Proliferation

Jun 13
0

Advertising Must Make the Move Toward Mobile

By | advertising, marketing agencies, Mobile marketing | No Comments

With the drastic increase in smartphone popularity over the past 10 years has come a sudden decrease in the popularity of other media. The smartphone has become the GPS, television, calendar, ultimate connector and so much more.

While Americans are spending close to a quarter of their daily media time on mobile devices, advertising and marketing agencies are only spending a small fraction of their budget on mobile platforms. Some forward-thinking advertising and marketing agencies are calling for a shift in advertising and a conscious move toward an increase in mobile advertisements.

Out With the Old

In a world where the selfie is king and Facebook is the most popular media platform, big advertising and marketing agencies are still spending huge sums of money on print advertising. Though there is still a place for print advertising, there are several instances in which mobile advertising is drastically more effective.

Advertisements placed on TV and radio are doing reasonably well, but advertising on the internet is sub-par — and where mobile is concerned, nearly non-existent. In order to have a blended and totally effective campaign, it is important that advertising and marketing agencies let go of preconceived notions and get on board with mass mobile advertising.

If your target market mirrors the behaviors exhibited by the vast majority of Americans, then it is safe to say that mobile consumes your market’s time — and unless you meet them there, you risk being completely ignored.

In With the New

With the future of advertising tied so closely to Facebook, it is time to revolutionize the way advertising is executed and bring the ads to the masses. If smartphones and social media are the future of advertising, then that is where we must go.

Take the time to develop a serious plan to integrate mobile advertising into various campaigns.

In the past mobile advertising was considered a bonus — but today it is essential. You wouldn’t fight a Sith Lord without a lightsaber — a campaign without mobile advertisements is equally as hopeless.

Mobile advertising is more than just ads that pop up between levels of Candycrush or business pages of Facebook. Advertising and marketing agencies have the potential to put creativity in action and push the limits of mobile advertising. Whether these advertisements come on Instagram or Snapchat, there are hundreds of ways to advertise and interact with customers.

Jun 08
0

Twitter’s New Changes: What They Mean for Marketing

By | digital marketing, marketing agencies, Social Media | No Comments

Lift up your voice and rejoice! Twitter just announced some major changes that will make life at marketing agencies much easier. The changes are a step towards loosening Twitter’s strict 140-character limit in tweets, while still preserving its signature micro blogging charm.

Adios “.@”

 Under Twitter’s current formula, tweets starting with another user’s Twitter handle were only seen by the shared followers of the person tweeting and the recipient. Twitter users created the “.@” to circumvent this rule. When the new changes take effect, users can do away with that pesky period before the handle. Tweets beginning with a handle will be seen by everyone instead of being restricted.

Media Files

 In the past, photos, GIFs, videos, polls and quote tweets could take up to 25 characters each. The new rules do not count media files towards the character total. This is especially welcomed news for marketing agencies that rely increasingly on visual and interactive elements to engage with audiences. Not having to worry about characters being sucked up by media files means more room to be creative and share your message.

Twitter Handles in Replies

 When replying to another user, Twitter handles will no longer count toward the character limit, with one exception: Only names already in the conversation will be exempt from counting. Adding new handles to the conversation will still count toward the character limit.

Retweet Yourself

 That’s right, Kanye. The new Twitter will allow you to retweet and quote yourself. You’re so vain. You probably think this tweet is about you … oh wait, it is.

When Will It Come to Pass?

 In the blog post announcing the changes, Twitter’s Senior Project Manager Todd Sherman said users could expect the updates to roll out in the next few months. He also announced plans to help users get even more from their tweets. Marketing agencies can only hope that means URL links will one day not count toward those precious 140 characters either. Twitter gods, hear our plea.

May 25
0

The Facebook Metrics You Should Care Most About

By | digital marketing, Facebook, marketing, Utah | No Comments

Facebook boasts just over a billion daily active users, making it a huge storehouse of potential customers that businesses can pursue. Since most businesses and digital marketing firms are onboard the Facebook train by now, the next step for them is understanding some of the metrics Facebook provides — and how those metrics can be used to improve posts.

Page Views

Page views refer to how many people have visited your Facebook page. This is useful because it can show you how many people were either curious enough about your brand to look you up, or wanted to interact with more of your posts after seeing them on their news feed.

Reach

For Facebook, reach refers to how many users viewed your post. This helps digital marketing firms because you can see which posts gather the most reach, compared to which aren’t doing so well. While this information is useful, it it’s not nearly as useful as seeing how many people engaged with a particular post.

