In web design, as in life, sometimes the smallest gesture can make the biggest impact. I was recently asked by a Board member of the nonprofit, Center for Domestic Peace to help them with their brand strategy. So first thing I did was look up their website (like 90% of people). What struck me the… More »
Facebook Content Strategy: Why Being Smart Is Better than Being Big
In contrast to the truly uninspired Pepsi Facebook strategy we reviewed last week, a small nonprofit here in the Bay Area, is doing something very interesting and increasing fan engagement at the same time. Probably not a coincidence! In the spirit of transparency, this nonprofit is a ThinkResults client but we did not come up… More »
Facebook Content Strategy: Why Pepsi Has It All Wrong
At the risk of getting slammed by the Pepsi brand team, I just have to point out that being a big brand and having a big budget doesn’t always equal smart. The Pepsi Facebook strategy is … lame. There’s no other way to describe it. Here are a few representative posts: Tuesday, January 15 Saturday,… More »
Is Content Marketing Replacing Traditional Advertising?
We certainly think so. This new infographic report from Marketo certainly paints a convincing picture. Content marketing budgets are growing; over the next 12 months, 51% of companies will increase the budget for these programs. So what are the top reasons companies using content marketing, according to Marketo? Risk mitigation Lead generation Lead nurturing Lead… More »
Google AdWords: The Zen Moment When Your Messaging Hits the Road
We’ve often joked that you know your messaging is tight when you can get it all into a Google Ad. Seriously. With a 25-character headline, and two 35-character description lines, crafting a great on-message Google Ad is a Zen-like exercise in branding elegance. This is often where we find out how “tight” the messaging is,… More »
Is Your Website Sticky or Slippery?
One of the nice things about having been working in the web world since the mid-90s (I came out of the science world so we were “playing” with the web before it became a big popular thing), I’ve seen a lot of trends and changes. Always interesting to see how things change. Five or so… More »
Three Easy Steps for Raising Your Google AdWords Quality Score
There is a lot of blather about creating quality Google AdWord campaigns and increasing your Quality Score, but it’s really a very simple formula: Target Keyword + Repeat Target Keyword in the Ad + Repeat Target Keyword on your Landing Page = High Quality Score So in the example we had in the prior blog… More »
Do You Know Your Quality Score and How It Affects Your Google AdWords?
Did you know that a poorly executed Google AdWords campaign will make your ads more expensive and less frequent? Yup. Google has a logical system to track and rate the quality of any advertisers campaign. It’s called a “Quality Score.” This makes perfect sense from a user experience perspective. Google is in the business of… More »
Quick Tips to Prepare for the March 30 Facebook Timeline Deadline
With the March 30 deadline looming for the Facebook transition to the new Timelime format for brands, there is much to learn. Here’s another great article on some of the key new features and how to best take advantage of them: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/7-new-facebook-changes-impacting-businesses/ I particularly like Tip #4 about the new application display format and how… More »
Facebook Timeline for Brands: Big Changes
We have gotten lots of questions over the last week about the new Timeline format for brands, which will become mandatory by March 31. It’s definitely a big change in the way your brand page looks. If you’ve already converted over to the new timeline format on your personal page, it will be a bit… More »
Pinterest Is Building a Social Circle of Love
Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! Pinterest is definitely a place of love. And I expect that will continue for some time as we are highly visual creatures. It’s in our nature. (BTW, I think, as an evolutionary biologist by training, this is one of the main reasons why Facebook is much more successful than Twitter and… More »
Google!
Sheesh, after over a dozen years of trying to decipher Google’s highly secret rubric for search, I think we’ve gotten darn good at it. We’ve catapulted brands to the top of the search heap and seen them maintain that position sometimes for YEARS after we finished our search engine optimization work for them. So we… More »
Social Media is Now Imperative for Business
Some of you may have missed the news last week but I think it’s really important and indicates a sea change in online marketing. If you’ve been ignoring social media for your business, it’s more than time to stop. Last week, Bing announced that it was tightly integrating Facebook, yes Facebook, likes into its search… More »
AMA’s “Cracking the Code”: Social Media Trends
In our previous entry, we discussed the recent American Marketing Association virtual event, Cracking the Code: Advanced Social Media Strategies. It is more apparent than ever that social media has become essential to any company that wants to remain on the cutting edge of marketing. The event’s presenters delved deep into the issues surrounding the… More »
Email metrics: Conversion Rates
Now that you know when to send your email messages, and how to read your delivery rates, open rates, read rates and click-through rates, let’s turn to the final and most important metric: the conversion rate. This is the one metric that is most commonly NOT measured, simply because it’s a little harder to do… More »
Email metrics: Click-through Rates
Ah, now we get to the meat of any email campaign … how many of your recipients took an action and clicked through on one or more of the links in your email message? This is really important to know. We send out email messages because we want to change behavior, right? We want people… More »
Email metrics: Delivery, Open and Read Rates
So you’ve sent out your first email newsletter and you want to know who “got” it. Well, that’s a tricky question. Your email provider should be able to provide you with some basic metrics on your message, including the delivery rate, open rate, and hopefully, the read rate. It’s good to know how many were… More »
Best Days to Send Email Messages
“What’s the best day for us to send our email message/newsletter?” I get this question A LOT from clients so I’ll share it here. I’ve always gone by a rule of thumb that messages should be sent on Tuesdays, Wednesdays or Thursdays, only because Mondays are generally hectic and Fridays are check-out days. For this… More »