Sky King Fireworks, one of the nation’s premier fireworks retailers, has officially rocketed into the fireworks season with a new multi-prong digital marketing campaign. From the launch of a brand new (search engine optimized!) website, to the creation of a social media campaign that includes Facebook and an extremely large video library on YouTube, to an overhaul of their email marketing program, Sky King Fireworks is ready to kick off their summer selling season. The 2011 summer campaign holds a lot of opportunity for their 18 stores across Florida, Indiana, and Pennsylvania, specifically:
- the opportunity for the site to be found on online and map searches to create a competitive edge over nearby stores in their local markets
- the ability to create a “wish list” of products that the visitor can print off and bring into a store, decreasing the likelihood that they stop at a competitor fireworks tent on their way to Sky King
- housing a central database of their organically-acquired email addresses that they can now send segmented and targeted emails to
- videos of their products can now be shared through social networks.
- analytics on their website so they can monitor usability, engagement, and make educated decisions about their site moving forward
EIM created a look and feel with an integrated approach across all their channels that brings the “King” to the forefront, with a whimsical and fun design. Check them out!
It’s time to get reacquainted with an old web marketing friend: Google AdWords. In case a recap is needed, this is the platform through which ads are developed and managed for display on Google’s search engine results pages (the listings you see at the very top of the page, above the organic listings, and stacked along the right side of the page).
With new social media tools constantly being introduced and ever-evolving mobile marketing technologies to stay on top of, AdWords is really a breath of fresh not-so-traditional-advertising-but-more-traditional-than-social-media-and-stuff air.
Yes, a good marketing strategy includes a combination of tactics designed to work together to achieve a common goal, and that may mean introducing some newer options. But in all the excitement of what’s new and popular, have you forgotten about some “older” standbys? Paid search advertising through AdWords might be just what you need to pump some new (old) life into your online marketing.
Let’s look at a few benefits of Google AdWords to remind ourselves why this is: read the full story...
First things first: Bing is out there and growing. It’s an important search engine to many and should be considered in your interactive marketing plans. But Google still has the much larger market share, so that’s why we’re focusing on it.
Adwords’ paid search ads allow you to target an Internet user at precisely the moment they are searching for what you sell. And if you optimize your ad, campaign settings, and landing page well, your ad should gain optimal exposure to this target audience member. You don’t have that kind of control within the organic side of the search engine listings.
StumbleUpon is a recommendation engine that allows you to view web pages, photos, and videos all over the web based on your tagged interests. You can seamlessly “stumble” from page to page, liking and disliking each page you view on the way. StumbleUpon then begins to learn what you like and provides you with related information based your like/dislike behavior. They also offer a very targeted CRM paid advertising option where they discretely insert your web page into users “stumbles” (about $.05 per visit/ $50 CRM).
Check out this quick video to learn more:
What are the benefits?
Increased Traffic
StumbleUpon is a great way to generate additional traffic to your website, and every time you submit a page to the site you have a change to hit a potential social media home run—it seldom happens, but when it does you have the potential to get hundred of thousands, or even millions of visitors to your site.
SEO Value
StumbleUpon can also be great to create some additional SEO value for you website. If your page/video/image gets enough likes to make it to the top of its category, you will be seen by millions of users. Since StumbleUpon’s user base is so large (15 million +), many people can find your pages and link to them, ultimately increasing cross linking between your website and therefore boosting your website ranking. Your StumbleUpon profile can also rank well if it gets a lot of interaction, and a large amount of users like your posts.
So things over at Google are getting a little scary, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Although it is still technically in testing phase, Google is allowing users to block domains/hosts from appearing in your personal Google search results. They are also allowing users to report bad links and content farm websites through a new Google Chrome extension. The idea behind the extension, called Personal Blocklist is that users can block websites they don’t want to see in their results and Google can then determine bad websites and content farms by looking at the patterns of websites people most often block.
This is the first time that Google has given a searcher the ability to have an impact on search results and the search engine as a whole. Because of this new extension, users can effectively have an impact on page rank since “the extension will also transmit to Google the URL of the web page on which the blocked or unblocked search results are displayed.”
There are currently 116,995 users worldwide and an average of 23,835 weekly downloads. The extension also has a perfect 5 star user rating. At this pace it’s not going to change the Internet, but it’s a very interesting direction and one to keep your eye on. It is also cool because if you use Google Chrome you can now easily block those websites you don’t want to show up in your results. As search gets more personal, this will certainly have an effect on SEO and finding creative ways to get in from of people who can actively manipulate search results.
If you’re a marketer that does not live under a rock somewhere, chances are you are migrating (if you haven’t already) your marketing and media plans to the online space. Print ad budgets are getting nixed for a shot at AdWords, websites are getting revamped every couple years to keep up with the growing technology and search engine changes.
Since my agency, envisionit media, is in the online arena, I wanted to do a little research and see what we’re calling “online marketing” these days. Our office throws around several terms – interactive marketing, emarketing, digital. Why do I want to find that out? Well, I want to make sure our website is optimized for the terms that people are actually searching for in Google – not just our opinions of what they’re searching for.
So, I used this fabulous free tool called Google Insights that we use a lot when researching keyword themes for our clients.
I typed in the following terms – interactive marketing, emarketing, website marketing, online marketing, and digital marketing – into the tool; set the parameters for Web Searches in the US in the past 12 months, and Voila! I was served this lovely little chart that showed me what terms were being used more frequently.
In looking at a quick glance of the outcomes,
It appears “online marketing” is the winner and one we should test creating some website pages around, optimizing them, and determining what traffic it brings in. In fact, we should also test “website marketing” and “digital marketing” to determine if each key phrase brings a different level of qualified traffic. We may be able to bring in a lot more traffic on “online marketing”, but maybe the visitor is not as sophisticated or as qualified to work with our agency as one who types in “digital marketing”…. read the full story...
