Yahoo Gemini Unites Mobile Search and Native Advertising

By Jason Abbruzzese from Mashable

Yahoo-mobile

Yahoo is blurring the line between its native and mobile-search advertising.

The company on Wednesday announced Yahoo Gemini, a new platform that combines mobile search and native advertising into a single marketplace.

“With Yahoo Gemini, advertisers get the performance and ease of search, combined with the scale and creativity of native advertising,” Yahoo wrote in a Tumblr post. “By bringing the two together, advertisers can now buy, manage and optimize their mobile search and native ad spend in one place — driving greater performance and higher impact for their businesses and brands.”

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has made no secret that she sees an opportunity in the advertising space around mobile ads and contextual search.

 

READ MORE:  http://mashable.com/2014/02/19/yahoo-gemini-advertising/

 

Zuck Says Ads Aren’t The Way To Monetize Messaging, WhatsApp Will Prioritize Growth Not Subscriptions

by  (@joshconstine),  (@anthonyha) from TechCrunch

Facebook won’t be throwing its advertising weight behind its new acquisition WhatsApp like it did with Instagram. But WhatsApp also won’t be focusing on rolling out the $1 a year subscription fee it currently charges in some countries. Instead, with the financial security Facebook brings, it will dedicate itself to growth.

Monetization was the big topic on today’s analyst call after Facebook announced it acquired WhatsApp for a jaw-dropping total of $19 billion. That’s $4 billion in cash and $12 billion in stock, and it reserved $3 billion in restricted stock units to retain the startup’s employees. But Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, CFO David Ebersman, and WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum all said that won’t be a priority for the next few years. And when the time does come to monetize aggressively, it won’t be through ads.

“Our explicit strategy for the next several years is to focus on growing and connecting everyone in the world,” Zuckerberg said. Currently, WhatsApp has a strong presence internationally with 450 million monthly users, but it’s a fragmented market with many competitors. Outpacing them right now is critical, Facebook’s CEO explained. ”Once we get to being a service with 1 billion, 2 billion, 3 billion people, there are many clear ways that we can monetize.”

Zuckerberg bluntly stated “I don’t personally think ads are the right way to monetize messaging.” Beyond WhatsApp, that could mean Facebook doesn’t plan to use ads to monetize its own Messenger app, either. That makes sense, as the highly personal and intimate nature of messaging would cause ads to stick out like sore thumbs.

The comments on the call reiterate a point that Koum has made in the past. In a 2012 blog post, he argued, “Advertising isn’t just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought” — it also means that companies have to mine user data. (When asked about the age of WhatsApp’s users on the call, Ebersman couldn’t say, because the app doesn’t ask for that data.)

Koum made a similar commitment today in his post about the acquisition, writing, “You can still count on absolutely no ads interrupting your communication.”

 

READ MORE:  http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/19/whatsapp-will-monetize-later/

Crush Content Marketing in 2014: 5 Outside-the-Box Techniques That Get Results

, February 19, 2014 via Search Engine Watch

Crush Content Marketing in 2014

There’s no other way to put this:

If you aren’t upping your content game in a big way this year, you’re going to struggle.

A lot.

With big brands going all-in with content marketing, the competition has never been fiercer. That means people that take the “I’ll publish twice a week and see what happens” approach to content are going to be invisible.

Don’t let that be you. Stand out from the noise with these five techniques that flat out get results.

1. BuzzFeed Style Headlines

Love ’em or hate ’em, BuzzFeed and its “Facebook crack” counterparts are generating obscene amounts of traffic.

Their secret?

 

READ MORE:  http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2329636/Crush-Content-Marketing-in-2014-5-Outside-the-Box-Techniques-That-Get-Results

