By Duncan Wierman (c) 2010

For years now, the squeeze page has practically been the lingua franca of the marketing online world. Whether you’re in real estate (and actually, the real estate industry in particular has leaned particularly heavily on squeeze pages), banking, e-commerce or anything else, the conventional wisdom has been to target tightly focused groups of consumers through these web pages/marketing tools.

These pages do OK at helping marketers identify which keywords or keyword phrases do well in terms of attracting targeted traffíc and if they’re well designed, at gathering email addresses or other contact information from these visitors. However, there are much better methods of doing keyword research than creating a separate squeeze page for each of your keywords. Additionally, building and maintaining these pages represents an investment of time and money which isn’t likely to produce a worthwhile return.  

The squeeze page is dead – it just doesn’t know it yet and neither do the marketers who still use this direct marketing-style methodology in their líst building efforts. I know there’s probably at least a few of you out there reading this that still use them and are wondering what exactly is wrong with squeeze pages.

As it happens, the answer is plenty. They’re unappealing to consumers and increasingly, they’re seen as undesirable pieces of virtual property by the search engines as well. When you’re trying to market your business with a tool that turns off both your target market and the search engines, it’s clear that the time has come to abandon ship. I’ll explain in more detail below.

They’re Completely Unappealing To Readers

You’ve seen a squeeze page before – and chances are you’ve hit the back button on your browser almost immediately. These pages almost universally feature incredibly unattractive cookie cutter designs and copy which is generally nothing but sensational hype. That alone is enough to turn off most readers, not to mention that squeeze pages seem all too often to be riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. Put simply, they don’t look professional by any stretch of the imagination – but they do look professional enough to fool many business people who are new to the medium of the web into using them at least for a while.

Think of it this way – if you got a flyer in the mail that looked like one of these pages, would you be in a hurry to contact the marketer to sign up for their mailing líst, let alone actually do business with them? Probably not.

 As a general rule, if it looks too awful to be true, it’s just what it looks like and squeeze pages are a prime example of this. They lack any kind of credibility with your prospective customers, especially when you’re in the real estate business. These pages make you look like the online equivalent of a shady used car salesman, not the kind of person that people want to do a real estate deal with. There are other things about squeeze pages that turn off your potential customers, but since there’s some crossover with this and the SEO shortcomings of the format, we’ll get back to that a little later on.

Google Slaps Squeeze Pages

It’s true: squeeze pages are nothing less than poison as far as your performance in the search engines is concerned. Google and other search engines have been working on ways to discount the rankings of these pages, which are rarely the kind of content that users are actually looking for when they use the keywords which these sites target. It comes down to what it always comes down to when search engine rankings are the issue – relevance. A webpage designed to entice visitors to fork over their contact information simply isn’t that relevant to many, if any, actual search engine queries, no matter how much content you try to cram onto the page.

Speaking of the content, this is something which has changed about squeeze pages in the last couple of years. Once these pages started being penalized by search engines for their lack of content (“classic” squeeze pages, after all, feature little more than an opt-in form), marketers started turning them into the online equivalent of the long form sales letter – in other words, something no one wants to read, especially not page after page. This unappealing content has led to a further decline in the ranking of these pages in search results, making them even worse marketing tools than they already were.

Squeeze Pages Can Sink Your Main Site

Let’s get back to that subtitle about Google “slapping” squeeze pages, because this is one of the most important points I’d like to make here today. If your squeeze pages either link to or are part of your main site, they’re more than likely causing a slump in your main site’s search engine ranking, making you less visible to your market online. In other words, the exact opposite of what you’d hoped to accomplish. If these pages link to your site, you can be penalized for these links from unpopular sites in what Google considers to be an iffy online neighborhood – and what are the three most important things in real estate? Exactly.

Another way that squeeze pages can drag down your online presence is through having a large percentage of duplicate content. Many businesses throw up dozens of squeeze pages which are basically identical other than the targeted keywords for that particular page. Even if you make an effort to rewrite the content on these pages, there’s only so much you can do without putting a disproportionate amount of time or money into the effort.

So if squeeze pages are out, what are real estate professionals to do in terms of marketing online? There’s plenty of options, all of which are better choices than building a series of squeeze pages. I won’t go into them all here, but as always on the web, it’s all about good content which is geared towards readers first and search engines second. When your market sees you as credible and reputable, they’ll beat a path to your door and happily sign up for your email list. And where the market goes, the search engines will follow; but no one’s flocking to squeeze pages.

by Caroline O’Donoghue

Sponsorship is brilliant for many reasons;  supporting a great cause or event, building awareness of your brand with a new audience and changing opinions of your brand through affiliation.

When it comes to something as big as the World Cup, the link between sponsors and the main event can appear tenuous until you’re introduced to the “concept” behind the relationship through brand messaging.

For example, Coca Cola’s desire for people to celebrate goals with a beverage or McDonald’s customers being compelled to avoid or discuss the games in its diners during the tournament.

