As newspaper circulation continues to decline, so does the reach of printed ad circulars/free standing inserts, which are important drivers of both brick and mortar and ecommerce sales. Along with challenges of decreased reach, retailers are also finding that the promotional lift of circulars is declining. According to research conducted by Nielsen, printed circulars are less effective than they were 6 years ago. In 2010, the average ROI boost of printed circulars was 20% compared to 28% in 2005. Retailers are faced with the challenge of maintaining and/or expanding the reach and efficiency of circulars in a declining print market.

In many ways, the internet has replaced the Sunday paper. According to an Audience Insight Survey released in December 2011 from interclick, two thirds of Americans are learning about in-store deals online. In addition, 42% of consumers prefer online advertising to newspapers and other sources, and those consumers who see in-store deals online are more likely to visit a brick and mortar store. This is especially true for electronics, grocery, drug, department, and clothing retailers.  Many retailers have made circulars available on their websites; however the associated user experience of these is fairly poor and very few can be viewed on tablet or mobile devices.

Google has acknowledged this challenge and recently launched a new product that offers an interactive and personalized circular experience aptly named Google Circulars. This product was launched in October 2011 with a small alpha test of US retailers including Macy’s, Best Buy, Home Depot and others. The success of the alpha has led Google to move this product into a beta release launching in Q1 2012 with an expanded set of retailers and vendors.

Google has always had an emphasized focus on the retail industry, and many of the beta opportunities they have rolled out over the past few years have been designed specifically for retail partners. They have increasingly understood the challenges retailers face in utilizing online channels to drive in store purchase. With Google Circulars, they are hoping to further bridge this gap by offering a more robust and user friendly digital circular solution.

Google Circulars presents an exciting new opportunity to utilize digital circulars in a highly customized and targeted way. The breadth of data that Google has access to use in serving personalized circulars is unprecedented and this new ad format has shown early success. As with any new marketing opportunities, there are risks involved in being an early adopter. The lack of proven success, as well as the potential resources required to run such a program, are very real barriers. In addition, the monthly minimum media spend would result in incremental cost or reduced spend in existing tactics. Success of this initiative is ultimately dependent on consumer adoption and engagement. While it’s too early to say whether or not Google Circulars will be a success, this product offering does attempt to fill a growing need of offer communication between retailers and consumers.

To read the full Razorfish Health POV on Google Circulars, click here.

There’s been a lot of speculation about the future of Google+ since it launched last June. Recently, we heard about their strong December showing with a hefty increase in sign ups, but the jury is still out on whether this offering will end as a flop or resounding success.

After going public in September, the nascent social network now has around 50 million active users. Some estimates put the number over 60 million, with still others going as high as 150 million. The approach so far has been to emphasize the use of Circles which allows users to easily control what they share with members of their network. This, along with Hangouts, has formed their core value proposition thus far. While it may not be destined to overtake Facebook as the king of the social world, it may be able to carve out its own niche and help Google stay relevant in an increasingly “social” world. One can only imagine how targeted Google could make its ads once it pulls in a user’s Google+ info.

Either it will be a huge success or it’ll suffer the fate of Buzz and countless other failed pet projects the internet giant has launched in the past. The new network certainly has several things going for it, so this could be a case where the final ruling lies somewhere in the middle.

Brands Can Augment Paid Search and SEO Efforts

With the introduction of Google+ pages for businesses, one trend we have noticed is that Google+ pages are enjoying increased visibility within organic search results. As reported by multiple sources, many top brands now have Google + pages which now appear in organic results, taking up a decent amount of real estate to boot. This could serve as a clear sign to businesses that setting up a Google+ page is akin to an investment in SEO, allowing them greater presence on and potential dominance of the search results page.

Integration with Android Devices

The latest generation of Android smartphones are now optimized for Google+, allowing the social network to grow along with the Android platform. The Android OS already owns about half of the US smartphone market. As adoption grows, Google+ will come along for the ride, enjoying the benefits of Android’s success. With the activation of every new Android device, Google+ will be given the opportunity to increase its ranks.

Google’s Acquisition of 200+ IBM Patents

Google’s recent move to purchase patents from IBM was undoubtedly an effort to bolster its defenses against litigation of the intellectual property variety threatening Android. Yet, there were some curious patents in its latest haul that could hint at new products/innovations. Perhaps the most interesting was a patent detailing the analysis of user-generated content to ascertain potential interests and preferences. The system would use semantic cues from user posts to identify individuals who may be interested in particular topics without having to rely on self-reported interests. This would allow Google+ to connect its users with other individuals who may share their interests based on their behavior within the Google+ community and would also allow for even more relevant search results.

Since we all know Google is in the business of providing results that are as relevant as possible (read: those most likely to be clicked), this validates the purchase of these patents. Also, the benefit to advertisers cannot be ignored, as this could serve as an invaluable tool allowing for more precise targeting of potential customers.

