16 The Internet Plan

In North America alone, over 250 million people connect to the Internet every day; globally, that figure is closer to 2 billion—and climbing. In order to compete in an economy that has become increasingly connected globally, effective use of the Internet and its various technological tools to market, advertise, and promote products and services is a necessity whether you’re IBM, McDonald’s, or a small local business—ready or not. In this chapter we cover the following: search engine optimization (SEO), pay per click (PPC), banner and pop-up ads, smartphones apps, and social media. SEO is particularly important because, unless you use outside media to promote your Internet site, you will only be “seen” if the search engines register your keywords. We show you how to optimize your keywords and offer a list of websites that will help you select the best ones for your business.

There are four basic types of websites—promotional, content-based, customer service, and transactional (i.e., sales)—but increasingly websites combine elements of each of the four basic websites into their websites. For example, on Verizon Wireless’s website, you’ll come across promotional information on their cellular offerings and special deals. Through their customer service component, you can pay your bill or find out how many minutes and text messages you’ve used. You can buy a new phone or a Bluetooth headset and have them shipped to your home. And you can find customer reviews of phones, as well as content on cell phone safety tips or how you can save money by bundling service offerings or other informational content. Amazon.com and countless other websites do the same.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Pay-per-click programs are Internet advertising tools in which you, as an advertiser, pay a host or a search engine when their advertisement is clicked on by a web surfer. Generally whenever there’s a pay-per-click arrangement on a website, the advertiser pays a fixed rate to the website/publisher. In many cases, the publisher/website has a rate card, much like a magazine, newspaper, or television network detailing how much it will cost to advertise within the website and it’s based on several factors, including the popularity of that particular portion of the website. It’s much more likely to be “pay more per click” on a segment of a website that’s extremely popular and has a lot of traffic. Of course these rates can be negotiated if your business is planning to enter a long-term or high-value contract.

With search engines, it’s much more likely for advertisers to bid on keyword searches relevant to their target market and to their business. In the bid-based model, the advertiser will sign a contract that allows them to compete against other advertisers in a private auction hosted by a publisher, an advertising network, or a search engine. Each advertiser informs the host of the maximum amount that he or she is willing to pay for a given ad spot, often based on a keyword. The auction plays out in an automated fashion every time a visitor triggers the ad spot whenever they use a search engine. When the ad spot is part of a search engine results page (SERP), the automated auction takes place whenever a search for the keyword that is being bid upon occurs. All bids for the keyword that target the searcher’s geolocation (real-world location), the day and time of the search, etc., are then compared and the winner determined. In situations where there are multiple ad spots, a common occurrence on SERPs, there can be multiple winners whose positions on the page are influenced by the amount each company has bid. The ad with the highest bid generally shows up first, though additional factors such as ad quality and relevance can sometimes come into play. Bidding through a web engine may be an attractive way to market and advertise your company, your products, or your services to as large of an audience as possible. After all, almost every Internet user will use a search engine page—whether it’s Google, Bing, or Yahoo!—at some point while online.

Banner and Pop-Up Advertising

Banner adverting consists of embedding your advertisement into a web page. You should place your banner ads on websites that have something in common with what you are selling. If your company manufactures washing machines and you place a banner ad on a website that sells computer parts, you probably won’t have many readers clicking over to your website.

There are three ways you can promote your banner ad. You can pay the owner of the website you want to advertise on, you can exchange with others, and you can create your own “network,” where you commission many sites to display your ad. DoubleClick (www.doubleclick.com), a subsidiary of Google, can help you with this.

If possible, you want to add movement or animation to your ad for greater effectiveness, as motion captures a viewer’s attention. Several companies such as Corel (www.corel.com), ABC Banners (www.abcbanners.com), and Make Your Banner (www.makeyourbanner.com) can help you produce an effective banner ad.

But you should try to avoid making large expenditures on this kind of promotion. Banner ads have become less successful over the last decade or so, as many Internet users find them obtrusive, distracting, and irritating. And we have all grown increasingly wary of banner and pop-up ads, since some criminals use these methods to scam people or to pass on computer viruses.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization involves the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page on search engines by targeting different kinds of searches including image search, local search, video search, and industry-specific search engines. As search engines have gradually replaced the Yellow Pages and the White Pages, it has become increasingly necessary to employ SEO tactics for your business.

SEO as an Internet marketing strategy considers how search engines work and what people actually search for when they’re online. Optimizing a website for searches can involve editing its content, as well as its HTML and other associated coding that make up the website and its design, to increase their relevance to specific keywords. This is also done to remove any barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Generally, the earlier (or higher on the page) and more frequently a website appears in the search engine’s results list, the more visitors it’ll receive.

You cannot do this alone. A number of companies sell their services: www.seocentro.com/tools/search-engine/metatag-analyzer.html, wordtracker.com, and adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal are a few of the better known ones.

