What’s the current state of the sports industry? What are corporate sponsors saying and doing this year? What are sports organizations doing to market themselves as the economy slowly recovers?

To understand these trends, I was fortunate to attend the National Sports Forum, which held its 15th annual gathering in Baltimore last week. Hundreds of sports industry colleagues gathered to discuss these topics and gain insights for the coming year.

Naturally, I tried to absorb all of it in the context of Internet marketing. From my perspective, the quick take-away lessons were:

1. Sponsors and advertisers demand real business results from any marketing program. Actual, measureable results - sales, for example - are the new signs of success in marketing.

2. Social media is the hottest of hot topics. EVERY conversation and panel discussion, for three consecutive says, eventually turned to social media. No matter the subject on the official agenda, these executives and marketers couldn’t help but discuss this aspect of Internet marketing and communication.

Naturally, lesson #1 bodes well for Internet marketing and search engine marketing. It’s impossible not to measure this marketing channel and it’s easy to evaluate the real-world business impact. Fortunately, if the impact of your Internet marketing campaigns isn’t what you hoped for, you can make changes on the fly - something that isn’t always possible in traditional media.

Lesson #2, meanwhile, raises questions for me. Primarily, if social media (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Digg, etc.) cost money, would marketers be as excited by it? If companies had to pay to tweet, would so many be participating? We’ll have to revisit this one later...

During a presentation about “outrageous” advertising by author and marketer Bill Glazer, I was reminded that most principles of successful advertising are also fundamentals of a good Internet marketing campaign. According to Glazer, your marketing must:

a) cut through the clutter;

b) always have an offer or call-to-action; and...

c) grab someone’s attention in a matter of seconds.

Glazer pointed out that the same holds true for direct marketing as well as display advertising or out-of-home advertising. When designing a web site, landing page or Internet marketing campaign, each of these must be true as well. Even though our society moves faster and faster, and increasingly online, it seems that many fundamentals of communication haven’t changed.

Forum attendees also had a great opportunity to receive and dissect the results of the 2010 National Sports Forum Corporate & Industry Survey, which was conducted and presented by GMR Marketing and the Ohio University Center for Sports Administration. I’m still reviewing my copy of the report and I’ll share my thoughts in this space, next time. Stay tuned!

Thanks for reading,

- Jeremy Davidson

Tags: Social media, Internet marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Internet marketing campaigns, twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Digg, Bill Glazer, GMR Marketing, ohio university

A recent examination of some of my clients' text ads, and their positions on the search engine results pages, brought back an age-old advertising truth: the message matters. Despite the technologies and targeting abilities of today's Internet marketing platforms, advertisers must always provide a compelling and relevant message. If your message resonates with a customer, they're likely to click on your ad and visit your web site, no matter where the ad appears on the page.

I wanted to know if my clients' lower-positioned ads were being clicked less frequently. I plotted click-through rates for a series of text ads, against the positions of those ads on the search engine results pages. I expected to see a basic, inverted curve, with higher-positioned ads enjoying higher click-though rates, and click-through rates diminishing as the positions of the ads became lower. This theory makes sense, right? If an ad isn't at the top of the page, weren't users more likely to ignore it?

To the contrary, my simple chart showed that ad position was less important than I'd assumed. Click-through rates for this particular group of ads varied, with no negative effect on the lower-positioned ads. In fact, some of the highest click-through rates were for ads that had the very lowest positions!

The moral of this story? A few things...

Of course, the message matters above all else. If your [text] ad is compelling enough, and relevant enough to the users' intent, they'll click on the ad no matter where it appears on the page.

Secondly - and no less importantly - this was one study of an isolated group of ads. Each campaign may be different and users may react differently to another series of ads.

In the world of Internet marketing, there is a wealth of detailed data available to advertisers. This data should be used to drive decisions, write ads, select keywords and optimize your campaigns in response to real-world, real-time results. Our assumptions may help us get started, but as our marketing campaigns evolve, we should follow the paths that our customers' actions lay out for us. What works for one campaign may not work for another - but we'll have the data and evidence to tell us the difference.

Thanks for reading and good luck with your Internet marketing efforts!

- Jeremy

Tags: Google, text ad, Search Engine Marketing, Click-through rates, Data, Campaigns

Remember your "elevator speech"? The quick, to-the-point explanation of what you do and why it's beneficial? If you can't explain the value of your products/services in a few sentences or less, your customer's attention may go elsewhere.

Now, boil this pitch down to 140 characters and you have your basic search engine text ad. Challenging? Yes. Rewarding? Definitely. People will be interested in your products/services, or they won't. They will let you know with their actions. It's a highly efficient use of your time and resources, and a highly efficient way for customers to find the products/services they're looking for. Everybody wins.

With search engine marketing, you can reach people at the very moments they're looking for your products/services. True, you could reach a wide audience of baseball enthusiasts by advertising in publications like Baseball America. But when they read the issue containing your ad, how do you know if they're in the market for the bats and gloves you're selling? Maybe they bought new equipment right before they picked up that issue. In this case, your ad dollars were wasted on that particular reader. You'll still attract some customers who need new equipment, but you've paid for the other readers, too - the ones who won't become customers. Online, you're only paying to reach the people who specifically click on your ads. Continuing our example: they're looking for bats and gloves and you've met their needs at the precise moment they're looking. Everybody wins.

Boil your message down even further, and you can also reach people on their mobile devices. An iPhone isn't a phone, it's a handheld computer with an Internet browser. This is the new frontier for advertising and marketing - and you can't reach this audience through print or broadcast advertising. If customers show interest in your products/services by clicking on your ads from a home computer, doesn't this interest increase exponentially when they're on the way to the mall, wallet and credit card in hand? OK, this is an extreme simplification of consumer behavior, but I hope you'll agree about the impacts of well-placed online advertising. It's the perfect merger of customer intentions and your products/services. Everybody wins.

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Tags: Search Engine Marketing, text ad, Efficiency, mobile devices, online advertising

Since it's the only blog entry so far, I guess there isn't much of a choice. But you're here, so I'll assume you have some interest in Internet marketing for your business. First and foremost, thanks for visiting to see what we have to offer!

Internet marketing can include MANY things. The options and new technologies can be overwhelming, and so is the amount of data that comes with it. For example, if you're advertising your business through search engine marketing, you can test and tweak your keywords, ad copy, landing pages, messaging, offers, web site copy, contact forms, site design, colors, graphics, images, navigation and more - to see what your customers respond to. And you can break down the results of these campaigns into detailed reports showing every possible angle. Adding social media to your marketing mix creates another layer of results to be analyzed.

I can't honestly say I was always a "numbers guy," but I'm a huge believer in doing business efficiently. Today's technology allows everyone a chance to be more efficient. You can figure out how to spend less to acquire new customers, by taking time to study how they became your customers. I believe that Internet marketing is the best way of doing this, with detailed tracking available at nearly every level of the sales process.

As you read this, I hope you are considering what brought you here. What is your organization trying to accomplish? More merchandise sales? More season ticket sales leads? Better, more qualified season ticket sales leads? More participants for your marathon, triathlon or tournament? The data available from an Internet marketing campaign may answer the questions that other advertising missed.

I could go on all day. We're new here, and ready to grow with you. We'd love to share more thoughts and ideas (seriously, I could go on all day. You've been warned!). Please do get in touch or download our list of Internet marketing ideas for sports businesses. They'll be more later and I wish you the best of luck with your marketing efforts!

Thanks for reading.

- Jeremy

Tags: Internet marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Data, Efficiency, Campaigns, Ideas for Sports Business