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  • Instagram Debuts Clickable Carousel Ads

    Instagram is a fast, beautiful and fun way to share your life with friends and family.  And it’s free. All of that adds up to 300+ million users throughout the world, all of them potential targets for advertising.

    Instagram has always wanted people to browse for photos or videos and remain on the platform, not click on links that take the user off site, as is the case with ads on Facebook and Twitter. With the introduction of clickable carousel ads, advertisers now have good reason to get excited. Instagram’s carousel ads give brands more flexibility in telling their stories by allowing people who view their ads to swipe left to see additional images and link to a website of the brand’s choice.

    Think in terms of glossy multi-page ad campaigns in upscale magazines. That’s essentially where Instagram is headed with this advertising tool. But here’s the key difference between magazine spend and Instagram. The ads on Instagram have the advantage of all manner of digital analytics telling advertisers the exact nature of the impact.

    Cash flow

    Instagram has positioned itself with clickable carousel ads to give leading brands a quantifiable way to measure the impact of their marketing campaigns. The brands, in turn, are seeking vivid ways to influence people. Clickable carousel ads are a valuable resource to, among others, apparel, automotive, and restaurant brands that need more than a single image to fully display their latest offerings. Users swipe through the series of images, much like turning the pages of a magazine. Click through rates will help advertisers determine the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. And the subsequent cash flow will keep Instagram a free and ever growing app.

    Contact Position² to reach out to your B2B clients on social media now!

  • Content Marketing Trends in 2015

    Over 35,000,000 distinct units of content were shared on a daily basis in 2014.  As staggering as that may seem, 2015 promises to  be even bigger. Now’s the time to look at the content trends likely to appear in 2015, and plot your marketing course accordingly.

    content-marketing-trends-2015

    Current Marketing Trend

    Social Media Marketing and Blogs on Top

    Today most marketers promote their content on social media sites, and for good reason. Clicks, shares, and views from social media sites are five times more likely to be shared.

    The Prediction: This year we’ll see content marketing efforts push beyond social media and spill over into webinars, case studies and other relevant content platforms. These efforts deliver more value, brand awareness, backlinks and discussions than just a simple social share.

    1. Businesses will finally get involved in content creation

    Nearly all marketers now factor content marketing into their overall marketing plan, and 45% of B2B marketers report having a content strategy in place. They understand how social media and content marketing line up with each other. They understand that content marketing is all about story-telling. Make this the year you generate high quality engaging  multimedia content. Customers respond to visual content and remember it better.

    For help planning a content strategy for your business, see the links below:

    1. Content marketing targets engagement and brand awareness

    According to the Content Marketing Association, brand awareness and engagement are the leading marketing goals for 2015. To build better brand awareness develop regular posting schedules, speak with a consistent voice and share the kind of content with groups that functions like free publicity.

    In 2015 expect to see a deeper focus on brand awareness and engagement as content marketing assumes a more natural approach.

    1. Get ready for the content marketing visualizations boom

    Neil Patel of Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics says that content marketers should be ready for visualizations in 2015 and move beyond basic infographics. Neil suggests that 3D infographics or animated infographics work to your advantage, adding a “wow” effect that generates more shares and likes.

    To learn more about infographics check content marketing infographics for 2015

    1. Calculating content marketing ROI

    In 2015 you’ll see content gaining more traction in terms of lead generation, and lay a new groundwork for the future of content marketing. Content marketing platforms will become fully integrated with customer records and customer relationship management.

    For tips on how to improve digital marketing ROI see tips to improve digital marketing ROI

    1. Smart marketers prefer thought leadership

    Don’t just present content. Add value. From shares and tweets to blog posts to whitepapers, have a well-defined plan to engage with the consumer. Always ask the question,”Will our clients and prospects find this content valuable?”

    1. Content marketers wake up to email marketing

    There was a time when you could offer a company newsletter via email and that was enough to build and grow your list. Email marketing has been used as a distribution channel for existing content such as blog posts, and to promote paid products and content to subscribers. All that has to change.

