Costs to develop a website increase as the project nears completion, because once website developers get involved, costs go up fast. Planning and research during the discovery phase is invaluable to launching or relaunching a website on time and under budget.
I’ve had the revelation that after all of that hard work becoming “grownups”, it turns out, just like our high school years, the Internet is a popularity contest. Practicing general SEO is kind of like enrolling and beginning high school classes; using link building techniques is like getting noticed by the “cool” kids.
emfluence CEO, David Cacioppo and our client Kris Nielsen from Soave Automotive Group/Mercedes-Benz of Kansas City will be speaking at the 2014 Email Evolution Conference in Miami, January 23.
Nexgate’s report also noted that 1 in every 200 social media post are considered by consumers to be spam. It’s difficult to have a substantial ROI, if your followers think your posts contain spam, meaning it is seen as overly promotional or irrelevant. Try these 5 tips to prevent sabotaging your own social media content marketing.
The blogosphere may be buzzing about mobile-responsive email templates and video in email, but the bottom line is – if you want to optimize your email design to boost your open and click rates, you’ve got to know where and how your own audience looks at your emails.
Headlines are more important now than ever, thanks to social media. Think about what is shared when you Tweet, post to Facebook, or share a link on LinkedIn. What auto-populates when you click “Tweet This” above an article? Usually, it’s the headline. And if it can’t capture attention in 100 characters or less, that share isn’t working as hard for you as it could.
Google recently announced that they are moving to encrypted (https) search in an effort to make searching “more secure” for users. Whether the move actually creates a more secure search experience is up for debate, but for the SEO world, this announcement has created quite a stir.
Per an email from Pinterest founder, Ben, in my inbox this morning, it sounds like Pinterest is starting to get serious about how to monetize. They’ve announced that their dipping their toes into the idea of sponsored pins. If they do it well, this could be great news for marketers, especially of products in popular Pinterest categories.
Flip through the slide presentation from Jessica’s presentation on integrating emerging media into your event crisis management plan, given to the PCMA Heartland Chapter on Sept 19th.
Pop Quiz, social media marketers: What’s the difference between Oreo’s “You can dunk in the dark” tweet during the 2013 Superbowl and the Golf Channel’s #DreamDay promotion on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I have a dream…” speech? One is a cheeky quip about a current event. One is making a speech that inspired and liberated an entire group of people somehow equivalent to golfing. And there’s a lesson in there for us social media marketers and brand managers.
Google+ for Business offers strong SEO opportunities by actively passing relevant traffic, if not through preferential treatment from Google itself. Tyler takes a look at 3 ways incorporating a Google+ plan is still worth it for your SEO team (even if the social media team pushes back).
emfluence emsights features posts about email, social medial, mobile, search marketing, and digital marketing.
I’ve been working on upgrading a client’s form autofill options. Right now, they have server side ip sniffing, and forms I’m unable to cache because of the defaulted information. So, blank forms with client side geolocation through the the javascript navigator object is required. I’ve done this kind of thing before, but it’s always been on the page, assuming everything would work. This time around, I’m doing things a little differently, anticipating using this over and over for their many forms.
As just about everyone in web development knows these days, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has become one of the preferred cloud hosting services in the US. Why? Because it’s relatively easy and cost effective to set up robust yet flexible web sites and applications. And because it lets web devs large or small use the same kind of hosting as the biggest companies on the market.
When you start getting into scalability, you want to be able to use your web server (EC2) instances with your virtually limitless storage bucket (S3). That way, you can boot up as many EC2 instances as your traffic demands and they can all access the same files.
One of the world’s social media darlings proves why email + social = love. Pinterest has been a model user of email marketing since their first full year as a social medium. Have you ever received a Pinterest email on your phone and seen the same email on your desktop? Notice the clever shift between mobile version and desktop version? It’s a simple 2-version email…
It’s official: 2013 is the Year of Mobile. Statistics on mobile read rates for emails, social media usage on mobile devices and the market share of smart phones vs. “feature” phones are everywhere. Even our own emfluencers have asked “Is it time for responsive email design?” But, more important than trends and even best practices as email marketers consider mobile is knowing your *own* list and whether mobile or responsive email design will pay off.
We have an increasingly growing audience accessing information and connecting in a mobile environment that fits their time. In this new digital world, donors are just a click away…how will you reach them? Many brand marketers have been working towards mobile solutions, but unfortunately, I see too many of my favorite non-profits and causes failing to take advantage of mobile… and falling behind.
This is the first of 3-part blog series on shaping your social media strategy. Step 1: creating social content that is current and fits your overall marketing strategy.
Social media is a powerful force in how brands are perceived, received, shared and discussed and I’d argue that content is at the crux of that. Social Media Marketers have a challenge on their plate: we have to come up with the great content to support our brilliant marketing strategies. If you’re like me, you’ve had that day where you just think, “What the heck do I talk about?”
A few months ago, an email marketing client called who had been collecting email addresses for over 8 years, and they’d never sent out an email. They ask what they needed to do to start sending, since some of those addresses would be pretty old and I answered: time for a Re-Permission Campaign. First, we had to talk about why we needed to ask permission again…
Today, the highly visual social media site, Pinterest, announced that they’ll be helping pinners find fun stuff like recipes, movies and products by creating ‘more useful’ pins; great news for social media and digital marketing practitioners.
There is definitely an art to writing for social media, and for Twitter in particular. You think you have 140 characters – already a hard task — but you actually only have 97 characters to say what you need to say. The anatomy of a healthy, sharable tweet looks like this…
It’s almost summer which around emfluence means it’s time for our annual emfluence Marketing Platform User Conference! A full day of sessions on best practices, training on new features in our Platform and case studies from our savvy clients. We’re brewing a lineup of super powered content for this year’s conference and we thought we’d let you sneak a peek at the sessions:
Storify is among the newer tools for a social media practitioner and has been gaining popularity as a way to collect and organize tweets, especially those collected around a specific hashtag or top. Today, they launched their Storify Business account option, offering journalists, agencies, brands and bloggers the chance to upgrade their toolset.
Responsive web design was a popular topic in many sessions. One in particular I attended “What You See Is What You Spec’d” touched on not just the importance of a flexible web design but the how-to. Here are my five takeaways from the session.
In a fantastic SXSWi panel on the growing area of social customer service, the people behind the social media voices of Southwest Airlines, Chase Financial and Samsung spoke to a packed room about how the big guys handle (and learn from!) social media. My 3 favorite quotes:
Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek & The 4-Hour Chef, insists, “You can become word-class in something in 6 months or less” if you learn to learn the right way. In his many experiences, he’s broken down the process of successful learning and shared a few key tips with session attendees:
On Tuesday night, emfluence and our clients won 4 KCDMA AMBIT Awards! Two for search engine optimization and 2 for email marketing.
I’m finally getting through some of my notes, tweets and photos from South by Southwest’s Interactive Conference in Austin just over a week ago. I’ve found more good tidbits than I know what to do with, so for the next few days I’ll post some of the juiciest content. In this pic-filled post, check out some of the coolest promos and giveaways I ran across.