• Large Ad Firms
• Template Oriented Firms
• Cousin Rick
• Small Web Shops

There are plus and minus arguments for all of these categories and they all serve their purpose for their target audience. Startup companies usually do not have the cash to spend thousands on their first website. Using a template firm or cousin rick out of his basement will get a website online for much less. Firms that are ready to take their website to the next level can use a small web shop or a large ad firm to transform their “site” to a “marketing tool” that will actually drive leads and sales.

Here is the breakdown, in my opinion, of the pros and cons of each category:

Large Ad Firms

Great for large companies that need a dedicated team on retainer to help with radio, print, web campaigns. They do all custom work, no templates. You usually get a dedicated team lead that you can call at any point to get anything you need. Obviously very expensive because of the overhead of all the salary employees, fancy studio, etc.

Template Oriented Firms

What I mean by template oriented firms is the companies that create template sites for the vertical industries. Everyone has seen the real estate sites that all look very similar. These sites can be put up with minimal effort and can be controlled via an administration system. Great for people just starting up. Lots of templates for every industry. But your site will not be very flexible, it will look very similar or identical to hundreds or thousands of other sites out there. You must stay within the boundaries of the template, not much room for creativity. Also not great for search engine rankings as the template structure is identical to others.

“Cousin Rick”

I use “Cousin Rick” to describe that family member of friend that “does web design”. I come across this all the time when pitching to potential clients. People always know someone who does website design on the side. This can be a viable option for the first time website owner who does not have the cash to start. 99 times out of 100 this type of relationship does not work out. Rick may move out of the country, start college, etc and will be unable to make the updates in a timely fashion. Unfortunately Rick also doesn’t really understand the strategy behind SEO and how to position your site so that customers can find you. He also doesn’t have a team of professionals so that someone is always on the end of the phone for emergencies, quick updates, changes, design needs, etc.

Small Web Shops

Using a smaller web shop is essentially the best of all the categories above. This may be a tad biased as I am involved with a small web shop but hear me out. A small web design shop has the creativity and team backing every project. They have all the skills and know-how to get your site designed, built, launched, maintained and found by customers. They can also help with print campaigns, radio campaigns and other forms of marketing. They are in tune with the latest social media marketing strategies. They usually don’t have fancy studios, keeping overhead lower, and some are structured with some full time, but most contract workers to keep overhead even lower. You can call at anytime and get someone real at the other end ready to help you. You can always depend on that team to help tweak your site and keep it driving leads to your business.

I hope this gives you a little bit more insight into the web design industry in Ottawa (and around the world) as I categorize it. Comments are welcome! Cheers, Ryan

That being said, there are still a large number of businesses that either don’t know what social media marketing is or just don’t know where to start. In this post I am going to attempt to educate small and medium business owners or marketing directors on what social networking is and how it can be used to spread messages, stay in tune with your customers, increase customer satisfaction, and help drive sales.

The Wikipedia definition: Social media marketing is a recent component of organizations’ integrated marketing communications plans. Integrated marketing communications is a principle organizations follow to connect with their targeted markets. Integrated marketing communications coordinates the elements of the promotional mix—advertising, personal selling, public relations, publicity, direct marketing, and sales promotion—to produce a customer focused message. (more)

Simplified down, social media marketing is using already established mediums and tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube etc to share two way conversations with your customers. You can setup Facebook pages, twitter accounts, blogs, message boards, and other tools to initiate that conversation. You could use these tools to let customers know of upcoming events, share product update notes, let customers report software bugs, customer surveys, and lots more.

There are obvious things that you must do in order for a social media campaign to be successful such as proper moderation, response time, and choosing the right mediums. It can also backfire under certain circumstances. Some recent Aussie examples are Tourism Queensland’s ‘dream job’ campaign and Witchery’s ‘girl in a jacket’. Both companies used YouTube video clips that were later uncovered as fakes – which was quickly followed by public backlash from users who didn’t appreciate feeling tricked by bogus or contrived videos.

Sony faced a similar problem in 2006 when it launched a viral marketing campaign on YouTube featuring a couple of boys in a video discussing how much they wanted a Playstation portable for Christmas. Unfortunately their target audience is tech savvy and quickly sniffed out that something wasn’t right – and they made their anger public via blogs across the world. Within weeks, Sony made a public apology to its consumers for misleading them.

But used right social media marketing can be a very powerful, and cost effective way to spread messages, get feedback, and stay in touch with your target audience.

Although Ottawa based businesses seem to be catching onto this Social media phenomenon more quickly than other parts of Canada, there is still lots more businesses out there that would benefit from looking into it.

The printed version of the phone book is quickly becoming extinct. Next year households will only get a copy of the book if they specifically ask for it in the Calgary area. Over the next 5 years the printed books will be phased out in many areas and more emphasis put on the online listings.

With a well designed and built website you will be found by users who are interested in what you sell right at the very moment the potential customers are in the mind frame to buy. Your website is open 24/7, 365 and has all the information on how you are different from your competition. When the customer has made a buying decision your website has tools that make it easy for the customer to contact you. What an efficient selling tool!

The difference between baby boomers and the new generation of customers is what business owners must wrap their heads around. The new generation uses the internet to do their market research and make a buying decision. Most of them have never even used a phone book before.

