The Internet marketing industry’s game-changing reality of the mobile internet is going to have a large impact on the future of websites, and QR codes may just be the link between print and digital that keeps your brand in the mind of consumers.

According to a survey by the Mobile Marketing Association, budgets for mobile marketing spend is set to rise 124% from 2010 to 2011. Mobile marketing has provided event marketers with some great ways to mix QR Codes with marketing and advertising efforts at conferences, fundraisers, tradeshows and other events. Mobile marketing gives exhibitors another way to engage with users on the show floor and drive traffic to your booth.

The following is a case study from online interactive agency, The Net Impact is a great example of how QR Codes can be an effective mobile marketing tool at tradeshows and exhibitions.

Client: Auctori:city (now named Auctori:gov)– Content Management System designed for cities and municipalities

Website: http://www.auctorigov.com/

Services: Mobile Marketing/ QR Code

Challenge: Auctori:gov was a sponsor of the 2010 National Association of Government Webmasters Conference (the premier conference for government webmasters, which focuses on local, state and regional government web). As a Gold Sponsor of the conference, Auctori:gov  received an exhibition booth. The booth was to feature demonstrations, informational pamphlets, giveaways and Auctori:law representatives on hand to answer questions. Auctori:gov was looking for a way engage the tech-savvy NAGW members with their marketing pieces and familiarize the attendees with their brand before the conference.

The Net Impact’s Solution: The Net Impact suggested Auctori:gov include a QR Code on their pre-conference marketing materials to provide an interactive, and thus more memorable, experience with their product. The QR Code led NAGW members to a landing page which included: more information on the company, a special discount for NAGW members, the location of Auctori:gov’s booth at the conference and a chance to win an iPad.

Results: Instead of remembering the URL from a print ad and typing it into a browser, NAGW members simply used their smart phones to scan the QR Code and reach their destination. With good motivation (free iPad incentive) Auctori:gov utilized mobile marketing and a QR Code to bring their target audience to a remarkable real time action, engaging them with their brand and increase conversion (in this case landing on their webpage and visiting their booth to learn more about their product). Utilizing the QR codes provided Auctor:gov with information previously limited by space on their marketing materials. In addition, their web traffic from their QR Code was measurable through web analytics.

“Search is not just about trusting algorithm, it is about trusting friends”. My favorite session at PRSA-Tech Day was “Leveraging Your Brand in a Digital World”, led by Michael Pranikoff ( @mpranikoff ) Global Director of Emerging Media for PR Newswire.  In the presentation, I learned today’s Public Relations has made the shift from brand voice to social voice (in other words, your brand is what others say it is). Social voices are manifested in several real people, making your brand more human by engaging in two way conversation which enables your brand to listen, learn and interact with a community.

In using specific examples- such as the Starbuck’s use of crowdsourcing in their Starbuck’s My Idea Campaign to compete with Dunken Donuts’s social media marketing - Pranikoff highted the importance of combining public relations, Internet marketing and advertising to share one, consistent message. With at least 72% of Internet users being a part of at least one social network and 57% of users sharing links to news stories via social channels; learning to use social media to compete in the competitive online space and boost your company’s brand image is becoming a necessary component of public relations.

Did you know in 2010 there will be more content created than in the history of mankind?! Crazy huh? So how do you get your content found amongst the crowd online? Make sure your content is accessible, easy to view and easy to use – use social media to make your content directional! Check out Pranikoff’s presentation on slideshare!

Learn more about my experience at PRSA Tech Day at Blog.TheNetImpact.com

What was your favorite presentation at  #PRSATECHDAY!

The Net Impact’s Internet Marketing team attended Search Engine Strategies San Francisco this past August. SES attracts the world’s best Internet marketing professionals who come from around the world to attend highly informational sessions and labs related to the ever-changing web marketing industry. This was the 3rd West Coast SES Conference The Net Impact, a St. Louis based Online Interactive Agency, has attended.

