Published 12/10/12 on iMediaConnection.com by Peter Platt
Digital marketing has already had its share of watershed moments. 2013 is not going to be “the year of the [fill in the blank].” Instead, 2013 is going to build on the digital accomplishments of the past. Our industry is going to continue its refinement based on consumer needs — and not a marketer’s desire to make something big happen.
Something big has already happened.
Published 10/31/12 on iMediaConnection.com
Since its inception, digital has been perceived as being the most measurable media. But most of that measurement has been meaningless. It’s time digital marketers stopped talking about clicks and impressions and instead focused on what’s important to marketers — business results. This is pretty easy if you have an e-commerce site and can track direct online sales. But what do you do if you’re part of the 94 percent of retail commerce that occurs offline?
We all know that consumers’ purchase decisions are greatly influenced by digital. They might be trying to decide where to go to dinner on their smartphone, on the web looking up reviews for a car they are considering purchasing, or surfing the web on their tablet after seeing your TV commercial.
Can’t track that impact? Sure you can. You just need to look at things a little differently.
Facebook is the darling of the social media world. Everybody’s there, so your brand has to be there.
Or does it?
While most brands are desperately trying to develop a Facebook strategy and build their presence and “likes,” the reality is that a Facebook presence isn’t the right thing for many brands to be focused on. For example, one of my clients has 1,500 or so Facebook fans. For the client’s industry, 1,500 is a good number of fans — but it pales in comparison to the half million website visits it has had in the first half of this year. Completely ignore the 1,500? OK, maybe not ignore – but the client should recognize that what’s really going on for its brand is happening on a much greater scale in other places.
View the full article at iMediaConnection.com..>
This blog cross-posted at iMedia Connection.
Finally, we can now safely say that the year of mobile has arrived. According to Nielsen, 50% of US mobile phone users now have smartphones. Looking at your web analytics you’re probably seeing upwards of 5-10% of your traffic coming from mobile devices (for some industries that traffic can be significantly higher). Less than a year ago, sites were only seeing 1-2% of their traffic from mobile visitors.
Before you run out and start developing (or updating) your mobile presence, it’s important to realize that mobile visitors aren’t all the same, and their needs vary dramatically based on the device they are using.
Most people are pretty happy when they take a look at their web site traffic and see that a large share of traffic coming to their site from search engines. The natural reaction to these numbers is likely to be “Isn’t this great? Look at all these new prospects who are finding me on the web!” But in many cases, such assumptions about who’s finding your site via search may be completely wrong. Before I give you some tips on how you can improve your search results, let’s take a look at how people use search engines today.
It all begins with a need or interest—something inspires a person to search for a certain topic. Let’s use a hypothetical example of person considering buying a new camera. A typical search begins pretty broadly. Type “camera” into Google (65.9% of searches happen on Google according to ComScore, December 2011); the results page brings up a bunch of links for places where you can buy cameras, some photos of cameras, links to manufacturer’s sites, and so on. Great—but you’re not even sure what you’re looking for yet. So you go back to the top of the page and start adding qualifiers to your search terms. Perhaps you go with “Camera Reviews” and are presented with a variety of sites offering reviews of the latest cameras. You start reading the reviews, go back to the search engine and search patterns start to diverge…maybe you want an “SLR camera”, “digital video camera”, “10 megapixel camera” or maybe even a “film camera.” This research process can last minutes, hours, days—even weeks depending on the searchers interest level. Somewhere along the way the searcher will start to get specific and introduce branded searches into the mix (e.g. “canon camera” “kodak camera”) and then near the end of the purchase cycle the searcher will start using specific model number as search terms.
Cross-posted with iMedia Connection
As marketers, we strive to ensure that our messages capture our prospect’s attention, encourage them to consider our offerings, and in the end make a purchase. But sometimes we lose sight of what’s important to the very people we’re trying to motivate and our ads cross the line between interesting and irritating. While this phenomenon isn’t relegated to just the online world (the Las Vegas strip is a good example of how to cross the line in the traditional world), there are several key things to avoid to ensure your ads are well received.
This blog cross-posted at iMedia Connection.
As online marketers, we’ve long touted the benefits of online marketing as being the most measureable form of advertising. While in theory there is some validity to the argument, the reality is we spend most of our time focused on a relatively insignificant data point — the click. The click was the metric touted in the very first paid banner advertising when AT&T asked: “Have you ever clicked your mouse right here?” At first glance, clicks seemed like a metric that made sense, but when you dig in, you realize there’s a lot more to be looking for.
Reason 1: 99.9 percent of banner ads don’t get clicks
What other industries base their success on a metric where the industry average response rate is 0.1 percent? My best banner campaign ever had a 5 percent click-through rate. Now this was in the early days of digital marketing (1998), but it’s been a long time since we saw response even close to that. Ad networks tout success at a 0.05 percent click-through rate. It seems to me that the impact we have on the other 99 percent of the audience is going to be much more important.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) specialists have long recognized the value of having external sites link to your web pages. With the boon of social media, we’ve finally found a way to easily generate more inbound links, but are the links we’re using really helping us?
Google’s original algorithm, Page-Rank (named after Larry Page and is not necessarily a reference to where the page is listed), is based on the common practice of citations within the academic community. When academicians publish articles, they often cite other articles as a means of providing confirmation of their findings and/or positions. The more often an article is cited, the more credibility the source gains. This practice is the basic foundation of how Google ranks pages in their search results.