Donna's Promo Talk - Promotional Marketing that Creates Excitement and Gets Results

Super Bowl XLV Sunday is here: Get your TV's, Tweets and Treats ready

Super Bowl XLV Sunday if finally here: The big day when two teams get to play some football in front of the biggest television audience of the year and the brands get to show us what 60 second message they think is worth close to $3 million.

I took a look back this morning through some of my Super Bowl posts from previous years looking to find some interesting stats. Here's a post that I wrote two years ago on February 4, 2009, a couple of days after the Pittsburgh Steelers beat the Arizona Cardinals in Super Bowl XLIII down in Tampa Bay. The Steelers became the first team to win six Super Bowl titles that year. So can they make it a seventh today? And what happened to the Arizona Cardinals? They didn't even make the playoffs this year, in fact they were last in the NFC West, the worst division in the NFL this year. What a difference two years makes!

95% of Super Bowl Ads Scored Online was the title of my 2009 post which referenced a search marketing scorecard created by Reprise Media that measured advertisers who integrated their TV ads with search and social media. It showed that 69%, 2/3 of advertisers, bought paid search keywords on their brand and products. For example, E-Trade bought the keywords "Talking Babies". I just Googled it now and no ads for e-Trade came up, although my results organically gave me a video link for one of the E-Trade Talking Babies ads. Maybe now they don't need to buy the words.

The other interesting stat from this scorecard was that only 22%, 1 in 5 Super Bowl ads, included a specific call to action directing viewers to their website. This was the same year that Wendy's promoted the free breakfast in their ad and it's a good thing they didn't reference their website because it went down shortly after the ad ran from the amount of traffic that it received. Wendy's isn't back in this year's Super Bowl broadcast.

I ended that post with the question, will we get to 100% integration in the future between the ads and online? This year we've jumped right past website integration and went straight to social media making this the Digital Social Super Bowl. All my posts this year have been about how the brands are integrating social media into their ad campaigns and trying to make the most out of their $3 million investment. Why we even have the non-advertisers doing it with campaigns that tie into the "Big Game".

One of the advertisers, Audi, who I've written about already this year "Luxury auto makers utilizing Super Bowl XLV to take the plunge into social media", will be the first brand in history to include a Twitter Hashtag in it's ad. Two years ago when I wrote the post on Super Bowl XLIII a very, very small percentage of the nation even knew what at Twitter hashtag was! Now we have people all over the world following #Egypt.

The hashtag "#ProgressIs" is expected to be shown in Audi's ad which is scheduled to run during the first break after kick-off. Viewers who use the hashtag and the URL "audi.us/ProgressIs" in their tweets will be entered to win a trip to Sonoma, California, to test drive an Audi R8 supercar. Audi will also award $25,000 to a charity on behalf of the grand prize winner. The Super Bowl ad, promoting A8, is set to feature two well-dressed inmates trying to escape from a luxury prison, along with a cameo by Kenny G.

So enjoy the day and the game. I'm going to be watching it on our HDTV from my living room couch with my computer on my lap, while following the tweets on Visa's new Go Inside the Super Bowl page, @VisaNFL, and reading what my friends on and reading what my friends on Facebook have to say. All the while cheering for the Packers. Stay-tuned for some post game day coverage.

Thanksgiving is here. Let the Holiday Shopping Season Begin!

It's the day before Thanksgiving which means we're all getting ready to kick off the official 2010 holiday season. It's a time to reflect on the year and give thanks for what we have and to remember what we have lost. I'm a bit ambivalent about this holiday season since it will be the first one without my mom. She passed away in April from breast cancer which I wrote about on here. That's a photo of her to the left. Thanksgiving was always her favorite holiday and one that she hosted for many years.

However, I am thankful to be able to host Thanksgiving this year and have some of my in-laws as guests. My daughter Alex arrived home yesterday from college, so it's great to have her in the house again. The dogs were overjoyed to see her. Unfortunately my other daughter, Kelsey, won't be joining us since she's still in Florence, Italy, doing her study abroad semester. I spoke to her on Skype yesterday and she's feeling a bit homesick. She'll be home before Christmas though.

