Even more interesting, is that these premium brand products showed resilience in the marketplace. Lu Ann Williams, Head of Research at Innova Market Insights, states that “recent product launch activity reveals that US manufacturers are not giving up on premium products, despite the uncertain recovery. Instead, they are aiming to meet the demand for added-value encompassing better quality and offering consumers a momentary escape in stressful times.”

As an agency where “premium brands thrive,” Warren Douglas has seen the same acceptance among our own client roster, which are not new to the marketplace, but established brands. During the economic downturn, there has been a rise in requests for coupons, deals, etc. However, the majority of clients still see their customers’ loyalty to their superior, or premium, products.

We all know people can have a marketing hunch, but this recent study proves that there is data to back up that marketing belief that premium brands always sell no matter the economy. Makes you think your brand could stand to make sure it’s really seen as premium, doesn’t it?

Post based on a press release from PR Newswire, 6/9/2011.

Search engines are sophisticated and can determine when a page has been “stuffed” with keyword rich content and “black hat methods” to try and trick a search engine. It is very hard for a new website to rank well in search engines, and approaching this correctly the first time will help prevent future pitfalls.

Seven ways to boost your on-site optimization:

• Use keyword(s) at least once in the H1 tags on your website.
• Write relevant and useful content using keyword(s) at least 3 times throughout the content body. Using the keywords in different phrase variations works best. Just make sure the content makes sense and doesn’t feel like you are “keyword stuffing.”
• Use the keyword in title tag of the web page (Notice how we use the term “premium” a lot?)
• Bold the keyword in the body text at least once
• Use images that relate to the keyword(s), and use an alt tag for the image description.
• The URL page structure should have all keywords in it.
• Place keyword links throughout content, navigation, footer, and anywhere else there is content that could be used to link to other pages with keyword anchors.

Question: What methods are you currently using to optimize your SEO on-site?

This post is second in a series on Premium SEO. See other posts on this topic here.

Secured distribution? Check.

Market Need? Check.

Competitive Position? Check.

Appropriate Price? Check.

Now what? Cue the first planning meeting….

Long Pause.

Well, definitely a website.

Yep, and we’ve got to have good sales collateral for the trade.

We won’t sell anything without some awareness. How ‘bout a TV spot! No, wait, radio is cheaper. Or maybe a billboard? Those digital ones might be cheap…

Yeah, yeah, let’s do that! But wait, it won’t look cheap, right? I mean, we’re more premium than the cheap stuff…

What about a sales promotion? Or a sponsorship of something cool. No, I’ve got it – a promotion that leverages a sponsorship of something cool.

Yeah, with a viral video so we don’t have to pay for it!

Yeah! You know all social media is free, so we should definitely get on Facebook and Twitter too.

But we’ve got to track everything back to sales. We can’t do that without paying for social media, can we…

If you’re reading this blog, you have probably been in that meeting more times than you can remember. The organization is ready to launch a new product, steal market share, increase margins, etc., so the marketing team gets together to brainstorm. Everything is ready to go, and everyone just has to figure out how to tell the market that we are here to serve its unmet need.

It’s exciting! The possibilities are endless, and we all know that during a brainstorm “there are no bad ideas.” It’s fun! No spreadsheets here—just a whiteboard, some unhealthy snacks, excessive caffeine intake and the group’s collective imagination. Often times several good ideas come from these sessions, and the group leaves excited about the possibilities of putting together our new campaign.

Then the questions begin:

• How much of this can we afford?
• Our brand is premium. Are we doing things that a premium brand would do?
• What will management think?
• How can we sell in the new ideas?
• What’s the ROI? Can we even measure that for everything in our plan?
• Are there other metrics besides ROI that are important this year?
• Will all of this really help us meet our objective? Really?

At Warren Douglas, our strategy team guides premium brands through a deceptively simple four step process to answer these types of questions and provide a roadmap that shows the path from objective to tactics. Without a lot of detail, the four steps are as follows:

1. Define the Core Objective
2. Identify Measurable Goals
3. Articulate Strategies
4. Align Tactics

Check back to hear how these four steps can help make a strategy work for a premium brand—perfect for the proactive brand manager.

Question of the day: What have you found to be effective in making sure tactical plans will ultimately support the larger corporate objective for the upcoming plan?

Search Engine Optimization(SEO) is a large part of the performance discussion of a website. To rank well in search engines, several tasks have to be completed—utilizing many man-hours to accomplish good optimization. (No good  marketing deed goes without some sweat and blood behind it. You were all excited because we put “free” in bold above, weren’t you?)

To start at the very beginning (a very good place to start), SEO revolves around keyword usage. Most brand managers don’t have a clue which keywords are appropriate for their brand. Well, we at Warren Douglas begin our SEO 101 strategy with these three simple tips :

• Determine which keyword(s) a premium brand should be associated with. This can be a hard, yet important, task because each brand could potentially have hundreds of associated keywords relevant to a search engine. If the main goal is to sell a product or service, then you want to rank for the keyword(s) that has the highest conversion rate.
• Tools to determine keywords can suggest keywords and project how much traffic will come from each keyword. One such resource can be found at Google AdWords.
• Long-phrased keywords (or keyphrases) are easier to rank with than short-phrased or one-word keywords. For example it would be easier to rank for Fort Worth Advertising Agency rather than Advertising Agency when practicing good Search Engine Optimization techniques.

As an optional tactic, if keyword research has not brought in the ideal solution for finding high-performing keywords for your premium brand, it is often a good idea to allocate resources for a paid online campaign. With this paid online campaign, ”purchasing” certain keywords and keyword phrases and monitoring the traffic for website conversions can help narrow the scope. This will determine which keyword(s) perform best before committing the manual resources for the full optimization plan.

Once keywords in place, which are highly relevant to the content within a website, there are a number of tricks (which will be revealed at a later date) to make sure these keywords are being used in a highly effective manner.

Mr. Nese is the perfect example of the fact that just because an opportunity comes along that others have taken and seen success, that doesn’t mean it is the path for every brand out there. His greatest line is that each brand should “set yourself apart and provide your customer with something no one else has.” He did that by offering over 500 premium brands of soda pop rarely found any other place. And from the video, you can tell he’s had fun counting his success as he continues to stick to the ultimate goal of creating something with worth to his customer and not being enticed by every shiny opportunity that comes along.