The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth has followed up on its 2007 and 2008 studies of social media usage by the Inc. 500. Adoption and awareness continue to trend upward, with 91% of firms using at least one social media tool in 2009 and three-quarters describing themselves as “very familiar” with social networking.
Social networking and blogging have seen the most growth in adoption, while other technologies have flattened or even declined in use, including wikis and online video. Twitter usage, of course, has caught on quickly—more than one-half of businesses reported tweeting in 2009. This was the first year respondents were polled about Twitter.
Tying an online ad or piece of email marketing directly to a customized landing page that acknowledges the initial communication and has a specific call to action can improve lift by 40%, according to a survey by CrownPeak.
Despite the importance of linking to relevant pages, however, the survey revealed that a majority of marketers still do not take the basic step to link their online ads or emails with relevant landing pages, and are missing out on a wealth of post-click analytical data, not to mention sales, reports MarketingVOX.
The recently-released “Holiday PPC Ad Strategies” study found that 66% of this year’s holiday-themed online search advertising drives traffic to a home page or some other landing page that is not obviously tied to the online ad, and confuses and/or annoys potential shoppers. Only 34% of the holiday-themed search-engine ads analyzed in the study directed traffic to specific landing pages that urged shoppers to buy, or were otherwise reflective of the original ad.
Campaigns Not Linked
As part of the research, CrownPeak analyzed search marketing results across 10 different holiday-themed phrases, including general themes such as “holiday deals” and “holiday gifts; specific products such as “Nintendo Wii” or “Elmo Live”; and product categories such as “Halloween costumes” and “Christmas decorations.” Individual ads were analyzed from more than 100 online marketers, all of which used Google Adwords to disseminate campaigns. Advertisers were assessed over a period of two weeks.
The study found that the majority of online ad campaigns and web content were not linked. Of the 66% of advertisers that did not tie specific, relevant landing pages to their search ad, nearly 13% went to the advertiser home page. The remainder sent traffic to general category pages, or canned “searches” that didn’t specifically play off of the advertising copy.
Additional study findings:
Product-specific advertising performed better than its holiday-themed counterpart, though many retailers still failed to direct the majority of ads to a clear consumer call to action.
50% of product-specific advertisements linked either to a canned “search” or “category” page, or the website home page.
Some advertisers – primarily content aggregators – directed ads to specific landing pages, which then featured advertisements for other providers of the product.
Amazon, Target Best Scores
Ecommerce retailers were the winners in the race to tie marketing ads and landing page relevance, Crown Peak reported. When looking specifically at Ecommerce sites, 54% of advertisers had content-specific landing pages paying off a click from a search ad.
Amazon and Target – which also were two of the most-visited Black Friday retail websites – were among the highest scoring advertisers overall, consistently driving consumers to landing pages for products they were seeking.
“The goal of our study was to determine how smart holiday marketers are being with their online PPC spend, and the results were surprising,” said Jim Howard, CEO of CrownPeak. “By driving traffic to irrelevant content or the company’s home page, marketers are virtually guaranteeing that they aren’t going to convert Web visitors to buyers through online ads.”
Reposted from Marketing Charts “Linked Landing Pages Boost Lift 40%” Written by Crownpeak
Word-of-mouth is the top influencer for just about everything consumers do, and many social media marketers take that as an encouraging sign. After all, social media are about conversations. But, at least when it comes to video viewing, online dialogue is not as valuable as what Knowledge Networks refers to as “verbal” word-of-mouth.
Online video viewers were most likely to discover content and decide what to watch based on conversations that took place either in person or over the phone, according to the “How People Use Video Navigation” report. Traditional TV viewers were most influenced by TV ads, but verbal word-of-mouth ranked second for them as well. Social media was significantly more influential for discovering online viewing than traditional TV viewing, but still did not come close to real-life advice.
Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.
In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate—in ways we can only begin to imagine.
“I’ll stick with e-mail — write when I want, as often (or not ) as I want, to whom I want privately. No interest in letting the world know that I overcooked the spaghetti.”
—–Don Brazier
We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun.
Why wait for a response to an email when you get a quicker answer over instant messaging? Thanks to Facebook, some questions can be answered without asking them. You don’t need to ask a friend whether she has left work, if she has updated her public “status” on the site telling the world so. Email, stuck in the era of attachments, seems boring compared to services like Google Wave, currently in test phase, which allows users to share photos by dragging and dropping them from a desktop into a Wave, and to enter comments in near real time.
