Boosting Your Sales and Distribution Through Online Marketing

When people think of online marketing, they usually think one of three things: e-commerce, B2B lead generation or flashy ads from Fortune 500 companies. But, if you sell a consumer packaged good (CPG) at retail stores – the bricks and mortar kind – online marketing could be your secret weapon to grow your sales and distribution.

You’ve probably heard of email marketing, SEO and social. But simply engaging in these tactics will not necessarily deliver results. The key to success is having a strategy that can engage and activate your customer base – both existing and potential customers.

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“You learn more from failure than you do from success but the key is to fail early, fail cheaply, and don’t make the same mistake twice.” – Former Proctor & Gamble CEO, A.G. Lafley

We love this philosophy because it has so many important lessons – “always try new ideas,” “make sure you have data to learn from,” “be smart about how you allocate budget” and on and on. And while this philosophy helped Proctor and Gamble go from a 15-20% success rate with new products in the 1990’s to a 50% success rate more recently, it is not an approach that only the biggest companies can afford.

So, what does this have to do with Food, Beverages, Email and Social Media? Cost-effectively using online marketing to build a successful food and beverage brand, of course!
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Web Page Optimization is a critical marketing activity that combines search engine optimization (SEO) and website usability to ensure that your website continuously improves as the marketplace evolves. Web Page Optimization occurs on an ongoing basis on existing websites to help websites avoid staying static and uninteresting to customers. Web Page Optimization is designed to accomplish the following:

• Your business has an increasing amount of organic traffic because customers are finding your website via search engines and social media;
• Your customers increasingly interact with you when they visit your website (ie. “helping your customer further down the conversion funnel“);
• Your website is a thriving, continuously improving channel for sales, leads and signups. Continue Reading »

Every month, people in the United States type in the keyword “jeans” more 20 Million times (that’s 20,000,000) on Google. The #1 show on TV last week, NBC’s Sunday Night Football, had less than half that amount of viewers (9.7MM, 18-49). Think about it. Any jeans manufacturer buying an ad on TV could at most reach only half the people they would reach if they bought that keyword on Google. And the people they reach on Google, by virtue of the fact that they are searching for “jeans”, would be exponentially more qualified as targets for a jeans marketing campaign. But this about jeans, not TV vs. Search.

TV is a fantastic media for reaching new customers but it is also expensive if you are a growing company without endless marketing dollars. Search provides a window to reach more customers than most companies could ever imagine and on a pay-as-you-go basis. And for that reason, it presented a perfect opportunity for us to conduct a thorough analysis of the online jeans market. From household names to fledgling brands, we found winning strategies and areas of opportunity that we think are worth pointing out to our clients. Continue Reading »

On occasion, a member of the Thrivepoint team will look online for a product that he or she has a close connection with and provide some unsolicited advice. Maybe it’s a favorite childhood food. Or maybe it’s great smelling candles from back home. It could be just about anything. This time we have chosen Hartley’s Potato Chips. And unless you grew up in Lewistown, Pennsylvania (or know someone who did), you probably haven’t heard of them.

The potato chip market is a $15+ Billion dollar a year industry. There are a few leaders, such as Lays, Pringles, Cape Cod, Zapps and Wise, but there are also a lot of smaller companies out there that have a distribution range of a hundred miles (if that). These companies can use the Internet to increase their sales and distribution.

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We examined the different types of search marketing firms earlier this year in our whitepaper: “The Anatomy of Search Marketing Firms”. But should a business outsource search engine optimization (aka SEO) in the first place?

The answer depends on your business. In some cases, the smart decision for a business is to outsource SEO to a marketing services company. In other cases, it makes sense to bring it in-house which could mean hiring consultants, hiring full-time staff, or asking existing engineers, copy writers and marketers to incorporate SEO into their work. Every business is unique and determining the your business’ needs, objectives and resources is the first step to answering this question.

What follows is an outline of the questions every business should ask itself before bringing SEO in-house or shipping it off to an SEO firm. Continue Reading »

There is a growing urgency for marketers to have a Facebook and Twitter social marketing strategy. With announcements and articles about these popular social networks coming out at lightning speed, it is easy to get caught up in the buzz and to jump right in.

The problem is that the current state of social marketing is much like online marketing was 10 years ago when every channel – search, email, affiliate, display – was lumped into the same general “online marketing” category and marketing strategies were applied uniformly across all. In the time since, the industry has evolved to understand that these channels have unique opportunities for engagement and should be managed as such.

Social marketing is in that same early stage with many marketers treating Twitter and Facebook the same by simply synching their Twitter Tweets with their Facebook Newsfeed. What gets lost in the excitement is that Facebook and Twitter offer completely different opportunities for brand building, direct marketing and customer engagement. Continue Reading »

One of the reasons (aside from great performance) that Google Adwords and other search advertising has become so popular is the ability to optimize campaigns “on the fly”. With unprecedented control in a self-service interface, the user controls budget, pricing, targeting and creative within a simple, easy-to-learn interface. But with all this control comes the downside of “over-optimization”.

Have you ever been too hot and turned down your air-conditioner only to find that you are too cold later? And then you turn the AC back up only to find that you are too hot later? The difficulty getting it just right is, in effect, what happens with over-optimizing search: The user logs in, changes all the parameters (keywords, bids, creative, etc.) to improve results and then finds that they did too much. So they log back in and make a number of similar changes to correct the campaign; except the campaign quickly goes back the other way. This happens to too many search campaigns and the following is intended to provide a brief guide on how to avoid over-optimization: Continue Reading »

Links are a critical component of ranking well in organic search listings. They are also one of the most difficult parts of a search engine optimization (SEO) program. Some SEOs will offer a quick fix and guaranteed results to improve a client’s rankings with their link-building programs. Oftentimes the campaigns deliver positive results at first. But in the long term, the client is usually left with a hefty bill to pay and no quality links to show for it. What happened?

Quality links from quality sites are hard to come by without effort. They require extended efforts to build, and the approach to achieving a long-lasting quality link can be manual, tedious and very time intensive. At the very least, it is an ongoing effort; not a one time, quick-hit activity. Continue Reading »

The following is an excerpt from the whitepaper, “The Anatomy of Search Marketing Firms: An Insider Look at Search Marketing Service Operations.”

Every marketer wants the best toolset to be used for their campaigns, but search marketing software is developed by a wide range of companies. Knowing who is behind development and maintenance of the software is just as important as knowing what features it offers because the costs and effectiveness of software varies by developer and can significantly affect the outcome of a campaign. It is crucial that clients clearly understand the benefits, limitations and market readiness of the software its employees and agencies use and the developers who make them.

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