I was attending group presentations in my Marketing Applications course and one of my classmates made the recommendation for her textiles company to start showcasing her samples on Pinterest.

Now, I haven’t actually been on Pinterest myself because I just know I would get hooked and end up spending countless hours on there probably looking at wedding related things (yes, I am that girl). Maybe I’ll venture on it once school’s over. But it occurred to me that it makes so much sense for marketers to get their products up on Pinterest for two reasons:

• Women are swarming onto Pinterest with each day that passes.

• Women are spenders who make most of the household purchases.

I think if I were a company trying to build a strong brand image and looking to increase sales…it wouldn’t take long for me to have the light bulb moment and bolster my brand on Pinterest where a very captive audience exists.

Also, the Internet is awesome because I was just searching for a picture to put at the top of this post and my search led me to this page about 6 reasons why brands are hyped up with a Pinterest interest. Here they are and check out the page if you want to read more into detail:

1. Pinterest is the fastest growing standalone site ever
2. Pinterest drives traffic to retailers
3. It is easy for brand sites to integrate with Pinterest
4. Pinterest attracts female shoppers
5. Optimal design – in more ways than one
6. Focus on product

Well there you have it! It’s not just me…the whole world knows that a smart brand will pin itself up on Pinterest! (I do think that…Pinterest is appropriate for certain brands more so than others so I would take this with a grain of salt and know your brand and customers before jumping on the bandwagon).

Cheers.

I was definitely going to stop blogging after the required 10 blogs – I just don’t feel like blogging is my cup of tea. However, given that I’ve locked myself out of Facebook until after finals, I naturally needed to find another way to waste my time! I feel like this new form of procrastination is a bit more useful though because I’m turning to reading articles and the news! I never read the news and I recognize that as one of my greatest downfalls.

Anyway, the article that caught my attention is called “10 Ways to Humanize Your Brand on Social Media” because I’m always thinking about how brands can interact with us on a much more personal level and therefore essentially become more humanized to us.  I skimmed over the 10 tips that Joe Chernov, the VP of Content Marketing for Eloqua, shared and thought they were some pretty useful basics for all of us to keep in mind.

Check them out:

1. Think Like A Social Network – aka treat everyone equally
2. Start With Staff – get customers to connect to your employees before your brand
3. Keep The Suits In Check – keep execs off of company social media accounts
4. Create Access – to as many areas of your business as reasonably possible
5. Treat Customers As Partners –  treat customers like the face of your company
6. Reach Out To Key Individuals – networking is everything
7. Own Your Mistakes – humans aren’t perfect, brands don’t have to be perfect
8. Put Your Fans To Work – loyal customers are great helping hands
9. Be Open To Debate – because let’s face it, people argue
10. Be Present – that’s your promise

Happy marketing!

It looks pretty refreshing doesn’t it? As the weather heats up (if it ever heats up…) Molson is getting ready to launch its Coors Light Iced T that will sport a citrus, iced-tea flavour as its latest flavour innovation. You might wonder why I’d choose to speak about this in a blog that should be about e-marketing when a lot of the marketing done for the Iced T will be on the street, in person, with lots and lots of sampling during street level stunts. Like the vice-president of marketing for Coors Light says in this clip about how they’ll conduct their promotions, ‘tasting is believing’ and the most effective way to get people hooked on the new beer is to get them to experience the flavour as it swishes around in their mouth. However, no marketing campaign is complete now without amazing online advertising and I look forward to seeing what Molson does with its virtual marketing in order to substantiate its offline efforts.

Social media networks make marketing efforts go viral in just a few days. The power of online is extraordinary. I don’t drink beer but after seeing Heineken’s Walk-In Fridge ad that exploded across the Internet…I probably would’ve made that my drink because I loved the ad so much. And that just goes to show how effective online marketing can be when done right, when done in such a way that it really engages the viewer and is so entertaining that one can’t help but want to pass it on.

Happy marketing!

And because I love it so much…

I read this article a few days ago and I thought it acted as a really good reminder to us marketers when we’re creating a campaign or making recommendations for a company who wants to improve their online marketing efforts. This is especially pertinent right now to us as we draw closer to finalizing our own recommendations for our class project and our respective clients. It’s one thing to tell them to get online, revamp their website, reach out to their target market by interacting with them on social media, and engage them through a company blog. But it’s another thing to really educate them about how they can harness all these platforms in an effective manner that will be received positively by their prospective clients.

