1. Know your target audience profile

Knowing your target audience, in the context of Google AdWords, goes beyond maintaining a list of demographic parameters that describe the identity of your customers. You also need to keep in mind one important question – how is my audience using Google? Trying to get a feel for their behavioral patterns and letting that behavior inform your selection and use of keywords will give your AdWords campaign an edge over your competition.

2. Speak the language of your audience, not your own

Keep in mind that your target audience may or may not use the same vocabulary that you do to describe what you sell. Your keywords should reflect the way they talk about your offerings, not the way you do.

3. Select primary and secondary keywords

Each keyword in your campaign has a cost that depends on how many others are bidding on it. Your primary keywords are directly related to your product/service. In case of highly competitive products, your primary keywords may prove to be quite expensive. It’s equally important to choose secondary keywords that are not directly related to your product. Secondary keywords widen your reach and can bring down your pay-per-click advertising costs if you choose less competitive segments.

4. Select smart site placements

Apart from bidding on keywords, AdWords also gives you access to a wide range of partner websites where your ad can appear. You can choose categories of websites that your target customers are most likely to visit. For example, if you sell digital cameras, you can advertise on photography sites or sites that target gadget-lovers.

5. Use long-tail keywords for high conversions at lower cost

Online users are gradually using longer key phrases rather than keywords. These longer phrases have lower search volume than common keywords. However, long-tail keywords increase your chances of clicks and conversions since they are very specific. For instance, “digital camera” is a generic keyword. A long tail alternative would be “best deal for Canon 1000D.” If you’re struggling to find relevant longer tail keywords, there are a number of free keyword tools that can help you discover profitable, traffic-driving terms.

6. Monitor conversions, not just clicks

While you pay for clicks, tracking overall conversions from each keyword can help you derive better value out of your campaign. This, however, requires good integration of Google Analytics and AdWords with your CRM and sales management system.

7. Optimize your ad copy

Just like headlines play an important role in a traditional media campaign, having highly contextual ad copy that’s closely related to the keyword being searched for plays a vital role in conversions. An ad for a broad term like “digital camera” might lead to information that would aid the purchase decision of the buyer. However, if the search term indicates intention to buy, the copy should be persuasive and lead the user to a landing page with an option to purchase.

8. Test your landing page designs

The key to continually increasing ROI from Internet marketing is testing. Beyond testing multiple versions of your ads, make sure to test variations on your landing pages. Google offers the Google Website Optimizer tool that can help you decide the best layout for your landing page. Decisions like where to place the “Buy Now” button and what color to make it may be aided by this tool.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

8 Ways to Optimize Your AdWords Campaign

Marketers have two choices when they’re standing at their customers’ virtual gates. We can either beat against the door even harder or we can tap the right decision triggers and be invited inside.

If you’re like most marketers – and you’re being honest with yourself – you probably fall into this first camp. Beating on the gates takes persistence, money and a thick skin. The by-invitation-only option takes an understanding of the psychology of how we make decisions – specifically, it means we have to learn something about how we can tap our target’s decision triggers, those psychologically hard-wired rules that route requests to the inbox or the mental spam filter. Tap the right decision triggers and you move your customer to yes faster.

Before we start, understand that we’re not email marketing mavens or social media consultants –– we’re influence strategists. The work we’ll describe here is based on over 30 years of research in the social sciences. It transcends cultures, demographics and marketing budgets. In other words it’s solid stuff.  But what you’ll get out of understanding how decision triggers work is the difference between knocking yourself out for a 3% return and making those subtle changes that boost your returns up to 33%.

How can subtle changes help you overcome the noise in the market place today? Let’s focus on three primary blocks you face to getting your message heard and then illustrate how one specific decision trigger helps overcome each.

Block #1: Grab Their Brain. Decision Trigger: Contrast.

Brains love contrast. Before and after, faster or slower, easier or harder, engaging or boring, simple or complex, black and white, up and down, expensive and cheap, inside and outside, hot or cold. Your brain instantly takes notice. Setting up a comparison – a “just noticeable difference” – between your target’s frame of reference and your alternative does two important things. First, it sets up tension – and tension needs resolution. We hate it when we don’t know the rest of the story, don’t we? This is the heart and soul of storytelling. Second, it gives you the meaningful separation you need to show how different your difference is.

