Let’s take a look at six ways in which many companies’ digital marketing campaigns have found success.

Keep it simple

When creating a campaign, keep in mind that, if you want your target audience to remember your company’s intended message, keep it simple. People are generally not going to remember more than one or two messages at once. Condense your campaigns to communicate one common message or pair the varying messaging with one central theme. It’s important that your campaigns are still a solid representation of what your brand stands for—this means that your campaigns should be recognizable in style, feel and messaging. After all, the most successful of companies have clear, simple messages associated with their brands.

Example: Reese’s “Dark Remote” Campaign

Be unexpected

Who doesn’t enjoy a nice surprise every once and a while? If you take a look at the successful brands out there, you’ll notice that many of them incorporate a sense of surprise within their digital campaigns. The key to a clever and successful viral campaign is to deliver a message that is not only unexpected, but makes sense for your brand. It’s always great to see ads which are thought provoking and communicate a message which, although conventional, may not be something generally associated with products or services in a specific industry.

Example: Dove’s “Evolution” Campaign

Stay concrete

Making empty promises in the business world is never a good thing; this holds true to a company’s campaign messaging. People take comfort in knowing that a company will go above and beyond to make their customer experience the best it can possibly be. Communicating the “hassle-free” aspect of doing business with your company can reassure current and potential customers of the risk-free investment involved with purchasing your products or services. Sticking to your company’s word will increase the amount of repeat customers and positively influence word-of-mouth recommendations from current customers.

Example: Orbitz’s “Price Assurance” Campaign

Embody credibility

A company’s credibility is a vital part of its success. Having a powerful voice in your industry can tremendously affect the size of your market share. The challenge is, however, that your company will almost always have some form of competition in its industry. In order to break away from your competitors, your brands must embody a sense of confidence and credibility to appear superior to those of your competition’s. Leveraging distinguishing factors, awards and third-party findings when creating your campaigns can help your company establish that credibility.

Example: Hyundai Veloster’s “Best in Class”  Campaign

Connect emotionally

A smart goal to aim for when creating marketing campaigns is to connect emotionally with your current and potential customers. Identify your company’s ideal target market and focus on what resonates with this group of individuals.  Connecting emotionally with your target market can mean anything from making a reference to a person’s childhood to highlighting a certain safety feature to keep protective parents at ease. Establishing this connection through your ad campaigns can not only make your message more memorable, it can also lead to an increase in conversions and ultimately, higher ROI.

Example: Oreo’s “Perfect Mother’s Day Gift” Campaign

Tell a story

Finally, incorporating a story into your marketing campaign can be a distinguishing factor in engaging your target audience to buy into your brand. Using stories can strengthen your brand’s impact by providing something for your audience to connect with on a more personal level. An easy way to incorporate stories into your campaign is to provide real-life testimonials of people using your products/services. This is one of the most personal ways your company can gain exposure aside from word-of-mouth referrals. By communicating the positive results your customers achieved from using your products or services, the credibility of your campaign (as addressed in my fourth point) dramatically increases.

Example: Weight Watcher’s “Jennifer Hudson” Campaign

Try incorporating one, or even a few, of these best practices into your digital marketing campaigns for 2012. Keeping your target audience at the forefront will strengthen your brand message, distinguish you from your competition and help your campaign drive conversions for your company.

Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conferences are the largest global conferences focusing around Search and Social Marketing, touching on topics ranging from SEO to Video Optimization to PPC Management. The conference, since its start in 1999, has been held in major cities across the world and brings together professionals from a variety of different industries. The extensive, three-day event encompasses over 70 sessions, within tracks such as SEO, Paid Search and Social Media, along with interactive workshops led by Marketers and SEO professionals from major companies.

SES recently hosted one of their conferences here in Chicago. Rise Interactive’s CEO and Founder, Jon Morris, was featured on Day 1 during the SEO track. Morris participated on a panel focusing on Metrics for SEO. He later went into more detail on the topic with his presentation entitled “SEO: How Understanding Your Analytics Gives You the Edge,” which emphasized the importance of Web Analytics when looking to generate the highest return for your interactive investment. Following the event, Morris participated in an interview hosted by WebmasterRadio.FM where he further discussed the concept and practice of Interactive Investment Management.

