October 2012 Archives

Archive for October, 2012

The 2012 Guide to Successful Holiday Marketing

Published October 31st, 2012 Ecommerce, Mobile, Paid Search, Social Media 19 Comments

Be smart with search this holiday season.

If you haven’t thought about your digital marketing strategy this holiday shopping season, you better start now. According to a study conducted by Google, most people start their holiday shopping around November 5^th and are finished well before Christmas Eve, 37% of people say search is their source for gift ideas, and 4 in 5 people use their mobile phone or tablet for holiday shopping. To help you be more prepared this holiday, we outlined the most important elements of a successful holiday marketing strategy. (Google, “Holiday Consumer Intentions 2012”)

Run Google Shopping Ads

To get the most exposure this holiday you should be on every paid advertising platform, which now includes Google Shopping. On October 17th Google Shopping, a retail focused search engine, transitioned from free to paid. Google claims they did this to improve user experience, but we know they did it to make even more money. For the basic information on Google shopping, check out our latest post on Google Shopping.

Let’s get real; the basics are not going to cut it during online shopping’s busiest time of the year. To be ahead of the game: make sure your product listings have as many extra attributes as possible, your photos are mouth-watering, and your ad groups are completely optimized. Product listings Ads appear when a shopping search query matches the content in your data feed product description, so make sure your product descriptions are filled with as many keywords as possible. Finally, make your product listing ads stand out by adding your promotions. For more information on how to add promotions, one of the newer features, visit the Google Retail blog.

Capture Everyone, Everywhere with DSA and Remarketing

Dynamic Search Ads

Dynamic search ads show your ad based on the content of your website. If you leave out a keyword in your AdWords campaign, with the right bid your ad will still be eligible to appear. This feature comes after a successful year of beta testing, so there is no reason why you shouldn’t be taking advantage of it. It is as simple as creating a “dynamic search ad” campaign, targeting all pages or a subset of pages, and writing a few ads. To have more control over your DSA campaign create separate ad groups for different categories on your site. This will allow you to write more relevant ads based on that category and attract more qualified customers. Learn more about Dynamic Search Ads on Google’s Blog.

Remarketing

Remarketing is essential. You have taken all of the appropriate measures to attract customers to your desktop, tablet, and mobile site, now it is time to keep them coming back for more. By adding a small piece of code, the remarketing tag, onto your site, you can track everyone who came to your site and left without completing a desired goal. These visitors are then added to a “remarketing list” which you can send targeted ads to. There are two ways to go about remarketing, using adwords or using analytics. We’ve outlined below reasons why you would choose one over the other.

Adwords Remarketing

The only reason to use adwords remarketing would be because you do not use Google Analytics.

Google Analytics Remarketing

Apply one simple change to your current analytics tag.
Deliver targeted ads based on specific customer segments that are not available in adwords. i.e. time on site, users who placed an item in shopping cart and didn’t purchase etc.
Richer analysis and customer analysis

Optimization Tips

Start tagging visitors now – Your remarketing list must have at least 100 users before you can send ads to them.
Include an incentive in your display ad, “Free Shipping!” “Take 10% off your purchase with coupon code: —- “. Don’t forget to create a landing page if the offer doesn’t exist elsewhere on your site.
Use all ad formats
Test different ad designs, incentives, colors etc.

Dynamic Remarketing Ads With Your Product Listing Ads

Dynamic Remarketing is only in beta testing right now, but is definitely something worth signing up for. This new feature allows you to target anyone who has clicked on a product listing ad and did not purchase. To apply for this feature, fill out the Beta form with your adwords ID and Merchant center ID.

Remarketing is one of the best ways to match the right content with the right customers, so win the moments that matter this holiday with Remarketing.

Be Mobile Friendly

Mobile shopping is set to exceed $20 billion in 2012. With that said, if you don’t have a mobile friendly site you should rethink. Here are a couple ways you can go about creating your site if you haven’t done so already.

Separate Mobile Site

Design your mobile site to fit your business needs. That could mean either keeping it simple by showcasing only your best sellers or making it complex and including everything on your site. Whatever the case, creating a separate site for mobile gives you more flexibility and customization options.

