Why Choose a Los Angeles SEO Firm During a Tough Economy?

There is no question that small to medium-sized businesses often struggle during tough economic times. Over the years we have seen many clients try to cut back on marketing during these times. There are several schools of thought on the topic: 1) A bad economy is the time to spend money on marketing. 2) Don't spend what you don't have.

Well here is another thought. We have actually been getting quite few new business leads lately. Why? Today, more and more people realize that search engine optimization (SEO) is a must, because most people realize that if they are not in the top pages of the engines like Google or Yahoo, their customers may not find them. But with that there is allot of confusion about who they should hire and what the right SEO strategies. Lucky for us we have lots of experience, and in fact are possibly one of the few Los Angeles SEO firms that are also experts in the new Social Media Marketing -- according to guru and author of The New Influencers, Paul Gillin, MarCom is actually part of the ten percent of marketers nationally doing it. The other 90 percent are still trying to figure out what it is.

In 2006, MarketingSherpa did a survey of 3,053 client-side marketers. They determined that SEO was viewed as the most valuable marketing solution in terms of return on investment (ROI.) In other words, ROI is critical during an uncertain economy.

In the past, traditional marketing and advertising meant spending quite a bit of your budget on tactics that typically don't provide tracking methods for figuring out if it works. Today, the beauty of the Internet and new media marketing is that we can track the results, and tweak the campaigns for better results if need be. In other words, we are more of a lead generation company, than just SEO, or PR or marketing.

A good SEO campaign can tell you a lot about your market because when we do our research about your market, we also research your competitors. We can even see how much money they have been spending on Pay per Click ads. We can determine how many visitors go to their website. A keyword analysis will tell us exactly how many people are searching and what words and phrases they use to find what products and services like you offer

We know that our campaigns address a need or a desire - so when we optimize your website, it will be so that the visitors referred from search engines through your target keywords will have a chance to find you and what you're offering on your website. Int he end SEO should help drive quality traffic to your website. And with that you have a better chance of closing the sale.

We use HitsLink for web analytics, which is a great program to tell more details of what people do after they do come to your site. do they stay on one page longer than others? Do they spend enought time on your site? How much time? Where did they come from before they went to your site? Tracking your website allows you to track your users.

So how should you decide if you need to invest in SEO and or Social Media Marketing? In-house employees are going t probably be too pricey. And on top of that, few people in the marketing today have as much experience as we as SEO experts have. So you are better off hiring outside consultants like MarCom.

The bottom line, SEO and social media marketing should not just be an afterthought to your marketing plan, especially during tough economic times. Because with such good ROI, you really cannot go wrong. In fact, you may get more business than you had before.

New Domain Name Controversy for Online Marketing

So would you like a website domain name that ends in dot.bank? dot.hotel, or what about dot. restaurant? Well in the future of the world wide Web, you may get your wish. This may be the situation, and major brands are really worried about having to spend millions in order to protect their brands.

The entity that oversees the Web, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, plans to start selling the rights to an unlimited number of top-level domain names in the year 2009. The names would be those of popular subjects geographic locations, types of businesses.

Think about it this way. If you were a national restaurant with a cool branded name, for instance, like McWeener, and you already owned all the sites you thought you needed to own surrounding that name, like McWeener.com, McWeener.biz, and dot.org, dot.net, etc. Now you have to worry about owning McWeener (dot)restaurant, or McWeener (dot) Los Angeles and every other city where the franchises exist too!

Big companies are really worried that this situation could open the doors to Internet scams and fraud, and drastically increase their costs of doing business online. Brand names could get hijacked, causing millions in legal fees, and loss of business.

Online Marketing in Tough Economy

Recent reports say that the percentage of small and midsized home and trade-services businesses with Web sites will increase to 60 percent by 2010, up from just 33 percent today. (Source: Kelly Group.)

