When looking for a distribution method for your marketing budget, where do you start? There are relationships with aggregators, vendors and others but with the ever-changing nature of the education industry and the goals related to school success, how do you know who to partner with? Who will give you what you’re asking for? Most importantly, who will deliver to you — the end buyer — what they’re promising?

This is a conundrum that many schools and education marketers deal with. Some providers haven’t survived the changing landscape. Whether it’s falling behind with compliance requirements, or struggling to maintain enough traffic to stay afloat, many online education marketers and agencies leave the business and move on to other, less-quality driven industries.

But what is important to a college or university should be of the greatest importance to the school’s marketing sources. We all know that high-quality, compliant leads are necessary for success with any higher education marketing campaign, but a partnership with the right aggregator needs to be more than just that; and a school’s expectations should be nothing less.

Compliance, quality and an understanding of a successful admission life-cycle from the first point of contact with potential students to enrollment is what most satisfies a client. 

The Trust Factor

The focus of each school’s lead buyer should be the following: Do I trust this lead provider? Do they know what they’re talking about? And, do they know what I’m talking about when discussing goals, metrics and quality requirements?

The answer is probably. Your marketing partner probably knows what you’re looking to achieve, but is the entire marketing team on the same-page with you and your goals? Does their network know what you’re looking for? Does their SEM strategist understand your end goals? Does their creative team understand what will get you the most bang for your buck?

Fortunately, MediaWhiz has those tools and a team of Education Specialists to enhance the quality of all work, media and marketing going out the door.

By putting together targeted campaigns with the right marketing channels, partnerships and creative, the goals of each individual school are identified, defined and deployed with the school’s direction and insight, along with MediaWhiz’s direct-marketing expertise behind it.

So, think about your last marketing buy and think about your goals. When doing this, ask yourself this question: Do you have your goals identified?

Partnering with a marketing agency, such as MediaWhiz, that has the ability to spend time on your campaign, tackling it from all angles and using tools like compliance monitoring, sophisticated user engagement projections and true A/B testing will give you, the client, results you should expect.

The right direct marketing tools are crucial to a campaign’s long-term success. Yes, compelling copy is great, but if you have a company spending your marketing dollars you want to make sure the cost they’re incurring for quality users to “click” will actually convert on your landing page.

By using direct marketing tools and best practices, MediaWhiz helps clients increase the results needed from their marketing pieces. This gives your admissions team a better opportunity to engage the potential students you’re spending advertising dollars to target.

Don’t settle for poorly targeted marketing campaigns. Call us today at +1 646.264.0144 and learn how MediaWhiz can help you target the students you want to reach.

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Traditional and mobile SEO can’t continue to work as separate marketing initiatives. They must become synonymous.

According to the venture capital firm KPCB, there are more than 244 million Internet users in the United States and 358 million mobile device subscribers, 48% of which have smartphones.ComScore reports that 52.1% of U.S. mobile phone users access a browser on their device. This equates to 187 million U.S. mobile browser users.

Does this mean marketers need to shift all of their attention to mobile search? Not yet. But the trend indicates a definite shift in the devices people use for search. And that will have a significant impact on how digital marketers engage, acquire, and retain customers for years to come.

The rate of increase of mobile Internet users illustrates the need for marketers to stop thinking about traditional and mobile SEO as two distinct programs. Marketers need to start developing strategies to merge traditional and mobile SEO into a single multichannel marketing process that is device and platform agnostic.

The merger: Traditional SEO meets mobile

The rapid rise in consumer mobile phone use for local search and e-commerce necessitates an equally robust shift in a brand’s search strategy. Marketers need to cater their search and SEO campaigns to consumer interests and habits, regardless of the device used.

