1) Search
Search is easily the most reliable, trackable and ROI focused channel for online marketing. If you are interested in showing up when people search for your products and services, then a search marketing strategy is a must. For more information on SEO and Paid Search, visit our website.

2) Blog/Digg/Tumblr/Content Marketing
Content marketing refers to the strategy around creating interesting and compelling written resources for a specific target audience.

Typically, this will include blog posts, white papers, tip sheets and many other forms of content. Content marketing can help build subject matter expertise, can increase search engine visibility and serve as a repository for social media marketing channels.

3) Facebook
Facebook pages for businesses can be very effective at improving engagement, assisting in customer relations, and providing a unique experience for customers. Facebook also offers a rich and targeted advertising that is cost-per-click. Facebook also has a nice viral component with both its “share” and “send” functionality. With over 800 million users, and 50% logging in daily, Facebook is a smart place for marketers to be.

4) Twitter
Twitter provides businesses with the opportunity to develop a relationship with their customers. Businesses have the ability to customize their Twitter page and to join lists and add photos to tweets. These features plus many others can help make Twitter a strong channel for creating a following or community around the business or products that you offer.

5) YouTube
Posting videos within a website or a social network can cause slow loading times leading to user frustration. If your business encompasses product demonstrations, customer testimonials or employee / product information sharing, YouTube may be a good fit. YouTube offers free and highly customizable channels for personal and business use.

6) Flickr
Is your company delivering products or services that are creative and visual in nature? If you are an aesthetic or visual company, Flickr is a great way to compile, organize and share your images. You can send people to your Flickr page via your website, Facebook and Twitter.

7) LinkedIn
LinkedIn is an excellent resource for companies who are in high growth mode and have a need for recruiting new talent and employees. Also, LinkedIn offers a group function as well as a Q&A section. Ask yourself and your colleagues if you will be focused on bringing in qualified candidates or if you are looking for a way to create groups or communities around a subject matter. If these strategies are important to your business, LinkedIn may be a powerful resource.

YouTube Stats

Remember, video doesn’t need to be a cumbersome and expensive marketing technique. iPhones, Smart Phones and Flip Videos are an inexpensive way to create viral and branded video.

1.) 35 hours of video footage is uploaded to the site every minute

2.) Over 13 million hours of footage was uploaded in 2010

3.) More video is uploaded every 60 days than the three major US television networks produced in 60 years

4.) Each week, YouTube receives the equivalent of 115,000 full-length feature films in uploads

5.) 70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the U.S

6.) YouTube is localized in 25 countries across 43 languages

7.) The base age demographic for YouTube is 18-54

8.) Over 2 billion videos are viewed every day

9.) YouTube Mobile gets over 100 million views per day

10.) In 2010, there were over 700 billion video playbacks

11.) A full 10% of YouTube videos are in HD

12.) There are 7,000 hours of full-length movies and television episodes available on YouTube

13.) 2 billion video views per week are monetized

14.) Hundreds of partners are making six figures per year

15.) 94 of AdAge’s top 100 advertisers have run campaigns on YouTube

16.) The total number of advertisers using YouTube has increased 10-fold in the last year.

17.) There are currently over 10,000 official partners

18.) Content ID–YouTube’s automated system that serves as a copyright-violation watchdog–scans 100 years’ worth of content every day

19.) 1000 partners are now using Content ID

20.) Over one third of YouTube’s total monetized views come from Content ID

21.) Over 5 million people have found and subscribed to a friend’s channel using YouTube’s friend-finding tools

22.) Every auto-shared tweet results in six new YouTube.com browsing sessions

23.) More than half the videos on YouTube have been rated or commented on by users

24.) Over 4 million people are connected and auto-sharing to at least one social network

25.) Every day, millions of clips are “favorited” and millions of subscriptions occur

Source: ReelSEO

Image Credit: Organic Apex

Transparency, Tracking, Data, Reporting; these are all words that will translate into leads, sales, and ROI. Whether you manage your paid search campaigns in-house or outsource them to an agency, you need to be in the “know” when it comes to analytics and reporting.

If you don’t know analytics, look into attending a training session (many agencies offer this training including Marcel Media) and take the time to understand how to read and interpret your data and metrics.

Understanding the sales cycle is essential for any marketer. You should want and make it a requirement to know the drivers factors that cause conversions from clickthroughs to sign ups to online sales.

Where to start? Beginning at the keyword level provides tracking and analytics that show marketers insight on their sales cycle and helps them drive future decisions. Optimizing campaigns for top performing keywords can boost the cost efficiency of paid search campaigns and potentially increase ROI.

