Accountability exists in all professions. Physicians are accountable for their diagnoses, receptionists are accountable for the messages they route, and marketers are held accountable for the strategies they propose and the methods they choose to implement them. A good first step in keeping up with what’s expected of us and staying in touch with the primary goals of what it is we’re trying to accomplish is performing a marketing audit.

Marketing audits allow us to discover problems and ask questions as to what goals we were trying to accomplish in the first place. Because marketing audits are so important to increasing ROI and maximizing revenue, we often begin our new client-agency relationships with a thorough look at how our clients go about marketing their products, goods, or services.  Over time, we’ve found 5 main reasons why a marketing audit isn’t just a good idea, it’s a necessary one:

Marketing audits reintroduce you to your product or service.

There’s nothing more embarrassing than a customer calling up your call center and, in not so many words, telling you that you don’t know your product. Believe it or not, it’s happened. Account executives, product marketers, and even CMO’s have fallen victim to the “just get through today” mentality and have forgotten what matters most: the product. When beginning a marketing audit, you go through your marketing plan, project plans, and budget documents to get a better understanding of why it is you chose “option B” instead of “option A”.

Marketing audits remind you of the initial campaign goals so you can adapt and succeed.

I remember back when I was in grade school I wanted to be a doctor when I grew up. Looking back, it was definitely an accomplishable goal, but somewhere along the line things changed and I no longer wanted to venture down that path. The same is true in marketing: campaign goals can, and most likely will, change along the way. By looking back at your planning and goal-development process you will get reacquainted with the original reason you got the project funding in the first place.

Marketing audits allow you assess what’s worked, and what hasn’t.

It doesn’t take much to realize that the best way to survive a crash is to avoid it altogether. Marketing audits give you an opportunity to take a look at what you’ve done, how you’ve done it, and any positive (or negative) results that may have come of it. Assessing the path you’ve chosen to follow with your marketing budget will enable you to sense an err in direction and pivot to avoid the proverbial crash.

Marketing audits uncover inefficiencies that you didn’t know existed.

You know that sinking feeling you get in your stomach when you pull into your local gas station, fill up your car or truck, and drive a couple blocks down the road to find the next station offering gas 20 cents cheaper? That happens a lot in marketing- you think you’ve gone down the right path only to find that if you’d chosen that “option A” you would have saved your organization $100,000 per quarter in ad spending. The results you gather when looking at your current marketing strategy allow you to see where your dollars are going and search for ways you can make that dollar go even further. Who knows what you’ll find?

Marketing audits recharge your campaign and spark life into new strategy and direction.

For me, there’s nothing more exciting than taking a client from planning to launch. Whether you’re unveiling a spiffy new website, sending out a new creative to the masses, or trying your hand with a new media publisher, launch dates get the adrenaline pumping and instill a sense of focus like none other. After looking at an old, aging campaign and identifying weaknesses, you can propose new ways to achieve the old goals you’ve been seeking all along. Modifying an old campaign shows the same promise of success that a new one brings so it will reignite the fire and take your product or service to a new level.

Anthony Piwarun
eMarketing
anthony.piwarun@johnsondirect.com

Over the years, Facebook has evolved from a “yearbook” of sorts for college students to a full-fledged, 400 million user strong social networking site. As any marketing and advertising professional would tell you, the possibility of members from your target market having a Facebook account is relatively high. Luckily for you, Facebook’s advertising platform is easy to use and offers an analytics dashboard to help you track and measure your investment. If you are interested in advertising your brand on Facebook, then this guide is for you. Follow these easy steps and you will be advertising your brand on Facebook and seeing results in no time.

Identify Your Goals

Before creating your ad, targeting you should first think about what you want to accomplish. Some goals we’ve seen in the past include generating revenue, increasing cost per sale, or simply promoting your brand by maximizing visibility. It’s important to think about what you hope to gain so you can accurately measure your return and decide if it’s worth the time and resources.

