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Home › Search › SEO Crispin Sheridan 8 Tips on How to Utilize YouTube and the New ‘YouTube One’ for Your Business Crispin Sheridan | April 3, 2013

thoughland — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 00:34:23 +0000

Your brand has the opportunity to broadcast to the 800 million monthly viewers, and a powerful video has an opportunity to get you ranked in universal search in the traditional engines.[Read the rest here]

Content Zombies: How to Fight The Walking Dead Christina Zila, October 28, 2012

thoughland — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 00:47:33 +0000

They’re there, in the dark, waiting for fresh victims. You know they’re out there, waiting for you. They stumble and shuffle, slowly and inevitably aiming to take your most precious asset – your content! Yes, the moon is high and the content zombies are out in full force.

Is Your Content a Zombie?

SYMPTOM: No pulse.

While you wouldn’t get so close to a human zombie, content zombies don’t transfer their condition to humans.

Lean in and see if your content lives and breathes.

Does it interest your target audience? Does it garner social media attention? [Read the rest here]

Like Any Good Story Derek Harding | October 24, 2012

thoughland — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 00:42:58 +0000

By now, anyone familiar with email will tell you that good deliverability depends on good list hygiene, good reputation, and good engagement. Good engagement comes from getting the right message to the right person at the right time, and revenue per email goes up in proportion to this. Any marketer worth her salt can tell you that to get the most revenue you must get your message in front of as many people as possible. But how do you develop a long-term strategy that combines these goals? One that can adapt to changing conditions and yet still maintain quality of list, quality of communication, and ROI over the long haul?

I liken the email communications lifecycle to a story or play. It has a clear beginning, middle, and end. To manage your program effectively you must take care to address each part of the story in a systematic, methodical way. [Read the rest here]

Facebook Brand Engagement Up 896% – New Adobe Study James Dohnert | October 24, 2012

thoughland — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 23:24:26 +0000

Facebook brand engagement has risen 896 percent on a year-over-year basis, according to a new advertising study from Adobe.

Adobe’s Digital Index for Q3 2012 reports that the huge uptick in engagement is, in part, a result of Facebook’s new Timeline feature. Facebook introduced its new Timeline feature last February.

Adobe’s research points to its introduction as a major factor for engagement growth. Other studies tend to agree, as a report released earlier this year found that the feature garnered positive results for small to medium-sized brand pages.

Facebook’s gains come with a drastic upswing in mobile. About a quarter of Facebook engagement came from mobile users. Mobile growth on Facebook engagement also came with increased mobile marketing gains overall. [Read the rest here]

Facebook Ads Reach 5x Greater Audiences Than Organic Content Matt Kapko | October 26, 2012

thoughland — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 23:03:19 +0000

There are generally two schools of thought when it comes to marketing on Facebook – paid media and earned media. Although organic (earned) media is inherently valuable for any brand, that reach only goes so far, according to new study from Facebook and comScore. Among the top 100 brand pages on Facebook, those using paid advertising reach an audience that is 5.3 times larger on average, the study found.

comScore looked at how three major brands — a retailer, Samsung Mobile and a financial services company – used paid media to extend their audience five times over their organic audience in one week. Some brands were able to extend the reach of a single post or other piece of content by more than 100 times with paid media, according to comScore. [Read the rest here]

Online Ad Spend Up 12% Globally in Q1 Melanie White | July 10, 2012

thoughland — Sat, 04 Aug 2012 16:53:13 +0000

Online ad spending continued to grow in the first quarter of 2012, with significant rises across all parts of the globe, according to Nielsen’s quarterly global AdView Pulse report. In particular, the Middle East and Africa enjoyed 35.2 percent growth, while Latin America saw a 31.8 percent rise compared to the previous year. Europe has also grown by 12.1 percent.

The report also found that although TV continues to attract a large proportion of advertising dollars, Internet advertising has seen the biggest increase with advertisers spending 12.1 percent more in the first quarter of 2012, than they did in Q1 2011.

Radio has also seen an increase in ad spending globally, including a 2.6 percent increase in North America and 2.8 percent in Europe. In emerging markets such as Latin America, and the Middle East and Africa, there was a substantial rise with 18 percent, and 21.1 percent growth respectively.

Conversely, print ad spending in magazines declined since the previous comparable year, specifically in the US. Newspapers however have seen growth with a 3.1 percent increase.[ Read More Here]

How to Build Your List Through Social Media Jonas Blanck | August 4, 2012

thoughland — Sat, 04 Aug 2012 16:49:17 +0000

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Email in business will always be a vital component in an Internet business. A lot of relatively successful Internet marketers subscribe to that age-old adage: “The money is on the list.” And it is true, email is still the most effective way you can get an audience’s permission to be marketed to – up-close and personal.

