Small Business Marketing - Using LinkedIn?

Wednesday, May 11, 2011 by WebVisible Team
Most small business owners will tell you that they get the Online Marketing basics when it comes to Social Media. They know they need a Facebook. They hear that Twitter is a good idea. "Fans" can "follow" and "like." And most of them will tell you that this is a good way to market their businesses online to their clients.

But what about LinkedIn? Isn't that just for job searchers? Or just a way to connect with people who might have access to a new job at a company you'd like to be at?

Wrong.

In an interview with Business Insider, Krista Canfield tells individuals and Small Business owners how to get the most out of their profiles, driving traffic your websites.

A few of her key points:

1. LinkedIn Today is a new daily digest of news and information that people are sharing on Linkedin.  This online pub allows you to look easily keep track of what is going on in your industry, or industries that you are interested in (like Advertising ideas for Small Businesses!)

2. Business Page customization options are becoming more and more robust. Not only can you post jobs about your company, but add photos and logos to give your profile a branded look and feel.  Your fans can also follow you on LinkedIn now as well (follow us here!)

3. Customize your LinkedIn URL to provide optimization. The provides relevance to the Search Engines, enabling you to come up in the results, and becoming more visible to your potential clients

To catch the rest of the points, take a look at the full article!




0 Comments »

6 Things You Hate Most About Traditional Advertising: Number Five

Wednesday, April 27, 2011 by WebVisible Team
Finding new clients and growing your business can be a challenge. You’ve most likely tried traditional media – direct mailers, directory listings, coupons, newsletters – and found that they are expensive, time consuming and not cost effective.  You might even be thinking about Pay Per Click or Online Advertising to see if helps you generate more business than Traditional Media has. Tune in for this new Blog Mini Series to see a list of the 6 things you hate about advertising…and how WebVisible can help.

5.    “I have several versions of my advertising and I don’t know which one my audience will best respond to”

When discussing Advertising ideas for small businesses, most expert marketers will tell you that it is important to test your messaging to find the highest response rate. But sending out multiple versions of your advertisement and calculating your metrics can be not only time consuming, but confusing.

WebVisible, Inc. not only has expert copywriters who will craft highly converting ads, but built into your advertising campaign is A/B testing options. Your campaign will be provided with various versions of your advertisement, and WebVisible’s software, the award winning Geneva Technology Platform, will “learn” which ad attracts the most customers and converts with the highest ratings. No more looking at conversion metrics to choose the right messaging…with WebVisible the best messing is served to your potential clients, everytime.

Ad Copy Variation
0 Comments »

Three Critical Strategies for Affective Search Advertising

Wednesday, April 27, 2011 by WebVisible Team
When getting starting on an Online Advertising campaign, it can be tough to know where to get started. Advertising can be complex, and difficult to know if you are focusing in the right places. WebVisible has complied several advertising ideas for Small Businesses to help ensure that you are getting the most out of your search enginge marketing campaign.

One of the major concepts to understand when building an online advertising campaign for your business is the factors that can affect results. 
  • Impressisons: Typically, search ads are measured by “impressions”, which is the number times your ad is displayed to searchers.
  • Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of viewers who click on your ad to learn more.
  • Conversion rate: Arguably the most important metric of all is conversion rate, or lead rate, which is the percentage of people who clicked on your ad and then took the next step to contact you or provide their contact information because they have a need for your service.  Those are the people you’re trying to capture with search advertising.

You might already know that it’s vital to have compelling ad copy to drive up CTR.  You might also know that an effective landing page, with a special offer (Free legal consultation) and a clear “call to action” (Call Today for Your Assessment!), helps to increase conversion.  But did you know that the quality of your search terms, or keywords, is one of the most important factors to increasing your lead rate?

Many business owners think that selecting keywords is simply a matter of using common terms for your business services and choosing a budget that you’re willing to spend on those terms.  However, over the last ten years and through hundreds of thousands of search advertising campaigns, performance experts at WebVisible have identified three keyword types that have the ability to make or break your campaign performance:

1)    Long Tail Keywords:  Getting Better Qualified Leads
2)    Negative Keywords:  Avoiding the Wrong Audience
3)    Dangerous Keywords:  Popular and Expensive, but Low Conversion

The right combination of long tail and negative keywords can ensure you target the right audience (better target your impressions), but add dangerous keywords to the mix and you could risk blowing out your budget with few returns.

