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Month: November 2015

10 SEO Tips You’d Be Surprised You Didn’t Know
Whenever I set out to write something like this, I’m always hesitant because I know that someone (or multiple someones) will read this and know every single thing on the list already. I write it anyway because I think it’s always good to have a refresher. If you pick up even one new idea that you can put into practice, then I think it’s worthwhile.

When it comes to SEO, there’s obviously a lot of fluctuation in the industry, and not just from search engines like Google, but from the way people themselves search for and consume information. The tips below are a blend of analytics, organization, and productivity practices I find useful and seem to be the most frequently forgotten during chats with other marketers.

Create Keyword Groups to Better Leverage Your Data

When I say create keyword groups, I mean create lots of them. Here’s why: Keyword groups can be used to reflect things like products, features, marketing campaigns, audience segments, messaging, geographies, and more. Consider creating multiple types of groups (keywords can belong to more than one group) so you can compare products and features as well as messaging, campaigns, etc. Keyword groups are not only good for comparisons of your internal marketing efforts but also for monitoring and analyzing competitor movements as well.

Create Content Groups

I promise I’ll talk about something other than groups, but if you’re taking the time to create keyword groups, you should also look at grouping your content. One of the reasons I like to group content, in addition to keywords, is that it gives you a different angle on how your audience is finding and interacting with you. A few ways I group content to get the most insights are:
1. Use the same groups you used to create keyword groups such as: products, features, campaigns, geographies, etc.
2. Create groups of content by content type such as videos, white papers, case studies, blogs, etc.
3. Create content groups based on user flow – for example, I might have one that is lead gen content, consideration content, etc.
This method allows me to make comparisons easily and to see how keyword groups and traffic are driven to my content.

Pay Attention to Top Keyword Activity

Top keyword activity is essentially the keyword, and corresponding content, that has changed in rank the most over the past few weeks. I keep an eye on both the top positive keyword activity and declining keyword activity for my content because it tells me not only when we’re hitting the right content and keyword combinations, but it also alerts me to shifts in audience needs and interests.

Keep an Eye on Top Keyword Activity for Your Competitors

Watching top keyword activity for competitors allows you to see not only which of your targeted keywords they are focusing on, but also the corresponding content they’re creating that is being served to your audience. This data may help inform future content creation decisions or improve existing content.

Pay Attention to Competitor Social Signals at The Content Level

Social signals are often a good indicator of what’s organically popular and relevant to your audience at the moment. While most people pay attention to their brand’s social signals, viewing your competitor’s social engagement is also important. By viewing a list of their content sorted by top performing social signals, you can see what your audience finds relevant for the same keywords you’re tracking and see where you might have gaps in your own site content.

Prioritize Your Recommendations

If you’re using an SEO and content platform that delivers recommendations, it’s possible that you’ll get a list of recommendations back that’s daunting and scattered. Prioritizing your recommendations will not only help you stay sane, it will also make sure that you focus on the most important items first. Whether you’re looking for a site-wide rankings boost, doling out simple tasks to other team members, or looking to focus on a specific group of content or keywords – you should be able to use your platform to sort and assign recommendations.

Start Your Day by Staying in the Loop

Depending on your level of experience and interaction with your organization’s SEO and content efforts – you may or may not dive directly into a platform first thing every morning. One thing I do to let me know just how quickly I need to log in, (can it wait til after I check emails or not?) and how deep I need to dive, is set up email alerts with some basic data that will give me an overall health check of my site and its content. A few things included in my daily notification list are: a traffic summary, top keyword activity, recommendations summary, and marketing channel performance overview.

Do Some Competitor Discovery

So you know about the competitors already in your market, and you’re probably doing some checking in on them. But what about the new brands that are starting to take traffic from you, or existing brands that may have shifted focus and are gaining your audience’s attention?

Keeping a regular eye out for who is starting to rank for your targeted keywords and looking at the corresponding content can help you catch and strategize against changes in traffic before you lose position and visits.

Polish up Older Content

One of the most frequently missed opportunities is reviewing your older content to see what could be polished up using new information, updated SEO practices, and current content to give it new life. Most of us have lots of potentially evergreen pages out there that could increase in rank with just a little time – often less time than creating entirely new content. We’re often focused on driving traffic to the latest campaign and features, so it’s easy to overlook or de-prioritize these supporting pages. Don’t overlook these opportunities already on your site – they can be great “bread and butter” places for your audiences to find you and may even open up new audiences with a bit of a refresh.

Annotate as You go

Adding new keywords? Annotate that. Make a bunch of changes to page structures or complete other recommendations? Annotate it. Your team just released a bunch of new content for a campaign? You got it – annotate! Why annotate, other than because I think it’s a fun word? Because it helps you tie actions to outcomes.

When you’re looking at rises and falls in ranks across groups of content and keywords, if you’ve been adding annotations to your analytics along the way as you complete tasks, you’ll have a much easier time figuring out cause and effect. Trust me, for every 20 seconds it takes you to annotate something, you’ll save 20 minutes trying to figure out why that spike in traffic happened.

When it comes to good SEO, it’s as much about managing your own process and priorities as it is about keeping up with Google’s changes, so hopefully some of these tips are fresh ideas to try or just good reminders of best practices.

Source – SearchEngineJournal.com
November 30, 2015
4 tips for growing your email list with opt-in
By using these four tips in conjunction with the formula for acquisition conversion rate, email marketers can significantly boost opt-in frequency for subscriber lists.

Earlier this month, I led a webinar for the Specialized Information Publishers Association (SIPA). One of topics we discussed was boosting opt-in email list growth. Here are some tips that you can use to acquire new subscribers, no matter what industry you’re in. The key metric we focused on is acquisition conversion rate.

