Are you promoting a product or service? Have you produced a marketing plan for it? Then you must have already identified your target audience … right?

Once you know who your target is, you’ll need the right tools to get their attention. There are countless platforms and networks that can target users by location, demographics, behavior, network, price and bid options. But what if you wanted to target someone who is attending Stanford University in their sophomore year, on their birthday, without needing a robust customer database? The answer is Facebook.

Facebook is one of the fastest growing websites with 400 million active members, and growing. Whether your target audience consists of 213 people or 3,812,010 people, they are on Facebook.

Any company can start advertising on Facebook for any price, there is no minimum. Advertisers can promote a Page or Event by driving visitors back to the Facebook entity or choose to drive visitors to a separate website. Facebook ads are a combination of Pay Per Click ads and image display ads offering 25 title characters, 135 characters of ad copy and an image upload. The advertiser can schedule ad flights, choose daily budgets and select CPM or CPC pricing.

But most importantly, the targeting features are extremely refined:

• Location
• City and state
• Radius around city (in miles)
• Age: 13 to Any
• Birthday
• Sex
• Keywords: Found in user’s profile updates, info tab and interests
• Education
• High School
• College: Name of college, major, graduation year
• College Grad: Name of college, major
• Workplace
• Relationship Status
• Interested in men/women
• Language

If you run a Facebook Page or are an admin for a Page, you can also target Facebook users by their connections:

• Users who are connected to your Page, Event, Group or Application
• Users who are not already connected to your Page, Event, Group or Application
• Users whose friends are connected to your Page, Event, Group or Application

With every targeting restriction you choose, Facebook will calculate the estimated number of people expected to see your ads along with the suggested bid. The more specific you get with your target audience, you will find the number of people estimated to see your ad start to dwindle, but they will be exactly who you want to see your ads.

Facebook provides detailed reporting for your ads:

• Advertising Performance: Total and Unique Impressions, Clicks and CTR along with CPC, CPM and Cost. Conversion tracking is now in Beta and expected to roll out to all advertisers in Q1 of 2010.
• Responder Demographics: Provides valuable demographic information about users who are seeing and clicking on your ads.
• Responder Profiles: Provides information about the types of users who see or click on your ads such as interests that they have listed in their personal profiles.

This re reporting allows us to identify the best performing ads and recommend ways to improve them on a regular basis through testing and experience. For more robust reporting and management, we utilize Omniture’s Search Center to manage Facebook media buying and advanced analytics. This could potentially allow advertisers to effectively manage Facebook campaigns and enhance reporting on cross-channel campaigns.

Connect with us to develop a strategic Facebook advertising strategy that integrates with your current marketing plan.

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In two recent talks that I led about the state of mobile marketing, the issue of 2D codes generated a great deal of questions and confusion. Like many things in the mobile industry, competing proprietary solutions and a lack of standards are impeding the potential as marketers grapple with the overly convoluted ecosystem.

What is a 2D Code?

2D codes are an evolution of the 1D code (e.g. UPC code) and use symbols to house data in order to initiate a specific action upon being scanned by a mobile device. QR (Quick Response) codes are the most widely known type of 2D code, but competition amongst providers is heated as each races to market their specific format as the new industry standard.

What can a 2D Code do?

2D codes can be used to encode a variety of data, including:

• URLs
• Phone Numbers
• Text Messages
• Email Addresses
• Maps
• Contact Information
• Social Networking Details
• Videos

What are the Different Formats?

As previously mentioned, QR codes are the most pervasive form of 2D codes but there is no shortage of competing formats. Here are several to consider:

• QR Code: These codes are based on a standard and enjoy widespread support by marketers worldwide. Free QR code readers are readily available in the respective mobile application stores and QR codes were recently used by Google in an effort to mobilize 100,000 small businesses throughout the United States.
• Microsoft Tag: Officially still in beta, the Tag technology is similar in functionality to a QR code but uses what’s known as HCCBs (High Capacity Color Barcodes) to provide more data in fewer symbols. As this is a proprietary technology and can’t be read with a standard QR code reader, users will need to download the Microsoft Tag Reader to their phone.
• ScanLife: Using EZCodes, Scanlife utilizes what’s known as indirect codes. These codes don’t hold the content data, but rather a unique identifier which is then sent to the ScanLife servers to initiate the intended action. If, for some reason, ScanLife ceases to exist, so does your marketing platform.
• JagTag: Similar to other 2D providers, JagTag relies on a unique identifier on marketing materials but rather than scanning the code with an application, the user is instructed to snap a picture with their camera and then send it to JagTag via a short code or email (depending on the carrier). In trying the demo on their homepage, it took me 2:02 to start the camera on my phone, snap the picture, send the picture, wait for the response, and then view the video and ad.

