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Internet marketing can catapult business sales. A company that sells homemade jars of jam to local customers could develop a website, advertise themselves online, and suddenly be inundated with more orders than they can fill, if the product is high quality. Rather than just adding new long-distance customers, online marketing can grow your offline business. Those living within reasonable driving distance of your store often turn to the internet to search for products, and if they see your information online, they will likely gladly visit you in person rather than purchase a product they haven’t seen and touched. Customers like to know exactly what they are paying for, and though they often turn to the internet to learn where to find products, ideally they want to buy them physically.
The reason internet marketing allows for such success is that a vast audience can be reached at a relatively low cost. Advertising in a local publication, such as a magazine or newspaper, can be costly and can only reach so many potential customers. Advertising online opens up endless possibilities. The key is placement of your ad. If you are selling picture frames, for example, then you want your ad to be placed on a website with related content in order to reach interested buyers. A photography website would offer ideal placement. Customers coming to the website to purchase a photograph will likely be in the market to buy a frame for that photograph, and they can see your ad displayed on the page. All it takes is one click of their mouse, and they will be directed to information about your products and how to purchase them. If you are looking to generate mainly offline business growth, then you will want your ad placed on a local related business’ website. The frame-maker would want to place his ad on a nearby photographer’s site.
Ideally, if you market your products on the internet, then you need to have a website set up for your business. On it, you need photos and detailed descriptions of your products, prices, a biographical section telling how your company got started and information about its founders and its history, and your store’s hours of operation, location, and telephone number. This will allow your customers to become familiar with your company and many of your products before they walk in the store. They can come knowing exactly what they want to buy and what the price will be. Listing location and store hours is crucial to maximize customer inflow. Listing the phone number will allow those living far away who cannot visit you in person to place phone orders. Stores selling similar products in other cities or states may see your products and be interested in selling them in their venues. Be sure to also provide an email address at which you can be reached for the convenience of potential customers or vendors. This could lead to more offline orders. You will want to use every avenue to boost your business.
Another marketing opportunity is using Facebook or Twitter to market your products. Set up a page for your business and invite customers and other related businesses to follow you or become a fan. Post your special sales or coupons.
An online tool can greatly enhance your offline business.
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Oct 15
Oct 7, 2010 at 12:44pm ET by Barry Schwartz
Google is testing a new feature that lets you connect your Twitter account to Google News. Some people are seeing a “Friends” box on the right hand side of Google News inviting them to do this.
The friends box asks you to enter your Twitter username and click “Save.” When you click save, Google News will refresh, and you will see a list of updates containing news articles shared by the people you follow. Google even has a help document on this feature.
@jblukin spotted this and posted a picture of the sign-up box:
And @dacort posted a picture showing the Friends box in action:
Google’s help page on the feature clarifies that the Friends box only shows you links to news content that can also be found in Google News. Other links they share, if they aren’t Google News-worthy, so to speak, won’t be shown.
Oct 14
Oct 7, 2010 at 2:05pm ET by Mark Sprague
At first blush, generating a QR code while shortening a URL seems like a great idea. If you need to generate unique QR Codes for your printed or mobile advertising strategy this is one way to get the job done.
The process is straightforward. You simply type or paste a URL into the text box, press the shorten button, and your new short/long URL is displayed at the top of your URL list. You then have the option to track click activity for each of the shortened URLs that you have created.
To access the QR Code you will need to click on the details link to get to the following display. You see what you would expect, the long URL, the short URL and the QR code.
I found this somewhat confusing; I could click on both the long and short URLs, but there are no graceful options for directly accessing or saving the QR Code. You actually have to highlight and copy the green link under the QR Code (in this case, http://goo.gl/AGXY.qr), and paste it into a browser. This is the only way to generate a clean QR Code that can be saved as a JPG file. It seems logical that Google should provide the functionality to generate and save codes as an option on this page, but they didn’t. This section needs some help from their usability team, as it feels like it was thrown together at short notice.
Google’s QR code generator is limited to encoding URLs only. If you have other marketing needs such as encoding contact information, or using the QR Code as a dialer, you will have to go elsewhere. There are other limitations: you can not specify levels of error correction, or use other options commonly found in QR code generators, such as the ability to specify display size. This is what you see. For a simple URL, this is just fine.
Just to be clear, the following QR code URL http://goo.gl/AGXY.qr that is produced with the Google platform is of little value for inclusion in a tweet or an email, as it does nothing but take you to the new QR code (which also has to be clicked on), thus inserting a second step between a customer and your content.
