U.S. Financial Crisis Impacts Search Marketing

What’s happening on a macro level, in key verticals and in light of the U.S. financial crisis?

In an ongoing down economy, we fully expect that search will suffer the least. It can be tracked with an end-to-end view of economic impact. In a continued down economy, it is likely we’ll see less clicks with purchase-intent overall, particularly for premium goods and services in the retail sector. However, that will be countered to some extent by interest in clicks tied to special offers and incentives, which often surface in a down economy. Of course, certain verticals will experience significant downturn and decreased spend as key players implode, such as with financial services.

Branding and display advertising appear to be softening amidst a slower economic climate, and we expect some of those budgets to be reallocated to search, especially among small and midsize businesses, many of which invested relatively little in display to begin with. To be sure, with vast inventory and softening prices, the quarter and year ahead will offer less expensive opportunities for brands to invest in display and branding.

While search is fundamentally stable and has a very strong reputation, we believe churn will be a trend to watch, especially amidst a continued downturn. In the SMB segment, some less sophisticated advertisers with less accountability and lower ROI might abandon or decrease search marketing. Moreover, there have been some concerns about over-selling and under-performing by a number of local, small-business lead-generation services. Search will prevail as a fundamental tactic to capture customers, but we may see some volatility here.

If a down economy persists, it will be interesting to see how search spending will be impacted by shifts in advertising among Fortune 1000 companies – a sector Google clearly has identified as critical to penetrate. The F1000 spend a vast majority of their advertising budgets on brand advertising, with a small percentage allocated to search. In down economies, large brands often decrease their overall ad budgets. It is unclear how that will bode for search.

What is the Google-Yahoo partnership all about?

The monetization of search is dependent on a critical mass of advertisers. Volume of advertisers drives volume of ads, which drives quality of ads (relevance) and increases the price of keywords. That has been one of Yahoo’s challenges, and among the rationale for its possible partnership with Google. As of this post, Yahoo and Google have agreed to delay their partnership to give the Justice Department more time to evaluate the deal.

If the partnership occurs, will the deal be good for advertisers? It depends, but there are key variables to consider. How will inventory be allocated to the different ad platforms? What will the nuances of each network be? How will the performance differ across the legacy Yahoo search versus Google network? How much transparency will there be? A key question will be how much inventory Yahoo will cede to Google. That could impact advertiser relationships and synergies with Yahoo’s display business.

What would a major deal like this mean for small and midsize advertisers? Can Clickable help? At this early stage of online advertising, change and volatility is inevitable in the marketplace, including developments with all advertising networks. This will present ongoing complexity for advertisers. However, overcoming complexity is Clickable’s core mission; we will continually invest in our solution to help marketers navigate and drive accountability and profitability through change. Clickable will always figure out what’s best for its customers, guaranteeing the optimization strategies that capture this dynamic market.

What’s the meaning of innovations like Chrome and Android?

Google’s Chrome initiative appears to be an attempt to influence the evolution and speed of innovation among all browser developers. There are clear performance and experience benefits, but an overall browser market that follows suit would create a better environment for Google’s advancement into Web applications, moving closer into Microsoft’s OS domain. The same goes for Android, with advancement into Apple’s mobile domain. It’s a little nudge to both Microsoft and Apple as all three jockey for position around the future of mobile and apps.

Mobile Advertising – will it materialize in 2009? International?

Mobile will not “explode” in 2009, though we will get much closer with developments around iPhone and Android, as well as Google’s efforts to require API partners to package new ad formats in third-party ad systems and dashboards. Significant mobile traction continues outside of the U.S.

What’s the significance of the Yahoo APT deal?

Yahoo APT reflects a broader trend toward automated, self-service ad systems, reducing the friction still associated with antiquated manual operations in place. Yahoo hopes to offer advertisers more control and ease-of-use over spending, while providing publishers more dynamic, effective inventory controls. Yahoo is looking to bring the efficiency of paid search advertising to the display side.

Changes in advertiser versus agency activity?

