March 10th Facebook announced an update to the look of Facebook company pages. Some businesses have already updated to the new look. It is your option to do it early or wait until Facebook converts everyone’s business pages.
The Admin Panel has updates providing relevant details up front. You can dive deeper into the metrics just as before.
Read MoreTopics: Social Media, Advertising
There are a slew of story titles claiming email is dead. Some claim that social media, spam and instant messaging have killed email. Some of this is attributable to the rising number of smart phone users that have driven up the use of texting.
Read MoreTopics: Online Marketing, Social Media, Business Management, Mobile Marketing
Let’s face it, managing your business marketing is not for the faint of heart. Setting realistic goals for on-line marketing is difficult with Google’s constant changes that affect page rankings.
If you’re wondering how you will know if your investment in SEO, PPC and/or Social Media is paying off, you are not alone.
It doesn't work to "wing it." Consider adding a technology tool that provides a reporting dashboard showing the ranking of your keyword at the start of the campaign and the current ranking, providing concrete evidence of your campaign’s progress. You can expect to see an increase in traffic to your site as the rankings of your targeted keywords improve.
Sending traffic to a website with a paid search (PPC) campaign is easy. And it’s great to see that big surge in traffic. Remember though, you are paying for every visitor delivered by the PPC campaign so you want to be sure that you’re getting quality traffic, (i.e. visitors that are likely to take action when they land on your site).
Besides finding the best keywords and writing compelling ads, there have to be goals to measure the campaign and compare you different ads.
Without a goal you cannot measure cost per click. You could just use Google analytics to measure your campaign. It tracks traffic, most visited pages, pages visitors stay on longest and can be linked to your Google PPC campaign to provide. It even offers keyword suggestions. But there is so much more you can learn about your website if you capture information about those visitors that Google cannot provide.
Testing ads and landing page effectiveness is critical to getting the most of your PPC budget. The dashboard we use lets us see which are working better than others over time. It is easier to do A/B testing and revise strategy, keywords and copy content of ads and landing ages to get the best results. If you have a large budget allocated to web marketing (PPC and social marketing) and you feel you have hit the ceiling you need to consider using a program like Hubspot or Optimize to manage your inbound marketing.
Read MoreTopics: Social Media
SEO is ever changing. It may appear to be straight forward, but as with everything else, there are factors that impact results. One is that SEO is not a quick results process. It doesn't perform like a a simple science experiment where you see a reaction in minutes, hours or days. It takes time to build momentum. It is more than listing your pages with search engines and directories.
Topics: Online Marketing, Social Media, Marketing, Business Management
While companies of every category encourage people to click their Facebook Like buttons, the accountability questions continue to surface: "How much does liking a company influence a purchasing decision and increase loyalty to the business?"
The best way to determine if there's a relationship between fans who've actually liked and purchased is to directly ask your customers and clients, "Have you liked us on Facebook? Did that influence your purchasing decision?"
Topics: Social Media, Marketing
While the world is in a Facebook frenzy, Twitter is quickly becoming a player in generating sales leads for companies. It takes some patience to dig through the thousands of innocuous posts, but the "gold" is there. There are many tools available that search through tweets and allow you to drill down to a specific topic or even a specific geographic location.
Topics: Social Media, Mobile Marketing
Its quite an accomplishment if youve been fortunate enough to have your Web site land a spot on the first page of Googles search results. Youve likely beat out thousands of other sites, all competing for that coveted top 10.
Read MoreTopics: Online Marketing, Social Media, Branding