In its latest preliminary research released last week Gartner said 2010 PC shipments would increase nearly 20% over 2009 while revenue will increase 12.2%. The increase will be driven largely by sales of mobile computers. This is significantly higher than the 13.3% shipment growth and 1.9% revenue growth Gartner projected last December.  Read more at InformationWeek.

Marketing budgets grow; dollars continue to move to digital.

According to a recent Econsultancy survey, 46% of companies plan to increase their marketing budgets in 2010 and 66% will increase their investments in digital marketing channels. 28% of marketers are shifting at least some of their overall marketing budgets from offline to digital channels. The shift to digital marketing is being driven at least in part by the ability to track online marketing’s contribution to financial metrics. Read more at MediaPost.

But should you care?

For most readers of this blog I believe the answer is no. Not yet anyway. Traffic to technology and other business-to-business sites just doesn’t warrant it. In my experience – with my own search habits and those of my friends and associates – mobile searches tend to be more local and consumer-oriented. We look for restaurants, retailers, doctors, plumbers, and even the occasional Wikipedia definition. Rarely, if ever, do we use our mobile devices to find a new piece of business software.

Just to be sure, I took a look at a bunch of analytics reports – those of our own websites as well as our clients’ – to see what percentage of visitors accessed the site over the last month using a mobile device. With one exception (and it’s a weird anomaly) less than 4% of visitors used mobile devices – and most were under 2%.

Unless you’re the guy with the 21% mobile visitor traffic, it’s just not worth worrying about.

So are your visitors using mobile devices to reach you?

It’s easy enough to find out. If you’re using Google Analytics, just follow these three steps:

1. From your analytics dashboard, click the “Visitors” link in the left-hand column.
2. Click “Mobile” in the drop-down list.
3. Click “Mobile Devices”.

Among other things, you’ll see the number of visits and the percentage of site total. Most likely you’ll find your marketing resources are better focused on something else.

If you find you have a significant amount of mobile traffic, I’d like to hear about it. Post a comment below.

Why bother with blogging? Because nearly half of all IT professionals rely on blogs as a resource when they are researching and comparing potential solutions. Okay, on with the questions.

Blogger readiness assessment question #2: Who is your target audience?
Knowing your readers is paramount because it sets the tone for your blog, determines the language you’ll use to communicate with readers, and helps you achieve secondary goals such as higher SEO rankings and more traffic.

If you want to attract technical folks, for example, feel free to use technical terms in your blog posts.

If your desire is to influence C-level executives, you’ll need to ditch the technical jargon and speak directly to their leadership and business challenges.

If your goal is to attract new clients, you will want to use more general terms when blogging so that people who don’t yet know the “industry lingo” will find you through search engines.

One thing I recommend you do before you start blogging is to create a list of target keywords and phrases to incorporate in blog posts. Over time, your repeated use of the keywords will lead to better search engine rankings, and they will help keep your blogging posts on topic.

Blogger readiness assessment question #3: What will you blog about?
Once you have a clear understanding as to why you want to blog and the audience you want to attract, it’s time to choose a subject (or theme) that interests you and your target readers.

If you pick a topic that is too broad or too narrow, you’ll either run out of ideas for new content or your posts will be all over the map. Either way, you’ll find it hard to attract a steady readership.

Likewise, avoid the urge to use your blog as an advertising platform. Remember, IT buyers visit blogs to learn — not to be sold to — so you’ll be far more successful if you use your blog to educate, discuss industry news and trends, and encourage an open exchange of ideas and opinions.

Your blog should be bigger than you or your company. Write for your readers’ benefit, not for yours.

Blogger readiness assessment question #4: How will you measure success?
The majority of corporate bloggers surveyed for Technorati’s “State of the Blogosphere 2009” measure success by counting unique visitors, reader comments, incoming links, and RSS subscribers. While these statistics are valuable, I contend they will not give you the entire picture when it comes to evaluating the impact that you are making with the blog.

You’ll also want to monitor what people are saying about you outside of the blog. Incoming links provide hints, but some people will talk about you without linking back.

