For decades, advertising agencies and the media have operated under a shared myth about what they do. The canard runs something like this: “Create brilliant advertising that gets people’s attention, run it in enough places the consumers can’t get away from it and eventually you’ll see your share of market increase as a result.”
When it came to generating measurable performance, agencies and the media gave lip-service to “Return on Marketing Investment” and other things that sounded very measurable and analytical; but the hard truth of the matter was that advertising has always been a fairly imprecise endeavor – and everybody was fine with the smoke and mirrors of it all.
Aaron Smith, writing for MediaPosts’s Email Insider, provided an interesting sumary of the most common misconceptions about email marketing. Aaron is a founder and principal at Smith-Harmon, a design agency focused on email marketing. (Visit the Smith-Harmon site.)
In these tough economic times, more and more businesses are turning to low-cost marketing tactics that offer potentially high rewards – tactics like email marketing.
The problem, as Aaron points out, is that this potential for a high return on the marketing investment can lead executives to make incorrect assumptions and uninformed business decisions that can have significant (and negative) consequences over time.
In the last installment of our series on where your business should be connecting to the social web, we take a look at job sites. After all, Web 2.0 is all about people – not technology. And by finding the best people, you’ll position your company for growth and future success.
If you want to secure high-quality talent, you have to know where to look.
Leveraging your business’ and employees’ experience via the Social Web is another strategy for increasing your brand’s online “footprint”. In part four of our series of important social web sites your business should connect to, we provide a list of general, informational sites that in many cases serve as the “front line” of online research.
The marketing news site ADOTAS caught my eye with this article on the growth of local news sites earlier this week. While dozens of companies have been trying to develop the sites to tap into local ad dollars, there are some problems.
The lure of billions of advertising dollars (an estimated $32B will be spent by 2013, ADOTAS reports) is attracting developers but the big problem is content. Will these local sites be able to afford the reporters, et al, neccessary to provide relevant (and readable) content local news consumers will want?
As part of our week-long series of important social media sites for your business, today we’ll list a number of niche sites that will help you stay on top of important news and trends in a variety of areas. These sites can be very important for small and mid-sized companies that don’t have the large training budgets or funds available to participate in industry events or conventions.
Although we only have eight niche sites listed below, we’re open to other suggestions as well. Just email us and let us know.
In the second part of our listing of important social media sites for businesses (especially yours), we’ll look at professional networking sites that can make a difference. These sites are intended to help business people find colleagues, employees, employers and sales prospects.
When it comes to top social media/social bookmarking sites, you need to make sure your business has a presence in order to capitalize on the social web’s ability to share ideas and build concensus behind those ideas. After establishing your “virtual beachhead” make sure you spend some time getting to know the territory and the “hot button issues” discussed in the community. Once you’re up to speed, jump in and make a name for yourself, your company and your brand.
I’ve also been talking to some self-professed “Twitter experts” who have offered to answer your questions here at Brand Central Station, so if you have a Twitter question, send it to me and we’ll post the answers every Friday.
And don’t forget you can follow Brand Central Station on twitter by clicking our Twitter Feed in the right hand column and adding it to your RSS reader.
Online banner ads have been taking a beating. Not just recently, but over the past few years. Click-through rates on banner ads stink in the metrics-heavy world of online advertising. The experts will tell you that search advertising is the place to be.
Then comes a new study, released on Friday afternoon, that draws a connection between click-through rates on paid and organic searches and the presence of display ads for those brands. According to the study conducted by Specific Media, the results showed a 155% performance improvement by search ads when display ads promoting those brands were running. The greatest impact on search was in travel and tourism, where exposure to display ads boosted click-throughs by nearly 300%.
Here’s a link to the story that ran on the BtoB Magazine website.
Ad Age Global reported that more than 400 “hooligans” crashed Georgina Hobday’s 16th birthday party in Brighton, England after she advertised it on Facebook. The report in the UK’s Daily Express, said the group of party crashers included a 20-strong gang of thugs known as the Facebook Republican Army.
This is Brand Central Station - a place where marketers can find helpful information; discover new approaches to old problems; and make connections with other marketers and service providers.
The free document library on Brand Central Station has over 25 helpful downloads for you that don't require you to sign in and won't result in a follow-up sales call. Latest additions to the Library include:
Download a free copy of a summary report on international corporate values from the ECCO International Public Relations Network. As a member of ECCO, Brand Central Station is able to make this exclusive offer to our web visitors.
Online banner ads have been taking a beating. Not just recently, but over the past few years. Click-through rates on banner ads stink in the metrics-heavy world of online advertising. The experts will tell you that search advertising is the place to be.
Ad Age Global
