Monthly Archives: September 2010

Top 5 Pitfalls to Avoid in Digital Copywriting

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There’s a lot of information on the web about how to write digital copy. But just like how you struck out a bunch before figuring out how to hit on attractive members of the opposite sex, sometimes it’s equally important to learn what not to do. Location3 Media presents…

Top 5 Pitfalls to Avoid in Digital Copywriting

5. Not putting main selling point first

We all know keywords belong at the front of titles and near the top of copy, but sometimes in our craze to optimize and be clever, we bury the main point in the third paragraph. It is common knowledge that web readers have all the attention span and focus of a puppy on speed. If you’re lucky enough to catch attention you won’t hold it long, so put your main selling point or best benefit statement front and center. A funny opener can hook them, but the well-executed pitch converts.

4. Keyword stuffing

Do you like wombats? Wombats are furry and fun. You could have a wombat today! Wombats are part of this balanced breakfast.

Keyword stuffing is a serious crime. Not only does it ruin content for the reader, it can actually hurt SEO efforts. The keys to effective SEO-optimized copy are balance and ingenuity. Intersperse the keywords within tight, relevant, and interesting copy and they will disappear. Use your imagination and free association brainstorming to fit keywords into text in unexpected ways.

3. Lack of editing

The push for constantly updated content makes it harder and harder to spend time editing. While time constraints sometimes mean shooting off a quick and dirty blog post, successful ad copy, articles, and landing pages need to be edited. And edited. And edited again. Tight copy doesn’t necessarily mean short copy, it just means that every word works hard for the money, and slacker words are cut. A solid seven word headline has 100 words cut.  Think of editing as a beauty pageant- for every Miss America there are 49 losers with hairspray on their butts.

2. Falling in love with your own voice

I know you think you’re funny. But Pledge doesn’t care if your friends think your status updates are hilarious. They care if women ages 30-50 laugh at your cute copy and buy Pledge. In writing for different clients, it’s important that your voice don’t always sound the same. Each project needs its own tone- your ideas filtered through a well thought-out position that appeals to the target audience.

That said, it is important to develop unique voices to build up followings. People don’t love Oprah because her East Coast diction is perfect; they love her because her voice speaks to them on a deeper level and she gives away cars. Use your one-of-a-kind voice to build a following on your blog and in social media.

1. Focusing on features rather than benefits

This goes way back in the annals of advertising rules, but remains relevant today. The fact that an iPad can display pictures is a feature. Being able to flash your friends a picture of your dog’s butt at any moment on a 9.7 inch high-res screen is a benefit. Wrinkle-resistant fabric is a feature. Being able to wear the same button-down for a three day bender in Vegas and roll straight to the office from a red-eye with a crisp-looking shirt is a benefit. Readers don’t care about what any product does unless you can point out how it will make their life easier, better, prettier, faster, cheaper or less hairy. Never lose focus on the benefits.

Branded Entertainment

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Or, How Agencies and Movie Studios Are Becoming More Alike Than They Are Different

With a background in both advertising and film/commercial production, I have a real soft spot for good advertising and good movies. I’m the guy that actually looks forward to the pre-show spots playing ahead of the feature at your local cinema. There’s a reason I love Mad Men.

When these two worlds intersect, even better. And we’ve seen a lot more of this intersection of late in the form of branded entertainment.

Why Branded Entertainment?

With the massive online content boom of the Aughts –and the rolling aftershocks that continue to shape our daily work as ad professionals – the way we speak to consumers is changing. We’re more content-hungry than ever and it is readily available at every turn. It’s on computer screens, mobile devices, and now the living room with technologies such as Google TV and Apple TV (from the Goliath’s) plus Roku and Boxee (from the David’s).

It follows that advertising messages are increasingly more integrated in the content – the stories – that we consume so insatiably. This is nothing new, of course. Think back to the P&G sponsored soap operas at advent of TV and the corporate sponsored radio shows of the Great Depression. Hell, even the first Sears-Roebuck catalog had to be entertaining on some level for early settlers in the outhouse.

So as more eyes and ears gather at the web for their content, often to timeshift and avoid ads in traditional broadcast programming, we’ve seen many smart brands/agencies catch on and integrate their message accordingly. Even as I write, I’m listening to Trent Reznor’s free five track sampler of The Social Network’s soundtrack. Is this advertising or entertainment? I don’t really care, it makes my ears happy.

