Your online marketing strategy should align this insight with the proper online marketing  tactics to ensure your goals are met to make your online marketing presence/campaign a success.

]]> http://www.targetedinternetmarketing.ca/planning-online-marketing-strategy/feed/ 0 http://www.targetedinternetmarketing.ca/canada-engaged-online-coutry-world/ http://www.targetedinternetmarketing.ca/canada-engaged-online-coutry-world/#comments Sun, 06 May 2012 14:40:06 +0000 admin http://www.targetedinternetmarketing.ca/?p=566 Continue reading →]]> TORONTO, CANADA, March 1, 2012 – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released the 2012 Canada Digital Future in Focus report. This annual report examines how the prevailing trends in general web usage and demographics, social media, online video, digital advertising, mobile and search are defining the current Canadian marketplace and provides insight into what these trends mean for the year ahead.

“The digital media industry in Canada is evolving in extraordinary ways, largely driven by today’s multi-platform consumer engaging with content across a variety of media,” said Bryan Segal, vice president, comScore Canada. “2012 is poised to be a defining year for digital as consumers grow their engagement with social, video, mobile and other emerging media. As Canadian businesses shift more of their ad dollars and investments online, it is more important than ever to understand the key trends being seen across platforms to devise effective marketing strategies and deliver digital ROI.”

To download a complimentary copy of 2012 Canada Digital Future in Focus report, please visit: http://www.comscore.com/2012CanadaDigitalFutureinFocus

Key insights from the 2012 Canada Digital Future in Focus include:

• Canada continues to lead the world in online engagement, with visitors spending an average 45 hours per month online, representing a fertile ground for digital marketers and advertisers.
• While Facebook is nearing a point of visitor saturation in Canada, other social networks’ visitor bases are posting strong growth, including Twitter, LinkedIn and Tumblr. Engagement on many social sites is trending upward, with Facebook driving the large majority of the increase in total minutes and page views for the overall category.
• Online video is becoming an increasingly popular channel, with total videos viewed up 58 percent. YouTube continues to dominate the marketplace, representing nearly 1 in every 2 videos viewed in Canada.
• Display advertising is evolving to be more social, not only with the rise of “socially-published ads” (i.e. those published on social networking sites), but also the increase of “socially-enabled” ads running across the web that direct click-throughs to the brand’s Facebook fan page.
• Smartphone penetration has reached 45 percent in Canada, with daily mobile content usage growing more than 50 percent in several key content categories.

1. Search Engine Marketing is NOT your traditional advertising medium-it lets  you target people who are in the process of ACTIVELY looking for your products and services
2. Friend’s don’t let friends  use Adwords without Conversion Tracking and Analytics.  Your Adword’s manager should be able to prove a positive ROI on your ad spend with solid data–you can’t manage what you can’t measure
3. Take advantage of knowing how the auction works! You can get better placements for a fraction of what your competitors are paying-the secret is good Quality Score.
4. Tight content themes=successful ad groups.  All the keywords, the ads, and the landing pages should be extremely focused on one semantic theme.  As a general rule if you have more than 25 keywords in an ad group, consider splitting into more than one ad group.
5. Do your keyword research.  When evaluating a keyword, you need to look at the FREQUENCY, RELEVANCE, and COMPETITION.
6. Make your ads STAND OUT form everyone else’s–Set up and use ad extensions.
7. Test, Test, Test. And then test some more.  You can stop testing when your CTR and Conversion Rate are both 100%.
8. The time you spend mining negative keywords and exclusions will easily pay for itself in cost savings and account performance.
9. Remarket for direct response.  Create a sense of urgency and gently push people through the sales cycle–but don’t be creepy
10. Add hours  and days back on to your life –use the Offline Editor for speed, collaboration and bulk management.

Accepting credit card payment online is essentially a process with 4 types of stakeholders involved.

The first stakeholder is your company.  Your company will provide a method for requesting the information from the customer. This can take form of an online web form or a virtual terminal if the client calls in.

The second stakeholder is the gateway solution provider. This is a company like Authorize.net that provides the web application solution that takes the information inputted by the customer and hands it over securely to the processor.

The third stakeholder is the processor. A processor like Moneris or Chasepaymentech, takes the information from the payment gateway and interacts with the financial institutions. This stakeholder processes the credit card transaction by interacting with the credit card and banking network

The fourth Stakeholder are the financial institution involved, mainly Visa , Mastercard and your bank. Your financial institution provided you with a Merchant account. In the case of Moneris, and ChasePaymentech they service both roles as a processor and merchant account provider. It takes the credit card payment from the customer and settles it into your banking account after receiving authorization. Although the whole transaction takes place in a matter of seconds, the actual deposit into your account will take one to two days.

