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Month: September 2015

How Copyrights Become Public Domain
Grab a slice of cake. You can now sing “Happy Birthday” without risking a lawsuit.

A U.S. federal judge dismissed Warner/Chappell Music’s copyright claim of the birthday tune and placed “Happy Birthday to You” into public domain on Tuesday.

The company has been enforcing the copyright since 1988, when it bought Birch Tree Group, a company that supposedly held the initial copyright, for $15 million, according to Billboard.

The lengthy court case was brought forth in 2013 by musician Rupa Marya and filmmaker Robert Siegel, who argued that the company was wrongly asserting copyright ownership.

Judge George H. King ruled that Warner/Chappell Music did not own the rights to the lyrics of the song but rather the copyright to a specific piano arrangement in the melody.

This is not the first copyright to come under scrutiny in recent years and it will likely not be the last. Copyright law is complicated. So, how does it really work? CNBC explains.

What is public domain?
Public domain encompasses all works that are not restricted by copyright and do not require a license or a fee in order to be used. These works fall into this domain for three reasons:
1. The work is not considered copyrightable by law.
2. The works have been given to public domain by the author.
3. The copyright of the work has expired.
What can be copyrighted?
Literary works: Traditionally, novels, stories, essays, etc., but has since been expanded to include computer programs.

Musical compositions: This copyright includes both the lyrics and the tune.

Dramatic works: Plays, screenplays and TV scripts are included in this category.

Pantomimes and choreographic works: This includes ballets, dances or mime routines.

Artwork: This category encompasses paintings and drawing as well as sculptures, maps, diagrams and blueprints.

Audio-visual works: Movies, film strips and even slideshow presentations are included in this copyright.

Sound recordings: Different from a musical composition, a sound recording copyright goes beyond the sheet music and copyrights the sounds on the recording as separate entities.

Architectural works: Similar to artwork, architectural works can be copyrighted by their blueprints, but they can also be copyrighted by their physical structure and design.

What cannot be copyrighted?

Ideas or facts

Expired copyrights

Works of the United States government

Laws or regulations

Works authors have dedicated to the public domain

When does a work become public domain?

All works published in the United States prior to 1923 are considered public domain. Why 1923? Because of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and Disney’s mascot Mickey Mouse.

The Copyright Act of 1909 initially stipulated that all works were granted protection for 28 years, with the option to renew for an additional 28 years. After that 56-year period, the work would enter the public domain, according to the United State Copyright Office.

“Steamboat Willie,” the very first Mickey Mouse cartoon was published in 1928 and thus was slated to become public domain in 1984. However, Disney lobbied Congress in 1976 to extend copyright law to a term of 75 years. With that extension, the company’s copyright would expire in 2003.

This wasn’t the only time that Disney advocated for a copyright extension. In the late ’90s, the company once again lobbied congress and in 1998 the Sonny Bono Act was signed into effect by President Bill Clinton. This act extended all existing copyrighted material by an additional 20 years.

Works that had been published in 1922 were unaffected because their 75-year copyrights had already expired by the time the extension was enacted. Works published in 1923, which had not expired in 1998, were granted the 20-year extension.

If Congress does not elect to extend the length of copyright, these works will begin to enter public domain in 2018. However, it would not be unexpected for Disney to seek another copyright extension for their famous rodent. In fact, brand experts in 2008 valued Disney’s mouse at more than $3 billion, according to the Los Angeles Times. No doubt that number has only increased in the last seven years. (Disney didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

According to the United States Copyright Office, copyright protection for all works created after Jan. 1, 1978, lasts for the life of the author plus an additional 70 years.

For any work made for hire, published under a pseudonym or anonymously, the copyright is set for a term of 95 years from the year of its first publication or a term of 120 years from the year of its creation, whichever expires first.

Unpublished works are a bit different, however. Works that were never formally published become part of the public domain 70 years after the author’s death. In contrast, anonymously unpublished works are incorporated into public domain 120 years from the date of creation.

To make things even more complicated, copyrighted works can enter the public domain if they are not published with a copyright notice or haven’t been registered for copyright within five years of publication.

These rules change depending on what year the work was published. Cornell University broke down the specific copyright and public domain terms in a timeline on its website.

Source – Entrepreneur.com
September 30, 2015
How to Plan for the Next 5 Years

Where do you see yourself in five years? Will you be a workaholic on Wall Street, living the simple life in America’s heartland or will you be a successful entrepreneur with a million-dollar business? If you are reading this article, I am guessing your answer is the latter.

While trendy strategies come and go, there is no substitute for classic goal setting. Here are a few tried-and-true tactics to propel your business to success.

Review your goals every day.

Goal setting is like getting on the scale — you’ll see greater success if you do it every morning. As entrepreneurs, dreaming big is standard practice. The distinguishing factor between the big dreamers and the big doers is that the doers take action.

“Sometimes our biggest life goals seem so overwhelming. We rarely see them as a series of small, achievable tasks,” writes Jack Canfield in his book, The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be.“But in reality, breaking down a large goal into smaller tasks — and accomplishing them one at a time — is exactly how any big goal gets achieved.”

Behavior science expert and writer James Clear calls these smaller goals “systems.” “If you’re a coach,” he explains, “your goal is to win a championship. Your system is what your team does at practice each day. If you’re an entrepreneur, your goal is to build a million-dollar business. Your system is your sales and marketing process.”

Clear finds his success in focusing on the systems while keeping the larger goal in mind.

Evaluate your goals regularly.

Goal setting is a process of discovery as much as it is a way to get the job done. As you monitor your goals, ask yourself: Does this goal matter?

“Being a leader means finding the path,” explains author Kevin Hall in his book, Aspire: Discovering Your Purpose through the Power of Words. “But before you can help someone else find their path, you must know yours.”

By evaluating your goals regularly, you can make sure to focus on what’s important to you. For example, if your goal is to run 10 miles a day but you’re starting to have knee problems, then you may ask yourself if your goal is really to run (as an end in itself) or to enjoy a healthier lifestyle. This kind of flexibility will get you what you really want — and may save you from having surgery down the road.

Zig zag your way to the top.

While the idea of racing toward your goals at breakneck speed is seductive, there are unexpected obstacles that inevitably complicate any business. “The road to success is never a straight line,” writes Rich Christiansen in The Zig Zag Principle. “The diversions and detours I had often found so frustrating had actually created more stable and solid businesses. On the other hand — and without exception –each time I had raced directly at a target with high velocity, I had failed.”