Acquisition conversion rate

For most organizations, the corporate website is ground zero for email subscriber acquisition; this metric shows the percentage of new (not returning) website visitors that sign-up to be email subscribers.

Here’s how you calculate it:

Here are three scenarios:

As you can see, the conversion rate can have a dramatic impact on how many new names you add to your list each month. With my clients, I shoot for a conversion rate between 5 percent and 20 percent. Obviously the higher the better, but something in this range should be attainable for any website.

There are a few simple things you can do to increase this rate. These are some examples based on my work with clients.

1. Include the sign-up fields in the call-to-action

I’ve been able to boost email list growth by up to 450 percent, which is more than five times the sign-ups generated by the control, by embedding the sign-up directly in the call-to-action and removing the need for visitors to visit a separate page to fill out the sign-up fields.

ClickZ does a good job of this:

2. Embed larger sign-up forms in webpages

In the example below, we used a combination email sign-up and lead generation forms. It may look a little busy, but the boost in email sign-ups and leads generated was dramatic compared to the control where people had to click to another page to take these actions.

3. Place the email sign-up call-to-action above the fold

No matter what the primary goal of your website may be, the secondary goal should be to get an email address from every visitor. I’ve increased sign-ups by 30 percent or more just by moving the call-to-action above the fold.

Above the fold is prime real estate on a website; there are usually turf battles to get positioned here. But the value of an email subscriber is huge – it gives you the opportunity to reach out to that person and continue to communicate with them.

4. If you must have a dedicated sign-up page, keep it focused

Some organizations can’t or don’t want to embed the sign-up form with the call-to-action; that’s fine. There are still things you can do to boost performance.

In this client case study, the completion on this page went from 10 percent to 45 percent when we removed distractions and moved the sign-up fields above the fold.

You want to focus prospects on the task at hand. Here, the control page had standard website navigation as well as banner advertising.

When these elements are present, I typically see one of these scenarios:
1. Visitors are actively clicking on these other links and leaving the sign-up process without completing it. In instance, removing them usually boosts response dramatically, which is a win. And you can go back to including them on the thank you page after sign-up in complete.
2. Visitors aren’t actively clicking on these other links and are completing the sign-up process. Usually when this happens, no one is clicking on these links anyway – so they are just cluttering up the page. Again, it makes sense to remove them.
No matter which scenario exists, the answer is to remove these extraneous links.

The other thing that we did here was we moved the fields up above the fold. Eliminating the visitor hunt for fields will also contribute to an increase in conversion rates.

Try these with your website and let me know how it goes!

Until next time,
Jeanne

Source – ClickZ.com
November 30, 2015
Kids’ Presents – How to Please Kids and Their Parents

When you give a child a present, there’s a little more going on behind the scenes than when you give an adult a present.

With a child, you have to think about the things they enjoy and what a suitable budget is – just as you do for an adult. But where things get more confusing is in the consideration of whether the gift is suitable or not. Is it a good influence? Will they choke on it??

Then there’s the matter of whether or not it’s going to frustrate the parents. In many cases, the gift you give the children is going to be a gift you give the parents in a sense. If you’re getting a present for a 3 year old son or daughter of one of your friends, they likely won’t remember whether you gave them something or not – but the parents will.

With all that in mind, it’s actually just as important that your gift be appreciated by the parents as it is that it be appreciated by the child! So how can you give a gift that will please both parties?

Things Not to Give

A good place to start perhaps would be with all the things that you shouldn’t get for a child unless you want to quickly lose friends.

Some pointers on things not to buy:

Annoying gifts: Try to avoid giving children gifts that are very noisy or very messy. The objective is to give the parents something they can let their child play with quietly. This buys them some respite from parenting, which they’ll greatly appreciate! If you gave the child a bugle horn though, then it’s not going to be very well received.

Dangerous gifts: This goes without saying but it’s still a mistake some people make. Avoid any obviouslydangerous gifts such as airsoft guns (I got given one of these as a kid!) or anything sharp. Likewise though, think about the inventive ways that a child can turn a safe toy into a dangerous one. Is it big enough that they won’t swallow it?

Bad influences: You also want to avoid getting gifts that might be seen as a bad influence. That means films, TV shows or computer games that aren’t age appropriate for instance. Likewise, some parents might also prefer to avoid anything that they consider ‘trashy’. If the media appears to be aimed at the lowest demographic with puerile humor and shallow plots, then some parents won’t like it. It’s always worth actually watching DVDs before giving them – YouTube can offer a good preview.

Practical Gifts

If the child is very young, then the parents will be likely to appreciate practical gifts. For instance, new parents will often say that they appreciate getting nappies. Likewise, as the kids get older they might enjoy educational toys or things like kid-friendly furniture.

Do think carefully about this though and don’t be afraid to ask if you’re uncertain – it’s easy otherwise to get this sort of thing wrong.

For example, many new-born children will receive so many clothes that they can never wear all of them before they grow up! Another issue here is the size of the clothes – it’s always better to get clothes that are too big that the child will grow into, rather than getting clothes that will only fit for a week!

Gifts for Older Children

For older children, you can start looking at more interesting gifts.

What’s important here is to consider the interests and hobbies of the child, as well as their general sensibilities. Try to avoid buying ‘generic’ gifts just because they’re aimed at children. For example, if you buy the child a Transformers comic and they only like Ben 10, then it won’t go down well. Just because they’re children, you still need to spend the time to get to know them!

Then again, this is where the discrepancy comes in between what the children enjoy and what the parents deem suitable. If the kid loves Grand Theft Auto then you may want to check before getting them the latest game. The same for anything else potentially violent and/or offensive.

