By Keith Trivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications
Ahh, summer. That most glorious time of year. The sun is shining, the beaches are beckoning and everywhere you look, people are on their smartphones — shopping and watching entertainment.
At least, that appears to be the trend for summer 2013. According to Adweek, “brands are preparing for what could be a break-through quarter in mobile advertising as consumers spend more time outdoors while constantly checking their iPhone or Samsung.” Summer, according to Brian Ng, marketing director and lead for brand strategy and trademark development at Del Monte Foods, presents an “unstructured environment” in which mobile is key to bridging the “planning-to-purchase divide.”
Mobile marketing and the summer go together like peas and carrots, to quote Forrest Gump. And to that combination a mobile performance marketing functionality, such as mobile lead gen, and marketers could see a big growth opportunity for their brands over the next three months. (more…)
By Kristen Pulver | Director, New Verticals
When looking for a distribution method for your marketing budget, where do you start? There are relationships with aggregators, vendors and others but with the ever-changing nature of the education industry and the goals related to school success, how do you know who to partner with? Who will give you what you’re asking for? Most importantly, who will deliver to you — the end buyer — what they’re promising?
This is a conundrum that many schools and education marketers deal with. Some providers haven’t survived the changing landscape. Whether it’s falling behind with compliance requirements, or struggling to maintain enough traffic to stay afloat, many online education marketers and agencies leave the business and move on to other, less-quality driven industries.
But what is important to a college or university should be of the greatest importance to the school’s marketing sources. We all know that high-quality, compliant leads are necessary for success with any higher education marketing campaign, but a partnership with the right aggregator needs to be more than just that; and a school’s expectations should be nothing less.
Compliance, quality and an understanding of a successful admission life-cycle from the first point of contact with potential students to enrollment is what most satisfies a client. (more…)
By Marc Purtell | Director, SEO
The continuing rise in worldwide mobile device usage has pushed mobile SEO to the forefront of marketers’ attention. This is especially true for local businesses, which benefit greatly from search results on smartphones due to the location influence of local search results. Nearly half of mobile phone owners use their device to look for local information,according to a new report from the Local Search Association.
Traditional and mobile SEO can’t continue to work as separate marketing initiatives. They must become synonymous.
According to the venture capital firm KPCB, there are more than 244 million Internet users in the United States and 358 million mobile device subscribers, 48% of which have smartphones.ComScore reports that 52.1% of U.S. mobile phone users access a browser on their device. This equates to 187 million U.S. mobile browser users.
Does this mean marketers need to shift all of their attention to mobile search? Not yet. But the trend indicates a definite shift in the devices people use for search. And that will have a significant impact on how digital marketers engage, acquire, and retain customers for years to come.
The rate of increase of mobile Internet users illustrates the need for marketers to stop thinking about traditional and mobile SEO as two distinct programs. Marketers need to start developing strategies to merge traditional and mobile SEO into a single multichannel marketing process that is device and platform agnostic. (more…)
By Caroline Ramos | Director, Client Services
Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of blog posts focusing on best practices for lead generation in the online education industry.
Year after year universities struggle with enrollment rates. At the same time marketers are testing new advertising channels, shifting budgets, designing new creative assets and everything in between to reach that seemingly elusive enrollment goal.
But why is nothing changing? Why are enrollment rates dropping after all that investment in time, money and effort?
It’s simple, really: The first point of contact is your first impression and it can make or break the success of a prospect’s enrollment. The best advertising campaign in the world is frustratingly useless if the admissions process deters prospective students.
Many universities with large marketing budgets fail to focus on what’s happening right under their nose, and in most cases, right down the hallway. I have seen everything from a first point of contact being a direct-mail piece to callbacks that occur two weeks after an online information request is submitted.
A successful online marketing campaign for a college or university isn’t just measured by a conversion rate. Performance marketing in education requires three critical components to be successful:
- High-quality traffic sources: You need to have traffic (students) who are interested in learning more about a particular school.
- Optimized creative: A high-quality landing page, great email design and banner ads that really catch the eye of prospective students.
- Structured workflow: A cohesive admissions process that is ready to work a lead. (more…)
By Keith Trivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications
There’s no question that mobile marketing and advertising is the hottest area of digital marketing at the moment. Big consumer brands are seemingly tripping over themselves to launch the fanciest mobile app.
We’ve written a lot recently about the foibles of mobile marketing campaigns that don’t have a direct lead generation or sales component tied into them. Heck, it’s for this reason that we launched MediaWhiz Mobile, our new mobile performance marketing service. Advertisers and publishers consistently tell us there is a big need to help them more profitably engage, acquire and retain customers and generate mobile-specific traffic.
And yet a number of leading advertisers complain that all of their mobile spending doesn’t improve their most important marketing metric: sales.
Mobile certainly captures a lot of eyeballs but its ability to produce a consumer action — leads, sales, downloads, etc. — is often lacking.
