Looking for a Cost-Effective Solution?
For you companies out there that are looking for solutions to use mobile in a cost-effective way, I have not seen another solution that matches the value of GoMobile. It’s easy to use and is priced for companies that want to experiment with mobile and integrate it with their existing communications initiatives.
For more information
MacFarland Media Partners has two mobile offerings – Broadcast and Boomerang. Both of these are cost-effective programs that provide our clients with an exceptional mobile communication tool guaranteed to reach your customers – now that’s good business!

MacFarland Media Partners has two mobile offerings – Broadcast and Boomerang. Both of these are cost-effective programs that provide our clients with an exceptional mobile marketing and communications tool.

Blogging for search
Organic search is a complex animal that if not understood, you will most likely miss the mark all the time when attempting to utilize it for targeted marketing. Most marketers don’t think like this, but here’s the formula for Organic Search – (Data + Content) x Volume = Organic Search traffic.

I know, you’re thinking… “Why in the world do I need to know that? I took calculus in High school.” Well, here’s why. In the case of online marketing, the data are your targeted keywords. Content is based on target to those keywords. And, the magic word is volume. The more web content you create specifically around your targeted keywords, the more organic search traffic you will drive. It’s as simple as that.

Blogging is a target marketing strategy
We must realize that blogging is a target marketing strategy based on delivering a branded corporate message to a keyword. There are three main traffic sources to a corporate blog. Direct navigation, a referral, and lastly, search. Are you ready for this? Search is the only measure you should focus on because it’s the only one you can control and, more importantly, scale.

You can’t easily increase the number of referrals or direct navigation. It either happens or it doesn’t. On the other hand, if you want more organic traffic through search, you simply have to add more blogs targeted specifically to your keywords and write more content. – The simple math shows that the more content you create, the more organic traffic you will attract.

Do you know the value of Keywords?
Blogging for search at its most basic form is a data-driven strategy. What’s great is that the data are easily available with solid metrics. Quite simply; the data are your keywords. People are telling you exactly what they are attempting to find.

Every industry has loads of people getting online every minute entering keywords specifically asking for your product or service. These keywords are easy to find, simple to track by volume, and easy to value. Keywords imply buyer intent in most cases. Whether that person is looking for a Piano or a Toyota, when they are searching with those terms, you can be pretty certain they are a worthwhile

prospect. (compared to them watching a TV show). Search is also a target marketing strategy. The marketer’s job is to deliver a message to the hundreds or thousands of keywords ready to serve that message when someone makes the search. Of course, those keywords are an integral element of your blog content.

Blogging = Better search ranking
Most people don’t read the web, they scan, looking for themes or an idea. Think about your content in terms of search terms and web user behavior. When people have a problem and need an answer, they enter their keywords into the search engine looking for help. Will you come up? Who knows, but we do know that you first have to show up and blogging will help you with that.

Most likely people are looking for a quick source for an answer. By writing simply, enthusiastically, or talking about specific problems and solutions, you stand a much better chance of not only winning the search, but also winning the conversion.

Here are a few tips for your corporate blog:
1. Keep it basic
2. Be Honest
3. Be Humble
4. Be Humorous
5. Make sure everyone can understand your writing style
6. Keep blogging – never stop

Employee blogging
Since blogging started in the corporate world, the big problem has been that it’s been too corporate. People who generally read corporate blogs don’t always care or, even trust what the CEO, PR team, or brand says. They’ve seen and heard so much garbage and they really want a real person’s perspective. Here’s the good news, your employees are in a position to tell the kind of stories that foster both trust and engagement with the readers. A reader can tell when a blog has a PR or marketing twist and the sense it.

People don’t necessarily care about your corporate opinions as they care about their problem. You employees are in a much better position to discuss things that customers cares about. Employees are also human, engaged, passionate, and want to participate and feel valued. If you give someone a business card and let them talk on the phone to customers, you should let them blog, you’ll be surprised at the response.

Volumes of content
Here’s the real benefit. Widespread employee participation is the content volume that is being created. When your employees know what the target keywords are, they can incorporate these into their blog entry and help your search engine rankings. And, by sharing the blog-load among everyone, you naturally generate an increased volume of content that is timely, relevant, and will drive more traffic. And better yet, your employees will naturally learn more about the topics they are writing about and become more knowledgeable just be writing and researching. If the social media phenomenon is telling us anything, it’s that people like interacting with other people. Take advantage of this and the people that work for you and you’ll also educate them along the way.

Get local
Blogging is a great strategy for local search. Directories like online yellow pages win most local searches because nobody is competing for them at that level. The reality from a search standpoint is that an estimated 20-50 percent of all search has “local intent.” Local search grew 76 percent last year, according to ComScore. This gives a huge advantage to those local and national companies that focus on a local strategy. Do people really want to search, find a directory, and then have to search again? Of course not, they just want to find you. Blog about your location and blog about your products and inventory. And don’t forget your keywords.

