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.

Social Media World Rages over the Acquisition

Immediately after the deal was announced, social media sites went ablaze with negative criticism, lamenting this potential disaster. As a popular social blogging platform, Tumblr has quickly risen to prominence as a source of highly interactive multimedia content, as well as a community of bloggers seeking an alternative to the WordPresses and Blogspots of the online world. Within the realm of social media, it’s normal for loyal users to panic when their favourite sites are acquired by larger corporations: in fact, this was similar to when Google purchased YouTube and Facebook purchased Instagram.

“Promises Not to Screw It Up”

Yahoo! anticipated the rampant criticism coming their way by prefacing their official press release with one simple line: Promises Not to Screw It Up. Unfortunately, commencing a press release with a promise not to mess up will not easily quell the fear of regular users. With more than 300 Million monthly unique visitors, Yahoo! needs to ensure that it has a strategic plan in place to monetize Tumblr’s traffic, while at the same time keeping the user experience relatively unchanged. Mayer seems to realize the potential backlash of this deal, promising to let “Tumblr be Tumblr”.

Potential for Yahoo!

This could either be a breakthrough deal for Yahoo!, or it could be the death knell of the former search engine marketing giant. For Tumblr, this is an opportunity to make the platform more robust and add to it’s existing set of features…but more likely than not, it’s a  chance for CEO and founder, David Karp, to cash-in big time. For Yahoo!, it provides long-term potential in two forms: (1) owning a social media networking hub, and (2) lucrative opportunities through selling advertising space. Yahoo! can now boast that it owns one of the largest social media sites, giving it a golden goose to compete with Google, Twitter, and Facebook. Additionally, it provides Yahoo! with a site that attracts more than 300M unique monthly visitors, translating into a potential goldmine for online advertising revenue streams and cross-promotional activities to keep Yahoo! relevant in this digital age.

Image credit to Mashable. 

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Social Media Reigns Supreme

Social media marketing proved to be the most utilized channel among B2B content marketers, coming out at top with 87% of respondents incorporating elements of social in their online strategies. Other than traditional blogs, social media sites provides ample opportunities to create and distribute original content in a cost-effective manner. The global reach of sites such as Facebook and Twitter provide an inordinate amount of sharing opportunities, when once effectively leveraged, can make original content go viral. Other tactics employed by marketing professionals were website articles (83%), eNewsletters (78%), blogs (77%), and case studies (71%).

Quality Content is Difficult to Produce

29% of respondents cited producing an abundance of original content as the main concern in developing their online marketing strategies. The amount of blogs and articles published every day is staggering, and to compete in this day and age, it’s imperative to produce enough content for both social marketing community building and search engine optimization. Interestingly enough, marketing professionals were not overly worried about producing engaging content, indicating that some B2B professionals are willing to sacrifice quality for quantity. Additionally, 14% of respondents cited a lack of a sizable budget as another impediment to successfully executing content marketing strategies.

Confidence Gap Shows Faith in Interactive Content

Although there is a significant a push to create a wealth of blog & website article content for social media and strategic SEO activities, B2B professionals rated in-person events as the most efficacious tactic for distributing content. Case studies and webcasts were second and third respectively, illustrating that interactive and insightful content is invaluable to any online marketing strategy. However, only 49% rated social media as “effective” or “very effective”, indicating that while it’s an integral component of strategic digital marketing, it should not be your focal channel for content distribution.

Future Outlook

Will B2B professionals invest more in content marketing, or scale back budgets in an effort to reallocate resources to other departments? The survey reported that 54% of respondents plan to increase their overall spend in this area of digital marketing, whereas only 2% stated that they would definitively decrease their budgets.

With content marketing playing a crucial role in any social media or search engine optimization strategy, B2B marketers would be ill-suited to scale back resources.

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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.