Always ask yourself, “compared to what?”

Block #2: Disbelief. Decision Trigger: The Strategic Retreat.

We’re bombarded with hyperbole, fluff and bombast, day and night. Believable statements are unique in their rarity. So do something unique. Argue against your own self-interests.

We told you at the top of this post what we weren’t. This wasn’t an accident. Saying we’re not social media consultants probably caused a very real physiological reaction in many of you. Go back and read it again and see if you notice. Give a little concession and retreat early on. When you make a careful strategic retreat, your listener acknowledges that you are being honest because you’ve just proven it – and then you can win the game on ground of your own choosing. Whatever request you make next will be coming from a credible, unbiased source – and you’ll be in a better position to get the “yes” you want.

Block #3: Closing the Sale. Decision trigger: The Rule of the Rare.

Act now, because scarcity is going fast! Actually, there’s more to it than just shouting, “Supplies are limited!” The Rule of the Rare says that things are perceived as having more value when they are perceived to be in short (and diminishing) supply, when they aren’t commonly known or when there is real exclusivity to owning them. When things get scarce, people get motivated.  When there are only 2 Sony Playstations left in the store and your promised your kid you would get one for their birthday you, act immediately.

Interestingly, competition is more powerful a motivator than time – your prospects don’t have control when it’s them against someone else, do they? Supplies could evaporate in seconds! We can control our actions if we know how much time is left. Uncertainty is stickier than control. So be honest and let them know about this one of a kind opportunity or you may be inadvertently sabotaging your efforts by telling them that it’s OK to procrastinate. However, you must guard against phony offers to maintain your believability (and your ability to sleep at night, too).

What does all this mean?

When you tap your targets’ decision triggers, you get them to “yes” faster. We made brief mention above to the difference between getting 3% and getting 33% – when used this framework in a program aimed at Fortune 500 CIO’s that should have garnered a 3% response, we were able to deliver a 33% return. That’s a powerful response. Get the whole white paper here, if you’d like to learn more.

No matter whether you’re an email marketer, a social media consultant, a brand manager or a CMO with a billion to spend on demand generation – you still need to engineer your message correctly. Spend doesn’t equal conversion. You can either have a message or a mess. You choose.

Inbound Lead Generation Kit

Learn how to generate more inbound leads using SEO, blogging, and social media. Download the free kit for tips and tricks to drive more leads and business to your site.

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It’s just a …

As expected, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the social network’s “next generation messaging” system yesterday, and the highly anticipated announcement underscores both the key role email plays in today’s communications and the implicit need for social media and email to work hand in hand.

The new messaging service, which will roll out gradually after an invitation-only start, will focus on seamless messaging, conversation history across multiple channels, and a “social inbox” that can filter the inbox to only allow messages from “friends.”

The announcement, coupled with AOL’s Project Phoenix unveiling on Sunday and similar expected inbox enhancements by Yahoo, MSN and Google, confirms that we’re seeing a movement toward a single messaging inbox.

So, with more than 500 million Facebook users, what impact will the social network’s new messaging system—and the similar iterations from others referenced above—have on marketers?  Here are seven areas marketers will need to pay careful attention to moving forward:

1) Brand name/subject line: With Facebook doing away with subject lines, “From” names and brand ID become even bigger in determining whether recipients ignore, delete or open your message. Now’s the time to revisit your “From” name and make sure it’s the shortest, most logical, most recognized brand that would make sense to subscribers and that they would most likely expect to see in their inboxes.

2) Design: Zuckerberg talked about shorter, less formal messages, and the need to optimize your email’s design to make sure it works regardless of environment has never been more important. Make sure your design is optimized for blocked images and consider adding text to the preheader to ensure your value proposition or call to action is communicated even in email clients’ preview snippets.

3) Personality/voice: As social and email continue to become more integrated, it’s essential that your company marketing messages reflect this, focusing more on education, personality and peer recommendations. If your messages continue to be solely filled with sales pitches and corporate speak, you risk getting lost in the inbox, so take the time to create a personality in your messages that makes them “pop.”

