Now you are about to launch a brand, before you broadcast it out, are there things you need to do as part of online strategies? Definitely plenty of.

• Domain name. Register the top level domain names .com, .org, .net, and all country specific ones (like .com.sg, .sg, …) wherever you expect your brand’s presence. I know you are probably facing a list of dozens of if not hundreds of domain names to register; but, you may regret it if you don’t. Remember this, not just the exact brand name but different variations and combinations with your company names and product categories.
• Trademark. Unless you are not serious about the brand you are about to launch, there’s no reason you don’t trademark it in all your markets you care. This is not only helpful when there’s trademark infringement issue but also valuable when you run PPC campaigns; you can protect your brand terms from being bid on by your competitors.
• Search Engines. You want to make sure, the moment you launch your branding campaigns and some people look for you, they can find your official website in search engines. To do that, you need to optimize your site for search engines and at the same time, you can run PPC ads on your brand terms.
• Websites. Besides usability and content, make sure your websites deliver the same marketing message as that of your off-line campaigns like TV ads and outdoor display.
• Social Network. An overwhelming majority (88%) of marketers in a recent survey say they are now using some form of social media to market their business. Register on social networking websites with your brand names whether or not you have a strategy in mind yet for that specific social network. The ideal case is to register on all social sites; you can easily do that with knowem.com for $64.95.

Be proactive and it saves a lot more trouble if you do.

Also read:Who Are Bidding On Your Brand In Google?

This is part four of a series of posts on Search Engine Marketing for marketers. This part explains how to do budgeting in SEM campaigns.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

If you do SEM campaign in house, your budget just needs to include search engine cost. If you outsource to an agency, you probably need to include 10% to 20% account management fee on top of your search engine spend. How much should you spend on search engines? You should do the estimation for each search engine and sum up the total. Request for a proposal from search engines directly (which usually requires your monthly budget is between two to five thousand dollars depending on which search engine you use) or your agency to get the proposed total budget with projected number of clicks (which roughly equals the number of visits).

In case you can only start with a small budget and will do it in-house, this is a simple way to work out the estimated spend and total clicks yourself:

1. Generate a list of keywords with search engine keywords tools like this, this, and this.
2. Use Google traffic estimator to estimate the cost and clicks.
3. Referring to search engine market share in different market, relatively estimate the spend and clicks on other search engines. A better way is to refer to user demographic data in each search engine as well; but this sometimes requires experience.

The senior management is more interested in proposed budget and projected results. Now you’ve got the budget which is probably the maximum you can spend with search engines. You need to adjust it according to the current economy, industry, and company situations.

How to Estimate the Results

Let’s take the number of clicks on your PPC ads roughly as the number of visits to the site. Ask your web analytics guy to get an estimation of the site conversion rate (CR = number of leads divided by the number of visits).

1. Conversions (Leads, Registration, Sales…) = Clicks * CR
2. If you have online sales, get an average sales value; otherwise, assign a dollar value to a conversion
3. Return = Conversion * Average Worth (dollars) – Cost (Proposed Budget)
4. ROI = Return / Cost

Then, you can tell your management investing X amount of dollars in SEM will bring Y sales / leads, and the estimated ROI is Z. Of course, you need to show how exactly you get your projections.

The actual budgeting is more complicated; depending on which industry you are in, it could take days to finalize the proposal. Your job is to make sure you have specific goal in mind to deliver via SEM, track your SEM campaign performance, and keep improving it. The next chapter discusses branding in SEM and brand keywords.

Also read:In-House SEM/PPC Management (Marketers’ SEM Guide Part 6)

Dec 1 is Cyber Monday for 2008 if you haven’t known yet. comScore reported last year the heaviest online spending day of the season was Cyber Monday (November 26 2007) with $733 million in sales.

What is Cyber Monday?

The term Cyber Monday refers to the Monday immediately following Black Friday, the ceremonial kick-off of the holiday online shopping season in the United States between Thanksgiving Day and Christmas. The premise was that consumers would return to their offices after the Black Friday weekend, making purchases online that they were not able to make in stores.

Cyber Monday is considered the biggest online shopping day of the year. If your business does have online capabilities of selling to consumers, you should get prepared for Cyber Monday.

