If you catch your relatives glancing at their phones this Thanksgiving, it’s a good chance they’re bookmarking some juicy Black Friday deals. Consumer confidence is flying high in 2017, and experts predict it will lead to a significant bump in Holiday spending. Current forecast suggest a 4 percent increase in retail Holiday spending this year, which is a slightly higher gain than in 2016. Ecommerce businesses and other retailers should therefore get geared up for a better-than-usual Holiday spending season, starting with Black Friday. Here are some of the strategies you can use to prepare for the Holiday rush. Torture Test Your Website A deluge of Black
2017 has been an… interesting… year, to put it mildly. Our highly advanced, globalized world has resulted in some fairly disturbing consequences. Most of these consequences are the result of huge culture and technology changes we took for granted decades ago. At the same time, issues that have been boiling under the surface have finally come to a hideous head, forcing us to acknowledge their presence. This is the reality modern marketers live in, and it’s admittedly scarier than ever. While most of the time we try to gloss over the dramatic “doom and gloom” aspects of a story, this week we’re going to
Your brand’s desktop experience still matters a whole lot, despite our mobile-focused world. Some brands may even want to make desktop their first consideration during website design and strategy. That assertion may sound contradictory in an era where many marketers — us included — strongly recommend that mobile-first should be the default. But, to clarify, when people say “mobile first,” that doesn’t have to necessarily mean “desktop last.” There’s no question that all businesses need to consider mobile a leading priority for their digital marketing development strategy. But, they also have to consider the volume of users who migrate between mobile and desktop as
Facebook has been experimenting with a new newsfeed that completely hides all organic posts created by Pages. Unless businesses opt to pay for “promoted” posts, their page fans and audiences will never see their content on the main feed. Instead, all that content will be housed on a separate newsfeed, intended just for Pages. Before businesses start tearing their hair out, realize that the new feature is only being tested in a select few, small countries: Slovakia, Serbia and Sri Lanka. So far, the pilot program has been running for just a few days in these countries, but the results have been dramatic. Publishers
Google has rolled out changes to AdWords that could potentially use more of your budget than intended, but they are unlikely to have an overall impact on most marketers’ spending. As the internet is wont to do, digital marketers staged a collective freakout when Google announced recent changes to AdWords budgeting. The phrasing everyone honed in on was that Google could now potentially use twice the daily budget allocated to a campaign, making the account holder pay for the overcharges. This assertion that Google could spend more than your chosen limit scared some and angered others. But, upon follow-up and clarification from Google themselves,
Writing headlines for blogs and other content can feel like a difficult test with no right answers. There is a very good reason for this: you usually feel pressured to write your headline so that it satisfies all of your possible digital marketing goals at once. Since the qualities that make a headline work really well for search can make it a poor performer on social, people feel saddled with an impossible task. Rest assured that writing the headline that is perfect for all things and all people is impossible. But, you can get as close as possible by setting goals and making compromises.
Interactive content can draw a surge of new leads into the top of your marketing funnel. It can also provide deep value to those further down the funnel who are looking for specific, personalized answers. Gating your interactive content behind an email capture form also gives marketers a direct route into people’s inboxes. Types of interactive content include quizzes, polls, calculators, interactive infographics, build-your-own-product tools, games, quick assessment tools, and more. Research shows that interactive content can accomplish lead generation and brand awareness goals far more reliably than traditional, non-interactive content. In a survey of 185 digital marketers, over three times as many people said
Google recently announced that they will amend their “first click free” service for news publishing sites in favor of a “flexible sampling” model. The change also accompanies a new program where Google will selectively optimize search results for users based on how likely they are to subscribe to a particular news site. By looking at audience profile data, the search engine can identify audiences with high conversion potential for specific sites and influence their search results accordingly. These capabilities could signal a shift in the way Google provides lead generation options for businesses online. Although Google has not yet indicated whether they will bring their
Anyone taking a deep dive into SEMRush’s latest search engine optimization ranking study may be shocked to see conventional SEO ranking “wisdom” turned on its ear. The results of the study prove that many top-ranking pages have little difference when it comes to standard accepted SEO practices like keyword use in the meta description. Instead, what seems to matter most is that sites have high-quality content. This level of content quality drives traffic to sites and keeps users occupied, encouraging them to stay and read more. According to SEMRush, the following factors have the highest amount of differentiation between high-ranked pages and the strongest correlation
Google certainly has a way for getting attention, and displaying your site pages as “Not Secure” in Chrome is just the latest example. According to recent update notes, the Google Chrome browser will begin to flag certain site connections listed as HTTP rather than HTTPS as “Not Secure” in Chrome’s address bar. This warning will appear as red text whenever a site user begins to enter information into a text entry form, potentially scaring away visitors and shattering your marketing funnel. Since “forms” can include everything from an email submission widget to an in-site search query, sites that put off the switch will likely see