4) Relevance: The new Facebook messaging tool, which allows users to restrict their Facebook inbox to only include friends (or “friends of friends”), prioritize notes from some senders, and relegate others into—well, an “other” folder—once again confirms the importance of relevance. Though it’s still unclear whether “liked” companies will receive preferential inbox placement, the fact that users can move senders from the “Others” track to the “Messages” box—and vice-versa—means that marketers will need to use every tool at their disposal—segmentation, personalization and more—to ensure they engage recipients. By moving your program to one that’s triggered by individual user behavior and data, you’ll be well-positioned to thrive in the age of the “layered” inbox.

5) Multichannel communications: With its integration across channels, Facebook’s new messaging system underscores the wisdom of integrating marketing communications across multiple channels—both social and traditional. Just like some of your Facebook friends may want you to confirm plans via text, but share photos on Facebook and engage in some spirited back-and-forth about the weekend’s big game via email, marketers should also realize that recipients expect different things from different channels and should reach out across a variety of touch points to achieve maximum impact.

6) Preference centers: With new Facebook email addresses potentially flooding the scene, you’ll want to take steps to minimize list churn. Make sure your email preference center includes an address-change option and that you link to it prominently within all your outbound email and on your Facebook page. The preference center is also key in giving consumers the ability to connect with you by whatever channel they prefer—which may depend on the type of message you’re sending. Simply put, preference centers are now a must.

7) Timing: Acting quickly is becoming a must in the communications arena. Whether it’s delivering transactional emails seconds after a purchase or sending a triggered cart recovery message in real time, top-tier marketers embrace tactics that enable timely communications with customers. By matching your messaging cadence to current trends, buying patterns, news events and other factors, you can maximize your effectiveness. And marketers who are going a step further and analyzing recipients’ inbox behavior over time to select the ideal message delivery time for each and every individual are reaping tremendous rewards—driving conversions and even increasing average order size.

1. Optimize Everything: The easiest way to get MORE from your online videos is to make sure you’re doing everything you can to make them findable by optimizing them for users and the search engines. When it comes to optimizing your video, you want to pay special attention to your Title, Description, Tags, and Captions/Annotations. The more keyword-rich and engaging you can make them, the better.

2. Test your Thumbnails: Once you upload your video, YouTube will allow you to pick from three video stills to use as that video’s thumbnail image. You may want to test what works best for you. Does a human face get more clicks than a slate of text? Does a smiling woman get more clicks than an image of your CEO (probably)? These are things you’ll want to experiment with to make sure picking the thumbnail that will lead to the most conversions.

3. Add Transcripts: A few weeks ago I offered some tips on how to add transcripts to your YouTube videos. This is a really easy way to increase the benefit you’re seeing from your videos by making them more findable and search-engine friendly.

4. End with a call to action: Make sure your video closes with some type of call to action. Someone sat there and watched your entire two minute video – now what do you want them to do? Include a call to action that encourages them to continue their interaction with your brand and gets them to DO something, whether it’s to visit your site, check out a blog post or even to share the video with their friends. If you’re not including a call to action at the end of your video, you’re missing out on a great marketing opportunity.

5. Make an offer: Want to increase views and comments on your video? Offer an incentive for customers to do so. Maybe there’s a free discount code in the video or something that will give them special access to your brand. Include an offer to incentivize the video.

6. Make it easy to share: Encourage people to share your video by including calls to action for them to do so, uploading it on Facebook and, of course, tweeting it! The new version of Twitter is designed to put media right in the forefront of the service. That means prime real estate for your video content.

7. Experiment with different platforms: While it’s the biggest, YouTube isn’t the only video game in town. Try uploading your video content to sites like Vimeo, Viddler, Blip.tv, iTunes and others to increase your audience and monopolize more room on the search engines results page. When you upload your content to both YouTube AND another platform, you can make them both rank for keyword-searches. Don’t have time to upload the same video to multiple sites? TubeMogul will do it for you at no cost.

