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via Entrepreneur: Latest Online Marketing Articles

With over 1 billion websites on the World Wide Web today, it comes as no surprise that the domain name you may want to use is already owned by someone else. Luckily, in some cases, the current owner might be willing to part with it — for the right price.Acquiring a pre-owned domain can have a drastic impact on your SEO efforts, so it is important to approach such a purchase with caution. It is recommended that you do your due diligence — it’s not uncommon for a domain name to have changed hands many times, and just like buying a used car, it’s often difficult to get the full history.While examining the SERPs and scanning for any spammy links may be a good first step, it’s important to conduct a thorough assessment to ensure that the domain does not have a manual action penalty or warning from Google. There are many small issues that may not initially be cause for concern; however, in aggregate, these problems can seriously hamper your domain’s ability to rank.If you’ve bought, or are …

One of today’s marketing mantras is “brand loyalty is dead.” As always, the truth is more complicated than a slogan.While millennials and Generation Z are less likely to be loyal than previous generations — chiefly because there’s more transparency and information available to them — there’s a strong argument to be made that brands and retailers that get the customer experience right will see greater loyalty. Amazon is example number one of customer loyalty in a digital age.An extensive new report from Astound Commerce, based on a consumer survey of 1,000 US adults, takes a look at shopping patterns and explores the relationship of brands and retailers and how different channels impact purchase behavior, including physical stores. In many cases, these brands (apparel, appliances, electronics, sporting goods and others) have their own stores; in some cases they do not.I spoke to Lauren Freedman, SVP of digital strategy for Astound Commerce and the author of the report. Among the many f…

Here’s our recap of what happened in online marketing today, as reported on Marketing Land and other places across the web.From Marketing Land:How AI and image recognition are transforming social media marketing
Aug 30, 2017 by Rob Begg
Contributor Rob Begg discusses the explosion of visual content and how artificial intelligence and image recognition are making it easier for marketers to identify visuals in social media for better metrics and customer service.A martech wish list: Where marketing clouds need to go
Aug 30, 2017 by Jose Cebrian
Columnist Jose Cebrian takes a look at the platforms that are currently available for large-scale marketing, particularly for email, and highlights what they’re missing and what would make them shine.Report: Data-Driven Marketing — Push Forward or Fall Behind
Aug 30, 2017 by Digital Marketing Depot
It’s no secret that data-driven marketing is top of mind for brand and agency executives. But what is surprising — shocking, in fact — is how vital fi…

Ranking number one is easy!Of course, that is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek comment. After years of working in the search industry, I know that ranking number one in Google search is very, very difficult. But as for ranking number one on YouTube search? Maybe not so much.In fact, we’ve developed a process at Siege Media for achieving first-page rankings on YouTube search in less than a month. Using this process, we saw massive returns in terms of views for our ranking video:Today, I want to share this process with you and help you execute this strategy for your own videos.Because I feel that showing is always more effective than telling, I’ll use a running example throughout this post to help demonstrate the full process we’ve used.For my running example, I’m going to borrow from a recent situation in my life where I could not get my wireless Xbox One controller to sync to my Xbox One console. With “Game of Thrones” in full swing, this was an unacceptable problem, as I needed to be able …

If a picture is worth a thousand words, social media users are speaking volumes. People now share more than 3.25 billion photos a day on the world’s biggest social platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. In 2012, that number was less than 500 million.Data also shows that social media users gravitate toward visual content: Facebook users are 2.3 times more likely to engage with posts that have images than with those that don’t, and tweets with images receive 150 percent more retweets than those that are pure text.It’s safe to say that social media is now primarily a visual medium, and marketers can’t afford to look the other way.Tapping into the photo explosionDriving this visual explosion are two main factors. First, starting about a decade ago, the rise of mobile devices put a camera in everyone’s pocket. Suddenly, consumers no longer needed a desktop device to log into their social media accounts, and very quickly they began to engage on social media platforms on the …

For marketers, messaging technology options abound out there, from complete marketing clouds to channel-specific options, such as email service providers (ESP) or push platforms. They all were designed around a particular customer and set of use cases, and their current versions often reflect that starting point and the evolution of their customer strategy.In one aspect of my job, I get to look at the various platforms on the market to understand the different capabilities available for different use cases. My lens is generally focused on large-scale marketing, with an emphasis on email. With that in mind, I have created a wish list for platforms that view this as a target market. It should be noted that many platforms currently offer some of these features — but whether they’re full-fledged and practical or merely exist to help check a box on an RFP (request for proposal) is up for debate.Content:• Stop making us upload images and links separately and then repath them. It’s a waste o…

It’s no secret that data-driven marketing is top of mind for brand and agency executives. But what is surprising — shocking, in fact — is how vital first- and third-party information is for creative and execution strategies today.In this report from Oracle and Forbes Insights, you’ll learn that while 70 percent of senior marketing executives polled say data-driven marketing is a core element of their campaigns, there’s still a knowledge and execution gap around how to fully optimize data in marketing.Discover the difference between simply using data and effectively integrating your marketing and analytics strategies to drive core business KPIs. Visit Digital Marketing Depot to download “Data-Driven Marketing — Push Forward or Fall Behind.”

