We’ve been looking for an extensive 2011 digital marketing report that would summarize, in a more comprehensive fashion, the state of digital currently and to provide an outlook for the future for brands and retailers in particular. 

And we’ve found it.  Below is a report from Engauge based in Atlanta.  Interestingly, Scott Hildebrand, who is featured in the presentation, is now the Chief Consumer Relationship Officer at Engauge as of August 2010.  Scott used to work at Capital One here in Richmond and then had his own agency based out of Charlottesville called BoldMouth Inc.

Here is what Engauge says about their 2011 Digital Marketing Outlook report:

A comprehensive report on emerging technologies and best practices for brands. CMOs and brand leaders will find creative digital strategies to drive growth in the year ahead.

Technologies and platforms include mobile and location-based marketing, owned-media channels, online coupons, interactive TV, apps, virtual goods, gaming, augmented reality, social analytics and measurement.

Best practices and market insights include the foundations of digital success, defined brand behaviors within social channels, creativity in the era of co-creation, brand storytelling, crowdsourcing, retail convergence, consumer narcissism, privacy regulations, social coding of sophisticated teens and behavioral marketing.

Read exclusive interviews with some of the tech community’s most-watched start-ups: Figment, PlacePunch, GetGlue, Crimson Hexagon and BlueCava.

We hope you take the time to read and experience this report thoroughly and use it to brief your staff and brainstorm ideas and stategic marketing plans within your organization, whether it be large or small.  We feel it justly summarizes consumer trends, how marketers are often lagging and resistant to change, and how digital technology and related marketing are changing for the future.

Please note that this presentation is copy heavy so you’ll want to view it in the full screen mode.  Just click the “menu” button on the left-hand side below the presentation and it will give you an option to view in full screen mode for much easier reading.

Last Fall, I spoke at three of the Retail Merchants Association’s chapter meetings and delivered about 1/2 hour talk about what local retailers and small businesses could do for free or very low cost to increase traffic to their retail establishments prior to the holidays. 

Because we were meeting at restaurants – and one was even over dinner – I opted for using a handout (rather than the infamous powerpoint slides) that they could take with them and have for future reference.  As it turned out, the handout became very popular and everyone took copies – one person even wanted extra copies to take back with her so she could have a meeting with her staff to review the ideas.

We always want people to take away at least one thing from our talks – that’s what anyone who is a trainer hopes for.  If people can learn three things, that’s even better.  In this case, we had several people say to us that it was THE BEST talk they had ever attended and got so much value from it.

If you’d like us to make a presentation to your group, please contact us at our Richmond area office at 804.777.9940.  In the meantime, you can view the handout from this presentation below – it has been updated to remove the holiday references and to appeal to a wider audience, not just retailers per se.

Recently, a local small business owner told me that he spent nearly $4,000 per month to advertise in directories such as the YellowPages and YellowBook. His annual contract included some online advertising, as well as about $400/month in pay-per-click ads. He said he got tons of reports but when we really sat down and reviewed them, he wasn’t getting much in results in the way of website traffic, off-page search engine optimization or phone calls to the separate numbers they had set up for him.

And when we looked at his pay-per-click ads, the traffic wasn’t going to his site — it was going to a replication of his site on one of their servers. Other than the information they were reporting to him, he didn’t have access to any kind of detailed analytics on these efforts, like he would have with Google, even though he has Google Analytics on his website.

I just read that phone directory advertising equates to $13 billion dollars annually.

And what I’ve heard from small business owners is that the sales folks are selling aggressively and doing everything they can to upsell them from previous year’s contract, which is how they make their commissions.  It’s unfortunate, because small business owners often get locked in to a contractual agreement that often doesn’t make the most sense for them if you look at the bigger picture of their overall online and offline marketing budget and plan.

