Internet Marketing in 2009The following speech was delivered on July 20, 2009 by Jonathan Jaffe, Founding Owner, in a SBA series for small business owners. click here to download the PowerPoint Presentation (as a pdf) that accompanied the presentation
Good evening. Over the last fifteen years, the Internet has become nearly ubiquitous in the United States. Today, 74% of Americans are online with nearly 63% of Americans having broadband access at home according the Pew Internet and American Life Project. This ubiquitous access coupled with high speed access on multiple devices means that the Internet has become a highly viable platform to distribute large amounts of marketing material in nearly every form to nearly everyone. With tools like YouTube and UStream.tv any business can have the equivalent of its own television channel. With WordPress, Blogspot, and Twitter, any business can have its own newspaper and newswire. With ConstantContact and iContact, any business can form their own email marketing campaign. With GoogleSites and OfficeLive, any business can have a basic web site. From the first spam email message on March 31st, 1993 to the first banner on a web site placed by AT&T on HotWired on October 25th, 1994, Internet Marketing has come a long way. This new Internet has a name: Web 2.0. It's also known as working in the Cloud or Cloud Computing, since many of these newer technologies are not based at any single location or even on a single computer. It has opened up a new realm of possibilities for marketing on the Internet. Tonight, we are going to go through all of the hot Web 2.0 tools, such as micro-blogging and social networking, and hot techniques, such as Search Engine Optimization, but first some background on me. My name is Jonathan Jaffe. I am the Founding Owner of www.its-your-internet.com, located in Forest Hills Queens, on Austin Street. I have been consulting for the past 14 years, starting out building large software systems for the who's-in-trouble-now companies on Wall Street, such as AIG and Merrill Lynch, moving on to working with dotcoms on multi-million dollar web sites to today where my focus has shifted primarily to concentrate on small and startup businesses interested in successfully building online presences. Internet Marketing or e-Marketing today can be divided broadly into three activities: 1. Branding 2. Indirect Advertising 3. Pure Advertising So let's begin with Branding. Branding on the Internet has a long and storied history. Branding is the identification of a product or service with a particular company and vice versa. If I say Kleenex, you think tissue. If I say Ford, you think car. Likewise, if I say office supplies, you're likely thinking about Staples. If I mention motorcycle, maybe Harley Davidson popped into your mind. If I say computer, you might think about Dell. Different brands have different emotions we associate with them. Let's try some:
Think about what emotions are instantly associated with each one. So can small businesses effectively create brand identity through the Internet? Early marketers such as Seth Goldin argued forcefully that companies could persuasively set their identity through banner advertisements alone. In practice though this has never been recorded as successful despite the numerous creative ways that banner ads evolved into pop ups, in page pop ups, rich media (video, audio, and animations), and even as interstitials where before you get to your content, an ad pops up instead. Yet, there are companies who were successfully able to brand themselves on the Internet through sheer usage with almost no offline (that is television, radio, or traditional print) advertisement. The most notable of these would be Google. Others would include MySpace, Facebook, Craigslist, WordPress, and Amazon. The lesson here is that branding on the Internet is possible, but only when you are consistent in the presentation of how people use the services you offer on the Internet, mainly on your own site. Even in the virtual world online, you can form a unique identity for your company. To do this, follow a few simple rules: 1. Keep the look of your web site consistent on all of your pages 2. Display the logo on every page in the same place, and most prominently on the home page. 3. Carry the colors and curves or straight edges of your logo throughout the rest of your web site adding additional variations minimally. Let's take a look at a few sites that do this well.
