Online Marketing for Small Business

Today is our birthday—ten years! A decade. It’s crazy.

We’ve changed a lot over the past 10 years, growing from a small SoCal search marketing company into an international organization serving over 100,000 customers in 14 countries. And of course Search Engine Marketing itself has changed completely. How?

This is kind of obvious, but it’s the biggest change. Used to be, search marketing was explored with the leftovers of companies’ marketing budgets. Humble beginnings for a now $20 billion dollar industry. These days companies are shrinking their display and TV marketing budgets to buy more online ads and…

When we started, we didn’t offer online videos. Back in 2001, there was no real reason to. But today, online videos are the fastest growing ad medium. We went from no videos, to extremely low-tech videos made in PowerPoint, to partnering with professional automated video production company Stupeflix. Then, this June we began accepting live footage from customers to incorporate into these videos.

Marketing Style

Marketing styles are constantly evolving. Currently, we’re moving away from interruptive marketing and towards an informal exchange between business and consumer (like blogging). The goal is to create trust. Consumers are skeptical of traditional marketing messages and want transparency so they can make informed decisions. This is especially important when marketing to millennials (people ages 18-34).

Social Media

Yelp. Facebook. Twitter. Social media has become a huge force in marketing. Recently we began offering a reputation monitoring service. We track and provide an overview of reviews and ratings, what’s being said on networking sites and how your reputation compares to your competitors.

Mobile Search

This is probably the biggest change happening currently. More and more people are searching for products/services on their mobile device. Your website or landing page may look great on a computer screen, but how will it look on a phone?


SEM has grown a lot over the past 10 years. And, for the small to medium business owner, this is good news. No longer does one need a big budget to create a strong, effective marketing campaign.

So good luck marketing! And Happy Birthday to us!

After spending 3 inspirational days representing WebVisible at the DMS 2011 conference in Denver (put on by BIA/Kelsey), one thing seems more true than ever: SMB owners have their hands full. They recognize the importance of internet advertising, but often wear multiple hats, juggling sales, marketing, and branding in one hand, and customer service, retention and innovation in the other hand. Outsourcing is often the only viable solution for many of their day-to-day business processes, including lead generation and marketing on the Internet.

As a company founded and known for excellence in supporting reseller and partners with small business advertising solutions, WebVisible manages many of the same processes upstream. Pay Per Click online advertising, lead generation, SaaS driven marketing solutions and Reputation Monitoring are all part of our value proposition. Our goal is always three-fold: deliver easy to use marketing solutions for WebVisible clients via an automated advertising system, provide scalable solutions for our partners, and innovate, innovate, innovate.

I read an article recently about Steve Job’s formula for success at Apple, who lists the following as one of his top mantras for success: “Make it all one platform”. Apple’s commitment to blurring the distinction between software and hardware with respect to providing a singular user experience has driven every-day consumer experiences with mobile devices into the cloud. iPhone is iTunes is Mobile.me (now iCloud). Their customer loyalty is unparalleled, and it’s largely due to their commitment to platform integration and unified user experience.
 

WebVisible recently unveiled a cutting edge Reputation Monitoring product. It stood alone with a separate log-in for a short while, but is now baked into our Merchant Center Dashboard alongside Geneva, KPEye and all of the other behind-the-scenes technology that our customers, partners and resellers benefit from on a daily basis.  

Steve Jobs’ desire to make Apple ‘just one thing’, with no distinction between hardware, software, products and services is largely paralleled with the Reputation Monitoring iFrame integration for two reasons:

1.) Fusing access to our Merchant Center and Reputation Monitoring dashboard effectively turns two activities into one, making it easier for a business owner to keep track of online advertising and reputation. If you’re wondering how or why this is, think about the area code of your cell phone. Area codes are perceived as a single unit of information, not three separate numbers.  Single sign-on access for a dashboard benefits from the same psychological principal.

2.) The second is a bit more of a game-changer, as it leverages the well-known statute of negative word of mouth, and that it travels 10 times faster than positive word-of-mouth, albeit in reverse.  