If Google+ is to survive, it will need to distinguish itself. Given their preeminence in search, the continued growth of the Android platform, and any potential innovations they may have planned (whether related to newly acquired patents or not), Google may carve out a truly unique identity for its little social network that could. They will need to continue highlighting the benefits of Google+ and how it differs from its competitors, so that users are motivated enough to try yet another social network. The road ahead will be a long one, but if they arrive at their desired destination, it will be well worth the effort.

Hi, my name is Nicole, and I just opened a pet supply store in northern New Jersey – and I’m trying to gain awareness and traffic to my new store.   (Well, this not all true, but for all purposes of this post… it holds true).

As a small business owner, it can be hard to find the appropriate outlets for gaining awareness and foot traffic to a new store – especially when your business is in a suburban town of New Jersey (no pun intended).   One usually has to rely on word-of-mouth in order to gain exposure.  But in this age, where computers, cell phones, tablets and social media dominate – you cannot solely rely on friends of friends to get your name or brand out there.

Small businesses, like my pet supply store, are in need of exposure – exposure in the online space, that is.   That’s where search marketing comes in, specifically paid search marketing.

Paid Search marketing can be an extremely useful tool for small business owners, since you, the owner, can manage your own campaigns on your own.  Essentially, you can market yourself!  And yes, small businesses can compete with large businesses.   My pet supply store can play in the same advertising space as PetSmart, Petco, or even Amazon – as long as it’s done right.

Put Your “Thinking Cap” On

If you’re a small business trying to run a paid search campaign, try thinking of the following:

• First things first, Devise a Plan – What is the goal of your website?  What is the call-to-action?   It could be promoting a sale, new inventory in stock, an email sign up, or simply to drive potential new customers inside the store location

• How much money to invest?  Remember, this is a pay-per-click model, meaning each person who clicks your ad, will charge your business – or better yet…you!

• Is my website ready?   Do I have flash on my website? Is my site user-friendly?  Is there enough useful information on my site which I can build an effective campaign/ keywords?

• Be Relevant! –What are the most relevant pages to direct the user to visit? – and from here, how can I build out keyword lists/ ad groups/ ads campaigns that ties in with the page.

Those are just some of things to think about before and during creating a paid search campaign for your small business.   Of course, there are several other components that make up a paid search campaign, but these are just some ideas to think of.

Benefits of Paid Search for Small Businesses

The benefits.  Paid search is a useful tool that can be beneficial to not only small businesses, but any business that wants to establish a name for itself.   Here are some (definitely not all) of the benefits small businesses can gain from paid search marketing.

• Budgeting – As mentioned earlier, since paid search uses a CPC model (more often than CPM), you only accrue cost when someone clicks on your ad.  Therefore, the key to a successful paid search ad/ campaign is to be (once again) relevant.   Through paid search, the advertiser is also able to set daily caps, so that the engine would not go over a daily allotted budget.  The advertiser is also given the flexibility of changing caps whenever it’s necessary.

• Day-Parting – Day-parting is a nice strategic move for small businesses with limited budget, or for those who wish to only display ads during certain hours of the day.  The advertiser is able set up the time of day and/or day of week which they want their ads to be appear on SERPs. (i.e. I can set my ads to run only during 7am – 11pm Tuesday – Saturday and pause at all other times.)

• Location Targeting – Another strategic and also cost savings tactic.  Advertisers are able to have control on what areas of the world their ads are shown.   Since I have a small business in northern New Jersey, chances are, I only want to reach people in surrounding towns of my shop.  I don’t care to advertise to people in California or Tennessee, since they are least likely to visit my store.

• Customizing & Sitelinks/ Rich Ads – Probably the best part of paid search marketing is the abilty to customize ad copy and tailor it to your business.   The advertiser is able to create ad copy they want (as long as it abides by the Engine’s policies).   And now, Google and Bing/ Yahoo offer advertisers the ability to add sublinks to their ads.   Google Sitelinks or Yahoo! RAIS can help small businesses (or any business for the matter) display several links within an ad, driving users to more relevant pages based on the sublink.  For instance, I can have 4 sublinks driving to different pages (1) Sale (2) Email Sign Up (3) New Arrivals (4) Contest Sweepstake.   (*An important takeaway of sitelinks is that sitelinks (at least on Google) have been proven to show a lift in CTR for many industry verticals.   And of course, an increase in CTR can bring lower CPCs and higher average position.  Meaning, my small business has a great chance of showing in top positions alongside large name brands or possibly in the top position spot).

Of course, there are many more reasons as to why paid search is a viable tool for small businesses, but this is just a taste of the greatness that paid search can do for small businesses.

