Entries from December 2008

I love to read, and in the ever-changing world of Interactive Marketing, constantly reading is imperative to staying fresh and relevant in the marketplace.  While nothing substitutes for real world experience, I have found that maintaining an extensive reading list is the most surefire way to accelerate your career (and your profile within your company).

When I first started with Search Marketing, I found that there were several quality books that were published both in print and in e-book format.  All of these books were highly relevant to the topic of search marketing, and offered a solid background as to how the search engines evolved, which engines were succeeding in the short term, and an outlook for the future of search.  This was exactly what I needed in order to get started in the industry, and it helped me put form to the theories that I had crafted in my head about how to approach the industry.

This worked well for the first several books, but then I started to notice two very distinct and opinion altering trends when it came to reading Interactive Marketing books in print:

1. There is a lot of overlap between the books. While seeing a comprehensive history of how Google became the dominant search engine is very useful on first read, hearing variations of the same story in 3-4 print books becomes quite tedious.

   Continue Reading Interactive Marketing Reading: RSS feeds, Kindle and more! →

I have heard a lot of discussion over the last year about nebulous leads, especially in the home improvement industry. What do I mean by “nebulous?”  By definition, nebulous means indefinite.  A nebulous lead is prospective buyer for your product that happens to be early in the educational buying spectrum.  While they might not be at the stage of soliciting estimates yet, (and therefore won’t respond to traditional advertising), these prospects certainly have product needs on their mind and are gathering information preparing to do the project.  Putting systems in place that identify these potential customers presents a tremendous tactical opportunity for savvy companies to make contact with these prospects before their competitors.  These companies are then able to introduce their company and their products to these potential customers; building goodwill that can ultimately be translated into a sale when they are ready to buy.

Marketers typically identify this type of prospect by offering free information such as a whitepaper, or a free sample or through sweepstakes marketing efforts — the thought being that if an individual is interested enough to request a free window brochure, or sign up to win a house full of windows they will become a window buyer sometime in the foreseeable future.  Conventional wisdom suggests that 85% of respondents to these types of offers are prospects for the product.

Continue Reading Nebulous Leads – Can Your Company Turn Them Into Sales? →

In addition to reverse-engineering Google’s Local Search algorithm, we Three Deepers are always looking for more venues for expanding our reach for our local business clients, especially with Adwords.  I have been particularly intrigued of late by Google’s iPhone search application and how it pertains to local search.

If you haven’t read about it yet, the basic premise is that you open the iPhone app, hold it up to your mouth and say your search term.  Google recognizes what you say and automatically ties what you say to your geographic location (using either triangulation or GPS) and then returns search results based on where you are located.

While evaluating this application, I noticed that there were no advertisements on the search app results, or the Google search results on my phone.  Not having ads on the results pages was great for advertisers with strong organic search rankings (and especially those who had top 3 listing in the onebox), but it was a negative for PPC advertisers who wanted to push their way up to the top of the results.  I knew it was only a matter of time before Google would start allowing advertisers to place AdWords ads on these results pages (remember, it’s AdWords revenue that made the iPhone app FREE to users in the first place).

Continue Reading AdWords on Your Mobile Phone (Google’s G1/Android and the iPhone) →