november 2013 - Pagina 2 van 7 - E-commercemanagers.com

Advertising Networks for Online Businesses

26 november 2013/in Usability/door Joost Hoogstrate

Google’s AdSense and AdWords are two of the most widely used advertising platforms for online business. And although Google facilitates a massive amount of traffic online, there are dozens of other ad networks that ecommerce businesses can take advantage of.

Here are twenty-five popular advertising networks to help target as many Internet users as possible and grow your business.

Large-Sized Search Engine Affiliated Networks

Google AdSense. One of the most widely used and popular ad platform for online publishers to earn revenue by displaying relevant ads on a wide variety of content that is suited to an audiences specific interests. Participation in AdSense is free and advertisers pay Google for clicks or impressions of ads displayed on participating sites.
Google AdWords. Ads appear on Google search result pages and the Google Advertising Network – your business ads will appear besides relevant related search results. Best of all, you only pay if people click your ads.
Yahoo! Advertising Network. Personalize and optimize ads for specific users using Yahoo!’s user-data proprietary advertising technology. Various packages and ad solutions available, depending on your business’s needs – price varies with each package.
Microsoft Advertising adCenter. Use adCenter to create ads that appear in search results of both Bing and Yahoo! search engines and reach millions of their users. You only pay when someone clicks your ad.
Microsoft Ad Network. Create a custom campaign on Microsoft’s vast network of brands — from search advertising to display advertising and much more — target ads directly to your potential customers. Each advertising package is customizable and price varies with each option as well as scope of campaign.

Alternative Advertising Networks

PocketCents. Create and display text, image or video ads directly to the kind of users who are interested in your product or service on the PocketCents Network. Set up a fixed monthly budget per ad, eliminate competitive placement based on bidding and much more with PocketCents. PocketCents features a flat rate of $.25 per click on text or image ad or per play of video ad.
Clicksor. A contextual targeting ad network that automatically matches your ads to the most relevant websites in Clicksor’s network. Create text or graphic banner ads, pop-under ads or interstitial ads — appearing between web pages — and pay per click (CPC), per 1,000 impressions (CPM), or per visit (CPV).
AdBrite. One of the largest ad networks outside of the big search engine brand networks — create and target ads to users in the network and pay with variable pricing models including CPC, CPM and other flexible pricing options.
Bidvertiser. Advertise across thousands of websites in the Bidvertiser network on a pay-per-click basis. Browse the categorized directory of websites and select the appropriate ones you want to advertise on for your business; set your desired geographic targeting and your pay-per-click bids and your ads are ready to go.
Chitika. An ad network that targets your ads directly to interested individual users. Currently, Chitika is only open to advertisers interested in spending a minimum of $50,000 per month.

TribalFusion. Reach the almost 230 million users on Tribal Fusion’s ad network per month with your ads — several advertising package options that can be tailored to suit your business’s needs, pricing varies on package and scope of campaign.
Advertising.com. Reach approximately 183 million users monthly on this large alternative advertising network — pricing is depending on campaign.
Vibrant. With around 250 million unique users in its network, Vibrant is a great text-based advertising option for ecommerce businesses. Pricing is cost per 1,000 impressions and varies based on available inventory and the category of ad placement.
ValueClick Media. Place ads and target users on this network that reaches approximately 173 million unique visitors per month. Pricing dependant on scope and style of ad package.
ContextWeb. Target ads to relevant users in this network to get the most value for your dollar spent. Pricing is flexible with a name-your-own price option for cost per 1,000 impressions.
Claxon. Run banner campaigns on this ad network and geo target by nation and cap impressions, if needed. Pricing depends on size of banner ad and scope of campaign.
Clickcent. Run ads on this contextual advertising network and pay only for the actual unique traffic to your site at a price that you negotiate. You can monitor responses to your ad in real-time and change your bid price or ad copy as you see fit.
DynamicOxygen. A search engine marketing solution that allows you to target millions of prospective customers coming from Google, Yahoo!, Bing and many more. Pricing is cost per click and rates depend on size and scope of ad campaign.

common copywriting mistakes

26 november 2013/in Opinion/door Joost Hoogstrate

There’s a lot of bunk information out there about copywriting. The barrier to entry for being an “expert copywriter” is pretty low and some of those crossing that barrier are simply wrong when they give advice.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some great copywriters out there. What’s funny though is that most of us here at MarketingExperiments wouldn’t claim to be one of them (even the great Daniel Burstein).

