http://ccmcmarketing.com/101marketingquotesjune2011.pdf

The question isn’t IF a good online marketing employee will help increase revenue.  If they are good they will.  But there is a question as to if the cost of this person will exceed the revenue they bring in.  For example:  $100,000/year salary and benefits for a good online marketer is a good deal.  If this employee helps you bring in an incremental $200,000/year in revenue this is a no brainer.  If the market will only let them bring you in $50,000/year there is probably a problem.

Acquire PTE (Part Time Employee)

A part time employee may also be considered and may cut the salary requirement in half.  You may also reduce the quality of the person you are seeking.  You are probably seeking (or at least hoping for) Organic Search, Paid Search, Display, E-mail, and Social Media marketing skills in one person.  Your chances of finding all these skills in one person are slim in the first place.  This effort is further hampered when you only have a part time position to offer.  Two reason for this: 1) you screen out the best people and 2) you limit the time they have to devote to doing a complete job each month.

Hire an Agency

Acquiring a GOOD agency will address the problem of expertise.  They will most likely have expertise in Organic, Paid, Display, E-mail, and Social Media.  Unlike your perfect employee they will most likely be multiple individuals who focus on their core competencies.   The problem with this scenario is you will probably go from $100,000/year salary and benefits for a full time employee to $200,000/year to engage a good agency.  You may also find you will not have an employer/employee type relationship.  As hard as they may try not to do so they will probably come across as a bunch of arrogant know-it-alls that will insist on doing everything their way with little input from you.  This may be justified in some cases but will be unacceptable in many situations.

Hire a Virtual Agency

This is the best of both worlds and more.  You have a)  at your disposal expertise in Organic, Paid, Display, E-mail, and Social Media, b) part time “virtual” employees while maintaining the quality and coverage of a Full Time Employee, and c) a cost that is closer to the cost of the part time employee.  The expertise gained by engaging  this virtual agency is further enhanced with years of contacts, available online marketing tools and techniques at their disposal, and economies of scales that simply can’t be enjoyed by companies that don’t have online marketing as their primary business.

What You Should Expect From A Virtual Agency

In a previous blog posting I discussed your effectiveness with Twitter as measured by your Retweet Rank.  A Retweet Rank is a representation of the number of times a user has been retweeted by others. I argued that this rank can be used to determine how much self promoting you can get away with.

Beyond Measurement

This time I talk about how Twitter may be used to emulate, in my opinion, the most successful marketing tactic in the history of marketing.  If you haven’t guessed it already I’m talking about search marketing.  Most people are familiar with search marketing.  You go to Google, or some other engine, and search for what you want.  The results are displayed in either the organic (free) or sponsored (paid) listing results. 

Search Marketing 

I argue that search marketing is the most successful tactic because, from the marketer’s perspective, you can market directly to the people who are specifically looking for your product or service.  And you can tailor your offers and call to action specifically to the prospect. What still amazes me is you can “automate” the process to track your success (conversions) and adjust your activity to improve results even more.  Yes, I think this is the greatest invention since slice bread…but wait.  The market is getting saturated.  Click costs are going up. Too bad there isn’t another tool that could work beside it.  Well maybe there is.  Twitter!

Twitter has Context and is Free

Twitter has two attributes that could help accelerate the growth of advertising in the mobile market. Like Google, Tweeter has context and is a free service.  With Twitter you can determine the hot topics (keywords).  Additionally, since people tell Twitter about themselves through their account or through their tweets, Twitter can layer on demographic and behavioral targeting.

Twiter as a Search Tool 

This is where it gets similar to Google AdWords.  Advertisers could buy keywords or phrases that are tweeted.  This could be based upon geographic location and a Twitter profile of previous Tweets.  If you want to get real fancy, assuming that the GPS location is turned on, a retailer, say, in a mall could send offers to the mobile device of people walking in front of their store, or generally in the mall.

Beyond Just Search 

I’m excited, but is it just me?  There is nothing better for a retailer than the ability to know that John is looking for a new WII game and getting him an offer before he begins to shop.  How about Sue with a broken windshield that would appreciate the convenience of getting a fair price and mobile service without having to ask.

Is it just me?  I don’t think so.

Contact steve.thompson@siteedgeagency.com .
Technorati Tags: Twitter, Social Media, Online Marketing
 

As this is being written we are gathering responses in a Twitter poll from actual Twitterers.  This poll attempts to gauge what users of Twitter expect from their time and energy.  As of today the Twitter poll respondents believe Twitter should be used to:

1. Generally socialize and get connected 27%
2. Keep informed about a particular topic or interest 30%
3. Inform others about a particular topic or interest 19%
4. Promote a product or service I provide 24%

See poll results and add your two cents by clicking here.

From these responses we conclude that most people are not using Twitter to promote a product or service.   If you are a business person, and since you are reading this you probably are, you may at first view this as bad news.  But it is actually good news.  Since less than a forth of the Twitterers are promoting a product or service, we conclude the market place is probably more open to a few doing just that.

Let’s illustrate this with an example of businesses at a trade show.  If only the businesses at the trade show were the ones presenting, they would be focusing so much on promoting their own product or service that they may not be as interested in hearing about yours.