In fact, video games themselves can be divisive: sometimes they’re a great distraction that will give parents peace and quiet. But other parents worry about the effect that video games can have on their children’s health.

Again, the safest bet is often to check – though if you can find something that’s good for the child or that helps them to learn, this will almost always be a safe choice from the perspective of the parents. Ideally, look for something that is fun but that also offers some health or educational benefit. Sports are great for this (find out what team the child supports), as are books.

Source – GiftsAndSpecialOccasions.com

November 27, 2015
Enhance Your WordPress Site with JetPack
Plugins are designed to enhance the many features of WordPress, but only one, JetPack, is developed by Automattic, the makers of WordPress.

JetPack is a free plugin originally intended for sites running on the hosted WordPress.com platform. Later, it was released for the self-hosted WordPress.org CMS, which millions of businesses use.

JetPack has been around for more than three years. Recently updated to version 3.8, it provides a suite of tools that can be essential for marketing your local business or promoting your blog’s content.

New Features

Two new features were added to version 3.8, to help manage multiple sites as well as increase security protection for brute force attacks. Site management delivers a new interface that allows you to update plugins and make posts to all of a user’s WordPress sites that are running the JetPack plugin.

JetPack now also provides the ability to block brute force attacks, which utilize many servers to gain access to your site. Now, it will monitor and block excessive login attempts, to prevent unauthorized access. (For other ways to secure your WordPress site, read the article “How to Keep Your WordPress Site Safe from Hackers.”)

Sharing Tools

JetPack uses two tools, Publicize and Sharing, to increase social networking visibility for your site. Publicize provides an interface to connect your site to the major social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, as well as others like Tumblr, Google Plus, and Pinterest.

After connecting the plugin to your networks, you will see a new menu above the “Publish” button where you can choose the platforms on which to share a new post and what the custom message should be.

Similarly, “Sharing” is another add-on that provides buttons, enabling readers to share your content on their networks. The icons are clean and simple but can be overridden to use those that fit best with your site.

Images and Galleries

Displaying images on a WordPress site is easy, but displaying images full-screen in a gallery with a lightbox usually requires two or three plugins.

JetPack adds a new way to display links with “Carousel,” which shows images in a stunning full- screen photo browser. It can be configured to display a white or black background, to match your site’s overall look and feel and can display metadata (Exif) of the photo. Carousel has been so useful that a plugin containing only this feature was created, for users who don’t want any of JetPack’s other features.

JetPack also updates the default gallery display with the “Tiled Galleries” add-on, in three new styles: circular grid, square grid, or rectangular-tiled mosaic. The mosaic function takes your photos and automatically sizes them to fit in a horizontal layout on your site.

Related Posts

Jetpack also provides an easy-to-use related post function that utilizes WordPress.com’s cloud computing to analyze and process your posts while adding no additional load to your server.

Related posts are a useful way to increase visibility to older blog or news posts. It provides visual templates that allow text only or text with images.

Site Stats

Google Analytics is the tool to use if you are serious about site analytics. If you are looking for easy to read, concise information about your site’s most visited posts and pages, then JetPack’s Site Stats should meet your requirements.

The Site Search dashboard provides a day-by-day view of traffic, along with a listing of all top posts and top searches, a stat that lets you know what keyword searches drive traffic to your website. Site Stats can also provide a display of visits by country.

Site Stats doesn’t negate the use of Google Analytics or other tracking metric services but can serve as a heads-up display in the WordPress dashboard, indicating your site’s performance.

Sidebar Functionality

Thousands of plugins add functionality to the sidebar of your site, but JetPack has pulled together some of the standard widgets used by most people.

Among them are a selection of social network widgets, to show Facebook and Twitter streams. Others allow the addition of images, photo galleries, or even a list of recent posts, with formatting options.

Another problem many people face with sidebars is the ability to show or hide specific widgets on different pages. JetPack comes packaged with a widget visibility tool that allows you to specify which pages or sections of your site to display a particular widget.

Installing the JetPack Plugin

To install JetPack, you will first need a WordPress.com login. If you already have a WordPress.com blog, you can use that login. If not, go the WordPress.com sign-up pageto create one.

The simplest way to install Jetpack is via your site’s Plugin section. Follow these instructions to install and connect Jetpack:
1. Click on the “Plugins” tab in the left panel, and then click “Add New”;
2. Search for “Jetpack,” and the latest version will appear at the top of the list of results;
3. Install it by clicking the “Install Now” link;
4. When installation finishes, click “Activate Plugin”;
5. Click the green button on the top right that says “Connect to WordPress.com”;
6. Log in with your WordPress.com account (or create one) and click “Authorize Jetpack.”
You can see a video of the installation process here:

The plugin is designed to be load-time efficient and may help improve site performance compared to using multiple plugins to achieve the same results.

JetPack provides a unique suite of tools for marketers and bloggers to enhance their sites as well as tools that make managing WordPress easier.

Source – Webmarketingtoday.com
November 27, 2015
How to Write High Quality Clickable Ads (No Matter What Network You are On)
The whole PPC experience is frustrating. You want to throw your coffee mug against the wall, but that type of behavior is frowned upon in your co-working space.

Your cost per click is too high to ever be profitable–certainly much higher than you were led to believe it would be. You wonder where all these mysterious five cent clicks you read about in industry blogs have gone.

This high cost per click is a real business problem. To understand why the cost is so high, you review your impression share report and a new problem is brought to light: Your ads hardly even show.

You took the time to read blogs about writing great ads, spent valuable hours carefully crafting your campaigns, and even made high quality individualized landing pages. Yet the price per click climbs every day. You wish there was something you could do about it, and there is.

You just need to align your advertising strategy differently.

