Marketing Pilgrim Published: “From The Writer’s Garage: A Closed Loop Marketing Overview” plus 6 more |  |
- From The Writer’s Garage: A Closed Loop Marketing Overview
- Bing Upgrades Their Mobile Browsing Experience
- Jobs Made for a Pilgrim (JOB LISTINGS)
- Honest to Goodness, Yahoo Is Still In the Search Game
- AOL Cuts Continue as They Close the Door on 30 Sites
- NYT Paywall Cost Comparison (CHART)
- Survey of SMB’s Online Activities Shows Some Progress
| From The Writer’s Garage: A Closed Loop Marketing Overview Posted: 24 Mar 2011 07:54 AM PDT
This post comes to us from Kathleen Colan, director of marketing and content for Mongoose Metrics. Thanks, Kathleen! Enjoy! HOW CLOSED LOOP CONVERSION TRACKING CAN IMPROVE MARKETING CAMPAIGNS Closed-loop marketing is the process of tracking website visitors from the time they arrive at your website, to when they convert into a lead, and through to becoming a customer. To enable closed-loop conversion tracking, Internet marketers need a constant stream of real-time performance data to understand campaign effectiveness, and identify opportunities to improve lead quality and volume. Specifically, they need to analyze: Website Activity – Web analytics track and record traffic source, bounce rate, time on site, pageviews, pages per visit and exit pages. Online and Offline Conversions – Web analytics also track web form completions and online purchases, and call tracking solutions record phone leads. Lead-to-Customer Conversions – CRM systems collect and organize lead intelligence, and track leads that convert into customers and the revenue they generate. Armed with this data, marketers are more prepared to answer the five questions they will face throughout a closed-loop marketing campaign: 1. Are my target audiences finding my website relevant? If your audiences find your website content relevant to their needs, they will be more likely to engage with it. This will: lower bounce rate; increase time on site, pageviews and page per visit; and in the end increase the number of web form, checkout and phone-call conversions. Review these metrics by traffic source, and target your marketing initiatives toward the sources of engaged visitors with a high likelihood of converting. 2. Is it easy for website visitors to take action? Look at pages with calls to actions that have high exit rates and low conversions. Don't forget to reference call tracking reports to account for offline conversions. A lack of conversions may indicate that your calls to action are unclear, or you're not giving visitors a reason to convert. If this is the case, consider revising the web page layout, adjusting call-to-action prominence, or reducing how much information you ask for in the web form. Also, if you don't have a phone number listed, consider integrating one as your visitors may simply prefer to call. 3. Which Internet marketing activities are driving conversions? To understand which marketing activities (i.e. SEO, PPC, content, social media) are driving conversions, look closely at the website traffic sources that drive visitors to fill out web forms, purchase products online or contact you by phone. If your marketing activities aren't driving conversions, you may consider: Testing different calls to action. 4. Are we helping customers move through the buying cycle? In a closed-loop marketing campaign, the job doesn't end at lead generation, but continues through to customer conversions. This is often done through lead-nurturing campaigns that share useful content or specials/discounts via email. To understand if your lead-nurturing campaigns are effective, review website traffic sources to see how many visitors they drive. Next, look at time on site, pageviews, and online and offline conversions to understand if these visitors are taking the time to read through the content you've shared, and requalifying themselves via web form or phone call. Also, through the CRM, you can see how many leads associated with a nurturing campaign are converting to customers, and how much revenue those customers generate. 5. Do campaigns receive an acceptable return on investment? Compare ROI across campaigns to identify the top-performing initiatives. Consider putting more budget and effort into these activities, and adjusting or eliminating under-performing ones. Study which lead-nurturing campaigns are converting leads to customers, and then apply what you're doing there to other campaigns. Also, experiment with different ways to motivate leads to take action, either though sharing different types of educational content or offering different discounts/specials. When managing an Internet marketing campaign, it's important to have all metrics readily available, from initial traffic source to customer conversions. With this information, marketers are better equipped to gain valuable insight into campaign performance and capitalize on opportunities to improve.