Zigzagging requires you to be nimble and flexible and to take advantage of multiple opportunities. When a challenge comes along, consider your goal and whether it would be best to forge directly ahead or to pivot toward a different, short-term goal. It may not be the straightest path, but being adaptable is the clearest path to success.

Some of the most successful entrepreneurs have achieved their success in part by practicing disciplined goal setting. By breaking down your long-term goals into smaller daily tasks, evaluating your goals regularly and being adaptable, you too will enjoy the benefits of your efforts.

Source – Entrepreneur.com

September 30, 2015
How to get a handle on a sea of data
Bring your data in-house and raise your internal analysis skills to fish a rich picture out of the data ocean.
A man flyfishes in Cuba. Pick from your data smartly to get the most out of a sea of noise. Photograph: Alamy
In today’s world, one thing that marketers are not lacking is a wealth of data. The issues that concern us more are around how to ensure we identify all of the sources of data that we have available to us and whether we own it. How do we develop it, and how can we best leverage our data, whilst ensuring we work in the best interest of our customers?Looking back through history, it was a much simpler world in the old days – the science of advertising has evolved tremendously. The first classified ad in a newspaper appeared in 1631. Direct marketing was born in 1892. Then the radio took over the 1920s, starting with just one radio station that grew into 600 stations in only two years. And then came the TV. Inventive advertising by P&G came through soap operas initially on the radio in the 1930s and then on TV in 1949.

The 90s brought arguably the biggest changes, pivoted by the launch of the mobile phone and the internet. In 1994 the first commercial website sold a clickable ad, or what we know today as a “banner ad”. Then social entered the landscape in 2006 and it’s been an explosion in interconnectivity ever since – a transformation from well-known, low data forms of advertising through traditional channels through to a multi-channel inter-connected network. Each consumer is accessing, consuming, and generating information through multiple forms of media and devices in a given day, creating an abundance of data.

The evolution of digital tracking brings empowerment to every marketer, and the capability to apply data and research gathered instantaneously so that they can talk to each of their consumers in a very relevant way. But how many are actually managing and implementing data strategy effectively?

The most valuable asset that the marketer owns and has the power to grow is their first party data. This is the data collected from web properties, mobile app properties, email campaigns, direct marketing efforts – it is all of the data owned both online and offline. Marketers need to gain insight and understanding of the data required, as well as how to source the technology to handle, process and provide meaningful information from it.

Today’s marketer typically lacks in-depth knowledge of their consumer onsite and the primary reason for this is that they have been outsourcing campaign elements that gather data to numerous vendors. A savvy advertiser that does a lot of tracking and knowledge gathering may know their consumer well once they are on their owned and operated properties and through direct marketing, however they can be blind to what their consumer does when they are not browsing their owned and operated pages, performing search or interacting with other brands. How powerful would it be for the advertiser to have that visibility, and the data all in one place?

This is all doable, with just a bit of help from technology. There are a number of methods of data collection to the marketer, as well as mechanisms to help collect and aggregate this valuable data in a secure way. Cookies for web tracking can be customised not to just track a particular action but to pass valuable information along such as items purchased, searches performed, etc. APIs allow us to be connected – linking online and offline data holistically.

Advertising is no longer about the pushing of the message, it’s a conversation. Marketers need to understand how they can use data as a tool to help them:

know how to listen

know where to listen

ensure that their consumer is protected

know how to process the information they hear

leverage the data to successfully meet specific campaign objective as well as to develop smart future campaigns

It is a new world of marketing and market research. We live in an era of constant change and we have the technology to enables us to continuously learn from what our customers are saying and doing. We no longer need surveys to find out what the consumers want or need, they tell these things to us in real time on their own. We just need to make sure that we’re listening and actioning on it in a closed loop real-time fashion.

Natalie Mazer is vice president strategy and development, AudienceScience

Source – TheGuardian.com
September 29, 2015
Advertisers need to regain power over programmatic trading

Digital advertising can be can be woefully ineffective and inefficient. Photograph: Cultura Creative/Alamy

Advertisers are being kept in the dark about who is getting a share of their digital spend. More transparency is needed.

When it comes to marketing technology, the events industry is the place to be. This year saw the launch of the new Lions Innovation Festival as a new element of the Cannes mega-congress, both Dmexco and ad:tech later this month promise to be bigger and better than ever before while the Guardian’s own Changing Media Summitwhich celebrated its 10th anniversary this year continues to draw bigger crowds and higher profile speakers year on year.

It’s not surprising given the unstoppable growth of the digital marketing sector and constant change and innovation around what technology is enabling marketers to do. This makes digital marketing an exciting arena to work in – but also a daunting one as marketers constantly strive to understand the complexities of an increasingly technology-led profession. Hence, marketers are investing time and money on attending conferences that open the window on the newest thinking and ideas that could give them the edge.

Not surprisingly, this thirst for knowledge is making marketers more questioning of their existing marketing partners as, when they are evaluating new ways of doing things, they inevitably want to compare them against the efficiency and effectiveness of their current marketing practices. Herein lies the ugly and inconvenient truth of digital advertising today: it can be woefully ineffective and inefficient.

As Mark Butterfield, at Boehringer Ingelheim commented recently in an influential report from the World Federation of Advertisers: “We have little or no clear understanding of what percentage (of digital spend) is being delivered to the media owner and what is being taken in fees from either the agency or middle men. There needs to be clarity in the value chain otherwise clients will continue to question the validity of the digital buy.”

This reflects surveys by both ourselves at Ebiquity and a 2014 report from the World Federation of Advertisers which showed that of an advertiser’s investment of $100, $40 reaches the publisher as a result of fees from agencies and up to ten middlemen – with the advertiser typically being kept totally in the dark about who is getting a share of this money and why. Add to this the fact that half of online advertising is not viewable (at a very low threshold of definition of viewability), plus the growing amount of non-human (bot) traffic and ineffective targeting, and you can see that ad spend may translate to only 15-20 cents in the dollar that is really working.

As advertisers become better-informed about the value their investment could and should create, they are becoming more confident in challenging their agency partners to be transparent about where their budget is going. They are more wary of the media agency holding company model, which has made agencies both buyers and sellers of media inventory, and the inevitable compromises this could bring to the way in which their money is spent.