8. Alter the content for each platform: Or, instead of uploading the same content to different platforms, tailor the content to the different audiences to increase conversion rates.

9. Put videos on high-conversion pages: Help increase sales by using online video on conversion pages. At last year’s Streaming Media West show, Zappos Content Team Senior Manager Ric Nasol talked about how Zappos was using video on product pages to help drive sales. And they seemed to have worked. Ric reported a sales impact of 6 to 30 percent.

10. Create playlists: If you’ve ever gotten stuck in an endless loop on YouTube watching one funny video after another, you know that video is addicting. Luckily, it’s also addicting for your customers. Help feel their addiction by creating playlists for them to watch and subscribe to. By going to your My Videos page and linking your videos, you help your customers kill their entire day watching content about your brand. Like potato chips, when it comes to online video, you can’t have just one.

11. Use the Insight: YouTube Insights is a free tool that allows video creators to see detailed statistics about the videos they upload to the site. You can see how often the videos are viewed, how popular they are relative to other videos, what the community engagement is like, how many subscribers you get daily, and lots of other important information. Just like with anything, knowing the numbers behind what you’re doing can help you to make smarter decisions down the road.

Those are my eleven tips for getting more out of YouTube. What’s working for you?

From Small Business Trends

11 Ways To Do More With Online Video

The Social Media Marketing Series is supported by Webtrends Facebook Analytics, which provides comprehensive tracking and measurement solutions to help you maximize your ROI. To keep up with Webtrends Social products, follow its blog.

Social media is an increasingly popular area of marketing and communications for businesses of all sizes. Companies from industries of all types are interested in learning about the basics of building and implementing a social media strategy.

Since social media is still a burgeoning area in business, there aren’t any set steps for success. While there are many suggestions and recommendations across the web, many of these pointers are specific to certain types of businesses or industries.

One area of social media that can be discussed with relative consensus, though, is how to define a social media team’s role in your organization. While there are varying paths that can be chosen, they all stem from the same considerations: the goal of social media, who should be involved, what the responsibilities include, and how the strategy should be implemented. Furthermore, it is important to note how the social media team will interact with the company and community at large.

We spoke with two social media experts to get their tips on this topic. Read on for their opinions and add your own in the comments below.

Determine Goals

The first step to planning any addition to an organization should be setting goals. Before joining the social world, an organization should have an understanding of its goals for:

• The social media team at large,
• Each social platform, and
• Individual team members.

“The first thing we did was to define a purpose. What is the purpose of starting a community? Over the past two years, we heard, ‘You’ve got to be in social! You’ve got to be in social!’ A lot of companies are doing that, but they don’t know why,” said Kailei Richardson, manager of strategy and social media expert at PointRoll.

Richardson commented that Ripple6, the social marketing division of PointRoll, decided to create a social presence to “use [the company's] product to show how effective it could be, but to also act as an extension of the Ripple6 website.” She noted that the website acts as a brochure of sorts for the company, but the social sites they’ve created promote real dialogue and show a bit of personality behind the organization.

Morgan Johnston, corporate communications manager who leads JetBlue’s social media strategy and execution, pointed out that planning a strategy for each social platform was key for planning the role of the social media team within JetBlue:

“For JetBlue the role of the social media team started with defining what our role as a company was within each of the various social channels where we interact with customers. Each community tends to define how they’d like to see the business interact with them. It was important to be receptive to those ideas and work collaboratively to define a role where both customers and the organization can find equal utility.

“With Twitter for instance, the real-time nature of the tool tends to lend itself to an operational focus; service monitoring and recovery… While Facebook or our blog are more focused on story-telling, sales or promotions.”

Having goals in place for the social media team, its individuals and each social platform will enable team members to define responsibilities and measure success.

Allocate the Appropriate Internal Resources

After an organization has defined what the social media team should be and who it should include, the next step is to survey available internal resources and allocate them appropriately. This includes employees, funds and equipment.

“Once the role is defined, the internal resources best suited to address each of those areas work to figure out how they can support it effectively,” said Johnston. “We’ve found that having representatives from various teams: Corporate Communications, Marketing, Customer Commitment or Operations coming together as [a] working group is a great way to make sure all expectations are met, but [we recommend] keeping those representatives tied to the overall functions of their original teams. This allows a great deal of flexibility for the team.”

