Impact Media's SEO Blog

As Social Media continues to expand and lure in vast volumes of Internet traffic, where does its fustier, slower (methodical if you will) and more derided website marketing compadre, SEO, now fit in?

Search Engine Optimisation has been saddled with a reputation for being something of a shadowy practice; online alchemy, created to appease the search engine gods. The thing is though, it works. Better still, it continues to work to this day.

Social Media has emerged from the Friends Reunited Petri dish and exploded into a full-grown living organism, consuming everything in its path; or, at least, nearly everything. Facebook has experienced the most meteoric of rises, propelled by the slipstream of fading stars like MySpace, it has slipped seamlessly into the top 3 sites in the world (2nd by some metrics, 3rd in others) and gained itself over 350 million users.

Thanks to Facebook, along with Twitter, YouTube and a whole multitude of bookmarking cohorts, Social Media has got the world communicating in real-time. This free network of conversations has engulfed the Internet and opened the door of opportunity to marketers. Inevitably, when something huge comes to dominate an entity as the Internet, something has to make way; but is that thing SEO?
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Your website isn’t just another way to let people know where you are. It is the bridging point between your online and offline worlds, it is your businesses major mouthpiece, it is your leading marketing tool.

Once upon a time a laissez-faire approach to Internet marketing would have been understandable, if slightly unadvisable. However, today an Internet presence is a must for any business. Those who have worked hard to establish themselves online a reaping the rewards, whilst those who haven’t are having to work even harder to catch up.
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The Internet has completely changed the way that customers look for and get what they want. It has also changed where they search for and where they buy goods and services. Consequently, those businesses that wish to remain profitable are changing their marketing methods to respond to this transformation in their customer’s buying habits.

Traditional forms of marketing such as newspaper and television advertising, direct mail and cold calling simply do not integrate well with the powerful medium of the Internet and have become less and less effective as a result.

One of the most beneficial ways that the Internet has changed marketing is the dramatic reduction in cost. With direct mail for instance, someone has to be paid to produce the materials that are sent out. This involves designing, writing, editing and printing costs. It’s an expensive way of connecting with a limited number of potential customers and its difficult to measure the success of direct mail. In comparison, email marketing can be performed by anyone with rudimentary marketing skills and a computer.

In the past, a company in Southampton could not easily market their products/services to potential customers in Australia without great cost. Yet the Internet has no geographic boundaries and whatever marketing is prepared for Hampshire can easily be tailored for Queensland. Internet marketers can target customers anywhere in the world and anyone with a computer can respond to their advertising/marketing and purchase goods or services with the click of a button.

With the vast increase in popularity of the Internet, the speed of marketing has changed. Customers can be immediately responding to advertisements that were posted only seconds ago. These adverts can be changed with equal speed to respond to need.

The Internet is driven by information or content. The more high quality content you can provide a potential customer with, the greater your credibility and the increased chances that they will spend their money with you. Both building and web-based businesses need to address this issue and provide potential clients with the information they need to make the decision to buy from you. Again, the production of content is time consuming but not a costly activity, allowing companies of different scales to compete with each other.

Through social marketing, word of mouth or buzz is instantly created around products and brands. Again, social marketing is a low-cost/high benefit method of marketing online. Traditional marketing cannot possibly compete with the efficacy of Internet marketing for speed, accuracy of qualified leads and low costs.

Traditional marketing has been badly affected by the change to Internet Marketing. One only has to see how the commercial television stations have incurred massive debts associated with rapidly decreasing advertising revenue.

In the past 12 months, the traditional marketing department has all but died. Any company that wants to succeed in the new Internet-changed marketplace must create an integrated approach, a strategy for marketing that fuses together limited traditional methods with the multi-faceted approaches of Internet marketing.

In the past, Internet marketing has been ignored, labeled a ‘fad’, a phase that will eventually pass. Those businesses that do not want to disappear in the global recession can’t afford to share this outdated viewpoint.

