When will Marketers start to get it?
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
In 1996, I left a secure 9 to 5 job to work in sales and marketing for a "multimedia" agency - two guys who designed websites. At the time their biggest name client was Rollerblade Canada. The site was pretty advanced for the time whereby surfers could actually look at a 3D skate from all directions.
Once I got the lay of the land I opened my Rolodex and started calling the corporate headquarters of well-known companies in my city offering the service of designing a website. The response was overwhelming - 90% of the people I spoke to said they had heard about the World Wide Web, but were not ready to start the process and kindly asked me to call them back… in a YEAR!
This was amazing to me. Here was an opportunity for companies, with advertising dollars to spend, to take advantage of a new vehicle that could not only generate awareness and sales, but likely set them apart from their competitors. I assume that within that year they all had websites, but I left the company after three months because people just didn't get it…
In my current position, handling business development for Connors Communications, I feel like we are at the same crossroad. The Internet has changed the way that consumers research and buy good and services and, Search has become a unique marketing opportunity for companies to influence the landscape they ultimately control. From propagating positioning messages to gathering intelligence about the marketplace, Search Marketing is creating industry leaders that you've never heard of. For example, shouldn't the mail order business have dominated eCommerce? Instead of Sears, some no-name brand called Amazon.com ate their lunch. Procrastination at these crossroads can be deadly. Companies need to shuffle not only their budgets, but their mindset - the consequences are simply too great. Marketers: how and where your brand is found online is where the game is being played. It’s time to get in on the action.Labels: eCommerce, Marketing, messaging, SEM, seo
posted by Liz Bazini
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The Buzz About PR 2.0 Firms & Technology
Sunday, July 23, 2006
It seems that PR companies "getting it" either consists of partaking in online dialogues via blogging, optimizing press releases, or word-of-mouth buzz. I went to a conference recently, and any time I would introduce myself as being from a PR firm, people immediately thought I was going to talk about the "buzz thing". Some of our peers out there that have done a very effective job of positioning PR as word-of-mouth bumble bees, real-time bloggers or press release optimizers.
While we believe in and partake in these practices, the PR industry has been so successful in getting these messages out, that it makes the challenge even more difficult for PR agencies that are technological innovators. Its one thing to be experts at using online tools, such as blog software or newswires, but it's an entirely different thing to have the insight and capacity to invent wholly new technologies and marketing methodologies.
And PR agencies such as Connors are doing exactly that with applications such as HitTail. And now that we have defined a new category of software, tools to help you write for the long tail of search, we have to get over the hurdle that we're branded as buzzers and bloggers and blasters... oh my!
HitTail fosters a decidedly softer sell that's more aligned to the true mission of PR--to get you publicity that you could never have paid for at any price--usually in the form of editorial coverage. You generally pay less for PR than large advertising campaigns, but the pay-off can be much greater. The favorite saying is what is a mention in The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal worth? Today, the equivalent is saying what's a top position in Google, Yahoo or MSN worth? PR and SEO are the same. And brilliant editorial coverage is what happens when the client's prospects FIND THEM in the due course of their research, vendor selection process, or the like. In other words, that taboo acronym: SEO, but made palatable to the mainstream marketers of the world.
So, the question is how does a PR agency formulatize the process of SEO? It needs the intimidating luggage that goes with that horrible acronym removed. And it needs to be executed in a reliable, confidence-building fashion, similarly to how the traditional process may involve positioning & messaging, SWOT analysis, pitching news to journalists, and staging newsworthy events.
PR's answer to online marketing is not merely making those same press releases more effective through search, though that helps. PR's answer is not just in opening a corporate blog and entering the online discussion, though that helps. And PR's answer is not merely in chatting it up online or off, though that helps. The answer is in incrementally and systematically dominating an entire conceptual area on the Internet. And since some conceptual areas are so difficult to penetrate in natural search, the answer is in finding the right starting point, carving out a niche, and continuing digging out from the niche in concentric circles until it grows into a crevice, then a cavern, then a canyon. This is not theory. It actually works. You can control a lot of quality traffic in your space this way.
HitTailing works because there's easy pickings out there in the long tail of natural search. If you pick a phrase that's at all off the beaten track and write about it in blogging software, you're almost assured a strong position in the search results. And it may pay off. The difficulty is in knowing where to begin and improving your odds. And a PR agency has the answer. A PR firm has such a deep strategic understanding of natural search that they were able to break out just a tiny piece of the SEO offerings that they offer to their clients, with that alone, potentially move the entire state of online marketing a large step forward.
The technology is necessary, filling a major missing hole in online marketing tools. Why? Because, if you begin in the wrong part of the long tail of keywords, you're going to be doing a whole lot of writing for nothing. But if you start in the right place, then you're going to start growing traffic and improve the accuracy in your decisions of where to go next in that endless long tail of potentially lucrative, but mostly time-wasting long tail of search. This technology is 50% automation, and 50% hard work, because you can't automate the craft of writing original content.
But I find myself constantly having to knock down the buzzing and the blogging and the news blasting hurdles, which were the first PR attempts to master online media. It has actually given the some SEM firm counterparts a lot of ammunition to discount PR agencies as limited in technical capabilities. As practitioners of warm & fuzzy relationship building, there's no way we can consult about search on a strategic level, some say. In fact, they plan on making the search discussion so technologically intimidating, that they scare away traditional agencies, and reduce the competition in the new media agency space.
