I thought it would be a good idea to summarize a few tips and tricks that can help optimize eMarketing performance or enhance tactics. I preach optimizing the “micro” elements of an entire eMarketing strategy. These are just little items, but nevertheless can be helpful in your strategy. So here we go:

Pay-Per-Click

• Geotargeting: If you’re geotargeting a certain area of a market, I encourage local advertisers to also test a new campaign targeting the entire market (DMA). Reason? Many of your prospects surf at work. Depending on your product/service, you may wish to test a geotargeted campaign two ways: 1. Before 8a, after 5p, and weekends in your preferred market area, and 2. DMA between 8a-5p.
• Mobile: Start taking advantage of mobile marketing by utilizing Google’s Click-to-call feature. Create a mobile ad, utilize one key phone number, and when people do mobile searches, you ad would appear if you sponsor the keyword. Phone extensions will appear as clickable phone numbers beneath the main text ad, and will be visible to high-end mobile device users who access Google.com search, Voice search, Google Mobile App or Google Maps for Mobile from their phone. When the mobile device user clicks on the phone number, you will be charged the same as for a standard click on the ad.

Search Engine Optimization

• Metatags: When search engines index your site, the spiders and bots look at your page title tags (which carry the most weight) and page descriptions (metatags).  The title tag is the name of each page on your site that you see in the browser’s title bar.  The first 60 characters are the most important, so please include important keywords early in your title. Remember you want to be found for important keyword queries.  Keywords before company name in title tags please.
• Domains: Best seo practice is to get at least one of your primary keywords in domain or sub domain name of your website. You can use hyphens (-) to separate multiple keywords.
• Keywords: Choose precise keywords; look for those keywords that have a decent traffic count, yet lesser competition.  This task needs an SEO pro to analyze which keywords have a number of competitors.  For example if you’re a business coach, choose keywords like “executive coach” “leadership coaching”, etc.  Specific “long-tail” keywords give you a better shot at getting on that treasured first page.

Google Analytics

Event Tracking: Suppose you have a white paper PDF to download on your site, a webinar, a podcast, or some sort of activity that requires more than just a page view. Well, we can track those events.  Typical Google Analytics data tracks page activity. To track specific page events, we need to add additional code to the pages where the event may occur: The syntax for the _trackEvent() method is:_trackEvent(category, action, label). Additionally, when you create an event, you give each specific a value so you can weight key metrics. So not to lose anyone here, Google provides good detail on this important feature. Here are examples of events that can be tracked using this tool using examples for categories, actions, and labels:

1. View a video:  Category: Video, Actions: Play, Pause, Stop. Label: Widget Demo

2. Specs for a new car:  Category: Car Configuration, Action: Color, Label: White, Yellow, Pink

3. Download a specific white paper from a page with multiple downloads: Category: Download, Action: Click, Label: Widget Whitepaper

It certainly takes some planning and help with a webmaster to determine the specific events, parameters, and values that need to be coded within your web pages.

Facebook

I found this one recently.  Regarding Fan pages, Your default landing page is the Wall page.  It doesn’t have to be- if you wish to focus on a special tab with offers or perhaps your Info page, just change the setting-”Default Landing Tab for Everyone Else”:

Twitter

I like the search features.   Whether you search for a keyword “marketing”, or a hashtag phrase #marketing, save the searches, and add those saved searches into your RSS feeds.  I for one read my Google reader first thing every morning, and it’s nice to have important twitter searches complement my blog feeds. Here are my hashtag keyword saves:

Lead Capture

Web forms:  Whether it be using Marketing Automation or an email program, please use short web forms and capture the data that’s essential.  You can capture additional data later if those prospects have the opportunity to download more content.  Giving phone numbers or email addresses as contact methods limits your ability to capture contacts for database marketing.  At the very least, use fields NAME, EMAIL, PHONE NUMBER, FIRM.  Then consider TITLE, and if necessary, a radio-button or drop-down box to select INDUSTRY or COMPANY SIZE.  I’m not a fan of the MESSAGE free form field because you can’t initially segment audiences from that.  MESSAGE is good for a general inquiry, but not needed for a request for specific information or a download from a landing page.

The focus of this blog post was just to highlight some tips and tricks; future blog posts will cover these eMarketing tactics in more detail. More tips another day!