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Category: Paid Search

  • Black Friday [Infographic]

    The Thanksgiving feast is over and the turkey, sweet potato and cranberry sauce is long gone. After the feast and celebrations comes America’s busiest shopping day – Black Friday. Sales just under $27 billion in 2005 have skyrocketed to $61.4 billion in 2013.

    Tectonic shifts are happening all around us in the way people are shopping. People’s penchant to shop online via their tablets and smartphones will be fully manifested this holiday shopping season. The biggest shopping extravaganza of the year is underway and the online world is abuzz with staggering deals. Go through this discerning infographic to learn more on how trends have shifted to online shopping via smart phones and tablets.

    Black Friday infographic

  • Black Friday Holiday Shopping Season

    It’s that time of the year when shoppers are thronging retail outlets in the hope of getting a steal of a deal. But as you might have already realized e-commerce today has caught the fancy of shoppers in a big way. If you are a digital marketer, then you must have an ace up your sleeve to leverage this positive customer sentiment. You need to be sure that your message reaches the customers, breaking free from the clutter that is around this time of the year.

    Today, customers are savvy and you need to take cognizance of that while devising your marketing campaign. So what makes you stand out from the crowd, capture mind-share and eventually pull in the customers? Now the million dollar question that you need to address as a digital marketer is “HOW DO I GAIN A HIGHER MIND-SHARE & WALLET-SHARE OF MY CUSTOMERS”?

    The deals that e-commerce players offer is much more profitable for shoppers as compared to the deals offered by offline retailers. During the shopping season around this time of the year, people are naturally hunting for the best deals online. Hence, as a digital marketer, you need to have a well-planned approach to get the best bang for your buck this holiday season.

    Your 3 Point Agenda for a successful Online Venture

    • Pay Attention to Social Networking Sites – The explosion of social networking sites is one of the hallmarks of Web 2.0 technologies. Your customers are everywhere. Learn what they are saying on Facebook, Twitter, et al to dovetail your digital marketing strategy
    • Your Online Review Strategy is critical – People today make shopping decisions based on online reviews. So it pays to have good reviews about your company together with the products and services that you sell. Influence your customers to give their feedback, reviews and product ratings, which will bolster your digital marketing campaign
    • Email Marketing Pays Rich Dividends – Even in this age of the social media explosion, email is an effective way to reach out to people. So make sure you have a flawless email marketing strategy in place. Send mails to people to give them a preview of all that you are going to offer this Thanksgiving holiday shopping season. This will surely give you great ROI

    How Brands are Wooing Consumers this Black Friday

    Legendary PC maker Dell is offering Jaw-dropping discounts. Its door buster sales include:

    • Tablets starting at $99.99, Laptops at $189.99, desktops at $199.99, the Alienware gaming PCs starting at $549.00
    • Special deals on a full range of consumer electronics, including TVs as low as $167.99, monitors starting at $99.99 and Bluetooth speakers starting at $29.99

    ………And a lot more such incredible deals beginning November 27.

    The world’s biggest retailer Wal-Mart is dumping the one day ‘Black Friday’ sales model and instead moving towards an annual holiday shopping season. If you thought that only brick and mortar sales is Wal-Mart’s forte then think again because this beast of Bentonville is going all guns blazing in giving some of the deepest discounts available online!

    The biggest online retailer Amazon will offer new deals every hour. It will offer multiple ‘Lightning Deals’ along with two coveted ‘Deals of the Day’ every day this holiday shopping season. So any brand worth its salt is going to make the most of this season when people are not averse to loosen their purse strings.

    Position² POV

    The Thanksgiving weekend kick-starts the Christmas Shopping party. As a digital marketer, you must realize that it is manna from heaven for bargain hunting customers as there is no better time to shop than this in the entire calendar. But savvy digital marketers are looking beyond this holiday shopping season. It has been proven that the shoppers who buy from you during the holiday season more often than not, are just fickle customers. They might not provide a lot of value to you in future.

    Now, as a digital marketer, you can change this with the right strategy. You need to collect information about these customers and utilize it to derive more lifetime value from them. This deluge of customers to your online websites need not be a onetime affair, but more of a regular occurrence for you.

