Search Engine Optimization and Pay-per-Click Marketing Strategies

Any e-commerce venture using a website as the main shop front should invest in marketing its website. In this study, the relationship between website owners having invested in search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC), respectively, is investigated. The design used in this research involves an empirical field experimental approach in which implementation of both SEO and PPC are considered, with subsequent comparison of results. Data were gathered from Google search results after performing both Fat Head and Long Tail key-phrase searches based in various categories. Websites that were listed among the top 10 in the sponsored section of search results were recorded. These websites were then checked to see if they also had an SEO ranking within the top 100 for both the Fat Head and Long Tail key-phrases. It is found that website owners seldom invest in SEO as part of a search engine marketing (SEM) campaign. This seems to confirm some of the findings by other authors. This research has important implications for SEO and PPC practitioners, and for website owners. It should influence the way budgets on search engine marketing are applied. Finally, it could be used by marketing managers in better utilizing their limited SEM dollars. No evidence could be found that this kind of empirical research has been done, hence the results are considered to be unique.     

Social marketing: Conceptual and pragmatic observations from a current Australian campaign

In this paper the authors discuss the meaning of social marketing and its essential differences from “conventional” marketing. Further, by reference to a current campaign which seeks to maximize adoption by medical general practitioners of an “early intervention” package to prevent development of alcohol‐related problems in patients, the authors discuss the merits of the application of social marketing principles to such a public health campaign. The difficulties experienced in both the application of social marketing principles to this campaign and in empirically assessing the effectiveness of this and similar campaigns are also discussed. The authors conclude that, although the validity of social marketing as a theoretical construct is unimpeachable, there is much further work to be done in establishing empirically the effectiveness of the application of the principles of social marketing as a social change strategy.     

The risk of programmatic advertising: Effects of website quality on advertising effectiveness

Programmatic advertising is prevalent in online advertising. However, it offers managers limited control over the type of website where the ad appears, resulting in brand safety issues. Aware of the risk that ads may potentially display on websites of poor quality (nonpremium websites), managers have developed strategies to reduce this risk. Due to the lack of empirical insights, these strategies are based on “gut feeling” and depend on campaign type (branding versus performance) and brand type (premium versus nonpremium). Our research addresses this void and analyzes website quality effects for premium and nonpremium brands in branding and performance campaigns. Our results show that effects, indeed, vary depending on campaign and brand type, but not in ways that managers might expect. When a branding ad appears on a nonpremium website, attitudes towards the ad and the brand deteriorate, but only for premium brands. In contrast, website quality does not affect awareness for either type of brand. When a performance ad appears on a nonpremium website, it generates fewer clicks; this effect is stronger for premium brands. Overall, these findings enrich our understanding of the consequences of programmatic advertising and highlight the crucial role of website quality dependent on campaign goal and brand type.     

Targeting Young Voters in a Political Campaign: Empirical Insights into an Interactive Digital Marketing Campaign in the 2007 Finnish General Election

At general elections across Europe, turnout among young people tends to be significantly lower than among older voters. Therefore, this article examines a digital marketing campaign that was targeted at young voters in the 2007 Finnish general election. More specifically, this article aims to provide insights into the creative development process of a political marketing campaign and the nature of the client-agency relationship in political campaigns. The methodology adopted in this article consisted of in-depth interviews with key informants involved in the campaign planning and implementation. The results provide new empirical insights into the challenges that political campaigner may face when they target political marketing at young voters. In addition, the results suggest that there are differences between commercial and political marketing also in a digital marketing context. Finally, the results support the view that marketing professionals have a strong role in a creative development process of a political marketing campaign. The ideas put forth herein can certainly help advertising professionals to plan political marketing campaigns that engage young people in future elections and therefore aid candidates in their quest to achieve electoral success.     

A grounded theory of World Wide Web search behaviour

The behaviours and underlying motivations of consumers and business people surfing the World Wide Web (WWW) are presently not well understood. Furthermore, until now no empirical studies have offered any scientifically sound guidance to marketing communication strategists as to using this interactive medium. Therefore, the authors have conducted an exploratory multiple-case study of this interactive behaviour and its underlying motivations. Consumers and business people were observed unobtrusively while navigating the WWW. During a retrospective in-depth interview, the underlying motivations were probed and the respondent was confronted with video images of his/her own navigation behaviour. The analysis and interpretation of these two sources of data resulted in the development of a grounded theory of search and surf behaviour on the WWW by linking the behaviour and motivations with the visited websites. The following five behavioural search scenarios were discovered from the data: exploratory surfing, window surfing, evolved surfing, bounded navigation and targeted navigation. Marketing guidelines are outlined allowing the marketing communication strategist to enhance the effectiveness of the company's website.     