Twitter Introduces Self-Serve Advertising in the United States

Until now, Twitter’s promoted products have only been available to users on an invitation-only basis. Seeking to further monetize its growing traffic, Twitter will now make this feature available to all U.S. users; however, it remains to be seen when this feature will be rolled out globally. Users in the United States now have two options to further promote their brand on Twitter: Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts. The former advertising product will allow page owners to promote specific content, whereas the latter promotes accounts, similar to Facebook’s sponsored stories.

Google+ Surpasses Twitter as the Second Largest Social Network

Google received some good news this week, as the latest studies coming from the Business Insider report that their social media network, Google+, is now only second to Facebook with 359 million active users. In comparison, Twitter has 269 million active registered members, and the king of social media, Facebook, has 700 million active users. Google+ can attribute it’s growth to the synchronization of all its Google products, such as Gmail, YouTube, and Google Maps.

Pinterest Users Generate 70% of all Brand Engagement

A recent study prepared by Digitas and Curalate reports that an estimated 70% of all brand engagement on the aforementioned social media site is created by end users. The report pointed to a lack of activity on the part of brands, particularly from the fashion retail and automotive industries. Since its launch in late 2011, Pinterest has proven its weight in gold for a number of companies in generating significant brand exposure, and in some cases, increasing sales for e-commerce websites. According to the study, electronic brands tend to be very active, generating 47% of all electronic-based pins.

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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.

Facebook Updates Promoted Posts Targeting

Relatively minor compared to the CPA bidding feature, the new expanded promoted posts option available in the Facebook ads manager will also be rolling out soon. Currently, page owners can promote their posts to fans of their page and people within their respective networks; however, this update will permit advertisers to promote specific posts to everyone on Facebook, targeting specific groups outside of the typical  page owner’s reach.

Social Media Bench-marking Report Notes that Twitter Reigns Supreme in B2B Marketing

A recent report prepared by Circle Research extracted the following key insights from surveying B2B marketers:

• Twitter is the most popular social platform with an approval rating of 85% from B2B marketers. Following Twitter was LinkedIn (82%), YouTube (77%), Facebook (71%), and Google+ (36%).
• While Google+ is not a focal part of social media marketing strategies at the moment, B2B marketing professionals expect the platform to become more important by 2014.
• The top three objectives in any social media marketing plan were reported to be: (1) driving traffic to the website, (2) building brand awareness and positioning, and (3) strengthening thought leadership.
• B2B marketers measure the efficacy of social marketing programs by analyzing the following in order of importance: website traffic, number of followers, content downloads, and last but certainly not least, lead generation.

These results, while not surprising, indicate that social marketing is more complementary to branding/remarketing strategies rather than a main lead generation/sales strategy. Reinforcing your brand message, cementing your position within the market, and driving traffic to your website should be the main goals of any B2B social program.

27% of all time Spent Online is on Social Media Networking in the United States

As expected, users spend a significant amount of time on sites such as Facebook and Twitter, logging an average 16 minutes out of every hour on social sites and forums. This put social media ahead of entertainment (9 minutes), shopping (5 minutes), email (3 minutes), and business (3 minutes).

The post This Week in Social Media: Facebook Rolls Out New Advertising Features appeared first on Rank Media Agency's Online Marketing Blog.

PPC Advertising: Paid Search

From Optify’s 2012 B2B Benchmark study, the median monthly conversion rate came in at 1.96% from paid search. Marketing professionals who effectively leveraged the capabilities of paid search reported a conversion rate of 3.58% (75th percentile), whereas those on the lower end of the spectrum (25th percentile) recorded conversion rates of 0.82%. The average B2B company also reported generating 547 monthly visits from paid search advertising, translating into 46 new targeted leads every month.

Additionally, the findings revealed that 10% of companies surveyed planned to discontinue their paid search campaigns in the near future. Effectively managing PPC advertising campaigns can be an arduous endeavor for marketers because significant testing is required to find the perfect combination of keywords, ad copy, landing pages and conversion paths. A lot of resources are also needed to discover the critical path, and some companies just do not have the budget to test and mine through pools of data.

