Marketing Pilgrim

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The concept of brand awareness has changed a lot in the past 10 years. Who knows your brand, what do they think, are they loyal and who are they? For many marketers, this is valuable stuff. But, before the days of the direct attribution provided by online marketing, companies had to rely on brand awareness studies to help understand the efficacy of their marketing efforts.

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It’s coming faster than we expected, that moment where digital magazine sales top those of their print counterpart. Future Publishing showed off their wares this week at PaidContent.org and it’s looking good. “£1.1 ($1.78) million in digital profit, nearly making up for a £1.2 ($1.94) million print decline.” When you think about the fact that tablets are only just beginning to hit the market, the future for Future, and everyone else, looks pretty amazing.

Future Publishing does have a leg-up since their reader base is already tech savvy. They’re the publishers of Mac Life, Xbox Magazine, T3, TechRadar and other music, movie and tech magazines. However, it’s Guitar World’s “Lick of the Day” app that is making a big splash for Future. This is a simple, but useful app that is the perfect add on for the magazine’s print subscribers. By driving them to their smartphones, Future is giving their audience a taste of the digital life and from there it’s an easy hop to the tablet and paying for a digital magazine subscription.

You may be asking yourself, who in the world are Drs. Foster and Smith (DFS)? Well, that may be unless you are a pet owner. You see, Drs. Foster and Smith currently ranks #115 on the Internet Retailer 500. That list includes names like Amazon, Staples, Apple, Netflix and about 495 others who top the online commerce world. If there is anything you need for your pet, it’s likely you can find it on the site.

DFS has reported in the past total revenues between online and catalog sales of $250M annually with $155M of that coming online. As part of our desire to bring you information about the world of search from many perspectives, I was afforded the pleasure of interviewing Gordon Magee who heads up the online efforts for this very large and successful site.

Environmentally conscience websites got a boost in April thanks to Earth Day and our ever increasing interest in all things green. According to comScore’s Media Metrix report for April 2011, “green” websites were up 32%, more than three times the change of any other category. Shine Green had the most visitors with Planet Green and Care2 scooping up several million visitors each. Even the government’s EPA website visits rose 10%.

Entertainment sites got a boost thanks the the Royal Wedding giving them a record high of 100 million. It’s a bit frightening to see that TMZ came in second with 15 million visitors while People had 12.8 and E! Online handled 8.3.

Top Properties

It looks like Google really is turning into a marketing company after all. Now they have entered the ‘research as PR’ phase in the process of getting the word out about local and mobile.

Of course, they are just doing what everyone else does and doing it quite well in a study they released last month regarding mobile. The study was brought to my attention from Chief Marketer. Here are a few of the more interesting charts and bits of information.

The first is about activities that mobile users are involved in when using a smartphone.

Of course urgency wins the day with mobile users as well with most of them needing something pretty much right away.

Gareth Davies of GSINC Ltd covered SMX London last week and filed this report.

With the latest Google Panda update, and the issues some webmasters have faced as a result of the update, attendees at this year’s SMX LONDON were looking for answers to what’s working for SEO in 2011.

The panel consisted of Mikkel deMib Svendsen, Christine Churchill and Max Thomas.

SEO Has Evolved:

First up was Mikkel deMib Svendsen. Mikkel began by reminding attendees that when it comes to SEO, things are very different in 2011 to what has gone before.

In the 1990’s SEO was relatively easy…simple algorithms meant that SEO was mainly about on-page factors and search engines had very few (if any) people dedicated to fighting Spam. Today the search engine algorithms are very complex, and there are huge teams dedicated to fighting Spam.