You Have Not Aligned Yourself With the Ad Networks

The prevailing wisdom is that you need to align yourself with the customer and optimize your account for conversions, and to an extent that is certainly true. Without conversions, it makes no business sense to even run PPC campaigns.

However, you also need to align yourself with the networks you advertise on.

The way it works is that (generally) the ad networks only make money when someone clicks on their ads. Hence, ad networks like AdWords and Facebook have introduced financial incentives to entice advertisers to make better and more clickable ads.

They reward advertisers who have clickable ads in an inverse relationship. The higher the click-through rate of the ad the lower the cost per click to the advertiser. The ad networks also make it their business to discontinue showing ads that do not have high enough click-through rates.

If you want to lower your cost per click, you need to increase the quality and click-through rate of your ads.

Optimize for Both the Ad Networks and Your Potential Customers

The most famous (and first) incentive for clickable ads is Google and theirquality score.

To understand why quality score evolved this way, we need to hop in our Delorean time machine for a moment and go back to the year 2000. It was the year that Britney Spears ruled the airwaves with her classic hit “Oops I did it Again” and also the year when Google started its PPC advertising platform.

Back then, the gist of online advertising was the advertiser who could pay the most would be shown (they also showed ads on a CPM basis only). (This is basically how TV advertising still works.) However, in an online environment this led to a poor advertising experience for all involved:
- The user saw ads that were not relevant to them.
- The advertiser had visitors to their site who were not all that interested in their product or service.
- Google had users and advertisers who were unhappy with their results of using the search engine.
Google realized they needed to change-up the game to make all parties happy.

In 2005, they introduced the concept of quality score and it changed everything. Quality score was how relevant the ad was to the search, and as a proxy to tell this relevance Google heavily relied on click-through rate. What Google recognized is that each party involved in online advertising has a complementary goal:
- The user wants to be shown results which are most relevant to their search, even if those results include relevant ads.
- The advertiser only wants clicks of visitors to their site who are interested in their product or service.
- Google wants users and advertisers who are satisfied with their search experience.
Google began using quality score as an incentive for high quality, clickable ads and their profits began to soar—from $1.88 Billion in 2004 to $37.91 Billion in 2013.

The formula of click-through rate and ad relevance was a success and as other networks came into being, they also provided financial incentives for highly clickable and relevant ads as well.

Below you will find three ways to create ads that increase your click-through rate, decrease your cost per click and get your ad campaign to produce the return on ad spend that you know it can!

How to Write High-Quality Clickable Ads (No Matter What Network You are On)

1. Split Test Your Ads

The best way to find out what ads garner the highest click-through rate is to actually to test it in the real world. No amount of guesswork can beat real world data. Split testing allows you to get that real world data.

Split testing your ad means you test one variable across two ads for a specific outcome. You do this scientifically until you get a statistically significant result—usually a 95% confidence interval. Variables can include different headlines, images, ad copy, offers, and even different display URLs. Outcomes can include conversion rates, click-through rates, and overall conversions. For the purpose of aligning yourself with the ad network, you are going to begin by testing for click through rate.

Many new to PPC start with small variables like changing where a comma is placed and then get frustrated when the split test never completes to a reasonable confidence interval. I recommend starting with big variables like a different headline or my favorite a different value proposition.

Once you have decided what you would like to test, let it run with no interference until the tests complete. There are some great testing tools to work with – I highly recommend AdAlysis for AdWords and here is a great article about split testing your ads in Facebook.

This is not a one-time process—as you test you will find winning ads, and when you do it is time to immediately test them against a new challenger. Your goal is to always have your click through rate climbing.

2. Recognize Where the User is at in the Buying Cycle

Users want particular offers and respond to ads differently depending on where they are at in the buying cycle. If you want to achieve a high click through rate on your ads you need to understand where the customer is at in the buying cycle and meet them there.

Advertisers who aggressively go for the immediate sale when the user is simply looking for information are going to have a much lower click-through rate, because although you may have the product or service the user is looking for – it is not what they are looking for at that moment.

In AdWords and Bing, a user can be placed in a different stage in the buying cycle based on their searches. Take the search query mp3 player reviewsversus buy an mp3 player.

Though they are similar search queries, understanding and meeting the user where they are at in the buying cycle will help optimize your click through rate. For the search query mp3 player reviews you may want to offer a whitepaper about the different capabilities of mp3 players in exchange for the users email, whereas with buy an mp3 player you might want to highlight a sale to pique the user’s interest and receive those clicks.

In places like Facebook where you don’t get search queries, you have to use context clues based on demographics and psychographics to understand where a user is at in the buying cycle. For example, we run a Facebook ad campaign for an annuity company (which is a type of retirement plan). We offer different eBooks based on the age of the user because as they get closer to retirement years (demographics) they have different concerns which these specific eBooks addresses.

3. Be as Specific as Possible

Users type in specific searches, and the more your ad precisely matches those specific searches the higher your click-through rate will be. This is pretty obvious from the perspective of the user why specificity matters.

As an example, let’s say you have a broken fence, so you type in fix my fenceas your search query.

You are shown a variety of ads, some of which are general to repair work. As an example of general repair work this ad appears:

While you probably are looking for someone who is on time and reliable, your specific problem is your fence. It looks like it is one of the things that they do, but is not the main service and for that reason not specific enough. Compare that general ad to the specificity of the ad below:

That matches it exactly—why would you not click on it and click the more general ad? You can see how it is matches your search query almost exactly and as such will probably have the highest click through rate.

