SEO Werkt!

If you’re launching a new product, designing a sale or getting your business ready now for your version of Black Friday or Small Business Saturday, there are series of steps that you need to include in the planning process in order to create the most effective campaign.

photo credit: khalid almasoud via photo pin cc

As you design a new campaign, brainstorm these questions with your staff and use the answers you come up with to create a series of launch action items.

1) What do we want our customer to do 30 days after the purchase?

This is such a great place to start because it lets you begin with the end in mind. So often all we think about is how to get the sale. This question forces you to think about how you get the result, the next sale or the referral and puts the emphasis squarely on creating a total customer experience.

2) What message will create the most interest?

For the most part no one really wants to buy what you sell, but they do want to achieve a result, save money, vanquish a demon, make money and feel more in control. How will you tell the story that helps them understand that’s what you’re selling? Get your messaging right, focus it on a narrowly defined ideal customer and start the process of education.

3) How many formats and delivery vehicles can we create for the message?

Would your message benefit from a series of supporting video messages, an eBook, blog posts, an online seminar? These days prospects have grown to expect a full suite of educational information to accompany a sales message. How will you let your prospect sample the results or the process they are considering?

4) What are the ways our can message intersect with our prospects?

Now it’s time to put your message in front of the prospect. How will you employ advertising, public relations, referral generation, email, partners and social networks to create the greatest amount of awareness, repetition and consistency of message aimed at your ideal target customer?

5) What is the ultimate pathway we want our prospect to travel?

Go through the precise “ideal” way you want a prospect to become aware of your campaign and then design how you intend them to move from know, like and trust to try and buy. What small steps do you intend them to take to move closer to the decision to buy.

6) What is our call to action mechanism at each point along the way?

How are you going to motivate your prospects to take each progressive step? What words, buttons, links and value exchanges will you employ to keep your prospect engaged?

7) What is the next thing we intend to sell?

Some might find this last step a bit crass at this point, but you don’t have to think about it that way. If your products and services deliver a positive result, you should always be thinking about new ways to do that. Your campaigns should always have an integrated product or service suite element that automatically upsells, introduces additional options and even downsells when a prospect decides they aren’t ready to make a decision on your current campaign.

For example, as you offer a new consulting service, you could either offer some additional “done for you” add ons for those that decide to buy or a $79 DIY program for those that pass on your initial offer.

I think the point here is that you adopt a routine and process that makes you stop and consider this holistic approach to campaign design. Often, by simply stopping for moment to consider these powerful questions you’ll find ways to make any offer much stronger and much more customer focused.

7 Questions That Lead to Incredibly Effective Marketing Campaigns is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

Google’s tools for tracking the upcoming U.S. election later this year mostly focus on the presidential election. It’s no secret that Google – thanks to its various advertising services – also makes a good amount of money from the various political campaigns that compete in smaller contests, including the 435 races for seats in the House of Representatives this year. This year, thanks to the recent redistricting of many congressional districts, quite a few of these races are very different from just two years ago and many districts now include new media markets that can make reaching voters hard.

Today, Google launched a new tool that allows political campaigns to simply select their district and ensure that their ads are shown only within their district. This tool, says Google, allows campaigns to “quickly and easily target their search, display, mobile and video ads solely within that particular district’s border.”

Google says it “built a sizeable team” that’s helping candidates with their online advertising efforts. With its “Four Screen To Victory” program, the company is clearly putting a strong effort on bringing political campaigns (and their advertising budget) on board with AdWords and its other tools.

Just last month, Google also launched the ability to target U.S. ZIP codes which gives political campaigns (and anybody else who wants to advertise locally) the ability to target specific areas in their district. While Google hasn’t announced how many political campaigns are using its tools, the company today said that “thousands” of political campaigns are using its tools.

As Gerrit Lansing, the digital director of the National Republican Congressional Committee told the Wall Street Journal earlier today, his team is already taking advantage of this new tool. ““Any time you can be more specific in your advertising it is a big benefit to a political campaign. The ability to draw a precise circle around these convoluted districts is a big deal, and we’ll be taking full advantage.”

A WebmasterWorld thread has one AdWords advertiser sharing his experience going through the decision making process of allowing a Google employee to set up a new AdWords campaign for free and see how it goes.

