How 3 Companies Took Content Marketing to the Next Level Shane Snow is a Mashable contributor and cofounder of Contently.com, an “agile publishing” platform for brands and professional bloggers. It goes by many names: branded content, custom publishing, content marketing. Cheap and ubiquitous web technology has become fuel for a rising trend of businesses becoming publishers and brands becoming media companies. Through content creation, brands can engage directly with an audience rather than relying on intermediary media channels. If you publish and spread great content, customers will come to you. According to the Content Marketing Institute, an organization that provides research and education on content marketing, “93% of marketing professionals create, or plan to create content marketing as part of their overall programs in the next year.” Blogging, tweeting and posting not only generate brand awareness and buzz, they also build links, which are like gold to Google’s ranking algorithm. 1. 2. Hubspot has over 4,000 customers. 3.
3 Tips To Boost Sales And Bring In New Customers The Economics of Attention: Why There Are No Second Chances on the Internet : Tech News and Analysis « In my last Om Says, Why Some Apps Works and Some Don’t, I started to explore one of my core theses — the growing importance of the economics of attention and how it relates the success and failure of Internet (and mobile) applications. I believe that the economics of attention is much more ruthless and unforgiving than the real economic underpinning of a product. What I mean is that you can find money for your company from an investor, but it wouldn’t really matter if you don’t have users’ attention. This is a hard reality that has been obvious in highly competitive and somewhat subjective marketplaces. Hollywood movies, music and even fashion are markets where “attention” determines the outcome. No Second Chances And just as it is hard for a movie to recover from a bad opening weekend, today’s “apps” are likely to lose their place in the marketplace if they don’t make a good first impression. MVP + Happiness + Utility = Early Traction Sareen makes a good point. What Doesn’t Work?
4 Ways Behavioral Targeting Is Changing the Web The Digital Marketing Series is supported by HubSpot, which offers inbound marketing software that helps small and medium sized businesses get found on the Internet by the right prospects and converts more of them into leads and customers. Learn more. We’ve already seen signs of it — targeted ads on Facebook, suggested people to follow on Twitter, even Google Instant seems to know what you’re thinking — but how is behavioral targeting changing the Internet at large? Here’s how behavioral targeting works: Targeting companies establish an agreement with a publisher, who puts a piece of code on his website. Now that your browser has a cookie, the targeting begins. All of the data that has been collected by targeters has huge implications for the Internet of the future. 1. You know how Amazon suggests items that might interest you, based on the items you’ve perused? “Amazon does a fantastic job at making the Amazon experience reliable for the consumer. 2. 3. 4. What’s Next?
5 Mobile Marketing Tips: Lessons From A Chase Bank QR Code Online Advertising Goes Open Source inShare0 A Q&A with Chris Davey, senior vice president and managing director of SapientNitro. Programmatic buying of digital media across exchanges is going through an accelerated growth phase. Recognizing the enormous benefits for the entire industry, companies on the buy and sell sides have dropped their competitive biases to create the OpenRTB Consortium. The group's mission is to improve ad technology adoption and integration through the creation of open, flexible, and safe industry standards. I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Chris Davey, senior vice president and managing director of SapientNitro. Mike Baker: Sapient is a really unique company, since you offer agency services, IT consulting, and even financial trading systems. Chris Davey: Absolutely. To complete this evolution, I believe the marketplace needs to adopt a set of open standards that allow buyers and sellers of inventory to interact more efficiently. CD: Yes I do.
14% Of Groupon/LivingSocial Subscribers Respond To Push Notifications As I’m writing this the perky blue box on my iPhone has lit up with a “Groupon: 64% off Papa John’s pizza” message, in the same format as I receive texts from friends — This is why these things are so manipulative, it’s almost like your BFF has texted you to go grab discounted pizza, which is comforting and unsettling at the same time. According to comScore’s State of Retail webinar, these notifications seem to be working — While 5% /6% (Groupon/LivingSocial) of users surveyed said that they open their respective apps to actively search for offers, 14% said that they engaged with the app, i.e. viewed the deal, searched for deals or purchased offers after seeing a push notification. That’s double the engagement with minimal development effort. As 31% of 234 million U.S. mobile subscribers now own a smartphone (72 million), the reach of these notifications via app is potentially 10 million people. No wonder there’s so many of these things.