The cost of having a 1/8th page black and white ad in most phone books for one year is the approximate cost to create a nice website.

All business owners should make a well designed website part of their marketing mix. It will drive leads and sales and over time will become a very important tool for creating brand awareness and educating potential customers on service offerings.

Huge list of non-relevant keywords

When you create your AdWords campaign it is important that you do not go keyword crazy and create long lists of irrelevant and generic keywords. For example if you were selling shoes then it would not be in your best interest to target the keyword “shoe”. The reason being is that the cost per click (CPC) for such a generic keyword would be incredibly high when compared to a more descriptive relevant keyword such as “Nike Cross Trainer”. An example of an irrelevant keyword which would not produce conversions if you strictly conducted automotive sales would be “Running Shoe Laces” the phrase may bring visitors to your website but if they do not find what they are looking for when they get there they will be gone just as quickly as they arrived.

Not Identifying Unique Aspects of Your Product or Service

Before implementing your AdWords campaign you must first understand exactly what it is that makes you stand out from your competition.By identifying your unique products or services you will have a lot more clarity on how to rise above your competitors and zone in on the keywords or phrases that are unique to your business.I would recommend that you perform an analysis of your competition, have a look and see what they are doing and which phrases they are using.After conducting a competition analysis and after understanding what makes your products or services unique you will be able to come up with a strategy that will topple your competitors.

Lack of Keywords in Your Ad Text

When creating your descriptive ad copy it is imperative that you find a means to inject your keywords in to your title and description while maintaining the delicate balance of clarity and relevance.Your ad copy should be tailored in such a way that when read by a visitor they know exactly what they are getting in to when they click on your ad, which brings me to my next point.

Directing Users Solely to Your Home Page

Taking the time to decide on which landing page should be designated to which ad instead of pointing all ads in a campaign to your homepage is an oversight that I come across far too often. Send your users straight to the page that contains exactly what was described to them within your ad copy.

Creation of Single Ad Groups

By categorizing ads that are targeting related keywords into a common ad-group will create a much higher level of control that you have over your entire campaign. Let’s say that you were a sporting goods store, start by grouping all ads targeted towards hockey skates into a single Ad Group. You would then create another ad-group which would be targeting hockey sticks and another containing hockey gloves and so on. By organizing your ad-group structure in this manner gives you the ability to create in-depth reports on the performance of each ad-group.

Utilizing Single Campaigns

Once you have your Ad Groups sorted out into easy to identify categories you may then move on to the next step of creating relevant campaigns. From the example above you have created Ad Groups containing separate products of hockey skates, sticks, gloves etc. Now it is time to create a container for all of the Ad Groups into one campaign entitled “hockey equipment”. You would then repeat the process creating Ad Groups for tennis, one group for shoes one for racquets etc and then once again you drop them all into a single campaign entitle “tennis equipment”. Having highly organized campaigns is the key to determine which ads are creating the optimal conversions.

Using Broad Match Only

When you do not take advantage of the phrase matching options that are available to you chances are you are missing out on potential customers and creating a higher CPC. Broad matches are usually less targeted than exact and phrase matching. Broad matching is the default option your ads will appear for expanded matches such as plurals or relevant keyword variations. When utilizing phrase match your ad will appear for search terms in the order that you specify and sometimes for other terms. Exact matching is by far the most targeted option to use. You will appear for the exact keyword specified. Negative keyword is also a fantastic option to utilize in order to specify which keywords you do not want to appear for.

Failure To Optimize Ad Serving For Your Ads

When you take advantage of AdWords Ad Serving service basically what you will be doing is showing your most popular ads more often.The AdWords platform will give weight to ads with the highest click through rates (CTRs) and display them more often then keywords with lower (CTRs) within the same ad-group.

Not Tracking Results

In order to have any idea on your AdWords campaign performance you must be able to see the keywords that work as well as those that do not. Google AdWords supplies a vast array of very useful tracking tools. Google has also built in to the user interface Google Analytics which is a marvellous web analytics tool that provides you with in-depth reporting on all aspects of your campaign performance. I can not stress enough the importance of creating goals for your AdWords campaign to measure your success by. You can also setup the reports to be sent to you automatically.

Entering The Content Network Without Modifying Bids

Within the AdWords platform you have recently been given the ability to set different bids for the content network compared to that of the search network. If you do not set different bids on the content network for certain keywords, you will be paying more per click than you should be. After lowering the prices on certain keywords you will notice that the amount of click throughs that you will be attaining will remain the same as they were at the higher bid.

Conclusion

The purpose for this article was to create awareness for common mistakes and to eliminate frustrations that may emerge when managing Google AdWords campaigns.The points mentioned above are compiled from management mistakes that I have stumbled upon time and time again in hopes to assist you in creating a marketing campaign that will generate dramatic increases to the profits of your business. There are many more tips and tricks that we use to help our clients achieve success in the Google Ad Words arena.

Google calculates a webpage’s importance from the votes cast for it. How important each vote is is taken into account when a page’s PageRank is calculated. It matters because it is one of the factors that determines a page’s ranking in the search results. PageRank isn’t the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is a very important one.

Wikipedia’s definition of PageRank: “PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page, used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references.” Full PageRank Definition