I haven't decided if I'm going to deal with any Black Friday in-store specials this year. I'll probably stick to doing most of my shopping online and spend the weekend doing some research and putting a gift list together. It's going to be a short list this year. However I have been reading that retailers are expecting consumers to really open up their wallets. The predictions are that online sales will top in-store sales for the first time. From what I've seen so far, it seems like most online retailers have been heavily marketing to women online this year and offering free shipping and other offers.

Google already has predicted what some of the hot items will be this year just by the number of searches that people have done. Electronics are always on the gift list and searches on 3D TVs rose ten times in 2010 compared with 2009, flip camcorder searches rose about 30% this year and "kids computers" rose by around 30% since this summer.

If the trends on the search engine are correct it is telling us that this year's hot toys will include Pillow Pets and Magic Orbeez Maker. Searches for Pillow Pets, stuffed animals that also function as a pillow, rose nearly 70% this year. My daughter Alex has one, Ms. Sassy Cat, which lives on her bed that she got as a gift last year. Magic Orbeez Maker are beads and pellets that grow when immersed in water and are then used to play games. Searches for this item rose 100% in the past 90 days. Here's a video of it that I found on YouTube. Another hot item may be Nerf Stampede which has been one of the fastest-rising toy searches in the past 30 days.

As far as fashion goes, Google is predicting that black will remain the hottest color beating all others by at least 50%. Red, blue, pink, green, yellow and purple follow, with green and purple being on the rise during the past six years.

So from now until the end of the year I will be writing about holiday marketing promotions, what I think is new, different, unique. I'm pretty sure they will all have a social media element as part of the program.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours. Hope you enjoy the day and the weekend. I thought I'd share this dog with you which is one of my favorite Thanksgiving photos. Feel free to share your stories here, either about your holiday or your shopping experiences. Thanks again to all our readers for being here.

SEO Tips for driving site traffic I picked up from Stephan & Chloe Spencer

I attended the Driving Traffic through Search Engine Optimization (SEO) break-out sessions while at BlogPaws West in Denver. The session was so good that I chose it not once, but twice. They were highly interactive sessions that included audience participation, so after experiencing the first session on Friday I just had to come back for more the next day.

Mary Archer of Strategic Rankings started off both sessions with her quick SEO Myths Debunked presentation that she has shared with us on her blog. Many of us guessed that most of these statements were indeed true. Download the presentation and you'll see what Mary's dogs, Sadie Lu and Sally Mae, taught us!

Next the real fun began with Stephan Spencer, co-author of The Art of SEO, along with his daughter Chloe Spencer, the newest guest blogger to join the Lip-sticking blog, took the controls and asked for a volunteer to review their website. They pulled up the pet-care related site from our first victim and started to tell us what could be done to improve it's search rankings. Here are some of my key take-aways from the sessions:

First off most people don't use the proper keywords in their title tag. This is what shows up at the very top of your browser when you visit a site as well as on the search engine results page. If you look at the top of your browser now you'll see the words "Donna's Promo Talk - Promotional Marketing that Creates Excitement and Gets Results " Before the conference it just read "Donna's Promo Talk". I just changed this to add my tag line to the name of the blog so I hopefully will now start to see more traffic from people searching for "Promotional Marketing".

Most of the examples of sites from those in the audience showed that they are just using the name of their blog, company or organization. For the majority of sites, unless you have a very popular brand name, this is not the most effective title since people are not searching for your brand. Stephan brought up the Lip-Sticking blog in the first session and suggested adding the tagline there as well so it would read "Lip-Sticking: Marketing to Women Online". I have to speak to Yvonne, the founder of the Lip-sticking blog, about this recommendation.

Both Donna's Promo Talk the the Lip-Sticking blog and are built on the Typepad platform which doesn't give you the option to change your title tag. It just defaults to the name of your blog, which is why I added words to my blog name. WordPress however has a plug-in that can do this that Stephan actually created called SEO Title Tag. This allows you not only to change the title tag of yoursite, but also any individual pages and posts.