During a recession, everyone has two objectives: save money and make more. Internet marketing is an effective way to achieve both objectives and here are 5 top tips for marketing during the recession:

1. Smart Spending

Experts at Harvard Business School conclude that spending on marketing and advertising is one of the best ways to beat the recession. But you must get the most for your money. Internet marketing has many advantages over traditional marketing, but the most obvious is the low pricing structures. Internet advertising and marketing are a fraction of the phenomenal sums charged by traditional marketing and advertising agencies.

2: Precision Targeting

Internet marketing helps you connect directly with your potential customers. This is a significant advantage during a recession. Instead of widespread blanket marketing (the expensive kind), you can target your market by the area they are in and precisely how they are choosing to word their searches for your products or services.

To ensure a smart spend, you can target your marketing to a geographic area and set a budget that you can afford. Once you’ve had time to analyse the results, you can make smarter spending decisions.

3. Measure It

To ensure the cost effectiveness, you must be able to measure the success of your marketing. This has traditionally been very difficult to gauge from a television advert or billboard. But online marketing is fully measurable. This means you can analyse how effective your various campaigns are and drop the ones costing you money but not delivering desired outcomes.

Google AdWords is one of the most effective marketing/advertising weapons in your contemporary marketing arsenal. It allows smart spending, precision targeting and measurable results.

4. Give It Away

You may have less money, but you still have another valuable resource, time. Marketing effectively during a recession means building credibility. This involves giving away your expertise for free.

If you sell “Red Widgets” and every time I’ve got a question about my current Red Widget, I find the solution on your website, then I’m much more likely to buy my next Red Widget from you when the time comes. Blogging and article writing are marketing activities that cost only time and build credibility, loyalty and a relationship with your potential clients that begins long before they make the decision to buy from you and continues long after they’ve given you their money.

5. Change Your Story

Your customer tells themselves a story when they consider buying your product. They imagine themselves using, and they tell themselves a story about the benefits that it will bring. Whether it’s new office equipment, a motorbike lift or a piece of software, they tell themselves stories.

But during a recession, the customer’s behaviour changes, the story changes and focuses on security and stability, but also a tiny sliver of hope that they can return to spending freely. When your customer’s story changes you must respond by changing the elements of your business that your customer uses to construct their story.

Even during these recessionary times, Impact Media’s search engine marketing services still offer a cost effective to promote your business online. Find out more and if you’d like a no-obligation proposal as to how we could help, contact us to get full details and a risk-free SEO analysis of your site.

It’s a trying time for UK companies; you can hardly switch on the TV or the radio without hearing about the economic downturn and the gloom of the recession. Business leaders are under great pressure to take stock of their financial situation and cut back wherever possible; every pound saved means less dependence on immediate new business.

However, there is a slight paradox; if companies are to survive the recession and emerge strong and competitive with a healthy market share, then they must continue to invest in their sales and marketing to get more orders.

The wise choice then, is to market your company in a way that provides the best return on your investment. Those companies that have an online presence have an immediate advantage, since online marketing represents the most cost effective and beneficial opportunity to make a healthy profit.

As online marketing goes, the most immediate benefits can be achieved through the use of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategies to push your business to the top of search engine listings in your chosen market.

By investing in the right SEO consultant to collaborate with you, you can increase the number of potential clients that find you online, based on the key words and phrases they have searched for in the likes of Google and Yahoo.

You may have the best products and prices in your market, and the confidence to provide a better service than your competitors, but if people can’t find you near the top of the list, you won’t get the opportunity to win their business.

You don’t need to sell products and services directly online to get the benefit of Search Engine Optimisation. Since a good SEO strategy is multifaceted by using a mix of optimised web copy, site content and article writing there are many different methods to grab the potential customer’s attention.

Once your business has been noticed and given attention by the customer, you can use a variety of cost effect direct marketing techniques (such as e-mail marketing) to encourage them to place an order.

Along those lines, it’s also worth remembering that a good SEO approach cannot only win new clients, but also help develop existing ones. As any marketing manager knows, it’s more profitable to develop additional business from existing clients than to solely rely on new ones, and online marketing is a perfect tool to achieve those results.

As consumers in the private and commercial sector look to get the best value for money in their purchases, they will invariably increase their online buying habits in the search for a better deal. This is comforting news for a marketing manager who is looking towards a strong online marketing push to get results.

