Mad 4 Blog

Pinterest started out as a website where individuals could share pictures they’d found online, like cute cats, pretty dresses and original artwork. People can pin their favorite items to their own boards to share with their friends – or any fellow cat, dress or art aficionados on the Internet. It’s a way for people with similar interests to find each other and easily discover more items that they’re apt to enjoy.

One of the website’s appeals is that people can quickly browse through images that are all laid out on a well-organized page. It’s easy to pin things to your board from almost any outside website, or to grab an item from the board of someone else who inspires you – so it’s an effortless and easy-to-use model. The combination of appealing visuals, convenience and simplicity speaks to social media’s strong suits – so in a way, it’s no surprise the website is doing so well.

In January 2012, the site boasted 11.7 million unique visitors – and even in the short time since then, traffic has increased 145% to make Pinterest the third-largest social media outlet behind only Facebook and Twitter.

But it’s not just about traffic, it’s also about sales. Although Pinterest was designed to allow people to share their visual inspirations, those images actually link back to their retailers’ sites. For example, if you have a shop on the indie e-commerce website Etsy and your item is getting shared all over Pinterest, people will click through to visit your page and check out the rest of your wares.

According to a report by Spotify in 2012, not only were just as many visitors coming to e-tailers through Pinterest as through Twitter, people who came to shop through Pinterest actually consistently spent more money than those coming through Twitter or Facebook.

Check back next week for some interesting demographic info about the people who are using Pinterest – and how you can appeal to them with your brand.

As the new year kicks off, we’re looking at some exciting growth and new developments around the office at Mad 4 Marketing. One thing we started at the end of 2011 was staffing up the company, which included introducing new team member Damon. Damon has been professionally involved with the Internet since the early 1990s and has worked on major sites like the WSJ and TigerDirect, to name a few. Now he’s leading our interactive marketing division, which helps you attract and retain clients via the power of the Web.

With the addition of Damon, we’re able to continue buying ad space online, helping you market your website and build relationships via social networking. The best part about expanding our work on these services is that we’re able to provide you with extremely measurable results on pay-per-click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. This means we can also better predict how certain tactics will improve your existing and developing online advertising strategies. We’ve got the numbers on hand and we’re excited to show our clients how our efforts can help you gain a following, drive traffic to your site, track information and even complete sales online.

We’ve been talking about holiday shopping trends – especially with regard to viral spending – for the past few weeks. Now it’s time to look at some key figures and report back on how the major shopping event actually went down.

You may be surprised to learn that even all the hype for Cyber Monday 2011 failed to anticipate the actual numbers that e-commerce retailers would see. They were actually even higher than either the optimists or analysts predicted. In fact, Search Engine Watch reported that November 28, 2011 was the biggest online shopping day in U.S. history based on data from such sources as comScore, PayPal and IBM.

SalesTracker reported that online sales rose 33% from the average on the Monday after Thanksgiving, according to IBM Benchmark (comScore reports a 22% surge). Each individual purchase rose 2.6% from the average order. The total amount of sales recorded by comScore was $1.25 billion in that 24-hour period. The same source concluded that more than half of all purchases were conducted from office computers as workers spent their post-holiday, back-to-work breaks (we hope!) on shopping to catch limited-time, heavy online markdowns.

With regard to the importance of mobile marketing, we have to also note that transactions conducted via smartphone – both Web access and specific shopping apps – represented 7.37% of sales this past Monday – which is a strong surge from last year’s 2.25%. (Figures as reported by The Washington Post; may vary slightly depending on statistics source – for example, IBM reports the surge as 3.9% in 2010 to 10.8% in 2011.) Sales conducted by iPad rather than phone clocked in at 3.3% of mobile purchases, states IBM.

Top e-tailers across the board on Cyber Monday were Target, Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Amazon. Retailers can earn up to 40% of their annual income during the span of the holiday season, especially with highly promoted shopping days like Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday.

Did you feel like you adequately prepared your company for visibility via online advertising on Cyber Monday? Are you interested in taking advantage of mobile marketing as this phone-based shopping trend continues to explode? Let us know!

How are shoppers supposed to navigate all those ads hitting their inbox and flooding their computer screen today? With so much commercialism competing for the same wallets on Cyber Monday, it’s hard to sort through the buzzwords and price tags to determine what’s really a great deal. Reduced costs aren’t enough to help buyers decide which sites to visit and where to ultimately check out. But understanding how the competition operates and how people think about shopping today can help you attract some of that interest – and some of that holiday buying power.

And in 2011, that buying power is stronger than ever. This is the biggest year so far for shopping on the Internet. Web sales are projected to stand for 15% of all holiday purchases. It will also be the biggest year for mobile commerce; InMobi found that about 60 million shoppers would use their phone to find bargains this weekend, with a third of those searches translating to online sales.

And that’s also going to impact how advertisers promote the products and services that are highlighted today – and on Cyber Mondays going forward. For example, several stores are highlighting games like scavenger hunts where shoppers can earn additional discounts or even free items. This can help drive potential purchasers to a website in the hopes of getting them to complete a transaction. Plus, this type of ad is more likely to go viral with individuals linking the game to their friends and posting the opportunity on social networking sites.

The timing of when advertising goes out will also change. Businesses with brick-and-mortar locations first want drive audiences into their stores and take advantage of Black Friday. But immediately following, the Cyber Monday sales begin. They don’t actually all take place on Monday; the Saturday after Thanksgiving is when e-commerce begins to pick up across the Web. For those vendors who only operate online, they may offer the same sales all throughout the holiday weekend or they might switch up the sales in order to get people to come back not just once, but on Friday and then again on Monday for fresh deals.

