Vine and Instagram are the happy marriage of video marketing and social media. It can be a challenge to create video content for these social media platforms because they have extremely short time limits. Almost all the typical formats of video marketing mentioned in our last video marketing post are possible on Vine and Instagram, but it does… More »
7 Fresh Ideas for New Video Content
As a follow up to the earlier 4 Tips for Video Marketing Success post, here are seven different video types to inspire some fresh approaches to your video marketing strategy. 1. “How to” and Tutorials How to’s, tutorials, tips and tricks, and product demonstrations are all very popular video formats because they help customers see… More »
Six Simple Rules for Your Next Website Design
These six basic but oh-so-often violated simple rules should guide the design for any website. Despite the simplicity of these, we’ve seen every single one of these rules being broken over the years — from different sets of navigation on each page of a website to a home page containing a book’s worth of content…. More »
4 Tips for Video Marketing Success
Video is such an important element of any marketing strategy because it gives marketers the power to show, instead of tell. If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words is a video worth? Here are 4 Tips to Successful Video Marketing: 1. Create Great Content The first step in successful video marketing… More »
New FDA Social Media Guidance Means Marketers Must Skip Twitter
The FDA recently released two draft guidance documents on the use of social media platforms by drug and device manufacturers. Guidance on the inclusion of risk and benefit information is one of the most important pieces to come out of the documents. The draft states that the character limitation on certain social media platforms does… More »
Gray Hat SEO: 4 Ways to Bend the Rules
As the color suggests, gray hat SEO is defined as white hat tactics plus a few tactics that bend the search engines’ rules a bit. Some SEO professionals believe that there is actually no such thing as 100% pure white hat SEO, but instead only gray and black hat. Gray hat SEO’s main benefit is… More »
White Hat vs. Black Hat SEO: 6 Ways to Keep Your Site from Being Blacklisted
First of all, SEO professionals do not wear colored hats. The term’s origins come from the Westerns, in which the hero wears a white hat and the villain wears a black hat. The term “hat” is used in both the SEO industry and hacker community. In the SEO industry hat refers to the types of… More »
Top 5 Web Design Trends for 2014
It’s that time of year. Prediction articles abound. Saw one set of web design predictions recently that I really liked because I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how web design is changing. Again. Here are my top five predictions for what I think are the most important web design trends, and how I see… More »
Twelve Days of Social Media: The ThinkResults Cheat Sheet
In the spirit of the upcoming holidays, we offer this gift to you. This is the cheat sheet we use when posting social media material to make sure we’ve covered everything in those 140-character to 2000-character posts. We thought it might be helpful for you as well. Also be sure to check out the social… More »
What’s Old is New Again: It’s All About Engagement (and Metrics)
“It’s time to stop thinking about new vs. old media, or traditional vs. online. The goal is engaging audiences wherever they are. Video is video. “ – Jay Fulcher, CEO, Ooyala This quote from my good friend, Jay Filcher, CEO of Ooyala, a video analytics platform to track viewer engagement with actionable metrics across all devices…. More »
Latest Facebook Redesign: Implications for Your Facebook Content Strategy
Constantly implementing new ideas and directions, the latest Facebook redesign was done with the intent of positioning Facebook as a personalized newspaper. These changes have important ramifications for your content strategy. With a strong emphasis on visual content, Facebook has made changes to create subfeeds within categories, as well as allowing larger images since, time… More »
Know Your Users: Simple Features Make the Difference
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 »