More and more businesses are continuing to improve their digital footprint by expanding their online marketing and development solutions. For many companies, the focus on widespread marketing can often overshadow the importance of local marketing. Depending on the type of business, localized marketing is becoming more important than ever for independent retailers, restaurants and others. Luckily, there are some great alterations a marketing and business team can make to improve localized marketing strategies.

In the last few years, the takeoff of check in services has been crucial to many companies. These check-in services such as Foursquare have been more crucial to those businesses looking to promote on a local level than anyone else. With these services, businesses are able to offer up benefits and discounts for checking in at their location. When customers check in, it has a twofold effect. First, it keeps customers coming back to receive discounts and second, it allows people throughout social media rings to see their friends checking in at your establishment, working in a sort of viral marketing type way.

In social media, it’s important to gear your profile towards your customers. With a company looking to build local marketing, remember to use platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to spread a localized campaign first, and then go wide if necessary.

Along with check in services, it is important to stay on top of the overall digital marketing landscape. Just like national companies, small businesses and restaurants often struggle building their names because of a lack of web features and information. No matter the size of the company, it’s more important than ever to maintain a solid online profile.

Extending from just an online profile, building a mobile platform has become crucial as well. Most websites that have mobile versions climb the search rankings easier. It also helps get correct information and directions out to people on the go.

So now you’ve focused on building a localized social media and web campaign. When building a website and looking to improve local based marketing, it’s important to gear your website to your customer base. This means that the information and content should be targeted towards the area where your businesses is located or attempting to break into. Another great tip for improving a localized profile is to keep your companies address within view throughout online profiles. With this technique, visitors will be aware where your company is located and ease of access to your services.

Many businesses that are looking to improve localized marketing are often in a tough position when it comes to improving their advertising and reach. Small restaurants and stores are sometimes lacking in a professional who can properly improve marketing efforts. Luckily, there are some outbound options that can be taken to help improve a company’s local marketing profile. For example, an independent store in the state of Florida could look at Jacksonville, Tampa and Orlando SEO or development platform to improve their footprint. This can be a big help for marketing, as well taking some of the stress and load off of the everyday employees of the business who could be ill prepared.

With smaller companies and regional businesses, having a local marketing plan can often be essential to success over time. With the ease of access on the internet today, an improved digital footprint can help improve localized marketing, with the possibility of both quality and convenience.

Data analysis and performance in 2011: Trending in analytics

In the growing world of web analytics tools, it’s hard to track an always changing slate of leading trends. Still, there are always a few new systems and tools that are taken on by numerous clients, while building a positive reputation online. Right now a quick look at the industry and you will see somewhat of monopolization on the category of web analytics.

The increase of marketing optimization and customer experience are veering away from traditional web analytics in an effort to look elsewhere. Some companies are looking for new innovations to look elsewhere for revenue. Some attention has seemed to turn away from traditional analytics towards a more optimization and user experience focus.

Right now, the internet is growing as a key aspect for more and more businesses. In many cases, it’s the main avenue of implementation, exploration and overall revenue. With the importance of social media only continuing to grow, it’s allowed for closer connection from the provider to the user. This has continued to shape where analytics is going because of the focus on the customer and their own behavior. ‘

Along with an increased focus on the behavior of the customer, optimization and testing has become more important than ever. Many companies are using testing in coordination with their other online efforts with plans to have everything working together. When testing and optimization are linked with the other platforms of the business, companies have been able to get a full view of the results and success of their optimization efforts.

Along with the trends in what companies are doing, there have been some exciting new platforms in which organizations are expanding their efforts. Companies have been taking on too much data in previous years and in recent times organizations have aimed to use new tools in an effort to manage easier. Things such as user analysis, intrusion and anomaly detection, as well as tag management have all been taken on to help companies manage their growing heap of data.

Certainly there are a growing number of tools in analytics as businesses continue to push the boundaries of digital marketing and web analytics. As the analytics universe seems to be heading towards more user oriented tools, look for optimization and customer experience to continue to influence the emerging software and tools that shape the industry.

 What does all this mean?

Our Ads Were Shown 330,000 Times
An impression (Impr.) is when an ad is served. So you can see we had 330,000 impressions. Where did these 300k impressions appear? Either on the right hand side of a Google search or on their content network (which consists of other websites that have google ads).

129 People Visited Our Website
We received 129 clicks to the various web pages. These would count as leads.

2 People Filled Out Forms
We received 2 forms filled out. One person never contacted us in return after following up.

1 Proposal Was Written
The lead went dead and cold. We ended up wasting too much time.

After 3 weeks and $115 we stopped the campaign.

Lessons Learned

Cost Per Click
To keep our costs down we served ads in Florida and a few select major cities across the nation. By doing this our cost per click (Avg CPC) was a very reasonable $.90. So basically every time someone came to our site is costs $.90.

Most of the clicks came from the Google Content Network. In laymans terms that means other websites serving up Google Ads. A very small percentage of clicks came directly from ads displayed on the Google search results page.

Keywords
Our keyword selection covered the gamut of terms you would expect. Remember, many of our clicks were from other sites in the content network - so keywords wouldn’t apply here. Just context. For the clicks that did come from search terms here is a sampling:

google ad words (5 visits)
internet marketing firms (1 visit)
search engine marketing (1 visit)

From the content network we had 87 visits of the 129.

Click Through Rate (CTR)
Our CTR was very low .04%. This is how often people saw the ad and clicked through to our site. From what I understand, click through rates vary greatly by industry; however, from the limited info I gathered this is low.