And the other trend - social media marketing - shows that there are also a number of consumer referral and home-services community sites like Craig's List or ServiceMagic. In addition, small business entrepreneurs are posting pages on MyFace, while creative talent post on pages in MySpace.

There is much interest in marketing online today, as the costs are less than print or electronic advertising, and more and more customers use the Internet to find what they want. MarCom New Media, Los Angeles SEO consultants, always recommends the business directories for our clients. Yahoo! is around $299, and others include the SuperPages, with a monthly fee at about $75.00

Other tools for small businesses include CitySearch and YellowPages.com to capture those searching in a local geographic area.

Why the Internet is an Awesome Social Measurement Tool?

I have been reading an interesting book that I know some folks would find quite boring. I even think it is boring at times - as I am NOT a numbers person. But the point is that it is a good indicator of this business we are in called Internet Marketing. The book is called Click, by Bill Tancer, and it is about what millions of people are doing online and why it matters. Much of the book is about the fact that companies competing in the online space need to use competitive intelligence data - because that's what Bill does for a living at Hitwise.

This book has taken me awhile to read, unlike Paul Gillin's book called the New Influencers, which I couldn't put down. I think partly because I am not a numbers person, and Tancer is all about statistics, numbers and data. But yesterday I finally got to an ah-haaa moment when I realized that the point of the book will have tremendous value for some of our clients. In a chapter called "Finding the Early Adopters" Tancer talks about why innovation spreads from one idea to mass adoption.

Why for example did it only take YouTube less than six months to host more than 25 million videos and out rank Yahoo!? He says that the reason is probably because the first group to discover YouTube was called "Innovators." The Internet has always been made up of different segments. He knows this because his company has a tool that figures out what websites people were on before they clicked over to visit YouTube. Turns out allot of them were on sites like MySpace, Friendster, Xanga, and even Facebook.

But here is the really cool part. His data showed after about a month, the numbers started shifting and he was seeing traffic from web-based email accounts like HotMail, or Yahoo!Mail. Why? Because YouTube did a brilliant thing. Once a person posted their video on the site, the company let them email their video production with a link to their video to a friend! And when friends clicked on the video, it took them to YouTube, and the data showed that's where the new audience had come from.

It is the same reason why this target group started getting tongue rings and drinking Hussong's Beer. It was cool. And they shared the news with their friends. Other market segments include what Tancer calls the Bohemian Mix - that Claris pretty much describes as a bunch of mobile urbanites living liberal lifestyles - and are early adopters of entertainment and technology; Money and Brains; and the Young Digerati. You'll have to get his book to learn more about these guys. But my point here is that as a marketer, the trends we are seeing on the Internet can be measured better than any previous kind of marketing, ever.

The ways that we as a Los Angeles search engine marketing firm doing social media marketing online can track a campaign for our clients, are sprinkled throughout our strategies, and we are getting fabulous results.

Social Media Marketing Comes of Age

After attending a Social Media Marketing "Agency Bootcamp" luncheon yesterday, it has come to my attention that very few marketers are doing what MarCom is doing. In a room filled with Los Angeles advertising agency staffers and consultants, I can honestly say that very few knew social media marketing to the depth that we do. In fact, I have read that we are in the top ten percent nationwide and the other 90 percent are just starting to try to catch up.

We regularly update our website with relevant searchable content and post new search engine optimization (SEO) tags, descriptions and links on the pages as needed. We have set up multiple RSS feeds - one for press releases, another for articles, and I am about to set up a third one for newsletters. we use http://www.press-feed.com/. I have joined a few more social networks and niche communities to mine customers -- places like FaceBook, and I will be updating LinkedIn and MySpace regularly now.

We added a new social media blog on our homepage, so now there are two - each with a seperate focus. I have started conversations online by stepping up my blogging, added more blogrolls, updated MySpace. Next I need to begin Friending in Facebook, then Twitter about current happenings to my growing list of followers.