Delivering world-class results to our advertisers is easy. Helping them to carve time out of their busy schedules to spend time engaging with our Merchant Center to revel in the success of their SEM campaigns is a bit more challenging. If an advertiser invests in a successful advertising platform that delivers dynamite results, if they don’t engage with the platform, they might not recognize the success of the campaign even when we are exceeding their expectations.

Business owners are busy, and they don’t know what they don’t know.

To this end, the real magic in platform integration is that by giving our advertisers the ability to identify and respond to negative (and positive) reviews in a unified dashboard, their retention rates increase.

Why is this?

How do negative reviews relate to lead generation, advertiser retention and platform engagement?

By putting Reputation Monitoring right alongside the ability to track SEM campaigns simultaneously, something remarkable happens. Marketing and Reputation Monitoring merge into the same platform and become synonymous in terms of the mental energy it takes for advertisers to set aside on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Advertisers’ log in to their Merchant Center dashboard more often, and retention increases alongside client satisfaction. 

According to the principle of the speed of word of mouth, the desire to vet out and respond to or eliminate negative reviews online is also far greater than the desire to read positive reviews. Since advertisers are already online and logged in checking their reviews, they naturally check the results of their advertising campaigns since it’s only a click away. Merging these previously separate platforms together drives advertisers to engage more frequently, for longer, and with greater attentiveness. With platform integration, the distinctions between marketing Reputation Monitoring blur into a singular activity, encouraging more frequent and increased platform engagement with our advertisers.

Lead generation services and reputation monitoring tools are now interrelated, interdependent and act as drivers and motivators for one another. The power of harnessing innovation via platform integration is gestalt-esque, resulting in a downstream increase in both perceived and objective value in the eyes of advertisers, and an upstream lift in retention rates for resellers.

1 + 1 now equals 3.

Apple isn’t Apple because of it’s product mix alone.

Apple is Apple because of it’s unified user experience.

When it comes to the complexity of Internet advertising for small businesses, platform integration is as crucial as ever for today's SMB.

If I was a betting man, I ‘d say that Steve Jobs would be proud of us :)

Eric Rosen
Manager of Business Development
WebVisible

To learn more about why online advertising agencies worldwide make WebVisible as their Interactive Advertising Software Platform of choice, click here.

Some business owners skeptical if the long-term payoffs are worth the cost

You’ve seen the emails and heard the radio ads. Internet-based “daily deal” coupons are becoming a large part of the online advertising industry. But are such offers worth the cost for an auto repair shop or other small to medium-sized business? Some say no, while other business owners report they are gaining new customers–and profits–from the venture.

A June 2011 survey of small businesses by MerchantCircle finds that the leading reason companies like daily deals is customer acquisition (58%). At the same time, the top reason for not offering a daily deal again (42.4%) was their failure to attract new customers. Hmmm, perhaps more data will help answer our question.

Two surveys back up the belief that daily deals attract new customers. The first, a survey conducted by Utpal M. Dholakia at Rice University, found that new customers made up more than 77% of deal buyers. All of them spent over the value of the deal offer and, on average, about 20% became repeat customers. The second study, done by ConsumerSearch.com and The About Group, discovered that an overwhelming majority of those who had used a daily deal returned– even without another discount. Fifty-three percent of redeemers went on to become regular customers.

Businesses who were skeptical about the value of daily deals expressed concern about giving discounts to consumers who would have patronized the establishment anyway. According to a ForeSee Results survey, there is some basis for this concern. The largest share of daily deal users – thirty-eight percent—said they were already loyal to the business offering a deal. However, nearly a third of those taking advantage of a daily deal special were new customers, and the same percentage were customers who had either visited only occasionally or had stopped patronizing the establishment altogether.

So what’s the answer? Are daily deals worth it? Looks like the jury is still out. But one thing is certain. As this graphic demonstrates, an on-going search engine advertising campaign will put in front of people who are ready to buy, when they’re ready to buy – not when your “daily deal” happens to hit their email box. This is especially important in the auto industry, where people who need services or products typically need them right now.

