The evolution of digital marketing has forever changed the way marketers have to think about how to build and manage a brand. No longer a “behind the scenes” function, marketers are now one of the most critical and visible functions of a successful organization. With responsibility for both traditional and digital marketing channels, an effective marketer must be a strategist, writer, online guru, relationship builder, executer and more.
But many communicators are struggling to find the most efficient and effective way to connect traditional marketing tactics and digital marketing tactics.
When connected effectively, traditional and digital marketing tactics offer immense opportunities to build market recognition, increase brand awareness and provide the foundation for strong and sustainable growth. To do so, successful marketers must turn to the “Multi-Touch” approach.
The “Multi-Touch” approach combines traditional marketing (advertising, public relations, events, etc.), which offers opportunities to reach the masses, with digital marketing (social networking, SEO, etc), which offers a more personalized, one-on-one communication opportunity. This integration allows marketers to offer consistent messaging that resonates to as many of the ‘right’ customers as possible, through all the proper channels.
The integrated marketing campaign that is created through the “Multi-Touch” approach provides marketers to use existing assets from traditional marketing for search and social media marketing efforts, and vice versa. Utilized by smart marketers, the “Multi-Touch” approach and integrated marketing campaigns can generate the measurable results needed to build your business quickly and effectively.
The name “Content Farm” kind of describes it perfectly. What a strange concept, isn’t it? Or maybe not. Spammers and BlackHat SEOs have been auto generating low quality content for long tail search engine rankings for a while now. The content farm technique arguably takes this a few steps further by creating better quality (note – still questionable quality), user friendly content for the exact same reason.
Essentially certain companies have hired thousands of writers and video content producers to churn out content that is determined algorithmically:
The system starts with an automated process, crunching data and running it through an algorithm to identify story ideas that have the best chance of success. The algorithm factors in audience type, ability to attract advertising and potential for traffic.Source
The whole “Why” of the situation is pretty much easy to decipher. After all, there are over tens of billions of searches every month. That traffic has some serious value, especially for Informational Queries. After all, more than 80% of searches fall within this category.
Continue reading via Explicitly – Includes how to create your own content as well as what other professionals think…
4 Steps to Successful Email List Rental & Email Display Advertising
Note: This post is NOT written for list owners and publishers. It’s written for advertisers that rent emails lists or advertise in email newsletters. If you’re an advertiser who has, or is planning, to include 3rd-party email into your marketing mix it will help to use the channel more successfully and get a better ROI, with smaller budgets. In the end, it will help list owners, too. After all a happy advertiser is a repeat advertiser.
Throughout my years in email marketing both on the agency and list side, I’ve had a few conversations like this, and I paraphrase, “I’m cancelling my campaigns because I’m not getting enough [clicks, leads, sales, or other tangible results].” The advertiser then pulls the campaign and leaves disappointed with the performance of the email list.
But there have also been instances when, before the advertiser (or their agency or list broker) pulled the campaign, they were willing make a few small adjustments and retest. And for those who once felt disappointed then saw an immediate improvement in campaign performance. I shared with them one tried-and-true secret to successful email advertising, which is:
“Match your creative and success criteria to your campaign objective.”
Marketing 101right? But I cannot tell you how often I have seen that the objective, creative, and measures of success are completely misaligned. And when they are, the campaign is nowhere near as successful as it could be. For reasons unknown this misalignment happens more often with email.
The good news is that it’s an easy fix that can quickly invert the ROI of email marketing. When looking at an email-centric campaign, start by asking yourself these four questions:
1. What is my goal for this campaign?
2. Does my creative and landing page align with that goal?
3. Does my offer, creative and landing page make sense to my audience and not just to me?
4. How will I measure the success of the campaign, and does it align with the goal?
What are you trying to achieve? Branding? Registrations? A sales inquiry? An immediate purchase? Whatever your goal is, make sure that your creative, landing page, and measurements all align with the goal and make sense from the perspective of your audience (which is often different than yours).
Is your goal branding? Email effectively achieves key branding goals: awareness, message association, favorability, purchase intent, etc. I’ve found that most advertisers, especially when using e-newsletter advertisements, have great success with branding ads in the email channel. Their creatives are engaging, their brand is prominent, and they reinforce messages that they want the viewer to associate with their brands. But the disconnect, when there is one, comes when the advertiser measures the campaign by clicks or some other metric when the creative was never intended to elicit that kind of response. Brand is measured by the impact that viewing (i.e., an impression) the ad has on the perception and intent of the viewer, not by an immediate response. Instead use open-rates as your barometer.
