Articles by jaydixon

It would appear as though more and more businesses are starting to get it. Social media (or Social Network Marketing) is no the be-all-end-all silver bullet for marketing wizardry. It has its place to be sure, but the great myth that began with Barrack Obama winning the 2008 presidential election due to his efforts with this free marketing resource called social media is beginning to be exposed. The “free” media via social outlets cost his campaign something like $45 million and was executed by an army of highly trained and coordinated volunteers.

Jason Keith recently posted the following article on Boston.com on Social media and small business marketing. It’s worth a read.

Social media might not be worth the time

Jason Keith  September 4, 2011

You’ve heard the hype by now.  Facebook has over 650 million users, Twitter is growing at a breakneck pace, Google+ is going to crush them both eventually. Everyone is checking in on Foursquare, while Groupon and LivingSocial offer deals and ways to get customers not ever seen in the industry before. By now I’m sure small businesses owners everywhere are feeling the pressure to get in on the action, wondering what it is they are missing.

The benefits of social media are obvious; it allows you to connect directly with customers and it’s (relatively) cheap to set up, costing no money to set up an account.  There’s also a lot of ways you can incorporate it into email, websites and other materials to get followers and fans, so building up a base sounds easy.  It’s a microphone that everyone should be stepping up to, because if you’re not, your competition is.  Right?

But what you never hear is that social media, without question, is the most time consuming marketing channel you will ever undertake. There is a level of commitment with any one of these platforms, Facebook and Twitter specifically, that you need to be aware of before you even consider using them.  The other caveat is as you grow your base and you get more followers, the time commitment needed to maintain your social media properties in an effective way also grows.  The more people you have talking about you, the more you have to respond and reach out yourself.

Wondering how much time it actually takes?  There are varying degrees.  Dell for instance has its own social media  command center, which tracks 22,000 topics a day.  At Vistaprint, we have 70,000 Facebook fans and 10,000 Twitter followers, and spend on average 3-4 hours a day monitoring and interacting with our community.  If you have a group in the thousands, you can expect to spend roughly an hour a day on your social media initiatives.  Traditionally this has been time that entrepreneurs or small businesses with a few employees simply don’t have to spare.

The reason social media can be a bear for a small business owner or entrepreneur is that it not only takes time, it takes diligence.  You have to be on top of your social media pages daily, because all it takes is one unhappy customer, spam comment or potentially offensive content to really make your business look unprofessional or distant.  If you’re not ready to monitor your Facebook page at least a few times a day, then don’t jump in the first place.  Your time will be better spent on a traditional avenue like email marketing, direct mail, search ads or even networking.  Those are controlled environments and while they do need a level of consistency, don’t require the level of commitment social media does.

So while social media CAN be a great avenue for small business owners, what you really have to ask yourself before getting into it is, “do I have the time?”

Have you had time to get into and really see success with social media? If so please discuss in the comments section.

End of article.

Social media is a great way to manage your brand. But with tighter and tighter budgets, your online marketing investment should be allocated to results-oriented endeavors first and foremost. Once these resources have been exhausted, brand management via social media could be an option worth exploring.

Remember, the sky’s the limit for doing this wrong. If you’re doing it wrong you’re really wasting your time, energy and money.

Miller and Smith (and their joint development partner North America Sekisui House LLC, an affiliate of Japan’s SEKISUI HOUSE, Ltd.), have selected BORCZ:DIXON as the advertising agency for One Loudoun.

The development team considered 7 of the Washington, D.C. area’s elite advertising agencies specializing in real estate advertising and narrowed the field to four agencies selected to present a creative branding pitch. BORCZ:DIXON was awarded the project based on their demonstration of new urbanism community branding that reflected the attitude of this sophisticated, contemporary and culturally diverse master-planned community.

One Loudoun is a new urban destination that will become Loudoun County’s new downtown and is now under construction at Rt. 7 and the Loudoun County Parkway. This New Urbanism development will be the one, all encompassing place for living, working, shopping, dining and recreating in Loudoun County.

One Loudoun is a premier 358-acre omni-use, master-planned community in Loudoun County, Virginia that will feature 1040 residences, 702,000 square feet of retail to include fine dining, upscale shopping, luxury hotel and movie theater, three-million square feet of office space, a community center, and an amphitheater – all complimented by approximately 150-acres of public land and miles of walking trails. One Loudoun will also be home to the World Trade Center Dulles Airport.

