Lessons Learned from Top Brands on How to Rock on Instagram

Here is a list of some top brands that will serve to help marketers gain inspiration for How to Rock on Instagram.Related Articles

1. How Brands are Marketing Themselves with Instagram
2. The Weekly Wrap: Benchmark FTW!
3. 5 Ways I Use Instagram & Pixlr-o-matic to Boost My Art Business

from Benchmarkemail Blog http://ift.tt/1WWXmIG
via IFTTT

Hunting Big PPC Optimizations for Massive ROI Increases at SMX East

This fall, the SMX East crowd once again descends on the Javits Center in New York City for three days of expert advice and instruction on SEO and search marketing. This year, the agenda features over 50 sessions, 5 in-depth workshops, epic keynotes, Janes of Digital, The Landy Awards (by Search Engine Land) and of course, the amazing SMX After Dark party.

From September 29th to October 1st, plan to be in New York for one of the search industry’s top educational and networking events. I’ll be there leading my SEM track session, "Hunting Big PPC Campaign Optimizations for Massive ROI Increases" on Day 1 at 4:20.

Hunting Big PPC Optimizations at SMX East

It’s not really that difficult to optimize PPC campaigns for 2-5% increases, simply by employing best practices and testing small changes like button color, ad text variations, etc.

But is that the best you can do?

If your boss or client demands better than average performance, you don’t want to miss this session. We’re going to dive right in to the new game-changing weapons of mass ROI, in order to effect exponential increases in your campaign’s performance.

We’re talking about outperforming your previous performance and outpacing your competitors by 3x, 5x -- even 10x.

How?

I’m going to share the latest tools and techniques top PPC marketers are using to blow the average marketers out of the water, including:

• Mobile call-only campaigns
• New email targeting capabilities in Google AdWords
• Defining custom affinity audiences specific to your business

... and a lot more.

Amazing Networking Opportunities at SMX East 2015

Let’s face it, the best part of any conference is the networking. In the expo hall events, at the parties and at the dinner table are where you meet the most interesting people and find the most relevant conversations.

Don’t miss these incredible opportunities to connect with the people who could make a huge difference in your business in the coming year:

• SMX Meet & Greet - Monday at 6pm. Open to All Access Pass holders, the meet & greet reception is a great place to meet other attendees in an informal setting. Just off the plane? Don’t worry, this is business casual.
• Meet & Eat or Birds of a Feather Lunches. SMX offers two unique experiences during lunch breaks each day of the conference: you can either grab a seat at a table that looks interesting, or sign up for their more structured “Birds of a Feather” tables. That way, you’re seated with people whose interests closely match your own, making for some great lunch conversation.
• SMX Expo Hall Reception - Tuesday at 4:45pm. Unwind and enjoy a drink in the Expo Hall as the first day of the conference wraps up.
• Janes of Digital - Tuesday at 7:30pm at 404 10th Ave. Bing and SMX present an incredible opportunity for women in digital marketing to meet, interact and support one another in a cocktail party environment. Men are welcome to attend, but all are asked to pre-register, as space is limited.
• SMX After Dark and Landy Awards - Wednesday at 8pm at BB King’s Blues Club in Times Square. SMX East promises this year’s will be the biggest and best After Dark party yet! This is an event you can feel good about attending, too, as all proceeds from ticket sales, Landy Awards entry fees and sponsorship are donated to charity (specifically, to BeTheMatch.org and CODE.org).

See the SMX East website for more on their in-person and online networking opportunities.

Will I see you there? Ping me on Twitter if you’re hoping to meet me or some of the WordStream team at SMX East this year and we’ll be sure to connect!

 

from Internet Marketing Blog by WordStream http://ift.tt/1WWIfPw
via IFTTT

How to Create Content That Drives Organic Traffic

When writing content, there are a lot of factors you have to keep in mind. You need:

• A great headline that’ll get people to click (without it being clickbait).
• Well-written content that must get to the point, move along, be an enjoyable read, etc.
• Memorable content.
• Content that achieves a goal promised early on. This article on book titles, for instance, implies that it will show you how to pick the perfect book title. So, by the end of the article, the reader should know how to do that, or at least have learned a lot.
• Content that creates engagement. If the article was written well, people will talk about it in the comments. This is especially true if they found something useful or had a question about something. (Hopefully, they won’t leave comments because they found errors or false statements in your content.)
• Content that gets some action out of the reader. This can be a social share, subscribing to your blog, commenting, following you on social, etc.

In addition to all this, the content should be search engine friendly. These documents from Google and Bing outline what they view as good content, but there are a few things they left out.

Today’s infographic shows you how to create content that drives organic traffic. Take a look….