WebVisible has more than 10 years of experience helping local businesses establish an effective online marketing presence through fully-managed online search advertising programs that generate predictable results. Contact WebVisible today for more information on how search advertising can help grow your auto-related business.

According to a recent Affinity Express survey of small to medium businesses (SMB), it appears the importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is often overlooked. As shown in the following chart from the survey, 77% of SMBs are using websites and landing pages to market their businesses, but only 31% are using SEO to assure customers will easily find them online.

There are probably many reasons as to why the use of SEO is rather low in comparison to website and landing page usage (ie. limited resources, lack of knowledge, or perhaps businesses feel their products or services will speak for themselves). Whatever the reasons, SMBs need to realize that in today’s market, SEO is an integral part of any online marketing effort. It is not an option, it is a necessity.  Since most consumers today are searching online to find potential products and services available, a business must optimize the chances of their website being found on major search engines by using SEO.

SEO can be challenging for any business, especially smaller ones with limited resources since keeping up with the competition, popular search terms, and the ever-changing algorithms search engines like Google and Bing use is a continuous process. To meet this challenge, many businesses find out-sourcing this task more efficient. WebVisible is a Software as a Service (SaaS) company and leading name in local online advertising, known for being a true expert in bringing the Internet as an advertising and customer acquisition medium to small businesses around the world. WebVisible’s award winning Geneva software platform (named 2008 Internet Product of the Year by the American Electronics Association) contains a powerful optimizer – a rules-based campaign management algorithm that continuously learns and improves the placement and results of our clients’ advertisements. With over ten years of experience, WebVisible offers proven SEO results.

To learn more about how WebVisible can provide SEO solutions and other Internet marketing services, please feel free to contact us.

With a lot of changes taking place in the online advertising industry and most notably - at WebVisible, we’re excited hear CEO Ron Burr in a candid interview this afternoon with Will Crist on www.octalkradio.net streaming at 5pm Pacific time. Ron will discuss our expansion into the Asian marketplace, improvements to our interactive advertising platform, new products for small business marketing, and more.

You can find the show on iTunes as a business podcast by typing Pilgrim on the 405 in the iTunes podcast search box, after the initial airing of the show.

Pilgrim Talks is one of the innovative talk show on OC Talk Radio, Orange County's premier business station. The goal of the show is to interview CEOs and Presidents of thriving Orange County companies to hear how they are making it through this new economy.

To learn more about Will Crist and the Pilgrim on the 405 visit www.pilgrimonthe405.com

• 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.

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 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

Typical 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.

Blogging live from Interactive Local Media 2010 in Santa Clara, CA, Carla Fitzgerald, WebVisible's VP of Marketing gives an update:

Topics today addressed a variety of local content channels:  Local News, Local Radio, Local Search, Local Deal-of-the-Day offers.  With so many options to reach consumers, advertisers have tough decisions to make about where they should invest and what will deliver the best ROI.   Along these lines, the partner from Google Ventures (investment arm of Google) said there is a huge opportunity for companies that provide analytics to small business that helps them to understand which customer acquisition and retention programs work.   SMB’s need “visibility and actionable information” to manage their online investments because it’s overwhelming.  I was happy to hear that since “visibility and actionable information” is exactly what WebVisible is offering with our Merchant Center application for advertisers. 

There was a lot of talk about the fact that “local” is not a static, geographic radius from a business or service area.  What the consumer sees as “local” depends on what they are looking for:  if it’s a regular purchase, like dry cleaning, then local needs to be convenient to work or home;  if the need is for a special event like a concert or show, then “local” can be a lot further away and the price or offer really matters, and if it’s for a critical service like tooth replacement, then the location and price are only part of the decision – the credentials and reviews are just as important.  Again, this multi-dimensional view of “local” is something our founder, Kirsten Mangers, has been talking about for years.  (WebVisible is validated once again!)

