Radium

The landing page – one of your most crucial marketing assets. A well crafted landing page can catapult the profitability of your online campaigns into the stratosphere and a poorly designed landing page can destroy your conversion rates all together. In this post we’ll take a look at five paid search landing pages for athletic and lifestyle footwear brands and present general findings, trends and takeaways that you can use in developing your online campaigns

This is the first post in a series of landing page reviews. Subscribe to our RSS feed to be notified when new landing page reviews are conducted.

Earlier today, MediaPost presented a research study conducted by Knowledge Networks. The study focused on how people use social media and specifically how social media influences consumer purchase decisions. According to Knowledge Networks, the study was based on responses from 418 social media users. While the study raises some important topics, I take issue with several items in the report.

If you’re running a paid search campaign that includes keywords you rank well for organically, you need to be careful that your paid search campaign isn’t generating sales at the expense of organic search. Cannibalization occurs when a user that would have clicked on your organic listing clicks on your sponsored ad listing. Because you pay on per click basis, a free click is now costing you money.

During a recent new business pitch the perspective client informed me that in addition to strategy and design, the other two agencies in contention were proposing on the daily management of the clients social media campaigns. The agencies were offering to act on behalf of the client, posting content and responding to inquiries as if they were indeed the company. They told the client, you don’t have to do anything.

Maybe it’s just me, but doesn’t outsourcing your social media campaign totally defeat the purpose? If social media is about having your voice heard, what is the value in having someone else speak for you?

Still think you need a corporate website to promote your product? Glaceau doesn’t think so or at least they are heavily promoting their facebook company page over the actual Vitamin Water website. The latest television spots caused quite a response when viewers noticed they contained a URL to the facebook.com/vitaminwater page instead of the expected company URL.

I got the idea to write this post after reading ProBlogger and Pistachio’s article on twitter landing pages.
If you’re using twitter as a marketing tool, you may be overlooking a simple and effective way to convert more traffic into sales; a properly optimized landing page. Landing pages are web pages that users reach after clicking on an ad. In this case the landing page is the address listed in the “more info URL” displayed on your twitter profile.

Why is this important?
Any marketer will tell you, a poor landing page can kill your campaign. What good is sending traffic to a website if the user is simply going to leave once they get there? Open rates and CTR’s are good metrics but conversion rates are the real metric of success.

Because we love playing around with data and we wanted to see what the top 100 twitter users do for a living we compiled the following graph showing the top 100 twitter user by job category. For source data we used the top 100 rankings from twitterholic on March 31, 2009. For this post, “top 100″ is defined as twitter users with the largest number of followers. Although we believe there are better metrics to use, this was the easiest to quantify.

We are pleased to announce that our client Quench launched a newly redesigned website today. The design and development of the website was done by Winsper. Radium was engaged to handle search engine optimization services, including on page META development and off page link building.

About Quench
Quench is the largest point-of-use water cooler company in the US and distributes bottleless water coolers and water filtration systems to over 15,000 businesses. Quench’s patented technology utilizes advanced UV water filtration to filter out harmful contaminates while freeing landfills from those awful 5 gallon water bottles.

Digital marketing in a recession:
Hint – Don’t cut your budget and give away free stuff!

Forget about just weathering the storm and hiding under the covers. Now is the time to increase conversions, streamline your digital marketing and grab market share cheap! I know most companies will have the kneejerk reaction to cut their marketing and advertising budget. That’s fine if you want to lose market share and profits. But, if you’d like to keep your current customers and maybe gain new ones, don’t cut your budget – cut your costs and refocus your attention. Here are 8 steps to help you market electronically in a down economy.