These are just a few of the codes available but represent the majority of the major players in the space.

Who’s using 2D Codes?

The list of companies using 2D codes is lengthy and includes such well known brands as Google, Nike, VW, Sports Illustrated, American Airlines, and many more. Placements include print, outdoor, television, and just about anywhere you can display the code.

What are the implementation hurdles?

Conceptually, integrating a 2D code into current marketing initiatives is straightforward enough. Just slap the code on your creative and consumers will flock to your fancy marketing message. Well, not so fast.

It is vitally important that marketers think through the entire campaign, from creative integration, messaging (not everyone knows what the code is for), tracking, technology, media, and fulfillment.

Are you using 2D codes in your marketing?

*Photo Credit: Clevercupcakes (Flickr)

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For as long as I have been doing online marketing consulting a key consideration in driving business strategy has been related to what competitors are doing. Generally there is some really valuable information that can be ascertained from assessing competitors interactive marketing strategies and there are also some common pit falls.

The most common pit fall is thinking that you have to be doing what your competitors are doing otherwise you’ll fall behind. A few examples of that approach not resulting in success:

• Because your competitor has a facebook presence you think it is the right thing for your business to stay relevant. The problem lies in having not thought through a content and communication strategy around your facebook page and/or failing to put the resources in place to track and maintain a social property. Customers may be left feeling let down that you weren’t ready to actively engage with them or provide them valuable information and will be less likely to give you another shot in the future.
• Bidding on your competitor terms in PPC just because competitors are doing it to you. This is always a bad strategy as you’ve not considered that quality scores and CPCs are going to be higher resulting in higher cost per acquisition costs. In this situation your aggregate paid search strategy and budget can be pulled down by the knee jerk reaction to bid on competitor terms.

So we’ve talked about pitfalls, but what is the best strategy for leveraging competitive insights?

• Be the best at what you do, not what your competitors do. It’s extremely important to understand your competitors business models and key differentiators so that you can strategically craft your unique value proposition (UVP). Your UVP is your elevator pitch for what makes you better than the rest. If you spend your time analyzing what competitors are doing in order to help better define and grow what you do better than anyone else, your time will have been well spent.
• Look for opportunities to leap frog not just catch up. With the pace of change in business today there are a number of opportunities to not only catch up to what your competitors are doing, but to completely surpass their efforts. In this scenario you leverage your competitive intelligence to craft a plan around how you leverage tools and technology in a way that has yet to be done in order to find some way to better serve your customers.
• Leverage what your competitors are doing to better understand your customers needs. One of the values of looking outside of how you currently market to and engage with your customers is that you’ll often find customers are responsive to something you didn’t expect. Keeping an eye on what your competitors are up to allows you to think outside of the confines of your day to day and think of new and better ways to reach and serve your customers.

A few tips for how to keep an eye on your competitors:

• Set up Google alerts for your top three competitors – this will keep you in the loop competitor product releases, press and news
• Regularly read your competitors blogs/forums – similarly keeps you informed of press, news and updates to their business models
• Check out all of the paid and organic listings on page one of Google for your top competitors – this will give you a sense of how they are leveraging both their own web properties and external web properties

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Photo credit: Bigiain (Flickr)

Google knows where you are. Google can find you. And Google is coming to get you!

OK, that last part is speculation on my part, and not very good speculation at that. But the first two parts are quite true, and have been for some time. Users have been adding location-specific terms to their queries for years to find local results. More savvy users have noticed that many results — in both paid and organic listings — show what appear to be results tailored to the city you live in. And you’d have to be blind to not notice the map results that show up on most queries. To repeat: Google knows where you are.

