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Let’s begin with what seems to be a self-evident statement: good branding is of vital importance in the growth and success of your company. Though this statement seems obvious, if you look around at the “branding” of so many companies, there are certain things that have been entirely overlooked or ignored in their branding process. Today we hope to cover some basic, general things that should be considered when considering your company image.

In General

To stand out in the increasingly competitive modern market place, businesses need effective, well-executed branding strategies. This does not mean relying on tricks and gimmicks, but rather, developing branding that is accessible, attractive, meaningful, and memorable to your customer base. We build relationships with brands, so your image should be one that people can build that relationship with. This, of course, requires research; you must know your target audience, and what types of imagery will best connect your business with them. Remember – your audience is NOT everyone! No business is marketed for everyone. Know your business, know your niche, and build your image around that knowledge.

A Few (Vital) Rules to Remember

1 – Your company image, or brand, must fit what your company actually does. Sometimes quirky branding works for companies, but it more often backfires. The general rule is to brand your company in a way that reflects the actual products/services that you offer, making it much easier for your audience to effectively identify you, and begin to build a relationship with you.

2 – Your brand should also say something which is immediately recognized by your audience. Again, sometimes the “can you figure this out” branding model works, but not usually. One of the general rules we often give clients is quite simple – your branding should answer your customer’s first question. If people see your image and still have to ask “what do you do,” more often than not, you have already failed.

3 – Your branding must also be accessible to your audience. You do not have to choose a tired cliche to make this work! (In fact, cliche fails as often as the meaningless quirky option.) Find something which will connect your audience intimately with your brand and with your product, and then run with it.

4 – It is VITAL that you remember this final “rule”: you are not Coke. You are not Apple. You are not Toyota. These large companies have a brand recognition level that most of our small to mid-sized companies could never even dream of, and this recognition means that they get to do things which simply will not work for the rest of us. Coke, for instance, can run a long commercial about whatever they would like, stick a Coke logo at the end, and the branding has worked. This type of “content-free” branding will not work for the rest of us. So as you are zeroing in on your actual branding imagery, remember that your branding will be used to market your business, and that the primary form of marketing campaigns (for most of us) involves content. Your branding will be a huge part of the time-intensive process of building the relationship between your brand and your consumers that will help your company succeed.

Now that we have covered some of the basics of business branding, our next article will look at how to incorporate your company image into the actual designs that your business will use to reach your public.

What

There are so many ways that businesses today can reach out to their audience – television, radio, print, online ads, public space ads, etc. But there’s one type of reach that is growing both in popularity and influence, and also seems to be doing a particularly good job of connecting businesses to potential consumers – blogging. Blogging is one of several forms of marketing that can be lumped under the term “content marketing.”

Blogging has been popular for quite some time, but until recently it was mostly used by individuals. Over the last several years, business have more and more realized that blogging can also be a great tool for them to use. People will take the time to read good blog posts, so if a business can figure out how to properly use this medium, it can be a great asset in their overall marketing strategy.

How

There are some simple things to keep in mind in order to make your blogging campaign a success. People have become very good at ignoring direct advertising, so that’s not how blogs are approached. The ideal is to create and nurture a relationship with your reader. This is how blogging became so popular to begin with – the writers developed relationships with their readers, and therefore the reader (potential client) wants to stay around to continue seeing where the story might go. This is also the model that a successful business blog will take.

Create content which is interesting, helpful, relevant, and valuable for your reader. Readers engage with content that provides meaning, so as you write posts around the various services you provide, be sure to give specific information and address specific questions. Give your audience something that matters. This type of content helps build the relationship because by providing information and being helpful, you are becoming their expert in your particular field. Then, when they need the services you provide, they will come straight to you, their expert.

We always hear “create shareable content,” and above is how you do that. Content which is meaningful and important is much more likely to be shared by your audience with their friends, co-workers, on social media, etc. Sharing is crucial, because this is really how you get the word out; this is how blogging works. And if you figure out how blogging works in general, then you can fine-tune it to work for your company.

