Knowing your audience better is your competitive advantage: A case study
Sometimes, the key to increasing ROI is not to expand your targeting, but to refine it. Columnist Kristopher Jones shares a case study where hyper-targeted advertising based on detailed customer personas produced award-winning results. Paid advertising on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram allows you leverage your existing customer data (emails, names, addresses) to create...
Six ways to improve convenience store advertising campaigns
Whether you’re a manager at a large national chain of convenience stores or heading up a local family business, it’s important that your advertising budget is wisely spent. A badly run advertising campaign will not only be a waste of carefully guarded company funds, but may also damage your company’s reputation. Here are six ways you can improve your current, and future, convenience store...
How can small businesses compete in the new age of email marketing? 3 ways.
Email marketing isn’t what it used to be. Which is not to say that it’s become any less effective. Quite the opposite, actually: Email continues to offer the best return on investment around — outperforming other digital marketing channels substantially. In fact, according to the Data & Marketing Association and Demand Metric, email has a median ROI of 122 percent. So, all...
3 ways to ensure early content marketing efforts pay off
As a strategy, content marketing is anything but quick — but that doesn’t mean you can’t see small ROI improvements early on. From pop-ups and banner ads to high-budget prime-time television commercials, traditional advertising methods are struggling to be effective. Audiences are tuned out, and with so much data available for marketers to segment, consumers demand that their...
Is yours a digitally born business? What? You haven’t yet embraced your brand?
In the past, digitally native businesses found their first success without a brand: In fact, many Silicon Valley companies didn’t even use the “B” word. Conventional VC wisdom, in fact, supported a model where entrepreneur would take the lowest salary possible, live on the future promise of their equity stake, put all their money into your engineers and their UX designers, code a killer...
Seeing the trees for the forest with paid social
Everyone’s on social media these days, so your business should be, too. But without paid media, your campaigns could have the impact of a falling tree that nobody is around to hear. If an evergreen tree were to fall over deep in the Oregon forest, would it make a sound? Of course it would. The 2,000-pound tree would slam down with such force that the ground would shake as the noise...
4 ways to reach a new target audience without abandoning your old one
Four strategies to reach a new demographic without changing what current customers already love about your company. For 56 years, Häagen-Dazs had a consistent message: high-quality, old-fashioned ice cream for sale. But that’s changed: Thanks largely to millennials, the company recently refreshed its brand with a revised logo, more vibrant packaging, new flavors and a global advertising...
7 ways to keep great content from dying a slow, unremarkable death
A website that isn’t adapting is a website that’s dying. The internet changes so fast that the moment you stop improving your website is the same moment that you start losing momentum and falling behind the competition. If your site isn’t actively adapting to the changing nature of the web, it’s stagnating and growing outdated, stale, and – yes – even boring. And the content on your website is...
Should marketing emails use a ‘no-reply’ email address?
Don’t send the wrong message to your customers. Columnist Ryan Phelan explains why using ‘do-not-reply’ or ‘no-reply’ in your email sending address is a bad idea. I love talking with marketers, and I do it often. They ask me great questions about email and how to do it better. But every once in a while, I get a question that makes my head explode, and I got one of...