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  • Historically, companies that monitor links to their websites haven't looked kindly upon inbound "deep links"—links to site pages other than the homepage or other top-level pages. But the truth is that deep links can actually be really good for a website. Here are five benefits they provide.

  • Marketing dashboards are all the rage. Perhaps because every other management function has a dashboard, VPs of marketing feel they need to have one, too. Or maybe because dashboards can be a great tool to help you manage your business processes. But it is entirely possible you could be deploying a useless software-based tool.

  • Large reductions in marketing budgets contributed to dismal sales performance in 2009, but companies are fighting back: Over three-quarters (72.5%) say they are increasing their marketing budgets in 2010, and over 9 in 10 cite customer acquisition as their top marketing objective in the next 12 months, according to a survey from CSO Insights.

  • Social networking sites reach a higher percentage of women than men worldwide, and across leading social sites, such as Facebook, women are more engaged—consuming more pages and spending more time—according to a new study from comScore. On average, women spend 30% more time on social networking sites than men; moreover, 75.8% of online women visited a social networking site in May 2010, compared with 69.7% of men.

  • Though many brands now use Twitter to drive sales, improve customer service, and enhance brand loyalty, Twitter is a consumer-dominated medium: 91% of tweets are by consumers and only 8% are by marketers, according to a study by 360i. Brands are moreover rarely a topic of conversation: Only 12% of consumer tweets mention one.

  • Like many aspects of mobile marketing, location-based social networks (LBSNs) offer interactive marketers the promise of connecting consumers with places and points of sale. Most marketers, however, should wait to adopt the nascent channel until larger industry players, such as Facebook and Yahoo, offer location-based services at a sufficiently large scale, according to a study by Forrester.

  • The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index, which had declined sharply in June, retreated further in July and now stands at 50.4 (1985=100), down from 54.3 in June, the Conference Board reported. The Present Situation Index decreased to 26.1 from 26.8 last month, while the Expectations Index declined to 66.6 from 72.7 in June.

  • E-commerce sites can be particularly challenging for search-engine optimization (SEO) because they tend to lack unique, relevant content. The challenge can be easily (though not necessarily quickly) overcome with these five content techniques that can help you search-optimize e-commerce websites.

  • Poorly designed questions and scaling problems can derail your research efforts faster than you can say "the cat in the hat"! To help you avoid a few of the more common and onerous problems, this article explores two separate but related questionnaire-design issues: matrix questions and unbalanced scales.

  • When people think of branding, they often think of just a logo or business card. Or they think of the opposite extreme, such as Apple, and so assume they will never have the resources to "brand effectively." But branding on a budget is more than possible, and dispelling these five popular myths is key to starting that process and transforming your business.

  • People tend to open an email based on the two things they can see in their inbox: the From name and the Subject line. If recipients receive an email from a sender they do not recognize or trust, they are less likely to open it. If an email with a "suspicious" Subject line lands an inbox, it's most likely to be deleted or marked as spam.

  • Small-business advertisers spent on average $2,231 on search advertising in the second quarter of 2010, up 159.7% from the $859 spent in the same period a year earlier, and up 1.4% from the $2,201 spent in the first quarter of 2010, according to a WebVisible study based on its small-biz clients.

  • To help drive viewers to online content, a just-launched platform uses linguistics technology and search marketing best-practices to integrate social media with search engine optimization (SEO). Search engine marketing and design firm Zog Media launched the platform, dubbed Project Redline, in partnership with social media press release builder PitchEngine.

  • US retailers are actively pursuing the mobile channel to enhance customer engagement and loyalty: 73% have some type of mobile initiative in place and 20% of are in the process of evaluating the mobile channel, according to a survey from Forbes Insights, in association with Research In Motion (RIM).

  • Though Facebook is the dominant social media platform, consumer satisfaction with the industry giant is low—with users citing concerns over privacy, security, technology, and advertising—whereas satisfaction with nonprofit Wikipedia is more favorable, according to a survey from ForeSee Results for the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).

  • Though the adoption of sophisticated mobile devices continues to climb, the integration of mobile marketing into email and online programs is still low: Less than one-third of marketers say mobile-optimized experiences are relevant to their email audiences, but nearly two-thirds say they are integrating social technologies into their email efforts, according to a survey from eROI.

  • More than 90% of consumers who are a fan of, or "like," at least one brand on Facebook also receive at least one permission-based marketing email per day, and roughly 75% of consumers who follow at least one brand on Twitter subscribe to at least one brand's email marketing, according to a study by ExactTarget.

  • The Grateful Dead teaches us to show our brand's playfulness and to trust that our customers will recognize our brand even if it looks a little "different." By loosening up your brand, you allow your company to show its personality—and, by extension, its ability to roll with the punches.

  • Previous installments of this article series have describe the importance of relevance in direct digital marketing and three of the five keys to achieving a relevance-centered approach. This article looks at the fourth key: taking an incremental approach to creating more relevant, valuable communications every day.

  • Eigen values are what marketers use when we're doing our best work. Once we view everything that our brand does through the prism of eigen-value standards, it changes how we launch our websites, train our customer-service people, and hire our employees. Want to see how an eigen value plays out in real life? Look at Vibram and its FiveFingers shoe.