Many local small businesses still should have basic listings in the printed directories, especially if they’re appealing to an older demographic. But gone are the days that it makes sense to take out a full-page ad in a phone directory.  Eventually, over the next few years, I’m guessing that the $13 billion dollar industry will shrink.  But, for now, many small business owners are still not knowledgable enough about what the phone directories are selling that they get sold a service that sounds good but is really less effective in the long run. 

Here are three reasons why we think small business owners should re-evaluate and reconsider their phone directory advertising spend:

1. Fewer People Use Printed Phone Directories. With the increased usage of computers especially in the form of laptops and iPads, as well as smart phones like iPhones and Androids with geo-location services, fewer people have a need to grab a paper directory to find a business product or service, a phone number and an address.   For advertising to be effective, businesses have to be where people are spending their time.  And very few people are spending much time with their phone book!  Facebook, yes.  Phone book, no.

2.  Consider Better Options for Your Advertising Dollars.  The business owner that I mentioned to you at the beginning of this post didn’t realize that he had very little control over what was being done for him.  He didn’t realize that once he stopped paying, that he had no online history of the PPC advertising.  He didn’t realize that none of the web traffic actually went to his site like he thought it was.  He didn’t realize that Google Analytics as well as the Google Adwords and Google Places accounts could have been integrated but weren’t even being used.  Today, there are so many better options – both short- and long-term – that he could have considered such as SEO and better SEM.  Heck, for $4,000 a month, he could have even considered advertising on TV (something he never thought he could afford).

3.  Focus on Building Relationships, drawing people to you rather than have your ad sit in a book on someone’s shelf in hopes that they’ ll find you one day.  There are people looking for your business and products or services every single day – and people who will refer others to you if you remind them and if you reach out and help other people and other businesses.  It’s not all about selling.  It’s about connecting and engaging with your target audience, and paid advertising – especially in phone directories – just can’t do that like social media and organic search methods including effective blogging and content management.

So what should you do instead?

1.  Well, first, don’t eliminate your phone directory listings altogether.  If you’ve always maintained a presence there, then reduce your spending by reducing the ad size.  And always keep your online listing up-to-date.  For example, AT&T’s Yellow Pages will allow businesses to maintain a free and fairly detailed listing as long as you update it annually.  Others like SuperPages.com are similar but don’t require annual updates.  Yellowbook seems to want a bit more control with their sales force but you can still get a free listing if you don’t want to pay for one.

2.  Make sure that the basics are covered.   Create and/or update your other online directory listings like Google Places, Bing, and Yahoo and any local directories like Richmond.com.  Fill them out completely and add photos and/or videos if they let you do that at no charge.  And be sure to include your website URL!  Keep a list of them in a spreadsheet so that you don’t forget your log in information and passwords, or print out the sign-up emails and keep them handy.  Also, be sure you’re talking to your web developer about optimizing your website for appropriate keywords and make sure you have access to your Google Analytics account.  Get familiar with the tools you probably already have in place – review results at least monthly.

3.  Evaluate the status of your current online marketing efforts.  If you haven’t updated your website in a few years, or if you’re not active on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter or if you haven’t even considered whether it makes sense to begin blogging, then evaluate those marketing efforts as they’ll provide you with better traction in the long run.  Also, be sure you have both an on-site and off-site SEO effort in place and that you know your best keywords, particularly long-tail keywords that might get less hits but better conversion for you.   The idea is to do the work that will get your OWN website up in the search engine rankings – not to help the directories push yours off the first page.  This takes commitment but a lot could have been accomplished with less than 25% of the $4,000/month budget my small business owner was spending on phone book directory advertising!

In addition, test and run your own PPC campaigns, even if you start with just Google Adwords.  If you run your own campaign, you can learn a lot more and know what questions to ask if and when you feel you want someone else to run them for you.  Even if the small business owner spends just $300/month or $10 day on Google Adwords, you’ll at least get a feel for your better performing keywords.

Need more help?

If you’re a small business owner and would like a free evaluation of your online marketing efforts and in how you can get more traction from your overall marketing expenditure, then give us a call at 804.777.9940.  We’ll be happy to talk to you in person, by phone or webinar.

