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TM in a Digital Economy phxmedialabs.com © Copyright 2011, PHX Media Group. All rights reserved. PHX Media Labs™ and Cybertising™ are registered trademarks of PHX Media Group, LLC. Written by | Paul Gimenez S. (PhX) and Jesus Pacheco (PhX)

PHX Media Labs Cybertising ebook

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Page 1: PHX Media Labs Cybertising ebook

TM

in a Digital Economy

phxmedialabs.com© Copyright 2011, PHX Media Group. All rights reserved.PHX Media Labs™ and Cybertising™ are registered trademarks of PHX Media Group, LLC.

Written by | Paul Gimenez S. (PhX) and Jesus Pacheco (PhX)

Page 2: PHX Media Labs Cybertising ebook

indexIntroduction P. 2The Importance of Your “Conversion” Rate P. 3Competitor Benchmarking and Business Strategy P. 5Building a Competitive Online Presence P. 9Driving Traffic to Your Online Presence P. 12Search Engine Optimization (SEO) P. 14Search engine Marketing (SEM) P. 16Pay-per-Click (PPC) P. 17Ad Networks P. 18Remarketing P. 19Affiliate Marketing P. 20Shopping Channels P. 21Local Media P. 22Social Media P. 24Mobile Marketing P. 27Optimization For Better Conversion P. 29Cybertising, Defined P. 31

Page 3: PHX Media Labs Cybertising ebook

INTRODUCTION

2

As a CEO, Business Owner, Marketing and/or Sales Executive you surely know that mastering new media and online marketing is essential to maintaining and growing your business.

For you as the decision maker, this means that beyond a website, you must allocate marketing and sales dollars to new and often complicated online marketing tech-nologies, tools, and processes like pay per click (PPC), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Display Networks, Email Marketing, Mobile Ads, SMS, Social, Etc.

The list keeps growing, and staying ahead of the game requires a lot of time or a whole team of online marketing specialists working on numerous aspects of your digital marketing strategy.

The aim of this guide is to give you practical knowledge of the most important aspects of online marketing. Using real-world examples, we will outline vital concepts you need to know about the processes of online marketing, the many activities involved, and the importance of coherently integrating them to achieve superior commercial results over time.

TM

Page 4: PHX Media Labs Cybertising ebook

3

THE IMPORTANCE OF YOUR

CONVERSION RATE

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THE IMPORTANCE OF YOUR “CONVERSION” RATEBefore entering into the processes of online marketing, it is important to clarify that any webpage or online initiative for a business must have a measurable commercial objective or conversion goal that clearly justifies the investment. The days of creating a “beautiful” website that acts as an expensive brochure which nobody visits or, even worse, websites that do not generate business, are over.

The objective(s) or conversion(s) could be:

To sell products on the site.To generate leads for the sales department.To drive traffic to a location.To engage customers and create loyalty.To gather customer feedback efficiently.To create brand awareness. To lower the cost of customer service, by providing online chat help.

For the purposes of online marketing, “micro conversion” refers to any time a potential customer takes the desired action leading to the next step of the sales process e.g. adding items to a shopping cart.

A “macro conversion” is when people actually do what you want (buy, generate a lead, review posting, etc.)

Conversion rates are expressed as a percentage. As an example, here is a simplified conversion funnel for an ecommerce site:

4

1 100 clicks on the search engine results page link leading to your site.2 40 stay on the site and start exploring (40% micro conversion)3 10 put and item in the shopping cart (25% micro conversion)4 2 enter credit card and click checkout (20% micro conversion from previous step, 2% Macro Conversion for Site)

Online Marketing like Offline Marketing is in great part a numbers game. However, unlike offline marketing, the real time nature of interaction allows you the capability to measure conversions in real time (versus weeks and months) and make adjustments instantly to optimize the process.

Average conversion rates for e-commerce sites are between .075%-2%, but superstar conversion rates of up to 20-40% are not unheard of for those companies that successfully optimize conversion by constantly tweaking usability, design, and copy elements to achieve the desired results.

We believe that, if you are in business, your website or any online marketing initiative must have, at its core, clear conversion targets and a process for conversion rate optimization.

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5

COMPETITOR BENCHMARKING AND BUSINESS STRATEGY

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COMPETITOR BENCHMARKING AND BUSINESS STRATEGY

6

Your online initiatives must be competitive, and that means you need to acquire a deep understand-ing of what is happening in your industry online: what your competitors are doing, what the best practices are, what kind of keywords your competitors are using, what kind of keywords your clients are searching for, etc.

Wars are won at the command headquarters, and before sending troops to the battlefield, good commanders design their plans based on good intelligence about the enemy. Before going to the drawing board, ask yourself:

Is your online marketing better or on par with your competitors when it comes to driving new business and conversions?

Is your online marketing in sync with the business strategy and realities of your business?

Let’s start on how to approach the first question. For your website or online presence to be competi-tive, you must acquire a deep understanding of what is happening in your industry online. Here are some of the questions you absolutely need to answer:

What are your competitors doing online? Are their websites professionally designed and branded?Are their websites designed for conversions?Which competitor has more visitors?How are competitors capturing new clients and promoting their website?What are the best practices on the pages you consider the best?What kind of content and copy are your competitors using to convert?What kind of keywords (the terms people enter into a search engine like Google to find what they want) are your competitors bidding on?What kind of keywords your clients are searching for?What kind of results appear on the Search Engine Results Page when you type in those keywords?

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COMPETITOR BENCHMARKING AND BUSINESS STRATEGY

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A solid understanding of these questions allows you to build your online marketing campaign on quantifiable, real market information. The good news is that the Internet is rich in free information, with many tools that can help you gain a better understanding before you spend any money. Here is a list of some research that you should perform to ensure that your online marketing is competitive within your industry:

• Search engines. Type the keywords you think describe your business and explore the pages of your competitors.• At each competitor page take a good look at: branding, design, copywriting, how professional it is, where does the website ask for data or the sale, what kind of trust elements (e.g. BBB sign) are present, how useful and easy to read is their content.• Use easy-to-use tools, such as Alexa.com or Compete.com, to understand what kind of visitors volume or traffic the website has.• Use tools like Keywordspy.com to understand what kind of keywords the site is bidding for.• Use free tools like Google Insights for Search and Google Trends to identify the trends on relevant keywords for your business.

