Search Marketing in Google’s New World
Early in 2011, marketers got a wake-up call in the form of something called The Panda Algorithm Update. What’s a Panda algorithm, and why was it a wake-up call for marketers? The Panda algorithm is one of Google’s top-secret formulas for determining page rank — that is, where a particular web page will show up in a Google search. The release of this algorithm was a wake-up call that showed marketers in no uncertain terms that to achieve higher online rankings meant playing by Google’s rules with white-hat Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics. It started in February when retail giant Read More
6 Sources for Legal, Low-cost or Free Images
This image shows two weeks of post headlines & illustrations from this blog. The free or low-cost sources the images, clockwise from upper left, are: a photo of the editor’s grandson that she took, a chart from a survey we conducted created in Excel, a licensed cartoon ($12), a free cartoon, a scanner image of a man’s hand, and a photo of the editor’s dog. Looking for great photos for your blog or social media site — without spending much cash? Good news from Silicon Valley last week: Wired.com staff-produced are now available in high-resolution format under a Creative Commons Read More
Corporate Holiday Gift Etiquette
Guest post by Kevin Wessner, Senior Vice President, MarketingFX A gift basket that can be shared may be a good option when budgets are tight. I’ve been in the business of supplying promotional items to corporations for many years, and every year, I get questions like these about this time of year: I want to send a gift to my customer, and I want to put my logo on it. But I don’t want it to look cheap or tacky. What do I do? I need to send a gift to someone I work with, but I don’t know them well. Read More
Baiting Your Hook for Retweets
Any avid fisherman will tell you that to catch anything, you need the right bait. Twitter is a lot like fishing: to get noticed by the mass of fish swimming by in the Twitter stream, you need the right bait. Step one is deciding what you want to catch. Are you angling for retweets, clicks, or followers? If it’s followers you’re after, you need to dangle attractive bait over time, and you need to tailor your bait specifically to your audience by using the words and phrases that attract them. Clicks, of course, depend on giving someone just enough information Read More
Why Marketing Automation Matters for 2012
By Edgar Rodriguez, EVP Marketing, Distribion, Inc. Marketing automation isn’t a new idea. Software platforms that enable marketing and sales departments to increase lead conversion by leveraging captured data to automate and streamline communications and audience segmentation have been around in various forms for almost two decades. Distributed marketing platforms are a bit newer – they’ve been around about five years. These advanced systems provide an integrated set of online tools so that local users can easily search, find, select, assemble, customize, distribute and track campaign assets across multiple channels at the local level while allowing central or corporate marketing Read More
How to Create Contagious Content
Earlier today, Distributed Marketing Blog Editor Deb McAlister-Holland joined MyPRGenie for a session on the tips and techniques that marketers can use to help content “go viral” – even without a video. It was a huge success, attended by a wide range of PR people, marketers and bloggers who want to be heard and draw traffic without spending a lot. Usually, the phrase going viral brings to mind videos that score millions of hits overnight. But the word “viral” just means content that is so contagious that it gets shared far beyond its original audience. Any kind of content can go Read More
1950’s Rules to Drive Customer Engagement Now
Legendary radio personality Paul Harvey formulated three rules of audience engagement back in the 1950’s – and those decades-old rules can help marketers jump-start social media and email marketing efforts today. His 1-2-3 approach to audience engagement is particularly applicable to social media and email marketing, even though he formulated them decades before either one was even dreamed about. The Paul Harvey approach goes like this: Grab their attention with an intriguing “teaser” that gets them to want to hear more. Give them the rest of the story (succinctly, clearly, and directly). Wrap up and close (by repeating the main Read More
Franchiser Scores Sales with Distributed Marketing
If you’re like most marketers, this is the time of year when you’re being asked to take a sharp knife to your marketing budget for 2012. To get better results without spending more, think distributed marketing. The more customer-facing employees who have the ability to tailor the communications they send out without jeopardizing brand and regulatory compliance, the better. How do you do that? By giving local, field, and individual sales and marketing reps access to approved content that they can personalize with a few mouse clicks. Why does this matter? Because distributed marketing technology has been proven to increase Read More
Blogs Much More Than “Graffitti with Punctuation”
“Blogging is not writing. It’s graffiti with punctuation.” That’s what movie maker Stephen Soderbergh said in his film “Contagion.” Of course, he isn’t a corporate marketer faced with a changing customer buying pattern and the need to build in-bound traffic from search engines. If he was, he’d know that today blogging is one of the most important marketing tools available. Yes, there are still some old-fashioned corporate marketers who agree with Soderbergh. But they’re an endangered species as nimble, social media savvy mid-size companies push their way into the “big leagues”, demonstrating along the way the value of blogging and Read More
Harnessing the Power of Word-of-Mouse
We often promote this blog through press releases and advance copy sent to other bloggers and journalists. Last week, Forbes.com columnist David Coursey surprised us by a draft blog post that quoted him and submitting it to Forbes.com as a guest post. “I had planned to write something about the topic myself, and link back to your blog as the source for some of the information, but I couldn’t think of anything to write except what you’d already put together,” Coursey said. Before we knew it, our blog post was featured on the top “promo bar” on Forbes.com. And instead Read More