If we were writing a book right now, we might call it “Lessons Learned in the Trenches” and this would be one of the first topics that we would discuss when it comes to online marketing for small businesses.  Social media particularly is redefining how people use the web and since it isn’t slowing down anytime in the near future, many small business owners are having a tough time catching up.

And that’s because the technology and applications are improving so fast that it is very difficult to keep up with the changes, especially those of the search engines, even for those of us who are in it everyday. 

Wordpress is a perfect choice for small business websites.

But that’s all the more reason for the small business owner to take control of their online brand, and to utilize a flexible, open-source CMS platform like WordPress to build their self-hosted website. 

First, let’s clarify that we’re not website designers by trade.  We’re content generators.   And whether small business owners realize it or not, they will become content generators as well because static websites are quickly becoming a thing of the past for many reasons.  A static website = a static business.  Keeping a website continually updated is becoming more and more important in search engine rankings as well as increasing the chances a prospect will convert (recency and relevance of content to the viewer). 

After working with several small business owners and learning about the challenges they’ve experienced with their websites, we’ve compiled five reasons why a small business owner should build his or her website in WordPress.  WordPress…

1. Is Free and Updated Software.  Because WordPress is an open-source project, there are literally hundreds of people working on it everyday.  What does that mean to the business owner?  It means you are free to use it for any type or size of business without having to pay a licensing fee.  It is always being improved and the  updates are free with a simple download.  Design templates are endless but if you want something unique or want to make changes to a template, a web designer can rather easily custom design for your tastes.
2. Includes a Blog.  Whether you think you need a blog or not,  or even if you’d like to have one but are not sure that you would have the time to update it, it is critical that you build a website with integrated blog capability.   In fact, WordPress was originally built as blogging software which gives it some unique advantages.  Once programmers started working with it, they realized they could use it to build full-scale websites.  We highly recommend that our small business Clients use a blog for many reasons (credibility, easy content generation including video, promotability, website traffic, etc.) but the main factor in integrating a blog within your website is that it is a very easy way for small businesses to keep their website updated with great content.  
3. Is Great for SEO.  Small business owners are not always well-versed in search engine optimization techniques (hey, it’s difficult for us to keep up with it and we’re in the industry).  But it’s important to know the factors of where your site ranks naturally when people do a search on a product or service that you offer.  While other software platforms can be great for SEO for the experienced user and programmer, WordPress comes prepackaged to help you immediately with the basics and beyond plus the ability to easily add on other plug-ins designed to help you with SEO such as the very popular All In One SEO Pack which now comes in a Pro version.  There are plenty of other search engine ranking factors like age of domain name and hosting, but at least you’ll start out with more than the basics covered.
4. Is a Content Management System (CMS).  A CMS website platform allows the novice user to update their website with copy changes and new graphics in an easy way, almost like using Microsoft Word.  WordPress is not the only CMS website software, there are others such as Expression Engine, Drupla and Joomla.  But WordPress is becoming the most popular and widely-used and easiest-to-use for the small business owner who would prefer to a) not spend a lot of time making website changes, b) would rather not have to pay a website designer to make the changes.  The latter adds a lot of cost and those dollars could be allocated much better in online or offline marketing efforts and we can’t stress how important this is, especially to a small or start-up business.  And, with it being so widely used, there are many people who are WordPress experts who can help you if you need it.
5. Has Easy Social Media Integration.  It seems social media changes faster than SEO these days and WordPress makes it easy to nicely integrate social media within your site.  There are so many options with various plug-ins and easy-to-use widgets which help you to custom design your site in the way that you choose.   Just like a blog, we believe your social media should be seamlessly integrated in places in your site that are natural to your reader.  By showcasing your involvement in social media in the right places on your site, it shows that you are staying up-to-date with current trends, that you’re accessible and that you’re encouraging customer feedback and engagement with your company.  All good things to do.

