Video: Industry Experts Share Tips for Targeting Women Online
Listen to key insights from The Women Connectonomics Study
Did you know that women will control $28 trillion in annual spending globally by 2014?
We did. That’s why Yahoo! researchers surveyed thousands of women to create The Women Connectonomics study. It’s a definitive look at the needs the Internet fulfills for women, why they turn to certain online channels and how receptive they are to advertising messages on various sites. Key study findings include:
The top needs for women revolve around personal growth and their interdependencies on others.
Women’s lifestyle sites like Yahoo! Shine and special interest sites fulfill the most needs for women.
Women are three times more receptive to marketing messages on lifestyle, specialty and review sites.
The study was released in late July at a Chicago event attended by industry leaders like top bloggers, CMOs, and key agency executives. Check out their expert tips for helping your brand connect with women online.
A sneak peek into the new Yahoo! Content Syndication Exchange
Speaking at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Francisco, Wendi Sturgis, Vice President, North America, Business Development and Partnerships Group at Yahoo!, talks about what’s being called (for now) the Yahoo! Content Syndication Exchange—a new platform that will allow publishers to draw down Yahoo! search and other content, content from our vast array of partners, from Associated Content, from Facebook, Twitter, and more.
Tough choices between PPC and SEO, and how to become a search marketing pro
Lee Odden, Mike Grehan and pals at the Black Hat, White Hat cocktail party
Day three of the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Francisco was, admittedly, a bit of a graveyard. We reckon that, after the Yahoo! | Bing cocktail hour on Tuesday and the Black Hat, White Hat Un-conference soirée on Wednesday, people needed a bit of a rest. But the future goes to the hearty and the hearty showed up. So here are a couple of final tips to live by in the digital marketing world.
Do you have to choose?
The session “PPC vs. SEO” was set up as a debate to determine which is the more effective method of getting traffic. Melanie Mitchell, the SVP of Search Strategy at Digitas, argued that paid search allows you to “own the presentation,” as Toyota effectively did during its period of bad PR in ’09 and ’10, using PPC ads to push down the page news items about recalls. She also showed how Delta Airlines’ tickets sold and incremental revenue rose and fell as the company increased and decreased its PPC spend on brand keywords. In the end, Mitchell said, “PPC and organic don’t cannibalize each other, and using both together results in significant lift for both, as it enables you to reach the entire search audience.”
Quantity over quality: As a devotee of SEO, Rand Fishkin, the CEO of SEOmoz.org, stated that while PPC has a 20% higher conversion rate than SEO, SEO gets 7.3X the clicks that PPC does. Paid search providers also enforce a bunch of restrictions on ad copy, where as what you put in your meta data is your own choice. Still, he admitted, PPC is easier to use and easier to test, but that fact increases the number of competitors you have. In other words, a lot of firms get scared off by the work required for effective SEO.
Become a search marketing pro
Appropriately, the last session we attended at SES covered advanced paid search tactics, giving the audience a slew of useful takeaways. David Rodnitzky, Founder and CEO of PPC Associates, offered seven tips for getting your campaigns to the next level: 1) Use the right engines (have search and content keywords in different campaigns and optimize each separately); 2) Use the right keywords (the “long tail” is highly overrated—do “keyword sculpting” by creating targeted landing pages, copy, geo-targeting and dayparting); 3) Use the right bids (you can’t “set it and forget it”); 4) Use the right ad copy (engines’ maps, shopping and other features to gain more real estate); 5) Use the right landing pages (test headlines, buttons, conversion funnel, video, benefit statements—this can provide more lift than anything else); 6) Use the right tracking (purchase latency can be as high as 60%); and 7) Use the right targeting (it can turn bad keywords into good ones).
After the opening day of the Search Engine Strategies 2010 conference in San Francisco, Yahoo! and Bing got together to host a little—well, big—cocktail reception in the exhibition hall. We can assure you that there were shenanigans. Among these was the Yahoo! Photo booth, where conference goers were encouraged to don silly costumes for candid snaptshots. See the Flickr slide show below.
Deep mobile, common courtesy, spooky display and refining your campaigns
Yahoo's Paul Cushman checks his Twitter feed at SES
Day two of the Search Engine Strategies confab was, in a way, even more intense than the first, with sessions going deep into the details of mobile, search and display advertising. Here are some lessons learned.