The article is completely right when it says a a lot of companies don’t want to admit to their marketing efforts because there is such a negative perception of marketing. It’s manipulative. It’s overwhelming. It’s overbearing and obnoxious. It. Is. Everywhere.

I think this sentence sums it up quite well: “It’s clear that just as social media allowed us to have a personal connection to everyone, marketers have found a way to exploit that connection for commerce.”

As I move forward in making recommendations to my client, I would like to keep in mind these three top reasons for why many people hate marketers and ensure that I caution my client to steer clear of these pitfalls.

No Empathy

People can’t stand being spammed with marketing ploys that assume they have what you need. People want to feel like they’re being understood so marketing efforts should be tailored and targeted and with the abundance of tools readily available, there is no excuse for not doing so!

No Authenticity

Be real with your potential and current customers. Honesty, contrary to popular belief, does have a place in marketing and people appreciate it when they feel like you are truly being genuine with them. The example they use is those who claim to be “authentically tweeting and Facebooking 20 hours per day” when in fact, everyone knows about the industry of ghost tweeters/Facebookers that are utilized. Plus, as a customer, I’d be concerned about why you’re tweeting 20 hours a day instead of running your business.

Wasting Time

“We marketers use up the most valuable commodity of people…time.” I definitely agree that it really matters sharing content that is relevant and thoughtful – something that adds value, educates, truly entertains, and actually is perceived as serving a useful purpose. This is a classic case where it’s all about quality, not quantity.

 Perhaps if everyone pulls together and makes an effort to learn from these…there would be just a little less hate and a little more love.

One of my biggest challenges of working for a very traditional business that has predominantly focused on face-to-face direct marketing and that has generated the majority of their business through customer referrals is convincing them of the power of going online and investing time into social media and having a company blog. Their major concern is whether having a Facebook page or a Twitter Feed or starting up a blog is even worth their time. What kind of return can they expect to see? Do these virtual mediums even fit with their business and clients? I want to convince them that YES is the answer. But it’s difficult. I can’t just ask them to start a Facebook page without knowing that they will commit to updating it on a regular basis with engaging and relevant information that their customers (and potential customers) want to see. There’s nothing worse than a blog or Twitter Feed that hasn’t been updated since March 2, 2011.

Inbound marketing really works when you’ve got timely and relevant information readily available for your viewers to consume. If you’ve got what they’re looking for and you create the trust that you are committed to keeping them updated, they’ll keep coming back to you.

I think I’d like to show my clients this infographic because it really highlights some of the incredible benefits that can be reaped from inbound marketing. First, take a look at how much attention inbound marketing is now getting:

And it’s especially perfect because it shows how appropriate it is for smaller businesses (just like my client!).

Finally, I really like this last part of the infographic because I want to communicate to my client how important it is for them to invest in some serious website architecture and create effective and meaningful landing pages. I knew I needed them to help with SEO and actually making their AdWords campaign useful but what I didn’t know is that businesses with many targeted landing pages generate 10 times more leads!

It’s a pretty good article so I’d invite you to take a look at it here. It might just spark some ideas for you in creating your own marketing campaign!

I’m not sure what this has to do with e-marketing but it’s something that I’d like to point out – a realization that hit me suddenly and made me sad. It also made me pause in the moment and just realize with wonder how much things have changed. How so much of the tangible, which was once an integral part of our lives, is on the path of becoming archaic as everything turns virtual in our digital age.

Ever since I was little, it had been my dream to have a library as magnificent and as packed with books as the Beast’s library in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. If you need a refresher, this is what my dream looked like:

Now, I actually have a fear that I will never have that. Rarely I see someone with a novel in their hand, flipping the pages as the story unfolds. I look around and I see iPhones, iPads, Kindles, Kobos, and an array of other e-readers and I know that that is the direction our world is going in. Any book is at the tip of our fingers, reachable with a few taps on the screen, and available at the fraction of the cost of a hard copy. And as quickly as tech companies push out the latest gadget, my dream has rapidly dissolved and morphed into a harsh realization that looks something like this:

It’s amazing how far we’ve come in such a short time. I marvel at how technology has seeped into pretty much every aspect of our life and therefore absolutely changed the landscape of living, relationships, business, and marketing. It’s like how electricity entered our lives and made candles nothing more than decorations we see once a year on birthday cakes. It’s mind blowing being able to watch this evolution take place over the course of one’s life and witnessing how all things marketing can be seen in a totally different light.

