BroadBased Communications: Marketing, Public Relations, Graphic Design

While you certainly desire that everyone on your e-newsletter list would open and read it, that’s just not going to happen. But before your CEO complains to you about low open rates, arm yourself with some industry facts.

According to a July 2011 Email Marketing Metrics Report from MailerMailer.com:

• Once your email campaign has been sent, you can expect open rates to peak within the first two hours, followed by a sloping decline for the next 46 hours.
• Transportation (17.6%), Non-Profit (15.2%) and Consulting (14.9%) enjoyed top performing open rates in 2010 while Media (8%), Restaurant (8%) and Medical (7.1%) had the lowest email open rates.
• While it’s reported that most people tend to open email between 7 a.m. and 10 a.m., at BroadBased, we send ours out at 5 a.m. and regularly receive 100 views by the time of our peak at 8 a.m. (Our open rate hovers at about 35%.)
• Data collected from mailermailer.com customers shows that smaller email list sizes ranging from 25-499 or 500-999 recipients perform better than lists containing 1,000 or more addresses.
• Declining open rates can be attributed somewhat to retail email volume per subscriber increasing to 61% overall, with the most significant jump in 2010 when volume increased by 16%.

Posted in Web/Interactive Development

While the BROADcast is distributed only once a month, we’re spreading the news daily on top trends and hot topics on Facebook and Twitter. For regular doses of marcom, design and PR news, follow us on Twitter at @BroadBased, and “like” us on Facebook!

Posted in Corporate Communications, Public/Media Relations, Social Media Planning, Web/Interactive Development

In March, BroadBased held an educational seminar with BusinessWire to show off all the latest benefits of the company’s mobile, SEO, online and social media technologies. BusinessWire, a Berkshire Hathaway Company, gave our clients and partners an in-depth education on writing press releases targeted for all the platforms. Marketing directors love the awesome analytics that BW offers – and PR pros love the amount of online buzz that BusinessWire gives our business-focused clients.

Would you like an invitation to our next educational seminar? Email Maria Coppola, APR at maria@bbased.com and we’ll put you on the list! (Psst: it’s free!)

Posted in Social Media Planning, Web/Interactive Development

A January study by eMarketer.com predicts that online marketing will post a 20% growth in 2012, surpassing gross print ad spending for the first time. The study goes on to state that the growth of TV advertising will remain relatively untouched by online spending.

Posted in Marketing Planning, Web/Interactive Development

Enhanced EmployBridge sites go from design to launch in just nine months.

The BroadBased team recently wrapped up a trio of websites for EmployBridge, a privately owned national leader in branded, industry-specific staffing solutions. Boasting nearly 150 locations throughout the United States, EmployBridge is the fastest-growing national provider of staffing and workforce solutions. Each of its seven divisions offers defined recruiting, testing and placement processes tailored to the specific industries they serve. The websites for ProDrivers, ProLogistix and ResourceMFG were conceptualized and designed by BroadBased and developed by a third party.

The websites, each featuring a common geo-location database strategy crafted by BroadBased CIO Jules Allen, immediately identify visitors by IP and present regional job opportunities on the homepage. Additional customizable job searches are available on the Jobs pages. As each division completes the rollout of its new website, the database will become more robust. The three websites were developed and launched within about nine months.

Posted in Web/Interactive Development

In a blog announcement in January, Google announced some changes to the way “organic” search is referred to your website.

The big change is this: When individuals are logged into one of their Google accounts while performing a search query (Google accounts include Gmail, Google Docs, Reader, Calendar, Google+, or even YouTube), the keywords they use to get to your website are stripped out of your website analytics. This results in a keyword “not provided” line item (see above). This change only affects “organic” searches, not paid Google ad campaigns. Paid campaigns continue to receive all keyword data.

While the change is good news for individuals whose searches were increasingly personalized with identifying data that clearly isn’t anonymous, the impact for marketers and business owners is that Google campaigns could be less accurate.

Google’s blog posting on the subject asks us to “keep in mind that the change will affect only a minority of your traffic,” but in our recent findings we’ve seen up to a third of our clients’ referral data stripped. “These changes undoubtedly make it more difficult for business owners to identify keyword performance or do SEO. Without informed keyword data, it would be hard to figure out what content is driving traffic to your site,” wrote KISSmetrics in a recent blog post.

