You need to be sure that your digital marketing is placed with a business that really understands the marketplace… and we do: every one of our services is something that we do – day in, day out. You can also discover what makes working with Ergo Digital so different to the norm.

We’re confident that the way we go about things is so measurable and make so much sense, we’d come and visit you at your offices, totally free of charge… on us! You can tell us about your challenges, frustrations or opportunities and we’ll offer free advice and suggestions for you.

It’s easy, just call us on 020 7043 2617 and we can kick off the conversation!

For most, the above page is a dull footnote in the ocean of Google blog posts, but for those using Adwords, this is exactly what we were expecting (and hoping) for.

What Was the Problem

A few years ago, brand owners threatened Google by arguing that they were using their trademarks unlawfully by allowing businesses to use their brands in keywords and adverts.

Brand owners thereby forced Google to let them approve which advertisers could, or could not, use their brand.

If this had been done properly, all well and good, but in our experience what this meant was that brand owners decided that those who offered the best discounts, or special terms, or even import of branded good were effectively barred.

Whilst those who towed the corporate line were given ’special dispensation’.

… Cracks Started to Appear…

However, Google’s first counter to this was to allow advertisers to advertise against branded keywords as long as they didn’t use the branded term in the advert. So, for example, anyone could advertise to searches for ‘Adidas Trainers’ just as long as they didn’t use ‘Adidas’ in their advert.

… It Then Got Ugly…

The upshot of this was, however, ‘ugly’ adverts. For example on ‘Adidas’ trainers then the advertisers would misspell Adidas – Addas, Ad1das, and so on. So, for example, the advert could look like this:

Cheap Ad1das Trainers

From only £29.99 buy Ad1das trainers
With free delivery.

It was soon realised that whilst Adidas could take out further brand protection with Google, they would have to cater for all misspells and then they’d still be dealing with ads which are well written but don’t mention the brand at all.

… Which Brings us to Today…

So, finally the post from Google which has just been announced for the UK: essentially any legitimate store or advertiser of branded goods can use the trademark on Google.

Sense has prevailed at last. But if you think that Google just did it for us, then think again. More brand advertisers is undoubtedly a good thing for advertising revenues. They may be backing ‘the little guys’, but you can be sure that they’re confident it will be worth their while.

After all, it is by increasing the number of advertisers that the big G’s pockets are filled!

An Addendum…

As usual, Yahoo! and MSN are some way behind Google. Just had an email in from one of the two telling me that they were stopping me advertising on a brand name… ah well… give it 6 months to a year and they’ll catch up at the back!

Real World Learning No.1 – Your Website IS Your ‘Store’

We are often asked by clients to ‘fix’ their Pay Per Click campaign, or to get more traffic to their website and yet when we visit the site, it’s clear that the site needs attention first.

Why Put the Site First?

Simply, your site is like a ‘change’ machine and your marketing is like sliding a £10 note into it… you put the money in (marketing) and you wait for your return.

Income < Expenditure?

A site that returns in less than £10 in change to you tells you a very simple message: your site is not optimised and you will lose money if you don’t sort it out.

Therefore your action is not to drive more traffic to it, but to scrutinise your website and work out WHY your site is not performing for you. Look in these places first:

1. Are visitors finding the ‘product’ easily (this can be an actual product, or a service, or a contact form)?
2. Are you charging enough for the product?
3. Do you have the right range of offerings?
4. What are your competitors promoting / offering?

Income = Expenditure?

So, you suddenly start to break even, and for every £10 plugged in, you’re getting £10 out. You’re OK, aren’t you?

Sadly, no, you are not OK. In many respects this is a worse situation to be in than losing money. Why? Because at this level there is a danger you will persevere with your marketing without still addressing your website.

Your action should still be to develop and improve your website. In our opinion every website could do with improvement – so don’t settle too early for ‘mediocre’ – expect more!

Income > Expenditure

OK… now it’s clearing profit and so you think, “this is where I spend more heavily on marketing”. True, it should be BUT the question is HOW. The two observations on marketing spend we would offer to you are these:

• Spending more in Pay Per Click, and other online bid-managed advertising, generally reduces margin. So if your gross profit margin is tight, then don’t go upping spend too much, there is normally a threshold where profit starts reducing so make sure you don’t overbalance when it comes to being more aggressive
• Diversify when increasing spend. Don’t just stick with a narrow range of sites or marketing media, find other routes to market and other means of placing your offers

Not only that, but don’t forget your site. It’s too easy to sit back and believe that you’ve got it made once there is some profit. Continue to work on your site, improve, fine tune and tweak – squeeze as much performance out of it as you can get.

It is like the real world in that respect. Shop, catalogue and direct mail all measure the performance of their marketing and their main focus is first on the proposition and how it monetises interest and potential customers: scrutnising conversion rate and spend.

You’ve got to look at your website in a similar way!

“The amount of these £$*%£$ trees I have to see EVERY week. They’re a real pain. An imported blight. It would be better if it were chopped down.”

