MindScape

An effective sales plan involves prudent selection of the marketing tools complemented with the appropriate Search Engine. While these would catalyze the arrival of the visitors, it may not necessarily facilitate conversion of these visitors to a sale / sign up.

The visitors may arrive as a result of the marketing initiatives like pay per click ad, email marketing or simple keyword based organic search. Brevity and clarity of the message that is being communicated through the respective page, would ensure that the visitor performs the desired action. Further, the message should have enough call for action to persuade the visitor to initiate the appropriate action.

In Marketing parlance, while the marketing initiatives may bring the horse to the well, it may not be adequate to make it drink. The well should be appealing to galvanize the swig!!

Determine the objective of the Landing Page: While designing the landing page, it becomes imperative to identify the objective, that is expected to be achieved through the landing page. A landing page is required to be a highly focused web page. It may be designed to achieve any of the following objectives:

Sell a product.
Provide Contact Information.
Promote a service or an idea.

The landing page demands considerable effort and time, and should be developed after due introspection. Sending your viewer to the homepage is not always a good idea. Doing this would make the visitors search through the site for information proposed (through the email or pay per click link). Consequently, the visitor may leave the page out of dismay. It is always recommended that there should be ease of navigation for the visitor and the visit should be well orchestrated.

It is ideal to get the visitors to an attractive landing page, carefully crafted for the ad link. It should be in consonance with the brief ad copy, given in the email or the PPC link. PPC driven landing pages may be thematically organized for each keyword. Further it is suggested that the look and feel of the landing page is consistent with the email content, as it renders user experience, more fluent and persuasive.

Know the identity of the target audience: Landing pages may be used to target both B2C and B2B contacts, with each having their specific characteristics. While B2B customers seek detailed information, price range and testimonials to facilitate decision-making, B2C customers are more interested in brand names, price tags, discount rates, free offers and shipping charges.

For a B2B customer, the landing pages must establish a sense of reliability and quality for the company’s products and/ or services. Landing pages for B2C must be concise, quick to scan and focused on selling, rather than convincing. B2C pages must sport product pictures with exact price tags, preferably inclusive of shipping charges and other applicable taxes. Irrespective of the type of customer, there should be an attempt to provide a promise of privacy, and the policies of the company must be communicated succinctly.

Gather contact information – The immediate objective of a landing page may also be to obtain some ‘call of action’ for future follow up. It is essential to capture useful contact information of the visitor to facilitate follow-up. However, asking too many questions may irritate the visitor. Hence it is is a good practice to desist from collecting too much personal information. Just the relevant questions intended to elicit appropriate information is usually sufficient.

Technical considerations - Fast loading time of landing pages is absolutely essential to hold and capture the otherwise short attention span of the potential customers. In other words, the landing pages should be vivacious in every sense of the word. Hence, heavy flash images are usually not recommended.

Use of daughter windows is often recommended while opening new content, rather than overlapping information in the same window. This would ensure that even if the landing page takes the visitor to a third party link, the return can be easily accommodated.

Incorporating the aforementioned points while developing the landing page, would reduce the bounce rate of the respective page, and increase the chances of a closure. This would assist in achieving the Online marketing objectives. In other words, this would ensure that the horse drink from the well. Happy closures.

Web 2.0 outlines the latest version of World Wide Web - dynamic, highly scalable and organic in growth. The rampant popularity enjoyed by Web 2.0 design patterns has resulted into companies blindly including the buzzword among their highlight features. Following are the state-of-the-art web design and development patterns that may be looked up in full or in part to determine a Web 2.0 company:

(a) Harnesses the potency of small sites that form the majority of the web content. Web 2.0 reaches out to the masses wide and across Internet, generally utilizing algorithmic data management. For example, Googles AdSense indulges in dynamic content generation by placing least disturbing, context-sensitive and consumer friendly text ads across exhaustive Web Pages possible. Likewise, eBay acts as an automatic intermediary between even highly small-scale single individuals dealing in few dollars. BitTorrent renders every client a server that empowers its network to provide both bandwidth and data. As a result, files that are more popular take relatively less time to download.

(b) Sports forte in handling a specialized and distinctive database. Be it Google or Yahoo or Amazon, all offer specialized database services that lends them an unbeatable niche. Web 2.0 applications are not merely collection of software tools, but applications collecting and managing unique and large-scale data.

(c) Encourages user participation to add value. The highlight of Web 2.0 design is that it is empowered by collective brainpower. For example, Google PageRank is based on the number of links (outsider votes) garnered by a website. Amazon outdoes competition by inviting extensive user participation in various ways, including reviews and ratings. Wikipedia grows organically as it allows any web user to add content to be collectively edited and proofread. Open source software projects may be found on certain sites that let users copy/ add code for mutual advantage.

(d) Builds vital database using a natural architecture of participation. Web 2.0 architecture enhances intuitive networking by aiding selfish motives of the target users. It recommends setting inclusive defaults for assembling data gathered by day-to-day use of the application. Like, Napster by design serves earlier downloaded music that helps user activity and builds valuable database naturally. Open source software projects like Linux, Apache, Perl, etc. also sport well-defined extension mechanism that empowers network growth in outer layers akin to onion.

(e) Keeps fewer restrictions in licenses. Web 2.0 design chooses in favor of least restrictive Intellectual property protection limits to harness benefits of collective adoption. In fact, it recommends scope for hackability and remixability.

