If you’re not seeing a positive return on investment with your online marketing campaigns, you likely never will because your ad agency hasn’t been hanging around enough drunk Google employees. Remember that scene from the Academy Award-Winning 2000 film Erin Brockovich, when the creepy guy who Erin thinks is trying to pick her up […]
A New Twist on the BCG Matrix to Evaluate and Grow Brands Online A Simple Heuristic for Online Marketing Strategy with Deep Implications As you probably remember from your Marketing 101 textbook, the BCG Matrix plots a brand’s growth vs. its market share. This has traditionally provided valuable insights that can guide overall brand strategy. […]
We were eating lunch with the online marketing team for a $1 billion consumer brand. Their sky high conversion rates on paid search and retargeting ads would put your jaw on the floor. They’ve carved out a nice niche that drives several hundred thousand dollars in sales a year. The only problem is they can’t […]
10 Immutable Laws of Driving Online Revenue for Start Up E-Commerce Brands We’ve been talking with a lot of startups. Lots. Many of these potential clients used to work for some of the big, established brands we work with. They find that doing marketing for a startup is entirely different from marketing for an established […]
How to Comply with GDPR without Killing Your Marketing Efforts New Infographic from SmartClick Shows Program-by-Program, What Specifically You Need to Do to Comply with the EU’s new General Data Protection Regulation, without Over-Complying. Ok, Are you ready for GDPR? We’re just weeks away from the May 25, 2018 deadline for marketers to comply with […]
Few start-ups can brag that they achieved one million in revenue—it’s an audacious goal, especially for a start-up in the clothing category. Still, that’s what a board member of a new client challenged us with in an early conference call. It was a big, scary, tangible goal We got to work. We focused in on […]
I spent the early part of my career working in brand management for Heinz and Unilever in the 1990s. We had access to scanner data, which told us the sales of a particular item or category at the store level. We had access to shipment data, which told us how much product we had shipped […]
Are Facebook Carousel Ads Really The Next Golden Goose? In the past year, Facebook has rolled out an unprecedented number of changes to their advertising suite. We’re particularly excited about the new carousel ad format, formerly known as multi-product ads. These new ads not only look sleek, they also perform incredibly well. Carousel […]
Great Results for Clients with NEW Instagram Ads It’s clear from early results that Instagram ads will be a huge win for Facebook and for SmartClick’s Clients SmartClick was honored last month to get early access from Facebook to set up and run Instagram ad campaigns for clients before other agencies. Now that Instagram […]
Demystifying Facebook’s Ad Relevance Score Could Save You Hundreds Of Thousands Why is Facebook’s relevance score relevant to you? Because using it to your advantage could potentially mean hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in revenue from Facebook advertising. So, what is relevance score or RS? Facebook wants its users to have a great […]
The True Cost and ROI of SEO – 10 Questions You Should Ask Your SEO Person Today. Years ago, we added up the cost of each legitimate SEO program we were running and analyzed their results to get their cost/acquisition. In all cases, the cost/acquisition was higher for Organic SEO programs than for paid online […]
5 Ways to Get The Most Out of Your Next Ad Photoshoot Great photos are extremely important, especially with Facebook advertising. If a brand has poor photo assets, it’s going to be difficult to actually build a credible brand. You don’t get fantastic photo imagery by accident. It’s all about the photoshoot. Online advertising photoshoots […]
Advertise on YouTube to Build Brand Awareness and Sales A great alternative to TV because it’s performance you can actually measure. Busting The TV Measurement Paradigm For years, companies have been placing ads on television with the hope that they would drive awareness and sales. Unfortunately, you never know what TV is actually doing for […]
5 Reasons We Stopped Doing SEO for Clients SmartClick doesn’t do Search Engine Optimization anymore. We haven’t done it for years. Instead we focus on paid online advertising—and that’s how we made our clients, in aggregate, an incremental $25 million in revenue last year. In the marketing department at PepsiCo years ago, we were always […]
How We Tripled Email Revenue for a Brand in Just 3 Months A/B Testing Emails To drive big results, sometimes you just need to break some rules. We’ve been doing some interesting testing for an e-commerce client that shows how a creative, aesthetically pleasing email that breaks many of the rules of email coding […]
Just as Free Shipping has helped Amazon take over the ecommerce world, your brand can take back lost revenue at higher margins by implementing Free Shipping as well. Amazon with Prime and its 2-day Free Shipping is kind of like Genghis Khan, conquering everything in his wake. It’s tempting for many manufacturers to launch on […]
Brands need to think more about the data they’re pushing out with the big aggregator websites who are increasingly controlling the majority of website traffic, as well as the data brands are pulling in to manage decisions, or risk being left behind. Way back in September of 2012, Tom Anthony, Head of R&D at Distilled, […]
Your Easy Guide To Twitter Cards The advent of Twitter Advertising has been painfully slow in coming. Announcements were made as far back as 2010, but only recently have all advertisers gained access to the platform. SmartClick was among a select group of agencies invited participate in beta testing for Twitter ads as early as […]
20 Steps To Setup And Optimize A Google Shopping Feed Google Shopping is one of the easiest and most effective ways to drive traffic to an e-commerce store. See our Welding Supplies From IOC case study for an example of how Smartclick used Google shopping to grow a client’s revenue by $2 Million in a […]
The 2 Commandments Of Online Ad Creative Smart online ads can be the difference between your business becoming a wild success or your living arrangements moving to permanent status with your in-laws. The hard part is that bad online marketing doesn’t always look “bad.” Instead, bad online marketing doesn’t utilize the advantages it has over […]