Some of the most useful online tools for research are Google’s AdWords’ Keyword Tools and Google Insights. Using these tools a car dealership owner can know FOR A FACT that there were 3 times more searches on Google for “Ford Mustang”—almost 1.8 million unique searches monthly—than for “Chevrolet Camaro.” Or you can see that on average “Mustang 2011” has 50% more searches, at 450 thousand unique searches per month, than “Camaro 2011.” The dealer using keyword research will also learn that Camaro is quickly catching up to Mustang during the first 6 months of 2011.

At its most basic, keyword research shows how the public is interacting with a given industry online. It is one of the essential data points for any online marketing initiative, and it casts a revealing light on any industry.

TM

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COMPETITOR BENCHMARKING AND BUSINESS STRATEGY

8

Let’s go to the second original question. Now that you know the best practices of your competition, it is time to understand what kind of resources you have in place or need to match in order to better your opponents.

Some important questions to consider:

What kind of budget and resources do you have available for online marketing?What are your conversion and growth goals?What is the timeframe of your online activities?Do you have the knowledge and time in-house to execute your objectives?

Based on your answers you will start crafting an Online Marketing Strategy according to your resources, business objectives, and scope of work in order to start competing or gaining market share from your competitors over time. A solid understanding of these questions allows you to build your online marketing campaign on realtime Market Information.

TM

Page 10: PHX Media Labs Cybertising ebook

As a CEO, Business Owner, Marketing and/or Sales Executive you surely know that mastering new media and online marketing is essential to maintaining and growing your business.

For you as the decision maker, this means that beyond a website, you must allocate marketing and sales dollars to new and often complicated online marketing tech-nologies, tools, and processes like pay per click (PPC), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Display Networks, Email Marketing, Mobile Ads, SMS, Social, Etc.

The list keeps growing, and staying ahead of the game requires a lot of time or a whole team of online marketing specialists working on numerous aspects of your digital marketing strategy.

The aim of this guide is to give you practical knowledge of the most important aspects of online marketing. Using real-world examples, we will outline vital concepts you need to know about the processes of online marketing, the many activities involved, and the importance of coherently integrating them to achieve superior commercial results over time.

BUILDING A COMPETITIVE ONLINE PRESENCE

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BUILDING A COMPETITIVE ONLINE PRESENCE

10

Internet and mobile Internet users are bombarded with over 3,000 promotional messages per day. To make matters worse, 99% percent of what they find online is clutter. Did you know that the average time spent in a website is 4 seconds?

Have you noticed, when you are looking for something online, your own reaction when you land on a poorly designed and poorly written website?

Have you noticed the difference between a custom and a template site?

Have you struggled to find a way to contact the business behind the page?

Have you tried to reach a website from your mobile phone and could barely read what was on the page?

Have you searched for something specific, and, when you click on a page, they talk about everything but what you were looking for?

Even now, in 2011, many marketing decision makers and business owners define an online initiative as having a website with as much information and content as possible. That used to be effective. Today, Internet users have become more demanding and expect to find what they are searching for easily. There’s a lot more competition too, making it even harder to outperform your opposition. And with mobile and social media’s ubiquity, the definition of “a business web presence” has grown way beyond an official corporate website.

Many times we have clients that say, “I have a great website, now I need traffic!” And many times we see costly traffic that turns into BOUNCES, because the page is not RELEVANT, is poorly designed, or has no call to action, no mechanisms for conversion and in general lacks transactional capabilities.

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BUILDING A COMPETITIVE ONLINE PRESENCE

11

Today, given the nature of our always-connected Internet state, supply and demand has changed forever. Search engines are responsible for consumers having the capacity to research and make purchases 24/7. We live in an age where people search for what they want online thanks to Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines. This interactivity and real time nature of online marketing offers the opportunity to capture a customer with INTENT to purchase at the most critical point in the sales process. When they are actively searching for a product, service, or informa-tion.

Google is now an internationally recognized verb and one of the most valuable companies in the world. Businesses that understand these marketing dynamics and make the investment to implement them appropriately will gain market share over their competitors. On the flip side, allocating unlimited resources to Search Engine Marketing in the same way traditional advertisers sprayed mass media messages can be very expensive and not very effective.

If you take only one thing from this guide it is this: Do not spend money bringing traffic to a poorly designed website that is not geared for conversion.

In 2011, to successfully exist online you need to establish:Your main site. Your business’s website is important, because it is the core of your web presence. It has to have professional appear-ance, usability, branding, contact forms, web-copy, security badges, terms of use and written policies, etc. Avoid using cheap run of the mill web templates. Your main site is vital to your Branding, so don’t settle for anything less than custom, and remember a $99 web template will probably give you $99 results.

Targeted “landing pages.” These landing pages, or “micro sites,” are extensions of your main site built to communicate, specifically and efficiently, the service or product that potential customers are search-ing for. When a client is looking for product X or product Y, make sure they “land” on the page that sells product X or product Y not on the one page where they have to search from A to Z to find the product they are looking for.

A mobile site. More than 20% of the searches are now mobile, and this number keeps growing. As Smartphones become the norm, it is increasingly important to create a separate website designed specifi-cally for the small screens and navigation constraints of mobile use. Have you tried to navigate a big site in a small screen? Not fun. Another advantage of having a mobile strategy is mobile search. Think about your own time to action between searching on a mobile and actually arriving at the store, restaurant, or business you were search-ing for.

