In our blogosphere recap we examine four blog posts from last week that discussed SoLoMo, social media links and email marketing, evolution of QR marketing, and how to generate high quality leads with content marketing. Below are some of the highlights from these articles:
- Foursquare Explore provides personalized recommendations based on a user’s check-in history, the histories of their friends, their current location, and other preferences.
- Only 18.3% of email marketers include links to share the content in their emails.
- Smart marketing strategies need to combine behavioral – or “personal” – relevance with contextual relevance.
- Make sure a portion of your content focuses on the pain points and interests of your most valuable and important segments.
Foursquare Explore: The SoLoMo Search Engine
iMedia Connection | Rod Reed | 1-21-12
Foursquare has made its previously mobile-only Explore recommendation engine available for the web. The feature provides personalized recommendations based on a user’s check-in history, the histories of their friends, their current location, and other preferences. Not only does the Explore feature considerably increase Foursquare’s value proposition for users by facilitating the discovery of new places, it significantly changes the value equation for brands as well. Indeed, Foursquare Explore is the first SoLoMo search engine.
Key Takeaways:
- Brands need to optimize their locations for search, discovery, and engagement in this new medium.
- Through the MomentFeed platform, one can track and measure individual competitor locations relative to their own.
- Proper venue optimization alone can increase location-based engagement (LBE), including check-ins, by 100%.
Infographic: How Social Media Links Help Email Marketing
Marketing Land | Staff | 1-23-12
Are you including ways for people to share what you’re emailing them about? If not, think again. Adding a way to share your emailed content can double your clickthrough rate when those emails are read by those on Facebook and Twitter and quadruple them when read by those on LinkedIn. That’s a pretty easy conversion win — but only about 20% of email marketers include social sharing links in their emails.
Key Statistics from Infographic:
- 18.3% of email marketers include links to share the content in their emails.
- 91% of email marketers include sharing links to Facebook.
- The CTR for messaged shared without social sharing is 2.6%.
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Why Relevance Rules Digital Marketing
iMedia Connection | Jonathan Gardner | 1-24-12
When you look at the buffet of content available to us these days – from every conceivable source, on every established and emerging platform – you might think that content remains the manna of digital marketing that it once was. It’d be an understatement to say that brands have embraced content creation as a marketing strategy. Branded content has become a staple of cross-platform, integrated marketing campaigns everywhere, as a nearly fail-proof way to engage consumers, and turn them into customers. Sooner or later, some savvy startup or sprawling conglomerate has to realize that the long tail is losing its appeal. More isn’t always better. What we need isn’t customization, but relevance.
Key Takeaways:
- If targeting is to deliver effective results, marketers need to understand changes in consumer context.
- Smart marketing strategies need to combine behavioral – or “personal” – relevance with contextual relevance.
- With mobile Internet usage expected to soon surpass desktop, nearly all media consumption is bound to soon be mobile. As a result, contexts will shift ever more fluidly.
7 Ways to Generate High-quality Leads with Content Marketing
Ion Interactive | Megan Leap | 1-26-12
Content is a critical component of great B2B marketing today. Content can help position your organization as thought leaders, nurture prospects over time, and best of all, it can generate high-quality leads, too.
7 Steps:
- Create content that attracts your best prospects. Make sure a portion of your content focuses on the pain points and interests of your most valuable and important segments.
- Help solve problems and address pain points. All good content, whether white papers, blogs, webinars, or slides, addresses pain points and solves problems.
- Go beyond your specific offering. While you should always create content about your organization’s specific area of focus, you’ll attract a bigger audience if your content addresses other topics that are interesting and important to your best prospects.
- Become a trusted resource. Every marketer is now a publisher. It’s important for your content to be helpful and useful.
- Delight and engage – let your prospects get to know you. Don’t discount the importance of delighting your visitors and letting them get to know you and your brand via your content marketing.
- Include conversion points within your content. If you’re promoting a webinar on email marketing, you can generate interest in the webinar by writing a blog on the “Top 10 Ways to Improve Email Open Rates”, and then cross promote a call-to-action at the end of the blog to sign up for the webinar.
- 7. Make it easy to share. Include share buttons for LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and any other network that your prospects use.
