Marketing Pilgrim

There’s no doubt that this is the year of the social media holiday marketing blitz. More folks than ever are using Facebook, Twitter and other sites to encourage holiday shopping.

According to eMarketer, 27% of retailers said they’d spend most of their marketing budget on social media, up from 18%. And 75% said they had a social media strategy this year as opposed to only 51% last year. But does this rise in activity mean a rise in sales?

We’ve been told that Black Friday and Cyber Monday both did very well this year, but is it as a result of all the social media air time?

FX has canceled the TV show Terriers. You’re probably not too crushed by the news. It’s safe to say that the majority of the people who will read this blog post never even heard of the show before today since less than a million people watched the premiere. A million may seem like a lot but 13.5 million people watched the Lost finale, so in TV terms, not so much.

What does the cancellation of a low rated TV show have to do with marketing? I’ll tell you. Or rather, I’ll show you. Just look at the ad FX used to advertise the series. It was one of a couple of graphics that all featured snarling dogs. Add that up with the title of the show, “Terriers” and you gotta figure its about dogs, right? Wrong.

This is a guest post by HubSpot’s social media scientist, Dan Zarrella. It contains data from his upcoming webinar “The Science of Blogging” taking place on December 9th.

Many marketers and small business owners see blogging, rightly, as an important aspect of their SEO efforts because of their ability to attract inbound links. And even beyond SEO, getting lots of links for your blog posts is key to establishing yourself as an expert and building traffic.

I’ve spent the past few months analyzing data on over 150,000 blog posts and I’ve identified several ways you can optimize your blogging efforts to drive more incoming links.

Day of Week

It’s noon and Black Friday is almost over. Well, it is if you realize that most big box stores opened around 4:00 am. I slept in this year, hitting Staples at 9:00 and just made it under the wire on the items I wanted. Got the last two on the shelf. From there I hit CVS where I bought $26.00 worth of items and was handed a gift certificate for $26 at the end of the transaction. In other words, it was my favorite word – FREE!

Now it’s time to take off my bargain shopper hat and put on my marketing hat for the 5 Marketing Lessons We Can Learn from Black Friday. Here we go.

1. Tweet, text, post or pigeon: Communication collaboration is the key

By Renée Revetta

While you might be optimizing your website for search and participating in social media, are you optimizing your social efforts for search? Looking at four of the main social networks; Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube, here are some tactics to implement for each profile. While maintaining an active presence on social networks is a good start, you might be over looking some of these common sense tips. If used properly, these tactics should help your profile rank well within social search results.

Facebook

• Include URL in static text box beneath Page photo.
• Include URL in Info tab, and if possible tag with a lead source to track that visitors are coming from your Facebook Page.

This morning, as I skimmed through my newsfeeds and email messages, I found three posts that had to do with finding a way to excel on Twitter. Since the bird seems to be in the collective consciousness today, I thought I’d take a moment to add my two cents to the communal pot.

Let’s start with Business News Daily. For some strange reason, they have two, very similar articles running today that deal with Twitter success. First, there’s 9 Steps to a Successful Twitter Strategy.

The title alone will stop many people in their tracks. Strategy? I just post whatever comes to mind when I have minute, right? Is that a strategy? No, Newman, it’s not. The article lists nine steps to setting up a plan but basically it breaks down to this, list your marketing goals, listen to your customers, create a plan to regularly engage and respond to your customers, set up metrics to measure your success in regard to the marketing goals.

You’re the author of a book on how to turn kitchen waste into cash and you want to spread the word. So what do you do? Why not invest in a snazzy TV commercial to play on the Food Network or during Pawn Stars. This is your audience, foodies who love to treasure hunt! But author Joel Comm says don’t waste your money because despite all the hype, TV ads are not the stuff dreams are made on.

It goes back to the early days of TV, when Ralph and Norton demonstrated the Handy Housewife Helper and Lucy proclaimed that Vitameatavegamin was so tasty, too! For years, sitcoms have taught us that a single TV commercial can result in an avalanche of sales which generally left our TV hero struggling to meet the demand with comical results.  In reality, a TV commercial is just another tool in the tool kit and not always the best tool for the job.