Online Marketing News: Most Effective SMB Social Sites, Converting Customers Prefer Video

Digital Now Accounts for 57% of Daily Media Consumption

Consumers now spend more time each day consuming digital than traditional media, according to the most recent GlobalWebIndex. Overall, consumers now spend an average of 10.7 hours a day with all forms of media and 5.6 hours of that on digital. People are turning to online channels for radio, TV, social and other forms of content consumption in record numbers, especially in China and UAE. Social increasingly dominates the time that consumers spend online; globally, social accounts for 48% of total digital time.

Marketers and Publishers Rallying to Change Display Ad Metrics

The simple display ad market, now worth $12.7 billion may begin shrinking soon. Marketers are starting displayad1to understand that a significant percentage of the inventory has no value, primarily because of new viewability standards. To counter this problem, publishers are making changes to the media spaces that they are selling.

Facebook Sponsored Posts: Do They Work?

Can Facebook's sponsored stories help your marketing efforts? Maybe, but it's complicated.

Facebook is working for advertisers, according to an Advertising Age survey.

Out of 701 marketers and media execs polled, 85 percent said that they use Facebook as a marketing tactic. Just under 30 percent had tried using sponsored stories. Of them, 15 percent were very satisfied with the results, 65 percent somewhat satisfied, 15 percent, somewhat dissatisfied, and 6 percent, very dissatisfied.

Many businesses are trying to understand if, and how, sponsored posts can work for them on Facebook. Instead of focusing on "marketers and media execs," which could mean many agencies, I put a PR query out to thousands of companies and heard from dozens. This isn't a statistical study, but it did result in anecdotal evidence that helps explain how entrepreneurs are using sponsored stories and the results they're getting: good, bad, and indifferent. 

A Stress-Free Approach to Adopting New Marketing Technologies

The rate of change in marketing technology -- continually accelerated by all the new innovations we see every day -- has created growing demand for tech-savvy marketing professionals who know how to research, select, manage, and integrate a diverse collection of tools. "Prototype marketers" -- what we at PR 20/20 call the hybrid marketers that have a variety of skillsets -- are ideal to manage this rapidly evolving industry of ours. Why? Because they are able to recommend and work with technology and software that drives marketing automation, email, social media, project management, customer relationship management, analytics, and more.

7 Ways to Tell Stories (Truthful Ones) to Sell Online

Want to make social media work for you? Tell a story. A personal, honest one about you, or an employee. Not effective? Try again.

Consumers don't care about you. They care about what you mean to them. And meaning comes from stories. When you tell your company story, you become more relatable. And when consumers relate to your brand, they'll buy from you.

Social media allows you to tell your stories at scale and build powerful relationships with your customers. In the past, storytelling to the masses was expensive and only possible via large media firms. Now, storytelling is free, or near-free, via accessible social media tools.

Here are seven simple ways you can become a more effective storyteller on social media: 

4 Blogging Basics For Online Retailers

Retail websites are flush with product information, specs, and images of items available for purchase.  However, it may be difficult to find a way to provide detailed and engaging content for customers visiting a website when they’re just looking to purchase.

Starting a company blog provides a good opportunity to attract new customers and engage current customers with content about your products and other topics that are of importance to them.  It doesn’t matter if the items being sold are car parts, clothing, electronics or furniture, there is an opportunity to help solve pain points and arm your customers with information that encourages engagement and purchasing decisions. 

How To Run a Successful Contest

How Contest Domination Can Power Up Your WordPress Blog

How to Run a Successful Contest

Bryan Haines: What is Contest Domination?

Travis Ketchum: Contest Domination is the most effective way to run a contest, and it's dead simple to use.

Bryan Haines: What is the purpose of Contest Domination?

Οnline προβολές - Ανεβάστε τα εταιρικά σας βίντεο

Αν το µόνο που θέλετε είναι να δουν κάποιοι τα βίντεό σας, τα οποία µπορεί να αφορούν διαφήµιση προϊόντων και υπηρεσιών της εταιρείας σας, τότε ανεβάστε τα στο YouTube. Αν, ωστόσο, θέλετε να τα δουν περισσότεροι ή να τα ενσωµατώσετε στο εταιρικό σας site ή απλώς να τα χρησιµοποιήσετε για να φέρετε κίνηση σε αυτό, τότε θα ήταν καλό να στραφείτε σε άλλες υπηρεσίες φιλοξενίας [hosting] και να µην περιοριστείτε στο YouTube. Aν, επιπλέον, χρησιµοποιείτε πολλές υπηρεσίες video hosting, τότε σίγουρα θα θέλετε έναν γρήγορο και απλό τρόπο για να ανεβάσετε τα βίντεό σας. Στον παρόν άρθρο θα σας δείξουµε πώς να τα κάνετε όλα αυτά.

ΥοuTube

Αναµφίβολα, το YouTube [www.youtube.com] αποτελεί τον παντοκράτορα του βίντεο στο Web. Κάθε βίντεο που δηµιουργείτε για δηµόσια κατανάλωση, θα πρέπει να ανέβει στο YouTube, ενώ σε κάθε βίντεο που ανεβάζετε, οφείλετε να ενσωµατώνετε ένα κείµενο που να περιέχει το URL του site σας. Σηµειώστε ότι όλα τα βίντεο που ανεβάζετε στο YouTube φέρουν το λογότυπο της υπηρεσίας, το οποίο σηµαίνει ότι το YouTube χρησιµοποιεί το site σας για να προβληθεί.

A Hotelier’s Guide to Online Hotel Marketing Strategies

Nothing is predictable in any industry. Even the best known names in the hospitality industry cannot determine or predict how consumers will buy or make their choices. No doubt, online hotel marketing strategies will be very strong in creating a well-executed presence for every hotel in the virtual world.