Courtesy of: Quick Sprout

Content marketing is tough, but ensuring you have SEO down (see building an SEO optimized web page) will make your job a little easier.

For more on SEO and content, see our SEO category and our blogging category.

About the Author: Zach Bulygo (Twitter) is a Content Writer for Kissmetrics.

from The Kissmetrics Marketing Blog http://ift.tt/1F2LMAQ
via IFTTT

4 Creative Uses of Marketing Automation

From automating marketing emails to automating your Facebook and Twitter posts, marketing automation offers businesses of all shapes and sizes many different benefits. From eliminating tedious and often repetitive tasks, to ensuring efficiency is optimised in every aspect of work […]

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

4 Creative Uses of Marketing Automation

--
Written by Jonny Ross, jonnyross.com

The post 4 Creative Uses of Marketing Automation appeared first on Search Engine People Blog.

from Search Engine People Blog http://ift.tt/1JBaBVo
via IFTTT

Resource-Based Marketing: 5 SaaS Companies That Are Doing It Right

Want to put your company on the map? There are many ways you can approach your marketing in order to get eyeballs and grow your business.

From press releases that result in media mentions to a great paid campaign for your social media page, and from an ad that gets you seen in search engines to a commercial on TV or an ad on a website, there is no shortage of opportunities to grow your online footprint.

A lot of people use the aforementioned tactics to build visibility. When you think about it, online marketing typically encompasses the three standard marketing components: SEO, social media marketing, and PPC. That’s your SEM (search engine marketing) in a nutshell.

But what people don’t seem to recognize is that there are other creative tactics to use within SEM that could be incredibly valuable to your company’s bottom line.

What tactics, you ask?

Tools and education!

Lots of companies are using free tools and resources as well as education to power massive customer acquisition. In this article, I’d like to showcase five companies that have created significant resources which really helped grow awareness of their product.

1. HubSpot: Building a Product to Drive Leads

Inbound marketing company HubSpot is your classic example. Years ago, it launched to appeal to a niche audience of marketers by creating the now defunct Twitter Grader, which would grade your presence on the social media platform. At the time, the social media space was abuzz with news about the tool, and everyone wanted to share their statistics. The result was significant awareness (the company went public last year).

While Twitter Grader doesn’t exist anymore, HubSpot replaced it with a more ubiquitous (and more appropriate for its product offering) Website Marketing Grader. But, now, even that’s out of date, so HubSpot is building a better version at Website Grader.

Once you grade your site, you get pitched to try out HubSpot’s service offerings, all of which can help with your website presence online. By doing this, HubSpot not only offers a tool that’s relevant to what it does, it also captures leads regularly.

What you can learn from HubSpot: Product-based launches that are relevant to your business are best. Offer a tool that will lead people to want to know how to “fix” the problems you identify for them.

2. Groove: Building a Business on the Back of a Super Informative Blog

If you haven’t checked out Groove yet, you should. It’s one of my favorite blogs, and if you have a look, you’ll see why.

GrooveHQ is a relatively simple helpdesk application for small businesses. Beyond having a really great interface, their customer experience goes far beyond the product offering. Their blog is a goldmine of great content, and it keeps on getting better and better.

Groove has three blogs. Their main blog is the Startup Journey, and it is authored by their insanely intelligent CEO, Alex Turnbull. In it, Alex talks about his journey and gives tips on how people can learn from other businesses just like his. For example, he talks about how he grew his email subscription base to 50k, how to manage remote teams, and what he learned from failing to hit his 12-month growth goal. The blog is beautifully designed, giving readers a true chronology of his successes (and failures).

Groove’s second blog is the Customer Support blog. True to its name, it covers topics related to customer support, such as a weekly customer service maintenance checklist and articles on how to reduce the number of customer service emails you get, how to deal with bad reviews of your business, and how to turn your most unhappy customers into brand promoters. It is chock full of good content, as is their third blog, which is product-oriented.

The Product blog covers new feature additions written in such a way as to engage the reader. It also covers topics like “how Company ABC switched to Groove,” product hacks (i.e., how to make the product better with some hacking), and more. The way these posts are written is refreshing and really conveys a true interest in connecting with the reader. It’s not your typical educational blog. It is passion in (digital) print. No wonder Groove is growing so much.

What you can learn from Groove: If you write amazing content, your business blog can soar above the rest. It’s even better if you are transparent about your journey as a business, discussing your successes and failures so that people can really identify with you and the situations you describe.

3. Synup: Building a Resource that Drives Awareness on top of What You’re Already Selling

Synup, a local listings tool, has been really making waves in the local SEO space. Earlier this summer, it launched the Local SEO Checklist to help anyone working on local SEO to learn what steps need to be taken to ensure their local website has the best possible SEO. The tool is totally free, and it is a true checklist of every step necessary to grow a local online footprint.