    In 2015 marketers need to get really smart about the kinds of email marketing content they want to produce and develop engaging ways to promote it.

    1. Conquering content on mobile

    In 2015 there is no longer any debate about mobile. Everyone will be investing in the space. So it is essential for content marketers to develop mobile-friendly content for customers. The health of their brand depends on it. It’s a problem that needs adressing. While 41% of respondents confirm that up to half of their subscribers open emails on mobile devices, only 42% of vendors admit they rarely employ a mobile-friendly design in their communications.

    There’s a big disconnect between what marketers know they need to do, and what they’re actually doing. Look for that to change in 2015 because it’s a change or die situation.

    2015 to-dos

    • Make responsive connections with your prospects
    • Build brand awareness
    • Increase commitment

    What ups and downs or trends do you predict for content marketing in 2015? Please Share your insights below!

    Contact Position² to establish a B2B content marketing strategy now! Happy Blogging!!!

  • Improved Ad Campaign Tracking Tools on Twitter

    For Internet advertisers of all kinds, Twitter is fast becoming the place to be. Consider the numbers:

    • 288 million active users tweeting monthly
    • 500 million tweets sent daily
    • 80% of active tweeters using mobile (Twitter)

    With this in mind, advertisers will need a better way to manage their Twitter ads. Fortunately the micro-blogging site has just launched two new ad conversion tracking tools, both of which will help advertisers gain better insight into ad campaigns run on Twitter.

    The two new tools are:

    • Transaction Values
    • Key Conversion Tags

    Transaction Values

    While advertisers may have previously used website tag for remarketing, now they can use it to track their sales figures as well. By making some simple changes begin collecting order quantities and conversion values for each conversion. Twitter Ads analytics dashboard will then display the aggregated value and reporting.

    improved-ad-campaign-tools-on-twitter

    Advertisers will be able to see their ROI from their Promoted Tweet Campaigns. If not already using conversion tracking, now would be a good time to start. Simply create a tag in Twitter Ads UI and begin implementing it within a website. This new feature allows digital marketers to measure sales that were directly driven by Promoted Tweets.

    improved-ad-campaign-tracking-tools-on-twitter

    LiveNation, a Beverly Hills, California-based company that promotes concerts and  live-events, finds Twitter’s real-time platform a natural fit for its business model. Live Nation beta tested the Transaction Values feature on Twitter for over a month with Promoted Tweet campaigns using the Website Card to increase ticket sales, and the results they logged were impressive. The analytics of @LiveNation reveal that the company earned a ROAS of 819% in the test phase.

    Key Conversion Tags

    With the key conversion tag feature advertisers can select the single conversion event that is most important to them and optimize for it. They then receive gleaned analytics within their Twitter Ads UI that show only that conversion type. And they can still get all their conversion type reporting for their campaigns within their analytics dashboard at any time.

    As an example, a boutique bakery might turn to Twitter to drive more sales of its cakes for a specific holiday. All it needs to do is place a website tag on the final conversion page of the cake sale and then select this tag as the key campaign tag. Twitter will then optimize the bakery’s campaign to generate more conversions on the cake sale page. The bakery will be able to view all the cake purchases within the Twitter Ads analytics dashboard, all in real time.

    Contact Position² to deploy B2B advertising campaigns on Twitter now!

  • IoT: What You Need to Know as a Digital Marketer [Infographic]

    The Internet of things (IoT) will play a major role in the way we conduct business and assimilate information in a more interconnected world. But do we have the right infrastructure to let IoT reach its full potential? And are we fully disposed to explore its immense benefits to digital marketing? Go through this incisive infographic to learn more about it.

    Internet-of-things-position2_infographics

  • An App to Manage Your Facebook Ads

    Facebook has come a long way. What started as a university dorm room project has become the go-to social networking platform for one sixth of humanity. Today Facebook boasts an ad community two million strong, and counting. To address the needs of this advertising community, Facebook has rolled out an app which is sure to make life more flexible.