Impressions

While reach refers to number of people who saw your post, impressions refer to how many times your post was seen. This is different, because the same user can see your post more than once if one of his or her friends shares the post. Impressions are a useful metric because they give you a clearer picture of how many times your message is appearing to your audience — and can be a good indicator of how shareable it is.

Engagement

For digital marketing firms in particular, the keyword for social media is, of course, “social.” Engagement measures the percentage of people who interacted with your posts, either through commenting, liking, sharing, etc. This is one of the most useful metrics — because the best type of content is the kind that’s interesting enough for people to share with their friends. The beauty of Facebook is that if you’re sharing something your audience likes, they will do a lot of the legwork for you.

Videos

A major focus for all digital marketing firms is video. If you’re posting videos to your Facebook page, you’ll want to know how many people are actually watching them, right? What’s more useful, though, is seeing how long people have watched your video. Facebook will provide you with the number of times your video has been viewed for at least ten seconds. If videos consistently underperform and people begin to watch but quickly bounce, that’s a solid indicator that your videos need some improvement.

In Summary

Facebook provides these statistics for a reason, so don’t forget to make studying them a regular part of your social media strategy. Only by analyzing stats and understanding how your posts are performing can you continually improve your digital marketing game.

May 25
0

Amp Up Your Content Quality With Good Grammar

By | content marketing, SEO, Utah | No Comments

Content marketing is the driving force behind convincing consumers to use a company’s services or products. Good content marketing gives information to the consumer and that information convinces them to act.

This strategic portion of advertising uses SEO and keywords to draw customers in. Once the consumers find the written content it is important that nothing drives them away — this includes poor grammatical errors.

A good content marketing agency will be able to take care of your content creation for you and with a string of editors double checking posts, grammatical nightmares can easily be avoided.

Avoiding Error

Remembering the little things is key. If your company is located in Utah and it consistently forgets to capitalize Utah in its blog posts, it is likely that your Utah customers will be turned off by the unprofessional mistakes. This could ultimately affect sales.

Many spelling and capitalization errors can be caught by internal spellcheck programs on your computer but there are several other grammatical issues that can’t be resolved by spellcheck.

If your company uses AP Style as your format, make sure that all posts are written after this manner. Inconsistencies within style are confusing within a webpage. Keep style guides handy around the workplace in order to have a quick point of reference when questions arise.

Online sources can also often offer overviews of specific styles and identify commonly made grammatical mistakes. In order to maximize a company’s content marketing reach, refer to these online guides often.

These guides and sources can be found through any search engine. Before your use one though, make sure to check your source and verify that it is a reputable one. You wouldn’t take Jedi training from Chewbacca so why would you take grammar training from dizzyflowerlover454?

After you have referenced guides and established online sources it is always a good idea to have someone give you a second opinion on your work. Content marketing can be tricky so having a second set of eyes catching your little mistakes is important.

With good grammar though, you can keep customers reading and clients happy.

May 19
0

Personalization: A Call for Deeper Content Marketing Metrics

By | content marketing | No Comments

Content marketing is all about making things personal. It’s about providing the information consumers need in a way that helps them see the benefits of your goods and services. It’s about reaching both an advertising executive in Utah and a mommy blogger on the West Coast.  It takes a lot of work, and after all your time and effort is put into personalizing and optimizing content marketing strategies, how do you know if any of it is paying off?

What’s the Deal With Metrics?

Content marketing metrics allow marketers from Utah and around the world to quantify and visualize the success of each piece of content. There’s just one glitch. A recent McKinsey survey shows that only a third of marketers report they really are able to quantitatively show how effective their marketing is.

How to Dive Deeper Into Analytics

This dilemma is creating an industry-wide call for deeper content marketing metrics. These forms of deep analytics don’t just show return on investment. Deep analytics enable marketers to improve future content. In order to get this type of information, marketers must invest in emergent content technologies that turn consumers into active participants by delivering each consumer a custom, interactive experience.

How does this differ from traditional content marketing approaches? Well, most content marketers work under a distribution point model, meaning they try to collect consumer data when the content is delivered to the user, like selecting ads based on search history. This is all good, but too many marketers stop there. There’s limited personalization, so you get limited engagement and limited insights into the consumer.

We’ll Say It Again: Give the Customers What They Want

To continue to improve and develop, content marketing professionals need to bridge the gap between creating personal content and improving data analysis and collection. This means investing in a personalized customer experience, or simply put, giving the customer the content they actually want. It doesn’t matter if you’re in Utah or in the Big Apple. Increasing personalization means more insights into each customer and deeper metrics overall.