Synup’s tool has worked. Their service has attracted thousands of new users in the past three months who needed to do more with their local SEO. After all, Synup’s offering is tangential to review monitoring for small local businesses. This complements the standard local SEO tips wonderfully. With the checklist, one will learn the steps it takes to be visible, while their review offering gives companies the tools to maintain positive visibility.

What you can learn from Synup: Customer acquisition can be jump-started by offering value-added functionality that enhances what you already offer, especially if it is tangential to your product offering. With Synup’s checklist and its review management solution, one gets a great grasp of local online marketing.

4. Zapier: Gated Content that Drives Product Awareness and Customer Acquisition

Zapier is a tool that connects apps you use and helps you automate tasks to get more out of your data. For example, you may want to use Zapier to add a Google Calendar entry to your to-do list or add basic information from LinkedIn contacts to a Google Spreadsheet or send emails directly to Slack.

Zapier has grown on me, especially through their great content promotions. Beyond their blog (which is incredible, just like Groove’s), they also have a learning center with more exhaustive guides that are way too big for a standard blog post. My favorite, by far, is “The Ultimate Guide to Remote Work” because it speaks to my lifestyle as well.

As you can see, not only are these guides beautifully designed, they are also pretty informative, too. The Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing talks about how great emails are made, the top 25 best apps, how to grow your subscriber base, how to segment email lists, how to import/copy/remove subscribers, the basics of drip marketing with 25 tools to do so, the best 7 tools for transactional emails, how to a/b test, 21 mistakes to avoid, and how to keep sending great emails.

In other words, there are 15-20 blog posts in one super cool and informative eBook. And it’s free. This puts Zapier’s amazing service in front of many people who would be interested in learning more about what they have to offer.

What you can learn from Zapier: Going a step beyond what Groove did, rich pieces of informative content that read like eBooks are fantastic ways to acquire customers. Significantly, they shouldn’t be boring whitepapers, but rather cool content about a variety of topics that would be of interest to your audience, even if they’re not actually about what you’re selling!

5. Dropbox: Building a Product that Enhances the Usefulness of the Main Offering

Dropbox is one of the world’s topmost file sharing and storage tools out there, allowing people to easily store their most important files online with cloud backup and redundancy. Files can be synced from one computer to the next seamlessly. Dropbox has gotten better and better through the years and has enhanced its offering substantially.

While Dropbox has a lot of business applicability, it also has a lot of personal applicability. Dropbox encourages users to automatically upload photos to its platform, and that’s synced to its Carousel gallery app.

Carousel advertises itself as a “lifetime of photos, simplified.” It’s an amazing organizational tool for photographs, allowing users to see the photos anywhere. This app can also help you review what you’ve been doing in previous years, giving you small flashbacks into your life in the past.

These flashbacks are similar to a lesser-used Facebook feature (and what Timehop already does), but they are far more appropriate to the medium in this case. Since Dropbox stores files from the past and the present on the cloud, having photographs with a historical perspective at your fingertips is not just fun but applicable to the primary tool. Carousel is an optional download that simply enhances the Dropbox experience.

What you can learn from Dropbox: Offering tools that make your service more appealing to use is a great way to acquire customers. Your SaaS service or business may not be very exciting, but adding small tools that make product usage fun (even if it isn’t directly correlated to your business offering) is another great way to acquire new customers.

Create Resources to Grow Your Business

There are many terrific ways to market your product. Creating content or an app to enhance its presence online is an excellent way for your brand to stand out.

Has this article inspired you to create something outstanding? Then I hope you do so and reap the benefits.

About the Author: Tamar Weinberg is a professional hustler and author of The New Community Rules: Marketing on The Social Web. She blogs about all things tech, productivity, and social media customer success at Techipedia.

from The Kissmetrics Marketing Blog http://ift.tt/1U8Ra1u
via IFTTT

How Marketers Can Survive in the War on Mobile Ad Blocking

It’s likely that when you opened a news app sometime this week, you saw a headline screaming how “Ad blocking is going to destroy mobile!” These articles are hard to avoid; they’re ubiquitous.

If you’re a brand, or work directly with brands, don’t be alarmed. Mobile may be the main key to your digital strategy, or perhaps its newest proponent. In any case, you don’t want to lose control of your audience. This “survival guide” will help brands master the mobile domain and understand that a few obstacles don’t mean the end of the road.

After all, ad blocking is nothing new. It’s been around for decades; this is just its first foray into mobile.