Recently, we spoke with an interior designer whose website developer built her website using Flash.  It is not optimized for SEO and she cannot do anything with it without calling her web guy.  She doesn’t know if she has Google Analytics on the site and her blog is created separately in Blogger.  Her social media links look like an afterthought because, well, they were.  Overall, the site is gorgeous but isn’t practical for her as a owner/operator of her business.  Unfortunately, she spent a lot of money on her website only to have a web presence that isn’t cohesive from a design, operational or SEO standpoint.  We really get annoyed when we see these situations because there isn’t much we can do to help without redoing nearly everything she’s done.

We’re not saying here that you can’t successfully build a website in another platform but we favor WordPress for small business owners for many reasons.  The biggest one is to keep costs down while giving you the ability to expand your website as your marketing needs increase .  For example, if you’re doing a lot of PPC advertising with Google or Facebook, then you want to create landing pages on your site that are specific to those ads.  You don’t want to be in a position to have to call your website designer every time you need to feature a special event, run a targeted offer or make changes to your staff photos.

If you need a quick analysis of your online brand efforts, simply call Traction Group at 804.777.9940.  We’ll be happy to give you a web assessment and answer any questions you may have.

At Traction Group, we work with several types of small businesses including franchise owners, product dealers and stand-alone businesses who may be members of a governing trade association. In the age of new media including online marketing and social networking, it is essential for all types of small businesses to hire a photographer and build a portfolio of images which will be reflective of their own brand.

Granted, stock photos work well for certain purposes and we highly encourage their use to make a visual point when needed. We even use photos from FreeFoto.com on our site, just to add some interest. 

Home Instead Senior Care provides franchise owners with a photo bank of seniors and caregivers.

Franchise owners often have the benefit of using videos and images that their corporate home office makes available to them, although not all franchise owners use those to the fullest extent. Dealers have the ability to use manufacturer product photos, images, videos and design drawings which come in handy when they’re promoting or explaining a specific product to a prospect. And a stand-alone business might be able to utilize similar images from a trade association for which they may be members. 

Using imagery of any kind these days is critical to a small business success as consumers have an increasing desire to interact and engage in various ways. But photographs and images like these can only serve small business needs to a point. For a franchise not to localize its business, or a dealer to count only on the manufacturer’s brand, or for a small business to rely on the laurels of its association membership, is just absurd from a business branding standpoint. And that’s particularly true since we find ourselves thrown in to this new social media world with photo tools like Flickr, Picasa, and the many online photo album services including the one available on your Facebook Fan page. 

So why should a small business prioritize hiring a photographer and not rely on stock photos or other images from their franchise corporate office or their manufacturer? 

Here are Traction Group’s top 10 reasons why a local small business should hire a photographer:

1. Business owners need terrific profile shots. Social media profiles like those on LinkedIn, Twitter or your WordPress blog require profile headshots that tell people that you’re both professional and approachable. The business owner’s photo helps people to remember you and connect with you and the photographs can be used for your company business cards, sell sheets or brochures. If you have a business development director, the same goes for that person as well, as they are often the face of the company.
2. Prospects often research your company online. Often your customers or prospects are checking out your business online before they even call, or connecting with those who answer the phone and they don’t always know or talk to the business owner. Having photos of your office team that your prospects or customers can find on your website or on your Facebook Fan page is important so that they can put a face with a name, or that they can see that your business is both serious and credible.
3. Accurately depict the size of your company. Recently, one of our clients almost didn’t get called about a project because the prospect found some outdated data online that said his company had 2-4 employees. While my client did have 4 employees a few years ago, his company now employs nearly 20. Having updated photos of your company and your team every couple of years is important so that prospects can easily see that you have a business that is big enough to service their needs.
4. Keep your content fresh. In the age of social media and online content development, adding photos and images to your blog posts, your website and your Facebook Fan page keeps your content fresh and engaging. There is nothing more important in the world of online marketing than to continually keep your customers and prospects engaged with you and your brand. Yes, I said your brand. Not the brand of your franchise and not the brand of your manufacturer or association.
5. Developing your unique brand. Hiring a photographer to shoot photos of you, your building, your signage, your team, your work – or anything that defines your company – is part of building your business’s unique brand and sets you apart from other local or national competition. And if you’re a franchise owner, it helps to localize your business and sets you apart from similar franchises that may be in your area. And photo selections can easily be turned into slide shows and videos, even cool online banner ads, that can further define your brand in the online media space.
   