Encourage discussions outside the blog by giving readers sociable links they can click when they Digg something you say. Then, monitor the discussions by searching social networking sites and search engines, or use a social monitoring tool like Social Mention. It sounds time consuming, but most sites have alert capabilities to automate this work.

Some bloggers also measure success by tracking the connections they build on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. If this is one of your objectives, encourage this behavior in your blog by giving readers quick connection links to these sites.

Of course, we all wish people would comment on our posts, but don’t be discouraged if week after week you see zero comments. Many readers prefer to remain anonymous. If they like what they read, they’ll send you an e-mail directly, or share it with others via the sociable links you include in your blog.

Finally, don’t expect miracles over night. Like any good PR activity, you need to remain patient, persistent, and consistent with your blogging. Give the blog at least nine months before you decide if it’s worth it to continue.

The answer is simple: IT buyers don’t hang out on Twitter, at least that’s the message from 1,685 IT professionals surveyed for TechTarget’s 2009 Media Consumption Report.

Where do they turn for information when searching for an IT solution? Blogs.

Contrary to popular belief though, “WordPress or Blogger” isn’t the only decision a new blogger needs to make. To attract the desired audience and keep the blog going long-term, you’ll need to start thinking and acting like a publisher. Here are seven critical questions to help you assess whether your company is ready for the blogosphere.

Blogger readiness assessment question #1: Why do you want to start a blog?
If you’re feeling pressured into a blog because your competitor has one, or because you want more website traffic or higher SEO rankings, you’re not ready for a blog.

Of course, all of these are fine secondary motives -– especially when you consider that the average technology blog garners 41% of its page views from search engines –- but these reasons alone will not help you when you are staring at a blank screen at 11pm, or when there is “other business” that needs your attention. When forced to prioritize, you can be sure the blog will always lose.

While an individual blogger’s motivations may vary, the one thing that all corporate bloggers agree you need to be successful is passion. This alone will keep you personally interested and excited long after the newness of the blog wears off, and it is what will attract readers to you.

If you’re running a business, you most certainly have passion already. Your goal is to articulate that passion and channel it into your blog.

I’ll continue my readiness questionnaire on March 2nd, which should give you plenty of time to mull over this first question.

In the meantime, if you haven’t taken my grammar survey yet, please take one minute now to complete it. It’s just five questions long and your answers will provide valuable insight into how writing errors influence buyer behavior.

Follow this link to start the survey:
http://bit.ly/6yXttb.

Thanks in advance for your help and opinions!

Sue Anderson-Lenz
Marketing Lure, Inc.

Last month I mentioned our soon-to-be-published free report called Will PPC Work for Me? I’m happy to tell you it’s now available.

The report gives you a proven formula for deciding whether or not PPC can work for you.

Just go click here Will PPC Work for Me to access your copy.

Let me know your thoughts about it.

Clearly, there are some people who believe that content should be judged on substance, not technicality and structure. Several people brought up prior incidents where they felt their own words were nit-picked incessantly and unnecessarily.

One person speculated that the woman who canceled her New York Times subscription had another underlying reason for doing so, and he called her a fool for canceling.

Still others were willing to cut people some slack depending on the communication medium used and the type of person committing the writing error. Techies, for example, were more likely to be forgiven than journalists or professional writers.

What’s also clear is that there is a second group of people that believe writing errors are a strong indicator of bigger problems.

One of the questions in the survey asks people what (if anything) they question whenever they encounter a writing error in business communication.

Respondents could write in their own answers to this question, and interestingly, one person said that errors made them question the legitimacy of a business. Credibility, professionalism, and quality were also points of concern raised by some folks.

It’s not too late to weigh in with your own opinions. Just five questions long, the survey should take you less than two minutes to complete. As a participant, you can remain completely anonymous, or you can submit your e-mail address to receive survey results.

I’ll keep the survey open until February 28th and will post results in this blog during the March/April timeframe.

To take the survey now, go to:
http://bit.ly/6yXttb.

Thanks in advance for your help and participation.