Want visits to your website or new registrations? Great! Make sure to design your creative to elicit that kind of response. If your ad’s message is, “WidgetTown: The best widgets around. Click here for more.” you may have impacted the prospects’ brand perceptions, but you are unlikely to get them to click. Why should they? They have all the information they need, and down the road, if they need a widget, they are more likely to call you. But they’re not going to click right now or they, by virtual of impeccable timing, have an immediate need. If your goal is registrations, give the viewer a reason to click. Give them something that’s truly valuable (to them).
Is your goal lead generation? The incentive and landing page is now a critical part of your campaign. Does the creative tie in to the landing page? Is the incentive promoted in the creative clearly and prominently shown on the landing page? Is it clear on the landing page what the viewer must do next, and is the incentive reinforced? Are there distractions (navigation, social network links, etc.) that would derail the prospect from completing the task? Any of these can reduce the effectiveness of a lead-generation campaign and reduce the number of leads you generate.
Maybe your goal is online sales. Is it a product that someone would buy on impulse or should your campaigns be centered on events, such as holidays? Have you gone through the entire checkout process? Is it clean and simple, or convoluted and cryptic? Are you tracking cart abandonment so you can see where the problem spots are? Does your email service provider (ESP) or internal email solution support cart abandonment triggers? Are you placing a cookie in the visitors’ browsers so if they come back in a couple days and buy that product, you can credit the ad that generated the leads?
By the way, don’t try to achieve multiple goals with one campaign. It will be like a futon—it doesn’t make a very good sofa or a very good bed.
These are just of few of the basic but ever-present factors that can affect desired actions and thus your evaluation of the ROI of your 3rd party email campaigns. Just remember, the line between and email marketing success and relative failure in a fine one. Use these steps to ensure that your messages and objectives are inline and you can instantly sway the ROI-meter to your favor.
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Scott Hardigree is CEO at Indiemark, a full-service email marketing agency and consultancy based in Orlando FL.
Ann Smarty over at Search Engine Journal has a great post on how to grow your fanbase on Facebook. One of the most frequent questions on the Web Uncovered is about the most effective ways to promote a Facebook fan page. Here is her Top 5 List; the most effective, not really difficult to implement and quite obvious ways to promote your fan page: Click here to read more about growing Facebook Fans with screen-shots along the way.
1: Create fresh content for people to want to join
2: Invite your friends to join
3: Try social ads
4: Promote on Twitter
5: Leverage your email contacts
While Google has dominated the market for PPC as compared to MSN, there is still plenty of people who find it useful enough to keep using. For those folks, there is a great tool that they put out, which makes the process much more doable once you get the hang out it.
There is a blog post on Subliminal Pixels which gives a great explanation of the features on the Ad Intelligence PPC Tool, and how to use them. If you fall into the camp of MSN Ad Intelligence users, be sure to check this out and implement into your strategy… As well as consider switching over to Google Adwords altogether.
According to Hitwise, the past month’s paid search traffic is down 26% from the same time-frame last year. Hitwise said, “This is no doubt a result of cutbacks in marketing spent due to the recession.” This analysis, however, seems shallow at best.
The online marketing blog The Marketing Pilgrim suggests a less worrisome reason. Perhaps companies are no longer paying for their own names for paid search traffic, when their organic traffic is high enough, and of course free. They ask, “is it likely due to a reduction in budget spent, or is Orbitz et al are figuring out that they really don’t need to spend so much on paid advertising–considering they’re #1 in the organic results?”
The Takeaway: Perhaps it is time for you to look at the keywords you are paying for in search traffic. If your keywords render your website in the top results of a search engine, perhaps your money would be better spent on keywords that you are less likely to get organic traffic from.
The evolution of digital marketing has forever changed the way marketers have to think about how to build and manage a brand. No longer a “behind the scenes” function, marketers are now one of the most critical and visible functions of a successful organization. With responsibility for both traditional and digital marketing channels, an effective marketer must be a strategist, writer, online guru, relationship builder, executer and more.
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