And it just got smarter. Last week, Google released a change to their “more options” sidebar that most of you never have clicked. Next time you do a search, look for the small plus sign above the results of your query. Click it and discover all sorts of ways you can refine you query. And as of last week, “Search nearby” was added to that list. Now users don’t have to put in their city, metro area or even zip code to get local results. Search for what you want, then filter nearby you. Or nearby somewhere you want to be. Easy.

The ramification for markers? Stop ignoring the rush to localization. KML, geo sitemaps, RDFa… all sorts of new — and not so new — formats are cropping up to help tag web content with location-specific information. If you or your agency isn’t on top of the changing nature of “local”, you’re missing out on showing to people making location specific searches.

How often does this happen? It’s a small percentage of searchers using this option, to be sure. Today. But as stated earlier, Google is serving up geo-specific content on just about every search. How will it know that your content is specific to any given location? If you don’t know the answer… find out!

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What if you had a friend who, every time you talked with them, sounded different? You call them in the morning and they greet you with a crisp British accent. You text them at lunch and they respond in leetspeak. You meet them for after-work drinks and they ramble on like a Texas auctioneer. How long would you remain friends with this person? Not very long. And it probably has nothing to do with their personality…but the schizophrenic way in which they communicate makes it hard for you to even know their personality.

While this may be an extreme example, companies and brands deal with the same issue. How do you get people to buy your product, watch your video, read your press release, become your Facebook friend? Well, for starters, you have to have a personality.

Humans are hardwired to be social. A brand that has a distinct personality makes it easier for customers to respond. But it’s more than just having a Facebook page, it’s more than just “social” media – it’s about maintaining a consistent voice, a consistent personality, throughout all facets of your online (and offline) presence. Susan Baier wrote a great post for Convince & Convert about the online retailer ThinkGeek and their successful creation of brand voice in the online social sphere. If you can create a holistic persona for your company that influences your PPC, SEO, PR and Social content, you’re on your way to building a cohesive personality.

The key to curing schizophrenia and maintaining a consistent voice is Content Strategy. Content Strategy is the new buzzword, encompassing all aspects of online marketing. While social media is the popular kid at the party right now, lots of people don’t know what to do with it. Content strategies are being formulated in an effort to make sense of social media and create a unified brand presence for companies. Kristina Halvorson’s post at Brain Traffic highlights some of the key trends in Content Strategy, comparing the rise in content awareness to that of social media.

Start thinking about how you sound online – how your PPC, website, PR and social content fits (or doesn’t fit) together. Would you be friends with yourself? If your brand was a person, what would they look like? What would their favorite movie be? Would they play an instrument? Wear hats? Start to answer these questions and you’re brand will come alive…not only for you, but for your customer as well.

*Photo credit: Saurabh Goswami (Flickr)

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Image by sanbeiji via Flickr

Recently Domino’s Pizza went through a very public campaign where they admitted their pizza wasn’t very good, and recreated it from bottom to topping. They posted very interesting and blunt excerpts from customers and focus groups that said what many people knew, and then explained what they were going to do about it. Talking about this campaign with someone at an established company, they commented that could never do something like that, but wished they could because there were so many things they would like to tackle. This struck me as a fantastic exercise!

If you had the opportunity to reinvent yourself using everything you know, with all the new tools at your disposal, how would you do it?  Here are my thoughts:

Gather the Minds

Grab no more than ten of the best and brightest minds who know your brand. You want both supporters and critics, and skills ranging from Public Relations to Customer Support. More than ten people and things become unweildy, so keep it as small as you can while still getting diverse opinions.

Find an External Facilitator

You’re too close to this to be objective. Bring in someone from another brand, or a trusted consultant to keep the meeting moving and capture all the information.

Boot Out The Boss

You don’t want anyone concerned about saying something negative in front of the boss, so remove anyone who could intimidate or influence others in the room. The Boss will see the output, he doesn’t need to be part of the discussion.

Lock the Door

You want the ideas and opinions to be 100% honest, even for the brutal truths. Lock the door and don’t discuss any of the conversations that happen. The only thing that will ever be shared from the session is the output.

