Digital Marketing Power

Inbound marketing is all the rage. Social media has us consumed.  B2B Marketers are creating more content than ever before.  We’re optimizing everything we possibly can all with the intention of driving more people to our sites, engaging with them and offering them opportunities to raise their hand and announce themselves.

For many of us, it’s working!  Visitors are showing up at rates we’ve never seen before. Some are just stopping by to see what we’re offering, some clicking around the site to check us out and of course those that decide to take the bait, oops, I mean fill out the lead form.

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There is a continuing disconnect with people’s personal use of the internet and how they then apply digital marketing to promote their business.

The company CEO will use Google for researching and buying a new car but when it comes to optimizing his web site for ranking high in Google he struggles to see the value and perceives that building a website is all he needs to do to be “found online” and generate mountains of cash.

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Full-service restaurant operators are aware that societal and technological changes are affecting the way people communicate and interact. We’ve become more visual than we have ever been before, helped along by sites like Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook.  That’s why deploying digital signage (DS) to help evolve your restaurant’s brand and tell a visual story about who you are and how and what you serve makes sense. It’s not only a smart move; it brings you closer to the way people communicate with each other today.

.Marketers are not typical consumers: They're more likely than other online consumers to explore new digital environments, own a smartphone, and use various digital media frequently. Consequently, marketers can lose touch with the people they're trying to reach, according to a study by ExactTarget.

Below, additional findings from ExactTarget's new "Subscribers, Fans, and Followers" study titled "Marketers From Mars," which polled online consumers and marketers about their use of digital media.

Last month, this author wrote about "How to Tell if Your Agency Sucks at Digital" and tips for selecting an agency that actually knows digital and can demonstrate their knowledge about it. Here he focuses on digital strategy and ensuring that the marketing tactics to be deployed are the right ones and will work in a unified manner to drive optimal impact on business objectives.

We’ve all been there: You’ve had a raucous weekend, and now it’s Monday morning, time to drag yourself into work. If you have a certain kind of job, it’s no big deal. You can coast a bit, maybe surf the web and take a few extra trips to the water cooler until you feel up to reallyworking.But if your job requires you to be creative — and perhaps you’re getting paid a decent amount to come up with ideas — then you don’t have that option. In that case, you have to start coming up with ideas even though you’d rather be lying on your couch eating Cheez Doodles. What to do? Mashable checked in with some digital innovators and a few professors who study creativity to get some tips on how to get the upper hand on the muse. Below are seven suggestions.

Social media is no longer a reminder or subsidiary medium. To understand and invest in this medium, marketer need to have a strategy in place, risk appetite in case of failure and a measurement system which is in sync with the brand objective.

Dos and don’ts of social media have been chalked out quite a lot of times. However, experts express that to make the medium a permanent part of the media mix without risking RoI, there are a few business rules that they can keep in mind.

Integrated digital marketers (IDMs) rely heavily on data analytics to track campaign performance over website, social, and mobile channels. To ensure each initiative is achieving the desired effect, they may track various performance management metrics, including website bounce rates; keyword performance rankings; eMail open rates; landing page conversions; visitor-to-lead, lead-to-customer, and customer retention ratios; and ad click-through-rates and costs-per-impression. Striving for perfection, IDMs rely heavily on user data to compare marketing initiatives with real-world results.

In other words, they keep their EAR to the ground.

Here are three ways to do the same:

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John Doerr of KPCB calls it “SoLoMo“. Others call it by different names. I see it as the holy grail of our digital marketing future. I’m talking about Social – Local – Mobile SEO/search marketing… the exciting golden triangle of unification and synergy created by billions of people armed with mobile computing devices who are seeking and finding instant gratification, wherever they are and wherever they go. The business case for this evolution is clear. The writing is on the wall. And unless you, as a business owner, adapt quickly to this change, you’ll be leaving money on the table! Mobile SEO that is focused locally and integrated socially will drive relevant, quality traffic that converts far better than any other option – and the volume of this traffic is set to grow exponentially in coming years.

Today Holiday Inn, official hotel provider to the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, unveils the world’s first Augmented Reality Hotel which features a host of Britain’s top athletes. Hotel guests can use their smartphones or tablets to see London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic stars in virtual action in the reception, corridors and bedrooms of the Holiday Inn London Kensington Forum.