Why

The obvious answer to “why?” – because it works! A well done blog connects with potential consumers and clients in a way that almost no other medium can do. Content marketing (like blogging) is also part of many types of online marketing such as social media marketing (with people sharing great content), SEO (Google ranks great content), PPC (you need great landing pages for high quality scores), and inbound marketing (great content is what drives your traffic).

We have used our own blog as a way to do a bit of research into this notion. For example, in the first 90 days of our blogging (inbound marketing campaign), with just 2 posts per week, we have seen an increase of 28% in overall number of visits to our website. This kind of increase is amazing, and can be attributed entirely to following the above “rules” about how to manage an effective and impactful blogging campaign.

Today we’re recapping a series of posts centered around online advertising and online marketing. These two are growing in importance, and will continue to shape our business success in 2014.

We’ve covered pay per per click (PPC) advertising. Google AdWords PPC advertising. Email marketing for business, and it’s amazingly high return on investment. Online video marketing, and finally we covered how social media optimization (SMO) relates to search engine optimization (SEO).

Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising

PPC ads are setup on an auction system, and are a way for companies to pay for advertising in search results from search providers such as Google or Bing. Some of the key elements to PPC ads are as follows:

• pay attention to bid adjustments (don’t over or under pay for clicks)
• keyword research (as well as negative keywords)
• high quality, keyword focused landing pages
• quality scores are critical
• the relationship between keyword, ad text and landing page
• better quality scores lead to higher ad rank, and lower cost

While PPC advertising campaigns can be expensive, keeping in mind the above guidelines will set your company on the right path to PPC success.

Email Marketing for Business

Email marketing has a proven track record of success, and is one of the most established forms of online marketing. Interestingly, email marketing is more relevant today than it’s ever been because of it’s personal nature. The web is becoming a more personalized experience, and email marketing fits well with this model.

One of the most appealing aspects to email marketing for business is the high return on investment (ROI) that it delivers. For example, email marketing averages a revenue more than double the amount spent to generate it. This from a Marketing Sherpa survey finding that the ROI on email marketing was 119%, or more, for business.

Your keys to email marketing success are:

• keep your content valuable and high quality
• your emails should be a go-to place for helpful content
• they should build a relationship between you and your clients
• should present your company as the expert on topics

Online Video Marketing

Video marketing is not only engaging, and highly sharable, but because of these it has real SEO value as well. It’s no secret that Google tends to rank video content more highly than textual content, and this can be very advantageous for online marketing. For example, we’ve recently seen Google Hangouts on Air videos rank very well in Google search for some competitive keywords, and almost immediately.

Not surprisingly Google favors YouTube over other video, and a recent Marketing Land article outlines how YouTube videos are 8 out of 10 videos in Google search. YouTube videos work very well with SEO because they have titles, and descriptions into which you can place your keywords. Be sure to keep your video content helpful, and of a high quality for success with online video marketing.

The SMO of SEO – It’s all Changing Again!

Social media optimization (SMO) is now a key component to your successful search engine optimization strategy. With the recent release of Google’s Hummingbird update we’re seeing increased weight added to social signals. In a recent Search Engine Land article Eric Enge, a well respected leader in SEO, wrote, “With Hummingbird, Google now has the infrastructure to better process social signals (among other things).”

With social media signals taking a more prominent role in search engine optimization, the value of social media optimization has never been higher. These two, combined with PPC, form a solid search engine marketing campaign.

With a combined strategy of pay per click, email marketing, video marketing, and social media optimization, your company will have the kind of integrated online presence necessary for a strong bottom line in 2014.

Social media optimization (SMO) has been around a few years, but recently has taken on a new depth of meaning. Joshua Berg, an expert in this field, is now saying that social media optimization (SMO) is part of SEO, and he’s exactly right. Originally, SMO simply referred to driving traffic to your website or blog from social channels. We’ve come a long way since then! Now SMO is a growing piece of the SEO puzzle.

Continue reading “The SMO of SEO – It’s all Changing Again!”

Online marketing takes many different forms, and knowing which to choose is important. We’ve covered search engine optimization (SEO), pay per click (PPC) advertising, email marketing and native advertising. Today we’re going to cover another very effective form of online marketing: video marketing.

