2010 has come and gone, leaving you with the task of setting new goals and establishing benchmarks for your 2011 interactive marketing campaigns. As it did in 2010, search spending is expected to rise with 41% of respondents in a Strongmail marketing trends survey noting that they would increase budget for the channel. If you’re one of those that plan on increasing search spend, and you’ve read our tips on optimizing for universal search, then you know how important it is to have a well-rounded strategy. A critical ingredient to the healthy mix is local SEO. Following are some insights on why your brand should consider going “loco for local.”

Why Optimize for Local Search?

Say, for example, you own a pizza shop in Milwaukee. You know your target customer is anyone in the surrounding area with a hankering for Milwaukee’s finest slice, and you’d like to make it easier for them to find you. Chances are they will likely search “pizza Milwaukee,” or some derivation of the sort. What comes up when the search goes down? A map of local Milwaukee pizza restaurants, results for place pages and relevant local pizzerias.
 

The value in ranking near the top seems obvious – more clicks, more customers and more sales. So now, the questions are: What do search engines look for? And, what will it take to get to the top? While the answer to the second question varies from client to client, the basics of what search engines look for are well documented from both our work clients and this year’s industry survey on local SEO ranking factors. At Fullhouse, we’ve noticed that some are weighted more heavily than others.

Claim Your Google Place Page

This may seem obvious, but it’s still common to see an unclaimed listing - and sometimes even a small business without a web site. While we can’t do too much to remove the rock you’ve been living under if you don’t have a web site, the best place to get started if you do is to claim your local listing on Google Places. They’ll ask you to verify ownership of the physical address by mail or phone, and then you can begin adding your basic information.

Ensure Location is Accurate

When someone searches for “pizza Milwaukee,” it’s pretty clear what they want: a Pizza shop in Milwaukee – not Chicago, New York or Philadelphia. For this reason, the physical address of your business in proximity to the city center is taken into account when displaying place pages in search results. The closer you are to the intended search location, the better chance you have of showing up. Exceptions would include non-competitive queries like “ski slopes Miami, FL” or searches for rural business. Unfortunately, you can’t optimize for this if you’re a single location shop. You can, however, set up multiple Google Place listings if you have more than one physical location (i.e. a chain restaurant).

Associate Listing in Proper Categories

After you’ve been verified and your business has been listed, you’re eligible to edit your information and start the optimization process. Aside from having a Google Place Listing and an address close to the query, a top ranking signal is the category in which your business is listed. Google allows you to enter up to five categories, and we recommend researching them before you go ahead and submit. Choosing at least one well-known, common category will help Google associate your business with the industry. After this is chosen, you are free to go ahead and add custom categories that align more with your niche.

Obtain Citations in Local and Trusted Directories

Just like incoming links are important for traditional search engine rankings, citations or mentions of your business, address and telephone number are a critical part of local search. Directories like Local.com, Super Pages, City Search and Yellow Pages are locally focused and give you the most “bang for the buck” in terms of authority and trust. Local newspapers, blogs and magazines are also excellent prospects for building citations.

Get Customer Reviews (the good kind, not the bad)

Word-of-mouth advertising and peer recommendations add a layer of trust between the customer and the business, as most often it comes from a friend or acquaintance. Take that into the age of digital and you have online customer reviews. Nothing proves to Google that you are a reputable business more than positive user reviews. When displaying local listings in search results, Google aggregates reviews from Yelp, Insider Pages, Urban Spoon and others to get the best possible information.

With that said, is any review a good review? No, not really. A lot was shown on the importance of customer reviews and links in general for search marketing with the DecorMyEyes fiasco back in November. Since then, Google has “made changes to the algorithm” to take negative reviews out of the “positive ranking signals” and into the “bad for business on Google” category. Google claims they do not use sentiment analysis in search, but suffice to say that a bad review is a bad review, period.

So, What Are You Waiting For?

Local search doesn’t have to be a guessing game. Follow these best practices and gain an advantage over your competition. Get the process started and list your business in Google Places before it’s too late.