On Facebook, this means targeting your ads as tightly as possible based on (you guessed it!) psychographics and demographics. You can utilize tactics like:
- Mentioning the city you are advertising in. Copy such as Looking for a wedding cake in Philadelphia? is much more specific than Looking for a wedding cake?
- Utilizing interests. If you are selling baseball hats you could have your ads be specific to Red Sox fans by having only having images of the models in Red Sox gear.
- Utilizing age-appropriate imagery. You can segment your ads by age and have the images match that. For example, those ads targeted towards people in their 20’s could have images of people in their 20’s so that they can relate and the same goes for people in their 30’s, 40’s and 50’s
What tips do you have for crafting high-quality clickable ads?

Source – SearchEngineJournal.com
November 26, 2015
Storytelling in Marketing: An Interview With Warren Whitlock
At Pubcon 2015 in Las Vegas, I had the opportunity to speak with Warren Whitlock, of LimitlessInfluence.com, about storytelling in marketing.

You can’t just market with data alone. You need to use that data to tell a story. A story is what sparks emotion in people and gets them the share it, link to it, and so on.

In the video below, Warren explains how businesses can better incorporate storytelling into their content marketing:

Here are some key takeaways from the video:
- Warren starts off by saying keywords matter still matter, but they should not come before telling a good story.
- Optimization is taking a good story and making sure it fits the medium in which its being published.
- Old school of though used to be to to fulfill a word count while incorporating X-amount of phrases. It’s still easy for SEOs to get carried away with this.
- Search engines ultimately want to present the best information — content that tells the best story while giving searchers what they need tends to rank well.
- Warren offers up a simple strategy for brands: get down to the essence of what the brand needs to tell, tell it in the right away, optimize it for search, see what ends up boosting your KPIs, then create more of that content.
- The best thing to come out of the past 10 years in SEO, Warren says, are the tools available today to facilitate easier content creation.
- Warren gives Amazon as an example a site that is perfectly well optimized. This is particularly notable since 40% of e-commerce searches start on the e-commerce site itself. Warren also commends Amazon for diversifying its traffic through things like its app. It’s now gotten to the point where companies are optimizing for Amazon as well as optimizing for Google.
Please visit SEJ’s YouTube page for more video interviews.

Soource – SearchEngineJournal.com
November 26, 2015
Amazon’s first physical bookstore: offline’s death has been exaggerated

Amazon’s first brick-and-mortar book outlet shows that physical stores still play a significant role in the customer purchase journey on the rise of online shopping.

This month Amazon opened its first physical bookstore in Seattle’s University Village neighborhood.

Many laughed at this move because it looks ironic for an online retailer to establish a brick-and-mortar book outlet, especially when Barnes & Noble continues closing its stores nationwide.

However, it should be noted that having a physical presence can allow a digital brand to own the entire customer journey from research to purchase.

“Amazon’s bookstore plan is a targeted strategy that is probably as much about PR as it is about selling books. Rumors of offline’s death have been greatly exaggerated. We have many clients who use a combination of online and offline marketing, such as physical stores to extend or complement their efforts, with great success.” says David Rodnitzky, chief executive (CEO) of digital marketing company 3Q Digital.

“Old-school physical locations – even with their high costs – still resonate with consumers,” he adds.

The importance of data

The wealth of data available to Amazon can help the retailer to maximise its impact in a physcial location. For example, it will have a good idea of the kinds of books that are popular in Seattle.

Ecommerce expert Linda Bustos explains:

“Amazon is a bit like Uber. It’s really a data company that happens to sell things. Like Uber is a data company that happens to involve driving folks places. It has enough reliable data to ensure its physical store’s assortment is optimal to the city and location.

“Amazon has the ability to use all its own digital assets and features in the physical store, something Borders (RIP) couldn’t do, Barnes and Noble can’t do that either, and smaller independents have no chance to match. If the experience is enjoyable, it will attract bodies and wallets, and it’s experience that’s really the missing piece in physical retail today.”

A great shopping experience involves online and offline

In 2011, the second-largest U.S. bookstore chain Borders Group filed bankruptcy.

Many factors led to the loss of Borders: one was that the company had too many stores (around 659 stores at the time); and the second reason was that consumers were increasingly downloading e-books or having physical books mailed to them.

But Amazon is not opening thousands of retail locations to replicate Borders’s failed megastore business.

Rather, the bookstore is an extension of Amazon.com: online customer reviews are placed near relevant books in the store; the books are placed cover-out – the same way they are displayed online – rather than the traditional spine-out; and there are even stations for Kindle e-readers!

Amazon is looking to close the loop with offline sales because online shopping is gaining popularity, but the majority of retail sales are still taking place in-store.

This year, a mere 7.2 percent of U.S. retail sales are occurring online, according to eMarketer. AndCoupon’s October report reveals that more than 70 percent of 2,000 millennials prefer in store for household goods, beauty and personal care items.

Apple has built its unique retail environment – Apple Store – through the integration of the product, retail, and customer experience. So Amazon is looking to bring online shopping to life via a similar strategy.

“Amazon has done a great job in making money from every single point of its value chain. More than 90 percent of sales are occurring offline. So if Amazon only does online business, it can get at most 10 percent of the market,” says James Green, CEO of technology company Magnetic.

“Apple Store creates an irresistible customer experience. [By the same token,] the bookstore will be a great ad for Amazon. Even if someone decides to just buy online, chances are they’ll buy on Amazon.com instead of other websites,” he adds.

Look beyond Amazon

Amazon is not the only e-commerce company that has offline locations. In July of this year, menswear e-tailer Bonobos opened a showroom in Manhattan, where consumers cannot walk out with any merchandise but they can place an order and have it shipped for free.

Back in 2013, eyewear e-commerce pioneer Warby Parker made its first foray into the world of brick and mortar with a store in Soho. The company is planning to open more stores this year. Also, online shoe retailers JustFab.com and Birchbox have opened physical stores.

