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The next time you’re standing in the coffee aisle at the grocery store and pick up one particular brand of joe over another, ask yourself why. The answer might be rooted in behavioral economics 101.

Marketers and their agencies have been trying to decode why consumers buy what they do since the 1920s, when N.W. Ayer suggested people would “walk a mile for a Camel.” But lately they’re turning to behavioral economics, a blend of psychology and economics that has until recently been a mostly academic discipline, and could be described most simply as the study of how consumers make economic decisions.

It deviates from traditional economics in that it doesn’t assume consumers behave rationally, like a market (in theory) does, making decisions based solely on facts or logic such as price or quality. Rather, emotions and social psychology affect or dictate decisions and create sometimes predictable “irrational” tendencies. Those tendencies form the tenets of behavioral economics. The health care, finance, and even government policy industries are turning to behavioral economics. The Credit Card Reform Act, for instance, is cited as one big behavioral economics document with ideas such as clearly labeled interest rates and terms and tables of actual spending on credit card bills to “help” consumers make decisions more easily on which card to get or use, how to spend within their means, etc.

President Barack Obama’s administration is rife with behavioral-economic proponents such as Cass Sunstein, head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, who co-wrote “Nudge” with revered behavioral economist Richard Thaler. And while many of the government’s uses for behavioral economics, such as upping nutrition labeling and financial reforms, have been positioned as counter balances to an advertising world that pushes unhealthy food and spending to feel good, marketers themselves are exploring and adopting behavioral economics to do more and smarter product pushing.

Irrational effects
Dan Ariely, author of “Predictably Irrational” and a behavioral economics professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, often works with agencies and marketers, has an ongoing relationship with neighbor ad agency McKinney in Durham, N.C., and has trained and consulted on specific clients. He warns that professional ad people often don’t see what nonprofessionals see — and the irrational effect people’s emotions have on their choices. His research with agencies and marketers is meant to help them understand consumer choices and the forces behind them.

For example, McKinney and Mr. Ariely are working together using behavioral economics in one example they provided, to figure out what makes people go to the gym. Traditional focus group research has found that people will say they would go to the gym if it were closer to their office, or less expensive, or even offered free babysitting. However, gyms have offered all those things without measurable increases in attendance.

Mr. Ariely found through his behavioral research that people are more likely to go to the gym when they have an appointment with a trainer — perhaps because they paid for the extra help in advance, felt ashamed for not showing (and now someone else knows they didn’t go) or felt guilty that they had just wasted another person’s time. Jeff Jones, partner and president of McKinney, said they’re also studying different payment structures that drive behavior, and gave the example that instead of paying via a monthly credit-card deduction for membership, what if consumers didn’t pay at all except if they didn’t go to the gym?

“Who knows what the economic impact would be?” he posited. “But what might it do for the churn rate?”

“Behavioral economics gives Ph.D. credibility and academic rigor to intuition,” Mr. Jones said. “It’s really hard today to make million-dollar decisions based on intuition. This helps clients realize there is data behind the decisions and there is research behind the decisions.”

And indeed financial pressures, ad-agency marginalization and greater availability of sophisticated consumer data are all reasons ad agencies and marketers are increasingly drawn to this formalized process of analyzing consumer spending choices.

DraftFCB, New York, has adopted behavioral economics as a key discipline within its recently launched Institute of Decision Making, which also looks at other emerging areas of study such as neuroscience. It recently pitched a utility company using behavioral economics.

“It’s easy to get people to agree that they should use less energy — 86% of them strongly agreed they should — but they don’t do it,” said Matthew Willcox, who heads the institute as executive director (and continues to serve as director of account planning at DraftFCB, San Francisco). So DraftFCB researched and included specific ideas in the pitch, such as the number of things the utility could ask and people would be willing to do to reduce energy, or the things they would be willing to tell others about saving energy.

One concept of behavioral economics that’s particularly practical for marketers is framing — the way in which an offer is framed or put in context for consumers, along with the bias and experience that each consumer brings to that purchase.