For too long the power has been in the hands of the agencies, but advertisers are seizing back control.If they want to retain the savviest advertisers with the biggest budgets, agencies are going to have to show demonstrable results, measured and audited openly and accurately. Otherwise relevance, trust – and ultimately ad accounts – will be lost, especially as tech companies, marketing suite providers, management and independent consultancies are stepping firmly into the same space, while being better placed thantoday’s agency groups to deliver impartiality. It seems that transparency is the new battlefield that could define the future of digital advertising and the power players within it.

Nick Manning is chief strategy officer at Ebiquity

Source – TheGuardian.com

September 29, 2015
17 Ways To Immediately Improve Your Website Traffic

As entrepreneurs we can often feel like the deck is stacked against us when it comes to the digital world. We don’t have the same budgets as our massive competitors, nor do we have the army of marketers that they can employ. So how can a small- or medium-sized business, against overwhelming odds, carve out its piece of the market? The tips below will show you how.

1. Facebook remarketing

Facebook is a great promotion tool whether you’re in the B2B or B2C industry. But did you know you can set up remarketing audiences in Facebook? By installing a Facebook tracking pixel on your site you can continue to market to customers who have visited your site. This is a great way to create return traffic to your business blog or website. And you can start remarketing to audiences as small as 100 visitors.

2. Facebook email custom audiences

Staying with Facebook, you can also give that email list of yours a second life. Instead of just using it to blast emails to your customers once in a while, you can upload that list into Facebook and capture the social accounts of anyone that has their email address attached to it. This is a HUGE benefit since it will allow you to market to those users on their mobile devices.

Related: 4 Ways to Successfully Link Build to Increase Website Traffic

3. Twitter remarketing

Twitter remarketing works in almost the exact same way as Facebook remarketing. Simply install the pixel and you can now target your sites visitors on Twitter. The main difference is that Twitter will require a higher minimum audience count before you can start advertising towards them, 500 people to be exact.

4. Twitter custom audiences

Just like Facebook, you can target Twitter users on their mobile devices by uploading their emails into Twitter. However, if you cannot get at least 500 users into your custom audience through an email upload, then you won’t have the required minimum to advertise towards them.

5. Twitter Cards

Twitter Cards is a great tool to drive traffic to your site. They are larger tweets that incorporate images and allow you to have buttons built into the tweet. They allow you to have engaging calls to action, attractive images right in the stream, and you can even give them special functionality like having downloads attached directly to the tweet. Tweets with images get 18 percent more clicks than its text counterparts, so make sure you’re using Twitter Cards.

6. Spend 80 percent of your time on the ad’s headline

Did you know that 8 out of 10 people will read a headline and not read the rest of your ad? If this is the case, you should be spending the majority of your time perfecting the headline to grab your audience’s attention – and driving them to your site. Whether you’re running ads in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or pay per click, make sure that your headlines are on fleek. (Yes, I went there.)

7. Build an email list

I just told you how you can use emails for social promotion, but they’re also an amazing tool for driving traffic through a newsletter. Make sure that you have a newsletter opt-in on your website. We personally use a great tool called Drip. It’s free and very easy to set up.

8. Blog, blog, blog

Blogging really does drive traffic. We recently ran an experiment where we increased our blogging from twice per week to over 10 posts per week. The result was a 300 percent increase in traffic in just two months. And this isn’t an unusual occurrence. Another company called Convirza ran a similar experiment with even better results. But, if you’re going to blog, you better do number nine.

9. Promote your blogs on Facebook

You may have heard that Facebook has cut back on their organic reach. This means that almost no one will see your social media posts on Facebook. Instead, you need to put a little bit of budget behind them. A good strategy is to have a campaign constantly running that is featuring your blog posts and target that campaign towards your custom audience and remarketing audience as described above.

10. Optimize your site for SEO

Trying to manipulate the search-engine rankings is a losing proposition at this point. Instead, what you should be concerned with is making your site look as good as possible for the search engine robots that will be crawling your website. Software like SEMrush can give you a complete SEO audit and show you what you should fix. Spending time on your site’s SEO optimization is always time well spent.

11. Exchange blog posts with other sites

Syndicating your blog on other sites is a great way to drive new audiences to your site. A great way to do this is to search for blogs that are in a similar industry as you and that are in a similar situation in terms of size and audience. Then, you reach out to their editor or site administrator and ask if they’d like to swap blog articles and you each take turns featuring each other’s blogs and linking back to the site. Special measures should be taken to avoid duplicate content, but this is a great way to drive new customers to your site.

12. Automate your emails

Shockingly, marketing automation has only been adopted by 3 to 5 percent of all businesses. Yes, this number is higher if you only look at larger companies but this list is trying to help smaller companies compete with their bigger brethren. So, why aren’t you using marketing automation? It may have been that the costs were too prohibitive or that it seemed too daunting, but there’s help with that. There are new lower cost marketing automation platforms like Autopilot and Hatchbuck that are great for small businesses. But if you still have your heart set on HubSpot or a similar product, then look for a certified partner, like my firm, that can help onboard you and can even waive the kickoff fees that can cost several thousand dollars.

Related: Generate Traffic With a Well-Rounded Content Marketing Strategy

Now that you have your software set up, you need to ensure you have email campaigns set up for everything. There should be an automated email campaign when someone fills out a form, downloads some content or signs up for the newsletter.

By staying in front of your customers through email you’ll continue to drive relevant traffic to your site.

13. Become a contributor

Contributing to other websites is a great way to drive traffic to your site. I myself write for about a dozen major media site, and while it may not result in immediate customers, the benefits are definitely felt throughout the organization. And our referral traffic from these sites is a huge boon.

To become a contributor you need to start small and work your way up. Also, you need to hone your craft when it comes to writing. To do this you need to be writing every single day. The more you write, the better you’ll be come and the better your chances will be at becoming a contributor.

14. Create a quiz

Quizzes are fun pieces of content that work really well at driving engagement with your visitors. Plus, they’re a cinch to promote on social media using the techniques presented earlier in this article. Sites like Quizzr allow you to create free quizzes to then post on your blog and drive traffic to your site.

15. Host a webinar or webcast

Regardless of your industry, I can guarantee there’s a topic you have enough expertise on that your customers would come to listen to you speak. The trick is to identify this topic and then to create a fun and engaging presentation. Carol Tice put together a phenomenal guide on putting on a great webinar.

16. Create a podcast

If you’re worried you can’t present to a live audience or develop the right message, then instead consider a podcast. Podcasts are great ways of distributing your expertise and are a surefire way of driving traffic to your site — but you need to be consistent and promote it.

