If you’ve been listening to the social-media evangelists over the past couple of years, you could be forgiven for coming away with the idea that social media is free.
Sure, there’s no direct charge for putting up a Facebook page, and you won’t get a bill for tweeting. However, as Uwe Hook put it in his recent post over at iMedia Connection:
“Social media is not free. Social media is not cheap. Social media requires a considerable investment of time and resources to make it work.”
The fact that the platforms are free has unfortunately encouraged (more…)
June 30th, 2010
Posted by: Bill Gadless
We’ve posted guidelines for landing-page design before, and one of those is to make your call to action inescapable and avoid confusing your prospect with other options.
But what about the other pages on your website? Although they’re not landing pages, many of the “meat-&-potatoes” pages on your site – those that describe your products or services in particular – have at least some chance of inducing a visitor to want to take some next step with your company. Clearly, you’ll do better to anticipate this and provide for it than to leave your visitor to puzzle over what might be a best next step …but what exactly should you do?
Posting on FutureNow, Brendan Regan suggests (more…)
June 24th, 2010
Posted by: Bill Gadless
OK, so you know all about lead nurturing: what to do once a suspect accepts one of your landing-page offers and gives up their contact info.
But what about all the others? …the ones who exit your landing page without converting, or the even larger number of “touch-&-gos” who visit various pages on your website (possibly multiple times!) and then disappear with nary a howdy-do? You basically have two choices on these: you can passively wait around for them to (maybe) come back; or you can take a proactive approach, as recommended by Christian Templeton in his recent post over on the B2B Insights Blog.
Here’s a boiled-down version of his recipe (and please do click on over for more): (more…)
June 22nd, 2010
Posted by: Bill Gadless
I see the following scenario happen time and again …and it’s agonizingly frustrating.
Client ABC Inc. wants to line up a killer search engine optimization (SEO) effort. They’ll study the field: they’ll learn all about keywords, meta & alt tags, inbound links. They may even subscribe to Search Engine Journal, buy stock in Google (a bit late, perhaps) …even engage eMagine’s search consultants. And when they finally embark on their SEO program… by gum, they’ll get (more…)
June 17th, 2010
Posted by: Bill Gadless
Citing a report by Mashable in his post for ClickZ, Jack Marshall reports that Twitter has been quietly beta-testing some new functionality with a limited number of its business accounts. It’s expected that the new features will be rolled out gradually to more and more business accounts shortly.
Dubbed the Twitter Business Center, its components include the ability for businesses to… (more…)
June 15th, 2010
Posted by: Bill Gadless
We’ve seen (and reported on here) numerous studies of marketers’ increasing adoption of social media. What’s been largely missing is analogous research on the demand or buy-side of the equation.
Until recently, that is, with two such studies appearing in close succession. Most recent is a UK-based study conducted and analyzed by McCallum Layton for Base One and B2B Marketing Magazine. It’s especially significant for limiting participation to buyers involved in the decision-making process for the purchase of a business product or service of value over £20,000 during the previous 12 months …in other words, a population very similar to the customers of many of our readers.
Posting on The Customer Collective, Ardath Albee has briefly summarized the study and points out a key finding… (more…)
June 10th, 2010
Posted by: Bill Gadless
In fact, we didn’t hear anything much coming out of Redmond by way of marking Bing’s one-year anniversary …and perhaps with good reason. About midway through that year, we raised the question here of whether Bing was already headed for IT’s Land of the Living Dead. Now, even more than then, Bing’s triumph is a tough case to make.
It’s all in the numbers, and Jack Marshall over at ClickZ has done a nice job compiling and summarizing the data from scorekeepers comScore, Nielsen, and Hitwise. On average, those three providers concur that (more…)
June 8th, 2010
Posted by: Bill Gadless
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