當今世界的網絡營銷
Internet Marketing In The World Today 

 

當今世界營銷跟三十,二十,甚至十年前是不一樣的。現今世界上的營銷有著新思想,新概念,新技術。 在1990年，電視是一個巨大的產品的營銷渠道。 廣告被寫得很好,有趣并且針對特定的觀眾。 即使平面廣告是流行的被風吹起，貼滿所有的建筑物，汽車，廣告牌，并幾乎在公眾所有視野中出現。現在，甚至二十年后這些廣告仍然存在,但可以以十年前更便宜的成本買到。新媒體往往成為在營銷的世界廣泛運用的一個詞。新媒體可以被描述為新事物,并且它讓所有其他的孩子受到一定的影響。當我在匹茲堡藝術學院完成了我的學位的時候，我沒有意識到，但我一直給一個特別的禮物，那就是對所有的媒體有了一些了解,和學習如何運用營銷只是我必須完成一小部分任務。

 

當我在揚斯敦州立大學工作時，我學到了所有的大學里真正有意義的東西，我也意識到我有很多東西需要學習。我最初是作為一個網頁設計師被重要網站（揚斯敦州立大學教育網）雇傭。我用一點時間在營銷部門的另一邊,進行印刷、媒體和招聘營銷材料的準備。 我了解到作為一個大學,對目前的趨勢來說我們的方式非常落伍。 我我們有沒有在網絡上的視頻，沒有互聯網廣告，和一個網站，更不用說一個不存在的搜索引擎優化的計劃，這點，我將在稍后討論。 

 

In the world today marketing is not the same as it was thirty, twenty, or even ten years ago. The world of marketing today revolves around new ideas, new concepts, and new technology. In the 1990's television was a huge product of marketing. Commercials were well written, funny, and targeted at a specific audience. Even print ads were popular being blown up and plastered all over buildings, cars, billboards, and almost every item in public view. Now almost twenty years later these ads still exist but can be bought at a much cheaper cost than ten years ago. New media has since become a word used more often than not when it comes to the world of marketing. New media can be described as the new kid on the block, which puts all the other kids out of business. When I finished my degree at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh at the time I did not realize but I had been given a special gift of knowing a little bit about all medias, and learning how they can be used for marketing was just a small piece of the puzzle that I had to complete.

 

When I got hired here at Youngstown State University I learned about all the things that really go into making a university successful and realized that I had a lot to bring to the table. I was originally hired as a web designer for the main website www.Youngstown State University.edu/. With a little time I got involved in the other side of the marketing department which does our print, media, and recruitment marketing materials. I learned that as a university we were very behind in our ways with the times that were currently trending. We had no video on the web, no Internet ads running, and a web site that was outdated by three years, not to mention an inexistent search engine optimization plan which I will talk about later. #p#分頁標題#e#

 

I immediately started to research other universities, major corporations, and media outlets to see what trends were current and how we can bring ourselves up to date. I also needed to have a cause and effect plan as well as a timeline for completing this in order to make a good pitch to my director.

 

My initial reasoning for this entire overhaul was because as a higher education web site we were lacking a lot of material that in the long run was probably hurting our enrollment. We did not have much organization to our site, meaning that every piece of information we could have possibly crammed into our site was there, and whether or not it was relevant was a whole different story. Some of the information on the site was outdated by fifteen years; old documents that had been updated and changed ten times were still in the view of the public. This was a large problem because with over ten million views a year, people will find these old files and not know the difference whether they were good or not.

 

My initial change was with our admissions department. Finding out what their position on the Internet was and I came to find that no recruitment was being done with the web from their end. They were still involved with going out to high schools and college fairs and handing out print material. Currently this is still the technique but as we discussed this more in detail I came to learn that it was a dying routine and colleges are scrambling to find out new ways to reach potential students. Enter Facebook, MySpace, streaming media, and search engine optimization. It is no secret that today no high school students watch television anymore or even read anything in print. The long running series MAD television just went off the air as a direct result in declining numbers. For this reason it opens a whole new door for recruitment and admissions offices for any type of university large or small. These sites have millions of users, which are mostly high school students or early college students. These are potential students of Youngstown State University or transfer students. Transfers are big right now because with a crumbling economy the kids that went away to school are coming back to lower their tuition and loan costs, plus parents would rather fork over the money for college if it cost a lot less.