Video marketing has many advantages, particularly when it comes to SEO and search rankings. Studies back in 2009 showed that video ranked 50 times higher than traditional text based content. Obviously we’re in a much different world now, but recently we’ve seen recorded Google Hangouts on Air (HOA) rank on page 1 of Google for some fairly competitive search terms.

YouTube Video for Online Marketing

With any discussion of video marketing comes a discussion of YouTube. Marketing Land discovered that 8 out of 10 video results in Google search came from YouTube. There is an obvious connection between Google and YouTube because Google owns YouTube. As long as the YouTube content provides a great search experience that’s what Google prefers to serve.

YouTube has many other advantages as well. For example you can place your keyword in both the title as well as the description text of your videos. Branding is another important aspect to video marketing, and YouTube offers some great editing features which can be used to brand your videos. Using your logo in video helps build brand awareness, associates your brand with high quality content and helps to personalize your brand.

Provide Value with High Quality Content

As with all content marketing it’s important in video marketing to provide value. Valuable content is helpful, sharable, generates positive buzz and has the opportunity to go viral. When your content helps people, they talk about it, and they share it with their friends. Google pays more attention to content they determine people find value in. High quality video generates more social signals, such as comments and plus ones, and these social signals are part of Google’s ranking algorithm.

Annotate your Video and Spin off Content

YouTube also provides annotation features, which are clickable links that overlay your video. It’s a good practice to use annotations at the beginning and end of your videos with links to your external website, and to subscribe to your YouTube channel. In order to put an external link in an annotation you’ll have to enable your account for external annotations. Here’s a video tutorial on to do just that.

Video marketing is a powerful way to spread your message, and video lends itself well to spin off content. For example you can take a video you’ve recorded, and embed it in a page or post. Then write an article based on the content of that video. Now you have an entirely new piece of content that is very valuable. Whatever your online marketing goals, video marketing can be a very effective part of them.

Stay tuned to our next post, in this online marketing series, we’ll be covering social media optimization (SMO)!

Today Mississippi-based wireless provider announces it will offer 1 Gbps fiber Internet to nine Mississippi communities including Batesville, Clinton, Corinth, Hattiesburg, Horn Lake, McComb, Quitman, Ridgeland and Starkville.

Pricing for this service starts at $80 a month or $140 a month for Fiber Internet and digital TV. If you’re already a C Spire customer you will receive an additional $10 off per month. 1 Gbps Internet is 100 times faster than most current home Internet speeds.

Here’s the C Spire press release in its entirety:

C SPIRE REVEALS FINALISTS FOR ‘GET FIBER FIRST’ CHALLENGE – BRINGS FIBER TO THE HOME DEPLOYMENT ONE STEP CLOSER TO REALITY

Cities and Towns Across Mississippi Answered C Spire’s Call-To-Action and Joined the Race To Make 1 Gigabit Internet Access Available To Their Residents

Ridgeland, Miss (Nov. 4, 2013) – C Spire announced today the nine Mississippi cities that will be finalists for the nation’s first and only statewide roll out of ultra-fast 1 Gbps broadband fiber to the home Internet service.

The nine communities who will be participating in the initial phase of the historic broadband initiative include Batesville, Clinton, Corinth, Hattiesburg, Horn Lake, McComb, Quitman, Ridgeland and Starkville. These cities and towns were among 33 municipalities that submitted formal applications late last month to be the first to bring the technology of tomorrow to their communities today.

From Southaven to Gulfport, cities responded to C Spire’s Get Fiber First Challenge, which began in

September when the company announced a statewide initiative to deploy ultra-fast 1 Gig Fiber to the

Home Internet in cities and towns that best showcase their passion for securing service that’s 100 times

faster than national average broadband speeds.

All of the applicants developed creative, aggressive campaigns featuring rallies and town hall meetings,

local celebrations, door-to-door canvassing, mobilization of neighborhood groups and homeowner

organizations, dedicated websites, social media campaigns and even stadium and freeway billboard

advertisements.