Social Media Marketing

No matter where you look online, there is a tremendous amount of hype for social media, as Search Engine Watch recently discovered when it analyzed the amount of news coverage social receives in comparison to SEO. According to that report, social was covered 4 times more than SEO on the putative technology site TechCrunch, and 58 times more than SEO on Mashable. In relation to performance, however, this channel provided less than desired results for B2B companies.

LinkedIn vs. Twitter vs. Facebook

Despite being a social media network for professionals, LinkedIn fell behind Facebook and Twitter in generating new visits and leads for B2B companies online. In terms of visits, Facebook drove in 54% of the traffic, with Twitter and LinkedIn coming in second (32%) and (14%) respectively. However, Twitter proved to be the ultimate social media lead generation source for B2B online marketers in 2012, providing 82% of all leads from social marketing efforts. In fact, Twitter’s conversion rate was reported to be 2.17%, finishing far ahead of the average conversion rate of 1.60% from all traffic sources.

Summary

Despite these numbers, an integrated online marketing strategy is necessary to capture traffic across all relevant sources. Depending on the industry, different users will exhibit particular behaviours online. A combination of search engine optimization, PPC advertising, and social marketing will not only boost cross-promotional activities, but will allow your brand to drive in targeted traffic from all possible sources.

Images and statistics courtesy of Optify.

The post 2012 B2B Online Marketing Trends: PPC Advertising and Social Media appeared first on Rank Media Agency's Online Marketing Blog.

Search Engine Market Share

“Hmmm…I don’t know the answer – let me Google that.” More likely than not, that’s something that you have said in the past when trying to decide who won Superbowl 17 or which actor was in that hit movie from 1986. In fact, “googling” a question has become so popular that the verb “google” was added to the Oxford dictionary in 2006. In terms of B2B marketing, Google remains the king of search engines, ending the year 2012 with an average market share of 88.21% for all searches made. Bing was second with 5.95% of the search market share, with every other search engine combining for 5.85% of all searches.

(Not Provided): the ire of advertising professionals

Pull up any Google Analytics account and you are bound to see that the term “(not provided)” will account for the bulk of visits via organic search. This proved to become more prevalent in 2012, as the “not provided” rate went from under 15% of all organic visits at the beginning of the year to reaching heights of 40% in September and October. When users utilize Google’s secured search, search engine optimization professionals will not be able to identify the keywords that drove that particular traffic to their respective sites because the referring data is blocked by Google.

Google vs. Bing

As illustrated in one of the aforementioned paragraphs, Google proved to be the dominant search engine, driving over 88% of all organic traffic. However, in terms of measuring performance, it seems as if Bing is providing users with a similar, if not, better user experience. The average conversion rate from all visits via organic search on Bing came in at 1.86%, with Google slightly behind at 1.61%. Bing also generated 3.33 pageviews per unique visit, resulting in 15% more pageviews than it’s search engine counterpart.

Summary

Even though Bing’s performance metrics were stronger for B2B marketing professionals, there is simply not enough traffic coming from the #2 North American search engine; on the other hand, 36.07% of all B2B online marketing traffic came from Google. Evidently, mastering search engine optimization for your B2B business should be focused on dominating the page on Google to capture the majority of all organic search traffic. Tailoring your SEO campaigns to rank highly on Google will drive more targeted traffic and help you generate a significant amount of leads in a cost-effective manner.

Images and statistics courtesy of Optify.

The post 2012 B2B Online Marketing Trends: Search Engine Optimization appeared first on Rank Media Agency's Online Marketing Blog.

Traffic Generation By Source

Search engine optimization proved to be the main source of traffic for B2B companies in 2012, as 41% of all visits from Optify’s data points originated from organic sources. Direct traffic accounted for the second most amount of visits; however, this statistic may be misleading because direct traffic can include erroneous data that accumulates from users within the company visiting their own sites. Trailing behind these two sources were referrals, paid search, social media, and email marketing.

