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When optimizing a website, one of the best places to start is the value proposition. This is the combination of words and images that tell your visitors why they are in the right place and why they should continue exploring on your site.The value proposition changes depending on the kind of page you’re working on. For a home page, the value proposition will include:What you offer. What products or services do you offer the visitor? What category are you in?How you position your offering. Are you low-cost or high-value? Do you specialize in any way? How are you different?Your selling proposition. This may include return policies, guarantees and shipping policies.Your brand attitude. How do you use words and images to show your swagger, reassure prospects and build credibility?The value proposition for a landing page is all about the promise made by an ad, email or social media post. The value proposition should include these elements:Repeat the promise. Assure the visitor that you are …

The civilized bot has arrived.As bot makers begin to differentiate their wares, customer communications platform Intercom is out this week with a bot — named Operator — which it says is the first one to care “what an end user’s experience is like.”For its 17,000 or so client companies, Intercom provides a dashboard that receives live chat messages through a brand’s website chat window, emails, custom application or profile pages on Twitter and Facebook Messenger.Although Intercom has provided some automated communications, such as messaging through those channels to collect email addresses, all other communications through its platform have been chats — either live or asynchronous, where the message remains visible and is answered later.Operator is its first bot, and it is available for sites, emails or custom applications, although not yet for Twitter or Messenger.[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]

via Marketing Land

Email blasts are a time-honored tradition in email marketing where a business sends one email to thousands of people simultaneously, often unsolicited. It’s an effective means of getting attention, but it’s not the type of attention brands should want. Like a man on a soapbox screaming into a megaphone, the email blasts annoy rather than inform and cause their recipients to avoid rather than engage.There is a much better way to send updates to recipients. Permission marketing tactics, where a recipient can choose to receive newsletters, and email blasts at a particular cadence, can help email marketers send their messages to receptive ears, for example. In fact, there are a few methods email marketers can employ to successfully deliver emails without treading on the morally gray areas email blasts entail. Let’s take a look at a few of them now:Always use permission-based marketing tacticsFirst and foremost, any and all email marketing programs need to operate from a permission-based p…

Local businesses have lots of great opportunities to use digital channels to their advantage. Here are a few actionable ways to promote your local business online apart from the most important (and the most obvious) one: Getting verified on Google Maps.Most of the time I try to avoid making very general statements when it comes to small companies. That is because the ways that businesses market to their audiences are not held back by expectation; they have every opportunity to apply innovation and creativity to their efforts.However, I do feel able to make at least one sweeping statement: online visibility is crucial for local businesses. While you can also focus on IRL advertisements, your efforts will be far less impressive than the online equivalent.Evidence for the effectiveness of online visibility comes from Google’s findings that 50% of all Google smartphone users who searched for a local business went there within 24 hours. In spite of this, as many as 60% of small businesses …

Facebook is ready to premiere its attempt to take on YouTube.Facebook announced on Wednesday that it will begin rolling out a revamped version of its existing home for videos that caters to the original, episodic shows Facebook has been licensing to make people think of it as a digital video service on par with YouTube, Netflix and Hulu.Called Watch, Facebook’s new video hub will be available in its mobile apps, on its desktop site and through its connected-TV apps, but for now only “to a limited group of people in the U.S.,” according to a company blog post published after Business Insider and Mashable reported that Facebook would unveil Watch on Thursday.While people already watch a lot of videos on Facebook, they likely don’t think of Facebook as a place to watch video. It just so happens that their Facebook feeds are full of videos (and it just so happens that more videos means more video ads, which means more money for Facebook). Facebook does want people to think of Facebook as …

Facebook has the power to help you find, build, nurture and convert new audiences on mobile and desktop. It’s an integral part of every digital strategy — e-commerce, B2C, B2B, health care, education and so on.With the proliferation of ad types, goals and things you can actually achieve on Facebook, the options and best practices can get overwhelming. This guide from 3Q Digital breaks down the six critical components of Facebook ad management. Read it today, and learn how you can use 3Q Digital’s insights to set your ROI soaring.Visit Digital Marketing Depot to download “3Q Digital’s Complete Guide to Facebook Advertising.”

