CityVoice Blog

As you’re reading this, there is probably a little chat window on your computer screen with Cartoon Katie asking to talk. Chances are, you will choose not to talk to me (yes, it is really me not a robot or outsourced to a different country. But no, I am not really a cartoon). Just like the chances are you will not pick up the phone and call us, where once again I will most likely answer. Clearly, my goal is to be completely unavoidable if you want to contact us J. So, today I want to take a look at the statistics of chatting.

Over the summer, since June 1st, 14268 of you have visited our website. Some of you have stopped by more than once, and some have stumbled across us on accident while looking for a City Voice in France, which is actually a flatlands BMX contest. Sorry to disappoint! But of all these people, BMX enthusiasts included, less than one percent of you have chatted with me, and that makes me sad. It’s still less than one percent when I include all of the “dead” chats, where someone clicked chat on accident and then clicked out. You folks are about 20 times more likely to submit a form or call. Let’s examine the contact breakdown.

So 80% of you would like to just submit a form and go. I get that, it’s convenient and you may not have the time to talk at the time. Another potential theory would be that it is the most impersonal form of contact; therefore it is preferable. That argument falls apart though. Theoretically, it would follow that you are more likely to chat than call, but as we’ve seen that’s not the case; you’re still three times more likely to call. Let’s look at that graphically.

Another interesting way to look at how often I get to chat with site users is the time of day. Clearly, I only chat when I’m at work, and usually around midday. Interestingly, chats are clustered around the end of lunch time and the end of the day, which makes sense. But when I remove all of the dead chats, most of the conversions happen in the morning. So mornings I’ll likely have less chats, but more fulfilling ones. For this graph I’ve removed all non-lead chats, which are basically randos who are a) friendly b) bored, or c) need someone to talk to.

So throughout this post we’ve learned a little about the brave one percent of you who’ve decided to chat. My hope is that more of you will take this leap of faith and either chat with me, or another chat operator somewhere out there in the vastness of the internet. Happy Chatting!

There’s plenty of do it yourself info out there about online advertising, and yes, you can do it and get results. In a previous post, “To Insource or Outsource, that is the Marketing Question,” we ran across some of the do it yourself advice that covers the internet. Normally, I’m all for doing it yourself; seriously, I grow my own herbs and vegetables and have a very pink tool kit.

But some things like installing a garage, wiring a chandelier, and yes, internet marketing as well, are just better done by an expert. Let’s take a look at a company that ran their own Paid Search compared to CityVoice running it. The results are for the same amount of time, 1 month, and both used exactly the same budget. In reference to the graph, CityVoice brought in 62 calls compared to the 21 calls the individual was able to generate. That’s about 3 times as many calls. So, 3 times as many calls for the same budget, which means for a customer the cost per call is 1/3.

Why is there such a difference? Let’s see, they ran ads to the same website, so it’s not a conversion difference, it’s a marketing one. That means the difference lies in campaign management. It was the writing of the ads, coordinating the budget, deciding when to run the ads and tracking campaign effectiveness that made the difference. I would personally guess a major part is simply the time aspect. For a campaign manager, this is their job. He or she devotes at least 8 hours a day to monitoring the campaign, while for a business owner this is something that gets squeezed in amongst the many other things running the business.

When I think about business data I like to group into 3 major categories: bottom line data, marketing data and customer data. Now, these categories aren’t mutually exclusive; there will be overlap between them and that is a good thing. Let’s take a look at these categories and the reasoning behind them in more detail.

Marketing Data: Marketing data doesn’t always start out as marketing data, sometimes it is just really cool data that you’re compelled to share! Intentional marketing data is how you track your effectiveness so that you have proven results to sell your company with. This stuff is great, it says you have 98% client retention rate or that you drive x many calls to customers. Most of the time marketing data is in the form of an average or a specific case study example.

“Our average HVAC customer gets 62 calls during the summer.”

But a lot of the really meaty marketing data comes from the little data nuggets that show up when you’re looking for something else. These are little interesting facts that let your market know just how deep you drill down.

A true example: “Contractors get the most calls on the Mondays following pay day.”