Agencies are being challenged on two fronts, especially in an economic downturn. First, many Fortune 1000 brands, with most ad dollars tied to branding, are likely to reduce overall budgets. Secondly, agencies are challenged with savvier advertisers continuing to ponder managing search in-house, or some aspects of it. Advertisers will be more sensitive to higher agency margins, and more cognizant of improving tools to more effectively manage their accounts, both internally and externally via agencies. Agencies are not going away by any means, but the core value and economics are changing.

What is comparative activity across networks?

We’ve seen no major comparative spending changes across the major search ad networks (i.e., share between Google, Yahoo and MSN), however we still see advertisers (especially small and midsize advertisers) willing to pay more on Yahoo versus Google because prime inventory is less competitive. Because of greater complexity associated with managing a second network, many agencies still often avoid Yahoo and consolidate spending with Google.

Invest time talking to new sources of finance. You might need them if your current providers prove difficult

I understand the point but this is where I diverge from Clive Lewis, if only in terms of practicalities.

There are only so many hours in the day and if you are spending more time on finance control issues and making sure that your business does everything it can to avoid financial difficulty, where is the extra time to come from?

From a marketing perspective, I want you to be strengthening relationships with your best customers to take advantage of the “flight to quality” where customers want to have confidence in their suppliers.

It is certainly worth finding out names and contact details through your network of contacts so that you are ready but I don’t really see the value for you or the other financiers in spending time in speculative relationship building.

How to Start Internet Marketing

Assuming you already have a website, the first step to effectively begin exploiting Internet marketing options through your website is to research two key things:

* Who and how are consumers already using the Internet to find and patronize similar businesses; and

* What type of online marketing tools and Internet services are available and which one(s) will work best for your type of business.

Top-Five Marketing Strategies

Strategy 1. Think big and audit your time. No matter the size of your business, place a mental image in your mind as if you are the largest and most successful person in your industry. How much time is consumed by routine office work someone else should be doing? Spend more time with more important tasks such as marketing strategies, improving customer relations, and implementing new strategies to expand your services.

Strategy 2. Be different and stand out from the competition. Jordan Furniture sells more furniture per square foot than any other furniture store in the nation. They transformed their family-owned business into a multi-million dollar corporation by following a principle called “shoppertainment.” To surprise employees and customers, Barry and Eliot Tatleman dressed up like the Lone Ranger and Tonto and rode horses in their parking lot. They built an IMax theater inside one store to entertain children while their parents shopped. When you drive around the back to pick up your furniture they provide you free hotdogs and wash your car windows.

Strategy 3. Build relationships with your customers. For each month that goes by, customers lose 10% of their buying power. Create a customer database and contact them on a regular basis. Mail them a postcard, birthday card, sales flyer, newsletter etc. to keep your name, phone number, and service on their mind.

Strategy 4. Collect E-Mail Addresses. As part of your customer relationship process get permission from your customers to use their E-mail address. Periodically send updates and notices to your client list. As long as you have their permission and avoid overuse, E-mail can be a powerful and inexpensive marketing tool. Consider the Fox’s Pizza Den in Punxsutawney, PA, they ran an anniversary promotion offering a medium cheese pizza for the 1970s price of $1.40. To get this special price, customers had to go to their web site and register their email address to have the special coupon emailed to them. An amazing 500 email addresses were collected in two days.

Strategy 5. Avoid poisonous personalities. Unfriendly and negative employees cost you money by chasing your customers away. Spend more time and money interviewing and hiring people who enjoy helping people. Use behavior based interviewing and screening assessments to improve your chances for hiring success.

Fresh Ideas for Innovative Marketing

For many entrepreneurs, summertime brings slower sales and less hectic activity. What better time than right now to explore fresh marketing ideas for growing your business? Rather than slide into the busy fourth quarter with the same old marketing bag of tricks, you can get a jump on your competitors by embracing new tactics for increasing leads and sales.