- Sue Anderson-Lenz
Marketing Lure, Inc.

P.S. Please help me spread the word about this survey by sharing the survey link with your own network of friends and colleagues. More people will equal more accurate results.

As I look today at what it takes to succeed in Pay-per-click advertising and compare it to requirements of the past, I have but one response – Whoa! That’s not my actual response but I never know who’s reading this.

Anyway as Bob Dylan noted many decades ago – the times they are a ‘changin.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to look at each of the factors that are critical for a successful PPC campaign, but let’s start with an overview in case you want to take some fast action.

Here are the biggies:

Keywords

Today it’s less important to identify all of your keywords than it is to identify the most highly relevant ones. This is especially important for new advertisers who have to prove their value (ie relevance) to Google before their ads will be shown with any regularity on the first page.

Get your most relevant, highly focused keywords right, perfect the performance of the exact match, expand to phrase and broad match and Google will find more keywords for you.

Ad Groups

Organizing keywords into tightly related ad groups is even more important today than it was last year. The words in an ad group not only must be linguistically similar; they should also represent the same buyer’s frame of mind – in other words, where the searcher is in the buying process.

Match Type

One of the most common mistakes I see in poorly optimized PPC campaigns is the improper use of match type. New advertisers in particular are prone to using only broad match – which means that Google can pretty much run your ad any time one of the words in your keyword phrase appears.

Until Google has a good enough understanding of the words you are targeting, your ad will appear in all kinds of irrelevant searches. This won’t cost you clicks but it will cost you dearly in quality score.

Also, the importance of negative keywords has exploded over the past year. This is how you tell Google what search terms are irrelevant for you. For many campaigns there are far more negative keywords than there are positive ones.

Testing & Tracking

Nothing has changed here. Constant testing of ads and landing pages is the key to a successful PPC campaign. If you can let your prospects show you what they respond to best, why would you not do this?

Google has also made it easy to track your conversions. Unless you’re into branding campaigns, clicks without conversions are just a waste of money. Keep your eye on your conversion rate and conversion costs.

Customized Landing Pages

With pay-per-click search advertising you know exactly what’s on your prospects’ minds when they click on your ad. By all means, send them to a customized landing page. But there’s been a change in the type of landing page that succeeds.

Single-purpose landing pages where visitors can either do what you want them to do or leave are  no longer a good thing. One reason is that Google doesn’t like them and will ding you on your quality score. The second reason is they effectively block out people who would have been interested in seeing other parts of your site.

Today “customized” is still good. “Stand-alone” is not.

Quality Score

For years Google has factored more than bid price into ad position, but quality score has become even more important – and click-through rate on exact match keywords plays a huge role in your quality score. This makes is very challenging for niche advertisers who want to filter clicks from broader keywords.

Search versus Content Network

Google continues to perpetuate a huge PPC management mistake by making both search and content network advertising the default in a new campaign. Marketing on search engines to people who are actively searching on a particular keyword phrase is vastly different from marketing to people who are simply reading a website or blog and not actively looking for you at the moment.

Search and content network advertising should always be separate campaigns. Be sure yours are.

Change is rapid and inevitable

As Google continues to make search more and more relevant for its users, rules changes and PPC advertisers can find themselves sinking very quickly. Pay-per-click has never been a “set and forget” tactic, but now more than ever you have to stay in motion to succeed.

Or as Dylan says, “you better start swimming”.

The opinion piece was about the Leno-O’Brien debacle, but in passing he mentioned that one of his neighbors was canceling her daily subscription to the New York Times because it contained typographical errors.

Fast forward a few hours later, and I couldn’t help but notice the number of errors in a web marketing book I was reading. Before you ask, no this wasn’t a self-published book. It was published by a company that’s been in business for the last 23 years. And no, the errors I found weren’t obscure errors that only another writer would notice. This book had numerous, obvious errors — like missing periods at the end of sentences. As I continued to read and encounter errors, I couldn’t help but question the merits of what I was reading.