Responsive Design

Responsive design is a way to design your site so that it will reformat itself to be friendly on any device. In my opinion this is the way to go, although it does take more technical resources which are not always available.

Mobile site examples worth taking a glance at:

Fedex.com, Hilton.com, mercedesbenz.com, Proflowers.com, Macys.com, Ticketnetwork.com

Now that your site has been created, Advertise it.

Make sure your mobile campaigns are separate from your desktop and tablet campaigns. By doing so you have more bidding control, and the option to customize ad extensions and ad copy accordingly. For example, on a desktop ad you include “Buy Now” as a site link whereas on a mobile ad you would include “find a store near you”. Check out the Macy’s ad copy. You’ll see their ad copy includes “Shop Macy’s on Your Phone” this is a great way to grab someone’s attention.

Finally, don’t forget to properly track your mobile site. Read about Measuring App Usage to learn more on how to track your Mobile site.

Get Savvy with Social

Google Plus

Google Plus currently has over 400 million users. It is easy to set up and navigate and has been proven to increase your CTR, increase your Search Rankings and increase your number of customers. Google is the powerhouse of search, so there is no reason why you shouldn’t have a Google plus page. To learn more about adding Google plus read our blog post. Plus, when someone searches for your site, the right hand side of the results page will feature your Google plus content, as seen here:

Facebook

In the past, Facebook has shown to be a key influencer when it comes to holiday gift buying. Not only do people turn to Facebook to share and interact with their friends but they use Facebook for gift ideas as well. Now you can capture all of this action by sending targeted ads. Advertise to everyone on your email list, target ads based on the mobile apps people use, and my favorite, send ads to people based on where they checked in. There is no reason why you shouldn’t leverage this powerful social platform over the holidays.

Free, simple, yet powerful. That is why you should be on Pinterest promoting your products. Visit our recent Blog Post on Pinterest to learn more.

Final Tips and Techniques to Expand Your Brand This Holiday

Now that you have all the resources to launch your 2012 holiday digital marketing strategy here are some of my personal tips along with questions for you to keep in mind.

Don’t forget about last year’s data.

Which products did shoppers buy in 2011? Do you see any trends? What dates last holiday did you bring in the most revenue? Do people tend to buy more on a specific day of the week? What are your peak hours? Make sure to use all of this data wisely including to target and segment your adwords campaigns, or schedule your email promotions.

Be competitive!

Are your competitors offering free shipping and you’re not? Keep in mind that the most common promotions are “Free shipping” and “the more you buy the more you save” deals. For example: Spend $50 save 10%, Spend $100 save 20%!

Testing, Testing and more Testing

Site content, Ad Copy, etc. – Make sure your A/B testing is in full force.

Keep your content fresh.

Don’t leave an ad for free shipping running if that promotion doesn’t exist anymore. Constantly promote your newest deals.

Engage with your users.

Don’t forget to engage with your customers on all social media platforms. Most people want to be heard!

Make it easy for your customers to find what they are looking for.

Don’t hide products in the corners of your site. Make sure you have relevant keywords in your product descriptions.

Track everything

Lastly, make sure you’re tracking your data correctly! You have created a holiday marketing campaign guaranteed for success, make sure you’re data shows it!

There are so many ways to boost your sales this holiday season. Start by implementing your digital marketing strategy ASAP!

After all, you dont want to get left in the cold this winter.

Google Product Search, Google Shopping, & You

Published October 25th, 2012 Advertising, Paid Search 6 Comments

Paid Product Search is Here

As of October 17th, free Google Product Search is no more. The king is dead, long live the king. That new king is Google Shopping, a paid version of Google Product Search that utilizes your product feed from the Google Merchant Center just as with Google Product Search but is managed and paid for through AdWords’ Product Listing Ads.

It’s not hard to see why my former employer would move in this direction. Officially, the reasons cited include ”having a commercial relationship with merchants [that] will encourage them to keep their product information fresh and up to date. Higher quality data—whether it’s accurate prices, the latest offers or product availability—should mean better shopping results for users, which in turn should create higher quality traffic for merchants.” Unofficially, the reason is money. Retailers who have already seen the customers that Google Product Search attracted will probably not scoff at the idea of throwing some ad spend at a proven revenue generator.