Click here to see more about the creative branding for One Loudoun, or visit oneloudoun.com

BORCZ:DIXON was acknowledged this week in an article in the Birmingham News for the grand opening of the Shops of Grand River. We have been working with the Daniel Corporation for several years throughout the early development and planning of this Audubon International Gold Certified Master Planned Community. Check out the article…

What’s up with the spiral icon in Shops of Grand River sign in Leeds?

By Michael Tomberlin

Published: Thursday, October 28, 2010

Is it a maze meant to represent the corridors leading to the nearly 60 shops at the Shops of Grand River?

Or does it represent the inner rings of a tree to suggest how long it took for the new retail center in Leeds to go from idea to reality?

Or maybe it’s David Bronner’s thumb print, signifying the Retirement Systems of Alabama chief’s financial backing of the $127 million project.

Nope. It turns out the spiral symbol that takes the place of the “O” in the sign for the Shops of Grand River outlet mall is, well, symbolic of something else.

Developer Daniel Corp. says the design is taken from Native American pictographs, which are paintings on rocks, and petroglyphs, or carvings on rocks, that represent water.

“It pays homage to the historical significance of the Cahaba River,” according to literature on the logo from Daniel. “The river is the essence and starting point of all life, based on the spiritual beliefs of the local Choctaw Indians. Cahaba (Cahawba as referred to by the Choctaw), meaning ‘above water’ was chosen as a home by these Native Americans for its springs of good water, route of transportation and fertile grounds as their base of community.”

With that in mind, the Grand River development is meant to be a place “where Mother Nature co-mingles with the thrill of human nature,” Daniel’s literature says.

It’s not just bluster from the developer. Grand River is the first community in Alabama to be designated as a Certified Gold Audubon International Signature Sanctuary, meaning it adhered to strict set of environmental and sustainable design and development criteria.

The logo will not be attached only to the outlet mall, which opens to the public today. It will be used throughout the 6,500-acre Grand River community, which is set to add thousands of homes, more retail and entertainment development along with some office and light industrial space over the next several years.

The early stages of the Grand River development process included detailed planning sessions, known as charrettes, and throughout them all, one thing stood out.

“In studying the aerials and topographic maps, it was clear that the Cahaba River was an integral component of the landscape,” said Jeremy Tickle, development manager for Birmingham-based Daniel. “It was a natural treasure that we wanted to embrace.”

Tickle said Maryland advertising agency Borcz:Dixon “reached back to the roots of the land” for the logo.

“We identified a series of Native American pictographs from the Choctaw Indians that once inhabited the area around the Cahaba,” he said.

Daniel’s partner in the Grand River development is land-owner USS Real Estate, while RSA provided financing. The same team was responsible for Hoover’s Ross Bridge development.

Not only is Pay-per-click Advertising the best place to start your Search Marketing program, but it’s also the best place to start your overall marketing and advertising program. It’s simple logic. Why wouldn’t you spend your first advertising dollar and every other after that on search marketing until you’ve exhausted that resource? And then think about branding and other advertising mediums to build out your program. Why? Because Search Marketing, and specifically Pay-Per-Click Advertising, puts your message in front of those prospects who are already looking for you. Let me repeat that… THEY ARE LOOKING FOR YOU! Right now.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising is beginning to dominate the search results page

Google keeps controlling more real estate, and if you are not leveraging AdWords (Google’s brand name for Pay-Per-Click Advertising) then there is a chance your business could  eventually get pushed “below the fold” – perhaps not for longtail keywords…but certainly for the highest traffic and most valuable keywords in your industry. Google recently launched their vertical search panels, and to some degree you can think of many of these as what will eventually amount to some form of an ad channel (or a channel which promotes content from premium related partnerships with Google).

In short, you need to be here. These prospects that are looking for you are double qualified. First, they qualify themselves by telling you what they’re looking for with a keyword. Second, your text ad, if properly written, can act as an additional filter ensuring their interest in whatever product or service you have to sell.

But the sky’s the limit for doing this wrong. Work with a Google Certified expert and your search advertising will yield a quantifiable return on your investment.

Last month the Wall Street Journal published the article below about the new Print campaign touting print media as a worthwhile investment for advertisers. I find it amazing to see print media battling this way. Print media is not dead. They’re just fighting the wrong fight.

