Is mobile marketing getting enough investment?
SEMPO's 9th report on the State of Search Marketing highlighted that mobile marketing is a priority for respondents. As a result, SEMPO created a separate Mobile Search Trends infographic to showcase the findings which we feature here.
Agencies and clients who took part in this survey shared their views on mobile marketing:
8 out of 10 respondents plan to include mobile marketing in their plans though have only allocated 3% of their overall budget goes into to this.
The main objective of mobile search is unsurprisingly to generate leads through mobile marketing.
Agencies ranked 'geotargeting' as the top technique to help with mobile marketing, compared to insight from Google's Universal Analytics support for cross-device tracking according to companies.
Additional resources on mobile marketing on Smart Insights
Mobile Marketing Strategy Guide
Mobile statistics summary
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What is influencer marketing and how to use it?
Buying decisions, particularly high-value or complex ones, are not made in isolation.You need to know who your buyers are talking to, and get those people on side. You need to know who’s on their team, and get them on yours. That is how I define influencer marketing. In this post I'll show how you can use it in practice by mapping third parties to the buying decision to plan your influencer marketing.
Why is influencer marketing important?
The source of a message is often as important as the message itself... The opinions of others are sought during a buying decision for two main reasons:
people may wish to shortcut the process by asking someone they think knows the subject well,
and secondly, they may look for reassurance that their decision is sound.
This is why you’ll hear marketers talk about including ‘influencers’ as part of your wider audience.…
Plus examples of good and poor practice in writing ad copy
Paid search advertising provides an opportunity for almost any business to improve their visibility in the SERPs.
But creating an advert and setting it live isn’t enough. As Google continues on its mission to deliver only the highest quality search results, its rules around what adverts are generated and where they appear are ever stricter.
It is therefore essential that marketers do all they can to ensure their advert is seen – and that people click on it. One of the simplest ways to achieve this is to write better AdWords ads.
Seven Tips to improve your Adwords campaigns
Here are seven tips particularly relevant in my experience to small and medium businesses (SMEs/SMBs). I've illustrated the tips with examples to show the details you must consider to make your AdWords ads effective.
Tip 1 - be relevant
This might seem obvious but it’s absolutely vital that…
How to avoid 5 common keyword research mistakes for Search Engine Marketing
Choosing the right keywords for your PPC campaigns and SEO can be a real challenge. For example, do you target only niche keywords you can gain visibility for or do you concentrate on the more generic keywords that are the most competitive?
The key is balance. You should be targeting both types. To understand why, let’s first look at which metrics we recommend you use to categorize and value a keyword.
1. Volume and Difficulty
Volume : Number of keyword searches for the term within a given period.
Difficulty: Level of competition between domains for the keyword.
Types of actionable keywords:
Common: Usually a one-word keyword with very little context. Let’s look at a search for the term 'Apple'. What information can we determine from just looking at the keyword 'Apple' about what the person was searching for? Not much. He may be looking for an iPhone…
Using Talkwalker Social Search for social media listening
Value: [rating=5]
Recommended link: Talkwalker Social Search
Who are the most important influencers in my sector? What types of content are most popular for sharing? What social media strategies are my competitors pursuing?
Answering these question is a concern for any social media marketer trying to review and identify tactics to improve their social media and content marketing.
To help answer these questions there are literally hundreds of social media listening / monitoring tools options available. Of course, many of these services are paid for which rules them out for many smaller and mid-size businesses.
If you were looking for free social media insight, then the two most popular tools we have previously recommended are Social mention and Topsy. For free tools, these can be a great help in finding the most influential sharers or content and the most…
It's more than increasing online adspend...
Digital. It’s not a channel box to tick, unless you work for a media buying company, it’s not TV 2.0 for your new ad creative or campaign. Though it appears for many, it still is.
Whenever I hear traditional ad spenders, most typically big brand managers or marketers, talk about investing in, or doing digital, I pause and cringe, and listen in hope. More often than not what they’re saying is - “we’re spending ad money on more ads in digital channels.” Driven by an ill-informed “cost per click.,” or worse a crude “eye-ball” metric. It’s still just advertising, and worse, using creative so often intended for TV or for billboards - neither of which translate well for online will guarantee to deliver exceptionally poor results.
What are you amplifying and measuring?
This is what jumps to mind first, for me. It’s not that digital advertising is…
Are you missing out through not advertising in social media to ensure content success with Paid Social Amplification?
In our industry, good content is invaluable. But good content is also hard work.
From planning to Quality Contro, content must be researched, nurtured, analyzed, and improved on an ongoing basis to make it as suitable as possible for your target audience. But if no one is finding your content, then regardless of the quality, it won't have an impact on your business's bottom line. This is where paid amplification comes into play.
[Editor's note: The Smart Insights research report on Managing Digital Marketing in 2014 showed that many businesses are looking to increase their paid advertising on social media this year, so we hope these tips on how to do this are helpful]
Pushing targeted eyeballs to quality content is something our team has had success…
The growth in Semantic markup for SEO
It’s been almost a year since Google started to encrypt searches and keyword data began to disappear from website analytics reports. During that time, site owners and marketing managers have gone through the various stages of grief.
Initially, businesses were in denial and attempted to grab their keyword data from any available source including using Google Webmaster Tools keyword data, internal site search and other search engines, in an attempt to build up a picture of their referring keyword traffic.
This proved to be less useful than expected and search marketers increasingly became angry at Google, accusing the company of being hypocritical and attributing the decision to a cynical attempt to get more people using Adwords.
However, marketers may have unknowingly benefited from the lack of keyword data in their reports as it allowed them to focus on creating valuable content which would be beneficial…
A review of 9 new features in Google's consumer search behaviour insight tool
When the Google Keyword Tool was removed and replaced with the Keyword Planner, approximately a year ago, the ability for marketers to filter traffic estimates by device was lost. It was no longer possible to see the volume of searches by consumers made on mobile devices including smartphone and tablet.
However, with the introduction of nine new features to the Google Keyword Planner Tool last month, users will now have greater insight into mobile device volumes, mobile trends, enhanced location breakdowns and how this data trends over time.
In this post, I’m going to focus on the mobile and location enhancements, which offer some really useful data and allows us to consider how we can optimise our sites more effectively for mobile and tablet searchers.
Contribution of search volume for keywords by device
From the nine new features…
By
23 May 2014
On 3rd April 2014 Google announced that the clock is ticking until they automatically upgrade all Product Listing Ad campaigns into Google Shopping Campaigns. The timeframe they have outlined is August 2014.
Therefore we recommend that you make this switch manually before the end of July as otherwise Google will take the liberty of doing it for you.
Shopping campaigns were released in beta mode in October 2013 and then fully in February 2014.
There are many aspects to shopping campaigns that are consistent with product listing ads:
The ads are matched to user searches based on your product inventory data feed that you send to the Google Merchant Centre rather than being triggered by keywords that the advertiser sets.
From a shoppers perspective they look identical - the ads show an image of your product, the product name and price and there is the option to add…