Convert Traffic to Action
Think about your web traffic, what do you want the people to do? Read about your corporate blah, blah, blah? I think not. Maybe you do want that, but that’s hard to monetize. Think about calls to action. These keyword-targeted blogs have the same responsibility as any other web property. They have to convert that traffic into action. Whatever you expect from your site, you should challenge the blogs to perform the same in conversion.

Measurement and metrics
Are your blogs doing anything that is helping the brand? The only way to find out is to measure them. Just like any good marketing campaign, measurement is key. Blogs, like any other web marketing initiative, have a huge advantage in that they are all measurable. The key is what to measure. A great measure is blog post volume versus overall traffic volume. As you see the correlation between the traffic increase as you increase your content, it absolutely supports engaging more bloggers. You should also measure your keyword traffic against the value of that traffic if you were paying for it. You need to measure what that traffic would cost if you had to buy it. By measuring the value of your keywords, your organization can focus on converting the blog reader traffic into actionable business.

Wrap-up
The next time you are thinking about a way to increase web traffic, think about blogging. The benefits far out-weigh the costs and you can engage not only your customers, but also your employees.

MacFarland Media Partners is an interactive marketing consultancy with over 20 years of expertise serving domestic and international brands. We focus on creating and developing strategic and tactical initiatives using web, social, video and traditional media.

Here’s a few tips for you marketers out there who really don’t know what to do and are somewhat afraid to begin. Using social media to market your business can be a great idea, just don’t plan on letting any person in the marketing department hold the reigns of your brand in the social world, it could end up being disastrous.

Before you take the plunge, bear in mind there are a few untruths that surround social media. We will discuss a few below.

Social media is free

Then last time I checked, employees get paid money to work for companies. And, a marketing campaign performed poorly has a tremendous cost and also impacts brand performance, sales and credibility. Add all of those up together and you have a huge cost that could severely impact a brand and corporate image, let alone the negative impact on the top and bottom line.

Let’s discuss the free tools out there that you can use, and with a professional guiding you on the nuances of them and how to use them most effectively, you will absolutely reduce your cost of use.

Many of the tools that can be employed in social media marketing are free to use. Some of these include: Google’s video-sharing site YouTube, Yahoo’s photo-sharing site Flickr, the social-network building tool Ning, and content aggregators such as Digg and eBay’s StumbleUpon. There are also free blogging tools that are very effective. Among them are WordPress, Twitter, and FriendFeed.

Keep in mind that integrating these tools into a corporate brand’s marketing and communications plan requires professional skill in strategic and tactical execution of the existing brand assets, tools and channels. It also requires the knowledge of how they all fit together in one cohesive unit to accelerate the brand goals and objectives.

I know this all sounds like marketing mumbo-jumbo, however, to do this correctly, you must think about all the brand properties that are integrated into your social media plan.

Anyone can do it

If you’re an experienced marketer with a few young whiz kids on your staff claiming to be social media experts, you may want to assess their marketing chops prior to handing them the responsibility of your brand in the social media’s wild west. This is a good news, bad news situation. The good news is, you may have some people that are socially up to speed on some of the latest social networks… at least on a personal level. The bad news is, they probably have no clue on how to integrate brand and measure the effectiveness of it.

You may want to ask your staff a question – How many of you have actually created a successful campaign using social media tools? I bet you’d be hard-pressed to find one.

Big splash in a short time

Sometimes a social media campaign can produce substantial results quickly and it can be even more effective if your brand is already a shining star, but that doesn’t happen overnight.

Let’s talk about Twitter as an example. You can use Tweets to drive traffic to websites, blogs, articles, contests, videos, and so on. This can be more effective if people already care about your brand. It also can be highly effective if you have a really unique idea that will be shared among your following. This takes a lot of time on a consistent basis, and a keen understanding of the goal in mind and your following (or brand ambassadors)

In-house is the way to go

Wrong! – need I say more?
First of all, you need a social media strategy, contacts and experience. This combination is not always found with in-house marketing teams, who often resort to reinventing the wheel or end up using the wrong tools. In the end, this ends up costing more money and doesn’t help you accomplish your brand goals.

It is rare to find an in-house marketing team that has the strategic and tactical expertise to create and execute a social media campaign and also leverage SEO, SEM, blogger outreach, advertising, email, mobile and more.

Do something great and people will see it

If you believe this, you should probably stop reading. Otherwise, keep going and we’ll support our methodology. Until you can drive traffic to your social media effort, you’ve got an exotic car in your garage that nobody knows about but you.

There’s a number of web tools that can drive traffic, including Digg, StumbleUpon and Twitter, but nothing works better than word or mouth, wherever it is.