Typepad gives you the option for posts to have the name of your blog before or after the title of the post. I just changed mine to have the blog name after the post title. Again, as Stephan had pointed out, more people will be searching for content from keywords in your post rather then from the name of your blog.

This brings up a great tip we all learned regarding content which is that you should always be using relevant keywords in all your blog post titles. They recommended a few keyword research tools that you can use. The one I use that is free is Google Adwords Keyword Tool. One thing that Stephan pointed out about this tool that I haven't been doing is after you type in your keywords and hit search, scroll down and change the default from "broad match" to "exact match". Since the tool is primarily for pay-per-click (PPC) ads, not SEO, broad match doesn't give you accurate traffic volume results. For example, many more searches will include the word "shoes" but a much smaller amount will include the keyword "horse shoes".

Links to your site is another pillar of SEO that was discussed. The more links you have from quality, relevant sites, the higher Google will rank you. To see who is linking to your site you can use Yahoo's Site Explorer. In order to use this free tool you must be logged-in to your Yahoo account. You can change the results to not include links from your own domain so it will give you a more accurate number of in-bound links. My results included many links from Lip-sticking to my blog since I'm a weekly guest blogger there, however I did find many other blogs and sites that are linking to me that I wasn't aware of. You can export this list to an Excel document as well.

Both Stephan and Chloe (who BTW is still a teenager) did a great job presenting at these sessions. Take a quick read over at Chloe's last post, Breaking Through the Glass Ceiling at 16 Years-Old on the Lip-sticking blog to learn more about her. I met Stephan at BlogPaws in Columbus back in April when he presented there as well as several years ago when he came to Rochester to speak at a luncheon sponsored by our local AMA. So it was wonderful to finally meet Chloe.

These were some of the basics that were covered at BlogPaws and I'm now planning to read more of Stephan's book so I can become somewhat of a SEO expert. Everyone walked away from these two sessions with a few things that they can easily do to help increase their site's search rankings. I hope you also received a few new tips from reading this post. Please feel free to add more!

 

Looking to SES Toronto to help sharpen my SEO skills

Here's another post that I wrote yesterday on the Lip-sticking Blog:

Yesterday I sat through a webinar on Search Engine Optimization which promised to review with me 10 Free Tools. SEO is something that I have some knowledge of, but I admit that I still have much to learn. So I thought it would be a good use of my time.

Now nothing is ever really free, so I've now spent most of the morning downloading some of these free tools and restarting my computer. I really don't know what to do with them now or even how to get them started. Some are specifically for Firefox and they're supposed to show up now in my browser. But I don't see them. I guess I'll just have to invest more time.

The conferences, workshops and webinars that you pay to attend are really where you're going to get useful information that you can use. I attend some, but of course there are so many today you have to be choosy. In regards to search engine marketing I've attended the SES (Search Engine Strategies) Conferences now for the last few years which are held throughout the world. My first one was in Toronto and then next two years I was in New York, which is one of their largest events. Last year they had some great keynotes including John Gerzema, author of The Brand Bubble who I wrote this blog post about It's All About Giving Consumers Value and Values.

 Unfortunately I missed the New York conference this year because instead I was at the PMA conference in Chicago which was the same week. Since I missed New York I'm planning to attend SES Toronto which is taking place on June 9-11 at the Hyatt Regency. I'm located in Rochester, NY, so it's really just a couple of hours drive around the lake, Lake Ontario that is. I believe we have many Canadian readers on the Lip-sticking blog, so I assume I have a few here as well. 

Ace Hardware taps writers to promote their Labor Day sale

Happy Labor Day. I hope everyone is enjoying (or enjoyed) the long weekend. We have had a beautiful spell of warm, sunny weather here in New York which was really needed since we’ve had a pretty wet and cool summer overall.

