Search Engine Optimization
The 4 Step Plan to Harnessing Youtube as a Marketing Channel
by: David Bain
The recent purchase of YouTube by Google was big news. Yet, people seem not to be surprised by Google’s move. After all, YouTube is a very promising video blogging site that is inviting more and more viewers by the minute. In the following years, YouTube definitely promises to attract more and more people and thereby become even more attractive to internet marketers and online businessmen.
You may know by now that YouTube is not just for personal, casual and out-of-this-world videos. The business industry has found a new business partner in the internet and specifically in online video blogging. Do you want to get the word out about your business online? Here’s how you can do it through YouTube and other video blogging sites like it.
— Getting Into the Tube
1. Prepare you business plan and identify your target market.
In your business plan, you must set out your objectives or what you wish to accomplish through YouTube. You may set a particular number of people becoming your subscribers in a day as your internet marketing objective. It can also be the number of people following the link to your home page and becoming your customers. It can also take the form of the number of people who reposts your video in their own blogs. It is important to set out a plan (objectives and the way to achieve them) so you will always be clear on what constitutes internet marketing success and how you can attain this success.
It is also important to identify your target market before launching an internet marketing campaign so you can be sure that YouTube is the site for you. YouTube has been mostly for teenagers and the younger set, but this is rapidly changing young professionals and middle-age people have now found their way to YouTube. If your products or services have a wide market base, then you can definitely use YouTube.
2. Accustom yourself with video making.
It is important that you know the technology behind video blogging so you can make videos that will stand out among the millions of videos in YouTube’s repository.
3. Make your video. Keep it short and do not forget to indicate that it is a short video on your business product once you upload it.
Remember to specifically indicate your product’s value to your target market and if possible have a catchy slogan at the end of your video. Don’t forget to aid your audio narration with a few subtitles to make your business goals clear and understandable to anyone who watches your video. Make it more interesting with a soundtrack that is relevant to your marketing message and that has universal appeal.
4. Upload it on YouTube and wait for results.
As much as possible make the online audience aware of your video. Send notifications through e-mails, newsletters, online blogs, groups, social networks and more.
What YouTube has to offer is the possibility and opportunity for others to view your video and become aware of your business. So stop stalling and start video blogging at YouTube!
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )How to Bring Brand Recognition by Means of the Curiosity Factor
It’s easy to over-think a marketing campaign. A successful campaign does not have to be expensive, nor should it take years to plan.
Find out how thinking out of the box pays off…literally.
Challenge
Deciding on which marketing campaign to execute can be a daunting decision. Emmi felt the same decision weighing about the launch of the brand in the United States. How can we inform customers of the Emmi brand and how can we allow users to drive the content of our product? How can we generate curiosity around the Emmi brand name by means of a very simple marketing strategy – a strategy of planned curiosity? This is challenging task in a world of continual distractions. A billboard in Savannah, GA created by Titan, a local advertising group reads, “Tough times require fearless marketing.” This campaign proved that maxim true.
Campaign
Emmi is the second largest dairy producer in the world. In the Fall of 2007 a small team of marketers set out to promote Emmi Café Latte. In the competitive market of coffee and frozen lattes, changing customer loyal from one brand of coffee to another great poses a tremendous challenge. Consumers are creatures of habit. To ask someone to step out of their normal patterns
is near impossible. Due to the immediate nature of the Emmi marketing request, there was no time or money for a long research project to gauge customer intent. Instead, the marketing team was asked to do the near impossible: steal customers!
How do you tempt a prospective customer to try something new…something outside of the box? It was decided that Emmi’s motto, “Keep you going when you’re on the go” would need a swift kick and a loud introduction.
Step #1: Come up with a hook: it will bring them back.
To set the stage, several vintage refrigerators, referred to as “coolers”, were strategically placed on the streets of Downtown Chicago. These coolers were painted by local artists using bright, funky colors with the question, “What’s in the cooler?” painted on the front. To add even more personality, the coolers were equipped with speakers. When a casual passerby crossed the path of a cooler, it mysteriously spoke to the consumers! The key was local actors were hired and hidden in nearby locations to gently prod the passersby.
“What’s in the cooler?” A question that is far from complex, but intriguing; intriguing enough to spark the interest of 15,000 plus Chicagoans last October. “What’s in the cooler” sparked curiosity and raised eyebrows. This question would soon grab the attention of college students, young professionals, families, and senior citizens as they walked the streets of Chicago.