    We feel that the old retailer’s customer acquisition strategies for minimizing cost per customer acquisition is passé. In this situation, marketing intelligence & analytics, like Position2’s MiDash is the digital marketer’s best friend. It helps them understand in real-time the difference between the cost of acquisition & customer lifetime value for various customer types. Marketers can now identify channels and tailor make strategies on how effectively, they can optimize customer acquisition and retention. After all, a customer 50X more valuable than another, certainly needs a different acquisition strategy and cost.

    Contact us now to retain your customers well beyond this holiday shopping season!

    Happy Holidays!

  • Apple iAd Expands into Programmatic Buying

    The programmatic buying bug has bitten brand Apple too. The iAd mobile advertising platform developed by Apple has finally gone the programmatic way. This platform is one of the biggest mobile ad platforms with tens of thousands of advertisers bidding on the available mobile inventory to promote their brands and businesses alike. So it was only natural that Apple resorted to programmatic buying in order to improve the speed and efficiency of the ad bidding process.

    iAd will now make more than 250,000 apps across its platform in over 100 countries accessible to the DSPs (Demand-side Platforms) and ad tech firms like MediaMath, The Trade Desk, Rubicon Project, GET IT Mobile, Accordant Media, Adelphic and AdRoll. These are just a few of the launch partner names. The network is going to expand rapidly in the days to come.

    Programmatic is the way to go when it comes to ad bidding since it reduces redundancy and improves overall efficacy of the process. Mobile is the dominant platform for advertisers to reach out to the young and aspiring demographics in any country. Apps have a preponderance over other forms of content consumption on the mobile platform. Apple brings with it phenomenal scale, high quality user experience and a unique, rich data set. This has got the advertisers quite excited.

    Key Takeaway for Digital Marketers

    With each passing day, more and more online processes are getting automatized. The ad bidding process if done manually is too cumbersome, especially if you are going to bid for tens of hundreds of ad spots and that too on a regular basis. Programmatic can help you make sense of what actually is offered to you and what are your options regarding the various ad inventories available. To learn more about the advantages of programmatic buying of ad inventory over traditional forms of buying ads, please visit the link here.

    With its move into programmatic buying, Apple has released an updated API for its automated buying platform the iAd Workbench. This new API allows the advertising fraternity to generate campaigns, make updates, access analytics and optimize bids seamlessly via their own systems. Learn more about it now at iAd Workbench API Guide.

    Has this new move from Apple got you all excited? Well, we can’t hide our excitement!

    Contact us now to get started with programmatic buying on the Apple iAd platform.

  • Make Your Website Mobile-friendly Now

    Today more and more people are using the smart phone as the primary device for browsing the web closely followed by the tablet computer. Now what does this tell you about the way your website should be designed to cater to this group of burgeoning users? Having a website that just caters to the desktop users is so twentieth century approach. Give it a thought!

    If you still think that you can make do with a desktop-only optimized site then you will be relegated to digital oblivion in no time. Google has come up with a new set of rules that will judge your site’s suitability for the mobile platform. It’s not just Google but every search engine out there that wants you to optimize your site for the mobile browsers of today.

    If you do not know whether your site is mobile optimized then it is high time you take the Google test now in order to demystify the ambiguity revolving around your site’s suitability for mobile users. There is an exclusive set of rules that you need to adhere to in order for your site to be certified as mobile-friendly. They are as follows:

    • Use only those technologies that are supported on the mobile platform (unlike Flash, et al.)
    • Your text should be readable without zooming or squinting the eye
    • Justify your text to the mobile screen so that there isn’t any horizontal scrolling needed
    • Don’t clutter your links in such a way that tapping on one is humanly impossible

    Peruse the Google Webmasters Mobile Guide that will take you on a step by step process of creating mobile-friendly sites. Read the mobile usability report here that highlights various issues related to the efficacy of your entire site. If your site is created using third-party software like WordPress or Joomla, then there is a how-to guide in order to assist you to migrate to a mobile-friendly template.

    In the not so distant future Google might make the mobile-friendly experience a critical criterion for ranking on the search engine results page. So what are you waiting for?

    Get in touch with us now to stay ahead of the curve!

  • Your Website is Your Digital Persona. Is Yours Worth Clicking?

