Link: http://www.marcomnewmedia.com

Search marketing is becoming ever more important given the recession, because people are more diligent about searching online first before they buy. SEO is one of the best customer acquisition tools available.

As a Los Angeles search engine marketing company (SEO), MarCom likes to follow eMarketer's Search Marketing Trends report which analyzes the various factors that are driving consumers to online searches. Marketers are following...

Consumers have always looking for deals - especially in down economies. Today we have something called extream couponing, with well seeded sites like www.Groupon.com, and new sites such as www.adollarone.com, where people can get just about anything for $1.01.

The report confirms the fact that people shop for prices, selection and services and once they find deals, they usually will switch brands.

There are four basic search options: paid search, contextual advertising, paid inclusion and SEO, which is something MarCom has always recommended as opposed to Pay per Click (PPC) searches. Why? Because that is like renting and not buying. Once you stop paying for the clicks the leads stop too. Whereas with SEO, you pay us to set it up right, and put you on the fist pages of the search engines. And it lasts, bringing in more traffic and customers as time goes by.

Todays marketers are turning to SEO more and more help their clients get new customers. According to the report these four options will experience increased spending through the year 2013.at which time U.S. search marketing outlays will reach nearly $23.4 billion, and marketers will be spending more on SEO than on contextual advertising.

MarCom has a great SEO case history that proves this trend is the right direction to go. Client Entertainment Connection has three websites and three years ago they were paying close to $30,000 per month on PPC. After weaning them off of PPC while increasing their SEO results, their leads have doubled, and they pay nothing for PPC marketing.

Source: eMarketer

Link: http://www.marcomnewmedia.com

MarCom has been blogging for a variety of different clients over the last eight years. Some of the first tricks that we first learned still apply, and there are plenty of new tips as well. Trusted communities are forming all over the Internet, and blogs increase the search visibility for online audiences. As Los Angeles SEO consultants, we have found the following blogging tips to work very nicely for our clients including:

1) Use newsworthy topics that tie-in to local, national or industry news if possible. Place these key words in your headline and body copy. One example for instance is a recent blog I did for our client The Interface Financial Group (IFG). The topic was about invoice factoring and the recent June Small Business Economic Confidence Report.

2) Make sure you link to your key words and phrases in your blog posts to a page on your website with relevant content. Use about three links per blog post. Beginning middle and end, and always towards the beginning middle and end of each paragraph and/or sentence if possible.

3) Use site studies, statistics, and use science when you can to lend authority.

4) Use photos/charts/diagrams and videos. These need to be uploaded with names that include your keywords.

5.) Use number steps when you need to be clear about a process needing an outcome. Like this blog post, for MarCom New Media's Social Media Marketing in Los Angeles blog.

If you have a blog but need help writing and performing the right search marketing strategies and tactics for better visibility, MarCom New Media can ghostwrite your blog, or train you on how to get the best return for blogging on the Internet. Just email kristin@marcomnewmedia.com, or call 323.650.2838

Link: http://www.marcomnewmedia.com/services/socialmediamarketing.html

If you are on Facebook, then you already know about the little "Like" feature, which enables you to click on something someone posts that you like and then share that with your Facebook friends. Now Facebook wants you to start sharing your likes from other places on the Internet, like blogs, or other websites. Start watching for other web publishers to begin installing the FB like button.

For instance, more than 1,500 TypePad bloggers have installed Like buttons on their blogs. The Like widget became available in early May, then soon thereafter a second feature was released allowing users to attach a Facebook “Like” button to the bottom of their blog posts.

According to typepad, as of this last week, more than 2,400 bloggers have added this feature and are enjoying a 200 percent growth spurt in their referral traffic from Facebook.

As a leading Los Angeles social media marketing firm, MarCom New Media tests out most all of the revenue boosing social media tactics that we hear about. Another tactic that we have seen some good results with are Facebook ads. More on that later.

For more information on the best Los Angeles search engine optimization practices, and social media marketing, call us at 323.650.2838.

Link: http://www.marcomnewmedia.com

Here are the top three questions marketers are asking about the value of social media marketing:

1) What are the best practices of social media marketing?
2) What are the time management considerations with social media?
3) How will marketers measure the return on investment of social media marketing?

