Page One on Google Is Your New Business Card

Do a search for your name, your company name, your product or service names. Whatever you find on page one in the Google SERPs amounts to a significant collage of how your brand is seen in the wild today. See, it doesn’t matter if your best client tells their best friend you are the most…

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Amazon’s December email campaigns outperform competitors, earning nearly 20% read rate

Twin Design / Shutterstock.com According to eDataSource, an email marketing and e-commerce analytics platform, Amazon’s email marketing efforts have outperformed seven other retailers so far this month. Tracking campaigns sent between November 29 (the day after Cyber Monday) through December 10, the e-commerce giant sent 1,691 email campaigns – earning 96.6 percent inbox placement and…

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What does the Consumer Review Fairness Act mean for consumers and online reviews?

Online reviews have steadily become a part of our everyday online world and an integral part of consumers’ buying process. Whether you’re proactively seeking out reviews for a product/service or responding to a Facebook friend’s post asking for provider recommendations, online reviews surround us. Reviews and star ratings show up in search engine results pages (in…

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Video Marketing 2017: What You Need to Know

Video is the new darling of digital marketing. With more than 400 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, consumers have grown increasingly comfortable with video. Smart marketers are responding by generating compelling, shareable content that delivers relevant brand messaging across multiple devices. Join us as video marketing expert Mark Robertson and senior research…

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How Google may be slowing down AMP by not using direct links to publishers

One of the biggest disadvantages for publishers in using AMP — the accelerated mobile pages format — is that Google will not show a publisher’s actual URL when displaying AMP pages. Google says this is so AMP pages load quickly. However, using a publisher’s URL might hardly slow a page down. In fact, using Google’s…

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Twitter is eliminating its ads that requested people’s personal information

tanuha2001 / Shutterstock.com Twitter is phasing out its lead generation ad format that brands could use to request people’s names, Twitter handles and email addresses. A Twitter spokesperson confirmed the move on Monday. The spokesperson said in an emailed statement: “We are always experimenting with the best ways to help advertisers effectively connect with consumers. At…

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Digital assistants, conversational search and the future of local

Traditional search has us conditioned to speak like cavemen: choppy sentences, verbs optional. But that’s all starting to change with the rise of digital assistants and conversational search. Conversational search comes with the expectation that digital assistants will actually converse with us. Our primitive two-word queries (grunts and hand gestures included) have evolved into full-fledged, honest-to-goodness questions. The age of digital assistants is upon us. For…

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Forget big data: Why thinking small can help marketers see the future

No one can predict the future, but smart marketers come pretty close. Using big data and machine intelligence to gauge the possibility of outcomes based on customer data and historical context, predictive analytics are about as magical as you’d expect a crystal ball to be: not perfect, sometimes murky, but more accurate than not. Every…

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How to use your buyer personas to build your 2017 marketing budget

If you have a love/hate relationship with buyer personas, you’re not alone. According to a 2016 survey by Customer Think, 72 percent of marketers are familiar with these personas, and 60 percent have created their first persona within the last two years. Unfortunately, lots of marketers are confused about how to use their personas or are frustrated…

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Why good SEO is strategic

From its inception as a marketing discipline nearly a decade ago, SEO has generally had a tactical focus. And that’s fine. After all, the specific tactics used to gain links, mentions, rankings, traffic and other KPIs are amazingly interesting subjects in their own right. (I’ve long been fascinated by the exact position of the demarcation…

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