I’m pretty sure (and this is sad to admit) that before I sat down in this e-marketing course I hadn’t actually heard the term “call to action” be used before. And now it’s all that I can think about. Having a strong call to action, whether it be on one of your advertisements or on your website, is one of the most important lessons I’ve learned in this course. What’s the point of even having a website if you don’t have some sort of call to action that guides your visitors to take an action that will help your business? One of the most frustrating (albeit interesting) experiences has been trying to run an AdWords campaign for a client but not being able to measure conversion in any way. Why? Because the landing pages that we have to work with do not invite the visitor to take the next step. And so, when you’ve put all that time and money into trying to get their attention, it just feels unrewarding when nothing comes from it!

I see a strong call to action as the perfect way of aligning your online marketing goals with the needs of the client. You’re providing them with the next step, the solution to their need, and in turn you are achieving your objective – whether that’s to have them sign up for a newsletter, subscribe to your site, or give you call. That call to action gives people a way to further connect with you and to me, that’s what e-marketing is all about. Connection. It’s your way of reaching out to your next potential customer to connect with them – so why not make it as obvious and easy as possible for them to get that invitation and respond to you.

Being new to all of this – I had to find out what it takes to make a strong call to action and what things I should avoid doing. I just love it when I find neat tips laid out attractively in an infographic so I thought I’d share it with you (you can also check it out here).

And this:

But from everything I’ve read…I really think the most important thing is to make your call to action OBVIOUS! If they don’t see it, it’s not calling out to them. If I look at a webpage and have to spend more than a second squinting and searching for some invitation to do something next…there’s a problem and an opportunity to improve.

What about you? What do you think makes a good call to action?

I’ve just recently gotten my friend to lock me out of Facebook because, I admit it, I am a Facebook addict and with this crazy slew of end-of-the-term projects, reports, presentations, and finals, I just don’t feel right about wasting time on there anymore. But in the last while, all I’ve seen are status updates about hating the new timeline layout and how much of an inconvenient change it is. Woe is the day that timeline became mandatory but it’s here and I really don’t see what the big deal is. My feeling is that people are just naturally opposed to change and having to get used to a format change is now a huge inconvenience. I didn’t find that my Facebook experience changed all that much. After hearing a lot of negative complaints about it, I thought this article provided a nice change of perspective.

It speaks to how a marketing study by Wildfire found that Timeline is actually a positive change for 95% of Facebook pages as it’s increased the number of Likes to 95% of  pages and fostered more conversation around a specific profile. Some further encouraging news is that local businesses that have Facebook pages are now seeing five times the amount of exposure in news feeds and eight times the number of fans engaging with them in some sort of post. These numbers, however, hold true only for local pages that have 30-100 fans. Comparisons with corporate pages that have more than 100,000 fans are showing that having corporate fans just isn’t as valuable as having local fans – a really important point to take into consideration when deciding what tactic will work best for your particular kind of company.

If I were a local business looking to find an effective way to engage with my potential consumer base…I think I’d be welcoming Timeline with open arms.

Taking Chris Brogan’s advice to be brief, my goal with this post is to be short and sweet.

Recently, I had to complete a website audit for a local company and make recommendations on how they could improve their website. It was an interesting experience because I picked up many neat tricks and tips that I would never have learned since I have no experience in web graphic design. The central message to this all – beauty is everything in web design.

• Visuals are fantastic but using lots of images can be ineffective without captions. Apparently, our attention gets drawn away from the body of the text to the images but is then quickly lost without any caption tie in the picture and direct our attention back to the body.
• Bullets make your information-delivery crisp and easy to consume.
• Keep your fonts simple. Stylish fonts apparently confuse us!
• Don’t information overload: keep one page limited to about two screenfuls of info.
• Put your most important information at the top! Everything at the bottom gets scanned over.
• Animations and sounds are things of the past – they clutter and confuse.
• Never use more than one exclamation point! (This made me slightly sad. I love !!! but apparently they scream ‘amateur’ and exude desperation. Point taken.)

There is a wealth of knowledge out there on how to take your website to the next level. This list doesn’t even begin to skim the surface so I encourage you to go out there, explore, and learn!