Wouldn’t it be more effective to focus their energies on what they should be doing to take advantage of the digital revolution rather than fight it.

People still need/want information – the information that the print media delivers. They just need to re-think their delivery.

Company’s brand in traditional media to create lasting impressions about their brands, impressions that effect decision making that occurs online! Thus the explosion of online advertising.

Traditional media is still incredibly valid. The value of branding remains as potent today as ever before. Print media just needs to re-think how it delivers its message across a digital world. Check out the article below and let us know what you think.

March 1, 2010 – Wall Street Journal – By RUSSELL ADAMS and SHIRA OVIDE

Magazine executives spent much of last year telling anyone who would listen that they were taking their brands digital.

Their message this year: Print rules.

Five leading magazine publishers have pitched in on a multimillion-dollar ad campaign touting the “power of print.” They say nearly 1,400 pages of the ads will be sprinkled through magazines including People, Vogue and Ladies’ Home Journal this year.

The ads press the case that magazines remain an effective advertising medium in the age of the Internet because of the depth and lasting quality of print, compared with the ephemeral nature of much of the Web’s content.

“The Internet is fleeting. Magazines are immersive,” says one ad, which is slated to appear in May issues of the participating publications. The first spread features a photo of swimmer Michael Phelps from ESPN The Magazine, with the headline “We surf the Internet. We swim in magazines.”

Backing the campaign are Time Warner’s Time Inc., Hearst, Advance Publications’ Condé Nast, Wenner Media and Meredith. The ads were created by WPP’s Young & Rubicam.

The effort is scheduled to be announced Monday at an industry conference in San Francisco.

Just a few months ago, a handful of publishers announced another collaborative effort aimed at readying magazines for the migration of readers to digital devices. Since then, however, industry executives say advertising has begun creeping back into magazines after a two-year drought. The improved results have given them more ammunition to persuade readers and advertisers alike that the ink-on-paper business isn’t dying.

“A lot of us sat back for way too long and listened to all this abuse and said nothing about it,” says Jann Wenner, who orchestrated the campaign. “Meanwhile, we sit on top of one of the greatest mediums,” adds Mr. Wenner, whose Wenner Media publishes Rolling Stone and US Weekly.

The five publishers say they have committed to run the first of the ads in the front one-fifth of their titles’ pages, and have agreed to run all subsequent ads in the first half.

The ad space they are devoting to the campaign is valued at more than $90 million, based on public ad rates for each of their participating magazines. They say they have never before attempted such a large-scale campaign.

The spark for the campaign was a “manifesto” Mr. Wenner penned last year, in which he said that just as TV didn’t kill magazines, the Internet was a threat only to publications that lost focus on what makes magazines unique. “In a certain way, this campaign is aimed at the magazine business itself,” Mr. Wenner.

That the campaign might seem out of sync coming from an industry that has spent so much time trying to prove it can hold its own in the digital arena is beside the point, executives involved in the collaboration say. The purpose of the campaign is to remind people that these brands are rooted in print products with huge cultural and commercial influence, they say.

“Going digital is very important to Time Inc., but I don’t want my clients to believe that no one is reading the printed word,” says Time Inc. Chief Executive Ann Moore.

Even so, the Internet is expected to continue attracting a growing proportion of ad dollars away from traditional media. The share of global ad spending devoted to the Internet will rise to 16% by 2012, up from 12% last year, according to ZenithOptimedia, part of ad company Publicis Groupe. By the middle of the next decade, the firm expects the Internet to overtake newspapers as the world’s second-largest advertising medium, behind TV.

Magazines’ challenge is to be ahead of the digital curve while recognizing that for now print is their best asset, ad buyers say. Magazines are grappling with how to adjust to new devices like Apple’s iPad, the tablet computer that is sparking fear but also enthusiasm in the media business.

“The iPad is bringing sexy back to magazines,” says Robin Steinberg, an executive at Publicis’s MediaVest arm who advises marketers on print advertising.

Amid a decline in spending on traditional media, other industries are making similar pitches for themselves. The Newspaper Association of America has run repeated ads to publicize the number of people who read a daily newspaper. As with the magazine campaign, the newspaper trade group says its ads are designed to counter the notion print is a dead medium.

The local-TV industry’s trade group is starting an on-air ad campaign this month to encourage companies to advertise on their local TV stations.

The Internet Advertising Bureau couldn’t be reached for comment.