When you first start off, it will seem like you’re talking into a black hole and no one is listening to you. But if you stay persistent and promote your podcast on social media, your audience will grow and your future episodes will gain more and more listeners.

Another great trick to getting a boost in your podcast audience is to invite a guest that has a large social following and asking them to help you promote it. You’d be surprised who would say yes to joining your podcast, if you only ask them.

Zach Cutler put together a great article on getting your podcast off the ground.

17. Find partners in your industry

There are usually dozens of partnership opportunities for any business out there. The trick is to find those partners and establish a working relationship. To give an example of this, we signed up as a partner for Unbounce. They’re a landing page creation software that helps companies optimize their marketing campaigns. It was free to sign up as a partner and they then featured us in their partner section and allowed us to do a little write up on our firm. Before you knew it we were getting leads from their site and it’s been a great source of traffic for us.

Related: 4 Types of Google AdWords Conversions You’ll Want to Track

Source – Entrepreneur.com

September 23, 2015
Net Promoter Score: Six Pros and Cons

Here’s why the Net Promoter Score remains a satisfaction metrics mainstay, and how it can be put to good use

Brand advocates and ambassadors are invaluable these days, but it can be tough for marketers to determine which customers truly are satisfied and loyal enough to publicly sing a brand’s praises—and which of those customers are influential enough to effect change. For the past dozen years, many marketers have looked to one metric, in particular, for help.

Invented in 2003 by Fred Reichheld, a partner at Boston-based management consulting firm Bain & Co., using data from Redwood City, Calif.-based customer experience management software provider Satmetrix Systems Inc., the Net Promoter Score (NPS) was conceived as a means to help executives find a better way, other than traditional customer service surveys, to know how customers felt about their company and establish accountability for the customer experience. Reichheld and his team tested a variety of questions to see how well the answers correlated with customer behavior, and found that high scores on one question, “How likely is it that you would recommend [company X] to a friend or colleague?” correlated strongly with repurchases, referrals and other factors contributing to a company’s growth.

Customers are prompted to rate their likelihood to recommend the company on a scale from zero to 10, and then are sorted into three categories based on their responses: promoters, who rated their likelihood at 9 or 10, who will keep buying from the brand and referring others; passives, who answered with a 7 or 8, who are satisfied but unenthusiastic; and detractors, whose responses ranged from zero to 6, who generally are unhappy customers who could damage your brand through negative word of mouth.

The beauty of the tool is its simplicity, but its findings present just the tip of the iceberg, according to NPS experts. Here, experts offer insight on the pros and cons of NPS, and how marketers can make the most of it.

Pros

1. It’s simple. According to Andy Zimmerman, CMO of Somerville, Mass.-based Evergage Inc., a SaaS company that uses NPS to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty: “It’s a simple question, and everyone can understand it. With some surveys, customers interpret the question wrong and your data can end up being inconsistent,” but NPS is straightforward, he says, and is readily applicable in the digital era. “The question, itself, has gained relevance these days with the advent of social media, review sites and word-of-mouth marketing. If someone’s an active detractor on social media, it’s really risky. NPS gives you a quick indicator of the general health and happiness of your customers.”

2. Its findings are easily digestible. “For years, we’ve been measuring customer satisfaction through things like [the American Customer Satisfaction Index], but people can’t always get their arms wrapped around that number,” says Deborah Eastman, chief customer officer at Satmetrix, the firm that worked with Reichheld to develop NPS. “If I tell you your customer loyalty index is 7.2, what does that mean to you? If I tell you that 60% of your customers are promoters, it’s much more understandable. Net Promoter helps get everyone in the organization engaged in building a better customer experience.”

3. It can be benchmarked. Because the NPS process is standardized, you can compare your results from period to period, and from company to company, Zimmerman says. “You can do a search on the Web and get Net Promoter Scores from companies in your industry, and get a sense for where you stand, and whether you’re above or below target with your peers.”

Cons

1. It focuses on the relationship more than the transaction. The single-question format requires more follow-up, says Rob Markey, partner and global leader of the customer strategy and marketing practice at Bain & Co., and co-author of The Ultimate Question 2.0: How Net Promoter Companies Thrive in a Customer-Driven World.

“In the old days, we simply asked, ‘How likely would you be to recommend, and why?’ Today, we recommend a refined approach where we ask their likelihood to recommend the company, and then we ask a second question about the transaction, itself,” he says. “The limitation that often gets raised is that asking about someone’s likelihood to recommend a company or brand is a relationship question. When you do that right after a specific interaction or transaction, you may get responses that have very little to do with that particular hotel stay or telephone call, or Web-browsing experience. The modified approach allows you to get a read on the overall relationship and the transaction’s impact on it.”

2. It shouldn’t stand alone. Adds Zimmerman: “NPS is a health indicator, but if you’re really trying to improve the product in certain areas, it won’t give you any insights. You have to complement it with a more detailed customer satisfaction survey. We do progressive surveying, where the NPS score might be the first [question], and based on how you answer that, you’ll get a different question in the future” to dive deeper into a customer’s satisfaction or dissatisfaction.

3. It might create tunnel vision. “The score is only an indication of whether you’re heading in the right direction,” Markey says. “If you want to improve your company’s ability to earn customer loyalty, you can’t ignore the energy, enthusiasm and creativity of your employees. If marketers are facilitating the connection between employees and customers, employees will be motivated and empowered to do the things that will earn customer advocacy.”

As with all satisfaction surveys, NPS necessitates an action plan to fully leverage promoters and help to assuage detractors. “It’s like losing weight,” Eastman says. “Stepping on a scale will give you a measurement, but the only way you get an outcome is by changing your behavior.”

It’s pretty self-explanatory, but customers who fall into each of NPS’ three categories require distinct communications, she says. “If you have a large base of detractors, you’ll want to identify them and reach out to them, and identify opportunities to do service recovery and address customer experience issues. With passives, you want to understand why they like you but don’t love you, and what you need to do to move over that goal line. With promoters, you can think about how to mobilize them to help you acquire new customers through word-of-mouth recommendations.”

Enlist your C-suite to help implement your action plan, Eastman says. “Marketers can’t do it alone. Without engagement from their operational leaders, they won’t be able to impact the Net Promoter Score, and that will result in challenges in terms of customer retention and acquisition.”

Think of NPS as a starting point for a longer-term conversation with your customers, Zimmerman says. “It requires you to continue the dialogue. It’s one question. It’s not the only question.”