Richardson also believes that it is essential to “get the right team members involved.” She advocates divvying up responsibilities based on each team member’s strength and the goals of the social media strategy. Strategists, marketers, site administrators, content managers and project managers were all valid needs in Ripple6’s case.

Create a Social Media Policy

A social media policy is a great way to set your company’s expectations for social media use in writing for all to see — either internally or externally (or both). These policies come in many forms and can be sensitive documents only for company eyes or public-facing guidelines shared with the world.

In most cases, it’s a legal and organizational necessity to have a social media policy to set the tone for employees and the community. If you’re still in doubt about whether you need one, check out the basic considerations here.

For companies ready to take the next step toward planning a social media policy, another great resource is a write-up of “10 Must-Haves for Your Social Media Policy” by Mashable guest author Sharlyn Lauby. The post sums up the most important topics and guidelines and includes an example of a sound social media policy.

JetBlue circulates a number of internal-facing and publicly available documents regarding the social media team. Johnston shared JetBlue’s 600-word social media policy and said of it:

“We’re proud of our crew members and love that so many want to share their passion for the company in social media spaces. Corporate guidelines for best practices are a great way to help foster that engagement by clearly communicating responsibility and accountability. JetBlue has a 600-word social networking policy that boils down to, ‘Don’t be an idiot.’

“Our guidelines outline requirements surrounding: disclaimers of personal views, protection of sensitive information, responsible and respectful use, and social media use while working.

“We do discuss the difference between personal and professional use of social media. However, at this point, any ‘official’ use of social media is limited and overseen directly by our social media team and corporate communications.”

Take a look at JetBlue’s social media policy, as well as other great examples, from companies including Forrester, Intel, IBM, Best Buy and Coca-Cola, to get ideas for your company’s social media policy.

Communicate Effectively Across the Organization

Just because a team is labeled the “social media team” doesn’t mean they have to exclusively use social media tools to communicate with each other and the rest of the community. There is a bit of a misconception about social media enthusiasts that portrays them as Facebook-crazed, Twitter-frenzied social media addicts.

Johnston is a firm believer that sometimes old-school tools work best. “Many of the traditional corporate tools work quite well for the majority of our teams — e-mail, IM, or phones,” he noted. “And with the various representatives of the social team spanning the company already, we’re in a good position to reach any additional resources we may need and have them offer their expertise.”

For dispersed teams, those tools still work, but Johnston recommends using a collaborative tools such as CoTweet and Google Wave. He explained:

“For Twitter, where we have our Social Media Support Team from our Salt Lake City-based support center, as well as representatives from our headquarters in Queens all working with a single account in real time, there’s a greater need to make sure we’re constantly connected. We use CoTweet as a great asset for team management of Twitter traffic, and we use Google Wave as a vehicle for team chat, collaboration, and resource management. Though, we are obviously exploring replacements at this time as Google Wave will be shut down at the end of the year.”

Richardson noted that Ripple6 uses the company’s proprietary platform to create communities among its various departments and teams. The customized social network is private and allows each team to interact effectively without burdening the rest of the organization. The social media team utilizes the internal community page for sharing content and current projects with each other. The company also has an external-facing community page as well, where team members engage with the community at large.

Other communication tools that enable organizations to customize an online networking experience among teammates include the 37signals products, StatusNet Enterprise Social Network and Yammer.

Setting up a social media team is quite a task, but it can be simplified by following some of the above recommendations. What advice would you add for new enterprises entering the social space? Add your thoughts in the comments below.

The Social Media Marketing Series is supported by Webtrends Facebook Analytics, which provides comprehensive tracking and measurement solutions to help you maximize your ROI. To keep up with Webtrends Social products, follow its blog.

