Some big names in Internet marketing have gotten together and started up BlueGlass Interactive, described as a "new agency concept that combines proven online marketing strategies and resutls with a suite of proprietary technologies."
Here’s…
Econsultancy and Exact Target have released a report based on joint research, polling over 1,000 marketers about their brand reputation strategies. The research found that marketers are slashing their budgets for radio, TV, and print, while looking online to build their brand reputation. The firms say the research indicates there will be a 17% surge in digital marketing spending this year.
"The shift from offline to online is in full swing as marketers look to measure direct increases in top-line sales, site traffic and improve overall marketing return on investment," says Morgan Stewart, ExactTarget’s director of research and strategy and co-author of the report. "Interestingly, brand reputation is becoming a more significant driver of the migration to digital marketing, particularly when it comes to social media."
Over 70% of respondents to the survey say they are increasing budgets for off-site social media marketing through sites like Facebook and Twitter, while about 65% are planning on increasing their budget for on-site social media.
Additional findings:
- 28% of marketers are shifting marketing budgets from traditional to digital channel
- Two-thirds of marketers are planning to increase investments in social media even though less than one-fifth can effectively measure ROI.
- 64% of companies plan to increase budgets in search engine optimization.
- 56% plan to increase budgets for mobile marketing.
- 54% plan to increase budgets for email marketing.
- 51% plan to increase budgets for paid search.
- 42% of marketers plan to keep budgets the same as 2009 and 13% plan to decrease their overall marketing budget.- 41% of marketers plan to decrease spending on print and radio marketing in 2010.
"The research shows a healthy outlook for the digital marketing industry with the majority of responding companies increasing their budgets for most digital channels," says Linus Gregoriadis, research director at Econsultancy. "Social media marketing is the area where companies are most likely to be spending more money during 2010, but areas such as search engine marketing and email marketing will remain buoyant."
A summary of the report, titled More Money, More Channels: Marketing Budgets for 2010, can be found here.
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Econsultancy and Exact Target have released a report based on joint research, polling over 1,000 marketers about their brand reputation strategies. The research found that marketers are slashing their budgets for radio, TV, and print, while looking online to build their brand reputation. The firms say the research indicates there will be a 17% surge in digital marketing spending this year.
"The shift from offline to online is in full swing as marketers look to measure direct increases in top-line sales, site traffic and improve overall marketing return on investment," says Morgan Stewart, ExactTarget’s director of research and strategy and co-author of the report. "Interestingly, brand reputation is becoming a more significant driver of the migration to digital marketing, particularly when it comes to social media."
Over 70% of respondents to the survey say they are increasing budgets for off-site social media marketing through sites like Facebook and Twitter, while about 65% are planning on increasing their budget for on-site social media.
Additional findings:
- 28% of marketers are shifting marketing budgets from traditional to digital channel
- Two-thirds of marketers are planning to increase investments in social media even though less than one-fifth can effectively measure ROI.
- 64% of companies plan to increase budgets in search engine optimization.
- 56% plan to increase budgets for mobile marketing.
- 54% plan to increase budgets for email marketing.
- 51% plan to increase budgets for paid search.
- 42% of marketers plan to keep budgets the same as 2009 and 13% plan to decrease their overall marketing budget.- 41% of marketers plan to decrease spending on print and radio marketing in 2010.
"The research shows a healthy outlook for the digital marketing industry with the majority of responding companies increasing their budgets for most digital channels," says Linus Gregoriadis, research director at Econsultancy. "Social media marketing is the area where companies are most likely to be spending more money during 2010, but areas such as search engine marketing and email marketing will remain buoyant."
A summary of the report, titled More Money, More Channels: Marketing Budgets for 2010, can be found here.
Related Articles:
> Businesses Benefit as Customers Share Current Locations
> Customer Connections Now Important for Google Results
> Facebook Most Popular Mobile Social Website
There have been many articles written about why to use Twitter, and we’ve certainly published our fair share of them. However, the landscape is constantly changing. New trends, ideas, applications, and features come out, and they further emphasize Twitter’s place in said landscape. Following are some reasons why it is becoming increasingly important to marketers.
Still not convinced Twitter is useful? Tell us why not.
1. Twitter Lists
Twitter Lists are changing the game. We recently looked at several reasons why, but also consider that with the Lists gadget, your tweets may appear all over the web if you can get onto lists. They will appear on sites and blogs, which are more than likely going to be related to the niche you are in anyway if you have the right audience on Twitter.
2. The Openness of Twitter
The openness of Twitter, social media and the web in general, pretty much means that your messages on Twitter won’t be limited to your Twitter audience. Facebook and other social networks will bring tweets in. People will share them, screenshot them, link to them on blogs, etc. Twitter is a means of getting your message out to more people, but it’s not necessarily only the people on Twitter that will see those messages.
