Jivox

Archive for September, 2009

21 September 2009

Online Marketing Musts: Directory Listings

Making sure your business shows up on Google Local, Yelp, Yellowpages.com and other locally focused directory services is key to driving traffic to your site and through your door, but working with these services can be a bit tricky.  Some of them allow you to create your own listings, such as Google Local Business Center, Yellowpages.com and Superpages, while others focus on enabling users to enter ratings and reviews, such as Yelp and Angie’s List.  However, even these “unbiased” sites allow a bit of leeway for businesses to enhance their listings with additional information and special offers, or to buy paid ads alongside the reviews.

Here’s a quick overview of a few sites where your business should be listed:

Google Local Business Center

http://www.google.com/local/add/

It’s free to create a listing on Google Local, and you can specify a map location, opening hours, website, services etc. There is no way to pay to have your ad appear higher up in search listings, but you can try some simple techniques to improve the quality of the listing, hoping it gets moved up in the rankings. This blog post has a lot of helpful techniques on improving your listing in Google Local: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/enhance-your-google-local-listings/5423/.

Yellowpages.com

Owned by AT&T, this digital version of the old-school book claims to get 125 million monthly searches. They offer a very basic free listing, but it costs more if you want to add details, site links and images.

Yelp.com

Yelp has become the go-to site for many consumers when looking for local businesses, both online and on the iPhone, so it’s essential to have this site on your radar.  Yelp is a primarily a user-generated review site, with anyone able to add a listing for free and comment on the company’s products or services. But Yelp also allows business owners to create a profile, if their customers haven’t already created one for them. You can also “unlock” your page if it’s already created, adding specific information about your business and tracking visits, comments, number of reviews etc. Yelp also offers enhanced listings, where businesses can pay to move a positive review closer to the top of the page.

Angie’s List

This review site does not allow businesses to create their own listings. However, local service businesses can buy paid ads on the site, but only if your business is already listed and has a “B” rating or higher. Companies can also pay to add coupons to their business listings.

There are many other local directory listing services, including Yahoo Local, as well as vertical sites like Opentable and Menupages for restaurants, or SpaFinder for health and beauty businesses, or ServiceMagic for home improvement businesses. Investigating the directory services that make sense for your business is a key step in attracting new customers.

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16 September 2009

7 Paths to Viral Video Marketing Success

By Jeremy Scott of ReelSEO

Viral videos are the Holy Grail of Internet Marketing. Every individual, marketing firm, and corporation is striving to create a piece of video content that goes viral…  Read the whole story > >

Great article by Jeremy Scott of ReelSEO. Highly recommended. -Jivox team.

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16 September 2009

Online Marketing Musts: Using Search to Attract Customers

As a small business owner, chances are you’ve had a website for some time. Perhaps you’ve also accumulated a decent number of reviews on Yelp or another online directory service, and now you’re ready to take your online marketing strategy to the next level. Where should you begin?

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing some tips on how to jump headfirst into the world of online marketing – starting today with Search.

What do you do when you’re looking for an Indian restaurant, or a chiropractor, or a putt-putt golf course in your area?  You go to Google, Yahoo or Bing or another search engine and type in some keywords, right?

The first step to driving sales is to help people find your website through these searches, and there are two main ways to make your site show up in more searches: paid search and natural search.

Paid search, also called search engine marketing (SEM), is a good place to start. Paid search ads work pretty much the same for all search engines and show up next to natural search results and usually are comprised of a simple one- to three- word headline and a line or two of text offering a promotion. An example of a search ad would be: “Ganges Restaurant – The Best Curry in San Francisco.”

To get started, launch a small campaign on Google AdWords (http://adwords.google.com).  Google AdWords enables you to choose relevant keywords or key phrases (such as “Indian restaurant”, “San Francisco Indian restaurant” and “best San Francisco Indian restaurant”) to your business, create text ads to be displayed on search results and specify a budget for your SEM campaign. Based on your budget and ROI goals, you can specify a maximum price you’re willing to pay per click for each of your keywords. Usually, the more specific the keywords, the lower the keyword bids will be. So, to keep your costs down, identify the niche keywords that are specific to your business, specialty, product, services or location, and test and see how they perform from an ROI perspective.

Another way to keep costs down is to make sure your ads are shown to only those people most likely to buy your product or service using Google AdWords targeting tool. With it, you can geographically target your ads by zip code, city, state, by demography and even by days of the week and times of the day. Google’s comprehensive reporting tool shows you how many people clicked on an ad and how many of those visitors eventually made a purchase providing you insert Google tracking codes on the pages of your web site (ask your web site administrator for help). Remember to start small; try a few keywords and see what happens.

Google also offers a free web site analytics platform called Google Analytics (http://analytics.google.com) which shows you details of your website traffic like visits to your site, the most popular pages, navigation trends, time spent on your site, traffic sources and much more to help you better understand your web traffic and optimize your site to increase traffic.