When you build identity you are looking to create an intangible. What does a potential customer or client feel when they see your name? Branding combats the following: 1. Fear 2. Uncertainty 3. Lack of trust When we speak about branding on the Internet, thus, it's your own web site/blog/profile that is the most prominent in building that. On your own web presences, you may not have millions of dollars and the millions of impressions that are necessary to deliver those messages. So if you are not Google or Amazon or Craigslist, how do you substitute elements that replace the warm and fuzzy feeling of branding? Essentially, you have to instill a measure of confidence in visitors to your site that says "I'm a legitimate business. You can purchase goods and services from my business. You can trust me." Here's how you do it. Make sure you have a professionally designed logo. Professionally designed does not mean expensive. Check out sites such as www.19dollarlogos.com. Avoid a logo that looks cartoonish or unprofessional. Put your business address and phone number at the top of the home page. Do not bury your phone number on the contact page of your site. Real businesses have physical addresses. Place some testimonials on your home page and if you are startup, don't be afraid to admit it. People like to see other people's comments. Make sure the comments are specific to the services you offer or the goods you sell not just generic praise such as "they're great." If you have many years experience tout it, but if you do not, disclose that you're a startup. Whether you are in business ten years or one month, people want to know. Consistency, consistency, consistency. To build a brand, you need to be consistent. You have to do this from the colors you use, to the fonts, the message, and the overall tone or voice of the site. Whether you are playful or professional in your tone, be consistent. What do I mean by tone? Let's take an example. Examine the following two newspaper headlines reporting on the premiere of the new Harry Potter movie: HORNY POTTERFORGET QUIDDITCH! HARRY AND GANG CAST A NEW KIND OF MAGIC, PLAYING TONSIL HOCKEY IN THE SERIES' SIXTH FLICKHow Much Harry Potter Can You Handle?
How about these two headlines discussing the sentencing of Bernie Madoff? BERNIE UN-APPEALINGRESIGNED TO REST OF HIS LIFE IN JAILMadoff Is Sentenced to 150 Years for Ponzi SchemeThe tone you set is an integral part of your identity, and it's important that you keep the same tone in marketing emails, brochures, and advertisements, especially as a smaller business you cannot afford to be inconsistent. Do not try to be too creative. Branding is about consistency not only in your own site, but also in the broader marketplace. If you find yourself always classifying your business under the ‘Other' category or your site has a unique menu system, you may be more confusing to potential clients and customers than enlightening. Talk about the key differentiators between your business and your competitors'. What makes your business different from your competitors? Every business has competitors. Absolutely every business does. Where would your clients go if your business did not exist to fill their need? Make sure the overall look of your web site is professional and the web site's design is flexible. If your web site looks like your seven year old nephew wrote it, clients will feel as if your seven year old nephew is running the business. On the other hand, if you have a slick design, but it is completely inflexible and every change that you made looks as it was bolted on to the side of your site, it will be just as bad. So, when you build your web site, make sure it has a professional look and is flexible enough to seamlessly add new pages and menu items as needed. So now, let's assume that you have a site that is sufficient to retain and capture the attention of the people who land on it. How can you tell who is going there? Good marketing is also primarily about good research. Two terrific sites that can break down the traffic to your site and also your competitors are compete.com and quantcast.com. Both sites use statistical inference methods (very similar to the exit polling done in elections) to not only report the number of people who visit your site, but who these people are by gender, ethnicity, age, and household income. Beware of measuring hits or page hits. Both give you highly exaggerated results by counting in the automated programs that visit your site. Your numbers may be inflated by as much as ten fold. Now if you do not have sufficient traffic to find data even on compete.com, then take a look at your large competitors to get a sense of the overall market. Who are the players that dominate? How much traffic do they get each month? Are there monthly patterns, seasonal patterns, sudden spikes or dips? What is the makeup of the individuals who visit each site? What income do they have? Are they browsing from work or home? Do they have children? The answers to these questions can help you set your own expectations. If your average competitor only receives a few thousand visitors a month, then at best you can expect a fraction of that amount starting out. These statistics can also help you determine where the soft spots in the market are. Are there particular demographics that are not appearing on your competitors' sites? Perhaps you can put something on your site to appeal to them. So to summarize: branding is entirely possible on the Internet, but it has to come from the core audience visiting your site. Do your research. Determine the size of your market and the likely makeup of your potential audience. Construct a site that is professionally designed with a consistent look and feel. Think about the questions that good branding answers: is this company