To avoid the junk mail bin of the financial agents we were targeting, we mailed a simple postcard that drove recipients to a personalized URL address online (PURL). The page that each person discovered was filled with data, customized to their unique location – showing them the huge potential for business surrounding them if they were to partner with Tucker Financial Group. Behind the page was the engine we built to pull relevant census data and deliver a compelling, personalized message.

With today’s B2B prospects heavily searching the web for solutions to their business needs, thinking several moves ahead when creating an email campaign to drive web traffic provides a distinct strategic advantage in attracting and acquiring new business. Driving traffic to your site through email campaigns provides several strategic advantages. First, web analytics allow you to analyze responses to your messaging via click through rates. Second, email offers, if designed correctly, pre-qualify prospects by allowing them to opt out if they are not interested in your offer. Third, emails prompt interested customers to contact you before your sales force wastes time chasing dead-ends.

Readers think, readers judge, readers decide

Effective email campaigns prompt readers to think, judge and decide immediately about you and your offer. This fact alone increases return on investment because your sales team will spend the majority of their time following up on qualified and motivated leads. Through the enclosed process, you can drive, anticipate and predict prospects’ responses to your offer.

If you know your prospects’ pain points in advance, plant questions in your email blasts that lead them to the conclusion that your company can answer their needs. Providing an immediate solution to a qualified prospect is the key to increasing ROI on any marketing campaign.

To drive traffic and provide immediate solutions through an email marketing campaign follow these 6 steps:

Step 1: List the pain points. Create a list of the pain points your company solves for various prospects.

Step 2: Determine your prospects. Use psychographic and demographic information related to the pain points your company solves to develop a targeted email list of prospects who struggle with the issues you alleviate.

Step 3: Create relevant messaging. Segment your email message into three sections. 1 – Begin your email message with a question that gets your target thinking about one of the specific pain points you can solve for them. 2 – Briefly tell them how your company has solved that pain point in the past through a summarized case study. 3 – Lead them to the site for a deeper explanation.

Step 4: Capture and convert prospects to qualified leads at the site. 1 – Provide an offer on the site (product demo, white paper, etc.). 2 – Provide a form that captures contact information from interested parties. 3 – Provide a form box where prospects can tell you how to help them. 4 – Tell them that your sales team will be following up promptly.

Step 5: Provide an immediate solution. Following up within at least two hours of inquiry with a phone call increases sales closing rates by up to 70%. In phoning, provide the right solution for the right pain point. Be sure that your sales team’s message is in sync with your email web messaging. If their message differs from the email or web, the prospect will become confused and delay making a decision.

Step 6: Analyze campaign results and tweak messaging. Analyze click through rates from open emails to actual leads that were captured. This information can easily be obtained through web marketing partners with solutions designed to track this data. At this point, you can begin to test several different messages by repeating the above steps, but be sure to only change one thing at a time so you can effectively analyze the change.

After several months of analysis and tweaking you can start to launch several different messages in to the market simultaneously directed at different target audiences. This will continue to increase marketing ROI on the entire campaign by more effectively targeting a larger segment of the market.

For more on partners for email campaign tracking and development, web analytics and purchasing targeted lists, feel free to give us a call.

For any interactive agency in the world, it is a grave disservice to build a website for a client that is invisible to search engines and ultimately potential customers. Great content, design and usability are simply not enough anymore in this ultra-competitive online landscape.

According to BtoB Magazine, 80% of all web traffic now begins with a search engine. If your website appears on the second or even third page in that search, you can increase your site’s traffic volume by up to nine times. A first page appearance (ranking) can mean an additional six-fold increase in traffic.

Want people spending their time and money on your brand and your brand’s website? You need Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization is both an art and a science. At its core, SEO is centered on increasing your website’s relevance and visibility to your target audience. It’s done by editing and organizing the content on your website to feature the specific keywords your target audience is using as they search for your products or services. The result is that every section of your site is designed to widen the site’s footprint, make it more visible to Google and other search engines, and get it found by the people you want to find it.

Every search engine evaluates a website on a number of factors to determine its ranking. In order to successfully rank a website high on the list, you must increase relevance to users and search engines alike by optimizing three key components:

1. Code
2. Content
3. Inbound Links

Try this quick test to witness SEO’s power

Step 1: Open Google.

Step 2: Search for the terms and phrases you’d like customers to be using to find your company online. Imagine the customers are brand-neutral, looking for the products or services you offer without using your specific company name.

Step 3: Scan the search results to determine where your company ranks in the list for each search.

Step 4: Now, imagine you really are that customer searching online for these products or services. Which sites give you the impression of being the category leader? Which sites in the list are you going to click on? Which sites are going to get your time and, most likely, your money? Is your site even a contender?

How is SEO done?

1. Optimizing Code

In order to be search engine friendly, the source code of your website needs to be clean and streamlined while adhering to industry best practices. Sites should be built for search from the ground up, ensuring that the code of your website is optimized for proper search engine indexation. Existing website code can also be optimized for real results.

