Online marketing. Content marketing. Inbound marketing. Native advertising. Sponsored content. There's a lot of buzzwords being tossed about these days when it come to making it easier for people to find your brand online. Most of these buzzwords front for practical and effective strategies any intelligent brand should employ. But let's not forget about the granddaddy of "getting found" online: SEO.
The approach to SEO has changed quite a bit over the years. It's no longer about "gaming" Google will silly parlor tricks because, well, Google is on to your tricks. So effective SEO is a lot more than keyword stuffing and other forms of trickery.
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In a unique bit brand warfare which really isn't brand warfare at all, Taco Bell is out with a Deutsch LA-created campaign that features Ronald McDonald. No, not that Ronald McDonald but 25 actual people whose names are Ronald McDonald and who are more than willing to profess their love for Taco Bell's new breakfast menu.
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For the better part of the past year, Altimeter Group Analyst Jeremiah Owyang has been trumpeting what he calls the collaborative economy. Loosely defined, it's all about people getting what they need and want from each other without out buying. Think Uber, BlackJet, Rent the Runway, Airbnb, LendingClub, etc.
Of the collaborative economy's future, Owyang says, "The data shows that new forms of peer-to-peer sharing like custom products, loaner vehicles and crowdfunding will double in adoption over the next year."
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20th Century Fox Film has partnered with Social Rewards, a social loyalty engagement platform, to create Fox Rewards Program. The partnership was announced during the CinemaCon Theatre Exhibition Conference in Las Vegas this week. Social Rewards was founded in 2010 to help companies in the entertainment industry leverage social media to build sales and collect data through a loyalty program.
Basically, the program allows people to earn free movie tickets for sharing movie trailers.
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That Neal McDonough ad for Cadillac in which he struts around his pool and home and raps about building the American dream with crazy hard work and "only" two weeks off in August has finally received spoof treatment.
Ford developed "Upside: Anything is Possible" featuring Pashon Murray, founder of Detroit Dirt, who raps about the beauty of turning waste into compost which she sells to people who create urban gardens.
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There seems to be a consensus that referrals are the best form of leads. They close faster, buy more and stay longer. In fact, great sales people have been good at generating referrals for what seems like forever.
Until recently, large corporations have struggled to figure out how to scale the success of individual sales reps to systematically and proactively drive large volumes of referrals. But that is all changing as technology is now coming to market that can help large brands automate the best practices of sales reps and institutionalize the process of generating referrals from customers, employees and other people who influence the buying decision.
Good technology systems typically are designed to automate manual best practices. Let's take a look at key functions that great sales people all tend to have in common:
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Joe Smith wakes up one morning, walks out the front door of his apartment building and takes a selfie with the 3 feet of snow that have piled up on his Toyota Camry. He tweets out the photo with the header "OMG, that is A LOT of snow." He gets a few comments and retweets from friends. An hour later, he arrives at work, logs into Facebook and finds a friend's link to www.theflatteringman.com. It turns out to be a prank website for a "Push Up Muscle Shirt" that is part of an Old Spice viral ad campaign. Joe likes and shares it.
By 11:30 am, Joe can't look at the Excel spreadsheet in front of him without getting cross-eyed, so he logs into LinkedIn, spots Joe Pulizzi's latest post, "Content without Strategy Is Just Stuff ," and sends it off to the other guys in his marketing department. They were just talking over social media strategies the other day, so Joe thinks the article could help the entire group.
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This one will go down as one of the worst examples of newsjacking since newsjacking was invented. Or, maybe since anything was invented. The idiocy is simply incomprehensible. TeamWork Online, some kind of sports industry job network, thought it might be a good idea to riff off the Malaysian Airlines flight 370 disappearance.
For it's weekly Coaching Tip, the site wrote, "Malaysian Airlines 370 has vanished. Do you feel like employers can't find you? Let's get your 'black box' engaged. Let's start the 'pings.' 'Here are some tips on how to get noticed in a very crowded job market' says Buffy Filippell, TeamWork Online Founder."
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Ah, yes. The logo. That emblem which represents the essence of a brand in a way that communicates its purpose in mere seconds. Or at least that is the hope. Over the years, brands have evolved their logos as both the times and the brand, itself have changed.
Taking a 100+ year look, this infographic from Graphic Design Degree Hub examines the transformation of logos from Pepsi, Coke, Shell, Mercedes, Kodak, IBM, Chevrolet, BP, UPS, Ford, Xerox, Canon, Walmart, Apple, Microsoft and others.
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Social media is a tremendous driver for business growth, everybody knows that. But there's this little problem of saturation with this media, or rather, with the Internet itself. There's too much information out there. Too many businesses are trying too hard to be heard, to stand out from the competition. The result? A lot of same ole, everything seems stale, and consumers are in a real danger of ending up desensitized to your efforts.
How do you get more people to check you out online then? Thankfully, we are not out of ideas yet and there's still a lot of novelty out there when it comes to using social media. Here are three excellent ways in which you can beat the crowd, capture the imagination of your target audience, and make the most of your social media presence.
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