Labor Day this year is the latest it can possibly be, September 7th. Normally the kids don’t go back to school till the Wednesday after, but this year our city school district and a couple of others did go back last week since the holiday is so late.

We spent the last two previous weekends getting our two daughters off to college, so this was the first weekend in a while that we are home so we really needed to spend some time doing work around the house. Yesterday I mainly did house cleaning and my husband has been tackling a major home repair project, a new roof on our garage. Our neighbor behind us starting painting his house and I see several others in the hood doing home related chores as well.

Retailer Ace Hardware has executed a Web-based marketing campaign for Labor Day weekend targeted to those like us doing home repair and maintenance projects over the holiday weekend. They are working with an organization called Associated Content who has tapped into their roster of some 250,000 contributing authors to promote original articles about home maintenance, gardening, and decorating.

This content is being featured on AssociatedContent.com over the long weekend with topics such as "How to Replace Your Shower Head," "Build Shelves to Organize Your Closet," "Trendy Outdoor Accessories For Fall," "Outdoor Lighting Fixtures for Your Patio," and "How to Lay a Brick Patio." Visitors to theses sponsored articles will receive contextually relevant ads that drive them to retail locations for the Ace Hardware Labor Day Sale. In addition, behavioral targeting is being employed to engage consumers across the Web. Traffic is largely driven through search engine optimization closely tied to Google, Ask.com, Yahoo, and Bing.

I have to admit that my husband didn’t go to our local Ace Hardware store for his roofing project, but instead shopped at Home Depot. However with me being a blogger and a contributing writer for the Examiner, I thought this was a pretty interesting and innovative campaign which combines online advertising and search marketing with a form of social media. This is the direction more marketers need to be heading.

Bing, Microsoft's New Search Engine Arrives With a Wimper

Well the long awaited and much hyped new search engine from Microsoft is now live. Bing (formally known as Kumo) apparently went live yesterday while it wasn't supposed to debut till June 3. Why on a Sunday? Who knows. Since I wasn't on my computer much at all yesterday I just got a chance to try it out today.

It certainly has a nice design on it's home page and much different from Google's all white page. But then again since the Google search box is right in my toolbar I never see the homepage and really don't need to. I did do a very quick and surprisingly enjoyable search using Bing which is supposed to deliver fewer search results which are more-focused, especially with the video. Scrolling over the video results, prompts the videos to start playing in their windows. May not be great for those searching from their cubicles.

There have been a few people praising the new search engine such as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak who said it “was the most astounding software demo I’ve every seen,” after seeing Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer unveil Bing at the All Things Digital Conference last week. Search Engine Land says while it’s better than Live Search, it’s no Google killer.

American Idol Finale. Did Google & Twitter Get It Right?

Well I'm doing what many others are tonight, watching the season finale of American Idol. I have been hooked on this show and last year I wrote this post the day after David Cook won the title. This season has been very entertaining with many talented contestants as well as a new addition to the judging panel.

Digression to my train on thought...Carlos Santana is playing his guitar magic with the various contestants providing the vocals. How cool! No one has that unique style like he does.

Well earlier this week it was reported that Simon Cowel told Oprah Winfrey on Monday's episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show that his money is on Lambert because the contestant is fearless, unique and "he's got swagger."

Another article appeared earlier today on Mashable that predicted that Adam Lambert with be this year's champ. By looking at Google search trends – volume, demographic and geographic – from March through May for the top three finalists of prior seasons they were able to spot patterns in the data that seem to predict the eventual winner of American Idol Season 8. It wasn't as simple as looking at who has the most search volume, they also looked at past seasons to see the trends.

So can search engines now predict the future? Will Adam Lambert be the next Idol champion? One thing that is really new from last year is that by looking at search trends we can reveal a lot about what people are interested in right now.Twitter is also a great tool for predictions. You can see the search volume for both Adam and Chis on Twitter Trends. In fact Twitter co-founder Biz Stone came right out and said here that he doesn't see advertising as their business model but instead selling "light analytics" to companies, maybe doing revenue-sharing with mobile phone companies so we can Twitter our way, using our mobile devices, to distraction.