    This mobile app, currently available only on the iOS platform for the US market, helps advertisers create new ads or monitor current ads, and makes managing Facebook ads much easier than ever before. It’s called Ads Manager App.

    App-to-Manage-Facebook-Ads

    App-to-Manage-Facebook-Ads

     

    Tasks that you can perform with the Ads Manager App while on the go include:

    • Monitor your ad performance
    • Tweak your live ads
    • Increase or decrease budgets
    • Change ad schedules on the fly
    • Receive push notifications
    • Start a new ad campaigns

    Two Million Strong Indeed!

    facebook-ads-manager-app

    Facebook recognized all the small- and medium-size business enterprises that have ad campaigns on their platform, and paid homage to them with a thoughtful and inspiring ad that ends with two big words from Mark Zuckerberg: “Thank You”.

    Facebook illustrated an international mix of entrepreneurs who actively contribute to the global economy in their own ways while at the same time providing useful services and jobs in their own communities. The Ads Manager App is sure to be of  benefit to all those entrepreneurs and, Facebook hopes, to the 1.3 billion strong Facebook user community as well.

    Let us know what you think of this new Facebook app for advertisers!

    Contact Position² to deploy B2B advertising campaigns on Facebook!

  • Web Design Trends for 2015

    With a quick look back at Web Design 2014 you’ll see mobile, HTML 5, scrolling, micro UX, flat UI and the  king of design principles, minimalism, were all the rage.

    For what’s headed your way in Web Design 2015, read on…

    Top 10 design trends in 2015

    1. One Page Layout

      Embrace the mobile and choose one page layout to deliver a web project on iPhone, tablet or any other mobile device in the most optimal way. With one page layout you view the entire site without clicking on links to visit additional pages. You scroll instead, because everything is on a single page. This is the navigation technique requiring less page loading, less flowing data, less dynamic interaction with the end result, a smoother user experience.

    2. Responsive Design

      Responsive design has become the new standard for web design over the past few years. 2015 is no exception. Responsive web design and mobile friendly websites were made for each other.

    3. Focus on Typography

      iA’s Oliver Reichenstein rightly said “Web design is 95% typography”. Web typography isn’t limited to the use of fonts on your website. Rather, it’s the art of creating and manipulating the typefaces and white spaces to enhance communication and readability.

    4. Ghost Buttons and Big Background

      Make your site stand out by prominently displaying great content. Ghost buttons are pretty simple, are becoming more widely used, are minimal, stylish, very easy to create, and usually combined with a cool and simple hover animation. What caught on in 2014 will expand in 2015.

    5. SVG

      Scalable Vector Graphics may be the best format for responsive web design. It’s an ideal fit for flat and material design. The SVG advantage is its vector format which maintains sharpness after scaling. It can be implemented with CSS or JavaScript and can be used to create animations. With SVG, web designers focus on their design and spend less time thinking about different screen resolutions.

    6. Card Design

      Websites relying on an arrangement that resembles cards or tiles are usually very simple while presenting the viewer with as much information as possible. Card design works well with advertising products or displaying a portfolio. Social media giants such as Spotify, Pinterest, Twitter and Google have caught on and are using the tile-like arrangement.

    7. Flat Design/ Material Design for Mobile

      Incorporating Skeuomorphism into Flat Design is Material Design’s raison d’etre. The everyday objects and interactions we know in the real world are thrown into the sleek minimalism and mobile-friendliness of Flat. This results in an intuitive and device-friendly design style, convenient for both the machine and the user. The best of both worlds.

    8. Parallax Scrolling

      As the mobile web continues to grow and web design continues to skew in the direction of a more effective and enjoyable mobile experience, scrolling will continue to dominate clicking. It’s more intuitive, easier to do, cuts down on load times and allows for more dynamic interaction to take place between the user and the website. Parallax scrolling first became popular in early 2014, but look for it on more and more websites in 2015. With parallax scrolling you can create flexible and unique web pages that will surprise your visitors with effectiveness and convenience. It works especially well in creating single page websites or storytelling.