Search Marketing Ideas

We’ve divided search marketing into two topics. Search engine marketing (SEM) which is PPC (Pay Per Click) and CPC (Cost Per Click) programs such as Google Adwords that allow you to pay for a sponsored listing in the search results. And search engine optimization (SEO) which is the process of gaining a higher natural search position in the search engines.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

1. Create a search marketing budget.
* How much will you need to spend to get a sale?
* How much profit do you make per sale?
* How will you track and improve your ads?
2. Advertise through Google Adwords.
* Largest market, most searches
* Highest competition
* May need to focus on a smaller niche to be profitable
3. Advertise through Yahoo Search Marketing
* Moderate search volume and competition
4. Advertise through Microsoft adCenter
* Moderate search volume
* Lower competition
5. Advertise through Ask.com
* Low search volume
* Low competition
6. Look for new niches and customer groups to offer your products and services to (web designer for automotive shops) to decrease competition.
7. Use keyword tools to research what your potential customers are searching for.
8. Google’s keyword tool and Wordtracker are two free tools to help research what people are searching for.
9. Use local search marketing area specifications to target a specific city or zip code. Again reducing competition and increasing effectiveness.
10. Track Your Search Engine Marketing: Track leads, track conversions, track what each keyword does or doesn’t do for you.
11. Adjust your campaign to explore more of the keywords that work and decrease bids on the keywords that don’t preform as well.
12. Create multiple landing pages and test the effectiveness of each landing page. Test different layouts, different copy, different calls to action.

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Marketing strategy

A marketing strategy is a process that can allow an organization to concentrate its limited resources on the greatest opportunities to increase sales and achieve a sustainable competitive advantage[3]. A marketing strategy should be centred around the key concept that customer satisfaction is the main goal.

Approaches to budgeting

Many budgets are based on history. They are the equivalent of `time-series’ forecasting. It is assumed that next year’s budgets should follow some trend that is discernible over recent history. Other alternatives are based on a simple `percentage of sales’ or on `what the competitors are doing’.

However, there are many other alternatives – Ven:

* Affordable – This may be the most common approach to budgeting. Someone, typically the managing director on behalf of the board, decides what is a `reasonable’ promotional budget; what can be afforded. This figure is most often based on historical spending. This approach assumes that promotion is a cost; and sometimes is seen as an avoidable cost.
* Percentage of revenue – This is a variation of `affordable’, but at least it forges a link with sales volume, in that the budget will be set at a certain percentage of revenue, and thus follows trends in sales. However, it does imply that promotion is a result of sales, rather than the other way round.

Both of these methods are seen by many managements to be `realistic’, in that they reflect the reality of the business strategies as those managements see it. On the other hand, neither makes any allowance for change. They do not allow for the development to meet emerging market opportunities and, at the other end of the scale, they continue to pour money into a dying product or service (the `dog’).

* Competitive parity – In this case, the organization relates its budgets to what the competitors are doing: for example, it matches their budgets, or beats them, or spends a proportion of what the brand leader is spending. On the other hand, it assumes that the competitors know best; in which case, the service or product can expect to be nothing more than a follower.
* Zero-based budgeting – In essence, this approach takes the objectives, as set out in the marketing plan, together with the resulting planned activities and then costs them out. Differences between marketing and business plans.

Budgets as Managerial Tools

The classic quantification of a marketing plan appears in the form of budgets. Because these are so rigorously quantified, they are particularly important. They should, thus, represent an unequivocal projection of actions and expected results. What is more, they should be capable of being monitored accurately; and, indeed, performance against budget is the main (regular) management review process.

The purpose of a marketing budget is, thus, to pull together all the revenues and costs involved in marketing into one comprehensive document. It is a managerial tool that balances what is needed to be spent against what can be afforded, and helps make choices about priorities. It is then used in monitoring performance in practice.

The marketing budget is usually the most powerful tool by which you think through the relationship between desired results and available means. Its starting point should be the marketing strategies and plans, which have already been formulated in the marketing plan itself; although, in practice, the two will run in parallel and will interact. At the very least, the rigorous, highly quantified, budgets may cause a rethink of some of the more optimistic elements of the plans.