Another concept, called anchoring, refers to the fact that when people are given a number, they tend to use that number as a kind of permanent benchmark for future thinking.

Behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won a Nobel Prize in economics and is considered the “father” of behavioral economics, described anchoring in a McKinsey Quarterly video in May 2008. He said when people are thinking about quantities, the first number that gets mentioned has “enormous impact.” So if he asked people if the tallest tree in the world is more or less than 900 feet, most people would correctly guess that is way too tall and say it’s less. However, he points out, he’s now made you think of very tall trees. The opposite would have been true if he used 100 feet as an “anchor” number.

Behavioral economics is not about whether a person might be into a new brand of coffee or what they think of coffee brands in general, but what coffee a person picks off the shelf, said Joel Rubinson, chief research officer at the Advertising Research Foundation.

Also, as brands have become less powerful today, thanks to a plethora of choices and information, it’s become more important to figure out how and why consumers purchase. “Market research today is studying purchase intent, but not really studying how people make decisions,” said Mr. Rubinson. “When only half of people who say they plan to buy something actually go out and purchase it, and 50% of decisions are made at point of purchase, that’s leaving a lot on the table.”

He adds that marketing does a good job of studying brand equity, a less than perfect job at studying brand activation, and mostly very little in studying how consumers purchase. “Brand equity and purchase intent are fine, just incomplete,” Mr. Rubinson said.

However, even the early adopters and aficionados understand that behavioral economics is not a replacement or panacea, but rather an additive set of tools for marketers — and other industries, for that matter — to use. “It’s not about ‘We used to do it this way and now it’s a wholesale change and we’re doing it this way,’” Mr. Jones said. “These are just new ways of understanding how and why people make decisions. And it’s just smart marketing to understand them and use them.”

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — If you’re looking to reach upholders of traditional American values, your best bet might be the Hispanic market.

The market is growing: The 2010 Census expected to count a record 50 million Hispanics, or one in every six U.S. residents, meaning the Hispanic population will have increased a stunning 42% from the previous census in 2000. (By comparison, the non-Hispanic population will have edged up just 5% in that decade.) It’s also got scale: Hispanics are now the nation’s second-largest consumer market after white non-Hispanics, who are still the largest group at about 200 million.

But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Hispanics in America is how closely they exemplify our idealized concept of 1950s America. They are young (their median age is about where the whole nation was in 1955) and more often live in large, traditional, married-with-children families with lots of participation from grandparents.

More often than not, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they eat family meals at home, and spend less than average on alcohol. They’re moving to the suburbs, tend to be community-oriented, and have high aspirations for their children. In short, they are the sweet market for consumer goods and services that the entire nation used to be when baby boomers were young.

Hispanic children are overwhelmingly U.S. born. Fully 91% of Hispanic children were born in the U.S., compared to only 47% of Hispanic adults, which has great implications for the demographics’ speed of acculturation. With the Hispanic market at this tipping point, one of the biggest challenges for marketers is reaching young, acculturated bilingual Hispanics who behave differently than their parents who didn’t grow up in the U.S. and don’t spend as much time with Spanish-language media, but still feel a deep sense of Latino identity.

More than 1 in 3 Hispanics in the U.S. (34.3%) are children under 18 years old, as compared to fewer than one in four children (22.5%) that are non-Hispanics. The youthful U.S.-born Hispanic population means that children of immigrants, who typically attend public schools, where they learn English, will acculturate much faster than their parents did. And, in fact, English is making gradual gains as the language U.S. Hispanics are most comfortable speaking. Some 27% are most comfortable in English, with another 17% comfortable in both English and Spanish; meaning that nearly half—44%—of the demographic is at ease in English.

Over the next decade, as millions of bilingual Hispanic teens become young adults, we can expect their consumer behavior to move closer to other non-Hispanic young adults. However, the very large size of this segment suggests that the Hispanic culture is likely to remain strong, even among U.S.-born children.