 

Facebook and Myspace both net over 100 million users currently and both provide outlets for advertising. As a department we discussed going into this market to provide ads and hope for some admissions or campus visits. The only problem I foresee with this is that kids are not on Facebook or Myspace to apply to college. They are on to post pictures, talk to friends, or stay up to date with what is going on in their social network. I see a lot of ads on my Facebook when I log on and surprising enough they are relevant to what my major was. This is because when someone signs up for Facebook they are actually handing over their information into a database. Much like Google does this database will log the information and place them into a category. For me the all the information on my Facebook describes that I am a creative person and when I am in the system I see ads for creative things. Such as the Art Institutes and applying for a degree in a web related field. For a university this makes our job easier, we can now target kids by their interests according to information they put in that they do not even realize is being used to categorize them. Again though the argument has to be made that if we spend fifty thousand dollars a year on nothing but social market ads what type of ROI are we going to see? I am willing to bet not much. Kids just are not interested in these ads and for the most part probably do not even see them on the page. So we moved on to 'Plan B'.#p#分頁標題#e#

 

For me my 'Plan B' needed to be something more interesting than anything we have been doing in the past. We needed to reach students in a new way, grabbing their attention and selling a point that could turn into a potential new student. The old styles of marketing obviously are not working for us so I wanted to focus on what my research provided for me. I did not realize at the time but I was performing research the same way that any high school could would to find out information about college, by doing a Google search. I went on Google, though of a phrase or idea, and searched for it. Then the top results became my entrance points of research. Becoming one of these entrance points in the Internet world this is known as SEO or Search engine optimization. Search engine optimization consists of a lot of parts that make it what it is. There are entire companies that do nothing buy search engine optimization for large corporations and make a lot of money doing it. First off though search engine optimization cannot be confused with Internet marketing in the sense that you are going to buy ads and run them. Search engine optimization can be absolutely free for a company if you have the right resources.

 

A successful search engine optimization campaign would be described as someone going to the Internet, searching for your product by keywords they think of, and finding your site as a top ten result. For instance if I went to Google and typed in 'Ohio engineering colleges' and 'Ohio Engineering College - Youngstown State University' came up as a top ten result, my chances of clicking that link are higher than any other form of internet searching available. Even if we paid to have our ad run on the right side of the page when someone performed a search, the chance of them clicking that ad is lower than them clicking it as a top ten. The reason for this is because there is a line of sight that all users have. The line of sight is evaluated by how the user moves their eyes around a screen as they search. When they come to a website the user tends to focus their attention on the left centered side of the screen, then their eyes move down rather than left to right. Therefore being in those top ten results put us in better eyesight than an ad would. To become a top ten results there are a lot of steps that need to be taken on a routine basis.

 

Step One: Site structure. The way your site is structured is going to be a major factor in the way your site gets categorized by Google. Google writes algorithms on a regular basis and changes them just as often to ensure when you search you are going to get the most relevant information returned on your search. When setting up a site you need to consider your entrance page from a search, from here the way you write the code on the back end is going to assign keywords and content to that page. If I am writing a page about engineering I need to make sure I specify in my meta keywords the type of engineering I am specifically providing. This also applies to the meta description tag as well. Google's spiders are smarter than any other web crawler out there and when they come to your site they can read and understand what your site is providing. Other important information here would be your 'header tags'. In the web design world there are six header tags and are separated as H1, H2…H6. H1 categorizes the most important heading tag all the way down the H6. When Google crawls your site they look at the H1 tags first and use them to help categorize your site. Having misleading information in this section of your page structure can lead to a miss-categorization of your site within the search results. If you fill your site with rich content and have keywords repeated and embedded into your landing page you have successfully taken the first step to becoming a successful search result via Google. A really important factor from here becomes the updating of this content. Along with the algorithms that Google is writing to search your page they are looking for rich updated content. Keeping you content up to date on a weekly basis will not only help position your page month to month but also keep Google coming back. It is easiest to look at it this way. When Google comes to a website they scan the whole site, the landing pages, the secondary pages, etc. They pull out information and store it somewhere that can be searched by millions of users. Then next month they will stop back at your site to see what has been changed. If nothing has been changed they may not stop back for another two months, and if nothing from there not until another 3. If you update your content weekly when Google comes around they make a note of that, and then the next time they schedule to come back may be in two weeks rather than one month. This is because they are still a business and need to provide a great service. If we are providing them updated content this helps them get the user to your page, which will keep the user going back to Google to perform searches. As a site you do not want to lose Google as your major search client for you page. Updating content is one of the most important aspects of web site when trying to reach good search engine optimization.#p#分頁標題#e#

 

For this reason as the marketing department we are making sure that we are in control of the top level landing pages for departments. This way we can have a template structure that provides all the right tools to increase the search engine optimization of those landing pages. We no longer will rely on the departments to update the landing page content, rather we will. This is for two purposes. One is for the last paragraph reason to ensure that Google will keep coming back and the second is because the main purpose of these landing pages is not to make Google happy, but to sell our University to potential students. For this reason that landing page has to have a specific amount of information to provide to our users. No matter what type of business you are you need to have a great landing page because this page acts as your selling point. You only have a few seconds let alone a one page to sell to your client. If you do not provide the right information or have a poor selling structure you run the risk of losing that sell. These landing pages no matter what the business or product need to laid out perfect. With search engine optimization you need to adapt the landing page in a way that it has a purpose, but will not lose the customer once they find you. This is just step one of great search engine optimization; there are several other steps that need to be taken.

