Online Marketing Blog

New Google+ Layout: Hangouts, Photos and Stream Reminiscent of Pinterest

Google announced a major update to their social network this week that changes the way Hangouts, photos and the Google+ stream are viewed by users. The decidedly Pinterest-esque layout was just one of many announcements this week out of Google I/O, the totality of which Jeremiah Owyang and Chris Silva dubbed a “wreck.”

“The end result, we hope, is an app that looks and feels great across a family of devices,” Senior VP Vic Gundotra wrote of the Google+ changes. This is in line with Google’s mantra of late: Technology works best when it gets out of the way, and lets people do what makes them happiest: living, learning and loving.

Your customers want more personalized messaging and content. In fact, 64% believe it’s more important that companies represent them with relevant offers, compared to 36% who don’t want their activity tracked. Given the tools available to block ads, tactics to stop tracking, opt-in nature of communications and social participation, it’s clear that customers who do choose to interact with brands expect a more personalized experience as a result.

The Mass Marketing vs. Personalization infographic from Monetate shares a number of other interesting recommendations and finds, including:

• 94% of companies agree that online personalization is critical to business performance.
• Two of every three companies believe personalizing their website will improve the customer experience and overall success of their business.

Brands understand the importance of content marketing, yet most have not yet addressed their content needs on either a strategic or tactical level, according to Altimeter’s Rebecca Lieb.

Researchers for the company conducted interviews with executives actively engaged in content strategy or marketing; their findings were the basis of a new report, Organizing for Content: Models to Incorporate Content Strategy and Content Marketing in the Enterprise. Lieb and report co-authors guide brand marketers through a variety of organizational models for content, with recommendations to help companies execute an effective content strategy. Read the full report on SlideShare.

Text messaging open rates are far superior to those on Facebook, email and even Twitter, according to this latest infographic from SlickText.com. In addition, SMS coupons are ten times more likely to be redeemed and shared than mail or newspaper coupons. Almost all text messages are read within the first five minutes, they claim, which makes sense as the average person checks their phone over 150 times per day. See more insights at SlickText.

Eric Schmidt Predicts “Entire World” Will be Online by 2020

Never mind that just 38% of the world’s population use the Internet today; within a decade, every person on the planet will be connected through the web. So said Google chairman Eric Schmidt recently in a public Google+ status update.

Technorati Media Shares: Where Brands Are Social

Over 90% of brands recently shared with Technorati Media that they have a presence on Facebook, with Twitter and YouTube comig in second and third with 85% and 73%, respectively. Just 26 percent of brand managers report a presence on Google+, lower even than Pinterest at 41%. According to their 2013 Digital Influence Report, Technorati also found that “brands are spending the largest parts (nearly 75 percent) of their digital budget on display advertising, search and producing video. Spending on social, including influencer outreach, makes up only 10 percent of brands’ digital marketing spend.”

7 Step Framework Demonstrates Core Elements of Successful Content Marketing Strategies

There is no silver bullet in content marketing, yet there are core, common elements to successful content marketing strategies, says Content Marketing Institute. They’ve shared their content marketing framework to help marketers increase their own chances of success, along with a whitepaper expanding upon each of their seven identified elements. See The CMI Content Marketing Framework: 7 Building Blocks to Success for more.

Businesses Plan to Spend More on Email Marketing in 2013

A new report from iContact found that 56% of businesses surveyed plan to increase their email marketing in 2013. Just 1% said they plan on cutting back. Other key findings from their survey of SMBs with revenue between $1 million and $50 million include:

In advance of their SES New York session on social commerce, I wanted to see what tips and tricks moderator Mel Carson and speaker Deitra Mara could share with our readers. At 9:30 am March 28th, the two will join Tami Dalley from Salesforce to present Social Media Meet ROI: The Secrets to Driving Social Commerce.

Carson and Mara graciously participated in interviews prior to their session, to share their experience and advice with marketers looking to improve their social media channel awareness, content creation and social ROI.