3. Building Valuable Relationships
Laura Fitton, the author of Twitter for Dummies, chalks up success on Twitter to four basic concepts: listen, learn, care, and serve. Basically, if you listen to the community, you will learn, and if you show that you care, you are more likely to get more out of your efforts. Serving means providing something of use to the community. If you what you’re not doing that, you may be setting yourself up to fail, as Fitton talked about in this interview with WebProNews.
4. Traffic That Cares
Twitter can bring you not only random traffic, but traffic from people who are actually passionate about the niche that you are a part of. Retweets are huge in this regard. Guy Kawasaki calls retweeting the sincerest form of flattery. He has a point. He notes that people are willing to risk their reputations by retweeting your content.
5. Staying Current
Being found in Twitter searches (not to mention real time search in general, which is starting to become a main area of focus for all of the big search engines, not to mention all of the standalone real-time search sites) provides a lot of opportunity for exposure. We discussed this here and gave tips for getting found in real-time searches.
6. Connecting with Local Customers
There are a variety of ways you can connect with local consumers and customers using Twitter and Twitter-related tools. There are tools like our own TwellowHood, which let you find Twitterers in your area, for example. Another thing to keep an eye on is Google’s new Social Search. It’s currently just a lab experiment, but could become more. It certainly has potential.
A recent Search Engine Land article made some good points about the potential of local marketing with this tool, which delivers Google search results based on the communities you are a part of. It draws from Google profiles, which include the networks that people are connected to (based on what any person includes in that profile). If you’re not familiar with this feature, watch the following clip, and you’ll understand.
7. Going International and Multi-lingual
Twitter is expanding into more languages. If you thought Twitter was important to marketing already, consider that for most of its existence, it has only been available in a couple of languages. Now it’s in Spanish, and many more languages will follow. That’s not only going to be huge for international and multi-lingual marketing efforts, it’s going to be huge for Twitter’s growth, and the more Twitter grows, the more potential customers are out there.
8. It’s Still Young
Consider that Twitter is just getting started in the grand scheme of things. It’s still young. There are no doubt going to be a lot more features added in the future. And don’t forget about the thousands of Twitter apps that are already out there that can make Twitter useful in different ways to different people and businesses. Take some time and explore them. Fitton’s site OneForty.com, which is like Yelp for Twitter apps, is pretty good for that. It has reviews, and people tell why certain helps have helped their businesses.
Did we leave some reasons out? Please share with the rest of us.
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> 6 Ways Twitter Lists Are Changing the Game
> By Tweeting, You Could Appear All Over the Web
> Twitter Expands the "Lists" Feature
> Microsoft and Google Score Deals with Twitter
Paranormal Activity is a movie that has made its way to a wide theatrical release this weekend as a result of some clever online marketing. The movie is described as a "Blair Witch"- type film, in that it is told through fake "realistic" video footage. This is a cliché that has been used numerous times in the horror genre.
The film boasts some pretty bold quotes from some well-known sources. For example:
"an ingenious horror film. It’s so well made it’s truly scary" – Roger Ebert – THE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
"A POTENT FRIGHTFEST That will fry your nerves and CREEP YOU OUT" – Peter Travers ROLLING STONE
"SO SCARY! Just when you thought it was safe to close your eyes… GOOD LUCK GOING TO SLEEP!" – Harry Knowles AINT IT COOL NEWS
Among people I’ve talked to personally, I’ve heard mixed reviews – nothing quite so positive. I’ve not seen the film yet myself.
The real story is how the movie was initially released to only a handful of theaters at midnight showings, and has blown up from there as a result of online marketing. Paramount, the studio distributing the film, used Eventful.com to get people to demand the film in their own towns. The more people that demanded it, the better shot it would have at a wide release.
It worked.
According to Washington Post, the film has become the most consistently popular trending topic on Twitter. Flixster says it’s received about 5,000 individual reviews despite only playing at a maximum of 760 locations to date. Flixster’s overall inquiries into showtimes, information and tickets for Paranormal Activity grew by 36% this week – on top of last week’s increase of 329%.
"It’s exceedingly rare for a movie to increase this much week over week, rather than see a decline," said Flixster’s co-founder and CEO Joe Greenstein. "Paranormal Activity is exactly the sort of phenomenon we’ve been anticipating – a movie fueled not only by positive critical response, but by the buzz, feedback and word-of-mouth excitement generated by moviegoers who get information and make decisions online, driven by what their friends and acquaintances say."