Mobile can no longer be thought of as a separate search component. Running a comprehensive search and SEO strategy that targets users on all devices opens up many customer acquisition opportunities for brands. Here’s a look at three such opportunities worth considering:

1. Ranking for mobile-specific searches. As more consumers switch from desktop browsing to local mobile search, there is a big opportunity for brands to launch paid and organic search campaigns aimed at mobile devices. Digital marketing on mobile devices remains less competitive than traditional desktop marketing, which makes mobile SEO-specific campaigns a low-hanging fruit.
2. Use Google’s mobile-specific search content index. Google has a separate index of content for mobile search than it does for its traditional search product. The results on a mobile device can be much different than those on a desktop for a given search query. One of the key differences in how Google selects its results on mobile is whether a webpage is user-friendly on a mobile device. A website that is not optimized for mobile will often provide a poor user experience on mobile devices. In those cases, Google will likely rank a more mobile-friendly page higher on the list of results.
3. Tap into local. Search results on a mobile device are more geocentric than desktop-based search results. Google recognizes that mobile users are on the go and are often searching for something close to them. Local businesses should have a mobile-friendly website, as well as optimized pages in each of the major local search engines, such as Google+ (formerly Google Places), Yahoo! Local, Bing Local, etc.

The Web is becoming more mobile. Marketers must realize and embrace blended desktop and mobile search and SEO campaigns to remain competitive. The mobile SEO era is now upon us.

How is your brand adapting its search strategy to take advantage of mobile-specific SEO opportunities?

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Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of blog posts focusing on best practices for lead generation in the online education industry.

Year after year universities struggle with enrollment rates. At the same time marketers are testing new advertising channels, shifting budgets, designing new creative assets and everything in between to reach that seemingly elusive enrollment goal.

But why is nothing changing? Why are enrollment rates dropping after all that investment in time, money and effort?

It’s simple, really: The first point of contact is your first impression and it can make or break the success of a prospect’s enrollment. The best advertising campaign in the world is frustratingly useless if the admissions process deters prospective students.

Many universities with large marketing budgets fail to focus on what’s happening right under their nose, and in most cases, right down the hallway. I have seen everything from a first point of contact being a direct-mail piece to callbacks that occur two weeks after an online information request is submitted.

A successful online marketing campaign for a college or university isn’t just measured by a conversion rate. Performance marketing in education requires three critical components to be successful:

1. High-quality traffic sources: You need to have traffic (students) who are interested in learning more about a particular school.
2. Optimized creative: A high-quality landing page, great email design and banner ads that really catch the eye of prospective students.
3. Structured workflow: A cohesive admissions process that is ready to work a lead.

You can leave the first two requirements to the experts at MediaWhiz. We know what converts well in terms of website and landing-page design and we know what media mix will work best for you based on your program offerings, location and unique application requirements.

The third component is where you and your admission team come in. The admissions process needs to be prepared for these new prospects, armed with answers to their questions and the ability to guide them in the right direction based on their needs.

Below are a few best practices to follow to ensure your admissions team effectively and efficiently closes the loop from the time an information request is made to the ultimate goal of enrollment.

1. Your first point of contact should be a phone call. Anything less puts you light years behind your competitors who are using this tactic.
2. Call the prospect within 24 hours. Some schools call back within the hour, but manage these times within your team’s bandwidth.
3. Make sure your team has some sales background. At the end of the day you need your team to sell your school and help finalize the decision process for the potential student.
4. Make sure your Admission Representative:

• Asks open-ended questions
• Probes to identify buying motives
• Acknowledges prospects needs and concerns
• Links program details to buying motives
• Uncovers objections
• Addresses objections with solutions
• Creates a sense of urgency
• Gains commitment

5. Have a strong call closing. Assure that the prospect begins the application process immediately or that they have everything they need to begin the application  before ending the call. I’ve seen too many universities direct their prospect to an email that often ends up in the spam folder. Needless to say, the application process ends there.

6. Follow up on the prospects that are not interested at this time. If a prospect doesn’t sign-up after two weeks, it doesn’t mean they won’t sign-up in the future. All it costs is the price of a stamp or an email distribution to stay in touch with the prospect for as long as you wish. Some take up to a year to decide to attend college.

The purpose of advertising is to sell. It’s crucial, therefore, to have a strong admissions team that can sell the school and its programs and get the prospect to begin the application process while on the phone. Unfortunately, education will not sell itself. The competition in the education market is only getting stronger. If you’re not managing your lead flow efficiently, you could be handing hundreds of thousands of enrollment dollars to your competitors.