For more on the Net Promoter Score, check out “The Key to Deciphering Brand Value,” from the June 2015 B2B Marketing e-newsletter.

Source – Ama.org

September 23, 2015
Data management platforms becoming marketers’ tool of choice

Data management platforms (DMPs) are becoming the marketers’ tool of choice according to new research from Oracle Marketing Cloud and ExchangeWire.

Their study show that DMPs are becoming an essential tool – rather than an early adopter advantage – for marketers who want to better organise, make sense of and activate their data. The research showed that almost three quarters (73%) of those surveyed said that their awareness and knowledge of the benefits of DMPs was either good or excellent.

Although uptake remained below half (48%) for those media buyers and sellers surveyed, the results showed an increasingly compelling argument for adoption with more than 90% of current users experiencing positive impact on return on investment in the first twelve months. Only 10% of those surveyed had no plans to implement a DMP. The ad technology offers a unification across the media industry with publishers using them to support premium ad partnerships and media buyers using the insight gained from such DMPs in order to improve their understanding of audience buying and better improve their targeting across digital campaigns.

The research showed that a quarter (24%) of brand marketers who had implemented a DMP had done so in order to improve the ROI of their marketing and advertising activities. A third of publishers with a DMP said they chose it to integrate first party data to offer better targeting options to their advertiser clients.

Both publishers and advertisers also appear unified in their use and appreciation of the technology. Of the publishers all said that DMP implementation had been successful whilst 76% of media buyers said the same. In both parties DMPs were rated to have either achieved or overachieved against the individual objectives set for nearly 9 in 10 (87%) of those surveyed.

However despite all the benefits the research showed that DMP implementation isn’t necessarily as straightforward as both parties would like. For media sellers nearly half of respondents said that disparate data sets was a major challenge whilst 22% of media buyers said that removing or replacing legacy technology was the biggest impediment to their implementation.

Such challenges are not putting adopters off though. A fifth (21%) of both groups said that their organisation plans to implement a DMP within the next six months.

Zuzanna Gierlinska, Oracle Marketing Cloud’s director for data management platforms in EMEA said that marketers could no longer shy away from putting in place a centralised data strategy. “As brands increasingly rely on digital channels and the technology vendors that power them in order to engage their audience having a holistic approach to data management is key to driving ROI.

“DMPs are fast becoming an essential tool to help marketers organise, make sense of, and activate their data. It’s no longer the sole preserve of the early adopters, and for modern marketers striving to deliver a personalised message at the right time on the right channel it should be at the heart of their operations.”

Source – MarketingTechNews.net

September 23, 2015
Connecting the dots in the cross-screen era: How marketers can navigate mobile targeting

Targeting users in a mobile environment is a constant challenge for marketers evaluating the pros and cons of the two main approaches to targeting.

The UK is now a ‘smartphone society’ according to Ofcom’s 2015 Communications Market Report, which recorded that 33 per cent of internet users see their smartphone as the most important device for accessing the internet.

Online audiences’ migration to mobile devices presents a myriad of problems for all parties in the media business as targeting ads towards mobile users is more challenging compared to a desktop environment.

This is due to the fact that cookies – the primary means of targeting ads toward internet users in the desktop era – don’t work as effectively on mobile devices. This is fuelled by the increasing number of ‘connected screens’ (think smartphones, tablets, and connected TVs) meaning it is now rare for internet users to begin researching a purchase, and then converting on one device.

Most advertisers are aware of the importance of making sure their ad campaigns take place across a number of screens, and then being able to attribute value back to each media placement. However, the difficulty lies in coordinating the messaging across screens in a manner that will tell the brand story, to the correct audience, and in a coherent manner.

Currently two models prevail in the industry, either through deterministic or probabilistic targeting (see box out).

Prevailing model?
Research from eMarketer claims that Facebook and Google dominate mobile advertising, with the pair commanding a joint market share of 68.5 per cent last year (21.7 per cent and 46.8 per cent respectively).

This figure suggests that advertisers are opting to target users employing the deterministic model.

First party benefits
Facebook, which relaunched its Atlas ad stack last year allowing advertisers to target users across third-party properties using the Facebook ID, with some suggesting its wealth of data could enable it to rival Google’s DoubleClick stack.

Steve Webb, head of Atlas, EMEA, claims the strength of its offering is derived from the insights gleaned from Facebook’s 1.49 billion users. He adds: “Through Atlas, marketers are able to target and measure their digital ad campaigns with people-based data rather than cookie-based data – providing high-quality inventory with attribution, targeting and audience reach.”

However, Webb rebuts assertions that Facebook, or Atlas, is a ‘walled garden’, highlighting the outfit’s partner enablement strategy, where it works closely with companies such as Marin Software and Kenshoo.

He adds: “The Atlas measurement tag can also be run in conjunction with most existing ad-serving tags, giving critical reach, frequency and conversion insights across devices and publishers.”

The Drum requested an interview with Google, but it declined to participate. However, speaking previously about the potential threat posed by Facebook’s Atlas, Darragh Daunt, Google DoubleClick’s head of platform sales, independent agencies, said: “It’s a question of graph size [ie how many logged-in users] and we would argue that our graph size across all screens is extremely formidable. If you think about [the fact that] Android penetration is 80 per cent in the market… and if you think of the people that use YouTube and Gmail and Google Now, hopefully, that is a formidable graph.”

Aside from targeting users across screens, a key element of the process is attribution (i.e. being able to assign value to every ad placement, and how it contributed towards a conversion, or sale), and key to this is the passing back of device IDs to the advertiser paying for the placement.

However, Facebook fell foul of advertisers when it proposed to stop doing so recently, so much so that it eventually performed a U-turn on this policy.

On this matter, Webb comments: “We encourage our advertisers to apply people-based measurement solutions so they can determine whom they’re reaching, not just where they’re reaching them. But we want to give advertisers the freedom to measure ads based on what is important to them. Facebook will therefore continue to give advertisers the option to receive device-level reporting from our mobile measurement partners for mobile app ads.”

The case for open
However, as stipulated above, this is not to say that using such closed ecosystems, or walled gardens, is perfect. For instance, this can fragment the execution of a campaign, potentially leading to bad practice, such as bombarding a web user with the same ad, due to poor visibility on how many times a single web user has been served.

Caspar Schlickum, chief executive EMEA for GroupM ad tech hub Xaxis, says: “The idea of agnostically targeting users across devices is a good one. The probabilistic model is good for the market.”