Examples of Branded Entertainment

Of course, there are examples of both good and not-so-good executions of branded entertainment. On my good list I would recommend you take a few minutes and sample the following:

  • In Gayle We Trust: This online comedy series follows an American Family Insurance agent helping the members of her community. Talk about baked-in brand values. Produced by NBC Universal Digital Studio and Mindshare Entertainment.
  • The Temp Life: Just renewed for its fifth season, this is the longest running brand sponsored web series to date. The story follows the fun(ny) side of taking temporary work while still aspiring to big dreams. Produced by CJP Communications for Spherion, a large US recruiting and staffing company.
  • Will it Blend?: Ah, an oldie but a goody. One of the lowest budget and most virally popular, this homegrown series produced by/for Blendtec blenders satisfies the curious child in all of us by showing what happens when you put an iPad, glowsticks, or golf balls into a blender. Not your traditional, narrative-based branded entertainment per se, but this series has racked up millions of views and driven great awareness for Blendtec.
The Move to the Movie Model

While countless ad agencies are creating this work on commission by their clients, there are others who are creating original entertainment on speculation that they will attract a brand sponsor. This falls into a unique type of medium, one that is on some level integrated with a message. And while there are several downsides such as a limited ability to tailor the content to a client, the upfront investment, etc., I believe that agencies with an in-tune creative sense will win big here.

In a great AdWeek article about the challenges of creating branded entertainment with media, creative, and digital shops all collaborating for a given client, the author (Mike Wiese of JWT NY) mentions another key benefit of this approach, which is that creatives thrive under the freedom to create. A great example here is Wieden + Kennedy’s entertainment division, which describes itself as “an arts and culture digital content delivery platform [whose] goal is to renegotiate the relationship between art, media, advertising and the consumer.”

While this emerging business model may strike many as risky, I say to them, “It is.” But when did anything worthwhile ever come without risk? There will surely be a big pay off here, both on the business and consumer side. And of course, there will always be poorly-made entertainment along with the good stuff. But art and entertainment have always been on some levels linked to the mighty dollar. This goes back to the days of patronage supporting the likes of artists such as Leonardo Da Vinci. But thankfully, true artists will prevail by producing their greatest work within the context of some sort of external boundary or brief.

We’re going to see more and more original and branded entertainment coming from agencies in the years to come. Given my personal dual/dueling passions, this is an exciting prospect and one that places even more responsibility on us as advertising professionals. To produce work that brings value to both client and consumer.  Work that inspires and brings out the best in us.

Stay tuned, folks…

Allocating Local Marketing Budget for 2011

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Google, Local Budgets and the Marketing DirectorTis the season for many of our clients to assess online marketing initiatives and begin to set local budget allocations for 2011. So with that in mind and with full disclosure that we, (Location3 Media) offer all of these services to our clients, let’s look at a few local opportunities to consider adding to your online repertoire.

Sponsored Local Ads: This option can get expensive with a little friendly debate involved regarding its full effectiveness towards driving conversions. However, if you have a strong brand and lots of store locations you can often negotiate a good deal with some of the local players. Just for the branding aspect alone, if you can leverage a good rate in order to show up in the local sponsored listings then it can increase not only your brand awareness but can also increase the performance of referring traffic from your organic (read: free) local listings; not to mention of course the clicks you actually receive from those sponsored listings.

You won’t have much luck negotiating a discounted rate with the big dogs like Google Maps, but for some of the ancillary local sources like Superpages, Insiderpages and CitySearch there is often flexibility to engage in some haggling. The results of an effective, well-negotiated sponsored local listings campaign can have an impact in both measureable and some less measurable ways.

Organic Local Maps Management: Taking care of business with your (free) organic local listings is perhaps one of the most inexpensive but conversely the most important areas that you can allocate budget towards. No one wants to spend the time that they should spend on managing data for thousands of store locations on hundreds of local search engines, IYPs and user review sites but doing so can pay off dramatically and can make you, as a marketing director, very popular in the eyes of the CEO. Seeing a quantifiable ROI on your annual organic local investment, often within one to three months from what I have seen, goes over very well when your annual review comes up. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that the olden days of dumping data into an online database doesn’t cut it anymore and actually hasn’t cut it for years despite some highly self publicized companies’ insistence that their “tried and true” local data methods are best in class. Manual, direct management on the many different online local channels is important and is what proves to be most effective in gaining better exposure for discovery search terms as well as for maintaining accuracy within the intertwined net of location data sources that propagate your info throughout the world wide web. (FYI, I just won a bet that I couldn’t fit the antiquated term “world wide web” into a blog! Yes!)