Mar 26
0

Millennials & Content Marketing Go Hand-in-Hand

By | content marketing, Millennials | No Comments

As the baby boomer generation ages, getting on into their social security years, Millennials are quickly taking over as the largest single adult age group in the United States. And yet, as the millennial generation grows in purchasing power, marketing companies from the East Coast to Utah are wringing their hands in worry.

Why, you ask? Well, millennials simply aren’t going for the old marketing tactics — such as billboards along the I-15 in Utah — that worked for previous generations. Instead, millennials are looking for something more authentic. Content marketing was made for millennials. Content marketing is about storytelling and bringing consumers to your brand of their own accord — concepts the millennial generation holds near and dear.

In 2016, the results are clear: To successfully reach the lucrative millennial generation, content marketing is the way to go.

What makes content marketing so enticing for millennials? For one thing, content marketing doesn’t interrupt people. By skipping the invasive pop-up ads and flashing neon widgets, content marketing doesn’t keep people from doing what they’re doing. Instead, good content marketing listens to the demands of the target audience, providing content that is both relevant and useful. In this way, content marketing brings the target audience to you — not the other way around.

Millennials love a good visual as much as the next generation, but they also love technology. Content marketing is extremely flexible in its application, with content in mediums such as video, text, graphics, mobile, social media and many more. And it doesn’t take a huge firm in the Big Apple to do it; even small businesses in Utah can take advantage of content marketing’s multi-media approach — all you really need a smartphone.

Finally, content marketing breeds engagement. Good content marketing gives millennials the opportunity and the incentive to contribute their own user-generated content — which is then repurposed in order to add authenticity to the brand and bring in more user-generated content in a glorious, self-fulfilling cycle.

With a plethora of original, relatable content, even the newest start-up business in Utah can take advantage of content marketing to reach out to the millennial market. So what are you waiting for? Stop interrupting millennials, and start listening to them instead.

Mar 25
0

The World of Content Marketing Is Oversaturated — What to Do to Stand Out

By | content marketing | No Comments

By this point in 2016, pretty much everyone and his mother is using content marketing. Eighty-eight percent of business-to-business marketers currently utilize content marketing; that number is expected to eclipse 90 percent in the near future.

At this point, content marketing isn’t anything new. Amid the onslaught of articles, lists and stories that abound on the Internet, how can a small content marketer in Utah garner the short-lived attention of his chosen audience? Let’s think about this closely.

Most of today’s content marketers in Utah and elsewhere know that content with images garners more engagement and more shares. Visual content is more than 40 times more likely to be shared on social media, and Facebook posts with images experience 2.3 times more engagement than posts without images.

But that featured image at the top of the article isn’t enough — did you know articles than feature an image every 75–100 words are shared twice as often as articles with fewer words? Consumers can’t get enough of images; so go Shutterstock shopping and build up that relevant image library.

Speaking of social shares, did you know that long-form content is actually significantly more likely to be shared than short-form content? On social media, content with 3,000–10,000 words is almost twice as likely to be shared as content with 0–1,000 words.

Considering most people in the content marketing business focus on pumping out a large quantity of short-form pieces, long-form content represents a serious area of opportunity for online marketers in Utah and elsewhere.

In terms of written content, additional length and image usage can go a long way. But that’s not all — research shows viewers don’t interact with all parts of a written piece equally. Across numerous sites analyzed by Web analytics company Chartbeat, 65.7 percent of viewer engagement on written pieces occurred below the fold, and most of that engagement is with the beginning of a piece.

What does that mean for content marketing professionals? Don’t save the most interesting part of the article for last — no one will ever read it. Instead, make sure the first couple of paragraphs are composed of rock-solid, share-able material. Your business partners in Utah will thank you later.

Mar 24
0

The 4 R’s of Good Content Management

By | advertising, content marketing | No Comments

In content marketing, both how much content you produce and what kinds of content are equally important for consumer engagement, sales and ultimately return on investment. Effective content management is an essential component of any content marketing campaign, for businesses in Utah and across the globe. For great content marketing strategy, follow the four R’s of content management.

Recycle

Unless you’re part of the world’s largest content marketing agency, chances are you don’t have the budget to produce only 100-percent-unique content every single day. Get the most out of your marketing content by recycling content and applying it to different mediums, tweaking things as appropriate. Change things up enough to develop a slightly different message for each format.

Reinvigorate

When you pull out old content to recycle it, make sure that all the information is still relevant in the present day. Update your information with all the latest statistics, latest website URLs, branding, etc. There’s nothing worse than recycling an old piece of work only to realize that one company in Utah or that particular website you reference no longer exists. And besides, content that’s no longer relevant is not content that drives conversions.

