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Kevin Hofmaenner joined the RepEquity team in January. As a Search Engine Marketing Manager, he drives SEM results for our diverse range of B-to-B and B-to-C clients. Prior to working at RepEquity, Kevin managed digital marketing campaigns for some of the strongest hospitality brands including the Four Seasons, Ritz-Carlton, Fairmont, Intercontinental and Loews. Kevin prides himself on closely following the industry and innovating with new strategies and tools.

What did you expect you would be doing when you graduated college?

I graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Integrated Science and Technology from James Madison University. The focus of my degree was towards renewable energy/energy efficiency. I completed an undergraduate internship at an engineering firm where I helped conduct energy efficiency audits on large scale commercial buildings. When I graduated from JMU, I got a job as a Contractor for the Department of Energy in Washington, DC. I had no idea what I wanted to do when I graduated but I ended up finding that working with websites, analytics, and online marketing was more interesting to me.

How did you get started with paid search advertising?

I have always gravitated towards the web and over time it’s become second nature to me. I got my start with paid search marketing by building websites for friends and family. One thing led to another, and I began working at a digital agency that specialized in driving direct revenue for some of the world’s largest Hospitality brands.

What is one piece of advice you would give to someone who wants to pursue a career in paid search marketing?

Read, read, read. Keep abreast with current industry news and blogs. (Kevin recommends Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch, SEOmoz, Mashable, LinkedIn and Google’s Inside AdWords blog.)

Build a blog or website, even if it’s just getting a tumblr up and running or a WordPress theme going. Install Google Analytics. Play around with registering domains. Learn a little bit of HTML/CSS. Google everything you don’t know and read it all. By doing things, you will run into dead ends that will force you to research and learn.

Get AdWords Certified and Bing Certified. While having certifications does not necessarily mean you know what you are doing, it helps when you are trying to get your foot in the door.

What did your work in the hospitality industry teach you? Continue Reading…

Chip Cullen, one of our top senior front end developers, spoke to the Northern Virginia Drupal Group this week about responsive design and the Drupal content management system (CMS).

Responsive design is an emerging approach to dealing with the web as we know it today and is an important component of a future-facing web strategy.  It enables one website, with one code-base, to accommodate various devices with different screen sizes. This approach differs from that of a dedicated mobile website, which has a separate code base and might also require the maintenance of device-specific content.

Our team has built many responsive websites – from small microsites to large, enterprise-level websites. Based on his experience, Chip shared five lessons that he has learned about how to approach responsive design projects. You can see Chip’s slides here.

This week, the SEC released a new social media policy clarifying the terms of what can be shared on social networks and when. The last time the SEC released guidelines on the distribution of company information online was back in 2008, when sites like Facebook and Twitter were just getting started. According to the new policy, companies are now allowed to distribute significant information to the public via social media, as long as investors are informed of this strategy beforehand. The SEC’s acknowledgment of the shift from traditional to digital platforms underscores the growing transparency that social media has brought to some of the world’s biggest corporations.

What do these rules mean for us, as an agency that oversees the social media accounts of our clients?  The answer is change, as we help clients adapt to the new SEC policy. We are working with our clients to ensure that they alert investors to their plans to use social media outlets for announcements. Clients who have multiple social media profiles rely on us to help determine the best strategy for disseminating information. While Facebook and Twitter are the most popular social media sites, we encourage clients to use whichever networks are best for their purposes, even including Instagram or Orkut. For companies that wish to create separate corporate accounts specifically for announcements to investors, we can claim, develop and manage these profiles. The change means similar changes for RepEquity. We will need to decide whether to share with our investors information via social media, and alert our investors of our policy.

Companies should also be mindful to not share information that the SEC deems “company announcements.” For example, last year Francesca’s Holdings CFO Gene Morphis tweeted, “Board meetings. Good numbers = Happy Board” and was subsequently fired for sharing non-public information.

What do you think about the SEC’s policy change? Can the new policy, as it stands, work for social networks that may emerge in the next few years? Should investors be required to like and follow the social media profiles of all companies in which they invest?

Paul Hrusa recently joined the RepEquity team as our new WordPress developer. Before joining RepEquity, Paul spent four years working as a freelancer and contractor in the DC area. Paul began working with WordPress after realizing that small businesses and organizations needed websites that their staff could easily update without requiring special software or HTML knowledge. These companies couldn’t afford to pay top design firms to design and update their sites, so Paul began offering his design services and teaching businesses and organizations how to manage websites on their own.

Paul’s former work as a freelance graphic designer taught him to be quick, adaptive and curious – skills that he uses every day as a developer, and that make him a valued member of the RepEquity team. What Paul enjoys most about working at RepEquity is twofold: the freedom to create and the team atmosphere.

Paul and his wife have lived in the DC area since 2006 and since then, he’s seen the tech scene undergo a major shift. “If I remember correctly, at that time the demand was more for developers with various language and scripting skills,” he said. “Now the demand is more for people experienced with content management systems and integrating various content platforms.”

Would Paul like to see his five-year-old daughter, Stella, go into the tech field? That would be great, he says. By the time Stella is old enough to work, Paul believes that the tech field will need individuals who can focus on predicting outcomes and forecast ahead of trends. His daughter has plenty of time to decide though. Paul added, “Right now she wants to be a Magical Chef.”

Outside of the office, Paul enjoys keeping abreast of popular culture by listening to music, reading, following sports and visiting DC’s numerous museums.

The following is a post from Kevin Hofmaenner, our Search Engine Marketing Manager at RepEquity.

Last month we discussed Why Online Reputation Management is Never Complete. The same concept holds true for pay-per-click (PPC) search marketing. For many companies, PPC can easily become set it and forget it, but by doing so you may leave money on the table. Continuous analysis and optimization leads to better results and can save you on media costs.

Account Structure

Make sure your account structure has the correct hierarchal flow so the search engines can efficiently understand and rate your account content. This serves multiple purposes, but the most direct is a higher quality score. In recent years, all major search engines have implemented quality score initiatives that measure how relevant your keywords, ads and landing pages are to a person seeing your ad. The higher the quality score, the lower the cost per click (CPC) and higher the average position of the ad. Optimizing your account structure can effectively reduce your cost to obtain traffic.

Keyword Buckets (Ad Groups)

Correctly organize keywords into appropriate buckets (ad groups). By having tightly themed ad groups filled with very similar keywords, the ads become much more targeted, which leads to higher click through rates (CTR). CTR is a major factor in determining quality score and ultimately CPC. Optimizing ad groups also ensures more accurate reporting and prevents keyword cannibalization, where similar keywords in different ad groups compete for impressions. Continue Reading…