Of course you should Not come across as only being self promoting.  You need to build relationships, offer value, entertain your followers, then every tenth tweet or so they may not mind a little self serving promotion.

This brings me to the point of this blog posting.  How do you tell how effective you are on Twitter?  Yes, you can create tracking url-s that tells you when you got a visit, lead, or sale from Twitter and that is the ultimate indicator.  But how do you know how you rank with your followers as compared to other Twitterers?   How effective are your tweets compared to the best on Twitter?  A lack of knowledge here may make or break you.

One indicator of how you rank with your followers is your Retweet rank.  A Retweet Rank is a representation of the number of times a user has been retweeted by others recently on twitter.

If you enter my Twitter ID of @steventhompson, I have a Retweet rank of 8,406 and a 94.2 percentile.   This compares pretty good with Twitter ID @airductcleaner who has a retweet rank of 144,868 and a 0.0 percentile but not as well with Twitter ID @britneyspears who has a retweet rank of 1001 and a 99.31 percentile.  As you can see the lower the rank number and the higher the percentile number the better.

If you rank low and have a higher percentile this is probably an indication that you may get away with a few more self promoting tweets.  If you rank high with a lower percentile you may want to promote every 20 tweets or 30 tweets, of even more.

Go ahead and take the Twitter Poll.  Then find out your Retweet Rank.  You will then be positioned to do the optimal amount of self serving promotional Tweets.

Contact steve.thompson@siteedgeagency.com .

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Social Media, Online Marketing

I agree with Eick on the importance of negative keywords but added my additional comment below:  

Erik,
You could also stick to “Exact Match” search terms but that may be restrictive in some cases. What you didn’t mention was how to determine the negative keywords. With Google new “Search Query Performance” report it becomes convenient to view what search terms are actually being picked up in Broad and Phrase match. This is after the fact but may be worth periodically reviewing and making selective parts of these search queries negative keywords.

Contact steve.thompson@siteedgeagency.com to discuss further.

Technorati Tags: Paid Search, PPC, Google Negative Keywords

It’s as simple as following these steps:

1.  Resolve to put your ad dollars into getting internet traffic

2.  Use the “marketEDGE Technique” to develop 6 to 8 ads

3.  Use an approved Campaign Optimizer to identify the top producing ads

4.  Use the “marketEDGE Technique” to develop 2 to 4 offer pages

5.  Use an approved Campaign Optimizer to ID the offer page that delivers the most prospects/customers

6.  Use approved Campaign Tracking to tie every single customer generated back to the source

7.  Continuously narrow the source of the internet traffic until you are only paying for the traffic that is producing customers.

You now have the Marketing System That Never Fails and all you have to do is repeat these steps until you have more business than you can handle.  It typically takes 3 to 4 months to perfect the process. 

You can do all this yourself but the “marketEDGE Technique” is the key to its success and it is proprietary to siteEDGE.  Don’t worry it’s not that expensive.  One of my customers paid the Yellow Pages 20 times what they paid me.  References are available upon request.

Contact steve.thompson@siteedgeagency.com to discuss further.

Technorati Tags: Paid Search, PPC, Analytics, Campaign Tracking,  google content network, google site targeting

An Example of a Previous Implementation of Search Retargeting

1. At one of the major search engines I might search on the term “Home Saunas.”  I go to several sites and narrow my interest down to a couple of products at two different sites.  I do nothing yet because I want time to think.
2. With Retargeting I have been tagged and will be re-engaged base upon my previous behavior at the site set up to do Retargeting.
3. When the visitor goes to another site in the network of participating web properties, another offer is presented to the visitor.
4. The visitor doesn’t know we have tagged him and we will respect their privacy but we will get tighter and tighter with our messaging and offers with a goal to get them to take a predetermined course of action. We will try several ad approaches and different offers.  We will also keep our brand out front in the prospect’s mind.
5. After the prospect contacts us or, or after 30 days, we will stop the re-engagement process.  The result is a coordinated display of timely offers calculated to elicit the appropriate response.

Yahoo’s Implementation of Search Retargeting
While this technology has been available for several years, Yahoo has recently introduced its own version.  Yahoo implementation is notable in several ways:

1. Yahoo is associated with tons of websites that millions go to daily.  Previous solution providers were never able to offer this large a network of website properties and resulting visitors.
2. Yahoo is able to re-engage quicker.  With other solution providers we were lucky to re-engage a visitor within a couple of days.   Again because of the large Yahoo network reengagement occurs within hours, and even minutes.
3. Yahoo implementation of Retargeting removes the criteria that the person searching has to actually visit the site.  To become a candidate for retargeting the prospect is only required to perform a search on Yahoo—not actually click to the site which was previously required.  Once someone searches on “Home Saunas” for example, Display and/or Text ads will instantly be selected and directed towards this person.

Yahoo has had its challenges over the past few months but, in my opinion, this is a step in the right direction for them.  My experience with Search Retargeting, along with personal touches that Yahoo brings to the table, leads me to conclude that, if done correctly, this could be a gold mine for many companies. 

Feel free to contact Steve Thompson at 816-587-8880 if you would like to discuss how Search Retargeting might help you.