Online marketing news and resources.

Last year saw online ad spend reach £3.5 billion. For the first time, online media has overtaken traditional media to become the UK’s largest advertising sector as SMEs increase investment. Despite an overall global reduction as a result of businesses trying to cut back avoidable costs, online marketing continues to rise and it’s not difficult to see why!

According to different surveys conducted by commerce and advertising monitoring groups, in 2009, paid search, or PPC, increased by 9.5% to £2.15bn. As a result, businesses are also now competing against an increased number of bidders when using Google AdWords to market their brand identity and obtain high ranking visibility. The last twelve months has seen more SMEs integrating PPC and SEO into their overall marketing strategies.

A key reason seems to be the ability for the precise tracking by website analytics of campaign performance and thus, an efficient method to measure return on investment. Specific campaigns can be closely monitored and amended, determining future budget allocation based on proven results and target market response. The long-term strategies inherent in organic SEO, e.g. link building traffic, can also be assessed for keyword traffic, audience behaviours and site conversions.

However, it is strongly suggested that much of the real increase in online advertising has come about mainly due to the increasing migration by the user population through ever more platforms, i.e. mobile, netbook and tablet, and through social media channels, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and forums. In other words, more people are spending more time engaged online!

Even traditional broadcast mediums, like terrestrial television and radio, clamour ceaselessly for their viewers and listeners to respond via Twitter ( formerly it was all about sending text!). Accordingly, observing the striking changes in consumer behaviour has led to rapid reappraisal of what it means for a business to market themselves, their products or services in the age of virtual social engagement.

As the results of marketing studies are increasingly demonstrating, many of the forward-thinking businesses, predominantly youthful SMEs in the vanguard, have embraced the online marketing environment and involving themselves less in hard to track, traditional means of promotion. Inevitably, budgets are being taken away from the more traditional marketing avenues, like print advertising and direct mail, to fund increases in online spend.

Even as you read this, a new generation of affordable smartphones and their accompanying mobile apps are launching, and location marketing, exemplified by Foursquare, gains traction. Only the most nimble, sharp-eyed and savvy of eCommerce business, as ever, will be positioning themselves to take full advantage of the continuing online revolution.

It’s true to say that companies either ‘get’ Social Media or they don’t. As brows furrow over trying to define whether it should be budgeted under online marketing or PR, and who should be ‘looking after it’, eyebrows shoot upwards as questions of ROI become answers in KPI!

Business owners like straightforward definitions, preferably ones that translate to measurable traffic growth on SEO keywords, website conversions, sales figures and bottom lines!

The likelihood is that social media will be most understood as a combination of marketing and publicity rather than a ‘conversation’, or loose engagement whose principle aim is not to sell a product or service, but simply interact, offering freely shared info, ideas and data.

But this won’t wash with business owners and their Sales Directors who judge a successfully positioned brand identity by monthly sales enquiries and orders taken. After all, as often argued, if their PPC campaigns are already, successfully bringing in traffic -  with a readily measurable return – and email marketing newsletters are relatively low cost, where does social media fit in, and why bother with Twitter, etc??

However, social media is not just about Twitter! The quality content, link building value to both Google and human visitor alike, across all communication platforms, is now an important signifier of online presence. The success of harnessing social engagement is as much to do with defining purpose, i.e. what a company wants to achieve, and interacting with the appropriate channels to achieve realistic objectives.

The distinction between social media as marketing or PR should be made at the outset rather than just to lump in with sales and marketing because it can’t be readily assigned.

Social Media can be involved as marketing strategies if the purpose is to increase traffic and sales, brand exposure and product launches. Key is the online conversation, which builds up crucial feedback and ideas for product or business development and which will establish relationships and connections with potential customers (fans or followers).

If the aim is to use social media within PR campaigns, then this would include the posting of latest company news, blogs and articles, acting as an official source of company information and a “quick response” to any immediate customer comments and issues. The key here is to keep in touch with how the brand is being perceived and commented upon by a company’s audience segment.

Are you optimising your website for search engines or for people who use search engines? Many businesses tend to think of search engine optimisation as simply keyword crampons levered in to place to scale the PageRanks of Google mountain! But in fact human friendly sites are equally key to driving traffic and page indexing.

