With summer now in session, it is the perfect time to revise your college marketing plans before school starts back up. Targeting students can be easy but at the same time it can be very tricky when the minds of college students can easily be drawn into other interests. An article at MediaPost successfully gives some insight into how you can enliven your marketing plan to keep the Gen Y demographic engaged.

Making up 30% of the Internet’s users, the Gen Y demographic is flooding online channels of communication, particularly social networks. What better way than to reach to them through social media and new media marketing? If you get their email through on-campus promotions during the first week of school, take the extra step to add them on FaceBook and Twitter. Use a blog to share student deals and write about the benefits of what you are trying to sell to them. Connecting to them through these channels will give them more of a personal connection and will also give opportunity for customers to recommend your business to their friends.

Make sure your company’s message that you are sending out through these channels are targeted towards this demographic of consumers. Also make certain that it is well defined and consistently carried throughout online and offline marketing strategies. It is also a good idea to make sure that all of your marketing representatives who visit the campuses that you “hone” in on are carrying out the same message to these students and the coveted Gen Y demographic.

 If you have non-web developers maintaining your site’s content, update the content more than once a month, manage it from remote locations or run a blog on your site, then a Content Management System (CMS) is a wise decision for your site. When choosing your site’s CMS it is important to make sure that it will be search-engine friendly. Here are some critical key points, addressed in an article on Search Engine Land, to look for when purchasing your next CMS platform:

Title, Header, and Meta Tag Customization

Make sure that you have control over customizing titles, H1 headings and meta descriptions. Not only do you want to access over these basic page elements, but also make sure that you can enable rules for particular sections of the website.

Alt Attributes

It is important to tell search engines what an image is about, so make sure you have the ability to implement the alt attribute within the site’s image tags.

Anchor Text Flexibility

To ensure your site is optimized, as well as search-friendly, make sure you are able to customize the anchor text

Nofollow, Noindex

To avoid duplicate content, it is important that your CMS supports Nofollow, Noindex tags.

Avoid Hidden Text

Many CMS platforms use CSS “display:none” to create expandable webpage elements such as a drop-down menu. Search engines could possibly misinterpret your hidden text as a spammer. Make sure your CMS avoids hidden text issues so you do not lose your page rank.

301-Redirects

For expired content, pages with a new version, or dodging keyword cannibalization issues, 301 redirects are necessary. A critical feature of your CMS is the functionality for redirecting content whenever necessary.

Keyword-Rich URLs & URL structure

To help solve a common SEO issue, your CMS platform should feature custom URL creation to implement static, keyword-rich URLs. Also, be sure your CMS allows customizable URL structure, as your SEO team should manually sculpt the URL structure of your site, not your CMS platform.

There are many crucial elements your CMS should deliver, these are just some of the most influential on-page and site-side SEO factors. From an SEO perspective, review your current CMS as soon as possible. Or, if you’re looking for a new platform remember these critical factors when deciding if your new CMS will be SEO friendly.  The decision to purchase a search-friendly CMS during the development cycle can reduce future customization costs many eTailers run into when trying to execute and manage a results-oriented SEO campaign.

Now, more individuals than ever before, are participating in the blogging community. As social media networks are rising in popularity, retailers must recognize the importance of connecting with these communities. These groups of bloggers help to create the content of these brands, and in a sense contribute to the future of their image. As a retail business, it is necessary to effectively get engaged with the bloggers, by listening to what they have to say. From adult to youth bloggers, many different aspects can be touched about your business than can help you fine-tune and alter your business practices. At the same time, many aspects may be touched about your business that either are not true or you don’t want portrayed to the online community.

It is important to participate in ongoing dialogues, to help generate good content and a trusted image amongst consumers. Through these you can create a larger conversation to extend the content, especially if it is of good quality, or even to steer it in a positive direction. By keeping customers updated on the latest online or in-store promos, special events, or campaigns through your blog, you can really make money off of creating a retail blog. You take that further step in reaching a whole community of bloggers and you really can increase online exposure and build raptor with your customers. Use your blog to discuss retail trends, marketing ideas, merchandising tips, and other facets of your business or industry to help promote and strengthen your brand.

As a retail business, you want to make sure the content is good and effective, so being proactive in the blogging community is a must. What others say about your brand impacts your business more than what you say about your brand; especially in user generated content circles. You want people to promote your business by blogging about you, your products, and your company without the common sales pitch. While, most retail businesses don’t have the time to comment on blogs and write articles you can find new media and social marketing companies that can integrate these techniques into your online retail marketing practices. These tactics will help deliver traffic to your website as your retail blog will serve as a communication engine, pumping out content to receive higher search engine rankings. It isn’t easy enough for the average, non-tech business owner through, or their staff, so it is best to hand this task over to a company who has the tools to help drive online success for your business.

What are your plans for protecting your online business during the current economic slowdown? According to Internet News, many online retailers are putting customer retention at the top of their priorities in hopes to survive the recession. But the question is how exactly are they going to change their business strategies to retain more customers and at the same time use a cost-effective approach? A new study from Shop.org, an online retailing industry group, found that more and more online retailers are turning to social media and other emerging marketing techniques to cut back on costs.

