You can rely on us to keep you up-to-date on the latest Web-related updates, digital marketing news, best practices, and industry trends. Following are the ones we wanted to bring to your attention today.
Content Marketing
Brand awareness—Establish and build awareness of your brand to foster trust, build brand equity (value), gain a loyal audience, and improve your marketing efforts, consumer perception, and revenue. (source: HubSpot)
Blog comments: policy—Assemble communication rules for your blog or website including its purpose and examples of types of communication you allow and disallow, to reach solutions faster and have time to do more important work. (source: Copyblogger)
Digital Marketing
Usability testing—Evaluate websites’ user experience with users or customers that represent their typical audience and uncover any issues; benefits include discovery of user intentions, impartial accuracy, convenience, and being able to fix issues prior to investing more resources. (source: HubSpot)
Cobranding partnerships—Put brands into a strategic marketing and advertising partnership to increase awareness and break into new markets; examples include:
- GoPro and Red Bull
- Pottery Barn and Sherwin-Williams
- Casper and West Elm
- Bonne Belle and Dr. Pepper
- BMW and Louis Vuitton
- Uber and Spotify
- Apple and MasterCard
- Airbnb and Flipboard
- BuzzFeed and Best Friends Animal Society
- Alexander Wang and H&M
- CoverGirl and Lucasfilm
- UNICEF and Target
- Nike and Apple (source: HubSpot)
SEM
Google Ads: interface—You can manage paid search advertising with new reporting and automation features driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. This enables pay-per-click (PPC) managers to better identify what’s working and what’s not in order to gain a competitive advantage. (source: Search Engine Land)
Google Ads: security—Account admins can protect against hackers by implementing an authentication policy that requires all those with access to the account to use multifactor authentication. (source: Search Engine Land)
Social Media Marketing
Facebook ads: Facebook events—Use Facebook advertising to promote events you’ve scheduled on Facebook and increase ticket sales; platforms that integrate with Facebook event pages include Eventbrite, Shopify, and Eventbee. (source: Social Media Examiner)
Social media tools—As selected by influential online marketers, in alphabetical order:
- AgoraPulse—assembles all your mentions and messages in a social media dashboard; also, auto post with queues works great for reposting evergreen content on a periodic basis across various social networks
- Animoto—offers gorgeous templates, themes, and stock music as well as ability to add text overlays on video ads
- Backly—provides shared credit to content publishers as well as curators who disseminate their articles; integrates with other social-sharing tools (e.g., Buffer)
- Bit.ly—shortens and tracks links, measures performance from your campaigns, and identifies which channels bring in most traffic
- Brand24—allows you to see everyone who mentions your brand on social media in dashboard as well as monitor competitors
- Buffer—schedules social media updates; you can have it create a huge list of tweets from the URL of a favorite blog and install browser widget that lets you “buffer” any page or image you come across and have it sent immediately or later
- BuzzSumo—finds interesting topics in your industry on social media so you can write blog posts that will generate traffic and leads; also shows who’s shared content so you can connect to influencers and ask them to share your own content
- Canva—lets you create great images even if you’re not a graphic designer and optimize sizes for any social platform
- ClickToTweet—enables readers to immediately share your content with one-click boxes of preloaded Tweets, hashtags, and mentions; also, use ClickToTweet generator to add links to emails and PDFs
- Crowdfire—follows most engaged followers of people in your industry (many of them may convert and follow you); you can use automatic direct messages to A/B-test your most popular articles
- Edgar—schedules posts to share in rotation at least a few times per day
- Evernote—organizes story-telling materials (e.g., animated GIFs, infographics, photos, and text such as song lyrics, famous sayings, etc.)
- Facebook: Audience Insights—spells out your target audience members’ demographics, behaviors, and interests so you can provide content that they’ll probably engage with
- Facebook Messenger—allows direct communication with customers
- Followerwonk—helps you understand your audience and when it will most likely engage, find similar followers and when to post your most important updates on Twitter
- Foursixty—creates shoppable Instagram feeds and adds them to your homepage, product pages, and checkout
- If This Then That (IFTTT)—allows native posting of images on Twitter that were posted on Instagram
- InShot—creates video content on the go and lets you quickly edit them in various size formats
- Kicksta—helps to more easily upload, schedule, and add hashtags to Instagram
- LinkedIn: Elevate—expands content reach with employee advocacy
- LinkedIn: Sales Navigator—finds decision-makers at companies for lead generation—
- Moz: Fresh Web Explorer—monitors and alerts you re. brand mentions as well as finds content to share socially
- Narrow—interacts with hashtags, influencers, and keywords of interest to you
- Oktopost—allows collaboration and amplification of content via social media
- Planoly—schedules and posts content on social media as well as search for interesting content with hashtags or usernames
- Pocket—saves interesting social media posts to read later
- PopSocial—grows your Instagram audience
- Post Planner—increases engagement and provides access to viral posts on Facebook and Twitter
- Quuu—provides hand-curated content and promotes it via large distribution network
- Qwaya—optimizes Facebook advertising campaigns
- Repost—allows you to share content while giving credit; brands can tell their story with user-generated content
- Ripl—enables you to create animated visuals for social media
- Rival IQ—compares your social media engagement rate and top-performing content to that of your competitors
- Sendible—schedules, automates sharing via RSS feed, analytics, team management, and keyword monitoring, connecting to a large number of networks
- Snapchat—social media platform that works great for allowing followers to peek behind the scenes at your company or personal life
- Sumo—creates social-sharing buttons onsite, SMS, Flipboard, and WhatsApp and tracks social counts on blog posts; its Welcome Mat is a pop-up that captures emails
- Tweeps Map—offers visual representation of where your followers are located so that you can target followers from specific areas and ensure that content is relevant and valuable for those followers
- Twitter—helps you keep in touch and communicate with supporters; Promote mode gives constant broader reach; you can also create Twitter lists to track key opinion leaders and competitors
- Venngage—infographics tool; helps you create graphics for presentations and social media
- WordSwag—mobile application that turns your ideas, quotes, and content into attractive graphics that you can share on social media
- Yoast for SEO—helps with search engine optimization (SEO) for your blog and website
(source: Content Marketing Institute)
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