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By now you've heard the news—your paid marketing and advertising efforts are suffering from a loss of credibility with your target market. Marketing authorities Al Ries and daughter Laura have even declared the "Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR" when it comes to building brands and perceptions in ... more
If you're considering a site redesign for the new year, you'll want to optimize it for search engine results. What's the best way to optimize? Jody Nimetz at SEO Space says that designing a site to generate revenue through search takes a good amount of planning and, most importantly, patience. ... more
"In the two weeks leading up to the November 4th election, email messages came fast and furious from both campaigns," writes Morgan Stewart in an article at MarketingProfs. "I saw … commonly held best practices to be emulated, other [elements] that should be avoided … and a few new concepts ... more
The dream of every marketer for a cost-per-click (CPC) campaign is to increase its effectiveness while staying at or under budget. Kellysearch.com's Matt Lester recently offered some creative ideas to boost CPC ROI at little or no extra cost. These tips focus on Google AdWords, but many might apply to ... more
The possibilities for mobile marketing grow with each new smartphone introduced. For marketers, it's best to keep on top of the latest iterations—to better design mobile campaigns that dazzle. The latest newcomer? RIM's new multimedia Blackberry, the Storm, arrives tomorrow. After 18 months in development, some say this slick combination ... more
Can asking a question in an ad increase sales? Some will argue vehemently that the use of a question is a non-starter, a pre-ordained copywriting disaster. Craig Huey, founder and president of the award-winning Creative Direct Marketing Group, froths at the idea of a question in sales copy. Nevertheless, a question ... more
Gaming is no longer the sole domain of geeky guys with programmer's pallor: 44% of online gamers, and 40% of gamers in general, are women. Over half are between 18 and 49, and "extreme gamers" devote 45 hours a week to games. Salivating yet? Good, because here's a pretty meaty ... more
"I subscribe to a wonderful Web-based entity that sends me a weekly newsletter, which I enjoy very much," begins an entry in the Editorial Emergency newsletter. "But a while back they started sending me a daily e-mail on top of my weekly e-mail." The first problem with this scenario is—of ... more
To do search marketing right, it's best to send potential customers who click on your search-engine-generated links to a "jump" or landing page. This page is the gateway to your site, and should promote further action from your prospective clicker, be it to make a purchase or leave a name ... more
Even if you've never heard the term tag cloud, you've likely seen them in your online travels: clusters of keywords relevant to a site's content, rendered in varying font sizes and shades, and often found on the left or right navigation bars. "Flikr, the photo sharing site, was the first ... more
New media and technology have inherently changed the way the newest generations experience the world: how they learn, live, play, and communicate. So what's this mean for marketers, specifically, who want to reach digital natives... and the rest of us, too? more
According to comScore, Americans conducted 11.5 billion searches in June 2008, 61.5% of those searches using Google. This is living proof, if we still needed it, that marketers should not only be investing in paid search, they should be optimizing their sites to be picked up in unpaid, organic search ... more
Let's face it: as consumers, we're not that good at judging the volume of a product (eg, how much liquid is actually in that bottle or glass of juice). Moreover, we use (sometimes erroneous) mental shortcuts to make inferences about how much a given product contains. For example, a well-documented ... more
"In these stressful economic times, it is more important than ever to build messages that resonate with your audience," says Winston Bowden in an article at MarketingProfs. "Like retailers, nonprofits should be thinking about how they can tell their story and leverage the holiday season." Here's some of his advice ... more
Numerous studies have shown that when it comes to finding business information online, the big search engines may fail to deliver. Outsell, for example, found a 31.9 percent failure rate among business users when researching topics using the major search engines. That's because, according to Jason Prescott in a MarketingProfs ... more
If the popularity of the 3G iPhone is any indication—Apple sold over one million units during its first weekend on the market—the smartphone is here to stay. According to Loren McDonald, this presents something of a quandary for email marketers. While everyone likes the idea of customers having access to ... more
It can be tough and costly to win sympathetic ears for your life-changing service. But the Net—and a wildfire proliferation of iPods—have conceived a powerful ally for you: the podcast. A full 18.5 million US users listened to podcasts last year—a figure that might hit 65 million by 2012, says ... more
Is it more effective to tell customers your brand name right away in advertising? Or is it better to create a little mystery, and reveal the brand name only at the end of the ad, once you've intrigued them? One might think that it's better to create some mystery. (After ... more
While mobile marketing can be invasive on its own, integration with the larger marketing campaign mix and proper tracking of customer response can ensure that customers are drawn in, rather than turned off, by mobile messages. The mobile medium has achieved staying power as a gateway for marketers to reach customers ... more
While good SEO boosts site traffic, not all tactics used these days are above-board. Some, designed to "trick" search engines, are not only bad business: they can get your site banned. And that's no treat. To make sure you're operating with the good guys, it's best to avoid using questionable tactics. ... more
In late August, 2.9 million subscribers learned the identity of Barack Obama's running mate with a 26-word text message delivered via SMS (Short Message Service). The announcement joined a trend of strategies employed by the likes of NBC (Olympic coverage), Fox (American Idol) and others. According to R.J. Talyor, the ... more
When Apple unveiled its first iPhone in 2007, most reviews highlighted features that skewed to personal—rather than business—use. You could use the iPhone for many things, but you surrendered a measure of professional functionality in the tradeoff. A recent re-design, however, coupled with the introduction of the App Store, has made ... more
Whether customers come back and buy your product again may likely depend on whether they remember it fondly or not. So, how do you promote positive product memory? Well, research on consumers' memories for experiences (eg, listening to music, attending an event) shows that whether they remember an experience as good ... more
Even if your email campaigns meet goals and deliver great ROI, you probably wonder how you compare to industry standards. If so, you’re going to love the spreadsheet in a recent blog post from Mailchimp. The company analyzed 271 million emails delivered by its system on behalf of small business ... more
Should SMS be used for every marketing message? No, definitely not. Your company must consider whether or not your intended message is urgent and determine if subscribers will appreciate receiving it in a mobile form. With that said, there are certainly are two major reasons SMS should be on your ... more
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