C Spire had initially hoped to name multiple cities as finalists, but because of the strength, quality and

comprehensive nature of submissions by so many cities, the company decided to increase the number

of partner communities to nine during the first phase of the initiative.

The finalist cities were announced during a news conference at C Spire headquarters with Mississippi

Gov. Phil Bryant, a host of state and local elected officials and representatives from the Fiber to the

Home (FTTH) Council Americas. Bryant acknowledged the historic announcement by presenting a

proclamation declaring Monday, November 4 as “Get Fiber First” and “Gimme Fiber” day in Mississippi.

“We’re proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with a company that cares about the future of Mississippi

and is investing its resources to ensure that we become a leader for U.S. technology investment,” Bryant

said. “Fiber to the Home technology will make our towns and cities stronger and more attractive places

to live and work.”

C Spire also announced pricing for its ultra-fast Internet and related digital television and home phone

services. The 1 Gbps Internet access will be available for $80 a month, $100 a month for combined

Internet and home phone, $140 a month for Internet and digital TV and $160 a month for the entire package. C Spire Wireless customers will receive an additional $10 monthly discount on all

packages.

The finalist cities were selected by a C Spire review panel that considered factors like proximity to the

company’s fiber optic infrastructure, community mobilization capabilities and incentives to speed up the

construction process and reduce overall costs. The application review process was monitored and the

Individual and overall results tabulated by Ridgeland-based Horne LLP, one of the nation’s top

independent public accounting and business advisory firms.

“We are truly impressed with the overwhelming show of support for C Spire’s Fiber to the Home

deployment and the tremendous interest and demand for making this service a reality for the residents

in these communities,” said Hu Meena, president and CEO of C Spire. “The positive response we’ve

received only strengthens our determination to bring 100-times-faster Internet, and the limitless

possibilities that come along with it, to as many people as we can because we know that this service has

the power to transform our state into a hub for technology investment and economic growth.”

Meena said C Spire plans to continue working with the cities that were not selected in the preliminary

round and will share best practices and improvements that promise to make the process easier, faster

and better for subsequent challenges. “We want to ensure that all of our communities remain actively

engaged in the process and keep the demand and excitement alive for upcoming phases,” he said.

Officials with Fiber to the Home Council Americas also participated in the news conference after

announcing in September that C Spire had been chosen as the North American showcase initiative for its

inaugural “Gimme Fiber Day” award.

The award is part of an annual event and celebration to honor the achievements of Professor Charles

Kao, who pioneered the use and development of fiber optics in telecommunications, and showcase how

fiber optics have positively impacted communities around the world and what policymakers can do to

accelerate its deployment and adoption.

“We are incredibly excited to be recognizing C Spire and the state of Mississippi during our inaugural

Gimme Fiber Day celebration,” said FTTH Council President Heather Burnett Gold. “Increasingly,

communities and companies around the U.S. are recognizing the power that FTTH brings, and we’re

glad to be celebrating in Mississippi, a state that has not traditionally led the digital charge, but where

individuals, communities and technology companies like C Spire recognize that they must take control of

their own broadband destinies to secure a high-tech future.”

“Fiber to the home is a transformative technology, serving as a platform for innovation and a whole new
Internet experience,” Meena said. “We thank the Fiber to the Home Council for this honor and look

forward to showing them the power of Internet at the speed of light as we turn up service soon in the

first C Spire Fiber cities in Mississippi.”

Now that the finalist cities have been selected, the next phase of the ‘Get Fiber First’ Challenge kicks

into high gear. As this stage gets under way, elected officials and community leaders will be rallying

their respective communities to quickly pre-register homeowners in designated neighborhoods at

percentage levels that will qualify them to be the first for C Spire’s build out of the service.

As soon as a critical number of neighborhoods have reached their percentage goals in an individual city,

C Spire plans to begin construction in those areas – so there is a possibility that work could commence in

more than one community at the same time, said Gregg Logan, senior vice president of C Spire Fiber.