He goes on to argue that a fundamental problem with walled gardens is that they benefit the provider ultimately, and that this can come at the expense of the consumer experience.

“We have to be able to frequency cap, so as we don’t annoy some poor consumer,” according to Schlickum. He adds that while Xaxis does work with companies like Google so as to prevent doing so, it is far from ideal.

Paul Gubbins, head of programmatic sales EMEA, for Millennial Media, explains how his company helps advertisers target users across screens, and then trace those ads back to a sale, or other action such as a website visit. This is performed by identifying household IP addresses, and then creating a device graph for mobile devices that are consistently present in that IP.

He adds: “The first steps to a successful cross-screen attribution strategy can be simply deployed by adding a mobile tracking pixel to the brand’s desktop site. If the object is to track visitation, this would be on the landing page.”

However, he does acknowledge the trouble facing advertisers is that the lack of a single standard for device mapping means no single vendor or technology can track every user on every device all the time.

As a result advertisers are faced with the task of deciding between the precision of a deterministic strategy, or the potential scale posed by probabilistic players.

Data leakage?
Although Gubbins warns how brands opting for the former model, may be giving away a key competitive advantage by inadvertently donating its customer insights to such third party providers (a phenomenon widely known as ‘data leakage’).

“Platforms that operate within a walled garden are happy to ingest first-party data but rarely enable the extraction of post-impression insights that allow chief marketing officers to inform other parts of their marketing strategies.”

This point is also echoed by Gareth Davies, chief exec of Adbrain, who adds: “The accuracy of first party data is good, but brands shouldn’t expose their data too much, and chief marketing officers should ultimately have full control. What they need is an independent solution.”

Hence brands must ask themselves: how much can a closed ecosystem open them up to competitors gaining their insights?

Source – TheDrum.com

September 23, 2015
How to Create a Social-Media Marketing Plan From Scratch (Infographic)
When I went rock climbing for the first time, I had no idea what I was doing. My friends and I were complete newbies about ropes and rappelling and every other bit of jargon and technique that goes with climbing. We saw others doing it spectacularly well. We were thrilled at the thought of reaching the top of the climbing wall; we had no idea how to get there.

I’d imagine that a social media marketing plan could feel the same way.

If you’re starting from square one, it might feel equal parts thrilling and overwhelming. You know what you want to do and why. You can see that others have climbed the social media mountain; you’ve got few ideas how to get there yourself.

It’d help to have a plan.

We’ve shared before about different parts of a social media marketing plan—the data and research and personal experience behind what works on social media. Now we’re pleased to put it all into a cohesive, step-by-step blueprint that you can use to get started. If you need a social media marketing plan, start here.

Oh, and our friends at online infographic maker Venngage were kind enough to wrap all that follows into a comprehensive infographic that’s easy to keep, share and reference:

Social media is as homogenous from network to network as soda pop is from brand to brand. Sure, it’s all social media, but Google+ and Twitter might as well be Mountain Dew and Pepsi. Each network is unique, with its own best practices, own style, and own audience.

You should choose the social networks that best fit your strategy and the goals you want to achieve on social media.

You don’t have to be on them all—just the ones that matter to you and your audience.

Some things to consider that can help you choose not only which social networks to try but also how many to try.

Time – How much time can you devote to a social network? Plan on at least an hour per day per social network, at least at the start. (Once you get going, tools like Buffer can help you save a bit of time.)

Resources – What personnel and skills do you have to work with? Visual social networks like Pinterest and Instagram require images and photos. Social networks like Google+ emphasize quality content. Do you have the resources to create what’s needed?

Audience – Where do your potential customers hang out? Which social network has the right demographics?

For the latter part of this decision, you can reference the audience research and demographics from surveys like those conducted by Pew Research. For instance, Pew has complete data, collected last fall, of the demographics for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Here is a side-by-side comparison of Facebook and Twitter demographics.

Social media is as homogenous from network to network as soda pop is from brand to brand. Sure, it’s all social media, but Google+ and Twitter might as well be Mountain Dew and Pepsi. Each network is unique, with its own best practices, own style, and own audience.

You should choose the social networks that best fit your strategy and the goals you want to achieve on social media.

You don’t have to be on them all—just the ones that matter to you and your audience.

Some things to consider that can help you choose not only which social networks to try but also how many to try.

Time – How much time can you devote to a social network? Plan on at least an hour per day per social network, at least at the start. (Once you get going, tools like Buffer can help you save a bit of time.)

Resources – What personnel and skills do you have to work with? Visual social networks like Pinterest and Instagram require images and photos. Social networks like Google+ emphasize quality content. Do you have the resources to create what’s needed?

Audience – Where do your potential customers hang out? Which social network has the right demographics?

For the latter part of this decision, you can reference the audience research and demographics from surveys like those conducted by Pew Research. For instance, Pew has complete data, collected last fall, of the demographics for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Here is a side-by-side comparison of Facebook and Twitter demographics.

Step 2: Fill out your profiles completely

One of our monthly checks here at Buffer is to visit each of our social media profiles and make sure that our avatars, cover photos, bio, and profile info is up-to-date and complete. It’s a key part to our social media audit. A completed profile shows professionalism, cohesive branding, and a signal to visitors that you’re serious about engaging.

Profiles will require two parts: visuals and text.

For visuals, we aim for consistency and familiarity with the visuals we use on social media. Our avatar on Twitter matches our avatar on Facebook. Our cover photo on Google+ is similar to our cover on LinkedIn.

To create these images, you can consult a social media image size chart that will show you the exact breakdown of dimensions for each photo on each network. For an even easier time of it, you can use a tool like Canva, which comes with prebuilt templates that set the proper sizes for you.

For text, your main area to customize is the bio/info section. Creating a professional social media bio can be broken down into six simple rules.
1. Show, don’t tell: “What have I done” often works better than “Who I am”
2. Tailor your keywords to your audience
3. Keep language fresh; avoid buzzwords
4. Answer the question of your potential followers: “What’s in it for me?”
5. Be personal and personable
6. Revisit often
Step 3: Find your marketing voice and tone

The temptation at this point might be to jump right in and start sharing. Just one more step before you do. Your foray into social media will be more focused and more on point if you come up with a voice and tone for your content right off the bat.