MarCom has been writing a number of articles that can be social bookmarked at DIGG, but I want to create a Google map mashup and then start a white paper for people to StumbleUpon or find at Squidoo.

My associates and I have been brainstorming ideas for podcasts and videos to post on YouTube, and we have even thought about doing a virtual B-2-B seminar at Second Life. I plan to research and sign up for some new measurement and conversation mining tools to listen to what people are saying online, although everyone in the social media marketing industry agrees, the tools are still not there yet.

We have started conversations with our own clients to update their social media marketing strategies. MarCom New Media is looking forward to continuing to lead the transformation from old school marketing to building relationships in online communities, and we are already celebrating the results.

Oh BTW if you have no clue what I am talking about…you need to read Paul Gillin’s book, The New Influencers, and of course, hire us as your Los Angeles social media marketing firm.

Online Marketing Trends: Virtual Learning via Second Life

Apparently there's a group at Second Life called 'Real Life Education in Second Life.' It is made up of people who are interested in the educational possibilities of Second Life. According to them, there are more than 400 universities and 4,500 educators participating in the Second Life Educators List (SLED). And this group is studying how to leverage the benefits of learning in a virtual world in order to assist the students of today.



Caption: From Second Life, students role-play a courtroom scene in Ramapo, Suffern (N.Y.) Middle School’s virtual world campus hosted by Peggy Sheehy in Teen Second Life.

In an article written by a professor of computer science at Colorado Technical University named Cynthia M. Calonge, she notes, "the benefits outweigh the risks associated with venturing into a virtual world educational platform. For me, the virtual world is my preferred learning and teaching environment."

What does this have to do with what our Los Angeles marketing firm can do for our clients? It means is that more and more of our clients need to set up social media networks, to engage with customers, teach them, and share knowledge. And it means that websites need to be filled with content to educate people about what they do and optimized properly with the search engines so that they will come up first on the search engines. And blogs are becomming a way of life.

Imagine the magnitude of virtual classrooms? Futurists like James Canton and author of The Extreme Future, have already said that one of the top ten industries of the innovation economy is, "8. Education and Learning. The creation of immediate, portable, transferable, on-demand knowledge sources on a scale equivalent to the Library of Congress."

The True Value of Social Media

Finally, advertisers are beginning to realize how valuable social media marketing can be. This is truely exciting because now more than before, our clients are starting to understand the value when we recommend social media campaigns.

Just yesterday at the doctor seminar, Two Days Back on Earth, on environmental endocrinology for our client T.S. Wiley and The Wiley Protocol (http://www.thewileyprotocol.com/), Wiley's book publisher talked about the importance of social media to the traditional publishing industry today. She said they now strategize books that have websites for reference materials and more information, and places where people can host e-books and chapters that are bookmarked pages from new book releases.

This means we can strategize longer term social media campaigns for MarCom New Media clients -- and just like any marketing campaign, it takes hard work, tracking, which the Internet makes easy, as well as maintenance.

We can easily blend direct-response and branding. It is about the objective for the campaign, then fine tuning the right strategy. The good news is that the Web is ideal for measurment.

Today, 70 percent of the ad dollars online are going toward direct-response advertising, but the shift toward brand-building campaigns is starting to happen. Check the following interesting stats from a recent research report. (Source: Awareness, Inc.)

• The number of organizations that allow employees to use social networks for business purposes has increased dramatically to 69% in 2008 from 37% last year.
• More than six in 10 companies are using social media to build and promote their brands, improve communication and increase consumer engagement.
• There has been a fivefold increase in the percentage of employees who use popular social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn for business purposes, from 15% in 2007 to 75% this year.
• Some 37% of organizations plan to focus communities on specialty areas where they can provide focused business value.
• More than 40% of respondents report using one or more of the following tools: user groups, tags, communities, blogs, social networking and videos.
• The most popular internal tools are social networks, blogs and wikis, with adoption rates of between 50% and 55%.