Social media. This is a fantastic chance to interact directly with existing and potential customers, allow them to recommend you, and give you feedback. Creating self-replicating viral conversations is key but making sure those conversations are positive is vital.

Successfully managing all of the different elements of a business’s online presence requires expertise in design, copy, and usability, all ultimately focused on conversions as they relate to your business goals. All of these elements of your online presence should be com-petitive, since you took the time to benchmark best practices from successful competitors and now have a competitive presence for your company. Your websites are now ready for visitors, and you want to do this fast, effectively, and economically.

TM

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DRIVING TRAFFIC ONLINE PRESENCETO YOUR

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Your online initiatives must be competitive, and that means you need to acquire a deep understand-ing of what is happening in your industry online: what your competitors are doing, what the best practices are, what kind of keywords your competitors are using, what kind of keywords your clients are searching for, etc.

Wars are won at the command headquarters, and before sending troops to the battlefield, good commanders design their plans based on good intelligence about the enemy. Before going to the drawing board, ask yourself:

Is your online marketing better or on par with your competitors when it comes to driving new business and conversions?

Is your online marketing in sync with the business strategy and realities of your business?

Let’s start on how to approach the first question. For your website or online presence to be competi-tive, you must acquire a deep understanding of what is happening in your industry online. Here are some of the questions you absolutely need to answer:

What are your competitors doing online? Are their websites professionally designed and branded?Are their websites designed for conversions?Which competitor has more visitors?How are competitors capturing new clients and promoting their website?What are the best practices on the pages you consider the best?What kind of content and copy are your competitors using to convert?What kind of keywords (the terms people enter into a search engine like Google to find what they want) are your competitors bidding on?What kind of keywords your clients are searching for?What kind of results appear on the Search Engine Results Page when you type in those keywords?

DRIVING TRAFFIC TO YOUR ONLINE PRESENCE

13

We mentioned before that people are searching the Internet with intent to buy, download, or gain information on a subject. As a business owner, it is your job to sell it to them, or in other words convert a query into a paying customer. Those clicks, on the search engine results page ad or banner, that direct visitors to your website, mobile site, landing page are what we call traffic. However not all traffic is good. There is useless traffic that makes no money, and targeted traffic that translates into conversions and money in your bank

Regardless of what kind of traffic, the search process always starts with a query or “keyword.” Search Engines arrange those queries into data that is readily available to users interested in gaining a competitive edge. “If content is King, Keywords are Queen.” Needless to say, not all queries apply to all businesses, and, based on numerous factors, search engines determine if a page matches what a searcher is looking for.

The major forms of driving traffic are:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)Search engine Marketing (SEM)Pay-Per-Click (PPC)Local SearchSocial Media MarketingAd NetworksAffiliate MarketingShopping Channels & Marketplaces

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

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We will begin by making it clear that organic traffic (the one you don’t pay search engines for, and the one that people optimize with constant SEO) is highly valuable, but it’s not free.

Search engine companies such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo are in busi-ness because they deliver RELEVANT results to their users queries, and their methods for organic ranking are, a big secret, all ultimately driven by relevancy.

As a business owner in order to craft a successful website, search engine relevancy is a matter of having the right content, the right site program-ming, and many relevant sites linking or directing traffic to your website, therefore validating that your site is relevant.

Remember that ranking for an obscure word that only 100 people search with 10 results, is not as competitive as ranking in a keyword searched by millions of users, with hundreds or thousands of competitors in the same space.

SEO also works slowly, as search engines must crawl a site several times before organic keyword relevance will gradually begin to move your site up in organic search results. Because of this, successful search engine optimization is an incremental and iterative process that takes a lot of time (i.e. money), constant improvements, and requires many processes to be implemented in a coordinated fashion.

DRIVING TRAFFIC TO YOUR ONLINE PRESENCE

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Page 16: PHX Media Labs Cybertising ebook

Let’s go to the second original question. Now that you know the best practices of your competition, it is time to understand what kind of resources you have in place or need to match in order to better your opponents.

Some important questions to consider:

What kind of budget and resources do you have available for online marketing?What are your conversion and growth goals?What is the timeframe of your online activities?Do you have the knowledge and time in-house to execute your objectives?

Based on your answers you will start crafting an Online Marketing Strategy according to your resources, business objectives, and scope of work in order to start competing or gaining market share from your competitors over time. A solid understanding of these questions allows you to build your online marketing campaign on realtime Market Information.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

15

When making changes to a site for improved SEO some of the most important things to remember are:

Good usability and website navigation.Keyword relevant content.Good “Metatags” (item descriptions hidden in the code of your page).More Relevant sites linking to your page. When launching an SEO campaign it’s important to reach out to bloggers, by Email, phone, or in person and convince them to link to your site. Adding a relevant blog to your page and creating new content with regularity.SEO best practices also favor clean, informative, text-based URL’s over numerical, automatically generated, meaningless URL’s.

Estimates say that 45% of traffic for a given search term clicks on the #1 ranking, which is an amazing number. For this reason SEO is very impor-tant, however it is as complicated as it is important, and that is the reason many business hire experts to take care of their optimization efforts.

However, it’s essential to strike a balance between SEO and user experi-ence. Adding too much content or creating weird, keyword-stuffed Meta Data can hurt your conversion rate, even if it helps your site gain traffic.

The three things we hope you take away about SEO are:

SEO can be highly beneficial, but it is not “Free”—a lot of effort is required. SEO takes time—literally months—and any consultant promising you fast results is setting your business up for easy, non-relevant rankings. Even if SEO is working, but your page is complicated because of your SEO efforts, your conversion rate will suffer from poor user experience and lack of RELEVANCE for the CUSTOMER!

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Page 17: PHX Media Labs Cybertising ebook

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

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Search Engine Marketing is a form of online marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility on search engines through various forms of paid advertisements and placements. The most signifi-cant players in SEM are Google and their Adwords platform, Facebook with their own pay-per-click ad serving capacities, Yahoo Search Market-ing, and Microsofts Bing’s adCenter.