The Michael Phelps ad is accompanied by an essay about the appeal of magazines. “Even in the age of the Internet, even among the groups one would assume are most singularly hooked on digital media, the appeal of magazines is growing,” the ad says. The publishers point to data from Mediamark Research & Intelligence that show magazine readership has risen 4.3% over the past five years.

There are seven spreads in the series, four of which are essay-like and three that are more lighthearted. The campaign’s signature is “Magazines: the Power of Print,” with each letter of the word magazines appearing as it does in the title of a major publication. The “a” is from Vanity Fair.

Straightforward article explaining the benefits of Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for small business online advertising from Network Solutions.

While the Internet can truly be a level playing field for businesses of all sizes, it will take a search engine marketing strategy to get you in the game. Search engine marketing includes both Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – and that’s where the confusion tends to begin. If you’re unsure which method is right for your business, you’re not alone. Many business owners get bogged down trying to decide between the two. However, most eventually learn that an effective search engine marketing campaign should include both.

Search Engine Optimization

Think of the last time you performed a search on a major search engine like Google® or Bing®. The results that appear along the center of the page are referred to as “natural” or “organic” results. They are influenced by search engine optimization techniques – such as using relevant keywords throughout your content, clean web design, link building and more. Keep in mind that natural search results are generally regarded as being more credible that paid ads.

• Time: SEO can deliver the results you want, but you’ll have to be patient. A boost in rankings can take time to achieve, and results will have to be monitored and adjustments made as search engines change their algorithms and competitors move ahead of you in the rankings.
• Cost: Professional SEO services can be costly in the beginning, but it’s an investment that pays off as you establish long-term search visibility without paying for the clicks that it brings.

Pay Per Click Advertising

Again, think of the last time you searched for a product or service online. Atop and alongside your natural search results, you saw Pay Per Click Advertising, often called “Sponsored Results”. In a PPC advertising campaign, you bid on keywords relevant to your business. The more competitive a keyword, the more you’ll have to bid to achieve a high search engine ranking. You’ll pay only when someone clicks on your ad, which makes it crucial to craft your PPC ads in a way that brings you quality visitors rather than quantity. Conversions can be increased by using landing pages that take your visitor straight to the information they need.

• Time: A PPC campaign can be “up and running” on the Internet very quickly and a well-crafted, competitive ad can bring you same-day search engine visibility. PPC also allows you to determine the amount of time your ads will appear, essentially letting you flip the switch that turns your ads on and off.
• Cost: Choosing relevant keywords, creating landing pages and targeting your audience can help you keep down your PPC costs by drawing clicks from quality visitors. Unethical practices from competitors such as click fraud (intentional clicks made with the sole purpose of increasing the cost to you) make careful monitoring a necessity.

A Balanced Search Engine Marketing Campaign

Many businesses find that dividing their search marketing dollars between SEO and PPC pays off. If you’ve just created a website, you may want to consider using PPC to garner quick visibility while slowly building your SEO results. And beginners aren’t the only ones who can benefit from incorporating both strategies into their campaign. You’ll likely find that ramping up your PPC advertising is helpful when your SEO rankings slip and, vice versa, that having strong long-term SEO results can help when your PPC ads aren’t driving as much traffic as you’d like. Another hidden advantage: Internet users widely view businesses that appear in both SEO and PPC ads as more credible.

The following is an article recently written by our good friend and colleague Dan Levitan.

The larger homebuilders are now strongly targeting the first time buyers.  They are, whether they realize it or not, therefore attempting to sell to the “Millennial Generation”.  But the question that must be asked is whether they are doing it correctly and, for the smaller homebuilders, why aren’t they in the game.

In the United States the Millennial Generation, also known as the “Echo Boom” (the children of the Baby Boomers) and “Generation Y”, is generally considered to consist of those born between 1982 and somewhere from 1995 to 2001, a thirteen to nineteen year span depending on which demographers and sociologists you choose to believe, and consisting of approximately 75 to 80 million people, a market second in number to or possibly even exceeding the Baby Boomers.  But the Millennials comprise a market with entirely different philosophies, expectations, practices, perceptions and procedures than their predecessors regarding life and, as it relates to the homebuilding business, marketing and purchasing.

They are perhaps best identified by an increased use and familiarity with communications, media, and digital technologies made possible by the advent of instant communication – email, texting, and IM (instant messaging) and the social media outlets such as YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter.  But they are far more than just technologically proficient.

