No objective / plan In the 4th quarter of every year companies start planning for the upcoming year. The problem is that the planning starts with budgets. They look at what was spent over the past year, consider if the activities will remains consistent or change and adjust the budget accordingly, or just arbitrarily cut…
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Social Proof – a few simple things for big results
We see social proof all around us. From celebrity endorsements on the high end to ratings and reviews on the more common programs. Social proof can come in many forms, but it comes down to people believing in you because others believe it you. Take advantage of this in digital marketing and you’ll see increased…
Google’s Penguin Goes Real Time
Last month Google hit us with two pretty major changes to the search algorithm. The first was a straightforward update in early September. When this hit, we saw most programs take a slight dip and then recover after about a week. But, then Google announced that they will incorporate Penguin into the core algorithm as…
Hyper targeting ads on facebook
This past week I conducted a workshop at SCORE Chicago, which is a business mentoring organization for small – to mid sized companies associated with the SBA. The content was marketing on Facebook. We covered the basics of setting up a social media presence, engaging on Facebook (and others) as well as Facebook Advertising. While most…
UTM Tracking for Your Google Analytics
Okay, starting with a couple of assumptions. 1. You care about knowing where your website traffic is coming from and finding better places from which to get it. 2. You have, or are willing to get, Google Analytics (GA) setup on your site. If you are putting links in social media or paid advertising, you…
Microsoft’s LinkedIn View Through Conversion Tracking
View through conversions have been around for quite some time. The simple premise is that a media channel tracks when a person sees your ad or content and then, some time later, when they go to your site and convert, the tracking tag on your site sends data back to the media channel indicating that…
Ad Blockers Put On Notice by Facebook
Facebook announced that it will implement ad serving in such a way that ad blockers can’t prevent the advertisements from showing. [ad blocking]…reduces the funding needed to support the journalism and other free services that we enjoy on the web. Facebook is one of those free services, and ads support our mission of giving people…
Why can’t I find new customers? Wrong question.
Not too long ago the paradigm shifted. With few media choices for consumers and large budgets for advertisers, brands would focus on targeting the customer. Consumers watched one of the major television stations, you just needed to look at Nielsen to know which shows. It seemed like every household received the major newspaper in town…
Changes With Google and Bing Search
There have been a lot of changes in search this year and some big changes in store. You have likely seen many of these, but since they tend to come out in a fairly ad hoc fashion, I am bringing together some of the bigger changes. Bing and Yahoo! are breaking up their deal. While…
Content marketing has made SEO link building harder
Yes good content should generate links back to your website and improve SEO perfomance. The challenge is in helping people differentiate between content marketing strategy and SEO link building tactics, and their respective control. Content marketing starts with a broader marketing objective, using distributed content to help achieve goals, and in some cases linking back…