eMarketer's Online Predictions for 2009: Multicultural Ramp Up

This just out ... According to eMarketer, traditional media will suffer in 2009, with more print media going out of business, while online media's future looks bright, including search engine optimization, online video, and social media marketing.

They also mentioned something called multicultural initiatives - which will gain intensity. What is this? "Since white Americans make up about 70 percent of the US Internet population, more and more African-Americans and Hispanics are going online through their PCs and their mobile phones, therefore marketers will follow, targeting these segments with language and culture-specific messages, which will evolve from their general-market campaigns." (Source: eMarketer)
Aside from that, today's Internet is a buyer's market with search engine marketing remaining recession-proof, at an estimated growth of 14.9 percent in 2009 up to $12.3 billion.

Key trends include video advertising spending which is projected to go up 45 percent to $850 million. Just watch the escalation of videos online. MarCom is set up to do our next video campaign for the Wiley Protocol this Sunday. We're interviewing doctors attending her Two Days Back on Earth CME seminar on environmental endocrinology.

Web 2.0 from all our sources is on shaky ground, and MarCom's online guru, Mike Keesling, says it will not go away, but it's reached its peak potential insofar as SEO factors. This is where the youth market is and the referral value is still here.

The main issues this year for businesses with websites are twofold: Are you optimized and do you have good original content? What does that mean per Google's manifesto? You need the correct tags on your Web pages, plus 300 to 400 words of original (and optimized) content on each page.

We can show you how to do do this consistently, how to optimize your tags and do off site optimization and link back strategies. We can teach you how to do it yourself, or we can do it. It is not rocket science but in 2009 you have to do it. Most vulnerable are those who use CMS programs, which for the most part are terrible for SEO.

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.

Popular Social Media Marketing Terms

Have you heard of an “RSS feed” or a “mashup?” You know what a“wiki” is, right? If not, you are not alone. In fact, many people are still clueless about social media marketing (SMM), which is defined as the use of the Internet technology tools for the purpose of sharing and discussing information with others. In other words, it is all about going on websites like Facebook, My Space, Twitter, or You Tube and sharing ideas, interests and “gossip” with other people of like mind ... or not. (People do disagree online of course.) But more important is to understand is how marketers use social media in our marketing efforts.

We can control messages and market your products and services online with well thought out SMM strategies, and clever tactics. For example, one such social media site is known as "del.icio.us” which is a social bookmarking website. These sites allow users to store and share your bookmarks online. You can access these bookmarks from any computer anywhere, anytime. Another SMM site is called “DIGG,” where users submit content and then other Digg users read your submission and Digg what they like. In this case popularity rules, and the more diggs you get the better it is for your brand.

Much of what MarCom New Media does is search engine optimization, combined with online public relations and marketing that all ties together. We do keyword analysis to see what terms folks use to search for your company online, then come up with a strategy to use those words in blogs, articles, releases, and on SMM websites, linking back to your website. It builds traffic so you can prosper online.

SMM Definitions:
RSS - Really Simple Syndication. This is the primary way people can syndicate content from Web sites, blogs and social networking sites to be read online by other people in what are known as RSS readers. RSS is very important for a company and its website because it allows people to track current news via their RSS Feeds.

RSS Tags. Simple technology that allows you to bookmark specific Web pages and sites of interest. It is how Digg and del.icio.us work.

Mashups. This brings multiple sources of data together and creates a single application, or Web service which helps manage events, etc. Content used in mashups usually comes from a third party via a public interface that combines data from more than one source into a single tool. One new example is Earthquake! A Google Maps mashup – thanks to the recent worldwide earthquakes.

Wikis. A collection of Web pages allowing anyone to add or edit content. This tool can help company employees, for example, in their collaboration efforts for projects or clients.
Internet marketing tactics continue to change on a frequent basis thanks to the search engines like Google, and new technologies. As marketers, we must learn fast, adapt, and then tweak strategies for what works best.

The State of Internet Advertising

According to ZenithOptimedia research the Internet will account for 10.2 percent share of 2008 global ad spending. Television comes in at 37.6 percent and magazines at only 11.6 percent. It’s no wonder that all my magazines now fit in the mailbox – their pages keep getting thinner. But then we have known this for quite some time as more and more people adapt to getting their news from the Internet. In fact analysts have predicted that it will take another ten years before the medium is well established.