This group has been aggressively studied and well documented, perhaps best known in the 2000 book by William Strauss and Neil Howe, Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, a follow-up to their 1991 book Generations: The History of America’s Future.  They were reported on in Morley Safer’s television special on the new generation of American workers, “The Millennials Are Coming”, originally broadcast on Nov. 11, 2007, which dealt with the significant changes in the workplace needed to accommodate this new generation.

One of the more interesting papers that I have read on the subject of the Millennials is “Millennial Behaviors & Demographics” by Richard Sweeney, New Jersey Institute of Technology, (December 22, 2006) (http://bit.ly/9WmaGS).  Although written primarily to address this generation’s attitudes and behaviors compared to previous generations as they impact education, several of the conclusions have far-reaching impact on the homebuilding industry:

Sweeny suggests:

•    that Millennials have far more choices and are far more selective; that they expect a much greater variety and array of products and services yet they are far less brand sensitive;
•    That they are experiential and exploratory learners;  they prefer to learn by doing and they seldom read directions;
•    They expect flexibility and convenience;  they want what they want when and where they are ready;
•    They expect as much personalization and customization as possible;
•    They are intolerant of delays, expecting their services instantly;
•    They are the ultimate multi-taskers;
•    They embrace a “nomadic” style of communication; they communicate more frequently using IM (instant messaging), text messaging and cell phones and do whatever they need to do regardless of distance;
•    As a group they have different personalities and behaviors than their predecessors – they are direct and more confident; they are more outgoing; they are more adaptive and mature; they are more adventuresome yet also more self-doubting; they are more open to change and more self disciplined.

Another very useful source of information on the Millennials comes from Scott Keeter and Paul Taylor of the Pew Research Center (http://people-press.org/).  They suggest that this generation, like individual people, has a distinctive “personality”:

■Millennials are the most ethnically and racially diverse cohort of youth in the nation’s history – 18.5% are Hispanic; 14.2% are Black; 4.3% are Asian; 3.2% are mixed race or other; only 59.8%, a record low, are white.
■They are the most politically progressive age group in modern history;  in 2008 they voted two for one for Barack Obama over John McCain while adults ages 30 and over split their votes almost evenly.
■They are the first generation in human history which regards behaviors like tweeting and texting, along with websites like Facebook, YouTube, Google and Wikipedia as common and integral parts of their lives.
■They are the least religiously observant youth group since survey research began charting religious behavior.

If you wish to test yourself on “How Millennial Are You”? – Take the simple 14 question quiz on their website – http://pewresearch.org/millennials/quiz/.  I thought that I was fairly “in tune” but scored only 46 out of the potential 100 (perhaps in part because I do not text).

The fact is that many of us in the homebuilding industry, especially, the principals and department heads of the major building companies, and the established consultants and service professionals, are far older than the Millennials.  Many of us have been slow to embrace new technologies.  We interpret multi-tasking as not paying attention.  The vast majority of us are white and non-Hispanic. We are far more conservative and may well have voted for McCain.  So there may well be little commonality between us and our potential customers.

Unless and until we understand and appreciate who these new buyers are, how they live and, most importantly, how they purchase, we will fail to maximize our sales and our market share.

From a marketing standpoint, the following questions related to this new technology and lifestyle orientation need to be answered:

•    If all purchasers (not just the Millennials) buy individual communities as opposed to a corporate brand when selecting a new home, why have most builders including the “nationals” failed to provide individual Facebook, Twitter and YouTube pages for each of their communities and why is every new home salesperson not blogging regularly about his or her community?

A recent E-Marketer story reports that marketers in all industries are planning to allocate a major portion of their budgets towards social marketing, with respondents to the budgeting questions reporting that they would devote almost one-fifth of their marketing budgets to social media over the next five years.

•    If Millennials (as well as the other markets also who are “tech savvy”) believe in instant communication, why is it that only one of the largest homebuilders and almost none of the smaller builders provide web concierge services?

Failure to respond to a potential customer within the customer’s time frame for expectation of a response takes you out of consideration.

•    If the homebuilding industry now concentrates a substantial portion of its media budgets on web-based marketing, why are homebuilders not constantly updating SEO (search engine optimization) for their websites?  Why are we not tracking and analyzing all web visitors in real time to determine number of visits, page preference, time on site, etc?  Why are we not obtaining real-time analysis of visitor traffic source to optimize cost and placement of click-throughs, banner ads and other purchased space?