via Marketing Land

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:5 ways to balance technical & non-technical SEO
Aug 9, 2017 by Jim Yu
Though tactics and strategies differ greatly for technical and non-technical SEOs, columnist Jim Yu believes it’s critical that they find ways to work together. Each is powerful on its own, but it’s in the combined efforts of both that the real magic happens.Apple Search Ads: Still tapping after 6 months of testing
Aug 9, 2017 by Anna Shirley
Columnist Anna Shirley shares her impressions of Apple’s App Store search ads platform, highlighting its positive and negative aspects.The future of AI marketing applications in retail
Aug 9, 2017 by Daniel Faggella
From customer segmentation to virtual agents, columnist Daniel Faggella explores the ways artificial intelligence is reshaping retail marketing.3 ways to tap into AI to get more results
Aug 9, 2017 by Nandini Rathi
In thi…

In SEO’s earlier days, technical SEO was largely about coding. For a fun throwback, check out this 2008 SEL article on search-friendly code by Jonathan Hochman, an internet marketer and computer sciences grad from Yale. Technical SEO was all about how to optimize (and often, manipulate) code, metadata and link profiles to achieve better results.And you know what? That basic purpose of technical SEO hasn’t changed.As black hat tactics and manipulation became less effective and more dangerous, they fell out of favor. This gave rise to the more creative, non-technical SEO tactics designed to show search engines the value and relevance of each piece of content.Technical and non-technical should never be pitted against one another, as both are critical to the health of your site and the success of your campaigns. Technical SEO is the framework on which truly great content is built, ensuring that each piece is structured and optimized for search engine discoverability and human consumption.…

It’s been five months since Apple expanded their Apple Search Ads program to advertisers in three additional countries (UK, New Zealand and Australia). After its initial, US-only launch in October 2016, I was really excited to finally get to test out this brand-new platform when it finally launched in the UK.Now that I’ve had some time to experiment with it, I’m going to discuss what I like, dislike and hope to see in the future across this new and exciting platform. I want to share my own experiences here in the hope that anyone looking to test some Apple Search Ads campaigns in the future can get started as soon as possible.One of the reasons I was so interested in Apple Search Ads is how booming the app market is globally, with 2.2 million apps available in the App Store alone as of March 2017. Furthermore, according to research by Flurry, the mobile browser is effectively dead — on average, 90 percent of time on mobile devices is spent within apps. So, what does this mean for adve…

Over the past few years, e-commerce has been slowly and steadily transformed by artificial intelligence (AI). The world has watched Amazon go from bookseller to voice-activated, product-recommending, Internet of Things behemoth over the last 15 years, and — for many reasons — e-commerce has been an area of great AI adoption, particularly in marketing.That being said, the retail space (which encompasses a much broader array of businesses beyond just e-commerce) often doesn’t get the same degree of limelight when it comes to AI use cases. I’ve set out to display some real use cases that highlight how and where AI is pushing the boundaries in the retail sector.While the applications below are by no means a complete list, it serves as a nice general overview of the possibilities in this space, along with related startups and technology companies working on those specific applications.We’ll begin with what is arguably one of the most import broad areas of AI retail marketing, segmentation.…

Big data is at the core of algorithms that power artificial intelligence. From machine learning algorithms to predictive modeling, artificial intelligence is trained to scour big data to look for patterns and establish a correlation between variables.The AI algorithms that make the highest level of personalization possible for marketers aren’t crystal-ball magic but are driven by big-data analytics.Today, e-commerce marketers are getting overwhelmed by tons of data generated every second. And to extract meaningful insights out of this data maze, marketers need to have a proper analytics framework in place.Without analytics, it will be hard to assess the outcome of any artificial intelligence system. So, here are three ways to tap into and analyze your data to implement AI successfully.1. Descriptive analytics: Think customer, not data pointsUnderstanding your customer is crucial for delivering intelligent insights. But most marketers are still using multiple-marketing tools, resulting…