via Marketing Land

WPP’s GroupM, the world’s biggest media buyer, announced new, heightened standards for ad viewability last week and is now sharing more details.The move highlights the influence of major advertisers like Unilever (one of GroupM’s key clients), Procter & Gamble and others who’ve been complaining loudly about digital advertising standards and transparency of their agencies. It also underscores changing content consumption habits, with more time spent swiping or scrolling through mobile feeds.A major concern when viewability standards were first being considered was ads being served “below the fold” on desktop. Today, it’s the speed with which users fly past in-feed ads on their phones, as well as questions of viewer intentions with autoplay video ads.In 2014, GroupM established that 100 percent of a display ad’s pixels must be in view, but there was no time limit placed on the viewability. In response to the prominence of in-feed ads and mobile scrolling behavior, GroupM is now requ…

In what is sure to be a model for other publishers, last week Google and Vogue magazine announced a partnership that offers “behind the scenes” audio content from selected Vogue magazine interviews. Most of these are monologues from the writers about their subjects.By asking Google Home to “talk to Vogue” (one of several ways to invoke the content), users hear a brief introduction and then a menu of choices, which in this case includes five articles from the September issue on Jennifer Lawrence, Oprah Winfrey, Nicole Kidman, Serena Williams and Megyn Kelly.There’s a corresponding indicator in the print magazine about which articles offer Google Home companion “behind the scenes” audio content. Each piece is split into shorter and longer segments. The speaker in each case is the author of the article initially answering the question, “What is [interviewee] like?” Then there’s an option to hear more in-depth information.Julia Chen Davidson (Partner Marketing Lead, Google Home) told me t…

For Adobe, email is still a king.The marketing tech giant is out this week with a new survey showing email’s enduring appeal across generations, as well as some updated features to email in its Marketing Cloud’s Campaign tool.The survey, based on responses from over 1,000 white-collar workers in the US, found that consumers spend a phenomenal average of 5.4 hours each weekday checking emails.In a blog post, Campaign’s Director of Product Marketing Kristin Naragon crowed on behalf of email:All of this suggests that, even though politicians and entertainers embrace staccato communication bursts, most consumers still prefer longer form, more intimate email messages when we reach out to colleagues, friends and family.And it’s not just the older crowd. The survey found that it is “just as sticky with [consumers aged 18 to 34] as with consumers overall.”In fact, the younger crowd appears to be better at it. Sixty-six percent of them claim to regularly reach the nirvana of Inbox Zero, that r…

I was lucky enough to experience totality during the recent full solar eclipse. Despite my knowledge, I could understand why someone might think it was OK to look right at the eclipse as it approached totality. The risk was deceptive — it seemed as clear as day (or rather, dark as night) that I could trust my senses to look straight up.Good thing I had external data to contradict my sensory assumptions! But as I was thinking about it on the way home, I realized this experience reminded me in a way of something I’ve often noticed about marketing technology to developers (or to anyone, really). Let me take a step back and explain what I mean about the risk of confusing our own experience with the facts.For every mythologized outsized success in Silicon Valley, there are many more also-rans and outright failures — even some spectacular bombs. That shouldn’t be a surprise. Risk and reward are central to the culture of innovation to which so many of us aspire.But when risk-taking is confus…

As Entuity’s vice president of global marketing, Laurie Klausner manages all marketing technology for the network analytics software platform.After joining the company three years ago, one of Klausner’s first major projects was a complete audit of Entuity’s martech stack.“In essence, we looked at everything we were using,” says Klausner.During the yearlong project, she says one of the biggest eye-openers for her was the number of tools being used by a limited number of people as a result of her team being split between two different continents.“We are a global marketing team, so a fair number of my direct reports work out of our London office where Entuity’s headquarters are,” says Klausner, “Some of us are here in Massachusetts, so it was very disjointed.”She says the two marketing offices — one in London and one in Massachusetts — were often using different marketing technology.“That was a big challenge for us — to determine what was being used and then, most importantly, what makes…

What if YouTube were able to swipe left on its brand-safety problem?Sometime “in the coming months,” YouTube will let people swipe from one video to the next, the Google-owned video service announced on Tuesday.In adopting a swipe-to-see interface a la Snapchat Stories and Instagram Stories, YouTube could also adopt those platforms’ interstitial ad placements that decouple ads from adjacent videos and could assuage advertisers concerned with being associated with controversial, or at least undesirable, videos.That hypothetical makes a lot of assumptions, so let’s take a step back.The problem with pre-roll adsPre-roll ads can be problematic. Since they preempt a video, they can be perceived as presenting a video, even if, thanks to audience-based ad targeting, there’s usually no relation between ad and video beyond the person watching them. That tenuous association is significant enough to shake advertisers when they find their ads attached to pro-terrorism videos, as happened on YouTu…

