Online Marketing Blog

One of the most trusted sources of marketing research and information is MarketingSherpa. I’ve been a subscriber for many years and always look forward to the reports on Search Marketing, Email Marketing and B2B Marketing. Last year MarketingSherpa started conducting research and publishing a Benchmark Report on social media marketing.

The new Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report (affiliate link) was recently released and I’ve had a few days to take a look and will provide a review for our readers.

As you can expect, this guide is a “meaty” 250 plus pages of research, charts & tables, examples and well written advice. Over 2,000 marketers participated in the survey covering a myriad of topics ranging from strategy to forecasting & budgeting to integration with other marketing channels to specific research on social applications such as Twitter, Facebook and blogs.

Our team works hard to stay on top of current best practices and as a result, we’re asked to speak at a variety of conferences, workshops and webinars. One of the goals at TopRank Online Marketing is to help companies better understand the current landscape of the digital marketing & PR environment. That includes strategies that can be executed more efficiently and marketing programs that can adjust to persistent change. Hopefully you’ll find an event below that fits your needs.

Feb 9, 2010
Webinar: Secrets to B2B Marketing Success
TopRank, along with our client Marketo and Ion Interactive will be collaborating to educate B2B marketers on best practices before and after lead generation with an upcoming webinar focused on pre-click, post-click, and post-conversion optimization.

After reading Lee’s post earlier this week on how to source content on Twitter, I started to think about the homemade guacamole I made for the football playoff games last weekend. Stick with me here.

With my guacamole, I carefully strategize on the right mix of each ingredient to achieve the perfect flavor and consistency.

Not enough lemon and lime juice, and the avocados brown too quickly.

Too much garlic salt, and the guacamole gets a pungent taste.

Twitter as a marketing tool is much the same way.

Too much product pushing and self-inflation, and your followers head for the hills in droves.

Too little interaction and communication, and your followers forget you exist altogether.

If you haven’t already integrated Facebook into your online marketing mix by creating a fan page, consider the most recent staggering Facebook statistics:

• More than 350 million users are active on Facebook
• 50% of active users log in on any given day
• The average user spends 55 minutes a day on Facebook
• More than 1.6 million active Facebook fan pages have been created

With numbers like these — plus the fact that Google is now using social content to help determine the ranking of web pages — it’s difficult to justify not creating a Facebook presence for your brand.

Take the guesswork of Facebook marketing, and follow these 5 tips for making the most of your fan page.

Last week Erik Qualmann posted a list of “All Star Social Media” players in his ClickZ column. Being included in such a list with the likes of Chris Brogan and Scott Monty was humbling to say the least.  Erik qualified the list by saying they were mostly people he knew and he welcomed suggestions.  I noticed few women were mentioned and knowing there are so many power players, I decided to create a list of my own featuring women that I think “rock” the social web.

The photo to the left is my flexible business partner, Susan Misukanis, who “Rocks” as President of TopRank Marketing.

Many in the list below are from the PR industry that I know so it’s biased in that way. Suggestions of other accomplished & influential women in social media (consultants and corporate) are welcome. Now on to the list:

(CC) Randy Stewart, blog.stewtopia.com

Vanessa Fox works as Entrepreneur-in-residence with Ignition Partners but is especially well known in the Search Marketing world because of her past work as Google’s search engine strategy spokesperson and creator of Google Webmaster Central. I’ve interviewed Vanessa several times on video in the past here, here, here and podcast here but nothing as substantial as what you’re about to read.

Vanessa has a new book coming out called “Marketing in the Age of Google“, which I’ve had the opportunity to preview and it reminds me of how important it is to draw attention to her exceptional insight. My kudos for the book:

More than ever, it’s essential for hospitals and health providers to rethink their healthcare marketing mix to include social media.

The proof is in the numbers: 34% of consumers use social media to search for health information, according to research data from How America Searches: Health and Wellness.

While it’s easy to identify demand, many healthcare marketers are not exactly sure how they might tap into the social web to reach business goals. To help understand the possible applications, consider these five examples of how the social web can work for hospitals and others in the healthcare industry:

1. Tweet Live Procedures
In the past year, social media channels have helped open up an area of healthcare previously only available to a select few: the operating room.

Crafting unmissable headlines which resonate with social web users is something which appears deceptively simple. Yet it’s an art form requiring writers, bloggers and marketers to craft thousands of headlines to perfect.

As someone who has been successful with creating content that goes hot across social channels I’ve come to appreciate the art and challenge of crafting sticky headlines. In fact, crafting headlines is equally if not more challenging than leads and even content itself.

Something many bloggers have down, but communications professionals aren’t always fluent in, is the art of crafting headlines specifically for social news sites/users. While there is no one formula for success, I’m going to share 5 things I’ve learned from experience as a blogger, social news user, PR pro and marketer.

We may already be a week into 2010, but that doesn’t mean it’s too late to starting making resolutions.

Resolve to give your online marketing efforts a boost this year by recognizing areas for improvement and putting in place a plan to make positive changes.

To help you get started, TopRank Online Marketing has come up with New Year’s resolutions for 5 different online marketing channels: Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media, Email Marketing, Pay-Per-Click and Mobile Marketing.

If you’re “on Twitter”, no doubt you’ve noticed different Tweeple running polls from time to time. We ran our first poll on Twitter over 3 years ago which resulted in the post, “Guide to Twitter as a Tool for Marketing and PR“, offering insights from other marketing and PR professionals experienced with the Twitter web site.

Polls have been popular interactive tools on web sites as far back as Angelfire and Geocities. Polls have been popular widgets on blogs too. Polls on Twitter are effective for a variety of reasons including the real time feedback and mass, yet relevant, reach that can be achieved.

To understand how running polls on Twitter may or may not be right for you, read on for 10 benefits to running Tweet Polls:

Ready or not, 2010 is here. And according to eMarketer, 2010 is going to be a good year for email marketing. A December survey revealed that 69% of respondents plan to increase spending on email marketing efforts – more than any other marketing strategy.

To ring in the New Year, we’ve compiled 5 email marketing tactics that are likely to gain even more ground this year.

1. Integrating Email With Social Media.
This email marketing tactic – which picked up steam throughout 2009 as a way to boost customer reach – is likely to spread like wildfire throughout 2010. Consider the results of an early 2009 study by Exact Target, Ball State University and the Email Marketer’s club: 46% of marketers planned to incorporate the two marketing strategies in ‘09, compared to 13% in ‘08—a whopping 253% increase.

When it comes to businesses leveraging the social web to communicate with customers and improve brand awareness, there’s some good news and there’s some bad news.

The good news: 86% of professionals have adopted social media in some way, according to a recent survey by Mzinga and Babson Executive Education.

The bad news: A whopping 84% of survey respondents who’ve adopted social media don’t measure their social media programs.

Even worse: 40% weren’t even sure they could monitor social media ROI.

Thankfully, there are a host of free or low cost tools available to help companies and organizations track social media success. Use one or more of these 5 social media monitoring tools to gauge how well your efforts are working.

1. Trackur