labels: ad age, branding, starbucks

After it's acquisition of Grand Central, Google closed the service down to new accounts. Only existing Grand Central users had access to the service. Now Google is starting to open new accounts again.

Here's what it offers:

• A personal phone number that rings all of your existing phones when people call
• All of your voicemail in one inbox with unlimited online storage and free voicemail transcripts sent to your phone and email
• Low-priced international calling to over 200 countries and free SMS
• Other powerful features like the first phone spam filter to protect you from unwanted callers, the ability to ListenIn^TM on your voicemail messages while they are being left, conference calling and more

Learn more about Google Voice.

Labels: free phone, google voice, voip