Provided by Cshel!
Vertical Track | 10:45a-12p
Moderator, Anne Kennedy, Managing Partner, Beyond Ink
Speakers: Ettore Rossetti, Senior Manager, Internet Marketing, Save the Children Nan Dawkins, Partner, RedBoots Consulting Kevin Gottesman, Founder, Gott Advertising
Audience is fairly light. Anne encourages the audience to move closer.
First Speaker: Ettore Rossetti
1. Apply Pareto’s Principle to SEM. (20% of the searches result in 80% of the clicks) 2. Find Your Search Niche, being small and finding your narrow niche is better than being big and broad and general. Try to be #1 for a very narrow category than fight to be #1 in a broader category that might already have a leader. 3. The Brad Pitt Effect. Informally named after the “butterfly effect” in chaos theory. Unanticipated effects from non-intuitive actions or causes. 4. Actionable Advertising. Discover what times of year/day/whatever your visitors are more likely to convert. Be aware of these peaks and valleys in traffic. Know when your browsers buy. 5. Searcher Intent = Expectation. When searcher intent and results delivery connect, the result is a win-win outcome. Make sure your call to action perfectly matches the result after the user clicks. 6. A click is not a Customer. You cannot communicate back to a click. Therefore, a click is not a customer, nor is it a lead. It’s an anonymous suspect with the potential to become a prospect. Be aware of your conversion rates and what you’re actually paying for. Make sure you qualify your customers before you communicate/convert them? 7. Measuring holistic results. Search marketing is part of a greater whole of integrated activity and needs to be tracked and measured holistically. Make sure you’re getting a “panoramic” view of your online marketing efforts. If you focus in too narrowly on a single aspect, you might miss more important details or trends.
Second Speaker: Kevin Gottesman
Non-profit is not a dirty word. People have real money, they spend real money and they’re using real budgets and buying advertising and developing strategies, etc. A few years ago, non-profits seemed to be (or at least have the reputation to be) all about getting free pub and just praying for some conversions.
Client Goals and Types of Campaigns:
1. Fundraising: a. Get peoplel to renew or join, b. Get EOY (end of year) donations, etc c. Appeals for specific assistance or types of donations. 2. List building a. Breaking News – Have a baseline campaign running constantly so that when a breaking news event happens, you can just add in a few new keywords to take advantage of the search spike in the 2 or 3 days after the story hits. b. Core Issues c. Seasonal – Take advantage of seasonal events and tweak keywords accordingly. d. Petitions – If the primary goal of a campaign is to get people to sign/send petitions to congress, whatever, then once you’ve successfully completed the petition action, send them to a page inviting them to join your organization. Piggy back an additional action on the campaign and take advantage of the traffic. e. Land based events – Rallies, petition drives, food drives… non-online events.
Google offers “Google Grants” for non-religious, non-political not-for-profits to run free keyword campaigns. Many groups who are taking advantage of this make the mistake of driving all the traffic to their homepages, rather than to a specific call-to-action page, rather than hoping they dive deeper past the homepage and choose to act.
Potential members and donors are online searching, donating and joining daily. Look for them where they are searching for your information, mission, cause or event. $200 billion donated by individuals in 2005 SEM and SEO are long term, necessary investments for all non-profits and charities.
Third Speaker -- Nan Dawkins
“Missed Opportunities”
#1 PPC • Overly broad keywords and terms • Mismatched keywords • Failure to fully utilize Google Grants
#2 Failure to be seen – Multi-channel visibility • PPC isn’t the only way to be seen on the SEs. The cost of PPC is going up, and will continue to do so. A multi-channel strategy helps you appear more time on the search results page; the more likely you are to get a click. The more clicks, the more conversions. Plus, the more times you appear, the better your brand exposure is as well. • ROI is higher with multi-channel strategies
#3 Social Media Strategy
What does social media have to do with search? • Brand recognition, improves CTRs dramatically. • SERP shelf space and reputation management. • Social media can boost the number of quality links which boots your organic rankings… in other words, better search visibility.
Social Media Examples: • Wikipedia, blogs (your own, your supporters), • MySpace/Facebook (local organizing), • Vertical social networks (Change.org, Hot Soup, 43 Things), • Ning, • Flickr (photo sharing from events), • Second Life, • Video
Don’t start a social media campaign or effort without a sound strategy, because a misstep or poorly executed effort could inadvertently alienate a large group of very vocal people.
#4 Testing and Tracking
Make sure you have analytics and use them. Make sure you’re looking at your log files and regularly audit your traffic, clicks, see what search terms your users are clicking on to get to your site, etc.