You can not really do that with social media – perhaps you can send in some messages through Twitter and Facebook. But really? Just because they liked your page or followed you on Twitter does not mean that they gave you explicit permission to market to them.

But you can’t stop social media – it’s literally the hottest thing since the World Wide Web. Every hot brand in the world has a Facebook page and a Twitter following.

There is no doubt that when you put these two titans together to work with each other (and not square off), they’ll do very well for business. That’s the idea – to grab the lead via social media and follow-up through both social media and email.

Here’s how it should go:

Facebook Apps and Sign-Up Forms

This is how you get your email subscribers. If you’re new to the Internet business, you should make sure that you get an email marketing service that provides an application that allows you to place a sign-up form on your Facebook page.

You might also want to try having a developer and designer nearby in case you might need to do little tweaks on both aesthetics and function.

Remember, one vital factor in sign-up conversions is how your sign-up form looks and how easy it is to navigate through it.

Give them something FREE [Read More here]

Accurately Evaluate the Performance of Your Marketing Efforts Amy Manus | August 1, 2012

thoughland — Sat, 04 Aug 2012 16:46:21 +0000

Evaluating the success of your marketing efforts across key performance indicators (KPIs) is essential; however, making those KPIs meaningful can be a challenge. Here are four steps that can ensure you are accurately measuring the performance of your marketing efforts.

1. Start with your business objective. Aligning with the company’s overall business objectives is important in proving marketing activities have the ability to directly impact the overall performance of the business. Additionally, this can help you develop marketing objectives and a strategy that aligns with the business objectives. [Read More here]

Ensure these marketing objectives have the ability to be universal and translate to KPIs across all of your efforts, from the goals established in your website analytics to media objectives. All too often marketers can get tactical in evaluating performance by expected metrics. For example, leads from a trade show or completion rates from online video are metrics or data segments typically used to evaluate these tactics; however, if leads or awareness is not part of the objective then how is that working to move the needle?

2. Invest in research. Frequently we hear about “the power of data.”

Breaking News: Email’s Not Dead! Christine Doré | August 2, 2012

thoughland — Sat, 04 Aug 2012 16:42:29 +0000

As a die-hard email marketer, I’m getting a little sick of hearing about mobile. That’s right, I said it. Now don’t get me wrong; I’m not naïve to the fact that optimizing messages and branding for mobile devices is a necessary trend to get behind, but I reject the notion that email is dead. Especially when research proves that it is very much alive and well.

I’ve found through the years that companies and organizations have gotten sloppy with their email marketing as more and more attention gets focused on social media and mobile. But don’t slack! Yes, Instagram is rad, but so is the old, reliable way of engaging countless people through their inbox. You just have to be sure you are targeting the right people. If you are flooding your lists with every update, every coupon, every news item that comes through, then yes, I don’t blame your audience for preferring Facebook over standard emails. But if you come up with an audience segmentation strategy, you will be shocked at how much life it breathes back into your email campaigns. Here is my favorite suggestion that I have personally found to at least double (sometimes even quadruple) open and click-through rates.

Before you send an email, ask yourself, who on my list would be interested in this topic? And if you’re not sure, then you need to start categorizing the origins of your subscribers more effectively. For example, if someone purchases a cat litter box on your website, then they should be tagged with a “cat” interest and an “online shopping” interest.[Read the rest here]

The Web Analyst Job Gordon Choi | May 11, 2012

thoughland — Sat, 12 May 2012 22:14:26 +0000

In recent years with web analytics software/tools/systems becoming more widely used by companies that have websites, the necessity of having a web analyst role or even several web analysts for a web business is essential.

Back in the days before year 2000 when website traffic statistics were quantified as “hits,” web analytics was not a common tool for many web businesses. The concept of “hit” means for every file that is requested by a site visitor, the counter of “hit” increases by one. This was never a meaningful way to look at visitors’ traffic and how visitors interact with a website.

A web analyst’s job description in the modern day should consist of the following tasks:

Trend and data reporting
Analyze current online marketing acquisition strategies and explore nw opportunities and/or new strategies
Understand on-site visitors’ behavior and experience
Stay connected with the trends and the details

Trend and Data Reporting

Daily trend and data reporting is tedious and repetitive as you are possibly using SQL queries to extract all the required data from a SQL server database and then placing the numbers in an Excel spreadsheet.

One basic dimension for any reporting is the time period: daily reports, weekly reports, monthly reports, quarterly reports, and annual reports.[Read more here]