This post is part of my notes from the Online Marketing Summit I attended in June 2009 in Cleveland, OH.

Interactive Advertising Bureau local committee

US online ad spend rising with increased broadband penetration. Local advertisers generally conservative, slower to adopt, and buy more based on trust. Large amounts of spend in direct mail, however there is no “face” so it is often overlooked. Large SMB growth with online marketing, especially in customer ratings and reviews, blogs, and more.

• Email = retention / loyalty
• Search = lead generation
• Display Ads = brand awareness

Search: Engage in multiple activities for maximum gains. Get listed in local (natural) search and paid search.

Display: National clients use display to increase brand awareness and local advertisers tend to illicit a direct response.

Mobile: advertising or marketing messages delivered to portable devices. Features text messages, ringtones, wallpapers, mobile video, etc.

This post is part of my notes from the Online Marketing Summit I attended in June 2009 in Cleveland, OH.

Chris Caputo, Optiem

Attention levels with social media are high and ad spend is increasing very rapidly. Identify the right social networks – niche sites may be best. Connect with “experts” in these communities. Join the conversation and focus attention. Break through background noise and optimize perceptions. Influence opinion and behavior. Foster credibility.

Social media strategy:

1. Assess the landscape through internal and 3rd party analytics
2. Align marketing efforts with consistent messaging
3. Define goals for specific social media campaigns
4. Develop the plan by identifying major influencers, monitoring content, and develop a strong team
5. Execute

This post is part of my notes from the Online Marketing Summit I attended in June 2009 in Cleveland, OH.

Josefina Mendez, Business.com

1. Look before you leap
   Marketers used to “suggestions” about how to optimize programs. Separate what you know from what you don’t know. Evaluate and benchmark.
2. Don’t try to boil the ocean
   One prioritized project at a time. Systematic focus is even more important these days.
3. Improve marketing and sales alignment
   Marketing and sales have aligned goals and priorities. Generate new insights that will help focus search marketing efforts.
4. Find where you’re not capturing value
   How do you measure search marketing ROI today? Are you measuring the value of all search marketing visitors? Changing times require changing metrics. Engage in post-conversion offers.
5. Start from a focused, stable base
   Utilize all the keyword matching types available (e.g. exact, phrase, negative, etc)
6. Pick apart the buying process
   You must cover all buying steps. If you have to cut back, retain certain programs at each stage:
   - Early stage – seo & relevant community participation
   - Mid-stage – directories
   - Late-stage – brand keywords
7. Reduce buyer risk & barriers to conversion
   Buying involves risk, so mitigate it through: Personal experience, word of mouth, vendor credibility and position, online research, and price. Include “customer reviewed” in search ads – helped Office Depot increase paid search revenue 200%.
8. Roll out the purchase incentives
   Find ways to increase conversion counts and value. Clarify target audience and purchase type. Identify attractive incentives by talking with sales and prospects daily. Simplify landing pages – make it as easy as possible.
9. Get social
   Search marketing ROI is impacted by other marketing programs. Develop integrated plans with peers in other marketing departments or become a champion for social media within your company.
10. Target the “doer”
    Doers = have to get something done
    Buyers = attempt to enforce a rational buying process
    Recession places more rationale, evidence-based argument. Instead, work the emotional side.

With a number of new college graduates and employees being displaced, now is a great time to learn a new, employable skill. Search marketing is driving electronic marketing and commerce and is almost essential for any large web business. This post goes over how you can become a search marketing pro in just a few months.

Executive summary

1. Read the right blogs to familiarize yourself with news and lingo
2. Get certified by Google to add legitimacy to your work
3. Get some experience by working for a local non-profit
4. Learn more than just keywords and bidding strategy
5. Attend conferences to network and get the latest trends
6. Get a job through a search marketing job board

Read the right blogs

Reading the right blogs can help you stay current with best practices, industry news, and learn from some of the most talented in the industry. The list includes blogs of the three major search engines and more. You probably won’t learn bidding tactics or “how to” do search marketing from some of the blogs, but you’ll get a good idea of what’s going on in search marketing.

• http://www.battellemedia.com/
• http://www.mattcutts.com/blog
• http://www.searchenginejournal.com/
• http://www.searchengineland.com/
• http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/search/
• http://googleblog.blogspot.com/
• http://www.ysearchblog.com/

Get certified

Getting certified is important – it will separate you from the other “experts” in the field. The de-facto certification is the Google Adwords Qualified Individual. It has a few requirements, such as managing $1,000 in spend over 90 days and passing the exam. (I wrote a post here on how I prepared for the exam and what to expect when taking the exam.) Overall, it was fairly straight-forward and most people should be able to study for a few days and pass it with relative ease.

Also, you can become Microsoft AdCenter Expert by participating in Microsoft adExcellence Program (thanks, @nsurya).

Get some experience

Don’t have $1,000 of your own money to spend? Then volunteer running the search marketing for a local non-profit or small business. Be sure to collect the current campaign information (spend, CPCc, CTRs, conversion rates, etc) before starting so you can measure your performance. Once you’ve finished compare current data vs. the data from when you started. It should be much better and that makes great talking points during an interview.

Learn more than just keywords and bidding strategy

Familiarize yourself with the entire chain of search marketing by experimenting with landing page optimization and search analytics. Sign up for and implement Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer and run A/B tests on your landing pages.

