As our recessionary hangover drags on, you're probably thinking of evermore-creative ways to engage customers. But Drew McLellan of the Marketing Minute blog offers this caveat: "As you are crafting a new campaign or gimmick that you hope will go viral—always ask yourself, is the juice worth the squeeze for ... more

"Brand identifiability is under the advertiser's control and is a key consideration in ad design," note the authors of a recent research report on the effectiveness of visual ads. But because of rising "media noise" due to competing advertisements and "active ad avoidance by consumers," it has become challenging for ... more

Nearly eight in 10 of the nation's smallest companies (79%) say marketing is a major success factor for their business and nearly one-half (46%) of such firms, or microbusinesses, say they are using some type of social media for marketing, according to a survey from Vistaprint. more

With short message service (SMS) reaching 5 billion mobile phones around the world, marketers can no longer ignore the significance of texting as a marketing channel. Some consumers, however, are hesitant to take advantage of those mobile marketing programs, in part because of the fees associated with branded messages. Enter ... more

As the mobile channel continues its rise to prominence among marketers and consumers, the lines between the digital marketing and the physical marketing worlds have become blurred. If mobile is meant to connect the two worlds, a new approach to data management is crucial for marketing to remain effective and ... more

It's well known in SEO circles that most links created through social media are "nofollow"—and therefore don't help sites rank higher with search engines. Some SEO professionals believe there's no SEO benefit to developing social-media profiles at all. Not so, counters Derek Edmond in a recent post at the Komarketing Blog. To ... more

Despite dismal economic news overall, some business sectors are showing signs of improvement: Fully one-half of industrial-sector companies are expecting annual revenues in 2010 to be higher than they were in 2009, compared with the 24% of companies that reported the same a year earlier, according to a survey from ... more

Google Sites led the US explicit core search* market in August 2010, accounting for 65.4% of total searches conducted during the month, down 0.4 percentage points from July, according to data from comScore qSearch. more

From April to June, luxury shoe vendor Jimmy Choo leapt into tennis-shoe production and social media with a splash: It dreamed up CatchaChoo, a "trainer hunt" that united the real and digital worlds on a quest to capture free sneakers. Inhabitants of London were invited to follow CatchaChoo on Facebook, Foursquare ... more

While most experts will say there's no such thing as the perfect time to send your email offer or newsletter, conventional wisdom holds that Tuesday—generally speaking—is the best day for a campaign, and Friday the worst. "The theory behind the rule of thumb makes sense," notes Caroline Ruggiero at the Marketo ... more

Keyword discovery is a huge component of pay-per-click advertising. You need to find relevant keywords so you can create topical ad groups, text ads, and landing pages. But for truly cost-effective, high-ROI PPC campaigns, it's equally important to find negative keywords—those that aren't relevant to your offerings or customers—so you ... more

Led by television media spending, total measured advertising expenditures reached $63.6 billion in the first half of 2010, up 5.7% from the same period a year earlier, according to data from Kantar Media. Ad spending during the second quarter of 2010 grew 5.4% over the same period in 2009. more

"E-commerce sites can be particularly challenging for search-engine optimization (SEO) because they tend to lack unique, relevant content," writes Adam J. Thompson in an article at MarketingProfs. "Most e-commerce websites contain mostly navigational pages (with little content) and product pages (with mostly duplicate content)." So how can you improve results for ... more

With brand awareness cited as their primary brand-management goal in 2010, most corporate brand executives say online communications and traditional public relations—not social media—are still the most effective channels to reach their audiences, according to a survey from MiresBall and KRC Research. more

Businesswomen deliver a 23% higher click-through rate for online ads than businessmen, who are 53% more likely, however, to take action—such as download a whitepaper, start a free trial, or make a purchase—after clicking on an ad, according to a study by Bizo. more

Texting among US adults has increased substantially over the past year, but still does not approach the magnitude of texting activity among teens: 72% of adult cell-phone owners send and receive text messages now, up from the 65% who did so in September 2009, whereas 87% of teen cell-phone owners ... more

Though consumers say the Apple iPad is "more compelling" than the Amazon Kindle, 64% of e-reader owners say they prefer the Kindle to the iPad, according to a new survey from One News Page. more

Driven by a faster than expected rebound in the US advertising market and continued robust growth in Asia-Pacific and Latin America, worldwide ad expenditure is forecast to grow 3.9% in 2010, an upward revision of 1.0 percentage point from the 2.9% forecast issued in March 2010, according to Carat. more

In a post at Email Marketing Reports, Mark Brownlow presents a screenshot that looks like a page from a 19th-century novel: lengthy paragraphs filled with sentences of uniform length. That, he notes emphatically, is not how your email messages should look. "In fact, you wouldn't read the words if that was ... more

According to Brian Clark, founder of Copyblogger, using the right words in the right way in your website copy will consistently help convert visitors to buyers while also determining "how well you rank in search engines and how much traffic you get." In a popular post at the blog, Clark offers ... more

Google Sites comprised the top-ranked online property in July with 178.4 million unique visitors, followed by Yahoo Sites with 174.2 million, while BrightRoll Video Network led in comScore's July Ad Focus ranking with a potential reach of 96% of Americans online, followed by SpotXchange Video Ad Network with 93%. more

One in five US consumers age six and older (20%)—roughly 56.8 million people—say they have played a game on a social networking website in the previous three months, according to a report from The NPD Group. more

Higher spending small- to medium-sized business advertisers (SMBs) not only allocate more money to their advertising budgets than the other SMBs on average, but use over twice as many media channels in their marketing mix, according to a survey from BIA/Kelsey. more

"One click between email message and e-commerce is so ingrained for all of us—as both buyers and marketers—that it's almost nostalgic to think of using email solely to promote offline purchases," writes Stephanie Miller in an article at MarketingProfs. But that's exactly how Scotts Miracle-Gro—a company with no direct online sales ... more

According to Lee Odden, the SEO concept of "fresh content" has been distorted by a convoluted game of telephone—one person giving information to the next, each with his or her own interpretation, until the final person receives a definition quite unlike the original. "I'm sure the genesis was something like: Someone ... more