Chicagoans played along heroically with the bit and added local color by responding to the talking cooler as it harassed the walking public. Eventually the curiosity factor of what was in the talking fridge out-weighed the folly of participating in a conversation with a highly decorated, antique refrigerator!
Video taped conversations between the cooler and the Chicagoan went something like this:
Fridge: “Hi, how are you today? I’m doing fine, you know, just a talking fridge.”
Participant: “Can I open you?”
Fridge: I’d rather not – we just met. You guys ever talked to a fridge before? I have a question to ask you. What’s in the cooler? What do you think is inside of me? I’m not ready to open. October 5th I’m going to open up.
Step #2: Market, market, and then market some more.
The following methods were used to market Emmi to the public:
MySpace blogging and advertisements
Billboard signs
YouTube
Traditional media is established, but why not use the fastest growing marketing machine available on the planet today? The Internet and social networks provide segmented markets that are interested in your product, all one must do is utilize it to your benefit.
Using MySpace, blogs, texting and videos Emmi was able to flood the Internet with their brand and, at a minimum, influence the market to “check them out.” The curiosity factor was intense. Emmi corporate was just as excited as the marketing community as the launch date approached; they had no idea what to expect for the unveiling.
Step #3: The Revealing of “What’s in the cooler?”
On October 5th, 2007, in Chicago’s upscale Lincoln Park, Emmi was ready to reveal its Café Latte product and show the world what exactly was in the cooler. Emmi’s marketing team prepared for less than 1,000 guests to attend this event. Emmi’s product was handed out at the event to any and all attendees. Hundreds of the frozen lattes “specially, carefully roasted and then made into espresso coffee” would be distributed. Café Latte Cappuccino, Macchiato, Light, and Choco Latte would be sampled after the revealing. Customers would experience the “Espresso + Milk = Drink Different” taste.
Results
The results were unexpected and much more exciting than Emmi could have ever predicted. A campaign of such simplicity and using curiosity (and as before little used marketing avenues) could prove a talking, painted cooler a genius? 15,000 people witnessed the Emmi Café Latte reveal and all just to ease their troubled minds.
Emmi was not prepared for such success, but is confident that the marketing efforts and success points towards what has been known to be called the “Google killer”… MySpace.
Measuring Social Media
by: Nelson Bruton, Research Analyst, Interchanges.com
You can measure a social media campaign only after you determine the objective for the social media campaign. Influence and interaction and results are the ways in which a social media campaign can be measured. Each has quantitative and qualitative elements. Below are my initial thoughts on this subject. Please bear in mind that over time, there should be more to add to each category.
But for now:
INFLUENCE
Quantitative –
- Number of people in the network
- Number of networks/social communities/platforms
- Growth rate of your network
Qualitative –
- Who is in the network?
- What is the motivation for people joining the network?
- What ideas are discussed in the networks?
INTERACTION
Quantitative –
- Number of communication methods within a platform
- Number of scheduled tasks (e.g. messages, replies, comments, bulletins,
blogs, etc)
Qualitative –
- Types of communication being sent out
- Who are you targeting with a particular message?
RESULTS
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Quantitative –
- Number of leads generated
- Number of sales generated
- Number of new contacts made
- Revenue generated
Qualitative –
- Types of leads generated
- Types of contacts made
Stop Steampunk SEO, Start Being Friendly to Your Peers
Steampunk laptop by Datamancer.net
Some people are hopelessly late. Are you one of them? Many people still think that
- search engine submission
- meta tag optimization
- keyword stuffing
- PageRank
- link exchange
and similar SEO anachronisms straight out of the nineteenth century will get them website traffic and make it an authority. Wake up, you have been asleep for more than a century. Stop practicing steampunk SEO tactics and start dealing with the future or rather the current web, web 2.0
In web 2.0 we also speak of the social web. The social web is not a web of spiders anymore, it’s a web of humans. Yes, people like you and me. Webmasters, bloggers, social media users, readers, people who seemingly do not contribute anything but click.
Something radically changed. And you were asleep. You didn’t notice it while you were exchanging links in your footer, watching your pagerank bar and adding three different synonyms of the same word into your page title.
Maybe you have been on Digg, Flickr or YouTube already and you read some blogs like Boing Boing.