(f) Improves continuously. Negating scheduled releases, Web 2.0 recommends continual and consistent upgrading in real-time, without disturbing existing services. The Web 2.0 companies, like Google and Yahoo, may be often spotted sporting Beta logo to mark ongoing development process and real-time monitoring of user behavior by restrictive implementation. They refine the new feature consistently based on feedback received, before its actual pervasive implementation.

(g) Offers syndication and lightweight programming models. Composed of a network of co-operating data services, Web 2.0 applications encourage web services interfaces and content syndication. They favor lightweight programming models that allow loosely coupled systems to the extent of fragility.

(h) Develops device-independent applications. Keeping in mind the scope and access of Internet beyond a personal computer, Web 2.0 design enables seamless incorporation of its services across various platforms, including mobile handsets, PCs and Internet servers.

While DoubleClick, belonging to the Web 1.0 era, recently claims over two thousand successful implementations of its software, Google AdSense, the child of Web 2.0 purely, has already crossed hundreds of thousands implementations. The radical success and growth witnessed by the truly Web 2.0 web designs indeed reinforce the relevance and far-reaching prospects of Web 2.0 catchphrase.

To make any online marketing strategy garner the desired ROI, it is imperative that the right search engines be chosen to get maximum mileage out of the Online Marketing initiatives.

Thus far the obvious choice of most Online Marketers has been the big three Search Engines, viz Google, Yahoo and MSN, besides the smaller regional Search Engines like Looksmart, Altavista etc.

While most of these Search Engines have been successful in delivering relevant results for the searched query, they have lacked in objectivity.

A website can rank well by being Search Engine compliant, however, it may not always be the sought website. Eg. When the keyword oxygen is searched, only one website of the top ten gives relevant result and provides information about the element.

Though the Search Engines were successful in delivering the expected results, however the efficacy of the same appears to be diminishing. The inherent deficiency of the first generation Search Engines has been addressed by the emerging Social Search Engines (SSE).

SSEs like Google or Yahoo, Social Search Engines seek to produce relevant information for end users, but with an element of human mediation. While regular search engines are purely algorithmic, based on link and text-based computations, social search engines attach importance to book marking, tagging, voting, highlighting and other prejudicial indications of relative popularity of content among its consumers.

The Social Search Engine concept gained boom between 2004-2005. Yahoo MyWeb 1.0 (2004), for example, allowed users to save one favorite links and web pages in a searchable and sharable directory. Encouraged by its success, Yahoo introduced MyWeb 2.0 in 2005 that allows the users to form groups and expand their communities by sending invitations to people.

The prominent difference between a social search engine and a regular search engine is the expanse of human opinion that plays a pivotal role in concluding search results. While search engines place more value to the choices of web masters, social search engines organize their choices based on the consumers of the content. It has been established beyond doubt that Content is the King and any website that is content rich will always have loyal patrons who would further act like walking talking billboards of the respective website.

Social search engines also enable web masters to compete better. For example, social search engine Eurekster provides Swikis service that enables empowered websites to control the listings in their search results index to their benefit.
Another advantage that the social Search Engines have over the first generation search engines is that the SSE are specifically more fruitful when finding non-textual content, including photos, videos and music. Google is attempting to address this deficiency by introducing Google Universal Search.

From the marketers view point Social Search Engines offer the advantage of using videos to promote the website, while also leveraging their popularity among the visitors to their advantage.

Human mediated search engines is a rather novel concept that still is exploring its true dimensions. A major limitation that handicaps the actualization of the potential of this concept is its overt dependence on human element. The chief pitfall of human involvement is that it cannot cope up with the rapid pace of Internet propagation. In other words, the social search results cannot be expected to be as comprehensive as the results from regular search engines. Though in terms of delivering dynamic and relevant results.

However, the phenomenon of social search engine holds a lot of promise on the basis of the merit of the concept itself. The phenomenon is anticipated to take off with flying colors in the coming years, probably in conjunction with algorithmic search.

Watch out this space for more on the emerging web 2.0 Search Engines.

The debate over whether PPC (Pay Per Click) is more effective as an Online Marketing tool or is it SEO (Search Engine Optimization), is almost as old as the evolution of the Search Engines.The role of Online Marketing assumes greater importance in the present context, with incredibly large number of websites, 110 million at last count and growing exponentially. With competition in each industry vertical increasing manifold, the endeavor to capture eyeballs in the most cost effective manner is a challenge forevery online business.Out of the various tools of Online Marketing, the two that conspicuously stand out are the Paid Campaign (Pay Per Click) and organic Search Engine promotions (Search Engine Optimization).In the following table, it is attempted to highlight the individual merits and shortcomings of each of these tools on five parameters.

The ideal marketing plan is usually one that is a combination of both the PPC and SEO with the efforts of one complementing the other. The right blend of the two ensures optimal ROI for the marketing spend.To summarize, the decision to opt for PPC or SEO is determined by the specific marketing need of the individual business. It is further a function of the allocated marketing budget, and the respective industry vertical that the business operates in.The appropriate blend of the Online Marketing Tools is recommended to ensure that the website attracts the desired traffic in an effective manner. This becomes critical in view of the new forms of Search Engines that are quintessential of the Web version 2.0. The USP of these new age Search Engines is that these would be human edited and merely bidding for the desired keywords would not get you those elusive rankings.