Google Allowing More Search Results From Each Domain

Until now, search results in Google would only include one or two results from a single domain. 

To dominate the results for a brand name query you had to use sub-domains or create multiple sites with unique content that focused on that brand.




Google announced, "Today we’ve launched a change to our ranking algorithm that will make it much easier for users to find a large number of results from a single site.

"We expect today’s improvement will help users find deeper results from a single site, while still providing diversity on the results page."

This could have a profound effect on strategies for online reputation management, social media marketing, affiliate marketing and the proliferation of microsites.

How Brands Should Use Twitter

Razorfish just released a report called “Fluent: The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Report”. The entire report is a wealth of information on social media and its impact on purchase decisions and advertising.

The closing pages of the report includes a section on "Ten Ways to Make the Twitterverse Work for Your Brand" which includes the following advice:

1. Become familiar with Twitter by reviewing, or following, the activities of successful brands such as Dell (dell.com/twitter), Zappos (twitter.com/zappos) and Comcast (twitter.com/
comcastcares).
2. Listen to what is already being said on Twitter about your brand.
3. Identify initial objectives for using Twitter, including what would qualify as a Twitter success
story for your brand.
4. Look into competitive activities and potential legal considerations, especially if there is already
a Twitter account that uses your brand’s name or other intellectual property associated with it.
5. Use the findings to decide on the appropriate opportunity such as offers or community
building, tone of voice and method of engagement—that may be right for your brand.
6. Since Twitter is an ongoing activity—even if your company is only listening in—dedicate a
resource to monitor the conversations and competitors.
7. Map out a plan for the content you will share, including valuable initial content to pique
user interest.
8. Integrate your Twitter account throughout your marketing experience, by embedding it as a
feed on the company Web site, including its URL in communications and so forth.
9. Maintain momentum by following everyone who follows you, responding to queries and joining
in conversations without being too marketing oriented.
10. Provide ongoing direct value through your tweets by continuing to listen, learn and fine-tune
your Twitter activities.

Note that they reccomend, and I agree, that Twitter needs to be an integrated part of a companies social media landscape.

Industrial Marketers Shift To Online Marketing

Acquiring new customers and generating leads and during the economic downturn remains both a top goal and a top challenge for industrial marketers, many of whom are turning to online marketing tactics to find new prospects and ways to generate revenue, according to the fourth annual survey of marketing and sales executives and managers in the industrial sector conducted by GlobalSpec.

The report, “Trends in Industrial Marketing 2009: How Manufacturers are Marketing Today,” says that 44% of respondents stated that customer acquisition is their primary marketing goal, with another 29% choosing lead generation. An additional 13% of respondents selected customer retention as their primary goal, up from 5% in 2008.

While lead generation is a key initiative for industrial marketers, lead quality outranks lead quantity when deciding where to allocate marketing budget. The survey also found that three out of the top four marketing channels for generating quality leads are all online.

The proven ability for online marketing to deliver high quality leads has encouraged many industrial marketers to shift to online marketing. Forty-eight percent of respondents reported that online is a greater portion of their marketing budget in 2009 than in 2008, and nearly one-third surveyed said they will be spending more than 50% of their marketing budget online. At the same time, 30% of respondents are reducing trade show attendance and 28% are reducing print ads.

Despite the increased shift of marketing dollars to online media, respondents still face a number of challenges in their marketing efforts. More than half of all respondents selected "too few marketing resources" as one of their top three marketing challenges in 2009, with "generating enough high quality leads for sales" and "need to improve my marketing ROI" rounding out the top three.

Other top findings from the Survey include:

• 63% of respondents will closely evaluate the performance of marketing programs and reduce or eliminate those that don't perform well
• 43% will expand marketing efforts to reach new industries
• 88% of respondents will spend the same or more on online marketing in 2009, as compared to 2008

About the survey: The fourth annual survey of its kind was conducted among US marketing and sales executives and managers in the industrial sector. Of the 555 survey respondents, 66% hold management positions in sales or marketing and 12% indicate they are a president/CEO. The respondent pool represents a variety of company sizes, with annual marketing budgets ranging from less than $50K to more than $1 million.

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

Those words of wisdom come from Mike Tyson, the “baddest dude on the planet”.
A new documentary film, Tyson, tells the rags-to-riches-to-prison story of the former heavyweight champ. Hmmm... I wonder how many similar stories will be written about Wall Street whiz kids and mortgage bankers.

Strategic marketing is an essential element of any business plan. But what happens when you are punched in the face by the unexpected? While you can’t have a plan for every contingency, you can have a fit, well trained, disciplined team to react and turn the unexpected into an opportunity. After all, if everyone in your industry is on the ropes, the one who responds to the new market realities quickly and efficiently can gain the upper hand. An effective team with a depth of real life experiences and instincts can come out punching while the competition is down.

After all how many times can you get head-butted before you lose your focus and bite off someone’s ear?

Ad Agencies Not In Sync With Marketers

Ad agencies are more optimistic than marketers about short term ad spending according to the latest tracking study from Advertiser Perceptions Inc., which measures various aspects of the industry’s confidence levels during the recession.