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| Bing Upgrades Their Mobile Browsing Experience Posted: 23 Mar 2011 02:17 PM PDT
SHOPPINGLike the Bing app, the Bing mobile browser offers a scrolling list of categories to help narrow down your choices from the moment you start to search. From there, you can jump to the updated shopping helper which uses more graphics than text to guide you through the next steps. Each category drills down at least twice until you’re presented with a list of pre-selected items, which, unless you’re gift shopping for someone you don’t know, is fairly useless. I don’t know how Bing chooses which items to show, but when I picked Scifi Movies, I was presented with Mars Attacks (an old $2.50 DVD), Retro Scifi Adventures (?) and Beowulf (??). Tron comes out in two weeks, shouldn’t that be the top item on the list? If you search for a specific item, the chosen category does refine the search results so you only get items for sale and not general websites. By searching Supernatural inside of the Shopping: Movies: category, the top three items presented were indeed DVDs of the various seasons of the TV show. Used that way, this is a time saver vs a general Google search. TRANSIT AND WEATHERFor those of you who use public transportation, Bing has made it very easy to find bus routes and walking routes. Simply tap Directions, fill in your ending location, then choose the car, bus or walking icon to get appropriate directions. An excellent tool. Bing also upgraded their weather application to use auto-suggest so all you have to do is start typing the city name and you’re there. Great. The odd part is, I have to keep typing in my own zip code to get my own weather. Shouldn’t that be automatic based on my phone settings or GPS? OTHER IMPROVEMENTS
The Bing blog says they’ve built in an app search system that suggests related apps for your phone, but I couldn’t figure out how to get that to work. They’ve also improved their movie search to organize by time and location nearest you with links to reviews so you can see what the critics think before you go and form your own opinion. Access all of this by going to m.bing.com from your iPhone or Android. Windows Phone 7 support will be along later this year.
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| Jobs Made for a Pilgrim (JOB LISTINGS) Posted: 23 Mar 2011 12:43 PM PDT Our job board has been very busy lately. I hope it’s an indication of the economy as a whole on the positive side. In reality it could even mean the economy is still on the fritz but the Internet is where investment and growth is happening because of cost efficiency etc. Heck, I don’t know, I’m not an economist but I do know a choice job opportunity when I see one. Here’s a few to consider. Online Marketing / Social Media Manager for Easton-Bell Sports in Scotts Valley, CA (as a baseball fan this one is VERY cool) Social Media Specialist / Startup Business Group for Microsoft in Redmond, WA (as a business fan this one is hard to not get a bit jacked up about) Check out our Internet marketing and social media job listings for more great opportunities. If you are an employer seeking the best and the brightest you can find a Pilgrim for just $27 / month per job listing. Honestly, that’s hard to beat. Happy job and employee hunting!
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| Honest to Goodness, Yahoo Is Still In the Search Game Posted: 23 Mar 2011 11:40 AM PDT I can't remember the last time I had a chance to write a little something about Yahoo that didn't involve the word boatloads, layoffs or a product’s demise. Today, Yahoo has announced (hold on to your hats) a search improvement called Yahoo Search Direct. Ok, cue the cool video to behold this strange wonder called a Yahoo search announcement. I took the beta which can be found at search.yahoo.com out for a spin and it's nifty in that it is a different search experience. Is it a better one? We'll see. It worked well on direct terms and more widely searched terms. Where is falls down a bit is at the local search level but that may be something that will evolve with time. As with all changes in any search engine my immediate questions are 1) Is this going to get past just the industry types who will find this interesting, talk about it then wonder why no one else (meaning the rest of the world who actually moves away from their computer on a daily basis) is using it and 2) Is there going to be marketing muscle to the masses to make them aware of this innovation or will it be left to user self-discovery. If the answer to one is that only the industry will play with this then this is dead on arrival. If the answer to number two is that it will be a self discovery thing then it will do nothing to increase market share and could even stand to alienate that rare breed that uses Yahoo as their primary search engine. So, I say Woo-hoo! for Yahoo as they make some strides in search. It's about time and if they are to stand a chance in this game they need to make quite a few more announcements like this one. The key is not keeping it a secret. Any thoughts? Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!