Children's perception of dinner conversation with parents in Japan

The children's perception of dinner and dinner conversation with their parents was surveyed for sixth‐grade students of elementary school in Japan. The data were analysed from the gender of children and attending parents. The children had dinner and dinner conversation more frequently with their mother than with their father. With father attendance, girls and boys had the same frequency of dinner and dinner conversation, although, with mother attendance, girls had dinner conversation more frequently than boys. Most of the children felt happy when they had dinner with their parents. However, a lower percentage of children felt happy when having dinner conversation with their parents, thought that they were important to their parents and thought dinner conversation was useful. More children felt happy during dinner and dinner conversation with their mother than with their father. However, there was no perceived difference in the usefulness of the conversation based on the father or the mother attending. The contents of conversation were greatly affected by which parent was attending. Subjects concerning children's manners were talked about more frequently in conversation with mothers than with fathers. Children had more frequent conversations with their father about ‘social issues’ and the ‘parents’ surroundings’ than with their mother. Girls had more frequent conversations on a wider variety of subjects with their mothers than boys. Girls could more easily share in their mothers’ knowledge or sense of values through dinner conversation. Boys were, for the most part, excluded from this process in conversation with either parent.     

Factors Used by Parents in Selecting Child Care Providers

Abstract

Regardless of the type of small business, marketing research shows that understanding how consumers/clients select a particular product or service is useful when formulating a promotional program. Traditionally, marketing research results have seldom been applied to the world of child care, but child care providers have a valuable “product” to market. Child care research indicates that the most important three factors lor which parents are seeking relate to warmth, health and safety, and daily programming. In order to meet parents” (the consumers') needs, child care centers/homes should be characterized by, and advertise, these components.     

对上海市高星级酒店市场定位的比较研究——基于酒店宣传手册的分析

宣传手册作为向消费者传递酒店市场定位信息的一种渠道和表明酒店服务质量的一种有形证据,其作用在酒店的营销活动中不可忽视。通过对比上海市20家四星、五星级酒店的宣传手册,文章着重从三个方面比较分析了这些酒店在市场定位上的差异,即在酒店产品和服务组合、市场形象和消费者购买酒店产品和服务后所获得的利益等的差异,并指出了上海市高星级酒店在市场定位中存在的问题,在此基础上提出了进行市场定位的建议。     

The Role of Place Marketing as a Competitive Response by Town Centres to Out-of-town Retail Developments

Following a consideration of the development of regional shopping centres (RSCs) and issues relating to place marketing activities by town centres, this paper details the collective response of a number of town centre management (TCM) schemes in the north west of England to the opening of the Trafford Centre RSC in September 1998. This response incorporated a public relations-led place marketing campaign to promote the advantages of shopping in town centres. The scope of the campaign was later extended to incorporate a more explicit and overt urban regeneration focus. The paper concludes with an evaluation of both elements of the campaign and a discussion of its implications in terms of the role of public relations in place marketing activity, and also in terms of the further development of the concept of town centre management in the North West and more generally.     

Health Belief Model: Evaluating Marketing Promotion in a Public Vaccination Program

National health objectives are driven to increase participation rates. Individual health decisions are determined by attitudes, behavior, lifestyles, and government policies. This research, therefore, examined not just the development and delivery of a message targeting individual voluntary behavior change, but the intention of changes in social structures that will facilitate individuals reaching their potential; thus the purpose of this article is to shed light on the uptake of the human papillomavirus (HPV) immunization using the health belief model (HBM). Research was conducted with the use of focus groups by drawing on the framework of the HBM. This research approach is conceptual by nature, based on the virtue of marketing promotion and on HBM literature. Though offering the vaccine free to the general public provides additional evidence to certain groups on the intention to act or uptake of the vaccine, awareness levels were found to be poor despite increased efforts by the government trying to promote this vaccine. There was evidence that social capital and trust can produce effective communication message strategies that reinforce social bonds. This article provides an interesting basis for further investigation; however, as implausible as it seems the article also contributes to the concept of perceived benefits and of self-efficacy.     

How Does Perceived Effectiveness Affect Adults’ Ethical Acceptance of Anti-obesity Threat Appeals to Children? When the Going Gets Tough,the Audience Gets Going

Little is known on the appraisal of ethically questionable not- for-profit actions such as social marketing advertising campaigns. The present study evaluates the ethical acceptance by adults of anti-obesity threat appeals targeting children, depending on the claimed effectiveness of the campaign. An experiment conducted among 176 Belgian participants by means of an online survey shows that individuals’ acceptance of social marketing practices increases along with the claimed effectiveness of the campaign. As such it demonstrates that the audience adopts a pragmatic perspective, challenging the non-consequentialist stance of social marketers who refrain themselves from using these ‘questionable’ techniques although highly effective. The trade-off between ethical judgment and claimed effectiveness varies depending on whether the threats focus on the child’s physical integrity or social life. Individual characteristics such as parenthood and age also influence the relationship. All in all, it seems that people with stronger connections to the issue such as parents are more ready to compromise. These findings enrich our insights into consequentialism in social marketing campaigns, how people respond to controversial messages targeted at vulnerable group, and open new venues to social managers and public policy makers. Managerial implications and concrete advice on how to communicate with the various audiences are proposed, as well as suggestions for future studies.     