31% of agencies and 42% of marketers believe they will reduce their ad spending over the next six months, reports Media Post.

The differences in expectations are even more apparent when it comes to particular media. Agencies expect a 35% cut in Broadcast TV spending verses 55% for marketers. Cable TV will be cut by 18% according to agencies but 33% say marketers. Newspapers continue to fall into disfavor with agencies seeing a 54% drop and marketers a whopping 71% drop. Outdoor is expected to lose 22% by agencies and 44% by marketers.

Ad agencies and marketers are more optimistic about online media with 17% of marketers and agency execs planing cuts in that area. Search engine marketing fairs better than most with 10% of agency execs and 11% of marketers expecting cuts.

Mobile advertising is still a very small part of most integrated advertising plans but 52% of agency executives and 58% of marketers expect to increase spending here.

Source: The Advertiser Optimism Report is a new series of bi-monthly polls tracking the confidence top ad execs have in spending budgets across the major media.

What is Needed is an Integrated Marketing Plan

In a recent survey, 56% of decision makers plan to increase their content marketing spending for 2009. The top six content tactics are social media (other than blogs), e-newsletters, blogs, case studies and online video.

Joe Pulizzi, the survey’s author says, "More and more marketing professionals now realize that tomorrow's marketing is all about developing a conversation with customers. Without valuable, relevant and compelling content, that's pretty much impossible. The numbers show that."

So should you follow the pack and put your resources into the new social media marketing? Your team may want to because they are busy Twittering, Facebooking, MySpacing and living in a virtual world. But are your customers?

In the old days we would talk about full-contact marketing or 360-degree marketing. It was all really just following the principles of reach and frequency to optimize the message delivery to compel customers to take the most desired action and to achieve business objectives.

Today, organizations are no longer in a position to just push the message at the consumer and determine when the message will be delivered and how. Many, but not all, customers are now self-serving, choosing to access information when and where they want via a range of channels – from online to offline, from social media to video.

What is needed is an integrated marketing plan that optimizes the mix of customer contacts with a consistent message in alignment with business objectives. The results must be measurable to ensure that business results are delivered and not just outstanding creative designs or fun new ways to communicate.

By managing the marketing process holistically it facilitates the development of best practices that not only ensures consistency, but also drives down the cost and time required for devising and managing new campaigns across the organization.

To Improve is to Change

Favorite quote of a quote from the new Sandy Carter book, The New Language of Marketing 2.0: How to Use ANGELS to Energize Your Market

"As Winston Churchill once remarked, 'To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.' Hence the most important challenge for today's marketer is how to keep pace with and take advantage of change."

Integrated Marketing Communications

The overall goal of integrated marketing communications is to drive new revenue growth and profits by maximizing the return on total marketing investments and resources while managing the overall brand experience thus building brand equity and future sales.

Many companies have separate online and offline marketing efforts, with distinct budgets. Some even treat online marketing as an IT expense rather than a communications expense.

Two recent books attempt to enlighten marketers on this situation. I highly recommend them.

Steve Woods in Digital Body Language says "Marketers who continue to pursue their mission with a disconnected set of communication tools and non-integrated data sets cannot gain the multi-perspective visibility into their prospects that is required to understand and leverage their digital body language."

Sandy Carter, an IBM vice president, describes the challenge in The New Language of Marketing 2.0: How to Use ANGELS to Energize Your Market as follows: "In an integrated campaign, marketers define the role of each channel. … The integrated campaign moves down a purchase funnel across a series of elements of the campaign. What is challenging is how to measure the success of that integrated campaign. … The way you measure the integrated impact of tactics is difficult, in particular, how the channels are synergistically working together is incredibly difficult."

10 Harsh Truths About Web Sites Of Large Organizations

Paul Boag on Smashing Magazine has a great article on the common mistakes that large organizations make running their Web sites. It includes 10 points. I've highlighted one below.

1. You Need A Separate Web Division
In many organizations, the Web site is managed by either the marketing or IT department. However, this inevitably leads to a turf war, with the website becoming the victim of internal politics.

In reality, pursuing a Web strategy is not particularly suited to either group. IT may be excellent at rolling out complex systems, but it is not suited to developing a friendly user experience or establishing an online brand.

Zeldman urges organizations to create a separate web division. Marketing, on the other hand, is little better. As Jeffrey Zeldman puts it in his article Let there be Web divisions: "The Web is a conversation. Marketing, by contrast, is a monologue… And then there’s all that messy business with semantic markup, CSS, unobtrusive scripting, card-sorting exercises, HTML run-throughs, involving users in accessibility, and the rest of the skills and experience that don’t fall under Marketing’s purview."

Instead, the website should be managed by a single unified team. Again, Zeldman sums it up when he writes: "Put them in a division that recognizes that your website is not a bastard of your brochures, nor a natural outgrowth of your group calendar. Let there be Web divisions."

Even better, manage Web sites, online and offline marketing as one integrated marketing strategy.