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There’s no question that mobile marketing and advertising is the hottest area of digital marketing at the moment. Big consumer brands are seemingly tripping over themselves to launch the fanciest mobile app.

We’ve written a lot recently about the foibles of mobile marketing campaigns that don’t have a direct lead generation or sales component tied into them. Heck, it’s for this reason that we launched MediaWhiz Mobile, our new mobile performance marketing service. Advertisers and publishers consistently tell us there is a big need to help them more profitably engage, acquire and retain customers and generate mobile-specific traffic.

And yet a number of leading advertisers complain that all of their mobile spending doesn’t improve their most important marketing metric: sales.

Mobile certainly captures a lot of eyeballs but its ability to produce a consumer action — leads, sales, downloads, etc. — is often lacking.

That may be starting to change, though. A recent eMarketer report shined some light on how mobile branding and marketing campaigns are starting to translate to sales and brand lift. And, most crucially for advertising, mobile marketing spending is beginning to make a serious dent in consumers’ purchase intent.

The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), in partnership with IHS Global Insight, studied U.S. mobile marketing expenditures and their impact on sales for the “Mobile Marketing Impact Study,” released in May. The study found that this year spending on mobile marketing — including mobile advertising, mobile customer-relationship management and mobile direct-response marketing on non-mobile media — will reach $10.46 billion. By 2015, spending on the channel will approach $20 billion.

All of that sounds great, but what it does it mean for actual sales and leads generated? Well, quite a lot actually.

InsightExpress found that in 2013, mobile and tablet advertising got strong results across brand health metrics, raising ad awareness, purchase intent and brand favorability. Tablets performed particularly well.

The below chart breaks down how mobile marketing performs across several critical brand metrics.

While there is still quite a ways to go before mobile marketing becomes a true customer-acquisition channel, the key metrics are moving in the right direction. For performance marketers, where consumer purchase intent is crucial, this is a welcomed sign.

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Much of the recent talk in the online marketing world has centered around the emerging concept of SoLoMoCo. For the uninitiated, that stands for SOcial LOcal MObile COmmerce. Boiled down to its most basic parts, this funny looking acronym encapsulates the future of digital marketing: everything social, everything local and everything mobile.

It’s with that perspective in mind that a recent report issued by the Local Search Association (look them up here) caught my eye. The report finds that nearly half (48% to be precise) of mobile phone owners use their device to look for local information.

The Local Search Association findings point to the increased role that smartphones and tablets are increasingly playing for the search industry in the United States. In particular, the report points to the need for marketers to view mobile at a local level.

From local search and SEO, to local mobile (what we at MediaWhiz call “LoMo”), online marketing is becoming more targeted and geo-specific. That presents huge opportunities to marketers that wisely find ways to blend their traditional and mobile SEO campaigns to achieve comprehensive search results.

As my colleague Marc Purtell, MediaWhiz’s director of SEO, attests, the future of SEO is local mobile.

Search marketers need to cater to consumers regardless of the device they use.

Mobile can no longer thought of as a separate search component. Running a comprehensive search and SEO strategy that targets users on all devices opens up several new opportunities, among them:

1. Ranking for mobile-specific searches
2. Using Google’s mobile-specific search content index
3. Tapping into local

Need help with your local mobile search campaign? MediaWhiz is here to help! Learn more about MediaWhiz Mobile, our mobile performance marketing practice, here.

How is your brand adapting to the local mobile search/SEO era? 

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What’s driving the biggest gains in Facebook’s worldwide growth? It’s not the U.S. It’s emerging markets.

According to eMarketer, India, Brazil and Russia, along with the Middle East and Africa, are contributing the most new users each month to Facebook. According to new estimates from eMarketer, Facebook will pass 1 billion active users worldwide in 2013 as the company sees particularly strong growth in its Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa, and Latin American user bases, with each region set to rise by about 30% or more this year. By next year, Facebook will reach 1.26 billion global users.