SES Chicago presentation: http://www.riseinteractive.com/webinars/understanding-seo-analytics/get-the-analytics-edge.pdf

SES Chicago interview: http://www2.webmasterradio.fm/search-engine-strategies-conference/2011/interactive-investment-management

Morris will take you on a deep dive into understanding the key data points that will help you move the needle with your SEO investment. This session will go beyond the basics of search engine optimization and will give actionable items around Prioritization, Content Development and the Analytical data points you should be monitoring.

Attendees will also learn about the growing practice of Interactive Investment Management and how to manage their online spend in a manner that will produce higher ROI. Morris will use real world examples drawn from his experience working with some of the world’s largest and best known brands on how to create your own SEO roadmap.

The Roadmap looks at 6 key factors in determining the appropriate way to prioritize your SEO efforts.

These factors include:

Analysis of a keywords by category

Current coverage in the category against all others

An understanding of content needs

Probability for ranking success

The relevance of the keywords to your business

Your estimated ROI

Register for SEO: How Understanding Your Analytics Gives You the Edge here.

To access real-time reporting, a user must enable the new version of Google Analytics (GA5).  For anyone who doubts the necessity of making the switch, we made a compelling argument in August that is underscored with the roll-out of ‘real-time’.  The new reports originally were housed in the Dashboards tab, but they will be moved to the Home tab in the imminent update of the GA5 interface.  Four reports are available in the Real-Time beta:

Overview

Locations

Traffic Sources

Content

The Overview tab provides a high level view of the most salient metrics and data about your site.  Visitors are segmented between returning and new using the utma visitor cookie.  Top Referral, Top Keywords and Top Active Pages are displayed in separate tables.  A heat map shows the geography of the Top Locations of traffic origination (or more correctly, the server hosting the visitor’s IP).  Additionally a time graph of pageviews is offered using (t-minutes) data which keys off of the utmb session cookie.

On the Locations tab, the time lapse page view graph persists accompanied by a flat world map or 3-D view enabled by adding the Google Earth Plugin.  Active visitors are now segmented by country.

The Traffic Sources report segments the visitors according to Medium and adds a table including source and the number of active visitors.

Lastly, the Content report is similar to the Traffic Sources report with the exception that the source/medium/active visitors table is substituted for a table with Active page and Active Visitors.  The Active Visitors metric can be toggled to display number of views by page.

I am suitably impressed by the smooth feel and efficiency of the Real Time Google Analytics reporting.  I feel obligated to caution readers that the interface can become a quick time-sink as you monitor active updates and changes to visitors on your site.  From a business value stand-point, some additional time is required to come up with application of the real-time metrics.  Perhaps blast email campaigns efficacy can be analyzed spontaneously?  Maybe testing environments could be made much more dynamic if configured adequately to display in the Content reports.  These are just a couple preliminary musings.  I welcome additional insights and feedback.

Spyfu:

If the name doesn’t give it away, this is a great tool for competitive analysis. Spyfu allows you to check keywords that you currently rank for along with your competitors’ keyword rankings and provides a comparison. The unique piece that Spyfu offers is that you can look into what your competitors’ top organic words are, as well as get an idea for what they are doing in paid campaigns.

SEO Tip: Use this tool to come up with blog topics! Spy on your competition to learn what words they are ranking for. Then, run the same report on your own site to cross-check and find words that you don’t have anything ranking. Once you have a set of words that your site doesn’t rank for, get writing!

SEOMoz:

SEOMoz has TONS of resources for search engine optimization (it is hard to even know where to start). If I were a business working on my own SEO and could only have one tool- this would be it. Overall, SEOMoz has a wide-variety of tools to help be proactive in your SEO efforts, as well as to address any problems you are having in your optimization efforts. My favorite offering of SEOMoz is the campaigns. You can set up a “campaign” for websites that you need to monitor regularly. Using this campaign, SEOMoz sends a crawler (RogerBot) to crawl your site on a weekly basis. RogerBot reports back on any items that could raise a flag with search engines. You can even download these reports whenever you want.  Another valuable (but not very unique) tool that SEOMoz offers is the keyword tracking ability. You can upload a list of keywords that you want to track positions on and it will check positions on a weekly basis and keep historical positions.

I am very much looking forward to their social media tracking (currently in Beta). That is another really nice part about SEOMoz- it is always improving tools and capabilities.

SEO Tip: Link your Google Analytics account to view organic traffic, number of URL’s receiving organic traffic and the number of keywords sending organic traffic on a weekly basis. (We know you could just login to your Google Analytics account, but it is sure nice to see this all in one place!)