The key points to consider when planning your virtual advertising for Cyber Monday (and similar holiday campaigns) is understanding shopper mentality, knowing you’re your competition is doing, using creative incentives to get shoppers on your site and timing to determine when your sales or ads should run to get the most from your marketing.

It always makes sense to ask successfully acquired clients and customers how they came to hear about your business. By carefully comparing how well each of your advertising efforts performs, you can bulldoze past a lot of trial-and-error and simply direct your budget toward what works, both in quantitative and qualitative units. For example, if no one’s seen that ad in the newspaper but everyone heard about you from a friend or relative, you may wish to pull your print ads and focus on buzz-generating word-of-mouth campaigns–or even reward former patrons for referring a friend. And if you’re reaching a higher caliber of clientele via brochure than billboard, you’ll certainly want to bring your message down to the smaller scale, which can also cut back cost.

These days, tracking is everything when it comes to building successful campaigns. Online, it’s perfectly easy to determine how a person landed on your page; analytics mark each click-through by its referring links, search engine source, browser type and even the viewer’s physical location—it’s not only effortless, but also automatically built into most website content management systems. But even online there’s always more you can do; when it comes to e-commerce, many shopping outlets utilize codes. Asking buyers to enter a code before they take advantage of a sale helps marketers to track which sales and campaigns were more successful than others, and to help determine if shoppers heard about it from a newsletter, referral or ad. This is why you might see several usable codes available for the same sale, depending on where you hear about it.

In what other ways can coding and tracking be used in your business endeavors? Mad 4 Marketing recently posted job listings on several career search websites. But each posting required us to pay a fee, and since we weren’t sure which websites or which wording would be most successful for attracting the best new teammate, we decided to generate a few different ads. We asked job candidates on each board and posting to reply with a different subject line. This took a little more time and thought, but we were able to see from where we were getting hits, and what kind of prospective employees were nipping the bait. After the first week we cut our ad placement (and cost!) in half and only used phrasing that was clearly expressing our desires to the most qualified candidates.

Another example is Satori’s text message campaign. In 2008, we used a lot of on-the-scene guerrilla marketing to advertise for the newly opening apartment rental community in Fort Lauderdale. We wanted to reach out to those who already lived in and loved the surrounding area of South Florida. At each event (such as street fairs, art shows and the boat parade), we advertised the chance to win six months’ free rent by texting a code to a given phone number. At each event, the code differed. That way, we could see which community event had directed the most participants to our giveaway, as well as which regions or crowds were most interested in Satori. This information turned out to be extremely valuable in later marketing endeavors, such as choosing local ad placement.

The bottom line is that tracking efforts are a smart investment in the future. It means looking past today’s brochure or even tomorrow’s website, toward next year’s entire marketing strategy. Tracking provides you with the tools to always understand and surpass prior tactics–and no matter what, this means that you will ultimately succeed.

It’s pretty clear that we feel confident of the many benefits of blogging here at Mad4Marketing, which is why you’re reading our blog about marketing right now! Creating a blog on your website is a valuable way to gain readership, increase traffic and improve your search ranking. At Mad4Marketing we create SEO-strong blogs for our clients’ websites to increase visibility and brand awareness with a stronger web presence. If your company owns a website to advertise its services or wares, you already own pivotal Internet real estate—and setting up a blog will help you make the most of it.

•    Gain Readership – Generating steady content on your site keeps readers coming back for more, instead of seeing what you’re about once and then moving on. Humorous content, inventive stories and informative articles are popular, but sometimes readers are just intrigued to see the inner workings of your company and follow your business plan. Whichever angle your choose for your blog, just make sure your content is smart and original to keep readers enticed.

•    Increase Traffic – When a website regularly posts fresh content, search engines give it more weight for relevancy, and may list it higher among resulting search links. This is just one element of the complex formula dedicated to ranking pages, but if your competitor has a similar yet stagnant website while yours is dynamic, you’re likely to get first dibs on readers. Increased traffic is also vital if your website features advertising as a means to supplement business costs.

•    Improve SEO Rankings – Another way that blogs can help you improve search engine optimization is if you use relevant business phrases often within the body of your blog. Infusing your blog posts with key words will make your website rank higher when people search for those services and phrases online. There’s only so much text you can fit on any tasteful webpage, but blog content is limitless and gives you more opportunity to repeat your message and plug SEO.

It’s also important to update frequently. Many experts recommend that blogs be updated at least three times a week, and every day if possible. But more important than quantity is the quality of your posts, which is why it’s also sometimes more relevant to write when you have something to say rather than as much as possible. For less than three blog posts per week, we recommend asserting a regular schedule—and sticking to it! Earn return visits by adhering to your schedule so that readers will begin to follow your weekly postings (you can tell when this is successful if your website traffic spikes on the days blog posts go up). For example, Mad4Marketing is responsible for the Satori Living blog, which is updated twice weekly on Tuesdays and Thursdays to promote the premiere eco-friendly apartment rental community in Fort Lauderdale. Prospective tenants come to the Satori Living blog to learn about the Satori apartments and amenities, and we hope to encourage residents to come back again every week for information about local events, restaurant reviews and neighborhood highlights.

Whether for e-commerce purposes or just to draw customers to your company’s site for information, blogging is a surefire way to gain momentum and success with your website. We’ll continue to give you advice for improving your website and utilizing modern marketing techniques online through this blog, so visit us here every Monday morning to kick off your week with marketing tips, anecdotes and insights. (See what we did there? And you can do it, too.)