These astonishing numbers — the sheer fact Facebook will soon have 1 billion active monthly users worldwide — combined with Facebook’s recent implementation of new CPA bidding for direct marketers, portend huge opportunities for performance and affiliate marketers. Just tapping into 1/10^th of this user base could hold significant potential online marketing value to most brands.

What is your brand doing to tap into Facebook’s expanding performance marketing opportunities?

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SMX London is right around the corner, and the conference agenda is packed with some great panels discussing everything from prioritizing marketing efforts to advanced tactical recommendations. Search and social media are two intertwined topics on which there will be a great deal of discussion.

I will be joining a panel alongside Kelvin Newman, director of strategy at SiteVisibility and Justin Sanger, CEO of SupportLocal, to discuss Facebook’s new graph search and its marketing implications. Although Graph Search is currently available to a small beta this new search function will eventually be available to billions of users around the world.

This panel discussion will focus on the implications of Graph Search on SEO, including the opportunities and challenges it will present advertisers and publishers.

As part of the discussion, I will present a history of Facebook advertising as it pertains to the evolution of search within Facebook. I’ll how Graph Search fits into the direction Facebook is going with its search and advertising options. Of course, knowing how and why an advertising medium has evolved can provide some very strong clues into what the future of marketing through Facebook may look like.

Together, the panel will dive deeper into Graph Search by providing an overview of how Graph Search functions, as well as offer some detail into Unicorn, the system that powers graph search.

We will also discuss best practices for leveraging Graph Search for marketing, the future of Graph Search and its current limitations. This will provide detail on some of the planned updates that are currently in the works. Finally, we will look at some ways that Graph Search could be improved to provide a better experience for users and more opportunity for brands.

I welcome all who will be in attendance to introduce yourself and ask questions. Feel free to let me know how you plan to utilize Graph Search for your marketing initiatives. See you there!

Are you going to SMX London? If so, we should meet! Email me at mpurtell@mediawhiz.com

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What are your plans for early June? An early beach vacation, perhaps? Maybe you’ll be stuck at work, patiently counting down the days until your two-week siesta in Madrid. Better yet, why not join MediaWhiz at the annual Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities (APSCU) Convention and Expo.

That’s where you’ll find us June 5-7 at the Rosen Shingle Creek resort in Orlando, Fla. There, you can chat with Kristen, Kyle, Caroline and Shon from the MediaWhiz team at booth #708. We’ll be on-site throughout the convention to discuss our education-specific performance marketing services, including our new education portal, ChooseYourColleges.com.

About MediaWhiz’s Education Marketing Services

MediaWhiz has the lead-generation tools to make your student prospecting strategy a success!

We offer a comprehensive suite of performance marketing tools and services designed to help advertisers, colleges and universities engage, enroll and retain prospective students. Our education-specific Internet portal, ChooseYourColleges.com, offers a well-balanced lead-generation platform that helps students narrow their search by curriculum, geography and affordability.

By using a variety of online marketing channels MediaWhiz can accurately target, attract and help match prospective students to schools that meet their needs. We ensure a consistent flow of highly qualified candidates for our advertisers and abundant traffic for our publishers.

Must-Have Information

MediaWhiz will be exhibiting at the APSCU Convention and Expo, June 5-7, at Rosen Shingle Creek resort, Orlando, Fla.

Meet us at booth #708.

Contact Kristen Pulver for more information or to schedule a meeting with us at the show.

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By Marc Purtell | Director, SEO

It’s not uncommon in today’s SEO landscape to wake up and find a sudden drop of organic search traffic and/or keyword rankings. When such a disaster occurs, most large brands have access to a qualified SEO agency or robust in-house team to identify and rectify any issues that led to the drops. For smaller brands with limited budget allocated to SEO, this could mean the end of the organic search channel as a driver of business.

It doesn’t have to be this way. As I explore in a new report, “10 Free, Must-Have SEO Tools,” there are a variety of excellent free SEO tools that marketers can use to analyze the situation and identify the problem and solution.