Below are five steps you can take to track analytics at the keyword level:

1. Smart Bidding – If analytics are indicating that certain keywords are driving unqualified leads, lower your bids or these keywords or pause them altogether. This gives you flexibility in your budget to increase bids and budget for keywords that produced qualified leads.

2. Grow Your Keyword Universe- Keyword level analytics can provide you with a stronger understanding of which keywords drive the most qualified leads, and thus allow you expand your keyword universe (which is a good thing).

3. Test to Convert – Testing is the essence of conversion optimization, which should be the goal of any search campaign. Consistently testing campaign elements such as keywords, landing pages, ad copy, and match type, will give marketers a sound understanding of what methods, content and campaigns perform the best. Leverage your keyword insights to determine what is driving online conversions.

4. Integration – Paid search is a nimble and flexible marketing technique that can be implemented and executed fairly quickly. Use paid search to try out ideas before investing large amounts of money on traditional marketing channels. A good example of this is the Gap logo blunder (although it included social media and search, it saved Gap millions of dollars in rebranding).

5. Increase Relevancy-Analytics allows you to look at the exact search query that visitors typed in to reach your website. It is a good idea to use this information to expand your negative keyword list. What keywords are driving traffic to your site that you don’t necessarily want to pay for? Create a list of these keywords and add them to your negative keyword list to ensure you are driving more targeted, quality traffic.

Image Credit: New York Times

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the umbrella term that encompasses a variety of online marketing methods. Some of the better known SEM techniques are Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Social Media Marketing (SMM) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) which is Google’s keyword advertising platform.

This article will speak only to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) which is comprised of two elements; on page SEO and off page SEO. A major factor in the success of a SEO campaign is the ability to generate a substantial amount of high quality links and/or backlinks.

What is the difference between a link and a backlink?

• A link is an on-page HTML element that allows the user to navigate to another page on the internet.
• Backlinks are from pages on an external site that link back in to your site. The goal of any off-site SEO campaign is to increase these links in quantity and quality to build the search engines’ authority of your site.

Why are links important?
All links are important to SEO as they control the flow of search engine authority. The most important types of links for SEO are “backlinks“or “inlinks”.

What are some examples of backlinks?

• Authority Links -links from relevant sites such as .edu sites, personal websites etc
• Directory Links -include search engine and paid directories such as the “Yahoo! Directory”
• Real Time Links -links from regularly updated content-driven sites such as blogs, PR sites

All of the above examples of backlinks are considered white hat linking practices IF they are not received through some form of payment or bartering. In the example of Overstock, they bartered with universities and colleges encouraging them to post links to Overstock pages so that students and faculty could receive discounts on the shopping site. Because .edu sites hold very high authority (next to .gov sites) this helped to increase their SEO or natural search rankings.

Each case is unique in their attempt to scam the search engine giant. Overstock created an internal program promoting colleges to link to their pages and receive discounts. JC Penny purchased a number of suspicious links in order to manipulate search engine rankings for certain keywords and search terms. Forbes also suffered a similar fate when they were caught selling links on their site to manipulate PageRank.

What to Avoid?
Understand the distinction between paying for links and using link directories (i.e. Yahoo! Directory). Not all paid links violate search engine guidelines. Buying and selling links is acceptable for advertising purposes. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. See how this can be done on Google’s Webmaster Central Blog. Google’s guidelines clearly state that is is unacceptable for websites to participate in “link schemes” that are intended to manipulate PageRank.

What are some examples of “black hat” SEO practices?
There are many. Here are just a few that really get under our skin.

• Unrelated Keywords: irrelevant keywords added to website copy to increase traffic
• Hidden Links or Text: avoid illegible text at the bottom of a web page and make the text the same color as the page background
• Page Swapping – getting a page ranked, then once ranked completely change out the content
• Blog Spamming – Submitting comments on blogs and link back to your website
• Link Farming  - The process of exchanging reciprocal links with Web sites in order to increase SEO and PageRank
• Hidden Affiliate Links – hiding links to affiliate sites throughout your website in deep interior pages or page footers

Any legitimate SEO agency should be happy to answer any of your questions regarding link building, and share with you what their methods are as well. Don’t expect the agency to give away their secret sauce, but you can have a conversation with about best practices and the health of your SEO campaigns.

Image Attribution: JC Penny

First it was the Gap logo fiasco, followed by the Kenneth Cole Twitter faux paux, then the tacky Groupon Super Bowl Ads and now JC Penny’s is trying to justify shady link building activities. As a PR or marketing professional, I am not sure if you can say one situation trumps another in the severity, but all three would make exceptional consumer loyalty case studies.

The upside of JC Penny’s recent blunder is that the general public knows little to nothing about “link building” and SEO best practices. They will read the article in New York Times and skip over to the Entertainment section to check out the best and worst dressed at the Grammy’s. However, to us search marketers that live and breathe SEO, this is big news.