Think Social

What tools would you use that you aren’t already using? If you were as honest as Domino’s, what would your Mea Culpa video look like? How would you rally your fans to your new direction? How would you reach out to people who had gone elsewhere?

Don’t Solve Everything

Focus on the biggest things. What are the things “everyone knows” could be improved? What are your biggest strengths that are maybe underutilized? Don’t get into the details for a hypothetical exercise.

Prioritize and Share!

Once you’re done and your Facilitator assembles all the input into a clear summary, decide who and where it should be shared. This is where you bring in The Boss and give the update. Depending what you came up with you may need to share discretely, but start looking for things that maybe you can really start changing.

Even if you can’t get approval to really rebrand yourself, go through the exercise. It may be both educational and a lot of fun!

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There is a small but growing number of bloggers, Tweeps, and other social media professionals who are beginning to discuss traditional database marketing and mining techniques as an important part of social media strategy. I’m one of them, and I think this group is right on.

Data mining – the extraction of information, often unseen information residing in large databases, for the purposes of predicting behavior, is a powerful technology. Data mining tools and the data mining process allows businesses to make informed, data-driven decisions, and possibly predict future customer behavior.

An important component in mining data is the concept of modeling. Modeling is fairly straightforward – you build a model out of positive information. Put another way, you plot all of the points or characteristics of something successful each time it is successful, and use this data model to predict the likelihood of future successes. If I’m a fisherman and every time I catch a fish I make note of the time, temperature, bait, wind, water conditions, season, and which pocket my lucky coin was in, chances are that I will build a “profile” of success. Now by using this profile and understanding that if I fish in a manner consistent with my model, chances are I’m going to catch fish.

This brings us to the importance of “flagging” your social media customers in your database (I’m making a critical assumption here – that you have a customer database). Understanding which customers are fans on Facebook , which customers have downloaded a mobile application, which customers have possibly written reviews or provided ratings, and which customers have responded to a blog post are all indicators of specific customer behavior. A profile begins to emerge – a cluster of customers who prefer to interact with your brand in a way that is different from other clusters. From this interaction and using the techniques discussed above, you can build a predictive model. This model can then be used to make data driven decisions on marketing strategies to address the huge migration of customers to social media channels that we will all experience in the coming months and years.

To us, social media marketing is no longer an “early adopter” business model. However in mainstream businesses today, the social space is still largely “uncharted waters”. Implementing tried and true database marketing techniques is one way to help our businesses predict the future based on a small but growing group of “early adopters” to our social media marketing efforts.

This is going to be a continued area of focus for me in the coming months. I’ve challenged myself and my team to think of ways to implement these ideas in order to continue to develop the Social Media marketing model for our partners. I would appreciate your thoughts and challenges.

*Photo credit: NIOSH (flickr)

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A little over two weeks ago Google launched a new addition to the Local Business Center. As one who has followed the Local Business Center progress from the start, I am always curious to see what Google has planned for this awesome platform. The new addition, plainly stated, is disappointing.

After the reviews section on the Place Pages is now a section called “Nearby places you might like” which lists local competitors, even if the owner has claimed the Local Business Center (LBC) page! Looking at an Olive Garden page here in Arizona brings up this result in the “Nearby places you might like” section.

(click to enlarge)

If Olive Garden spends the time to claim the LBC listing, as well as optimize the page to be found better, why should the competition benefit from Olive Garden’s work? I was hoping that this section would develop into more of an “accessories” or “additional recommendations” such as a person who shops for a car would see car insurance or car stereo installer recommendations instead of direct competition.

As this appears near the bottom of the page, I would suggest making sure your “Details” section of the LBC be completely filled in. For example a business could add more phone numbers, add more categories if they are a fit, in the additional details add areas serviced or products available. The coupon section appears before the “Nearby places” as well as the hours and payment options. I would highly recommend making sure all the information be added to push the competitive section below the fold.