A major difference between SEO and SEM is the ability to pay search engines for immediate placing and results. Below we will outline various forms of SEM starting with pay-per-click.

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Page 18: PHX Media Labs Cybertising ebook

Pay-per-Click

17

Pay-per-Click (PPC) ads are the text advertisements you see on the sidebar of a search results page (SERP) on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing, or Social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn (advertising on Facebook is further discussed in the Facebook section of this paper).

PPC ads work on a bid system, and advertisers set bid limits for keywords. How closely a user’s search query matches the keywords you are bidding on and your bid limit for those keywords determines if your ad will show for a query and how much it will cost. Noncompetitive terms can cost only $.05, but competitive terms can get pricey. High-ticket services like cable packages or insurance can cost upwards of $35-per-click, since there are many businesses bidding highly on these terms. However, successful PPC advertisers see amazing ROI when a $35 lead becomes a $300+ customer.

PPC ads are the way for freshly launched or low-traffic websites to get traffic quickly. Since you are paying for these clicks, it’s crucial that this traffic converts. This point cannot be overemphasized. Remember, most sites only convert 1%, and, if you pay $1-per-click, that means one customer cost you $100 dollars!

When bidding for keywords it is crucial to research using tools like AdWords Traffic Estimator or Google Insight,and and try to bid for keywords that show intent. It’s not the same to bid for the word “Shoes” than to bid for the phrase “buy Adidas Commander size 10.” The former is too generic, yet the latter shows INTENT to purchase. Tapping into this intent and convert a visitor into a paying customer should be the goal of any PPC campaign.

PPC is not rocket science, however, successfully and profitably imple-menting a PPC campaign has a potentially steep and expensive learning curve. Even though you could launch a massive campaign in an hour, we strongly recommended that you start slow, see what works, then build out your campaign based on precedent, quantifiable data, and market experience. As with SEO, PPC requires a deep understanding of its capacities, best practices, and processes.

Training is highly recommended. Google offers a 75-page training manual and certification program for fundamental AdWords manage-ment, but we have noticed that very few busy business owners have time to truly train and master this very powerful tool. Many companies seek outside help with their PPC advertising or hire a PPC expert, if necessary.

DRIVING TRAFFIC TO YOUR ONLINE PRESENCE

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Page 19: PHX Media Labs Cybertising ebook

Today, given the nature of our always-connected Internet state, supply and demand has changed forever. Search engines are responsible for consumers having the capacity to research and make purchases 24/7. We live in an age where people search for what they want online thanks to Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines. This interactivity and real time nature of online marketing offers the opportunity to capture a customer with INTENT to purchase at the most critical point in the sales process. When they are actively searching for a product, service, or informa-tion.

Google is now an internationally recognized verb and one of the most valuable companies in the world. Businesses that understand these marketing dynamics and make the investment to implement them appropriately will gain market share over their competitors. On the flip side, allocating unlimited resources to Search Engine Marketing in the same way traditional advertisers sprayed mass media messages can be very expensive and not very effective.

If you take only one thing from this guide it is this: Do not spend money bringing traffic to a poorly designed website that is not geared for conversion.

In 2011, to successfully exist online you need to establish:Your main site. Your business’s website is important, because it is the core of your web presence. It has to have professional appear-ance, usability, branding, contact forms, web-copy, security badges, terms of use and written policies, etc. Avoid using cheap run of the mill web templates. Your main site is vital to your Branding, so don’t settle for anything less than custom, and remember a $99 web template will probably give you $99 results.

Targeted “landing pages.” These landing pages, or “micro sites,” are extensions of your main site built to communicate, specifically and efficiently, the service or product that potential customers are search-ing for. When a client is looking for product X or product Y, make sure they “land” on the page that sells product X or product Y not on the one page where they have to search from A to Z to find the product they are looking for.

A mobile site. More than 20% of the searches are now mobile, and this number keeps growing. As Smartphones become the norm, it is increasingly important to create a separate website designed specifi-cally for the small screens and navigation constraints of mobile use. Have you tried to navigate a big site in a small screen? Not fun. Another advantage of having a mobile strategy is mobile search. Think about your own time to action between searching on a mobile and actually arriving at the store, restaurant, or business you were search-ing for.

Social media. This is a fantastic chance to interact directly with existing and potential customers, allow them to recommend you, and give you feedback. Creating self-replicating viral conversations is key but making sure those conversations are positive is vital.

Successfully managing all of the different elements of a business’s online presence requires expertise in design, copy, and usability, all ultimately focused on conversions as they relate to your business goals. All of these elements of your online presence should be com-petitive, since you took the time to benchmark best practices from successful competitors and now have a competitive presence for your company. Your websites are now ready for visitors, and you want to do this fast, effectively, and economically.

Digital Ad Networks

18

Unlike your PPC campaign, graphic ads typically display on a cost-per-impression basis also know CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions). So, even if no one clicks on your ad, you are charged every 1000 time it loads. The flip side is that your business is branded across hundreds or even thousands of different sites in an effort to further a company’s branding efforts. While ad networks and graphic banners are a great way to instantly send a strong text and visual message to drive traffic, they must be handled with care, since it is easy to run up a steep bill without seeing any return on investment. Google Display Network is the biggest Ad Network, but there are others, each with it’s own intricacies, propri-etary platforms, and processes.

As with PPC, it is recommended that you start slowly with ad networks. See what gets conversions and build on that. If possible, try to place your ads on sites relevant to the demographic you are trying to reach. And remember, while they definitely drive relevant traffic, ad networks also serve a secondary purpose: a powerful brand building tool . Even when you don’t get a click-through, your logo and message have been broad-cast and millions of eyeballs have been reached.

