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Moms spend 37% of their daily media time on their smartphones and 97% of moms made a purchase on their tablet in 2012. There’s a huge opportunity for brands to provide value to customers through apps, especially to moms. However developing an app, particularly for the first time, is not a simple task. Rather, you need a well thought-out mobile strategy. App development requires a large budget, skilled engineers, dedicated marketers, and time. Here are several key topics to keep in mind while you consider if an app is the right choice for your brand.
Augmented reality (AR), which overlays text, images, or video over physical objects, is one of those technologies that gets marketers really excited. In recent years, it's been used to create engaging advertising campaigns by brands as diverse as DreamWorks, Bloomingdale's, and Elizabeth Arden. But despite the pizzazz of AR-powered creative, it's still a novelty and marketers aren't entirely sure how it translates into ROI.
In her book Ultimate Guide to Pinterest for Business, marketing and branding expert Karen Leland provides a Pinterest roadmap that will help you drive website traffic, boost your brand and build business. In this edited excerpt, the author reveals how to write pin descriptions that draw viewers to your account. One surefire way to optimize your pins for search and attract more traffic is by giving each one a spot-on description that includes your relevant keywords. There is a 500-character limit for descriptions, so be deliberate in what you write -- and follow these guidelines for making your descriptions count:
The world of professional services is relationship based. It always has been and it always will be. Clients work with firms that they know well and that they trust, and this is precisely why cold calling has such a low percentage success rate. The challenge with this notion is that you are limited to your network. Firms that rely on referral leads can only grow so quickly because one can only develop so many personal relationships. Fortunately, because of the Internet, there is another way to meet new prospects and build trust.
Serious inbound marketers are known for their near superhuman abilities to generate leads. But these supermen and women aren’t from another planet, and they don’t have a secret identity. Instead, they utilize modern marketing tools, dig through data and adjust their tactics on a regular basis. So how can you, too, be an inbound marketing man (or woman) of steel? Well, here are five things that make a super inbound marketer:
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.
LinkedIn recently announced that they now have over 225 million users. A reminder that LinkedIn gives opportunities to connect and communicate for both individuals and businesses across more than 200 countries. In this post, we will look at some of the main features that are available for individuals and businesses on LinkedIn..
Most of us who are content creators love to write. And we are pretty good at organizing and layout out content in ways that are useful and helpful to our customers. But as good as we may be at creating digital content, many of us are weak when it comes to marketing what we’ve created. It’s just not what we like to do. We create our stuff, we say a little prayer, and hope that the sales roll in. Need I say that weakness in marketing is a problem if you want to create income from your digital content? One of my first coaches, Ali Brown, set me straight by saying early on “if you refuse to become just as great at marketing as you are at your craft, your business will fail. Learn to love it.” That strong statement made me blink back then. I’m a good student, and in the years since then I’ve come to realize that half the battle of marketing is building into your product certain components that actually help you to market. Here are 3 ways to make your marketing easy when you’re ready to launch your digital content into the world:
Although digital marketing is considered to be a relatively new industry, many of the theories underlying it have been around for almost 90 years and are still generating sales for some of the web’s biggest brands. In 1923, Claude C Hopkins wrote Scientific Advertising, one of the most valued resources in the advertising industry. Hopkins pioneered split testing of his ads and defined a set of principles which, when applied to digital marketing can increase both traffic and conversions. This article will give you some great insight and practicle ideas which you can put into practice straight away. Enjoy... .
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: .
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.
There is one difference between winners and losers when it comes to web analytics. Winners, well before they think data or tool, have a well structured Digital Marketing & Measurement Model. Losers don't. This article guides you in understanding the value of the Digital Marketing & Measurement Model (notice the repeated emphasis on Marketing, not just Measurement), and how to create one for yourself. At the end you'll also find some additional examples to inspire you. Let's go..
Many marketers have worked hard in 2011 to develop appropriately customized ROI measures for social media. Are you measuring the interplay and overall performance of your combined paid, earned, and owned digital media channels? Here's a 5-step process to discover which elements are driving the most value.
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It is not so much a revolution but a rapid evolution and digital transformation. The growth of digital media, the convergence of paid, owned and earned media practices and the rapid growth and adoption of mobile and video have fueled change in the way we work in 2013. If you add to this equation the technological changes and innovation and the catalyst that is social media and content marketing it becomes apparent that dealing and adapting to change is a digital marketing necessity rather than the option that it used to be.
