Yesterday I was talking to a client of mine about how important it is to track the results of your marketing efforts (especially in a small business). Today I wrote her a follow up email and I thought that it would be fairly topic appropriate to share it with everyone because, quite frankly, it’s that important.

*The names have been changed and the attachments added below the paragraphs in which they were mentioned for simplified reading.

I usually end up sounding like a broken record when I talk about tracking but, quite frankly, that’s how important it is. The general theory is that everything you put out to the general public should be able to be tracked for effectiveness. This is the only way that we can avoid the “let’s throw it to the wall and hope something sticks” approach. Here are the three main areas we focus on:

• Web Tracking: We touched  on this briefly yesterday with Helga’s tracking capabilities for your website. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with Google Analytics or not, but it’s an amazing source of information on what’s going on with your website. With this tool you can see how many people are visiting your site, how they’re getting there (search engines, referring sites and direct traffic) and what  they’re doing while they’re there. You can do what’s called a Site Overlay and see what links people are clicking on and set goals for each link within your site. You can even go so far as to set goals for conversion and specific keywords you want to see traffic coming from. It’s really quite something…and the best part is that it’s free! Again, I’m not sure what Helga’s using for her CMS, but all of them these days have the ability to install Google Analytics so you can login and get this information. I’ve attached a screenshot of the dashboard of Score Consulting’s report for the past 30 days so you can get a feel for it. There’s way too much information for me to break it all down, but if you want a tour of a working account, I can show you mine.

• Email Tracking: This is pretty simple: create a separate email address for every magazine advertisement, newspaper advertisement, press release, etc. When you get an email to that email address, you know what produced the contact. Assuming you can create an unlimited number of email addresses (which you should be able to do with your host), it’s also free.
• Phone Tracking: This is also pretty simple, but does cost some money, while the email and Analytics cost nothing. A tracking phone number is a distinct and dedicated phone number that’s put onto one marketing piece and rings seamlessly to your main phone number. There should be a separate phone number for your website, every advertisement, every mail piece, etc. The phone is normally where most tracking efforts get lost because the “receptionist asks where they heard of us” technique usually falls flat. We sell basic tracking phone numbers for $750/yr/line and provide monthly reporting on every line.

Let me know if you have any questions on any of this. I know you’re pretty new to tracking marketing results so, again, if you want to go over any of this in more detail, I can show you around the accounts I use so you can get more of a feel for it.

Despite the recession, the interactive marketing environment is still growing and diversifying. This development creates many opportunities for actors of the interactive marketing market. The recession forces people to be more creative and more competent with their marketing campaigns.

The forecast for 2010 and beyond in interactive marketing is promising. The spending in interactive marketing (mobile marketing, social media, email marketing, display advertising, search marketing) will be significantly increasing for the next 5 years.

At the end of 2009 Google added some new ad formats. Site links, with more links appearing for the ranking results. Every result on the top page will have more clickable links, which can be seen as an opportunity for interactive marketers. Google’s product search is also another update. Product extensions and listings are getting more developed on the ranking results. When doing a general research like laptop, in addition to websites, you have a product view with a link and the price of the product. Make sure to have your images optimized if you want to benefit from this feature.

Google Caffeine will be released “sometime after the holidays”; it will bring some significant changes in interactive marketing. It will have direct effects on crawling, ranking and indexing. Google Caffeine will focus on real-time results by creating frequent content updates and participating in social media communities. Under websites links will scroll some recent social media activity as tweets for instance. This is another chance to maximize your ranking. It will also provide faster results. Page load time will be an algorithmic ranking factor. With webmaster central, Google gives you the time your page takes to load compared to the majority of websites. Page loading time will have an effect on quality score for PPC and SEO. The last point is that Google Caffeine will provide more blended search results as images, videos, blogs, social search, maps, etc.

In order to benefit from Google Caffeine you have to drive more traffic to your website through increased channel as social media and real-time. Use Twitter and other social media to increase inbound links to your site. Increase your brand visibility on the internet. Be careful when having a social media policy; be sure to develop a content strategy with frequent and consistent updates.