While most marketers who have conducted virtual events report them as successful, these kinds of events are also reported to fall short in terms of exhibitors’ top objective: generating leads. So, if they’re not as good at delivering leads, what explains the popularity and success of hybrid events, and what are some implications for marketers?

In Part 1, we noted that hybrid events are growing in popularity, but have not yet delivered on what is generally exhibitors’ top priority: generating leads. We hypothesized the reason for this may be that virtual experiences do not fully deliver on attendees’ motivations for attending trade shows – Education, Purchase Evaluation and Networking – which are more difficult to address by a single exhibitor (which is usually the case with hybrid events).

Nevertheless, we believe hybrid events are here to stay and can be highly effective when they’re well planned and executed. Below are some benefits of hybrid events, which help explain their rapidly growing popularity, as well as some key implications for marketers.

Benefits of hybrid events

• Expanded reach. Perhaps the greatest benefit of hybrid events is that they increase the total number of people exposed to the trade show content. For people who are unable (due to budget, geography, etc.) or not interested in attending the physical event, hybrid events can represent an attractive option for attending. In addition, social media extensions commonly found in hybrid event technology make it easy for attendees to share event content via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other digital channels, thus expanding audience reach.
• More engaging. Hybrid event attendees represent a captive audience that can be more engaged in the content and with other attendees compared to physical events.  Virtual event technology providers offer live video, chat, instant messaging, Q&A and other rich content—and many offer social and community extensions—making for highly participatory and engaging attendee experiences.
• Highly measurable. Hybrid events deliver new levels of measurement and tracking, with a variety of detailed analytics on attendee behavior and preferences – from time spent in the event, to whom they interacted with, to the content they looked at and for how long. Virtual event analytics can be combined with physical event metrics to provide a more accurate assessment and insight into event performance and ROI.
• “Shelf life.” Whereas physical events often have a distinct end, virtual extensions often do not. Product information, keynote speeches, chat transcripts and other content can be archived and made available for as long as the host wishes. We have seen traffic to online content six months to a year after the physical event has ended.
• Revenue stream. In addition to being able to collect registration fees from virtual attendees—just like traditional real-world events—hybrid exhibitors can and sell sponsorships and monetize content after the event, i.e. pay for downloads, transcripts, etc.

Some implications for marketers

• Avoid “cannibalization.” The virtual side of the event should not hurt the live event. The virtual event should be about enhancement, never replacement. By providing exclusive content—content only available at the real-world event or vice versa, for example—exhibitors can provide reasons to attend one side of the event that don’t undermine the other.
• Focus on the experience. Deliver on the reasons attendees visit events—which we proposed earlier are Education, Purchase Evaluation and Networking—in terms of the content and functionality the virtual side provides; and make sure the experience is user-friendly and that help/support is readily available for technical issues. Also be sure to measure user satisfaction and the value attendees received, as these insights can inform future events.
• Engage existing customers. If you plan to conduct a virtual event, make sure to invite your current customers. This is a great way to gather customer insights, foster customer-to-customer connections, and to introduce them to your latest innovations and offerings without the financial and time investments of attending the traditional event. (To take it a step further, insofar as competitors are often present at real-world events—which could cause customers to re-evaluate their relationship with you—getting them to attend your virtual event might be a good defensive move!)
• Lead nurturing. We’ve discussed how hybrid events have not been reported as big lead generators, but we believe there is significant opportunity to use them to nurture existing leads. These important contacts, who have taken an interest in you but are early in the buying process, might not be interested in attending the live show; and attending a hybrid event can be a good way to advance their sales-readiness. Virtual platforms can be integrated with CRM and marketing automation applications, bringing event participation into the complete prospect view and scoring.
• Consider multi-vendor exhibits. In Part 1, we stated that, because most hybrid events are put on by a single exhibitor, they may not fully satisfy prospects’ buying needs in terms of Purchase Evaluation (and this may help explain why they have not been big lead generators). Putting on a multi-vendor exhibit, in which non-competing, complementary exhibitors—or possibly even head-to-head competitors—could bring greater value to attendees in this regard, and should be considered where appropriate.
• Invite the media. Like much of Corporate America, trade publications have also faced budget constraints in recent history, making it difficult to dispatch journalists to all the trade shows they would like to cover. Creating a section of the virtual event specifically for the media, which includes media contacts, press releases, detailed product information and making executives available for virtual interviews, can result in valuable press coverage.
• Give it time. Like many technologies and platforms that are relatively new, time will give rise to best practices for hybrid events, and exhibitors and attendees alike will become more comfortable and proficient with them. But, just to be clear, this doesn’t mean take a wait-and-see approach to it! Get in the game, experiment, measure—and share your learnings with others.