If you’re already using Product Listing Ads and/or Product extensions, this shift won’t affect you as much as it will other retailers. However, there will likely be increased costs from continuing to pursue Product Listing Ads in Google Shopping. The reason for this is twofold. First, there will be increased competition from companies entering the AdWords marketplace who were previously content with just a free Product Search presence. Secondly, these Google Shopping ads will presumably take up a greater portion of the search engine results page (see image below), thus potentially driving up costs for top positions.

What Should You Do?

If you decide you want to pursue this type of advertising (and if you are an online retailer with a product feed or the resources to create one, we’d recommend you do) there are several steps required in order for you to take advantage of Google Shopping. First, create and/or update your product feed to ensure that all necessary attributes are in place and all product data is accurate. Some attributes are required for all items, some are required only for certain types of items, and others are simply “recommended.” Failure to provide a required attribute will prevent that item from showing up in Google Shopping results and could lead to your feed being suspended, whereas failure to provide a recommended attribute could result in your items showing up less frequently. Different products have different required attributes, for example, all shoes must include a size parameter. For all products, though, an “AdWords grouping” parameter should be added to separate products by category in accordance with their respective campaigns and ad groups in AdWords. I.e. if you sell both jackets and shoes, they should be identified as either/or so that different ad groups can be created for different products.

Additionally, since promotional text can be added to these ads, it’s a smart idea to have a plan for utilizing this space with offers and promotions e.g. “free shipping” or “holiday sales” etc.

Required steps for transitioning over to Google Shopping:

Link your AdWords account to your Merchant Center account
Make sure you are including all required and recommended attributes in your data feed
Eliminate any data quality problems that are listed in the data quality tab of the Merchant Center
Eliminate any processing errors in the feed status summary
Create Product Listing Ads, preferably in their own campaigns and ad groups

Strategies Out of The Gate

An important step to consider when entering Google Shopping is to become a Google Trusted Store (GTS). GTS’s are selected to help users “easily find retailers offering a superior online shopping experience.” A GTS badge will be shown on all ads for merchants who are participating in this program. Additionally, after certain criteria are met, becoming a GTS allows star ratings to appear on ads that have this extension enabled. There are four steps to becoming a GTS, each of which includes multiple tasks. Broadly stated these steps are as follows:

Enter your business information
Sign program agreements
Set up shipping and cancellation data feeds
Add the Google Trusted Stores JavaScript code to your site

More information on becoming a GTS can be found here.

What’s Swellpath Doing?

Should any clients want to pursue Google Shopping opportunities, Swellpath will work with them to ensure that their product feeds are up-to-date with necessary, full, and accurate information. Most importantly, Swellpath will be creating and managing the Google Shopping ads and adjusting bids as performance data becomes available. We’ll look at things like quality scores to make landing page recommendations and help determine if the images used in your product feed are having a positive or negative influence on click-through rates. As details start to roll in for the latest developments in Google Shopping — either through the Google Commerce Blog, the Google AdWords blog, or third party sources — Swellpath will keep our clients up to speed with the latest strategies and methods to capitalize on these changes and opportunities. Good luck and godspeed.

Additional Resources

Product Feed Attributes: http://support.google.com/merchants/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=188494

Google Trusted Stores Setup: https://www.google.com/trustedstores/sell/setupoverview

The Google Commerce Blog: http://googlecommerce.blogspot.com/

The Google AdWords Blog: http://adwords.blogspot.com/search/label/Google%20Shopping

Leveraging Pinterest for eCommerce & Adding SEO Value

Published October 23rd, 2012 Advertising, Ecommerce, SEO, Social Media, SwellPath 15 Comments

As the fastest site ever to gain 10 million users, Pinterest took the social sphere by storm. While there are many resources (including tons of awesome infographics), which illustrate site statistics and user demographics, there isn’t too much out there on how brands can utilize Pinterest for eCommerce. With the holidays right around the corner, it’s time for your brand to start using this ultra-powerful platform to drive sales.

Before you commit your brand to the platform, it’s important to determine if your brand is right for Pinterest.

Does your brand satisfy these factors?

Is Your Brand Pinterest Perfect?

Once you’ve determined that your brand is a good fit, you might ask what’s the value; is it worth my time?

