Okay, so you have a company blog and you’ve been getting some traffic, but not enough to justify your blogging efforts. Well, you’re not the only ones, this is a common problem and it can be solved with a simple fix: proper promotion.
Twitter and other social media are often regarded as “marketing” tools and are usually believed to be solely part of marketing’s sphere of influence, and it’s true, marketers are the most common users in many businesses, but that doesn’t mean that Twitter can’t be used effectively by sales teams to promote relevant conversations with leads.
In the web marketing world, creativity is an essential quality for a compelling, unique and effective marketing initiative. A great example is the recent Old Spice social media campaign where the creators took an already effective strategy (their original TV ad) which had received great feedback, and used it in a new and exciting way by having the actor respond with personalized videos to tweets he received from fans.
Most likely if you haven’t already implemented a content management system in your institution you will one day soon. The web is a crucial marketing channel for higher education marketers due to the rising popularity of online enrollment and engagement. With such a large target audience and a high number of content contributors, it is no longer viable or efficient to be running your website with reliance on IT, or highly technical individuals for website updates. As a result, more and more institutions are turning to content management systems as a solution. Implementing a CMS can sometimes be a complicated task, especially in higher education, so we’ve put together a list of our top tips for surviving a CMS implementation.
This week's post has two blog posts, a presentation on the ROI of social media and a video on the evolution of marketing.
The first impression you make on your visitors when they arrive at your website is crucial, but this is often more focused on the design aspects, which are the very first things that your visitors take in. What do you do once that initial impression is over? Does your website have the kind of copy that encourages your readers to stick around?
Proper search engine optimization (SEO) is a key aspect of every web marketing strategy (or it should be) but many times optimizing a website is seen as an afterthought to design when a company is trying to revamp its website. When it comes to designing a website that will be optimized from the get-go, it is essential that your company’s marketing team be involved from conceptualization straight through to launch. Why is this? Well that’s where we come to of part 1 our biggest website redesign mistake with regards to SEO.
Part 1: Leaving your website’s SEO until the website is already designed.
For some reason, a lot of people seem to believe that SEO is a process that should begin once a website is already up and running, when this is in fact that opposite of what should really be taking place. Would you go on a trip before you pack? Would you wait until you were sunburnt before applying sunscreen? Well, maybe you would, but I think we can both agree it would be a poor decision. The same goes for trying to implement SEO once your website has alrady been designed and built.
When your SEO is done properly, it helps you to determine the type of content that should be present on your site to help it rank well in search engines from the time it launches onwards, and, realistically, you shouldn’t be designing a website if you don’t know what content will be on it, right? Now, we’re not saying that you should design your website specifically around the keywords you’ve determined it will be easier to rank for during keyword research. What we’re saying is that determining how your customers find you and what they are looking for on websites in your industry is an important step in determining what content will be present on your website, and, depending on what kind of content your site needs to appeal to your target audience, your design will probably change to reflect that. This might sound like a relatively straight forward idea, you might even think this is a no-brainer, but you have no idea how many times we’ve seen companies come to us looking for some SEO consulting help, only for us to realize that they’ve built their entire website without once taking SEO into consideration. They have essentially built their website on a weak foundation. In addition, there is always the danger that if your website designer has no experience with SEO, then they won’t have designed or built your site in such a way that you can implement optimization tactics successfully without paying them for further development.
Part 2: Having your design firm do your SEO for you.
Location-based social services are one of the hottest trends in social networking for the moment and have had a significant effect on how marketers use social media to reach their target audiences. Well, social network behemoth Facebook has finally joined in the fray with the recent launch of their newest feature, Facebook Places. The service, which is meant to be comparable with other location-based social networks like Foursquare and Gowalla, allows users to check in to offline locations to alert their friends to their location. The feature is currently available via iPhone as well as Facebook’s HTML5 mobile site.
Lead nurturing email campaigns are a great way to front of mind with your leads, but only if they are implemented effectively. Lead nurturing is the process of building a relationship with your leads through multiple touches to move them down your sales funnel until they are ready to become a customer. So what are the essential elements of an effective lead nurturing email campaign?
Today's presentation has an interesting animated video on what really motivates us, an infographic on search engine optimization (SEO) and presentation on marketing measurement targeted towards higher education.
This presentation from Karine Joly discusses marketing measurement in the higher education space and is a great resource for all your higher ed marketers out there!
Well, today's webinar didn't go as smoothly as usual, (for those of you who couldn't attend, we had a few technical difficulties early on with our webinar service provider). However, we hope you all found the information in today's webinar useful and as usual, here are some of the most frequently asked questions from today's webinar:
As promise here is the second half of our list of landing page mistakes that can cost you sales:
Landing pages are one of the essential elements of any marketing campaign but only if they’re done correctly. If you’re guilty of making any of the mistakes on this list your landing pages may not only be detrimental to your campaign, but they may actually be costing your company sales.
Invoke Solutions, a market research firm, recently performed a study on frequent social media users to determine which factors they feel makes social media trustworthy. The main results, which were discussed in a recent blog post on eMarketer, narrow down several main social media trust characteristics.
B2B companies need to work hard to gain visibility in a crowded market and one of the main ways they can do this is to help their company and it's employees to be seen as thought leaders in your industry. As a B2B marketer, thought leadership is one of the most important aspects of your marketing strategy that you can cultivate and provide for your brand.
This week's post has an infographic on improving your landing pages, a video on tweeting and a presentation on "Micro Marketing."
In the past, before the internet and websites were such important selling tools the only way that information was available to prospects was by contacting sales. Now more and more information is available and buyers tend to avoid “marketing speak” and instead take to platforms like social media to get word of mouth recommendations about brands and products. Prospects are less likely to register for early stage content or sales interactions and are more likely to contact companies later in the buying cycle after doing their own research through online channels. Because of this, the process of effective lead nurturing has been forced to evolve and absorb social media into its process to help build relationships with prospects before they even become leads.
A content management system (CMS) allows regular business owners with little or no technical experience to update and manage their websites quickly and easily. An effective CMS can also be a powerful tool for supporting your business' search engine optimization (SEO) strategy since it provides a powerful base from which you can develop and maintain your website's content, and, consequently, support your overall SEO goals. 


This is a guest post written by Randa Codron, a Marketing and Communications Specialist for WaterTrax, one of Marqui's SaaS partner companies.