Emory Digital Blog

Today we moved the emory digital blog to http://emorydigital.wordpress.com/ to network and share our ideas and opinions with as many small businesses as possible.

I hope you join the conversation and we can create a digital marketing dialog about your company.

Dear friends & colleagues,

The secret is out! If your business depends on your web site for its success, Re-marketing is the single most effective online advertising tactic of the 21st century.   

Simply defined, re-marketing displays your ads to consumers who have previously visited your web site, to recapture their interest  while they are visiting other sites.  

The good news is that small businesses can use re-marketing  just as effectively, at the same cost per thousand as the big guys thanks to the advent of ad exchanges and ad networks. Small businesses  
can buy online media for display and re-marketing from ad agencies and ad networks at up to 50% less than the retail rate you would pay directly from the most popular websites that accept advertising.  

Even more good news-If you are like most other businesses, you have tried and maybe still use paid search but with increasingly diminishing returns. When you add Display and Re-marketing to your marketing mix, it will dramatically  increase your paid search conversion and sales rate.

In conclusion,  take a good look at the benefits of display and re-marketing where you literally can buy your target audience-not a web site, to increase brand awareness and online conversion.

Display and Re-marketing are the reasons why Online advertising surpassed Print Ad spend in 2010 and will probably surpass TV Ad spend in 2011.

Don't just take my word on these claims-follow this link and read more on real statistics that show how Display and Re-marketing can dramatically change your Small Business. 

Digitally yours,

Steve Emory
President and Managing Partner
steve@emorydigitalmarketing.com

Dear friends & colleagues,

Yes, spring starts this weekend and If you're a sports fan it's Nirvana with March Madness for round ball aficionados and the Phillies home opener is just days away on April 1st.

If you're looking for some answers on how to maximize your online advertising ROI, this note is for you.

Since the dawn of e-commerce, everyone has heard about or experienced firsthand the agony and defeat of spending a sizable portion of a limited ad budget on banner ads, only to get very little ROI from "clicks". That's another way of saying the media was not targeted enough and conversion was not good.

But today's display ads can be precision-targeted down to the "hyper-local" level and they are not about clicks- they are about sales. In fact a strong argument can be made that display advertising has become the "new direct marketing”! Today you can do everything online that you can do with direct mail and more, only a lot cheaper.

Targeting by demographics, geography, web surfing, purchase behavior, and contextual placement are the norm for display ad campaigns today at a cost in the $5-20 CPM range vs. a solo direct mail package CPM of $500-750 with postage.

So what is the click thru rate you ask? Wrong question. Just like the direct mail question “what’s the response rate?” I always use to get. The question is can a display campaign be tracked back to a click, phone call, email or “web event” such as an inquiry, registration or sale? The answer to this question is YES! With display advertising today, you absolutely, unequivocally will know the ROI of your display campaign because you can track the results back to the specific Ad displayed, and can easily manage and scale your spend accordingly. And it gets better. A majority of all display advertisers already deploy paid search. That’s because it is a proven fact that search volume on your site in general  and conversions in particular increase dramatically as a direct result of the brand awareness and to a lesser extent the clicks that display ads generate.

Even better, my favorite reason for being so passionate about display advertising is the ability you have to “re-market” to previous visitors to your web site…at the same low CPM, with a guaranteed increase in online conversion. Why you say, is this a big deal? Because about 98% of all visitors to your web site do absolutely nothing…after you have invested your entire budget in driving traffic to your site in the first place. So over time, your display campaign produces more sales and delivers an even better ROI. That certainly is not like your father’s banner ads.

Don’t take my word for it. Take a look at these Comscore survey results that show "How Online Advertising Works". Comscore is the online industry’s most respected research company. Like all online media, you can test Display and Re-marketing quicker and cheaper than traditional media. So if you are ready to test, and you already advertise with paid search-find a Display Ad resource that offers strategy, design and media all under one roof so you don’t have to guess what web sites to place your display ads on (your father’s banner ad way) and you benefit from the lower costs of ad placement in “Ad Networks” which are like a consortium of highly targeted web sites with similar visitors and web behavior, at a cost of up to 50% lower than rate card.

Now you know why online marketers use the term  “display” Ads-and not banner Ads. So what are you waiting for? Get out there and test!

I look forward to continuing our dialogue.

Digitally yours,

Steve