Online Marketing & Advertising

The Website – Basic Elements A home page which provides a brief “storefront” for your company and a navigation bar that allows visitors to navigate to the other pages on the site An “about us” section which describes a bit of your company’s background, personnel, and competitive differentiators Contact information Profiles of your products and services. The website can also include a great deal of additional information, such as pages where visitors can purchase your products & services and detailed help functions and documentation for your customers.

Modular Materials – Online Platforms “Keywords” that can be recorded in advertising platforms such as Google’s AdWords and display a link to your company’s website when internet users search on terms related to your company’s products & services. Banners which feature attractive visual graphics and offer discounts, free samples, and similar promotions, to be placed on high-traffic websites such as search engines and news outlets. Blast s which feature anywhere from a few lines to a paragraph or two of text, as well as attractive visual graphics, to be sent to mailing lists of addresses of your existing or potential customers.

Modular Materials – Online Platforms Blog postings which feature anywhere from a couple paragraphs to a couple pages of text, with embedded branded background graphics, on topics such as “how to” guidance, opinion pieces on current business topics, or “white papers” on topics related to your products & services, to be posted on a variety of industry information and opinion websites. Social media profiles featuring graphics, biographical information, contact information, photos, audio files, and video files about your company, products, and services, to be posted on social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Circles. “Tweet” messages consisting of a single sentence (140 characters or less) and featuring news and information about your company, products, and services, to be posted on social media platforms such as Twitter. Additional materials such as Groupon offers, postings with local guide services, and other platforms mentioned by your beta customers.

Platform Details PlatformPrice*Useful Optimization Apps Comments** Website$ (domain name) $10-20/mo. (basic web hosting) Website Grader (rates site performance to help optimize your site) Zemanta (helps you produce online content)  The website is your location for offering a rich, wide range of information about your business and your products & services. It is the “home base” to which your various other online advertising elements send customers. Pay Per Click (AdWords) $1.04 (cost per click) $3.97 (CPM) Google XML Sitemap (helps Google and other search engines index your blog postings better)  Pay per click is a virtual must for any business. The reporting functionality of Google’s AdWords, and the opportunity to tailor your keywords, gives most businesses, at the very least, a useful market research tool. Average conversion rates of less than $20 also make this an extremely affordable way to acquire customers for those businesses which can effectively tailor their keywords and product/service offering.

Platform Details PlatformPrice*Useful Optimization Apps Comments** Banners$1.50-$17.26 (CPM) My Etsy (helps to import your banners into Facebook pages)  Banner advertisements are not as efficient as pay-per-click models such as AdWords, but there are a lot more websites where you can place them. You can expand your reach and the visibility of your brand name by placing banners on a variety of news, industry association, and thought leadership websites.  CPM rates vary based on the audience of the website where you place the banner. Blast s$ / address $ (CPM) Mail Chimp (helps you manage customer newsletters)  Blast s offer you the option to “push” your products/services to customers, rather than “pulling” them to you passively by waiting for them to click on your advertisement or contact you.  Buyerzone.com (see sources of additional information below) offers an overview of a variety of mailing list brokers.

Platform Details PlatformPrice*Useful Optimization Apps Comments** Blog Postings$13+ per blog posting if done by a professional Editorial Calendar (helps you to manage your blog postings with drag-and-drop functionality)  Blogs offer a more subtle, indirect marketing opportunity. They allow you to communicate information about your products/services to thought leaders, or contribute to thought leadership by offering expert opinions or white papers.  The decision on whether to hire a professional blogger or not depends on your level of expertise in blog-relevant topic areas, the breadth of your knowledge of where to post blog postings, and your available time. If you are an expert in thought leadership and know where to post, you can get a lot of value out of blogging by yourself. If not, your blog postings will come off as much more professional, and get exposed to a much broader audience, if you hire a professional.

Platform Details PlatformPrice*Useful Optimization Apps Comments** FacebookFreeSend Social Media (allows you to post content to Facebook and 30+ other social media networks)  Facebook allows you to post more “touchy-feely” content about your business, such as photos, videos, and employee profiles. The effectiveness of Facebook as a marketing platform for your company depends on how well you understand your customers’ personal life habits, and how their feelings about your employees as people impacts their propensity to purchase your products/services. The best way to generate buzz about your company on Facebook may be to start with posting content which some of your closest customers find personally interesting (like feel- good stories about employees or entertaining videos), then allow these customers to “like” your content and share it with others.

Platform Details PlatformPrice*Useful Optimization Apps Comments** LinkedInFreeCreative Portfolio Display (allows you to display creative work and other rich media in a format which fits in with LinkedIn’s resume- oriented layout)  LinkedIn offers similar content-posting opportunities to Facebook, but the community is more professional-oriented. The content is much more oriented around the resumes of your employees than around photos or videos. To generate buzz about your company on LinkedIn, you can focus more on your employees’ professional background. The more different companies your staff have been associated with, and the more areas where they are seen is experts of some kind, the more professionals who are interested in these companies and expertise areas will become linked you your employees and thereby exposed to your company.

Platform Details PlatformPrice*Useful Optimization Apps Comments** Google CirclesFreeDocument Display (allows you to give visitors to your website or blog postings the ability to “like” content in Facebook)  Google Circles is in some ways a hybrid of Facebook and LinkedIn. It is well integrated with the rest of the Google set of cloud productivity applications and other Google features, but the community has a relatively small base of users at present. TwitterFreeCrowdbooster (allows you to measure and manage Twitter marketing efforts)  Twitter should perhaps best be seen as a way of broadcasting short announcements about your company. Since the broadcasts only go out to the community of Twitter users who “follow” a certain person or company, your best strategy for generating buzz about your company through Twitter initially may be to get well-known individuals or companies with large Twitter followings to mention your company in their Tweets. The more you build up your own network of Twitter followers, however, the more you can use the platform to broadcast news about special offers or new products/services.

Search Engine Optimization Once you have your basic online marketing portfolio together, you can move on to maximizing the frequency and salience with which potential customers find information about your company while utilizing major search engines such as Google and Bing. Search engine optimization involves augmenting certain factors, such as the text, media, and embedded data features contained in your website, blog postings, and social media profiles, as well as enhancing the number of other websites which “reference” your online materials with links, which are indexed in the algorithms which these search engines use to identify the most relevant results for users. In addition to the free software tools available via Google’s Webmaster Tools and Bing’s Webmaster Center, there are a variety of SEO software & service vendors, such as SEOMoz, SEOP, and Qualified Impressions, which off you a flexible range of options based on your budget.

Search Engine Optimization Application/ServicePrice*Comments** Webmaster Tools (Google)FreeSoftware dashboard provided by Google. Allows you to do-it-yourself in optimizing how your website gets indexed by Google. Webmaster Center (Bing)FreeSimilar dashboard to Google’s Webmaster Tools for optimizing how your website is indexed by Bing. SEOMoz$ per month Offers more robust monitoring and reporting features than the basic features offered by the search engines for free. Also allows you to optimize blog postings and other web content from the same dashboard you use to optimize your main website. SEOP$1,000+ per month An internet marketing agency, as opposed to a software application like SEOMoz. Qualified Impressions$250-2,000 per month A bit more affordable service provider option compared to SEOP.

Additional Information For additional information, please consult the document “Digital-Virtual World White Paper” on Blackboard