To do so, you could spend time coming up with marketing personas and debating the finer points of your mission statement and customer base. These are all well and good. However, for a social media marketing plan just getting off the ground, you can make this process a bit easier. Start with questions like these:
- If your brand was a person, what kind of personality would it have?
- If your brand was a person, what’s their relationship to the consumer? (a coach, friend, teacher, dad, etc)
- Describe in adjectives what your company’s personality is not.
- Are there any companies that have a similar personality to yours? Why are they similar?
- How do you want your customers to think about your company?
At the end of this exercise, you should end up with a handful of adjectives that describe the voice and tone of your marketing. Consider this to keep you on track: Voice is the mission statement; tone is the implementation of that mission.

MailChimp has created a standalone website simply for its voice and tone. Here’s an example of how they implement these qualities into their communication:

Cultivate a voice that delights your customers, then your customers will be thrilled to spread the love about you.

Step 4: Pick your posting strategy

What’s the ideal amount to post per day? How often should you post? When should you post? What should you post? The solid gold, ironclad answer on questions like these is:

It depends.

So much of the social media experience is about your individual audience and niche. What works for you might not work for me, and you never know until you try (we’ll get to trying in step five).

That being said, there is some pretty good data and insight about where to start. Here’s what we’ve found to be good jumping off points.

What should you be posting?

Images are ideal.

The push toward visual content has plenty of anecdotal evidence—as you browse the streams on Twitter and Facebook, you’re likely to see images all over. There’s data to back up this change: Image posts get more views, clicks, reshares, and likes than any other type of post. And it’s not even close.

On Facebook, photos get 53% more likes, 104% more comments and 84% more click-throughs on links than text-based posts.

Same goes for Twitter. In a study of over two million tweets from verified users across a number of different industries, Twitter found that photos have the greatest effect on retweets.
- Photos average a 35% boost in Retweets
- Videos get a 28% boost
- Quotes get a 19% boost in Retweets
- Including a number receives a 17% bump in Retweets
- Hashtags receive a 16% boost
The 4:1 Strategy

Now that you know what works, you can place these different types of updates into a consistent strategy. One of my favorite systems is the one used by Buffer’s co-founder Joel Gascoigne. It works like this:
1. Start with the basic five types of updates we all post: Links, images, quotes, reshares, plain-text updates
2. Choose a “staple” update, a single type that will make up the majority of your shares
3. Create a 4:1 ratio of sharing: for every four “staple” updates, publish one different type for variety
This way your followers know what to expect from you, and you can hone your sharing to a specific type, making it easier to perfect and to experiment.

(Note: You might won’t want to post the exact same updates across each of your social networks. Consider composing your updates in a unique way to complement each network’s own best practices, culture, and language.)

How often should you be posting?

There’s been a lot of interesting data out there about how often to post to social media. Some of the factors that might impact your specific sharing frequency may include your industry, your reach, your resources, and the quality of your updates. The social network you’re using will have its own best practices, too.

If people love your updates, you can typically always get away with posting more.

For a specific number, here’re some guidelines we’ve put together based on some really helpful research into how often to post to social media.

When should you be posting?

There are many neat tools to show you the best time of day to post to Facebook, Twitter, and more. These tools look at your followers and your history of posts to see when your audience is online and when historically have been your best times to share.

So what’s someone to do who’s just starting out on these social networks, with no audience and no history?

Again, this is where best practices come in. Perhaps the most helpful (and adorable) infographic I’ve seen about timing comes from SumAll, whichcompiled timing research from sites like Visual.ly, Search Engine Watch, and Social Media Today to create its awesome visual. Here’s an overview of what they found in terms of timing (all times are Eastern Time).
- Twitter – 1-3pm weekdays
- Facebook – 1-4pm and 2-5pm weekdays
- LinkedIn – 7-8:30am and 5-6pm Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday
- Tumblr – 7-10pm weekdays and 4pm on Fridays
- Instagram – 5-6pm weekdays and 8pm on Mondays with a sweetspot at 6pm
- Pinterest – 2-4pm and 8-11pm weekdays with weekends being the best
- Google+ – 9-11am weekdays
Step 5: Analyze, test, and iterate

Remember how we talked about social media sharing being a very individual, specific endeavor? Your stats will likely start to bear this out.

The more you post, the more you’ll discover which content, timing, and frequency is right for you.

How will you know? It’s best to get a reporting tool. Most major social networks will have basic analytics built into the site; it’s just a little easier to seek and find this information from an all-encompassing dashboard.

These tools (I’ll use Buffer’s analytics as an example) can show you a breakdown of how each post performed in the important areas of views, clicks, shares, likes, and comments.

Which social media stats are best? We’ve gained some insight from looking at each of these main statistics and the composite engagement stat on a per-post basis. The resulting stat gives us a great look, over time, of how our social media content tends to perform, and we can then test and iterate from there.

Here’s one way this analysis step.

Set a benchmark. After two weeks or a month of sharing, you can go back through your stats and find the average number of clicks, shares, likes, and comments per post. This’ll be your benchmark going forward. You can come back and update this number at any time as your following and influence grows.

Test something new. We’re open to testing just about anything at Buffer. We’re in the midst of some tests right now on our Twitter account. Do Twitter-optimized images gain more clicks than non-optimized images? Does capitalization matter? We’ll often hear about someone’s new strategy or get a new idea and then test right away.

Did it work? Check the stats from your test versus the stats of your benchmark. If your test performed well, then you can implement the changes into your regular strategy. And once your test is over, test something new!

Step 6: Automate, engage, and listen

The final piece of a social media marketing plan involves having a system you can follow to help you stay on top of updates and engaged with your community.

To start with, automate your updates. Tools like Buffer allow you to create all the content and updates that you want to, all at once, and then place everything into a queue to be sent out according to whatever schedule you choose.Automation is the secret weapon for consistently excellent sharing, day after day.

Your plan doesn’t end with automation, though. Social media requires engagement, too. When people talk to you, talk back. Set aside time during your day to followup with conversations that are happening on social media. These are conversations with potential customers, references, friends, and colleagues. They’re too important to ignore.

One way to stay up on all the conversations that are happening around you and your company is to create a system for listening. Tools like Mention will send you an alert every time you’re mentioned online, and you can rely on custom searches and email alerts for mentions on specific networks, too.

What would you share with someone new to social media?

Coming up with a social media marketing plan is a great step toward diving in to social. If social media looks thrilling and overwhelming all at once, start with a plan. Once you see the blueprint in front of you, it’s a little easier to see what lies ahead.
1. Pick your networks
2. Fill out your info
3. Find your voice
4. Choose your strategy
5. Analyze and test
6. Automate and engage
Bingo!