Long Tail Keywords and Getting Qualified Leads

In a recent study of 551 Advertising campaigns, WebVisible examined the relationship between the number of positive, long tail keywords and the number of leads generated per campaign. Positive keywords are the terms or phrases that a desirable prospect would enter into a search engine when looking for a business or service that matches yours. Additionally, as coined by Chris Anderson, author of “The Long Tail,” long tail keywords are those that are focused on very specific, niche markets instead of keywords that have broad implications (think “Small Retail Business Web Design” instead of simply “Web Design”).
Long Tail Keywords
Image taken from Search Engine Land's B2B Longtail SEO Article

So how do these long tail keywords affect your campaign results? WebVisible’s research has shown that campaigns with the highest number of leads per campaign dollar used 41 to 50 long tail keywords. The campaigns with the lowest leads per campaign dollar only used 1 to 30 long tail keywords.

When looking specifically at search campaigns with monthly budgets of $1,000, those having 41-50 long tail keywords generate an average of 10 more leads per month than campaigns with 1-30 long tail keywords.

Here are some examples of effective long tail keywords that legal professionals should take into account when creating keyword lists:

Too Broad
Effective Long Tail Keyword
AttorneyChicago DUI Attorney
DentistAtlanta Teeth Cleaning Appointment
Garage DoorGarage Door Repair in Portland


It is also important to remember that the quality of long tail keywords is just as important as quantity. For example, 50 poorly-selected search phrases can be ineffective and result in zero leads, while 35 clear, specific search phrases may deliver an abundance of leads. 

Unfortunately, there is no formula for choosing effective long tail keywords. Often times the difference between effective and ineffective long tail keywords is the result of years of research defined by market variables, advertiser budget, business category and geo-targeted region. Unless advertisers had the benefit of advertising experts on their team, it can prove difficult to ensure that the long tail keywords they are choosing are truly effective.


Negative Keywords: Avoiding the Wrong Audience

Negative KeywordsNegative keywords are terms that represent business you do not want to attract, and therefore are used to prevent ads from being shown. For example, an attorney might want to attract clients that search for "Chapter 7 Bankruptcy" or "Chapter 11 Bankruptcy", while legal services related to family law, such as "child custody” and "divorce" take too much time and are not as profitable.  Defining the latter terms as negative keywords prevents the attorney’s ads from being displayed when someone searches for "child custody" or "divorce". Just like long tail keywords, negative keywords can significantly improve campaign performance by reducing the number of clicks by poor quality leads, which reserves your ad budget for higher quality leads.

WebVisible also found that the number of negative keywords used in a campaign also had a strong affect on campaign performance. Our study’s results show that the campaigns with the highest number of leads per campaign dollar had between 1 to 5 negative keywords in addition to the right number of positive long tail keywords.

When looking at the same campaigns with monthly budgets of $1,000, those between 1-5 negative keywords also generate an average of 10 more leads per month than campaigns with 0 negative keywords. The data indicates that using negative keywords sparingly can improve performance, but using too many negative keywords can restrict lead flow unnecessarily and degrade campaign performance.

It is important to look carefully at the keywords you are utilizing in your campaign, and ensure that you are not only selecting long tail positive keywords, but that you are eliminating advertisement in areas of your business that are not profitable.

Dangerous Keywords Ahead

Danger AheadTypical analytics programs used on search engines such as Google can tell advertisers which keywords are popular to searchers, and receive a high number of clicks. However, clicks do not always represent the full story. To really understand which keywords are most effective for a campaign, advertisers must look at conversions – the phone calls, form fills, emails or text messages that are generated from your online ad.

Dangerous keywords are those that are highly clicked, yet still show a low conversion rate when you look across an entire transaction process. Often times, due to the popularity and demand for these keywords, advertisers will pay top dollar for these dangerous keywords, with little or no knowledge of the actual conversion history. Advertisers run the risk of spending a majority of their budget on these kinds of keywords, and receive little or no return for their dollars.

How do you find out what these dangerous keywords are? Unfortunately, the only way to identify dangerous keywords is to analyze historical conversion data. Advertisers would need to extensively research their keyword conversions over time, and compare results to thousands of other campaigns across major search engines over time.  This requires not only the analytics technology, but also massive amounts of conversion data, which is not readily available even to search engine companies, much less small business owners.  

With more than 100,000 online campaigns under our belt, and data from nine years of managing search ads for our clients, WebVisible has developed KPEye, a keyword performance engine that analyzes years of historical data as well as real-time market data, to help our clients optimize their advertising budgets.  With KPEye, WebVisible Account Managers can build high performing keyword lists for many types of businesses, free of any dangerous keywords, and optimized with negative and long tail keywords that drive the right traffic to your door.

