10 Trends for Online Marketers in 2011

With a new year in swing, it's time again to focus on setting new revenue records in 2011 by investing in the marketing strategies with the highest return-on-investment potential. Small businesses have more at risk than big companies when it comes to capitalizing on new trends, so your timing should follow the old saying, "The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

The following list features top 10 online marketing trends for this year, as well as advice for whether you should be the bird (invest now) or the mouse (leave the trend on the sidelines).

No. 1: Location-Based Marketing

Advice: Be the early bird

Location is so relevant that Google has already started mixing local results and maps with other searches.Get your business ready for location-based marketing by claiming your spot on Google Places. Make your website more mobile-friendly with clickable phone numbers and maps. Also, prepare for more marketing features to be added to search results, such as mobile coupons, custom tags and logos.

No. 2: Instant Search

Advice: Be the early bird

Since Google decided to make search results and suggested key phrases appear instantly as people type, look for some consumers to abandon their first-choice, shorter search phrases in favor of these more relevant suggestions. For example, a consumer searching "desk lamp" might go with the suggestion "desk lamp reviews." If your business is optimized for shorter search phrases, it's time to evaluate the longer phrases to make sure you aren't missing potential customers.

No. 3: Social Media Monitoring

Advice: Be the mouse

This year, the reality will be revealed that social media conversations conducted by businesses aren't as personal, memorable or profitable as they would like to believe. Spend your time and money building a fantastic customer experience. Then, let your fans do the positive talking as you leverage your social media properties to reach your customers with social marketing campaigns.

No. 4: Social Media Marketing

Advice: Be the early bird

Savvy entrepreneurs are abandoning chatter in favor of running actual marketing campaigns on social media sites. Try a social sweepstakes, contest, group deal or coupon. You can use sites like Foursquare to reward loyal customers who check-in to your business, and services like Wildfire to help you run promotional applications.

No. 5: Mobile Marketing

Advice: Be the mouse

While 2010 showed us that many people use text messaging, email and social media on their smartphones, most consumers still aren't comfortable snapping a picture of a bar code.

If you want to dabble in mobile marketing this year, start by building an application, mobile website or text messaging campaign. If you own a retail store, try an in-store promotion so you can walk your mobile users through the process of snapping a bar code or texting a short code to retrieve a coupon and redeem it at the register.

No. 6: Online Advertising

Advice: Be the early bird

Banner ads may sound antiquated, but display advertising is destined to become hot this year. In fact, it's now easier for small businesses to place display ads on millions of websites by going through a few ad networks that have purchased most of the space available on publisher websites. Those ads can be tailored by geography, behavior and category of interest. It's a great way to boost the results from your pay-per-click budget this year because combining search marketing with online display ads generally increases the results from both.

No. 7: Email Marketing

Advice: Be the early bird

Facebook has announced plans to add a more familiar looking email inbox and social media integration with email marketing tools is well underway. Mobile applications are making email easier to use on smartphones, and the HTML functions on phones are making branded emails look prettier on mobile screens. It's probably time to give your email marketing a facelift.

No. 8: Social Shopping

Advice: Be the mouse

People already share their purchases socially, but newer social shopping technologies, such as Swipely and Blippy, make it possible to share with just one click or swipe of the credit card. If your products stir excitement, or you can offer a group discounts, give this technology a try.

No. 9: Instant Messaging

Advice: Be the mouse

This could be the year when website visitors begin to expect instant answers to their questions. If you have customer service teams or a sales force that are in front of computers or mobile phones all day, consider running an instant messaging test.

No. 10: Online Television

Advice: Be the mouse

Consumers will be able to customize their television feeds, browse the Web while watching shows, watch programs on-demand and even control their televisions with a mobile phone. Online television presents a huge opportunity for advertisers because the targeting options are so much better than traditional TV. However, you may have to wait to capitalize on this trend as the corporate television giants tend to be slow about making changes.

What is Online Marketing?

In its simplest form, the term online marketing refers to using the power of Internet advertising to generate a response from your audience. Also known as Internet marketing or web marketing, online marketing is used by companies selling goods and services directly to consumers as well as those who operate on a business-to-business model.

Common areas of interest within the field of online marketing include:

• Affiliate Marketing: In affiliate marketing, a business recruits associates to promote the company's products or services. The associates receive a commission or other similar rewards for every sale, visitor, subscriber, or customer they bring to the company. Amazon.com Associates Central is an example of an affiliate marketing program that Amazon.com uses to encourage private website owners to bring traffic to its site.
• Display Advertising: Display advertising involves the use of web banners or banner ads placed on a third-party website to drive traffic to a company's own website and increase product awareness.
• Email Marketing: Companies that use email marketing send promotional emails directly to customers. However, it can often be hard to distinguish between spam and legitimate email marketing messages.
• Interactive Advertising: Interactive advertising involves the use of animations and other graphic techniques to create ads that engage the viewer and invite participation.
• Search Engine Marketing: Search Engine Optimization (SEO), paid placement, and paid inclusion are search engine marketing techniques that companies can use to increase their visibility in the search engine page results from Google and its competitors.
• Viral Marketing: Viral marketing is a technique is which companies encourage customers to pass along information about their products or services. Company websites that let visitors email interactive games or funny video clips to their friends are an example of a viral marketing effort.
• Online marketing, regardless of the exact method a company chooses to use, offers several benefits. It's convenient, affordable, and provides the opportunity for companies to track results as a campaign progresses. In addition, Internet marketing allows even the smallest of companies to compete in a global marketplace. Online marketing is often related to public relations, customer service, sales, and information management. However, it is important to remember that these fields can be considered separate specialties as well. Glossary of Marketing Terms If you're interested in learning more about online marketing, there are many websites that offer glossaries of common marketing terms. For example:
• Marketing Terms is a comprehensive website for anyone interested in online marketing. This site features a dictionary with cross-referenced definitions and basic information for beginners, as well as links to in-depth articles that provide the information a marketing professional will need to succeed in today's business environment. For your convenience, this website also includes a printable list of commonly-used Internet marketing acronyms and abbreviations.
• Marketing Apprentice offers an easy-to-understand dictionary of terms related to the online marketing industry with a number of cross-references and related links. To use this dictionary, you need to scroll through an alphabetical listing of links and click on the term you wish to learn more about.
• Lazworld, an Internet marketing services provider, has prepared a brief glossary of common marketing terms website owners need to know. There is no search engine available, but the entire document can easily be printed for use as a desk reference.
• SEO Book is a dictionary devoted exclusively to the search engine aspect of online marketing. Some of the definitions can be a bit technical for the marketing novice, but the information is extremely useful for anyone who is determined to create a successful website.
• The American Marketing Association has a dictionary that contains definitions for several online marketing terms as well as general marketing information.

Website Clinic: Call For Submissions

Googlers often participate in live site clinics at conferences, giving advice about real-world sites and allowing webmasters to learn by example. Now Google's Search Quality team is excited to host an online site clinic on the Webmaster Central Blog. In future posts, the Search Quality team will be looking at some user-submitted examples and offering broad advice that you can apply to your site.

This site clinic will focus on non-profit organizations, but chances are that the advice will benefit small business and government sites as well. If you work for a non-profit and would like your site considered, read on for submission instructions.

How to submit your site:

To register your site for the clinic, fill in the information requested on this form. From there, the team will determine trends and share corresponding best practices to improve site quality and user experience. The analysis will be available in a follow-up post, and will adhere to the public standards of webmaster guidance. Please note that by submitting your site, you permit the team to use your site as an example in follow-up clinic posts.

There are a few guidelines:

1. Your site must belong to an officially registered non-profit organization.

2. In order to ensure that you're the site owner, you must verify ownership of your site in Google Webmaster Tools. You can do that (for free) here.

3. To the best of your ability, make sure your site meets the webmaster quality guidelines. The team will be suing the same principles as the basis for their analysis.

All set? Submit your site for consideration here.

The site clinic goes live today and submissions will be accepted until 11/18/2010. Stay tuned for some useful webmaster tips when the sites are reviewed.

Google TV Ads Strategy Guide

Promote your business on TV

Google TV Ads allows businesses of all sizes to advertise on national television. TV advertising is a compelling medium, but if you're new to TV it can be difficult to understand how to set up ads and campaigns to ensure success. This handbook has been designed as a guide to understanding:

• Whether television is the right advertising medium for your business
• The TV ad creation process and best practices
• How to create and manage successful TV campaigns
• Methods to track and analyze TV campaign performance

Why TV advertising?

By exploring the world of television ads, you are considering one of the most compelling and powerful media outlets available today. With the average American watching over 150 hours of television per month¹, television allows advertisers the opportunity to engage with audiences while they're consuming entertainment and information. Television allows you to convey your message through sight, sound, and motion while building credibility and trust in your brand. Read success stories from small and medium sized businesses that have used television advertising to grow their businesses.

This Strategy Guide offers tips, tricks and information needed to set you and your business up for success as a television advertiser. We hope you find it useful enough to keep handy as you develop your business' television strategy and campaigns.

What you can expect with TV advertising

• Television allows you to reach a wider audience than any other advertising medium. Television advertising helps to expand on the benefits of your products or services and build a trust in your brand while generating awareness and demand.
• Unlike search advertising, which prompts ads based on a user's actions, television ads are placed within TV programs and generate new awareness and demand amongst a wide audience.
• TV ad campaigns require time and commitment in order to drive results. Typically, ads should air for no less than 3-4 weeks to get your message through and register an impact.
• TV can be used effectively as an extension of search campaigns to drive new customers to your website. Read our case study on ooVoo, a video chat provider that drove exponential growth in web traffic and searches through television ads.
• Google TV Ads currently only offers nationally targeted advertising in the United States. We do not currently offer local TV inventory, so if you are a local only business, national television may not be the right medium for you.