How did you develop your social media strategy? I’d love to keep the conversation going in the comments. If you know someone who could use this, feel free to pass this along. If you can use it yourself, let me know how it goes!

Source – Entrepreneur.com
September 18, 2015
15 One-Sentence Chunks of Online Marketing Advice You Can Use Today

A lot of marketing advice is available online, some of it extremely helpful, some of it outright incorrect. The Internet can be a double-edged sword: Information is readily available and easy to access, but not all of it is good advice.

To begin to address that problem, I took five popular online-marketing options — search engine optimization, local SEO, pay-per-click, content marketing and social media — and wrote down the first three one-sentence pieces of advice that came to mind.

So, read through the results and, in the comments section, add to any of the five topics your own best single-sentence pieces of marketing advice. Your contribution could potentially help someone get off on the right foot and experience a successful beginning to his or her online marketing journey.

1. Search Engine Optimization

Don’t neglect your on-page optimization. I’ll often hear small business owners say things like, “I need more links to rank,” when in reality all they need is proper on-page optimization. For local businesses, especially those in low-competition industries and markets, solid on-page optimization can deliver noticeable gains in and of itself. If you are completely new to on-page optimization, check out this guide designed for beginners.

If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Achieving a number-one ranking for the key word “weight loss” overnight — for the extremely low price of only $199! — sounds great, doesn’t it? So do those emails I receive offering to share an $88 million inheritance if I simply send $500 via Western Union to cover the paperwork fees. If it sounds too good to be true, it typically is.

Key-word rankings are important, but ROI is more important. Key-word rankings are a part of SEO, but they aren’t the be-all and end-all of a successful campaign. Many SEO agencies focus on key-word rankings and lead the client to believe that all is well because a few terms have reached “ranking 1” in Google. But if those key words aren’t bringing in revenue, they are useless. A ranking report is nice, but knowing how much ROI your SEO campaign is delivering is more important.

2. Local SEO

Understand that local search is constantly evolving. When Google’s local pack went down to three listings, people freaked out. Nothing ever stays the same, especially when it comes to local search. You need to constantly stay up to date on the changes — a perfect reason to read SEO news blogs daily, such as the ones listed here.

Get creative, and you can secure some of the most powerful local links from within your community. There are websites with amazing metrics right in your local community. Get creative and seek out opportunities that can lead to landing a link. Local schools often have athletic-sponsorship opportunities, and community websites often have pages dedicated to local businesses that have made a donation. Dedicate an afternoon to this and I am willing to bet you will uncover some golden link opportunities right in your local area

Make sure your website passes the mobile-friendly test, but also use real-life testers to improve user experience. Running your website through Google’s mobile-friendly test will let you know whether or not Google deems your website mobile-friendly, but it doesn’t guarantee that your user experience is the best it can be. After you pass Google’s test, get real-life input and reactions from users. These could come from employees, friends, family members or complete strangers. Have them run through your pages, attempt to contact you and access your offers. Use their feedback to improve your user experience.

3. Pay per click

Don’t be afraid of Bing. AdWords, AdWords and more AdWords. This Google feature is what everyone thinks of when they hear “pay per click” (PPC). Yes, AdWords can deliver a boatload of traffic, but it isn’t the only game in town. Import your PPC campaign into Bing and give it a try. Sure, the search volume and traffic numbers are lower, but lot of businesses will see a lower cost-per-click and higher conversion rate from this traffic source.

Create campaign-specific landing pages. Never drive paid traffic to your home page. It’s a complete waste. Doing this leaves the responsibility on visitors to find whatever it is that caused them to click on your ad — a free offer, a special discount or a particular product or service. Send your PPC traffic to a page that offers exactly what your ad promised. Landing pages with one clear offer and no site navigation or other distractions will convert at the highest rate.

Quality score is your wallet’s best friend. It’s possible to get a lot of traffic with a low quality score. It’s also possible that the traffic will convert and leave you with a nice ROI. But, don’t you want to maximize your PPC return? Spend just a little time on your quality score and you will often see more traffic as well as lower cost-per-clicks. Many people ignore their quality score as long as their campaign is producing a positive return.

4. Content Marketing

Stay consistent with your content publishing schedule, however frequent it may be. Not every business is going to have the manpower or need to publish content on its blog every single day. It doesn’t matter how often you publish, but once you do establish a publishing schedule, it’s important that you stick to it. Your visitors will get accustomed to the schedule and if they return to your website expecting new content to engage with but are left disappointed, they might not return — ever. Daily, bi-weekly, weekly or monthly: Whatever you decide on, remain consistent.

Give enough value, and you will convert some of your audience into customers. Don’t create content to try to sell products or services to your audience. Do it to educate and inform, and you will naturally convert some of your visitors into customers. When you constantly put out value without asking anything in return, you are rewarded with loyal brand followers that take the plunge with your company once they are ready.

Continue to share your content: Your entire audience isn’t going to see it the first (or second) time ’round. Worthwhile content takes time and money to create, so why do some brands share their content only one time? You should be recycling your content and putting it out there via your social media channels and email list multiple times. Your entire audience isn’t going to be exposed to it after the first time you share it. It might take a half-dozen times before a large percentage of visitors actually see it.

5. Social Media Marketing

Automation is great, but don’t go overboard. A lot of companies use automation because it’s convenient, and they assume it’s working. Too much automation, though, can be a bad thing. A perfect example: Twitter has programs that will automatically “favorite” a tweet containing a particular hashtag or term. I’m willing to bet I could tweet something completely outrageous and offensive, and as long as it included an #SEO hashtag, there would be a few accounts that favorited it.

Mix organic and paid promotion. To get the full benefit of social-media marketing, you need to mix some paid promotion with your organic campaigns. Paid promotion enables you to put your offers in front of an audience that doesn’t typically engage with your posts. As with everything else, start small and test to find out what works best for your business.

Take full advantage of Facebook’s targeting options to put your offer right in front of your ideal customer. Facebook will let you put your ads directly in front of ideal buyers, so take advantage of this opportunity. If your business sold NFL team hats, wouldn’t you want to create separate ads for every team and advertise them to people based on their location as well as their favorite NFL football team? With Facebook targeting, you can create an ad for a Miami Dolphins hat and market it only to people in Greater Miami who have indicated that they like the team.

Let’s hear your own best single-sentence pieces of online marketing advice! Relate them to SEO, local SEO, PPC, content marketing and social media marketing. Please head to the comments section to participate.

Source – Entrepreneur.com

September 18, 2015