Even as technology evolves at warp speed and new online tools spring up regularly, rest assured that the fundamentals of building a marketing communications strategy have remained relatively constant.

Whether “optimizing for search”, “tweeting”, or “posting”, it seems that every day there is a new way to engage customers, generate leads, and manage your brand. Just ten years ago, you may have been considering creating a website, sending out flyers, or advertising on the radio. Today, you are most likely making decisions about Social Media Marketing and Search Engine Optimization and Pay Per Click marketing.

If you are feeling overwhelmed by the vast array of online marketing options or are simply confused about which activities deserve your time and investment, you are not alone. Many businesses are facing the conundrum of how to navigate the online world. While some have yet to dip their toes in the water, others are diving in headfirst.

Recently, I caught up with Nicole Knight, the Director of Marketing and Communications for the Army and Navy Academy, located in Carlsbad, California, to find out how she is tackling marketing decisions for the Academy in 2010. The Army and Navy Academy prides itself on offering a superior education to young men thanks to its small class sizes and rigorous yet supportive college curriculum, which is designed to provide a foundation for excellence in leadership, personal growth and respect.

During the interview, Nicole highlights how she has integrated online marketing initiatives into the overall marketing strategy at the Army and Navy Academy. According to Nicole, this shift in strategy has not only been cost effective, but also has helped the school to attract its target audience exactly where it lives today – online.

Can you tell me about some of your major responsibilities as the Director of Marketing and Communications at the Army and Navy Academy?

My job entails marketing, communications and community/media relations. Responsibilities include:

· Controlling and updating on-line social networking sites like Facebook + Twitter.

· Working with and contacting the media to distribute press releases.

· Project Management of specific marketing campaigns for lead generation for the Admissions team as well as enhancing brand recognition locally, nationally and internationally.

· Planning and execution of annual internal and external publications.

· Editor-in-chief of bi-annual 50+ page magazine: Army Navy.

· Continuous branding of the school to internal and external communities by establishing a unique brand look and style.

What do you like most about your work?

I most enjoy the flexibility of my job that includes working on a variety of projects and marketing initiatives daily. I also really enjoy servicing parents and witnessing first-hand the substantial changes their young boys make while attending the Academy. It feels similar to having 300+ younger brothers.

What separates Army and Navy Academy from its competitors?

What separates Army and Navy Academy from competitive private boarding and day schools is our leadership program. Army and Navy Academy offers small class sizes, extended “support” hours for students to receive additional tutoring, and also follows a service academy model very similar to that of West Point. Leadership Education Training (LET) is threaded into the students’ entire school day experience. Through this training, Cadets learn self-accountability, self-esteem and respect for others. Of course, with the lower side of our campus reaching the Pacific Ocean, our location allows cadets to enjoy unique sports and clubs like the surf team in addition to a traditional athletics program. The Army and Navy Academy truly is positioned perfectly, between the Pacific Ocean and the coast highway in the village of Carlsbad, making it a dream location to attend high school!

During this time of year many companies are planning their marketing strategy for next year, can you give us some insight to your process? What information do you collect?

Planning is key. With the support of top administrators and the Academy’s Board of Directors, the school has undertaken a new attitude towards marketing. We are aware of the need to expand our marketing initiatives beyond those traditional avenues: print, radio, and television. With the explosion of Social Networking and the Internet, we realize the future is online and our prospective families are shying away from traditional messaging by exploring vehicles such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and search engines. While we still run small direct mail campaigns to highly targeted groups and also advertise in a few local and international print pieces, we are now investing more of our time, energy and budget into referral sites, search engine optimization, brand reputation enhancement and social networking sites.

Has the information changed that you collect?

I’ve been with the Academy for just over four years. In 2006, we did not have a clearly defined marketing strategy and virtually no representation on the web. We’d never run a SEO campaign and advertised only in those vehicles that our “big” competitors did. Our website was your basic site and didn’t offer more than landing pages, contact information a few photos and links to stagnant documents. This past May we launched a brand new site with capabilities that include, videos, photo galleries, interactive pages, links and a portal that our parents can log into to view specific class and athletic schedules for their sons.

A lot of similar businesses are facing cash flow issues right now, what would be your suggestion to them?