Mashable went on to say that for marketers, this type of data can be viewed as “votes,” helping to gauge the impact of their marketing and product positioning efforts, as well as providing insights into where they currently sit in the competitive landscape. Looking at search trends might not equate to looking into a crystal ball – but it can be a powerful resource for brands who want to keep their finger on the pulse of emerging trends online.

Okay, now for the final votes. They set a record with over 100 million votes. And the winner is......Chris Allen!!!!!

What? How can that be? Even Chris seemed extremely surprised and confused. Oh well, looks like we need to go back and review our search data. Either way, both Chris and Adam will both do extremely well I'm sure. Google and Twitter will also. So let me know what you think of these results. How surprised were you?

Chili's Integrates TV, Online, SEM & Social in the P.J. Blands Campaign

Here's a new promotional marketing campaign that I think is pretty clever and a great example of how to integrate paid search advertising along with social media into a promotion.

With the focus on today's economy Chili's wanted to promote its new "10 under $7" menu. So they launched a TV and online campaign that centers on a fictional restaurant chain named P.J. Blands. They serve customers bland food, it's not bad or good, just average. And made entirely from cardboard. Here's the first ad:

As you see the ad ends up with Chili's logo on screen. They even went so far as to create a P.J. Blands web site where you can meet P.J. If you click on menu it links you over to Chili's website. The site also has the TV ads, bios of employees of the month and a toll-free number that you can actually call and leave a message for P.J. along with your name and email address. I take it they want to add to their database!

So go ahead and Google "bland food," and a paid search ad for P.J. Blands should appear on the top of your search inquiry page with a Chili's ad in the #2 spot. You can also follow PJ here on Twitter where you'll get to read some of the "Blandest Tweets".

Kudos to Chili's agency, Hill Holliday, that created this great integrated marketing campaign. I hope to see more like this.

SES NY Day 2 Highlights - New Google AdWords Interface!

 Last night I made it home from NY after attending the SES NY Conference. I did learn quite a bit, made many new contacts and got to eat some good food. So I'd say it was a worthwhile trip.

SES NY Day two included a good mix of topics. I decided to start off the day with Social Media Marketing for Brand Building that was presented by ClickZ.com. It was pretty cool that I got to meet some of my favorite authors from the online publication including Hollis Thomas, founder of WebAdvantage.net, who I always try and follow. She spoke some more about Twitter and added a few new insights not covered by Guy Kawasaki yesterday. Harry Gold from Overdrive Interactive focused his presentation mostly on Facebook and gave us some good examples of some of his clients that have been successful there including Harley Davidson. Dave Evans from Digital Voodoo started off this panel with a good overview reminding us to use integration in social media as we would with other mediums.

The highlight of my day though was the next session that was an introduction to the new Google AdWords Interface. I knew it was coming, but I hadn’t seen it yet. Ariel Bardin from Google gave us a demo and showed off some of the new features that got some applause from the room. Two main design principals Google was following with this update is speed and consistency. They want us advertisers to be able to do our job more efficiently and be able to optimize our campaigns quickly. So overall it’s much more interactive and eliminates the need to have to navigate to a new page, therefore eliminates the time it takes for a new pages to load. Depending on the size of your campaign, sometimes this can really slow you down.

So I went over to the Google booth later and logged in to my account and they put me in the queue to switch to the new interface. Right now it’s still in beta and their philosophy is to go with a “rolling release” which means there will be some bugs. They stressed that they’re looking for feedback and are using the SES NY audience as a key target for this. They aren’t switching the My Client Centers over quite yet, just individual accounts. So I’ll play around with it now that I'm back and see how it performs.

I took a break from the conference that day and met an associate around the corner for lunch at a trendy mid-town, Italian restaurant called Remi. We had a great lunch, but the real thrill was having Sam Waterson, who plays Jack McCoy on Law & Order sitting right across from us. Being a Western-NY girl who normally doesn’t see celebrities around town I tried not to stare. However, I probably did a bit. He is a very distinguished looking gentleman.

