Online Branding Blog – reactorr.com

Digital Marketing Forecast

Search, social, mobile, email and display marketing is thought to grow to $77 billion by 2016, or 35% of all advertising. Interactive teams and budgets are growing as marketers believe the digital channel delivers better results and measurable returns.

Search marketing continues to dominate with the largest amount of the marketing budget, while social grows moderately. Mobile marketing overtook both social and email this year.

Source: Forrester US Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2011 To 2016

SEO, Social Media, PPC Compared

SEO, Social Media, and PPC were recently compared for effectiveness at generating leads and sales in digital marketing between B2B and B2C in the 2011 State of Digital Marketing Report amongst 500 U.S. online marketers, with about two-thirds of all respondents identified themselves as B2B marketers.

The results? While the clear winner is SEO, about 60 percent of respondents said they will increase their budget for social media marketing; with 53 percent planning to increase their budget towards SEO and 40 about percent will be increasing their PPC budget.

While social media is clearly the trend as of late, it’s often difficult to measure. But despite this, social media is not hype. What needs to be understood is that it takes time, and it can have significant influence towards online branding efforts.

SEO might take a while before seeing signs of progress, but it’s the clear winner. With the highest conversion rates, SEO outperforms all other means of online marketing. It’s worth mentioning that while PPC can bring traffic almost instantly, it will cost more over time than SEO, and is most suitable for starting a campaign to acquire traffic until an SEO campaign kicks into high gear. Additionally, PPC only earns about 10% of the potential search traffic, and if you’re not in the top spots (which are more expensive bids) then you won’t see a lot of visits.

Report

Social Media, SEO, and Advertising – A Digital Dilemma

Once upon a time advertising simply required choosing a demographic, channels like print, broadcast, or outdoor, and making some choices based on KPI metrics like readership, viewers, listeners, traffic counts, and GRP’s.

Over the last few years marketing budgets are seeing an increasing shift to digital marketing. With budgets tightening, there was a natural attraction to online advertising for reasons like its improved measurability and ability to make campaign changes almost on the fly. Almost as appealing is the near real-time tracking and analytics that online advertising can offer.
Does this mean an entire marketing campaign should be online? Definitely not, but it should be part of every campaign. Online marketing and advertising have proven themselves as part of the marketing mix, and that now includes social media.

An issue with offline advertising is its based on presumed eyeballs (or in the case of radio, ears) but it doesn’t mean that your ad was actually seen. Someone came up with the expression that an ad needs to be seen 7 times to be effective. Yes, there are variations such as 11 or even 20 times. Whether that’s true of not, the idea was probably started by someone looking to sell more ads. Although it does stand to reason to some degree.

One area I think that’s often overlooked is the entire campaign is a factor of influence. From the print to outdoor or any other advertisements, they all contribute towards brand awareness. It just so happens that the click often takes the credit.

Digital branding is the new frontier, and we’re starting to see more Facebook pages and iPhone apps integrated with a campaign. Brands are placing more emphasis on “fishing where the fish are” and increasing their social media efforts.

Yet there’s still one undeniable fact, that being that when a customer is looking to make a purchase, the vast majority will do a search on Google or another search engine.  Sure, consumers often rely on social networks for referrals, but that’s usually followed by a search.
If you’re to consider how SEO and social media affect digital branding, they aren’t really comparable, but linked and can work together.

Recommended reading:
Comparing SEO & Social Media as Marketing Channels – SEOmoz

Online Brand Protection

Being proactive in online brand protection can reduce the chances of taking a serious hit and eroding value to your brand, but where to start?

Understanding the different types of online brand protection is your first step. Many aren’t self-evident, and most are easy to manage. While its costly to buy up every domain extension of your brand, you should grab the ones of the most value. These being .com, .org, .net, and even your country domain at the very least. Less discerning online marketers will try to capitalize on your brand by using a domain squatting to acquire the trust it carries in their hopes of increasing sales or for some other use. You don’t need to host a copy of your site at all of these additional domains, but you should use a 301 redirect to point them to your main site.

Another form of protection is grab online real estate and claim user names for social media properties like twitter, flickr, youtube, facebook, vimeo, scribd, digg and more. Their are possibly thousands, and it would be impossible to get every single one, but grabbing some of the more popular ones will prove valuable at some point.

You also want to watch out for traffic diversions, where contextual ads (aka PPC) are placed on search engines. This not only siphons potential leads, it often erodes brand equity as well. Keep an eye on the sponsored listings in popular search engines like Google or Bing.

Site fraud is another one to be on the look out for. Sometimes you can find those engaging in the above traffic diversions that use your brand for paid search marketing steering the clicks to a carbon copy of your site in hopes of better conversion and more sales.

One other issue that’s of growing concern is plagiarism or content theft. This can actually have an effect on your ability to rank for brand related products or phrases and should be checked on occasion. Many have found the site copyscape to be useful for monitoring this sort of thing.

Any company that invests in its brand needs to safeguard for online reputation management and online brand protection. Imagine what potential customers or clients may think if they search your name and find a spammy site one or two down from yours. Using free services like Google alerts can also be useful for watching out for situations like the above. Obviously having counsel and trademarks helps as well.