The major difference between today’s immigrants and those who have come before them is the phenomenon called globalization. Inexpensive air travel, the internet and native-language TV stations featuring content from country of origin all allow this group of immigrants to come to the U.S. and become acculturated but still have close ties to their home countries in ways that past immigrant groups could not. That is having and will continue to have a transformative effect on the U.S. culture, including music, food and sports, as illustrated by this year’s World Cup fervor.

Hispanics will become a major force in U.S. consumer-spending growth over the next decade and beyond. The slowing growth and aging population that characterizes other segments of consumers means that younger and larger Hispanic families will be more vital to future growth in consumer spending than at any time in the past.

The Hispanic population is, on average, more than 10 years younger than the average for non-Hispanics. Their median age is just under 28, which means that 75% of adult Hispanics are age 18-49, compared to 56% of non-Hispanics. The household size of U.S. Hispanic families is the largest of any segment. The average Hispanic family has 4.0 members, compared to 2.9 members in the average white, non-Hispanic family. And only 4% of adult Hispanics live alone, compared to 15% of white non-Hispanics.

Hispanic consumers are the most geographically concentrated of any large consumer segment. The eight states with the most Hispanics are home to 76% of all U.S. Hispanics. About half of Hispanic consumers live in California and Texas. The other six states having more than one million Hispanics are Florida, New York, Illinois, Arizona, New Jersey and Colorado. By contrast, the eight states with the largest concentration of non-Hispanics have just 44% of that consumer segment.

By 2015, millions of baby boomers will have begun retiring, thus reducing their consumer spending. Hispanic consumers will play a major role in replacing those retirees in the consumer marketplace and will contribute to the upsurge of retail spending and economic growth.

And given their growing influence on this country’s culture, perhaps one day we may be saying: “It’s as American as dulce de leche.”

Ideally, if you were going to build a house from scratch you would first start by understanding who would be living in it and what their patterns of behavior are. How many people will be occupying the house? What are their ages? What tasks will they perform? What do they need? With that in mind, you can start “architecting” the blueprints for the house’s design. This helps to ensure the house is used properly and is enjoyed by all its participants.

How many of us start construction on our website before we have spent adequate time learning users’ needs first? Information architecture is nothing more than taking the time to understand and then design your site around your user base. It’s also the method of organizing content into meaningful groups to make it intuitive. Additionally, the user navigation and folder structure of your website are also a part of information design. This can be a complex topic with many facets, but I will touch on a couple points to get the gears turning.

Why Is Information Architecture So Important?

Well, a very organized site that’s very easy to navigate will be pleasing to your visitors and help them become customers. From an SEO (define) perspective, a site that’s well thought out from the beginning will likely adhere to SEO best practices. The benefits are usability and a higher ranking. Suffice it to say that taking the time up front to design correctly will serve you well in the long run. To learn more about usability tips, see this article.

A Good Foundation

Let’s start by looking at the foundation. Domain names help to communicate important information to users and to search engines. Picking a domain name that topically fits the theme of your website is foundational. It helps your users feel they have an understanding of what your site is about. It’s good to try and keep it short and to the point which will help make the domain memorable. The key here is starting with a topic in which to build that can contain all of the sections and categories that will come underneath it.

Categories and Keywords

So if domains help set up the foundation, then categories and sections help us set up and frame the site around the theme. For an SEO, this process starts with keyword research to the labeling and navigation process. As you begin laying out the hierarchy of your site, consider starting with your core keywords. Then take those keywords and divide them into groups. Those groups now represent the basic sections of your site. Each section should be optimized around the core keyword chosen.

Below, each of these sections are the category keywords sets you’re targeting, each with pages with more categories. These may have a few or several levels depending on how complex your concept is. By constructing your site this way, it helps to keep things organized and aids in the SEO process.

Pages and Directory Structure

As you start building out each page of your site, it’s good to keep a clean structure and good organized code. Not only does this help out the search spiders, but cleaner code translates to less errors and an easy to follow site for maintenance. One way to help with this is to keep your code compliant with known standards like WC3. From an SEO perspective, using your keywords effectively in file names can help create URL strings that make sense to search spiders as well as users. See this article on site structure for more information.