By taking advantage of the intelligence that is available for free, brands with low budgets can recover from SEO issues in order to return to leveraging the organic search channel as a revenue generator. Below is a review of three such SEO tools.

 RELATED: 3 Free SEO Tools for Auditing and Troubleshooting Onsite Issues

Google Webmaster Tools

An invaluable resource for SEO experts and webmasters alike, Google Webmaster Tools suite provides insight into the overall health of a website and explicitly points out many issues that can negatively affect a site’s organic search health.

Getting started is as simple as signing up for a Google account and verifying ownership of the website in question by adding either a verification file to the website’s server – including a verification meta tag on the homepage – or signing in to the site’s domain name provider.

This tool is provided by Google at no charge so there is no excuse for any website to not have an account.

Once a Google Webmaster Tools account is active, upon logging in Google will provide a list of recent alerts for each website being managed under the account. This is the first place to look for any issues that may have caused a loss of performance. More information on the issues identified as well as a list of recommended actions can be seen by clicking on “View details”.

If there are no alerts or if the recommended actions from the alerts do not remedy the issue, the next place to look is in the “Health” section within the Google Webmaster Tools interface using the left sidebar navigation. There are several reports in the Health section, including Crawl Stats, Blocked URLs, Fetch as Google, Index Status and Malware.

The Crawl Stats report is very useful in troubleshooting because it provides both a list of URLs that return errors and a timeline showing the total number of errors found on a day-to-day basis. This timeline can help pinpoint the day things went awry if there is a sudden increase in errors detected. For example, if a recent change to the website caused a number of pages to return server errors, that could definitely account for the loss of organic traffic.

The Index Status report is another useful tool in troubleshooting on-site issues that can cause decreased traffic and keyword rankings. Reviewing the timeline for sudden changes in the number of Web pages Google has indexed can provide insight into exactly when these changes occurred so they can be attributed to on-site changes or search engine algorithm updates.

Google Webmaster Tools provides a wealth of additional information, reports, alerts, recommendations and analyses that can not only help identify recent issues, but ensure maintenance of a healthy website going forward and is constantly being updated with increased capabilities.

Screaming Frog

In order to fully understand how a website is capable of performing in organic search, it’s important to understand exactly what search engines will find when their spiders crawl the site. The best way to do so is by running one’s own crawl of the website. The Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool is a desktop program that can do just that – for free.

Crawling a website with Screaming Frog returns a vast amount of data and is capable of identifying server errors, duplicate content, broken links, etc. that may not have been reported in Google Webmaster Tools.

After downloading the desktop program, simply run it by entering the URL of the homepage and clicking “Start”. The crawl will return various data points, segmented out of different tabs. For example, the “Internal” tab will list all internal pages linked from the page that was inputted, along with the status code. This makes it very easy to find broken internal links so they can be fixed immediately.

Similarly, the “External” tab, will list all outbound links along with the status code. This will inform broken outbound links and more importantly links to pages that are redirecting. It’s good practice to see where those URLs are redirecting to because there is potential for them to redirect to bad neighborhood sites (i.e., adult content, gambling, pharmaceuticals, etc.), which could reflect negatively on the website in question.

The “Page Titles” and “Meta Descriptions” tabs can help pinpoint duplicate content issues by identifying duplicate title tags and meta description tags, respectively. If duplicate tags are identified, there is potential that the on-page content of those URLs is also duplicate.

Even if performance issues have not occurred on a website, it’s always a good idea to run regularly scheduled (i.e., monthly) Screaming Frog crawls simply to ensure there are no new problems that could lead to performance issues down the road.

BrowSEO

While Screaming Frog is useful for looking at a website as a whole and identifying server errors, and duplicate meta tags, it’s also important to understand exactly what a search engine spider sees when it crawls each page.

BrowSEO Spider Simulator provides a free look into a page as viewed by search engine spiders. In many cases, a webpage may have great information for users, but that information may not be visible to search engines. Therefore, the page does not get any credit for it by the search engines.