So what exactly is black-hat link building? Link building is a way for websites to generate inbound links. Link building is a substantial component of off-site SEO and helps increase visibility and traffic for a website, thus driving conversions or sales.

Black-hat link building tries to essentially cheat the process.  Trying to “trick” Google is an unlikely occurrence and punishable by “the death penalty,” which would mean the site would be removed from search results. It seems JC Penny dodge a bullet and won’t suffer that strong a cost, but they are subject to something Google calls, “corrective action.” In an interview with Matt Cutts last Wednesday, he confirmed that JC Penny’s had violated Google guidelines, and it was not the first time Google had detected guideline violations with JCPenny.com.

The first piece of the puzzle that baffles most people is how did the JC Penny’s marketing staff not know their search firm was practicing shady linking techniques? Who at corporate was in charge of interpreting linking reports and search campaigns? As a marketing firm, we always have a point of contact, in-house, for all our client accounts.  We communicate with our contacts on a monthly, weekly, and sometimes daily basis.

In an article from the New York Times, a spokeswoman for JCPenny.com, Darcie Brossart said, “J. C. Penney did not authorize, and we were not involved with or aware of, the posting of the links that you sent to us, as it is against our natural search policies,” Ms. Brossart wrote in an e-mail. She added, “We are working to have the links taken down.”

JC Penny’s has fired their search firm, SearchDex who they had been using since 2004, SearchDex represents big brand names such as Armani Exchange, Anthropologies, Banana Republic, Best Buy, Blockbuster, Gap, Orbitz, Old Navy and Nike Town, among others.

According to Google, these irrelevant links have only been around for 3 to 4 months. What is most curious about the situation is how, all of the sudden, did these nefarious links appear?

Another interesting fact is that JC Penny spent close to 30 million dollars in Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising campaigns. PPC campaigns are innate to the Google search model and Google reaps massive amounts of cash from this advertising platform. A conspiracy theory surmises that Google was willing to overlook this extensive black-hat SEO campaign, because it helped one of its larger advertisers.

Google is not known for full disclosure when it comes to its search engine algorithms, so it is doubtful that any of the questions postulated above will be answered with any immediacy. The moral of the story is, for small businesses or big brands, any good and pure search campaign takes times. Search marketing is something that should be looked at as a long term solution and investment, not a quick fix to make a quick buck.

Sienna Swagga Wagon

2010 was the year of many new “trends” in online marketing, not the least of which was the emphasis on social media and the power of viral video. The majority of successful viral video campaigns feature dancing children, singing cats, and magical randomness from a small town in Northern Idaho. Not your typical T.V. commercials.

There are definitely some entertaining branded videos that went viral this year, such as the Old Spice commercials and Sienna Mini Van Swagger Wagon music video.  A main component to any viral video is audience engagement. Online videos need to be inclusive and inviting, so the user feels like they are a part of the brand’s message and experience.

Branded video content can be cool. Recent research conducted by Vizu showed that viral video is a driving force in consumer purchase intent. Because we couldn’t have said it better ourselves, we are recapping a blog post by Mashable highlighting the three elements to keep in mind when creating a social online video!

What Motivates People to Share? There are several reasons why people share anything, including video content. People are driven to share with others based on the following psychology.

• EMOTION- Sharing our feelings with other is a basic human survival skill. If your videos can tap into an emotion that resonates with its audience, users will share it.  Understand they are not sharing your content, they are instead sharing the feeling your video has fostered.
• IDENTITY – What we read, watch, listen to, buy and share helps to define our personality. Have a clear message and create it in a way that triggers ownership, make it something people will want to associate with.
• INFORMATION – Humans are hardwired to learn, we like to absorb knowledge, even if we pretend like we don’t. Online video is one of the most creative and effective ways to share information. Great example of this is the “Live Above the Influence Campaigns.”

Syndicate! YouTube is NOT the only online video platform out there. Make sure you check out and post your videos to the following sites as well. It helps give users additional touch points to find your content, and helps with SEO efforts as well.

• Vodpod
• Devour
• PopScreen
• Viddler
• TubeMogul
• Tumblr

Data Doesn’t Lie. If you want to “socialize” your video, you need to have a solid distribution strategy, and let the data guide you. Think about the following before you start spending time and resources on syndication.

• What sites generate high share rates relative to the content you are posting
• Which users share this type of content most often
• What time of day are they the most active
• Which videos have worked on the specific platform

Take the time and do it right. Just because YOU think your video is great doesn’t mean that it is. Think about it in terms of how you can share great content as well, even if it wasn’t produced in-house. People don’t like to be sold, they like to be included. Create fun, engaging and emotional content and know your audience. Follow these best practices and watch your video go viral!

