Iknowwhatyoudidtoday: Bench Craft Company on the art of hotels

The successful marketing mix includes a variety of strategies which are complicated and constantly changing. With the continuing improvement of technology on the web, new marketing skills have become just as integral to a solid marketing mix.

Let’s talk about four growing skills in marketing that really count.

Conversion Rate Optimization

When you can potentially double your revenue without doubling your costs, marketers would all ask, “How?” With conversion rate optimization, you’re optimizing your sales funnel to push more people through to customers. There’s less worry about increasing ad budgets and finding better audiences.

Instead, you spend more energy making sure more people that interact with your business have a positive experience and convert. Plus, you can easily do it yourself. When you can become a profit-making machine, without having to call on resources other than yourself, you’ll become a marketing asset that’ll have the recruiters all over your back. There are tons of case studies out there about businesses seeing dramatic results from optimizing a single call to action.

Social Media Management and Community Management

Social media was all the rage amongst marketers after it first came out, and beating the better judgment of some harsh critics, it’s really evolved and become an important part of the current day’s marketing industry. It’s about customer service, new distribution and even advertising, content strategy, and proactive listening.

Your customers have concerns and you want to hear them. Plus, you want to be able to positively react to those concerned voices and reiterate your business. You also have evangelists and listeners, who’d love to hear what you have to say, if you make it interesting, and if it’s exciting enough, they’ll tell a friend, or ten thousand friends.

Shapeways is a great example of a business doing social media and community management right. With a blog, forum, even live webcasts and attendance to some of the hottest events, they show they know how to communicate and connect with their audience of tens of thousands of co-creators, designers, and engineers.

Search Engine Optimization

The multi-billion dollar search industry led by Google spawned the incredibly complicated industry of search engine optimization. Outside of paid search, where businesses work to increase visibility through ads shown on search results for targeted keywords and where service providers help businesses to increase traffic and sales through strategic bidding, there’s organic search. Google effectively makes no revenue from organic search, but businesses are pouring sizable amounts of their marketing budget into managing search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a combination of keyword research, link building, content strategy, and relevance. Effectively, it’s about being relevant AND useful; usefulness always having been an important aspect of great business strategy, but only recently has it been more important in SEO after the Panda update.

SEO got sexy when marketers realized how much consistent traffic they could get from top positions for targeted keywords, and how great those conversions were because of users’ firm trust in Google. It seemed like the formula for success was getting your business ranked in the top results in Google. While this is far easier said than done, and while SEO isn’t really the end-all for a business’ marketing strategy, it’s certainly a valuable channel for marketers to explore and very useful if they can effectively capitalize on the opportunity available.

Social networking giant LinkedIn will go public this Thursday, May 19th.

According to the official word from the company, LinkedIn hopes to raise upwards of $274 million as the investment world will be closely watching the outcome of a major social media IPO – a rarity even today.

Shares of LinkedIn will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol LNKD.

id="more-15335">LinkedIn is currently planning to price its offering of 7.8 million shares between $32 and $35 a share, which will give the Mountain View, Calif.-based company a valuation between $3 billion and $3.3 billion.

Scott Sweet of IPO Boutique tells MarketWatch that LinkedIn is “the first of what is likely the start of several true U.S. social networking firms to come public.”

“This [LinkedIn] will certainly act as a barometer and guide others that are contemplating doing the same… as to price points,” Sweet revealed over the weekend in a note to investors.

Sweet added that he’s gauging “extremely strong” interest among possible investors closely watching ahead of Thursday’s IPO.

Other social media titans anticipated to go public in the near future include Facebook, Groupon, and Zynga.

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News broke earlier this week that Google had set aside $500,000 to settle a mysterious Department of Justice investigation of "advertising by certain advertisers," and now a report indicates the badvertisers were "rogue online pharmaceuticals."

The Wall Street Journal quotes unnamed sources in identifying the culprits, with Google and the DOJ refusing to comment on the matter.

The story says search engines can be held liable for advertising profits from illegal activity, referencing a 2007 incident in which Google, Microsoft and Yahoo paid fines totaling $31.5 million for accepting gambling site ads. Google has struggled for years over how to handle drug ads, moving in 2003 to ban ads for sites that sell certain drugs without prescriptions. The WSJ's sources say Google changed its pharmaceutical ads policy again last year after the DOJ began its investigation.

Google Near Deal in Drug Ad Crackdown [The Wall Street Journal via Engadget]

The fact that your smartphone has GPS and that most users are more than willing to give away their location for free is an advertiser’s wet dream. As we approach the dawn of hyperlocal advertising, it’s clear the big tech companies and advertisers are “Livin’ La Vida Local,” if you will.

Facebook launches Places, Google tries to buy Groupon, which is rumored to be thinking of a $25 billion IPO, Foursquare takes over local businesses, AOL acquires HuffPo, etc. According to the Kelsey Group, local online advertising is expected to reach more than $35 billion by 2014. Recent moves by AOL, CNN and Google, not to mention the rise of Groupon and Foursquare showcase that local is the next major battleground on the web. To get a grip on this trend, we interviewed Chris Tolles, the CEO of Topix, the largest local forum site in the US.

CBM: What is Topix?

Chris Tolles: Topix is the #1 local forum site in the US. We aggregate news from 50,000 sources and then use powerful Artificial Intelligent algorithms to categorize and localize the news, and then combine that with a web scale forum system for every city and town in the US, where we get daily activity in over 5,000 cities and towns.

