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Posts Tagged ‘marketing campaign’
Last week, we reported on a class-action lawsuit filed in Los Angeles alleging that Yelp was running an “extortion scheme”. Today, the company has just gotten slapped by a second, similar suit, this time coming from the D’ames Day Spa of San Diego County, which is accusing Yelp of removing many positive reviews because the spa declined to run ads on the site. In a very prompt response, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman has just written a blog post titled Different Day, Different Lawyer, Same Meritless Claim: A Classic Race to the Courthouse in which he looks to debunk the new case. We’ve embedded the lawsuit below, which was posted online by The Next Web.
The suit claims that Yelp removed 13 out of 14 positive reviews about the Day Spa. But Stoppelman writes that the Spa has admitted that it solicited the reviews in question, which the site has repeatedly instructed businesses not to do. The suit confirms that the spa did solicit the reviews:
In or around August, 2009, LaPausky contacted GROUPON to promote her business, D’ames Day Spa, through a mass email marketing campaign. A GROUPON representative informed LaPausky that her business needed more on-line reviews and/or comments to be featured in a GROUPON marketing campaign.
LaPausky began asking her customers to leave feedback regarding their D’ames Day Spa experiences on Yelp.com. In a short while, D’ames Day Spa’s reviews on Yelp totaled approximately fourteen, many of them very positive and detailed.”
Stoppelman also writes that this is a “copy cat” suit, driven by lawyers looking to jump on the bandwagon. From Stoppelman’s post:
These copy cat suits get filed in what is known as a “race to the courthouse,” where lawyers jockey to be named the lead lawyer of the case and take the biggest share of legal fees; being among the first to file a suit increases the chance of being put in charge of the case.
So, as I said: it’s not a surprise to see another such frivolous suit. In fact, it’s kind of expected.
This doesn’t change a thing however: this suit, like the other, is without merit, we will fight it aggressively and we believe we will win.
It’s worth pointing out that even if the reviews on Yelp were admittedly solicited, that doesn’t necessarily mean the case is dead in the water — the spa can still look to prove that Yelp offered to overlook these potentially fraudulent reviews if the spa purchased ads (or that Yelp removed more reviews when the spa declined).
Update: Yelp has reminded us that they’ve explicitly denied that they ever offered preferential treatment in exchange for money.
“Simply put, Yelp does not remove or hide negative reviews in exchange for money and Yelp salespeople do not offer to do so. Additionally, Yelp treats review content equally for advertisers and non-advertisers alike. Advertisers pay for advertising and enhanced listings, and nothing more; and businesses are not penalized for declining to advertise.”
12 Methods to Improve Website Return on Investment (ROI) Using SEO and Other Strategies
In: web resources
4 Mar 2010
Return On Investment (ROI) is the relationship between the total amount you spend and the total amount you earn from a certain internet marketing campaign.
If you are doing any online marketing campaign, then Return On Investment (ROI) is the most important measurement to estimate your success and the one metric that you must work hard on to improve over time.
Generally speaking, Return On Investment (ROI) is a performance measurement used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment and to compare the efficiency of one investment to the other or over a certain period of time.
Return on investment is a very popular metric due to its versatility and simplicity. That is, if an investment does not have a reasonable positive ROI, or if there are other opportunities with a higher ROI, then this investment should not be done. Return On Investment (ROI) is the final measurement of success for any advertising campaign.
How To Calculate your Return On Investment (ROI)?
Return On Investment (ROI) for any advertising campaign is very simple to calculate. There are only two variations in the calculation formula:
- Total cost of advertising campaign including all expenses related to this specific campaign
- Net Profit of this specific advertising campaign.
The Net Profit (return) of an investment is divided by the cost of the investment; the result is expressed as a percentage or a ratio.
Why should you constantly monitor your Return On Investment (ROI)?
Constant monitoring of your Return On Investment (ROI) either daily, weekly or both will guarantee 5 vital goals
- To ensure that you are not losing money on any advertising campaign on a daily or weekly basis.
- To detect any sudden decrease in the performance of any campaign and to take necessary actions to put it back on track.
- To detect any sudden improvement in the performance of any campaign and to take necessary steps to exploit the situation for your advantage.
- To assess the effect of changing different elements of the campaign to keep the best elements as in split testing and other testing methods.
- To detect if the campaign is achieving its goals or falling short.
How To Increase Your Return On Investment?
The two most important factors to improve your Return On Investment (ROI) are:
1 – Professional Search Engine Optimization.
2 – Website Conversion Rate Optimization.