However, communicating these concepts is no longer a mere media-buying activity. International brands now have their social media channels to help them along the way…

As part of an upcoming report, I assisted our Senior Research and Insights Analyst Dominic Parker by taking a look at what brands were doing within social media in order to exploit their relationship with the World Cup. I was genuinely surprised at a lot of what was and, just as importantly, was not happening in social.

The graph below demonstrates Facebook activity by active international brands who sponsored the World Cup over a two week period covering the beginning of the event (4th to 20th June 2010). The X axis represents the number of World Cup related status updates published during this time and the Y axis the amount of fan engagement (Comments and Likes) of World Cup v Non-World Cup related status updates during this time.

The higher up the Y axis, the more fans engaged with World Cup related updates, compared with non-World Cup related updates. The top line of brands engaged solely on the subject of the World Cup during this time. The size of the bubbles denotes the number of fans a brand has.

You can clearly see here that many large brands are sitting in the bottom left hand corner of the table, meaning that they didn’t update their Facebook page with news of World Cup related activity and therefore didn’t receive any engagement from their large Facebook following.

This is symptomatic of a continuing trend within companies of operating in silos when it comes to online activity. Why spend millions on display advertising and creative if you’re not going to make the most of it online?

Working with the example of Facebook, why not post adverts as videos? Why not let people know about competitions you’re involved with even if they’re not taking place on Facebook? Why not just shout from the rooftops that you’re contributing to one of the biggest sporting events in the world? I’m by no means saying ram it down people’s throats, but if you have exclusive content and assets why wouldn’t you share them?

Every brand marketing campaign these days should think about social media’s role within it as a given. Campaigns peak people’s interest and encourage consumers to engage with companies on Facebook and other branded online spaces. The more people you encourage to Like, Follow or Subscribe to your content, the larger the audience you will have to talk to you when it comes to your next campaign. These are all basic points that many of you will be rolling your eyes at but when you look at working examples from large brands, they are often missed.

This would be a step up from simply “broadcasting” to customers, analysis of customer comments allows brands to utilise their online customer base as a focus group. Think about what that could save a company!

Making friends with customers in social media might be a struggle for some, but for those who’ve got the people there ready and waiting, the opportunity for social as a broadcast, engagement and insights tool is there to be grabbed. For some brands the World Cup is an opportunity missed, but it should also be a lesson learnt.

What’s the easiest way to learn a tactical lesson about B2B marketing? By hearing it from someone who’s already learned it the hard way. You gain the knowledge—but avoid the pain. That’s the basic philosophy behind the MarketingProfs B2B Forum: It offers experiential case studies, best practices—you name it—to help take the pain out of gaining B2B marketing expertise.

Case in point: In a recent post at the Daily Fix blog, MarketingProfs’ Ann Handley summed up 30 pain-free lessons that attendees learned at the May Forum in Boston. “During the last session of the event,” she reports, “our trio of embedded journalists … came together to share what they’d been picking up as they floated in and out of the various sessions.”

Here are a few action-tip highlights from the 30 lessons learned:

• Be helpful online: That’s the key to successfully participating in social conversations.
• Listen to your sales force to know what content brings in the best kinds of leads, and optimize your messages accordingly.
• Create an editorial calendar for your content creation; use it to drive your social-media activities.
• Repurpose your content across channels to optimize its utility and value.
• Add a call to action at the end of a blog post; it can become a significant source of leads.
• Focus on the landing page “experience” (don’t just present a form) to earn 2 to 20 times more conversions at your sites.
• Don’t ignore Bing. It’s proving to be a solid lead generator.

The Po!nt: Knowing doesn’t have to hurt. Stay vigilant throughout the year to find golden nuggets like these shared by B2B folks who have been there, done that. It’s a pain-free way to boost—and maintain—your expertise.

Source: Daily Fix. Read the full post.

Is Google taking it in this direction?

When you think of public utilities, you think of things such as water, electricity, and telecommunications, right?

It’s an interesting thought and one that, according to Kevin Ryan of Motivity Marketing, is not too far out in left field. He did not mince words when he told WebProNews, “Search is going to be seen as a public utility.”

If you look at various definitions of the term “public utility,” you can see that they often explain it as a monopoly on the services it provides. Since Google is clearly the leader in search, with comScore’s most recent report showing that the search company occupies 63.7 percent of the market, is it a monopoly?

Although many rumors have indicated as much, no one has ever challenged the idea until last week. The New York Times reports that France did, in fact, call the search giant a monopoly in regards to advertising in online searches.

Not only is Google a leader in search and advertising, but it is also quickly gaining ground in the mobile industry. It has and is continuing to receive its fair share of antitrust concerns from both the U.S. and abroad in all these areas.

Incidentally, Ryan also points out in the above video that Google obtained a license to buy and sell electricity earlier this year.

Based upon this information, the idea of search as a public utility doesn’t really seem too far off after all.

“It’s going to get really, really interesting really fast,” said Ryan.