Design and Develop

Ad Copy and Creative- After you think about what you’d like to accomplish by advertising on Facebook, it’s time to create the ad itself. Facebook advertisements are located in the far right hand column of the screen after navigating away from the newsfeed. Ads are composed of a headline, copy and imagery to go with your theme. Imagery should be compelling and on-topic. It’s strongly suggested that in any type of online advertising, you use a creative featuring a person’s headshot- they tend to perform better than an object or lesser-known brand logo. In terms of copy, the titles can be 25 characters in length and the body copy of the ad can be 135 characters. It’s best to keep your copy short and to the point – let the imagery you choose do the talking.

Landing Page- After clicking on your compelling, well-written advertisement, the user is taken to a landing page where they will decide whether or not they will buy your product. Facebook ads can link to either a Fan Page or an external website. After managing the online ad campaigns for numerous clients, we’ve found that an external, campaign-specific landing page outperforms linking to your brand’s Fan Page. Taking that into consideration, it’s important to keep brand messaging consistent between the creative and the landing page. If your ad uses a logo or object as imagery, add it to your landing page so the user doesn’t feels confident that they clicked on the right advertisement.

Target Your Audience

One of the many useful features of the Facebook advertising platform is the ability to target your advertising to specific segments. On Facebook, it’s possible to target:

The ability to target your audience using this much detail makes advertising as effective, or even more effective, than PPC or traditional online display advertising. With a well thought out goal (remember step one?) and proper targeting, you’ve already qualified traffic to your landing page.

Define Cost Structure

Defining goals, developing effective creative, and targeting your audience is nothing new. It’s been done since the beginning of advertising and is a standard procedure when launching any new campaign. Where advertising on Facebook, or anywhere online for that matter, differs from traditional media buying, however, is in the cost structure. There are two ways to manage your ad spend when running media on Facebook:

• Cost Per Click- You pay every time a user clicks on your advertisement. It doesn’t matter whether your ad was served 100 times or 1 million times, you only pay for every click.
• Cost Per Impression- You pay for a set number of impressions, or, ad views. This is measured in multiples of 1,000 and is called a CPM or “cost per million” ad spend.

Choosing a price structure that’s right for you is critical to the success of your campaign. If your goal is to increase brand recognition and don’t have any commercially-tied reason to drive traffic to your landing page other than to promote your name, choosing a CPM model would be the most cost effective. If, however, your success is measured by the number of sales you get via the landing page, starting off with CPC and calculating return would be well-advised.

Launch, Measure, and Repeat

After deciding which cost structure is best suited to your goal, it’s time to launch. Run your ad and regularly monitor it using the dashboard under the “Ads and Pages” tab. Here, you’ll get detailed information on metrics such as bid cost, the number of clicks, average cost-per-click, and more. Narrow down your dashboard by selecting monthly, weekly, or even daily statistics, and dig deeper by exporting reports into csv format and analyzing historical trends.

After running your ad for a few days, tweak the copy or swap the image and run both ads to find a winner. Running split tests will enable you to find out what works, and what doesn’t work for your audience. If you notice a positive return with advertising on Facebook, keep in mind the fact that users may get used to your ads after several impressions. Remember, marketing is an iterative process, and creativity is king so we always urge our clients to be constantly tweaking their advertisements even after they’ve found one that works.

Anthony Piwarun
eMarketing
anthony.piwarun@johnsondirect.com

Feeding the continuous improvement process is the key to search and content marketing success.

Writing and distributing content on the web is as much a science as it is a form of art. Back in high school, we all learned the importance of having a methodology – a series of steps or processes – to follow in order to ensure what we were doing was logical and most importantly, repeatable. Whether you’re looking to increase online sales, generate leads, increase customer retention, or simply create a presence for your company or brand, following a set of steps will help you create compelling content to meet or exceed your goals.