I still prefer reading the hard copy of the Wall Street Journal every morning. Speaking of which, today there was a long feature article on the front page of the Wall Street Journal regarding Google’s push to sell ads on You Tube, the place online where they claim people watch videos more than one billion times a day.

Historically, it was 2002 when Google revamped its sales model for search ads – when a Google user searches for something online, ads related to the search words pop up next to the results. Right now Google makes most of its money via the text ads that are part of online searches. That means if you are looking for the latest trends in education, these ads come up in the results page -- the ones in the middle are called “organic” listings, while those in the grey blue boxes along the top and the sides are Google text ads. But the company wants to expand its video ads and claim the other 89.8 percent of the global ad dollars that are not currently being spent on the Internet – meaning video and display advertising. After all that is why Google bought You Tube in 2006.

Just imagine – some day when you go online you’ll get all the same stuff we get today. Television commercials at the beginning, middle and end of people’s personal You Tube videos – maybe display ads on blog posts – and billboards will be everywhere along the Internet highway.Google refers to the video spots as "preroll" and "postroll" ads, which could run before and after video clips, and companies that post video clips would get the option to sell these ads, and share the revenue with Google. Advertisers consider them very effective.I don’t mean to sound sarcastic, because after all this is our business here at MarCom New Media.

But if you read the WSJ article, you’ll see how things have been slowed down much like the entertainment industry strikes – thanks to copyright litigation, which has made the YouTube advertising push more complex. This is great news for us because it gives us a chance to digest strategies for our clients for Internet advertising. I love all the food related projects code names the company came up with for all of their latest initiatives –“Project Spaghetti” which is designed to help untangle the challenges with its advertising operations, which was 98 percent of Google's Q1 revenue. As always, people in high tech are always thinking about food.

Google also recently acquired DoubleClick Inc., to ramp up their display ads revenue, but that has not done too well. The company is known for inserting ads onto Web sites in addition to offering a way for ad agencies to manage and track online ads. They say these display ads are only generating a few hundred million right now.

We have one client called The Entertainment Career Connection that provides educational apprentice programs for the film, radio, television and the music recording industries. EC has mentor programs in more than 100 U.S. cities in all fifty states. After Mike Keesling, our SEO expert did SEO for three of their websites, we are now focusing on branding, public relations and social media marketing, in addition to their PPC campaign, he began to manage their Pay per Click (PPC) campaign. It was at around $29k per month.In less than one year we reduced the Entertainment Career Connection’s PPC budget from $29k per month to $9k per month. After six months of a carefully planned and executed reduction of the PPC budget, PPC media was at $11k, and after the SEO campaigns kicked in, plus after re-skinning the websites, we reduced the PPC campaign to $9k in about a year, while increasing SEO and social media marketing campaigns. We like the SEO technology environment better than PPC because it costs less than the ads.

Here’s the kicker -- for one third the budget they are getting 170 percent of the business, as we have decreased Entertainment Connection’s original PPC budget by 67 percent of what it was, and increased the number of leads by 67 percent. Their websites is getting excellent rankings for the keywords including: The Recording Connection, The Film-Connection and Radio Connection.

In the end, it will be up to the consumers to drive successful advertising online. I got an email this morning on my blog from a guy who really liked one of my old blog posts, "Consumers Define Social Media Marketing." Check it out and let me know what you think.

The Best Link Building Practices

One of, if not the most important element in getting high search engine rankings for your Website is what is called link building. The search engines analyze and count links to your website - and they take a look at patterns for linking, linking profiles, deep-linking, and if you have used one-way versus the now old school reciprocal link building strategies.

As we have said many times before, content is king on your site. But right up there in importance is the quality of each link. That is more important than how many links you have.

Here are ten tips from our MarCom SEO expert, Mike Keesling's tips for link building.

1) Make your links inbound one-way links with anchor text that is related to your site.
2) Links should be from a site that’s related to the theme and content of your Website.
3) You need to vary the anchor text of your keywords and keyphrases when getting links from other sites.
4) Find your competition’s links at Yahoo.com -- type linkdomain:competition.com.
5) Do NOT do reciprocol links, but IF you do, create a special link swapping page on your site.
6) Don't use link farms, which are sites that host a large array of spam links.
7) There are some good directories for link building but most are worthless.
8) Links from social media websites like DIGG are fantastic. Getting an article on the front page might even cause your server to crash!
9)Electronic press releases are good links. Use PRweb.com.
10) Do NOT purchase links.