Give their thumbs a rest
It’s one of Paul Cushman’s (he’s Yahoo!’s Senior Director of Mobile Sales Strategy) favorite truisms, invoked at the session “Getting Mobilized: Mobile Marketing Strategies: “Mobile is a channel, not a strategy.” Panelists Cindy Krum (Rank-Mobile), Sandeep Aggarwal (Caris & Co.) and Michael Martin (Mobile Martin) then proved his point, going way deep into the geek weeds of mobile SEO and usability.
One key takeaway for mobile eCommerce marketers is a simple one. “It’s a pain in the butt to enter your financial information on the phone with your thumbs,” said Krum. Instead, consider employing a payment solution like PayPal to make it easier on the user—and always provide a bail-out, one-touch phone number. After all, mobile users are on the phone, right? (Which, not incidentally, is another Cushmanism.)
Courtesy counts, online and off
At the session “Twitternation & Automation,” moderator Matt McGowan, Publisher and Head of U.S., Incisive Media, announced a surprise panelist. In addition to the previously announced speakers (Tracy Falke of Freestyle Interactive and Paul Madden of Crea8 New Media), 140Conference founder, renowned twitterphile and friend of Yahoo! Jeff Pulver would also be presenting.
Pulver gave his stock, “it-all-started-with-HAM-radio” and “Twitter is about love” speech while the other panelists patiently waited their turns. When it was time for Falke to give her talk on how she handles multiple Twitter accounts, Pulver pounced, interrupting repeatedly with quips and snide, though intelligent, remarks. During Madden’s admittedly “gray hat” Twitter automation talk, Pulver ejaculated, “You are EVIL.”
Granted, Madden pays legion of sweat shop copywriters in the Philippines $1.40 an hour to create fake Twitter personas and stories, but the effect was that of a teenager flaming others in an online forum circa 1999. It did, however, make for one of the liveliest sessions at SES. Pulver eventually backed off a little, saying during the Q&A period, “It’s evil, but it’s also brilliant, and I respect that.” Well, after all, the best panelists are entertainers and the best entertainers are insult comics.
Paul Cushman, Senior Director of Mobile Sales Strategy for Yahoo!, talks about the session he moderated, “Getting Mobilized: Mobile Marketing Strategies,” at the SES conference in San Francisco, August 18, 2010, as well as some of Yahoo’s initiatives in mobile.
The guy behind the Old Spice guy knows his audience
Iain Tate, Global Interactive Executive Creative Director at Wieden + Kennedy, is the brightspark behind the campaign that transformed Procter & Gamble’s Old Spice from venerable shelf-filler into a buzzworthy icon.
That shouldn’t surprise anyone who heard Tait speak about advertising’s embrace of digital at the recent Yahoo! Provoke Summit.
He observed that those stuck with traditional thinking dislike the new reality in which “the best stuff wins,” but it’s now the public instead of “experts” determining what’s best. Furthermore, advertising professionals too often seek inspiration from looking at other ads. “That’s the last place you should be looking,” Tait says.
Success requires watching for what people actually do in real life with technology and with each other. And for those biding their time until things settle down? It’s never going to, Tait warns: “We just have to learn how to deal with it and thrive on it.”
“One day little digital children and little advertising children will play together,” Tait predicted back in 2007, when he presented Ten Reasons Why Digital Is Better Than Advertising. He’s helped make his own prediction a reality.
Video: How the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance can benefit advertisers
Combining scale with the convenience of a single platform, the Microsoft and Yahoo! Search Alliance can help advertisers reach more consumers more easily. This new video illustrates how.
Video: Simon Mainwaring explains the transformative power of social media.
One of the many informative seminars at Cannes Lions addressed the challenges and promise of social networking. Simon Mainwaring, CEO of Mainwaring Creative, summarizes the proceedings in this video shot on location. “Brands are really trying to reconcile themselves with the fact that consumers want a better world, not just better widgets,” he says, and companies ignore this factor at their peril.
Mainwaring also shares his thoughts regarding how brands are responding to the new reality of reaching consumers who are now networked and actively communicating amongst themselves. He even delves into what he means by his operating philosophy: “The evolution of revolution is contribution.”
Video: Experian’s Chris X. Moloney on getting the best from today’s ad options.
Cannes Lions may be over, but the intrepid Yahoo! team who covered the event continues to deliver. Here they speak with Chris Moloney, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Experian, who explains why Cannes Lions is valuable even for companies like his.
Moloney also shares his thoughts on the relationship between traditional and online advertising. He has well-defined and unexpected reasons for disagreeing with “this perception that the traditional media, the TV media, is dying–is being broken apart into many pieces.” Enjoy the video for more detail:
