Marketing

Many social media sites are trying to push back against the juggernaut known as Google and its mammoth advertising operation. Perhaps it’s no secret how important advertising revenue is to most social media platforms. After all, free services have to find money to operate from somewhere. Fully taking advantage of advertising, however, has been tricky thanks to Google AdWords and its powerful influence across the web. AdWords’ reach is impressive and plays a crucial role in Google’s growth. In fact, AdWords is the mega-corporation’s primary source of revenue.

The year is still young, but it is already a busy one for software startup, Altocloud. The Mountain View, California company just announced $2 million seed funding and the commercial availability of its predictive communications platform for customer sales and engagement. The funding, led by Delta Partners, Digicel Group and ACT Venture Capital, brings Altocloud’s total funding to $3 million. Altocloud's new platform intelligently identifies the optimal online visitors and delivers tailored chat, voice, video and content so customers get the information and help they need at exactly the right moment.  

In Chris Lucas' article, 5 Mobile Marketing Mistakes – and How to Fix Them, he talks about how many marketers approach mobile marketing as an afterthought. Too often marketers make costly mistakes when it comes to mobile that can add up to lost customers. Here is the infographic that accompanies the article showing the top five most egregious mobile marketing mistakes — and how they can be fixed.

This infographic is provided by Formstack. Clicking on the infographic will take you to a fuller size image.

By Chris Lucas, VP of marketing, Formstack

According to a report from Mobile Media Consumption, consumers today spend nearly 60% of their time on the Internet on their mobile devices, as compared to their desktop or laptop computer, tablet and other devices. These findings support what we as modern marketers already know: Mobile marketing is more important today than ever before.

74% of the buying decision is made in advance of the first sales call, 50% before an email address is captured. So why wait until marketing automation or CRM to tailor the digital experience?

It seems like companies have an insatiable desire for information. In the era of big data there’s never enough, and organizations are constantly on the lookout not only for new types of information, but new sources from which to glean it. Of course, big data isn’t a crystal ball (though it’s sometimes hyped up to be), but it’s a great means of learning a number of different things, including personal preferences. The more we interact with different brands, and voice our opinions on social channels, the more we reveal who we are, our habits and overall behavior. That’s why marketers are so keen to adopt big data strategies. The more they know about us, they more they’ll know how to reach us.

Metrics are becoming increasingly important for content marketing. Simply measuring visitors or users, and displaying the results in colored graphics is no longer sufficient. A CMS solves this by going to the source: the content.

Content Performance Metrics

You've probably been measuring users or page visitors on on your site or mobile app for a long time. Thanks to free systems like Google Analytics or open source analytics software like Piwik, you have a (more or less) accurate picture of the pages that your visitors or users have visited. 

Content marketing is everywhere. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a marketer who isn’t seeing the impact of content marketing on their discipline.

Content Marketing is Growing. Fast.

Whether they’re B2B businesses, B2C businesses or even government agencies and nonprofits, enterprise sized organizations are going digital, and finding their online publishing needs looking increasingly like the needs of digital publishers.  

Technology is getting faster and smarter. Computers are now able to recognize and learn patterns, and make decisions in real-time. Their improved analytic and decision-making abilities allow them to outperform humans in areas such as medical diagnoses, legal recognition and customized marketing campaigns.

I was recently asked by the Argus Leader, a local newspaper in Sioux Falls, to give my two cents on the controversial South Dakota #DontJerkandDrive campaign. Since then the article has been syndicated out to USA Today and other publications. It seems that I caught the attention of a reporter when I labeled the campaign as "brilliant" on Twitter.