Basically, anyone can do these link building SEO strategies, however, those of us who have been doing SEO and social media for as long as we have, use other special tricks, and we know how to get the best links because we also link using your key words and phrases.

Ten Steps: Defining Social Media Marketing

The Internet is not just a different advertising channel, but an entirely new and unique culture with a multitude of online communities. Although there are many folks that think social media marketing is just the latest fad, it is not. The reality is, it is changing how we do business.

Although traditional marketing and new media strategies continue to morph, the Internet has emerged into a tremendous platform for direct and open communications among the media, businesses, and individuals worldwide.

Many of our new clients need some basic education on what we recommend, why and how we do what we do. We have been using these ten steps in most of our proposals for quite some time now.

Search engine optimization, social media marketing and online PR tactics include:
1) Fully analyze your situation, including competition, market, etc.
2) Conduct keyword research to determine the keywords associated with your name most likely to achieve high search-engine rankings and create a keyword strategy to map the keywords to specific website pages.
3) Optimize the pages of the website, www.meridianlasercare.com.
4) Create a blog and ghostwrite apx. -1 to 2 posts per week recommended.
5) Social Media Marketing: Create additional site content through writing and publishing articles to disseminate over the Internet
6.) Post and distribute electronic press releases (Using wires such as MarketWire or PRWeb)
7.) Create bookmarked posts to social media sites. (DIGG, Del.ic.ious, Stumble Upon, etc.)
8.) Optimize existing and new content over the next three months and execute the social media PR plan.
9.) Acquire reciprocal links and incoming links via article submissions, electronic press releases and a blog.
10.) Purchase directory listings for your new website to provide additional, high page rank links. Directories include Yahoo! Directory, Superpages as well as any industry specific directories with high page rank. (Yahoo is $299/Year Superpages runs $22/month)

The real truth is that although these basic steps are usually recommended, there is no single template for every client, because every client's situation, website, and place among thier competition is unique. MarCom's Social Media Marketing proposals are customized for each new client, and then throughout the yearly campaign tweak their strategies based on results we are seeing from the tracking results.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Versus Pay per Click (PPC)

We had a new business opportunity this week with a medical professional client who is completely confused about search engine optimization (SEO), versus Pay per Click (PPC) advertising. And she is not the only potential new client who doesn't get it. Some of my most sophisticated professional friends are having a hard time grasping the new media tactics that we do required for getting their websites onto the first pages of Google and the search engines.

This gal asked about her PPC campaign, and why it isn't getting any results after three weeks... so my associate Mike spelled it out. First he did her competitive landscape, and determined that she only had three other real competitors in her geographical area. One of the three was getting 15,000 visitors per month. But they also had more than 300 pages of content on their website. Her site had very few in comparison. He researched and noted that the competitor was spending about $700 in PPC advertising. The lesser known competitor got about 570 visitors per month, and did not have a PPC campaign. Both of her competitors have press rooms which means she will need one too and they are a great place for linkable content. The more content on your site with relevant keywords the better.

If your goal is to book five clients per week initially, and then eventually in a year, you want to have ten clients per week, think about these numbers. Typically conversion rates for Internet customers are a three to five percent lead generation per visitor to your website. Out of 100 visits per site, you should get three to five leads, and out of those, one percent will buy. Basically it takes 20 leads for one customer. You need a minimum of 100 visitors per day to get business, or about 500 visitors to get a sale. It's compounded as well, so the more visitors, the better the chances for sales.

But here is the deal insofar as PPC. It's important to remember that PPC may be beneficial when launching a company and its products and services online, but ultimately PPC and offline advertising benefits will disappear as soon as you stop spending money, while SEO keeps on working long after the money is spent. We actually helped wean another client off of spending thousands on PPC ads, while increasing their SEO results. The Entertainment Connection, who offer film schools for audio engineers and radio professionals - people who want to learn how to be a DJ for instance. One of the tactics I worked on was to get their press room up and running with press releases and a press kit. Next I will be writing articles and blog content for them to provide links back to their website, while Mike will continue adding website content and track their optimization, tweaking their site for increasing their customer leads via SEO.