First: Website Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization is one of the best internet marketing strategies to improve your Return On Investment. SEO if done properly will bring your pages to the 1st pages of Google, Yahoo, Bing and other major search engines. This will simply give you much more exposure for a long period of time.
Once the initial cost of Search Engine Optimization is paid, you do not need to pay much money to keep your publicity or exposure on the internet.
Other traditional online and off line advertisements require continuous payment to keep your ads running. These payments accumulate to a huge amount of money over time that will far exceed the total cost of Search Engine Optimization.
Proper Search Engine Optimization can be in the form of a combination of any number of the following factors:
- Meticulous keyword research, analysis and selection to find and use the most profitable keywords for your business.
- SEO copywriting your main website pages and your landing pages to make them more Search Engine Friendly and more easily found by search engines.
- Link building to improve your link popularity and to achieve a top search engine placement.
- Social Media Marketing to create more brand loyality and to reach more targeted visitors.
- (YOU DON’T PUT POINT #5 LIKE IN THE OTHER FILE??)
Second: Website Conversion Rate Optimization
When you increase your Conversion Rate, you will get more leads and more sales from your targeted traffic.
A variety of improvements can be applied to increase Conversion Rate:
- Find what are your Unique Selling Points (USP) and make them clear and obvious in your website and your landing pages.
- Improve your website design to be more search engine friendly and to better communicate your message to your visitors.
- Improve your website usability and accessibility to make navigation and finding information, products or services easier for your visitors.
- Improve your sales copy to clearly present the benefits of your products or services to be more convincing and compelling to your visitors. Such a Sales copy will encourage and entice your visitors to convert.
- Improve landing pages to accurately match your advertising campaigns and the keywords used in them.
- Ensure that your landing pages are closely relevant to the content of your website.
- Track your campaigns and analyze results to improve performance.
- Experiment with different ads, and split test every element and every step of your campaign to fine tune your marketing campaign and improve your return on investment (ROI) results
Nashat Mostafa is a Montreal SEO consultant and the founder of SEO 7 Services. During his long career as a SEO consultant, Mostafa has worked with many small and medium sized companies to plan and execute different search engine optimization and internet marketing campaigns to increase website conversion rate and improve return on investment (ROI).
Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources
12 Methods to Improve Website Return on Investment (ROI) Using SEO and Other Strategies
Run a Marketing Campaign on Twitter
In: web resources
21 Jan 2010Planning on how to run a Twitter marketing campaign requires, first, the assumption that you want to run a successful Twitter marketing campaign.
Thus you must plan a marketing campaign that actually does little selling and more connecting. Why? Because this “laid-back” strategy on Twitter is more likely to get you loyal followers interested in what you have to offer.
Let’s look at an imaginary Twitter marketing campaign scenario:
You join Twitter and immediately start tweeting only about your products and services. Every time someone follows you, you send that person a DM (direct message) with a link to one of your sales pages. You use an application to automatically bring your blog feed into your Twitter account, and every one of your blog posts focuses solely on pushing your products and services.
How many people do you think will be interested in continuing to follow you and clicking on your links?
Twitter is effective for marketing purposes only when you realize it is NOT about sales but that it is about relationships.
A different imaginary Twitter marketing campaign scenario:
This time you join Twitter with a marketing strategy in place. You find and follow people who might be interested in what you have to offer but at this point you do NOT tell them about your products and services.
If you still want to send a DM when someone first follows you, make it a personal appreciation for connecting without pushing any of your sales page links. If you really want to include a link, make it to a free report.
In your general tweets you share links to worthwhile articles that relate to your products and services. These articles do not have to be your own; in fact, sometimes they should be to other people’s material.
Then every so often you throw in a tweet about a product or service of yours and include a link. But even in this case what you say can make a difference:
Instead of tweeting:
Buy my super-duper widget right now and you’ll make tons of money in 30 days. You can tweet:
Check out my new widget training program – it can help you attract more visitors to your website.
See how the second tweet is much less selling and much more sharing?
Now if you’ve been sharing worthwhile information connected to this topic, people following you will be more inclined to click on the link because these people are already conditioned to trust you. You’ve established this trust by providing these people with valuable free information on the topic.
In conclusion, the best mindset for developing a Twitter marketing campaign is to take the perspective of your potential clientele/customers: Not constantly tweeting about how great your products and services are; instead consistently tweeting information that will help solve their problems.
And occasionally you can tweet that the products and services you’re selling are the solution to those problems.
Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is an Internet business consultant. If you liked this article, you’ll love her FREE report on “How to Become a Twitter Marketing Expert” – grab your report now from www.millermosaicllc.com/free-twitter-report
Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources
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