Internet Marketing Clinic

The newsletter I get from eMarketer is one of my favorite sources of information about what is going on with businesses and marketing on the Internet. Today, they provide information about how businesses are using social media to improve their marketing efforts to other businesses.

We have talked in other postings about how social media can drive traffic directly to a web site, and how it can be used to improve brand awareness. These are fairly obvious applications of the medium, and are entirely consistent with the efforts we make at marketing through our web sites themselves.

Less obvious, perhaps, is the benefit that social media offers in doing research into customer attitudes and preferences. If your company has established a presence on social media, you have an opportunity to listen to what your audience is saying about your business. That kind of information can head off some serious customer relationship issues, on occasion, but can also contribute to strengthening y0ur marketing of your site in more traditional ways.

We are always on the lookout for keyword phrases that can be important to our audience, and, in particular, phrases that might be overlooked by our competition! Those phrases are of special interest because of the impact they can have on the specific audience we are trying to reach, and because they can be much easier to achieve very high rankings on!

Keep on top of this important medium by following our comments on social media marketing.

The Economist has a briefing on the future of the Internet that makes very interesting reading. It is not an article about marketing on the web, although it touches on that topic, but one comment in particular caught my attention as I was reading the piece.

“Take Facebook, the web’s biggest social network. The site is a fast-growing, semi-open platform with more than 500m registered users. Its American contingent spends on average more than six hours a month on the site and less than two on Google. Users have identities specific to Facebook and communicate mostly via internal messages. “

Two points here hit me; Facebook has 500 million users, and they spend 3 times more hours on Facebook per day than they do on Google. That is a big market to be in contact with, and Google is not the best way to reach them! If they are your demographic target, you need to be on Facebook to get to them effectively!

In our clinic, we have had much discussion about the pros and cons of using Facebook as a marketing tool. There are definitely legitimate concerns about spending a lot of time investing in a Facebook based marketing strategy, but there is no denying the numbers and their import. In marketing, you have to go where your audience is.

Using Facebook as a marketing tool is a different proposition from marketing pages on your web site. It is a different tool with different characteristics and requirements. The audience is also different in how they interact with the platform and what their expectations are while they are engaged. Good marketing has to take all these factors into account, but the principle remains. You have to respect your prospects and their preferences, and you have to go where they are in order to reach them!

For more information, read some of the material we have collected on this blog about Facebook and using social media for your marketing.

Marketing on the Internet is constantly changing, and it pays to stay in touch with what the changes are as they happen. eMarketer featured an interview about changes in retailing marketing that will be of interest to businesses in this market segment.

One interesting comment in this interview is, “I’m seeing retailers spend less in paid search and invest more in search engine optimization.” That indicates that ranking on organic results may get more difficult as more attention is paid to this method of getting attention on the Internet. That emphasized the importance of staying in  touch with the latest techniques for promoting your business on the web, and of continually working on your site to maintain the competitive position that you have achieved. As the saying goes, “Never look back, someone might be gaining on you!” Even if you are doing a great job and out-performing all your competition, you cannot afford to let up in your efforts.

Another comment that jumped out at me is, “It’s still a bit of a mystery as to how to monetize Facebook.” This is a medium that business has not mastered yet. That says two things to me. One is that if you don’t quite understand how to make use of this tool, you are not alone. The second is that if you can figure out how to make it work for you, you will be ahead of the pack!

Now this is not going to work for everyone, or for all kinds of businesses, but if you are in a position to benefit from the audience that you can reach through this tool (Note: I am specifically thinking of Facebook as I write this.), it can prove to be a powerful tool for you.

The way I am seeing this used to some good effect is for a business to create a Facebook Page for their business. It could be useful to create multiple pages for different product lines(?) Creating a page is not a big job and does not require a huge investment of your time or energy.

The next step is to get the page in front of an audience. You must have people who are willing to become  a fan of the page. When you have created this audience, what you do is post something of interest periodically to keep yourself and your business in front of your audience. The people who have signed up to get your information will see that while they are browsing their pages for information about their friends.

What kind of business might this be a good vehicle for? An easy answer might be restaurants. Restaurants are social businesses, and people are always interested in learning about new and interesting restaurants, and would be happy to learn about specials that a restaurant might be running or a new menu item they are introducing. And people are always interested in getting referrals to restaurants from their friends who like a place. If your business fits this kind of pattern, this could be a great tool for you to utilize. If your business is oilfield equipment, it could be a completely different situation!It all depends on you and how you can make this work for you!