legitimate? Do I have to fear giving them my information? Will the goods or services be of the quality I expect? Why should I go to this company versus another versus skipping the purchase altogether? Let's move beyond focusing on the web site itself to what I have labeled our second major category, Indirect Advertising. The category of Indirect Advertising includes the following: 1. Natural Search Engine Optimization 2. Affiliate Marketing 3. Social Networking / Web 2.0 Tools a. Blogs b. Micro-Blogging (Twitter, but also MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn) c. Casual Social Networks: MySpace and Facebook d. Business Social Networks: Plaxo and LinkedIn e. Rich Media: YouTube and UStream.tv 4. Press Releases Let's talk about Natural Search Engine Optimization. Crudely put, SEO refers to the science of getting a site to appear higher in the results rankings for any given search phrase or keyword phrase, ideally in the first couple of results, sub-optimally on the first page. Natural search engine optimization is always preferable to paid search results. Take a look at the following Heat Map generated by EyeTools.com. The eye movements of participants in this study when they viewed search engine results using Google were recorded. The redder the area, the more focus was given to it. The x's represent clicks on the page. Clearly, the greatest emphasis was given to the top left of the page; however in terms of Search Engine Optimization, that tells only one half of the story. It's not just important to rank on a given term, but the terms that are most relevant to your business. If you sell office supplies, but rank on Britney Spears, then there's an obvious disconnect. Likewise, if you are a plumber, arguably you do not want inquiries from customers looking to buy new kitchen sinks. Although the science is complex, and there are over 200 factors that cause a page to rank highly, I'm going to tell you the big secret of Search Engine Optimization. Pages that best match the search made in the truest sense rank best. It's actually a very simple philosophy. Google and other search engines attract loyal followings of users because when users search they generally find pages that are relevant. If they don't, well you do not need to look further than the failed search engine of Excite and Altavista that once upon a time completely dominated the search industry. Sites need a sufficient number of pages to rank well over a large number of terms. To use a poor analogy, no matter how hard it's raining outside, standing out there with a spoon will not get you a glass of water. Simply put, you need sufficient surface area. The same is true of web sites. The sites that attract the most traffic and rank the highest have millions of pages matching one to one every conceivable search. If you do not have the resources to accomplish the same, you will need to find a niche to dominate. On the home pages of Google, Bing, and Yahoo, you can now see what others have searched. When creating content, match these searches. If you are a lawyer, but people search for attorneys, use the word attorney in your content. The bottom line is that no matter what tricks work today, the only way to insure that you will rank long term is to match with your content the words people use. Now there are seven key technical considerations to signal to any search engine to which keyword phrase a page on your web is targeted. In order of importance, you should include the words in your phrase in: 1) The Title tag on the page, which should be no more than 70 characters 2) The H1 tag on the page, which should be no more than 70 characters 3) The first P tag on the page 4) In the URL for the page, which should be no more than 70 characters 5) Any links to page (A tags) from other pages 6) The meta keywords tag in the header of the page (no more than one keyword phrase here) 7) The meta description tag in the header of the page, which should be no more than 70 characters Remember, search engines rank pages, not web sites, even though collectively the site a given page is on does carry some weight. If you have a store that sells shoes, and you are trying to target ladies shoes size ten, then you will need separate pages for "ladies shoes size ten" "high heels size ten" "ladies shoes size 10" etc. Each page needs to be unique, not a small reworking of another page or the page will get hit with the dreaded duplicative content black mark and not rank. In terms of the specific search engines, let me take a moment to comment on the differences between them. A terrific site on the Internet if you are interested in following the search engine battles is searchenginewatch.com. In general, Google receives the lion's share of the traffic. According to Alexa.com, Google is the most visited site on the Internet, Yahoo.com second, MSN sixth, and Bing, 13th. Even though Bing is a new search engine from Microsoft, heavy marketing has already made it more visited than Ask.com or AOL, and even Twitter. These rankings though are deceiving since they make it seem as if Google and Yahoo are roughly even when in reality according to comScore survey results from April 2009, respectively Google has 64.2%, Yahoo 20.4%, Microsoft 8.2%, Ask 3.8%, and AOL 3.4%. If you are going to try to optimize your site, optimize for Google, not anyone else. Search engine optimization is just one way today to attract people to your web site. Affiliate marketing is a second way that is highly effective and increasingly appealing as many people are now out of work at home, connected, and looking to make additional money. In affiliate marketing, you allow others online to act on your behalf to attract clients and customers for your business, paying out commissions when they are successful. This payment is usually known as a CPA