Bottom Line Data: For me this is data that has the potential to affect your business’s bottom line and day to day operations. This data takes a variety of forms: workplace data, customer data and industry data. Workplace data can be any information about how your company works whether it’s the prime number of outgoing calls, average job time or how long it takes your team to reach clients. Customer data is what you’ve gathered about your customers. It lets you gain insight into how effective you are. Industry data is also key; it keeps you up-to-date on what’s going on in your industry and how to change your business to be competitive.

An example of Bottom Line Data: “It takes technicians 34 minutes to reach their next job and 1 call to get directions; by fitting out our trucks with GPS’ we’ve lowered the time to 27 minutes. This means happier customers and less frustrated technicians arriving on the job.”

Customer Data: This is the data you share with your customers, it comes in the form of monthly or weekly reports or dashboards that your customers log in and access.

These stats are great because a) they’re interesting, and b) they allow you to show your expertise, and most importantly, they help you build your brand and close deals.

Since we’re in the market of search, it’s only fitting that we track users’ search usage trends. Basically this tells us where most searchers are going and how the trends are changing, plus how much Google is taking over the world. Let’s take a look at 2007 onwards. I’ve put the data into two different graphs so we can look at it in a multitude of ways! I’m just so helpful that way.

As you can see, the lion’s-share of searches occur on Google, which to most people is unsurprising. In 2009 Google peaked; on the line graph there is a peak that corresponds to the pie chart, where Google represents Pac-Man devouring the other search engines. Why doesn’t that upwards trend from 2007 – 2009 continue for Google? The answer lies in Microsoft’s shenanigans. In 2009 they shifted their focus from MSN search to Bing, coupling it with a major advertising campaign. In 2010, the major search engines, Google & Yahoo!, showed a shift downwards. Bing did not. Bing not only shot a lasso onto Google’s upward trend, but brought Yahoo! down as well, affecting the whole market.

What does that mean for your online advertising budget? Put your money where the people are! Begin with advertising on Google, and then if you’ve got enough of a budget allocate some to Yahoo! and Bing, throw a little that way too. Always remember to take into account your prime customers. If everyone in your area searches on Yahoo!, it behooves you to advertise there.

In the final part of our “Seven Things to Know about Online Marketing,” we arrive at a melodramatic title proclaiming one thing is everything. But here’s the thing, if you don’t bother to track, the other six things we’ve talked about are worthless. Remember the black hole we threw money into without tracking?

Or if you’re not fond of black holes, you can willfully not track and careen off the guarantee pitfall.

What I’m trying to say is that tracking empowers you; it gives you knowledge over your marketing budget and the ability to put your money where the callers are. Yes, your online marketer will track for you; calls, forms, click throughs and web visits. But honestly? None of it matters unless you’re tracking your revenue. Let’s take a look at what revenue tracking looks like:

You go in and listen to your calls, or simply cross check the phone numbers, and tag the revenue. Then you have an idea of how much each marketing campaign is generating for you and if it’s worth your investment. Track it on your own spreadsheet or in your online marketer’s portal, even on brightly colored napkins in gel pens, I’m not picky. But track it all separately, so you can tell the origin of each call. This means separate numbers, maybe even separate landing pages, but it is the only way to get the full value of your marketing budget. Anything less is a travesty.

Quick Recap of our 7 Things to Know About Online Marketing:

1: SEO vs. SEM

2: I Would like the Combo, Please.

3: To Insource or to Outsource, that is the Marketing Question!

4: Choosing the Right Company

5: Why you Have to Read ALL of the Contract!

6: Avoiding the Results- Guarantee Pitfall

7: Tracking is Everything

Tune in for our next blog talking about Search Usage Trends and how Google is on a mission to dominate the world!

Yes, I know the title of this blog seems pretty counter intuitive, but isn’t it true? If you’re anything like me, you’ve bought a product because it had a great guarantee, but when you tried to get your electric toothbrush replaced under the guaranteed warranty you found out that it really wasn’t guaranteed at all. In my experience, guarantees are just pretty selling points that are just a few words on a page that have a lot of extra terms and conditions, in other words everything, under which that guarantee doesn’t apply. They suck. I’m not alone in this; Urban Dictionary defines the word guarantee as “the inverse of trust.”