At Johnson Direct, Direct Branding™ is the approach we’ve created to deliver Marketing that’s Measurable. This proven process drives our strategic recommendations and plans — energizing the work we do, from advertising to website development and everything in between. Applying Direct Branding to our clients’ search engine optimization efforts is no exception.

THE FACTS: Search engine optimization is the process of developing and optimizing content to rank and perform better on searches via Google, Yahoo! and Bing. A recent Forester Research study showed that 93% of all web traffic is generated through search engines. Furthermore, a 2010 B2B Online survey showed a projected 57% increase in budgets for “content marketing” making now the best time to throw your hat in the ring and compete on search.

Direct Branding + Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Direct Branding™ is at the core of any traditional or interactive marketing solution offered by Johnson Direct. Whether your organization decides to work with us to improve organic search rankings or not, we advise anyone looking to boost web traffic to take a closer look at our approach.

The process in planning search engine optimization and content marketing differs little from that of other marketing strategies and tactics – it deserves a strong, persistent commitment in time, resources and energy to produce results.

Here’s a bird’s eye view of the 5-step process, inspired by Direct Branding, brought to you by the interactive team at Johnson Direct.

1. Fact-based Analysis

SEO / Content Audit: The first step in finding a solution should always be to first define the problem. Whether your issue is stagnant or decreased search traffic, page four rankings, or the inability to track and measure your investment in online marketing, it’s necessary to pop the hood and take a look at what you’re currently doing. Take a look at everything from your sites architecture and navigational structure to the copy on your pages to make sure everything is up to par.

Keyword Analysis: More often than not, we find that our clients don’t have a grasp of their target market. Sure, they may think they know what their users are searching for and where they go to search but unless you look at past results and go through the process of research it’s a shot in the dark. The key is to use a variety of resources, not just one, from keyword research tools to market intelligence. Using a variety research tools will limit the chance of error and give you a better idea of who is visiting your site.

Competitive Analysis: Equally as important as defining your problem and a path of improvement is knowing what you’re up against. Often times, your traditional competitors are not the same as your online competition. Using keyword research and analysis, it’s easy to find out what strategies your top competitors are employing to outperform you in search. Strategic competitive analysis levels the playing field and allows you to compete – even if they have a bigger budget.

2. Branding / Marketing Strategies

The heart of a search engine optimization and content marketing strategy lies in strategy development. When working with our clients, everything is pulled together – SEO best practices, content development suggestions, keyword placement, link building techniques and viral marketing strategy – and rolled up into an easy to understand report so you can be well on your way to improving your visibility in search.

3. Build Program Components

If you read any interactive marketing, SEO, or copywriting blogs, chances are you’ve seen the phrase “content is king” thousands of times. To be honest, it is. Having the knowledge of what works and what doesn’t is one thing but actually developing copy that plays to both your audience AND the search engines is another. Careful planning and cross-departmental collaboration is vital to the success of your content. It doesn’t make sense to have your web developer write your call-to-action or for your PR rep to set up Google Analytics, right? Play to your team members’ strengths and collaborate to produce end results that drive traffic (and revenue) through the roof.

4. Execute Tests & Campaigns

Whether you decide to implement your search engine optimization strategies in-house or utilize our experienced professionals to do it for you, the execution phase is where the magic happens.  By following the step by step process outlined in the recommendations report, you will be able to improve the efficiency of your current content and build a foundation of knowledge for future development.

5. Track & Measure

Everything done up to this point is useless without a method of measuring the results. To do this, we’ll optimize your web analytics and implement conversion tracking and goal funnels if you already have an analytics platform. If you don’t already have one, there are both free and premium solutions so you can track performance and assign value to your investment.

Continuous Improvement

We consider search engine optimization an interactive and ongoing process. A lot of marketers go through the steps of improving a process, see positive results, and call it a day. SEO, and any interactive marketing initiative for that matter, requires constant monitoring so you can see improvements as they happen and tweak for further improvements.