What’s next for us?
As we described in our previous post, almost all of our work is generated by word of mouth and client referall. The intriguing part for me is if we can get this working, it will be a very clean and calculated way of generating business. I’m moving on to monthly web site maintenance and I’m now focusing directly on website design and redesign.

More to come!

Meet Jeff Venn a Web Developer

My name is Jeff Venn and I own a web design company. For a little over 2.5 years we have made almost all our money off of website designs, website re-designs, and website programming. When it comes to websites we understand inside and out what makes them work and apply the basic principles of search engine optimization to many of the sites we do. Recently, we teamed up with Larry Bassani to expand into the world of driving new traffic to your website using the principles of Internet Marketing.

Meet Larry Bassani - Internet Marketeer

As far as driving new traffic to websites, I (Jeff) am rich in theory, and lacking in practice. When I met Larry Bassani through a mutual client, I knew we had a good fit. He doesn’t do any of the stuff we do and vice versa. His expertise began working in advertising agencies when direct mail was the hot new thing. He remembers working for a large commercial bank a blasting thousands of direct mail pieces out and analyzing the responses. Google Adwords has taken off where direct marketing left behind - except instead of blindy blasting to a large demographic you can find people exhibiting the behaviors that signal they are ready to buy. How? If a small business owner types in “professional website design”, they are letting Larry and me know they are in the business of getting a professional website. So why not serve up an ad via Google Adwords and have them check out our services at www.createwebstudios.com?

So this is our adventure… What has our Google Adwords process been so far?

1. Start with a solid website - we already had that at www.createwebstudios.com.

2. Build out specific pages for the Internet Marketing campaign. You can check them out by clicking below. Hit your back button to come back to this post.

Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization

Pay Per Click

Google Adwords

3. Set up 5 Google Adwords groups, which you can see below.

4. Setup the keywords to drive these groups along with bid prices

5. Turn it on.

So how did we fair? Check the follow up post.

• Keep em’ Fed: They have 11 FREE gourmet cafes
• Keep em’ Healthy: There are gyms, massages, language classes, and more for the body and mind.
• Errands at Work? Google takes care of some basic health care, laundry, hair cuts and other needs

How can you apply this to your business?

• Hire a concierge service, for around $25-$35/hr like this one in Jacksonville - East Coast Concierge. (we did their web site).
• Do something that is not too expensive and unexpected - like pay for a haircut, a massage, etc…
• Give employees some flexibility to run errands on the job. You should be measuring them by productivity, not by how long they sat in their office chair!

Check this amazing video from CNN, scroll down in this blog post.

Opus research writes “as a practical matter, Web sites without some other marketing element (e.g., SEM/SEO) aren’t particularly effective in reaching audiences.”

So what’s holding you back? Time and effort, perhaps? Hire a company like Create Web Studios to do an initial Search Engine Marketing campaign for you. The costs to getting in are very low when paired against print, broadcast, and radio.

Some time ago, Google bought Urchin web analytics software. It allowed you to track number of visitors, from what search engines and keywords, and so much more. From what I understand, Urchin used to cost upwards of $500/mo. Google aquires it, improves it, and releases it for free. It is a snap to install on any website, not taking any more than 15 minutes for your webmaster to put on there.

Learn more about Google Analytics here.

On the other hand, if you are in a unique market or specialize in a highly competitive market, there are things you should consider. For example, a realtor may focus on selling “atlantic beach homes” instead of “jacksonville real estate”. Highly competitive markets like clothes, electronics, and realty requires you to specialize to achieve top organic search engine results.
What should you be able to do with search engines and your web site?

• Your Company Name Comes Up First in Google, Yahoo, and MSN
  In most cases, searching on your company name should result in the top ranking for Google, MSN, and Yahoo. Even with sites that use flash technology this is possible. Search Google for our clients “Mack Salon” or “Create Studios Jacksonville” and see who comes first. In some cases it is necessary to qualify the search with your business location, since “Create Studios” is rather generic, whereas “Create Studios, Jacksonville” qualifies the search.
• Build Your Web Site Content with the Right Keywords
  Find the keyword “buckets” that will help sell your business products and services online. Many times these keyword buckets are counterintuitive. The realtor selling “atlantic beach homes” may need to target “move to atlantic beach” since it may generate 120% more traffic than the previous keyword phrase. There are many free tools to help you analyze keywords such as this keyword suggestion tool or the Google keywords analysis tool
• Learn to Write Content for Your Website
  Team up with someone well versed in web copy writing techniques as they differ greatly from the off-line world. A book like the Online Copywriter’s Handbook.
• Stay Clear of Black Hat Techniques
  Don’t use any “black hat” techniques for cheating the search engines. We consulted once with a prospective client who bought 12 different domain names, based on keywords, and redirected them all back to his master site. Google had them dropped within months!

So just what is this new face of the Internet? In a nutshell web 2.0 represents the second generation of the Internet that features social networking, user driven content, and the shift to the Internet as a platform for every business. Below is a quick whirlwind tour of web 2.0:

For your web 2.0 education, check out these sites:

• The official web2.0 definition on wikipedia.org (a web 2.0 site)
• The shift to the Internet as a key business platform explained by Tim O’Reilly who coined the term in 2003.

To experience web 2.0 check out these sites (there are many to choose from, but these are particularly noteworthy):

• Discover the best Internet sites with ease using StumbleUpon.
• How much did your friend pay for their new big house? Try zillow.com.
• Use this comprehensive list of many web 2.0 applications at go2web20.net.