But what we lack in copywriting prowess, we gain in mountains of research on copy that works and doesn’t work. We’ll be sharing a bit of that research with you on Wednesday in ourcopywriting Web clinic (educational funding provided by HubSpot.) if you’d like to learn more. But, throughout that research, we’ve picked up on a few commonalities in the mistakes copywriters make.

With the help of Austin McCraw’s unused slides from the Optimization Summit, I went ahead and took some of those commonalities and compiled them into a list of common mistakes marketers make when they’re writing copy.

After every mistake, there’s an example of how we fixed it and got dramatic lifts in each case. No bunk copywriting advice included. Just data.

Mistake #1: Headlines with no value

It seems like anytime someone writes about headlines, they use this quote from David Ogilvy:

“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”

Of course, clichés get to be clichés because they’re true. When it comes to grabbing your reader’s attention, nothing works better than a solid value-based headline. Your headline should offer the reader a reason to read that first paragraph in your body copy.

“Action words” or “power verbs” get touted a lot by copywriters the world over as the ultimate tool for getting prospects to buy. But our research suggests that focusing on the action that you want your visitors to take hurts conversion.

It’s not about the action itself, it’s about the value they’re going to get as a result of taking that action. Getting that right in your CTA can give you dramatic lifts with very little effort.

If you are, or ever have been married, you know exactly how this hurts conversion. Assuming conversion means getting to sleep in your bed rather than the couch, saying too much can take you from a 99.9% to somewhere around a .01% conversion rate.

The same is true for your copy. Depending on where your reader is in their thought process, you could be saying way too much when all they want to do is take action. That’s exactly what we found was the case in this experiment…

Mistake #4: Saying too little

If you thought you were safe on that last one, try this one on for size. Again, depending on where the reader is in their thought process, saying too little is just as bad as saying too much. Your reader needs exactly the right amount of copy to get them to make the decision on the page.

Sometimes that takes 30 pages of long copy, sometimes it takes a few words. In the following experiment, we found that we weren’t giving the visitor enough information to make a decision. Because they were in a different place in the thought process, they needed longer copy.

Mistake #5: Misplacing your tone

Your audience expects to be spoken to in a certain way. You don’t usually speak to an adult like they’re a toddler and vice versa. A lot of times, copywriters miss the mark a little in their tone. It might not be as dramatic as speaking in baby-talk to paying customers, but it could mean rubbing them the wrong way, even a little with not just what you say, but how you say it.

Mistake #6: Visual intimidation

An unclear eye-path in your copy that doesn’t match the thought sequence in your reader almost always hurts conversion. Heavy text without any highlighting, bullets, or bold text to pull the eye through the page is a great example of making this mistake. It also happens with the ever-popular design tactic: evenly weighted columns.

Mistake #7: Disconnected images

Good copywriters know that images are as much a part of the copywriting process as anything else. Images can support the overall value of the action you want your visitors to take on the page, but they can also cause confusion.

When a reader sees an image that makes her think, it forces her to use extra effort in understanding your offer. That’s the last thing you want your reader doing on a landing page.

Bonus Mistake: Not testing your copy

The biggest mistake you can make in your copy is not testing. You can read all the blog posts you want on the 7 mistakes to avoid, or strategies to consider, or phrases that sell, but until you’ve tested it for your own audience, you’ll never know for sure how your copy is actually doing.

Example:

So with that in mind, I’m going to run a little unscientific test on the copy in this blog post. When I sent this post to my editor, Daniel, I gave him an alternate opening. I expected him to pick one for me to publish, but instead he suggested I test it.

However, since we don’t yet know of a way to A/B test a blog post in a scientifically valid way, we’d like you to vote in the comments about which is the better writing. Again, this isn’t very scientific, but it will help to settle a little bet.

Here’s the alternate beginning:

[Every once in a while, Austin McCraw, Daniel Burstein and I disagree about what gets posted on this blog. Daniel and I tend to be very giving. We always try to over-deliver when we write our posts. Austin, on the other hand, likes to hold back his best content for our Web clinics.

Ever championing your cause, dear blog reader, Daniel and I decided to steal some of Austin’s great content on copywriting and post it here without asking! We’re hoping that asking for forgiveness is better than asking permission in this case.

