Geary Fresh

Start Up Gone Wild

I am one week into my role of Performance Account Director here at Geary Interactive and I have to admit I am feeling a little star truck by the creativity here. I am not tearing up or holding my breath like a 13 year old girl at a  Justin Timberlake concert BUT, and I put that “but” in all caps because it is a big one, when I walk by the creative department it is hard not to notice the amazing work that is being developed. If you are reading this blog then you probably already have a clue as to what I am talking about. If not, then take some time to browse are new website and their work awesome work here and you will quickly become a fan.

If you are honest with yourself you will admit to loving the design and creative portion of your job, regardless of if you actually are a designer or the VP of Marketing. It is so easy to get caught up in the flashy designs, gimmicks and tag lines that in many cases we over look the meat and potatoes of your business processes.

Now, here is the problem that I see more times then not and I will use an example of a fake company to illustrate the issue. A newly founded company, Wobble Incorporated, which recently developed a new and amazing Wobble Service (I made that up, if you weren’t catching on , just received their first round of funding for a staggering $57M. They allocated the proper budget and resources to scale operations and now are focused on generating sales leads! They build out a small Bus Dev team to hit the streets and are now extremely excited because they just hired the top rated marketing agency in town, Herald and Herald!! WoooHooo!! They talk about TV ads, which the CEO and CMO are excited about most. Their dreams of a Hollywood life are coming true, even if for only day or two! High gloss magazine ads with European models are included in the proposals given by Harold and Harold. Excitement runs through the start-up like an electric current!

However, what happens next is not so exciting. Marketing dollars are being spent at the speed of light, calls are coming in, people are visiting the website and people are knocking on their doors for their service, but money is being wasted. Why? Because leads are coming into the company and are not being worked properly. Such a simple, but gigantic step was not properly thought out. What do you do with the leads that are generated from our marketing efforts? How are you going to efficiently and quickly distribute the leads to our sales people? What happens if we cannot get in contact with the leads? What is your plan to follow up on these leads? Do you have to call the leads as soon as they come in or can you wait until the next day? So many questions were not answered prior top launching their marketing plans and now Wobble is forced to work frantically to get them answered. Its too late, though.

I am not going to turn this into the buckle your seat belt campaigns of 1980’s and tell you, “Don’t be a dummy”, or in this case “Don’t be a Wobble”, but I am going to tell you now and in future blog posts to not over look the unsexy lead management portion of your business. Don’t allow the amazing work that Geary Interactive or your internal team be done in vein. Take time to focus on what your lead management processes will be prior to launching your marketing initiatives. Working backwards through the process may seem strange at first, but it will put your company ahead of the curve and on a path to success.

Coming down the writing pike will be a few posts on the topic of lead management:
1.    Best Practices for Calling Leads
2.    Who Should the Leads Go To Within My Company
3.    Lead Follow-up, The Basics of

If you have questions on the topic of lead management, please send them to Michael.ferree@gearyi.com

Social Media Tips & Tricks

Last week, Geary hosted an executive roundtable in partnership with UNICEF’s Tap Project. During the event, top marketers strategized how they could best use their social networks to fundraise for Tap. Several social media tips and tricks surfaced that can help companies optimize their social media marketing.

 Here’s what everyone came up with:

Make it Trackable

• Since this was a contest, groups investigated how they could track their progress. Using resources like unique bit.ly accounts, team members tracked donations through shortened URLs. 
• Your company can use the same philosophy to track campaigns and report against marketing goals. Even in social media, you should still have ROI.

Make it Catchy

• 140 characters might not seem like much, but with a little creativity, you can still get your point across. Keep language simple and direct, and you’ll still have room to humanize your message. Example: “5 strangers, 1 cause. When was the last time doing good was this easy? Please check it out.”
• Your marketing slogan may be too long for social media, so consider a variation on a theme that hits home with your social audience. It might be slightly different than your offline customer.

Make it Count

• When you have a cause or promotion that’s worth talking about, like the Tap Project, promote it like there is no tomorrow. Being proactive will help your message cut through the ambient noise of social media. Take a cue from our attendees, and do not be afraid to ask your network to support a cause, product or brand.
• Your company can create brand evangelists that market your message. Remember social media is NOT a one way conversation. That means promote, but don’t let it be a one way exchange.

Special Thanks to Bondi–San Diego Australian Bar & Kitchen

Geary Interactive wants to thank Bondi for their recent support of UNICEF’s Tap Project. As a San Diego restaurant participating in this years Tap Project, Bondi is aiding UNICEF in its fight to provide clean water to children around the world.

To do your part and learn more about the Tap Project, visit www.tapproject.org.

10 Signs You Don’t Understand Web Analytics

Geary Interactive Web Analyst Nicole Rawski was featured in iMedia today. Here’s a snippet of the column, but to read the whole column visit iMedia Connection.

Sign 1: You brought the tool a year ago, and you’re still not measure your business objectives.