More Business Resources from Mashable:

– What to Consider When Building an In-House Social Media Team
– Social Media Marketing 101: In-House Team, Agency or Consultant?
– How Social Search Will Transform the SEO Industry
– 5 Big Social Media Questions from Small Business Owners
– 10 Essential Tips for Building Your Small Biz Team

Images courtesy of Flickr, Mulad, Mukumbura, Bourn Design & iStockPhoto, rubenhi

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About the worst possible insult you can receive on the Internet is to be accused of being a spammer. Any other attack on your character doesn’t have the same staying power. Once someone thinks you’re a spammer, you’ll almost never get back on their good side. The road to spamville is one-way only.

Worst of all, it’s surprisingly easy to take steps toward becoming a spammer without even realizing it! Here are the top five ways (in my opinion, of course) that you might get accused of being a spammer without realizing it.

#5 – The Random Cause Invitation

Back in the early days of the web, seemingly everyone would forward you joke emails and urban legends. You would correct them via websites like Snopes or sigh as you deleted their messages, but in total we all knew that this behavior was downright annoying.

The reason that these messages were so frustrating is that that didn’t seem relevant. You expect your family to use email to coordinate reunions and your colleagues to discuss business, not to forward the latest Internet petition which was debunked years before.

Thankfully, the Bored-At-Work Network seems to have mostly moved on. But now are inboxes are filled with random cause invitations. We are asked to save puppies, protect the environment, or stand up for the rights of a particular group whose rights are lacking.

And again, all of these causes are sound, but they seem random. They invade our space. If you want to support a cause, pick one or two to send to your friends. Otherwise, you’ll seem like a spammer.

#4 – The Soft Opt-In

Time for a Marketing 101 refresher. Here’s a quick definition

Express permission by a customer, or a recipient of a mail, email, or other direct message to allow a marketer to send a merchandise, information, or more messages.

That means that if I give you the explicit authority to send me messages, you can do so. But what if we meet at a networking function and I give you my business card? That means you can contact me personally, but it doesn’t mean I want to be added to any lists.

Likewise, if we happen to be on the same Reply-All list, you don’t have my permission to Reply-All about some topic other than the one at hand.

Remember that opt-in means opt-in. Otherwise, you’ll seem like a spammer.

#3 – Abuse of carbon copy

The most dangerous weapon in your digital arsenal is the CC box. It’s like a whole box full of armed grenades: you want to be really careful about using just one and almost never want to use them all at the same time.

Remember the Brody PR Fiasco? Here’s the simple rule:

Only use carbon-copy if you are 100% sure that 100% of the people on the list know each other well AND would appreciate the chance to immediately Reply-All AND would immediately appreciate any Reply-Alls.

Every time I get a CC’d message where I don’t know people on the CC line, I think: you seem like a spammer.

#2 – Preemptive Disclaimers

Have you ever heard start a sentence with “No offense, but…” or “Don’t take this the wrong way?” You can be certain they are about to say something cruel. Either we need to tell the honest truth or keep our opinions to ourselves. It will ALWAYS seems patronizing to say: “Sorry for the SPAM, but…”

So–don’t do it! If you promise you are not usually a spammer, you seem like a spammer.

#1 – The generic private message

Here it is: the absolute worst way to look like a spammer. It’s when you send a message to an individual person that was intended just for them, but could just has easily have gone to anybody.

A great example is a Twitter direct message (DM) or a text message. Consider this:

Hey, would you mind telling your friends about our new website? It’s at http://www.example.org. Thanks!

This might well have been a personal, handcrafted message sent just to one person. However, it reads like it could have been sent to millions! If you send a note that appears to be generic through a private channel, you’ll look like a spammer. Compare this with:

Hey Robby, you gave us such great feedback when we were building our new site. It’s up now, feel free to share it if you want.
http://www.example.org/ Thx!

That doesn’t seem appear to be spam. Make sure your messages are specific, so you don’t look like a spammer!

This post was written by Robby Slaughter

Robby Slaughter has had a lifelong passion for information technology, spanning some twenty years of education, teaching, full-time employment and consulting. Robby is the Principal of Slaughter Development, a workflow and productivity consulting firm based in Indianapolis, Indiana.

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It’s true. Here are the stories of two companies who netted huge increases in their subscription rates just by testing a design change.

Take a look at what they tested, then keep reading to find out what you could test to get results that are just as big.

