I’m always surprised companies do not test or refresh their ad copy on a regular basis.  It is not enough to simply make changes to your ad copy during the holiday season or when you want to run a special promotion (10% Off for the Month of May!).  It is important to tailor your message during the holiday season, especially for online retailers who rely on holiday sales, and that message is probably different than the rest of the year, so it makes sense to have different ad copy running during the holidays.

In addition, you probably do not offer a special discount all year round, so a “10% Off” promotion dictates special ad copy as well.  However, testing and refreshing ad copy should be a continual process in search engine marketing.  It’s quite helpful that Google (and your target audience) provide the test platform you need to make the right decisions about choosing the most effective message.

At MoreVisibility, we create multiple ads for every campaign and rely on real time statistics to show which ad copy is effective and which is not.  Regardless of the time of year or the promotion you are running, you should create multiple ads for your campaigns and continually test their effectiveness.  Google makes this campaign optimization process very easy, because you can set your campaigns so the best performing ad is displayed more often while you rotate multiple ads. 

As you see that one ad is outperforming another, create new and fresh ad copy and replace the poor performers with these new ads.  Reset the Google settings in your campaign to rotate your ads equally so you can start to gather click-thru data on the new ads in addition to the best performing ad you kept active.  Once you have enough quantifiable data, change the settings in Google to optimize the ad delivery and see if any of the new ads become your new best performer.  By doing this testing and refreshing of ad copy, you can zero in on the best marketing message that will drive more traffic to your site and keep you focused on optimizing your campaigns.

The bottom line, do not rely on the time of year or a special promotion to dictate when you change your marketing message in your Pay per Click (PPC) campaigns.  The better option is to allow your potential customers to tell you what works and what doesn’t.  Continually adding and testing new ad copy will provide you with the best feedback a business can have: unsolicited customer feedback!

When I first moved to Florida, everyone asked if I was fluent in Spanish.  Outside of the few essential phrases such as, “Hello, my name is Amber” and “Where is the bathroom”, unfortunately I can’t say that I know much.  My best friend is completely fluent in Spanish and I envy her ability to communicate in situations where I am not able to.  This brings me to the question, how important is it to be familiar with the Hispanic market and language?

According to WikiPedia, Spanish is the second most common language in the United States, after English. There are more Spanish speakers in the U.S. than there are speakers of French, Hawaiian, and Native American languages combined. According to the 2006 American Community Survey conducted by the United States Census Bureau, Spanish is the primary language spoken at home by over 34 million people aged 5 or older. The U.S. is home to more than 40 million Hispanics, making it the world’s fifth-largest Spanish-speaking community after Mexico, Colombia, Spain, and Argentina.

As a marketing professional, that’s a pretty large segment to ignore in your marketing efforts. With 23 million US Hispanics online and 80% of them searching for information, Hispanic-focused SEM should be considered for any online marketing strategy.  However, you might not know how or where to start.  Is search the best way to reach the Hispanic market?   Do you need a Spanish translation of your website?  If you have a Hispanic CPC campaign, do you need to write the ad copy in Spanish?   Etc.

Below are some steps to follow when launching a U.S. Hispanic-focused SEM campaign

1. English & Spanish. Test both languages when setting up campaigns to reach U.S. Hispanics. According to Comscore Media Metrix, 52% of online Hispanics are English dominant, 21% are Spanish dominant, and 27% are bilingual. It best to test both to see what brings in the highest conversion rate.

2. Proper Translation. Translations can be very tricky. If you would like to use a Spanish keyword list in your CPC campaigns, it is important that you have a native Spanish speaker to put the keyword list together instead of using a translation tool. There are several different dialects to consider and it is important for the translation to come across exactly as you mean for it to. 

3. Creative Ad Copy.   If you try to write ad copy in Spanish, you will often find that you run out of character space.  It is more challenging to write a “catchy” ad, when faced with character limitations.  Therefore, make sure that you have someone who not only writes well in Spanish, but someone who can creatively say what they need to say in 70 characters or less. 

4. Test Proper Landing Pages.  Getting people to click on your ad is only half the battle.  Getting people to engage with your site is the other half.  If you test the keywords and ad copy in Spanish, make sure you send the visitor to a Spanish page and vice versa.  Part of Google’s quality score for an ad, is the relevancy between the ad and the landing page.  Make sure the transition from the ad to the landing page, is clear for the visitor. It will result in better conversions.

5. Reach The Right Demographic. Search is utilized on both a national and local level. The U.S. Hispanic market makes us several different parts of the US. Consider your product/service, and make sure you are targeting the right demographic.

There has been a lot of hype and promotion recently with regard to incorporating Social Media into a company’s online marketing strategy.  Some of the biggest challenges are “how do we incorporate social media into our marketing strategy?”  And, “how is this going to help us grab a person’s attention?”

Well CNN gets it.  And you should too.  If you are wondering how to engage a larger audience and keep them engaged, check out how CNN is doing it.  One visit to their website, www.cnn.com, and you see they are all over the social media radar.  From RSS feeds, to Vlogs (Video Blogs), podcasts, and now… incorporating social media to create buzz and engage their audience live on the air!  Yup, you heard it right!  They are pulling the online world into the offline world right in front of you while you watch TV in your living room.  So, how are they able to do this in real time? Well, CNN is officially endorsing Twitter. They are the first major broadcasting network to do so, and they are doing a great job of incorporating it into their live broadcasting.  You’ll now find the likes of anchorman Don Lemon delivering a news story, then going to Twitter to see the direct impact of the story within the online Twitter community and announcing some of those comments live on the air.  It makes you want to go and check out CNN and Twitter, right?  I know I immediately started “tweeting” myself, hoping to get a comment in! 

This is social media done right!  Kudos to CNN and kudos to Don Lemon for laying such a foundation. So, you may be thinking, “Well that’s great, but what kind of online impact does social media really have?” Let’s look at CNN as compared to MSNBC, whom isn’t utilizing social media at the level CNN is.  One look at some online data utilizing Google Trends to see which website is receiving higher traffic volumes and it’s no surprise to see CNN is getting a great deal more online interest than MSNBC.  By CNN immersing itself into the online community, it’s seeing a direct impact with online buzz by people seeing CNN as their online news source. 

You can get started with this today.  If you already have a newsletter, then you can easily create an RSS feed on your website so others can download and share it.  You can start an online blog.  Make sure you post to it regularly!  Or, you can start podcasting.  Whatever direction is best for your company, you can easily get up to speed with web 2.0!  The internet is changing.  It is becoming a more interactive community.  No longer is a static website all you need.  More and more people are jumping online to interact with friends and businesses.  People are looking at customer reviews and corporate blogs to help them make decisions. If you can become more engaged, more social, in this ever changing online world, you’ll be sure to not get lost in the static.