Tips for Preparing for Cyber Monday

• Learn from the past by referring to the sales data and web analytics log.
• Make sure your website can handle a huge increase in traffic.
• As the traffic is likely to increase, you should allocate enough budget. If you run PPC ad like AdWords, make sure you up the daily budget.
• If you have a special promotion on that day, make sure you reflect it in your ad copy.
• Be clear about delivery dates and ordering deadlines.
• Test. Make sure everything is working! Don’t do things like usability testing as this is not the right time.

CyberMonday – Compare 2008 to 2007 Home pages (Download it here)

Bonus: On Cyber Monday in 2007, 45.5% of all online retail spending came from work locations, edging out the 44.1% of spending from home (source: comScore). Also, find out “Black Friday vs. Cyber Monday Shopping Differs by Generation“.

Update (Dec 3 2008): comScore reported that in 2008 Cyber Monday saw $846 million in online spending, up 15 percent.

Update 2 (Dec 9 2008): check out how satisfied shoppers were on this Cyber Monday as well as Nielsen’s findings (PDF).

Also read:Are You Ready for Black Friday?

Search Engine Marketing

• Use keywords and placements together on the content network [AdWords Blog]

Social Media Marketing

• 50 Ways Marketers Can use Social Media to Improve Their Marketing [ChrisBrogan]
• New online community study: what’s working, what’s in the way, advice from trenches [BlogHound]

Marketing Research

• Q&A: Bounty’s Andrew Thomas on marketing to Mums [e-Consultancy]
• MarketingSherpa B-to-B Presentation – Top 10 Marketing Fast Fixes + How to Generate and Nurture More Qualified Leads: PowerPoints, MP3 and Transcript
• Revenue Cycle Best Practices [IAB]
  • Interdepartmental communication between Credit & Collections, Sales and Operations
  • Processes and controls that ensure the necessary steps are taken and approvals obtained prior to taking action
• Brand Names Subconsciously Afftect People’s Shopping Goals [Science Daily]
  milliseconds of exposure to a brand name such as Wal-Mart or Tiffany can alter consumers’ subconscious goals, according to new research.

Also read:Digital Marketing: Must Read for Week July-28

Branding

• Color Psychology in Marketing [Branding Strategy]
  Give some thoughts to the message you want to send and to the psychology of the recipient. Then choose your colors accordingly.

Search Engine Marketing

• Top ad placements not always most profitable [BizReport]
  Achieving top AdWords placement positions isn’t necessarily the most profitable spot for advertisers.

Social Media Marketing

• 9 widget myths debunked [iMeida Connection]

Web Analytics

• 5 Great (Free) Web Analytics Tools You Might Not Know About Yet [Web Analytics World]

Also read:Digital Marketing: Must Read for Week July-21

The news is out that Google would release a tool for advertisers and agencies called “Ad Planner“. So what is Google Ad Planner?

Google Ad Planner is a free media planning tool that can help you identify websites your audience is likely to visit so you can make better-informed advertising decisions.

With Google Ad Planner, you can:

• Define audiences by demographics and interests.
• Search for websites relevant to your audience.
• Access aggregated statistics on the number of unique visitors, page views, and other data for millions of websites from over 40 countries.
• Create lists of websites where you’d like to advertise and store them in a media plan.
• Generate aggregated website statistics for your media plan.

The Google Ad Planner interface consists of an audience definition tool (where you define your audience by language, age, and other criteria) and a list of sites matching your criteria.

The site list includes traffic, reach, and other key data for each site to help you make informed decisions about where you might advertise. To make your research more efficient, Google Ad Planner automatically refreshes the site list when you enter, remove, or edit audience definition criteria.

You can use Google Ad Planner to research sites or create a media plan to save a list of your desired sites and placements for future use. Wondering where are the data from?

• Google search data
• Google Analytics data
• External consumer panel data
• third-party market research

Sites whose traffic doesn’t hit minimum thresholds are NOT included in this tool. You can still find some small websites through placement targeting tool in Google AdWords. By the way, you can filter Google Ad Planner search results to display sites in the Google content network only. But, you can’t buy ad placement through ad planner at this stage.

You can apply for an Ad Planner account here.