Cell Phones and Smartphones

At the end of 2009, roughly 21 percent of all American cell phone subscribers were using a smartphone such as the Blackberry, the iPhone, the Droid, and other models. Over the first few months of 2010, smartphone users have increased to about 29 percent of all cell phone subscribers. According to a recent Nielsen survey of cell phone users considering changing their phones or plans, 45 percent of respondents answered that they were considering some sort of smartphone as their next cell phone purchase. Based on these numbers and the falling prices of these devices, Nielsen projects that by the end of 2011, smartphones will overtake the standard phone market. Now that’s increasing market share with a vengeance! Analysts are speculating that about 1 billion people globally will be using a smartphone by 2014. With such a growing trend, it will quickly seem imperative to consider marketing products and services through mobile devices, as these consumers will be accessing all sorts of specialized content on their phones.

Harris Interactive expects the entire mobile ad segment to become a $7.4 billion market by 2014. This even includes text messages. In a recent Harris survey, 40 percent of respondents said texting is extremely or very important. Clear Channel Communications in January 2010 sold out its inventory of certain mobile ads.

Consumer products marketers—food, beverage, liquor, fast-food restaurants, household cleaners, personal care, pet, and apparel brands, for example—have been at the forefront of using mobile apps to promote, market, and advertise their businesses. For many marketers, mobile apps have increasingly become part of an existing media strategy. In fact, in a December 2009 survey conducted by DM2PRO and Quattro Wireless, 64.8 percent of marketers and publishers reported planning to invest in mobile apps. Mobile phones and devices play an important role in consumers’ lives and are spurring the growth of mobile apps.

Since many of these brands desire a closer relationship with consumers, mobile apps are ideal, because they offer—beyond the marketing message—the opportunity to invite these consumers into personal exchanges and much more immersive experiences. Of course if a brand is interested in developing a mobile app, they need to make sure that the app will be valuable to the user. There are now numerous mobile apps that fill utilitarian needs, serving up informative tips and educational bits; plenty that offer pure entertainment; and others that hover in between. For example, there are exciting new apps that enable you to reach your customers by mobile phone. Google has its “whisper”—targeted ads that will whisper your brand if the mobile users mention one of your keywords during a conversation. They also have an ad service that inserts your brand next to a search by a user. Foursquare brings up your store when the mobile user enters your area. Microsoft is channeling text-based ads on screens of phones using its upcoming Windows Phone 7 operating system, and Apple recently introduced the company’s iAd platform.

Flipboard is a revolutionary iPad app for social news or even a personal newsstand. It turns Twitter and Facebook accounts into magazine look-alikes. It builds custom magazines from prebuilt curated boards or improved Twitter lists. And it works in reverse. A brand’s Twitter account can be flipped to Flipboard.

Strategically, mobile apps may be appropriate for your company if your brand or company has a reputation for being a trendsetter. Plus companies will frequently jump at the chance to have regular, if not permanent, access to customers at just about any time and any place without the other distractions of Web 2.0. But this should only be done if your customer base sees themselves as trendsetters as well. Certainly, if being considered the first and best brand is part of your competitive advantage, then having a mobile app frequently creates powerful buzz among the social media world, as well as providing you with instant PR.

As brands are increasingly exchangeable, consumers are much more likely to quickly change brands multiple times. The mobile app is a closed environment for interaction between customers and brands in which brands can concentrate on the consumer dialogue—on the consumer’s terms. Brands that want to keep their market position may also be interested in apps as a way to set a new standard to their competition, forcing the competition to catch up to the standard and even perfect it. In the world of Web 2.0 ideology nothing is perfect from the beginning. If something is missing, it can be optimized, adjusted, or set up anew—by the brand itself or by the community of the active consumers.

Executives who attended the Cannes Lions ad festival in 2009 told Reuters that emerging economics were also promising, though the lack of a global mobile phone standard could break a speedy development. “If you are interrupted every two minutes by advertising,” says David Jones, global chief executive of Havas Worldwide, “not many people want that. The industry needs to work out smart and clever ways to engage people on mobiles.”¹

However, mobile advertising will likely attract interest from niche advertisers, which do not usually use mainstream media. They could shift ad budgets away from newspapers.

You should check out AdMob, Inc. (www.admob.com), if you are interested in advertising on cell phones. They sell ads across thousands of websites that are tailored for cell phones and were recently purchased by Google. Be careful, however: The ads are very small and the cell phone user can become annoyed.

WeReward can promote your business to smartphone users in your area. They use GPS to locate nearby potential customers and then send them ads on your facility. If the customer buys at your store, then he/she receives rewards from WeReward.