Spring Cleaning Your Marketing: 25 Strategies for 2014 – ExactTarget Blog

Written February 18, 2014 by 

No matter the size of your marketing team or programs, you need to decide what the rest of 2014 holds for your strategy. This time of year, the winter lulls can start to creep in, and all those impressive 2014 plans you created in December and January can begin to fade into the background. Use these recommendations (inspired by our 2014 State of Marketing research) to help “spring clean” your marketing strategies, prune the weeds, and plant the seeds for success that grows over the rest of the year. Focus on customer engagement. 1. Map your customer journey to understand at exactly what points your customers engage with you. 2. Develop a plan around how you manage those engagement touchpoints and think through how you could improve each.Develop a clear data strategy. 3. Take inventory of the data you have today and the data you need to collect. 4. Create a plan to collect that data over time and across multiple customer interactions—because asking for a lot of information at once can be a barrier to engagement. Consider your channel options. 5. Use this report to compare the channels you’re using to the channels other marketers are using. 6. Form a strategy around your presence on those channels—whether you flock to the most common channels or you choose to stand out by using an underutilized channel, like mobile. Email: Evaluate your lifecycle campaigns. 7.  Take inventory of your programs across all four lifecycle stages—acquire, onboard, engage, and retain. 8. Identify gaps across the lifecycle stages and implement campaigns to ensure that you have some form of engagement with your customers during each of these critical stages. Email: Roll out responsive design. 9. Determine how many of your subscribers open your emails on a mobile device. 10.  If you have a substantial amount of mobile opens—like most marketers reported—put a responsive design plan into action right away. Social: Start small. 11. Evaluate the social media channels available and create a pros and cons list for each. 12. Choose one or two channels to focus your efforts on first—then you can more easily scale successful strategies to other channels later on. Social: Hone in on clear objectives. 13. Establish measurable goals to avoid feeling unsure of whether your social media efforts are performing. 14. Add consistency to the list, and create metrics around how often you will post content, how quickly you’ll respond to customer messages, etc. Mobile: Don’t ignore the importance of mobile. 15. For most businesses, mobile is still a largely untapped opportunity—evaluate if mobile is right for your company. 16. Use this report to see what pioneers in mobile are already doing and see if any of those strategies are relevant to your customers. And since mobile marketing is still in its infancy, don’t be afraid to try out a few of your own ideas, too. Mobile: Integrate your mobile efforts. 17. Map your broader marketing strategies alongside your mobile strategy to determine areas where the two can work together. 18. Bringing your email and mobile efforts together can be one of the easiest ways to see an instant return and pilot the success of mobile integration. Customer Journey: Take a deep look at how customers are currently experiencing your brand. 19. Whether online or offline, and whether it’s a function of marketing or another department entirely, examine and document the current brand experience your customers have at every touchpoint. 20. Remember that these touchpoints transpire anywhere from call center to social media to brick-and-mortar and beyond. 21. What are your gaps and areas for improvement? These should be addressed in your new activation plan to both establish the ideal customer journey and develop a strategy for incrementally getting there. Personalization: Start communicating 1:1 with your customers. 22. Collecting behavior-based data is the best way to start working toward high-quality personalized messages. 23. Launch a more robust preference center to give customers the opportunity to voluntarily share the data they’d like to shape future messages. Personalization: Think about personalization beyond email. 24. Today’s marketers are unveiling personalized web experiences that reach far beyond email-only personalization to reach customers wherever they are. 25. Begin working toward cross-channel personalization for social, mobile, and web if your email personalization is already top-tier. Marketers experienced industry-affecting change last year, from the sale of Tumblr to Yahoo to Pinterest’s announcement of sponsored pins and beyond. 2014 won’t be any exception—agile marketers will lead 2014 and win customer attention in an ever-crowded marketplace. For more tips and strategies for marketing that grows all year-round, take a look at our 2014 State of Marketingresearch, a survey of over 2,500 marketers.

 

READ MORE:  http://www.exacttarget.com/blog/spring-cleaning-your-marketing-25-strategies-for-2014/

How to Use SEM as a Testing Tool – Adobe Blog

By  on February 17, 2014

Search is one of the only mar­ket­ing medi­ums in which the con­sumer is actively seek­ing out a solu­tion (e.g. a prod­uct or an answer). Because of this, mar­keters have a unique oppor­tu­nity to see what cus­tomers are search­ing for and what is pop­u­lar based on search terms. SEM (that is, paid search) updates in real time and allows for more cus­tomiza­tion than in SEO, so it is the best way to under­stand what cus­tomers want. The rela­tion­ship between searchers and search results can yield a lot of infor­ma­tion about prod­ucts, search terms, and mar­ket­ing cam­paigns. The smart SEM mar­keter will use this infor­ma­tion as a test­ing tool, and here are three ways you can too.

1. Deter­mine the Most Effec­tive Prod­uct Names

Using SEM as a vari­a­tion of A/B test­ing, you can show cus­tomers dif­fer­ent names in your SEM ads and then use search data to see which of the names sparked the most cus­tomer inter­est. SEM is cheaper than using focus groups and more dynamic than using social media, plus SEM data can show you what search terms are most pop­u­lar with searchers and which of these terms cus­tomers are most likely to click.

If, for exam­ple, you sell mobile phones, you may want to know what type of phras­ing is most inter­est­ing to cus­tomers. You can run one SEM ad that adver­tises “mobile phones,” another that fea­tures the phrase “smart­phones,” and a third that men­tions “cell phones”. Using these vari­a­tions in your search ads, you can see which terms cul­ti­vate the most cus­tomer inter­est, i.e. click-throughs, and searches. You might also con­sider the cost-per-click in rela­tion to the pop­u­lar­ity of some terms over others.