“Many of our clients with huge e-commerce businesses are investing in a ‘human connection.’ As Zappos has famously said, they love consumers to call them since someone that calls them for any reason has a lifetime value six times greater than someone that doesn’t. We’re seeing major investments in both telesales and in-store experiences from e-commerce businesses,” says Pete Christothoulou, CEO of mobile advertising analytics company Marchex.

From a data perspective, the landscape for tracking offline has greatly improved. Many companies now offer solutions to measure the impact of offline behavior, including attribution modeling tech companies Convertro (acquired by AOL) and Adometry (acquired by Google).

By opening physical stores, companies can collect conversion data and more email addresses that have become a golden key to connect online and offline.

“In Amazon’s case, besides the obvious consumer benefit of not feeling guilty over ‘web-rooming’ first, the company gets to collect valuable retail behavioral data which will likely fuel and inform future Amazon.com mobile shopper services,” says Phil Barrett, senior vice president of Purch.

Would this work for other online retailers?

While there are advantages in having a physcal location, such as offering click and collect or providing a more rounded shopping experience, the costs of maintaining stores and staff are likely to be prohibitive for most.

As Linda Bustos explains, “retail experiences like this will only benefit online pureplays if they carry exclusive merchandise ( think Warby Parker) or can create a “destination” experience that uses digital in the right way, as a value propostion over other stores.”

While Amazon has deep enough pockes to absorb losses on physical shops other pureplays would not be able to. Also, if they are making profits as an online retailer, why take the risk?

Linda cites the example of Target:

“Expansion is always risky – look at Target’s entry into Canada. Canadians expressed high demand for Target, but never shopped at their physical stores. (Arguably this is due to poor location, but again, this may all come down to using the wrong/insufficient data to make a decision).”

A few thoughts

Consumers interact with a brand not only on digital devices, but also offline: in-store, over-the-phone or on TV. Leading brands like Amazon and Apple are getting rid of siloes that separate their e-commerce and in-store sales, becoming more focused on an integrated omnichannel experience.

I think, though we are likely to see other online brands experiment with stores as Amazon has done, most online brands will look for other way to have a physical presence, such as temporary pop-up stores, or offering services like click and collect.

Source – ClickZ.com

November 24, 2015
What Twitter marketers can learn from JetBlue, Emirates and Royal Dutch Airlines
I’ve been learning the ropes of social media marketing lately. A few days ago, my friend Brian Honigman, a marketer and social media analytics instructor at New York University, gave me access to his Socialbakers account.

When I was playing around with this analytics platform, I found that three major airlines – JetBlue, Emirates and Royal Dutch Airlines (KLM) – are leading brands in their own right on Twitter. All of them have a strong presence on the platform and work hard to develop high quality campaigns for Twitter.

But there are nuances in their Twitter marketing strategies. For example, KLM is very focused on customer service on Twitter, while JetBlue and Emirates put more effort into branding.

Below is my analysis on their Twitter marketing techniques over the past three months. Hope it can help your Twitter account take off.

KLM

KLM has around 1.96 million followers. On average, it gains 31,000 followers per month and tweets 12 posts per day.

The airline remains authentic on Twitter. Like other airlines, KLM posts information around pricing, flight details and destinations in the form of images, videos and text-based tweets.

Unlike its peers, KLM constantly promotes its company blog with the hashtag #KLMblog. This is a smart plan because in doing so, KLM is not only able to drive tons of traffic back to the blog, but also tell unique stories around the brand and nurture a relationship with travelers.

Aside from blog marketing, KLM uses Twitter mainly for customer service. As the airline’s cover photo indicates, KLM aims to answer every customer request within 17 minutes and update every five minutes! It even includes the hashtag #happytohelp in its bio line.

KLM has a response rate of 67 percent, according to Socialbakers, meaning that the airline is responsive compared to others. KLM receives an average of 1,000 mentions per day, most of which could be genuine queries that need to be investigated.

JetBlue

JetBlue has the most followers (1,97 million), followed by KLM and Emirates. On average, JetBlue gains 4,000 followers per month and posts an average of four tweets per day.

Different from KLM’s blog marketing strategy, JetBlue seems to be more focused on offers, ongoing events and partnerships with high-profile brands. For example, its most engaging tweet over the past 30 days taps into NYC Marathon.

JetBlue also creates specific content for its business partners like American football team New York Jets, and gives them @mentions in its tweets.

When it comes to content formats, JetBlue has a knack for rich media such as videos and GIFs. Lately, the airline has been circulating funny yet thought-provoking GIFs, memes and videos around its 16-minute film “HumanKinda” on Twitter. This film is JetBlue’s first foray into long-form content.

Since JetBlue doesn’t use blog marketing, the airline occasionally creates original hashtags to give Twitter users useful information. For example, on Fridays, it introduces a place to go with the hashtag #DestinationFriday.

JetBlue also rewards its followers on Twitter to find even more new followers.

Like KLM, JetBlue doesn’t have a separate Twitter account to take care of consumer requests. With a response rate of 62 percent, JetBlue is less responsive than KLM on Twitter and has some room for improvement in terms of customer service.

Emirates

Compared to KLM and JetBlue, Emirates has fewest followers (590,000) and the airline only posts an average of one tweet per day.

However, on average, the airline gains more than 23,000 followers per month, according to Socialbakers!

While Emirates doesn’t post as often as KLM and JetBlue, why are the airline’s Twitter followers growing so rapidly? This huge gain can be partly attributed to unique services, high quality visual content as well as global sponsorship deals, particularly those involving famous soccer clubs.

For example, the airline posted a #HelloJetman tweet with a link back to an original video featuring two intrepid “jetmen” flying in carefully choreographed formation with a huge Emirates’ luxury A380. This tweet received 396 favorites and 289 retweets.