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| AOL Cuts Continue as They Close the Door on 30 Sites Posted: 23 Mar 2011 11:34 AM PDT
The graphic at the right is only a portion of the sites currently being operated by AOL and that’s before the acquisition of the Huffington Post. There was already quite a bit of redundancy across the sites, so streamlining only makes sense from both a financial and a brand standpoint. AOL Jobs. AOL Health. Fine. But FleaFlicker? ShelterPop? UserPlane? Oh, wait, those are the sites that are staying. The ones that are going away? According to Forbes, they include well-known TV news site TV Squad which will be rolled into the generic AOL TV. Financial site WalletPop will become part of Daily Finance, Politics Daily will roll into Huffington Post Politics. Other sites on the chopping block include DIY Life, AOL Small Business, Game Daily, Holidash and many more. Unfortunately, these cuts likely mean more people will lose their jobs. At the very least, plenty of freelancers will lose an outlet. The reports say that a few of these sites were already unmanned thanks to the first round of layoffs earlier this month. The Wall Street Journal says that none of the 250 Huffington Post employees were let go after the buyout and that’s got to be making those original AOL employees very unhappy. No one wants to see people lose their jobs, but for AOL to survive, this house cleaning was necessary. If they can tighten their focus and produce content that can actually be called journalism, they might be able to regain their footing as one of the top, first stops on the internet. What do you think? Can anything save AOL? Or is this a sinking ship that’s slowly going under?
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| NYT Paywall Cost Comparison (CHART) Posted: 23 Mar 2011 09:30 AM PDT This chart shows just how much the New York Times thinks of their content or how much they want their current paid subscribers to stick with their current print plan. It depends on your point of view. The chart comes from The Understatement.
How do you think this approach from The Gray Lady will work? Would you pay the premium for the right to view the NYT online or will you try the workarounds that the publisher is trying to cut off? Join the Marketing Pilgrim Facebook Community
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| Survey of SMB’s Online Activities Shows Some Progress Posted: 23 Mar 2011 08:39 AM PDT The SMB world is an interesting one when it comes to the Internet space. It goes without saying that there is a lot of talk around it. There is plenty of interest in it. Along with all of that though is also confusion and debate as to how to best service this incredibly large yet enigmatic segment of the business world when it comes to Internet marketing. American Express OPEN Forum has released a study giving some insight into this group. Here is a snapshot of what the surveyed companies said about their Internet efforts.
This next chart outlines what their plans are for the remainder of 2011.
One thing that is apparent is that at least most of the companies surveyed at least have a website! That's progress. Depending on the source, the percentage of small businesses that still don't have a website today can run as high as 50%. Now that we are getting close to the 20 year anniversary of this commercial Internet thing it's one would think that the basics would be covered by now. One interesting piece that stood out was a statistical match of sorts regarding Google Places. Of all the Place Page listings only about 10% of been verified. Interestingly enough only 10% of the surveyed companies are paying attention to this very important area (at least when it comes to Google and local search). Why is that? It's because outside of Portland, OR Google doesn't promote these assets so most SMB's are still unaware of their existence in some cases and importance in many cases. So the SMB space continues to garner attention but how much progress are we seeing? That's debatable. Any progress that has happened to this point can be attributed to early adopters and SMB's who have some level of tech savvy. The rest who are often older and more traditional in their business ways and marketing efforts need real help and the Internet marketing industry has fallen flat on its face in this regard. The industry wants to always sell these people something rather than educate them, bring them up to speed then give real life solutions. Real life solutions require heavy customization and customization doesn't scale. As a result, it is ignored and the products and service presented to this market are often short-sighted and poor options for the SMB. How do we get out of this cycle? Education will need to be done from the top down. I am waiting for who between Google and Bing will actually invest in programs to educate the SMB space about the Internet as a whole. I doubt Google ever will so the door is left wide open for Bing but I don't know if they have the chops to walk through it and take advantage. At least, they haven't shown that desire to this point. In conversations I have had with Bing they seem to want to do this but wanting and doing are two very different things. So the SMB space remains the Wild West of the Internet space. When it is corralled, tamed and trained in the right ways the Internet marketing industry will be very busy. When it will happen? Your guess is as good as mine. What are your thoughts?
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