This service is clearly a step in the right direction, but this functionality falls short and will not meet the needs of marketers who have requirements beyond encoding URLs. Google is asking that marketers use two QR code platforms to meet their entire range of needs, and that is unlikely to happen. There is no recognized 2D code leader in the US yet, and it will take the telecoms or companies like Google to step forward to champion a 2D code standard. Google can do this, but they will have to expose more of the QR Code platform and functionality in a user-friendly format to take the lead.
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
Oct 14
Oct 7, 2010 at 6:00am ET by Josh Dreller
We’ve spent virtually this entire year on buying paid search through the engines and now it’s time to dive into some of the other products that they offer for marketers. As a search marketer, you’ll be able to tap into some very powerful tools and ad inventory sources that can help supplement and compliment your current paid search efforts.
One of the more successful non-search triggered products that the engines offer is content targeting. The major search engines have shown a very good track record for developing marketing services and have made partnerships with millions of publisher sites across the web. These publishers drop a snippet of code on their sites which acts as a “smart ad box.” It’s smart because every time the page loads, the engine code scans the page and determines the context of what is being displayed and then matches up advertiser ads that are relevant to this content.
Here’s a classic “java” example from Google AdWords:
In relation to paid search, historically, these ads have tended to perform a bit less effectively as your most highly targeted keywords. But, really, it’s hard to find any advertising that can target users as well as paid search. That said, there are some clear benefits to using content targeting such as:
The ability to reach users who don’t know your product or service. They don’t know to search for you, therefore you wouldn’t be able to reach them on a search triggered ad.Scalability. Paid search is a pull medium which means that it requires user action (i.e. a query input on a search engine) to trigger an ad impression. Eventually, no matter how popular the keyword, you will run out of search ad opportunities. With content ads on literally millions of web pages, you’ll most likely run out of budget before running out of inventory.High levels of transparency and measurability similar to that of search.Everything is in one place. Results and metrics side by side with your paid search efforts.The big opportunity here really is scale. At last check, Google was serving around 17 billion search engine results pages per month in the U.S., whereas the Google content network was serving 6 billion ads a day worldwide. And because the number of websites serving search engine content ads is growing a lot faster than the number of searches on Google.com, the number of ad impressions on sites will certainly provide more ad inventory for marketers in the future.
Some other things to consider with running on content inventory are:
More than just text ads. You can use flash, image and video ads with many sites.Pricing. You can buy either CPC or choose CPM (cost per thousand) or CPA (cost per acquisition) models.You can now see how your content targeted ads drive your users to search on your terms and convert via paid search ads. Basically, you’re moving users down the market funnel instead of just catching them with paid search.This is just an intro into content targeting. Next week, we’ll walk through step-by-step on how to take advantage of this powerful search engine advertising product.
PPC Academy is a comprehensive, one-year search advertising course from beginning to end. Starting with the basics, PPC Academy progressively explores all of the varied facets of paid search, and the tactics needed to succeed and become an advanced paid search marketer.
Oct 13
Oct 7, 2010 at 10:41am ET by Greg Sterling
See more stories like this in the Members Library! Check out the Google: Maps & Local sections of the Members Library where this story is filed. Members also get access to exclusive video content, a members-only weekly & monthly newsletter, plus more. Check out all the benefits!
Will driving games soon be featuring images of real places and roads courtesy of Google’s Street View? That’s the word from the Kmeme blog, which says that Google will make its imagery available to game developers:
A game company will be able to license the entirety of the real world’s roads and all the surrounding areas from Google. The data will be streamed over the network from Google’s servers, where it is displayed seamlessly with the actual game elements.
The physical road surface will be mapped at centimeter resolution, every bump and rise accurately depicted. The visuals along the route will be in 3D and super high resolution, you could see the spots on a ladybug if you slowed down enough. And playback during the game will be silky smooth thanks to copious bandwidth and massive amounts of local hardware to warp the imagery in response to each subtle change in eye position.
Google could extend all this to Google TV, which would be pretty interesting and open up a range of new use cases for Google Earth, Street View and other related content. Microsoft could do something similar with Bing Maps and the Xbox. Indeed, there are many creative future use cases for all the images that are being collected by Google, Microsoft, Everyscape and others in the market.
I’m sure that other non-traditional uses of Street View will soon emerge — especially as this rich imagery makes its way into the living room. Think about “virtual worlds” for example: the combination of real imagery, gaming and group interaction. And the higher bandwidths of TV will undoubtedly open up a range of new possibilities.
See more articles by Greg Sterling >
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See more stories like this in the Members Library! Check out the Google: Maps & Local sections of the Members Library where this story is filed. Members also get access to exclusive video content, a members-only weekly & monthly newsletter, plus more. Check out all the benefits!RECENT COMMENTS
jamesoppenheim said ” You’re 100% right, Josh. Thanks for the great post to raise awareness about the benefits of content “BradleyT said ” I go to a web page and the site automatically load their last 10 tweets whether I want to see them o”szetela said ” Nice article, Josh (and sorry I missed seeing you at SMX). People interested in more info re: AdWord”See All »
Oct 13
Yahoo is launching a number of search enhancements this evening that start to deliver on the UI innovation that the company has been promising since the Microsoft search deal was announced. It’s part of Yahoo’s bid to remain relevant in search by spicing up the user experience and trying to bring more utility to page one.