We replied

“True. But where would your business be if it weren’t for these trees?”

The surgeon went very quiet.

That’s it in a nutshell: we deal with loads of suppliers, partners and clients… and it’s easy to focus on the negatives. Yet these are the guys we deal with, day in, day out.

What we can say for sure is that those that moan about clients, gripe about partners, argue (and late pay) suppliers… you can see where they’re heading!

So, next time you’re moaning about a situation, think about Leylandii. Horrible trees in many respects but for some they are the cornerstone of successful business!

1. YOU NEED HELP GETTING TOP FOR YOUR BRAND NAME

As long as your domain name has your brand name in it (and most of the time, even if it doesn’t) and your brand name isn’t completely generic (i.e. all the words in it are commonly used) then you will rank top or in the top 2-3 for it pretty quickly and stay there.

You don’t need anyone’s help to achieve this (nor should you give credit for it).

2. PPC = EXPENSIVE; SEO = CHEAP

If you’re spending £300 a month on Search Engine Optimisation, then it needs to pay off for you, on a monthly basis.  then it will have to drive the right amount of visits to the site incrementally per month to make the investment work.

Too often, this aim isn’t really achieved.

3.    SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION COVERS ALL THE PHRASES

Often you’ll focus on one or two keywords in order to evaluate whether SEO is working or not. Often these will be higher trafficked phrases.

For most online operators you want to cover 1,000+ keywords. For a SME, if a SEO supplier did a really good job they could, perhaps, gain first page for 5-6 phrases.

Maybe over time you could get to positions 1,2 or 3. However, they’d still only be covering a fraction of the overall searchers and opportunity out there.

4.    SEO REPLACES THE NEED FOR PPC

Any profitable channel to market is worth continuing to invest in and each requires scrutiny. You need to measure both in the same way – so even if you are successful in natural search (SEO) and you are also successful at converting these visits… then this is a green light for you to also spend on PPC. The metrics should still work for you.

5. GETTING TOP MAY NOT BE PROFITABLE

The biggest mistake you can make is to think that getting to position 1 or 2 is therefore a success. Be very careful that you know (or can estimate):

• The amount of searches (per month) on the phrase you’re targeting
• The relevance of the phrase you’re targeting to your business activity
• The amount of traffic you’ll get and therefore opportunity created

Too often, both in Google and other sites, you will be shown the top of pages that no-one sees.

Finally, we’d just add that SEO is not necessary if you don’t want to do it. Don’t get lulled into believing that you need SEO unless you are sure that you have the capacity to invest in it and are sure that your site delivers enough opportunity and revenue to make it worthwhile.

As with all marketing, don’t spend unless you’re confident of a greater reward!

Here are five quick tests you can take to find out if your website is passive or active:

1. Can You Navigate Without Using the Menu?

If a visitor cannot navigate through the website and end up at the destination you’d like them to get to (sale, enquiry or whatever your main revenue aim is) then your site is passive.

Ideally, website visitors should not need to use the main menu at all. It’s a fallback, not a critical path.

2. Do You Have Obvious ”Next Steps’ at the Bottom of Pages?

Once a visitor has read a page, or scrolled to the bottom of it, can they see relevant messages encouraging them further into the website? If not, then your site is passive. If you make the next steps as obvious and targeted as possible, then you will increase page views and conversion rates.

3. Do You Place Links in Your Text?

Too many websites avoid using links in their text, normally because they didn’t have the time to do it, or know what phrases to link. Sometimes this is done for aesthetic reasons. However, by not placing links in your text, you are creating a passive site.

4. Do You Have ‘Calls to Action’ in Every Page?

A ‘call to action’ is a genuine offer to a cust0mer with the express purpose of generating an enquiry or sale. Too many sites expect the website visitor to act – and too often they don’t. You can also mature your calls to action by ‘packaging’ them properly for the audience – for example if you offer a free consultation (like we do!):  then describe the value that the client will receive in that consultation. If you have a sale on, pick out the best selling items or the biggest discounts. Otherwise, your site will be passive and unappealing.

5. Are You Lazy With Link and Button Text?

If most of your links and buttons are ‘read more’, or ‘more’, or ‘next’, or anything generic then your links are passive. They again are making the assumption that the visitor will be so interested in what they are reading that they will click regardless. Make your links and buttons more compelling – and if you’re not convinced then test it!

Want some help making your site convert? Then consider Ergo Digital to overhaul your content, activate it and renew your business opportunity.

When there were buttons on a site, they were just the standard ‘Microsoft’-looking button: small, grey and missable.

Not very inviting, are they?

Then, with the advent of better graphics packages, things went a bit wild. Clip Art, Bevels and Shading:

Ouch – it was as if the 70’s had returned online and we suffered for it. There was a fascination about making as much as possible ‘not square’ so we had pill shapes in abundance.

