We are thrilled to have Margaret Hegg as a guest writer for the Online Marketing Mavens blog. Margaret is a maven herself– a media supervisor at an independent ad agency managing online media plans for several well-known clients. She regularly makes sense of the good, bad, and ugly in online marketing.
Well, it’s December and here I am, scrambling to think of good gift ideas for the holidays. Honestly, who has time anymore to go store to store to find that perfect gift? I know some of my friends consider shopping their cardio program, and that’s all good; but I prefer to multi-task. Phone calls, laundry, tv-watching and online shopping in one fell swoop. And judging from the latest stats on Cyber Monday, I am not alone. According to ComScore, Cyber Monday had online sales of $733 million, and over $4 billion was spent online during that week. It isn’t surprising that the big retailers like Amazon, Wal Mart, and Target topped the list as the most visited web sites that day. And, interestingly, more online shoppers made purchases from work computers (45%) than from home (44%). Hmmmm…..
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Google Local and Yahoo Local search products are often under-used as an online marketing tactic. With Google, the basic Google maps listing is free and businesses can input quite a bit of business information such as location, business hours, coupons and more. For those with a physical location, you’re crazy not to do it. This free listing can be a great way to get your business in front of searchers at the moment they are seeking your product locally. At the Google Local Business Center, Google will take you through the process of adding a listing. There’s also a great tutorial on Google Local Business Center: Adding Photos, Attributes, Maps Corrections & Stats on SearchEngineLand.com.
In the PPC realm, enhancing this listing with a custom map icon and ad text message is worthwhile because you don’t pay unless a user actually clicks through to your website. Now there’s a new benefit to going Local. A new feature called AdWords Local PlusBox allows extra lines in your text ad to appear in the search results page– IF you make the top of the page.
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I skim dozens trade articles daily to keep on top of the ever-changing world of internet marketing. One of my favorites is a MediaPost blog called “Online Spin”which features posts from different leaders in interactive marketing. This is one I typically land on and read despite the craziness going on around me. This craziness is brought on by the complex world of internet marketing. From the time I transitioned from traditional media planning to interactive over a year and a half ago, the scope of online marketing has changed a ton. Newer options have become more widely adopted such as behavioral targeting (which is supposed to REALLY take off in 2008), dynamic ads, widgets, you name it. So many companies have consolidated, purchased each other, merged, gone under, that it’s all I can do to keep up with it all.
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