There’s a great article on Search Engine Watch written by Miranda Miller titled “5 Pinterest User Insights Marketers Can Use to Drive Sales”. In this article, Miranda points out that when compared to other social sites, Pinterest users are less likely to convert, BUT when they do, they tend to spend more.

Let’s look at a few examples from clients of ours here at SwellPath…

As illustrated from the examples above, average order value from Pinterest referrals is much greater than those from Facebook.

Now that we’ve seen what’s possible, let’s talk about some ways to leverage the platform for eCommerce and add SEO value to your account and pins.

THE BASICS WITH A SPRINKLE OF SEO

First, make sure the description on your Pinterest profile is completely filled out. Include a high quality image of your brand logo, link your company website and your Twitter and Facebook accounts, if applicable.

In the ‘About’ section, include a thorough description of your offering and brand. Just like page meta descriptions, your profile description on Pinterest can contribute to the keyword-relevancy of your profile. Optimizing your Pinterest description will also ensure that the SEO authority passed back to your website has keyword value attached to it.

When creating pin boards, use descriptive keyword-focused titles. It never hurts to make them catchy and fun too. Whole Foods- Austin does a great job creating fun pin board titles.

Now that you have your account all set up, you can start pinning items or products to your categorized boards. This is probably one of the most crucial steps for SEO value. Ensure you’re including product keywords that describe the product and its features/benefits. The inclusion of keywords ensures that your pinned products and boards can be found through internal and external searches. However, optimization of these areas should always be a compromise between SEO and a friendly, personal messaging style. Always remember that you’re on a social network where people want to experience things that are fun and creative.

If you plan on pushing pins to Twitter it can be useful to include hashtags. Hashtags are also helpful to add a category to a pin such as #holiday, #recipes, or #craft. This helps users find your pins easier. Here’s a great example from Nordstrom.

Always use high quality and attractive photos. Pinterest is a visual platform before anything else. Make sure the images you’re pinning are high-res and accurately illustrate the product. Also, remember that Pinterest resizes thumbnails to 192 pixels wide, so detail might be lost when they’re thrown in the feed.

Finally, don’t forget to add a “Follow Us On Pinterest” button to your company website and social networking profiles. Also be sure add “Pin It” buttons on product pages. You can find the code to embed here.

SO WHAT ABOUT ECOMMERCE?

One of the best, and most underutilized Pinterest features is the price banner. To add a banner on your pined product stating the price, simply add the dollar sign ($) with the price in the product description. It’s really that easy.

Once you add the price banner, Pinterest automatically adds your pin to “Gifts” feed and inserts it into the correct pricing category.

Pinterest can be a great resource to drive traffic to your site, which can ultimately lead to sales. One of the best ways to bring people to your site via Pinterest is to hold a contest or sweepstakes. There are many ways to execute a Pinterest contest. I won’t go in to the specifics here, but check out this great pin board full various ways to conduct contents or promotions on Pinterest.

So, why should you run a contest on Pinterest?

First and foremost, this is a super low cost (if any cost at all) way to engage with your customers.

Pinterest is also a valuable resource for collecting customer and product insights. As users follow you to participate, create boards, comment, and re-pin your products you’re collecting priceless customer information and feedback.

Many “pin it to win it” type contests have a value-added factor. In this type of contest users pin images of your products to a board made specifically for the contest. Pictures of your products are now circling the world of Pinterst and getting repined and repined, with no effort on your part.

PINTEREST TOOLS

There’s lots of Pinterest tools out there to help you measure the value of your pins and also you help you identify influencers. Here are a few to look into.

Pinerly: Pinerly aids in marketing your visual content across the web. Their “dashboard” provides Pinterest measurement and optimization.
Pintics: Pintics is a Pinterest analytics tool that highlights the best-performing pins.
PinPuff: Measures “pin worth” and places a monetary value on your pins. PinPuff assigns an influence (pinfluence) score, similar to Klout. Your pinfluence is measured by your popularity, influence, and reach on Pinterest.

FINAL THOUGHTS

While Pinterest has the power to drive high-value referral traffic, it’s critical to remember that above all else, Pinterest is about customer engagement.