A webinar is a service that allows conferencing events to be shared with remote locations using Internet technologies, particularly on IP/TCP connections. The term “webinar” is short for “Web-based Seminar”, that often involves presentations, lectures, collaborative meetings transmitted online, specifically a portmanteau of web & seminar, and other types of specific web conference. Webinars are the latest marketing trend allowing for a more interactive and personal sales presentation. Popular online systems include service providers like GoToMeeting and WebEx.
Marketers (40%) are finding that delivering a positive customer experience is harder in mobile marketing than on the web. That’s likely no surprise, but what may be troubling is that 70% of marketers describe their multichannel experience for customers as “okay” or “poor. These findings, from a new IBM sponsored survey of more than 500 chief marketing officers and ecommerce leaders, revealed that while these leaders understand the importance of mobile, two-thirds still do not know how to define their mobile user experience. The top three most serious issues around mobile marketing were defined as bad navigation/poor “findabilty,” screen-sizing issues and form-filling problems. Mobile traffic continues to grow, with respondents attributing 19% of their total traffic to a mobile device. Even so, many companies continue to optimize their websites for mobile marketing and experiences, as opposed to building a mobile experience from the ground up which would provide an improved experience for the customer.
In 2012, the Encyclopedia Britannica – the go-to source for information for more than 200 years – announced it would no longer print its pricey reference books. It makes sense – why pay nearly $1,400 for a set of books when Google is free? Technology has changed the way we access information, including how we respond to advertising and marketing. We can record our favorite TV shows and skip through commercials. We can install pop-up blockers to keep pesky ads from annoying us while we’re online. And many people can’t even recall a time when they answered a “land line” and took a survey about their product preferences. Unlike the leather-bound reference books of yore, marketing departments are still relevant. But in order to be successful, they need to learn how to transition to inbound marketing.
Some people in the web marketing space have suggested that PPC shouldn’t be included in “inbound marketing” because you have to pay for placement. But this doesn’t make any sense. The whole point of introducing a term like “inbound marketing” is to create a more nuanced distinction than just “free marketing” and “paid marketing.” Any marketer who manages a budget knows that no form of marketing is truly “free.” HubSpot, one of the first proponents of inbound marketing, sells a product that helps you do it – how is that free? They know that if they called what they’re selling – a platform for blogging and SEO – “free marketing,” it would be a contradiction in terms. Of course, you can do inbound marketing without HubSpot (duh), but you’re either going to be paying someone or a team of people to do it (a blogger, a social media manager, an SEO specialist, etc.) or you’re going to be doing it yourself, as the business owner, and any time you spend on inbound marketing is time you can’t spend on other business activities, so all those activities have a cost. That’s why “free marketing” doesn’t cut it.
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.
Today’s blog post comes courtesy of Jonathan Dempster, a digital strategist based in Leeds, UK. He is focused on providing marketers the tools to justify their marketing spend by understanding the customer journey from online to offline channels. Inbound marketing, especially for B2B companies, is difficult to get right. With so many online social outlets, content strategies, and performance metrics, knowing where to begin is a significant challenge. It is important to get the basics right. Once you have a manageable campaign, you can begin to piece together the parts of your marketing puzzle. A well developed marketing strategy enables you to more effectively drive inbound leads to your website. Here are four tips that can get you started.
. 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. Read more here...
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.
San Francisco—In early March, 2012, the venerable Web Analytics Association changed its name to the Digital Analytics Association. Announced at the San Francisco eMetrics conference by none other than analytics ubermensch Jim Sterne, the name change confirmed rumors the web is officially dead. After a period of lying in-state in Switzerland, services will take place at the old headquarters of Uunet, an ancient provider of bandwidth now remembered only by a weathered stelae in suburban northern Virginia. If you detect liberal exaggeration above, as well as a bit of fabrication, you're right. But the kernel of the story is true. The WAA is now the DAA, and for good reason. In fact, many would say it is late in renaming - though I would quibble with that given the lightning speed of change in the digital industries.
Marketing is moving from analog to digital and many well established companies have not woken up to this and are still persisting with what was the “tried and true” but is now becoming the expensive and ineffective. There are essentially 3 elements that have emerged in the last decade that have brought us to this generational shift: 1) social media 2) mobile devices enabled with wireless broadband and 3) Google and other search engines continual evolution. Here is a list of the top 10 essential activities that should be considered part of your marketing strategy roadmap that are becoming vital in a digital world and are quite often ignored by a generation of management that grew up in the age of the TV industrial complex and telemarketing.
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