Sign 2:  You still have to remind the executive team what your company’s KPIs are (hint: key performance indicators)

Sign 3:  You create these beautiful dashboard, and no one knows what they mean.

Sign 4:  Your boss is always asking about the number of “hits” your company’s website is getting.

Sign 5: You’re still scratching your head wondering what you should segment and how it will help.

Sign 6: Even though your homepage has an 80 percent bounce rate, your boss doesn’t want a change because he/she likes the way it looks.

Sign 7: You’re running multiple online marketing campaigns, and you have no idea which performs better.

Sign 8:  The one time you ran an A | B test, a winner was chosen–but no improvements ensued.

Sign 9: You still cannot figure out why total site visits don’t add up in all the reports

Sign 10: You still design with HiPPO standards in mind.

I bet I can find 10,000 people who want peace in the middle east

Social media helped Obama win the presidency, and now his administration is hoping it can also help ‘win’ the Middle East.

Before Obama’s Cairo address on June 4th, publicity was geared towards asking people to sign up for text messages of the speech in Arabic, Urdu, Persian and English. Which was nice research, given the growing prevalence of cell phone usage in the middle east (over 44% penetration, ‘08 eMarketer). And what about the home team? US cell phone couldn’t subscribe, due to laws prohibiting State Dept. funding to reach a domestic audience, but anyone could receive the frequent updates via twitter & facebook.

Salon.com comments that over 2,000 people gave a virtual thumbs-up/likes this! to the speech’s closing lines – and also on the video “Muslim Americans Serving in the US Government” that joined the White House YouTube channel and website posting the same day.

- Sarah

Top 10 Reasons to Use a Corporate Blog

1. If the content is good, a corporate blog can drive a great deal of traffic to a website.

2. If the content is keyword dense and brand-centric, a blog can drive relevant  traffic to a website, encourage user interactions and conversions

3. Generating new, fresh content helps boost a website’s search engine rankings. Why? There are always new reasons for the search engines to crawl your site. They crawl the content and bestow your site with higher rankings.

4. Potential customers also have a reason to frequent your properties. If you can establish your site as an authority on a certain topic, consumers will turn to you for information (and hopefully business).

5. You look insanely smart and up-to-date.

6. Hosting a blog forces internal resources to focus on a website. Moderating comments, broken links and general up-keep will be attended to if company bloggers are constantly posting blogs.

7. It shows potential customers that you’re passionate about what you do–so much so that you cannot help writing about it.

8. A corporate blog lends personality to brands that sometimes don’t have an avenue to let their uniqueness shine. People relate to people, so the more character you can incorporate into a brand the better.

9. Interacting with users via a blog, social networking site or profile-based platform helps marketers understand their consumers better. This is never a bad thing.

10. It keeps up the war effort (so to speak) at home. As an active participant in the digital space, you have a better understanding of the climate. Insights derived here can be applied to other marketing avenues–online or otherwise.

Think About Optimizing…NOW!!

One question that I get asked when talking about site optimization is “when do you start planning a site optimization.”  My response is always the same:  as soon as the planning stage is complete.  A site optimization plan should be as well crafted as defining your KPIs, in order to minimize cost and maximizing visitor interaction. 

Another factor that a well crafted site optimization plan does is limiting the emotional factor on the analyst.  We all know that regardless of how well we plan a site, visitor behavior is something that is not easily determined.  As soon as the results are not as expected, our emotions take over and we tend to do anything to “fix” the problem.  Rather than being reactive to a situation, I like to take a proactive stance (having a Plan X), planning ahead on what to optimize.  Even if the results are favorable, you want to improve the quality of your traffic, while attracting a diverse number of visitors.  Remember that a static web site is bound to fail.

You might be thinking “OK, this is good, but what to optimize.”  What’s great about optimizing a site is that there are multiple points that can be used to improve the quantity and quality of traffic.  At a minimum, you should be looking at the following:

• The relationship between your media initiatives and your entry/exit points of your site, and look at what attracts or repels visitors when they are on the site.
• Look at the layout of your landing page and ask yourself “would I give out my personal information if I landed here?”  Ensure that your landing pages are not just relevant but that they convey a clear and concise message that entices visitors to move forward.
•  Look at the visitor experience that you’re providing  and look at modifying it by adding additional content, in order to not just attract new visitors, but also returning visitors as well. 

Thinking about an optimization plan before you launch a site is a way to “have in the ready“different options to attract not only returning visitors but a complete set of new visitors beforehand.  This allows you to spend more time analyzing your data and increase your site’s footprint.  What do you think?  Do you think about optimizing beforehand or once the results roll in?  Let’s get the discussion going.   

Geary Interactive Announces Three New Locations

Geary Interactive announced today it has expanded into Chicago, Los Angeles and Seattle. These new markets extend Geary Interactive’s national reach and its promise to deliver real results to clients.

