All kinds and sizes of businesses can benefit from implementing an E-mail marketing campaign. Unfortunately, not everyone knows how to do it properly. While for some, it can become the cost-effective marketing and communications tool needed to boost their business, for the inexperienced others it can become a costly mistake that turns their prospects and customers off. So how exactly do you go about launching an effective E-mail marketing campaign? Here are a few important tips. Know who you’re trying to reach out to E-mail marketing is about targeting an audience composed of prospects and customers with whom you might want to engage with – and vice versa. That’s why it doesn’t work to just compile all the E-mail contacts you have and barrage them with unsolicited advertisements and newsletters. Think about what you have to offer (in terms of products and services), and then determine who among your contacts may find it relevant or interesting. If you don’t have – Read the full article
Online advertising has evolved – and continues to evolve – so rapidly that secrets, tips, advice are coming from all corners. Just Google “PPC tips” and you’ll see what we mean. Businesses and marketers are keen on increasing their pay-per-click conversion rates and ROI, and they wouldn’t hesitate to try out this new piece of software, that new eBook, this new complex paid-for PPC management tool that should serve as current Shiny Object in the world of Internet marketing. We’re talking, in other words, about a lot of effort, time, and money. Sometimes, though, you can get the job done with something as simple as a Shiny Button. What are we talking about? Well, we’ve written in the past about “call to action” being one of the tips for a successful PPC campaign. Call to action: encouraging your visitors to make a decision about your product, your service, your brand. Writing persuasive ad copy that makes it hard for your – Read the full article
More and more brands are using Facebook to create Fan Pages – and for good reason, too. A Facebook Fan Page is a great online channel for sharing and promoting brand identity, as well as for engaging and interacting with audiences in a community-driven setting. SEO experts will also note that a Fan Page on Facebook can improve a brand’s online authority, thus making it friendlier to search engines. However, there are dangers that come along with the benefits of social media – dangers that can hurt a brand and a company’s reputation. Brand identity theft, for example, has taken on many forms on the Web, and we see many cases of it happening on Facebook. There are a number of companies who’ve made the mistake of letting fans take over Facebook Fan Pages of their brands. It may simply be that they trust their fans enough to let them have administrative control. Or it can be a case of – Read the full article
Marketing Sherpa, a trusted resource that publishes useful news, case studies, and best practices data about Internet and integrated marketing, recently released the new Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report. It’s a robust guide that contains research, charts and tables, case studies, and trends in today’s ever-evolving Internet marketing industry. Over 2,000 marketers participated in the surveys conducted by Marketing Sherpa, surveys which covered topics such as strategy, forecasting, budgeting, integration with other marketing channels, social applications, and social media. It is meaty: 197 charts and tables, 14 chapters, 255 pages, and results from research conducted with 2,317 business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketers. The benchmark report also introduced a ROAD Map, which stands for the Research, Objectives, Actions, and Devices that businesses and marketers would have to determine in crafting and implementing a social media strategy. Because social media is continuously evolving, one has to consider this ROAD Map, which is meant to help businesses and marketers stay abreast of social media – Read the full article
A PPC – pay-per-click – campaign is not for everyone, but when it works for you, then you’ll find out how it can stretch your advertising dollars and realize your sales potential. We wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s hugely underrated, but PPC can work in a way that helps your local business – hugely. In achieving local SEO and PPC success, however, you do have to keep some of these things in mind. Go for balance. Getting the right keyword or set of keywords is important. Choose too popular a keyword, and you may take years or never before you can reach the first page of the search engines results page. Choose keywords that are too uncompetitive, and you risk generating no traffic and lower conversion to ROI. Do all the necessary research. There are four main factors that come into why prospects will buy from you – or why they will not buy from you. These – Read the full article
The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) industry continues to evolve. More and more experts are finding out ways and thinking up new strategies to make their websites – and their content – friendlier to the search engines. Nowadays, it’s no longer such a mystery to figure out how to rank higher, find faster, and optimize better. For the most part, SEO covers just text and image content. That’s because search engine robots understand only text. But times are changing, and we’re seeing new innovations in video SEO that bring us closer to being able to rank published video content more systematically in search. Why is this important? Well, it’s important for the simple fact that people are publishing videos on the Web more than ever. On YouTube, the well-established leader in this industry, users upload 20 hours of video every minute – and 10.5 million hours, or 120 decades, every year. More videos are uploaded using other platforms, which include Vimeo, – Read the full article
Millions of people watch the NFL Super Bowl every year because they love American football. That’s why it’s consistently one of the highest-rated programs every year. Millions more watch it even though they don’t like football. Those of the second kind watch primarily because of the ads. And why not? So many commercial campaigns have made the Super Bowl their ultimate showcase: from Apple’s 1984 commercial to the Budweiser “Bud Bowl” campaign, to the dot-com ads in 1999 and 2000, Super Bowl tradition has proved that the game is where high concept ads and extravagant, expensive commercials are often placed and broadcast. It’s not just the people in advertising watching and talking about the Super Bowl ads. There’s a whole nation of armchair critics out there, eager to compare opinions with other armchair critics. That’s why Boston ad firm Mullen has partnered with social media monitoring company Radian6 in bringing the ultimate Twitter / Super Bowl experience, the Brand Bowl – Read the full article
When you search for your favorite celebrity’s name, or the profile of the novelist behind the book you’d read and raved about, chances are that the results will include a Wikipedia entry. On Page One. You’d almost be shocked if you find it on Page Two. The web encyclopedia seems to have outraced everyone to the top, and everything seems to be pointing to any one of its many, many pages. But do you see “Adam Lambert”, or “Jonathan Franzen” on Wikipedia’s home page? Probably not. You wonder how you can optimize your own website that way, without having to barrage your preferred landing page with a hundred links. The example of Wikipedia demonstrates how SEO can be used to target not just keywords – but entire target markets. This strategy was recently discussed in SEO Design Solutions as a way to out-optimize your competitors, if you will, and have your website rank from the top 1000 to the top – Read the full article
