Marketing

Communities need space. (Read the complete essay at Histories of Social Media)

In case you haven’t noticed the SEO buzz kill, it’s practically Armageddon out there, at least  for some last gen marketers. For SEO practitioners who don’t know what they’re doing anymore 2013 SEO is brutal man, just brutal.  Google’s veritable Jihad against link spammers and outdated link building tactics is finally working to a greater extent. Search engines in general are building better bullsh*t detectors than ever before. Search engine results pages mirror the real world more now and real brands have real advantages.  Marketers can complain all they want but the truth is that brand-advantage is not new. Before the Internet it was always hard for new brands to break through. We got spoiled for about a decade because early flawed search engine technology artificially leveled the playing field for clever would-be competitors. Now search engines reflect the physical world more accurately. Not happy? Get over it. *Sigh* The good news is that for marketers adept in organic, paid and paid-organic distribution of awesome content the living is high baby!  Pitching for links only with email and phone calls is SO 2011! There’s plenty of good ol’ #SEO links to go around for authentic and talented content marketers who understand the current distribution paradigm. Since so much of SEO is contingent on actual quality links and true social signals, there’s nothing to be afraid of for evolved content marketers. Great content properly distributed yields signals and links. We’ve seen this proven over and over. To begin, the foundation of great content marketing is…well… tremendously useful content advised, tailored and tuned by the very audiences to which we expect will consume it.  All the classic caveats apply: How does the content serve users and why will they care?  How does the content demystify, serve, remove barriers to conversion and move users towards the purchase funnel in attributable steps? This post is not about creating great content. We assume you already know how to create content that works. Content that “works” means to say that “If the right user sees the content then the user will value the content on some level and have a propensity to somehow act.”  Also “Good things will happen from content touches including users sharing, linking, and converting via content-as-the-landing-page. Rather, this post is all about how to get MORE, much more, out of your terrific content. In this post-Penguin & Panda link building environment, many old methods don’t work anymore. As we link builders seek new age replacement methods, we’re after content and distribution programs that: Earn real links from sites with good domain authority Generate authentic social signals from real users of good authority Insulate your site from harsh search engine algorithm updates Drive targeted & scalable social psychographic traffic to content that converts Amplify PR distribution to journalists, bloggers, and a myriad focused media-role users Recently Forbes magazine caught up with aimClear’s social distribution tactical successes online, and highlighted one of our client’s case studies to readers. The article by Neal Rodriguez details our team’s integrated techniques to amplify on-site content marketing winners for conversion. The attention was gratifying since we see stellar results over and over with our clients and have been evangelizing these distribution tactics for years. The Forbes article focused on paid-organic distribution for CPA KPI conversions using content as a vessel. Content marketing conversion amplified with paid-organic social distribution is cool enough in itself. However conversion is only half the groovy story. Paid organic content social content distribution also spawns transformational SEO benefits. let’s explore the (most delightful) “other side” of the paid-organic content distribution story, SEO.  Yep, we’re talking about the social signa

Mobile payments company payvia announced today it acquired Mogreet, which provides mobile video and rich media messaging engagement solutions used by marketers, retailers and others including ABC, Bloomingdales, Cox Media Group, Emmis Communications, Fox Television, and Gamefly. As part of the transaction, Mogreet founder and CEO James Citron will become payvia's CMO.

