Campaigns

How to Create Engaging Email Campaigns

June 5th, 2010 | Posted in Blog | Comments Off
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Click-through rate research has shown email to be one of the most effective elements of a brand engagement strategy, which explains why an increasing number of brand marketers are turning to email campaigns to gain and retain consumers. But all leads are not created equal. Cost-per-lead (CPL) advertising, which lets marketers reach only interested customers while only paying for signups, has been found to be the best way to engage with interested consumers. Think quality over quantity.

Across different industry verticals, leads acquired through cost-per-lead advertising deliver superior brand engagement as compared to industry averages. However, acquiring a lead is only the first step. It’s what you do with the lead that really matters. It’s important that marketers speak to the prospect in ways that are meaningful and relevant to them in order to deepen brand engagement.

Here’s how you can maximize your CPL advertising campaigns:

1. Know where your ads are running
Transparency, which allows you to know exactly where your ads are running so you can be sure to tailor your message to your audience, is it the most important factor to the success of a CPL lead generation campaign. Transparency helps you to protect brand integrity by allowing you to be sure the content of the site aligns with your brand. Transparency can also help you to optimize your campaign by mapping leads to their sources, which allows you to increase your spend on the better performing sites and increase your return on investment.

2. Make it manageable
Save yourself time and money by working with an enabling technology that provides access to a significant portion of the CPL market and can help you set-up, manage, and optimize all of your campaigns from one place – leaving you time to focus on developing meaningful engagement strategies that will resonate with your customers.

3. Immediate follow-up
Auto-responders enable an automated “thank you” email to be sent to the consumer in real-time. Just be sure that the call to action in the auto-responder matches the one that’s specified in the advertisement. In addition, the follow-up email should inform the user where they saw the ad, and list the benefits of following through on the call to action.

4. Give them more than just a good deal
To keep the consumer engaged you need to consider your long term strategy. While everyone loves a good deal and promotions are a great way to get consumers to respond to your ad, you need to consider other strategies that deliver value to the consumer by appealing to what they are interested in.

We can help you acquire the right consumers and engage them in a relevant way through email, Facebook, Twitter, and other engagement vehicles. Contact us today!

How to Maximize Your SEO

June 28th, 2009 | Posted in Blog | Comments Off
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While SEO is one of the best ways to drive quality traffic to your site, it’s also deceptively labor intensive. SEO isn’t a “set it and forget it” tactic – but rather requires constant attention to make the most of your efforts.

Where do you start, and how do you know if any of it’s working? Are you winning or losing your SEO battle, and if you’ve hired an (some other) agency to manage your search profile, are they doing all that they can? These are questions that anyone who manages a website should be asking. Below are a few easy tips that you can use to spot check your SEO.

Work with the search engine
Site operators can easily monitor their SEO performance by using some simple tools. For instance, Google’s Webmaster Tools – The tools will tell you what keywords you are ranking for, which keywords are driving traffic to your site, which pages are in the Google index, who is linking to you, and if there are problems on your site.

What does your link text say about you?

Are you the No. 1 website for the phrase “Next Page?”. If so, it’s because your linking to that phrase. When you link from one page to another, the search engines use the words in the link text to determine which keyword phrase to look for in the content of the page that the link is going to. You should be linking to your ‘apple pie’ page with the link text ‘apple pie.’ The search engines will confirm that ‘apple pie’ appears in the title, description, and body content of the page that you are linking to and award the page with rankability.

What do inbound links say?

You want all the inbound links you can get, but what really makes the difference is to make sure that the linked copy from the other website includes a term that people would naturally search for, rather than the name of your website.
Here’s an example: “A motorcycle website can identify key terms, such as ‘front end components,’ ‘discount exhaust,’ and ‘seats.’ Then, the website can encourage outside websites, including blogs to link on these terms instead of the name of the motorcycle website. Over time, the website will start to position itself on these key terms and improve its search engine positioning.

Meta matters

If you’ve ever wondered why some websites have a full-blown directory in the Google results and others offer only a lonely link, the answer is in the meta data. Marketers need to be cognizant of what story that information tells a prospective visitor to your site, and that means entering useful copy in your site’s meta data that will inspire the user into actually coming to your site to hear more.

Ask about relevance everyday

If you’re not asking about relevance, you’re definitely failing at SEO. Much like a credit score, no one knows exactly how specific factors affect rankings. But as a general rule of thumb, always ask yourself: What more can I offer the users who I want to attract? How can I be the most relevant website on a particular topic? This means an abundance of informative content, and a diversity of content that a user might be interested in. Don’t just load your site down with text. Make sure to include PDFs, videos, and even links to outside resources that would be helpful for your users. Do anything you can to make your site extremely relevant and useful for a visiting user, even if that means providing links to outside resources. This will rank you higher in search engines.

98% of all new technology purchases begin with a key word search; make sure your offering is at the top of these searches.

To learn more about the current state of your site, or if you’re looking for SEO help – Contact us today.

Increase Results and Stretch Event Marketing Dollars

May 28th, 2009 | Posted in Blog | Comments Off
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The recent downturn in the economy has had a significant impact on the events industry; budgets are being slashed and travel costs are limiting attendance.

However, there is a great opportunity to be successful during these rough times and (to no surprise) it demands creativity. So tune up your traditional marketing approach and try some of these strategies to show value in your event program:

  • Measure ROI today
    In order to institute metrics quickly, most marketers advise hiring a company familiar with how it is done. Some methods include polling attendees before and after a show via e-mail or surveying attendees during a show.
  • Ramp up your pre-event marketing
    One method is to have the thought leaders and speakers who will be giving presentations at the event help spread the word in advance. Have them connect to attendees through social networking or via the Web to give a preview of the types of useful information they will be providing those who attend.
  • Think digital
    Aside from the fact that digital events provide a significantly greater opportunity for measurement and attendee tracking, they also tackle the travel problem, since Web-based events make it easier for attendees to choose your event over other, non-Web-based ones.
  • Where do your customers network?
    Find people where they gather on a daily basis. In many cases this means using social networking sites.
  • Maintain an open mind
    Be willing to make changes. Marketers that create true value in their event, target exhibits directly to attendees based on their emotional and personal as well as professional needs. And they use metrics to prove ROI should weather the financial storm and come out the other side with a new set of tools for successful marketing.

If you’re looking for help with your next event, look no further – Contact us today.

Get More Out of Your Creative

May 3rd, 2009 | Posted in Blog | Comments Off
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The need to get more out of less is nothing new, but rather a continual trend in the marketing world. Below are 5 tactics that may seem like ways to deal with current economic environment, but they’re actually practices that will help you improve the performance of your marketing efforts.

1. Keep your messages simple
2. Test and optimize
3. Support campaigns on your homepage
4. Try out the latest technologies
5. Remember “searchability”

And no matter how “creative” your creative is, if you’re not taking ROI into consideration, it’s likely your competition is. So now is a good time to start.

If you’re looking for help with your next campaign, look no further – Contact us today.