As a Los Angeles social media marketing firm, we have been doing social media since the beginning about six years ago. I believe that the blog still wins out as being the best practice this far, although we are seeing pretty good results for corporate Facebook fan pages when done in conjunction with Pay per Click (PPC) ads on Facebook. I still have a hard time believing that Twitter has much value other than for link-buliding links back to websites, and for the construction workers who use it among their teams, the lunch truck business, and entertainment.

As for the second question, social media marketing is time consuming - period. This is where you need good writers, skilled at posting to the various social mediums. Social media may be best served when done by more junior staff members, so that senior management can take on strategies, marketing planning, meetings, and stressing about how to measure all of it.

Which leads us to the last question ... Many marketers are having a difficult time measuring the return on investment (ROI) from social media marketing. In fact, nearly 61 percent of marketers surveyed said their organizations' ROI measurement practices are poor, and 34 percent stated they are "very poor."

Public relations too has always had a reputation for been difficult to measure, and PR professionals have used the number of press articles (quantitative) and the messages that were written up (qualitative) for public relations measurement.

With search and social media tools being improved radically, I believe we will start seeing improved measurement capabilities built right into the tools. MarCom did a year-end report for our client the Wiley Protocol, using many of the measurement tools in the social media services that we have been using use. Here's a sample of what we accomplished during a six month period:

The Value of Social Media Marketing (SMM)

4,803 Links.
63+ blog posts; 90 videos.
20+ Articles each spun over 30 times and syndicated on Web.
10 press releases; 3 consumer, 1 doctor; 1 pharmacist newsletter.
210 Twitter followers; 140 Twitter posts; 2,275 links
114 Facebook friends; 100 posts; Facebook ad ¡V $200 per mo. = average 384 visitors to website. Average cost per month $224. Average cost per visit 60 cents (which is cheap for PPC).
20 Diggs; 20 del.icio.us and many more.
Resulting in over 75,000 measurable, trackable views and visits at a cost of $1.66 (our fees). This compares most favorably with the cost of pay per click at $2.00 per visit, minimum. This is a savings to Wiley of over $25,000 for the six month period July 1-Dec 25, or $4,250 in savings per month.

Increase of 49,000 website visitors in 2009
Additional 11,500 visitors to videos in 2009
Additional 6,000 plus visitors to press releases
Additional 25,000 visitors to blog in 2009
6,412 additional visitors to articles in 2009
Additional 6 to 8,000 visitors to press releases in 2009

TOTAL ADDITIONAL VISITORS 2009 vs. 2008: 105,912

-- Kristin Gabriel

Link: http://www.marcomnewmedia.com

Marketers used to call reputation management "crisis management" but with the onset of the Internet, we soon saw a need for solving this problem online. Ten years ago, marketers spent their time training executives in major corporations on how to handle a crisis, but when the worldwide Web was born, and now with social media channels like Twitter or Facebook, a crisis can travel at the speed of light, and potentially put a company out of business overnight. Reputation management was born to deal with a celebrity, politician, a CEO and a company's negative listings.

MarCom worked with our first reputation management customer in this arena in 2005 when a number of chief executive officers started seeing negative listings, comments or articles about them and/or their company’s products and services on the Internet. We saw CEOs unwittingly responding to people in blogs, or news forums and to journalists online – and often times their comments were perceived in a negative way. These showed up on page one of the search engines when people searched the CEO's name and company. Bad reviews showing up in a search meant a loss of revenues, and in some cases, lost businesses. Today most CEOs know better than to say much of anything online unless the mesasages have been approved by the company's communications and marketing teams.

In addition to using basic public relations strategies, SEO and link building MarCom's reputation management services promise to highlight positive pages and bury offending sites deep in search results. Most reputation services work by tracking what's written about a client on the Web, then doing search engine optimization (SEO) and promoting the positive pages, thereby pushing negative mentions back into the back pages of the Internet.

First we determine the new key messages for use online, then use optimum key words and phrases in all written content online and offline. That includes website copy, press materials, and optimized press releases that are posted on electronic wire services; syndicated articles for the Web; videos on YouTube and syndicated elsewhere on teh Web, blogs and newsletters. And nowadays, we also use Facebook, Twitter and bookmark sites like DIGG, and Stumble Upon, to create links back to the client’s website pages with relevant content. There are hundreds of social networking sites that can be used.

Depending on the industry, within weeks negative listings will start to be pushed back off of Google’s first page, and by three to six months a company’s ranking by the search engines should be showing a significant increase in organic listings based on the key words used, and the negative listings will be pushed down on the pages of the search engines, although they may never be completely gone.