BrowSEO is very easy to use. Simply input the URL of a webpage and click “Browse”. The tool will return two columns: a left-hand column containing each page element as it would be seen by a search engine spider (i.e., images, image alt tags, links, body copy, etc.); and a right-hand column that provides details about the various page elements (i.e., server response, word counts, character counts, meta tags, heading tags, etc.).

Compare the spider simulation of the page to the actual version a user sees. If there is any important content visible to users but not spiders, the page is likely not being credited for that content and there is missed opportunity for organic search performance.

When using BrowSEO for troubleshooting something like a traffic drop, a useful feature is the “Check for Cloaking-Attempt” available from the “Check for fraud” link in the right column. Cloaking will often exist on a page inadvertently, leading to search engine penalties. This feature compares the version of the page a spider sees to the version a user sees to ensure there is no cloaking being performed on the page.

What are your favorite free SEO tools for auditing and troubleshooting onsite SEO issues? Share your recommendations in the comments.

Want more insight like this? Download our new report, “10 Free, Must-Have SEO Tools” today. 

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Editor’s note: “Ask the Performance Marketer” is a regular series in which MediaWhiz’s performance marketing, SEO and digital media experts answer some of the most popular questions we from clients. 

To get more answers to your performance marketing questions, download our free eBook, “The CMO’s Guide to Performance Marketing.”

DOWNLOAD THE FREE EBOOK   

Mike Sisto, MediaWhiz’s director of performance marketing, has worked in performance marketing for 14 years. He’s seen it all, from the earliest days of the industry to the current evolution in which media, mobile, content, SEO and many other digital media channels are mixed together. Needless to say, he knows how to help his clients engage, acquire and retain customers more profitably.

Recently, we sat down with Mike to discuss some of the most common questions he gets from clients about accountability in affiliate marketing campaigns, email acquisition and optimizing lead quality.

How do you ensure accountability of affiliates for campaign and creative materials compliance?
We first establish accountability with each affiliate by employing a suite of external and internal tools to monitor advertisements. We hold publishers accountable for compliance violations. Once our high standards are made clear, the possibility of losing out on business due to compliance violations exerts pressure on affiliates to comply with advertiser guidelines. With adherence, publishers have the opportunity to cultivate a long-term business relationship with MediaWhiz as they continue to provide quality traffic via compliant marketing practices.

My company isn’t very familiar with email acquisition marketing. Where does MediaWhiz get its opt-in subscribers and what are the CAN-SPAM-compliance steps we need to adhere to?
Our WhiteDelivery™ list management division has arrangements with thousands of publishers to monetize their opt-in email data. These publishers range from finance, dating, news, travel, etc., and each list’s characteristics are segmented in a manner to match each audience to each advertiser in the hopes of acquiring the most customers from each mailing. The tens of millions of records we have access to generally are available on a pay-for-results model, making branded acquisition campaigns extremely scalable and immediately profitable for marketers.

CAN-SPAM-compliance for both WhiteDelivery™ and the advertiser’s brand are of critical importance. While federal law requires certain timelines for suppression files and unsubscribe language within email creatives, our standards offer higher degrees of respecting consumer privacy requests. This level of compliance reduces advertiser complaints, improves our reputation with the major email Internet service providers (ISPs), and maintains brand integrity — all of which produces the greatest amount of consumers with genuine interest in particular offers, and opts them out quickly when there isn’t an affinity.

How do you optimize the lead quality over time?
Web traffic is not a one-size-fits-all pool. Having thousands of disparate audience segments to market an offer to, MediaWhiz’s media planners take the first step of strategic campaign analysis. With more than a decade of past performance metrics to cull from, our team has the directional insights for each category of offer from the outset, thereby placing new campaigns into environments where profitable acquisitions have historically occurred. These placements, over time, could further be whittled down to the cream-of-the-crop with frequent collaboration with the advertiser on their lead-nurturing efforts per traffic source. Our employment of industry-standard URL, subID and transaction ID recordkeeping makes for a start good and ensures our clients receive high-quality leads.

Have a question about performance or affiliate marketing? Drop us a line in the comments below or tweet us at @MediaWhizInc. 

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