Attend conferences

There are tons of Internet marketing conferences, but the one I truly recommend is SMX: Advanced. It’s not cheap and it’s in the corner of the country, but it brings together the most advanced, recent content from the best in the industry. However, if you can’t make it to SMX: Advanced, then there are other conferences, such as: SMX, SES, OMS, and others. Going to conferences also helps build your personal brand, makes great interview talking points, and is great networking.

Get a job

In addition to the standard job search engines, there are some fantastic industry specific ones. The best ones seem to be Search Engine Journal, SEMPO, and SEOmoz. Also be sure to check companies websites as they might not advertise their job openings.

# # #

If you’re interested in career development, I also occasionally write over at Career Fire. I founded Career Fire (but no longer run the site) to educate readers on effective resume tactics, personal productivity, and general career development.

This post is part of my notes from the Online Marketing Summit I attended in June 2009 in Cleveland, OH.

Whit Lanier, Silverpop

Message and brand is defined by the market and marketing. It’s not completely in the marketers hands anymore. Can have instant, 24×7 insight to your business through using social media sites for marketing research. Place links in emails (e.g. newsletters) so readers can share on social networks. “Social email is the new viral.”

Best practices for great social email campaigns

1. Build trust and engage with your customers
2. Know what motivates your customers
3. Keep the message simple
4. State the value
5. Make sharing options visible and easy

Make sure the email is shareworthy.

B2C: Great offers, new season / product announcements, etc

B2B: relevant articles, event / webinar notifications, news / press releases

What’s not shareworthy: long newsletters, negative news, highly personalized emails, transactional emails, etc

From their social email analysis:

1. Branding in the subject line significantly increased sharing activity, opens, and click through of content
2. Offer in subject line marginally increases sharing activity and opens
3. B2B see a 57% higher rate of sharing compared to B2C
4. 28% of all content shared went to Facebook

Putting it to use:

1. Focus on shareworthiness
2. Make it easy to share
3. Monitor social buzz and engage
4. Reward influences
5. Test everything

You’ve read my thesis “The Social Media Use of Obama and McCain“, now take a look at the presentation of (most) of the graphs from the paper.

SU.PR (pronounced “super”) is the new URL shortening service from StumbleUpon that is currently in private beta. I had been using bit.ly to shorten my URLs for the past few weeks and [Update: I'll be switching from bit.ly to su.pr] I won’t be switching. The biggest problem with SU.PR is that it appears to not 301 redirect to the actual link. Instead, it redirects to a StumbleUpon URL which robs the linked to site (my site in my tests) of a quality backlink. Update: StumbleUpon is releasing some JavaScript and WordPress plugin soon to initiate a 301 redirect, keeping the link juice integrity in tact. From StumbleUpon:

Publishers have the option to create Su.pr URLs that will deliver visitors directly to their site via a 301 redirect, preserving their search rank. Simply upload a configuration file in the website’s root directory and it will turn on the option for all the Su.pr URLs for that domain.

Some of the good aspects of SU.PR are:

1. The in-depth analytics
2. Develop based on recommendations of Tim Ferriss
3. Doesn’t rob any search engine link juice
4. Allows people to stumble the post thereby increasing traffic
5. Use your own domain for branded redirects
6. Displays the number of retweets and the number of followers the retweeter has
7. Allows you to download statistical data – great if you have to make reports for the “higher ups” in your company
8. Gives a “suggested posting time” and apparently, you’re link will be exposed to more people if it’s posted between 4 and 6 A.M. and between 5 and 8 P.M. than the other times

What could make it better:

• Auto-posting new RSS feed items (like blog posts) to Twitter and FaceBook
• Integration with Twitter desktop clients
• Auto-stumble and add post tags into StumbleUpon

Today, I spoke at the third Social Media Breakfast: Toledo event. The title of my presentation was “Do’s And Don’ts Of Business Blogging” and you can view the embedded slides below or on slideshare.

Thank you for the wonderful questions and comments at the event. Also, a huge thank you to the SMB: Toledo planning committee for making it very easy for me. If you’re in the Toledo area, I really recommend making it to the next event on July 10.

The Internet is buzzing today with the release of Microsoft’s new search engine called Bing.com. Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer publically demonstrated Bing for the first time Tuesday at the All Things Digital conference. Bing is the next iteration of Live Search, which incorporates numerous new technologies, such as Powerset. Andy Beal has a great roundup of screenshots here. Bing goes live to the public beginning on June 3 and it will be phased in over the course of a few days. Congratulations to the search team for shipping! (Disclosure: I’m a former and future employee of the Microsoft Live Search, now Bing, team.)

For the next few weeks (possibly months) I’ll be beta testing Microsoft pubCenter here on daverigotti.com. Microsoft pubCenter is part of Microsoft Advertising and is a self-serve advertising solution much like Google Adsense. The program has received significant praise, especially from TechCrunch, which wrote in March that (emphasis mine):

“Our tipster says that he receiving from four times more in revenue Microsoft than Google AdSense. And the money isn’t the only advantage PubCenter has over AdSense. The advertisement themselves are are higher quality than Google’s ads, he says, and equally as targeted towards the content.”

I hope you don’t mind that testing and, if you’re interested in joining the program, you can apply here.