My suggestion to other businesses is to think outside of the box. Think of resources and individuals who can help to get the word out about your product without shelling out thousands of unbudgeted dollars. Think back to basic rules of networking and viral marketing. The cost of setting up a Facebook fan page is zilch. Update your page 2-3 times a week with helpful hints or ideas for your target market/customers. Link your Facebook page to automatically update a Twitter account and you are killing two birds with one stone. You customers or potential customers want to hear from you, they just don’t want to be inundated with your sales pitches. Use the “drip” method and you’re messaging will make it through all the other advertising “noise” out there. Also remember this is NOT the time to quit advertising or cut your budget. This is the time to be creative, look at where the majority of your leads or customers are coming from and invest your dollars there. I highly recommend working with a team of experts to advise you on SEO, PPC or brand reputation campaigns. Now is not the time to throw your budget out the window. “Trying out” your ideas on which keyword phrases or print campaigns will work best. Check your website tracking analytics, look at the numbers and ask for the advice of the experts!

How is Army and Navy Academy leveraging the web for lead generation?

Right now, we are running a brand reputation management and SEO campaign to establish and maintain our positioning on our most frequently searched key words and phrases. We are essentially giving the search engines what their looking for – from videos, to press releases to reviews/testimonials from our parents and alumni.

What are some key factors you look at when exploring a new online advertising opportunity?

Key factors we examine before beginning a new on-line advertising opportunity are demographics of the viewers and the numbers. What is the ROI and is it going to be worth it?

As the Director of Marketing and Communications, what’s your biggest challenge right now?

As the Director of Marketing and Communications, my biggest challenge is finding the newest and most effective avenues to expose our unique product to those who best benefit from an Army Navy Experience. Our supportive teaching style may not be “it” for every 7-12^th grade young man, however “it” has helped over 6,000 young men over the past 100 years go on to reach their full potential and lead lives of excellence.

How are you targeting these customers? Is it specific or broad?

Targeting customers is key in the business of education. Recent studies support the extreme differences in how boys and girls learn in the classroom. The Army and Navy Academy prides itself on educating young men of good character. We target those young men who thrive in smaller class sizes without the added distractions often found at public schools. The public education system works for some students. We cater to boys who want the extra support to “get ahead”.

Do you see yourself leveraging a social website like Facebook in the future?

Already do. Look us up: Army and Navy Academy – click on the fan page with the Academy’s seal.

-Erin Carpenter

Coming up with unique and interesting ways to build links is an ongoing challenge for most SEO’s.  We sometimes take on clients that are in industries that are not very interesting, but none the less, they still need links.  So the challenge arises, how do we get people to link to this site when it’s in such a boring industry?

Below are 3 of the hottest, newest, coolest link building strategies for 2010!

1.  Infographs or Infographics

If you’re not familiar with infographs, they basically represent data in a visual format.  A couple of sites that have taken this strategy and ran with it include: Mint.com & CreditLoan.com.  These infographs can send massive amounts of traffic and get you hundreds if not thousands of backlinks, but they have to be well executed.  Be aware that the initial traffic you get will be social media traffic, which typically doesn’t convert well for most industries.  But the strategy with infographs is links!

2. Trends

Trends are hot in every industry.  People love to know what’s going on, what’s coming up and what others are doing.  Smashing Magazine does an excellent job of this as seen in their “Web Design Trends for 2009“.   This type of content works well for building backlinks because its rich in content, uses images to tell the story, is well structured and it also gives credit to others in the industry.  I know if I was a designer and Smashing Magazine linked to me I’d probably blog about or atleast shoot out a Tweet to let my friends know.  As you can see, this post got them over 200 comments and over 5,000 backlinks.

3. Extended Research

Doing extended research on any one topic can reveal all kinds of facts and statistics that you’re most likely not aware of.  Simply compiling such information can make for linkbait content, but let’s go a bit further with it and truly make it linkable.  If you don’t want to do the research yourself put together a process and post it on Mechanical Turk.  If you don’t want do create the graphics post a job on Elance or oDesk.  Becoming THE source of information is a sure way to get links.

Conclusion

There are countless ways to build links, but with some creativity and know how, anyone can create linkable content.  I challenge you to push the boundaries of link building to come up with new and creative ways of getting those links.  Knowing what others are doing is a double edge sword, you’ll either adapt their techniques or take note of what they’re doing and push yourself to find better ways.  I choose the latter.

- Marko Nikolic

Facebook has proven itself as a legitimate business tool for building communities, spreading awareness of brands, and growing businesses.  But while opportunities and challenges are ripe with this marketing tool, B2B and B2C marketers need a strategy before diving in.

