In August, Facebook became the latest big name to jump into the original video content category with its new Watch tab. Content, which is produced for Facebook by partners, earns Facebook 45% of ad break revenue (partners get to keep the additional 55%). It’s a move designed to keep more eyeballs on Facebook for longer, which is to say more data—and opportunities—to sell to advertisers. We asked Jr. Account Coordinator Jesse Eiskina to share her rundown of the new feature and what marketers should expect.   If you haven’t noticed […]

Now more than ever, marketing and sales strategies and communications need to be aligned in order to create an effective growth strategy. The path and singular focus of these two historically siloed business units continues to move closer together into a unified vision. I believe that inbound marketing will be the centerpiece of this unification because of the focus on pipeline growth and nurturing.   An inbound strategy, in the broadest terms, is a marketing strategy which is focused on demand generation, lead acquisition, and lead nurturing. Traditionally, the line […]

Welcome to the age of the influencer, where consumers trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation. For marketers, that means what those reviews say—and what we do with them—has as much to do with our marketing strategy as it does with our customer service record.   According to the most recent BrightLocal Consumer Review Survey, 74% of consumers say that positive reviews help them trust a business more, and nearly 54% of people will visit that company’s website after reading those positive reviews (how’s that for inbound?). Consumers […]

No one has perfected email marketing. If they have, I hope they are enjoying retirement on a beach and have the urge to pass along their knowledge to the rest of us. But until that box of secrets shows up at our doors, the burden is on us to stay ahead of the ever-evolving preferences of our audiences.   Email marketing isn’t stationary, and what worked last week may not work this week. In truth, it is nearly impossible for an email marketer to know what always works all the […]

How many times have you hit a “submit” or “join” button in your lifetime? I’ll tell you – too many. Call-to-action buttons are just another touchpoint that a company can customize to set them apart from their competitors. In this post, I’m going to talk about 5 ways to make your CTA button a little less cookie cutter and a lot more unique.   1) Be Transparent – Literally The design of your CTA should not be overlooked. One of my favorite design tactics is implementing “ghost buttons.” They are a […]

Here’s a surprising statistic for retail marketers to ponder: more than 40% of retailers aren’t implementing an abandoned cart email strategy to entice back would-be customers.   That’s according to a recent study conducted by Kibo and Astound Commerce, which outlined how many retailers were making efforts to entice cart abandoners back to their sites. Something else the study uncovered: online retailers are missing some serious opportunity.   Across all segments and sizes of online retailers, nearly three-quarters of all carts are abandoned, and they’re abandoned for a variety of […]

I set out to answer an age-old social media question with this blog post: is there any truth to the claim that social media platforms (particularly Facebook) punish brands for posting content from a third-party tool?   I had a plan to answer this question very simply, and it was a question I wanted to clarify for all of us using marketing automation platforms to post content to social. I wanted to state that prior to 2011, the claim that Facebook favored content directly posted to Facebook was true. That […]

Whether it’s foot traffic to your retail store or an online purchase, there is no doubt that positive online reviews, combined with the power of local SEO, play a pivotal role in Search Engine Optimization and increased traffic to your business.   If you haven’t noticed them before, reviews show up under Google Maps when you search for a business name. This year, local reviews factored in 13% of the search algorithm that influences where one business ranks versus where the other ranks in the local 3 pack that appears […]

Ah, the spam filter: an email marketer’s nemesis. Finding our way through that filter and into the inbox keeps us email marketers on our toes—and away from too many exclamation points. But if you’re following email best practices (like the ones seen here) and still having trouble, you may need to approach the problem through a technical angle.   DKIM’s Role in Deliverability Inbox deliverability is never a guarantee, but understanding how DKIM affects email deliverability can improve your chances of landing in the inbox rather than the spam folder. […]

  Facebook is for B2C and LinkedIn is for B2B—end of story, right?   Well, not exactly.   Social media marketing has a complicated history with digital marketers. We’ve been working under a series of assumptions about what we should do and where we fit, depending on our B2B or B2C label. We began to believe that B2B marketers should dump all of their resources into LinkedIn. We demanded that B2C marketers live exclusively on Facebook and Instagram. We flooded feeds with clever puns and pretty pictures, and we forgot […]

Ecommerce paid search has had a renaissance in recent years and now Amazon is looking to use its credibility in the Ecommerce space to build a Paid Search Platform. According to a study by BloomReach in 2017, Fifty-five percent of people start their digital shopping experiences on Amazon. Seth Dallaire, VP of Global Sales at Amazon Media Group, said, “There’s an expectation from people who visit Amazon [that] they’re going to find anything they want.” Amazon hopes to use this credibility to create a paid search product that will monetize […]

Haven’t bought your ticket to the annual emfluence And Then Some Conference yet? There’s still time!   We’re officially two weeks away from this all-day digital marketing summit. Tickets are still available (for now), and we’re counting down the days and honing our basketball skills in preparation for August 25th at the College Basketball Experience.   This year, we’re building the conference around takeaways—things you can start applying as soon as you get back to the office. Let’s look at 5 things you’ll learn how to do if you attend […]

By now it’s no secret that email marketing is a must-have in every marketer’s toolbox.   More than 82% of companies—big and small alike—are using email marketing in some capacity to drive leads and sales, and they’re using it for good effect. Recent studies show that marketers rank email as the most effective channel for acquiring new leads and holding on to existing clients, and more than three quarters of marketers are happy with the ROI of email marketing.   But here’s the thing: even though the vast majority of […]