Search Engine Optimisation is regarded by Internet experts and business leaders as the most effective and efficient way to transform your online presence into orders. SEO is a high impact tactic, and most importantly in these tough times, offers an excellent return on your investment.

If you’re a business looking to maximise the return on your marketing investment, Impact Media can help with cost effective SEO services.

One of the benefits of online marketing when compared to offline alternatives is the huge reduction in costs. There are many financial benefits to Internet marketing, here are just a few explained:

Cheap but Effective
Kicking off, one of the major benefits of marketing online is that it is very cost effective. In fact it’s not only much cheaper than traditional advertising, but it’s also many times more efficient because it only targets the people that you want to target, rather than blanketing whole groups of people by location or broadcasting region.

With online marketing, you only pay for what you use. Take a look at Pay Per Click or PPC, you only pay for when interested people from your target market click on your ads, that saves money, time, and only attracts the already interested to your website. With lower costs and more precise targeting, online marketing seems like a no-brainer!

Cutting Expenditure
One of the top financial benefits of online marketing is that you can reduce your annual expenditure by making most of the process from advertising through to purchase automated. You will need someone to direct your online marketing, but you can reduce your sales and marketing salary costs.

If most of your sales process now takes place online, you can move to smaller premises, because you won’t need the physical space and that means a reduction in rent, utilities and insurance. What’s more if you use a catalogue for your products, you can avoid costly printing and distribution costs.

Global Marketing Power
Online marketing means that you can sell to anyone at any time. You don’t need a physical store because you have an online store that is open 24/7. This means you can sell your products to anyone, anywhere around the clock. You’re no longer restricted by time and location considerations. Your revenue potential just increased while your costs have diminished!

Staying Power
When you use article marketing as a tool, you may pay once for someone to write that article, but it will stay on the Internet for many years to come. Where else can you place a marketing proposition and have it stay around pointing at your products and services indefinitely for no added cost?

Emails Cost Nothing
Compared to direct marketing or telemarketing, email marketing costs relatively nothing, yet you get to deliver your proposition directly to your target market. You can send thousands of targeted messages directly into the homes and offices of your potential or existing customers with immediate responses.

Measure your Return on Investment
Unlike traditional methods of advertising, you can immediately measure you ROI with online marketing. This is particularly the case with PPC advertising where analytical tools help you to track sales from specific ads through to conversion. This helps you to reduce costs even further by discontinuing ads that aren’t working. With a television advert or billboard, it would be impossible to test the success as accurately.

Online marketing has revolutionised marketing, advertising and sales, it offers great financial benefits and if you’re not using it to its full potential then you’re wasting a great opportunity!

Social media is an instrument that businesses in the United Kingdom can benefit from. The Internet is a powerful tool for marketing your business and more companies than ever throughout the UK are turning to social media to make a connection with their potential and established clients/customers.

What do we mean by social media? It’s an overarching term to describe websites and web tools that allow user communication and interaction. A social media site or tool allows all to participate in the creation of content. Great examples are YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Digg and Twitter. It offers users the ability to connect, communicate and feedback on topics. Social media has many applications and benefits for business.

One of the simplest and largest benefits to any UK-based business using social media is what you get for your money. It’s a very low risk enterprise and the outlay is often minimal and much more effective than traditional advertising methods. You get more for your money.

Another strong benefit is the ability of your customers to provide you with immediate feedback. There’s never been such an immediate and effective way to receive feedback from your client base. Now you can know immediately what they think of your latest update, your newest product or a change in your policies. Whenever Facebook changes a feature, its users immediately begin to discuss it and it makes the International news. Social media is a source of publicity good and bad, but it all creates a buzz around your business.

A further benefit is that you can choose which social media site or tool works best for your business. If you want to update your customers about your latest range of products without much effort, you can use Twitter, a micro blogging tool. However, if you want to speak directly to a large amount of the general public, you can use YouTube to get your message out across the entire world, simply and at low or no cost at all.