The application of SEO to careful campaigns of PPC and link building around the sites, blogs and social networks is there for one reason only – to attract human traffic to click onto your site, build your brand identity and ultimately convert from search visitor to paying customer and regular subscriber /newsfeed reader.

Search engine ranking obviously helps greatly in the online marketing process, conferring both substantive authority and establishing long term value, but once a visitor lands at your site, the next crucial part of the conversion process has to immediately begin.

Search-engine friendly design is often talked of in terms of ‘crawlability’ or the ability for a search engine spider to crawl a site, and ‘indexation’, i.e. the ability for website’s most high-quality pages, videos, and images to be available to rank. But it is equally as important to be constantly aware of human site search goals, behaviours, and expectations, as registered by website analytics and monitored daily.

Established patterns of site navigation and positioning mean searchers have very clear mental models of how site pages should be constructed and where items should be placed. If those items are not in the right place or aren’t there at all, then the likelihood is that site visitors will be confused, very quickly lose patience and just leave. For eCommerce sites, this is clearly cyber suicide!

In the age of instant social media communication and rapidly evolving mobile apps and tablet readers, human ‘onDemand’ search results will not wait on issues of website accessibility.

SEO linking should be relevant, valuable and genuine – and take visitors to exactly to their expected destination.

Today, the proliferation of multiple search platforms means it is absolutely imperative that a website must be easy to navigate, and quickly arrive at the object of the search. Assuming that searchers will instinctively know what is clickable and what is not clickable on a site page layout is still a problematic issue, alongside unchecked, broken links.

Remember – if a website is confusing and difficult to navigate, visitors will not wish to subscribe or engage, traffic drops off, bookmarking ceases, and site content is no longer retweeted or linked to via social media.

It is fairly common knowledge amongst many of the website design and marketing agencies, there have been recent changes to Google’s algorithm, influencing optimised content, link building, and ultimately, visitor search results. In short, Google looks at site pages for signals of human activity in the form of regular, fresh content of relevance, influence and authority.

After two decades, the web resembles Mount Everest. Countless explorers have visited, leaving behind a detritus littered landscape. There are simply thousands upon thousands of dead or automated websites left unattended or simply not being looked after and updated on a regular basis.

This begs the question of how much – or how little – online marketing the site owner companies are actually doing? What would be the incentive, value and interest for a return visit? Aside from an eCommerce business alerting their database via an email marketing newsletter to a few price changes, the content remains unaltered, and means visitors will not be staying at the site to engage further. In other words, a brand identity is formed of a price–driven attitude, which offers potential customers nothing further in terms of added content value.

Google is always changing, and some important changes are now more evident than ever before. Relevant back linking from niche market sites is now more important and valuable, even if the sites are lower ranked. It had always been assumed that the top ranking factor voted by Google was always keyword-focused, anchor text from external links. (more…)

Nope!

Seems the message has not been getting through! A new 2010 study finds that nearly half of the UK’s SME websites contain little or no SEO, are not indexed with search engines and thus, fail to make any visible impact on driving visitor traffic, whatsoever!

According to a recent State of UK Business Websites Study, of a sample 1,000 SME websites analysed, around 47 per cent contained little or no SEO content.

It beggars belief that nearly twenty years since the start of the web, in today’s highly sophisticated online marketing environment, fast forwarding into mobile internet and social media led customer engagement, a staggering half of business websites defeat the purpose of their existence in the first place.

Why bother having a website if you are not prepared to invest in it’s growth and development? Learn to understand how it should properly function to enable it to perform properly so your business brand identity stands a chance of succeeding online? (more…)

Does this week’s railing against the free web by Prince, quickly following on the heels  of the paywall now firmly in place around the Times and Sunday Times, seem to be heralding a new era of two-tier online engagement between paying for original quality content/news and free access to all other common sources?

It’s possible that the assumptions of whole generations of users who have grown up to believe that the essential web, websites and content is grown, run and consumed in a so-called ‘no overheads’ Garden of Eden, are about to be challenged.

A common myth seems now to be woven into the general understanding of online as automatically being cheaper than offline. This may have been briefly thought to be the case in the early days of the web but the business of creating today’s web design and online marketing for operating a visible, successful eCommerce presence is a grown up sophisticated operation indeed.