Unfortunately I just caught the tail end of the Orion Panel when I got back to the conference which was on the State of Search, so I can't really comment on it (and I didn't hear much chatter about it either, so I may not have missed much).The afternoon sessions were a bit of a disappointment. Facebook took the grand ballroom and turned it into an mid-afternoon nap session. I thought we might hear more about the new Pages update status change feature, but instead it was only about how to create Facebook ads. We really didn't need a whole 75 minutes to show us a simple interface tool.

The last session of the day I attended was sponsored by Google and entitled Maximize Your Website's ROI. Alex Torres, Product Marketing Manager for Google Enterprise seemed liked a pretty sharp guy, but the session was mostly a sales pitch on Google products and how they're all integrated: AdWords, Analytics, Optimizer, SiteSearch.

The evening made up for the afternoon with a great dinner at an upper East Side Italian restaurant with some family; my sister-in-law Virginia and nephew Nick who live in the neighborhood, and my daughter, Kelsey, the NYU Freshman.

Now I promise to write one more post regarding Day 3 which will be mostly centered around John Gerzema's opening keynote that I really enjoyed (and Twittered my way through). So stay tuned.

Highlights of SES NY Day 1

It’s been a busy Day 1 of SES NY and I tried to make as many of the sessions as possible, meet as many people as possible and walk through as many exhibits as I could. Unfortunately I started on Twitter this morning during Guy Kawasaki’s opening keynote, but after that I wasn't able to get back online to the end of the day. I kept getting an error message that said that they’re over capacity and to try back later. I guess too many people from SES NY started Twittering after hearing Guy’s talk which was all about Twitter.

It was a very really interesting presentation and I learned quite a bit about this micro-blogging tool and how you can use it for marketing. Guy's opening quote (that I’m sure got many Tweets including one from me) was: “Nobodies are the new Somebodies”. Everyone gets 140 characters no matter who you are. His presentation walked us through 10 rules or guidelines of using Twitter according to Guy.

The first one is a question that I hear asked all the time and I’ve heard answered differently…Should you follow everyone who follows you? Now I’ve been told before that you look at how many followers they have vs. people that follow them and you can kinda tell that way if they’re “worthy” of following. Guy however automatically follows everyone who follows him. He uses a tool called Social Too that automatically does this for him. He believes it’s “arrogant not to follow someone who thinks you’re interesting enough to follow". He wants to enable as many people as he can to direct message him. 

Guy’s #2 rules focused on measurability…what are the goals and how should you measure your success. He believes it’s not the number of people that are following you, but the most important measure is the number of retweets you receive. The greatest form of flattery is when someone retweets you and the tool he uses to monitor how many times he gets retweets is ReTweetist.com.

I’m not going to go through all 10 rules, but I’ll leave this at saying he did give me some good ideas that I want to explore a little more and possibly write about after I’ve had some real time experiencing them first hand.

After the Keynote my first break-out session was from the folks at comScore who always have some great data to share. They gave us more insights into the study that they did in conjunction with Google towards the end of last year that showed that paid search in combo with online display ads lifts traffic and sales. The key is keeping a consistent message on both search and display and incorporating good copy that leads to a clear call to action, i.e. “Shop Here, Free Shipping, etc.” 

The interesting part of the study is how they attributed offline sales back to the original online ads, so I asked the question on how they did this. They apparently followed-up with surveys both online and in-store to get this data. So, it’s not the easiest thing to achieve obviously.

The rest of my morning went to landing page testing by Tim Ash from SiteTuners.com. Tim was highly entertaining and he reminded me that the basic principals apply to landing pages that we've all been taught in this business as it applies to most marketing communications. It was a good session that reinforced this. I then got to meet Tim after at Google's booth were he was signing copies of his book "Landing Page Optimization".

The rest of the day is kinda a blur and it's now time for bed. And yes, I made it to most of the networking events I mentioned in yesterday's post and met some great people through some real time social networkking. So good night for now and more to follow tomorrow.