Logan said pre-registration in the nine cities begins soon when C Spire launches an updated Fiber to the

Home website – www.cspire.com/fiberhome – with functionality that shows Individual neighborhoods

in each community and the percentage of residents who are needed to sign up for the new service.

Residents will be asked to make a $10 refundable deposit and provide credit card information when

they pre-register. The website also will feature detailed, interactive maps of neighborhoods in cities

showing progress each one is making toward turning their area “green” and qualifying for build out of

the service.

Logan said C Spire hopes to start turning up 1 Gig service in the first C Spire Fiber neighborhoods by

the middle of next year. The service is expected to pave the way for improvements in the areas of

healthcare, education, civic life, municipal services and economic growth.

To learn more about C Spire’s Fiber to the Home initiative, as well as to discover how you can help

your community get to the finish line first by pre-registering, visit www.cspire.com/fiberhome for more

details.

About C Spire

C Spire is a diversified telecommunications and technology services company that provides world-class customer

service and a superior comprehensive suite of customer-inspired wireless communications, high-speed Internet

access and a range of other telecommunications products and services to consumers and businesses with a

personal focus. This news release and other announcements are available at www.cspire.com/news. For more

information about C Spire, visit www.cspire.com or follow us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/cspire or Twitter

at www.twitter.com/cspire.

Our current ‘blog series’ has been about online advertising and marketing. So far we’ve done a brief survey of different forms of online advertising, and then we narrowed the field to look at pay per click (PPC) advertising generally, and Google AdWords specifically. These are only a few of the approaches a business can take to online marketing, and today we’ll take a look at another widely used and very effective form of online advertising – Email Marketing.

Email Marketing has been around for a long time, and it is a proven and efficient way to market products and services to potential consumers online. With the web moving toward a more personal, semantic experience, companies are also looking for ways to advertise more personally to individual consumers. Email marketing is personal because it arrives in someone’s private email inbox, addressed to them and containing information which is (hopefully) relevant to their life.

High Return on Investment (ROI)

From a practical business perspective, Email Marketing also has incredible return on investment (ROI), averaging more than double the amount actually spent. Of a group surveyed by Marketing Sherpa, the overall reported ROI from Email Marketing was an astonishing 119%. Organizations which sent fewer than 100,000 emails a month reported even higher ROI, 139%.

For a little better idea of the value and influence of Email Marketing, in this article from Marketing Land, they do a little bit of marketing comparison – only organic search accounts for more customers than Email Marketing; customer acquisitions from Email Marketing are dramatically higher than Facebook and Twitter combined (6.84% vs <1% combined); email is also more likely to be shared with friends, accounting for 50.8% of new visitors referred to companies by their friends.

Key to Successful Email Marketing

The key things to remember in Email Marketing is 1) keep your content valuable to your potential clients, and 2) don’t overwhelm your consumer base. Provide people with valuable content in your emails, content that helps establish you as their expert, or their “go to” place – this kind of content helps cement the relationship between your brand and your client. Just be sure not to go overboard, constantly filling up people’s inboxes with meaningless emails. Let this proven form of Marketing work for you and your company, and you’ll be happy that you did.

In upcoming posts, look for overviews of additional forms of online marketing. Diversifying your marketing approach by incorporating some of these various forms of advertising will pay big dividends in the end, if done correctly.

In the world of Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, there’s no doubt that Google AdWords is king. Nearly 70% of all search traffic goes through Google, giving them the ideal opportunity to sell ad space on their site and become the leader in PPC. AdWords works on a bidding system, matching up user search terms with advertisers who are bidding to have their ads displayed for those particular relevant keywords. Because of the bid system, advertisers are able to get their ads to display for the lowest possible bid prices, making AdWords a very appealing method of reaching the consumer.

Putting Together AdWords

On the surface level, putting together copy for AdWords is very simple – you are allowed three lines of text to “make your pitch” to your potential audience. Coming up with those short lines of text, however, is quite involved. First, advertisers must spend time doing keyword research, to figure out which keywords are relevant for their ads, and to decide which keywords they want to focus on. Google provides some good tools, like the Keyword Planner tool, to help with this research.