CBM: How did you become involved/company background?

CT: I was a co-founder of Topix and was here when we launched in 2004. I worked with the other co-founders at a previous startup, NewHoo, which was acquired by Netscpae and is still running within AOL as the Open Directory Project at dmoz.org.

CBM: What is hyperlocal advertising?

CT: I would characterize “hyperlocal” advertising as that which was targeting people at the neighborhood or ZIP code level.

CBM: What are the challenges of hyperlocal advertising?

CT: I think there are several large challenges facing hyperlocal advertising. It all comes down to connecting advertisers to potential customers, and the issues are different depending who you are in the ecosystem. For advertisers, both large and small, being able to easily purchase advertising and also measure the ROI is especially challenging when it comes to small audiences (or collections of small audiences) which is what hyperlocal has to deliver.

For consumers, getting advertising in a way that provides a demand-based connection to something they’re searching for, or “a serendipitous discovery” of a good deal in something they didn’t know they wanted are the positives, while misdirected or overly broad offers are definitely a downside.

How many times have you seen someone complain that a daily deal site has sent them something for a different town or for a different demographic? For publishers, there is always the problem of trying to provide scale to something with a lot of moving parts. In the case of hyperlocal, getting to a viable marketplace where there are buyers for particular hyperlocal inventory by location, and quality ads for the people coming to your site. It’s really hard to boot up that market from where we are today.

CBM: What are the benefits?

CT: People love getting advertising that is applicable to them, and 90% of every dollar is spent offline within 10 miles of the home – great hyperlocal advertising works to connect consumers to applicable business where they live. For advertisers, targeted ads are a good investment and online, it can be shown that geotargeting provides the best ROI of any of the different targeting approaches. For publishers of contextually local content, locally focused advertising pays out higher than generic advertising, so there’s definitely a “win win” scenario here for the parties in the ad transaction.

CBM: How is the effectiveness of hyper local advertising measured?

CT: It’s tricky to talk about how advertising effectiveness is measured. Small businesses want to see evidence of their advertising in having customer walkins and sales reference the ad in question. Advertising agencies will often create a proxy – whether it be a click or a coupon to try and judge the effectiveness of hyperlocal advertising. At the end of the day, advertising should result in incremental sales for the advertiser, and hyperlocal advertising needs to work in a per location basis. One of the challenges here is the lack of a standard approach for online advertising effectiveness in general.

CBM: What are the technologies involved with hyper local advertising?

CT: There are a few different ways to connect people to hyperlocal advertising online – you can target them by IP address, connect with them contextually or have them self-identify their location. Geolocation works some percentage of the time, and has the advantage of working for syndicated ads and ad networks (that is, you can tell your ad network, “only serve this to IP addresses in Arizona”. The downside of this is that there are both false positives and negatives, as well as not being able to get down to the neighborhood level.

Context provides a 120% lift in effectiveness – putting the local car dealer ad in the newspaper web site, vs. in your email, for example, — and has been shown to be the best approach for getting a good return. Technology wise, that means localizing your content, and then making sure you can localize your ad to a particular audience. Lastly, self identification can be as simple as an “enter your ZIP code” into a widget, or as new as a checkin to a particular store. Each of these approaches requires integration and data.

CBM: What is Google’s role in hyper local ads?

CT: Google is the largest marketplace for advertising, and they have both amazing inventory for publishers, as well as one of the world’s largest sites for advertisers to directly connect their local customers. They have the closest thing to a true marketplace for advertising.

CBM: What is Yelp’s role in hyper local ads?

CT: Yelp has built a great property around user generated content that is focused, by its very nature on hyperlocal businesses. The role they play in the industry is a proof point that investment in hyperlocal can payoff.

CBM: What do you predict the future of hyper local advertising will look like?

CT: Local is one of the fundamental piles of money on the Internet – like search and ecommerce revenue. I predict larger than expected growth in the long run, and a large amount of attention paid to industry leaders. With $100B of $150B of the US ad market aimed locally, I predict that no one company will end up dominating this space, but rather that there will be a large segment of the advertising ecosystem dedicated to local.

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What hyperlocal ads have you seen that work? Or don’t work…?

Further evidence that advertising on social networks (a.k.a. Facebook) is a booming business. BIA/Kelsey reports today that social media advertising revenues will grow from $2.1 billion in 2010 to $8.3 billion in 2015. BIA/Kelsey defines social media advertising as money spent on advertising formats across social networks.

The research company says that the currently, the predominant ad format on social networks is display, spending on which the firm expects will increase from $2.1 billion in 2010 to $7.7 billion in 2015. While revenues from non-display ad formats (i.e. Twitter’s “promoted products”) are currently minimal, BIA/Kelsey expects that in the coming years non-display formats will continue to grow as an ad genre on social networks, and expects the social non-display segment to grow from zero in 2010 to $600 million in 2015.

Of course, Facebook currently dominates most of the revenues generated from social media advertising. eMarketer reported in January that Facebook’s ad revenues came in $1.86 billion in 2010, while MySpace ad spend plummets.

BIA/Kelsey says that its version of social media advertising does not include virtual goods and rewards, social gaming, social commerce or social marketing, all of which are booming areas in advertising as well.

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