When you sign on to the emfluence Marketing Platform, you not only get the fantastic resources who work in the Kansas City office, but you also get access to industry-leading partnerships that emfluence has built over the years, like ReturnPath.  ReturnPath is the deliverability expert in the email marketing industry, and we value this partnership because it helps get your message delivered to the inboxes you want.   ReturnPath isn’t just a great email deliverability engine—they’re also a content machine. ReturnPath publishes multiple articles throughout the year covering topics ranging […]

Meet InspiroBot, the internet’s first artificial intelligence bot solely dedicated to generating unlimited inspirational quotes.   The results are an intriguing mix of terrifying, hilarious, and sometimes just a little too close to accurate. But here’s the thing: if you print out your InspiroBot creations and hang them around your office (like we did), no one is going to mistake InspiroBot’s quotes with actual inspirational quotes. The sentences are a little off. The inspiration is a little frightening. Something about them just isn’t…human.   InspiroBot is nonetheless a harbinger of […]

Following on from Alan’s great blog post about advertising blockers, I wanted to share a bit of information about the technical side of adblocking to help the techies in marketers’ offices understand how it works, what you need to know if you’re employing trackers, and how vendors might be impacted. So I took a quick dive into Webkit’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) initiative from a technologist’s perspective.   Alan’s post focused a lot on the adblocking aspect of this and how it’s driven by consumers. I’m going to focus more on the […]

As a marketer, you want to know as much as possible about a customer or prospect so that you can develop strategies to better target them and to generate more revenue. As an individual, you want to protect your personal information from misuse or mishandling. Finding a happy place for everyone is complicated. It requires respect and diligence from marketers and trust and understanding from individuals.   This is part one of a series of posts to help promote a general understanding of the current state of Information Privacy in […]

Ah, summer. College has wrapped up for the year and agencies are offering their internship programs to those looking to get their foot in the door and gain some real-world marketing experience.   At emfluence, we place a high value on the interns who come to work for us. Agency interns aren’t just coffee getters and copy makers. They get a chance to see the inner workings of an agency that prepares them for careers in a way that a classroom simply can’t.   Just because you got a college […]

I hate to say this, but your carefully crafted marketing message isn’t enough.   I know you spent hours working on it, and even more hours thinking about how you want your target audience to perceive your company. I know you’ve asked your customers what they like best about you and built your key messages around those elements. I know the messages look and sound exactly how you want them to. You’ve even created the perfect tagline—one that everyone, including your CEO, likes.   But if you really want to […]

If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. Measuring is the mantra of the digital marketer—it’s the determiner of a campaign’s success or failure and an influencer in where we put our dollars.   If you’re routinely reviewing your own email metrics, you’re off to a great start—and even better if you’re comparing your data year over year. But measuring your own data is just the first step. Without benchmarks to compare your numbers to, how do you know if what you’re doing is truly successful?   That’s why […]

Imagine you’ve just opened a website and a pop-up appears or a video starts pre-playing with sound before you can click or read anything. Or maybe you’re shopping for a vacuum cleaner or a pair of pants—which then follow you around the internet in display ads for the next month. Popups and video auto-plays are intrusive, and it has become a game-like challenge for site visitors to close the popup or pause the video. Similarly, display ads based on your search history aren’t always applicable to what you actually want. […]

Pop quiz…just five quick questions for you. Do you know every page/piece of content on your website and how it is displayed within search results? Do you know what errors have been found by Google, Bing, and other search engines? Is your site optimized for all device types? What does it look like on mobile vs. desktop? Has your site been negatively impacted by any of the latest Penguin, Panda, or various other algorithm updates? Do you know what your most important keywords and pages are on your site?   […]

If you’re using email strategy as part of your marketing efforts, then this blog post is for you. That’s because reporting on what you’re sending is a crucial step in a successful email marketing strategy. If you’re not already building email reports, you could be missing out on opportunities for the optimization of your campaigns.   With that said, the first step you’ll have to take is to build a template for your email reports. These email reporting templates should be based on your marketing goals—whether that be clicks, opens, […]

Customers are constantly being barraged with marketing messages, often multiple marketing messages from the same company. So, as a marketer, how do you know which message drove a customer to convert?   Recently, I was looking to buy a new pair of shoes. Let me walk you through my buying process: I had been looking at various big brand department stores that I had visited in the last few weeks, and I was finally in that sweet spot of looking to purchase. But after looking for deals on Amazon, Google […]

Regularly publishing quality content can be difficult for any business, even those with a wealth of marketing resources. It’s so easy to put content creation on the backburner. Creating content is time-consuming, and seeing the returns in traffic, social shares, and keyword rankings can take even longer to develop. It’s no wonder it’s so easy to forget about or delay creating content when immediate gratification is so rare. Nonetheless, consistently creating great content is an effective way for every business to increase audience reach, connect with customers, and reach critical […]

You’ve perfected the spacing, the images are just the right size, and now you’re ready to test and run pre-flight (which we always suggest before hitting send). The results are in. The email renderings look fantastic across the various inboxes; however, the Spam Filter check is not passing with flying colors. We’ve all been in this position – there isn’t enough time to send the email back to be rewritten, but we send with the risk of ending up in the dreaded spam folder. Luckily, we have a few MacGyver-style […]

So, You Decided to Run Terrestrial Radio Ads… Why: You wanted to achieve mass reach, with a low CPM, to reach a captive audience. You know your target demo is there, and 93% of U.S. adults still listen to AM/FM radio each week! It’s a no-brainer, right? Right? Radio listening is quite literally “wireless”. There is no meter to measure actual usage. There are no tickets sold, there are no circulations audited. There is no quantifiable “click-through” to point back to. The ratings systems of Nielson, Arbitron and holding companies […]