Once keywords are chosen, the AdWords copy must be written to match these keywords. At the next level, a vital but easily overlooked step, is that then the content on the landing pages must also be matched to the keywords. The greater the relevance and similarity between keywords, ad text, and landing page text, the higher quality score Google will award your ads. Ads with higher quality scores make better ads, and therefore have the higher chance of being displayed in better locations on your search results page. The high quality score also saves the advertiser money, because those high scores mean that lower bids will still land the ads in prime locations on the results page.

The results of Google’s AdWords system are several: people are shown ads which are highly relevant to what they are searching for, advertisers are able to connect with potential customers at the lowest expense for them, and Google is making billions in profit.

A Little More Technical

When you get into AdWords, there are a few other things that are good to know. Ads are organized into campaigns, ad groups, and then the ads themselves. There are two main types of ad campaigns: Search and Display. A Search campaign will display ads next to Google search results. A Display ad campaign will show ads on other websites that have space set aside for displaying Google ads. Google recommends that you split up your budget, with about 70% going for Search, and 30% for Display. Each ad group can then have multiple ads in it, and it’s good to have 3-4 different ads in each group so that Google can analyze each one and see which has the highest quality score.

AdWords is a huge player in online advertising today, and its potential is truly only beginning to be tapped. Getting in on the action early will mean that you can learn the technology and methodology from the beginning, learning and growing and changing with AdWords. This will also leave you positioned to take greatest advantage as each new phase of advertising potential is uncovered and unleashed.

At the top of new and emerging forms of online advertising lies Pay Per Click (PPC). Most people have probably had some exposure, at minimum, to this topic, which is such a new form of advertising that some industry experts say we’ve barely even scratched the surface of what can be done with PPC. But there are some things we know now, even early on, to help craft and maintain PPC ad campaigns.

PPC is basically when certain sites, particularly search engines like Google and social sites like Facebook, allow people to buy listing space which appears next to certain non-paid results. The sites are simply selling real estate on their pages for advertising.

PPC Advertising Basics: Bids, Quality Scores and Landing Pages

PPC advertising is a fairly simple concept at a high level. Basically, companies pay for ads on a 3rd party site, but only when those ads are clicked. The amount paid per ad is set up on an auction system; so basically you set bid prices you’re willing to spend per ad click, and if you’re the highest bidder, your ad gets displayed.

There’s a little more to PPC than bids. The other main component is what’s called a quality score. Basically, a quality score is determined based on the relationship between keywords, ad text, and landing page text. If your keywords match the ad text, which in turn strongly relates to the text on your landing page, then your ad will have a high quality score.

A landing page is simply the page that your ad links to. Landing pages should be highly relevant to your ads, and the keywords in each ad should appear on the landing page. It’s important to be a bit technical here with the number of keywords, and the number of total words on these landing pages. More on this later.

Proceed with Caution: Don’t Overspend on PPC Campaigns

As great as PPC campaigns can be, businesses should proceed with caution. This caution is needed because PPC can become very expensive, and bring in little to no new business if done improperly. Setting up an effective PPC campaign takes time, effort, and knowledge.

In order to avoid overspending on PPC campaigns, do keyword research. Keyword research will tell you how much traffic a given keyword will likely generate. Here’s where you’ll need to get a bit technical. Take your top 3-4 keywords (those most directly related to your product or service, and with the highest potential search traffic) and write ads based on each keyword. Make sure that each keyword appears 3-4 times in the body of your landing page.

For search engines to consider your content of good quality, your landing pages should be between 500-800 words in length. Your keywords should appear 1 time per 100 words. This ratio is important because you need good keyword density, but it’s also very important not to overstuff your content with them. Using the above information should give you high quality landing pages, that will perform well.

Negative keywords are also important. Negative keywords are basically those keywords you don’t want your ads displaying for. These are very important when cutting down on wasted ad spend. Some examples are educational materials, job seekers or free/low cost, etc. Obviously if your products/services are related to these topics these aren’t going to work for you.

Stay tuned to this pay per click advertising series. Our next topic will be on Google AdWords!