How are the most successful Facebook campaigns structured?  How are communities built?  What are the best practices for its use?  Participants will get an exclusive look at the ideation, strategy, and execution of the most successful Facebook campaigns interspersed with case anecdotes from eBoost Consulting’s expertise in marketing on Facebook.

You will learn:
• How communities are built on Facebook.
• How to grow your B2B brand with Facebook.
• What are the best practices for handling worst-case PR disasters using Facebook.
• What the blueprint for every campaign development should be.

This webinar is best suited for Brand Marketers, Social Media Marketers, Corporate Marketers, and Senior Executives who have dabbled in Facebook but didn’t have a clear plan or intend to add social media in the marketing mix.

Speaker:
Johnny Chan is CMO of eBoost Consulting. Johnny has guided the transformational initiatives for some of San Diego’s fastest growing companies and some of the web’s most ambitious social media projects and online communities, including Jedidiah, RealAge, and Michael Jordan Steaks. His portfolio of work builds on his years of strategic formulation and implementation for hyper-growth companies.

In 2002, Johnny received his BA in Economics with highest honor from Thurgood Marshall College at University of California, San Diego. His course work examined the domestic and international sources of economic and political change. Johnny continued education towards an eMBA centered on global leadership in business from Thunderbird School of Global Management, consistently ranked as the #1 International MBA program and #1 Executive Education program by sources such as the Financial Times.

To get started with product extensions, simply go to the Google Merchant Center and add your Adwords customer ID to your account.

Kurt Kaufer

Google Adwords Product Extensions

The measurement can offer a more accurate depiction of your ads influence and how effective your ad is at drawing visitors to your site, even if they don’t click right away. As an example, the user may see the ad, like it, but immediately close their browser bar without clicking on the ad because they were signing off for the day. Then, ten days later, they resume their product search and remember the name of your website or company from the display ad and go to your website directly. Although they did not click on the display ad ten days earlier, your ad did do its job of engaging and pulling the potential customer to your website.

The view-through metric has been added to the new Google Adwords interface as a default. It could be a sign that Google is really looking to get advertisers to engage with their Adsense content network, and that it may be time to re-optimize any content campaigns you already have running.

Kurt Kaufer

Bounce rate by definition is the percentage of visitors who land on the website and view only one page (without visiting any other pages) before leaving. For example: Kurt sees a pay-per-click ad which was advertising a wetsuit sale at a local surf shop. He clicks on the ad which takes him to the “sale” landing page. After he reads the page he then leaves the website to go back to Google and start another search. Typical ways a bounce is recorded is by:

• Clicking on an internal link to a page outside of the website
• Closing the browser window or tab
• Simply typing in a new URL
• Clicking the “back” button and leaving the site
• Session-timeout*

*A session-timeout is when a visitor views a specific page, doesn’t look at another page, and leaves the browser idle for a certain amount of time. A commonly used session-timeout threshold is 30 minutes; so once this time limit has been reached a bounce is recorded.

Exit rate by definition is the percentage of visitors who leave the website from a specific page based on the number of visits to that page. The difference between bounce rate and exit rate is that the visitor who exited from this specific landing page may have viewed many other pages on the website before landing on this specific page and then exiting from here. For example: Kurt sees a pay-per-click ad for a local surf shop that just opened. He clicks on the ad which brings him to the home page of the website. He views a few different pages before going to the “sale” page. After he reads the “sale” page he then closes his browser window, hops in his car and speeds to the surf shop.

How to use these metrics:
Both of these performance indicators can create actionable insight, but are used very differently. Bounce rate is important for determining how your landing page might be performing. If you have a ppc ad running and you find that you have a 75% bounce rate for the specific product page which your ad brings the user to, then there is a problem with the landing page. Why would so many users leave a page that was specifically targeted for them? What about the page is preventing them from moving onto other correlated pages within the site? Optimizing the page, multivariate testing, and statistical analysis may help you determine what the root cause and solution may be.

Exit rate is important for determining how a particular page is performing in the sales process. If, as an advertiser, you have mapped out a specific sales (page) funnel, and visitors seem to be exiting from one specific page in that funnel, then you know that that page is problematic and needs to be optimized.
As you can see, both metrics can be powerful tools in identifying specific problems in the user interaction process and help you determine what changes are needed to increase sales and ensure a better return on your ad spend.

Kurt Kaufer

1.    Broad Match:  This is the most basic option and happens to be the default when a campaign is set up.  This option is less targeted than the “phrase” and “exact” match options and Google will run your ads on relevant variations of your keywords, even if these terms aren’t in your keywords lists.  Keyword variations include synonyms, singular/plural forms, relevant variants of your keywords, and phrases containing your keywords.