The topics covered included: SEO, PPC management, social media, keyword research, local advertising, mobile engagement, link building, duplicate content, online video, website optimization, usability, and high-level online marketing strategy.

“One of the most interesting things I learned was about the importance of citations in Google’s new organic caffeine algorithm,” said Lauren Pesko, Internal Marketing and PR Associate at The Net Impact. “Google is now looking quite a bit at social networking sites and how many times your website or blog has been mentioned or linked to. This is really great to learn from an SEO standpoint. The speakers emphasized the importance of adding feeds to your “static” website and turning it into a blog. This can have an SEO benefit because Google’s new caffeine algorithm is giving weight to blogs due to the fact that they offer up to date information – caffeine is all about the real time.”

The Net Impact Internet marketing team is looking forward to putting together an informational session to share with clients and friends what they learned at SES!

“This has been an exciting year for the ever-changing web marketing industry,” said Project Manager at The Net Impact, Mandy Christanell. “At SES we learned how to implement proven techniques for transforming tactics into proven strategies that garner results for our clients today, while ensuring they stay ahead of the competition tomorrow.”

What was the most interesting thing you learned at SES San Francisco?

QR is short for Quick Response (they can be read quickly by a cell phone). The QR Code is a two-dimensional code, which when scanned by the appropriate device, drives mobile users to an intended location. They are used to take a piece of information from a transitory media and put it in to your cell phone. You may soon see QR Codes in a magazine advert, a web page or even on someone’s t-shirt. Once it is in your cell phone, it may give you details about that business (allowing users to search for nearby locations), or details about the person wearing the t-shirt, show you a URL which you can click to see a trailer for a movie, or it may give you a coupon which you can use in a local outlet.

According to Jeff Weidauer in his Retail Customer Experience report, he points to research that predicts that “two-thirds of retailers are planning a digital mobile initiative launch before the end of this year, and many of these will include a QR code capability.”

Your business, no matter how small or large, could use QR codes in a number of ways. You could add one to your business card containing your contact details so it is easy for someone to add you to their contacts on their cell phone. You can also add them to any print advertising, flyers, posters, invites, tv ads with the inclusion of Facebook and Twitter IDs, links to YouTube videos, event details, contact information, etc…
In conclusion, QR codes are another example of the blurring of the edges of media, as we all rapidly enter this totally connected world. It is the blurring of the lines between our cell phone and the Internet, always on Internet connectivity wherever we are, whatever we are doing and whatever device we have on hand –whether it’s a cellphone, netbook, laptop, pc, camera, or TV.

In the last decade, tracking web analytics has rapidly evolved from simply data crunching to a very powerful decision making platform. Web analytics is an important tool for Internet marketers and web designers alike to make choices about how to improve traffic flow, design calls to action, update search engine optimization and enhance the overall strategy of a website.

Paying close attention to visitor behavior on a website through analytics, is very similar to paying attention to the consumer behavior for a store, brand or product.  Think of it this way… a store manager arranges their shop with the most marketable items in places that grab the shopper’s attention and are easily accessible and highly visible. Just as the store manager is looking to make the shopper’s experience more satisfying by arranging their store based on the habits of his consumers, so that it is easy and enjoyable to navigate through, a website creator should take into account what information is most sought after on their website and the habits and pathways visitors are taking to get there.

Without web analytics it is next to impossible to measure and analyze website visitor behavior. Analyzing visitor behavior allows you to determine activity as it affects profit, sales and areas (pages) of interest. Page views, navigation, entry and exit pages, time spent, languages, geographic locations, visits, and keywords used in searches are a few of the features that are able to be determined using web analytics. By simply tracking items that are most often viewed you can learn what items or products on your site, receive the most attention. In this way you can adapt your offerings to attract more traffic and while doing so monitor what sparks and keeps visitor’s attention.

