SUCCESS! Slow and steady wins the race...

Just two months after the launch of our OP Marketing & Social Media Blog (an earlier ideaLab project that I apparently failed to blog about...), we're celebrating some small successes. 

To backtrack a bit, the blog was designed as an SEO experiment and indirect sales tool for advertising reps. Using Search Engine Optimized keywords, the posts are built to both offer free marketing advice from the sales reps and indirectly promote relevant OP products. For example, the post that discusses using geography to target the most relevant customers is immediately followed by a post featuring Yahoo! Geo-targeted advertising. 

And then to drive traffic to the site, we compiled an e-mail list of current and prospective advertisers to send out a monthly Marketing Tips e-blast. Our first e-blast (which was officially sent out to advertisers yesterday), featured some clips from current posts and will redirect users to the site to read the full article. The e-blasts themselves won't actually contain any form of advertising or promotions; it's simply to offer marketing tips to our advertisers and to drive traffic back to the blog (and thus, the indirect sales tool).

And now onto our successes...

On Sunday, January 30th (happy birthday to me...), a user entered our blog from Google on the organic search term "Marketing Workshop Oakland", landing on a post from January 18th featuring an invitation to our free SEO seminar to promote Matchbin products, just in time to sign up for the workshop!

Then just this week I noticed that another user entered the site on the search term "geo targeted advertising". Out of curiousity, I then Googled "geo targeted advertising" to find our blog nestled comfortably on the first page of search results! According to Google's free keyword tool, that particular term is searched approximately 170 times per month on average. So what does that mean for us? Potentially 170 new Yahoo! customers!

30 Days of Tools & Training

In addition to my upcoming "Senior Central" project, I've been tasked to choose a free digital tool to master and then teach to an audience of my peers. So I've narrowed the list down to the three products that interest me most: 


XtraNormal - Text-to-Movie ("I don't care")
myQR - A QR code generator with built-in analytics
hootsuite - Social Media Manager/Scheduler


Any suggestions?

QR Codes for Advertising ~ Part 2

My first advertising QR code finally went to print. Though I'm still searching for the MECARD + Analytics generator, this has opened up some avenues for non-traditional advertisers. 


Any thoughts on tracking scans?

Optimizing JRC Web Presence for Seniors

Optimizing JRC Web Presence for Seniors

SEO Basics for Sales Team

SEO Basics

Tagging URL's for a More Measurable Digital Campaign

One of the issues I've came across in measuring the performance of digital campaigns was the discrepancy in reporting from our customer's analytics to our own reports. Because of our ad serving software, in Google Analytics (and apparently some others) our ads generally report as "Direct" traffic, which is viewed as if the user entered the URL directly rather than being referred from another site. For customers that monitor their own analytics to track advertising performance, this can cause some confusion.

After doing some research, I stumbled upon Google's Free URL Builder, a simple form that allows you to tag your URL to differentiate campaigns, ad content, etc. in your analytics reporting. For example, I could use the URL Builder to tag my other blog URL (ophorsesense.blogspot.com) for a Yahoo Banner Ad campaign as: 

http://ophorsesense.blogspot.com/?utm_source=Yahoo&utm_medium=Banner&utm_campaign=TEST

Clickthroughs will then appear in my analytics reports with Yahoo as the "Source" and Banner ad as the "Campaign" (see below)

Using QR Codes for Non-Traditional Advertising...

This week I came across a new business, a Mobile Lockout Service, where I was challenged to find a way to create an effective advertising campaign for a non-traditional business on a new business budget. The obvious problem being that it is an "emergency" service and the prospective customer is not likely to take action at the time they see the ad. 


The basic ad message in this case is aimed at enticing the reader to save the contact information in their phone to be available in the event that they are locked out of their car and will need this mobile service (assuming that their cell phone is not locked inside the car). But how do we encourage a reader to take instant action on an ad that does not result in instant gratification? The answer: MAKE IT FUN! 


So I generated a QR code that will automatically download the business' contact information into the user's Smartphone "contacts" when scanned (see Droid example below). 


And better yet, http://myqr.co not only offers a free QR Code generator, but they also offer a free tracking system to report the number of scans!