That said, our goal for clients is to evaluate their needs, by asking these six questions:
1) What is your URL or website address?
2) When people search for your product or service on Google, where does your website appear?
3) Do you have a tracking or measurement program for your website?
4) Who are your top five competitors (National/Regional/Local)
5) How much traffic do you think your website can get by this time next year?
6) How many customers from your website would you like per month?

For a free analysis feel free to email us - check out http://marcombroadband.com/

Internet Growth Projections: 6.6%

I was doing research for our client the Entertainment Connection and found a Hollywood Reporter article written by Georg Szalai siting an annual study from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in June of 2006 predicting that a surge in growth in the online sector, global entertainment and media will expand into a $1.83 trillion industry in 2010, up from an estimated $1.33 trillion in 2005.

The report also indicated that the biggest global industry engines during that time frame will be Internet advertising and access spending, for which PwC projects a compound annual growth rate of 12.9 percent. The Internet sector, the report said, would be set for a five-year compound boost of 8.4 percent -- driven by online ads, radio/out-of-home media.

The article also said, "Internet advertising will see the largest five-year surge -- at an 18.1% compound rate -- from an estimated $22.45 billion last year to $51.6 billion in 2010... TV network ad revenue will increase to $51.95 billion in 2010, and online ads to $25.5 billion."

These figures are interesting, especially when we note other research that talks about declines in other media. In our MarCom social media marketing powerpoint presentation I have mentioned the following stats:

Decline in traditional media
–Box office is down 7%
–Newspaper circulation peaked in ‘87
–Down another 2.6% in 2006
–Radio was down 4% in 2006
–TV viewership is rising; audience is fragmenting and show ratings are declining
–Magazine ad revenues are up a bit; number of ad pages is flat; women’s magazine circulation is down
–Celebrity magazines continue to grow …

Ask any student where they hear the news -- as did at Cal State Northridge where I lectured a couple of weeks ago -- and they will tell you, "on the Internet."

The bottom line here is that marketers are realizing that the budgets they set for the future must include good white hat search engine optimization and social media strategies.

The Economics of New Media, or Social Media, Marketing

As of this week, MarCom Broadband is transitioning into a new website that will be known as MarCom New Media. And I also have another blog that I have started to mirror the new MarCom corporate identity, called MarCom New Media. For awhile I will post on both my blogs. And as always, we try to instruct as we do, so just a hint here ... the content needs to be 30 percent or more different if you post the same topic in more than one place on the Internet. Otherwise only one gets the "credit" with the search engines.

There are several names in marketing for basically the same thing these days. We happen to prefer the term new media, as opposed to social media. During a recession, people in business often pull in their horns on advertising dollars, especially for branding and awarenhess campaigns. In fact, one of my new associates has been calling people who have big ads in the pages of local newspapers, educating them on how they COULD be spending their money on online tactics , which are measurable and bring better results.

New media, or social media marketing is more about people sharing information than awareness. And because of that, interactive new media marketing is here to stay. We believe it is almost recession proof. One reason is the cost factor. Social and new media applications include blogs, social media platforms like FaceBook or MySpace, article submissions, etc. which cost next to nothing except the professional's time to post. Even PRWeb releases, are only max. $360 per post as opposed to more costly wires. I also like using ProfNet -- a great way to find editor's who are writing about a specific topic. It saves in PR media pitching time. I have a ProfNet account under the health category for my client T.S. Wiley and The Wiley Protocol.

Furthermore, social media is also measurable, generating leads, at which point the conversion ratios can be measured. If 3000 people come to your website, and only 200 purchase a product, with the right social media tactics, you might be able to increase that number so that more peopole convert from lokkie lous to customers.

Search advertising, pop-up ads and email marketing might also be recession-proof, as would integrated direct mail programs that direct folks to a special website (which will measure who shows up). Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising even has its place until your SEO has time to take over, at which time you can reduce your PPC budget, and insome cases for our clients, we have illiminated PPC from the marketing mix. One client recently cut his PPC from more than $18k per mo to $0. And even more leads are coming in thanks to our excellent SEO efforts.