 

Step Two: Blogs and Links. A website needs to have great information on it, but to Google this alone is not enough. Google likes to see credibility to your site. When a web crawler comes to your site it will scan the entire site, but it will also jump links to and from your site. Having links to your site is a very important part of the search engine optimization process. The way the crawler works is that when it is scanning other sites, once it hits a link it checks to see if that link works, if it does it send a crawler to that site to see what is on it, this counts as another visit from a crawler. Getting someone else to provide a link on your site is important and useful part of a great search engine optimization campaign. Look at it this way, the more links you have coming to your site the better chance you have of crawlers hitting your site more often. Especially if the site linking to you has a lot of hits and a good search engine optimization plan tied to it. Having no links to your site is a bad thing and you want to share your information with others. Maybe make a deal with another site to provide a link or ad from your site to theirs in exchange for the same. The second part of step two is to include a blog on your site. A few years ago blogs were very trendy and provided a way for anyone to write about ideas, daily things, news, or whatever. Now they are being used to help step one of the search engine optimization process. Writing a blog about your product or related products can take the place of the constant updating you should be doing to your page. This blog will be found by Google and tied to your site. Some companies use only blogs like WordPress to create their websites. This way they can update them on the fly and keep that content fresh. I use blogs all the time for my personal web sites because for this very reason. I have seen a good number of increased hits because of the blog and understand a lot better how it is a part of search engine optimization.#p#分頁標題#e#

 

Other than search engine optimization there has to be that side of marketing which is the old school way of selling: print and media. Print and media have always been a part of marketing. For years they were the best way to reach customers, usually the only way. But with the explosion of the Internet this has shifted the way marketing is done. Today print and media are still used, but more often it is done digitally. Print ads on the Internet are more often seen on websites built with rich content. If I am on a hunting website I will see ads for hunting gear all along the pages. These ads will be very visual with a strong selling phrase attached to it. These print ads are more useful than a magazine ad because all I have to do to get to that product is a single click. A magazine cannot even provide that type of transfer. As a University we have been doing paper ads for a hundred years. Today we are down cutting the number of paper ads we take more than ever. Not only do we save production cost and time, but also we can reach a larger audience for less cost than any other form of print. I know of a company that paid somewhere around forty thousand dollars to take out a 1/4 page ad in a magazine put on airplanes. The ad would reach something like 6 million people. Of that though you have no idea how many are interested in your product or will actually buy your product as a direct result of your ad. With ad software on the Internet such as Google Adwords you can target a direct audience interested in your product and with that type of budget reach millions more that you could actually track ROI from with the built in tools provided by Google for free. In our department we are shifting towards this type of print marketing so to speak, but not investing as much money. When talking with a company that specializes in search engine optimization and Internet marketing they told me that only about 30% of Adwords clicks would turn into an actual sell. From a universities standpoint this number is even lower because our product cannot be bought over the Internet. Print ads for a large university probably are not the best solution in today's world. I found out with my research that there is a better way. That way is video.

 

Last year a created a video ad for our admissions department promoting a campus visit day that was approaching. The video lasted about four minutes and talked about campus, campus life, statistics, and the date of the video. It was all animated with Pete the Penguin talking. The video was posted on YouTube and linked to via email that the admissions office uses to email potential students that sign up for information about the campus. At the same time a commercial on television was being run to promote a web site success.Youngstown State University.edu. I was able to track both the site and the video and within one week of the television spot running and the email being sent, my video had 1500 hits versus 150 hits that the television ad had gotten over the week. The reason behind this was a few reasons. Our television ad was poorly shot and to a large degree and embarrassment to the universities image. I was not involved at all in the production of the commercial but was a critic of it. It lacked that spark that ads are supposed to have. There was no attention grabbing going on and for a high school student it would have been a good place to change the channel at. My online video on the other hand was interactive, provided a direct link to the page to sign up for the visit, and entertained the audience. The numbers showed the difference. The biggest thing for the department was which project was more cost efficient of the two. For the production of the commercial and the cost to run it on television reaching a larger audience was somewhere in the hundred thousand mark paid to an outside agency. The animation took me 10 hours to complete and was all done in house. That campus visit provided more online sign-ups than any other campaign we ran as university. From here it could be researched to see how many of the online sign ups turned into actual admissions. This was the first insight to an actual ROI and using the web. Now a year later we have set up the necessary steps to shoot some in house video production and provide more online ads promoting not only visit days but also campus events. I have seen an increasing interest in the video work I have been shooting for the campus. Not only by hits but by returned visits from users. They like to see interactive content and video rather than print material.#p#分頁標題#e#

 

So what does this all mean as a marketer? It means that the ways of marketing have changed when it comes to print and media. Online is the most cost effective way for a business to go no matter what type of product they are selling. Almost all businesses have online capability today with high-speed Internet access to create an online store and run ads. It is almost like being able to set up a store anywhere in the world with your product. There are several steps that need to be taken to do so but the average person can learn it. Everything I have learned about Internet marketing this far I have learned from research. I had no classes in college that taught me this type of information and have found all my information online. A University is still a business at the end of the day so what I have set up here can be a shelled structure for a company. Certain aspects change but the point remains the same. The most important thing to keep in mind is that this is the marketing of today, yesterday it was old and tomorrow it will be different.