Marketing Is Evolving; Don’t Get Stuck

Fantastic post from SumAll today:

The Switch to Continuous Marketing – SumAll – Blog: “Social media platforms and analytics provide an immediate, continuous feedback loop that puts marketing into an entirely new cycle. It’s now possible to get a faster, deeper sense of your potential customer and to tailor marketing materials to a highly specific demographic.”

This is a concept that we embrace and focus heavily on at Harrelson Agency.

In the past, marketing campaigns were structured differently and might have done pretty well for the time. However, we’ve seen a gradual shift and trend towards online marketing in the past decade or so as the web has grown and social networks like Facebook and Twitter emerged. While paid search still dominates over social media traffic this year, that’s likely to change in 2014. Marketing via social media is bound to become the larger of the two traffic drivers and that’s due in large to the in-depth analytics and insights tools that services like Facebook and Twitter offer to advertisers. Old-school marketing (create, launch, sit back, evaluate) doesn’t work as well anymore because marketing on the web is a continuous process that requires lots of creative thinking, sweating the details, and monitoring (in real time, not when the campaign ends) exactly what works and what doesn’t. And if something doesn’t work, you can always change it and see where you went wrong.

Tools like SumAll and Chartbeat are fantastic for tracking how your campaigns are doing and what kind of traffic you’re getting, but even the out-of-the-box solutions that Facebook, Twitter, et al offer are pretty good.

“How Can I Get Free Advertising on Google?”

It’s a question we hear all the time, and a very good one for small businesses looking to make the most of their budget. Fortunately, Google has done a lot of the heavy lifting for you already and offers a ton of resources on its “Think Insights” portal.

For instance, here’s a link to their “Marketing Objectives” sub-category, which contains thousands of helpful articles, videos and case studies on various marketing topics related to small (and large) businesses:

Marketing Objectives – Think Insights – Google

If and when you’re ready to spend a money on AdWords, let us know. We’re a Google Engage partner and would love to help you out.

Some Things Never Change

It’s fascinating to me that mobile ad networks are making the same mistakes that we made with web-based performance advertisements 10 years ago…

Airpush – Developers: “Developers are paid on a CPM basis (cost per thousand impressions) rather than CPC. An “impression” in the case of Push Notification Ads includes any time an ad is pushed to a device, whether or not the user actually views the ad or not. The actual CPM rate which you are paid for a given app is driven by the CTR, CPC, and Quality for the given app.”

A mobile ad network based on real CPA or even EPC makes much more sense given what we know and the experience we’ve had over the past decade (going on two for some people).

What job do the ads do? Why would people click on them within an app? Those are the issues that these types of networks don’t address to their detriment.

Mobile is relatively young as a performance advertising and marketing space, but no reason to re-invent the wheel.