    9. Microinteractions

      Microinteractions are contained experiences or moments within a module on a website that revolve around a single use case, for example the email signup box that pops up on the website and wiggles back and forth on the screen, giving a playful personality to an otherwise static graphic. Microinteractions promote an increase in user engagement — in the case above, more email signups. You’ll see this theory begin to permeate web design in 2015. As developers begin to think along these lines you’ll see more WordPress themes and plugins.

    10. Personalized UX

      Look for cookies rehabilitation in 2015, just as certain popups have made a classier return with better design and best practices in place. The technique of using cookies to display certain content to repeat visitors can be used far more creatively than simply displaying spam and relentlessly up-selling.

    Contact Position² for professionally designed web pages to stay ahead of the trends!

  • LinkedIn Targets Users Off-platform

    LinkedIn is all set to monetize its users’ data outside its own platform. The business-oriented social networking site has come to realize that it is sitting on a mother lode of user data on the Internet. It has a precise database of corporate world professionals that is much sought-after by B2B advertisers worldwide. With LinkedIn, the user identity is authenticated which is critical for business transactions. It is also a budding platform for reputation and authority ranking. Targeting B2B professional services could be a real opportunity on this platform.

    For LinkedIn it all started with the Bizo acquisition. Bizo offers multichannel nurturing and is a leader in business audience marketing. It offers targeting and analytics for display and direct response ads. With the launch of Network Display global ad network, marketers can sift large amounts of LinkedIn user profiles and target only those users that make sense to them. It could be as granular as targeting HR professionals in Lower Manhattan with a delightful, modern payroll solution!

    LinkedIn has made significant advancement towards a strategic roadmap for its marketing solutions business with this new launch. It provides a full-funnel, end-to-end product suite offering for marketers to reach, nurture and acquire professional customers both on and off the platform. LinkedIn Lead Accelerator is the core offering here that connects brands to the right professionals with the right content while they go through the purchase funnel.

    This is a new frontier for LinkedIn wherein its quality audience and content marketing solutions can be embedded into Bizo’s unique targeting and nurturing solutions. All this can lead to better targeting, higher relevance and accurate measurement of advertising campaigns.

    LinkedIn is not the first social media site to target users outside its platform. Both Facebook and Twitter have been there and done that. But B2B digital marketers are particularly intrigued by LinkedIn’s entry into this domain since it offers the most precise B2B targeting group of any social media site.

    The business networking site can precisely target the type of professionals it wants to, from its vast pool of a few hundred million users. It has exclusive deals with a number of publishers and also with the ad exchange AppNexus, thus providing it access to a huge inventory over which it can conveniently layer its own data.

    Contact Position² to accurately target your audience on or off social media platforms now!

  • Best of the Week | Locale Adaptive Web-pages now Get Support from Google, and much more…

    This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world.
    Locale Adaptive Web-pages now Get Support from Google
    From the Position² Blog This Week:
    Locale Adaptive Web-pages now Get Support from Google
    If you are targeting users in multiple languages & multiple geographies without deploying locale-adaptive web pages now would be a good time to start. Google will henceforth crawl and index your locale-adaptive web pages. Find out what you need to do in order to stay ahead of the curve.
    Top Stories this Week: Social Media
    Top Stories this Week: SEO, PPC and Digital Media
    Wait, Paid Media Investments Can Yield SEO Value?! - Whiteboard Friday Best of the Week Video
    Can advertising boost your SEO efforts? Watch this Whiteboard Friday video hosted by Rand Fishkin to find out now!
    White Paper: Increase Visibility for Your Content by 4x
    Today’s traditional SEO is inadequate: Ignite your search results by accelerating visibility in more places than ever before.Download this White Paper and learn:

    • SEO, why the way we know it is not enough
    • Introducing and implementing Enterprise Visibility Accelerator (EVA)
    • Using multi-channel tracking tools for effective monitoring
    • How EVA benefits businesses.

    Download the complimentary EVA White Paper now

    Know more about Enterprise Visibilty Accelerator(EVA)
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