Many of these new features were previewed at the recent “Runway” event last month. The two biggest changes or enhancements that users will immediately notice involve image search and a new “accordion” module at the top of search results (though it doesn’t always appear).
Do a search for “Toy Story 3? or “Lady Gaga,” for example, and you’ll see this:
Users can flip through panes that contain different types of information. In the case of Toy Story 3 there are “overview,” “video” and “Twitter” tabs. The content types and number of tabs will vary and be relevant to the query. In the case of Lady Gaga there are additional “events” tabs and “album” tabs. The events tab contains a link to buy tickets. There are also horizontal tabs with related content on top.
Search SVP Shashi Seth told me that there will be more such transactional elements in search results going forward. It doesn’t currently exist but one could easily imagine an embedded OpenTable link tied to a specific restaurant query. And there are other scenarios in which this accordion module could enable actions or transactions. Travel is another category that quickly comes to mind.
I spoke to Seth about the potential appearance of display and rich media advertising in this area of the page. (Earlier today I moderated the SMX East panel on search and display, so it’s on my brain.) He said that isn’t the case at launch but Yahoo has thoughts along those lines in certain commercial contexts.
This module also enables “discovery” of information in a way that traditional search results do not. There’s a mixture of push and pull going on here, which is very interesting. Accordingly it goes beyond the “smart box”/”one box” universal search approach favored in the past couple of years.
Consistent with the notion of making page one more “actionable,” Yahoo is integrating what it calls “quick apps” into search farther down the page. The first of these is a Netflix app that will open a window and enable “Netflix members to add movies to their Queue right from the Search results page.” You could also watch trailers and theoretically stream entire movies in this window.
The philosophy behind all these moves involves taking search “from finding to doing.”
As mentioned, image search is being revamped. Image pages get a new more visually engaging and “immersive” environment. Yahoo is putting more slideshows (from Flickr and other Yahoo sites) in image search results that then lead to pages that look like this:
Beyond this, Yahoo image search will allow people to “view personally meaningful public Facebook albums from friends when they sign-in and connect their Yahoo! accounts to Facebook.”
Finally Yahoo says that iPhone and Android users will see faster and “more sophisticated” search results built on HTML5. The new Yahoo Finance app is an example of this.
This collection of new features and tools rolls out immediately in the US and then globally next year.
Yahoo has been promising UI/UX innovation for many months and these new capabilities represent something of a down payment. However the company says it will continue to do more and go further over the coming months. This “is just the beginning.”
Seth told me that user reaction to the accordion module in user testing had been very positive. What do you think?
Oct 13
I wanted to post about Google’s new two-factor authentication announcement. Two-factor authentication is something you have (e.g. a phone) and something you know (e.g. a password). It’s a Big Deal because if your account or business has two-factor authentication, those accounts are immediately less likely to be phished, hijacked, or otherwise abused. There’s a neat Google Authenticator application that runs on Android, iPhone, and Blackberry:
For the “something you have,” Google provides lots of ways to authenticate:
- SMS, e.g. for cell phones
- a voice phone call, e.g. for landline phones
- authentication apps, e.g. for smartphones that might be abroad or not have a signal. Android, iPhone, and Blackberry phones are supported.
- one-time/single-use codes that you can print out as a final fallback and put in your wallet, desk or a safety deposit box.
This announcement has a few bonus features. Here are some extra-good things that make me happy:
- Two-factor authentication will be offered on all Gmail accounts “in the next few months,” according to TechCrunch.
- You can authenticate a particular browser using cookies for 30 days per browser. So you don’t get bugged with a login message on a computer you use every day, like your home computer.
- Google open-sourced the Android authentication app and according to that page will open-source the iPhone app soon.
- Drew Hintz mentioned in the TechCrunch comments that the Google Authenticator app uses RFC 4226, so a lot of this work is open stuff that people could take and build on.
Drew also does a great job debunking misconceptions in the TechCrunch comments:
“Random commenter: Google wants my phone number? (insert too-much-data-conspiracy here)”
“Drew: Actually, you can use the app if you prefer not to provide a phone number”
Overall, this is a great launch. I’ve seen the pain that a hijacked account can cause, over and over and over again. Don’t just protect yourself with a password. As soon as you can, add an extra layer of protection with two-factor authentication on your account. Two-factor authentication: it’s not just for World of Warcraft any more.
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