Online marketing isn’t an exact game, it’s not like saying we’re building you this tv that will turn on every time you want it to. Any marketing strategy is the same. We can do our best to predict other people’s behavior, but because we can’t dictate it we can’t guarantee it. I truly can’t say “even in a month with absolutely perfect weather where nobody will turn on their AC, I can get you 50 air conditioning calls.”

Companies that do results driven guarantees run into a lot of problems because ultimately there will be months where they can’t hit that promise, but they still expect to get paid. Then, two different things might happen: the first is they swallow that loss and retool your campaign. The second and more likely outcome is that they get shady. Getting shady means they’ll call you on your tracked line and still count those phone calls in your monthly call report so it looks like you’ve hit the calls per month. Or they might get shady less directly. They’ll shift around your campaign by either opening up the area showing ads (meaning you get calls outside your service area) or advertise for services you don’t offer (plumbers that don’t do drain cleaning will get drain cleaning calls).

The other thing you want to avoid is the pitch of campaigns run by an algorithm or computer program. They’ll make it sound great, but what is it really? It’s a set and forget strategy. They punch your info into the computer and let it take over, hoping it will all work out. Computers are great. They’re better than me at math, but they can only respond to what they’ve been told to look for. However, there are a multitude of possible campaign problems or opportunities that can arise that a computer simply isn’t programmed deal with. For example, in San Antonio we recently had a really bad lightening storm that wrecked a lot of AC units. So in the days after the storm we upped our local contractor’s budgets to catch the customer surge. I’d like to see a non weather monitoring computer do that!

Tune in for the final part of our “Seven Things to Know About Online Marketing” series; “Tracking is Everything!”

You’ve heard it before: “Don’t sign anything without reading it!” But if you’re like the rest of us, you’ve probably also just skimmed those 15 page contracts of size 8 font written in incomprehensible legal jargon then signed it with a sigh. It can be hard to want to take your time with the sales person staring you down or pressuring you over the phone; after all you’ve got such a great relationship and trust them, right? I mean that’s why you’re going with them, because they seem honest.

Please, please, please for your business (and yourself) take the time to read it. I’m an optimist at heart and I truly believe that people aren’t out to deceive eachother, but they may not mention all of those pesky terms and conditions when gunning for commission. I was recently apartment hunting and did a ton of research online only to come across warnings about apartment contracts that allow for ANY of their employees to enter your apartment at any time for any reason and don’t have to tell you about it. No thank you! Unless you have a reason, please don’t let these 10 strangers walk into my apartment because they feel like it. Fortunately, my lovely new apartment doesn’t have that clause in its contract. But if it had, I would have simply crossed it out, initialed beside it, and then discussed it with the leasing agent before signing.

When looking at internet marketing you don’t need to worry about authorized strangers in your home. You instead need to fret over what you will own at the end of the relationship. Many, many online marketing companies retain the rights to everything they do for you; That means you don’t own your website, any of its content, the domain, or any phone numbers they’ve leased you. But I doubt that’s something they mention upfront, “Hey, so if you don’t want to keep working with us we rip your entire internet presence off the web. Then give that domain and really similar website to one of your competitors in your city.” Not cool. I’m not saying the relationship will end, or that it will end badly, I just feel that everyone should know exactly what they’re getting into and be prepared.

Some questions to ask (and answers to read for) when dealing with contracts:

What do I own in this relationship?

• It might be that big fat nothing. No website, no logo and no phone number.

What happens to any extra budget I may have when I’m ready to terminate?

• If they say we’ll run it until we’ve exhausted your budget, ask if that means you’ll be charged their management fees for however many months that takes.

Is there a clause that your fees will unexpectedly change (hike) and you don’t have the choice to end it without termination fees?

• This is a pretty common clause across everything. It’s just nice to be aware of it.

What type of notice do you have to give when leaving or changing your service in any way?

• Say you’re getting a ton of work and want to lower your budget or suspend your campaign, will they do it immediately or do you have to wait until two weeks from now?