Little wonder that while email continues to grow, other types of communication services are growing far faster. In August 2009, 276.9 million people used email across the U.S., several European countries, Australia and Brazil, according to Nielsen Co., up 21% from 229.2 million in August 2008. But the number of users on social-networking and other community sites jumped 31% to 301.5 million people.
“The whole idea of this email service isn’t really quite as significant anymore when you can have many, many different types of messages and files and when you have this all on the same type of networks,” says Alex Bochannek, curator at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.
So, how will these new tools change the way we communicate? Let’s start with the most obvious: They make our interactions that much faster.
Reposted from Emarketer.com ” Holiday Web Shoppers Hit Social Networks.”
US Internet users will be doing plenty of online research about holiday gift giving this year. Shoppers already conditioned to comparison shop, check coupon sites and look for discounts will also be heading to social networks for information—and good deals.
According to research conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation and Yesmail, 27% of online shoppers who plan to both research and buy holiday gifts online this year will look for ideas about what friends and family want on sites such as Facebook. And nearly one-half (45%) will use social networks to research items, compare prices and look for offers.
About one-fifth of online holiday buyers are specifically looking to social networks for exclusive deals or free shipping.
Deloitte found that, overall, 17% of consumers would use social media during their holiday shopping. Just over one-half of that group was ages 18 to 29.
Generation Y females have redefined the idea of “peer group” to encompass online friends, bloggers and anonymous reviewers, according to the “Why Y Women?” report from PopSugar and Radar Research.
Looking to this expansive group of peers, rather than experts or celebrities, Gen Y women are particularly influenced by social media.
Younger women are nearly twice as likely as their Gen X counterparts to say they had discovered a new brand or product when a friend mentioned it in an online status update. They are also significantly more influenced by blogs, by both professionals and especially by “someone like me.”
At the Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco, Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Labs and author of “The Facebook Era,” explains how social web platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, are impacting businesses. She says email is slowly being replaced by social networking applications — a shift driven by young people.
One of the biggest misconceptions with online marketing is that social media is only for large brands. Truthfully, a small business that invests its time wisely can improve customer (or client) loyalty and traditional word of mouth marketing efforts.
Social media is useful for almost every type of business. Cafes, retail stores, and even professional services can build their online reputation and increase trust. By taking advantage of social media, businesses can make themselves more accessible, more personable, and maintain long term connections. For a small business looking to increase referrals, social media can be a powerful tool.
Here are five ways small businesses can capitalize on this new form of marketing.
Why use social media?
The best way to illustrate why small businesses are using social media is with a story. Think back to the days of the wild west. In those days, towns had one general store, and the store owner knew everyone. People trusted him and knew what they were getting. Enter the industrial age, and efficiency trumped personalization. People didn’t mind where they bought from, as long as goods were cheap.
Now, that mentality has changed. Consumers are once again reverting to a need for personalization from businesses large and small. The need has been rekindled by the Internet and our ability to find anything we want, as well as a mistrust of advertising (think used cars salesmen).
We’ve reached a point where the consumer wants to know the store owner’s name and that he can be trusted. Small businesses must look beyond their want to grow into corporations, and instead focus on their core customers. Thanks to social media, we’re able to foster these relationships easily and quickly.
Back in July, we reported that Facebook had become the Internet’s ultimate time waster, with users spending an average of 4 hours, 39 minutes on it per month, more than any other site on the Web.
Since then, however, that number has only gone up. According to numbers from Nielsen Online, users spent an average of 5 hours, 46 minutes on Facebook in the month of August. To put that in perspective, that’s triple the amount of time they spent on Google!
Earlier today, we reported that Americans now spend 17% of all of their online time on social networks. This makes a lot of sense and many readers commented that Facebook or Twitter are the first things they pull up on the web every single day.
But what types of individuals are the the heaviest users of social networks and social media? According to a new study put out by Nielsen Claritas, if you live in the U.S. and use Facebook, LinkedIn or MySpace, you are likely to be more affluent — and more urban (that is, live in a larger city) than the average American.
Demographic Differences Between Facebook and MySpace
Even back in 2007, there was heavy discussion over the differences between the MySpace and Facebook demographics. Of course, much has changed in the past two years.
Facebook usage has skyrocketed and the types of users that flock to both services has changed (and are, on average, much older than they were in 2007). These changes seem to have created a disparity in wealth between users of the world’s two largest social networks.