or Cost per Action. It is rare to pay out only when someone becomes an actual client. More typically you pay for cold or warm leads. Cold leads might have little more than a name and a number. Warm leads have already expressed interest in your product and potentially already paid your affiliate who is now contracting with you to perform the actual service or deliver the actual product. If you sell products, you can practice a type of reverse affiliate marketing, whereby you leverage a larger network to sell your products for you, such as Google Shopping, eBay Stores, or Amazon. This can be highly effective. The pure Web 2.0 tools offer up new advantages. Starting a blog on WordPress or Blogger allows you to give passionate followers tidbits about upcoming developments and receive comments and instant feedback from your most dedicated customers. Good control of this information helps you bring products and services to market that match their needs and expectations, but you have to be careful that you are (1) not overburdened by creating content that only a few people are reacting to and (2) not responding to a small minority of clients and customers. Micro-blogging on sites such as Twitter or using the status updates of LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace gives you the ability to write short updates on new developments, but you have to be disciplined. Make each tweet count. Don't post unprofessional or personal information. If you are a jeweler, post your latest acquisition. If you are a doctor, post your thoughts on a new research study. The more valuable the information you give, the more people will follow you. Casual social networking sites let you access a casual/non-professional audience. If your services are more personal, e.g. photography, jewelry, housewares, music, then MySpace and Facebook are excellent venues to build a following. Don't wait for people to find out about your profile. Send invitations to everyone you know. Whenever you meet someone new, send them an invite. Join groups that are local based if your business is local. Even though sites like Facebook and MySpace cater to a casual audience, you can make use of them as a business user. Today, Facebook is gaining dominance over MySpace in appealing to businesses. Facebook now has several features that allow you to improve the SEO of your Facebook page, though be forewarned that due to the inherent limitations of these sites, there is a limited amount you can do. Start by choosing a name for your Facebook page that reflects the nature of your business but is not too generic (Facebook frowns upon generic names like Dress Shop). Choose a username that complements your business and is focused on the most important words potential clients will search. The Info Tab and the About Text are both excellent places for elaborating about your company using keywords. Use the Static FBML application to add even more text to your page. Finally, the Attach Link feature will put a short text snippet next to the link to your Facebook page. Business networking sites, such as LinkedIn and Plaxo, give you the opportunity to access a professional audience. Take the time to create a professional profile and build a network of connections. Aim for breaking at least one hundred connections. Take advantage of the weekly email updates that these networks send out. To get on the weekly update modify your status or join new groups. This keeps you in front of the individuals in your business circle. This is the best way to net referrals. Join groups of professionals who can either refer you clients or become clients. With all social networking tools, you have to discipline yourself to provide regular updates. What is regular? The answer depends on your personality and the nature of your business. That can be once a week or eight times a day. My emphasis is on the regularity of the updates. You want to be consistent, though of course greater frequency will help you out to a greater degree. YouTube and UStream.tv are two great tools for developing out and posting rich media content. Since video is difficult to search, make sure to take the time to tag all of the content you create with keywords accurately describing it. Videos of speeches or presentations are terrific additions to a small business image making you appear larger. Again, as with all marketing, the key is discipline and being consistent. You can never build a following with just a few videos. You need to post on a regular basis. Making a series is particularly effective as it encourages someone who views one video to view others. These videos do not need to be long. The length of an average video on YouTube is 2.7 minutes. Web sites and Web 2.0 tools such as social networks ultimately are limited in their coverage. Press releases offer your business an opportunity to circumvent those limitations by inexpensively distributing information about your business to literally tens of thousands of web sites. It is equally likely that you will be found by one of your clients through a press release as on one of your sites. Sites like pressreleasepoint.com allow you to very inexpensively distribute press releases to what I like to refer to as the Class B Wire Services. Unlike traditional wire services such as BusinessWire, PRNewswire, and MarketWatch, these services are essentially free and geared toward smaller businesses that just want to release their news on blogs and the general Internet, not the New York Times. When writing a press release to market your business, stick to the following few rules that will make it most likely to be circulated and reposted. a) Keep the release fact based, and place all opinions in quotes. b) Do not pitch your products and services in the release. Mention them in relation to your background