Partner Views Blog

In my last blog I gave some statistics for why your business should have web pages optimized for mobile. When you are building your web page you need to pay attention to some best practices for mobile web sites otherwise your customers will have a poor experience and probably abandon your site.

2013 should be time to take the plunge and optimize your web site for mobile, especially if you sell products online, you have information that people want to access through their mobile device or if you have any type of local business. It is not that you are preparing for the next phase of internet marketing; your customers are already there. Consider these statistics from Google:

Guy Kawasaki is quoted as saying, “If you have more money than brains, you should focus on outbound marketing. If you have more brains than money, you should focus on inbound marketing.” It often seems many large, traditional companies have continued to spend heavily on traditional or outbound marketing while smaller, leaner companies have embraced inbound marketing or as it is sometimes called, content marketing. Many smaller, cash strapped businesses are often hesitant to try inbound marketing because the “big boys” are not doing it. Well, according to Brandon Gutman in Forbes online blog, MarketShare, that is all changing. Check out 5 Big Brands Confirm That Content Marketing Is The Key To Your Consumer. Read the article for all the details and links, but I’ll summarize it here. (I have blogged a bit about Inbound Marketing and you can learn more about our Inbound Marketing Services here.)

Last week I wrote about 20 Tips for Using Google AdWords Effectively for the Holidays and today HubSpot came up with a great infographic for the Top Marketing Techniques for the 2012 Holiday Season. What are the big marketing trends?

In my last couple of blogs I talked about doing a Social Media Evaluation to Achieve Your Marketing Goals and how to Do a Social Media Evaluation Like a Social Media Guru. Both these blogs start from the assumption that you are already doing some type of social media. How do you evaluate your social media efforts if you are not doing any social media? Maybe you are starting a new business or you have come to the conclusion that this social media stuff is not a fad and you need to get started. Where do you start and what social media accounts should you use? You can fairly quickly get an idea of where your company or organization fits in the social media world and where you should start by conducting an easy social media evaluation.

Now that you have listened to everyone’s advice and set up your Facebook page and started tweeting how is it going? Perhaps you are one of those who set up a Twitter account four years ago and still only have 20 followers. How can you get your social media marketing moving? It may be time to conduct a Social Media Evaluation and see how you are doing and where you can make improvements. Most of us working in social media marketing have a quick check list that can help us quickly tell how an organization is doing and lets us know what we can do to help. Without further ado I’ll tell you what Image Media Partners does during a social media evaluation.

Your social media marketing plan means nothing if it is not aligned with your marketing goals. Measuring the effectiveness of your social media marketing plan not only gives you your social media ROI (return on investment) but tells you if you are meeting your marketing goals. (For a detailed method for calculating your ROI read ignite’s Social Media Blog: Calculate Social Media ROI with Ignite Social Media’s Purchase Equivalency Calculator.) Social media marketing is an important part of inbound and online marketing but it is useless if it does not support your organization’s goals and its effectiveness is unknown if it is not measured. When you conduct a social media evaluation for your organization you need to understand your goals. Traditional marketing, as well as social media marketing has three marketing goals that can be measured.

In my last post I reviewed Seth Godin’s latest book: We Are All Weird, The Myth of Mass and the End of Compliance. Godin is one of the leading voices for all of us who are trying to navigate the new world of marketing whether we think of ourselves as social media experts, inbound marketers or online advertisers. In We Are All Weird Godin shows how what we used to call normal is splitting up into silos of self-identified tribes of shared interests and passions. What people are now choosing to do is not normal, it is weird. How can we as marketers deal with weird? What does this mean for what we do online?

I just finished Seth Godin’s newest book, We Are All Weird, The Myth of Mass and the End of Compliance. This is an important read for anyone who is doing social media, online or inbound marketing. According to Godin we are in the midst of a revolution where the conventional thinking for the past 150 years that held there is a normal or mass market, no longer applies. Each of us has more choices. As we self-identify with a tribe we become weirder, less normal and less attracted to mass products and mass marketing. As Godin puts it, “Mass is dead. Here comes the weird.”

Last month HubSpot posted a blog on 7 Shameless Tactics Marketers Use to Lure an Audience and followed it up with this Infographic on Shameless Marketing Tactics that Totally Work. I follow these suggestions as much as I can, check out Monday’s 10 Motivational Marketing Post Card to Get You Through the Slump. Not only do I use a large number, I only have 10 fingers so that is large enough, I resort to animals, exaggeration, and piggy backing on the “Text-on-a-photo” post card craze. When I worked in television we had a saying, “There is nothing new in television.” This justified our borrowing anything we needed to get the job done. In that spirit and being entirely shameless and a bit lazy this week I’m reposting and sharing HubSpot’s Infographic.