Retire

On the flip side of recycling content, know when to give up and retire old content that is simply no longer useful. Technology becomes outdated, trends change and people move on from one thing to another. Don’t risk letting your business get left in the dust, and get rid of old content in a timely fashion. Nothing’s worse than giving off the vibe of an outdated, out-of-touch business.

Replace

When you finally retire old content for good, it’s essential for content marketers to replace old content with something new and exciting. Keep things fresh and up-to-date with a mix of new and cutting-edge content and older staple pieces. You can even just spice up older pieces in order to maintain those original links and SEO value.

From businesses in Utah to the East Coast, content marketing is all about bringing in consumers organically. Stay on top of the game by following the four R’s of content management.

Mar 23
0

Content Marketing in the Pre-Internet Era

By | advertising, content marketing | No Comments

Content marketing is the new big thing in online marketing — from billboards to in-your-face pop-up advertising, content marketing is like a breath of fresh air that brings consumers to your business the natural way.

Yet while content marketing is a buzzword currently trendy among businesses from the East Coast to Utah, content marketing has been around longer than you’d think. Let’s take a look at some examples.

John Deere

Back in 1895, agricultural manufacturer John Deere launched its own consumer magazine, known as “The Furrow.” Originally published quarterly in Clarinda, Iowa, “The Furrow” is now available in 12 different languages and 40 different countries around the world, with a consumer reach of 1.5 million people.

Michelin

A mere five years after John Deere’s “The Furrow,” in 1900 tire manufacturer Michelin came out with it’s “The Michelin Guides,” a series of comprehensive guides to automobile maintenance, travel and local restaurants and hotels. Originally distributed for free in France, “The Michelin Guides” expanded into annual releases that covered various different countries.

Jell-O

The next big foray into content marketing in the 20th century came from American gelatin company Jell-O in 1904. Facing low sales, the Jell-O company began door-to-door distribution of free copies of its Jell-O recipe book, featuring creative uses for the gelatin dessert. The recipe book was a smash hit throughout the Midwest and Utah, reaching $1 million in sales by 1906.

Procter & Gamble Co.

Without the Procter & Gamble Co. (P&G) approach to content marketing in the 1930s, we wouldn’t have today’s classic soap operas such as “Days of Our Lives” and “The Young and the Restless.” The P & G company, purveyor of all things household goods, needed a new way to appeal to stay-at-home housewives in Utah and elsewhere. Through the creation of dramatic storylines full of mystery and intrigue, the classic soap opera was born.

Hasbro & Marvel

In 1982, comic book legend Marvel and toy company Hasbro teamed up to create the iconic G.I. Joe comic book. Through cross-channel promotion via both comic books and a television series, G.I. Joe became a household name — and sold an unprecedented amount of merchandise.

While content marketing has come a long way since the turn of the century, the core concepts remain the same. Tailor your branded content in a way that is both relevant for consumers and beneficial for your brand, and people from the East Coast to Utah will be clamoring for your products. For a strategy that has stood the test of time, content marketing is it.

Mar 22
0

Make the Most of Obscure Holidays With Content Marketing

By | content marketing, digital marketing | No Comments

From National Pancake Day to Froot Loop Day and Arbor Day, the world is full of random and obscure holidays. While some holidays are more reputable than others — Pi Day, for instance, is totally a real holiday — even the craziest of self-proclaimed holidays can be a great resource for content marketers.

In content marketing, even the best campaigns can sometimes get a little stale. Capitalizing on random holidays throughout the year can add a little spice to your everyday content marketing strategy and increase engagement.

Just make sure to pick holidays that are relevant to your business; a company that sells Jell-O in Utah, for instance, would certainly benefit from National Jell-O Week, which takes place the second week of February — and has been officially recognized by the Utah state legislature since 2001.

Obscure holidays are great for times of the year that fall though the cracks between more-established holidays such as Independence Day or Labor Day. Research obscure holidays in advance, and plan your content marketing campaigns accordingly.

Run a local bakery? Consider running a sale for Cupcake Lover’s Day, or simply write a blog post or social media shout-out to get people interested. And don’t forget about National Donut Day. Work for a diner? Maybe Tater Tot Day is more your thing. The point is to get consumers thinking about your brand, in a more fun and genuinely interesting way. Plus, strange holidays are great for social.

No matter how strange the holiday, there’s almost always a way to work it in to your content marketing strategy. Whether you’re running a small business in Utah or a larger corporation based in the Big Apple, one thing’s for sure: People really, really love random holidays. Take the opportunity to celebrate, and connect with your audience in a way they’ll surely remember come next year.