Three effective tips to consider are:

• Analyze where you have spent your money for marketing and determine the returns you have received from your spend.
• Consider that meta and search that are important areas to spend on in years to come.
• Offer useful website tools such as currency converter to engage customers on your website.

Here is a checklist for you to consider if you plan to grow your hotel’s visibility through smart online marketing strategies.

5 Signs You Need An Online Marketing Consultant

Investing in an online marketing consultant should be seen as a profitable investment, not an expense.
Whether you need online marketing for your hotel is not in dispute, the question you need to ask yourself as an hotelier is whether you can afford not to hire an online marketing consultant? Internet marketing is not difficult but it does take time to learn and requires ongoing education as well as resources to carry out marketing strategies. Here are five signs that you may want to think about outsourcing your online marketing activities.

3 Hotel Internet Marketing Tactics From Outside the Box

There have been a torrent of articles and webinars extolling the virtues of social media for hotels. Social media is certainly applicable for hotel franchise brand-building, but this writer is still unconvinced about the marketing value of social media for individual hotels. Social media has been a boon for retail product sales because items can be of interest to people at any time, but the same principle is not true for hotels.

Interest is the key. Few people have any interest in a particular hotel unless it happens to be where they are traveling or planning an event. The exception is travel-oriented social media, like TripAdvisor, which is a viable tool to promote individual hotels because consumers can search comments about the specific hotel in which they have an interest at the time.

8 Ways SEO Should Influence Your Marketing Copywriting

INTRODUCTORY

In the world of inbound marketing, your content is your business and your calling card. Your effectiveness as an inbound marketer relies on the quality of your content, and your content is what helps you get found online, build trust with your readers, educate and inform them, build a pathway to conversions, and sustain ongoing and profitable relationships with loyal customers for years to come.

But for content to truly be successful, marketers must think like SEO professionals to ensure that content gets found online by the proper audience. Old school SEOs believed they could magically sprinkle keywords throughout content with the hope that it would result in solid rankings for as many keywords and keyword variations as possible. For instance, they might use “clickthrough rate” on one page, and “click-through-rate” on another page. But by doing this, you’re not only creating inconsistency in your content and confusing your audience, but you're also inconsistently alerting search engines of your expertise (as well as creating duplicate content -- eek!).

Tips for a Successful Seasonal Marketing Campaign

One strategy for increasing your website traffic and sales is to run integrated campaigns on seasonal merchandise. Almost any type of business-to-consumer — and even many business-to-business — stores sell items that are more appropriate for various seasons or holidays.

This article examines the benefits of planning an integrated marketing campaign well in advance by analyzing your target market, your goals for the campaign, and all the preparation required to make it successful.

Merchandise

Inbound Marketing in Various Languages

Inbound marketing involves getting potential customers to come to you. Consumers are no longer passive recipients of direct marketing messages (if they ever were).

Many people are becoming increasingly resistant to traditional "outbound" marketing techniques. Telemarketing, print and broadcast advertising, email shots, and other techniques are increasingly seen as unwanted intrusions to be avoided where possible – or simply ignored.

3 Thoughts on the Future of Online Marketing

In the world of online marketing, search and social media are evolving at an incredible pace.

Consider these stats: Google sites handle about 88 billion queries a month but did you know, twitter is approaching 20 billion?

Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year and Hitwise has reported that Facebook tops Google in weekly web traffic.

The future of digital music distribution and online music marketing

Following years of doom and gloom surrounding the rise of internet piracy and the death of physical formats, we’re finally hearing some good news from the UK music industry.

In May the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) announced that UK digital music revenues overtook those from physical formats. It means that the UK music industry is finally catching up with the US and China who were already earning the lion’s share of their revenue from online digital music distribution.

The BPI report states that consumers spent a total of £155.8m on music in the first quarter of 2012, with 55.5%, or £86.5m coming from digital music revenues. This trend is set to continue with the growth of music downloads as well as subscription and ad-funded music services.
So has the music industry’s winter of discontent finally ended?

How To Boost Your Credibility As An Online Marketer

To establish authority and create credibility as an online marketer there are a few necessary disciplines you must master. Becoming an industry expert and respected thought leader is not as simple as publishing a few blog posts and throwing up a Facebook Page. An industry leader creates something that is incredibly useful to those that need it most and leads with value first.

The big problem for many online marketers and bloggers is that while they are experts in their fields, attracting a loyal following and being recognized as a credible, influential industry leader is hard to come by.

Web Page Optimization: Avoiding the World Wide Wait

Think visitors are happy to wait for your site to load? Dream on. The good old days when we could expect visitors to cheerfully adhere to the golden two-second rule are over. According to Microsoft’s Harry Shum, that magical number is rapidly approaching 250ms. Blink your eyes and you’ll miss it: modern internet users want your site to load yesterday. If you want visitors to hang around and see what you’ve got to offer, you have to consider speed as the most important feature of your site.

15 Free Ways to Increase Blog Traffic

Get More Blog Traffic for Free

Generating traffic is the lifeblood of your online business. Without sufficient traffic your site and blog will never accomplish their purpose. And while there are numerous pay options to generate traffic, there are an equal number of effective and free tools and approaches. Here are some great traffic generators:

1. Free Traffic Source: Forum Marketing

3 Ways PPC Averages Lie

News organizations love to report averages. For example, in 2002 the CDC released data about the average height and weight of American adults. According to their data, the average adult woman is 5'4" and weighs 163 pounds.

Now think about all the adult women you know. Are they all 5'4"? Do they all weigh 163 pounds? Of course they don’t!

Averages are a necessary evil when it comes to reporting numbers. Averages help us spot trends.