Franchise level or geo-targeted PPC: Individual franchise level campaigns make the most sense if your store owners are responsible for their own marketing budgets; one single geo-targeted campaign makes the most sense if corporate is paying for the local marketing budget. If you want to save money on management costs then the geo-targeted corporate route will do so, whereas your franchisees will have to pay proportionally higher fees to have much smaller campaigns managed via the franchise level route. But I suppose if your franchises are paying for their own budgets then your corporate budget allocation would be zero and what’s better than that!

If you are planning on running a corporate level as well as franchise level PPC campaigns then that works too, whoever bids higher and has higher quality scores will show up whenever there is a conflict. Just keep in mind that Google will always favor relevance and considers the locally geo-targeted campaign as the priority to show up over the national campaign. Metro pages also can work well here; see Local SEO section below for more on metro pages.

PPC is still the most quantifiable marketing option and with API capable campaign/bid management software in place, along with some good old manual analysis, PPC is still the proven champion for driving online sales at an acceptable cost per acquisition.

Local SEO: Localized SEO strategies, just like overall SEO strategies, begin with building your site properly. If your site was originally designed without SEO in mind it is usually not too late to go back and optimize it without needing a complete site redesign. Typically, the work being allocated toward optimizing the site-side elements for local SEO can be consolidated by building a repeatable format for titles, tags, content, URL structures, H1s, etc. Build this search-friendly format for one location (or metro page) and then simply apply the same structure to all other location or metro pages. The practice of building optimized metro pages is currently an extremely cost effective practice, which helps you avoid duplicating efforts on thousands of individual location landing pages.

Metros also help to consolidate efforts and expenses when link building. If you were to attempt to link build for thousands of individual location landing pages this could be akin to multiplying the amount of links you are acquiring by however many locations you wanted to acquire links for.

8 quality links per month Xs 2,000 locations = 1 huge bottomless pit of budget allocation

That is not a good strategy and should be avoided particularly regarding link building. If you are trying to quantify local SEO in a corporate environment where it has never been seriously considered in the past then it may be a good strategy to pick your top metros, have optimized metro pages created, and then implement link building for those top metros. You can then track the results of those efforts and, based on what you see, expand the amount of metros you wish to focus on. There are also some additional consolidation efforts that can be applied here as well and of course link love for your site as a whole can help boost relevancy for the different local pages.

Social Media Monitoring & Engagement: Local online conversation monitoring and engagement can typically be done as a whole under one consolidated effort. Most monitoring tools can pretty effectively pull national results across blogs, forums, social media feeds, comments, images and videos. Having a good social media monitoring campaign in place is a necessity now with how quickly we see both negative and positive commentary go viral. For multiunit businesses, this can be done on a global level for more general chatter that applies to corporate brand, and on a local level for chatter that directly applies to individual store locations. The value of receiving this often unfiltered customer feedback is invaluable on both levels.

Most agencies can give you a pretty good idea of the volume of chatter that is occurring for your brand, vertical or specific services before you sign off on a contract for social; in fact we set budgets based on the anticipated content volume and anticipated time involved reviewing and recommending responses to that volume of conversation. Stayed tuned to future blog posts regarding ways to dig in more granularly on the local level for social media such as local review monitoring and engagement; that in itself is worthy of some more of our time.

This is by no means an all inclusive guide to all local marketing options but rather some important suggestions that, from what I’ve seen over this past year, are often being neglected. I purposefully neglect to mention some other areas such as locally targeted email marketing because I’m working on the assumption that most of you already have fairly robust and targeted email campaigns in place and have for some time now. There are of course other opportunities out there like display and mobile but you can worry about those after you get your local marketing foundation intact. Have fun budgeting!

All’s Fair In Love And…SEO?