The outcome was that he decided to see what the AdWords representative can do…

A WebmasterWorld thread has one AdWords advertiser sharing his experience going through the decision making process of allowing a Google employee to set up a new AdWords campaign for free and see how it goes.

The outcome was that he decided to see what the AdWords representative can do. Let it run for a bit and see the results compared to what he could do himself.

Six weeks later, the results seem pretty impressive.

• Clicks – up 23%
• CTR -up 103%
• Avg. CPC – down 13%

So clicks are up, CPC prices are down – that seems great! Well, doesn’t it?

As moderator, buckworks, asked – how are conversions?

I’d assume those are doing well also, but I am waiting for the post to be updated. If conversions are the same or better, then this advertiser won big time by using the right Google AdWords representative.

Is it always worth a shot? That depends on the complexity of your business model.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Democrat-oriented software developer NGP VAN (Voter Activation Network) is launching an updated tool today for the US 2012 election season, that uses Facebook to help stir up voter participation. Called Social Organizing, it lives on a campaign’s website, has users sign in using Facebook Connect, then filters a user’s friends on Facebook to match with their voter registration file. Users may also search the app specifically for people Social Organizing does not immediately locate.

“Campaigns wouldn’t normally know who your friends are, the core concept is real people talking about real things they care about with people they know,” NGP VAN CEO Stu Trevelyan told TechCrunch. “The goal isn’t about having people spam their newsfeed about a campaign, it’s about having that layer of data, but also asking them to do something useful with it.”

The app, which expands on a version introduced in 2011, matches names, cities and other data points on Facebook to actual voters. After creating a profile for the user, it begins asking that user to engage in campaign activities with these voters in the style of a social game. Campaigns may set the specifics of the game element, assigning certain badges for completing activities, there is also a leaderboard (that can be narrowed down by county) and users receive points for certain tasks.

These activities may include simple actions like sharing support for a campaign to the feed, as well as inviting others to Connect, emailing friends about the campaign, doing a virtual phone bank, putting up a yard sign and volunteering, for example. Several of these activities may be shared not only to Facebook, but also Twitter.

But perhaps the most valuable function of Social Organizing is that it allows campaigns to collect data from Facebook, and add it to NGP VAN’s flagship voter data product, VAN (Voter Activation Network). By taking social data from Facebook and adding it to the data collected in The Van from voter registration files, campaigns can develop a social layer to their campaign to micro target volunteer recruitment or campaign donations, for example.

“If your friend calls you and says you should support this campaign or effort, you are much more likely to respond positively to that than a cold contact,” Trevelyan explained. “The campaigns use the social capital that people have to engage in more sophisticated field programs than has ever been possible.”

In the future Trevelyan said Social Organizing will likely incorporate more fundraising features, as well as be better able to hyper-focus phone banking for campaigns.

“The war for the Internet has begun. Hollywood is in control of politics.  The Government is killing innovation.  Don’t let them get away with that.” So begins the latest music video from Kim Dotcom, the 38-year old founder of Megaupload, the file-hosting service that was shut down by the FBI at the beginning of this year.  Indicted on copyright infringement charges, Dotcom has lost his company and is stuck under house arrest in New Zealand until a hearing next March, but that isn’t stopping the former hacker turned web mogul from launching a campaign for Internet freedom.
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

If you are planning to use London 2012 related keywords in your SEO, online marketing, and social media campaigns to drive traffic to your site and to boost sales, you might want to rethink your strategy. While there are clear social media guidelines for participants, non-participants seem to believe that they are free to use [...]

Y&R Brazil have created an entertaining campaign for Colgate dental floss by incorporating some fun photoshop disasters. The campaigns purpose is simple, people will notice food in between your teeth before they notice anything else. See if you can spot anything out of the ordinary.

“Not even that extra hand gets more attention than a mouth without care.”

“Not even that missing ear gets more attention than a mouth without care.”

“Not even that six-fingered hand gets more attention than a mouth without care.”

Handling established campaigns across multiple countries can quickly become a case of handling overwhelming quantities of data interspersed with never-ending menial jobs, preventing the SEO from developing their strategy to squeeze yet more value from their campaign ROI.



Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.