Meanwhile, it promoted a special edition aircraft model to celebrate its long-standing partnership with Premier League football team Arsenal. This tweet has been retweeted for 3.3 thousand times, showing that both Emirates travelers and Arsenal fans love this idea.

Emirates also offers Twitter exclusive promotions to reward its followers.

On average, Emirates has around 1,300 mentions per day, but its response rate is zero. This is because Emirates has a separate customer service account @EmiratesSupport to handle consumer requests.

Major takeaways

Over the past three months, JetBlue topped Twitter lists with the most followers, while KLM saw the most growth.

The three airlines have different purposes on Twitter. KLM uses the platform as a customer service tool, while Emirates leverages Twitter for branding. In comparison, JetBlue takes a mixed approach for both customer service and branding purposes.

Although KLM, JetBlue and Emirates all talk about pricing, flight details and destinations on Twitter, they execute social marketing in different ways. KLM specializes in blog marketing.

JetBlue has done a great job in rich media, while Emirates smartly utilizes partnerships and offers Twitter exclusive rewards to attract more Twitter users.

The most important Twitter marketing strategies one can learn from the above three airlines include:
- Figure out your goal of Twitter marketing and then produce content around that goal.
- Go multimedia with a focus on still images, GIFs and video content.
- Post more often to generate more interactions, though don’t overdo it. Remember, not everyone can become Emirates.
- Create Twitter exclusive promotions to find more followers.
- Include trending hashtags and mention other brands in tweets.
- Create original hashtags and tell a story on Twitter in sequence with those hashtags, especially when you don’t have a blog.
- Partnerships with other brands help drive Twitter engagement.
Source – ClickZ.com
November 24, 2015
How to Make Money Online: The Basics
Let’s say you’re a newbie to the world of online sales and are looking to make money online, but you’re starting with a small startup budget. With the blinding wealth of information available for new business owners, knowing how to spend your limited funds can be a bit intimidating.

Here is a five-step checklist to help get you started and guide you toward success.

1. Spend time getting feedback on what you’re selling before launching.

Don’t rely on affirmation from friends and family to validate that you have a unique and salable product or service. Chances are, these people are emotionally attached to you, and they’re more likely to think every idea you share is the greatest thing since Nutella. Getting feedback from people who are emotionally attached to you is a “disaster from the start,” says Adam Callinan, founder of BottleKeeper.

Get market validation from potential customers who aren’t in your social circle. Some entrepreneurs use the “will they pull out their wallet” test before investing money in a business. Callinan, who’d come up with a prototype for an individual beer bottle cooler, ran a crowdfunding campaign on Fundable to gauge pre-orders for his product. His campaign raised nearly $14,000, 280 percent of his $5,000 goal.

Besides Fundable, there are a number of crowdfunding platforms to choose from including Kickstarter, Indiegogo and Rockethub.

Other ways to get people’s feedback, says Sujan Patel, vice-president of Marketing at When I Work, is using customer insight survey tools, such as Qualaroo and Client Heartbeat. If you’re just starting out, surveys are a chance to find out what the customer is hoping the product/service will solve or do for him or her. If you’re already in business, surveys can ask how the customer found out about the product or service, whether the customer is willing to be a return customer and why.

Or if you’re in a job in the industry you plan on starting a business in,get feedback from the people at your job — your manager and clients — says Steve Tobak, founder of Invisor Consulting.

2. Have a website.

You must have a website, says Joel Widmer, founder of Fluxe Digital Marketing. Not only for the obvious — to have something to refer customers back to — but having a website builds your brand’s digital footprint. Keep your site simple and copy-driven with opportunities for email captures on every page.

Three easy steps to having your own website to sell products without spending a lot of cash are:
- Select a content management system (CMS), such as WordPress, which is popular for its user friendliness and is free.
- Register a domain name and subscribe to a hosting service, such as GoDaddy or Bluehost.
- Customize your CMS with ecommerce-enabling plugins and themes. WooCommerce offers free ecommerce themes for WordPress, such as Storefront. Also, WP eCommerce andMarketPress are additional free ecommerce plugin options.
- Or for anyone setting up an e-commerce site, both Shopify andSquarespace are easy e-commerce platforms that allow you to build an e-commerce site yourself.
3. Know your competition and customers.

Study up on both competitor and complementary brands (i.e. if you are selling a fire alarm, then look for “house safety” websites). Widmer says your customers will be hanging out on websites for both competitor and complementary brands. He recommends using search tools such asSimilarWeb and Google’s related-search results (located at the bottom of every Google search) to see what sites your prospective customer may be visiting.

Other free research tools to get to know your market, suggests Brandon Schaefer, CEO of MyVirtualSalesForce, are LinkedIn (to see who competitor brands are connecting with and what types of updates they’re posting), Google Alerts (for brand mentions and keywords) andGoogle Trends.

4. Create an action plan for sales and marketing.

To earn your first million in sales, says Patel, work backwards and put a number on what it takes in monthly revenue to get to a million your first year — meaning how many units, subscriptions or services must be sold. Create benchmarks to reach. Even if you don’t reach them, you have a blueprint.

One way to reach your goal is to figure out which marketing avenues to leverage. Given the wealth of social-media possibilities, start with one or two social-media outlets where you know your audience is. In general, for new products the best channels are Facebook and Pinterest, says Widmer. For expertise and services, try LinkedIn.

Also, two effective and free marketing strategies are blogging on your own site and guest blogging on complementary sites. This strategy helps build content and a digital footprint for your brand, says Widmer. For guidance on what hot topics to blog about, Buzzsumo, a free web service, allows you to input any domain or topic and get a list of the 10 most popular related posts at the moment. It can also inform you of what popular sites to hit up for guest blogging.

