Internet Marketing Clinic

In many of my class presentations, I take a few minutes to review the basics of a Google search operation. I just “stumbled upon” a great summary of the Google operation on the web.

This is a nice step-by-step guide to what happens when someone goes to Google and looks for something. It is all interesting, but the key parts for people wanting to get rankings for their sites is understanding the “index” database (where the engine stores all the information that will later be provided in a search, as well as the information that will determine who ranks where in the search results), and understanding the importance of the links that Google tabulates.

There is not much discussion here of where the links come from or how they are evaluated, but that is what we have the free Internet marketing Clinic for. Stop by some Wednesday evening when we are in session and see how we can help you promote your business over the web!

PS: If the StumbleUpon link above stops working, you can read the article at its original location here, “How Google Works“

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.

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!

A new report from eMarketer shows the growth and potential of social media to businesses.

A couple of the interesting statistics cited in the piece include the percentage of ad spending that is going to social media, and the popularity of social media sites as compared to search sites.

This chart shows the growth in spending and is an indication of how seriously businesses are taking the media. This is a new factor in marketing and is still being explored to determine where and how it works best, but, whatever the findings, it is a factor that businesses must take into account when developing their strategy for the Internet.

This next graph shows the popularity of sites on the Internet in New Zealand. New Zealand may not be the biggest target in your marketing strategy, but the graph is still interesting because it reflects a trend that is much broader than NZ, which is that different applications are occupying more and more time of people on the Internet.

A recent magazine article in Wired announced that “The Web is Dead”. This may be an overstatement (not uncommon in selling magazines), but the point they are making is an important one to keep in mind, which is that the pattern of usage on the web is changing quickly and dramatically.

The question, as always, is, “What does this mean to me and to my marketing strategy?”

We will continue to explore that issue, and I plan to post some comments about the Wired article later after I have had more time to review it. Watch this space!

I have often commented in our clinic that big brands on big sites that have big budgets don’t really rank well in search engines. I just came across a long post that takes apart several sites to illustrate the point in considerable detail.

This post analyzes several big corporate sites and demonstrates pretty clearly that they just don’t do SEO very well! From my point of view, this is great news! What this means is that people who understand how to do their SEO properly, and who are willing to put the effort into doing it, can achieve great performance on search engines without having to spend a lot of money.

Since my clinic is oriented toward small businesses, and small businesses typically don’t have a lot of money (otherwise, they would be “big businesses”, yes?), this is really good news!

As I said, the article is a little long, and may seem, to some readers, technical, but it is worth reading to get a better understanding of what you are up against when working on your web site.

“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.