Lead Generation Blog

When Times Are Tough the Tough Get… Googling?

November 10, 2008

Even in this time of economic despair, there seems to be a light of hope for online marketers. I just read a very interesting and reassuring article written by Aaron Goldman on the Search Insider Blog. Goldman discusses the recession and its current effects on Search Engine Marketing. The good news is – the recession is actually positively affecting Search Engine Marketing. FINALLY there is something constructive coming out of this horrible financial state that our country is currently in! A study conducted by OMD’s Snapshots found that, on average, people are spending 87 minutes surfing the web per day during this recession. According to the study, people are spending so much time online in order to escape from their economic troubles. From an SEO standpoint this is great news: People may not be buying anything, but they are spending almost an hour-and-a-half each day searching online. This is very obviously valuable for search engine marketers, and therefore is causing many online marketers to shift their business model toward SEO practices.

Posted by Emily Meyer in Advertising and Marketing | Comments closed

Google Up, SEM Down

October 20, 2008

Just finished reading today’s Search Insider from Media Post. Steve Baldwin cheers at Google’s reported 18% increase in paid clicks over Q3 2007. I know people love to hate Google, but in today’s economic situation, I am happy for any growth news in our industry.

What really caught me about the article (Read the entire article here), however, was Mr. Baldwin’s great closing statements.

Despite this obvious and very real opportunity, I do remain doubtful about whether we in SEM, especially in the SEM agency sector, are doing a good enough job of reaching these spenders and convincing them of the value of outsourcing search to a specialist firm. Frankly, I think that many advertisers have had enough of our pitches… You really can’t blame these people, who are reacting rationally to the “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me” scenario. The onus is on us at SEM agencies to prove our case, realistically, free of jargon, hype, and especially over-promising. We need to start acting less like salespeople, and more like serious business consultants. If we can’t be honest and forthcoming about what we can — and can’t — do for our clients… we shouldn’t be surprised when these people slam the door in our faces.”

Advertisers are considering their return on investment now more than ever. They want to reward their valuable (and shrinking) marketing dollars to those of us that differentiate by delivering success, accountability and a high level of account management while managing to their reduced budgets. Simple formula… right?

Posted by Marcela Shine in Advertising and Marketing | Comments closed

Email & Social Networks Go Together Like Peanut Butter and Jelly

October 13, 2008

Email and Social Networks are much like peanut butter and jelly; they are great on their own but are even better together. I stumbled upon an interesting article that discusses the email marketer’s shift to include social networking. As society is starting to live by social networking sites, email marketers are taking the cue and working to integrate both in their campaigns.

The article mentions that many industry experts are predicting that due to spam filter restrictions, and shifts in budget toward social networking, email marketing will lose its spotlight in the Web 2.0 world. That being said, it only makes sense that email marketers would start brainstorming on how to integrate two very compatible sectors that already work hand in hand.

I believe this shift will be very successful for the email marketer. By socializing email campaigns, the email marketer will be able to get to know their consumer better, and personalize their campaign to meet the consumer’s needs. In addition, as mentioned in the article, since there is no competition between the two, there is no need to worry about one out doing the other. It is a win/win situation because they will continue to make the other better.

Posted by Emily Meyer in Advertising and Marketing | Comments closed

What Ad-Network Are You?

May 22, 2008

Since we have really been expanding our efforts in building our network publishing portfolio over the last 3 months, I found this article on MediaPost to be very interesting. It discusses how many of the networks out there today are not and should not be looked as the same. There are many things that differentiate a network and how to determine what network best fits.

Also from a company standpoint as we are possibly exploring the values of moving into our own network some things should be considered… Over the past year over $1 billion in combined value have been used to buyout networks from bigger companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo, and Media Initiatives some of the bigger players in the industry. Obviously this would be the level we would all like to achieve on a whole and moving forward could be useful to what type of representation we would like to achieve as a network and more importantly which one is valued the most.

Most agencies and advertisers have realized the benefit that networks provide for brand response campaigns. It’s through their mass reach, branded sites, and often unique out-of-the-box placements and technologies, that branding and brand response campaigns have been able to be successful using networks.

There are four main components that is determined as an ad-network:

Site Representation Network: these types of networks fully own their publishers inventory and are recognized as mostly brand only campaigns. They deliver a high quality traffic and do not focus on remnant inventory.
Advertising Networks: These Networks have non-exclusive publishers, and are mostly blind networks. The inventory is typically remnant space with mostly behavioral networks which allows for strategic media planning.
Technology Based Networks: These networks fall under the category of retargeting, contextual, and other tech based optimization. This type of network is somewhat effective, with the relevance of contextual users as well as the scalability of retargeting publishers makes a significant difference when determining your best course of action in your media plan. The value of these networks are based on the combined, un-duplicated reach of their network publishers.
Broker and Exchange Networks: These networks use an exchange model to find cheap inventory with low risk factor. They run as a blind network and use other networks and use their advertisers to run on other remnant space. Usually work on a CPA base model where placement is not so much as important as conversion.

As mentioned in the article all 4 are very effective. Its hard nowadays just to try and focus on only one category but to have a little of all 4. I believe to be completely successful in this world of online lead generation that it is important to have a little of all the types of Networks to be a player in the industry and not to completely limit yourself in any way in becoming a full service online media agency.