Despite the marketing potential that exists in social networks there has always been an element of doubt over the efficacy of buying social ads. Some of the most convincing arguments against social ads are that people don’t want to be sold to while they’re socialising and that you can’t always trust the validity of personal data on networks like Facebook. In fact our own head of social Matt Owen recently blogged about the problems he encountered with gauging the success of Promoted Posts due to poor targeting tools and fake profiles. But a new report from Kenshoo shows that although organic posts (such as maintaining a branded Facebook page) are the most popular social tactic, paid ads actually proved to be the most successful approach.The report, which is based on in-depth survey with 105 large social advertisers (i.e. they spend more than $100,000 per year on social media ads), found that consumer social networks were the most popular form of social advertising (87%), followed by microblogs (67%) and business-focused networks (51%). And although all the respondents used paid social ads, overall they were more likely to implement organic tactics like branded pages and content no matter what type of social network they were targeting. Which of the following marketing tactics do you use on social networks or microblogs or business-focused social networks? Paid posts achieve the best results Kenshoo asked 69 respondents who indicated that they are satisfied with their paid social media advertising what tactics they use.  The tactic that satisfied social advertisers used more than other survey respondents was paying to promote content on general social networks, followed by paying to promote trends on microblogs and buying ads on general social networks. As a result the authors conclude that social advertisers get what they paid for and are more satisfied with the results they achieve from paid advertising than the results they achieve with less costly organic tactics like branded pages. Personally I feel this is a slightly dubious way of concluding that paid ads are more effective than organic content, however it does at least suggest that paid ads are proving to be effective for these brands. Finally, the report also looked at which targeting methods are most popular among social advertisers. It found that despite the benefits of the advanced targeting methods that social sites offer (e.g. targeting users’ interests, targeting friends of a brand’s existing fans), more often than not social advertisers rely on simple demographic targeting for their ad campaigns.  For more information on social advertising check out our best practice guides for Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. What types of targeting do you regularly use when buying ads or paying to promote content on social networks?

Heineken offered a handful of men the opportunity to go to Champions League final at Wembley. How? By challenging their negotiation skills….with their women. Taking place in a furniture store, Heineken offered a handful of men the opportunity to go to Champions League final at Wembley if they could convince their ladies to buy a couple of football seats. The big catch? The men weren’t allowed to mention anything to their ladies. Many guys hate shopping with girlfriends, but what if the guy is secretly challenged to buy an overpriced piece of not-so-rad furniture in exchange for Champions League final tickets? Seems like a great script fore a hidden video concept. But my big question is: are the couples in the video real or are these actors? See it for yourself in the video below: Click here to view the embedded video.   My Opinion? Heineken has been showing some great advertising over the years and after reading their ad again lives up their amazing creative talent expectations. As I don’t believe the people in The Negotiation are actually not real couples, but actors, I feel a bit of disappointment. But it seems that I’m the only one, as people are actively tweeting about it and even more important for Heineken: they like it. What About You?After seeing the video, what do you think? Real or fake? And regardless the fact that these are actors or real couples, do you like the concept? Follow & Share Want more stories on breaking with the status quo? Browse our category Viral & Social Video, join us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, RSS and get our weekly E-mail Newsletter for updates and free bonus content. About the author Laurens Bianchi is an independent online marketing professional from the Netherlands and has been blogging on ViralBlog since 2008. Currently Laurens is also the Social Media Consultant for the Royal Dutch Football Association. The post Heineken’s The Negotiation: Real Or Fake? appeared first on VIRALBLOG.COM.

LinkedIn's career expert Nicole Williams weighs in with suggestions that go beyond a good photo