and as qualifications for your commentary. c) Comment on topical news that is relevant to something in the papers today. Unless you are a public company or very large private one, no one is reading about who you hired last week. So in summary, indirect advertising can be very successful, at a low monetary cost if you are doing most of the labor yourself, though you do have to be persistent, maintain realistic expectations, do the research, and put in the time. Although branding, web site development, and indirect advertising all are effective means of driving traffic, nothing is quite as effective and immediately so as some of the direct advertising. That brings us now to our final major category of Internet Marketing, direct advertising. Direct advertising can be broken down into the following subcategories: 1. Pay-per-click 2. Impression Based/CPM 3. Email marketing 4. Directory based 5. Traditional media Contrary to much popular understanding, the pay-per-click model did not originate with Google, but in 1998 with IdeaLab and GoTo.com. In pay-per-click, advertisers typically pay each time a user clicks on their ad to visit their web site. Payment is irrespective of intention, leading to the eventual coinage of the companion term, click fraud, a situation whereby a competitor or even pay-per-click provider fraudulently clicks on advertisements thereby costing the advertiser when there was no possibility of a sale. Pay-per-click is also known as CPC. Although you do not pay for impressions, most providers will remove your ad or lower it in the listings if they find that it is not getting clicked upon as frequently as others. Thus, it becomes highly important when creating pay-per-click ads not only to set the price at the correct rate, but also to have a compelling sales pitch. Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Microsoft AdCenter are the three giants in the field, but there are many other smaller providers, including yellow and white page directories. While the most competitive keyword phrases, like mesothelioma (a rare cancer caused by asbestos) will cost $100-$200 per click (I know since I was bidding for it), the average cost per click is $0.46 for the Auto industry, $1.54 for the Finance industry, $0.39 for the Retail industry and $0.57 for the Travel industry. To be competitive, you will likely need to spend between $1 and $5 per click. If you sell diamonds, then this is clearly worth it. If you sell ballpoint pens or individual paperback books, the tradeoff might not pay. Expect around a 2-3% return off of your pay-per-click campaign, that is 2-3% of your clicks should translate into customers. Of course you can do much better with sufficient experimentation, and likely someone in this room may have hit 60-80%, but that is more of the exception than the rule. I have had clients that have spent six figures per month on pay-per-click with middling results. More chancy, but more targeted with greater mass appeal are online CPM (cost per thousand eyeballs) or cost per impression campaigns. The best way to get the most eyeballs on your content is to approach ad networks. The top networks are Platform-A, Yahoo, 24/7 Real Media, Traffic Marketplace, and Fox Audience. Many of them though require a minimum spend of $10,000 per month. MySpace, Facebook, Amazon, and Business.com are alternatives with relatively fewer eyeballs, but lower monthly minimums. Whether you engage in CPC or CPM, do A B testing. Make multiple versions of your sales pitch. Try them out. Let the best one survive. Email marketing or frankly spamming is an extremely long shot for any business. The return is generally under 1% for smaller businesses. Prices of lists can be high, and you must use opt-in email vendors such as ConstantContact or iContact to avoid being blacklisted by AOL and other large email providers, so you end up paying when you email your list. Email marketing is notoriously difficult to measure accurately, so you really have to hire an expert. I would recommend staying away from it. Whatever the industry that you are in, you have likely been approached by sales people to join industry specific directories on the Internet. Stay away from directories, such as the yellow pages and similar online professional directories. They usually are overpriced and yield poor results. Do your own research with Quantcast and Compete to verify the traffic figures that are being given to you and to determine whether the makeup of their audiences is appropriate to your business. Now in your rush to make use of all of the new Web 2.0 tools and online advertising, don't forget that we are in a time where the cost of advertising in traditional media is at an all time low. It still works. ValPak, posters in the subway, flyers, newspaper and magazine ads, and radio ads do target mass audiences. Use these traditional forms of advertising to drive people to your web site instead of your phone line where your site can close the sale without tying up your time. Tonight, I have spoken about three broad classifications of Internet Marketing: branding, indirect and direct advertising. I hope that I have helped distinguish amongst them and how they can help your business reach its goals. I would like to end on a note of encouragement to everyone here who has struggled without seeing instant returns. Everyone struggles. Microsoft is in its third iteration of their search engine, moving from MSN to Live to Bing. It took three years for Twitter to reach critical mass. Even Google had an extreme uphill battle against AltaVista and Excite. As smaller businesses, set realistic goals and expectations. Look for steady growth from your efforts instead of an instant pop, and you will realize greater heights. Thank you very much. |
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