Can you relate to this scenario…You’re sitting in front of your computer, staring at an empty screen. The deadline given to you to submit the article is fast approaching, and you’re still fighting to start putting words down when you’re supposed to already be at the editing stage.As you sit there, struggling to get started, a strange feeling of inferiority creeps in – before your own eyes, you see yourself transforming from a confident expert into a self-conscious amateur.The good thing?You’re not alone.I used to dislike writing a lot. In fact, the thought of sitting down for hours and writing something that I didn’t even know if anyone would read was so demotivating.Whenever I needed to write anything, I would procrastinate, thinking that avoiding the task would make it go away. Finally, the procrastination eventually led to lots of rushed writing during the 11th hour to meet my deadlines.This usually resulted in substandard work.However, my primary problem wasn’t about writing; it w…

If you’re new to the business of SEO and are just figuring out how to optimize your WordPress site for search, navigating the landscape of SEO can seem like a nightmare.You’ll have seen a thousand different articles on SEO: on-page optimization tips, off-page optimization tips, SEO basics, email marketing tips, etc. online and implemented them – only to see them fail, or worse, backfire.Don’t worry, you’re not alone. SEO can be tricky, and there is always a huge scope for overdoing or underdoing things. While I can’t fully solve this problem for you, I’ll make an attempt to round up the most commonly faced SEO challenges with WordPress so that you can look into your site and make some amends.The important thing to understand here is that the same factors can prove to be a boon as well as a challenge when it comes to SEO. The key is to understand your own website intricately and devise plans depending upon what works best for you. Listed below are a few things that are commonly done wr…

Google released their AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) framework nearly two years ago, and even though Google noted at their recent I/O event that more than 900,000 domains have adopted the framework, that’s just a small fraction (.075 percent) of the 1.2 billion websites on the internet.Google is also aiming to make the AMP case to advertisers with a test that points mobile search ads to AMP landing pages. AMP landing pages have been called “the best-kept AdWords secret,” and some companies have gone all in on AMP, while others are taking a wait-and-see approach. We’re interested in gaining a fuller understanding of how our audience is approaching AMP adoption.We’ve put together a brief survey — 10 quick questions. It will take you about three minutes tops, and we invite you to participate. We’re looking for feedback on whether and why you or your clients have or have not adopted AMP for your sites. We’re also interested in knowing whether you or your clients are using AMP landing page…

Most people use LinkedIn to get email alerts for new job postings that match their interests but did you know that LinkedIn can also help track new hires made by a company? You can easily keep an eye on new employees joining your own company or a competitor.
Also see: The Best Email Alerts ServicesHow to Set People Search Alerts on LinkedInSimilar to job alerts, you can set up people alerts in LinkedIn and they will send you an email when new employees join the tracked company. You can track new hires by the parent company (e.g., Amazon) or limit your employee searches to a regional office of that company (e.g., Amazon India or Amazon’s Bangalore office).To get started, open the LinkedIn website, click the search box, type the name of the parent company and choose the “people search” option from the autocomplete list (see screenshot above).On the search results page, expand the Locations section and check the regions that you would like to track. You can select the country name, city,…

Here’s our recap of what happened in online marketing today, as reported on Marketing Land and other places across the web.From Marketing Land:Martech enablement series: Part 4 — Building the team
Aug 29, 2017 by Peter Ladka
In Part 4 of a nine-part series, contributor Peter Ladka takes a look at how to identify roles and responsibilities, and how to educate and train your team to successfully move your organization towards martech enablement.5 tools to take your marketing automation to the next level
Aug 29, 2017 by Ben Jacobson
Looking to step up your marketing automation efforts? Contributor Ben Jacobson takes a look at five tools that will help you streamline your business and stay a step ahead of the competition.6 web properties you can use to protect your branded search results (with real examples)
Aug 29, 2017 by Brian Patterson
How can you take more control of the SERPs for your brand name, beyond using your own site? Columnist Brian Patterson shares ideas for maximizing posit…

Image credit: Abdul Razak Latif / Shutterstock.com Welcome to Part 4 of “A Nine Part Practical Guide to Martech Enablement.” This is a progressive guide, with each part building on the prior sections and focused on outlining a process to build a data- and technology-driven marketing organization within your company. Below is a list of the prior articles for your reference:Part 1: What is Martech Enablement?Part 2: The Race Team AnalogyPart 3: The Team Members In this part, “Building the Team,” we will look at ways to evaluate the state of your current organization and some simple steps to begin the process of martech-enabling your team members and partners to create a winning team.Building the teamIn Part 3, we spent the vast majority of our time discussing the core team of a successful martech-enabled organization. This included the groups they are in, the roles themselves, and how they correspond to a winning race team.As we proceed, we’re going to look at the key steps in the proces…