Leads By Source

In terms of lead generation, the data points were more widespread among the top sources. In this case, direct traffic reigned supreme, with 34% of leads originating from users who entered the site directly. In second place was organic search with 26.5% of all leads generated, once again proving that an effective search engine optimization campaign can help B2B companies general viable leads. Social media and email marketing drove 4.75% and 9% of all leads respectively, providing advertisers with complementary marketing channels to leverage for lead generation.

Conversion Rates By Source

Website visits and leads are significant metrics to measure the efficacy of online marketing programs, but they prove to be rather vacuous until you dig deeper and analyze performance metrics against KPIs. In this study, email marketing proved to be the most effective, generating an average conversion rate of 2.89%, compared to 1.22% from social media marketing and 1.45% from SEO. Paid Search (such as PPC advertising on Google) was rather effective, generating a conversion rate of 1.96%, slightly above the overall average.

Pageviews Per Visit By Source

Email marketing proved rather dominant in this aspect, driving 3.75 pageviews per unique visit. This is rather significant because it means that users are not only targeted, but they are also genuinely interested in the website content and will on average view more than the initial landing page. On the other hand, social media only drove 2.02 pageviews per visit, and organic search was right on the median, generating 3 pageviews per visit.

Organic vs. Paid Search vs. Social Media

The aforementioned results, while significant, only scratch the surface and do not provide the necessary depth to determine whether B2B marketing professionals should adopt or disregard certain online advertising activities. The next two posts will analyze the effectiveness of search engine optimization, PPC advertising, and social media marketing based on the data collected by Optify.

Images and statistics courtesy of Optify.

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77% of All Mobile Searches Done At Work or Home

Users feel more comfortable making mobile marketing searches at home and work rather than using desktop PCs.

Despite most mobile users having computers available to them at home or in the workplace, the study found that 77% of all mobile searches were made in either of these locations. Additionally, 17% of mobile searches were made on the go, with the remaining 2% being made in-store. This presents the following insights for online marketing professionals:

• Users at home are more comfortable browsing on their tables and smartphones than on their desktop PCs.
• Users searching on the go or in-store can be targeted with local ads to further push specific products and services.
• With 59% of mobile searches occurring after 3 pm, media buyers can effectively day-part mobile ads on Google and Bing.

Mobile Marketing Conversions Occur Rather Quickly

One staggering statistic found within the study was that 55% of search made via mobile devices generated conversion within one hour. One insight in the study noted that users reported mobile marketing ads loading rather quickly, driving them to the promoted results rather than the organic search engine listings. On a larger scale, the study reported that within five hours, 81% of conversions and 84% of all follow-up actions (additional research, website visits, store visits, etc.) took place.

Effectiveness of Displaying Ads for Goal Oriented Searches

The type of search results users click on depends on which stage they are in the purchase decision process. Users in the information search stage are merely gathering product information, whereas users evaluating alternatives are closer to making a final purchasing decision. That said, 59% of users in the study found mobile ads useful, indicating that they found them to be non-invasive, short and to the point, quicker to load, and providing relevant information.

Summary

Online mobile advertising is quickly becoming more relevant as the technology itself becomes more advanced. Investing in mobile friendly websites is not enough to capture users anymore; however, carefully developing mobile SEO driven strategies and PPC advertising campaigns will generate targeted, ready-to-buy traffic.

Image and Stats courtesy of Google.

The post Mobile Marketing Insights: Mobile Search on the Rise appeared first on Rank Media Agency's Online Marketing Blog.

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:

• 80% of Twitter users expect a response within a day
• 50% of Facebook users expect a response within a day.

2. Product Ratings and Reviews

If your next product launch proves to be as disastrous as the latest Sim City saga, you can expect negative reviews to become widely shared on social networks. In this day and age, all types of businesses can be affected by both negative and positive reviews online. In fact, 80% of consumers will research products online every week. As a result, credible bloggers reviewing products or technology experts publishing video reviews on YouTube will have a significant influence on the public perception of a product. Brands can use this to their advantage and create marketing videos highlighting the benefits of their products. Key insight: the shorter the video, the more likely it is to be viewed.