Two recent articles present some interesting information about how the Internet is changing. One is in a eMarketer and the other in an article in Wired magazine.

The first talks about demographics on social media and points out how it is changing to an older crowd. In the group between 50-64, 47% use social media. This is a substantial representation. In the prime age group of 30-49, over 60% use social media. Facebook logged its 5oo millionth user in June of this year. That is a huge audience. And this is a worldwide group. Remember that this is more people than live in the United States.

These age groups tend to use the media in different ways from the younger group, an important consideration for marketers. Older users are involved in Facebook and Linked In, and have other differences in their pattern of use.

Ad spending for social media is also changing. This indicates that bigger companies recognize the appeal of this size audience and are working heard to find a position in it where they can capitalize on the attention that people pay to this medium. If you are in a retail business, you have to take this market seriously.

In the other article, the emphasis is on how traffic on the internet is changing. Keep in mind that there is a distinction between the web and the Internet. In broad terms, the Internet is the highway, and the web is destinations. That is an oversimplification, but useful and easy to remember.

This article points out that the volume of traffic on the Internet that is devoted to the web is now only 23% of the total volume of traffic! Keep in mind, this point is about traffic, not visitors. As marketers, we are interested in visitors. Traffic that comes from watching videos or listening to music consumes more bandwidth than traffic going to and from web sites, and that accounts for some of the huge change in where the volume of traffic comes from, but it still points to big changes in how the Internet is used.

What do these changes mean to your business, both in terms of threats and in terms of opportunities? It will certainly depend upon what segment of business you are in and what the demographics of your audience are, but no one will be unaffected by these changes. Pay attention so you will be on the bus instead of under it!

“According to Forrester Research, 25% of US online retailers are planning at least some mobile features for 2010, compared with just 4% in 2009.”

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Mobile applications have not achieved much penetration in the marketing area yet, but there are signs that this may be changing. An article from eMarketer provides some of the reasons why businesses have not yet turned to mobile applications.

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In our Internet Marketing Clinic, we plan to have a presentation from a local developer of mobile applications in the near future. This will be a good opportunity to learn something about the mobile application environment and a chance to identify ways that mobile applications might offer some benefit to your web site and business.

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Watch our schedule to see when our guest will be presenting!

A new study reported in eMarketer indicates that 90% of local shoppers go online first to find what they are looking for! I find this an astonishing figure. It really says that no matter what kind of business you are in, you better have an Internet presence if you want to be effective  in meeting your competition.

Local shoppers shop online first!

This chart, coming from BIA/Kelsey, makes the point clearly. Ignore this at your peril! If you are in business and not utilizing the web to inform your prospects about your products and services, your competitors are going to have an advantage over you. Someone competing with you will be using the web, and they are who shoppers will encounter when they go online.

I have often noted in our clinic that small businesses can compete very effectively against larger businesses with large marketing budgets by learning how to market their businesses over the web. A study by Conductor, Inc. documents the failure by Fortune 500 companies to make effective use of search engine optimization to promote their businesses. The study is available from their website by signing in to download.

The study opens with a list of what they consider to ge its “key takeaways”:

• The Fortune 500 as a group spent approximately $3.4 million per day on 97,559 keywords – yet only 25% of these keywords rank in the top 50 natural search results.
• Only 2% of the domains (not companies) surveyed showed a significant number of their terms in the top results. All of these positive domain scores were offset by other owned domains with significant visibility issues.
• 15% of Fortune 500 companies studied showed mid to strong presence for their most advertised keywords.
• 32% of Fortune 500 companies have low to mid presence.
• 53% of Fortune 500 companies have no natural search visibility for their most advertised keywords.
• Fortune 500 natural search visibility decreased with longer search queries.
• 68% of keywords were found on a landing page (e.g. www.amazon.com/cellphone) versus a top level domain page (e.g. www.amazon.com).

I have not yet absorbed the full report, but will be posting more interesting observations from there as I go through the report.

The key message here is quite clear, and that is that small businesses can compete against bigger marketing budgets by learning what works on the web and applying what they learn to their own websites!