So without further ado, here are 7 common mistakes most copywriters make when writing copy for their campaigns. After each mistake, there’s an example from our research detailing how we turned those mistakes into sizable lifts in conversion:]

Now, if you would, please vote for the open

PowerInbox Runs Facebook, Twitter & Groupon Inside Email

26 november 2013/in Usability/door Joost Hoogstrate

PowerInbox lets email users run applications inside Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail or Outlook. The startup, which launches Tuesday, is also announcing that it raised $1.1 million in a funding round led by Atlas Venture.

At launch, PowerInbox includes email applications for Facebook,Twitter and Groupon. Each app brings it with it the ability to view and engage with site content from inside the email message.

Email hasn’t really changed in its last 40 years of existence,” PowerInbox founder and CEO Matt Thazhmon tells Mashable. “Looking ten years in the future, I’ll put money on it, email will still have Reply, ReplyAll and Forward, but next to those buttons, you will see an edit button and an app store button … This is the future of email that we are working hard towards and our launch today is the first step towards making this vision a reality.”

What magazines with the most Facebook fans are doing right

26 november 2013/in Facebook/door Joost Hoogstrate

Magazine brands with the most Likes are obviously doing something right and other publishers could learn from their strategies. Digital think tank L2 recently released a survey withvarious statistics about digital presence, including a list of the top 10 magazine brands (by numbers of fans) on Facebook. Unsurprisingly, the mags in the top spots seem to employ similar tactics to drive their fan numbers up.

It’s important to remember that while having a lot of Likes has become a popularity barometer for media brands, millions of Facebook fans doesn’t necessarily translate toengagement and revenue. It does, however, mean that you’ve built a brand that translates well to social media. We took a look at the five most-Liked magazines on Facebook — Playboy, Vogue, People, Cosmopolitan and Seventeen — and found some common themes in their strategies.

Ways To Grow Leads

26 november 2013/in SEO/door Joost Hoogstrate

One of the practical opportunities for companies that acquire and engage customers through a sales force, is through social media content and participation. In fact, many corporate marketing departments have found their field sales reps active on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and even YouTube before headquarters has. Such “rogue” social media activity might be proactive, but can also create issues without adherence to corporate standards and provide conflicting experiences for customers.

A salesforce that functions as educators, consultants and in some ways “subject matter experts”, can be a formidable asset for corporate social media efforts towards engagement and customer acquisition. Rather than shutting down individual sales reps blogs and Facebook accounts until corporate gets their social strategy in place, companies should consider how to coordinate and empower sales teams as social media ambassadors of the brand to their individual circles of influence and social networks.

Those same sales people are already maintaining contact with prospects and customers through other communication channels like email, phone, snail mail and newsletters. Why not social networking and media sites?

As business managers decide how to best leverage sales people for social media objectives, here are a few ideas on tactics they may decide to implement:

1. Create a Destination – Whether it’s a blog, tumblr, posterous site, YouTube or even Facebook Fan page, a destination for social participation can serve as the hub for a salesperson’s social media activity. This is where social content is published, aggregated and curated. It’s also where calls to action, offers and invitations to engage on a more business level can be posted. The social hub scan serve as a destination for other publishers and bloggers to link to and appear within search results.

2. Monitor for Leads & Engagement – As more consumer and B2B buyers participate on the social web during the discovery and consideration phases of the buying cycle, sales people can monitor for comments and conversations that indicate engagement opportunities. IBM’s Listen for Leads program has uncovered millions of dollars in sales by monitoring social media sites for keywords that indicate prospects with questions or in the search phase.

Simple tools like search.twitter.com, board reader or a variety of Facebook search enginescan provide access to discussions. Free social search engines like socialmention.com ortopsy can also be used along with Google Alerts. Ideally, a robust social media monitoring tool would be used that includes advanced filtering options. It takes some refinement of search queries to make this kind of monitoring work, but can be very effective at identifying prospect conversation opportunities at their greatest moment of need.

3. Create, Curate & Repurpose – Most Sales Reps, Account Executives and Business Development people that I know are pretty busy, so efficiency with social media and content is essential. With an understanding of relevant search keywords and social topics that matter to prospective customers, salespeople can create a content plan as a guide.

However, creating new content on a regular basis while maintaining high quality can become a challenge, so it’s important to think about where content can be repurposed.