Also read:Update on Google Ad Planner

Search Engine Marketing

• Robots Exclusion Protocol for Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft [Yahoo Search Blog]
  The following are all the major REP features currently implemented by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!. Each of these directives can be specified to be applicable for all crawlers or for specific crawlers by targeting them to specific user-agents, which is how any crawler identifies itself.
• Google AdWords Editor [Google]
  Version 6.0 offers new and updated features to help you edit your AdWords campaigns faster and more effectively.
• Bad SEO Techniques That Will Hurt Your Google Rankings [Search Engine Journal]
  “As you begin to move onto more advanced SEO topics, you will undoubtedly uncover some techniques that sound like a good idea, but are really just dumb.”
• 26 Mistakes That Cost You [Search Engine People]
  “Here are the most common mistakes that I see when we take over a Small Business PPC Campaign.”

Social Media Marketing

• Marketers, Don’t Just Blindly Follow Latest Media Trends [Ad Age]
  Why ‘Because All the Cool Kids Are Doing It’ Isn’t a Good Excuse for Running to Nontraditional Media
• Who’s Doing Video Right? [iMedia]
  A number of brands are producing original online video, but not all the content is hitting the mark. See why Suave and Sprint get it, and why Bank of America does not.
• MarketingSherpa’s Viral Marketing Hall of Fame 2008: Top 10 Campaigns & Results Data
  If you’re in need of some viral viral marketing inspiration, look no further. Here are this year’s inductees into MarketingSherpa’s Viral Marketing Hall of Fame.
• How to Effectively Buy Into Facebook: Social Ads [ClickZ]
  You’ve established a presence for your brand on Facebook. Your new Facebook Page represents an additional channel through which consumers can effectively connect with your company and products.
• The Five Essential Elements of Effective Social Media Marketing [Copyblogger]
  Bob Hoffman is the CEO of a traditional advertising agency, and he raised some valid points about true interactivity online.
• Generation Y – Welcome To Their World [ReadWriteWeb]
  Here’s a glimpse into the world of Gen Y and how they’re using technology.
• What Types of Ads Are Better for Social Media Websites?

Email Marketing

• Three steps to better email campaigns [BizReport]
  An immediate and personalized welcome email is the perfect first step.

Web Analytics

• Track online impact of Google TV Ads using Google Analytics [Google]
  Now, you can track the online impact of your TV campaigns through your Google Analytics account.
• How To Design Effective Online Display Image Ads
  Eyes not only draw attention but also guide attention.
• Google Trends update [Google]
  You can now see numbers on the graph download to a spreadsheet.

Marketing Research

• Internet Advertising Revenues Estimated to Pass $21 Billion in 2007 [IAB]
  According to the IAB’s recent Internet Advertising Report, online ad revenues in the US reached $21.2 billion in 2007. This is an increase of 26% for the year.
• Paperless Coupon Usage on the Rise [Experian]
  According to the Hitwise data, U.S. consumer searches on the term “coupons” has increased 48% comparing to searches for the week ending 3/22/08 versus 3/24/2007.
• Mobile Social Networks Embraced by Millenials [InStat]
  Blogging, photo and video sharing, location-based socialization services, games, SMS, and IM will eventually be combined to afford the mobile user the entire social networking experience from a handset application, the high-tech market research firm says.
• Mobile Web 2.0: Gen Y embraces mobile social networks [Computer World]
  People born between the years 1981 and 2000, or “millenials,” are leading the move to mobile social networks and Mobile Web 2.0, which includes cell phone-based blogging, multimedia sharing, location-based socialization services, gaming and chat, according to new research.
• Is MSN Messenger An Effective Media for All Singapore Advertisers?
  1.6 billion messages are sent out from instant messengers monthly, as Singaporeans spend hours online at work and at home. Does it mean you should advertise on IM?