Preparing for Mobile Branding

Having doubled each year for the last four, the ad spend in mobile branding is hard to ignore. And experts forecast the same for next year as well.

As smart phones become increasingly more powerful, the mobile web will change how we live, work and play. Mobile web adoption is increasing at rate that is eight times higher than the desktop just 10 years ago.

We’ve just begun to scratch the surface for location based potential, and the apps keep on coming. But imagine what the future holds for marketers as we start to integrate proximity detection through RFID, bluetooth and other technologies so we can begin to deliver advertising messages that are not only timely, but of relevance to your surroundings. It won’t be long before we walk past a store and receive  sms promo codes.

Mobile apps have grown at an exponential rate, and according to a study from the Pew Internet Project its estimated 1 in 4 U.S. adults now use them. The iTunes store is home to over 200,00 mobile apps, and the iPhone was created only a few years ago. And Juniper Research suggests that mobile phone apps will reach an astonishing 25 billion by 2015. The mobile technology is advancing faster than probably any technology in history and exciting new uses like augmented reality keep on coming. The most recent advance is something called LTE, which is often referred to as 4G and allows improved speeds that will bring us closer to mobile tv and more.

But what’s really exciting is mobile commerce, or M-commerce. Between 2008 and 2009 mobile transactions grew from $25 million to $141 million in one year, and things are expected to exceed $500 million in 2010.

Concerns about whether location will outweigh SEO in mobile search have come up in the last few months, and it seems unlikely that one will replace the other. It’s more likely that marketers will have to factor in yet another channel, that being location based marketing.

Social media and mobile marketing provide exciting opportunities, considering most individuals have their smart phone with them throughout the day more so than any other device. We’re now hyper connected, and companies like Google, Apple, and Nokia are driving the industry forward.

Exciting times indeed, but what’s the take away from this? We’ve heard the mobile gospel before, but now is the time to get serious. And if you’re venturing into mobile branding, you’ll not only want to be on FourSquare, you’ll want to make sure your app is available for the main OS options like Android, iPhone, Blackberry and others.

The Shift of Brand Marketing With Social Media

Marketers are no longer in control of their branding. After decades of listening to advertisers broadcasting and force feeding their message, consumers have the upper hand. As advertising experiences a steady decline in terms of effectiveness, there is a consumer epidemic called social media that leaves many marketers grasping at straws and trying to adapt.

Social media has changed the game, and consumers are communicating with one another about brands, products and services. Much to the horror of many marketers as they stand at the sidelines confused about how to get involved.

It’s estimated that about 70% of bloggers write about brands organically, and almost half of that is product reviews. About 65% of blog readers access blogs specifically to get an opinion, and over 90% trust user reviews over an in-store clerk.

The new marketing – its not about marketing. Today’s brands need to be transparent, engage, and participate with the conversation that exists. It’s already going on, and its up to the marketer to find it and leverage these new opportunities.

What some don’t realize is the new social media tools allow a dialogue that essentially make your customer base more accessible, and almost like a giant focus group. Rather than diving in and reverting to broadcasting, they need to listen, and be part of the dialogue when the moment is right.

Traditional advertising has been about attacking the masses with their marketing messages, and justifying campaigns with repetition. Phrases like “we need to build awareness” and “a consumer needs to see an advertisement at least 7 times” became common place. But with poor targeting (aka segmentation) the ROI has called into the question of accountability in recent years.

From print and outdoors to broadcast and direct mail, it was never clear what the return was. And when it was measured, the results took weeks at a time. Usually it wasn’t until after a campaign was over before a tally could give any idea whether it was a success.

And now marketers have online advertising, where they can fine tune, shift spending, and track the results almost as quick as things happen. But there is one drawback, advertising is still advertising.

Social media integration isn’t an after thought to a campaign anymore, its a key component.

In a recent study, 40% of brand representatives world wide believe social media poses new challenges to the integrity of their brand. With more than a third saying that social networking sites affect brands significantly enough to bring about changes in their marketing strategy.

So where does this leave marketers? It starts with breaking old habits, and communicating instead of broadcasting. But to make social media work effectively, it often involves several layers rather than the “let’s make a facebook page” approach.

Internet Branding Is Key To Today’s Marketing

Internet Branding may still be in its infancy, with social media attracting most of the attention and buzz. But its an integral part of the online brand building process, and only one aspect to a larger picture. While its a separate channel than offline marketing, its critical to include with the web being what it is now. Many companies are slow to move, figuring a website, twitter page, and possibly one on Facebook is enough. Unfortunately, the laggards will have to work 3 times as hard to catch up. Social media and Internet branding is not a fad.

Building brand equity online can take enormous amounts of time, money, and energy. A culmination of online advertising, social media, SEO, and even online PR, big brands want to listen with social media tools to guard their online reputation management.

In this video of Dan Colbey entitled “What physics taught me about marketing” he discusses positioning brands and how one incident can erode much of the brand equity built.

What’s your game plan? Do you have a strategy that takes you past the next year?

How about a social media crisis plan should your brand come under attack?

