Jeff's Online Marketing Thoughts

3 Reasons to Attend a Conference

I was thinking back to why I started this blog and ways in which I'm helping direct people to the wealth of information available about online marketing. One topic I haven't talked about is conferences. Currently there are two major conferences going on, Search Engine Strategies and eTail. I attended the DMA's ACCM in May and Internet Retailer in June, two other good shows. If you are serious about online marketing I would encourage you to find a conference to attend once per year for the following three reasons.

1. New Ideas - People are not only talking about what works today, they are also talking about where things are going. You are guaranteed to come away with many things to try, usually too many to start on right away.
2. Sharing What Works - There are endless opportunities to talk to other people that face the exact same problems as you do. Not only do you learn from others, you can form networks of people to talk with throughout the year.
3. Re-energizing - I can be exhausted at the end of a conference, but when I get back to the office I am off and running, and probably annoying my co-workers. Something about being around some of the top minds in the industry and feeling like you are getting the inside scoop on things gets me going.

What I learned going to two conferences within 4 weeks is that they can be too close together. The industry changes fast, but most of what they talked about was very similar content. I also wasn't able to get through everything from the first show by the time I made it to the next. You are able to stay up on things pretty well because you learn whose blogs you should be reading and what sites to review to stay current.

Along with the conferences I mention above, here are some others that I haven't personally attended but give some more options for dates and locations. The content is similar in many but there are definite target audiences with each so look at their agenda and keynotes.
PubCon - From Webmaster World
eComXpo - Interesting Virtual Trade Show (Free to attend so why not give it a shot)
ad:tech - Multiple locations
eMarketing Association

Keyword Optimizing

When it comes to search optimization for better natural rankings, the keywords you choose are important. Aaron Wall at SEO Book had a good post about the keywords on your site and things to do to not get penalized. At the end of the day you need to write your content for people, specifically your customers, not to cheat the search engine. The search engines are always changing their methods and penalizing those that try stuffing and other shortcuts.

What does the Web tell people about you?

With the rise in blogs and social networking sites, it is easy to talk about your experiences with a company. Do you know what people are saying about you? AOL had a recent incident where a customer wanted to cancel his account and was having a very difficult time to say the least. He recorded the conversation and talked about the experience on his blog. The story became viral and everyone was linking to this story. Two morals, one treat customers with respect, and the second know what people are saying. It is very easy to setup alerts about different terms like your company or your brand in sites like Google and Technorati.

Tracking Offline Success

For almost every customer I deal with they all have another channel that they take sales through, be it through a retail store or over the phone. One of the most common things I hear is about tracking the effectiveness of search driving sales that aren't completed online. In a March 2006 study by comScore they found that 63% of customers purchased offline following their search activity. That is a big number that forces you to ask if you are measuring your offline sales driven by search. 

If you aren't one idea to think about is to have a separate 800 number on your Web site for people that come to your site via search versus naturally. With technology today you can even get to the point of having different 800 numbers for email marketing campaigns or for each search engine you are advertising in.

Another idea would be to build the interface for your customer service reps into the same Web site that your customers are using. That way if a customer starts an order online and decides to call in you can present them with an order number the CSR can ask for that picks up where the customer left off. The other benefit is it doesn't show up as an abandoned cart in your statistics, it can show that it converted to a sale, just offline.

Many times your search could be effective it just isn't evident. It also ties into remembering what your overall bottom line goal is and making sure you are hitting that.

URLs To Your Site

You've done your marketing, people know your brand and sit down at a browser to visit your site. They type in the URL, but it doesn't take them to your site, it goes to your competitors. There are a lot of companies that are taking advantage of typos of people entering a URL, also known as Typo-squatting. Microsoft has a product that can remedy that, but until it is automatically built into the browsers people typically use I don't see that as being a good solution. If your Web site has a name that can easily be mistyped, I would recommend buying any URLs related to ensure you don't lose visitors to someone else, mainly your competition.

One note with that, make sure to redirect all traffic from all secondary URLs through one main URL that is the core. If you don't it can affect how search engines rank your site.