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There’s a saying that goes, “The cobbler’s son is always barefoot.” It means when you sell a product, it’s hard to make time to provide it for yourself. Or maybe just that the cobbler doesn’t like his son much. The same principle applies to marketing firms- it’s important to use your expertise on your own projects, not just your clients. Over the last year or so my agency has been working on that principle, and as the SEO manager I was asked to optimize our agency’s website. As many know, search doesn’t always bring in the quality leads for a business like ours, ironically enough, so it was hard to find time to do something that doesn’t directly bring in profit. I’m glad I finally got around to it though, because as it turns out, ranking well on certain terms does have some pretty sweet payoffs!

We ambitiously chose the key phrase “digital marketing agency” and strategically placed it in titles and content, standard procedure. Then we reached out to our media partners and marketing bloggers for some much needed link love. After just a few months, our site popped to the front page in Google. While I was proud that our team’s hard work paid off, as expected, the leads did not come a knockin’.


Let me back up here and tell you a little about myself. I’m a single twenty-nine year old female living the dream in beautiful Denver, Colorado. I’ve been sans relationship for just over four years, which is more like twenty in girl years. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve enjoyed every minute of my footloose lifestyle and have certainly made the best of it, but it can get a little lonely sometimes. So naturally, I may have dabbled just a wee bit in the dating scene. Alright, if dating were an Olympic sport, I’d probably be on the cover of a Wheaties box by now. There were a few here and there that caught my interest, but none that were ever “right.”

Fast forward to about four months ago, our creative director Ryan brought a new friend into the office to meet the team and potentially interview for a position. He’d just moved here from San Francisco, where he started and ran his own digital shop. I instantly busted out my best move- the prolonged eye contact where you hold on just long enough to make it obvious, but not so long that it turns creepy. You know what I’m talking about. I actually turned to my computer the second they walked away and emailed Ryan, “So…who’s your friend?”

Ryan informed me that since he was interviewing for a position, he was off limits due to our very strict no inter-office dating policy. That did not make me happy. To make a long story short, the interview never happened, and we finally got our first date a couple months later. That quickly turned into the second, third, fourth, etc…and now, for the first time in four years, I am in what one might call- wait for it- “a relationship.”

So what does any of that shmoopy-ness have to do with SEO you ask? Last week my gentleman caller was in the office to discuss SEO, PPC and social media services for one of his clients. I was walking him out when we ran into our CEO, who of course couldn’t miss the opportunity to comment on the “adorable couple” and laugh at my instantly rosy cheeks. This turned into a larger conversation about what he’s been doing since moving to Denver, what sort of projects he’s working on, etc. Then our CEO asks, “So how did you find out about Location3 in the first place?”

“Well” he responds “when I decided I was moving to Denver, I Googled ‘digital marketing agency’ and found you guys near the top, so I reached out to see what sort of opportunities there were here.”

Yup, you heard it right. All that SEO work we did for our own site that we thought would never amount to anything did in fact generate one quality lead to conversion. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I SEO’d myself a boyfriend!

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank my SEO team, JD, Emily and Forrest for all of your hard work on our internal marketing efforts. Much appreciated.

What Does Google Instant Mean for Your SEM Campaigns?

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Yesterday, Google launched a new way that search results are displayed—Google Instant Search. Similar to their Search Suggest functionality, Google Instant Search predicts a searcher’s query as they type and delivers results immediately. This allows users to refine their searches and find the exact results they desire because they are given instant feedback. The benefit for searchers is obvious, but is this also an advantage for businesses using PPC management, SEO or local map listings management? Let’s look at each tactic individually.

PPC Management

The advent of Google Instant Search is likely to be hugely impactful on how searchers behave. This new functionality could potentially put a much greater emphasis on sponsored search results, but also cause an increased focus on short query exact match terms (one or two term search queries).

With the increased focus on short query search terms, we’ll likely begin to see increasing CPCs on these broad terms as even more advertisers compete for this space initially. This change may put a premium on high volume short query terms from a traffic perspective, but from a conversion-based performance standpoint, long-tail terms will be all the more important to maintain portfolio efficiency. The end result of this shift will be an increased importance on paid search, but also change the way we target keywords and optimize performance. Additionally, keyword builds will need to include all terms shown in Google Search Suggest that are relevant to your campaigns—as searchers get used to the new instant results, they may become more satisfied with the options being automatically provided, and less likely to dig through further results.