But, none of these new media tactics will work without the right search engine optimization (SEO). With Flash websites and content management software (CMS) -- they are often not SEO-able. My associate Mike Keesling says, embedded flash works, and some CMS programs are much better than others. But the bottom line, if you don't have an expert to do the keyword analysis, and recommend what keywords should be used to Meta and Title-tag your website, people who search for your product or service using search engines like Yahoo or Google, may not find your website. You want to be ranked withing the first page of the engines listings.

New media and social media marketing is about helping provide links from six ways to Sunday on the Internet, so people will find your website, and interact.

Powers of Social Media Marketing

Here's an interesting factoid. If your website isn't optimized properly, it's probably no more than a portfolio, and unless you just point people to it, nobody will find it. And if it is flash, it can't be optimized for the search engines. In fact, for expedience and time, it's probably much faster and more effective if you have a blog, or post information in social media sites like You Tube, or My Space.

We have a couple of new projects at MarCom, one of which will require launching and getting information out to the masses by early January. We need to build a simple website first, and even if my associate Mike did a key word analysis, and then optimized all of the new website pages (the meta and alt image tags), Google and the search engines would not necessarily start tracking the site for well over a month. Mike is a pro at website optimization.

One mistake is that many website are using same title tags for all pages and no description tags. And then I typically take a look at the content inside each of the pages, and make sure the key words are placed properly.

There is one pretty cool program that we often recommend to our clients. It's called PRESSfeed. This is a cost effect and easy way to put up a press room and post and show press releases within a website. But more importantly, PRESSfeed is a Social Media Marketing tool that creates RSS feeds for online content syndication and publishing as well as for better search engine visibility.

A blog on the other hand, is also a great online marketing tool. They are pretty easy to set up, and ready to go insofar as the RSS feeds. This blog, for example, is by Blogger. It's easy to set it up, choose a template, add photos, and add keywords, or as they say "Labels for this post."

Another tip is that social media marketing strategies must be well planned in advance. This means you need to map out a schedule and budget for posting PR Web releases ($360 each), along with traditional press releases on a newswire such as PR Newswire. You need to schedule blog posts. Three per week minimum is advised at first. And then you can always do a social media video to post on You Tube - and the 30 or so other video websites online.

In fact, we have a new client that we started about a month ago that we can now begin tracking in my next blog as a case hisotry. Stay tuned...

Consumers Define Social Media Marketing

As with everything in marketing, it’s the consumer who defines the market in the end. And we are there ready to give them what they want via what we call MarCom On Demand. Today it’s essential that companies – large or small – deploy an online marketing strategy that engages its customers. People research stuff on the Internet, so they can basically find anything that they want online. They go to chat rooms, and join social networking sites like Linked In, Facebook or MySpace, read blogs, newsletters, news groups, and often interact in online forums, wikis and chat rooms.

We have been out there experimenting with all the latest the social media marketing tools for more than three years – the search engine optimized online marketing strategies and tactics that will draw customers in by way of putting our clients’ info out there on the Internet. It’s working. Many of our clients are now on the first pages of the search engines like Google, or Yahoo. As people are seeking information about our clients’ products and services, we have made sure that every piece of content on the Internet about our clients, such as their website copy, press room, and then press releases we distribute over the wires, and articles that we post in submission sites, are chocked full of the keywords that we have determined are best. We do a keyword analysis for each client, and these are the words being used to pull in information in on by individuals searching the Net.

Nowadays, we have become more like online business consultants at MarCom Broadband, and we have to really know our clients business, and know their customers. It takes hours of research sometimes – just to get it right. Then we use many different social media tools to convey messages for our clients – everything from ghost writing their blogs to writing newsletters. My associate Mike is doing some really cool video podcasts and video shorts for clients that he posts in over 25 plus different video sites, including the big ones like YouTube and Google, as well as on the client’s websites.

Meanwhile I have been busy writing, as I call it, “six ways to Sunday” with topics that stretch from press releases to blog copy to articles that I write in a very special social media format. This includes keywords placed in specific places, and using a specific number for characters in the titles and subheads. It’s all geared for the search engines to be able to read the content – and if your keywords are placed right, Google reads it, then serves it up to people using their engines to find what they want.

The bottom line is -- the days of just simply advertising and pushing PR messages out to people are over. With anti spam software, how many emails to you simply avoid these days? Even the media use the Internet to find what they want, so PR people become less important. It’s now more important than ever to engage people in conversations, get them interested, share knowledge, and let them sell themselves on your client’s products and services.