Accessibility is another consideration that many people miss. Search engines like sites that have correctly labeled images. Remember to label your images with good descriptive alternative text attributes. This is also a good usability practice to aid disabled people so they can properly interpret your site. Here are some tips for making your site universally accessible.

Linking

A well thought-out linking structure will help your users connect to logical flows of information. To aid in the SEO process, good basic linking will help with the flow of page rank. Also, be careful not to have too many links, as this deters your users and the logical flow loses clarity. To learn more about linking, read my two-part article on link building basics.

These are just basic concepts of information architecture. This can be a complex field with fun terms like taxonomy and interpretation sessions that we cannot go into here, but you should know that it exists and plan to incorporate it into your site from the beginning. To learn more about getting started with information architecture, start by checking out the Information Architecture Institute. Without information architecture, you’re likely to build a house for the wrong type of residents.

Voice of the customer. Engagement. Loyalty.

What do these buzzwords mean? How do we use them to drive value? Where are the best practices?

These often-used terms have connotative and denotative meanings that can be quite different depending on who uses them and how they are used. We continue to see uncertainly about loyalty, engagement, and voice of the customer. Questions about these buzzwords keep coming fast and furiously.

The confusion indicates that in this challenging economic environment, the focus on loyalty and engagement is becoming ever more important. Customers, clients, employers, brands and channel partners believe that voice of the customer, Web 3.0, the Groundswell, etc., can give them a well-needed competitive edge. Yet they don’t know how to execute these initiatives effectively. They’re looking for best practice examples of groups creating engagement, excitement, and commitment to help the answer the overriding question: How?

On one hand, brands and consumer package good companies tell us that they want to re-engage their customers and have more direct communication with them, and that social, mobile and emerging media is helping them to do this. On the other, they want to have better and more actionable data results. They want to see the true 360-degree view of the customer, yet realize that they’re not privy to data from other sources — such as channel partners, merchants, and distribution channels — that allow them to complete this circle.

Getting the true voice of the customer doesn’t just mean using social, emerging, and mobile media. It also means focusing on traditional media channels such as the contact center, direct-mail response, customer loyalty program, surveys, etc.

Merchants, banks, hotels, restaurants, travel, and entertainment companies pose to us a litany of the same questions. These entities want to work together and collaborate in a manner we have not witnessed in quite some time. Capturing a 360-degree view of the customer means knowing what Jack Jones is spending at Applebee’s, on Delta, at JC Penney, and at 53 Bank. They want this level of broad insight because they know it will enable them to make more effective communication decisions and tailor the form, factor, and fashion of these timely communications in order to increase its effectiveness.

But they continue to ask: How?

How do I get this information? How can I create loyalty? How can I create engagement? How can I make the insight I have more actionable? How do I drive the behavior that I need to drive? How do I change the mindset within my organization to be more accommodating and amenable to this new transition?

The answer to each of these is twofold:

(1) Listen.

Listen, not in a lip service fashion, but listen with the belief that there is wisdom in crowds. Listen with the purpose that small is the new big. One blogger, one online community not addressed can have serious impacts on a brand. Being truly committed to listening to and engaging customers requires a corporate mandate guided by a visionary leader who compels the organization to look at their actions and address these questions honestly:

• When companies say they are committed to voice of the customer, yet they are only focused on call center responses, is that a true voice of the customer?
• Or when companies say they are committed to voice of the customer, yet they are only focused on social, mobile and emerging media responses, is that a true voice of the customer?
• Or when companies say they are committed to voice of the customer, yet they only use third party opt-in data, is that a true voice of the customer?

(2) React.

Once you listen you need to react with the purpose to engage and empower the dialogue with your audience. There’s no doubt the pendulum has swung from the brand to the client. For every success story that becomes lore within this new “social community” and “engagement marketing” space, we hear five where the “visionary” that sold them on the new technology that would revolutionize their brand, their company, their product, their offering has failed.

That’s because it comes down to commitment and a realization that the world of marketing is going to be more dynamic now than it has ever been. Customers, clients, employees, brand participants want control. Yet control means engaging in an interactive dialogue with the brand and brand participants. It means making the input for the various channels concise, relevant, interest and actionable.