Positioning and protecting your sweat equity with proper planning can help retain the strength of your brand should it ever find itself in the crosshairs. And if you haven’t come up with one yet, now is the time to start thinking about online branding strategies so that you have a path to follow and measure down the road.

Eroding Site Equity With A Brand Strategy

For many ad agencies, building a mini site for a client is often the answer to a new campaign. It allows creative control, a chance to grab a cool domain, and to create something fresh as an extension instead of being tied to the brand identity guidelines.

What most advertising agencies and businesses don’t realize is when they build a mini site, they’re giving up some of their brand’s equity by doing so. Links are like an Internet marketing currency of the web, and the equity they build also builds the brand online. Rather than creating mini sites, which can be cool, its of more value in the long term to keep everything on your main site.

First off, even though you could redirect it later, it dilutes the strength compared to any natural links that are deep linked into your site. If you have to have that cool domain for a campaign, you could redirect it. But the best advice is to keep it all on your site for the direct links instead of resorting to redirects.

If the new addition goes a few pages deep, you might also acquire new deep links as well. When it comes to link strategies, it’s all about keeping it natural. And deep links should probably out weigh the ones pointing at the root by at least 3 to 1. There’s no reason a campaign can’t be a sub directory of a mini site, and you can even deviate away from the main design. But it’s strongly advised to have the logo clickable back to the index so visitors can explore the rest of your site deeper.

I had talked to some folks about their site recently, and after examining their other web properties and a little investigating, it seems a few agencies they worked with each had them create new sites for new projects. Now they have some nice sites, but had these all been incorporated into the main one, they’re site authority would be stronger by the sheer volume of the links combined pointing at the main one. Containing within the main site would also probably lead to more stickiness and pageviews, which in this case would help, along with stronger rankings for a variety of phrases.

That’s not to say there isn’t a place for mini sites either. Often there is a need in SEO to build out a network of these in order to improve your inbound links (IBL’s). The advantage being you control the anchor text, and so long as they maintain relevance and a few other things its all good right? Well, yes and no. A surge of low ranking sites without being interwoven into the network or social web is just a bunch of low ranking unauthoritative spam to the search engines, and possibly does little for you. And you also tasked with creating links for all the new sites as well. In the long run, if you don’t do it right, you probably made twice as much work for yourself.

The majority of the time you’ll want to keep your content, campaigns, and mini sites within the framework of your main site. It’s your brand, and you want to create the equity through content and social strategies, not campaign clusters.

Creating Influence Online

Possibly the shortest Internet marketing conference ever, the Influence Project involved 60 speakers for 60 seconds. Some of the speakers included Brian Clark, Guy Kawasaki, Mitch Joel, Muhammad Saleem, Brian Solis and more.  MP3 recording and transcript  available through the above link.

Why Online Branding

If you ask yourself this, consider the logic behind why branding is part of almost every marketer’s strategy. Besides the consistency of a brand’s identity, you want to create a strategy for online branding that not only works with a marketing plan, but also with its target audience. But wait, there’s more, it isn’t as elementary as that.

Online branding is a bit different that it’s offline counterpart. The channels (advertising, social media, search) are different and the tools offer more opportunity through interactivity. And whatever channels you use, the real kicker is you can track your successes in near real time and adjust your campaign accordingly.

Remember the days when you might do direct mail or some other offline advertising and would have to wait weeks to tally the results? Tracking your Internet advertising and social media marketing campaigns allow you to see what’s working within hours. But you’re hear asking Why Online Branding?

Using the tools within the channels, not only can you have farther reaching and more targeted campaigns, you can capture better data and do multivariate split testing on your landing pages, copy, design, and creative. Again, in near real-time.

But beyond the control and monitoring potential, you also have lower production costs and better ROI for your campaigns. With most campaigns, you can’t even measure that with offline advertising!

You run your ad in print or outdoors, and unless your call to action includes a special offer with a unique landing page URL or 800 number to call, all you know is what the potential reach is. Like a newspaper or magazine have x readers, or a radio station have x listeners. Even though branding isn’t always about taking action at the time of mention, having the ability to track your campaigns allows you to maximize your spend so you can funnel your budget where online branding will be most effective.

While advertising online let’s you put your brand in front of potential customers on websites with traffic, and social media provides new opportunities, search marketing (both SEO and SEM) can get your brand in front of those customers when they’re in buying mode and searching for a specific topic. Being in the top search results helps create that synergy between your brand and a phrase, and contributes to top of mind awareness. SEO has also proven to provide the best ROI of all online marketing channels.

So when you’re thinking to yourself ‘Why Online Branding’, its hopefully more clear. Better tracking provides improved spending, the changes in advertising can be on the fly to account for improving your campaigns, and a higher level of interactivity also provides more bang for your buck. Marketers keep shifting their budget to online for this reason, and the growth in this channel has outperformed offline marketing options for the last few years. Television advertising might still be king, but the cost to produce and place the ads, along with poor tracking options makes it questionable which is the best choice.

I don’t think you can expect one to replace another, as they reach different segments, but keep in mind that Pepsi skipped their annual mutli million dollar Super Bowl TV ad last year, and put it in online advertising and social media.