Social media marketing can’t be measured

There are a variety of methods, including mentions on blogs and in media; comments on the content; real-time blog advertising results, and click-throughs to your web site. You can get precise statistics from several sites, including Google Trends, Twitter search, Google Analytics, BackType, and Compete.

If you are questioning yourself on how to move forward with social media to benefit your brand equity and sales, MacFarland Media Partners is positioned to help you. We are experts in helping our clients leverage today’s complex media channels.

Keyword selection is extremely important as it can help drive the right audience to your web front door. You need to pay close attention and choose the right keywords, because they can also enhance brand awareness. Despite the importance of keyword selection, and the fact that it helps lay the groundwork for every paid or organic search campaign, marketers everywhere commonly make mistakes with the process.

So what are marketers doing wrong? There are numerous ways in which marketers miss the mark with their keyword selection process, including selecting keywords with little or no research to back up their picks, or choosing keywords based on the needs and opinions of various individuals or divisions in their organization without considering what customers might be searching for.

Here are a few things you need to know.

Lack of external perspective:
All too often, marketers refer to their products or services from an internal perspective instead of how their customers view them. Marketing teams often use internal terminology to refer to their brand, and it results in content that reflects a product or service that may only be understood by insiders. (Bad idea) For example, what if I created a website that sells sunglasses, but I determined that they should be called “cool-looking plastic headwear?” My page would be organically optimized for those keywords, and my PPC campaign would be focused on that keyword phrase, However, I would only receive traffic to that page if consumers were searching for “cool-looking plastic headwear”.” Do I want that – NO. In other words, I would miss out on the millions of users who are searching for the term “sunglasses” Our lack of external perspective and strategic thinking ends up hurting our sales.

Select paid and organic keywords:
A good way to do this is to ask yourself a few basic questions: Do your keywords reflect industry terms or internal terminology? Is your business also marketing itself via these terms in its email, print, or TV ads? Is there any reason why there would be search volume on these selected terms? The bottom line is that you need to make sure that you are identifying yourself and branding your company in a way that mirrors how your customers refer to you. Don’t forget; optimize the content around these terms.

Research:
This mistake relates to the first one as marketers often create keyword lists based upon internal branding initiatives rather than research or past performance data. For instance, they may select a few generic terms that they feel relate to their business, but the research is not always being done upfront to substantiate their selection. This is a big mistake as being found on relevant terms will not only bring traffic and potential conversions to your website, it can also provide you with a brand “halo” effect as research shows that 39% of search engine users believe that the companies whose websites are returned among the top search results are the leaders in their field.

The simple truth:
Research is critical in the keyword selection process as you need to make sure that the terms you are optimizing for, or bidding on, are popular. Fortunately, there are free online tools such as Google Adwords keyword tool, Google Insight trend tool, and Microsoft’s AdCenter Labs Keyword Forecast tool that can help assess the popularity of terms.

With organic search, you may be choosing one or two terms per page of content. With PPC there is more flexibility, as multiple keywords can all be part of the search campaign. Some may receive more traffic than others, but at least the volume can be captured across several terms. Doing your research upfront will help you discover the terms your audience is searching for.

My best advice is to do your research and align yourself with a partner that knows how to help you in this area. It’s not something that you should take a swing of the bat yourself and see what happens. If you have a trusted partner, leverage that relationship and let them do what they do best in this area – your sales will soon follow.

Here are a few thoughts for jumpstarting innovation despite
what business-logic says. In good times, the process of innovation can get bogged down in bureaucracy and overall resistance to change, right? So, When a looming recession is on the horizon, what does a company do? First of all, re-align your thinking. Usually a company worries about belt-tightening, spending cuts and the risks associated with spending a dollar on investing in the brand. What happens when this thought-process seeps in to the business? Innovation paralysis sets in. Not good.

Recessionary times have proven to provide ripe opportunities for innovation at all levels of business, big or small. If we are indeed entering into a recessionary cycle, remember it’s just that: A cycle. There will be an end, and you’ll want you brand to be well positioned when the calendar turns for the better.

A Study of 1,000 businesses during the past 30 years, found that companies spent more on innovation during the downturn saw return on capital rise 23.8% during the recovery, compared with 0.6% for those that slashed spending. (AdAge 2008) Hmm…that alone would make me break out the greenbacks and come up with a plan to kick some serious competitive tail.

When times are good, we’re all making our quotas with room to spare, start-ups are popping up and money flows freely.
Our friends fat, dumb and happy are always having long lunch breaks and innovation dormancy usually sneaks in the back door without anyone realizing it.

In tough times, we are forced to think out of the box to go after that same dollar that used to come knocking at the front door.
A recession can actually provide a perfect opportunity to break away from the pack. Companies are forced to innovate just to keep up with the competition and keep the cash register ringing.