A very possible benefit offered by social media is the opportunity to allow your potential customers and clients to get to know and trust you long before they purchase from you. They come to think of you as part of their sphere, they look to you for knowledge, advice, they may even attempt to connect directly with you and this offers them a greater sense that you are a credible and trustworthy source. Then, when it’s time to buy a product/service that you offer, they’ll think of you.

Are you unsure about something in your business? Do you need to know what your customers think before you make a decision? Bingo! Just ask them directly and they’ll give you their honest opinion. You no longer need to make decisions based on luck, you can connect with the people who already buy what you sell and they’ll offer you their truthful opinion. Businesses never had this level of connection to their customers before.

Take advantage of social media marketing, it’s low cost and highly effective, businesses can no longer afford to ignore it!

Further Reading:

Marketers Moving to Social Media (eMarketer)

Recently the Government announced their plan that every home in the UK would have broadband by 2012. By that date, marketing experts project that the Internet will have overtaken all other forms as the dominant advertising source in the market. The result is that any retailer that doesn’t adjust their approach to the changing marketplace will sink – like Woolworths.

The marketplace has already changed, the rules have changed and companies that do not rethink their approach to marketing will simply disappear. The traditional approach to marketing is to sell an average product to the average person through mass marketing. It requires huge amounts of money aimed at interrupting enough people with regularly placed television, radio and newspaper adverts. It’s a numbers game, interrupt enough people often enough and they’ll buy your product. (You hope!)

But times have changed. Companies that have embraced the new marketing approaches are succeeding because their attitude to business has changed too. The entire company has embraced the change in the marketplace. The market doesn’t wait, it wants it right now. The market wants specifically what they came looking for, and if you spam them with general adverts on television or email, they’ll fast forward or press delete.

Let’s look at two old marketing approaches:

Take Direct Mail Marketing. Imagine you send out a marketing letter to all of the people on your mailing list in London. Paper, envelope, printing, and postage – all costs. Statistically, you will get a 1% response rate. So oftentimes, your sales division is working hard to cover the costs of marketing to 1% of your customers.

Take television advertising. The most expensive form of old-style advertising. Its aim is to interrupt and influence people’s future decision-making. Yet, research shows that only 7% of people could remember ads and which company they were for. Well, 7% is better than 1%, but at what cost?

Now consider the new approach to marketing, online or Internet marketing. What’s so good about it? It’s cheap, it’s quick and it’s without boundaries. These days people want to pay less and they want what they’re looking for immediately. If I want to purchase some vitamins, I want them now. So I go online, read about them, see who has the best brands at the best prices, and order them so that I have them tomorrow. People go from interest to ownership, prospect to customer within minutes. You’ve cut out time for indecision, you’ve cut out time to forget the advert and you’ve cut out the fast forward button.

The distance between company and consumer has reduced, the distance between advert and action has been compacted – speed has become essential. BUT – speed means we’re less patient. Tell us what we want to know now, or risk deletion, so when someone makes it to your website, or reads your permission-given email, you better be prepared, or you’re going in the trash.

Woolworths are re-emerging; they’re going to operate as an online store. But if Woolworths try to run their new business using their old business marketing tactics, mark our words, they won’t last long.

These days, when someone has a problem, they go to the Internet for the solution.  Smart Internet marketers have learned to offer their products and services in the form of solutions to those problems.  Nothing could be truer than the area of health and healthcare.  These days, before they even think of calling the Doctor’s Surgery, many people Google their symptoms to see what they can find out.   Even when they’ve been to the Doctor, people still search for more information around what they’ve been told by their physician.

UK Healthcare Spend Continues to Rise

The average family in the UK now spends £1200 per year on private healthcare.  Where do those families look for details of private healthcare providers? The answer, of course, is the Internet and the companies that appear on the first page of Google for the search term they used when looking for their solution.

In the past few years at Impact Media Ltd, we’ve seen an increase in companies looking to us for help in marketing their healthcare products and services online.  Why? Because quite rightly, they want to share in the £15 billion spent each year on private healthcare!

Marketing Healthcare Online Works!