I was recently at a loyalty conference where one of the speakers purported that we should treat our “best customer” with the best rewards and engagement. I thought to myself, what is your best customer? How do you define that customer and what are the best rewards and engagement for them? There’s no place for this type of old school thinking in this new media market of engagement, loyalty and voice of the customer.

I challenge you to listen — to truly listen — to react, and then to engage.

In April 2010, an astonishing 15 billion online searches were done in the U.S. alone, with Google (and Google sites like YouTube) accounting for over 60 percent of them. Those searches were done by people just like you and me, who are simply trying to find answers to satisfy their needs.

Other than Facebook and e-mail, searching is one of our primary daily activities online. The search interfaces and results pages we’re constantly interacting with are shaping our every day experiences and website expectations. Being the demanding online creatures we are, we expect this experience to continue being richer and more relevant.

But if your site is like most of those out there, you’re failing significantly at meeting your visitor’s ever-demanding expectations from search engines. What I’m referring to is your internal site search and the quality of the experience it provides. Everything from how easy it is to search, to the relevancy of the results, all the way to the actual display of those results. Google has countless engineers constantly tweaking its algorithm and have long realized that providing 10 blue links on a search results page was just, well…lame!

Whereas it’s unrealistic to expect you to invest the resources Google does into optimizing your in-site search experience, it’s still no excuse to turn a blind eye to the emerging trends and changing behaviors of online searchers.

It was in May of 2007 that Google launched “Universal Search” results to provide a richer experience for its searchers. Have your search results caught up to this change three years later? Now it isn’t just Google that’s setting these expectations. There’s a reason why a website like Amazon.com accounts for over 25 percent of all e-commerce transactions in the U.S.

So, it’s safe to say that there are some lessons to be learned, and here are some of them:

5 Googly Lessons to Consider

1. What did you mean? Did you mean “running shoes” when you searched for “sneakers”? Did you spell it “fouton” instead of “futon”? 

 Too many sites do not accommodate misspelling, phonetics, or synonyms, though there’s no shortage in tools that can help. What can be more frustrating than going to a site that has what you want but won’t let you find it?

2. I’ve got nothing to show you. Signs that the world is coming to an end include false prophets, a major plague, and Google displaying “0 Results Found.” Your site shouldn’t either.

If your in-site search engine is unable to match the visitor’s query with a result, suggest intelligent alternatives (extra emphasis on the intelligent part), or at the very least, offer them a list of your most popular products, best rated, etc., or even a phone number to speak to someone to help them.

A zero results page is just the geeky way of telling your visitors “Go away, I don’t want your money.”

3. KISS: Keep it simple, stupid! Google offers a simple search input box and two buttons – that’s it! Nothing fancy, no advanced search.

The advanced part is all done behind the wizard’s curtain and should stay there. Most people are intimidated by advanced search options and contrary to our hopes, have little or no knowledge of search operator commands. Put them at ease with smart links and navigation that can help drill down to find exactly what they’re looking for.

4. Are you showing enough? Chances are, you’re probably not. Think of all the different options on the new Google search interface. If I search for a black cocktail dress, I can sort my results by anything from latest arrivals, to videos, to what’s nearby.

Google Images gives you an expanded view with details of an image, simply by mousing over it. Do your results give people a “quick look” or do they have to click and move on to other pages to see product details?

5. Keep up or get out. Last and definitely not least, keep an eye out for emerging trends. People’s search behaviors will continue to evolve as they become less patient and more savvy. Be prompt in adjusting and accommodating, or your competitors will.

 So, go back to your sites and check if you’re applying any of these five best practices. If you want to learn more, join me at SES San Francisco for the Beyond the Click: What Shoppers Need Now session, where I’ll be sharing some tips and tricks you can do on the algorithm and cosmetic side of your search results pages to take your customer experience and your conversion rates to the next level.

