Are You Asking the Right Questions in Your Emails?

When you send an email to your list, chances are the end goal is to get your recipient to take some kind of action with you. Usually, that action is a purchase. To achieve that goal, you need to get your readers engaged with your brand. Engagement is a hot buzzword, but when you look at the statistics behind it, you’ll understand why. Customers (even your most loyal customers) buy more when e

What Marketing Executives Must Know About Mobile

On April 21st, Google rolled out a new algorithm change that’s shaking the SEO world into “mobilegeddon.” This new algorithm punishes “old school” mobile websites and rewards the more modern responsive design. Around the same time, Facebook started to hint toward a stronger focus on their mobile service. Their goal is to refocus their advertising revenues on finding better advertisers

How to Use Analytics to Tap Into Better Brand Journalism

When you hear the term “brand journalism,” what comes to mind? Brands touting their new products? Companies flaunting their best side? Brand journalism happens when a company tells its own story. It happens on the website, through blog posts, in emails, and on social media. Instead of relying on the traditional method of getting PR, through press releases, brands often take matters into th

How to Keep a Steady Pulse on Social Media Marketing

A Note About Analytics The devil is in the details. Your analytics tell the story about what’s happening when you share a link or content on any social media profile. There’s a difference in the types of analytics you monitor too. 80% of the content you share is copied and pasted when shared elsewhere. That means that you won’t know what’s happening unless you track dark social media

How to Generate Bigger Brand Awareness (and Make Your Sales Team’s Lives Easier)

Did you know that almost 60% of the sales process is over before your prospect speaks to a sales representative? People are looking at what your company has to offer before you realize they’re interested. Brands struggle to generate awareness about the products or services they offer, but with a little bit of helpful insight, you can drive bigger brand awareness while also taking some of the bu

Pros and Cons to Subscriber Pop-Up Forms

If you’re like many website owners, you have a small box on the right hand side of your page that asks your reader to sign up. It’s not intrusive. It’s simply available for anyone interested in learning more from your business. How is that small box working for you? Are you getting the numbers of subscribers you’d like? Although you could see an uptick in signups, chances are you would

Measuring Social Media ROI With Analytics

How do you determine the success of your social media marketing? If you’re like many business owners, you focus on likes, shares, and comments. Although that gives you a realistic insight into how people react to your content, what does it mean in dollars and cents? The ultimate goal of marketing is to make your business money. Shouldn’t you be able to show the amount of money you’re gett

Should Your Sales Team Understand SEO?

There’s a well-known divide in the business world between sales and marketing teams. Sales teams view their job as closing deals, whereas marketing teams are tasked with finding qualified leads and generating brand awareness. If you ask a sales representative if they should spend time understanding a marketing task, such as search engine optimization (SEO), chances are the answer will be no.

Bid Optimization Techniques

  RedLotus Programmatic Advertising platform uses Real-time Bidding (RTB), a protocol / mechanism to buy ad impressions at real-time. A RTB transaction is a second price auction where the highest bidder wins with the second highest price.   Optimizing ad campaigns for the right bid price is an art (and science). Price is sensitive – it can’t be too high or too low.  Advert

Using Emojis in Subject Lines: Yay or Nay

Are you an Apple lover? If so, the release of the updated emoji keyboard in early April was hard to miss. People, businesses, and celebrities raved about the new images. Some brands were in hot water for doing so. Regardless of whether you were one of the millions raving about the new emojis, or whether you sat back and let the world do all the cheering, one thing is certain: people love the

How to Create a More Cohesive Social Media Marketing Strategy

Love it or hate it, social media marketing is here to stay. More consumers are jumping onto popular platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you’re not there, you’re missing out on a valuable piece of the conversation. But before you sprint over to each network and set up shop, you need to have a plan in place. Here’s a step-by-step approach to creating a coh

7 Marketing Analytics You Can’t Ignore

  Have you ever wondered what really happens when you hit “send” or “publish” on each marketing campaign? Where does your traffic come from? What’s working and what’s wasting your time? Marketing analytics provides that insight, but in today’s world of Big Data and information overload, how do you know what to look at and what to ignore? Analytics are not create

How to Create a Personal Connection Using a Robot

When one thinks about email marketing, warm and fuzzy images are not necessarily the first things that come to mind. Yet making personal connections through automated email programs and applications is actually easier than you may imagine. Contrary to some opinions, email marketing is not going away anytime soon. As such, it’s important to use email marketing to fullest extent in order to reap i

3 Reasons to Incorporate Gamification Into Your Marketing Strategy

When you think of gamification, what often comes to mind are kids playing video games online. Yet the concept of gamification is actually the application of game mechanics and design techniques to engage and motivate people to achieve goals. Many companies are applying this concept — in everything from software to training — in order to enhance their sales and marketing results. In fac

Vanity URLs: What Are They and Why You Need Them

As you build your business’ online presence, you may hear a lot about the importance of vanity URLs, especially as they relate to social media platforms. The term “vanity URL” may sound fancy and technical, but it’s really a simple tool that will have a profound effect on your business’ online presence. Let’s look at what vanity URLs are and why you need them. What is a Va

Yes, You Can Use CRM and Social Media to Build Trust

When it comes to marketing your brand, trust goes a long way. While fewer and fewer consumers trust online ads — only about 13% do — there are other strategies you can use to build a connection with potential customers. Meet CRM. Also known as customer relationship management software, CRM is a powerful tool that helps you get to know your customers and deliver meaningful and highly tar

Use Buyer Personas for Stronger Social Marketing

We hear a lot about targeting these days. “Know your customer!” “Market to one individual!” We’ve got the technology to zero in on exactly the kind of person we want to reach, so why aren’t more brands using it? Forget Technology for a Moment All the latest tools and tech can’t replace good old fashioned research. When you pay attention to who your customers are (

How to Advertise in a Non-Invasive Way

It’s getting harder and harder to get potential customers’ attention these days. After all, they’ve become immune to ads and commercials. They now control what they decide to hear when it comes to brands’ messages. So how can you get their attention for your local business? Think Multidimensional If you’re advertising or marketing, there’s no reason you need to choose a single

#FacebookFriday: A Guide to FB Marketing in 2015

Marketers have a love-hate relationship with Facebook. As the top social networking site with 890 million daily users, its power and reach cannot be ignored. Yet the company has made it increasingly difficult for businesses to gain traction and followers through Facebook company pages without paying to play. If you don’t want to break the bank on Facebook advertising, but still hope to use

Use Social Media to Target Mobile Customers

When you go outside your home, the most common site you’ll likely see is people engaged on their smartphones. Whether they’re texting, posting a tweet, or mapping their next driving location, being consumed on the mobile phone is more common than not. In fact, users spend more time accessing social media from mobile devices than desktop computers, with 86% of mobile Twitter users and 68% o

Mobile Advertising vs. TV Commercials

It used to be when a company wanted to advertise its products to prospective buyers, the go-to medium was television to spread the word. But with the tremendous growth in the use of smartphones and tablets, mobile advertising has become an incredibly powerful strategy, generating $7.1 billion in revenue in 2013. Through mobile advertising on media such as Google and Facebook (the two most popular

The Never Ending Story of Analytics

Being the savage’s bowsman, that is, the person who pulled the bow-oar in his boat (the second one from forward), it was my cheerful duty to attend upon him while taking that hard-scrabble scramble upon the dead whale’s back. You have seen Italian organ-boys holding a dancing-ape by a long cord. Just so, from the ship’s steep side, did I hold Queequeg down there in the sea, b