The Net Impact team places special emphasis on the importance of clickstream tracking, or the following of a visitor’s clickstream as they move throughout a website, down to every microscopic detail. This analysis offered by Google under the name Event Tracking Tool,  allows you to track every movement your visitor makes as a unique event. Analyzing every small movement, or micro-conversion, your visitor makes provides you with useful feedback used to make changes to your website to improve your visitor’s experience, which will in turn enhance the overall value of your website. Every micro-conversion a visitor makes is important because, no matter how small the movement is, it is still conversion, you are still getting the visitor to do what you want them to dig deeper and deeper into your website.

An excellent example of this is The Net Impact’s findings with the website www.vangoghgallery.com. VanGoghGallery.com is an online collection of Van Gogh’s works. The website received thousands of visitors each day. The Net Impact helped Van Gogh gallery setup Event Tracking Methods to gain greater insight into the navigation patterns of its main landing pages.  Through event tracking, Van Gogh Gallery was able to determine that the large image links on the page received 98.5% of the click-throughs compared 1.5%  for the side navigation links, going to the same page. This was helpful for determining the elements necessary on each page to get visitors to take the next step.

In conclusion, if you ever wondered how to analyze website user behavior, determine which search terms they come from, which pages are most visited, which pages are of least interest  and how to maximize your ROI, look into implementing  a Web Analytics solution. Analytics will help you conduct a behavioral analysis of your website visitors, and with that information you can make the required changes to your website that will improve your overall conversation rate and make your visitor’s website experience one that is enjoyable.

To find out how The Net Impact can help you with your Google Analytics needs, contact us today for a free assessment and consultation!

Some of the advantages of PPC campaign are listed below:

1. Low cost
You pay only if a visitor clicks through your advertisement. Traditional methods of advertisements are not only slow but expensive. A small budget is enough to start a PPC campaign.

2. Instant results
PPC campaign can be started within a day or two. Once initiated, the campaign can yield instant results, because these ads get immediately listed on the search engines.

3. Keyword- Centric

Since PPC campaigns are  keyword specific, they provide the ability of choosing keywords and phrases that are reflect your business profile. You may also be able to get the detailed information about the search volume for your preferred keywords. Effectivly implementing a keyword research strategy will help you create ads that are targeted at customers who are actually interested in your products/services.

4. Provide market insight
PPC campaigns are helpful in getting an insight into the market. This will let you promote your products/services in the regions of your business profile and interest. You can run ads according to the keyword specific to that particular region. This again brings new business prospects for future marketing strategies to shape up.

5. Decode the customer mindset
Through PPC campaigns you can get an insight into the interest of customers from different areas. It let you understand what a customer is actually looking for. In this way your business gets developed in an efficient way that is in sync with the customers’ expectation.

6. Alert customers about a new product
You can update your clientele and prospective clients about your newly launched brands and services through PPC campaigns. You can build your brand image through PPC campaigns.

Overall PPC Campaigns are an effective and cost-efficient method of online advertising, that bring quick results. But remember that in order to make your pay per click advertising campaign a success, you must  monitor the performance using web analytics. These days there are lots of online tracking tools which can help you in keeping a check on click frauds.

The Net Impact is a full service PPC agency, and our consultation and bid management services are designed to assist you in setting up your pay per click search campaigns from start to finish. The Net Impact provides PPC account management and consulting services in both a supportive and hands-on manner.

The service – which will offer advertising inside mobile apps, initially on the iPhone and iPod Touch – promises to combine the emotion of TV advertising with the interactivity of internet advertising. Apple says the deals it has already secured represent almost half of the total forecasted mobile ad spend in the US for the second half of 2010.

Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, said: “iAd offers advertisers the emotion of TV with the interactivity of the web, and offers users a new way to explore ads without being hijacked out of their favorite apps. iAds will reach millions of iPhone and iPod Touch users, a highly desirable demographic for advertisers, and provide developers [with] a new way to earn money so they can continue developing free and low-cost applications.”