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It is well know that one of the many perks working at Google is to have 20% of your time available to work on projects that may very likely be outside your job requirements.  With almost 20,000 Google employees (per Wikipedia) that 20% translates into millions of hours of innovation time per year.  With the talent at Google that brainpower turns into really interesting ideas (not all work out of course) and needs somewhere to live and be tested.  I am a strong believer in taking risks and learning from your mistakes and without the bold ideas from their engineers, Google would probably not be what they are today.

Are you interested in checking out those ideas that may translate into the next big Google launch?  For those of you who don’t spend all day (and night) online like many of  us Sitewire employees you may not be aware that anyone can participate in trying out these ideas and that R&D home is called Google Labs.

Google Labs was launched in May 2002 and since then has posted many exciting projects such as Google Docs and with the help from Google engineers such as Henry Rowley who worked on Google Image Swirl Google Labs is a site you should monitor closely.  You can learn more about Google Labs at Google Labs FAQ or check out those Google Lab experiments that graduated.

Below are 3 Google Labs experiments you should consider checking out:

Google Squared

A trend with search engines is displaying search results in different ways such as with images rather than just text; however, when a search engine starts packing results with too many options it can decrease the effectiveness of getting to results you want quickly.  Few people would argue that Google.com doesn’t already provide a great search experience; however, Google Squared, launched in June 2009, is potentially a way to improve search results by collecting facts from the web and presenting them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet.  What I predict is Google.com will continue to leverage lessons learned from Google Squared to test out enhancements to Google.com results.  Give it a try at http://www.google.com/squared

Google Goggles

Google Goggles is different than the Gmail Goggles tool that saves you from potential embarrassment after a few too many cocktails and almost sending off that email on Gmail.  Google Goggles allows you to use a picture taken on your mobile phone as a search query.  You can learn more about Google Goggles from Sitewire’s mobile expert Sean Bartlett in his January blog post.  Keep in mind as with all Google Labs projects they are all works in progress so expect bugs.  Give it a try at http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles

Aardvark

This one just showed up in Google Labs but one I have been using for the past year.  Aardvark reminds me of a project that did not make it in Google Labs called Google Answers.  Aardvark was recently (Feb. 2010) acquired by Google.  Aardvark is really cool and quickly and easily allows you to tap into the knowledge and experience of your friends and extended network of contacts.  I use it with my instant messenger, Twitter, and email.  I can ask a question to Aardvark who then immediately sends it out to those that added my topic to their interest level.  The beauty of this tool is unlike other social tools like Facebook you don’t need to build up a network before you can get answers.  I found it interesting that Google immediately placed Aardvark into Google Labs.  I will be watching this closely to see how Google leverages Aardvark.  Give it a try at http://www.vark.com

If there is another project in Google Labs that you recommend we check out please post it in the comments area below:

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Much has been made in the press lately about the inability of marketers to measure mobile marketing efforts. Simply put, this illustrates a lack of understanding by companies and shines the light on agencies without deep mobile experience. Every mobile marketing channel has rich analytics available and to not leverage the data is the fault of the executer, not the channel.

In preparing your mobile strategy, keep these five keys in mind:

1. Strategy before Technology: Many of the aforementioned measurement problems arise because marketers are chasing the next shiny mobile technology, but not developing comprehensive mobile strategies. One-off tactical executions will always be more difficult to track than ongoing programs that deliver data over the course of months or years. Develop the strategy and then pick the appropriate technology.
2. Define the Goal: Without a doubt, our most successful clients set clear goals for all mobile efforts. This may sound elementary but you can’t track success if you don’t what it looks like. Is it new sign-ups, leads, coupon redemptions, phone calls, visitors, or something else? Pick something and measure it.
3. Integrate with Other Channels: Mobile is at its weakest in a standalone effort, while at its best when tightly integrated as part of a high-level strategy. Assuming that you have developed a marketing strategy and partnered with an agency that works across all of the mobile channels, tracking the relevant data isn’t difficult.
4. Analyze the Data: If you followed the three keys outlined above, you should have a nice pot of data to analyze and use to shape the next iteration of your mobile strategy.
5. Get Better: Tweak messaging, try new placements, and most important of all, don’t get complacent. There is always something new to try and staying ahead of the competition requires diligence and a commitment to the effort.

What are you doing to shape your mobile strategy for measurement?

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