Of course nobody’s perfect (especially me ), but I’ve always been a stickler for error-free writing because I know I have a tendency to judge people by how well they write.

At the same time, I secretly wonder if text messaging and twittering is turning us into a bunch of illiterates that no longer care.

Yet here on this Saturday, I had two concrete examples where writing errors definitely affected business.

Is it possible that on the surface we say grammar doesn’t matter, when the truth is we subconsciously judge others by their writing?

And if the answer is “yes,” can writing errors hurt or kill business?

To answer these questions, I need your help.

Follow this link to take an informal survey that will take less than 2 minutes to complete. I’ll ask you 5 quick questions, and at the end of the survey you’ll have the option to remain completely anonymous or submit your e-mail to receive survey results.

The survey will remain open until February 28th, and I’ll share my findings in this blog during the March/April timeframe.

To start the survey, click this link or paste this URL into your browser:
http://bit.ly/6yXttb

Thanks in advance for taking the survey and for sharing the survey link with your friends and colleagues.

- Sue Anderson-Lenz
Marketing Lure, Inc.

“The best thing is to do the right thing. The next best thing is to do the wrong thing. The worst is to do nothing.”

I have no idea who originally said that. I once had a boss who used it frequently. And boy is it true with conversion optimization.

Since our recent release of an e-book on How to Increase Profits from Current Website Traffic, we’ve received a lot of enthusiastic response – much of which can be summarized in the words of one software company owner:

“This sounds awesome! Where do I start?”

Here’s how we how we approach this question at Clicks ‘n Conversions. I’ll use a recent new client as an example. I hope this will help you get your own efforts going.

Shawn’s company has a specialized web application for a certain type of small business. He sells his application online. He came to us for help in getting more customers.

The first thing we noticed was that Shawn wasn’t using a web analytics program and we showed him how to put Google Analytics on his site. Website conversion optimization without analytics support is not impossible, but analytics makes it much easier to find and fix problems areas — especially as you get into more detailed tweaks.

Next we looked at Shawn’s marketing process, which – as is typical for web applications that don’t require a sales person – looked like this:

1. Send people to the website
2. Get them to sign up for a free 30 day trial
3. Convert them to a paying customer.

Each of these steps offers opportunities for improvement and to decide where to start we needed to answer two questions:

1. What percentage of Shawn’s trial users become paying customers?
2. What percentage of his website visitors take a free trial?

In Shawn’s company’s case, 5%  of trial users actually ended up as paying customers while less than 1% of website visitors were signing up for the trial. This information led us to focus first on getting more website visitors to try the application.

In reality, we could have chosen either place to start. The question is often which is more efficient. By doubling the visitor-to-trial ratio from 1% to 2%, we could double the number of new customers each month. To accomplish that same thing we would have to double the trial-to-customer ratio from 5% to 10%. Shawn had enough traffic to make the 1st option a better starting place.

But the bottom line really is that it’s impossible to start at the wrong place. Just by taking action and improving something, you will improve your sales – assuming of course that all else remains the same.

From the week of January 4, 2010

2010 Outlook projects increase in tech buying

InformationWeek’s recently published Outlook 2010 indicates good potential for growth in spending on customer-facing projects (45%), apps to support sales (31%), apps or systems to support new or expanded product lines (31%), apps or systems to cut operating costs (27%), apps or systems to support expansion into new markets (26%), data analytics software or strategies to identify growth opportunities (23%). You can download a full copy here: InformationWeek Outlook 2010.

“Green Marketing” on the rise.

According to a recent study published by Environmental Leader and MediaBuyerPlanner, green marketing is more of a trend than a fad. 33% of respondants said their green marketing efforts were more effective than normal marketing efforts. Just 7% thought them less effective. The report summary does not define green marketing, but presumably the term refers to the messaging rather than the tactic. Download an executive summary.

New FTC guidelines for bloggers and advertisers

Word of mouth marketers and those who use advertising endorsements now have a set of disclosure guidelines to follow. Ignore them at your own risk. Read 2010 Heralds New Disclosure Policies for Marketers and Bloggers by Sue Anderson.