Why is proper indexation important? When a search engine finds (or spiders) a webpage, it reads the source code and records the content of the page, placing that data into an index (or databse). Search results are then pulled and returned from this database when performed. If your content or code is written incorrectly, your site is not being properly recognized by search engines and will not come up in searches the way you’d like it to. In turn, you’re missing out on valuable traffic and leads.

2. Optimizing Content

Next is content optimization. In partnership with your interactive agency, you should explore and discover your customers’ needs and motivations – determining what drives people to your site and what motivates them to connect with your brand when they arrive.

Then, your interactive agency should develop and bolster your website content according to what is learned, so it resonates with both search engines and users. By increasing keyword density and optimizing your site’s content for search engines, you can position your company and brand as a leader in your space while driving targeted traffic to your site, increasing your rankings and significantly impacting your bottom line.

3. Optimizing Inbound Links

The third component of a successful SEO campaign is link building. Search engines view a link to your site as a digital vote, vouching for your content. The more other sites link to your site (called inbound links), the more reputable and trustworthy it appears to search engines.

To build these valuable links, your interactive agency should employ social media marketing strategies to communicate to your target market – sharing your unique brand attributes with people across the web, inciting dialogue and driving customers to your site. These tactics may include posting on relevant blogs and community sites, using online PR and article distribution on authority/news sites, and connecting through content with tools like YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and others.

How to track and ensure SEO success

Your SEO campaign and your objectives are as unique as your company and your brand. That’s why a great interactive firm will focus on web analytics to guide strategy and track user behavior – relying on data, not assumption, your site is being ranked for the most visible and powerful keywords that lead searchers to click and take action. This equates to higher ROI and meaningful metrics that allow you to make educated decisions about the future.

Web analytics allow you and your interactive agency to learn:

• How many visitors are coming to your website and where they’re coming from
• What keywords searchers are using to arrive at your site through Google, Yahoo and MSN
• Where in the world visitors are coming from
• Which topics, pages and content are the most popular
• What paths users follow to navigate your site
• How long users are interacting with what content
• At what point users are leaving your site and why
• How many returning visitors are interacting with your website
• What sites are linking to yours

Web analytics enable you and your interactive agency to:

• Track improvements in your site’s search engine ranking
• Find out where visitors are learning about your site and your brand and populate those areas with content
• Judge the effectiveness and usefulness of social media and online PR and adjust our strategy accordingly
• Refine and perfect the SEO strategy based on analyzing keywords
• Target specific local markets and geographic areas
• Attract specific audiences and user segments
• Reach new customers in new markets
• Craft and position content to drive users through specific navigation paths and sales funnels
• Understand how users perceive your brand, both online and off and affect positive change if necessary

Results, proven and guaranteed

Ascend the organic rankings. Be more visible to more customers. Increase brand recognition, brand affinity and brand relationships. Boost sales.

SEO. It’s impossible to ignore.

Assessing today’s media landscape

It’s perfectly okay to still love traditional media in this day and age. Sure, there are a million non-traditional routes for your next ad campaign to take, but maybe print, radio and TV have always proved their worth to you in the past. No reason to change a good thing, right? Or maybe you’re a little gun-shy about trying all these new ideas, uncomfortable with the unknown outcome they may offer. Maybe.

Thankfully, you don’t have to jump all the way into this experiment. But you absolutely have to dip your toe into the water on your next campaign. Because if done right, you’ll add a big boost to the exposure for your brand through a viral advertising component.

The world is ready and waiting

Great ideas get passed around and talked about online – funny ideas, smart ideas, unique ideas, new ideas, wild ideas – and if your advertising is one of those ideas, it’ll get passed around and talked about too.

Here’s the trick to tapping into this free PR phenomenon. The people who pass around those ideas aren’t waiting to forward your entire ad campaign to their personal network or feature every, single ad on their blogs for readers to check out. They’re waiting anxiously for a fresh, unique, singular execution that makes them think, “This is something other people should see.”

What’s great about this is that the bulk of your campaign can still bank on traditional media to carry your brand message to the masses – allowing you to risk little and stay within your media “comfort zone.” However, with the addition of a simple viral component, you’ll generate talk-value far beyond what your traditional media campaign may breed.

What’s the viral trick?

Because viral advertising tactics have become so valued and, therefore, so overused, a big key to success in developing your viral idea is to ensure it is on-brand and a logical extension of your campaign. Viral for viral’s sake simply won’t do.

Some of the options to consider as you begin this endeavor might be an online game to drive website traffic and interaction with your brand, a guerrilla stunt that is filmed and made available for pass-around via YouTube, or a “too hot for TV” extended-length commercial that can only be viewed online.

To ensure it goes viral, you should contact leading websites and blogs that cover great advertising with info on the campaign when it is completed, as well as sites that concentrate on reporting on your specific industry. Once it’s posted on their sites or on your own blog, you can submit links to those posts to social bookmarking sites that include Digg, Stumbleupon, Redit, Del.icio.us and others where your viral advertising will take on a life of its own as readers vote on its popularity and talk-value.