Build a Business Contest 2011 Launch your online store with a 14-day free trial Already have a Shopify store? Join the competition Important Competition Details Competition registration runs from Sept. 22, 2014 to March 31, 2015, but you can sign up any time. Still have more questions? View the full Competition Rules or the FAQ for more information. Attributing Brand Advertising Effectiveness – July 15, 2011Posted in: Advertising, U.S. Traditional methods of attributing the effects of digital advertising, such as last-click (commonly used to measure the impact of direct response advertising) and last exposure (commonly used to measure the impact of branding advertising) rely on overly simplistic, flawed methods. This means that insights are often inaccurate and not actionable for marketers, agencies and publishers. comScore has developed a methodology, currently being applied to AdEffx Brand Survey Liftâ„¢ studies in the United States, called Smart Lift Attribution Model, which overcomes many of the shortcomings associated with ‘last exposure’ measurement approaches. Check out this infographic to get a better understanding of how it works and what this means for you and your business:
Why Facebook's New Questions Tool Is Good for Brands & Businesses Brands and businesses are looking for ways to leverage Facebook's recently unveiled Questions tool in ways that differ from what they're already doing on Q&A sites such as Quora, Yahoo Answers and LocalMind. The feature, which Facebook rolled out to all users March 24, functions as a recommendation engine. It also presents a major opportunity for businesses to conduct market research and crowdsource in a far more elegant way than was previously possible, according to Ben Grossman, communication strategist for marketing agency Oxford Communications. "We know from Nielsen that recommendations from friends and family and the opinions of online strangers are the top two most trusted forms of advertising," Grossman told Mashable. "Facebook Questions offers the perfect opportunity for brands to tap into exactly that." Brands, businesses, groups and organizations can then use Questions in several ways. "The best part about this is that it’s in a trusting, social and real-time setting," he said.
Five Reasons Why Your Mission Statement Probably Stinks I can probably count on one hand the number of great company mission statements I've seen in my over two decades in marketing. While most business owners have been told that they need to have a mission statement, not everyone has been instructed on how to create one that's useful and meaningful. By definition, a mission statement communicates the fundamental purpose and values of a business or organization. Even corporate marketing executives have trouble understanding what makes a mission statement useful. What's wrong with this mission statement? Reason 1: Generalization Insert the name of your local airport into the real airport mission statement above. Related: Mission Statement Worksheet Reason 2: Fluff There is no room for corporate rhetoric in a mission statement. Reason 3: Confusion Did it take dozens of people and meetings to develop your mission statement? Related: The 3 C's of Communication Related: 10 Ways to Stretch Your Marketing Budget
The future of online advertising I gave a talk on Thursday at the AppNexus Summit in front of a few hundred digital advertising types. The first part of the talk was a macro overview, but when the Q&A session started, all that anybody wanted to talk about was my take on online media. And given how granular the discussions over the course of the rest of the day were going to be, I wanted to push back a bit against some of the unexamined assumptions which I encounter most of the time when I meet online-media people. The first is that there’s something necessary and inevitable about ad-driven models dominating the online media industry. Meanwhile, people were happily paying small sums for newspapers, for magazines, for coffee, for any number of fast-moving consumer goods. So one of the big reasons why online advertising has done so well is simply the negative one: online micropayments were a disaster, and never took off. So what’s an advertiser to do, online? In a digital world, we believe brands can be signals.
Top 5 YouTube Marketing Mistakes Small Businesses Make This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. The path to YouTube marketing success can be littered with potholes that budget- and time-strapped small businesses can't afford to fall in to. We've spoken to three top experts in the video marketing arena to get professional advice about the common mistakes that small companies make on the video-sharing platform so that you can avoid making those same errors. For your viewing pleasure and enlightenment, we've also included a few successful YouTube videos that were produced by small businesses. 1. Having Unrealistic Expectations Some businesses mistakenly believe that they just need to upload a video to YouTube and wait for viewers to watch by the millions. You need to manage expectations when it comes to the success of your YouTube content. 2. 3. YouTube is new media, it's social, it's about engagement. 4. 5.