Paid search works great – it’s one of the most effective forms of online marketing – but it also can be expensive. Luckily, buying keywords isn’t the only search marketing game in town. You should also leverage natural search, using tried-and-true methods to get your website to appear higher in the natural search rankings. This more cost-effective way to help visitors find your site is called search engine optimization (SEO). This technique involves modifying your website to make it easy for search engines to find. Your goal is to appear in the top five search listings – the higher up the better!

There are many sites that provide SEO tips and tricks, but a good place to start is to add keyword meta-tags to your site, add tagged and indexed video content, and use relevant and popular keywords throughout the content of your site.  Ask your webmaster to add keyword meta-tags to your site, or check out this article on adding meta-tags yourself.

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3 September 2009

Establish the Right Vibe: How to use video advertising to attract a crowd

By FuelNet

FuelNet presents a case study on how one smart owner of a growing business caught the attention of her target demographic through one of the Web’s creative advertising techniques: video.

PROBLEM: Alicia Petrakis, co-owner of Astaria Restaurant and Bar in San Mateo, Calif., was frustrated. The restaurant had inherited an older clientele from the previous owner, and Petrakis hoped to expand the customer base to a younger, late-evening crowd. But despite the restaurant’s new décor, concept, and updated seasonal menu, her target audience (ages 25 to 50) was not responding to Astaria’s newspaper ads.

SOLUTION: Petrakis worked with Jivox, a do-it-yourself online video ad service based in San Mateo, to serve up messaging targeted to a livelier, hipper crowd. The company created a pop-up ad with a video component and ran it only on Web sites in the San Mateo area. “We went where the people we wanted in here go for information,” Petrakis notes. “Jivox is like having your own media buyer. They created the online advertising campaign based on our target demographic.”

The ad’s visuals showed off Astaria’s sophisticated vibe and cozy space — complete with images of customers enjoying live music in the bar and, of course, the mouthwatering food. “With online video, people have the opportunity of being much more comfortable with their choice,” Petrakis points out. “It’s more effective than single-image ads on sites like Yelp. And it reaffirms the customer’s choices — you can’t do that in a print ad.”

Petrakis, who plans to update the video ad at least twice a year as part of her Internet advertising efforts, has seen significant business growth since the video launched. “Having a strong Web presence has changed our business dramatically,” she says. “We’ve had a 35 percent increase in sales at a time when other restaurants are struggling.”

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1 September 2009

Five Killer Marketing Videos You Can Create on a Budget

by Jivox

In a world where your potential customers are bombarded with marketing messages, an entertaining or useful video that communicates about your brand in a subtle way is one of the best ways to “get through” to your audience. According to MarketingSherpa, 95% of the marketers that have used online video marketing are happy with the results and expect to use it again in the future.

Here are five different ideas for marketing videos that won’t cost an arm and leg to produce. You can make these videos with a small handheld camera and, when needed, some simple online editing software.

 1. Customer testimonials – As a small business, your satisfied customers are your biggest asset. Put them to work! Ask your best customers to film a short clip of them talking about why they like your products or services, and then post these videos on your site and on YouTube. You can also distribute a link to these videos as part of an email newsletter or promotional email campaign. Another take on this is to allow customers to film their own testimonials or video product reviews, and allow them to upload them to a consumer review area of your site – but make sure to review the videos first for quality and overall message.

 2. Product demonstrations – You have a great product or service, so show people how it works! Film an employee demonstrating your product, or if you offer a service, show a practitioner in action. For destinations like restaurants and hotels, film the environment, giving a mini-tour of the space. These demonstrations should be short, to-the-point, and not overtly salesy. Think of them as a useful service for your customers.

 3. Video promotions – In addition to promoting special offers using email or on your web site, why not create a few video promotions? Film a short “commercial” of your product, service, or destination to show its great attributes, and add a voiceover telling people about a current special offer, such as a discount, deal, or promotion. To get maximum exposure for your offer, put the video on your site and on YouTube, include a link to the video offer in an email campaign, and place the video on a targeted video ad network.

 4. Branded entertainment – Chances are, you’ve got an amateur video producer on staff or have a friend with a creative flair – get them to shoot some fun videos for your brand. For example, if you run a hotel, create a travelogue video of your city, filming local scenery, interviews with café owners, shots of museums; one of your employees can play the irreverent guide. Place subtle cues about your brand in the video, or just make it entertaining and, at the end, note that it was “sponsored by XX brand” and post your website URL. To drive maximum sharing, make sure to seed it on YouTube and other video-sharing sites, social networks, Twitter etc.

 5. Troubleshooting/Self Service – If you sell a product, chances are your customers come to your site if the product malfunctions. Film one of your employees fixing common problems, demonstrating that most issues are simple to fix. You can also show customers how to service their own products, eliminating calls to the help desk.

These are just a few ideas to get you started. The best thing about marketing with video is you can be creative – so have fun!

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