At Google's annual I/O developer conference, an important new feature to Google Analytics was announced that's going to turn mobile marketing on its head. Built on the back of the new Universal Analytics platform and its baked-in ability to track users across sessions and devices, Cross Device Measurement is like Multi-Channel Funnels for devices. And it's huge....The new features were unveiled by Nick Mihailovski, Pete Frisella and Andrew Wales in a session titled Optimize Web and Mobile Apps, Across Devices, Using Google Analytics. You can watch the whole presentation here, and I recommend you do: it's forty minutes well-spent, and covers some additional stuff that isn't covered in this post. (It's embedded at the foot of this post).  What is covered in this post is, in my opinion, the most significant part of the session as far as digital marketing is concerned. Let's get stuck in.  Cross Device Measurement with Client ID  Cross-Device Measurement is related to one of the main ways we think Universal Analytics will change the way businesses look at their data. It's all about how Universal Analytics gives us a better understanding of how visitors use multiple devices to access our content. To illustrate this with some screenshots from the presentation, take a look at how "regular" Google Analytics will track three visits from three devices as three Unique Visitors, even if it's the same person using all three:   You can see the problem: each visit on each device initiaties a Client ID (cid) which tells Google Analytics who that visitor is. With three visits from three devices, we've got three Client IDs which, as far as Google Analytics is concerned, is the same as three Unique Visitors.  Clearly, this isn't optimal!  Luckily, Universal Analytics gives us a way of understanding when three visits is one person, or three people:  With Universal Analytics, we get a new parameter - uid, or User ID. This lets us tell Google Analytics that it's the same person using mobile, tablet and laptop. We're no longer seeing this as three Unique Visitors, but as one Unique Visitor -- so the distortion has been removed.  By itself, this is a huge change. We all know, from our own behaviour as well as that of our customers, that people are using more devices and switching from one to another with increasing frequency. From a digital analytics perspective, having a tool that can't tell the difference between three people and one person visiting three times is completely insufficient, and if your tools aren't up to the job your analysis won't be, either.  See, this is why we all need Universal Analytics!  Device overlap To continue with the example, let's say that someone accesses our website on a tablet, and then they switch to their laptop computer to complete a purchase.  With User ID, we know that only one person was behind us, but we're still not quite getting the complete picture.  Here's another slide from the session showing how it might look: On the face of it, we've got one tablet visitor with $0.00 revenue, and one desktop visitor with $3.99 revenue. That makes tablet traffic look pretty suboptimal, and you might decide to ditch tablet users and focus on desktop users instead. Once again, a suboptimal tool isn't going to get you anywhere in life, let alone in actionable data analytics. So, how can Universal Analytics help us? Cross-device Measurement In a word: Cross Device Measurement. Okay, that's three words but once you see what it does, you'll forget my inability to count. Here's how Cross Device Measurement would give us a more accurate view of the same situation:   Bam. Universal Analytics is giving us a picture of multiple-devices and how they're used by our audience to collectively contribute to our overall conversion volume and our revenue.  If you're thinking that this looks and feels a lot like Assisted Conversions, you're exactly right. Just as the idea of Multi-Channel Funnels gave us

There’s no question that web analytics are vital, but even Shakespeare acknowledged that one can have too much of a good thing.  In an environment where nearly everything that happens online can be measured, the challenge for marketers isn’t gaining the ability to measure even more factors, but rather the clarity to focus on measuring what matters. How can you measure all of the sources that contributed to a conversion–not just the last click? Which Google Analytics (GA) metrics are most important? How can you take action on analytics reports? What can GA tell you (and not tell you) about your sources of website traffic? How can you capitalize on the Advanced Segments feature in GA? Find the answers to those questions and many more here in 16 remarkable guides to web analytics from the past year. The SEO’s Guide to GA 5, Part II: Top 3 Features for Setting & Achieving SEO Goals by Search Engine Journal Dali Burgado details three key features of Google Analytics 5 (GA5) for SEO professionals: dashboard customization with SEO widgets (e.g., branded vs. non-branded search), custom alerts, and multi-channel funnels (see Pritesh’s post above). This last feature is interesting but would be much more useful if one could customize segment definitions to correct for the way Google gets search traffic wrong. Using Multi-Channel Funnels to analyse the impact of marketing channels on conversions by Smart Insights Writing that “When conversions take place over multiple visits rather than a single visit to a site, it’s really important to understand the complete customer journey and not use the standard ‘last click wins’ model of attribution,” Pritesh Patel demonstrates how to use Multi-Channel funnel reports in Google Analytics to obtain more detailed insights into the different interactions visitors have with your website before converting to a lead. Beginner’s Guide to Google Analytics: What to Track by Search Engine Watch Sarah Carling notes that GA is incredibly powerful–but needs to be set up properly first. Much of it’s potential analytical power can’t be accessed “out of the box.” She then provides examples of and instruction for setting up three types of data you may want to track: customer segments (actually, visitor segments), goal and event tracking, and page categories (“If, for instance, you want to know if product category A or B is more likely to result in a customer creating an account or making a purchase, you can track this data”). 9 Ways to Make Your Marketing Analytics Actionable by HubSpot Contending that good marketers use analytics to measure the performance of their marketing initiatives, while “Great marketers use them to adapt, improve, and modify their marketing efforts,” frequent best-of honoree Pamela Vaughan shows to use analytics to improve in areas like focusing on popular blog topics, refining SEO strategies, improving landing pages, and more. Setting Up Actionable SEO Dasboards in the New Google Analytics by SEO Book Okay, GA 5 isn’t “new” anymore, but the techniques outlined here are still intriguing. This richly illustrated post shows how to set up actionable dashboards and widgets to monitor a variety of specific custom metrics like non-branded keyword traffic, top actionable social content, page load speed, top converting keywords, top exit/bounce pages and others. Capturing The Value Of Social Media Using Google Analytics by Google Analytics Blog Noting that “Since social media is often an upper funnel player in a shopper’s journey, it’s not always easy to determine which social channels actually drive value for your business and which tactics are most effective,” Phil Mui steps through five different ways to gauge “social value” in GA, such as the Conversions Report, with which “marketers can now measure the value of each individual social c

