It’s been a wild ride the past year for Marissa Mayer, the ex-Google executive and current President & CEO of Yahoo!. She took over a near-dead company in Yahoo! and begun a process to bring the once eminent tech giant back to prominence. Some of her decisions have included modifying the company culture, cutting part of its global workforce, and streamlining Yahoo! apps to remove the dead weight (while at the same time building new interactive applications such as the new Yahoo! weather app that has a superb user experience component). However, she made gigantic shock-waves unrivaled by any other decision during the course of her tenure when the company announced the acquisition of the popular social media and blogging platform, Tumblr, for an impressive $1.1 Billion.
A recent study prepared by MarketingProfs and the Content Marketing Institute surveyed B2B professionals to identify content marketing trends based on insights from the year 2012. Content marketing has become more important recently for SEO purposes due to Google cracking down on black hat and outdated link-building tactics, and it has proven its worth keeping social media engagement high in the form of infographics and podcasts. The study focused on the various tactics B2B marketers employed, methods of content distribution, and the latest overall budgeting decisions made by marketing departments.
Social Media Reigns Supreme
Below is a quick recap of the recent social media updates to hit the news wires.
Facebook Introduces Promoted Page Advertising Product
Last week, Facebook rolled out their Promoted Page Likes advertising globally, giving brands an opportunity to increase their presence on the #1 social media site without using third party services. Facebook has been plagued with third party companies offering severely discounted Facebook likes, almost all of which are fake and do not provide any added value for brands. With the latest Facebook Advertising update, page owners can now target very specific segments, set a daily/lifetime budget, and start generating legitimate fans that will interact with the brand’s viral content. In order to leverage this feature, the Facebook pages must have a physical address as the geo-targeting will by default select a local audience. However, through the ads manager, you can change this location to target a broader geographic area.
Social media is continuously evolving, and as a result, marketing professionals now have access to a wealth of insightful information on the attitudes of a typical user. Additionally, sites such a Facebook continue to roll out sophisticated features to help advertisers better leverage the viral power of social media. Below is a quick summary on the latest trends and technological updates in the online marketing world.
Facebook Introduces CPA Bidding
Possibly the greatest improvement to the ads manager since the advent of promoted posts, Facebook executives recently announced that they will be rolling out CPA bidding for social marketing advertisers. At the moment, advertisers only have the ability to optimize bids based on a CPC or CPM model. The new CPA bidding will allow PPC advertising professionals to bid based on the following actions: offer claims, Facebook page likes, and clicks/link opens (specific click-throughs to an external page rather than general clicks). Managing CPA programs will allow advertisers to better optimize paid campaigns and control the amount they are willing to spend per on new Facebook page likes.
PPC advertising and social media marketing are two main channels of internet advertising that online marketing professionals use to convert traffic for B2C campaigns. However, the B2B market is a whole different environment with users exhibiting different search behaviours across both channels.
PPC Advertising: Paid Search
A recent report by Optify investigated the major online marketing trends among B2B professionals in 2012. The numbers analyzed for the study originated from over 62 million visits and 350,000 leads, providing a wealth of data that can be translated into valuable information relating to the performance of various internet marketing channels.
An infographic prepared by VerticalMeasures perfectly captures the four pillars of successful social media marketing management for businesses. Incorporating social media marketing can be a difficult task for some small businesses, but it provide enormous potential for brands that want to leverage the viral power of sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
The Foundation of Social Media
1. Customer Service
Twitter and Facebook have been social media sites users have utilized to lodge complaints for quite a while now. Despite the pain this causes businesses, it provides timely resolution and responses for clients, and allows brands to personally connect with users on a regular basis. When preparing customer service guidelines for your social media networks, keep the following expected response rates in mind:
Developing successful online marketing campaigns can be a difficult endeavor for small & medium sized business working with a limited budget. However, it does not take an extensive understanding marketing theories and the intricacies of the internet marketing world to successfully launch an online business. Below are some helpful tips for new professionals getting their first taste of the e-commerce world.
1. Choose the right online advertising tools
Choosing the wrong online marketing tools can lose you a lot of money.
Ever wondered what it would be like to make purchases online simply by submitting a keyword or phrase into Google or Twitter? According to the latest reports, Twitter and American Express are making that dream a reality by enhancing its Sync program, permitting users to make purchases via promotional hashtags on the microblogging social media site. For example, users can purchase a $25 AmEx gift card for $15 by adding the hashtag #BuyAmexGiftCard25 to one of their tweets. A couple of other products including the Kindle Fire will be part of this promotion starting next Monday. Users making purchases with these hashtags will receive verification from the @AmexSync official account, enabling them to redeem the limited time offers.
As advertisers become more creative online, certain channels provide better opportunities to reach targeted audiences. Over the past couple of years, not only has Twitter provided improved promoted products for marketing professionals, but the platform has also enhanced its presence on mobile devices via a very successful smartphone and tablet app design. However, the question remains: will Twitter’s mobile targeting provide positive results for advertisers?
The Experiment
By Jonathan Berthold on