Connors has actually made the deliberate decision to deliver paid-search through partners, and to focus instead itself on genuine editorial search coverage. This is the proper domain for PR, and is ever more widely acknowledged by industry observers as the most valuable company asset. Those who master natural search--especially ACROSS engines--are not beholden to anyone. As engines come and go, their asset and very strong posture will remain. With properly executed public relations, a strong presence in search is not the result of an advertising campaign that only lasts as long as you're buying the media. Instead, it persists, just as with the genuine reputation that comes from repeated exposure from trusted sources.
Connors has developed technology to do exactly that. It's different from the type of software you'll find in the SEM world, such as bid management tools, because it's not a media buy. It's a media seize--but in very small, smart increments. Results will be completely measurable, and over time, you can grab bigger and bigger pieces of the editorial media. Eventually, such small grabs will build enough critical mass within your site that making the big keyword grabs becomes possible.
What do I mean by that? Well for example, search for PR firm in any major search engine. Connors was not able to achieve the first page position across all major engines over night, even though it's the subject matter of the main homepage. We first had to start with smaller concepts. We used HitTailing to build up the content of our website and our blog. And over time, the concept of PR firms kept coming up, and natural links started to occur to us from people discovering our site, and they would reliably refer to us as a PR firm, without any prodding on our part. It's a 100% organic process that led from obscure HitTailing to spot-on cross-engine top positions on a paydirt primary keyword that PR firms much larger than us would kill for.Labels: blog, Connors Communications, Google, HitTail, HitTail Plus, MSN, outreach, pr, SEM, seo, Yahoo
posted by Mike Levin
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Gauging AdWord Dependency
Monday, April 17, 2006
Many marketing publications appear to be covering the April 2006 study from iProspect Search Engine Marketing Studies including keyword research regarding the first three pages being the most important. The most recently publication I noticed picking it up was eMarketer (this morning), despite the news being over a week old. I believe this hunger for the study is due to marketing managers the world over gauging their dependencies on their AdWords campaigns. If they were to go off of AdWords, how much would it cost them in terms of traffic, and how easy would it be to win back the traffic through the free alternative of natural or organic search?Labels: Adwords, SEM
posted by Mike Levin
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Click Fraud Settlement
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Google recently agreed to a $90 million settlement concerning click through fraud. Such a large settlement seems to indicate that Google does recognize this as a problem. Will settlements from Yahoo Search Marketing, MSN adCenter, and Ask Sponsored Listings follow? It would make sense. If you’re paying per click, competitors have the opportunity to add to the rate of your click-throughs without adding any sales. It's hard for any Google, let alone end users to track while it can skew your data and ending up costing you an unknown amount for bogus clicks.
This is a flaw of pay per click ads. And this on top of the difficulties of trying to run a real-time, comprehensive paid search campaign can make increasing search traffic a difficult and expensive proposition. Is the traffic from paid search even worth it? Search engine algorithms consistently go through changes and refinement, yet one thing doesn’t change. Natural search has advantages over paid search results. It gets your site into the most credible area of search results, on the main page of search, not buried among random advertising from eBay or NexTag, and also comes without the per click price tag.
Paid search has become big business. Yet it is more vulnerable than regular search results because you can have issues such as click fraud and the results disappear as soon as you stop paying for them. The safest bet in search is still bolstering organic search results, naturally avoiding any click-through fraud. And by settling this lawsuit and admitting this flaw in their system, Google seems to agree.Labels: Google, MSN, SEM, Yahoo
posted by Jessica Ek
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Search Engine Optimization is For You
Thursday, September 29, 2005
One of the huge benefits of team blogging is that we can play off of each other and make the interplay that usually takes place in email take place on the corporate blog, and use that demonstrate our smartness, and create new opportunities by attracting search traffic on the subject-matter. Case-in-point: every day, we send out a flurry of emails on developments in the Search and SEO space. There's news like Google making the WiFi download available, and opening the huge facility right around the corner from our office here in New York. But there's also controversial articles 7 Ways To Know That Search Engine Optimization Isn’t For You where we could counter every point. Together with the iProspect and MarketingExperiments report, it's almost enough to make one paranoid that there is some attempt to knock SEO going on.
Now I know that the type of work that goes into SEO and SEM is dramatically different. But they are different specialties and different segments under the marketing umbrella. There's room for both. I somehow get the vibe that people who run pay-per-click campaigns are not entirely comfortable with the emerging industry of SEO growing up, adding accountability, metrics, ROI and precise tracking that is as good (or in our case, better) than the tracking URLs within the AdWord world. If you take the time to maintain a website, then you should be receiving all the natural search engine traffic that is your right, based on the quality and reputation of your company, products and services. While we believe that PPC is a valuable part of the marketing mix, we feel that turning a blind eye to SEO is leaving money on the table. No matter your situation, search engine optimization is for you. Talk to us to find out why.
Oh yeah, the point here is that you should blog the news here instead of email, becuse Blogger will send the entire body of the blog post in email to the entire SEO team anyway—links and all.Labels: Adwords, Google, search, SEM, seo
posted by Connors Communications
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