Social Media

Social media has revolutionized the Internet, how it’s used, and how companies must market their services and products. Facebook, the website which expanded the social media revolution, now has over 400 million active users and recently became the world’s most popular, most clicked website, beating out Google. “Marketers have always known that the best way to sell something is to get your friends to sell it,” says Sheryl Sandburg, Facebook’s chief operating officer. “That is what people do all day on Facebook. We enable effective word-of-mouth advertising at scale for the first time.”²

Under the headline “Pepsi drops the Super Bowl to focus on Facebook,” brandchannel.com’s blogger Sara Zucker said, “Give Pepsi some credit. In addition to its efforts to offer consumers healthier options, the beverage behemoth also plans to forgo the Super Bowl to work on expanding into new media. . . . Pepsi is focusing its energy and money on its online presence where the brand believes a younger and accessible demographic is spending its time.”³

That same blog quotes Ralph Santana, VP of marketing for PepsiCo North America: “We’re living in a new age with consumers. They are looking for more of a two-way dialogue, story-telling and word of mouth. Mediums like the digital space are much more conducive toward that.” Many companies are spending more advertising money on social media, because that is where the action is. Pizza Hut currently has over 25,000 followers on Twitter and over a million on Facebook. McDonald’s has over 13,000 Twitter followers and 1,600,000 on Facebook.

Facebook is now offering a series of ad formats that tell users which of their Facebook friends have expressed interest in the brand or product featured in the ad. It is based on data it collects on the likes and friends of its users. The ad appears on the right side of a user’s homepage, with an image and headline from the advertiser. With the ads are the names of any of the user’s friends who have clicked on a button indicating they like the brand or ad.

Facebook had a 16.21 percent share of display-ad views in the United States in May 2010, up from 6.8 percent in January 2009, according to comScore, Inc., and Yahoo! is in second place with a 12.1 percent share. They have now commissioned Nielsen Company to measure ad performance. You can pay either by click or impression. You can go to the Facebook site and sign up for your ad. They will take you through the whole process including the design.

If your promotion campaign lends itself to video, the place to go is YouTube. Roughly 50 million users upload videos at an outstanding rate of twenty-four-hours worth of video every single minute, but millions more watch video clips daily. In fact, YouTube has quickly become the second most popular website and largest search engine in the world as more people go to YouTube than watch the Super Bowl. Their site, too, will take you through the complete process of becoming an advertiser. YouTube has signed up NPR, Politico, The Huffington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle for YouTube Direct, a new method for managing video submissions from readers.

Branded entertainment on the web is gaining ground by the day: “The goal is to extend our reach,” says Ellen Liu, media director at the Clorox Company in Oakland, California, “and attain a higher level of engagement than is possible through tactics like running 30-second commercials that interrupt episodes of conventional TV series.”⁴

Twitter, the microblogging and social media site, is quickly gaining users and is constantly mentioned on the news. Many companies, like Best Buy, are constantly monitoring Twitter to determine what is being said about their stores and product offerings. Best Buy has their “Twelpforce” Twitter strategy where 500 people scout the site looking for persons who have questions about computers, television sets, etc. When a person tweets about a question on a product that Best Buy carries—or has a comment about Best Buy—invariably she will receive a tweet from a Best Buy representative. Here’s a nice story: After buying a new navigational system at 6 A.M. on the most frenzied shopping day of the year, Laura S. Kern of Los Angeles could not figure out why it was not giving her traffic updates. She sent a message to Best Buy’s Twitter account and within five minutes not one but two Best Buy employees responded with fix-it advice. Bet Ms. Kern is one of Best Buy’s most loyal customers.

IBM and their agency, Ogilvy North America, used web searches, comments posted on YouTube, and conversations on Twitter to help develop their award-winning “Smarter Planet” campaign.

The Magazines Publishers of America is using Twitter to dispel the rumor that the Internet will drive magazines into extinction. It is running “The Twenty Tweetable Truths About Magazines,” a campaign made up of factoids about the vitality of magazines. Various members post them on Twitter. The site is even being used by companies tweeting for hires as well as job seekers.

If you want links to your website on Twitter or from specific blogs, check out SponsoredReviews.com. They only charge $1.67 per link. And if you want bloggers to recommend your product or service, go to Mylikes.

Following is a worksheet for your objectives and strategies for the Internet with some objective suggestions. You can photocopy the worksheet here, or you can print out a copy from your downloaded Worksheets folder. You will probably need someone with Internet marketing experience to determine a realistic number of hits, clicks, etc., for your objectives.

Worksheet 16–1 Internet Plan: Objectives and strategies

Notes

1. “Smart phones, social networks to boost mobile advertising,” June 29, 2009; http://in.reuters.com/article/idINLT63327920090629.

2. Emily Steel and Geoffrey A. Fowler, “Facebook Touts Selling Power of Friendship,” Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2010; http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240527487045450045753530925 63126732.html.

3. Sarah Zucker, “Pepsi Drops Super Bowl to Focus on Facebook,” February 1, 2010; http://www.brandchannel.com/home/post/2010/02/01/Pepsi-Drops-Super-Bowl-To-Focus-On-Facebook.aspx.

4. “Clorox, ConAgra, Maybelline Deals Signal Resurgence in Web Series Interest,” PlaceVine, November 24, 2009; http://www.placevine.com/blog/2009/11/24/clorox-conagra-maybellineresurgence-in-interest-for-web-series/.