When nonprofit marketing and fundraising programs fail, organizations too frequently blame the tactics. “We tried an email newsletter, but no one read it.” “We sent out a direct mail fundraising letter, but it didn’t raise much money.”

Closer examination of those tactics often reveals that the audience was poorly defined and the message was too generic. If the hammer doesn’t hit the nail on the head, take a look at the skills of the carpenter, not the hammer.

Marketing and fundraising that tries to reach the general public, or everyone, actually reaches very few people (It’s sometimes called spray-and-pray marketing). The general public includes newborns and elders, rich and poor, jet-setters and the homeless.  You don’t want to reach all of those people, and you couldn’t even if you wanted to. So stop trying, and start focusing on the people who really do matter most to your success.

Here are three ways to start defining your target audience.

1.  By Basic Demographics. Are most of your target audience men or women? How old are they? Do they live or work in certain place? Are most a particular ethnic group? Is income or education level relevant? Also consider factors that define how they spend their time. Where are they, and what are they doing there, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. or on weekends? What is their family status? Do they rent or own? Does this group of people tend to have strong likes or dislikes?

Answering questions like these will help you narrow down the general public into more specific groups that you can more easily target with appropriate messaging.

2. By Their Behaviors. What is this group of people doing or not doing related to your cause? Think about your calls to action. Are they doing the right thing, but inconsistently or not in the “right” way?

Let’s say you want businesses to donate products to your fundraising auction. Your committee brainstormed a list of 50 local businesses to ask. To more effectively target this list by behavior, you could separate out the businesses that have donated auction items in previous years for those who have not. Or could separate out those who you know have donated auction items to other nonprofits, but not to yours, and customize your messaging accordingly.

3. By the Stages of Change. If you are trying to convince people to modify their behaviors in significant ways (e.g. to become a reliable annual donor), the Stages of Change may be a helpful way to break down your target audience into smaller groups. The Stages of Change, known more formally as the Transtheoretical Model in health psychology, is often used in social marketing.

The first stage is Pre-contemplation, where the person doesn’t yet acknowledge that a problem or issue exists.  Next is Contemplation, where he acknowledges the problem or is aware of the issue, but has plenty of reasons why he can’t address it. Preparation comes next, where he says, “Okay, I’ll give it a try.” This is the also known as the testing phase. Next is the Action phase, where he is ready to do it and makes that change. The final stage is Maintenance and relapse prevention, where he works to make the behavior a habit.

Here’s how you can apply to this model to defining your fundraising audience. Let’s say you are trying to maximize end-of-year giving. The fundraising letter that you send to someone who has donated to your organization every year at Christmas for the last ten years should be quite different from the letter you are sending to someone who is brand-new to your mailing list. They are at different stages. The first donor is in the “Maintenance” stage because giving to you is already a habit. The new person on your list is not yet a donor. He is probably still in the “Preparation” phase, so your messaging needs to take that into account.

Focusing on specific groups of people, and not the general public, is a sure-fire way to improve your fundraising.

On a recent trip to Italy, I was struck by the pricing gap between “insider deals” you might get if you were a local, and the prices paid by harried newbies who just got off the plane.

It’s price discrimination against the “rich,” or anyone who is new to the scene.

It extends to everything from real estate to pizza slices. And of course, there are probably two sets of grocery stores in some towns. The “tourist” grocery store carries only a limited selection of marked-up wine.

Some towns have free beaches. In “touristy” towns, you mostly have to pay. The water-clarity-and-bikini-density quotient is roughly the same at both, so you figure most people who live there don’t pay for beach space.

Some time ago, Google figured out the “tourist tax” phenomenon, presumably to the benefit of its profit margins. Some have called it a “bozo filter,” but that’s not fair. Tourists aren’t stupid, they’re just trapped, vulnerable, and in a bit too much of a hurry.

Long-standing, loyal advertisers will be less impressed with arbitrary measures to ratchet up click prices, especially when they’ve invested heavily in optimizing their accounts. That relationship settles into a relatively happy equilibrium. Patient advertisers who are willing to build up their “local knowledge” over time can look forward to bargain rates. It’s important to stress, of course, that they’ve optimized a marketing channel over time, so that’s the primary reason for their improving ROI (define) as time progresses. The “tourist tax” I refer to is specifically the initial hump (lasting anywhere from a week to two months), during which it’s particularly daunting for the newbie.