If you want to succeed in today’s web memorize some more of these names:
- WordPress, Drupal
- MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog
- StumbleUpon, Yoono
- BlogRush, CLIQ
- Mixx, BloggingZoom
- Facebook, LinkedIn
- Twitter, Pownce
Just to name some of my favorites and some sites you just can’t ignore anymore…
But it’s not just about the sites, the brands, the latest hypes.
It’s about you. But it’s not only about you. It’s also about your peers, about your neighbours, your friends or even your competitors!
While you depended on the new deity, Google, the world has moved on.
While you removed links to other sites so that you do not loose PageRank others have been linking generously. While you did not sleep at night watching your PageRank bar in anxiety others uninstalled the Google toolbar. While you were determining the ideal keyword density others were socializing with their peers. They were creating relationships, building up power profiles, connecting with their colleagues around the globe.
They rank in Google above you, as a side effect, some of them do not even have PageRank but they not only outrank you but their traffic is ten or hundred times bigger than yours. They even link their own competition as you call it. Either you do it too or you’ll be forgotten and marginalized. Start now. Read on. It’s not too late yet. Be friendly to your peers. You depend on them.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )The Art of Blogging
Written by The Great Ganesha
Published January 31, 2007
For the last half-decade or so, a slow but steady transition has been taking place as web pages on the Internet move from the confines of the static page to a dynamic, interactive medium. Blogging has been at the forefront of these changes. Bloggers catalogue the changes and blogs showcase them as they venture into a heretofore unknown medium.
Blogging is in its embryonic stages and has not completely defined itself. It is also the case that it is several things all at once and so defies categorization. Its etymological roots are easy to explain — it is short for weblog. Some early bloggers split the word ‘weblog’ unconventionally into ‘we blog’, and a new word entered into the English language lexicon — a word, incidentally, that was Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2004. So by definition, a blog is an online log, a diary, a catalogue of one’s thoughts. Not unlike our thoughts, the types of blogs run the gamut from the political to the poetic; from the perverse to the picturesque.
Andrew Sullivan – a now-famous political blogger and journalist for Time magazine – describes a blog as “somewhere between writing a column and talk radio.” A blog could be as base as daytime television or as stimulating as an in-depth PBS documentary. A blog is a journalistic report of an event, a well-thought-out opinion piece, the errant ramblings of an old man, or the dull journaling of a teenager’s daily activities.
While it is easy to label blogs as extensions of newspaper or other journalistic media, this falls prey to shaping the unknown into what is familiar. Yes, there are several similarities, but there are more differences. This categorization also partly follows from the fact that it is mainly the political blogs which have ascended from the underground into the mainstream media. But it is the ones that go unnoticed by the mainstream that are the most intriguing.
There are photo blogs, on which amateur photographers post some of the most beautiful images; there are audio blogs where people post audio (also known as podcasts); there are blogs in which people who can barely speak English write the most lyrical prose, in English no less; and there are blogs focused on particular topics, usually started by people who are experts (sometimes real, at other times, self-imagined) in the field. The only universal statement that one can make about blogs is about their format: dated entries which are reverse-chronologically ordered and have a space for readers to comment on them.
At its best, blogging is an art. And just like any work of art, be it Nabokov’s Lolita or Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment, it can be subtle and expressive at once. A good blog post can stir up anger, elation, and grief. It appeals to everyone and can incite passionate discussion. Blogs can create trends or destroy them. Like art, a blog post has its roots in the banalities of everyday existence.
A good blogger can elevate the mundane, or debase the divine. A good blogger creates his own personal villains, orchestrates conflict, thus creating drama. A good blog post can be fiction, non-fiction, or somewhere in between, like a well-written op-ed piece, but written in less time and with less thought. No, that’s not a typo – less thinking is one of the things that sets blogging apart from any of the traditional media. The technology-enabled facility of quick publishing gives blog posts (and their responses) what can be loosely described as a stream of consciousness style. The immediacy creates a sense of intimacy with the audience, and motivates them to interact with the blogger.
This interactive aspect of a blog is what separates it from traditional writing. A blog post is incomplete without its comments – they are an integral part of it. Comments allow a blogger to clarify, argue, converse or just observe his audience. Unlike traditional works of art, comments enable a blogger to look inside his audience’s minds and digest and internalize what they are saying. This knowledge will, in turn, show up in the subsequent posts, where readers can comment again, and the cycle continues. This interaction makes blogging a largely synergistic activity and makes blogger and audience explicitly interdependent on one another. Of course, there is always interaction between artist and audience, but it is not nearly as intimate, and it is not incorporated into the artist’s work as quickly as with a blog.
