Online Marketing Blog

10 Crucial Consumer Trends 2013

2013 marks a new year filled with new predictions and trends for consumers.  This new Slideshare presentation from Trendwatching.com provides insight into the top trends ranging from mobile to data mining.  Browse the presentation for a detailed report on these trends and what it means for your business.

3 Tools to Simplify Your Social Media Marketing
The time it takes to post, respond, and monitor your social media marketing can eat up valuable time during the work week.  But don’t worry, there is a solution.  The three tools mentioned in this post will help simplify and manage your social media marketing efforts.  Via Social Media Examiner.

The recent Powerball of $550 million has a lot of people excited, fantasizing about what to do with all that money. That excitement also has more people than ever participating. Who doesn’t like to win?

It’s part of the game brands play with consumers to attract, engage and convert new customers, fans and advocates.

Social Media contests in particular have gained in popularity and can be a powerful catalyst for spreading a brand’s message where it matters most. Online marketers are finding that social media is great for holding online contests that boost awareness and engagement for consumer brands.

To help you tap in to some of the opportunity with contests on the social web, here are four examples of B2C social media contests that boosted brand visibility. We’ve also included one example that was popular, but not without risk.

Today’s post is like a virtual reunion with two people I have known in the search marketing industry for a long time that are also authors: Vanessa Fox formerly of Google wrote Marketing in the Age of Google, and Mel Carson formerly of Microsoft has co-authored a new book, Pioneers of Digital.

When writing this book about success stories from leaders in advertising, marketing, search and social media, Mel asked me for a quote about Vanessa’s contributions to the search marketing world. I easily obliged. I’ve had a chance to read through a preview copy of Pioneers of Digital and there are an impressive mix of lessons to be learned within. Rather than doing a regular book review, Mel agreed to share an excerpt from the book so I can share it with you.

The music business is tough. Everyone wants to be a star but only some put in the time, effort and bring the talent to really make a difference and become successful.

“Making it” in the social media world isn’t so different. Everyone seems to be a “social media guru” but few seem to deliver on the promise of making a difference and achieving a positive impact on business outcomes.  But like the music business, there are those few who bring varying degrees of talent, dedication and smarts to really leverage the social web to become rockstars in their respective industries and roles.

Long before an army goes into battle, intelligence organizations have been busy collecting and analyzing information about the opposing threat. The right information and insight could lead to a much more advantageous outcome. Inaccurate information or an absence of competitive research can lead to disaster.

In the competitive world of content marketing and optimization, it’s essential for companies of all sizes and industries to understand their online marketplace in order to gain a business advantage.

Developing a competitive strategy is essential in today’s dynamic search and social web and an effective approach starts by understanding both the broader Search Landscape and internal Website SEO Readiness.

The approach to competitive search and social media research can vary widely by situation because no business is the same. It’s essentially always going to involve some kind of information capture, assessment and comparison.

Content Marketing Media Matrix For Small Businesses

This new infographic from PRWeb provides a guide to finding what type of content is best for promoting your business depending on your audience as well as you’re services or products.  Use this infographic to find out what will work best for your content marketing strategy.

DMA Finds Marketers Bullish on Growth of Digital and Direct Marketing
According to this recent article, 75% of marketers say that they’re bullish about growth prospects for digital and direct marketing.  This is slightly up from a previous survey taken 2nd quarter, in which 72% said that they were bullish about growth prospects.  Via BtoB.

After months of waiting (or stressing) Thanksgiving is finally here.  Your relatives are on their way, you’ve gathered all of the last minute ingredients (hopefully), and you’re ready to start cooking the meal you’ve been planning.

When tackling an entire Thanksgiving feast it doesn’t take much to become overwhelmed.  As you begin rehashing the planning of the meal, cooking all the elements, and making sure you please your guests it’s likely you may feel like you’re in over your head.

However, if you break up your planning and execution into smaller and more digestible elements you’re more likely to be at ease, and have a much more enjoyable time.   How does the planning and execution of a large meal relate to your online marketing strategy, and what are all of the moving pieces?

Thousands of new businesses are started in the U.S. every month. Budding entrepreneurs with minds full of ambition and great ideas turn their understanding of a consumer or business problem within a market into a new product or service solution.

But there’s more to starting a business or launching a new product than a great idea and a market in need of a solution.

Many new businesses score well with the solution they’ve created including the logistics of suppliers, manufacturing, and distribution to bring that product or service to market. However, one of the greatest challenges of starting a new business centers on marketing:

Phew! What a whirlwind week at SES Chicago.  While my TopRank Online Marketing teammates were taking SES Chicago by storm, I was holding down the homefront manning the blog, monitoring Twitter feeds, and helping in any way that I could.

We were fortunate to have an army of TopRank  staff speaking, attending, live blogging, and interacting for the entire conference including:

Lee Odden: CEO
Jolina Pettice:  Director of Client Accounts
Thom Craver: Senior Technical SEO Manager
Alexis Hall: Account Manager
Evan Prokop: Associate Account Manager
Miranda Miller: Content Marketing Manager

In this wrap up I’ve provided you with a 360 view of the conference which includes links to our live blogs, tweets, a video with keynote presenter Avinash Kaushik, and photos from the conference.  Enjoy!

Companies large and small, in industries from retail to manufacturing, publish content online with an expectation that a certain audience of people will find, read and act on that content.  While most Search Engine Optimization efforts are rightly focused on marketing goals like acquiring more customers and increasing revenue, making purchases is not the only reason consumers use search or ask for referrals through social networks.

There’s a lot of tactical advice online about search, social media and content marketing for companies that want to better connect with customers but that advice doesn’t always consider the differences between types of companies or even content within companies. For the best return on marketing investment, it’s important to understand that there are notable differences in tactics for effective optimization depending on who the audience is, how they prefer to discover, consume and act on information.  The very nature of B2C vs. B2B or small company vs. large company content, audience and outcomes can be different, so the approach to optimizing content for search and social media must be tailored accordingly.

Social Stereotypes: You Are What You Share

This recent infographic from WIX  focuses on social media, and the types of things that people share, or read.  Findings include:

• 71% of tweets are ignored
• 23% of tweets get a reply
• 5% of Pinterest users are under the age of 18
• 97% of executives surveyed used LinkedIn in 2010

7 Effortless Ways to Find New Ideas for Your Blog
Coming up with new and exciting topics for blog content is no easy undertaking.  This article shares 7 easy ways to come up with new blog content regularly.  Read on to find out more.  Via Social Media Examiner.

Another update live from SES Chicago.  Erin Everhart and Katherine Watier  gave a highly entertaining and informative presentation about link building through guest blogging.

Guest Blogging Works, But You Have to do it Right

It’s a scenario that’s far too typical in the SEO world.  An awesome new tactic is discovered, word gets out, and it gets done to death, resulting in it not working anymore (sorry, but it’s true).

Link building through guest blogging has definitely suffered this fate.  Starting out as an incredibly effective means of generating high quality white hat links, over-use and poor implementation have resulted in bloggers cringing at inboxes full of poorly written, self-serving pitch requests, and ultimately ignoring the vast majority of would be guest posts.