Case Study

• A Look At Singapore Airlines’ Online Presence

Also read:Digital Marketing Resources for Week Jun-9

• AdWords: How does Load Time Affect Your Landing Page Quality
  “Beginning in April 2008, you’ll be able to see a grade for your landing page’s load time in your AdWords account. ‘Load time’ refers to the amount of time it takes for a user to view your landing page after clicking your ad.”
  (tags: AdWords Google ppc)
• Average Search CPC Data by Category for April 2008 – ClickZ
  “A look at the average cost-per-click in search by vertical in the U.S. for April 2008, compared to the prior month.”
  (tags: CPC search statistics)
• Key figures on European business, 2008 Edition
  The pocketbook Key figures on European business1, published by Eurostat, the Statistical Office of the European Communities, summarises the main features of European business in a concise and simple manner.
  (tags: europe business)
• Matt Cutts: What Google Knows About Spam
  “If you didn’t attend Web 2.0, you can watch my ten-minute keynote about ‘What Google Knows About Spam’ (and several other keynotes) on blip.tv.
  (tags: google spam SEO)

Also read:links for 2008-05-10

Asked again by an airline marketing manager about Google’s various ad formats, I sent his this very useful document Google AdWords Ad Formats And Options which might be helpful to you as well, it covers:

• Guide to Google online ad formats
• Guide to Google search & content network advertising options
• Guide to Google online targeting options
• Guide to Google online advertising media

via The Ultimate Visual Guide to Google Ads and Formats [via clix marketing PPC Blog]

Also read:AdWords Editor 5, Category Targeting & Excel Plugin

Googlers Alex (New York office) and Anva (Mountain View) provided half day training in Singapore to digital agencies. The training on AdWords covered topics from basic to intermediate level. I would not cover the basics in this post.PPC Tips

• Historical performance. The most recent performance has more weight while old ones have less. Historical performance is on both keywords level and account level.
• Compare performance in visual graphs in account snapshot. The product development team is still improving the visual graph function.
• Ad ranking is similar in search and content network; however, the calculation of quality score is different as content network PPC is on ad group level.

MCC Updates

• View all MCC alerts in one place. This is to be available this week. Agency can do alert search across all accounts and save to be shown on MCC.
• Now in MCC, agency can have an overview of last full day, last 7 days, last 30 days, last 90 days,…more options are going to be added.

AdWords Editor 5 is to be released soon this week. And, version 6 is also in development and about to be released in middle of Q1 next year. MCC structured view and spreadsheet importing functions would be available in version 6 next year.

Content Network Advertising/Marketing

In content network, there are three models available: placement targeting, contextual targeting, and category targeting. You may be aware Google has updated the “site-targeted campaign” to “placement-targeted campaign”.

In placement targeting, the advertiser is supposed to select the category of websites and then pick the sites to advertise on. However, category targeting (still in beta) is targeting category of pages. This is currently only in English in the back end. You need to ask your Google product manager to help on that.

Placement (site) targeting allows CPM and CPC while contextual targeting only supports CPC. After the name change, it’s a bit confusing to some people.

Anya advised advertisers not use dynamic insertion in content networks.

During the break, I asked Alex about the Excel plug-in regarding PPC management. He acknowledged that Google is working on the Excel plug-in. That’s all I know for now.

Also read:Google AdWords Ad Formats And Options

News

• Dell has selected WPP Group to co-create a stand-alone agency [PRWeek]
  Dell to form agency with WPP to handle all marketing; will invest $4.5 billion over three years
• Compete Inc released Behavior Matchâ„¢ [Compete via BizReport]
  The platform uses behavioral targeting to determine which websites are the best bet for marketers based on the audience viewing specific sites. Reports are available throughout the life of the campaign so that marketers can make spot changes as new information is gained.
• Advertising on PDF Document [Adobe]
• Coke’s Efforts In Online Virtual World [Read/WriteWeb]

