If you haven’t thought about search engine marketing (SEM) or search engine optimization (SEO) yet, it’s time to jump onboard the search train. Think about some of the goals of your marketing campaigns – building awareness, boosting ROI, and increasing conversions. What do you think your company’s website is for?

Reach

One of the most important goals of marketing is to increase brand awareness. The great thing about online advertising is that marketers can target consumers at any time during the buying cycle. Social media allows us to reach our consumers in a timely, efficient and measureable manner.

ROI

Analytics help you make decisions about your brand. When we optimize new insights and data, we optimize our marketing budgets. This is why it is important to select relevant keywords for your SEO campaigns. Your consumers (potential and current) use search engines like Google, Bing and YouTube to find information regarding your products/services.

Last month Google released a new Automated Rules feature in AdWords, only available to a limited number of advertisers.  Google is in the process of releasing it to all advertisers.  With this feature, advertisers can create rules to automatically change their budgets and bids, among other things, which make simple, but timely, daily maintenance very quick.  These rules can be set to run at certain times of the day, and advertisers can even set up e-mail alerts to let them know when these rules run so they can go into AdWords to see what might have been changed.

To see if your Google AdWords account has the Automated Rules feature, you will see an “Automate” drop down menu next to the “Alerts” drop down menu on the Campaign tab.

There are lots of costly platforms out there, like Acquisio, which offer similar automated rules, so it will be interesting to see if they will try to differentiate themselves further from what Google AdWords is capable of doing.  And, on the other side, it will be interesting to see if and how Google will grow this feature to continually simplify these tasks.

In order to have a successful pay per click campaign, you must keep a close eye on your metrics. Watch as Mike Hernalsteen, Online Marketing Specialist from LoSasso Advertising, explains the most important metrics used in PPC.

See more SEM Minute videos.

Mike Hernalsteen is the Senior Interactive Marketing Specialist at LoSasso Advertising Inc., a Chicago based interactive agency where he develops comprehensive online marketing strategies for leading B2B and consumer brands. (See more posts by Mike)

Scott LoSasso, President of LoSasso Advertising, answers questions from the audience and panel moderator Gary Slack of Slack Barshinger at Google offices in Chicago.

In an effort to help traditional advertising agencies understand how to implement search marketing strategies, Google invited a panel of agency experts to share their insights on how they have used search marketing and other online strategies to improve client and agency performance.

Scott LoSasso comments, “I was flattered to be asked to sit on the panel. The past few years have been such an interesting time of change in this industry. We continue to work very hard with our clients and staff to integrate everything we do. It requires a vigilant effort and a fundamental shift in thinking. This was a fun event and I was happy to share some of what we have learned.”

Google offers a full suite of tools for search management, and they are in the process of rolling out new support services to help agencies leverage their platform.

David Fabbri is Creative Director of LoSasso Advertising Inc., a Chicago based interactive agency specializing in content marketing strategies and customer acquisition for leading B2B and consumer brands. (See more posts by David)

In this short video, Scott LoSasso discusses the importance of conducting pilot PPC programs before heading into the 2010 planning season. Conducting tests now can provide crucial insights into what to expect from large-scale programs going forward – in click costs, cost per conversion, cost per lead and other key factors.

“This is a strategic, methodical science – it’s not simply buying clicks to your site… When the economy turns up, marketers that have learned how to do this are going to steal market share from those that have not.”

With several thousand advertising, marketing and PR companies in Chicago, maintaining first position in the search engines is an unrealistic objective for a tiny agency in Ravenswood – yet there we are – #1 in Yahoo! for the term “Chicago marketing agency”. Now, in the spirit of full disclosure – we are currently on page 2 in Google – down from our all time high on Google of #3. Organic search marketing can be a vexing concept. It is so much more nebulous than most forms of advertising that it often gets pushed to the back burner – or handed off to in house marketing staff person with little time or training. This is a mistake. The dynamics of marketing have changed a great deal in the past 5 years. Search marketing is the fastest growing discipline in the marketing world. And if you have not committed to a search strategy, now is the time. Most of your competitors are spending fewer dollars and will be slower to move. This gives you a time advantage that can pay dividends because organic search takes time.

About 7 months ago we were virtually invisible to the search engines. Ranking below position 100 for just about every keyword we wanted to show for. Since we were constantly pushing our clients to do a better job with their search marketing, we decided to walk the talk.

As a small shop, we maintain a lean staff, so we required lean plan for our SEO work. We redesigned our site using best practice architecture, incorporated a blog and began actively publishing highly relevant content with embedded links to our site and to other legitimate resources. We have also utilized social media such as Facebook, Linked in and Twitter to provide more traffic and visibility to our site. We have employed a few other tricks of the trade, but all has been done with a relatively modest time effort.

The key to this effort for our agency and clients is the continuous learning of our online marketing team. We have dedicated specialists for search marketing and web development. We encourage continuous development, and require that they spend time each day staying current with best practice.

The most common mistake in this part of our industry is the casual approach that many marketers take to this very important component of their marketing strategy. Search marketing is a discipline that requires distinct and separate skill sets that include web development, search engine optimization and pay per click ad management. And while it may be an anchor point, search marketing is only one component in the rapidly evolving digital marketing space.

eMarketer chart

There is great opportunity in digital marketing, but managing and executing this work is still a great challenge for many marketers and agencies. This is reflected in the active turnover of agency relationships in the digital space as recently reported by eMarketer.