There’s nothing more annoying than a brand aggressively pushing their products when you’re looking for craft ideas or a great dinner recipe. Be sure to interact with other Pinners in a natural and conversational manner. Brands can successfully converse with pinners by:

Pinning thematically relevant images from other Pinterest users as opposed to only pinning your own images
Leaving comments on other user’s pins, “liking” other user’s pins, when appropriate
Using the mention feature to mention other Pinterest users in comments (e.g., “Hi @FancyPants10, thanks for pinning!”)
Following other users or brands that pin items in a similar product category

Winning the Bigger Business Pitch by Increasing Your “Know How”

Published October 19th, 2012 Advertising, Events, Industry, SwellPath 4 Comments

As part of our Jumpstart campaign, here’s some quick pointers for increasing your “Know-How” for a big pitch by effectively using partners.

Today, we talk about “know how”. Winning the pitch might mean brining in some more “Know How”. When you’re trying to land the bigger business, sometimes your potential new client or customer is asking for a whole lot more than what your company can currently deliver. While some companies bow out and stick to safer waters, the bold venture forth and take risks. Meeting this challenge will often times mean enlisting help from outside of your firm. By partnering with those who will round out your current service offering, you will bring the expertise and experience needed to win, and then execute, on the bigger jobs, thus leading to great work and even greater rewards.

Here are 4 tips to ensure that you are making the smartest decision when finding partners to brave those uncharted waters with.

1. Knowing what you are NOT good at.

It’s hard to admit that you don’t know something. It takes a level of maturity and personal insight to freely admit you’re not really qualified to take on certain business. After some reflection, take that list of services you don’t do well, but can compliment your work and go find the best providers in those areas. Having your weaknesses covered by your partner’s strength will enable you to focus on what you’re good at, and be confident during the pitch. Confidence, clients love confidence.

2. Don’t wait till the last minute.

If that big pitch is a week away and you currently don’t have relationships with potential partners, you have already lost. Creating a network of contacts with partners prior to any pitch opportunity is essential. This is tangential to tip #1; always be seeking out and networking with potential partners. If it’s possible, work on some smaller opportunities with them to build trust, so when that big whale client comes along, you can both execute brilliantly.

3. Set boundaries.

Once you have found a partner, you will need to set boundaries for each firm in the beginning. All members of your new team should know in black & white terms what they are responsible for and also what they are not allowed to touch. This will combat most trust issues, allowing all parties to focus on their specific work and preparation for the pitch, without worrying about getting stabbed in the back on a grey area that was open to interpretation.

4. Respect

They key to any well-functioning team is respect for one another. If you are respecting your partner and the feeling is mutual, your pitch will be great and all of the partners business will grow because of it. Remember, in the end you are partnering with another firm, they are an extension of your company now, and when one does great, all parties will see the rewards.

Crafting your best pitch and winning the big business requires guts and “know how”. Go out there and find a partner you can trust and get some BIG wins.

Ready to put these tips to use? If you are a business owner in need of a JumpStart, submit your best pitch by October 26, 2012, for your chance to win $100,000 in agency services. Check out JumpStart for details.

Good luck! And Happy Pitching!

Like this post? Follow Charles Voloshin on Google+

The Post-Launch SEO Checklist

Published October 18th, 2012 SEO 22 Comments

It’s been an exciting month here at SwellPath; lots of projects that we’ve partnered on for SEO or analytics tagging are launching! Unsurprisingly, we’ve been doing a lot of quick post-launch SEO audits as a result. Since not everyone can have a full-service SEO agency in their corner, I’ve put together a comprehensive post-launch SEO checklist that everyone can use. Check off each of these 9 items and you’ll be ensuring that your new site performs well in organic search and has a solid foundation for measuring SEO gains.