Why Johnson Direct?

Johnson Direct is not an interactive shop. We are an experienced, results-oriented full service marketing agency providing our clients with solutions that are proven to increase ROI. By working with a full service agency to deliver interactive solutions, you are choosing to partner with a firm that has a complete grasp of your goals and objectives to form a holistic marketing strategy, be it via interactive or traditional means.

Like anything else in marketing, search engine optimization is an “all-hands-on-deck” process. Involvement is required from all departments – marketing, copywriting, design, web development, and even public relations. Partnering with a multi-channel marketing leader like Johnson Direct will ensure that your search strategy is seamlessly integrated with your other campaigns and organizational goals.

If you’re interested in learning more about our experience in search engine optimization and content marketing, contact us today and speak with one of our interactive marketing pros to learn more about how we can help.

Anthony Piwarun
eMarketing
anthony.piwarun@johnsondirect.com

Are you aware that your brand is under constant assault… from forces within? Countless employees on your payroll use and abuse company brand identity, key messages, and taglines. It’s not because they want to do harm- often times it’s that they just don’t know how to use them. Luckily, there’s a simple solution: a brand identity guide.

In the current issue of Chief Marketer, our eMarketing Direct Denise Hearden discusses 13 rules that should be included in your brand identity guide. Read it here.

This afternoon I was working with @denisebhearden on compiling results from a recent social media campaign we did on behalf of one of our long-standing clients when I noticed a link from a blog post in 2008 floating around the “twittersphere”. The article, originally posted on Ad Week in 2008, described how a TNS Media Intelligence/Cymphony poll showed that “agencies don’t get it”. Among the chief complaints was the agency treatment of outlets like blogs and social networks as traditional media. I hope that since social media has come such a long way in the past couple of years more agencies have come around to understanding the dynamics and power of social media. Has yours?

Johnson Direct has. We’ve produced measurable results over multiple channels for our clients, and that includes social media. If your in house team or agency is still struggling to define social media ROI , then it’s time to take control and realize that you are already behind. Playing catch-up with your competition is never an easy task and it’s about time to start looking into ways to increase your market share and in turn improve your bottom line. Johnson Direct has helped both B2B and B2C clients navigate the murky waters and make sense of social media so you can focus your resources on things that matter most to you: building and maintaining a dominant presence in your industry. After all, isn’t that why you hired an ad agency in the first place?

Anthony Piwarun
eMarketing
anthony.piwarun@johnsondirect.com

We can all agree that when it comes to marketing, 2009 was the year of social media. A recent Marketing Profs article provided statistics showing a dramatic increase in the number of business utilizing social media to increase brand awareness and sell products last year. It seems a lot of companies decided to dive into social media because it’s the “in” thing, and forgot about their bottom line. Let’s face it, you can post, tag and tweet all you want, but if your efforts don’t produce results then you are out of luck when it comes time to justify your budget to the executives.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that communication is a two way street and social media is no different. Engaging your audience is perhaps the most important aspect to any social media campaign. People interested in your product or service don’t subscribe to your list, follow you or become your fan only because you ask them to. Just as we seek a return on investment for marketing dollars, our followers seek a return on their time invested.

Success in social media can easily be achieved by engaging your audience. Take a look at the 5 tips below and incorporate them into your social media strategy to produce measurable results.

1. Keep an eye on your public profiles- Read comments, messages and questions posted on your profile to see what your audience wants to tell you directly
2. Use social media monitoring tools- Utilize some of the many monitoring tools available to see what your audience is telling others about your brand
3. Respond to questions and comments- When someone asks you a question, respond… and do it quickly!  Depending on the network you are using, low retention rates are something to keep in mind. Social media adds a whole new meaning to “real-time” information and if a potential customer wants to know something they want it now.
4. Utilize surveys or polls- Customers want to know that their opinions matter. Spice things up a bit and change your tone by asking them what they think. Running a successful survey will improve participation and lead to a positive view of your brand.
5. Run promotions specific to your social network- What better way to add value than providing your audience with special discounts just for listening? Be sure to track sources if linking to a landing page so you can fulfill your promise.