By giving people the freedom to write about what they want, when they want, along with a more-or-less automatic readership, countless souls (including myself) have found their ‘inner writer’. Blogging is allowing people to create a new style of writing, with its own set of rules. As more and more people join the blogging bandwagon, it is increasingly difficult to ignore. As it gains more exposure, it is also difficult to ignore the fact that blogging, at its best, is indeed a unique art form.
what they are saying. This knowledge will, in turn, show up in the subsequent posts, where readers can comment again, and the cycle continues. This interaction makes blogging a largely synergistic activity and makes blogger and audience explicitly interdependent on one another. Of course, there is always interaction between artist and audience, but it is not nearly as intimate, and it is not incorporated into the artist’s work as quickly as with a blog.
Forrester is Advising Clients to Advertise on Social Networks
E-consultancy had an interesting post about Forrester Research who are advising clients that a recession is the time to be advertising on social networks. As Forrester put it:
Check out Interchanges Myspace Social applications in particular, such as communities and social networking sites, are cost-effective and have a measurable impact on prospects’ decisions in the consideration stage, which will be important to companies under recessionary pressures.
This is an interesting position for Forrester to take as social networks have not exactly been a boon for most advertisers. In their paper Forrester makes two points why this is a good time to switch your advertising dollars to social networks. The first point is:
“Well-designed social applications are effective. Social programs leverage the voice of the customer to get messages carried further than ad impressions. If your message resonates with consumers, their word-of-mouth is a more effective medium than any of the traditional media.”
Yes a successful viral campaign can be much more effective than a traditional campaign (see the Barack video for an example of this). But isn’t viral marketing simply successful word-of-mouth marketing? You can plan on having a campaign go viral, but unless the message resonates with the consumer (and that is a big if), your message will go nowhere. Social networks can be a conduit to helping your message go viral, but it needs a good message and product in order to be successful.
The second point is:
“They’re cheap. Advertising campaigns often run into millions of dollars. But Facebook pages and blogs are two examples of social programs that you can start for next to nothing. Even more sophisticated programs like a full-blown customer community typically don’t cost more than $50,000 to $300,000 to get going.”
Just because it is inexpensive to advertise on social networks does not mean that the traffic you are buying is good. There is a reason why Stumble Upon lets you buy traffic at $.05 a click in even the most competitive markets. Social networks are notorious for providing advertisers with lots of ad impressions, very few clicks and even less conversions. One of the reasons for this is that users of social networks are not on social with a commercial intent. When I talk to my nieces who are heavy Facebook users, they all mention that they are never looking to buy something when they are on Facebook. They are there to socialize. They are blind to the ads.
It is akin to when you use Gmail. How many of you actually read the ads that go along with the email you are reading? You ignore the ads, because you are not looking to buy something. The same applies to broad based social advertising campaigns.
The only difference between a poorly executed cheap social marketing campaign and a poorly executed expensive marketing campaign is the amount of money that you spend.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Is Myspace a Google Killer
It was July 19th, 2005 when Robert Murdoch surprised Wall Street when he spent $580m to purchase MySpace. So how does the investment look 2 1/2 years later?
When Murdoch bought MySpace it was predominately a US social network. Today it is a worldwide force with 24 local versions. Besides introducing new musicians and playing host to amateur filmmakers, MySpace is also signing artists to its own record label and developing online video series. Earlier this month it introduced a content guide called MySpace Celebrity.
All these changes have worked out well for MySpace. With an estimated 110 million monthly active users, and more than 1.3 billion page views a day, MySpace has become a favorite of advertisers.
Richard Greenfield, a media analyst for Pali Research was interviewed by the New York Times recently and he said expect MySpace to have around $800 million in revenue in fiscal 2008, mostly through advertising. That $580 million purchase price looks pretty cheap now.
Chris DeWolfe, the co-founder and chief executive of MySpace is working on changing the image of MySpace.
“Some people still perceive MySpace like it was in early 2004, as a niche place for scenesters in New York and Los Angeles. That’s how it started, but it’s become very mainstream,” Mr. DeWolfe, 41, said. “It’s about consuming content and discovering pop culture.”
