What are the main costs in your marketing plan?

it strongly depends on who heads marketing in the organization and how open the organization is towards exploring new trends.

This openness will then result in some maverick thinking towards exploring new ideas of marketing, for instance one concept I developed together with a client which consisted of significantly declining budget for PI.

We then went ahead and all contacted relevant blogs run by private people and got fixed cost ad-space for a 100 EUR or less.

You see, there are too many variables, and I believe that trends are thus not really doable in detail.

Generally speaking by now EVERY marketer, regardless of their quality, has understood that social media is the place to go (it’s not only) but not figured out that there is more to success on the web.

How users search: I am looking for research on how consumers use native language for their keywords or phrases

Important to understand is the context you’re looking at.

For a search engine strategy and the internationalization aspects therein you will want to consider asking native speakers of that specific language.

In my book “Adding the E to your Business Strategy” (available on Amazon.com) I outlined specifically that issue of having – for example – a website only in English but wanting to attract clients speaking other languages simply because most people worldwide speak a sufficient amount of English but search in their native language.

Based on that you might want to contact emarketer.com whether or not they have data like that available.

How much navigation on PPC or organic landing pages used for lead conversion?

I am currently exploring the back to the roots thang…

Do you remember when we had frames in websites and the menu was CONSTANTLY visible?

This is what my people have solved through divs and CSS somehow.

Reason is that pages are becoming longer and longer because of the amount of content that has to be conveyed.

From a usability aspect (people don’t like to scroll 10 pages up to get to the menu) I had the idea of taking the route pointed out above and gave that to my designers who did a pretty nifty job with it, as I think.

I wrote about the topic in a white paper called “Web Trends 2010″ – You can download it in the section called “Publications”.

How do you use mobile in your marketing mix?

As one of the driver channels of traffic to the main platform, the website. As for the measurements et. al.:

I have only implemented measures like those a few times.

The outcome was not really significant as the brands I was working for were not really dependent on that channel.

Keep in mind not to waste too much effort/budget/resources on that issue because it’s still not really a prime source (excluding iPhone Apps etc.)

What SEO tools are worth the money?

You should not use paid tools at all, at least not for the page naming, etc.

That should be a native part of your CMS system or design crew.

If they don’t have that on the scope fire them immediately because they’re wasting money.

As for determining keywords et. al. you’ll want to go to the platform you want to put most focus on, which would be Google.

The big G has a free keyword tool that allows you to determine your competition etc.

Next step is link building. That’s a bit of a jiffy because you’ll have to find the right pages associated to your field of business.

Irrelevant links will not be rated as high as above mentioned will.

Why do people say that writing for the web is different? Writing copy is writing copy.

That’s because most copy professionals THINK – despite better knowledge – that copy is copy.

Copy for the web has to sales oriented PLUS include aspects of search engine optimization, including a certain density of relevant keywords in context to the pages general keyword primaries, etc.

I especially love this question from “SEO copywriters” or “blog ghostwriters” which imply that they have understood SEO and related aspects when they’re just cheating people out of their money.

Weekend Reading: Free White Paper for Web 3.0 and Customer Centric Internet Platforms

I published this white paper to outline the definition of Web 3.0 which resembles a customer centric approach on internet platforms.

Here is an excerpt from the Table of Contents:

Step 1: Attracting (the right) people to your website ………………………………………………………….. 6
1.1 Speaking to over 2 billion prospects …………………………………………………………………… 6
1.2 Social Media Marketing……………………………………………………………………………………….. 6
1.2.1 Facebook …………………………………………………………………………………………………… 6
1.2.2 LinkedIn ……………………………………………………………………………………………………. 7
1.2.3 Twitter ……………………………………………………………………………………………………… 8
1.3 Corporate Online Reputation Management ……………………………………………………………….. 9
1.4 Search Engine Optimization …………………………………………………………………………………10
1.4.1 The technical aspect …………………………………………………………………………………….10
1.4.2 The Keywords and Content …………………………………………………………………………….10
1.4.3 Your Competition …………………………………………………………………………………………11
1.4.4 Mobile Search Placement ……………………………………………………………………………….11
1.5 Email Marketing ……………………………………………………………………………………………….11
1.6. Mobile Marketing ……………………………………………………………………………………………..12
1.7 Search Engine Marketing & Paid Inclusion………………………………………………………………..12
1.8 Offline Marketing and the internet …………………………………………………………………………13
1.8.1 Offline Advertising ……………………………………………………………………………………….13
1.8.2 Event Marketing ………………………………………………………………………………………….13
Step 2: Your Website…………………………………………………………………………………………………15
2.1 Advanced Web & User Interface Design …………………………………………………………………..15
2.1.1 Accessibility ……………………………………………………………………………………………….15
2.1.2 Mobile Devices ……………………………………………………………………………………………16
2.1.3 Navigation and Menus …………………………………………………………………………………..17
2.1.4 Search Ability on your site ……………………………………………………………………………..17
2.2 User Experience ……………………………………………………………………………………………….18
2.3 Web Analytics ………………………………………………………………………………………………….18
2.4 Proactive Website Visitor Engagement…………………………………………………………………….19
2.5 Corporate Blogging ……………………………………………………………………………………………19
2.6 The Community Aspect of Your Website ………………………………………………………………….19
Step 3: Your Customer Relationship and Knowledge Management ………………………………………….20
Step 4: The Community Metric in your Strategy ………………………………………………………………..21
Free Market Research ……………………………………………………………………………………………..21
Improving Your Products & Services (crowdsourcing) ………………………………………………………22

Have fun reading over the weekend and make sure to call me on Monday to call so that we can make YOU a digital economy leader

DOWNLOAD HERE

Looking to learn more about “geo tagging” and search engine optimization

Google does not reveal all its secrets. Any why should it? The thing about SEO is that you’ll probably want to look at it as a part of your whole web strategy. My experience from consulting several clients around the globe was that the real SEO power came from regularly reoccurring articles. That is why I’m a bit fan of corporate blogs and implement them where ever I get a chance to. As for the positioning of your business on Google Maps et. al.: Manually implement them there with what is now called Google Places. That way you’ll be registered for sure and have control over that entry. Hope I was able to help.

Does online advertising work with anything else than impulse products?

Upon my speech at the Joomla!Dag in Utrecht in 2008 – and afterwards – I talked to several people about CPC and their thoughts about it.

The bottom line was that CPC only – if at all – is successful for impulse products. Thus for products that are “small” in terms of not requiring and reading verbose introductions, are known to people, or are just affordable things.

When it comes to offering services that need a more in-depth demo, you better make sure to have interactivity in form of video, sales presentations and so forth to give your product the personal note and to make your organization seem “accessible” and transparent because a majority of customers shopping the web are still sceptic when it comes to purchasing costly merchandise over the web.

What has your experience been with online advertising campaigns and their results?

German media continues to demonize social media

A few years ago it was the German media proclaimed that blogs had no future simply because they would give away too much information about the users and that they could not be kept private.

I have found my blog to be a most valuable platform – and so do my over 5000 subscribers.

Yesterday I was shocked to see that they haven’t learned and that the witch-hunt seems to continue: only with a different “witch”.

Now German media outlets, especially the Westdeutscher-Rundfunk (Government-related tv station), has repeatedly aired programs which totally falsify information in context to social networks.

Therein they stated that the information which people upload and enter on to social networks are indexed by search engines instead of the truth that they are only searchable if I the user decide that they should be.

A long line of arguments followed, totally torn out of context, but the primary indicators that this piece of “information” was not really true was that Facebook had 2 million members.

While this may be true for Germans registered on Facebook it was not mentioned by the network that they have a few million more.

If this trend of negative propaganda should continue I think a lot of German companies will endanger their competitiveness on the global markets as they have done with not embracing blogs. Most German companies could be doing better in terms of search engine score and public relations work if they were to utilize these and other great instruments out there.

Let’s see what the next trend in 2010 will be and what stories German media outlets will come up with to demonize those.