To recap the history of ad blocking, flashback to 1999. That year at CES, TiVo emerged, enabling viewers to fast-forward through commercials for the first time ever. Then, the popular extension AdBlock began to rise in popularity, allowing surfers to erase ads from desktop web pages. Now, mobile gamers opt for premium apps over their free counterparts, so they don’t have to click out of interstitials in between levels.

So when news broke about Apple possibly adding ad blocking on mobile, advertisers around the world took a collective breath. After years of evaluating where their consumers play, shop and browse; after slaving over ROI numbers on the mobile medium; after endlessly wondering if shopping cart abandonment on mobile meant something different than on desktop – it seems all the hard work would go to waste.

Here’s some real talk: The advertising industry as a whole needs to step up their game if people are going to block less. The key to surviving mobile ad blocking is adding value. Create ads that people want to see and viewers won’t remove you.

Sounds simple, right? Yet most advertisers ignore these best practices. Take a few steps in the right direction with these four tips that ensure brand success.

1. Respect Consumers

Successful advertising is about respecting user behavior. This means timing your ads to appear without interrupting app content. When your ads appear during natural breaks in in-app activity, users are less likely to be annoyed.

IPG ran a study that discerned the mobile moments when users were most engaged. By tracking the biometrics and facial coding of volunteers as they played games, IPG discovered that people were 40 percent more excited after they won a level in a mobile game. When advertisers reached out during these moments, users were more receptive to their messaging. Timing increased brand favorability, respect and even purchase intent.

Basically, brands can reach audiences when happiness and attention levels are at their peak to make the most memorable, positive engagements.

Excitement isn’t limited to gaming. Other ideal moments in mobile to do this include:

• When a runner logs a completed workout in a fitness app
• When a reader shares an article in a news app
• When a multi-tasker crosses off an item on a to-do list

2. Think Creatively

As an industry, we’re creating increasingly inventive ads. Consider how these three players got it right:

1. Chevy’s latest ad made waves by running digital video inside of print.
2. At Cannes last year, Nivea won the Grand Prix for a makeshift wearable. Targeted at young mothers spending time on Rio de Janiero’s busiest beach, a strip of the magazine ad tore off into a bracelet, activated by your smartphone. The bracelet tracked up to a limited distance, so moms could keep an eye on their kids from afar.
3. And who could forget Moto X’s interactive print ad? The featured phone changed colors when readers played with the corresponding buttons.

This creativity – this playfulness – is where advertising flourishes. We need to bring this energy into an era filled with new mediums and more expansive capabilities.

3. Demonstrate Relevance

Provide content that is relevant to the app or site where your ad appears. There’s a rather famous story about an ad for a tech job posted on a German tech site. The ad received a whopping one percent clickthrough rate. Compared to the industry standard of 0.1 percent, this is huge. Depressingly so.

However, the incident shouldn’t surprise you. After all, the ad was relevant to the site – many people reading about tech might be looking for a career change in that same industry. It makes sense that the ad was successful. If other ads followed suit and only showed endemic content to viewers, advertisers would see undoubtedly higher rates.

There’s a reason this approach works. It makes people happy.

4. And Most Importantly: Address the Root of the Problem

Let’s face it. More ads equal slower loading times on a mobile browser and sucking the life out of someone’s limited data plan. Those two reasons alone give people enough reason to look forward to mobile ad blocking.

Advertisers are responsible for improving load time and the overall content of their ads. Don’t shuffle the blame of this onto publishers – they can only control so much of the content delivery. Jim Edwards of Business Insider explained the problem well in a recent article. He argued, “Until I hear an ad tech exec say, on the record, that ad tech itself slows down pages, then ad tech will remain part of the ad-blocking problem and not part of its solution.”

The lesson: Optimize your content to enhance and add value to the user experience. If you follow best practices, people won’t pay to remove you. Instead, you’ll gain new and loyal consumers.

About the Author: Brian Wong is the CEO and Co-Founder of Kiip, a rewards platform that targets “achievement moments” in mobile games and apps. Once the youngest person to ever receive venture capital funding, Brian received his Bachelor of Commerce from the University of British Columbia at age 18, after skipping four K-12 grades. Kiip’s innovative approach to mobile marketing creates meaningful engagements between users, developers and advertisers. To learn more, visit www.kiip.me or shoot us a note at hello@kiip.me.

from The Kissmetrics Marketing Blog http://ift.tt/1U8p7z3
via IFTTT

The 6 Most Useful Articles About Email Marketing

To really get an edge on your editorial calendar, it’ll help you immensely if you’re well read on the best email marketing articles.Related Articles

1. Email Marketing Content: Trawling the Customer Service Files
2. Email marketing delivery: reviving an old email list
3. Email frequency: offer a “light” version of your email newsletter

from Benchmarkemail Blog http://ift.tt/1Uf4yfb
via IFTTT