Animal Health Marketing: Marketing ROI is the Trend In 2010

Return on investment (ROI) can be simply defined as the ratio of money gained or lost on an investment relative to the amount of money invested.  The definition is simple but for most companies measuring ROI, marketing ROI in particular, is easier said than done.

According to a recently released survey “Marketing Trends Report 2010” by Anderson Analytics and the Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG) marketing ROI is the hottest trend for 2010.  Marketing executives are more focused on getting a good return on their marketing investments.  The fact that marketing managers want to measure their return on marketing activities is a sign of a more optimistic economic future.  If marketing ROI is the top trend in 2010 this means that marketing dollars are increasing which points to a more positive prognosis for this year.

Marketing ROI has become a hot trend for two reasons.  First, companies are increasing their marketing budgets in 2010 but they are going to monitor it closely.  Most marketing budgets were reduced over the past year in light of the economic downturn but all indications show an upswing in marketing budgets.  The second reason why marketing ROI is a hot trend is due to the dramatic increase in using online marketing tactics (social media, blogging, mobile marketing, etc).  Online marketing is a new concept for most companies and most executives are still a bit leery on its true effect and ability to increase revenue.  For these two reasons, marketing ROI has surfaced as the most important trend for marketing executives.

Measuring marketing ROI has always been a challenge for companies in past decades due to the fact most marketing strategies were based upon traditional mediums (magazines, newspapers, radio, tv, etc.).  Traditional marketing ROI can certainly be measured (unique URL’s, tracking phone numbers, etc.) but it takes planning and diligent follow-up to measure the success.  The beauty of online marketing is that there are tools (Google Analytics, WordPress analytics, LeadLander, etc.) that can be implemented to allow you to measure your marketing ROI 24 hours a day.  But there is a caveat!  You need to know what to measure and how to read the measurements.

Most companies review their analytics once a month and only review their dashboard (the landing page of Google Analytics).  The dashboard will provide some basic information (visits, page views, average time on site, etc.) but it clearly does not provide sufficient information to measure the true success of your website.  To get a better understanding of your analytics follow these simple steps:

1. Get a weekly report from your marketing team or outside consultant that provides an update and overview of your website performance.  This weekly report is meant to keep you up-to-speed on the growth (or lack of) of your website.  This report does not need to be long in length as the objective of the report is to keep you and your management team informed of your website.
2. Give your marketing team or outside consultant one day a month (via in person or a webinar) to provide a detailed end-of-the-month presentation on your website performance.  This presentation should not only provide data but provide answers and solutions.  A presentation that only provides snap shots of your dashboard is not sufficient!  Some topics that should be covered include looking at your top landing pages and their exit percentage.  If you have any pages with an exit percentage of 50% or higher find out why and provide suggestions to improve that number.  Look at your top ten content pages and look at their exit percentage.  You may be getting a lot of people to a certain page but you could have a high exit percentage.  Your exit percentage on your best content pages should be 40% or less.  These are just a few examples of what this presentation should cover.
3. Ask for a short analytic report every time your company runs a new promotion or ad campaign.  In order for you to measure your analytics properly you must setup the proper parameters to allow analytics to measure your success.  For example, if you are pushing a new promotion through Twitter make sure you have a link to a page that you can measure click through rate and bounce rate.  This is called landing page optimization.  For example, you are providing a coupon that end-users can use at retail stores to get 25% off a certain product.  Create a new page on your website with the coupon.  This allows you to measure how many hits you are getting to the coupon page.  Another suggestion is to ask the consumer 2 to 3 questions so you can gather some market research.  Also add a function that allows the person to forward the coupon to others via email.  This allows you to collect email addresses of potential customers.

These are just a few strategies to implement to help measure your marketing ROI.  As the economy begins to show signs of life, companies are making new commitments to their marketing budget but they are doing it with a watchful eye.  Marketing ROI is not something new as it has been around for several decades.  It is receiving renewed attention due to the fact that marketing strategies have changed dramatically over the past 12 to 18 months.  Senior managers of most companies are still trying to get a complete grasp and understanding of online marketing.  One way to better understand it is to measure it.  Measure new leads generated, increased website traffic and increased revenue.  If you follow the suggestions outlined above you are taking the first needed steps to measure your online marketing campaign and marketing ROI.