All other Internet-based industries utilize these services and they are pros at knowing who is on their site, where the visitor came from, what have they looked at or purchased in the past, and all the other information necessary to guide a purchase.  The fact is that homebuilding must be an Internet-based industry if we are to properly service not only the Millennials but all our other target markets as well.  And if nothing else, you can provide the basics yourself through Google Analytics (free at http://www.google.com/analytics/) and several of the other programs available on-line.

The fact is that Millennials are very careful and thorough shoppers.  When they walk into your sales office they have been on your web site several times and you need to know how many times, what web pages they visited, what homes they have browsed.  They are also busy and do not wish to waste their time so you need to be prepared or you could lose the sale.

In fact, it is not just the Millennials who are on the web.   Baby boomers are avid Internet users. They make up 32.5% of the US adult population and 36% of the adult online population, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.  And according to Met Life’s Mature Market Institute, a 2009 study reported that individuals age 65 and over lead all other generational groups in online shopping with 77% reporting that they do so.

SEO should be provided by your advertising agency or whoever designed and monitors your web site and updated regularly.  If they will not provide you with the data you need there are several suppliers available who can do this and more at reasonable cost.

And on an even more basic level, have we made the significant operational changes necessary to accommodate this market:

•    Have we included ethnic and cultural diversity in the sales offices and provided for a bi or multi-lingual sales staff?
•    Have we adjusted our sales process, procedures and presentations to reflect how the Millennials learn, make decisions and purchase?
•    Have we adjusted our hours of operation at the sales offices to reflect their lifestyles?
•    Have we adjusted our designs and standard and available features to reflect this target market’s expectations of far more choices, personalization and customization, even at the affordable price points?
•    Have we adjusted our marketing thrust to sell the individual community as this group is not brand sensitive?
•    Have we instituted a procedure for timely information flow to the customer on an ongoing basis and established valid production processes and schedules so that all target dates are achieved?

And that is only the tip of the iceberg.  To truly accommodate the Millennial market we need to consider their impact on every aspect of our operation.  Millennials consider themselves as cash strapped and quite probably have incurred substantial educational loans and credit card debt – have we added a credit repair function to our mortgage approval process?  They are socially responsible – are we “green” and do we visibly and actively support worthwhile causes? They are experiential in nature – have we created the appropriate community entry, drive to the models and sales office experience?  The list is almost endless.

There are 40+ million homes to be sold to the Millennials in the next several years and that’s just their first home purchase.  Let’s make every certain that we make every possible sale.

Daniel R. Levitan, MIRM, IRM Fellow, CMP, CSP, CAASH, RAM is President of Levitan & Associates, a Florida-based firm providing marketing and strategic consulting to builders, developers and lenders.  He has been involved with properties throughout the United States, Canada and the Caribbean which have included well over 145,000 housing units in more than 950 communities representing in excess of $45 Billion in sales. Levitan has served as president and multi-term trustee of the Institute of Residential Marketing, Chair and multi-term trustee of the National Sales and Marketing Council and is the winner of the Bill Molster, John P. Hall, Trina Ripley Excellence in Education and IRM’s President’s awards and in 2010 was honored as the first “MIRM of the Year” designee.  He can be contacted by email at dlevitan@bellsouth.net, you can visit his website at www.levitanassociates.net and his housing industry blog at www.residentialmarketingblog.com/.

Worldwide Online Search Market Grows 46% from December 2008 to December 2009! And It’s only getting bigger.

Interactive marketing will near $55 billion and represent 21% of all marketing spend in 2014 as marketers shift dollars away from traditional media and toward search engine marketing, display advertising, email marketing, social media, and mobile marketing. This cannibalization of traditional media will bring about a decline in overall advertising budgets, death to obsolete agencies and a publisher awakening!

It’s nice to know BORCZ:DIXON is on the leading edge of this trend. We’ve been helping clients drive traffic and sales via search marketing for years. We know what works and what doesn’t. Cheaper, faster, stronger. Sounds pretty good to me.

Top 10 Lists are too long. Who has the time? We’re inundated with them this time of year. How in the world do “they” think we can keep up? What with all our emails, tweets, Facebook pages so on and so forth we’re more likely checking ourselves into some sort of facility (Pick the one appropriate for you).