Apple, which launched the fourth generation of the iPhone yesterday, has attracted brands including Unilever, AT&T, Best Buy, Campbell Soup, Chanel, Citi, Nissan, Walt Disney and Turner Broadcasting.

The new mobile advertising platform is designed to allow web developers to create in-app advertising. Currently anyone who clicks on an advert in a downloadable app is bounced out of it and on to the advertiser’s webpage. A Web development can keep 60% of all the revenue that is made through the use of iAd and Apple will get the rest.

The mobile advertising market represents a massive revenue stream, and the $60 million stat only reinforces the potential takeway that Apple could pocket from their move into the arena.

Do you think these big name advertisers are making the right move? 

Although this seems like a simple question, the answer is not always obvious or easy to define. Many website owners receive a significant amount of visitors to their websites; however, driving visitors to your website is only half of the online success equation. Turning these visitors into customers and having the motivation to answer the question above, are both equally essential to improving your online performance.Website testing can help you answer these questions and improve your website to increase traffic and conversion. Even though A/B Testing is an ongoing process, but when managed properly it will help you realize a greater return on investment.

A/B Testing Case Study

Issue:  The King and Prince Beach & Golf Resort is a luxury Georgia resort located on St. Simons Island. The resort receives a large amount of traffic to its website from its search engine optimization and paid search efforts, however, it was seeing a large number of visitors bounce from the home page. Analysis of the site’s Google Analytics statistics showed that the special offer that appeared on the home page was not receiving a large number of clicks (see image below). Knowing that this area of the home page should be great real estate for capturing the attention of potential customers, we decided to run a test to determine the type of message that should be presented in that area, which in turn would lead to a lower bounce rate.

Action: The Net Impact worked with The King and Prince Beach & Golf Resort to develop an A/B Google Website Optimizer Test (an easy-to-use tool for testing site content that delivers actionable results) that uses creative variations of the home page. The test ran the original home page, hosting the special offer, against a new variation that provided links to pages which were most popular with visitors. The pages were chosen based on the revenue they generated. The two variations were run against each other in order to determine which message received the greatest amount of interaction. Due to the high volume of traffic on the site, enough data to determine the winner of each test was collected within 2-3 days of the Optimizer test launch. The Net Impact then implemented the changes to the website to reflect the winning home page layout.

Results: The results of the Google Optimizer test showed that the new variation resulted in a 281% increase in clicks from that area of the home page. As a result, the overall bounce rate of the home page decreased by 6.22% during the testing period. Since the implementation of the results of the Google Optimizer tests, The King and Prince Beach & Golf Resort home page has continued to see a decrease in bounces.

Press release optimization is becoming an increasingly popular form of marketing. Just as optimizing your web site is vital to boost search rankings, so is creating an optimized press release. Internet news aggregators direct visitors to news sources in the same way that search engines direct visitors to web sites. Therefore, it is more effective for a press release to be optimized, and The Net Impact press release services will make your news visible to your target audience.

“Something like 25,000 press releases have been sent to me, resulting in no stories,” writes David Meerman Scott in his bestseller The New Rules of Marketing & PR. “Instead, I think about a subject that I want to cover in a column or an article, and I check out what I can find on blogs and through search engines.”

The purpose behind most online public relations efforts is to increase overall online exposure, which will in turn direct more people to visit your targeted website.  Increased online exposure can lead to greater brand development, a stronger relationship with your public, increased interest from the media, more connections with potential partners and increased lead generation causing greater revenue.

Any topic that will be of interest to prospects, the media and potential partners (such as a new product launch, industry news, events, community activities, etc…) can be used to construct a press release that is search engine optimized and distributed online. Then, distributing optimized press release via newswires has the power to directly reach millions of Internet users, generate inbound links to your website and raise search engine visibility of your website.