Anthony Piwarun
eMarketing
anthony.piwarun@johnsondirect.com

Today’s BizTimes Milwaukee had an interesting story on a local non-profit leveraging social media networks to push it’s annual donation drive to younger donors.  The article, “Use Social Media to Build Your Tribe”, reports that the campaign was successful, bringing in $12,460 of new donations.  While the quantitative results of the campaign were positive, some organizations may look at the “small” number and think it’s not enough to cover the investment of time and resources.  Those companies are wrong…

Social media isn’t just about quantity.  It’s about starting the dialog with your audience.  My strong belief is that the true measure of ROI in social media isn’t quantitative in nature, its qualitative.  Engagement may very well be an overused, ill-defined buzzword, but the truth is that the number of followers you have, links you post or dollars you earn mean little unless you develop an ongoing relationship with those that show interest in your brand.  Conversing with your audience and providing useful, relevant information so it can be shared with others will benefit you more in the long run.

Fortunately, the United Way of Greater Milwaukee got it right.  The spokeswoman for the organization didn’t define success as the number of dollars raised, but said “the relationships we managed to build will be worth exponentially more in the future”.  Bravo!

Anthony Piwarun
eMarketing
anthony.piwarun@johnsondirect.com

How will marketing shape up in 2010?  Grant Johnson’s predictions were published in The Big Fat Marketing Blog this morning and we invite you to take a look.

Anthony Piwarun
eMarketing
anthony.piwarun@johnsondirect.com

Image courtesy of Twine

Over the course of the past few months, I’ve been getting asked about all the “weird” stuff I post to Facebook.  I know what you’re thinking, but no, I haven’t been using the web’s most popular social networking site to announce my quest to determine the speed of darkness.  Instead, I’ve been using URL shortening services like ow.ly and bit.ly to post content to Twitter and automatically update my other networks.  URL shorteners assign a shorter address to a website and redirect to another destination page, adding analytics along the way.

Like many other results-minded social media professionals, I use the shortening services to track clicks and mask Google analytics tags to gauge user engagement.  If you want to measure results of your marketing campaigns then these services are a necessity, but one may wonder if they are beneficial when the everyday social network user says “what the heck is that?!” every time you use them.

As if to answer this question and solve the problem once and for all, Facebook and Google announced last week the limited release of fb.me and goo.gl, respectively.  Not to be outdone, YouTube announced yesterday the development of YouTu.be, a URL service specific to videos uploaded to the world’s most popular video sharing site.  Each of the three services now pose a significant threat to bit.ly, arguably the most popular external shortening service, because of their strong user community and household brand recognition. The promotion of a service by a popular icon creates an awareness that cannot be matched by even the largest marketing campaign.  Remember Ashton Kutcher challenging CNN on getting to 1 million followers on Twitter?  You can ask around, but I doubt you will find anyone that disagrees with the notion that Ashton Kutcher played a role in Twitter’s 2009 popularity boom.

Mainstream use of URL shorteners will help online marketers by providing credibility to their online identities and positively impact the results of their campaigns.  If these services see mainstream use and users know what they are, then they will begin trusting links and make our content, products and services easier to market.  Widespread use of social networks focusing on short form communication is bringing forth innovative new ways to increase leads, sales and customer engagement in an era where fewer people are clicking on display ads.  Embracing these trends will not only help you stay afloat in a down economy, but also help you stay on top of the competition.

When all is said and done, will the popularity of Facebook, Google and YouTube make URL shorteners mainstream in 2010?  Only time will tell, but my guess is absolute.ly!

Anthony Piwarun
eMarketing
anthony.piwarun@johnsondirect.com