Try it, you’ll like it

Viral advertising is equally addictive for brand managers as it is for their target audiences who gobble it up.

Have a strategy for success

Your brother has a blog. Your mother has a blog. In all likelihood, your grandmother probably has her own blog too. So, how’s your brand going to start a blog that competes with more than 60 million others currently in full swing across the world? Here are five tips to make your brand’s blog something people find interesting, meaningful and worth coming back to.

1 – Put someone passionate about your brand in charge. Your top brand ambassador might already be working inside your company. But he or she could just easily be an outsider who’s head-over-heels for what your company stands for and sells. Find that person and put them in charge. It takes an hour to create a blog, but endless attention to keep it going and keep it relevant. Treat it seriously, and the marketing ROI will be tangible.

2 – Create original content. The Internet is filled with sites that scrape content from other places and simply regurgitate it. While this is okay some of the time, people are coming to your brand’s site for original thinking presented by your brand. Give them what they want. Additionally, this will make you one of the sites that other blogs quote and grab information from. Increasing the number of in-bound links to your site raises your stature and the likelihood that an even wider audience will find your brand’s blog.

3 – Carve out your niche. As a living, breathing thing, your brand has its own unique view on the world. What is it? Your blog can become the quintessential place to express this distinct perspective – something no other site in the world can offer.

4 – Be authentic with your posts. Marketing spin and heavy selling are not allowed in this medium. Reserve that for your corporate web presence. Be honest, real and let your true brand personality shine through. Otherwise, you risk a backlash from people who will see through the guise.

5 – Encourage and participate in conversation. The wonderful thing about social media is it’s just that – a rich conversation with people who are interested in what you offer and who can give you deep insights about how to better position and sell your products to them more accurately. Use this to your full advantage by asking questions in posts to spark conversation and by responding to comments. A dynamic and valuable community will be built as a result.

Start your online community now

There’s no time like the present to get your blog going and growing.

Grab it, use it

Having instant access to gobs of information online has made it simpler to spot product and marketing trends today. It’s also made it abundantly more difficult.

How do you capture all that information from all over the world? How do you filter it? How do you leverage the most important realizations for your company and brand and its unique situation? Put applied trend analysis in the hands of your branding agency.

What is applied trend analysis?

There are trendspotting agencies all over the world you can hire that will gladly take your money. The issue is not whether they’ll discover the trends for you. The technology that feeds you trends is widely available – we use it too.

The hang-up with these agencies is that they never go beyond an autopilot delivery of cursory trends. They give you the data, sure, but because they’re strangers to your brand, they can’t and won’t make recommendations from those discoveries that apply perfectly to you. They’re a conduit, nothing more.

Applied trend analysis goes deeper by tracking the latest trends – then recommending how those trends can be applied directly to your business. You get a finger on the pulse of the industry, a current competitive analysis, a clear picture of untapped opportunities, and the ability to be proactive in your decision-making. Seriously valuable brand weaponry.

The only one for the job

This isn’t a job for a random trendspotting agency. And it isn’t a job for you, either. The assignment of applied trend analysis should be put firmly in the hands of your branding agency. Being intimate with your brand will give them the knowledge to apply trends in the most relevant and powerful way to your company. Of course, you’ll be involved with your own perspective. But let them lead the way, and you’ll find you’re the leading brand in your category.

Over the past few years, thousands of brands from the miniature to the mighty have sponsored campaigns featuring user-generated content (UGC). Why do some fly while others flop? It’s not about the money they spend. It’s about using three proven strategies to ensure a big return, no matter what your marketing investment.

1 – Target the diehards

Don’t expect everyone who sees your invitation to join in. Let the 1% Rule guide you. Referenced in several studies of online communities including Yahoo, the Wiki projects by Comscore and others, the phenomenon shows only 1% of a community typically contributes content to that community – the rest act as bystanders.

When you stop to think, aren’t the diehards the ones you want contributing to the campaign anyway? They’re the most passionate about your brand and the most predisposed to helping you create something wonderful and memorable. If you’re collecting email addresses through your website, that’s a great place to start building a list of fanatics to target.

2 – Get them to put skin in and reward them

People are busy and you’re asking them to go out of their way to make your brand look good. The first trick here is to prevent them from backing out of giving you what you want – inspired user-generated content. Ask people to commit to your advertising campaign verbally, communicate the importance of the promise they’ve made back to them, and consider producing a written list of participants’ names on your website or another public place to deepen your expectation that they come through.

Secondly, make it worth their while to play the game by rewarding them properly. While big, glossy prizes are great, some people just want their name in lights – to be acknowledged for their creativity – requiring little to no financial investment from you. Know your audience, and you’ll know what turns them on.

3 – Ask them to do what they already do well

This plays back into targeting your brand evangelists and requesting them to do something they naturally do without prompting – talk about your brand in a positive light. The final task is left up to your advertising agency to create an intriguing, buzz-gathering campaign worthy of everyone’s time and effort.