	Record Your Rankings
	If you didn’t do this in the days leading up to launch, do it right now! This is the last chance you’ll ever have to record how your old website ranked in search. You’ll be up against the clock because once the spiders hit your new site, your rankings could change dramatically. Pick the five non-branded keywords that are most important to you and record where your site ranks for them in both Google and Bing. File that away and, in a few weeks, you can compare how the new site ranks for those same searches.
	Test Your Top Links
	Chances are, the differences between your old site and your new site are significant. You’ll want to make sure that the pages (i.e., URLs) from your old site are redirecting visitors and search engines to appropriate places. If your old URLs are resulting in errors of just being lumped into the homepage, that’s a problem. You likely don’t have time to check every URL from your old site (assuming you had them all recorded), but you can get a pretty good idea by checking your top links. Head over to OpenSiteExplorer.org and type in your site’s domain. Check the “Top Pages” report. This shows you the pages with the most links (i.e., SEO value). Visit each of those pages and make sure you’re still getting to an appropriate page. If those top pages end up erroring out, get your team to fix it using a 301 redirect.
	Assess Your Analytics
	The next thing you’ll want to do once you’ve tackled the most critical concerns, is make sure you’re still tracking visitors. Go to the Google Analytics Real-Time content report. Home > Real-Time > Content Open a different web browser, or use your phone, and go to your website. A new visit should pop up in Real-Time analytics. Navigate through your main pages and site areas using your other browser and make sure your visit doesn’t drop out of Real Time. If that all worked, you should be good to go for Anaytics. If not, head over here to troubleshoot.
	Annotate Your Achievement
	Add an annotation in Google Analytics on the day your site launched. In a month from now, you’ll want to compare traffic levels from before and after. Adding an annotation in Google Analytics will make your life much easier when you’re trying to remember the exact day the new site went live.
	Recalibrate Your Robots.txt
	I’ve seen this more times than I care to remember, so it’s important to check for it. Many staging sites will, for obvious reasons, want to disallow search engine spiders from crawling and indexing them. Sometimes that directive gets carried over when the site is pushed live. Check www.newsite.com/robots.txt. It should look like this:User-agent: * Disallow: /private/ Sitemap: http://www.newsite.com/sitemap.xmlThe red flag you’re checking for is a line that reads “disallow” followed by a single forward slash. That forward slash is powerful; it means disallow EVERYTHING. If your robots.txt looks like the example below, get rid of that second line!User-agent: * Disallow: / Sitemap: http://www.newsite.com/sitemap.xml
	Retrieve Your Root
	There’s only one thing left to check to make sure there are no show stoppers on your site. You’ll want to check if Google can fully access your site by asking Googlebot to “fetch” the page through Google Webmaster Tools. If there’s any issue that would prevent search engines from indexing your new site, this test will fail. Log into Google Webmaster Tools. Select your site. If you haven’t verified yet, it won’t be there. Add it and verify using your Google Analytics tracking code. Go to Health > Fetch As Google Since you’re checking the homepage, just leave the input field black. Click “Fetch as Google” and wait about a minute. If it’s successful, you’re good to go. If it’s not, we should talk.
	Inspire Your Indexation
	Submitting to search engines is so 2001. The engines want to find your new site on their own. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t steer them in the right direction. Google loves Google+ (no duh), so encourage your whole team to post about your site launch there! Feel free to have people Tweet about it, too. That should get your updated site indexed fairly quickly.
	Maximize Your Media
	If you do press releases regularly, this one is a no brainer. Beyond being good exposure for your company, you can make sure your press release includes a link to your website. One of our recent releases was picked up by Yahoo! News. By putting out a press release for something we would have done regardless, we got a highly powerful backlink to our site. While there are tons of great sites out there for press release distribution, a couple we use and recommend are PR Web and PR Wire.
	Secure Your Seat Belt
	Hold on to your butts. This could get bumpy. With any new site launch, we always expect a bit of turmoil in the site’s ranking and organic traffic levels. You’ll probably see direct and referral traffic spike on launch day start to trail off a few days later. Organic could go up and down, but if you’ve followed the steps in this post-launch SEO checklist, you should see things start to even out within a week.

This 9-step, post-launch SEO checklist will make sure your new site is airtight for SEO. Assuming you didn’t remove 50% of your content during your redesign, you should be sitting pretty in terms of SEO. If you’ve used this checklist, please let me know how things went in the comments. Happy optimizing!

Jumpstart: How to Make an Impact During Your Pitch

Published October 9th, 2012 Events, News 13 Comments

Influencing the Yes

As part of our new Jumpstart campaign, we offer some pointers for making a great pitch. Today, we talk about “Impact”. No matter if you’re pitching a Fortune 500 company, your own executive team, or a room of investors, any great pitch needs to leave a big, favorable impression on the audience. Be sure they’re nodding their heads “yes” after you leave the room, and solidify your place on the short list. Answer these 5 questions before your pitch to effect a positive impact on your audience:

1) Who’s listening and what matters most to them?