Why Your Marketing Plan Didn’t Work Most marketing plans lack the balance between awareness building and message frequency to truly nurture consumers down a path to purchase. At SmartClick, when we begin a new engagement, we get a glimpse of the client’s past marketing plans. Typically, past plans haven’t worked well, or at best have […]
More Conversions From Facebook Than Adwords? For the first time, we’re seeing a Facebook ad type that can really drive sales for brands… and even outperform Google AdWords One of the biggest criticisms of Facebook advertising over the years has been that while Facebook ads drive visits to a website, they just don’t drive sales […]
Is Retargeting For You? Yes. Retargeting ads keep your brand top-of-mind and are essential in providing the multiple exposures that lead consumers to convert. If you’re expecting to reel in a 100-pound Salmon on your first cast, you’ve never been fishing (especially because the biggest Salmon ever caught was 97-pounds). The world of marketing is […]
If you’re currently A/B testing using Google Content Experiments (Formerly Google Website Optimizer), a home-grown system, or simple pre vs. post analysis using your analytics data, this is an intervention. There is a better way to optimize your website… Now, we use Google products all the time (including Content Experiments); and we’ve even been guilty […]
Google Shopping used to be a utopia for merchants online – where the benevolent “do no evil.” Google would list your products, free of charge, driving paying customers to your site to buy your stuff. All you had to do was upload a product feed to Google Merchant Center and keep it fresh. Life was […]
When visitors on your site perform an action that you deem valuable (a.k.a. a conversion), you’re probably pretty interested in understanding the various factors that influenced that action, right? What led them to convert? This insight is generally available in your Google Analytics reports, but depending on your particular conversion process and setup, the traffic […]
Paid search is a pillar of online marketing. Few other online channels can give you the quality direct-response traffic that paid search advertising delivers. But there’s a hitch – you cannot scale paid search. What? But search and the limitless expanse of the internet are joined at the hip, right? Errrr…. let’s look at […]
Paid search isn’t a game of chance, but the wisdom of The Gambler holds: “If you’re gonna play the game, boy, ya gotta learn to play it right…” Don’t forget that paid search platforms like Google AdWords and Microsoft adCenter are businesses that want your precious marketing dollars first and foremost. They urge you […]
In the world of Facebook marketing, a now standard tactic to fan building is to use custom Facebook tabs to incentivize people to like a brand’s Facebook page. Typically, these tabs consist of promotional coupons to incentivize liking the brand and converting those likes into actual customers. At the same time, a highly promotional […]
It’s become commonplace for companies to use a reveal tab in their Facebook marketing campaigns to offer an incentive to get people to fan their Facebook page. We’ve come up with a new twist that we’re starting to use with clients: offering a demo or chance to “explore” the product in exchange for a like. […]
A step-by-step guide to executing a successful Tweetup A Tweetup can be a great word of mouth generator to drive store traffic for a retailer or restaurant chain. By definition, a Tweetup is a real world meeting between people who know each other through Twitter or the blogger community. People come to share ideas, […]
There’s a lot to read out there. Here are the top ten online marketing posts we’ve read this week. Enjoy! Nice Washington Post Recap of Facebook’s Timeline 39 Social Media Statistics to Start 2012 Marketers are having some nice early success with promoted tweets on Twitter A nice approach to gaining […]
Try Something Different With Your Posts on Your Facebook Business Fan Page Have you looked at your newsfeed hide rate on Facebook lately? If your hide rate is much over 2%, chances are that it’s your own fault. You’re boring your fans. There’s nothing worse than reading a stale, you’re-making-me-slowly-yawn, Facebook status update from […]
Online press releases can get a brand to quickly appear in natural search results. How do we know? Because we do it to promote our own Boulder-based online social media agency. Uploading an online press release can have immediate impact on a brand’s search results, both in getting a brand on page 1 of Google […]
A brand’s social media footprint appears to be an increasingly important factor in the order of natual search results on Google. As you may or may not know, a page’s rank in search results on Google is determined by Google’s Page Rank Algorithm (actually named after Larry Page, one of the founders of Google). […]
With all the social media buzz and chatter happening around the world, people still wonder; Does it actually work? Big social media campaigns with hoopla, prizes and tons of money can promote a brand instantly. But, sometimes, all it takes is two eyes and two ears to gain some brand awareness. David and Goliath may […]
A new cutting-edge Facebook Fan Page App promotion from Pei Wei rewards participants for getting their friends to “like” Pei Wei’s Facebook Fan page. We know lot of companies are working on apps like this, but Pei Wei’s is the first we’ve seen to launch. The big question is, are apps like this consistent with […]
Since I poke fun at a lot of marketers out there, you’ve got to know, it’s not personal. In fact, I poke a lot of fun at myself as a marketer. We learn from our mistakes, and I’ve made some doozies over the years. My first foray into marketing on Facebook turned out to […]
[/caption] Some companies just haven’t figured out the first step of building Fans for their Facebook Fan Page. Example: Sad, but true: Gray’s Papaya only has 31 fans on Facebook. It’s one of New York’s most beloved establishments, with millions of happy customers. Many consider it the best hot dog in New York. They […]
Imagine being able to leap from position #4 on Google AdWords sponsored links to position #2 without spending more. I am continually surprised by the number of big budget advertisers that don’t put the keywords they’re advertising on in the actual ad. In the example above, for the search terms “Cheap Flights […]
Let’s talk fishing for a second. You know those large Japanese or Russian fishing trawlers that the fishermen on the smaller boats just hate, because they’re so effective at fishing that they decimate the fish population wherever they go with their 2 mile long nets that catch hundreds of thousands of fish at a time? […]
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