Many new advertisers are unsettled by the initial response to the first draft of their campaigns. There are some common outcomes:

• The advertiser is deterred by the high apparent costs of clicks, or other “scary” metrics like low quality scores, and pauses the campaign (leaves AdWords Nation on the next flight out).
• The advertiser is unsettled or even freaked out by their inability to make things work, and tries to fix things all at once. This might include taking dogmatic views of matching options, cranking bids up and down, etc. No progress occurs, so eventually they have to leave as well.
• The advertiser exhibits more patience, but misses a number of key optimization techniques, and buys into subtle cues in the interface (such as quality scores, “first page bids,” the bid simulator, and “impression share” reports) that make it seem like paying more is almost a requirement. These advertisers may show slight improvement over time but are accepting worse ROI than someone who is relentless in optimization, and who doesn’t take certain click price ranges as “inevitable.”

Seasoned advertisers, on the other hand, exhibit five key traits:

• Much like those who are natives of a “costly” country, they avoid the high-price district as quickly as they can. There are ways to accelerate progress in the short term, so why not compress some of that activity into the early going so you get out of the weird “new account spiral,” a negative feedback loop that feeds you low volume and bad metrics? Some “smart kickoff” activities might include leaving the optimize setting on for ads at first; starting with more granular, highly relevant terms first, and going broad later; bidding high (but not too high) for one to two days to get some data built up on particularly relevant parts of the account; enabling content targeting and optimizing that as well; taking care to walk bids down crisply as progress is made, so as not to exhibit too much irrational demand for your keywords; and more.
• They gain organizational buy-in for paid search, setting reasonable expectations that an initial “tourist tax” will be required, and that the days of setting expectations around 10-cent clicks are long gone. You don’t just set up a big campaign and “lowball” at 10 cents, hoping to cherrypick the odd click. Chances are such a campaign will just sit there.
• They plan to stay the course and run campaigns based on stable brand names and relatively consistent campaign structures, understanding that one factor Google looks at in quality score is the performance of the display URL.
• They manage accounts over a long period of time, with one eye on ROI and one eye on quality score friendliness, and enjoy the “green light” advantage of an established account that make new campaigns and ad groups more likely to gain positive momentum from the outset.
• They learn to tell the difference between helpful and boilerplate Google advice.

Google prefers the seasoned advertisers to the tourists, at the end of the day. But if the tourists are going to keep barging in to disrupt the flow of AdWords Nation – the least they can do is profit from their short-term stays. Your job is to minimize the damage, by thinking like a native.

Good luck on your long-term quest to attain that peaceful, reasonably-priced existence that is eventually extended to full citizens of AdWords Nation.

Events, big and small, have historically been an important marketing tool. Internet Week New York, consisting of over 200 smaller events, and Social Media Day, comprising over 700 Meetups across six continents, show the power of social media to significantly transform the impact of an event to achieve a variety of goals. Social media was a critical component of these events in terms of raising awareness, encouraging participation, and enhancing the experience.

7 Reasons to Add Events to Your Marketing Mix

Events can help marketers attain a variety of business goals whether your firm has a permanent physical presence or not. Here are seven reasons to create and/or participate in events:

1. Create revenue opportunities by offering either additional or related product or by charging admission.
2. Expand reach to new prospects who either hear about and/or attend your events.
3. Build your brand cost-effectively, either directly as the creator of the event or as a sponsor, advertiser, exhibitor, or presenter.
4. Enhance relationships with existing customers.
5. Provide education and/or training related to your offering.
6. Gather consumer input, especially for testing new business ideas and products.
7. Use as an internal tool set to enhance employee team building offsites, annual meetings, or fun outings.

7 Types of Events

From a marketing perspective, consider the type of event and match it with the appropriate social media to achieve your company’s goals. Here are seven options from which to choose.