Fueled by deep cuts to travel and marketing budgets in Corporate America, there is a growing trend for virtual trade shows. And hybrid events – physical shows augmented by virtual technology – are the fastest growing in the category. But do virtual extensions deliver on exhibitors’ biggest objectives?

This week we presented a review of three competing exhibitors’ presences at RSNA 2010, the world's largest radiology trade show. (If you’re not familiar with RSNA, it is accurately described as a “mega trade show”…a six-day event with more than 58,000 attendees from more than 90 countries in a 453,000 square feet convention center. It’s big!) The review looked at how the three competitors integrated online, social media and mobile content with their on-the-floor presences.

As you might expect, all three companies integrated digital channels with their real-world exhibits. Paid Search, Twitter, YouTube, and the companies’ web sites were used to promote and extend their traditional trade shows. One major difference, however, was that one company offered a virtual version of their exhibit – making it a “hybrid event” – whereas the other two companies did not.

The use of virtual extensions sparked a lot of internal discussion and raised some considerations, which we think are worth sharing here.

Let’s first start with our assumptions…

First, we assume that trade show attendees of any kind – real-world or virtual – attend for one or more of these reasons: 1) Education – learning trends, best practices, case studies, product information, etc.; 2) Purchase Evaluation – affirming or evaluating products/services; and/or 3) Networking – connecting with peers, prospects, partners, vendors, media, etc.

We also assume that exhibitors are mainly interested in Lead Generation. (We acknowledge there are other exhibitor objectives, but the assumption is lead generation is the main one. Several studies support this, including BtoB Magazine’s The Future of Events: Trends in the Demand, Usage, and Attitudes toward Events (9/2010); and Champion Exposition Services’ Exhibitor Trends Survey (8/2010), which show lead generation as the #1 objective for exhibitors by a good margin.)

Do virtual extensions generate more leads?
In answering this question, we noted a paradox of sorts: while many marketers have noted success with virtual events, the success has not been defined by lead generation. (This is nicely summarized on pp. 13-14 of TSNN and Onstream Media’s 2010 Virtual Event Report.) In fact, while it is very easy to find information about the benefits and best practices for hybrid events, we were hard pressed to find case studies in which virtual extensions were big lead generators.

It could be that hybrid events are relatively new, and there just hasn’t been much case study on them. But we suspect it’s more than that: that the answer may lie in why people attend trade shows (Education, Purchase Evaluation and/or Networking), which leaves virtual extensions at a disadvantage in terms of lead generation.

It’s true that virtual trade show technologies, such as those from INXPO, ON24, Unisfair and 6connex, can provide virtual attendees with rich experiences that rival in-person attendance. They support streaming live video, in-depth product information, and the ability to interact with sales people and network with other attendees.  A recent ROI of Engagement study, Measuring and Maximizing the Impact of a Hybrid Event, shows virtual events are comparable to in-person attendance in terms of “Reaction and Satisfaction” and “Learning and Understanding.”

But, given most virtual extensions to traditional trade shows do not provide attendees with access to other exhibitors or to “general” trade show content – which are key to Education, Purchase Evaluation and Networking – they do not fully satisfy prospective buyers’ needs, and therefore might not play a lead generation role as strongly as other tactics.

Now, that is not to say Fullhouse does not believe hybrid events are worthwhile. Quite the contrary, actually. In Part 2, we’ll share more about the benefits of hybrid events and what we believe are the implications for hybrid event exhibitors.