Don’t forget Bing and Yahoo! The factors when optimizing for Bing are almost the same as when optimizing for Google. If you follow the same strategy you should succeed. Be aware that your ranking results won’t be the same for Yahoo and Bing even if they have a partnership.

As a conclusion, in the future be sure to have SEO and content strategies for web, images, videos, social media, news and real-time.

Yesterday I was talking to a client of mine about how important it is to track the results of your marketing efforts (especially in a small business). Today I wrote her a follow up email and I thought that it would be fairly topic appropriate to share it with everyone because, quite frankly, it’s that important.

*The names have been changed and the attachments added below the paragraphs in which they were mentioned for simplified reading.

I usually end up sounding like a broken record when I talk about tracking but, quite frankly, that’s how important it is. The general theory is that everything you put out to the general public should be able to be tracked for effectiveness. This is the only way that we can avoid the “let’s throw it to the wall and hope something sticks” approach. Here are the three main areas we focus on:

• Web Tracking: We touched  on this briefly yesterday with Helga’s tracking capabilities for your website. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with Google Analytics or not, but it’s an amazing source of information on what’s going on with your website. With this tool you can see how many people are visiting your site, how they’re getting there (search engines, referring sites and direct traffic) and what  they’re doing while they’re there. You can do what’s called a Site Overlay and see what links people are clicking on and set goals for each link within your site. You can even go so far as to set goals for conversion and specific keywords you want to see traffic coming from. It’s really quite something…and the best part is that it’s free! Again, I’m not sure what Helga’s using for her CMS, but all of them these days have the ability to install Google Analytics so you can login and get this information. I’ve attached a screenshot of the dashboard of Score Consulting’s report for the past 30 days so you can get a feel for it. There’s way too much information for me to break it all down, but if you want a tour of a working account, I can show you mine.

• Email Tracking: This is pretty simple: create a separate email address for every magazine advertisement, newspaper advertisement, press release, etc. When you get an email to that email address, you know what produced the contact. Assuming you can create an unlimited number of email addresses (which you should be able to do with your host), it’s also free.
• Phone Tracking: This is also pretty simple, but does cost some money, while the email and Analytics cost nothing. A tracking phone number is a distinct and dedicated phone number that’s put onto one marketing piece and rings seamlessly to your main phone number. There should be a separate phone number for your website, every advertisement, every mail piece, etc. The phone is normally where most tracking efforts get lost because the “receptionist asks where they heard of us” technique usually falls flat. We sell basic tracking phone numbers for $750/yr/line and provide monthly reporting on every line.

Let me know if you have any questions on any of this. I know you’re pretty new to tracking marketing results so, again, if you want to go over any of this in more detail, I can show you around the accounts I use so you can get more of a feel for it.

This podcast will discuss the relation of Pay Per Click and the Long Tail and their importance for your website. We’ll also discuss the limits of broad matches and explain you how to manage cost effectively your keyword list and your tail.

In order to have an accurate definition of the tail we need to define the head. The head could be defined as a number of keyword and everything else would represent the tail. The head represents a measure of traffic volume. In this case the head is defined as, either the top 250 keywords by click volume or the keywords with 500 clicks or more in 90 days. The tail is represented by everything else.

The importance of the tail is determined by several elements. The tail varies according to the type and size of your business and more specifically of the number of the products or services you propose on your website and how people search in the category.

The tail is, or can be treated with a broad match strategy. The use of broad match has to be carefully managed. Broad match can be unprofitable and less efficient. If we take the case of a landing page for example, a visitor who is looking for something specific will arrive on the home page and will probably not continue its research on your site. Better landing pages means better conversion rate from each visitor, which signifies much value coming out of the traffic of the targeted keyword.

Because the traffic has different values you can differentiate the bids. With a higher value keyword you’ll spend more money, with a lower value keyword you’ll spend less. In other words more targeted bidding brings better resources allocation and a bigger program with better efficiency.