There are plenty more questions to ask, so we’re working on a whole list of helpful questions to use when shopping around for the best marketing fit. But in the meantime, I’ll get off my high, preachy horse and let you sign your contracts your way. Tune in later for the sixth part of our “Seven Things to Know about Online Marketing” series: “The Guarantee Pitfall.”

So in our “Choose Your own Adventure” of “7 Things to Know about Online Marketing” we’ve chosen to outsource, right? Now we’re doing our research and getting bombarded with “pie-in-the-sky” salesmen over the phones. Aaack! How do you pick a company that will be the right fit from all of your options?

I suppose I could make things easy and just say, “hey you’re reading this blog so pick us,” but like all Voicers I want you to find the best fit for your company, even if that isn’t with us That means picking the most knowledgeable online marketers for your industry! We are great at what we do, mainly because we take the time to become experts in our specialized industries, which is what you want from your online marketers. But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s look at what makes a marketing company specialized in an industry:

• They belong to your organizations and participate in speaking engagements in your industry.

• They go to your tradeshows (with specialized collateral).

• At least 10% of their clients are in your industry (Why 10%, Katie? This helps cut out businesses that claim to be specialized in 50+ industries, when in reality that’s just being generalized).

• They can provide you with honest, incentive free referrals in your industry that are willing to talk about their marketing company.

That’s all fine and dandy, but why does it really matter? You might also be wary because specialized marketing companies might be working with your competitors (expect a whole blog on this topic!). Let’s look at it this way: If I needed heart surgery and had the choice between a heart surgeon and a podiatrist to perform the surgery, I would clearly pick the heart surgeon right? Sure, they’re both doctors and both great at what they do, but I want the one who excels at what I need. Just like feet and hearts are different so is search marketing for different industries. It takes a ton of research and experience to know how to write the most effective ads, pick the correct keywords, and advertise at the right times to catch client surges. A marketer who specializes in travel will have a hard time doing this for a dentist. Yes, he knows the basics, but is his knowledge of the basics good enough for your company?

Mull that question over while you wait for our next post! Next, let’s take a look at our 5^th thing to know about online marketing, “Contracts: Yes, You Need to Read ALL of it.” Tune in, learn something and hear about my adventures leasing an apartment.

The internet is a funny place to navigate. You have everything from blogs (guilty!) and company websites to a plethora of do-it-yourself websites made by self-proclaimed experts.  Seriously, you can even learn how to install a garage door by yourself with a step-by-step guide on how to not get accidentally crushed in the process.  The same applies to online marketing; there is a ton of information, a lot of it conflicting, out there on the web if you're willing to dig through it.  When you're considering whether your company should keep your online marketing in house or outsource it to a specialized company there are a few good questions to ask:

• Does someone in your company have the time to devote to learning internet marketing, then run it on a daily basis while still being able to perform their other duties?
• Will they know if you are getting comparable results to other companies in your industry?

• Will they be able to effectively track and identify which calls came from the different internet marketing campaigns and the revenue gained?

For me at least, the third question is the most important! If you can't track the entire process from origin to revenue, you're throwing your marketing money down a black hole. We all know that marketing costs money and that you probably don't want to pay management fees when that's money you could be using online.  But let's consider looking at it this way: to afford a dedicated in-house PPC campaign manager, an analyst, a marketing director and a graphic designer would run you about $18,000 a month. Comparatively, that makes outsourcing to experts look quite affordable. If it's affordable to your company, outsourcing allows you to focus on what you do best, your business. It allows you all the benefits of industry experts working on your marketing campaign, without costing you an arm and a leg.

Now, like a "Choose your own adventure" book, we'll take a look at the next step in choosing to outsource.  Tune back in to discuss "How to Choose the Right Company."

"I Would Like the Combo, Please."

While combo deals are bad for your waistline, they/re usually great for your marketing! On Tuesday, we took a look at the differences between SEM and SEO, but today I want to take a look at the interactions between the two.  From a data perspective, the interaction is pretty exciting because it is a synergistic, rather than additive, effect.  Basically, this means that the total benefits are greater than the sum of both parts. Why is this exciting, you ask? Well, because it means that you're getting more bang for your buck, like a free supersize on your combo meal!