"Today’s audiences say that online word of mouth has become one of the most important elements of their movie decision-making, and Paranormal Activity is certainly benefiting from that shift in behavior," said Amy Powell, senior vice president of Internet marketing at Paramount Pictures.
The movie begins its wide release in theaters all over the U.S. this weekend. It’s already made $35 million. It only cost $15,000.
Seen Paranormal Activity? Did it live up to the hype? Share your thoughts.
The AT Internet Institute conducted a study comparing investments in online marketing campaigns among France, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The firm’s findings are that the UK far exceeds the other three countries in this realm.
According to the AT Internet Institute’s findings, online marketing campaigns in the UK account for over 50% of visits to websites that have adopted such campaigns. The firm explains the methodology behind this study:
As part of this study we only took into consideration websites which declared the use of online marketing campaigns (affiliates and partners, marketing emails, RSS feeds, sponsored links or advertising) on their sites. In addition to this, these websites were visited on a daily basis by internet users who accessed these websites via online marketing campaigns.
Our study involved four different European countries: France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom. For each individual country, visits to websites carried out within the specific country were only considered. The websites which were used as part of our study were those which could be measured by a specific AT Internet solution, and where the traffic to these websites tends to be mainly generated within the individual countries themselves.
Here are some stats:
- 53% of visits to these sites on average in the UK have been generated by online marketing campaigns
- 45.3% in Spain
- 40.3% in Germany
- 28.9% in France
The second source of visits so the sites in question came from affiliations and partnerships in Spain and in the UK. In France and Germany, marketing emails were the second source.
Facebook and Twitter have both been proven to be valuable sources of traffic to many sites, but another potential source that you might be overlooking is StumbleUpon. It is true that in the past, StumbleUpon has been presented as a traffic tool, but the results weren’t always what webmasters and marketers had hoped for.
StumbleUpon has been changing though. Last year, the company’s founders bought it back from eBay and have been busy ever since. They’ve been listening to users and playing catch up to the rest of the social media world and are now doing more for sites’ traffic than ever before. Have you seen much traffic from StumbleUpon in the past? How about more recently? Tell WebProNews readers.
At the recent SMX Advanced show in Seattle, WebProNews had a discussion on this very topic with Internet Marketing consultant Brent Csutoras. You can watch the entire conversation in the following clip.
In the past, Brent says you would get maybe three to five thousand visitors from StumbleUpon. "It was interesting, but it was just a little bit of traffic. It wasn’t enough to really drive a lot of time spent within the site," says Csutoras. Users were only getting random content, and it wasn’t all that great for links and targeted traffic, although it was always easy to see the potential of the technology.
Now since StumbleUpon has become more web-based this year with features like a web-based toolbar, a navigational section with popular & related content, StumlbeUpon buttons for webmasters to add to their sites, etc., the company has been driving people to participate and interact with other users more.
According to Csutoras, StumlbeUpon went from 5 million users last year to 8 million this year, and they are now drawing a more social userbase that is prone to sharing content.
So What Does This Mean for Your Traffic?
Well, Csutoras says StumbleUpon is now capable of sending anywhere from thirty to two hundred thousand unique visitors over a period of a week. He knows this because he’s seen it (the example is mentioned in the interview).
Fortunately for webmasters and marketers, it doesn’t end there either. When StumbleUpon users are stumbling through content and they come across your content and like it, they are apt to share it through another network like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc. That’s the beauty of the social web (and also a good reason to include as many sharing options on your content as possible).
If you weren’t already getting enough links from StumbleUpon, this opens the door for many more links as your content is spread from network to network – from reader to reader. This is basically (at least partially) where social media fits into the SEO equation.
Get Users to Stumble Through Your Content
StumbleUpon also has a partnership program, which Csutoras says is likely to expand (and apparently requires you to have 3,000 indexed pages within StumbleUpon). What this program does is allow you to place StumbleUpon’s technology on your site, so that readers can go through more of your content without actually being directed back to StumbleUpon at all. That means more time spent on your site.
Interesting Social Advertising Opportunities
StumlbeUpon also has a program where you can directly advertise through stumbles. Earlier this year, I interviewed the company’s VP of Business Development, John Bryan about this. Advertising through stumbles, means people get to vote ads up and down just like any other content. Not a bad way to gauge how effective an ad is.
Wrapping Up
So the moral of the story is, StumbleUpon has the potential to send some good traffic your way. It’s probably not going to happen all by itself though. You’re going to have to push it a little bit, and I don’t mean by spamming StumbleUpon. Create good content that people want to share. It’s the same principal that applies to every other facet of social media (and search engine) marketing. People will share what they like. Give them something to like. Also make stumbling a clear option on your content. Give them that button.
How have you encouraged users to stumble your content? Tell us what has or hasn’t worked for you.