Paid Search for Large Businesses

Enough about the small – let’s talk about the big picture…

Like small businesses, paid search is probably even more crucial for large businesses.  Why?  Because everyone’s doing it!  It’s like a scenario of peer pressure in high school – everyone’s doing it, so you should, too!

Because of the complexity of large businesses, many either hire an internal team to manage their paid search initiatives or hire outside agencies (ah-hem, Razorfish).

Time to Use Your Noggin & Think BIG!

Much like small businesses, you should think of the following when creating Paid Search campaigns for large businesses:

• The Goal – What is it that the brand offers? What does the company want to sell to the user?  Maybe the large business is a department store that sells shoes, clothing and furniture.   Do you want to focus on all departments the store offers?  Or just a single segment?

• Budget – What is the brand budget?  How much is the company willing to spend on agency fees (if hiring external help)?

• Landing Page – What pages will the users go to?  Because of the complexity of larger businesses – there will usually be several campaigns and sometimes accounts in order to segment the different categories of items the department sells/ or business caters to.

As mentioned earlier, the main idea of managing paid search campaigns for small and large businesses does not differ by much.  However, if you are managing for a larger business – you are managing at a grander scale – with larger budgets, etc. which requires more attention (usually by several people).   Since many large businesses are using paid search as a tactic, this makes it even more of a reason for why other large businesses need to use paid search as well.

Benefits of Paid Search for Large Businesses

• “Preventing other advertisers from eating your lunch” – As Razorfish Lead Account Manager, Amos Ductan, puts it.   Basically, if your competition is there, you should be there, too.  No one wants there lunch stolen, right?

• Paid search & organic work together – Many studies have shown that paid and organic listings working together help to increase traffic to the site, increase visibility and overall, increases brand awareness – businesses, in general, should not solely rely on organic listings as a way of promotion.

• Customizing – Paid Search allows businesses to customize ad copy – optimizing copy with add-ins like sitelinks, location extensions, product extensions, call extensions, etc.

• Targeting – Large businesses can choose to target users by demographics, psychographics, IP address, in order to write and tailor ad copy to niche audiences.

• And the list goes on and on and on…

In the end, Small & Large Businesses live happily ever after.

Whether tall or short, narrow or wide, small or large – paid search marketing can be useful tool for just about any business size.   There are many external caveats that can make search a complex tactic to manage.  But, with handy tools and creative minds – small and large businesses may both see success in using paid search as a medium.

What makes people share? What makes YOU share (or ‘Like’)?

As Google+ surpasses 50 million users, Facebook pushes out over 750 million, and Twitter reaches over 100 million active users, we must consider the end consumer’s motivation to share content throughout these networks.

As marketers hoping to capitalize on the growth of these networks, we have to improve our understanding of the fundamental motives behind consumer’s behaviors within them. The following post examines several theories on this topic, but please, add your own color and tell us: what makes YOU share?

Extending Your Own Credibility by Borrowing the Credibility of Others

Most of us follow people we admire, trust, or respect as thought leaders within our own industry, whether that industry is marketing, architecture, medical, financial, automotive, entertainment, etc. Most likely, we strive to be more like these people, to have the respect of our industry, with the greater intention of moving it forward. So why do we share so much content from these mentors: on behalf of ourselves or for the behalf of the creator?

Maybe this is the transitive property of “borrowed” online trust:

Affirmation of Personal Tastes

Why do people share or like content from brands or content within the entertainment vertical (where a great majority of share content comes from)? Receiving a ‘like’ to your own personal beliefs is the new feeling of “YAY, I received a real letter in the mail.” When you share this type of content, a part of you secretly (or not so secretly) hopes that others feel the same, that they affirm your own beliefs. Before social networks, we could only attain this affirmation from the few people within our physical circle that we felt comfortable sharing it with. However, we can now passively pass on our beliefs with a level of transparency that has never before existed. Our posts on this matter will either fall upon silence or they’ll be met with a shared understanding amongst our peers. If you don’t believe that still matters, recall your days in high school. Affirmation of our own beliefs is a great, morale and confidence boosting attribute of social networking.  Likes are confidence boosters.

Call for Interaction

The opening quote from the movie Crash sums this up perfectly, sans its negative connotation:

“In any real city, you walk, you brush past people, and people bump into you. In L.A, nobody touches you. We’re always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other just so we can feel something.”

In the Information Age, data moves fast. Our personal lives, however, move even faster. We are constantly bombarded by what is immediately in front of us, and maintaining relationships from the past or with those we don’t see any more becomes more and more difficult. At times, we may comment on or ‘like’ content that these people share in order to strike up a conversation, in hopes of rebuilding what we feel we may have lost.