    Today having a website is more than just a business imperative. You need to differentiate your website from that of your competitors. Your interface should be user friendly and at the same time it should be easy to maintain and upgrade. Having a robust site is very important since web security is of critical importance if you are really serious about scaling your business. You cannot take risks when it comes to web development. The world is going the digital way and you need to take cognizance of that.

    The first impression that your website gives is critical. It can make or break a deal for your website. So put your best foot forward. Have a website that is visually appealing and informative at the same time. According to statistics most visitors to your site will have decided in the first few seconds whether your website is worth spending time on or they ought to give it a pass.

    We can’t stress enough on how much content rules even in this day and age of gimmicks and smoke and mirrors. You cannot have mediocre content and expect first class results. Give your users first class content and sooner than later you will see how it benefits your website.

    Functionality is a big issue with a lot of websites as webmasters do not think twice about the user experience. A website is a platform where people navigate depending on what they are seeking and if your website has broken links, insufficient information, lack of guidance then people will immediately move away from your site and that does not bode well for you.

    As far as usability is concerned keep your website simple. Have a good layout with links clearly marked with where they are supposed to lead you. See to it that your pages load fast and efficiently. That way navigation is not an issue for your users and you can rest assured that rich dividends will surely follow.

    You cannot have any quick fix solutions just because they are cheaper. When you are in for the long haul it will cost you dearly and we are not talking about the monetary cost here. How much are you willing to pay for a lost client? So you need to be discerning and have a studied approach.

    The recent hacking of the BBC website is a case in point. This shows how serious you need to be when it comes to online security. A website endeavor is not a one-time approach but a continuous process of finding out what works and what does not. You will have some new technology coming up and you need to incorporate that in your site. Only then will you be able to compete in this cut throat world.

    Mobile friendly_website

    Image Source

    Today the Internet is going mobile. Due to faster wireless connectivity and cheaper smart phones and tablets, a revolution is underway in the mobile domain. But not all companies have a website that is optimized for the mobile platform. There is a whole generation of young men and women who have accessed the Internet for the first time on a mobile device. Now that is the generation which is of particular interest to the digital marketers. They drive the bulk of sales for products and services in the cyber space. Google has just come up with an exclusive set of tools to help you make your site mobile-friendly. Your site’s mobile compatibility might even become a deciding factor in ranking your website in the Google search engine results page.

    Position² POV

    Different websites have different requirements and you cannot have a cookie-cutter approach. It is better to build your website from scratch since that way all the things will be personalized to your particular needs. Wherever possible do not make use of plug-ins and such other technologies. Now this might seem costly but then it is worth it when it comes to scaling your business and offering a better experience for your users.

    We have worked extensively with a gamut of industry verticals with respect to Web and Application Services. One of our recent works that is worth mentioning is a complete revamp of the website of a leading global information technology and outsourcing company headquartered in Bangalore. After we extensively worked on their website they got an exceptionally high rating in a record period of time from Acquia’s external scanning system. The site was evaluated with tests created by Drupal experts.

    Another recent example is our work on the website of an emerging enterprise cloud storage solutions provider. Here we helped transform their marketing infrastructure with a transition to Drupal for the website, an upgrade to the WordPress blog. This and a lot of other improvements gave the company a renewed capability to reach new customers and partners.

    You need to design, develop, maintain, migrate and optimize your website. Thus, having the backing of a firm which has extensive experience in all these is half the battle won. But still there is no room for complacency. The world of web technologies is changing at a very fast pace and you need to keep abreast of it at all times.

    Contact us to learn how we can transform your business now!

  • Facebook Starts Monitoring Promotional Pages

    One of the biggest disadvantages of the free Internet to a lay user is the way in which ads find their way to you. Now Facebook will begin to closely monitor organic Page posts. Depending on how ads are accepted by the user community, the social networking giant will tag the Pages and regulate their flow across Facebook.

    The ads in your News Feed are no doubt monitored but going forward Facebook will rigorously evaluate the promotional Pages of businesses, brands and organizations too. If a brand or a company is found to hard sell its products or services then Facebook will keep an eye on it. Overly promotional Pages will be given a thumbs down by the social networking giant. Such organizations which just want to indiscreetly sell to users will find themselves slowly but surely locked out of users’ News Feed going forward.

    Digital Marketers Need to Revamp their Organic Posts

    As a digital marketer you need to tread with caution. You have to offer a compelling reason for users to Like your Page rather than flooding their News Feed imploring them to Like you. You will have to seriously cut down on the number of Posts uploaded, events hosted, apps delivered and such other things which will be under Facebook’s scanner hence forth. If your content is skewed more towards marketing your brand by announcing fictitious contests, incredulous sweepstakes and duplicitous claims   then you better watch out. Thus you need to have a fresh look at your brand Page and give users such content which is high in quality rather than quantity.

    All this was revealed in a recent survey conducted by Facebook according to its official newsroom update. Users clearly wanted to see more posts from their friends and Pages that they cared about rather than just promotional content.

    Digital marketers would definitely want to compensate for lesser reach of their unpaid Posts with more paid ads even though Facebook is in no mood to increase the quantity of ads shown on its site. Thus this crackdown on organic Posts will no doubt jack up the prices of Facebook ads. As a consequence you have two options going forward, either make your organic Posts exceptionally good so that users will actually love to read and interact with it or be ready to pay higher for Facebook ads!

    How do you think this change in Facebook’s tack towards your brand Page is going to affect you as a digital marketer?

    Contact our experts to learn more now!

  • Facebook Updates Privacy Policy

    The social networking giant recently updated its privacy settings in order to give its users more say in what they want to do and how they want to be treated on Facebook. Interactive questions have been included in the Facebook policy statement like “What kinds of information do we collect?”, “How do we use this information?” and “How is this information shared?”As per the new update, Facebook will tell how they get your location information depending on the features you decide to use.

    You can get personalized information depending on where you are and what your friends are up to. Facebook offers you Privacy Basics tutorial which is a step by step guide on how to manage your information. The resources about the policies for advertisers and developers are available for all users’ perusal. Users can now buy products without leaving Facebook using the Buy button that is an undergoing test. Facebook is working on new ways to facilitate transactions and make it more secure and convenient at the same time.

    Digital Marketers can Now Target Better

    Facebook will be closely working with digital marketers in order to help deliver more targeted campaigns. People are delighted if as a digital marketer you can anticipate what they want to buy before they explicitly state it by their actions. This is where the social networking giant is going to help you in finding out who exactly is looking out for your products. Facebook will scrutinize how users socialize on its platform, understand their quirky shopping habits and create respective consumer personas. This can then be used by you to pitch your product for a more forceful upshot.

    Facebook may use cookies to learn more about the outcome of an ad served to a particular user. It can do this by verifying if the user made a purchase on the advertiser’s site or installed the advertising app, as the case may be. Even digital marketers partnering with Facebook will have the opportunity to use cookies and similar technologies to confirm if an ad was actually served on the social networking site. You can check how your ads are performing and even provide Facebook, tips on managing your ads better for a higher level of user interaction. There are even opportunities for retargeting users outside the realm of Facebook Services, courtesy of the far-reaching influence of the social networking giant.

    As a digital marketer how do you view these new Facebook updates? Contact our subject matter experts to learn more now.

  • How to Write a Killer Ad Copy That Actually Sells

    We live in a world full of enticing propositions. As a digital marketer garnering the undivided attention of your customers is a challenge. The online arena is a complete world within itself where attention spans are shrinking and novel ideas come in all shapes and sizes.

    What the digital world lacks in attention spans, it makes up for with more focused advertising. Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is a very targeted form of advertising. Your audience is already primed to buy or wants to know more about the product that you are selling for purchase at a future date. This makes PPC advertising more predictable and you pay the search engine only when somebody clicks on your ad copy. So as a digital marketer you need to make the best of this chance to win over your customers.

    Writing ad copy within the character limits set by the search engine giants however needs practice. The online market is very lucrative and everybody is vying for the same target audience. Then how do you differentiate yourself from the competitor? It’s a tall order but is achievable if you stick to some fundamentals of writing a ‘killer ad copy’.

    • Understand the Audience
    • Use a Psychological Trigger
    • Use Keywords
    • Use Prices & Promotions
    • Use a Strong CTA
    • Differentiate
    • Make it Relevant to Landing Page.
    • Filter Clicks
    • Make it a Continual Process of Testing & Refining.