For example, salespeople might each maintain their own blogs that they publish to once a week. But they might also share portions or customized versions of their blog posts with other industry blogs, online publications and industry newsletters. They could compile blog posts into ebooks or could be used within corporate content marketing materials.

An effective way to become a “go to destination” for information on a particular topic is to aggregate or curate news from different sources on the web to the salesperson’s hub. Subscribe to other industry news sites, newsletter and setup Google Alerts for topics of interest to collect news. Collect the most interesting and/or themed news of the week and add short comments. The same curation tactic can be used to create a newsletter. With some practice, the process of scanning headlines and putting together a weekly news roundup can be done in only a few minutes a day, resulting in one beefy blog post per week.

4. Participate – In the course of researching useful industry news to aggregate or to cite in original blog posts, salespeople will undoubtedly find other blogs and online publications that allow commenting. They’ll also find others discussing topics of interest on sites like LinkedIn, Groups & Forums, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and others. Searching or monitoring for prospects also reveals these kinds of interaction opportunities.

Answering questions, sharing useful resources and asking questions on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Google+ helps communicate personal characteristics and thought leadership for the salesperson. Corporate marketing might be able to use their resources with social media monitoring tools to identify social channels, groups or individuals that are most influential and relevant. Salespeople could also use tools like Klout to find others with influence to engage with.

This can seem like a very time consuming task, but many salespeople who are the most productive with lead generation through social media make a consistent effort to participate on a frequent basis. Setup a recurring reminder in Outlook to spend 15 minutes each morning to ask/answer questions, collect, aggregate and share useful links. Spreading this activity over several days using a consistent amount of time is very productive. Schedule Tweets and Facebook updates during the day in advance using a tool like Hootsuite.

5. Collaborate – Corporate sales and marketing leadership can keep tabs on the most effective uses of social media and networking sites by their sales teams and create best practices for the benefit of all. Continuously improved processes, new social tool evaluations and tactics evolution can improve salesforce social media effectiveness and overall ability to create value and engage prospects.

In the end, it’s about empowerment, not control.

Companies can provide sales teams with templates, process and training plus regular internal networking opportunities to share best practices in order to help salesforce social media efforts succeed. It’s also important to provide ongoing education so salespeople know what it looks like to be overzealous and forward with their social participation efforts.

As with all social media marketing efforts, mileage varies according to the target audience, industry, resources and sales teams capabilities. There’s no doubt that strategy alone doesn’t sustain long term social media marketing success. Ongoing training and feedback mechanisms are essential to improve skills and identify both productive and non-productive behaviors.

Has your organization had to deal with “rogue sales reps” initiating social media marketing efforts? How did you handle them? Have you implemented or observed other companies effectively incorporating sales teams social media participation as part of corporate social strategy?

Brands As Publishers & Publishers Are Marketers

26 november 2013/in SEO/door Joost Hoogstrate

The trend towards “brands as publishers” over the past year has an increasing number of businesses entering the world of content in ways that are creating new opportunities for online marketing. The notion of brands publishing editorial is nothing new of course and has been known as Custom Media or Custom Publishing for years.

For example, P&G‘s “invention” of the radio and TV Soap Opera or both “Food and Wine” and “Travel and Leisure” magazines published by American Express. Interestingly, corporate editorial content publishing often overlooks the value of SEO as a way to extend reach and grow readership.

Publishers on the other hand, are becoming much better marketers. While online and offline media have always been reliant on growing distribution and readership to warrant advertising based business models, the changing nature of media, shifts in consumer behaviors and increased competition has warranted even more marketing savvy to capture, maintain and grow readership.

For example, it’s become pretty standard for more progressive media companies likeTribune Company, Turner Broadcasting and Hearst Magazines to have their reporters and writers employ SEO best practices to drive more search traffic to stories on newspaper and other media websites. Tactics like writing story headlines as literal, keyword rich title tags for search engines and using irony, puns or metaphors for on-page titles that consumers can read has become quite common.

It just makes sense to package content in a way that makes it easy for the target audience to find. Such insight and best practices shouldn’t be left to marketers alone. Any entity that is publishing searchable content online should consider optimization of content for search “findability” and social sharing.

An extension of that SEO savvy includes leveraging real time social media tools (like chartbeat or Newsbeat) to identify content opportunities. Search and social media marketers have been using social media monitoring and trend tools for this purpose over the past few years or more. This is particularly common with information marketers that want to leverage growing bursts of consumer interest in topics that are trending. They’ll monitor for topics and create content that matches the boost in search queries, resulting in an influx of traffic from an audience actively looking.