Finally, things settled down a little. After all, hammering the eyeballs is not the same as being inviting! We started to see better and more subtle designs coming in:

And, yet the problem was often that buttons were used in abundance, or sparingly. Or worse they had generic text on them: ‘Click Here’, ‘Send’, ‘Submit’… there was no priority, no emphasis and too often, again they were missed.

How times have changed. More often than not a site now knows much better what the purpose of a homepage is, or of other pages in the site. Is it little wonder that some of the most successful sites in the world make it difficult for you to do anything but the one action they really want?

• Sign Up (Facebook)
• Give it a Try (Twitter)
• Search (Google)
• Sign Up / Sign In (Hotmail – note the Sign Up button is bigger!)

What marketers have recognised is this – if you want someone to take a turning, then make it the only option and plant a nice large signpost for it!

So, the psychology of the oversize button is very simple… if you want someone to click it, make it OUTSTANDING!

… With more than just oversize buttons.

Twitter Verification?

Seriously, though, we find it intensely frustrating to be forced to interact with a service when there are perfectly good services already available that do this for you automatically. So, unless we must, we don’t use these services. It doesn’t make us think “wow, this user really gets the Internet”, it makes us think the opposite.

For what Spam Assassin has not done for email, we predict that Truetwit will also be as unsuccessful for Twitter.

What is It?

TrueTwit claims that it does the hard work to ‘validate’ your Twitter followers so you don’t have to. This is wrong, they don’t do the hard work – the people who are forced to validate through TrueTwit do – again, and again. Just because they chose to follow you on Twitter.

Of course, they can also get a TrueTwit account, but this is only feeding the troll (as it were).

Let’s Go Back to Basics – What is Twitter?

There are three immediate issues with TrueTwit which make it even less compelling than web-based email verification:

- Firstly, twitter accounts are already ‘validated’ to a certain extent. Now this doesn’t mean that some use ‘bots’ to post and reply to emails. Many people do… the irony is, of course, so does TrueTwit and it’s users, and

- Secondly, Twitter is not a private messaging system, it’s a dip-in, dip-out collaborative medium, and

- Thirdy, what is the problem with having followers who may not be reading your ‘Tweets’ with their own live eyes there and then? If you don’t like your messages being read by others, then why use Twitter in the first place?

Let Sense Prevail!

So, what next for TrueTwit? Well, that depends on whether its forcible signup process gains enough traction in order to become pervasive or whether common sense and the ’sit back and use your brain cells’ logic will prevail.

Our hope is the latter, of course – but we’re not sure. Although happy to hear a compelling argument for the value that TrueTwit brings to the web… anyone?

The first mistake is that there aren’t any. What is the point of writing content on a site which has no relevance to other areas of the site? Well, that’s easy to answer, so if there are pages which are relevant to what you’re writing, make sure you link to them within your body copy. Like point number 4 in this page: don’t finish on a whimper.

Text Links that Work

However, once you do get links in the page, make sure you:

1. Make a link visible - if it doesn’t have an underline, then make it bright. Even if it does have an underline, make it a different colour. However, don’t also use underlining for non-links or you’ll confuse (exception is this sentence because you need to finish this page… )
2. Make a link interesting – the laziest content writers use ‘read more’ (only surpassed by ‘more’) and ‘click here’ for link copy. You can be sure a link’s click through will double if it says the secret to creating content for your website, as opposed to more
3. Make a link contain relevant words - for two reasons, this is a sensible approach: firstly, when the customer lands on the page, it will match with what is expected and secondly for search engines, they always appreciate relevant keywords being in a link in a page
4. Place links in and at the end of your copy - what is the point of having several paragraphs of content which doesn’t encourage the visitor to delve further into your site? Particularly at the end of the page, you need to be sure that your reader doesn’t just give up… give them compelling reasons to move on.

So, we hope this helps you as you build your links into your pages. This is just one tiny ioto of what we could do for you to maximise your internet success with Ergo Digital.

On the face of it,

However, this is just the tip of the iceberg, there is a lot happening at the intersection of Local and Social marketing – which is what this week’s Social Summit is covering. We haven’t had a chance to make it down there, but it is the most interesting dynamic happening in online marketing and communications at the moment.

Why Social?

For many Social Media seems an impenetrable waste of energy. Why should someone be interested in our tweets? Or our followers? What is it all about?

Well, the key reason is something that has long since been the holy grail of online: community.

Facebook has done the best job so far of identifying the need for community and still it struggles to retain interest over a period of time. Other communities existing based around interest – whether it’s car ownership, or nail varnishing.

However, the issue is that these communities are mainly virtual and therefore artificial. This is not to say that the participants are not real, but there’s not much of a real world dynamic to the relationships.

How Web / Mobile Can Get Real…

Therefore, the intersection of Local and Social marketing is where it’s going to grow… where it’s going to develop, and fast.

From the $100m funding Yelp! got; to Google’s live search… to FourSquare and their ‘check in’ functionality based around geo positioning and real-life experience.

2010 is the year for Local Social. Are you prepared?