Banner advertising is also getting more and more interactive, allowing you to blanket the web with special promotions, such as coupons or engaging games. Some rich media banner ads play an animation or use other attention grabbing tricks to get views and clicks. Developing engaging display network adverting campaigns is key for branding and awareness, and, as such, ad network advertising campaigns should be considered in your online marketing strategy.

DRIVING TRAFFIC TO YOUR ONLINE PRESENCE

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Remarketing

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Welcome to the future of advertising. Another advancement within display and search ad networks worth mentioning is remarketing.

Have you noticed after searching for something like health insurance; you see a lot of health insurance ads in completely unrelated pages days after the initial search? Remarketing is when you leave a site, and continue to see highly relevant advertisements on any other site running the remarketing network’s ads. Remarketing, although a bit Orwellian in nature, is a vey powerful and sophisticated online marketing tool.

Remarketing allows advertisers to determine a computer’s unique IP address through “cookies” that track browsing behavior of Internet users who have been browsing online. The successful online marketer would take this information to remarket to their potential customers. Indeed, it seems like Big Brother has arrived, and in practice, these advancements are changing the landscape of how brands market their products directly to interested consumers in the context of a Digital Economy.

Remarketing effectively reinforces a brand in their prospects “Top of Mind,” and, if done properly, closes the sale’s cycle. The exciting thing about remarketing is that brands and companies that embrace these online capacities and adapt to new marketing practices like remarketing will gain a definitive competitive edge over their competitors.

DRIVING TRAFFIC TO YOUR ONLINE PRESENCE

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Page 21: PHX Media Labs Cybertising ebook

We mentioned before that people are searching the Internet with intent to buy, download, or gain information on a subject. As a business owner, it is your job to sell it to them, or in other words convert a query into a paying customer. Those clicks, on the search engine results page ad or banner, that direct visitors to your website, mobile site, landing page are what we call traffic. However not all traffic is good. There is useless traffic that makes no money, and targeted traffic that translates into conversions and money in your bank

Regardless of what kind of traffic, the search process always starts with a query or “keyword.” Search Engines arrange those queries into data that is readily available to users interested in gaining a competitive edge. “If content is King, Keywords are Queen.” Needless to say, not all queries apply to all businesses, and, based on numerous factors, search engines determine if a page matches what a searcher is looking for.

The major forms of driving traffic are:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)Search engine Marketing (SEM)Pay-Per-Click (PPC)Local SearchSocial Media MarketingAd NetworksAffiliate MarketingShopping Channels & Marketplaces

Affiliate Marketing

20

Another potential traffic and sales driver is affiliate marketing. This is when you give third-party “publishers” permission to promote your product or service on their sites and offer them a commission for every conversion or sale that comes in through their promotion.

A typical example of affiliate marketing is a popular sports blog running advertising for a sporting goods store. Every time someone clicks on their banner or other promotion and buys something from the store, the blog gets a commission. The affiliate marketer would likely work closely with the sporting goods company, arranging promotions like contests or limited time discounts that benefit both parties.

Affiliate marketing is different from ad networks in that it’s commission based, instead of charging for ad views under the CPM model. Say you are selling dietary supplements online. An ideal affiliate would be a successful blog on supplements with high traffic. Since there are already streams of qualified prospects reading and engaging with the blog, advertising dietary supplements on it could pay off.

Many businesses heavily involved with affiliates will have a dedicated affiliate manager within their marketing department, since providing affiliates with custom creative, coupon codes, and other promotional materials can be time consuming.

Some affiliates are individual, independently run publishers/websites, while others group together on an “affiliate network” that acts as a middleman between the publishers and the advertiser. On networks, offers are typically presented by vertical (diet industry, hotels, cruises, etc.), and the publishers select the ones they think are a good fit. Using affiliate networks to market increases your reach since one network can get your product promoted by hundreds of publishers, but you do lose visibility—most affiliate networks have surprisingly little tracking on the individual publisher level.

Once again, we would urge caution when engaging with affiliate adver-tisers. Most are legitimate, but there are dishonest affiliates who would commit fraud, using a stolen credit card list or placing fake orders just to make their commissions. Be very clear in the terms of what affiliates can and cannot do to promote your business. Can they use your brand name? Can they bid on the same keywords your in-house PPC campaign is bidding on? Also, if you use a network, do your homework and perform an online background check—different networks have different reputa-tions, and you want ones with a rigorous screening process for publish-ers.

DRIVING TRAFFIC TO YOUR ONLINE PRESENCE

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Page 22: PHX Media Labs Cybertising ebook

Shopping Channels or Comparison Engines

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The term shopping channel is relevant to businesses selling a product online. Popular shopping channels include Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Ebay, and TheFind. In addition to having your products listed on your own site and promoting them with all of the previous stated methods, you can deliver inventory “feeds” via these major, established shopping sites. Shopping channels are yet another example of how you can grow your web presence off-site. Like everything else search-based, your product feeds need to be optimized, and the most relevant products will be displayed first.

On shopping channels, price points also become key—if a shopping channel has several offerings of the same product, perhaps, a particular pair of sunglasses, it will display the cheapest first, the rational being that this result is most attractive to a potential shopper.

Particular shopping channles have their proprietary methoods and platforms that enable a business owner to upload their product or service catalogs. In the case of Google, Google Base allows merchants to upload their inventory database in Google’s shopping channels. Users searching for a particular product will find these products in the shop-ping results.

DRIVING TRAFFIC TO YOUR ONLINE PRESENCE

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LOCAL MEDIA,

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EXPLAINED

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In their own quest for delivering maximum relevance, search engines are beginning to shift emphasis to personalized search results. One of the main ways that they are doing this is through local search. There is no data to-date on how many of Google’s billions of queries are commerce-oriented, but Google is betting that many of them are. They are assuming that a search for “used car dealer” is from someone looking for dealerships near the searcher, and that the searcher’s intent is to go out and buy a used car. Optimizing for local search involves a series of best practices and some overlap with search engine optimiza-tion.