 

READ MORE:  http://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/search-marketing/use-sem-testing-tool/

Hit the bullseye with search marketing – Adobe

Hit the bullseye with search marketing. Download now

To boost conversions for your search and display ads, you need to understand the customer experience across all channels. But that’s not always easy when you’re juggling a multitude of SEM campaigns. This Forrester Research report can help you see the big picture. Download it now so you can:

[line_list]

  • Understand the digital experience across channels
  • Effectively optimize for keywords
  • Create better inbound links that lead to conversion

[/line_list]

 

Download the Forrester report ›

Twitter Testing Major Profile Redesign That Looks a Lot Like Facebook – Mashable

Twitter is testing a major profile redesign that’s very reminiscent of Facebook and Google+.

Mashable assistant features editor Matt Petronzio spotted on Tuesday a huge update to his Twitter profile page, with the main picture and bio scaled to the left and significantly more real estate dedicated to the header photo.

The revamped tweet stream is also a departure from its signature look. There is a greater focus on photos and content cards. It moves away from a strictly vertical timeline too.

Twitter Layout

 

READ MORE:  http://mashable.com/2014/02/11/twitter-redesign-facebook-google/?utm_cid=mash-com-fb-socmed-link

Adobe along with IMA Board of Directors member Matt Langie, were recently featured in Forbes

Adobe along with Internet Marketing Association Board of Directors member Matt Langie, were recently featured inForbes. Recognizing their outstanding progress with their Marketing Cloud Services.

[button type=”bd_button btn_small” url=”http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/11/07/adobe-takes-its-marketing-cloud-services-mobile/” target=”on” button_color_fon=”#ff2600″ button_text_color=”#ffffff” ]Read Full Article[/button]

Powerful Product Portrayal

Earlier we blogged about how you can use snippets for your ecommerce based website and we got a flood of responses about it. This week we decided to delve further into how you can work with your ecommerce websites to get better sales and better rankings.

On page SEO is an important part of your strategy for ranking and content that will help your consumer feel connected to your product is key in making a sale. Now keep in mind that it isn’t just the content in your page that is important, it’s a mix of the content and it’s presentation as well. Your website reads like a brochure of your real products and if that brochure doesn’t catch the consumers’ eye, those sales are going to be that much tougher to drive.

How do you get your product portrayal just right?

That’s going to take some doing. First steps, take a look at your websites listing in Google by typing in site:domain.com, where domain.com is your domain name. This gives you the default pages that Google has stored for you, what you want to do is decide if that description is okay, or if you need to edit it by adding a meta description tag to your pages. If your site is a few thousand products wide, it will take some time however the investment is well worth your time and it’s better you get started now!

Next, let’s take a look at the way you’ve presented your product, if you haven’t gotten down to putting at least a few paragraphs about why your product is interesting to your buyer, or what the important points for sale are, you’re missing out. Even websites selling tap showers can get down to putting more than just the technical information about their products.

At the least make sure you have a few high resolution photos of your product so that the end user knows what they are going to get. A great way to set yourself apart from the competition is to create a video for your products, it doesn’t need to be very long, just twenty to thirty seconds focussing on the product with someone explaining what it does is great to give an idea of how the product functions and its sellable points.

Now moving ahead of the basic information like the photo, the price and the product name, you really want to get a clear picture of the product with its description and details.

Market words and tone of language

Keep the end user who will be buying your product in mind, and think the way they would. Ensure that you have a description they would understand and relate to. Think of the words your customer would use to search for the product, they can be generalised like powerful shower head, or long lasting shower, these are terms that are general and would get your website traffic for long tail terms. You can always add more specific terms like the model number or the number of shower heads or other details in the text for someone who is looking for specifics.

Duplicate content

Most manufacturers will have a default description for their products, if you’re going to copy paste that text, you’re not getting very far. A lot of other websites have already done the same and you will primarily not get a benefit from the practice and there’s the off chance that you will get a negative rank because you’re duplicating content. So stick away from those default descriptions.

Real benefits vs. Feature lists

Be creative about how the product you are selling will help solve a pain point that a customer will have instead of listing a set of features that the product has. Most users are not technical enough to understand the technical of the products they are buying and are looking for general information on how they will benefit from your products.

SEO friendly descriptions that help your customer

At the end of the day you do want to make sure that your descriptions are doing more than just the task of ensuring that your customer buys the product, you also want to rank your page for the search terms for the product. So ensure that you can have some terms that you feel people would use for the product. Over time you will see multiple phrases from your search history that real users are using to get to your website and based on those terms you can edit your product descriptions to max your SEO potential as well.

Test and Tweak

At the end of the day, you want to test and tweak your pages to the best of your ability. Google allows you to A/B test pages via their Analytics product. You can use other methods such as Multivariate and Taguchi tests as well, however a simple split test is a great start to see what converts best for you.

We’ve listed out what you should do for your products now it’s time you got into your website and started doing it. There’s plenty of helpful information here for you to go out and increase your RoI so get to it and get those sales in. We would love to hear back on the progress you are making and how we can help you further!