Many of the big companies have already got their Internet marketing organised, and by people finding them first when searching online, they’re taking the lion’s share of the healthcare target market online.  But SMEs don’t have to sit back and take their meagre leftovers! Many smaller and medium-sized healthcare businesses are fighting back, using the latest Internet marketing techniques that can really help them compete with the big boys.

There’s no point signing up with a company that’s offering you quick success.  First of all, there’s no such thing.  Guarantees are worth nothing when it comes to Internet marketing; what counts are the results.  Always look for a company that allows you the time to assess results and doesn’t tie you into a lengthy contract.

Even if you’re confident about designing and building a website and selling from it, you might not have the knowledge to promote your business effectively online.  Traditional marketing techniques need an overhaul when applied to the Internet and specialist skills and knowledge are now required.  What you need is month by month support and assistance in building your company’s online presence and very soon, you’ll start seeing results: Increased Google placement, improved traffic to your website, new sign-ups, orders and sales.

Whether you want to start off just improving your natural search results, or start paying for online ads to massively ramp up the flow of traffic to your site, an online marketing agency can meet your needs at each stage of development.

The best approach to Internet marketing is a blended one.  By combining SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) for a higher Google ranking, plus carefully crafted keyword targeted AdWords for an increased supply of qualified traffic, you’ll see more and more customers arriving at your site.  Of course, this means your company website needs to be ready to handle qualified traffic from people interested in your buying your product or services.  So, now’s the time to update your site if it isn’t ready!

If you’re a marketing professional looking to promote a healthcare business online, take a look through some of our SEO case studies to see how we could help your business attract more qualified leads.

It’s well documented that marketing to social networkers has not turned out to be the golden goose that many had predicted.

Where search dominates online marketing opportunities, many companies are finding that, despite reaching a level of maturity in Internet terms, the social media sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo etc., are struggling to turn high visitor numbers into meaningful ad revenues.

Now, an article from eMarketer – Social Networkers Aren’t There for Ads – highlights the fact that many social networkers still shun advertising with a high proportion seeing it as inappropriate to have their personal information utilised for marketing purposes.

At Impact Media, our social media marketing services can help you pick your way through this marketing jungle and develop a strategy that fits with your business objectives.

Twitter is a micro-blogging tool that allows short messages (called Tweets) of up to 140 characters to be instantly shared with others via the Internet or mobile phones.  Like updating your status on FaceBook, it allows everyone within your network (known as Followers) to immediately catch your latest messages and read, reply or comment upon them.  It’s a free service that allows anyone to publish their thoughts, ideas or messages to anyone wishing to ‘follow’.

Twitter’s potential for use as a business marketing tool is only just being tapped.  But Internet marketers and online business owners are already using it as a valuable device in their overall marketing mix.  Clearly, the simplicity of this free service offers business tremendous opportunities.  Companies in the US such as Southwest Airlines have used Twitter to build loyalty and increase their high quality of customer service.

Potential Uses of Twitter for Business Marketing:

• Offer customers/clients an intimate insight into the workings of your company
• Offer incredible promotional opportunities, an instant FREE PR tool
• Target the specific customers/clients you wish to reach
• Provide instantly updated product/service information
• Gives potential for future Pay-to-Follow Services
• Perfect for influencing Online Reputation Management
• Build brand loyalty by offering exclusive news and offers via Twitter
• Instantly inform ‘Followers’ of the latest offers, sales and other promotions
• Create mass and immediate buzz around a Product/Service launch
• Clickable tiny URL links can be added to Tweets
• Allow Followers to provide immediate feedback on Product/Services

Many high profile users are on Twitter.  Both Barack Obama and John McCain used Twitter in the run up to the US Presidential Election.  It worked for one of them!

