A New Year, A New Perspective

There is something magical about this time of year. The weather turns cooler (unless you live in Houston), all the stores are decorated with twinkling lights, and days are full of anticipation- either for a break from work, or to spend time with family for the holidays. There is also something about this time of year that causes you to reflect on the time that has past. You may feel nostalgic, joyful, pleased, successful, depressed (though we hope not so much!). Not matter how you feel in your reflections of the past year, perhaps the most exciting thing about the end of the year is the chance to start a new year. A chance to make changes and a chance at new success.

If you haven’t already assessed where your company stands, you most likely will before the calendar reads January 1, 2008. This is also a great time to assess your marketing. Are you positioned where you think you should be? How are your sales? Are you conveying a clear message about who you are and what you provide? Are you reaching your target audience? Even if you feel you have been successful at all of these things, is there something more you could be doing?

The Marion Group is excited about a new service that we are providing that will help answer many of these questions as well as give you an overall evaluation of where you stand in your market. The Marion marketing team has been hard at work developing a system to help companies with brand equity & brand management. In fact, we have already put the service into use as we are helping our clients prepare marketing plans and strategies for the 2008 year.

The essence behind our Brand Equity & Brand Management services is to help our clients develop a clear image of themselves as well as a unified message to portray to your target market. By assessing your market in light of the industry you are in and the product or services you provide, we can help you to create and deliver a brand experience that will impact your customers at many different points of contact.

If you would like more information about our Brand Equity & Brand Management services or would like to know if this service will be beneficial for your company, please contact Chris Pascoe at The Marion Group. Also, check our website soon for more information on this service.

Happy Holidays from The Marion Group, and we hope you are looking forward to a fresh start and a Happy New Year.

Avoid Crisis! Spend your Marketing Dollars to Create a Sound Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Strategy

A company once spent a great deal of money promoting a new product. They pumped it on radio, TV, even on their own website. However, they didn’t have a sound search engine marketing (SEM) strategy. In fact, they didn’t have a SEM strategy at all. The results of this promotion? When consumers went to Google or Yahoo and did a search for the product, the product’s webpage didn’t even come up on the first page of results, but some “imposter” sites sure did.

Not convinced that you need SEM? A recent article on http://www.adage.com/ by Matt Creamer states that a very popular company had a similar situation, but the top “imposter” sites produced by search engines actually took the consumer to porn websites.

Ok, so now you’re probably thinking that maybe SEM is something to look into, but what is it? Search engine marketing is the process of incorporating search engine optimization into a company’s marketing strategy. Search engine optimization, commonly referred to as SEO basically means creating ways that search engines such as Google and Yahoo will pick up your website in an organic search (not a paid search) and that you’re link will be at the top of the search results.

There are three ways to optimize so that the search engines will pick up your links:

1. Choose keywords that consumers use when searching for your site or services and strategically place them on the pages of your website. There is actually an art to this as you don’t want to sound repetitive in your text.
2. Make sure that your site is navigable and has page titles that clearly state the information to be presented on the page. Sites that are confusing to navigate have a harder time being picked up by search engines. It is also a good idea to include a site map.
3. Use outside sources with content containing links to your site. Blogs, press releases, and social- media networks like Tweeter, and Squidoo, and directory listings on Yahoo Directory, Business.com, AllBusiness.com, and thomasnet.com. Adding links to your site on these popular sites will, in turn, help your site to become more popular.

SEM is very important, and it is much easier to plan from the beginning than it is to attempt to salvage your site once you’ve gone into crisis mode like the companies stated previously. You can’t just hope that your site will be optimized if you’ve made no effort to do so. When you have decided to promote a certain product or service of your company, before you do much else, talk with your marketing team or agency about how to optimize your site for that particular product or service, so when your consumers go to search engines to find your site, they actually find you and not an “imposter” you.