About cheetahLink

Founded by Preston Munsch, cheetahLink is an online marketing and consulting firm that specializes in the animal health industry. The focus of cheetahLink is to increase sales, brand recognition, online visibility and website traffic through search engine optimization, website development, social media site marketing (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) and other online marketing services.  CheetahLink also provides consulting services for animal health companies including product development, business development, sales/distribution plans, contract manufacturing, and other services.  Munsch has spent the past 10 years in the animal health industry specializing in product development, animal health marketing, branding, sales, distribution and advertising.  Munsch has a Masters Degree in Business Administration along with a Bachelors Degree in Communication and Associates Degree in Graphic Design.  If you have any questions regarding our services feel free to contact us at 720.244.2034 or pmunsch@cheetahlink.com.

Keyword SEO | 7 Reasons Why Keywords Are Still Important

After being the focal point of website structure for years, keywords have lost their luster over the past year.  It is true most search engines do not use the keyword meta tag for search ranking purposes.  Google recently posted in their blog, “Our web search disregards keyword metatags completely.  They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking at present.” 

But if you ignore keywords you are making a huge mistake.   If you want to increase your online visibility than keywords are still very mportant!

Most search engines may disregard the keyword metatag but establishing 6 to 10 keywords (per page) is extremely important.   The following is a list of why it is still important to spend plenty of time in determining your keywords for each landing page on your website.

1. Page title and description – Search engines certainly pay attention to your meta title and description so including keywords in your page title and description is vital.  Don’t go over board as you want to keep your page title to 70 characters or less (Google displays up to 66 characters).  Also, your page title is the hyperlink from the SERP (search engine results page) to your website so make sure it captives your audience.  The description is maybe the second most important element for search engine placement.  Again, try to include some of your keywords but avoid repeating what is in your title.   
2. Content– Keyword placement throughout your content is another good SEO strategy.  Most search engines give preference to the first 300 to 600 words of each page so make sure you include your keywords within these parameters.  Don’t go overboard but including a nice list of your keywords in your content is a good strategy.  To check the frequency of words on a page use this keyword frequency tool.
3. Headings – Similar to how newspapers and magazines use headings and sub-headings to help readers, websites can provide the same feature.  Headings not only help human readers read the content but they also help search engine spiders better identify and understand content on a page.  Because of their importance, including keywords in the headings is a good idea.  Don’t saturate your headings with keywords as you want to keep the headlines between 2 and 22 words for optimum visibility and search results.  Google results will only display the first 63 characters of each headline so keep that in mind.
4. Images – Images are certainly a great way to enhance a website but it is important to note that search engine crawlers cannot ‘see’ images.  If you have an image that contains important text, this content will not be seen by crawlers.  You can address this issue by using the ‘alt’ attribute.  The alt attribute allows web pages to assign text to the image.  This helps search engine crawlers identify the image.  The alt attribute is another opportunity to use a keyword or phrase.   
5. URL structure – The URL structure, along with your title tags and meta descriptions should all work together to help you with search engine visibility and rankings.  Just like your title tags and meta descriptions your URLs are also all going to be unique.  A URL such as http://www.example.com/recipes/detail.aspx?ID=34234 is an example of a poor URL structure.  Compare this to a URL of http://www.example.com/recipes/how-to-make-lasagna.com.  This URL is clean and targets specific keywords that are also included in the page content, headings and other important meta information.   
6. Viral marketing campaign – Establishing 6 to 10 keywords is vital not only for on-site purposes but off-site purposes as well.  Viral marketing, also known as word-of-mouth marketing, is the development of valuable content (new release, article, ebook, video, podcast, etc.) that is spread to others.  Using your keywords as the focus of your viral marketing campaign helps reinforce your relationship to those words and ranking within search engines.  Here is a blog post by fushionfoot.com on the Three Steps to Article Marketing.  The post talks about the importance of keywords in article marketing which is one form of viral marketing.  There are some other good tips as well.     
7. Social media sites/blogs – The right keywords are not only important for your website and a viral marketing campaign but they are important in the success of your social media marketing programs.  Search engines are increasingly indexing the social media tools such as blogs, micro-blogging sites like Twitter plus site profiles, discussions and forums.  The purpose of keywords in social networking is to gain the attention of fellow users on a topic which is of interest to them.  This is where your keyword analysis and structure comes into play with social media sites.  Social media expert Joel Comm talks about the importance of keywords in one of the most powerful social media sites – Twitter. 

To truly maximize your online visibility you need to establish 6 to 10 keywords (per landing page).  A good starting point is your home page as for most companies this will be your primary landing page.  As you grow and understand search engine optimization you can expand your landing pages which allows you to expand your total keywords.  So yes most search engines don’t regard the keyword metatag in search engine results but they certainly can have a major impact on all on-site and off-site activities. 

Please share your thoughts on the importance of keywords.  I am sure there are other applications and uses of keywords, both on-site and off-site, that I did not include.  I look forward to finding out from others additional ways to use keywords to increase online visibility.