When making a decision on a gateway provider, we recommend that you pay particular attention to the customer service component. In other words resolution of online payments should be quick and effortless when you interact with your payment gateway solution provider.

It is possible to pick a payment gateway solution provider like Athorize.net and integrate with one of the large payment processors such as Chasepaymentech, First Data or Moneris.  However, we would recommend against this.  Separating the various stakeholders makes it difficult to resolving customer service issues.  You will find yourself in a situation where payment processor and payment gateway will try to off load responsibility on one another.  For this reason we recommend a “captive gateway” solution.  This is an integrated processor and gateway solution provider.  The three we recommend are e-Selectplus from Moneris, Chasepaymentech’s Orbital and Internet Secure.

After analyzing the three payment gateway providers, technically they are virtually the same although Orbital uses old XML platform, while e-Select Plus uses ASP and ASP.net platform.

There ought to be no customer service issues, both provide 24/7 support.

Financially, it appears Chasepaymentech is the better choice. However, their credit card transaction cost is $0.10 more than Moneris. The discount rate although negotiable should also be a big factor in the overall equation because these costs could quickly add up in a low value, high volume scenario.

Cost Comparison: Moneris e-SelectPlus Chasepaymentech Orbital Gateway and Internet Secure

*Description from Moneris on the account Service Fee

The $7.00 Account Service Fee does include access to our online reporting tool Merchant Direct.

Merchant Direct provides 24/7 access to daily card transaction data (available by 7am the next morning and stored for 3 months) and monthly consolidated statements (available by the 3rd day of the next month and stored for up to 2 years).

Merchant Direct is searchable, so you can find transactions by transaction number, card number, date or amount. As it reports settled transactions, it makes it easier for you to investigate and resolve your own out-of-balance situations quickly and easily.

With comprehensive single and multiple location reports, the information can provide insights, and facilitate trend analysis and forecasting to assist in making good business decisions.

Many use the terms marketing and sales interchangeably.  However, there is vast difference between the two.  Clearly, some companies still don’t have a firm grip on this.   Especially when they spend a significant amount on a PPC campaign and it seems to fail.

Marketing and more specifically marketing strategy involves the very essence of your value proposition.  It is essentially the 5ps: People, Price, Promotion, Place (distribution) and Product (or Service).

An advertising tactic such as Adwords, Google’s PPC program, is nearly flawless as an advertising tactic.  It matches online demand (keyword search) with your company’s product supply.  But the real power of Adwords is that it allows you to track results through a comprehensive set of tools.  Yet, many advertisers are still disappointed when they don’t get the results that they were looking for.

Not getting results can be attributed to many factors.  But fundamentally, it is the advertisers fault for not realizing what Google is actually providing.  Google simply provides a sales lead.  It does not provide an actual sale.  Sales may be a consequence of the PPC campaign effort but not necessarily.

To generate a sale, you need two things: a superior marketing strategy and a strong sales process.  The person who just landed on your website is just a qualified prospect.  They still need to go through the full sales cycle before they become a customer.

Stay tuned for Step 2……

Conversion is the goal of any marketing effort.  Here are the conversion rates you should be benchmarking your Internet Marketing campaigns against:

1. Paid Search – 2.03%

2. Organic Search – 1.26%

3. Direct Url Entry – 7.38%

4. Email or Another Site link – 6.58%

Overall the average conversion rate was 3.6%.  If you are hitting these numbers or doing better, your Internet marketing campaigns are performing well.

The 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps from Carsonified on Vimeo.

The ten rules are:

1. Speed
2. Instant Utility
3. Software is Media
4. Less is More
5. Make it Programmable
6. Make it Personal
7. RESTful
8. Discoverabilty
9. Clean
10. Playful

Source: Ion Interactive Webinar

The spectacular growth in search marketing can be attributed to the fact that return on investment (ROI) can be precisely measured.

The search marketing, PPC or Paid Placement leader is Google.   Since its start just 12 years ago, Google has gone on to dominate this market.  Today it owns the search market space.  Its global market share is 74%.  Its US market share is 83%.

Global PPC Spend by Country

The US is still by far the largest search market in the world, comprising of 42.4% of worldwide search spend.  With the UK far behind in second place at 11.6% and Japan in third place at a distant 8.6%.

Source: Credit Suisse Google Report

The first paper concludes that off line word of mouth is more effective than online word of mouth.  This should clue marketers in how to more effectively manage referrals.

The second paper concludes that long tail strategy is valid and the paper supports a niche oriented sales strategy.

You can read the full article and get both papers here: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2455