    Pointers for a Great Ad Copy

    You need to make the most of the character limit that is standardized by search engines. Using the keywords wherever possible makes a crucial difference. Keywords are easily identifiable and are tagged by the search engines. Keywords that are highlighted in the ad copy give you better visibility and improve click through rates.

    Use of trigger words like ‘you’, ‘free’, ‘cheap’ are bound to garner your ad copy more attention. Every purchase is innately perceived with risks but more so in the online world where there is no touch-and-feel factor that we are so used to in the brick and mortar world. Hence, use reassuring words that can soothe your customers and assuage their anxieties.

    Use qualifiers wherever possible in order to give people a better idea of what you are selling and in the process discouraging people who don’t qualify from clicking your ads. Differentiate yourself from the competition by highlighting your unique value proposition. It could be some great offer or something that can add value to your ad copy in a way that can give you the edge over your competitors. Your ad should be in consonance with the landing page that you are going to use to convert your impressions to sales.

    Ask questions in your ad copy wherever possible. This gets the audience more involved. A question with the word ‘you’ is bound to earn your ad copy more attention. People feel you are directly addressing them and that it is not just a phony attempt of enticing people. It makes an emotional connect and people are more likely to buy from you if they are emotionally driven to want your product.

    A Process of Constant Evolution & Improvement:

    Remember ad writing is not a onetime process. You need to continually monitor the status and tweak the ad copy depending on what works and what doesn’t. Hence, you need to have more than one ad copies so that you can always split test and improve your chances of getting better leads. Track your performance using analytics tools available online, the chief being Google Analytics, and incorporate the feedback to get better click through rates.

    Now you might think that the character constraint set by the search engines is stymieing your creativity, but the fact is that people might not even read your entire ad copy. They might just be scanning for some trigger words and your ad copy better have it if you want to convert to sales. You cannot escape the fact that people today are always in a hurry and do not have the luxury of time to look at your ads at leisure. You need to constantly improvise, adapt and overcome in this new era of digital marketing.

    It’s a brave new world out there with ever-changing rules. But you can still conquer it with a killer ad copy.

  • Facebook Updates News Feed Preferences

    Facebook wants its users to have a more customized experience on its platform. Until now you did not have a lot of freedom regarding the content that you could view in your Facebook News Feed. But going forward you can choose to unlink any piece of content in the News Piece from the person or entity that you are following.

    If you are interested only in sports and you are subscribed to BBC International news then you get all the news from BBC in your News Feed. But now you can unsubscribe the news categories that you seldom read thus helping you to get only what you want, which in this case is sports. People have shrinking attention spans and a lot of them multi-task while going through their News Feed. So it was only appropriate that Facebook came up with such an update in order to make the user’s task simpler. You don’t have to sift through all that irrelevant content anymore but peruse directly what interests you, going forward.

    This is also good news for digital marketers. It gives them a way to assess people’s interest depending on what they have chosen to include in their News Feed. Thus breaking free from the clutter, digital marketers can have a fresh shot at targeted campaigns directed towards their potential customers.

    Those who have great news content online will be rewarded since people will choose to go through their content. But if your content is mediocre then you better watch out since thanks to this feature you might get relegated to News Feed oblivion in no time. Visit Facebook Help Center to learn more.

    What does the just launched Facebook News Feed update mean to your digital marketing strategy?

    Contact our experts to find out.

  • Bing Crawls Non-responsive Mobile Sites

    The search engine Bing from the Microsoft Stable is going to affect the fledgling mobile SEO market in a more impactful way. Bing has launched a new set of mobile crawlers with BingBot Mobile User Agents in order to index mobile sites better and to offer more optimized results on the mobile platform.

    Bing recommends all webmasters to design responsive sites but unfortunately not everyone follows these recommendations. Hence Bing had to come up with a way to overcome the hurdle and give searchers a better mobile experience. Bing checks if your website is mobile compatible with this new set of mobile crawlers and offers the most optimized sites in the Bing mobile search results.

    That way Bing can differentiate how your website is viewed on the iPhone as compared to the Android platform or the desktop browser. Bing needs unrestricted access to your JavaScript and CSS files for better mobile optimization.

    This is good news to all digital marketers who had non-responsive albeit high quality mobile sites, since now their websites can rank higher in mobile search results too. If your site is mobile optimized then you can reap rich dividends courtesy of this new update from Bing.