Summary
Optimizing keywords is a very time-consuming exercise that requires massive amounts of search history, conversion data, analysis, testing and refinement. If search analytics isn’t one of your hobbies, consider using a service to manage your online advertising campaign.  You might see a considerable increase in ROI by taking advantage of experienced Account Managers, Creative Managers, and Performance Managers who regularly monitor your campaign results and fine-tune your keywords to deliver targeted impressions, high CTRs, and most importantly, the highest number of leads for your campaign dollar.

0 Comments »

Once Upon a Small Business

Friday, June 12, 2009 by WebVisible Team
Once upon a time, in the cold, lonely, pre-post-historic days before everything important had two syllables (Google, Twitter, Facebook), and before the Internet itself was the ubiquitous mind-melding leviathan it has since become, I started a small business making surfboards in my parents’ garage.

I worked hard, had fun and relied mostly on word-of-mouth to sell my sleek creations of toxic foam and fiberglass. My target market consisted of high school friends and acquaintances. My business partnerships comprised my father, who grudgingly allowed me to use his shop vac, and my 13-year-old brother, who provided much unsolicited advice.

This was 1989. Bush 1 was president. Grunge loomed on the horizon like a flannel sunrise. Moviegoers eagerly awaited the release of Back to the Future, Part II. But I was 17 and ambitious. I was febrile with the idea of becoming a surfboard manufacturing magnate. By the time I was 25 (I surmised) I’d be so rich that I’d be able to hop on my private jet for impromptu surf sessions in Uluwatu or Kirra. But how to get there? “You need to advertise,” my younger brother quipped between Otter Pops.

Advertise? Sure, why not. But my marketing options seemed either ridiculously out of reach (TV commercials) or ridiculously small beer (flyers on car windows). After batting some ideas and cost estimates back and forth, I decided to rely instead on the Field of Dreams marketing strategy: if you build it, they will come. And they did come: a few more friends, my woodshop teacher Mr. Matsuyama, a couple of kids from other schools, and a second-cousin.

Then the price of materials began to go up. I was also close to failing a couple of classes. I was forced to hunker down and scale back my operation before it even got off the ground.

The old saw that “timing is everything” is, well, everything. A small business in 1989 and a small business in 2009 stand as far apart from one another in terms of targeted marketing as the catapult stands to the ICBM. The Internet, blogosphere and search engine marketing triumvirate are redefining what a small local business means, and how swiftly and accurately it can reach the customers who want and need exactly what it offers through online advertising.

Dark garages can be fertile ground for creativity; they gave us Grunge and Microsoft, after all, not to mention a few surfboards that still serve me well. But it’s a brave new world all over again, with tremendous Internet advertising for small business possibilities. Time to come out of the proverbial garage and into the light.

 -- Contributed by Derek Hoffmann
0 Comments »

The Future of Newspaper Revenue?

Wednesday, June 3, 2009 by WebVisible Team
It’s tough out there in newspaper land. The Chicago Tribune… The Rocky Mountain News… The Seattle Post Intelligencer… and the list marches on. What’s happening here?

According to a Pew Research Center study, for the first time, more Americans got their news online for free than paid for it in magazines and newspapers!

Newspapers predominantly make their money through newsstand sales, subscriptions and advertising. With the first two of the legs being kicked out from under them, the business model begins to fall apart. And with declining readership comes declining advertising revenue and the stool collapses.

Selling online advertising has helped newspapers offset the steady decline in print, but it’s a supplement, not a meal. This leaves newspapers looking for alternate methods of generating revenue to continue publishing content created by professional writers. These days anyone can put up a blog. But paid editorial staffs are a good thing. It pays for trained journalists, their expenses and important little things like real editors and fact checking. "Ideally" this translates to quality.

And the decline in revenue leaves the papers weak and vulnerable to special interest pressures. Just ask the San Diego Union Tribune which was recently pressured by the Los Angeles police officers and fire fighters pension fund (which owns $30 million of Platinum Equity, Tribune’s parent company) to change its editorial stance or fire its writers. "Since the very public employees they continually criticize are now their owners, we strongly believe that those who currently run the editorial pages should be replaced," said League President Paul M. Weber. Wow.

But getting people to pay for content and attracting advertisers is getting harder and harder. So what are the alternatives? Lots of ideas are being kicked around. Says Dallas Mavricks owner, Mark Cuban, “The quickest and easiest place to start would be by making sure that every time I went to DallasNews.com you knew that my credit card was on file and you offered me specials… If some local artist has a small or large hit, go to the label and try to license it and offer it for free to those of us who pay by card.”

Others have suggested offering section sponsorships: the Lakers or Raiders for example sponsor the LA Times sports section… or Staples the business section, or – well, you get the idea. Or what about partnering with an outfit like coupons.com? And there are dozens of others.

Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal announced a “sophisticated micro-payments service” to launch this fall. There have been quite a few failed Internet micro-payment systems. And this is the first time a major newspaper adopted one, so the other big papers will be watching closely.

But for now, local online advertising is, and search engine marketing services are, the shining star helping many papers stay afloat.

  -- Contributed by Jeff Werner
0 Comments »

4 Common Mistakes When Launching Online Advertising - Part 1

Tuesday, February 17, 2009 by WebVisible Team
Despite the recession, eMarketer recently predicted that U.S. search advertising on the Internet will still grow 14.9% in 2009, to $12.3 billion.

While search engine marketing is not recession-proof, it appears to be recession-resistant. Search is highly measurable; therefore, it remains a mainstay in marketing budgets as advertisers depend on more accountable and effective tactics in uncertain economic times.

While consumers may be shopping less, they are looking for deals, creating an opportunity for many small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs). But you must be alert to avoid making mistakes that can hinder your online advertising campaigns.

Below is Part 1 of four basic strategies that can help you obtain the best results as you plan your online advertising campaign. Remember, your site content should accurately reflect your business, and your ads should reflect your site for best results.

Mistake #1: Not matching online ads to the content of your site
Sometimes a new advertiser will write ad copy that does not closely match the content on the landing page. This can confuse visitors. And search engines will place your ad higher if it has direct relevance to the content of the destination URL.

If the landing page is text-heavy, prior to embarking on an online advertising effort, new advertisers could analyze their Web site’s text with a free online tool like the Keyword Density Analyzer at http://www.pagerank.net/keyword-density-analyzer/. Tools like this show the most frequently used words on any single Web page, so the advertiser can use empirical data instead of guesswork to see which words are already used the most.

Multiple landing pages can even be used to draw different customer groups to different pages based on their respective searches. (Bonus Tip: Study word choices on competitive Web sites also!)

Mistake #2: Not selecting the best, high-potential keywords
New advertisers about to invest on a campaign should consider it a true investment, treating keyword selection with the utmost proper attention in order to come up with the very strongest possible keyword set. In search engine marketing campaigns, each word counts.

Advertisers can use a simple thought experiment to quickly and easily focus on the most valuable keywords for a particular product or service: What is the single word that (in the advertiser’s opinion) would convert the best? Next, what if one could select only three words to describe the core business, product or service to a potential customer?

Now expand that to ten words. Then, a short paragraph. By the end of the exercise, there should be a short list of the most likely candidates. Avoid using superlatives: “experts,” “the best.”

Also, commonly misspelled words can be valuable terms. Finally, geographic modifiers such as cities, states, regions, towns, districts, or the names of common groupings of these areas, can help with targeting. Google Sets (at http://labs.google.com/sets ) is a useful tool to help determine related keyword ideas from a few words.

Part 2 will cover two more common mistakes to avoid!

-- Contributed by Dan Lozano

1 Comments »

Building Your Local Online Tagline

Monday, December 8, 2008 by WebVisible Team
We're constantly inundated with brand marketing messages, and the strongest companies believe that economic downturns are a prime time to build brand share, as weaker competitors struggle and consumers look for safer, trusted choices.

A recently released study from Specific Media discusses the search activity increase that display advertising created, especially for certain categories like travel, health, finance and automotive.  While they don't release a lot of detail in this article, they imply that most of the search queries are brand or advertised product line/service terms.  As has been discussed by many, and Greg Sterling posts about it often, the volume of consumers who research online and buy offline is still the majority.  Understanding where demand generating/brand advertising fits in the mix, as well as search engine marketing, is helping some companies walk with consumers through their process.

How does a local business employ some of these ideas in this environment?

1. Think both about how you build your local brand image, and for what key terms you should be locally known.  If you are a plumber in Detroit who specializes in tankless water heaters, then you should make sure all your advertising reflects a term like "Detroit tankless water heaters", as well as your company name.  If you are the Chicagoland area's local online marketing expert, make sure your ads in Crain's lead people to search for you by both your name and "Internet Marketing Chicago."

2. Run small online display ad and other media tests to determine if you can influence local search queries.  Set up a targeted online display campaign, either through a local media property or display ad network with effective local targeting.  Use some key messages that will drive search queries on your name or a prominent term (as mentioned in #1).  Test search volume before, during and after your integrated campaign.  Try this with radio, billboards, local cable ads, too, if you want to see what works best.

3. Find the few local terms you should dominate and focus your organic search engine optimization around those terms.  You want to show up on Google, Yahoo! and other search engines in both organic and sponsored ads around your core terms.  For the Newport Beach dentist, it might be "whiter teeth Newport Beach".  Be realistic about what terms you can win, and use them across your offline and online marketing.
0 Comments »