Publishers are doing the same kind of monitoring because after all, they’re information marketers too, no? They may not be selling a product, but they are selling stories that attract readers who may click on ads and possibly subscriptions.

The Online Marketing opportunity here is for brands that decide to go the custom content and/or content marketing route, to be thoughtful and smart about connecting target audiences with their investment. Make sure content and digital assets are optimized for keywords and topics that people care about. Think of topics in terms of the customer, not marketing language and you’ll find more search traffic as well as social sharing.

As brand publishing efforts mature and they find the need to feed a hungry readership, real time monitoring for story ideas, topics and trends will become increasingly important. As a SEO professional does research on search keywords for SEO, the publisher would do well to research topics flowing in the social information stream that match their editorial plans for real-time content opportunities.

Is your business publishing custom media? Do you leverage SEO with those content assets? If you’re a journalist, have you been trained on SEO best practices? Does your organization value the impact of SEO and social media for promoting news?

FaceBook Commerce

26 november 2013/in Facebook/door Joost Hoogstrate

As more and more brands are opening up shop on their Facebook pages it is becoming increasingly important to find ways to reward customers for purchasing and sharing. As a result, we are seeing an influx of special offers like group deals and flash sales hitting Facebook commerce stores. I had the opportunity to speak with several leaders in F-commerce—SortPrice, Zibaba, andWildFire—to find out more about how these deals work, why they’re great for creating a buzz, and how they play into the future of F-commerce.

Who I talked to…

Before getting into the nitty-gritty of deals on Facebook, I’ll quickly give a little bit of background on the three companies that I spoke with. The CEO and co-founder of SortPrice, Doron Simovitch, was the first person I heard from. SortPrice offers a Facebook store application that makes it easy for brands to create stores on their Facebook pages. SortPrice does not currently give users the option to offer group deals, but they are a forerunner in Facebook Flash Sales.

Michael Katz, the VP of Business Development at Zibaba also provided input. Zibaba is one of the first online storefront apps to offer users the ability to create group deals and offers. They also offer a unique affiliate program that lets outsiders promote a brand’s Facebook shop.

Finally, I heard from the CEO of Wildfire, an application that specializes in group deals on Facebook. Read on to find out what this triad had to say.

As more and more brands are opening up shop on their Facebook pages it is becoming increasingly important to find ways to reward customers for purchasing and sharing. As a result, we are seeing an influx of special offers like group deals and flash sales hitting Facebook commerce stores. I had the opportunity to speak with several leaders in F-commerce—SortPrice, Zibaba, andWildFire—to find out more about how these deals work, why they’re great for creating a buzz, and how they play into the future of F-commerce.

Who I talked to…

Before getting into the nitty-gritty of deals on Facebook, I’ll quickly give a little bit of background on the three companies that I spoke with. The CEO and co-founder of SortPrice, Doron Simovitch, was the first person I heard from. SortPrice offers a Facebook store application that makes it easy for brands to create stores on their Facebook pages. SortPrice does not currently give users the option to offer group deals, but they are a forerunner in Facebook Flash Sales.

Michael Katz, the VP of Business Development at Zibaba also provided input. Zibaba is one of the first online storefront apps to offer users the ability to create group deals and offers. They also offer a unique affiliate program that lets outsiders promote a brand’s Facebook shop.

Finally, I heard from the CEO of Wildfire, an application that specializes in group deals on Facebook. Read on to find out what this triad had to say.

How do Facebook flash sales work?

Doron Simovitch of SortPrice explained how flash sales work on Facebook. Basically, a flash sale is a timed sale that offers a deal for users for a very specific window of time. When a user sets up a flash sale via SortPrice’s storefront app, “the flash sale goes live immediately on the merchant’s Facebook store, with a product image and description and a countdown clock alerting shoppers how long they have to take advantage of … fans can visit the merchant’s Facebook store to take advantage of it, with the transaction being completed on the merchant’s actual website. Fans also have the ability to like a flash sale, comment on it, and/or share it with other Facebook friends, giving it a genuine shopping feel.”

5 Ways Salespeople Can Use Social Media to Grow Leads

26 november 2013/in Uncategorized/door Joost Hoogstrate