A good place to start is setting up a Google Places page. Google Places is Google’s own, integrated yellow pages. It syncs up with other Google products such as maps and photos. Google encourages businesses to put up a Local page, but many businesses are not aware of the benefits of optimizing for local search. Creating a content rich, keyword rich Google Places page is a great way to let search engines know where you are and make your business available to be found.

It’s also advisable to encourage customers to post reviews so that your places page looks fresh and active. Similarly, it’s necessary to promi-nently feature location and contact info on your main site, and link the main site to the Google Places page.

For local optimization purposes, any place where you can get your name and business address published is an asset. Again, there is some overlap with both SEO and social media here, which further emphasizes how creating a good business web presence is a multidisciplinary exercise.

Some possible places to set up local pages:

Google PlacesFoursquareLinkedIn YelpBetter Business BureauYahoo LocalSquidooBusiness review forums such as TrustLink or MeasuredUp

LOCAL MEDIA, EXPLAINED

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Pay-per-Click (PPC) ads are the text advertisements you see on the sidebar of a search results page (SERP) on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing, or Social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn (advertising on Facebook is further discussed in the Facebook section of this paper).

PPC ads work on a bid system, and advertisers set bid limits for keywords. How closely a user’s search query matches the keywords you are bidding on and your bid limit for those keywords determines if your ad will show for a query and how much it will cost. Noncompetitive terms can cost only $.05, but competitive terms can get pricey. High-ticket services like cable packages or insurance can cost upwards of $35-per-click, since there are many businesses bidding highly on these terms. However, successful PPC advertisers see amazing ROI when a $35 lead becomes a $300+ customer.

PPC ads are the way for freshly launched or low-traffic websites to get traffic quickly. Since you are paying for these clicks, it’s crucial that this traffic converts. This point cannot be overemphasized. Remember, most sites only convert 1%, and, if you pay $1-per-click, that means one customer cost you $100 dollars!

When bidding for keywords it is crucial to research using tools like AdWords Traffic Estimator or Google Insight,and and try to bid for keywords that show intent. It’s not the same to bid for the word “Shoes” than to bid for the phrase “buy Adidas Commander size 10.” The former is too generic, yet the latter shows INTENT to purchase. Tapping into this intent and convert a visitor into a paying customer should be the goal of any PPC campaign.

SOCIAL MEDIA,

EXPLAINEDMARKETING

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Unlike your PPC campaign, graphic ads typically display on a cost-per-impression basis also know CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions). So, even if no one clicks on your ad, you are charged every 1000 time it loads. The flip side is that your business is branded across hundreds or even thousands of different sites in an effort to further a company’s branding efforts. While ad networks and graphic banners are a great way to instantly send a strong text and visual message to drive traffic, they must be handled with care, since it is easy to run up a steep bill without seeing any return on investment. Google Display Network is the biggest Ad Network, but there are others, each with it’s own intricacies, propri-etary platforms, and processes.

As with PPC, it is recommended that you start slowly with ad networks. See what gets conversions and build on that. If possible, try to place your ads on sites relevant to the demographic you are trying to reach. And remember, while they definitely drive relevant traffic, ad networks also serve a secondary purpose: a powerful brand building tool . Even when you don’t get a click-through, your logo and message have been broad-cast and millions of eyeballs have been reached.

Banner advertising is also getting more and more interactive, allowing you to blanket the web with special promotions, such as coupons or engaging games. Some rich media banner ads play an animation or use other attention grabbing tricks to get views and clicks. Developing engaging display network adverting campaigns is key for branding and awareness, and, as such, ad network advertising campaigns should be considered in your online marketing strategy.

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Word of mouth in the digital age has taken on new dimensions. For the first time in marketing and advertising, consumers, empowered by social networking sites, now control the conversation. Indeed social media marketing is currently the cutting edge of online marketing, but many brands are playing catch up because many still poorly understand the actual marketing potential of social media.

It’s incredibly easy for companies to get distracted by irrelevant numbers like the number of Facebook “likes” you have, or how many Twitter followers you have. A gourmet coffee franchise may have 2 million Facebook “fans”, but how many of them are buying more coffee because of social media? Is their social media marketing initiative quantifiable and in-line with its business goals? Social media marketing needs to be planned and must follow a narrative, just like any other marketing initiative. So what is social media marketing good for?

BrandingIncreasing customer loyaltyRunning special promotions and contestsCreating self replicating viral conversations

In our section for Social, we are going to focus on the major player: Facebook. For starters, any business can and should benefit from a corporate Facebook page. If you’ve never set one up, you may be surprised how different a corporate page is from a personal page. Like your personal Facebook, a corporate Facebook page is a two-way relationship where consumers can “Like” your page and criticize it. This is a great opportunity to communicate with relevant customers. But don't forget that their comments will not be moderated.

SOCIAL marketing needs to be done right, offering value to end users with the best social media marketing actually passed on from person to person on its own merits. These self-replicating viral processes can be very beneficial to a brand, but on the flipside, if these users are criticizing a brand, the positive effect can turn sour and detrimental overnight.

To simplify, people share cool stuff with their friends. So be cool. Social media is not the place to post pictures of kittens with silly captions. Instead, run a “midnight madness” special, a sweepstakes, or announce a surprising pop-up store. The key here is to offer value to the social audience with the hope that they become brand advocates. It is also very important to properly address customer complaints!

Facebook is also like an insular mini-web. The developers refer to it as a “social graph,” and instead of web pages with search engine “Page Rank,” Facebook uses “Edge Rank.” This determines who sees your posts and how prominently they are displayed.

How often fans check your posts, how many fans you have, and how connected your fans are with each other are all elements that determine Edge Rank. By making engaging posts you improve the likelihood that more people will see and share them.

Another way in which Facebook is similar to the web is that it runs its own ad network. Facebook’s Pay-per-Click network is like the other PPC technologies that we discussed earlier. Facebook, however, is extremely effective at targeting demographic, psychographic, and personal prefer-ences of potential clients.

