Tuesday, March 31, 2009

The MarCom New Media Search Engine Marketing Audit

MarCom is no doubt, one of just a few cutting edge social media marketing firms in Los Angeles, and we are always getting leads for companies that have no clue about what their online marketing needs are or should be. Many people believe their web designers, or programmers, who often times "think" they know how to do search engine optimization (SEO). Our experience almost every time is that companies are NOT well optimized. if anything, webd esigners can do more damage than good when it comes to advising about SEO.

In order to help a company determine what they need to do insofar as SEO and SMM, MarCom has been also been conducting search engine optimization audits for companies. We just did one for client, ExpenseWatch.

Here's what our basic statement of work for an audit looks like. First we research and determine the keywords associated with your company's products or services that are most likely to achieve high search-engine rankings. Next we recommended a keyword strategy with the top SEO words and phrases and make suggestions to map the keywords to specific website pages, as well as how these words relate to competitive websites. You'll get a very comprehensive spreadsheet with this data.

Next MarCom conducts an audit of your current SEO and SEM and then provides recommendations for improving both. The audit reviews website content and offers suggestions for how to repackage pages and add to them. The navigation of the site is reviewed. In some cases we can provide a formula for your website Meta, title and description tags but it's often just easier for us to be hired to implement them.

The audit will also include your competitor activities, site visitor information, Google Adwords spends and organic search results. MarCom also recommends analytics or measurement tools and provides tips to analyze data. If your company already has a Google Adwords program, we'll review it (once you give us access) and provide tips for budgeting, improvements in the campaigns and we'll analyze their results. One of our clients was spending $28k per month. They are now down to around $7k per month thanks to our work. We weaned them off of Google Adword spending and improved their search engine results so they tripled their leads. We saved big marketing dollars.

In summary, many companies are able to leverage their existing content and outside websites already linking to them by using best of breed Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics. These include adding individual, relevant title tags, description tags, and where applicable, alt image tags to the website. But for others, we recommend our three phase approach: 1) Onsite optimization. 2) Offsite Optimization, and 3) Linking strategies and Social Media Marketing.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Find me on Twitter at MarCom4SMM - for Social Media Marketing

The Aberdeen Group recently published a report, “The ROI on Social Media Marketing,” which was sponsored by Visible Technologies. The report affirms that marketers have developed the methods and tools to drive return on investment (ROI) for companies via social media. It's just one more reason why I now have a Twitter account for MarCom - twitter me at MarCom4SMM.

This just affirms what Marcom New Media, a Los Angeles social media marketing firm, has been doing for the last five years, which entails listening to customers and influencing prospects. Actually, we keep telling clients that in order to compete online, flourish and be more profitable, there are three key steps:

Phase I - Online SEO
Phase II - Offline Link Building and Pay per Click (PPC)
Phase III- Social Media Marketing

The research report said 63 percent of the companies in their survey (defined as best-in-class) planned to increase their social media marketing budgets this year.

The truth is, social media networks started around the spring of 2007, and today, memberships in platforms like Facebook, or My Space, are in the hundreds of millions. We started doing tactics like forum posting back in the year 2000.

But there is something else know as social media optimization. This includes offsite optimization strategies with the intent of distributed content across multiple social media networks. Tools for this include adding links to services such as Digg, Del.icio.us or Readdit.

MarCom writes unique content (all articles must be 30 to 40 % unique or different than any other document on the Web) that's embedded with your key words and phrases, so when people search online, there’s a better chance of finding your content via the search engines.

We are also a Los Angeles Search Engine Marketing (SEM) firm, and helps clients audit and determine search marketing strategies for increased lead generation online. We use a many different social networking platforms for branding online.

A couple of the areas that have grown for us includes ghostwriting blogs for clients. We also shoot video shorts, edit them and syndicate them online in places like Google video or YouTube, and record and manage podcasts. We recently completed a number of online videos for our client The Wiley Protocol, which are also on YouTube, and syndicated around the Internet.

Monday, March 16, 2009

Email Marketing Report in From Forrester

According to a March 13, 2009 alert from Forrester, a report entitled, "Optimizing Email Marketing In An Economic Slowdown And Its Impact On Vendor Selection," by David Daniels
with Lauren Jesuitus, Corina Matiesanu, Dave Frankland and Emily Murphy, makes it clear we need to take heed. Following is an excerpt from that document. Marcom New Media, a Los Angeles Internet marketing company, believes that Forrester reports are a good indicator of the marketing marketplace.

"The current economic environment puts increased pressure on email marketers against which they must adjust their practices and strategies. A July 2008 JupiterResearch/Clickz survey of 286 email marketing executives reveals classic challenges of constrained staffing resources and data integration challenges. Driven by staffing challenges and the need to drive further cost efficiencies, 24% of marketers plan on switching their email service providers (ESPs) over the next 12 months. Email Marketers will need to quickly respond to changing consumer communication patterns and social marketing opportunities and must prioritize tactics to create efficiencies within their email marketing practices, such as improved use of targeting, leveraging automation and customer generated content as well as removing non-responsive subscribers from ongoing mailings."