That may be starting to change, though. A recent eMarketer report shined some light on how mobile branding and marketing campaigns are starting to translate to sales and brand lift. And, most crucially for advertising, mobile marketing spending is beginning to make a serious dent in consumers’ purchase intent. (more…)
By Keith Trivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications
Much of the recent talk in the online marketing world has centered around the emerging concept of SoLoMoCo. For the uninitiated, that stands for SOcial LOcal MObile COmmerce. Boiled down to its most basic parts, this funny looking acronym encapsulates the future of digital marketing: everything social, everything local and everything mobile.
It’s with that perspective in mind that a recent report issued by the Local Search Association (look them up here) caught my eye. The report finds that nearly half (48% to be precise) of mobile phone owners use their device to look for local information.
The Local Search Association findings point to the increased role that smartphones and tablets are increasingly playing for the search industry in the United States. In particular, the report points to the need for marketers to view mobile at a local level.
From local search and SEO, to local mobile (what we at MediaWhiz call “LoMo”), online marketing is becoming more targeted and geo-specific. That presents huge opportunities to marketers that wisely find ways to blend their traditional and mobile SEO campaigns to achieve comprehensive search results.
As my colleague Marc Purtell, MediaWhiz’s director of SEO, attests, the future of SEO is local mobile. (more…)
By Keith Trivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications
What’s driving the biggest gains in Facebook’s worldwide growth? It’s not the U.S. It’s emerging markets.
According to eMarketer, India, Brazil and Russia, along with the Middle East and Africa, are contributing the most new users each month to Facebook. According to new estimates from eMarketer, Facebook will pass 1 billion active users worldwide in 2013 as the company sees particularly strong growth in its Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa, and Latin American user bases, with each region set to rise by about 30% or more this year. By next year, Facebook will reach 1.26 billion global users.
These astonishing numbers — the sheer fact Facebook will soon have 1 billion active monthly users worldwide — combined with Facebook’s recent implementation of new CPA bidding for direct marketers, portend huge opportunities for performance and affiliate marketers. Just tapping into 1/10th of this user base could hold significant potential online marketing value to most brands.
What is your brand doing to tap into Facebook’s expanding performance marketing opportunities? (more…)
By Marc Purtell | Director, SEO
SMX London is right around the corner, and the conference agenda is packed with some great panels discussing everything from prioritizing marketing efforts to advanced tactical recommendations. Search and social media are two intertwined topics on which there will be a great deal of discussion.
I will be joining a panel alongside Kelvin Newman, director of strategy at SiteVisibility and Justin Sanger, CEO of SupportLocal, to discuss Facebook’s new graph search and its marketing implications. Although Graph Search is currently available to a small beta this new search function will eventually be available to billions of users around the world.
This panel discussion will focus on the implications of Graph Search on SEO, including the opportunities and challenges it will present advertisers and publishers.
As part of the discussion, I will present a history of Facebook advertising as it pertains to the evolution of search within Facebook. I’ll how Graph Search fits into the direction Facebook is going with its search and advertising options. Of course, knowing how and why an advertising medium has evolved can provide some very strong clues into what the future of marketing through Facebook may look like. (more…)
By Sultan Riaz | Marketing Coordinator
Editor’s note: “Ask the Performance Marketer” is a regular series in which MediaWhiz’s performance marketing, SEO and digital media experts answer some of the most popular questions we from clients.
To get more answers to your performance marketing questions, download our free eBook, “The CMO’s Guide to Performance Marketing.”
Mike Sisto, MediaWhiz’s director of performance marketing, has worked in performance marketing for 14 years. He’s seen it all, from the earliest days of the industry to the current evolution in which media, mobile, content, SEO and many other digital media channels are mixed together. Needless to say, he knows how to help his clients engage, acquire and retain customers more profitably.
Recently, we sat down with Mike to discuss some of the most common questions he gets from clients about accountability in affiliate marketing campaigns, email acquisition and optimizing lead quality.
How do you ensure accountability of affiliates for campaign and creative materials compliance?
We first establish accountability with each affiliate by employing a suite of external and internal tools to monitor advertisements. We hold publishers accountable for compliance violations. Once our high standards are made clear, the possibility of losing out on business due to compliance violations exerts pressure on affiliates to comply with advertiser guidelines. With adherence, publishers have the opportunity to cultivate a long-term business relationship with MediaWhiz as they continue to provide quality traffic via compliant marketing practices. (more…)
By Marc Purtell | Director, SEO
Today, we’re releasing a new eBook in our growing stable of Insights reports (read them all here). Titled, “10 Free, Must-Have SEO Tools,” the report outlines our top picks for the best free SEO tools and resources marketers can use to identify target keywords, audit and troubleshoot onsite SEO issues and gain competitive intelligence.
Below is a snippet of the many useful insights you’ll find inside the eBook. Download your free copy to find more.
Performance in organic search engine marketing requires an investment. Depending on the goals of a search engine optimization campaign, that investment can be quite substantial. Budget often must be allocated strategically in order to stretch it enough for success.
Part of the investment in any SEO campaign goes toward tools that help brands analyze data, strategize and track results. To do so, marketers need a bevy of tools and resources. (more…)