Yahoo Site Explorer:

Yahoo Site Explorer is nothing fancy or new- no bells and whistles. However, it is still my go-to for checking back links to a site. While you can only export 1,000 back links, it still gives you a good idea of the number of back links that a site has.

SEO Tip: Use Yahoo Site Explorer in conjunction with SEOMoz’s Linkscape Visualization Tool. This will give you a good idea of whether your site is falling short on authority of links or link count.

Screaming Frog:

Screaming Frog is a really fast site crawler. It crawls a website and returns all URLs, page titles, response codes, headers, meta keywords, meta descriptions, canonical tags and much much more! This site crawler is the most comprehensive crawler that I have found to date. In addition to being the most comprehensive, it is lightening fast!

SEO Tip: Use Screaming Frog to find 302 (temporary) redirects. Use Yahoo (above) to explore these URL’s to see if they have links. If so, switch these to 301 redirects so that link juice can be passed through to the new URL.

1. Communicate to cut the red tape

Getting something done in a corporate environment can be worse than pulling teeth. Clearly and thoroughly communicating what your link building efforts will entail—before they begin—to anyone who could possibly be affected by them is a crucial step to take. Upper management needs to be on board and in the loop from the start so that there won’t be any unpleasant surprises. Otherwise, any outreach efforts could end up stalled behind a wall of red tape.

2. Get Creative with your Content

Many big brands will have a team of graphic designers, researchers and web developers already in place that will hopefully be at your disposal, (if you executed step 1 well!), and using that team to create linkable content will be a major boost to any link building effort. In this scenario, your job as a link builder is three-fold: First, since a good link builder is constantly monitoring what topics relevant to the brand are being discussed out on the web, you can advise on what kind of content people might link to. Second, a link builder needs to identify the influencers in the client’s space who are leading the discussion. Third, a link builder needs to make sure these influencers see the content and are willing to distribute it through their respective channels. If you’ve successfully leveraged the creative capabilities of your corporate backer, these three steps shouldn’t be a challenge, considering that you’ll be able to produce outstanding, topical, shareable content and incentivize influencers to distribute it.

3. Making It Rain… for GOOD

Paid links, in the traditional sense of submitting to paid directories or throwing a webmaster a few bucks for an anchor text link, are not only increasingly useless, but also increasingly hazardous, as Google and the other search engines are constantly seeking to discover and penalize these kinds of activities. However, there are still plenty of ways in which a corporate link builder can utilize the well-lined pockets of his employer in a white-hat way. One example would be that anytime your client sponsors a community event, gives a scholarship, donates to a charity, etc., why not request a link on the recipient organization’s page as evidence of that generosity? It’s good PR, you’re supporting a good cause, AND you get a quality link out of it! Word of warning: I wouldn’t get too pushy when asking for a link in return though, since you don’t want it to seem like you’re contributing solely for the link.

4. Throw your weight around

Corporations occasionally get a bad rap for pushing around the little guy—for taking advantage of their heft. While living up to this stereotype might not be such a good PR move, it can be beneficial to your link building efforts. The most extreme example of this tactic I’ve ever heard was including a clause requiring an anchor text link as part of a business contract. That might be taking it too far, but gently prodding smaller vendors and other dependents to link is definitely fair game.

5. Utilize Your Employees

This is one of those painfully obvious tactics that should probably be the first step in any corporate link building program. Odds are that some of the company’s employees have blogs or websites of their own and the odds are even better that they have social media accounts. As part of your initial communication phase (remember step 1?), the client should encourage employees to link to the company site from their own personal sites, as hopefully they enjoy working there and thus don’t mind providing some easy, free publicity for the company. Encouraging employees (maybe providing some sort of incentive?) to share company news on their own social media accounts is even easier and might even be more important as social signals become an increasingly important factor in the SERP’s. Even a medium sized company will have hundreds of employees, so this tactic can have a big impact!

These ideas are only a few examples of how to leverage the size and scope of a large client. I’d love to hear any other suggestions or feedback in the comments section.

The latest example of this is the Subscribe button Facebook unveiled last week.  Subscribing (not yet available to all pages) enables you to convert your “fans” or “likes” into “subscribers” (known on Twitter and the probably-soon-to-be-defunct Google+ as “followers”).  But it’s not just limited to Facebook pages.  In fact, you can subscribe to the public status updates of any Facebook user that has not disabled the feature (and if you don’t want to allow subscriptions, you should go to your privacy settings and turn it off now—like most new Facebook features, this one is opt-out only).