1. Festivals are often consumer-oriented and include established, recurring events, such as those around holidays like Independence Day or annual events like Fashion Week. The social media version is a Twitter festival organized for social good with offline events. For example, Twestival Global 2010 consisted of 175 offline events focused on education. Company participation can vary from sponsorship to special-related activities.
2. Conferences, including their less structured social media cousins, unconferences, and the online version, virtual conferences. These can be important revenue-generators for businesses. Alternatively, companies can be sponsors, exhibitors, or presenters. For example, ThoughtLead created The Influencer Project. Billed as the world’s shortest conference ever, it presented 60 social media experts in one hour. The event was promoted and shared using #Influencer.
3. Meetings and their social media variant, Meetups, can be organized around business topics such as WordPress or consumer interests such as knitting. For example, SEMPO NY has a Meetup group with over 1,100 members.
4. Classes may be a fee-based line extension to provide skills to enable users to more effectively use your product or a means to encourage additional sales. Online video demonstrations also fall into this category. One great example is WordPress.tv.
5. Webinars – while most frequently used to reach a business audience in order to raise awareness or engage prospects, Webinars can be adapted to help consumers with complex topics like finance.
6. Twitter chats – promoted on Twitter and blogs, these are discussions that occur on Twitter where participants contribute to the conversation using tweets. They are identified through the use of a hashtag. (For a list of Twitter chats, check out this.) One popular example is #blogchat, which occurs Sunday nights.
7. Tweetups – formally or informally organized real-life meetings promoted via Twitter. Location-based services like Foursquare also enable impromptu gatherings at a specific location. For example, Boston and Chicago have regularly planned events.

7 Ways to Use Social Media to Promote Your Events

Social media expands the reach of your event while generating content that can be used to promote your events.

1. Organize events. Use of products like Meetup.com and Eventbrite facilitate keeping on top of meeting details.
2. Provide venues for the online participation in events using Twitter and Facebook, for example.
3. Promote events with a variety of media formats such as blogs, Facebook, and Twitter to encourage participation. Enhance the reach of your event by making content about it socially shareable. To this end, create a unique event hashtag like #smday to aid findability across social media platforms.
4. Enhance live events by providing concurrent commentary and capturing salient ideas using Twitter, live blogging, and live streaming. For example, moderators at live panels can incorporate comments and questions sourced from Twitter.
5. Extend audience for live events via online participation both in real time and on-demand. For example, the contents of Facebook’s F8 conference are available on its site.
6. Enable attendee interaction through Twitter, blog posts and comments, blogs, video, photographs, and Facebook. For example, check out the highly popular NY Tech Meetup’s page.
7. Record and post record of events via Facebook, blogs, video, and photo sharing. For example, here’s the record of Social Media Day on Flickr.

7 Metrics to Track Event Success

As with any marketing program, it’s critical to measure your results to determine their effectiveness. Among the salient measures to track are:

1. Participants. Monitor separately how many people attended your event live and online.
2. Shares of event-related content. Users that share feel strongly enough to spread word of your event to their contacts. Remember that sharing can happen across a wide range of platforms.
3. User-generated content created in a variety of formats including tweets, comments, check-ins on location-based services, blog posts, photographs, and video. In addition to tracking the number of comments and uploads, assess the sentiment of the contributions to determine how they reflect on your company and brand.
4. House file. As a result of this event, how many new prospects registered to receive your e-mails, catalogs, tweets, RSS feeds, or other forms of content?
5. Media attention. Did the event garner additional media attention? How large was the audience for this “free reach” and what were its demographics?
6. Revenues. Did you generate additional sales of product via new streams or any other related revenues such as training or conference fees?
7. Expenses. What was the cost in terms of the event and related marketing? Was additional headcount needed to support the event?

In addition, don’t forget to track less quantifiable variables. For example, did the event improve employee moral or brand recognition?

While events in themselves don’t constitute a total marketing strategy, they can be an important component of the mix, since they provide benefits for both marketers and consumers. By using social media to enhance your events, you can extend your reach while providing additional means to connect with your firm.