BusinessWeek
Brands may be cutting back on their overall marketing spending, but a new report from eMarketer asserts that many advertisers are likely to step up their efforts at reaching minorities — at least online. As the number of online Hispanics, African Americans and Asian Americans increases, marketers are adapting their campaigns accordingly.
Among marketers who target minority groups, a recent Association of National Advertisers report found that 95% tailor messages to Latin Americans, 76% target African Americans and 38% target Asian Americans. That’s up from 86%, 60% and 35%, respectively, according to 2003 research. Now, 70% of African Americans are online, making them the fastest-growing population of Internet users since 2003, when little more than half were online. Hispanics are the second-fastest growing segment, boasting a 79% penetration rate, higher than any other group.
Reaching that segment isn’t as easy as translating a mass-market campaign into another language, says eMarketer senior analyst Lisa Phillips. “You have to have an understanding of their cultures and traditions,” she says. But you should also offer your site in both English and Spanish.
BusinessWeek
How does Amazon.com finally plan to put its brick and mortar competitors out of business? Using a new mobile feature from the online retailing giant, consumers can take mobile photos of items they want to buy, store them in an online shopping cart, and then complete the purchase –usually at a discount — whenever they want. The application, designed for Apple’s iPhone, lets consumers reference Amazon’s entire catalog of items and complete purchases with a single click.
Amazon’s innovative mobile app is just one reason why the online retailer is expected to emerge from the economic recession relatively unscathed. As Stifel Nicolaus analyst Scott Devitt tells BusinessWeek, “When we come out of this and there is less competition, (Amazon’s) business is going to grow at an accelerated rate.” Devitt emphasizes that Amazon’s business has scale, a strong reputation, a broad array of product offerings, and a huge stake in research and development, which has led to new product offerings like the iPhone app.
In fact, Cowen & Co. analyst Jim Friedland points out that Amazon has spent nearly $4 billion on R&D over the past 10 years, which is vastly greater than the investment by online competitors like eBay, which has spent $2.7 billion on R&D in the same time period. Friedland says this investment has been “a key factor in gaining share of consumers’ wallets.”
aimClear
Optimize your tags based on a well-researched keyword strategy and look past algorithm-bait SEO tags, according to Marty Weintraub. Think about fundamental marketing processes because, when you strip away the onion skin, SEO is about writing rich and compelling organic advertisements. Keep the basics in mind and treat every tag and description similar to a PPC ad. “Anything less misses an important opportunity to raise your listing, bookmarks and all good things coming from tags above the fray,” he writes.
Watson believes you should think of title and description tags as the headline and the copy for organic text ads on search engine results pages (SERPs). He notes if a PPC company wouldn’t settle for “branded gibberish headlines lacking a call to action, no point of differentiation from other ads, offering no incentive to click and constructed solely as quality score fodder to play ‘beat the algorithm,”‘ why would most SEOs.
When building links to a site for SEO purposes, it’s easy to simply look at the number of backlinks, content relevance, Linkscape rating, search term rankings and other valuable criteria for measuring the importance and value of a site before acquiring a link on that site to your own.
In terms of checking bad SEO neighborhoods which would link to your site, it’s always good to monitor the inbound links to your potential linking partner’s site, and see what kind of sites those links are coming from and whether or not they belong to obvious link swapping or reciprocal linking schemes. But do you check to see if a site has been flagged for distributing malware?Continue Reading »
Los Angeles Times
At the beginning of 2008, one of Google’s stated objectives was to finally eke out some meaningful revenue from YouTube. And while the search giant has been actively pursuing content and advertising deals for the enormously popular video-sharing site, none of its moves has yet to hit pay dirt. On Wednesday, Google introduced a new auction-based video advertising system, that’s not dissimilar to the one it pioneered in search, which promotes sponsored video clips alongside regular YouTube search results.
Is this the move that finally makes YouTube profitable? It could be: YouTube, after all, has recently become the Web’s No. 2 search provider, after Google itself. “What we’re trying to do is bring the best parts of Google and the best parts of YouTube together,” said Matthew Liu, product manager for the service, called YouTube Sponsored Videos.
The new sponsored video program lets advertisers create ads and bid for placement alongside certain keywords through a new self-service Web site modeled after AdWords. YouTube says the system “levels the playing field” by making the ads available to everyone from individuals to small businesses and major brands. In testing conducted over the last few months, advertisers said the trial campaigns they ran were more effective than banner ads and even some search ads. That said, the prices were dirt cheap, as few advertisers were invited to the test, which meant that popular keywords like “iPhone” were going for 10 cents a click
Internet.com
Despite difficult economic times, experts suggest now is not the time to cut back on SEM and SEO, according to Jennifer Schiff. “With online shoppers saying they plan on cutting back on spending this holiday season, now may be the perfect time for you to optimize your site to attract every prospective customer you can–and keep your current customers coming back for more,” she writes. “Best of all, optimizing your site, giving it a pre-holiday facelift, needn’t be expensive or time consuming. And the return on your investment could (and should) more than offset the cost.”
It may mean redesigning your Web site to make it more attractive to search engine crawlers. Schiff provides an example from CoffeeCakes.com founder Sherry Comes, who says sales increased 50% “almost instantly” after making the site more accessible to Google, Yahoo and MSN. And she did it on a limited marketing budget. The site was redesigned, new content went up, and keyword and meta data reviewed, adding new ones as needed. “Just putting up fresh, new content is like catnip to the search engines,” she said.