It may take just one ‘like’ to break the ice and build the relationship anew. Think about the last time someone meaningful from your past, that you hadn’t spoken to recently, liked something you posted on Facebook. Did that ‘like’ entice you to respond? Did you at least recall off-Facebook memories of that person? Many would gawk at the idea that something so simple, within the confines of “online”, could have such meaning, but that’s the era we live in now. A simple ‘like’ can be powerful.

Invent or Alter Your Perception

Most people know who they are, but they also understand who they’d like to be. In the environment of a social network, we are given the opportunity to reposition our perception:  who we are to our network vs. who we’d like to be. Developing your personal brand is a hot topic these days, and what you share, what you put your name against, is a powerful tool to create this brand. Go ahead, try it out: connect with other coworkers on Google+, Facebook or Twitter, and especially LinkedIN. Some you may already know well, but for those you don’t, what is your perception of them after reading their posts, their shares, and their +1’s? Chances are, your perception of them is pretty close to the perception they are hoping to create. In an environment where we have more interaction with acquaintances than real connections, we all have this same level of control:

…if we utilize it.

These days it seems like you, me and our neighbor’s pet are all on Facebook. Facebook is certainly changing how we interact with each other and the world. We have digital records of college, weddings, birthdays, kids growing up and all other special occasions. Where these things used to be physical albums, now they are public and digital. Facebook has become the repository of our life’s memories.

Today, social media strategies are considered an integral part of any comprehensive digital marketing strategy. Brands and their marketing execs understand that social is the place they need to be – that’s where their consumers are. If you look up any big brand on Facebook, they will be there. As a consumer, we almost expect that any legitimate brand will have a Facebook page. Arguably, social media strategies are the most widely talked about, publicized and coolest/controversial digital strategies out there.

Social media is here to stay, with the percentage of social networking users increasing every year. Social media is important and there aren’t many people who will deny that, but… why Facebook? If you compare Facebook to other sites by the sheer number of unique visitors, you see that Facebook blows other social networks out of the water.

In the comScore media metrix, which measures the top online properties, Facebook ranked 4^th in the U.S, not to mention the top-ranking social network. For the marketers out there, Facebook ranked at the 10^th largest ad display network in the U.S.

 Simply put Facebook is hot right now.

Investing into a social media strategy seems like a good idea but there’s a slight issue:

Do current brand strategies resonate with Facebook users? There is a disconnect between the perceptions of what interactions between Facebook users and the brand actually mean.

Brands hope that Facebook users will buy their products, become an advocate, or for friends of friends, to become customers’ advocates. Facebook users, on the other hand, may be much less enthusiastic about the potential meaning of any particular action taken on the social network.

Within Facebook, the most popular way that users engage with a brand is through the “like” feature. In fact, 84% of users engage with a brand’s posts on Facebook through the “like” button. There is also data that suggests that Facebook likes will influence shoppers to purchase. In a study done by eMarketer on a sample size of 1,202 people, 35% of people said that seeing Facebook likes on a product would increase the likelihood that they will buy the product. 83% of users who have already liked a brand have also clicked the like button on the brand’s page. From a brand perspective, this sounds pretty phenomenal. Brands are interacting with their customers directly through the “like” function; thereby developing a relationship with them and gaining users who are now fans of the brand.

Or so it might seem.

According to one study, less than 42% of users actually found that the “like” meant that they were actual fans of the brand, while 58% of users perceived a “like” to mean that they were only subscribing to the brand with an expectation of special perks. A “like” may not even mean that much, 37% of people in the same study said that it meant nothing to them. In other words, a “like” doesn’t mean that the user is now a fan of the brand.

In addition to lackluster interest, some people have negative perceptions of the Facebook “like.” The graph below shows that people don’t want brands interfering with their lives or the lives of their friends. The largest reason people have not liked a brand is that they don’t want to be bombarded with messages or ads.

With these statistics, you might start to think that the social networking giant doesn’t provide as much value to the brand.

Now, I’ve given you a lot of reasons why a Facebook “like” isn’t all that it seems to be. However, you have to remember Mugatu and that Facebook is hot right now! Social media still has a lot of potential than can be tapped into with the right strategy. Brands have to give Facebook users content and utility that is more than just throwing advertising dollars into media strategies that give users negative perceptions or make them apathetic to their ads. Brands have to provide entertaining content and utility to the user where the brand becomes the backseat.

“Another example is from Orangina in Europe. Its slogan is “We’re the original.” It created an app that tells you who the first 10 people were you became friends with on Facebook. That’s cool. Occasionally, you’ll get a message from Orangina in your newsfeed suggesting a purchase of Orangina on a hot day. It offers a reason to enjoy Orangina rather than a 20% off promotion. Perhaps you’ll “like” Orangina because you have a reason to.”

-eMarketer

Facebook has a lot of potential, as we can see in digital and social trends, and people are still trying to figure out how to best utilize it. At the same time, we are getting there, to a point where brands are effectively communicating with their consumers by providing real value.