When building your keyword list, you need to spend a lot of time on the head about the language and how people are going to search for your products. For the head, your list has to be done by a human and not by automated software robot. Your keywords needs the right attributes as well as the landing pages need human verification. Whereas for the tail, you can use tools to build your keyword list, but you still have to control the results and the coherence.

When managing your keyword list, you must have sophisticated stats in order to make an accurate evaluation of your needs. Classification scheme and URL checking software is vital when you provide a wide range of products or services. It will help the classification of keywords and keep your strategy organized.

To conclude the best alternative is high bidding on exact match keyword ( for the head) and low bids on broad match and negative keywords (for the tail) is the most beneficial solution when managing your PPC plan.

Smile San Diego was one of Score Consulting’s first clients after our move out here to San Diego. When Smile San Diego came to us, they were in the middle of a complete branding and name change. We worked with them on developing their brand, redesigning their logo, getting the word out to their current clients while focusing on client retention.

Search Engine Optimization

We also wanted to start working with Smile San Diego to drive more new patients into their practice, so we worked with them on building out the website that they had subscribed to through a third party and adding 20 pages of content optimized for the search engines and adding the meta tags, titles and descriptions. By adding these pages to their existing website, we increased the search engine visibility of their website by approximately 70% and started driving visitors to convert. Over the past 30 days, 72% of their website traffic has come from their search engine positioning.

Client Retention

The single most cost effective way for any business to continue to grow is by relying on its current customer base for business. It costs 6 times more to develop a new client as it does to simply nurture an existing one. In Smile San Diego’s case, we developed an exit interview campaign to find out where the practice’s strength’s lay and to determine areas upon which to improve. We also employed a follow up card campaign from our popular partner Send Out Cards to stay in front of their current patients. By supplementing their current appointment reminder mailers with these more personalized cards, we were able to continue to develop the bond between dentist and patient.

Direct Mail

Along with drawing from their current patient base for more business, Smile San Diego also wanted to further penetrate the market and bring in new patients. To do this, we created a direct mail piece and offer to new patients to re-introduce Smile San Diego to their community.

Website Redesign

When Smile San Diego’s contract ended with their former website provider, they asked us at Score Consulting to step in and redesign their website. They weren’t in the market for anything fancy, they simply wanted a site with the information their patients were interested in and offer them with a way to contact them and that’s what we made them. We developed a website for Smile San Diego with a customized color scheme and a custom header that would portray the classy brand image they wanted to achieve. One of our simpler websites to be sure, but as they say, sometimes substance is speaks even louder than flash.

Tracking

There’s no way to tell which marketing initiatives are working and which ones are falling flat without accurately tracking them. After all, I wouldn’t be able to tell you that 72% of Smile San Diego’s website traffic over the last 30 days came from search engines or that of the calls that were placed to Smile San Diego from their website, 28% lasted over one minute without accurate tracking data. With our Analytics package, tracking phone numbers and email addresses, we’re able to accurately identify the campaigns that are successful and those that simply aren’t making the cut and adjust our budget accordingly.

We have thoroughly enjoyed working with Smile San Diego over the past year and are looking forward to working together well into the future.

San Diego, CA, February, 3, 2009 – Score Consulting is announcing today that we have joined RatePoint’s Business Partner Program. Score Consulting is now able to provide our clients with easy to use email marketing and customer feedback tools to help our clients improve customer satisfaction, build credibility and increase profitability. RatePoint, Inc. is the leading provider of customer feedback and online reputation management services for small and medium businesses.

As a member of the RatePoint Business Partner program, Score Consulting can provide our clients with customer feedback, product reviews, email marketing and survey tools and dispute resolution capabilities. Using RatePoint, we can easily help our clients proactively manage their online reputation through every customer interaction by capturing customer feedback and testimonials and displaying them in multiple areas, including Web sites, emails and marketing materials.

Our customers are always looking for cost-effective ways to grow their businesses,” said Ian Campbell, President of Score Consulting. “RatePoint’s tools help us provide our clients with multiple ways to connect with their customers and leverage their reputation as a sales tool. RatePoint’s business partner program is a valuable addition to our core services, helping boost loyalty and build stronger and more profitable relationships with our customers.”

“Offering RatePoint to our Business Partners provides them with a complete set of tools to help them build a credible online brand while encouraging more profitable customer relationships, says Tom Serani, VP of sales, RatePoint.”

We’re really excited about offering Ratepoint to our clients and are looking forward to implementing our new email campaigns!

Booklet Printing is an online printing company focused on providing ready print brochure, booklet and catalog printing services to their customers. They came to Score Consulting to build an e-commerce website with SEO capabilities and an instant pricing calculator. We provided them a website with a blog and a full ecommerce shopping cart filtered through Google as their Merchant Services. Booklet Printing’s site went live just recently and we look forward to working with them!

Hello all and happy new year!

Recently, I brought in an intern. There’s a young man from France by the name of Lucas who is interested in learning the ins and outs of marketing on the Internet and he dropped me an email shortly before the new year and asked if he could come do his internship with Score Consulting. I thought that it was a great idea for a number of reasons:

• If you know me, you know that I love to teach. I don’t know if it’s the manager in me or the mentor or what, but I love watching that “a-ha!” moment in someone’s eyes. I don’t, however, think that I’m really patient enough to teach school, which is why I use this forum, along with webinars and seminars to do my teaching. In this case, I get to take someone who is absolutely fresh and teach him what I know.
• Also (and again, most people who know me know this), I love to use unorthodox methods to go about doing things. There’s nothing better to me than shaking up the status quo and seeing what falls out. Again, I’m not sure why, but it’s a ton of fun for me. This is one of the things that a lot of my clients love about working with me because I blend new and cutting edge marketing techniques with the proven methods that we’ve been using for years (unless they’re lying, of course). The envelope was made for pushing and I love to do it.

Now that said, I also know that I’m never done learning and there’s always something else to learn, more knowledge out there to gain. And, since I always want to serve my clients as best as I can, I think that this internship program will be an interesting way to see all this Internet and marketing stuff the way that a lot of my clients see it, from an early point of view.

Internet marketing, be it search engine optimization, pay per click marketing, social media marketing, website development, etc, etc, etc is something that’s new to most of the experts out there, let alone the business owners who have to try to use it for business growth. I’m looking forward to working with Lucas not only so I can give him some trade education in Internet marketing, but also to learn more myself. Any teacher out there will tell you that the best way to learn anything is to try to teach it to someone else.

Anyway, that said,  I’ve set up another category inside of “From the Gut” that will show Lucas’ point of view on some of the topics that we’ll be discussing, so take a look sometime and welcome Lucas to Score Consulting!

Several aspects of Marketing are vital to the success of your company. Branding is a fundamental component for a healthy and accomplished company; it represents the personality of your company. In other words, what makes your company different from your competitors and what makes your company unique and special. In order to have a successful branding strategy, every aspect that is related to your brand (brand image, brand management, brand positioning, brand packaging etc.) has to be well managed and cleverly approached according to your company’s activity and target market.

Effective brand strategy presents advantages for both customer and company. A company with a valuable branding functioning will have a stable and solid reputation, and it will symbolize a strong and healthy company. As a consequence, customers will see a company in which they can trust and believe.

As a conclusion, branding is the marketing tool that will create faithful and loyal customers and lead to the triumph of your business.

By definition Pay Per Click (PPC) is a method of payment for an advertising space on the internet. The amount of the advertising will depend on the number of time an Internet user will click on the advertising space.

Pay Per Click advertising will allow you to have a favorable position on a search engine or on any internet publisher. Depending on the target market of your company, the chosen keywords will have different prices according to their level of competition. You can decide for your company what keywords it needs and how much you want to invest on every keyword or key phrase.

For instance, if we apply Pay Per Click advertising with the search engine Google, the websites using the Pay Per Click model will appear on the top of the page and on the right hand side of the ranking results. Besides, using the Pay Per Click model is valuable and offers many advantages. Using Pay Per Click will provide fast results, a flexible and easy to create advertising campaign. Those results will be simple to analyze and the freedom of choosing the key phrases and keywords allow you to have an original and effective campaign.