Category Archives: advertising

Are Facebook Pages Worthless or Are You Doing Social Wrong?

Posted on by
Reply

Often, we tell business-owners that just because someone liked your Facebook page doesn’t mean your posts show up in their news feed. Usually, they are shocked to know this.

This blogger on Forbes found out the hard way:

Once we started posting on our Facebook page, we were shocked, shocked, to see that not all the users that liked our page were seeing our posts. For example, with over 6,000 likes on our page, a typical post would only be seen by fifty to several hundred people. To reiterate, only 1% to 5% of the people that liked our page saw our posts.

But does this mean Facebook pages are a bad investment for small businesses, as the title of that post says? No. 

Continue reading →

Google AdWords Keyword Planner Just Launched

Posted on by
Reply

Yesterday Google officially launched its new tool, AdWords Keyword Planner, to help create better AdWords campaigns. Keyword Planner will replace our favorite Google Keyword Tool and AdWords Traffic Estimator.

You should learn to use this tool even if you never used Keyword Tool or Traffic Estimator and do not plan to use Google ads. Understanding search terms is important because that tells you what words your potential customers use to describe yours and similar businesses so that you can tweak your marketing and sales content accordingly.

Adwords Keyword Planner

Continue reading →

Weekend Reads for Better Marketing: Assorted How-to Advice

Posted on by
Reply

Assorted colorful donutsThis week’s round-up includes detailed tips on various things: contact forms, search ads, customer advocates, and productivity.

The best way to market is to encourage your customers to do it for you. Also check out my similar, old post with tips on how to do this.

Neil Patel puts together research about contact forms into a super helpful infographic. The most interesting things to me, are:

  1. Fewer fields get you more conversions.
  2. Dropdowns reduce conversions.
  3. Don’t ask for phone numbers!
  4. Use relevant text in the button.

What does Google AdWords’ Enhanced Campaigns mean for you?

I liked Joel Gascoigne’s post about how working with a partner makes you more productive. I’ve found that I’m much more productive when Nilesh is in the same room, partly because I am ashamed to be goofing off when someone is around, and partly because I can get quick answers to questions or get responses when I think aloud and it makes me move forward immediately instead of tabling the issue and starting on something else. Do you prefer working with a partner or colleague to working alone?

Marketing Reading, But Not Just for the Weekend

Posted on by
1

I couldn’t find any recent blog posts or articles I loved and wanted to share with you, so I thought I’d share my favorite marketing and business books.

Marketing books

I could only photograph three of the books, since the fourth’s lent out to our hacker

Continue reading →

Interview with Anita Campbell, Founder and CEO of Small Business Trends

Posted on by
10

Anita Campbell of Small Business TrendsAnita Campbell is the Founder and CEO of Small Business Trends, a popular U.S.-based site for small business advice. Small Business Trends has been mentioned in the Wall Street Journal, MSNBC, and the New York Times, and Anita herself is a popular writer and speaker and is on several advisory boards. She talks to us about content creation, content monetization, and entrepreneurship.

My questions and comments are in bold.

Tell us a bit about Small Business Trends – I read you started it as a version of an email newsletter? Who was your first audience? Continue reading →

Weekend Reads for Better Marketing: A Wide Assortment

Posted on by
Reply

Cheesecake with assorted fruits

With the five links below, you can learn about blogging, websites, advertising on social media, motivation, and sales. Let’s start!

Hubspot tells you how you (yes, you) can be a business blogger.

Copyblogger tells you how to set up a WordPress website in fifteen minutes. (Though really, if you’re new to this, I think it will take you at least half an hour. Or a couple of hours — speaking as someone who’s technically-challenged but got this website up and running, with a little help from the other guy.)

Continue reading →

Marketing Lessons from Mad Men

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve only been watching Mad Men when it airs on TV here in India, so I know I’m late in. but I watched the episode Blowing Smoke last night, and it reminded me of why I like the show. Yes, the characterizations are great, the acting is brilliant, the story touches on the politics of the era and doesn’t shy away from the ickiness (like the sexual harassment every woman on the show seems subject to, in one way or another). But what I like most, what really makes me sit up and watch, is the ad-making and the display of marketing strategy.

When their biggest client Lucky Strike fires the agency and everyone’s floundering, Don Draper makes a move. He puts up an ad in the New York Times where he writes about tobacco and its hazards, and why the agency would no more work on tobacco accounts.

It’s a move so bold as to be crazy. The other partners are furious: tobacco is a big advertising spender, and even if Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce reversed its stand, no tobacco company would be stupid enough to come to them after publicly disparaged one of their clients.

Continue reading →