CDG Interactive Blog

Whenever we work with start-ups as online marketing clients, they often want to know one thing: how soon will this start working?

It’s completely understandable. They’ve just invested considerable time and money in creating their new product or business. They want to know how quickly they can start earning a return on that investment.

But just as a new brick-and-mortar shop needs to take steps to build its customer base, an online business also needs to put in some up-front effort in its online marketing to create interest and drive traffic, and ultimately sales.

Although some of these steps yield more immediate response, others—search engine optimization (SEO) in particular—simply don’t happen overnight. A more realistic timeframe is 30 to 90 days.

So here’s our recipe, and a sample timeline, for generating success in 90 days or less.

Continue reading "How to Be An Overnight Success Online (In 30 to 90 Days)" »

As Heidi mentioned, I spent the last two weeks in Kombolcha, Ethiopia with Habitat for Humanity. My pictures are available on Flickr if you'd like to see what I was up to while I was away. Otherwise, here's what we've been reading this week:

What are you selling?

Sales people sell features, but customers buy benefits. Why we shouldn't discount emotional benefits from Branding Strategy.

Global Brands

What is a global brand? from Branding Strategy. This was recently interesting question to me since I was in an extremely rural part of Ethiopia for the past 2 weeks but Coca Cola was still pervasive.

Metrics

One of the most common questions we get is about measuring - either site metrics or social media metrics. Here are some tips on getting started from the Online Marketing Blog

60 Million Professionals Can't Be Wrong

When deciding on a social media activity mix, many companies forget about LinkedIn. The Online Marketing Blog offers some great suggestions about how to incorporate LinkedIn into your marketing mix.

Privacy Concerns

And finally, from the Onion - Google's "unsettlingly specific apology" about privacy concerns.

Metrics are the holy grail of social media - how can you tell what's working? In their new ebook Radian6 explores some easy and practical ways to measure your social media efforts.  

There were a few points in particular that stood out:

First, decide your business goals and then choose metrics that illustrate progress toward those goals.

And second, start with an hypothesis like, "Increased activity on Twitter will decrease call center volume and costs." Then measure that over time to see if it holds up. Just keep in mind that factors like annual sales are affected by so many factors that one activity can't generally claim credit (unless you're advertising during the Super Bowl), so that's usually not a good hypothesis to start with.

And the book included a hint that requires a little bit of extra effort up front, but will be well worth it for tracking purposes. When sharing links through a URL shortener, first create a unique URL using Google URL generator (or your analytics tool) including the parameters for the content and the social network where you plan to share it. Then use bit.ly or another shortening service to shorten the unique URL. That way you will be able to track referrals and conversion rates for each unique URL. Of course, that won't help you when others create shortened URLs for your content, but that will tell you something as well.

Have you successfully tested any hypotheses with metrics? What did you find?

WordStream recently wrote a great case study detailing a link bait campaign they created and launched that used a hot news topic as a peg to drive interest--and ultimately an inbound link from the New York Times.

While we can't claim attention from the New York Times, we were also recently able to capitalize on a buzzworthy topic--DC's recent back-to-back Snowmaggeddon storms--to drive interest and sales.

Here's how it happened, and what worked.

Continue reading "Case Study: Snowmageddon + Social Media = Sales" »

My colleague Lisa King is currently halfway around the world, volunteering for Habitat for Humanity in Ethiopia. So I'm filling in with this week's list of links, some for work and some for pleasure.

How Search Is Changing

In this edition of SEOMoz's video series Whiteboard Fridays, "How Search Is Changing," Rand Fishkin explains how recent moves by Google indicate that the social graph will become as important as the link graph in determining search ranking. What does this mean for businesses? That social media may become as important as search marketing.

Also in search news, John Battelle considers the implications of Google's recent purchase of human-powered search site Aardvark.

10 Goals to Measure on Your Landing Pages

Whether for pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaigns or organic search, you should be using landing pages to guide your users toward a conversion goal. But what can you measure as a goal besides sales? Megan Leap of Search Engine Journal has written a list of "10 Types of Landing Page Goals."

Complicators vs. Simplifiers

The always entertaining Ad Contrarian, Bob Hoffman, starts a 4-part series on Complicators vs. Simplifiers in advertising--and why the Complicators are winning.

Outsourcing Company Blog Posts

In our recent series on starting a company blog, one of the aspects we covered was the content for the blog itself--and how to generate it. One option is to recruit outside resources for writing posts. Marketing Sherpa offers 6 tips for outsourcing your blog.

Online Wedding Planning, Google Docs Style

Did you get engaged on Valentine's Day? Here's how to plan your wedding with Google Docs.

[Photo credit: Matti Mattila, Flickr Creative Commons]

In a perfect world, we’d all have unlimited budgets to lavish on our websites & related online efforts. (Also in a perfect world I’d look like Angelina Jolie and have an unlimited designer shoe budget—but that’s another post.) Alas, those of us living in the real world need to deal with pesky things like cost and time constraints.  

That means we sometimes (okay, usually) need to scale back our lofty ambitions for top-to-bottom redesigns, custom application development, whiz-bang widgets, etc, etc, etc. But the good news is, you can do a heck of a lot to improve your web strategy on a modest budget and an aggressive schedule. The key is to focus on what will give you the most bang for your buck; that is, what makes the most sense for your business goals.

Here are five ways you can quickly improve your web efforts:

Continue reading "“So You Can’t Afford a Redesign.” The Top 5 Things You Can Do Improve Your Website Right Now" »