Posted by Adam DiSilvestro in Advertising and Marketing | 0 Comments

Sluggish Economy Causes a Shift From CPM to CPL

May 2, 2008

I read an interesting article on MediaPost the other day that discussed WebMD’s decreased revenue guidance. It served as a perfect example of how, in the U.S. economy’s current “sluggish” state, health advertisers are concerned with response rate and a positive return on their investment. They are lowering their traditional CPM spends and instead moving into new online advertising opportunities that will give them the same type of media exposure but on a cost per lead basis. It’s less risky for the advertisers and the publishers are happy to accept the new approach too because it is a positive alternative to seeing their profit margins slide.

Posted by Eric Schwartz in Advertising and Marketing | 1 Comment

Google Gets More Attention…

April 9, 2007

Wanted to make sure that everyone read last week’s post by Gary on MediaPost’s Performance Insider. Here is an excerpt:

….To get out ahead of the Google juggernaut — or to enhance the performance-based ads you’re already running — here are six steps to getting the most out of a cost-per-action program:

1. Demand accountability now from your marketing spending — even your traditional media advertising.
2. Define marketing victory and focus all your media to working toward this goal. Is it immediate sales? Building relationships with target consumers? Educating consumers? Growing ROI?

LOL - YAA

March 14, 2007

No articles in over a week. Sorry! The flu gave us all writer’s block. And today’s weather (supposed to be 70 in NYC) coupled with Saturday’s prediction (snow!) will probably lead to another week of sickness. Not good. Well, let’s think about something funny instead…

Last week I was introduced to YAA (yet another acronym), CPB (Cost per Buzz). LOL. I almost ROFL. Cost per Buzz? What the heck? Here’s a link if you want to read about it. Relates to how much "buzz" your email marketing/campaign generates… the article was good. But that’s not my point.

So yeah, YAA’s. We do have way too many of them. Getting to the point that they are making me ROFL. Since PPI is just as guilty with CPQ, I looked it up. Here’s what I found:

Cost Per Qualified (lead) * Companion Parrot Quarterly * Corrective Patch Quality * Cost of Poor Quality * Closest Pairs Query * Chinese Painted Quail * Coastal Project Questionnaire

Cost Per Lead? Capillary Pumped Loop *Communist Party of Lithuania *Computer Programming Language * Canine Partners for Life

So what TLA (three letter acronyms) do you have? TTYL.

Posted by Marcela Shine in Advertising and Marketing | 0 Comments

What Google Knows About The Future of Marketing

January 18, 2007

I was excited when my colleague told me we were going to see Patrick Keane, Director of Sales Strategy at Google, speak to the Harvard Business School Club. As Precision Prospects provides qualified online leads to financial and business technology companies, I was interested to hear what Google was doing in this area. I quickly googled “Google + cost per acquisition” and was delighted to see the results. There were 1,070,000 results!!! And the first headline proclaimed, “Google announces CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) campaigns.” Wow, I thought, this is great. This could be a great opportunity to talk to Google about ventures, etc.

I couldn’t wait to get to the event. First of all, let me say that the Google offices are very cool. Exercise Balls in primary colors are everywhere (in comparison to Yahoo’s Yoga blocks). A Rollercoaster Bead Maze greets you at the reception desk. And the food and the wine at the reception was amazing. My senses were on overload and I was ready to talk to someone. Alas!! There was no one in the crowd wearing Google name tags. I walked around searching and finally meet someone from Google. Great guy but it turns out he heads event planning. I compliment him on the food and continue to look for someone to talk marketing or biz dev. They were either not there or traveling in disguise.

Undaunted, we sat down for the presentation with the audacious title of “What Google Knows About The Future of Marketing”. Perhaps an advertising medium can also be a psychic medium… The presentation was filled with anecdotes promoting Google Trends – kinda fun to see that OJ Simpson trumped Jessica Simpson and The Simpsons in Google searches after that book debacle. But what was missing was insight on where marketing is going, how Google can help marketers improve their returns and most important – counsel on what to consider as performance advertising evolves. Yes, Google will own everything and all advertising will be driven there – but please tell us how all the cool tools will bring our clients accountability and build their businesses.

Posted by Debra Flanz in Advertising and Marketing | 0 Comments

Dating, Marketing and The New Year

December 18, 2006

12-10-2006
Here is the most recent article we published about online lead generation…

New Year’s Eve is around the corner. You don’t have a date, but you’ve decided to go out anyway, hoping to meet someone that night. But where to go? Do you go to the club that plays your favorite music and makes your favorite cocktail, one that will likely have other like-minded individuals? Or should you instead go to Times Square and a party with hundreds of thousands?

The answer is largely based on who you are and what you are looking for in a date. In this case, let’s suppose you want to meet someone who shares your interests in music and nightlife. And, more important, let’s imagine that you want whoever you meet to be looking for, or at least open to, a long-term relationship….

Read more at the Coreg Insider - www.thecoreginsider.com

Direct link to the article: http://www.thecoreginsider.com/index.php?cent=news&nid=21

Posted by Marcela Shine in Advertising and Marketing | 0 Comments

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