Should you guest blog, use the opportunity to lead users back to your site and capture emails, says Widmer. One way to do so is to use a “call to action” — where you offer the reader something of value, such as a free how-to eBook or a must-have checklist — that the user can get or download by going back to your website and providing an email address.

Some other marketing tools? The free KingSumo app allows you to capture email subscribers through giveaways; Facebook Ads start at $1; and the e-newsletter tool MailChimp has a free option and is drag-and-drop easy.

5. Do as much yourself as you can.

The DIY mentality will usually save you money if your budget is limited. Also, it allows you to control the process and brand, explains Callinan, who built his ecommerce site from scratch by talking to others who’d already done ecommerce sites successfully. Don’t farm out jobs you can do yourself, especially in the beginning.

If you need on-demand expertise from entrepreneurs with a track record, try Clarity, says Widmer. The service allows the user to get specific, consultant-level advice for a fee.

All startups are a gamble — but as Patel advises, whose company will hit $10 million in revenue this year, “Hone in on where your strengths are and double down.”

Source – Entrepreneur.com
November 23, 2015
How to Use Quizzes to Boost Your Marketing Strategy
As marketers, we try to get our hands on the most sustainable content that not only increases sales, but also gives us the competitive edge in the industry. The problem many of us face is figuring out which form of content is worth investing our time and money in that’s had the most success with other brands.
If you haven’t caught on to Buzzfeed yet, the solution to your problem might’vegone undetected. Using quizzes as a part of your marketing strategy is one of the most underrated types of content that every marketer should be trying, and we’d be lying if we didn’t tell how effective they really were.

It isn’t enough for us to just convince you to implement quizzes in your marketing strategy, so we’re going to show you exactly how to create an effective quiz, how to distribute it, and how to follow it with marketing automation.

After following this guide, you’ll come across several brands that we’ll be highlighting to give you an idea on how they used quizzes in their marketing strategy so that you can walk away with a little more insight.

Part I: Creating Your Quiz

Title Selection & Quiz Types

There’s more to a quiz than you might actually think. Did you know that 80% of readers decide whether something’s worth checking out or not based on its title? That means we’re going to have to make a pretty good first impression.

The very first step to creating a quiz would be coming up with the title for it. Once you’ve got that down, you’re going to want to figure out what type of quiz you want to make.

Let’s see what options we have available for us:

Choosing Your Title
- The “Actually” Title – Believe it or not, adding the word “actually” can turn a simple question into a challenge. Compare “How much do you know about the Golden State Warriors” against “How much do you actually know about the Golden State Warriors” and you’ll see what we mean. No one likes to back down from a challenge, right?
- “The Which (Blank) Are You?” Title – This one’s a classic. Due to our innate inquisitive nature, sometimes we just have to know which Marvel superhero we are before we die. It’s just one of those things we have to cross off our bucket list.
- The “Celebrity Personality” Title – This is your typical personality quiz with the substitution of celebrities to give it that added pizazz. Because of the use of celebrities, they’re more likely to get someone’s attention sheerly through being starstruck.
Choosing The Quiz Type
- The Personality Quiz – We like to hear good things about ourselves, so because of the “self-serving bias,” personality quizzes work so well. This type of quiz categorizes people into personalities that compliments them based on their answers. If you’re a brand that focuses on product sales, you could use a personality quiz to place individuals into categories with personalized product recommendations based on the answers they gave.
- The Knowledge Test – This is another commonly encountered type of quiz that you can find on social media. The knowledge test simply challenges anyone’s knowledge on a given subject. You could ask your audience how much they know about your brand, the products it offers, or any of today’s trending topics.
Crafting Quiz Questions

Now that you’ve got a general idea of what kind of quiz you want to create along with a title to go with it, it’s time to bring it to life by filling it up with questions!

Here are some things to keep in mind when formulating your questions:
- Infuse Personality into Your Quiz – Breathe some life into your quiz by injecting your personality into it. Approach your audience as if you were talking to them in person. Make your audience feel comfortable so that they’ll be more likely to opt-in later.
- Use Images for Your Questions – There’s nothing wrong with having text-only questions, but don’t be afraid to use images either. Using pictures keeps things interesting and relevant, it also makes your quiz feel more like a trivia game.
- Keep Things to a Minimum – People these days don’t have the longest attention spans, so we’re going to want to keep things simple and sweet. Aim between 6 to 10 questions for your quiz, in general this will only take your audience about 2-3 minutes to finish.
Designing A Lead Capture: Do’s and Don’t’s

After coming up with the questions to your quiz, it’s time to create a lead capture form. The purpose of a lead capture is to gather contact information so that you can grow an email list. You can then follow these leads up through marketing automation, which we’ll get into later. For now, here are some helpful do’s and don’t’s you should follow when creating your lead capture:

Do: Incentivize Your Lead Capture Form
Give your audience a reason to provide you with their contact information. Offer incentives like a free eBook or an entry to a free giveaway. Standard incentives include infrequent updates about your brand or a weekly newsletter. Find what works best to encourage your audience to join your mailing list.

Don’t: Ask For Information You Won’t Use
What’s the point in asking your audience for their phone number if you aren’t going to call them? Make sure you only ask for information that your brand will use; the most basic being a first and last name, and an email address. What’s worse than handing someone your number and not getting a call back the next morning? Yeesh.

Do: Be Honest About Your Marketing Strategy
It won’t always be clear to your audience that after you get their contact information, you’ll be contacting them. It’s a good rule of thumb to let your audience know that you’ll be getting in touch with them soon, so don’t be all hush-hush about your marketing strategy. Be honest with your audience. Give them a quick head’s up about what’s to come.
Source – Entrepreneur.com
November 23, 2015