Let's look at it from a numbers perspective using May 2010 data:

SEM Plumbers: Average 21 Calls 

SEO Plumbers: Average 31 Calls

Combo Plumbers: 124 Calls

Do you see how big the difference is? It's giant and I've done a lot of digging into why! By showing both PPC ads along the top and having your company name show up organically, you appear at least twice (three times if you're on maps) on the first page.  The more times you appear before the consumer the more credibility they assign to you, and consequently the more branding you build. It gives an inherent sense of trustworthiness to your company, which if you go by a textbook explanation, is the number one contributor to credibility.  Credibility is huge for most industries; people only want credible trustworthy contractors in their homes or credible doctors and dentists working on their body.  I like to think of the multiple first page spots giving you almost the same credibility level as if a friend had referred you to the customer.  So Google, Yahoo & Bing are a) your friends and b) kind of like clients you want to keep as happy as possible so they give your business referrals. Your online marketer's job is to focus on keeping friends Google, Yahoo! & Bing "happy" so you can focus on keeping all of your human clients happy.

So now that everyone's happy and has super sized combo meals to feast on, let's recap. SEM does great for immediate marketing needs, SEO gets you to the coveted first page spots and the combo meal does both while brining in a boatload of extra callers, which in turn leads to a boatload of extra revenue. Next, I want to delve into the 3^rd topic of our series, "To Insource or Outsource, that is the Marketing Question."

For our inaugural post I would like to begin with a series called "Seven Things to Know About Online Marketing."  This series stems from things we and our customers feel are important here in the City.

Let's get to the nitty-gritty between Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising versus Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Marketing companies often throw around acronyms and words like SEO, SEM, and "white hat" policies, but what does it all mean for your business?  Pay Per Click advertising is in reference to the sponsored links spots, the first two ads on the top and the links along the right hand side of the page.  These ads are paid for only when a user clicks the link and visits the website, allowing a business to start advertising and immediately see results in web traffic.  Whether these results lead to revenue depends on the targeting of the ad, in terms of advertising for the correct search terms, and the effectiveness of the website in converting visitors to customers.

In contrast, the goal of SEO is to get your website listed in the unpaid search section where your company can be seen by searchers without having to buy the sponsored link ads.  CityVoice's SEO goal is to get you on the first page, because first page listings see an average of 60% more web traffic than PPC websites. Getting to the first page takes time to build that placement. It is achieved through targeted content, linking, web traffic and many other factors. Most companies want both immediate results and that longstanding marketing return of first page placement, which is why the most effective online advertising is a combination of both SEO and Pay-Per-Click.  With Pay-per-Click you get the immediate results while building for a bigger return in the long run with SEO.  We will talk more about this in the next post.

I hope this has helped clarify the two main types of search marketing for you.  If you're looking for more information I recommend checking out CityVoice's page at http://cityvoice.com/whatwedo/default.asp#Search_Engine_Marketing_Services, or just asking us!  Tune in on Tuesday June 29^th for the 2^nd part of this series, "The Combination of SEO and SEM, Statistically Speaking."

Welcome to the CityVoice blog! I'm very excited for this launch and to begin sharing my knowledge about topics such as search marketing, marketing & data for small businesses, customer service and anything else that catches my fancy.  Since you will be traveling through my mind it's only fitting I introduce myself.  At CityVoice I like to think of myself as Chief of the Data Police, but to HR my job title is Analyst.

My favorite part of my job is finding little "data nuggets," those unexpected really awesome little statistics that pop out of data sets.  You'll hear a lot of about them when I find them and see them sprinkled throughout these posts.  Besides playing in data land and R for data visualization, at work I also get to be the CityVoice.com live chat representative, eat snacks and throw out marketing ideas.

Outside of work I love to try new recipes (attempting sweet potato curry tonight), do pilates, keep in touch with friends from college (University of Virginia Wahoowah!), and plan my return to Europe.  Right now I'm also obsessed with the World Cup.

Back on the blog front, tune in tomorrow for the beginning of our inaugural series "Seven Things to Know about Online Marketing," we will be looking at the differences between SEM and SEO! If you've got any questions, comments or ideas comment here or email me at Kathryn@cityvoice.com