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING, EXPLAINED

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One thing that sets Facebook advertising apart is that advertisers have more opportunities for personalization and segmentation, since the display network has access to everyone’s personal profile information. This includes gender, location, age, and education level, but it can also include favorite sports team, movies, books, and music.

A band releasing a new album can display ads to people who have listed the band as a favorite. But, more interestingly, a band you’ve never heard of, but who sounds like your favorite band, can offer you free Mp3 downloads. Matching personal tastes in this way can be a great way to pick up new customers and expose them to your brand.

Facebook ads can click to non-Facebook landing pages, and it is likely that your business will want to develop separate optimized landing pages that works in sync with your Facebook campaign to increase relevance and lower cost-per-customer acquisition.

Social media and the way people communicate with these new platform are no joke. Indeed we are living a social media revolution. As an example of how fast social media is growing: This paper was written in August, 2011. Google+ social networking platform, Google’s response to Facebook, launched in beta in late-June. It already reports over 10 million Google+ signups. It is similar to Facebook in that it is a social networking platform yet different in the way users share information with “Circles” of friends.

Google + is still in testing and does not currently offer corporate pages, but with the success of other social networking sites to date, our bet is that advertisers and brands that leverage and understand Google+’s technologies will reap big benefits.

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING, EXPLAINED

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Another potential traffic and sales driver is affiliate marketing. This is when you give third-party “publishers” permission to promote your product or service on their sites and offer them a commission for every conversion or sale that comes in through their promotion.

A typical example of affiliate marketing is a popular sports blog running advertising for a sporting goods store. Every time someone clicks on their banner or other promotion and buys something from the store, the blog gets a commission. The affiliate marketer would likely work closely with the sporting goods company, arranging promotions like contests or limited time discounts that benefit both parties.

Affiliate marketing is different from ad networks in that it’s commission based, instead of charging for ad views under the CPM model. Say you are selling dietary supplements online. An ideal affiliate would be a successful blog on supplements with high traffic. Since there are already streams of qualified prospects reading and engaging with the blog, advertising dietary supplements on it could pay off.

Many businesses heavily involved with affiliates will have a dedicated affiliate manager within their marketing department, since providing affiliates with custom creative, coupon codes, and other promotional materials can be time consuming.

Some affiliates are individual, independently run publishers/websites, while others group together on an “affiliate network” that acts as a middleman between the publishers and the advertiser. On networks, offers are typically presented by vertical (diet industry, hotels, cruises, etc.), and the publishers select the ones they think are a good fit. Using affiliate networks to market increases your reach since one network can get your product promoted by hundreds of publishers, but you do lose visibility—most affiliate networks have surprisingly little tracking on the individual publisher level.

Once again, we would urge caution when engaging with affiliate adver-tisers. Most are legitimate, but there are dishonest affiliates who would commit fraud, using a stolen credit card list or placing fake orders just to make their commissions. Be very clear in the terms of what affiliates can and cannot do to promote your business. Can they use your brand name? Can they bid on the same keywords your in-house PPC campaign is bidding on? Also, if you use a network, do your homework and perform an online background check—different networks have different reputa-tions, and you want ones with a rigorous screening process for publish-ers.

MOBILE MARKETING

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The term shopping channel is relevant to businesses selling a product online. Popular shopping channels include Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Ebay, and TheFind. In addition to having your products listed on your own site and promoting them with all of the previous stated methods, you can deliver inventory “feeds” via these major, established shopping sites. Shopping channels are yet another example of how you can grow your web presence off-site. Like everything else search-based, your product feeds need to be optimized, and the most relevant products will be displayed first.

On shopping channels, price points also become key—if a shopping channel has several offerings of the same product, perhaps, a particular pair of sunglasses, it will display the cheapest first, the rational being that this result is most attractive to a potential shopper.

Particular shopping channles have their proprietary methoods and platforms that enable a business owner to upload their product or service catalogs. In the case of Google, Google Base allows merchants to upload their inventory database in Google’s shopping channels. Users searching for a particular product will find these products in the shop-ping results.

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Mobile is vital for your business health. The penetration of mobile phones is close to 100% in the United States alone, and more than 20% of searches are now preformed on mobile devices (and that number is growing). However, as of 2010, most corporations and small businesses did not have a mobile optimized website displaying the same long content of their website on the small screens of mobile devices.

The growth of mobile is not limited to mobile sites. Mobile Marketing is quickly becoming the norm with campaigns developed solely for Mobile Text, Email, Instant Messaging, and more.

Having a competitive mobile marketing strategy today means:

Crafting a mobile strategy that’s fits your business objectives Developing Mobile Websites (WAP) with the right format and contentTracking engagement, navigation results, and conversion dataOptimizing layout and copy utilizing methods including A/B testing and Multi-Variate AnalysesCreating SMS campaigns, promotions, contests, and more to generate leads and brand awarenessImproving offline to online strategies using mobile platforms and technologies such as SMS (short message service), MMS (multi-media messaging service), and QR (Quick response codes)

MOBILE MARKETING

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OPTIMIZATIONFOR BETTER CONVERSION

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In their own quest for delivering maximum relevance, search engines are beginning to shift emphasis to personalized search results. One of the main ways that they are doing this is through local search. There is no data to-date on how many of Google’s billions of queries are commerce-oriented, but Google is betting that many of them are. They are assuming that a search for “used car dealer” is from someone looking for dealerships near the searcher, and that the searcher’s intent is to go out and buy a used car. Optimizing for local search involves a series of best practices and some overlap with search engine optimiza-tion.

A good place to start is setting up a Google Places page. Google Places is Google’s own, integrated yellow pages. It syncs up with other Google products such as maps and photos. Google encourages businesses to put up a Local page, but many businesses are not aware of the benefits of optimizing for local search. Creating a content rich, keyword rich Google Places page is a great way to let search engines know where you are and make your business available to be found.

