How to Protect Your Brand Online: A Step-By-Step Guide

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Sales Force Automation (SFA) Worksheet Offered

Focus.com recently offered a great (free) tool called the “Sales Force Automation Product Requirements Worksheet”.

The tool will help to determine which SFA system best suits your business’s needs by allowing you to keep your vendor offerings organized? The worksheet can help you compare solutions and make the best decision for your company.

The form contains fields for contact management and lead tracking to sales, service and support requirements. It can be difficult to determine the right SFA system for your company. The SFA Product Requirements Worksheet can help you gain perspective and make an informed choice by scoring your top three vendors based on how well each vendor’s solution meets your needs. By prioritizing your needs and weighing your options, you’ll get a clearer picture of how each vendor’s offering stacks up, and which SFA solution most closely matches your ideal.

You can download the worksheet for free from their website.

Google Banning Advertisers for Life

Google Fights to Protect Itself Against Ad Scammers
Search Giant Implements a ‘Guilty Until Proven Innocent’ Policy

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Google has a new, harsh penalty for advertisers placing scam and malware ads: a lifetime ban.

The drastic move shows how important it is that Google protect its brand of search from what has become an increasing threat: ads that link to sites that download damaging malware on computers, offer sneaky, get-rich-quick schemes or trick users.

Read the story… | Source: Advertising Age| Posted: 11/19/09
Note: Some sources may require registration

Joe’s Comments

This is a significant development and comes directly from a source at Google. In many ways this is a good development because there are relatively a few bad actors that cast suspicion on the many. For online marketers, this means that it is more important than ever to stay out of “bad neighborhoods” online. There is now a significantly more costly penalty than a temporary ban.

You Can Learn From a Loser

Digital Scientist, Gary Flake lost the search war to Google. He spoke at a recent conference on advertising and Marketing Daily wrote the following…

Gary Flake, a Microsoft Technical Fellow who founded and now runs Microsoft’s Live Labs, was brought into Overture in 2002 to head up its paid search product. In 2003, the former GoTo.com actually had 55% of paid search, more than Google’s share. Now Google has 80% of a category that has quadrupled, and Overture was swallowed by Yahoo, which only has 15% of search.

Said Flake, “WTF? How did I lose so badly?” He lost, he said, because Overture ignored the “long tail” — focusing solely on premium partners, exact word-search, and hands-on, personal treatment of advertisers, and editing processes. Flake said the lesson — one that could apply to auto manufacturers as well as media companies — is that “the first companies in an industry must be willing to destroy their existing business to create something new; they must destroy their own business before someone else does.”

Google destroyed Overture’s business by becoming the engine of choice for the much-larger long tail of the Web — not just the premium portals like then-leaders AOL and Yahoo — and automating the search-results vetting process. Google, he said, benefited by the auto-feedback nature of networks: When your network grows, the growth creates more growth through economies of scale.

Marketing Daily

I’ve seen examples of this often enough to know that its true. Often, we don’t want to let go of something that seems to be going well only to lose our lunch to a new competitor. It reminds me of a story I heard about how to catch a monkey. You cut a hole in a coconut that large enough for an open hand to fit through but not large enough for a closed fist to come out of and then place a banana in the coconut. Then tie a rope to the coconut. Monkeys will reach in to get the banana but they won’t let go of it while you reel them in for dinner (I’m assuming this goes on somewhere in a third world country).

The point is that sometimes we have to let go of or reinvent our business models if we don’t want to become lunch.

Online Classified Is Growing

According to Hitwise, classified web traffic is climbing.

“U.S. online traffic to classified ad Web sites increased 84% in February 2009, compared with a year ago, according to a new report from Hitwise, an Experian company. The industry has experienced positive sequential growth in U.S. visits for all but one month during the past three years. As the state of the U.S. economy worsens, visits to these sites continue to climb, up 28% from December 2008 to February 2009. “

Although all classified traffic rose, Craigslist.com traffic rose by 90% and “Other Classifieds” rose 22%. They stated that traffic to other classified sites was down in 2008 but that it began to grow in January, suggesting that the economy actually helped those smaller classified sites. They also suggested that smaller classified sites could benefit by SEO efforts.

Online Media Daily

SAS Marketing Automation Software

Our goal at Marketing Automation.com is to find easy-to-implement systems and programs, especially for small to medium sized businesses.

SAS ® offers a campaign management system called the SAS Marketing Automation system. We invite anyone from SAS or that has used to software to write articles or comment on the product.

We’ve looked at their site here:

SAS Marketing Automation Software

The company claims that you can easily create marketing campaigns, coordinate campaign activities across the enterprise, improve marketing performance, and lower total cost of ownership. This is supposed to be done by the ability to segment customers, plan, execute, and manage campaigns. They state you can measure the results and use advanced analytics and they offer on-prenise deployment.

Our Impression on the Marketing Automation Software from SAS…

My impression is that this will be an expensive marketing automation solution and not conducive for small businesses. I couldn’t find pricing anywhere on the site but the site offers an 800 number on each page.

This marketing automation software may be very good for large enterprises since it seems designed to work across large and diverse organizations but I think the average small business will find it expensive and unwieldy.

Again, we invite anyone from SAS or that has used to software to comment or write an article or their own review on the product.

The Editor

Keyword Research

Most experts agree that well executed keyword research is fundamental to success in online marketing. You need not only to choose keywords that describe your products or services, but you need to consider…

• Synonyms
• Typos
• Keyword Effectiveness
• Relevance
• Quantity
• The Long Tail

There are several companies, programs, and software products designed to help you pick the most appropriate keywords for your marketing efforts. I’m going to list some of them here. Eventually I’ll discuss each in detail. In the meantime, feel free to browse the web sites of those listed here. They are listed in no particular order:

• Wordtracker
• Google’s Keyword Tool
• Spyfu
• Ad words Accelerator

These are programs and companies that I’ve had some experience with (amongst many others). More about them later.

Disciplines of Marketing Automation

I recently ran across a PPC window that listed a number of marketing services. I’m duplicating them below and would like to get your feedback on what areas you feel that marketing automation can be most effectively implemented?

Do you know of any companies that offer great solutions or software in these areas? Please let us know. Please comment below and let us know your thoughts.

* Graphic Design
Logo Design
Company Logo
Business Logos
Company Logo Design

* Marketing Strategy Services
Marketing Strategy
Sales Strategy
Internet Marketing Strategy
Product Branding
Real Estate Marketing Strategy

* Advertising Photography
Commercial Photographer
Black and White Photography

* Film and Video Services
Video Production
Video Rental
Teleprompter
Green Screen
Film Video

* Copy Writing
Copywriting
Copywriters

* Market Research
Surveys
Data Base Marketing
Data Mining
Traditional Market Research
Online Market Research

We’d like to get a discussion started on marketing automation. Do you use any software, SAAS, or programs that you have found especially useful?