Concerns About Using Twitter for Business Marketing:

• The casual nature of the Tweets can be deceptive; people can reveal more than they would normally be willing to do in any other medium
• Twitter presents things a distinct way, it’s aesthetically ugly
• It’s easy to pretend to be someone else on Twitter; anyone could set up a Twitter pretending to be your company (e.g. Fake Steve Jobs’)
• People need to log in to Twitter in order to use it, if users aren’t regular followers
• High volume of Tweets can be very irritating for customers/clients
• Twitter is not always a reliable service and has crashed in the past, wiping all of its data.   There are new third party tools to prevent this though
• Twitter is still relatively new and has not been properly evaluated as a marketing tool.  Insufficient data exists with regards to its effectiveness
• Misuse of Twitter could seriously damage your company’s online reputation
• Pay to Follow Services are not yet available

Twitter may be the latest zeitgeist Internet based marketing tool, but it cannot succeed alone.  If you’re planning on using Twitter for Business, it needs to be another useful tool in the Marketing arsenal of your company.  Combined with the other elements of your marketing mix, Twitter can be a powerful promotional tool.

With the rise of the Internet as the most powerful business tool created, there has never been such a need for words. Regardless of developments in Internet video, the World Wide Web is still a text-driven medium. With blogs, articles, advertising and website text all needing words, copywriting has taken on a new importance in the battle for online presence. Words have always had great power, now they’ve taken on a vital significance for all companies that do business on the web.

But copywriting for the web is not like copywriting in the traditional sense. The requirements of Internet copy and the psychology of the Internet readership are very different from those involved in print copywriting. What’s more, SEO copywriting, the craft of creating copy that appeals both to human readers but also exploits SEO principles to attract higher Search Engine Rankings (SERPS) is an entirely different game.

The SEO copywriter needs to constantly balance the needs of their human reader with the need to maintain strong connections to Google and the other Search Engines. Writing for the Search Engines requires an awareness of what they are looking for. Ensuring that the article is topical, entirely original and contains the important keywords at an appropriate density is only the starting point of SEO copywriting.

The trouble is that even inserting the keywords is enough to flummox the average amateur copywriter. Sentences stuffed with keywords make little sense and the human reader clicks away to another page immediately.

Instead, SEO copy needs to appear like any other form of copy, well written, informative and engaging whilst retaining the highest possible optimisation factor. This requires expert writing skills to blend the SEO into the already tight copy.

Web copywriting is about grabbing the attention of the human reader who is already distracted by images, offers and enticements. Maintaining their interest with relevant and topical content known as ‘web copy’ is the next essential element of successful web copywriting. Web copy should differ from traditional written English because it is more accessible, less formal, and closer to the way that we speak.

The next stage is to lead the reader to the point of making a decision. The original meaning of the word ‘decision’ means to cut oneself off from all other options and choices. The persuasive copywriter invisibly removes all objections and concerns whilst leading the reader to the point of making the decision to click.

The aim of good web copywriting is to hook the human reader into staying at the website long enough to make that all-important click, to compel them to take action. This is the final stage of web copywriting.

Above all things, SEO copywriting creates crisp, attractive text that moves the reader towards the point of action. At the same time, it blends in optimisation techniques that ensure that the copy gets read. Without the SEO element, no matter how good the copy, if no one can find it, they cannot read it.

Excellent website copy is the correctly judged balance between highly compelling copy and expertly optimised text. If you need SEO copy, use SEO copywriting services.

When it comes to Social Media, Web 2.0 or whatever it’s called, there’s a lot of companies trying to find a way to cash in on the trend of connecting with people (known or unknown) online and finding happiness in having so many friends…

Anywhere there’s a gathering of people, there’s sure to be advertisers wanting to unlock some cash from these social groups but how effective is it?

At this point I should declare that at Impact Media, we are performing a full evaluation of the Social Media space but do not currently offer professional services in this area.

Aaron Wall has recently published a great article – The Inconvenient Truth About Social Media Marketing – which basically suggests this area does not monetise. Of course, others would beg to differ and, looking at some of the multi-million dollar tie ups between major software companies, search engines and the current darlings of social media, you’d have to believe that there is gold in them there hills!

Purely from a marketing perspective, I guess my advice to anyone looking at investing in this marketplace right now, is to tread carefully and ensure that you take small steps and carry out tests just as you would any other Internet marketing platform. If you’re a business looking to sell more products or services, I would also ensure that you’ve fully exploited the more orthodox search marketing efforts, e.g. search engine optimisation and pay per click before moving into Social Media.

Meanwhile, I’m off to buy myself a white elephant