Carson, formerly of Microsoft, is the founder of social, PR and personal branding consultancy Delightful Communications. As moderator, he’ll have his hands full with the two powerhouse speakers.  Carson told us, “I’d encourage anyone to come to see two very powerful women in the industry speak. Deitra and Tami bring a lot of insight into different tools and products, best practices and disciplines on how to prove the ROI in social media commerce exists and how to get more of it.”

The afternoon of Day One at SES New York featured a high-level mobile marketing panel  hosted byDana Todd, SVP of Global Marketing at Performics.  Michael Bayle, Senior VP and General Manager at ESPN Mobile, Eric Litman, Chairman & CEO at Medialets and Brendon Kraham, Head of Global Mobile Sales and Product Strategy at Google shared the stage and their extensive knowledge on the current and coming states of mobile marketing.

The following is a collection of mobile marketing tips and takeaways based on today’s presentation, plus liveblog selection from the panel. Note that this is not a verbatim transcript, but the highlights from the panel discussion.

YouTube Gen C Stats Show Cross-Device Connectivity as Video Giant Reaches 1 Billion Monthly Users

YouTube made two interesting announcements this week, one each on the YouTube Global and Google Agency blogs. In a study of  Generation C multiscreen behavior, Google researchers found:

• 47% of Gen C users interact with YouTube as a destination site by actively searching for videos.
• The amount of time Gen C spends watching YouTube on their smartphones is up 74% from last year, when the number of Gen C viewers who regularly watch YouTube on smartphones caught up to the number of viewers tuning in on their PCs.
• 67% of Gen C watch YouTube on two devices or more, compared to 53% of the general population.

Google Wants You to Understand How Search Works

Google has released an interactive, next-generation infographic to explain how search works. Viewers are guided down the page, with clickable areas to pop-up text explanations of their visual points. The infographic walks readers through crawling and indexing, algorithms and fighting spam (they fight spam 24/7, it proclaims). Behind your simple page of results is a complex system, carefully crafted and tested, to support more than one-hundred billion searches each month, according to Google.

Pinterest Launches Web Analytics to Allow Marketers to See Referrals to Site

Pinterest is rolling out their new web analytics tool. It shows data on how many people have pinned from a site, the number of views each pin has, and how many users have visited a site from Pinterest. The tool is free starting today for companies with a verified Web site, making good on their 2012 promise to businesses to introduce data analytic tools for companies to track Pinterest traffic.

Intuit Shares a Social Media Marketing Roadmap for Brands in 2013

Intuit shared an incredibly helpful infographic on their Small Business Blog to guide marketers in their social strategy this year. Path to Social Success in 2013 assigns a theme for each quarter; we begin the year by taking a social media inventory. As we enter the second quarter next month, it’s time to focus on working on relationships. The third quarter is all about integrating everything, while at the end of the year it’s time to take stock and look forward.

Of course, these are all important aspects of social media management throughout the year. Intuit’s guide is a good reminder to help marketers remember to revisit each area and concentrate on it at some point in 2013.

Google Analyzes Consumer Device Preferences: Insight Into Mobile Purchasing Journey

Google has just released a blog post and infographic sharing insights into consumer shopping behavior over the recent 2012 shopping season. In many cases, Google said, consumers discovered a business on one device, for example on their smartphone while in a store, and would then engage further with that business on another device at a later time.

It is critical that companies understand the various entry and touchpoints during their customers’ buying journey, then optimize existing and new content to fulfill needs at each point. Your own data will always be most valuable, though the industry trends companies with access to as much relevant data as Google has can be helpful, as well. For example, they found that smartphones were the preferred device for contacting or navigating to a business with 71% of shoppers using a store locator on their phone, while 82% of shoppers used a larger device like PC or tablet for making online purchases. Is your content, whether written, visual or video, currently optimized for mobile formatting and consumption?