“We believe this growth highlights the success of our performance driven marketing model which holds us accountable for results,” said Andreas Roell, Geary Interactive’s board chairman and CEO. “Clients need marketing solutions that work and a team that can deliver. These offices will bring Geary Interactive’s digital marketing expertise to a whole new group of organizations.”

Already this year, Geary Interactive has been honored at San Diego’s #1 advertising agency, a fastest growing and largest privately held company, and ranked among the top B2B agencies.

To read the press release in its entirety, click here.

What!?! Less Than Half of Marketers Use Analytics?

So I was perusing through marketingcharts.com and came across a stat that just astounds me. Alterian released a survey in January that reported less than half (47%) of marketers use analytics to measure their campaigns. Less than half of marketers surveyed know how their campaigns are performing! I’m still baffled. In fact, I would love to learn more from those who do not measure their campaigns and why. If they’re not measuring the effectiveness of their campaigns or their website then I wonder how they decide what works and what doesn’t. The survey also revealed that 25% of the marketers stated that analyzing the results of the campaigns were the hardest part. If this is the case and you find that analyzing your campaign results to be difficult, here are a few steps that may help:

·         Define your goal. What are you trying to accomplish other than increasing traffic to your website? Once you have defined this goal, make sure that you are able to attribute your goal or conversion to your campaigns.

·         Be sure to tag your URLs with the proper campaign parameters that are available with your web analytics solution. Refer to your vendor’s manual for a detailed description of what this may entail. (Vendor’s URL parameters may differ)

·         Drive traffic to specific landing pages. Preferably landing pages that have content that is pertinent to your campaign and target audience.

·         Metrics that you will want to evaluate for performance include click through rate (CTR), conversion rate (CVR), cost per acquisition (CPA), return on investment (ROI), and landing page bounce rates

·         If you want to gather more insight about your campaigns, segment visitors based on the campaign that they respond to and analyze their behavior with your website. You may learn something new about your visitors or you may not, but until you analyze your site visitors, you will never know

Analyzing your campaigns does not have to be hard if you have the available resources. If you don’t, then the problem should not be that it is hard, but that you need to hire someone who can make sense of the data for you.

AdWords Trademark Policy Update

Overview

Google recently announced that starting June 15^th, advertisers will be allowed to use trademark terms in their ads even if they do not own that trademark nor are an approved reseller/partner.  Currently, advertisers have complete control over who can place their brand name in the headline and/or description line in order to ensure competitors are not using such brand name as leverage.  Advertisers who own their brand name manually grant companies permission to use these terms in the ad copy on a case by case basis.  Google will be rolling out an automated tool to properly scan landing pages and allow use of brand terms in ad copy based off of the following advertiser criteria:

1.       Resellers or partners:  Tool will scan the landing pages to ensure branded product is sold.  An example is Best Buy selling Belkin routers on the landing page.  The tool would allow ‘Belkin’ to be displayed in the ad copy

2.       Informational sites: Sites that compare and or review products, but do not sell such products.  For example, CNET as an advertiser may have a page dedicated to comparing routers.  They will be able to run ads saying “Looking for a new router? Compare Belkin to D-Link and….”

This change has no affect on keywords: anyone can currently bid on any term in AdWords.  Google’s Quality Score will bring the most relevant ads and landing pages to the top rank.

Why?

It appears that Google is making the marketplace more accessible to all advertisers by automating this feature.  However, the technology rolled out will ensure that competitors will not be allowed to fall under the 2 categories above.  Google’s goal (and that of the search landscape) is to connect the audience with qualified ads and, in effect, connect the user to the right page as quickly as possible.

Impact

The trademark update will obviously give companies less control over who can use their brand terms in ad copy.  However, the direct effect of this change will depend on the brand.

Clients with Resellers/Partners

Companies with a large manufacturing base (i.e. several resellers) may see an increase in cost per clicks as the paid search marketplace increases on both brand and general terms.

Clients’ Products on Informational Sites

On the other hand, informational sites, in time, could be quite beneficial to all advertisers.  Although ad dollars are moving towards the lead gen aspect of search, there are still a large percentage of users researching before they buy.  These sites may take away clicks initially, but these users are becoming more educated about your product and, if it is a good fit, will be more likely to convert – and convert faster.  This means a potential increase in conversion rates and return on investment.

What to do?

Clients with Resellers/Partners

Keep track of your clients’ resellers–which keywords they are bidding on with your brand in copy.  There won’t be much you can do to change their copy, but it is best to avoid click cannibalization and increasing CPCs.  In some situations, you may be able to work with your resellers or partners to keep this from happening.

Clients’ Products on Informational Sites

See which informational sites are displaying your client’s brand in their ad copy.  This could be an upsell opportunity for some premiere display placement, especially if the information is positive for your client.

So mark June 15^th in your calendar as Duplicity Day.  You may start to see your brand more than expected!

~Daniel Romotsky