Congratulations to the Financial Women's Association of San Francisco!

KLM is proud to be the marketing partner of the Financial Women's Association of San Francisco, who yesterday hosted the annual Financial Woman of the Year luncheon with record attendance and success. Congratulations to all involved, and thank you to the FWA for including KLM!



KLMer Mark Beyer attends the 2009 Financial Woman of the Year luncheon.

Adwords. To go.

One of the newest offerings you’ll find with Google AdWords is the ability to start having your ads appear on mobile phones.

Pretty cool, eh?

But before you start targeting your PPCs to the on-the-go audience, ask (or text) yourself the following questions:

Are your ads mobile ready? Google will only show your ad if your landing page/site is adapted for viewing on mobile phone screens.

If you sell stuff online, can customers enter billing/credit card information securely?

Is your display URL for your mobile ads over 20 characters? If so, you need to edit it down. And .com, .net, or .org counts as 4 characters already - so you only have 16 left to play with.

If you cleared the above hurdles, keep this in mind: Tracking conversions from the mobile market is very difficult. A significant percentage of mobile browsers don’t support cookies. (The mobile browsers that DO accept cookies have a shorter shelf life than that found on computers.) And since cookies are what help advertisers track who converts – and who doesn’t – this little hiccup can skew your ROI findings.

Granted, the mobile AdWords offering is new out of the gate. It’s bound to become more flexible –and I’m sure the tracking and technology to grow by leaps and bounds.

But these days with budgets being tight, it may be best to put this new feature on hold and use the money to further your existing CPC efforts.

videSEO

Numerous studies in the past year reveal that Internet searchers are about 50% more likely to watch a video than read an article. Here are a few tips to make sure the folks you want to find your videos do so.

• Be sure your videos aren’t embedded in a Flash page, or pop up on their own page all by their lonesome. Properly tag all videos and surround them with keyword-related content.

• Give each video its own URL and ensure that the word ‘video’ ends each URL.

• Always include a linking/sharing feature, and allow video to cross-reference other topics/feature of your site or your company.
  

• Extract the key words, topics and other information from your video content to ensure that whenever someone searches a term or phrase that relates to files on your site, the search results point directly to the relevant video content as well as text.

• Use advanced navigation technology where every word/phrase/video image receives a time-stamp that enables your users to locate and go to the precise portion of the audio or video file in which they are interested.
  

If you are interested in learning more about video search, sign up for a free 60-minute brainstorm with one of our search engine marketing experts.

Best Practices for email newsletters

These days seems like everyone is developing eNewsletters to support their customer retention and growth efforts. Makes a lot of sense, as long as you keep your customer at the top of mind when creating AND follow these best practices:

• Design should draw the recipient in
• Preview pane should include a logo or company name in a prominent position, a link to view the email online, and engage the recipient even if the images are blocked
• Include a table of contents specific to the issue with links, either to each item in the email newsletter or to the full text on a web site
• Use images as long as they add to the recipient's experience, not detract from it
• Content should be easy to scan, using bullet points and white space
• Personalize the content based on what you know about the recipient (info from sign up forms, web traffic, past purchases, etc.), whenever possible – technologies make this relatively easy.
  

And most importantly, make sure your content is relevant, benefit-driven content for your customer. First impressions mean everything here, if your customer doesn’t like it the first time, they’ll opt-out and we definitely don’t want that to happen!

no strategy + no investment = no return on social media

When it comes to social media, the ability to measure ROI is a top-of-mind topic among marketers and agencies alike. Watch this video and learn ways you can track the payoff of your social media efforts.

KLM's Matt Pavledakes talks social media measurement.