Last Call: decreasing drunk driving among 21-34-year-old bar patrons

Any effort to decrease the toll of drunk driving must include efforts directed at people who drink in bars, particularly young adults who use motor vehicles after drinking. We designed a multifaceted social marketing campaign, Last Call, to increase the use of designated drivers and safe rides homes among 21-34-year olds. There were three components to the intervention: (1) use of taxi stands to promote taxi use; (2) point-of-sale information to patrons at partner bars and (3) a mass media campaign to support the designated driver/safe ride home message. Among the heaviest drinkers, the programme significantly increased the use of designated drivers and increased the use of taxis by 63%.     

Exchange rate management in emerging markets: Intervention via an electronic limit order book

This paper describes and analyzes the implementation of a crawling exchange rate band on an electronic trading platform. The placement of limit orders at the central bank's target rate serves as a credible policy statement that may coordinate beliefs of market participants. We find for our sample that intervention increases exchange rate volatility (and spread) for the next minutes but that intervention days show a lower degree of volatility (and spread) than non-intervention days. We also show for intraday data that the price impact of interbank order flow is smaller on intervention days than on non-intervention days. These stabilizing effects, however, rely on the conditions of large currency reserves and the existence of capital controls; an electronic market seems to support this goal.     

Accountants' Attitudes Toward Advertising and Their Use of Marketing Tools

This paper reports the results of a national study of accountants' attitudes toward advertising and heir use of various marketing tools. A mail survey was used to collect the data from a randomly selected sample of accountants. Analysis of the results using percentages and means revealed overall negative attitudes toward advertising. However, younger accountants were more favorable toward the use of advertising. This indicates that in the future there will be increased emphasis on marketing and advertising of accounting services. Seminars, yellow page ads, and brochures were ranked as the three most effective marketing tools. The major reasons respondents did not engage in more marketing activities were concerns over the costbenefits of their use.     

An Alternative to the Impasse

Abstract

The volume of violence portrayed in American mass media has caused concern for decades, but media self-interests, weak governmental policies, and the First Amendment protection for freedom of expression have stymied efforts to improve media content. Grassroots endeavors to alert parents to possible negative effects may be a more effective approach. “Pulling the Plug on Media Violence,” a campaign aimed at escalating consumer awareness, has been implemented by a volunteer group in North Carolina. This study, using the results of a statewide poll, evaluates the campaign's effectiveness and provides useful findings for future efforts devoted to similar issues. The survey shows that although awareness of the campaign was high, the level of concern about media effects was not influenced directly. Religiosity, gender and parenthood were found to be the most important factors linked to higher levels of concern about media violence. Future efforts to mobilize an anti-violence effort may want to target messages to parents (especially mothers) and work with churches in order to increase active involvement.     

CASE: Mozilla vs. Godzilla — The Launch of the Mozilla Firefox Browser

The case describes an interactive marketing campaign used to launch the open source, Mozilla Firefox browser. The case highlights key features of the campaign and the facilitating conditions that enabled product success. The sustainability of the community marketing effort in light of product maturation is the central marketing challenge that the organization now faces.     

Claiming a family brand identity: The role of website storytelling

This study focuses on the creation of a family identity as a central communication objective in business storytelling. We contribute to the field of business website marketing by identifying, through textual analysis of US winery website narratives, how businesses communicate family brand identities. Results show that three claims that are critical for family brand identities—character, temporal continuity, and distinctiveness—do appear in the website texts. Our study provides beginning evidence that family identity does not require family ownership alone but can be built upon complementary narrative elements and tactics, including kinship references and heritage storytelling. Both content and linguistic style of narratives are useful in conveying a family brand identity to an external public for website design. Implications are discussed.     

增加教育投入的困境及政策建议--中西部两县经济资源的筹集与分配案例研究

本文以案例研究观察了中西部两县的各级经济资源筹集和分配过程,比较了教育和其他发展资源分配的情况.研究发现:(1)经济中上等县份所创造的总经济资源远远超过再投入的需求,但在分税制财政制度下,县级财政无法从地方创造的总经济资源中获得投入需要的足额资金;(2)直接增加县以下的教育经费并不利于农村地区的经济发展,而会恶化资源投入不平衡的状况--教育支出已经占去地方财政的大部分,农村和农业发展投入等于零.本文建议,经济中上等县份应采取保证最低改善(生产条件)投入的财政策略,逐步增加和平衡农村地区各项投入,形成农业和农村的可持续发展的条件.