It’s also advisable to encourage customers to post reviews so that your places page looks fresh and active. Similarly, it’s necessary to promi-nently feature location and contact info on your main site, and link the main site to the Google Places page.

For local optimization purposes, any place where you can get your name and business address published is an asset. Again, there is some overlap with both SEO and social media here, which further emphasizes how creating a good business web presence is a multidisciplinary exercise.

Some possible places to set up local pages:

Google PlacesFoursquareLinkedIn YelpBetter Business BureauYahoo LocalSquidooBusiness review forums such as TrustLink or MeasuredUp

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Wow, you made it this far in the guide! Congratulations! Now you have an understanding of how your business will benefit from having a web-presence geared for conversions and the importance of driving qualified traffic in good quantities and economically!

As a baseline, if the conversion rate of your website is above 5%, you are already winning the online marketing race. Most websites don’t convert at all or are dwindling with <1% conversion ratio. If your conversion rate is lower, you know there is room for improvement.

Whatever the case, an online marketing strategy is not something you set up and forget about. Constant SEO and conversion optimizations are vital. Think about it. Have you ever noticed how great websites keep changing overtime, but in essence they remain the same? Have you noticed that some changes are dramatic, but most are small? The important thing to remember is that the Internet offers advertisers with a highly modifiable medium that can be changed at any time to improve results. However, most business owners and professionals lack the time to be constantly tweaking their websites.

Marketing in general is an experimental process. Traditionally, that meant that based on customer research and competitor intelligence marketers come up with ideas on how to win customers and implement those ideas. Then they measure sales results and go back to the drawing board to keep improving the results.

The difference with online marketing is that when it comes to this experimental process you see results fast, really fast, in fact real time. You can change something in your design, copy, search terms etc. and notice the results almost immediately. Online marketing even lets you run many versions of a website, landing page, or mobile site at the same time and compare which one converts better. This is called A/B testing.

What is incredible about testing is that sometimes small changes have great impact on conversion rate. Sometimes a new picture does the trick, or a larger font, or a green button to ask for the sale instead of orange.

Some changes could be detrimental to the conversion rate, so we recommend testing different sites all the time, seting a baseline and making sure you document your data. (You can use Google Analytics and Google Optimizer for this.)Testing small changes one at a time. If you test too many changes at one time you might not know what change was responsible for increasing or decreasing your conversion rate.

Lots of big business approach online marketing without applying these conversion optimization methods. Many companies are accustomed to one percent conversion rates, allocating money towards search market-ing, and content with less than desirable results.

However, there are many businesses that understand the processes necessary for profitable online marketing and are implementing these experiments on a daily basis, coming up with outrageous conversion rates, and gaining very lucrative market share from much larger com-petitors who have not taken the time to master online marketing and use it to its full potential.

Okay, this is a lot of work…. but who said winning was easy? If you do not have the time to do optimization, hire an expert in conversion optimiza-tion.

OPTIMIZATION FOR BETTER CONVERSION

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DEFINED, AND FINAL COMMENTS

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PHX Media Lab’s Cybertising™ methodology is our response to the global phenomenon that is happening online as consumers take to the web to research and make their purchasing decisions. By definition, Cybertising™ is the integration and optimization of the many different online marketing disciplines (outlined in this document) in order to expand a business’s overall web-presence. Cybertising™ achieves this by leverag-ing keyword relevance and user intent. Cybertising™ is the new standard for marketing, and businesses that are actively and efficiently engaging with their online consumers will outshine their competition.After reading this guide, you are aware of the key concepts that should be the backbone of your online marketing strategies. First, you need to acquire a deep understanding of your industry, it’s competitors, your consumer behavior and shopping patterns, and your resources. After that, your web-presence needs to be geared towards creating conver-sions. In order to remain competitive, you must tune into what your consumers are demanding and saying in their search queries and stay relevant to them, capture their intent and driving qualified leads to your site.

By doing this you will tap into your consumers buying brain and may be able to convince your prospect to purchase or perform other valuable action for your business. Finally, you need to constantly monitor, meas-ure, and optimize to increase performance over time and test, test, test until you reach your conversion goals through optimization. If necessary, repeat from step 1.

CYBERTISING , DEFINED, AND FINAL COMMENTSTM

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One thing that sets Facebook advertising apart is that advertisers have more opportunities for personalization and segmentation, since the display network has access to everyone’s personal profile information. This includes gender, location, age, and education level, but it can also include favorite sports team, movies, books, and music.

A band releasing a new album can display ads to people who have listed the band as a favorite. But, more interestingly, a band you’ve never heard of, but who sounds like your favorite band, can offer you free Mp3 downloads. Matching personal tastes in this way can be a great way to pick up new customers and expose them to your brand.

Facebook ads can click to non-Facebook landing pages, and it is likely that your business will want to develop separate optimized landing pages that works in sync with your Facebook campaign to increase relevance and lower cost-per-customer acquisition.

Social media and the way people communicate with these new platform are no joke. Indeed we are living a social media revolution. As an example of how fast social media is growing: This paper was written in August, 2011. Google+ social networking platform, Google’s response to Facebook, launched in beta in late-June. It already reports over 10 million Google+ signups. It is similar to Facebook in that it is a social networking platform yet different in the way users share information with “Circles” of friends.

Google + is still in testing and does not currently offer corporate pages, but with the success of other social networking sites to date, our bet is that advertisers and brands that leverage and understand Google+’s technologies will reap big benefits.

If you don’t know where to start, Contact Us. You will receive an honest, in-depth analysis of your website and online presence along with a unique Cybertising™ marketing plan designed to fit your business.

[email protected]

PhX Media Labs500 S. Pointe Dr.Suite #250Miami Beach, Fl. 331391-855-PHX-MEDIA

Written by | Paul Gimenez S. (PhX) and Jesus Pacheco (PhX)