While many retailers are cutting costs, others have found the economic slowdown as an opportunity to increase market share. According to Internet News, almost half of retailers surveyed have no plans to cut back original budgets, while 24 percent will spend more on their online business than planned originally. Companies that plan to spend more will increase investments in areas of search (80%), e-mail marketing (65%) and social media marketing (60%) to help grow their businesses due to the pullback in consumer spending. Four out of five retailers surveyed said that they thought the web is the best suited channel to survive the recession, with one-third claiming the economic downturn has enabled the capture for greater market share.

To help optimize business strategies for retailers, new tools are making their debut in the industry. In order to withstand the recession, online retailers are learning to make smart spending decisions by doing more with less and taking advantage of new, innovative tools and techniques that have made their debut into the industry. New, innovative tools and techniques are launching to help retailers come out of this recession in a positive manner and effectively tap the power of social media, tribes and networks. The current goal for these online retailers right now is to get their hands on these tools to help accelerate sales, better resonate with prospective customers and thrive in a down market.

Triangle Direct Media proudly sponsored the 2009 Run Walk Festival in Cary North Carolina this past weekend.  The Festival helps the Rotary Club of Cary to fund many important groups in the community.

Triangle Direct Media fielded 2 Runners and 1 walker.

Thanks to all who participated and thanks to Scott for getting the whole event organized in at our office.

STORES Top 100 US retailers report for 2008 reveals some of the changing trends in retail. The list is based on sales volume and includes all types of retailers. As usual, Wal-mart tops the list with the most sales, with $378,799,000 in 2007 revenues. Following this retail giant are Home Depot at number two, CVS Caremark at number three, and Kroger taking number four.

Overall, pharmacies, including Rite Aid and Walgreen are moving up the rankings. We have certainly seen an evolution of pharmacies in the past few decades, and they are continuing to change and offer new goods and services to respond to demand. The chart says that Walgreen has launched a casual clothing collection, and is opening in-store clinics. Pharmacies are bringing in more revenue and opening new stores, despite the economic slump.

Retailers like Dell, Apple Stores/iTunes, AT&T, and Verizon are represented for the first time in this ranking. This certainly reflects the market shifts that are presently taking place and will continue.

You can take a look at the entire ranking here.

We have posted a chart with the top search terms before, but here you can find an updated version from data provided by Hitwise with data through May 2008. It’s worth taking a look at, because it can give you some idea of how the average person uses a search engine, and what terms are searched for most often. It can also give you an idea of what search terms people might use that would lead to your website.

Another resource you can use to find out what keywords are most popular and most widely used that are related to your website is a Search Term Suggestion Tool. With a tool like this, you can enter in a general keyword, and it will suggest other search terms related to that one, and give you the popularity of each.

It’s a good idea to be aware of how most people use search engines in order to see how customers may find your retail site in the vast world wide web.

eMarketer.com recently reported that retail shoppers are checking out stores’ websites first before deciding where to spend their money, even if they plan on going to the brick-and-mortar store. Competition tightens because it is now so easy for consumers to compare prices offered by different retailers.

With so much information available now on the internet revealing prices offered by different stores, there is limited information bias, and retailers have to offer competitive prices in order to survive. This is especially relevant for retailers that sell goods that are exactly identical to those sold by other stores, such as electronics.

According to a May 2008 Nielsen Online survey, even most of those who end up buying in a brick-and-mortar store check the web first. They found that eight out of ten consumers in the survey that had recently purchased electronics in a physical store had checked the retailer’s website beforehand. Consumers don’t need to drive around town to find out price differences. It seems that even if they are planning to stop by their local store, they check the website first to see what’s available, so they don’t waste a trip. With children now growing up surfing the web, we can expect to see this trend increase, and for shoppers to be more and more informed about competitors’ prices.

For a retail marketing blog to be successful, you have to keep up with updates. If you are posting something everyday, your blog will get picked up by the major search engines and gain your website better placement on the SERP and more traffic.

If you find it difficult to sit down and write a post everyday, take advantage of changing the post timestamp and setting posts to publish in the future. This way, you can write several posts at once, and then set some of them to post in the future, basically having your blog publish itself with a new post each day. If you are using Wordpress software for your blog, just change the timestamp to the future (say, tomorrow), and then click “Publish.”

Thanks to this handy little feature, you can publish new, unique content everyday and not actually have to keep up with your blog each day. Just don’t forget to come back and write some more!

RSS feeds have become immensely popular, and now you will see the RSS icon on most blogs so that their readers can stay up-to-date. Does your blog allow readers to subscribe to an RSS feed?

Readers can subscribe to your RSS feed and be notified of new updates to your blog or website. Many people who have a number of sites they like to keep up with find RSS feeds handy, because they can see the latest updates from these sites in a feed reader without having to visit each individual site to check. They also make it easy for readers to see your latest post quickly.

If you want your website to get noticed and you want to attract loyal readers, you need to make sure you have an RSS feed enabled. This site has a lot of information on how to set up an RSS feed.