So what does this new function mean for brands and why would your brand want to take advantage of it?  I’ll give you a hint:  You probably don’t.

The subscribe tool is actually way more useful and valuable for individuals than for brands, and plenty of other articles have explored how individuals can take advantage of the tool, but that’s beyond the scope of this blog post.  In reality, this is simply one of several new moves for Facebook designed to compete more directly with Twitter (and Google+).

You might think, “If this is like Twitter and my brand has been very successful at using Twitter, why wouldn’t I want to jump all over this?”

There are several reasons why, and much has been written about the value of a fan (Hint: it’s more than the value of a subscriber), but the real reason can pretty much be summed up with this:  As of right now, Facebook does not notify you when you have a new subscriber.  In other words, subscribers are not measurable, which makes the already difficult task of measuring social media ROI completely impossible.  EDIT: Since this article was written, Facebook has actually added a way to be notified of new subscribers and to see a list of who is subscribed to your public updates.  This ability to measure subscriptions does make it slightly more appealing, but the value of a subscriber is not yet known.

What that means is that while you will soon have the ability to convert your fans to subscribers, the only real reason to consider doing so would be if your brand is actually a person (such as celebrities) and you would rather update a profile than a page (Important note: by converting your page to a profile, you lose all your content from the page).

There is, however, one potentially valuable benefit to the subscribe feature for brands.  You now have a unique opportunity to add depth to your brand’s personality and to even put a new face on your brand.  Create a profile for your CEO, CFO, or another leader in your company—or create a profile for an employee that represents what your brand is about.  Just remember that in keeping with Facebook’s terms and services, it must be a real person.

There is a unique opportunity here to add a human element to your brand.  Social media has always been a way to add personality to your brand and now you can go deeper and farther than ever before.  Use your company’s senior management to position your brand as thought leaders in your industry.  Let your leader’s personality add personality to your brand.  This is a new way to get closer to your audience and help them feel more connected with your business.

I do feel the need to add this one caveat:  This is unproven territory.  Additionally, we do not yet know how Facebook wants brands to use subscriptions, or even if they want brands to use subscriptions.  But with any change in the social sphere, there are new opportunities and challenges.  If you’re looking for a way to get a leg up on the competition and want to take on the challenge of trying something brand new, here is your opportunity.  It could be just what your brand needed.

Even through the worst of the recession in 2007-2009, internet marketing budgets have continued to increase exponentially. Businesses have seen the light when it comes to these channels, which has bolstered the industry through tough times. In the chart below, survey results from Distributed Marketing describe how businesses plan to change their marketing budgets for 2012. Mobile, social media and SEO are at the top of the list for increases in budgetary spending, while traditional media like direct mail and print are decreasing in spending. (http://distributedmarketing.org/2011/07/25/2012-budget-survey-results-spending-plans-shift-toward-social-mobile/)

With more economic woes on the forefront, it seems an appropriate time to discuss why internet marketing is so effective, even for businesses struggling in a tough economy.

1. Results

Here at Rise, it is our mission to Drive, Measure and Optimize all marketing that we do for our clients. This means that not only do we execute all marketing initiatives to the best of our abilities, but we also strive to meet (or exceed) our client’s goals in a timely fashion. One of the best aspects of internet marketing is that businesses can see real, tangible results that are based on numbers. As opposed to some other channels of marketing, we are able to measure our successes (and improve upon our failures) nearly every day. Our clients are able to take the customized data that we provide them and make actionable plans based on performance and projections.

2. Flexibility

Another great thing about internet marketing is that there is a channel for just about everyone. Whether you’re a small, local business or a global corporation, there is probably some aspect of internet marketing that will be advantageous to your business. Some of our larger clients run with Email, Paid Search, Display and Affiliate, while we have some clients who ask that we simply help them set up their website for SEO. Whatever your business is, we can most likely help you market your business better and more efficiently with internet marketing.

3. Cost

Though this aspect depends on the company and what its goals are, the costs of internet marketing are relatively low compared to other types of marketing. While in some cases, a larger budget may be necessary to make an impact in a particular channel, the return that our clients typically get from their spend is much more efficient than what they spend in other more traditional channels. Even for our smaller clients, we try to ensure that every business gets as much of an impact from their internet marketing as possible for what they are spending.