Talking Avatar: + 131%

Small Business Trends, an online entrepreneurial publication, needed to find the right face to represent their newsletter in its sign-up offer.

They alternated a photo of the editor, Anita Campbell, with a talking avatar that resembled her.

Avatar Anita popped up as soon as the page loaded and talked for 20 seconds about why the viewer should subscribe, giving visitors much more information than the photo form provided.

And she converted 131% more subscribers than Photo Anita.

Red Light, Green Light: + 46%

Internet marketer Eric Graham, aka the “Conversion Doctor,” wanted to design the ultimate submit button.

He ran several tests. For his final split, he tested a simple red border around the button against a red border that changed to green when hovered over.

Red Border

Red Border, Green Roll Over

The color-changing border got 46% clicks more than the simple red border.

According to Graham, the button showed that it was clickable by reacting to the mouse. When the red outline turned green, he theorized, viewers interpreted the change as a “stop” signal changing to “go” – so they did.

Your Design Changes: + ?%

Granted, you have a different audience than SBT and the Conversion Doctor, and a different site. You could make the exact same changes and probably not get the same results.

But there are plenty of things you can test that could turn up results that are just as significant. Try:

Which category do your site visitors fall into? Change your button’s design, and find out!

Have You Tested Your Form?

Have you ever run a split test on your web form?

If not, what are you waiting for? What could you test today?

If you have, what did you find out? We’d love to hear your story!

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The world of marketing is evolving rapidly to accommodate today’s digital environment, especially when it comes to the many ways marketers have to connect with their consumers.

With the constant emergence of new social media, blogs, texting services, and other innovative channels, digital marketing continues to be a cost-effective and efficient way to deliver relevant messages that engage consumers with your brand. Digital campaigns are also a great way to build targeted in-house databases and gather metrics — bounce rates, click-throughs, opt-ins, polls, surveys, and more — that help analyze receptivity to campaigns.

Admittedly, the digital world is not always easy to penetrate; however, when executed effectively, it adds significant value to a campaign. In order to succeed in today’s crowded marketplace, marketers need to remember the basics. Often easy to forget, there are a series of classic tactics that are essential to any program. Here are those nine basic — yet critical — techniques for successful marketing in a digital age.

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Back in the day, if you wanted to know how successful your marketing had been you had to use expensive and time-consuming analysis.

You might have spent time putting together a direct mail package that had a call-to-action to return a slip with a customer’s details on it, and the amount returned to you would show how successful that campaign had been.

Of course, the problem is, if you sent out 10,000 flyers, you don’t know how many actually arrived at a home; how many were read versus how many were put in the bin; and how many never made it out the post office.

The only gauge of success were the returned slips, and when you’re spending money and time creating and distributing 10,000 flyers, knowing what worked and what didn’t becomes pretty damn important.

The same goes for radio ads, TV ads, newspaper ads – sure, you’re guaranteed airtime but unless you know who saw or read your ad and what their actions were afterward, you’re no better off than that wayward flyer.

Thankfully, that was back in the day. Now you have a lot more power at your disposal when it comes to grabbing results – and by using the research from that to tailor your future moves, you can have a research station ready for every campaign.

A Research Station?

Sales are great. Sales are what helps pay the bills, pay the employees, pay stakeholders – without sales, no business will succeed. Of course, to get sales, you need to market.

But to market effectively, you need to research and then use the research to prepare your future marketing for your next batch of sales. This is where your research station comes in.

All a research station is is clever use of information-gathering tools, and collating these tools into a cohesive action plan. There are a ton of tools to use, but I’m going to look at some of the best free ones and how you can use them for your needs.

So, first things first – where to start.

Building Your Research Station

To build a solid and practical research station, you need to know where to grab your information from. This isn’t as difficult as it sounds (although the level of information will vary – free is good, but premium research will always offer more).

The best way to carry out any research is to have the information at hand you want to know about. Then you start collecting the bricks to build your station.

• Google Alerts. Still one of the best tools for knowing what people are saying about you and your company. Set up your keywords, set up the frequency of alert, and let Google Alerts do the rest.