Like Marcel Media? Find us on Facebook!

Facebook is one of the most legendary platforms in online communications. It comes as no surprise that it is now rivaling Google rapidly gaining market share in the search and email verticals. Facebook places incredible amounts of power in the hands of marketers. You will see, as you look closer, that the issues advertisers faced when consumers got savvy to their broadcast commercials, is now also happening in the online advertising space. Advertisers and markets are being forced, by consumers like you and me, to be more creative and provide legitimate value to our online experience. So, how do you differentiate yourself from the other 500 million profiles on Facebook? CONTENT!

Here are some tips on how to strategically position and market your brand on this social powerhouse so you don’t get lost in translation.

1. We are visual creatures; give me something to look at!

Recently, Facebook has added numerous photo enhancements, which are often an overlooked brand utility. The enhancements include the ability to upload hi-res photos up to 2048 wide or high, the lightbox interface and the removal of pagination. These upgrades offer significant opportunity to marketers, as better pictures of the product can improve ability to engage fans.

2. We are visual creatures; give me something to look at AND interact with!

Video is such an underutilized and misrepresented mode of communicating. If you are a corporation, we beg of you, do not put up corporate videos on YouTube and Facebook, and give us something we can interact with. Give us a behind the scenes tour of your CEO’s house, or your V.P. of IT bowling, if nothing us give us data and information, not a sales pitch, please.

3. Utilize New Groups

The new Facebook groups feature, called New Groups, can be used for private, even secret, one-to-many communication. These groups are like mini Facebooks, with group chat and document uploading available. They can be used for consumer review groups instead of hosting feedback sessions, event groups to promote your events, or for conducting live chats about your product. Do not just randomly force feed this feature to your audience just because you can, opt in is still always a best practice.

4. Answer Questions

Another new Facebook feature is Facebook Questions, similar to LinkedIn Q & A. This Q&A product allows page administrators to post questions directly to their Pages with having the action show up in the News Feeds of their fans, and to respond to user questions as their business, not an individual. Posting questions is a great way to engage fans and demonstrate expertise.

5. Where can I find you?

If your job is to increase foot traffic for a storefront we strongly suggest that you use Facebook’s Places to inspire your fans to “check-in” to your business. This is very similar to Foursqaure. Once they check in, reward them! Give them a promo code or a discount that is exclusive to Facebook Check-Ins. Once they check-in the notice gets posted to your Place Page. Don’t worry, there is no extra work needed, your Place Page gets automatically created once a user checks in. Encourage your fans to promote your store with check-in reminders such as in-store signs and special events.

6. How do you “like” it?

Although “Likes” are not a new feature, they are growing in importance to marketing campaigns and company pages. The more your fans and future fans “Like” your Page and activity, the more distribution and exposure you receive. Likes also give you an advantage on Bing, in light of the recent partnership between Bing and Facebook, the search engine surfaces “Likes” in search results. In order to promote “Likes,” post content that inspires action. Also, incorporate the “Like” button on your website to gain fans and promote your Facebook Page further.

Video advertising has been increasing as well, and according to eMarketer, is expected to continue on a strong growth trajectory. Content websites such as Hulu are also taking this growth into consideration as they begin to add subscription plans to their ad-supported programming.

UBS estimates that in 2012, 77% of US online video revenues will come from paid content and 23% from ad-support media.

Online video advertising spending will continue to grow to an estimated $5.5 in 2014, up from $1.5 billion in 2010. In the same year, video will make up 15.2% of total online ad spending, compared to 6% in 2010. How will you get on board with video content?

The companies are intrigued by these ads, which Facebook developed over a year ago. Advertisements appear on the right side of a user’s homepage, and include an image and headline of the advertiser’s choice. The user is able to see if any of their friends clicked on the “like” button, meaning they liked the brand or add. The user may “like” the ad as well.

Through Nielsen research, Facebook has found that by using a friend’s name along with an ad doubles brand awareness. For this reason, they have created their social-context ads. They hope that by doing so, they will further monetize the network that has grown to 500 million users.

But some users are wary. They have a hard time accepting the automatic opt-in of ads connecting to the items they post on theirs and their friends pages.

Will Facebook users benefit from social-context ads, or will this just be another privacy concern?

ClickZ reports that “Facebook’s ad impressions have therefore grown by 52 percent versus Q4 2009, when it served around 115 billion impressions. In the same period impressions on Yahoo sites dropped from 140 billion to 132 billion, and impressions on Microsoft, Fox Interactive Media, and AOL properties also dipped, quarter-over-quarter”.

While the amount of revenue gained from the number of impressions on Facebook display ads is unknown, the growth of marketers spending on the social network is indicative of a trend. Have you started advertising on Facebook yet?