   Marshall Mechanical, Richmond VA, recently invested in creating their own photo bank.

6. Starting a photography bank. I can guarantee you that few small business owners realize the importance of creating a bank of approved photography that can be used for both online and offline marketing efforts. But it must be part of their overall marketing budget. With the economy the way it is, you can get a good photographer to get you started with as little as $500 to get some basic shots and the costs range to a few thousand for a couple of days of shooting. Be sure to negotiate that the photographer will do some minor retouching (especially for the profile shots) and give you all the images on a CD so that you have a permanent copy and can load on multiple computers for accessing and storage. Also, be sure to negotiate the fact that you have all photography ownership rights.
7. Photos for Case Studies. Many small business owners perform work that is visible and should be showcased as a case study on their website or in presentations for business development purposes or industry presentations. And if you’re working on a large job that takes weeks to perform, you might require photographs in the various stages of development such as the early stage, the work-in-progress stage and the finished job. Certainly many business owners who are in the construction or related business might want before and after shots, whether they are installing a geothermal heating system or a dedicated home theater, or whether they are performing a makeover or creating a memorable event. We can’t stress how important it is to write up a simple case study on the more intriguing projects that your company has performed. At a future point, we’ll add a blog post with instructions of how to write a case study but it is imperative to capture high quality pictures while the job is progressing and to make notes about the job before you move on to another one.
8. Using both primary and secondary shots. When we work with a photographer on behalf of our small business clients, we help them develop a shot list so that the photographer can properly estimate the job (they may be able to group some together) and so that we all agree on what shots we expect to get from booking of their time. Within our shot list, we specify the number of staff members, extra locations or backgrounds, wardrobe changes and various things that are unique to each business and their situation. In addition to those primary shots, we also will ask the photographer to shoot some secondary or stylistic shots that might be close-ups, shots at different angles or views, or of just cool aspects of a project that are unique which may not ordinarily get any attention. Asking the photographer to take those extra shots on location and during the main shoot is much less expensive than scheduling more time. And those secondary shots can be so interesting for use in social media – especially in blogging and how those blog posts appear on your blog and on your Facebook Fan page for example.
   

   Google's Local Business Center allows small business owners to add photos and videos.

9. Local Business Directory Listings. Most small businesses forget to take the time to update their online local directory listings on Google, Bing and Yahoo. Yet, it is one of the more powerful search engine optimization tactics to use for a local business. Many listings are free and then there are some that charge a small monthly, annual or one-time fee. Most of these listings will allow you to add a logo and additional photos or even videos to make your listing more interesting. Using well-branded photographs that are unique to your business, especially if you have a storefront, will help people to find you and recognize your business. And this is one of the many reasons why we suggest that you have a photographer take pictures of your signage and your building.
10. You can’t be effective at social media marketing without photos. One of the very first questions we ask our new clients is “what photos do you have for us to work with?” Often we have to refer them to a photographer right away as they have very few photos for us to work with or the photos they have are outdated or out of focus. So if you plan to invest both time and money to increase your social media marketing, then take a serious inventory of your company’s photographs. And if someone tells you that you don’t need photos to be effective at social media, think again. Without a decent start of a photo bank, you’ll end up with nothing but boring content. And boring content will make your readers run away faster than you can say “flapjack.”

If you need help with how to maximize your social media and marketing efforts through photography or otherwise, then give Traction Group a call at 804.777.9940.

Check back for our next blog post:  How one small business used photography to elevate its brand image.