4. Specificity

Lastly, one of the most important aspects of internet marketing is our ability to be as specific as we want to be. With new features and technologies allowing us to target specific electronic devices in paid search, and re-target users in display, we are able to drill down and reach the best and most-likely-to-convert audience. On the flip side, with this specificity, we can measure and report on what slight changes have the most impact and help us to predict what will work best for our clients. We are always pushing the envelope and have the power to make an impact with small changes.

In all, internet marketing provides many opportunities, for businesses small and large, even in the economy we’re currently stuck with. Evaluating the success of your business’s current marketing efforts is a smart practice to adopt. Many businesses out there are already making transitions in their budgets to increase spend in internet marketing. When the economy gets tough, we show our clients that we can squeeze a return out of every cent that we spend! You may want to consider if the same will work for your business.

As a marketing leader you are tasked with driving more qualified leads into the funnel, increasing revenue while decreasing ad spend or increasing brand visibility. While the market you play in helps define which objectives rise to the top for you, at the end of the day you need optimal performance. While there are many channels for you, especially in the interactive space, you need to make sure you have a firm grasp of the entire portfolio of options and which ones will provide you with the greatest return.

That is why at Rise we take the approach to operate as Interactive Investment Managers. By working with a client and understanding their defined goals we look at the entire interactive portfolio, including technology, training and services and operate as the investment bank for the CMO. Interactive Investment Management (IIM) is about taking a channel and technology neutral approach and providing marketing leaders with a diversified plan to enable them to achieve optimal ROI. By not being bound to a rigid plan, Interactive Investment Managers can truly operate in the best interest of their clients.

At the end of the day, marketing is not about how many people click a link, download your white-papers or watch your videos on YouTube.  At the end of the day marketing is about business, your business and how you can make it stronger and more profitable.  In short, marketing is about ROI – getting the best return on investment that you can for your marketing dollars. At Rise, we believe that IIM is the future of online marketing.

Paid Search (PPC) Budget Allocation

Many companies, especially those without an ROI-focused strategy, tend to run PPC programs that barely tread water (in terms of profitability).  Are you using a portfolio approach to your program?  Simply, you should make sure the most profitable areas are maximized before providing budget to less efficient areas of the program.  By using this approach, you can rest assured that you’re running the most profitable program possible.

Paid Search (PPC) Bid Strategy

In terms of bid strategy, it may be time to take another look at your program.  Specifically, are you overspending for branded keywords?  Many companies want to ensure dominance for their branded keywords, and maximizing the position of branded keywords is a priority for such marketers.  However, if you consider that individuals seeking your brand are already likely to convert, you may want to test a lower target position.  Many clients achieve incredible savings by dropping their average positions by 0.5-1 places.  This is simple to test, and one all marketers should test at some point.

Match Types and Negative Keywords (PPC)

If your company sells Britney Spears posters, you want to make sure the traffic you are driving to you site is interested in purchasing said posters.  However, if you investigate your potential keywords (and better yet, your existing program), you might find some surprises.  For example, you may find the search query ‘roman spears’ is generating a lot of impressions and even clicks.  However, this traffic is highly unqualified.  Likewise, one of the most popular search queries you’ll find is for ‘britney spears topless’.  Unless your company sells this variety of poster, you’ll want to prevent this unqualified traffic as well.  In the former case, you could consider using phrase or exact match to prevent the unqualified traffic. In both cases, negative keywords can be used to prevent this wasteful spend.

Display/Banner Media Planning

If you’ve been running a display program for some time with the same cost targets (whether CPM, CPC or CPA-based), this may be a good time to renegotiate.  Take the time to review your program and look for areas where you might be able to negotiate better rates.  For example, has one of your networks achieved your target goals with little innovation or change?  If so, it might be time to challenge them a little.  Work with your networks to explore opportunities to improve volume and/or reduce cost in your display program.

Reconsider your Analytics

Many companies, large and small, are paying for analytics platforms that are unnecessary (and often quite expensive).  If you haven’t done so recently, take a close look at your analytics platform and determine if you’re using its unique capabilities or if you’re paying for a platform you simply don’t need.  If your reporting needs are fairly simple and can be achieved via Google Analytics (free) or another inexpensive platform, should you really be spending substantially more on another platform?  This may be a simple line item to remove from your marketing.

Final Thoughts

There are many ways you can look to save money in your Internet marketing program.  Make sure you take the time to review your program.  What steps are you taking to control cost?