Example:  The keyword you are bidding on is, snowboard jackets.  Ads may appear for searches including snowboard, jackets, buy snowboard jackets, Burton snowboard jackets, winter jackets, snowboard coats, used snowboards.

Pro:  This option allows you to serve your ad to the broadest audience.
Con:  It often generates invalid/unqualified clicks and can increase costs.

2.    Phrase Match:  With this option, Google matches your ad only against keywords that include the phrase you designate specifically in that order.  You can designate this by typing quotation marks around the keyword in the Google interface or by simply selecting the phrase match option.
Example:  The keyword you are bidding on is, “red coat”.  Ads may appear for searches including “cheap red coat”, “buy red coat”, large red coat”.

Pro:  This option allows you to narrow your audience and focus your marketing efforts.
Con:  If one of your goals as an advertiser is generating brand awareness you are eliminating a large base of searchers from ever seeing your ads.  Additionally, if the user happens to misspell a word, or not type it in the exact order, “buy coats red”, then ads would not be served to a segment that really wants your product or service.

3.    Exact Match:  This is the most specific option and your ad would only appear when a user searches for the specific phrase in that order.  You can designate this by typing brackets around the keyword in the Google interface or by simply selecting the exact match option.
Example:  The keyword you are bidding on is, [wetsuit repair].  Ad would only appear for searches including wetsuit repair, in that order, and without any other terms in the query.

Pro:  This option allows you to target your ad spend as much as possible.
Con:  Same as phrase match, but to a higher degree.

4.   Negative Match:  Negative keywords function as a filter to prevent ads showing to unwanted visitors.  This eliminates the amount of untargeted and/or invalid clicks and help control costs.

Example:  The keyword you are bidding on is, snowboard jackets.  If you add the negative keyword ‘cheap’, you ad will not appear for any searches containing the keyword ‘cheap snowboard jackets’.

As you can tell there is a lot to consider when building your keyword list.  In order for your ppc campaigns to be as effective as possible it is a good idea to have a clear understanding of your audience, your marketing and business goals, and your budget well before-hand to ensure you are getting the most effective return on your ad spend.

Kurt Kaufer

The benefit of the Google Ad Preview Tool is that clients and account managers now have the ability to check ads without generating impressions and affecting key metrics.  Additionally, this tool was designed to help advertisers see the ads when they’re targeting a location outside of their own location, and target specific languages other than their own computer language setup.

For access to the tool, please click on the image below.

Kurt Kaufer

Google will list any parameters they have found and will auto select what they think is best for you, but this can easily be changed by selecting the drop down and selecting “Ignore” or “Don’t Ignore”.

The main benefit of Parameter Handling is to help eliminate duplicate content issues.  If you’ve used some of the older shopping carts out there (xcart, oscommerce) then you can probably recall the session id’s being loaded in the URL when a user signs in and out.  Well now thanks to this nifty little addition to Webmaster Tools we can eliminate these duplicate content issues.

In addition to helping avoid duplicate content, Parameter Handling can also help with crawl efficiency and PageRank dilution.   If search engines are crawling multiple pages with session ids for example, then they are putting a load on your server and theirs.  As for PageRank dilution, someone can easily link to one of your URL’s that has a session or id tied to it and unless you are using Parameter Handling, link juice will flow to that exact link.

The main drawback is that Parameter Handling is only for Google, but who knows Yahoo and Bing might offer something like this soon.  It wouldn’t be the first time they added a feature Google came out with.

-Marko

The earliest forms of social media were built on the premise of “members” exchanging information with other “members” across a wide range of topics.  Members create the content, the conversation, and have control over the conveyance and distribution of information.  In keeping with that tradition, this blog post, which presents five tools for social media measurement, is in itself a fundamental platform representing the principles of interactive social information flow.  I am neither trying to endorse nor detract from the below tools, and I am simply using this forum as a springboard for conversation, awareness, and information sharing.

With that said, the tools listed below are useful platforms for measuring brand reputation, tracking user trends, understanding influence, and analyzing customer sentiment.  As a marketer, the ability to organize and understand the massive amount of data available is paramount in not only being able to engage with your target customer base, but in converting them into loyal advocates for your brand.  The main goal is to create actionable insight from your conversation audit, thus advancing the brand and ultimately the business.  Below are five tools that help you get one step closer to realizing qualitative bliss.

Kurt Kaufer