3. Brand Awareness

Businesses with little-to-no brand awareness will need to rely on both search engine optimization and social media marketing campaign generate more exposure. In fact, four of the largest social networks prove their worth in various ways:

• Google+: In 30% of brand related search results, branded Google+ pages and content were visible, exhibiting it’s power as a content marketing tool.
• Facebook: 80% of social media marketing users enjoy connecting with their favourite brands on Facebook rather than on other social media sites.
• Pinterest: The number of unique visitors to the site has increased by over 2700% since May 2011.
• Twitter: 69% of new follows occur as a result of suggestions and referrals from friends.

4. Lead Generation

Evidently, unique and captivating social marketing campaign are futile unless positive returns are generated. In terms of lead generation and sales, Twitter has proven rather effective: 34% of marketers surveyed mentioned that they used the aforementioned site to bring in new prospects. LinkedIn and Facebook also prove their worth for new business opportunities, both for the community building tools available to company pages, and the display advertising and promoted products that can be leveraged on both sites.

Final Note

As long as it is relevant to your vertical, fully embracing the benefits and opportunities present through social marketing can help grow your business online. Even mobile apps such as Instagram and Foursquare prove advantageous, with the former being a photo-sharing giant, and the latter providing new opportunities for local businesses to push foot traffic. An effective social media plan of action will allow your company to reap the rewards of online advertising and build a community to which you can re-market for years.

Social Media Infographic by Vertical Measures

The post The Roots of Social Media Marketing appeared first on Rank Media Agency's Online Marketing Blog.

1. Choose the right online advertising tools

Choosing the wrong online marketing tools can lose you a lot of money.

Depending on the products/services you offer and the vertical in which you belong, it is necessary to carefully plan all online marketing activities. In some cases, social media marketing may prove to be more beneficial in generating brand awareness and sales, whereas media buying campaigns and pay-per-click advertising are more pertinent for immediate conversions. Before you end up wasting $5000/month on Adwords, make sure it’s the right promotional tool for your targeted audience.

2. Choose efficiency over superficial aesthetics

Does your website have a major flash animation banner slowing down the loading time of your site? Are there superfluous aesthetics components causing your visitors to suffer seizures? If so, it might be time to revisit your online marketing strategy and pare down the unnecessary designs that add no value to your business. Websites are meant to simplify the user experience - not make it a complex web of annoyances. Clean websites with a sufficient amount of content also aid SEO campaigns, whereas sites with numerous flash components and little-to-no content will hurt your website’s rankings on search engines. Easy to use websites may seem simplistic, but that simplicity will bring users back on a continuous basis.

3. To Facebook or not to Facebook….that is the question. 

Social media has become the latest craze over the past couple of years, with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other notable sites generating significant amounts of traffic. However, your business should only invest in social marketing if it can help you achieve the following:

• Increase your community organically and get fans talking about your brand.
• Drive targeted traffic to your website and/or blog.
• Generate leads and sales.

Inactive social media profiles will negatively affect your brand, so make sure you not only have the resources to manage social marketing, but also have clear objectives and a long term strategy in place.

4. Failing to Collect Leads

Re-marketing to your users should be one of the main foundations of your marketing strategy if you want to succeed with any internet marketing endeavor. If you invest in lead generation campaigns that drive thousands of subscribers to your newsletter, it will be beneficial to develop campaigns that drive these users back to the site. Incentives and member-only promotions are effective in not only increasing returning traffic, but generating repeat sales over the course of the customer lifetime cycle.

You’re ready to launch…now what?

If you have a comprehensive strategy laid out, it’s best to seek the advice of those who have perfected online marketing in the past. Educating yourself can only go so far; however, consultations with proven online advertising professionals can help you refine strategies and launch successful campaigns. It’s also important to test out different campaigns: the more data you generate, the more you will learn about your target audience’s purchasing behaviours.

The post 4 Helpful Tips For Launching Successful Online Marketing Campaigns appeared first on Rank Media Agency's Online Marketing Blog.