In general, we applaud Google’s commitment to provide additional security for its users, but this particular change may damage the search giant’s effectiveness for SEO analytics purposes. We hope Google returns us to business as usual in the near future.

For more information, please visit KISSmetrics’ “I Got 99 Problems But Google Ain’t One” blog post.

Posted in Web/Interactive Development

Although not all news releases will be picked up and covered by journalists, the content can be great for your company’s or organization’s website.

Much has been said about the dying art of the news release, including that it’s outdated and unnecessary. However, if content is king, then a more perfect news release can go a long way to support your SEO strategies and goals.

Although not all news releases will be picked up and covered by journalists, the content can be great for your company’s or organization’s website, thus giving you more content for social media sites. And if you’re creating content, shouldn’t it be perfect content that supports your SEO?

How does the perfect release support SEO?

The most powerful search engine-optimized news release should incorporate the keywords you’ve researched and rely on for search engines to find and rank your organization’s website. Including these keywords gives you another powerful piece of new content on the web. News releases often allow more space, longer forms of the keywords, and repetitive usage.

SEO releases should also include links to the most important content in your website. This requires your meta-tags and page URLs to fit with your keyword and SEO strategies. So instead of just sending readers to your website, we want to increase the clicks to certain pages. For example, if you’re launching a new product, you’ll want the release to include links to the specific product pages of the website.

Where does an SEO release help the most?

Hosting a regularly updated news section of your organization’s website is a great place for releases like this. Also, if you’re pushing out a release to a wire service like PR Newswire or BusinessWire, you will want your news release to be search engine optimized, as these types of releases tend to get posted online in various sites. If content is king, then inbound links are the prince.

Here’s a great article about how PR can help startups grow: 10 Essential PR Tips for Startups

Posted in Public/Media Relations, Web/Interactive Development

In August, Google reported that the average click-through rate (CTR) for banner ads dropped to .09% in 2010, down slightly from .1% in 2009.

This data tells us that most banner ads need 1,000 impressions to result in ONE click through to your website. One obvious lesson is how imperative it is for advertisers to take advantage of any performance edge they can find to increase their odds of success. The chart below presents click-through rates for different size banner ads, both static and flash-oriented.

View more results information on Google’s DoubleClick Advertiser Blog.

Posted in Marketing Planning, Web/Interactive Development

It was once thought search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) were strategies that should work independently of each other. But what marketers have come to realize is when combined, SEM + SEO make for one powerful tool.

Pay-per-click (PPC) strategies are an integral part of SEM. In addition to the “organic” search returns generated by your SEO strategy, “sponsored listings” are purchased via a Keyword bidding process. These are the ads at the top and side of organic search results. But why would you use a PPC ad? In addition to advertising a product or service, PPC ads can also be used:

• When organic SEO is not driving the desired amount of traffic to your website.
• When your top Keywords are too competitive for organic search to deliver satisfactory traffic to your website.
• To test the popularity of different keywords via click-through conversion. The resulting data can be used to help bolster your SEO efforts.
• To create immediate awareness of a new facility, product or service. You might try a PPC campaign when you need immediate visibility and don’t have the time for organic SEO to take its course.
• To generate campaign- or issue-based traffic. You might try a PPC strategy in the event that you want to create additional visibility for yourself as an expert resource on a timely topic such as a product recall.
• To boost employee recruiting efforts.

Posted in Marketing Planning, Web/Interactive Development

Although marketers continue to produce printed materials for promotion and internal communications, much of the conversation in our orbit continues to revolve around the digital realm. The question de jour concerns what type of smart phone people are using the most. Depending on the demographics you seek, the answer changes.

Companies targeting execs ask that mobile strategies and smart phone apps be compatible with Blackberry, long known as the executive workhorse device. More wide-reaching strategies targeting consumers usually pit iPhone against Android. Although Android owns the largest share of the market, it has interoperability issues across platforms from different manufacturers. If you can only develop your app on one platform, you should choose carefully based on the usage statistics of your target audience. Check out this April article from Business Insider titled Android is Destroying Everyone, Especially RIM (BlackBerry) – iPhone Dead in Water.

Posted in Marketing Planning, Web/Interactive Development