As part of its makeover, MySpace is starting to resemble more and more a traditional media platform like Yahoo or AOL than a traditional social networking site. Peter F. Chernin, the President and Chief Operating Officer of the News Corporation, called MySpace a “contemporary media platform” and said the site existed to “create content and connect people to one another.”
There is no doubt that the purchase of MySpace by Robert Murdoch was a smart business deal. The site dominates the social networking space in terms of visitors, page views and advertising revenue.
What will be interesting to watch in the coming twelve months is how MySpace develops as a media platform. MySpace has the potential to match the growing media platform that is Google. At the moment Google and MySpace are business partners, but I expect that relationship to be challenged as MySpace continues to grow.
Remember that since the MySpace acquisition Murdoch has purchased the Wall Street Journal. An advertising platform that covers Music, Celebrities, TV and Finance could be a Google killer.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Web Excellence -Why 3% of Web Sites Account for 95% of Online Sales-
As the ultimate free market, the web offers businesses in all industries an opportunity to touch potential clients that they would not be able to reach by any other promotional medium. With the increase in potential clients comes a great increase in competitors as well. The web offers your potential clients literally thousands of options from which to choose their products and services.
While in the general business world the 80/20 rule proves true, the web is a very different animal. According to a study conducted by the Internet focused business magazine WIRED “95% of all online dollars are spent with the 3% of web sites who do the best job attracting and converting clients.”
With this much competition on the web it is critically important to do things better than 95% of your competitors. The disparity of results achieved by companies with ‘great web strategies’ and those with simply ‘good web strategies’ can be likened to the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
Attracting, converting, and retaining web based clients requires a well developed strategy of marketing tactics specifically focused on YOUR businesses potential client. Potential web clients are a finicky bunch. They will typically decide whether your site will help them achieve their goals in fewer than 6 seconds. If your web site does not catch their interest in these precious seconds they will simply return to their search engine of choice and move on to the next site.
Creating an effective web strategy is a laborious task. Good web development firms invest hundreds of hours into developing these strategies for their clients. At the core of these efforts is a well developed understanding of the psychology of web user behavior. This understanding is reached only through extensive research conducted in a number of ways including:
Online Surveys
Customer Interviews
Visual Scan Analysis
User Interface Analysis
Conversion Analysis
To achieve superior web results involved tedious focus on hundreds of details. The location of every individual item on your site is relevant. Although I can not go into this issue in detail in this article, I will offer a few examples.
Sites in which the company phone number appears in the top right hand corner in at least 14 font have a higher conversion rate than those in which a user must scroll to find a phone number.
E-Commerce sites that offer “Free Shipping” have an 89% greater chance of converting a client than those that charge for shipping.
68% of users will leave your site if they click on a “dead link”.
Sites that offer a web based contact option such as “live chat” have much higher conversion rate. I can not quote a specific number of this stat because it varies greatly by industry.
Before developing your web site, perform a research based “web user analysis”. This analysis should include the following:
An understanding of key short and long term company objectives as relates to your web site.
An analysis of YOUR client bases behaviors and tendencies. For example, the number one reason a personal financial services client uses his or her provider is because “they feel the provider has similar values to themselves”. On the web it is critical that your site create the feel needed to match potential clients’ emotional needs. This is the key objective of this analysis.
Understanding of general web user behavior. I discussed this earlier in the column. Too many companies make the costly mistake of taking this for granted.
An analysis of the ‘core usability issues’ related to your site.
These core understandings should be the cornerstone of your overall web strategy. From these concepts you will be able to develop content, capture tools, and a general web site ‘feel’ that will maximize your company’s ability to convert clients.
Above all else, remember that every item on your site should be completely focused on the user. If any item on your site is not achieving a specific purpose in your efforts to convert prospects then it is ‘dead space’. Dead space works against you because it frustrates your users and leads them to seek someone else’s site to fulfill their needs. Once they leave your site, only about 1 of every 45 will ever return. To put it another way, if you don’t promote your offerings on the web in a way that is friendly to users you are strengthening your competitors hand.
Are you doing the things that 95% of your competitors are not or are you settling for mediocrity? There is no middle ground on the web. If you do not understand your potential clients’ actions and tendencies one of your competitors will.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )« Previous Entries
Interchanges.com News Weblog 