That being said, I’m going with a top 7. Yep, top seven advertising concepts to consider for the new year. Now, these aren’t mine. Dana Severson of Advertising Age came up with these gems. But as an advertising agency guy, I can really relate and think they’re spot on.

1. Social networking is only a good idea if you are going to be social. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a social media “guru” by any stretch of my imagination. However, it’s obvious to anyone who has a Facebook account that unless you’re having conversations, you’re not being social.

2. Just because newspapers are failing doesn’t mean that print media is dead. Numerous studies have proven it. That said, forget the research. If you want real proof that print media is still alive, just look at the collection of magazines on coffee tables and in bathrooms at your next get-together. Or, better yet, consider your own relationship with your favorite magazine. Magazines are shuttering because advertisers are spending less. It’s not, I repeat, NOT because readers stopped reading them.

3. For the reasons I just mentioned, do not eliminate print from your advertising plans. I’m generalizing here, but for the most part, rates are cheaper and there’s less competition for the reader’s attention between the covers. In other words, your ROI is going to be much greater.

4. The over-analysis of online advertising is detrimental to the concept of branding. Keep in mind, the measurement of success from your online advertising efforts doesn’t always have to come in the form of clicks. Don’t worry Mr. Client, it’s not your fault, you’ve been misled. Ad networks have trained you to believe that the only value in online advertising is conversions. This is not true.

5. With that in mind, banner advertising is becoming increasing less effective (both in terms of brand exposure and conversions). Focus on online campaigns that engage, entertain and inform. In other words, branded content is an idea you should be exploring. And, by branded content, I don’t mean sponsored blog posts. Those are nothing more than a banner ad made of words. Rather, think of engaging/entertaining the reader first, advertising second.

6. For once, green-light the third concept. You know, the one that’s outside your comfort zone. This is the campaign that will more than likely drive the greatest results. Why? Because we know what we are doing and we just want you to trust our judgment on this — just once. You won’t be sorry.

7. And lastly, for god’s sake, NO MORE BUDGET CUTS. OK, that was just some wishful thinking, but please do consider it.

So, there’s your seven ideas for advertising in 2010. As an Advertising Agency guy, of course I could give you way more than seven. In fact, it’s killing me not to continue spewing out idea after idea. But Dana has crystallized a few pearls of advertising wisdom that I won’t dilute with my own…. for now.

Understand where your website fits within your product/service buying cycle and you will be well on your way to developing an effective search marketing program whether it’s via Pay-Per-Click (PPC), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Network Marketing (SNM) or, ideally all of them.

More than likely, your website has several opportunities within your businesses buying cycle.

For example, if you’re selling televisions, you’d want your website to be found at the beginning of the buying cycle, the “research” phase for keywords like “new tv”. Then, you’d want to be found during the “comparison” phase whether it be for product or price. So brand name keywords would be ideal. Finally, you’d really want to be found during the “purchase” phase of the buying cycle. These longtail keywords might include the brand name along with the product name and often times even the product ID number. Remember, the internet has made for some very savvy buyers.

If your website doesn’t attract prospects throughout every phase of the buying cycle, you are most likely missing out on a significant opportunity. And if your competitors sites are, then they are establishing a high degree of credibility which will bring repeat business and referrals from existing customers.

Another interesting example would be new home sales. Unlike other retail products like tvs or sneakers or whatever, people don’t buy real estate online (not yet anyway). They do engage in a tremendous amount of research and discovery where impressions are made and perceptions are formed. In new home sales, a builder or community website is most often utilized at the very beginning of the buying cycle. The information gathering, or “research” phase.

Measuring web traffic results like conversions or other analytical data has to be examined quite a bit differently because of the place for a new home sales website within the buying cycle. New homes sales websites are also critical during the “validation” stage of the buying cycle. A phase more subtle for some products. We don’t look for a lot of validation from our families or peers when buying a new pair of sneakers as much as we do when buying a big ticket item like a car or a new home.

So, understanding where your website fits within your product/service buying cycle plays a huge role in developing a strategy for search marketing and again in how you measure the success of the search marketing through analytical data. It’s not always about conversions.

Remember, search marketing is just another medium within the broader umbrella of marketing. So called Online/Search Marketing experts may be very talented when it comes to manipulating and navigating the technical aspects of these online resources. But having a broader breadth of experience in marketing combined with a technical expertise allows us to see the forrest AND the trees.

So, where does your website fit?