The hot topics of Social and Mobile get “merged” when discussing “mobile location check in” services like Gowalla and Foursquare.  (Google Ventures said they’re looking at 35 different companies that offer this type of technology!)  These solutions can help advertisers with brand awareness, reputation management, generating more foot traffic, loyalty programs, and promoting onsite deals.  These are not specific to small business, but definitely focused on driving local business, and in some cases, driving loyalty to big brands.  What’s the SMB message?  Most importantly, understand what your customers care about and how they like to engage you.  If you’re a local bar targeting hip young adults, then location check-in may be just the right thing for you, but if you’re an attorney, probably not… unless you’re trying to stir up a class action of some kind!

There is an explosion of digital marketing technologies and services being developed, and even the experts at this conference are not sure which approaches will pay off for advertisers in the long term.  Regardless of the sexy new technologies available, the message was still clear that small business still needs simpler, measureable ways to promote themselves today.  We couldn’t agree more!

Blogging live from Dreamforce '10 in San Fransisco, CA, Jenni Brown, WebVisible's Direct Marketing Manager gives an update from Day 1:

This shift is creating all kinds of leverage for Small Businesses. Before, in order to build software, they would have to go out and purchase servers and all kinds of equipment, and then have their software products installed on hardware. With the cloud, it doesn’t matter how large or small your business is, you can build and grow within it. Or as Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com put it, “The Cloud is a democracy,” everyone has a say. Not only does creating and building products within the cloud allow for an even playing field between the larger and smaller software companies out there, but the pay-as-you-go model allows for flexibility.

For the environmentally conscious, they’d be happy to know that cloud computing uses 90% less energy than traditional software, and has a significantly smaller number of C02 emissions per transaction (1.35 emissions per transactions vs Salesforces’s 0.9). Green software!

In a recent conversation with a local real estate agent about her business, I heard her utter a familiar line... "It's all about location! Location! Location!" She wasn't talking about my future housing needs.  Rather, she was commenting on all the changes within digital marketing that are affecting her business.  And, how consumers are increasingly using their mobile phones for Internet information - whether to find a new Thai restaurant, a local plumber, or, in her case, checking the listing information and mobile web pages of local real estate agents!

Location Based Services is the fancy term used to describe a host of new online services that aim to bring more information to consumers on their handheld devices and smart phones.  FourSquare, Twitter, Yelp, even Facebook Mobile, are all very popular applications that consumers (and, even your B2B customers) are increasingly turning to while on the road, to find the services and products they need.

The challenge this poses to many small business owners - and also, of course, the opportunity - is to make sure YOUR company, or product, is positioned in these new location specific marketing channels.  To make things a bit more complicated, many of these new channels do not support traditional advertising or have yet to make it easy to get your business listed.  Instead, small business owners must often earn their way in, usually by spending time communicating with their customers within each application.  This can be very time consuming -- not to mention frustrating -- accommodating all the differences within each channel: using short 140 character snippets on Twitter, posting 3 minute "How to" videos on YouTube, cultivating fans on Facebook!  While difficult and certainly not free when you think of your hourly worth, all of this social activity CAN build your business an asset for the future - a loyal, mobile-empowered audience of potential prospects and customers. But, often times, it can also lead to a confusing array of sites, applications, and services that need to be updated. 

My advice to my realtor friend was to think of her business as a hub of information - advice, tips, promotions or offers, (perhaps a little humor or personality to give it a personal touch!) - and to view the various Location Based Services as spokes with which to push this information out to her customers or prospects.  A few tools can help simplify this process (And here at WebVisible we are furiously building additional ones!) so you don't have to spend all your time updating one service after another.  One of my favorites is a company called Posterous (http://www.posterous.com), because you can use regular old email to send social updates (perhaps a coupon mention or update on your business) and it will automatically post to all of the other Location services.  This can be a first step in taking a 360° approach to your online marketing - and something I will discuss much more in upcoming postings!

- Alan Edgett, Sr. Director, Product