Research

• Consumers respond to direct mail online [Vertis Communications]
  Twenty-one percent of total adults in 2007 have responded to direct mail advertising in the past month by visiting a sender’s Web site, up from 14 percent in 2003. Additionally, findings revealed older men’s responsiveness to direct mail advertising through the Internet has grown the most, with 28 percent of men ages 55-64 indicating this behavior, up from 10 percent in 2003, and 15 percent of men 65 and older exhibiting the same pattern, up from 5 percent in 2003.
• Shoppers Like Recommendations From Online Retailers [Choice Stream]
  “The results of the 2007 survey clearly show how important it is for online retailers to help consumers with product discovery. Personalized recommendations are table stakes in today’s competitive ecommerce environment. But retailers that provide customers with poor quality recommendations are putting their brand and revenue at risk,” said Toffer Winslow, EVP of Sales and Marketing at ChoiceStream. “Online shoppers increasingly expect help with making selections, and retailers that provide high quality guidance are rewarded with higher consumer spending and more frequent visits.”
• Marketing to a B2B Technical Buyer [Enquiro]
• 2008 B2B Marketing Forecast: Rise in Budgets, Online Spending [MarketingCharts]
  Most B2B marketers (some 60%) plan to increase their 2008 marketing budgets – but fully 79% plan to increase their online marketing budgets, according to BtoB magazine’s “2008 Marketing Priorities and Plans” study, scheduled for release Monday.

Search Engine Marketing

• Google has launched a free tool called Template Center via My Client Center
  It allows MCC account managers to create templates for pre-defined AdWords campaigns and share them with their directly linked AdWords accounts.
• Google introduced AdWords Local PlusBox
  The Local PlusBox is a feature that displays more geographical information for a local business ad that appears in the top position above Google search results. When users see the Local PlusBox and click on it, the ad expands to include a map, address, driving instructions, and phone number, in addition to the location name that appears beneath the last line of ad.
• Microsoft launched adExcellence Accreditation Program [via adcenter blog]
• Optimizing your keywords for the content network [Inside AdWords]
  Create a manageable, targeted keyword list; use tightly themed ad groups; use duplicate keywords for appropriate ad groups; use ad group level URLs instead of keyword level URLs; measure content performance at the ad group level; build a comprehensive negative keyword list.
• SES Chicago 2007 Wrap Up & Pubcon 2007 Round-Up [Online Marketing Blog]
  also here at Search Engine Roundtable
• Paid v. Organic Search Tool Launches [Hitwise]
• Video: Matt Cutts Discusses the Importance of alt Tags
  

Social Media / Viral Marketing / Word of Mouth

• YouTube launched Video Holiday Cards [via Mashable]
  YouTube has just added an interesting feature: Holiday Video Cards. Typically when you see greeting card options online, it’s an animation you can choose from, or a really cute picture of a puppy wearing a Santa hat. For certain occasions, we’ve even seen JibJab, among others, offer funny clips you can send out to friends. At first glance of YouTube’s holiday video cards’ page, you’d think the same was true for the popular video-sharing network. But in fact, you can send any video as a holiday greeting.
• 125 Social Bookmarking Sites : Importance of User Generated Tags, Votes and Links [search engine journal]

Display Advertising

• Types, Sizes, Rates & Metrics [MarketingSherpa]
• Copywriting, Design Tips & Ad Networks + How to Counter ‘Banner Blindness’ [MarketingSherpa]

Marketing

• Art of War [MIT]

Also read:Weekly Online Marketing Resources Dec-02-07

If you are running a domestic campaign in Google, it’s normally quite straightforward to find out who are bidding on your brand to hijack your customers. Simply go to Google, key in your brand term, and do a quick search. But, this sometimes doesn’t show you the whole picture.

You may miss out some competitors who:

• set a low daily budget so that their ads do not show all the time, or
• advertise on a specified time periods (day parting), or
• advertise on a different search engine as Google doesn’t dominate every single search market, or
• geo-targeting outside your office region

So, next time when you do a competitor analysis, take the above factors into consideration. Here is one quick tip:

• Search on your brand terms on multiple search engines across multiple domains. For example, if your company is in Singapore and your business targets UK and US, you should search in Google.co.uk and Google.com as well.

A better way is to have your online marketing department work with technical guys to design a script to automate the whole process. Take all the major search engines and variable domains into consideration along with proper proxy settings as both access domain and searchers’ IP matter in geo-targeting.

Can you trademark your brand terms in Google? Maybe. In US and Canada, you can’t stop other advertisers bidding on your brand keywords. Outside US and Canada, you can try. Mail or fax your trademark complaints to Google; find out the Google trademark policy. Before you trademark your brand terms, make sure you are not stopping your affiliates bidding on the brand terms at least.

Also read:Top 5 Things to Do Before You Launch A Brand