During this time, the little players tend to shake out, and many established companies go into innovation dormancy. It’s precisely this moment when a touch of strategic innovation can mean a big marketplace advantage. No matter what size your company is, what product or service you provide, you can overcome the impending economic challenges.

So how can you overcome the innovation paralysis in a recessionary environment?

And how can you stimulate revenue growth and increase brand equity?

First of all, for those companies that are not innovating… what are they doing? They are usually ducking for cover and using up any brand equity they once had to ride out the storm. This is not the approach that experts say will help you gain ground for building a solid foundation for future growth.

The answer is to bring speed, insight, ingenuity and focused innovation to the business-product-process or, as most marketers call it, to “Spinnovate”.

Speed is the overall guiding principle to ensure that you can quickly move to maximize the innovation opportunity. You need to be fast, scrappy and economical.

Also, Insight is the hidden truth that can unlock potential opportunities. Sometimes there are market needs that have been sitting under our noses for some time, and shame on us, we did not respond.

So, be open to new research techniques, new partner ideas, and don’t be afraid to leave the focus-group mentality for those companies that don’t know how to get to the next level. Sometimes, grass-roots research is what works best when time is of the essence, who knows, this just may uncover those essential truths.

And to get the right answers, you need focused innovation. This is a clearly defined strategy, driven by a goals-based timeline with an accountable action plan. Whew, now that’s a mouthful…I didn’t say this was going to be easy.

Next, focus on making sure the right people are involved. Find people from within the organization and from qualified, creative outsiders who can bring a fresh perspective to the process, both for R&D and definitely for your go-to-market strategy. This is a mission-critical component to adding ideas that are not from within your four walls. Innovation typically does not come from one person’s idea, but from a combination of many divergent thoughts and business strategies.

This also means that not every idea has to be a home run. A few well-placed doubles can be equally successful and get to market quickly and effectively.

Opportunities for successful innovation in a down economy are indeed out there. But rather than stick your head in the sand or duck for cover…unleash your creative juices and bring in a few fresh minds that have the ability understand your business model and or industry and also have a creative marketing mind. You’ll be surprised at the off the wall ideas you will come up with and you may even learn a little more about your product, customer, market sensitivity to your new idea and the potential growth.

“Spinnovate” – It’s not just your job, It’s your adventure.
Conveniently brought to you by – MacFarland Media Partners, Inc.
http://www.macmediapartners.com

Unlike online tv-spot ads, branded content engages people with good story-telling and visual messaging, while at the same time showing your product in action. Rather than telling people the features of your product or service, you get to illustrate it in an authentic way. Of course, one of the better ways is to do this without the heavy sales spin – show how your product fits into a particular lifestyle.

Honda recently produced a “Dream the Impossible” documentary series and states in one of its videos: “Honda is an engine company.” But even as an engine company, Honda strategists saw the potential of tapping into the power of story-telling and communicating personal narratives that correlate with their brand               -Mediapost, January 2009

Okay, so how does Honda’s strategy relate to your company?  As you know, banner ads simply flash a message (no pun intended), However, good Webisodic content holds the customers’ attention for minutes at a time and can lure them back for repeat exposure visits and often communicate a stronger, longer-lasting impression message. Now, do you think that’s worth exploring further and good for both big and small companies?

In today’s digital environment, consumers tend to empower themselves by utilizing the web to dictate media schedules from brands they know and love. They connect with these brands and relate to them because the content is entertaining, stands out from all the other clutter, tells a story in such a way that it becomes interesting and also is subliminal is sales approach. Better yet, the best of traditional Web advertising still applies.

In terms of distribution, content can be super-targeted to the right eyeballs, significantly reducing waste. Could you imagine if television networks, rather than shooting a number of shows out to a diverse audience and crossing their fingers for big pockets of success, could target each of their shows to the people who wanted to watch and enjoy them?
-Mediapost, January 2009

Webisodes have a distinct advantage that television networks do not have based on the above Mediapost quote.  Okay, so now you have another perspective of why Webisodes can be used and why they are considered to be a powerful channel, especially if you have some content that can be produced in such a way so that it is entertaining, informational and sticky. With today’s metrics, you can now see how long people are engaged with your content, where they rewind, fast-forward and how many times they watch and re-play your content. Now, let’s take it a step further, how would you like to know where and when they pass the content or re-post it to other social sites?  Hmmm… now that’s powerful.

The next time you are thinking of posting your :30 TV spot online, think again. Get rid of that mentality and put on your webisode hat, you won’t regret it.

Comments?  Email Scott at  scott@macmediapartners.com

Scott MacFarland blogs about today’s business-marketing channels and how companies can leverage the digital tools of today successfully.

Comments? Email Scott at scott@macmediapartners.com