• Social Mention. One of the best free solutions for finding information across the social web, Social Mention even gives a basic overview of sentiment and shared value.

• Social Search. Not a single tool as such, but using platforms like Twitter Search and Facebook Search (amongst others) can yield a ton of information.

• Analytics. Research is nothing without analytics. Choose from Google Analytics, Quantcast, Expo-Maxx or Sitemeter for some free options.

• Vanity URL’s. Having a call-to-action is great – having a call-to-action that appeals to your audience is better. Use URL services like bit.ly or budurl are great for providing URL’s to increase your level of attraction. (budurl is premium but offers a free trial.)

These are just some options I recommend. As I mentioned earlier, Google is your friend, so use its search to see which other platforms might interest you.

So now the bricks are in place to build, it’s time to solidify the foundations by mixing them together.

A Research Station Campaign

Because each tool above (and any you find to use) offer different strengths, the easiest way to show an example of how to use them together is with a dummy campaign. Hopefully, this can be transferred to your needs.

Let’s say you have a widget to sell. It’s not a revolutionary widget, but it’s a damn cool one. So you want to market the heck out of it and sell a ton, and retire to Barbados.

While you still use TV, or radio, or other “traditional media” to advertise, this won’t tell you why your widget is selling (other than folks like your advert, possibly). This is where you combine the research station with the media station.

Every flyer or ad you send out comes with a vanity URL (make sure the URL appeals to your audience and the needs your widget meets). This URL sends interested folks to a micro-site built specifically for the campaign.

Every area of advertising or marketing also has its own URL – so newspapers, radio, TV, etc, would be URL/tv or URL/radio (just as an example – you can be more creative).

To make your campaign even more effective, use multiple URL’s to take people to different pages of your site, based on demographics, type of widget, location, etc.

The micro-site has more call-to-actions, like a downloadable mobile APP or a QR code to scan, along with a newsletter sign-up for free updates about the widget, etc, where to find you online and more. Or you have coupons to download to get discounts from offline purchases, or to share with your friends.

You have your analytics package set up ready to grab the information about your visitors as they arrive and leave.

Your campaign is also set around specific keywords, which should also be in your micro-site URL for added visibility and measurement.

So now you have all the pieces in place, and you’ve sent the marketing out, it’s time to use your research station to gauge, measure and act upon.

Planning New Stations

By setting up your research station before your campaign – alerts, URL’s, micro-sites, type of media, what message is going to each, etc – you’ve created the basis of what information you want to receive.

This, coupled with sales of the widget from the campaign, can give you focused information that will make your next one even more effective.

So what do you take from each nugget?

Google Alerts. Set your keywords up from your campaign, as well as the widget name, the company name, the website address and “blog posts about WIDGET NAME”. See when you’re mentioned; where; who by; what topic they normally talk about, etc.

Social Mention. Type in your keywords and marketing efforts (WIDGET X on the radio, for example). Bookmark the most relevant mentions from the network results. Measure the Positive/Negative/Neutral feedback for each term.

Social Search. Much like Social Mention, but this time view more about the demographics on who’s talking about you. What Groups do they belong to on Facebook? Are they part of a bigger picture (mommy bloggers, widget enthusiasts, etc). Are they sharing you with their networks? If so, good or bad?

Analytics. Which URL’s were used? Which landing page had the biggest bounce rate? Why? Did your call-to-action work? How many apps or coupons were downloaded? What nationality was your biggest visitor base?

Vanity URL’s. Which keyword URL drove the most traffic? What medium offered the most return?  Were location-based URL’s useful?

By collecting all of this information and more, you’re painting a picture of your customers, and how they want to be marketed to.

You’re no longer guessing about which media worked and which didn’t. No longer questioning traffic spikes and who was responsible for them. No longer wondering if people were liking your approach or if they bought on a whim.

Once you have that, it’s not rocket science as to what comes next – you use that information to get rid of the crud and build upon the good.

You eliminate the need for costly mistakes and solidify the best parts of your previous campaign into your next one. And your next one. And your next one.

You win, the customer wins – result.

How about you? How are you building stations and what binds yours together?

image: Zanthia
image: Krista76