Many companies engage in online marketing because they want to control the way their brand and product looks where customers engage the most – the Web. There are many tools to help the online marketer, but one that is often overlooked is B2C marketing automation.

While B2B marketing automation is focused primarily on defining your market and nurturing leads through the sales funnel, B2C is focused almost entirely on brand and product development. With B2C marketing automation, marketers can increase email open rates, decrease shopping cart abandonment rates and improve customer retention with loyalty and rewards programs.

As for vendors, the B2B leaders get a lot of the fanfare, but there are some excellent vendors in the B2C space as well. They are listed below:

Aprimo
SAS
Unica
NeoLane
Alterian
ExactTarget

Marketing automation thus far has been little more than a buzz word in the B2C space. However, the horizon looks promising. Brian Kardon, CMO of Eloqua says that we are at a tipping point with marketing automation, where people are finally starting to see the value of the system and are wanting to get on board. “I’ll give you an example,” says Kardon. “We’re finding if you have 10 NBA teams who’ve implemented marketing automation, the others are seeing their success and saying, ‘Hey, we need that. We’re at a disadvantage.’”

For more information, visit the original post on the Software Advice CRM blog.

Search Plus Your World (SPYW) was launched to bring human element to search by integrating Google+ social data on the search results pages. Google has been using limited Google+ data on search results page, but the Jan 10th update was pretty significant.

Google’s search results page before SPYW. (before Jan 10th 2012)

Google search results page before SPYW. (after Jan 10th 2012)

What news with SPYW?

Besides excessive personalization of search here are some of the key changes to the search results page -

1. Google+ updates in search results – One of the most visible change on the search results page was the addition of Google+ updates. Any updates you or your circles may have posted on Google+ are now visible on search based on keywords. Traditional Google search results are overridden by Google+ updates to a greater degree.

In some cases, the Google search page is completely filled with Google+ data instead of traditional results. This excessive personalization has resulted in huge debates on the topic of relevancy being overshadowed by personalization.

2. Personalized vs Non Personlized results – Users who are logged into their Google account can now choose from personalized vs non personalized search. Additionally, the personalized version is the default option for logged in users.

3. People & pages recommendation – Another big change on the search results page is the Google+ people and pages recommendations. The paid search results on the right hand have been pushed down due to the addition of the recommendation box. Google now provides suggestions to join authoritative people and pages for particular keyword.

The recommendation box is also visible to logged out users for most keywords.

This is a phase I launch since most of the results do not have the algorithmic relevancy. Future updates of SPYW will certainly be geared towards relevancy.

In any case, what we learn is Google SPYW could have a significant impact on search engine optimization and there is no excuse for not having a Google+ profile.

Here are some initial thoughts on what you can do to prepare yourself and your business for this change.

1. Signup for Google+ account – Create a Google+ account for yourself and add pages for your business.

2. Participate in discussions – You can save Google+ searches and participate in topics of interest. Share latest product and service updates to engage your audience.

3. Produce Viral content – Google+ is a social network and like most social networks, users are hungry for shareable content. Viral content such as useful app, funny video, infographics and images can drive social signals to your website.

4. Influence influencers – Every business has thought leaders, and social media is a perfect tool to enable these influencers share their ideas, thoughts and insights. Use Google search to find the influencers in your industry and connect with them. Participate in the discussion topics, QA sessions, blog comments and webinars.

5. Become influencer – Social media mastery can be gained by creating a community of like-minded individuals who follow your thoughts and ideas. Become influencer by sharing your thoughts and ideas on your personal and third party blogs. Participate in third party QA portals such as Quora, Linkedin answers and Yahoo answers.

Let us know how you think SPYW can change SEO in the comments section below.

Identifying Social Marketing Best Practices is a must for all marketers (B2B and B2C), but don’t just take what you read for verbatim. What really is a best practice? Wikipedia definition: A best practice is a method or technique that has consistently shown results superior to those achieved with other means, and that is used as a benchmark. In addition, a “best” practice can evolve to become better as improvements are discovered.

The most important part of that definition is that “a ‘best’ practice can evolve to become better as improvements are discovered”. You have to remember that your company’s best practices should and will vary and most certainly will change depending on your industry, buyer persona, customer buying cycle, product set and many other reasons. More specifically, it will vary depending on what is your current marketing mix and strategy. There is no such list that is a one size fits all, it’s best to take the advice of others and integrate that into your own strategy and tweak it over time to best accommodate your goals. Once you have aligned your marketing mix to your goals and have instituted best practices, you will have a solid strategy that will be hard to refute .

So with that out of the way, here is my list of best practices. Although this advice is specific to LinkedIn and Facebook, the advice holds true to most platforms. Remember also that Social Marketing [Social Marketing Defined] plays a specific role in your marketing strategy, so each of these best practices will present itself when applicable.