Scott LoSasso is President of LoSasso Advertising Inc., a Chicago based interactive agency specializing in content marketing strategies and customer acquisition for leading B2B and consumer brands. (See more posts by Scott)

Compete.com put together a Slideshare presentation discussing the online media trends of 2008. Compete calculates and estimates total U.S.-based traffic for nearly every site on the internet.

Here are some of the key takeaways:

Did you have a strong enough search engine presence to be found by the 116 billion searches last year? Do you know what people said about your brand in 2008? Consider a search engine marketing campaign and monitor social media conversations so you can be there for your customers.

The numbers are there. Are you?

Mike Hernalsteen is the Senior Interactive Marketing Specialist at LoSasso Advertising Inc., a Chicago based interactive agency where he develops comprehensive online marketing strategies for leading B2B and consumer brands. (See more posts by Mike)

This morning, our company received an email from an SEO service concerned about our search engine ranking.

The search term in question (“marketing interactive”) allegedly listed us at position 5 on page 31 in Google’s search results, and the only way we could improve these results was if we used their back-linking service. A colleague of mine got the same exact email at his company halfway across the country. The same exact keyword supposedly lists his site at position 5 on page 31 in Google’s results.

This is one main reason SEO gets a bad rap. You receive an email claiming you do not have enough inbound links to your site, and they trick you into buying their service. The main concern is, a lot of companies like this use link building tactics that are considered “black hat” and are the quickest way to get your site blacklisted in search engines. A couple “black hat” techniques include spamming blog comments with your website’s URL, and buying links in link farms.

While linking is arguably the number one way to improve your website’s results in search engines, it is only one factor out of several hundred in search engines’ algorithms. How clean is your navigation and internal link structure? Do you have proper page titles? Do you have an appropriate amount of content? Do your images include proper alt text?

When deciding which SEO agency is right for you, always consider the full-service agency that understands your business enough to drive high quality traffic to your site. Not the agency only wanting to build links to ensure you rank high for nefarious keywords. As Steve Irwin always said *danger* *danger* *danger*.

Mike Hernalsteen is the Senior Interactive Marketing Specialist at LoSasso Advertising Inc., a Chicago based interactive agency where he develops comprehensive online marketing strategies for leading B2B and consumer brands. (See more posts by Mike)

In December, our company developed a fun holiday greeting featuring a video of our staff singing “The 12 Things Our Clients Want This Holiday Season.” The campaign included a printed holiday card with a message to drive recipients online to view the video.

In the past, we have discussed the importance of video and its obvious increase in popularity and use. Key to success when using online video is the ability to make your campaigns measurable. A strong analytics platform will allow you to track general activity such as page views, as well as more granular information such as where visitors came from, how long they stayed and where they went when they left.

A campaign with this level of measurability allows you to better gauge success, and more accurately understand user behavior to achieve better results in future campaigns.

We snail-mailed 321 holiday cards (18 bounce backs) on December 15 with a message inviting the recipients to view the digital version on our website. Here are some very telling numbers from our little ditty.

Pageviews for www.losasso.com/happy-holidays.php

December 15 – 0 views (the page was launched on this day)
December 16 – 36 views
December 17 – 178 views
December 18 – 108 views
December 19 – 64 views
December 20 – 14 views

We began to see traffic to the video the day after the page went live (Dec 16), coming directly from the friends and family of the LoSasso team.

Wednesday, December 17 is when recipients of the snail-mail piece began to view the video. 42% of our views on 12/17 and 53% of the views on 12/18 came directly from the holiday card recipients. That is a total of 111 unique pageviews in just 2 days. 12/19 and 12/20 added 44 more unique pageviews from the mailing.

Our staff also shared this page on social networks, bringing in substantial traffic (12/17 through 12/20) from StumbleUpon (16%), Facebook (15%), Twitter (8%), LinkedIn (3%) and others.

The length of the holiday greeting video is just shy of two minutes at 1:57. Users who came from the mailing stayed on the page for an average of 2:36. Users from social networks stayed on the page for an average of 1:18. Obviously our clients and friends who received the holiday card were more “qualified” visitors with a bit more interest in the content of the video than the users from social networks, making their average duration on the page longer.

Some more interesting statistics: 27% of the users who watched the video went to the ‘our people’ page to read more about the employees in the video, while only 6% from social networks did the same. This signifies that our primary audience was genuinely interested in seeing/learning more about their favorite LoSasso employees.

We also posted the video on YouTube. Though we do not have access to the analytics to find out where traffic came from, we do know there were 191 plays on YouTube and that this version has been re-tweeted on Twitter by non-LoSasso employees twice. We still collect an average of 4 views a day in the month of January for the holiday video.

Through today, we have received 193 visitors from the mailout. That is a 60% rate of return from the direct mail piece!

We were very happy with our increase in traffic and interest in December. As a result of this campaign, we received a call from a prospect on our mailing list who has requested help with her website and a more extensive interactive marketing strategy. Who knew a holiday card would be such a nice case study?

With a strong analytics platform, you can better understand your customers’ behavior, boosting the performance of your programs while cutting out the fat. Push for stronger results. Make 2009 the year when you make your campaigns measurable.

Mike Hernalsteen is the Senior Interactive Marketing Specialist at LoSasso Advertising Inc., a Chicago based interactive agency where he develops comprehensive online marketing strategies for leading B2B and consumer brands. (See more posts by Mike)

Twitter is one of the most popular vehicles in today’s social media world. A recent Motrin ad that suggested mothers carry their babies as fashion accessories caused a recent surge of negative response on Twitter, which resulted in Johnson & Johnson pulling the commercial. Read more in this article from PRSA’s The Strategist Online.