Click through rates (CTRs), impression volume and quality score will likely also be affected. An impression is now counted when a searcher hits enter, clicks on a listing or stops typing for three seconds or more. With a potential increase in impression volume and lowered CTR, quality score will certainly be affected, thus impacting rank and CPCs. Time will tell how these metrics play out, but rest assured that all paid searcher advertisers across the board will be affected. We foresee that Google will need to adjust their quality score factors to account for these changes.

Local PPC Management

For non geo-modified terms, Google will still take a searcher’s location—identified by IP address—into consideration when showing paid results. Google will also predict location based on search term and suggest it in a search query. It will remain important to bid on geo- and non-geo-modified terms for full coverage.

SEO

Google Instant Search may have a negative impact on organic search in that it is changing the searcher’s behavior. As the searcher types in their query, the results change multiple times. As the new results flash by their eyes, their original search phrase intent may change depending on what they see. This makes optimizing for certain phrases unpredictable and, therefore, more difficult. We see long-tail phrases being the most impacted as the searcher will be less likely to complete their query. This may lead to a larger focus on the general, highly competitive terms.

At Location3, we already put the majority of our focus on the broad terms, so we are predicting that our performance will continue as before, however the strategies we use towards the long-tail may change depending on what search query reports tell us.

Additionally, the Search Suggest box now takes up a good portion of SERP real estate, essentially pushing organic results out of view. If you look at the screenshot below, you’ll notice the complete absence of “above the fold” SERP real estate for natural results. This may cause searchers to overlook organic results—instead of waiting for more organic results to appear and scrolling down, users may quickly opt for paid or map listings.

Map Listings

No two people will see the same results anymore, meaning they are custom and more local centric with this release. The map listing area is well positioned with Google Instant Search as even more emphasis has been placed on geographic location. As PPC keyword prices are likely to increase on generic terms, it makes having an updated and enhanced map listing presence that much more important. With this recent change, the map listing 7 pack is appearing on more searches than ever before. Since we optimize for high traffic broad terms, our clients will have coverage for the suggested terms as well.

Google Analytics

Google Instant Search passes the suggested search result in the referral URL, which will consequently show up in the keywords report in Google Analytics. In addition, Google also captures the original user search query in a different parameter called “oq.”

If we search for “insurance”:

This is what the referral URL would look like:

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&expIds=17259,25856,25900,26086,26207,26446,26459,26512&sugexp=ldymls&tok=Fq-p_5b8e5FH9ruZEyJAOw&xhr=t&q=insurance+quotes&cp=10&pf=p&sclient=psy&aq=f&aqi=g5&aql=&oq=insurance+&gs_rfai=&pbx=1&fp=fecbcea05c97c6f3

As shown in the referral URL, “oq=insurance” captures the original search query by user.

Below is how you can capture this information using Google Analytics filter:

With this filter set, your keyword report will show both the query and the keyword with a “|” between (e.g., insurance+quotes|insurance). We will continue to monitor discussions about Google Instant’s impact on GA, and test out these new filters to ensure this is the most effective method.

Moving Forward

Google Instant Search has been rolled out to users on Google domains in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Russian. Users must have the latest browser versions (Chrome v5/6, Firefox v3, Safari v5 for Mac and IE v8). They will be adding new languages over the coming months.

Overall Google’s new system will allow their intelligence and insight into searcher behavior grow even stronger, which in turn can only help advertisers refine campaigns to receive the best results. The predictive search will also help guide searchers to find the best results for them. This may increase the number of searchers who click on paid ads (currently 34.5%) as the results become more refined and relevant. Google Instant Search can be turned off if a user prefers to search the old way. Whether the majority of people turn it off will be revealed in the coming weeks; however, if you’ve used it at all in the past day, you’ll most likely agree with me that you can never go back!

As we always have, we will be keeping a close watch on performance and metrics of all campaigns, and keep you updated as we figure out exactly what Google Instant Search means for your SEM campaigns.

Andrew Beckman Speaking at BlueGlass FL 2010

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Andrew is speaking at BlueGlass FL 2010, an online marketing conference in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. His session is a panel titled, “Domaining — The Evolving World of Domains.” It is taking place on Tuesday, November 2, 2010 right after the lunch break. Learn more about  BlueGlass FL 2010 and check out the full agenda.