• You need to have a house rules section or disclaimer page on your company’s social media pages. Reserve the right to remove bad content, remove any offensive, discriminatory, racist, political, religious, etc. (Here is the one I wrote for Rackspace as an example, look at the bottom of the page http://www.linkedin.com/company/rackspace-hosting/products)
• Build an engagement system within the social media platform. This includes a listening mechanism and a response mechanism. Remember that this requires consistent feedback with a specified SLA that you hold yourself to
• Foster conversation by building engagement systems through chat, video, and sharing features that enable conversations among individuals and groups
• Use a multitude of media channels to increase engagement
• Build out a content calendar, post multiple times a week, preferably every day, vary your posts, have a clear CTA
• Focus on engagement, so ask questions, post helpful tips, link to articles/videos/content
• Have a CTA that drives them to your company website or to parts of your marketing funnel
• 78% of consumers like fewer than 10 brands – HubSpot
• If you blog at least 20 times per month, you get over 5 times more traffic than those who only blogged less than 4 times per month, so the more you blog, the more likely you are to have consistent unique traffic
• Use social media to generate new product ideas and innovation, crowd source your next product idea
• Build a social product experience by using API tools and Social Plugins
• Enable people to like individual products and content across the web
• Use social plugins, like activity feed, recommendations, comments and live stream to make experiences social
• Run sponsored stories to promote people’s actions from the news feed
• Execute integrated strategies across the entire adoption cycle.
• Remember to always have fun

Why people click unlike on Facebook

The most common reason why users unlike a brand or a page on Facebook is because they lose interest on the product or content or both.

It is extremely important to keep your Facebook page updated. Here are the top five reasons to prevent unlike from your prospects and customers -

1. Brand interest – A non interesting brand is worse than non interesting product / service. Facebook is a place where people generally like to share something that is interesting to them. No on likes to share uninteresting articles and products because it will result in loss of interest from their Facebook friends.

Always keep your brand interest level high by constantly sharing cool benefits your product / services offers. For an individual brand, try to project your personality and your voice and connect with your friends at 1×1 level. For a company owned brand, share useful content and show users how to improve their life / business by using your product and services.

2. Content Interest – Interesting content fall along the same lines as an interesting brand. You can build an interesting brand by sharing interesting content. You can also create interesting content by answering the most pressing questions your users may have. You may also encourage user-generated content by asking open-ended questions.

3. Repeated Information – Have you ever wondered why DVR became so popular so quickly? Simply, because people are bored and annoyed by repeated advertisement. The worst thing to do in any social network is to repeatedly share the same information and bore to death your audience.

Always share fresh and useful content and never repeat the same content more than twice per social network.

4. Low quality Information – Low quality content is treated the same way as the repeated content. Facebook users like new and quality information that they tag, like, comment and share with their friends.  Never share something that will not be appreciated by your fans. Spend time on researching good information or hire copywriters to write good content.

5. Frequency of Sharing – The last and one of the most important points is keeping your fans engaged by constantly sharing useful information. Facebook users will certainly not like to engage with a brand or a page that is outdated. Constantly sharing content allows fans to promote your content and products to their network and this has a potential for creating viral promotions.

Follow these five rules and you will always have raving fans and loyal customers on Facebook.

Please share your thoughts, insights and comments.

The basis of the study was to identify the incremental traffic delivered by PPC ads. The key metrics used was Incremental Ad Clicks (IAC), and a model was built to measure this metric.

IAC = TH – TL / PH – PL

TH = High spend total clicks

TL = Low spend total clicks

PH = High spend paid clicks

PL = Low spend paid clicks

The team conducted several tests by running/pausing sample paid search campaigns to measure the incremental traffic with and without paid search. Amazingly, the results showed that ppc drives a startling 89% incremental clicks.

The study was extended over diverse sample types, including multiple countries, industry verticals, and daily spend level. Interestingly, the results were similar in almost all cases pointing to 0ver 85% traffic being driven by paid search ads.

This insightful study reaffirms the importance of paid search in online advertising as it continues to be the most popular online advertising channel.

The new and improved organic listing sitelinks now contain 12 links instead of the previous 8 links. This new format also includes the description of the page similar to what you see in regular SERP listing.

With the launch of the new sitelinks, Google is definitely making the brands stand out in the organic listing. Websites ranking for a brand keyword should expect to see reduce traffic because of brand dominance with the new 12 pack sitelinks.

Only time will tell if there will be any significant impact on web traffic of the competitors bidding on popular brand terms. This further solidifies the importance of building a brand.

Call (210) 775-5481 to book Ninja Marketing Consultants LLC for speaking engagements.

Google offers several new features, including their latest offering of “Product Extension Ads” and “Product Local Ads” to mobile ppc. Both of these ad extensions increase the chance of getting clicks.

Product Extension Ads – Contrary to the name Product Extension Ads are not ads. Product extension allows the advertiser to add product images to their Google Adwords ads. These images can be added by linking Google Merchant Center to the adwords account. This integration allows the ppc ads to automatically display images of the product from the Google Merchant Center.

Product Local Ads – Product Local Ads is another Adwords extension that allows the advertiser to specify the product availability at various locations. This feature is generally great for businesses that have multiple locations in the same city. i.e bicycle stores.

Both Product Local and Product Extension ads were available on the pc based ppc ads but with Google’s latest release these ads formats have gone mobile.

Hope you enjoyed this post.

Ask us about our free $100 Google Adwords credit for new customers.

The study spanned across 301 campaigns between June 2008 and Nov 2010 showed that users who were presented with the Youtube home page ads searched for the brand query 116% more than other users.

Here are some of the key insights-

• Increase in ad interaction frequency increase the rate of brand activity
• Increase in ad interaction frequency also increase the chances of visiting the target website (viewthrough visits)
• Masthead type ads are 2 times more effective

Emarketer predicts mobile usage for travel research will increase 50% by 2012. Growth of smart phone and high speed mobile internet is enabling users to research travel through their mobile devices.

In one of the studies, Google found that 19% of all the hotel search queries are conducted on mobile devices. The implications for online marketers in travel industry is to increase spend on mobile marketing.

Here is a screenshot of the online ad spend for next four years

Source: Emarketer