Google Instant and SEO – Thoughts About How It Changes Things

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Google Instant changes behaviors in search, and thus SEO can change as well. Originally, I posted a list like this in 2008 about Google Suggest – and it is revised here.

1. We May See More Traffic to Regional Sites. People regularly enter “cheap gas” and “best dentist” in search engines – without qualifying the searches at all. Organic results tend to send people to national portals, but suggest-driven search gets them closer to well optimized, regional sites. A search for “cheap gas” without Google Instant offers gasbuddy.com at number one organic result, while a “suggested” search for “cheap gas houston” gives houstongasprices.com.
2. Google Instant Drop Down a new micro “SERP”: Those who make their way into the suggest feature get a “better than #1″ position.
3. Google Instant Results May Change Long-Tail Search Optimization. Those of us who believe in doing long-tail marketing may find an decrease down the tail from search, and a greater need to develop segments of our site to serve those long tail queries. Searches that used to come in with two word phrases may now have 3-4 words, which helps with medium-tail optimization, but longer phrases previously further down the tail may be “clipped.” This will concentrate search terms so that Adwords bids will rise and competition increases in a sort of “cluster” effect.
4. Google Instant SERPS offer More Impact for Trademark Blocking in PPC. If your trade name is offered in Google Instant results, and you’ve filed a trademark complaint form, the results page will be free from paid competition giving you a better shot at the traffic through organic or ppc links.
5. Google Instant Can Improve User/Searcher Skills Forever. With Google Instant constantly popping up when you go about your daily queries, many who never really thought of keyphrases will now start to think about them. It will be a constant reinforcement of our efforts to think about how consumers search. We may have to adjust our planning to meet these enhanced skills.
6. Google Instant Can Be an Ad-Hoc Negative Keyword Tool. There are other ways to be more comprehensive, but Google Instant can help to identify negative keywords you may want to enter in your campaigns. And I saw some negative phrases with higher index numbers that never showed up in Google keyword tools.
7. Dramatically Reduced Spelling Error Opportunity. While many of us set up adgroups to capture spelling errors, this will have a decreasing impact as people start to use the suggest feature as a live auto-correction. Typo-campaigns may get less traffic.
8. Hijacking Google Instant May Become a SEO Technique. It may become possible to hijack Google Instant so that competitive phrases are strategically flashed to the user. For example.. if you sell “abc widget” then a suggest of “abc widget fails miserably” could be used to divert traffic.
9. Better Searches Offer Improved Analytics Information. With the user making clear choices among those available, we’ll have better information about what is enticing and engaging to the users. Vague, high volume two-word searches are always confusing when we’re looking to make decisions, and this might just help us plan better.
10. Google Adwords Impressions will change. We’ll need to consider how the rules of 3-seconds’ delay, clicks etc. It’s hard to yet predict what is happening.
11. Users will do more exploration. When users don’t fully know about a topic, this can change how they approach search. Searches for “corneal transplant” can see many new avenues about the procedures, treatments, etc and spend more time in these sub-categories.
12. Content Creation for SEO may cluster around Google Instant suggestions. If a given suggestion is offered more often, it makes sense to design content for that phrase and special derivatives. If someone is searching for “Lasik Surgery” – content optimized for “Lasik Surgery Risks” would tend to get a lot of clicks it might otherwise have missed. But considering personalized search here, we cannot precisely predict what will be searched for.

Google Instant...

The Impact on Search Speed, Refining Searches and the "Long Tail" of Search

Google Instant does two things: it returns results more quickly and it predicts search queries as the user types.

While it's too early to predict the implications of this with any certainty, a few speculations come to mind. For one, searching on Google is going to become a much speedier process for the end user, who may now be less likely than ever to click through to the second page of results. Searchers will also be able to more quickly refine their search terms on the fly, which could either prove to be good or bad for site owners.

"It seems to me that the top three rankings will get even more value," says Ian Lurie, President of Portent Interactive and blogger at Conversation Marketing. "Also, long-tail search is going to be more important, since folks can just keep typing until they see what they want."

On the other hand, John Ellis at Search Engine Land wondered earlier if Google Instant would "kill the long tail" of paid search advertising by making it less worthwhile to bid on more specific, long tail keywords.

AdWords myths: understanding the AdWords auction

Over the past few weeks, we’ve covered a few common areas of confusion related to AdWords, including billing and spending, and keywords. This week, we’d like to wrap up this blog series by offering some helpful info on the AdWords auction.

If you have questions about how the AdWords auction works, a great place to start is with this introductory video from Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist.

Introduction to the Google Ad Auction

One of the most important factors in deciding your ad’s position within the auction is its Quality Score. To learn more about how Quality Score is defined, and how to improve it, you can visit the Search Ads Quality Getting Started Guide.

Finally, remember that if you’d like to understand how bidding can affect your ad's performance in the auction, you can use the bid simulator. It will provide you with click, cost, and impression data estimating how your ad could have performed over the last seven days had you used a different bid.

These resources should give you more insight into how the AdWords auction works.

This concludes our AdWords Myths series. We hope it’s helped clarify a few things you may have been wondering about AdWords.