Navigation is central to the mobile user experience as visitors want to be able to find what they’re looking for or browse your wares with little fuss. If they have to struggle with confusing menu options and numerous barriers then they’ll become frustrated and jump ship to one of your competitors. A new report investigating consumer opinions of mobile commerce has found that there is still a perception that the mobile web offers a poor user experience. More than a third (37%) of respondents in the EPiServer survey agreed that many mobile websites are difficult to navigate, an increase from 32% in 2011. With this in mind, here are 11 tips for improving mobile web navigation...Limit the layers of navigation Mobile users aren’t known for their patience so you need to limit the number of clicks before they get to the product options. This problem is intensified when visitors are using 3G, as if they have a slow connection then each layer adds valuable seconds onto the navigation time and makes it hugely unlikely that they’ll stick around to complete their task. Therefore it’s a good idea to limit your site to a maximum of three levels of navigation, otherwise your site is probably too complicated and you’re asking too much of the user.  Use nested navigation The three-line navigation button is practically ubiquitous on mobile sites these days. It’s a great tool for hiding navigation options in a drop-down menu with the added benefit of freeing up space on the page. In general retailers position the button at the top of the page so it’s always available to visitors, which provides a comforting level of consistency in site navigation. Best Buy and Nike both use the three-line button on their mobile sites to good effect, while Best Buy also has a well positioned search tool.                        Clarity of options Copywriting is a big part of providing a user journey as you need to make it obvious to the visitor where each click will lead them. In general ecommerce sites are good at using simple language, however luxury and high-end retailers are often guilty of making things over complicated. For example, two of the five options that Abercrombie gives you are quite vague and I'm not sure exactly what I'll get if I accept Louis Vuitton's offer of "Gallant Love."                        Icons vs. lists I haven’t seen any evidence that either option is more effective, but personally I find icons more aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly. They tend to be bigger so they’re more forgiving on fat thumbs, plus they allow your designers to be more creative. Simple lists of text links are quite common and get the job done, but they take away a brand’s ability to stamp its own style and personality on its mobile site. The difference can be seen here in examples from Tesco and House of Fraser...                        Limit the number of menu options on each page While researching this post I came across various different recommendations for the maximum number of menu options mobile sites should include on each page. Some suggested that five was the optimum number while others said include no more than seven. Another report published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that people tend to get confused when presented with more than six options. So though the precise number of options is open to debate, it’s still advisable to place a limit on the maximum number of options per page so that users don’t get confused and drop out.  Even Amazon, with its wealth of product options, only gives six categories on its homepage. And though I'm not a fan of Sears’ mobile site with its dull as dishwater design, it does at least keep things simple.                        Filtered navigation Most major ecommerce sites have a broad product range so it’s important to allow users to filter out results that are irrelevant to them. There are a number of potential criteria, including brand, size, price,

Are you looking for better ways to measure your social media activities? Do you know if your social media efforts are worthwhile? Social media measurement is one of the most frustrating challenges business face. In this article I’ll show you three simple measurement strategies that can fit into one of your future campaigns. Why Measure? In [...]