Know who’s in the room. Individuals in your audience will always have unique concerns or pain points they want addressed. A CEO wants to know about the bottom line; The CFO cares about cost; The investor is looking at growth potential, and so on. Address these concerns during the pitch—before they ask a question—and you will make a definitive impact, and guarantee your place in the finals.

2) Are you excited and passionate about your pitch?

If you’re not letting your audience know through voice and body movements that what you have to say is exciting and great, they’ll get bored and lose interest. You must believe in your pitch with your heart and soul, and prove it in your delivery.

3) Have you practiced?

Speaking in front of a group is nerve-racking for most people, especially when trying to convince someone to take action. The reason the pros make it look easy is preparation. They’ve prepared themselves by rehearsing and practicing their pitch many, many times. A good rule of thumb: If you haven’t said it 10 times in front of the mirror yet, then you’re not even close to being rehearsed.

4) Is your pitch personal?

Get a leg up by doing your research. Learn the names, education and professional background of everyone in the room. If you connect with your audience in a personal way during your pitch, you’re guaranteed to stand out in a positive light after you’ve left the room.

5) Are you pitching what they want or asked for?

This is similar to question 1, but is more about what solution or idea you’re trying to pitch. An old cliché sales phrase about selling ice to Eskimos comes to mind. While you might have the best idea or product, if your audience can’t relate, you’re wasting not only your time, but that of your audience. No amount of preparation, passion or practice is going to convince a drowning man he needs water.

Preparing your pitch with answers to the questions above requires a good amount of time and effort. Want to win that new client, investment or initiative? Plan ahead and put in the time, and your pitches will consistently make an impact,

Impact is just one component of a successful pitch, so stay tuned for more pointers. Speaking of great pitches, submit your best to JumpStart by October 26, 2012, for your chance to win $100,000 in agency services. Check out the Jumpstart campaign for details.

Good luck!

Like this post? Follow Charles Voloshin on Google+

Google Tag Manager Overview

Published October 1st, 2012 Analytics, Featured, Industry, News 17 Comments

Google Tag Manager is Here

Google publicly announced the launch of Google Tag Manager this morning at eMetrics, and we’re very excited to be GTM specialized, and to already have a deep relationship with the product. What a fantastic way to start the day, week, month, and quarter! Google Tag Manager is an exciting compliment to Google Analytics and Google’s various advertising offerings – but it stands alone as another highly-functional, incredibly beneficial, free application from the folks at Google. It will undoubtedly disrupt the tag management space – just as Google Analytics has done with the analytics space.

Evaluating Costs & Benefits

Roughly 12 months ago we began the search for a tag management solution we could implement, affordably, for all of our clients. We explored all the offerings in the space, and were incredibly impressed by some of them. However, every cost/benefit analysis would come back with a “too expensive”, except for the largest of enterprise clients – those with literally hundreds of sub-domains, the lengthiest of development cycles, and the most complicated of internal processes. For the standard large business, the truly impressive tag management solutions were not worth the cost. So we shelved the idea of isolating a solution and “partnering” with the vendor.

Beyond Container Tags – Using a Data Layer

When we first caught wind of Google Tag Manager earlier this year, we were cautiously optimistic. Creating a container tag system isn’t too complicated – creating the ability to layer data between a site and multiple data collection locations, where almost any data can be passed in, and manipulated in a myriad of ways, is complicated. Google has really created a data collection layer, that will allow marketers and site operators to structure the passing of data from their sites and applications, to virtually any 3rd party collection system. For some more ideas on how this data layer can be used, check out this post from Justin Cutroni from earlier this year.

Find Out If Tag Management is Right for Your Organization

SwellPath will begin implementing Google Tag Manager almost immediately for clients. If you’re wondering whether a tag management solution is something you need, just call or email us. You also can checkout the Tag Management Checklist we put together. Whether or not it is something you’re ready for, everyone in the digital marketing and analytics space should be excited for today’s news. Google once again is offering the masses enterprise-class technology at no cost, and forcing the paid vendors to step up their game. Happy tagging.