It simply isn’t the case, as some business owners tend to assume, that because there appears to be less material costs involved in constructing a purposeful website, developing its functionality, creating powerful content and going ‘live’ than opening a high street or retail park outlet, that it follows that there is a corresponding downsizing of cost ratio to value. (more…)

Cross-channel eCommerce is the rule, not the exception in today’s multiple platforms. This often translates into online marketing driving offline sales and boosting better segment opportunities.

Interestingly, it is the traditional email marketing campaign, a recent survey has found, which still performs as a significant sales impetus, even in the age of social media messaging and mobile internet.

It appears that when retailers send out emails to their mailing lists, a boost to offline transactions may be the end result, as much as a fillip to online activity. That a recipient response occurs on a different channel to an outward message, may be familiar news to business owners, but the reminder here is to keep on top of across channel tracking and integration of marketing strategies.

The study found that in the UK, 43 per cent of consumers who receive a marketing email are more likely to make an in-store or phone purchase, while only a small number of consumers indicated that they’d be less likely to make an in-store purchase because of a marketing email.

In addition, it was found that ‘customer facing’ interaction can still provide valuable information. A third of respondents worldwide indicated they would be willing to provide their email addresses to instore sales assistants – another example of the offline feeding into the online. (more…)

Last week’s announcement that Google has obtained a patent for technology software to help identify ‘inadequate content’ is a wake up call for businesses and their web design and marketing agencies to improve uploaded content quality and focus on niche long tail search phrases.

Increasing market segmentation is being driven by a combination of consumer led search behaviour, such as the use of highly specific channels, made possible through the emergence of mobile applications and the Twitter social media platform of 140 character messaging.

The launch of iPad and the tablet format, hot on the heels of iPhone and smartphone, and the push for users to access dedicated content download shops, all point to the ratcheting up of ‘quality’ niche market content provision within online marketing campaigns.

Business owners who have simply relied on a basic SEO approach to producing large quantities of low quality content or concentrate their budgets almost totally on PPC, and bidding on commonly used generic keywords will likely be most affected. Companies who sustain longterm ‘organic’ marketing strategies to drive specific long tail keyphrase traffic will most benefit.

A recent report revealed that social media traffic referral, specifically to blogs, had increased by a staggering 50 per cent. The study showed that Twitter/ Facebook /social network users were sharing quality long tail content, and this behaviour is predicted to increase, emphasising the importance of content’s ‘social journey’.

The link building of niche communities around long tail topics, identified by Google’s increasingly sophisticated algorithms, is intended to enhance a web user’s search experience in their specific long tail search term enquiries. Businesses will need to seriously address their site optimisation approach and invest in quality written content provision to keep visitor traffic interested in the long term.

The web 2.0 principle of informal social media engagement is established. The mobile internet is well underway. Yet a recent web study finds that the websites of many brands and businesses still do little to engage with visitors and potential customers.

This is unlikely to be the fault of their website design and marketing agency team, who would, no doubt, have presented the possibilities for today’s approach to online marketing and developing brand identity visibility. Beyond simple transaction and price comparison, the message is that a company’s  potential niche audience market needs to be attracted to online engagement or their longer term interest is diverted elsewhere.

The adoption of social interaction via email marketing newsletters, Blogs, Forums, Twitter, Facebook and site community groups tends to be reflected by market sector and possibly one sided perception of demand. For some businesses, the extent of their attempt to reach out to their potential audience may be no more than the odd newsletter once a quarterly or the one time setting up of a newspage or blog that is soon neglected and only updated a few times a year, if that!

For most SMEs, forays into PPC gobble up nearly all their available ‘advertising’ budget, generating modest response and disappointment in the short term, and thus, lack of interest in exploring much beyond basic SEO tweaking of the home page. (more…)

Paying to drive visitor search traffic and push up site rankings appears to have once more been favoured by UK companies backing short term ROI over long term organic listings and establishing social media presence.

According to a new Search Engine Marketing report of more than 500 companies and agencies, UK firms have been increasing their investment in paid search and SEO over the last 12 months, even though lack of internal resources is the biggest problem affecting the success of marketing strategies by this method.

The findings show that almost half of UK businesses (49%) are now spending at least £50,000 a year on paid search marketing, up from 45% last year and 39% in 2008, while there has been a significant decrease in the proportion of those who spend less than £5,000 a year on paid search, from 25% last year to 14% this year. (more…)