Most newswire services offer you an exact report on how many people accessed your optimized release. This is an essential tool in gauging your reads and impressions.  In addition, through other analytical tools, such as Google Analytics, you can determine when someone follows a link to your targeted website through your optimized press release.

Now that online news sites such as Yahoo News and Google News contain such an abundance of press release content and RSS feeds, it is easy to syndicate news. An optimized press release can get you a page one SERP result for your relevant keywords in the search engines, news engines and news websites. So we see that press releases are not only an effective tool for distributing content to the media and consumers, they are easily syndicated creating an excellent opportunity to attract organic traffic and incoming links.

 A well written online press release has the ability to:

1.) Capture the attention of editors, journalists and bloggers looking for compelling topics for news stories

2.) Live on the web indefinitely. Press Releases are  published to various websites and blogs, giving your content a long shelf life as the content is never deleted creating enduring links.

3.) Create conversation on social networks.The press release link will be shared indefinitely through social media marketing, such as Twitter and Facebook

4.) Be viewed by new prospects – your target audience.

*As a result of all of these activities, hyperlinks will generate that will point back to the release creator’s targeted web site.

 If online press releases sound like something your company should be doing but you do not know the right approach,  have the time or the resources, Contact The Net Impact to help you begin your online public relations effort in an organized manner. The Net Impact’s public relations services include press release copy-writing and press release submission through third party online platforms.. We can help you implement a successful public relations strategy into your overall marketing plan.

When starting a social media campaign for you non-profit, remember: a simple, yet powerful mission and message can take a campaign far. Non-profits on social networking sites should set goals, update consistently, become a part of the conversation, build community and create value. Without a clear vision and well thought out strategy, it is difficult to encourage an audience to participate. If the time and energy are strategically spent to create a social community, others will help spread your message and your desired results will come.

The social media space provides the non-profit sector with the opportunity to connect and collaborate quickly and inexpensively, and without the help of big company sponsorships. Many non-profits are leveraging social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, to connect with their supporters online by crowdsourcing ideas, providing feedback and monitoring conversations regarding their organization.

According to Stacey  Monk, Founder and CEO of Epic Change, “Social media is making change possible. With social media, we’re able to hear totally new voices, who might not have had access to mainstream channels, which represents a real shift in power, and where change can originate.”

Recenlty The Net impact, an online interactive agency, teamed with St. Louis based non-profit, the Karla Smith Foundation to help build online aware for their campaign event with BringChange2Mind, a non-profit superheaded by award-winning actress Glenn Close that works to combat the stigma of mental illness. KSF and BringChange2Mind combined forces to host an unprecedented mental health awareness and anti-stigma event, “Change a Mind, Change a Life”, in St. Louis, Missouri.

The Karla Smith Foundation was in need of a strategy to build online buzz around the event and direct traffic to the event website. To quickly and effectively generate awareness around the campaign, The Net Impact worked closely with the Karla Smith Foundation to create the website, www.changeamind.org, for the highly anticipated event. In order to direct traffic to the website and create online awareness, The Net Impact implemented a social media marketing strategy for the campaign, which included a strong presence on Twitter and Facebook. The KSF social networking sites were updated daily with exciting news regarding the event, such as notices of upcoming media appearances, videos and pictures, and sponsorship information. The KSF Facebook and Twitter continued to see steady growth in fans and followers as well an increase in the level of fan engagement in the weeks leading up to the event.

As a result of the social media marketing campaign, KSF was provided with the opportunity to share valuable information with their existing community, increase interest around their event, catch the attention of local media, build their brand awareness and attract new fans and followers to get involved with their organization. Most importantly, the KSF Facebook page now serves as a platform for their online community to share personal experiences and give valuable feedback in real time.

In conclusion, while many non-profits still have a long way to go, the integration of social media in their marketing efforts can help these organizations meet and exceed many different goals. Social  media is a platform that allows people to participate in a conversation about what they think, feel and care about, making social media and excellent space for the non-profit sector to continue to explore.