6 Hot Topics Affecting Small and Medium Enterprises (Part 2 of 6)

Hot Topic #2 Creating Meaning through Re-Using and Re-Purposing Content

 

One major cost-efficient and effective trend that SMEs have been using to gain awareness is through the re-allocation of existing content. Specifically, businesses embed quotations across various media platforms, such as social media and news media. This technique captures the attention of perspective individuals, and gains a higher resonance amongst clientele.

 

Inspirational quotes about success may be a good place to start. For example, using inspirational quotations embedded in a video promo on your company website is one way to make your site more memorable. Quotations about profound aspects of life, and success are also tools to enhance remembrance, and to gain brand trust.

 

“Great ideas need landing gear as well as wings.” –C.D. Jackson. 

 

Next Article  6 Hot Topics Affecting Small and Medium Enterprises (Part 3 of 6).

 

Previous Article  6 Hot Topics in Affecting Small and Medium Enterprises (Part 1 of 6).

6 Tips to a Successful Holiday Campaign

The Holidays are just around the corner and that means consumer spending will start to tick upward as we head into Q4. Business owners and marketers must kick it into high gear to capitalize on retail sales this holiday season.

According to the 2012 eMarketer report, “Online Holiday Shopping Forecast and Trends”, US retail ecommerce holiday sales (excluding travel) will reach $54.5 billion in 2012, up 16.8% over last year. Millions of consumers will head online via a desktop or mobile device in search of the perfect holiday gift for family and friends. eMarketer predicts that online holiday sales will account for nearly a quarter (24.3%) of the $224.2 billion in US retail ecommerce sales forecast for all of 2012!

As more consumers flock online to make holiday purchase decisions, retailers and advertisers must develop a robust digital marketing strategy. Online holiday marketing campaigns must generate awareness (impressions), entice consumers (compelling messaging and imagery) and ultimately drive purchase intent (conversions) – paid search platforms, like NTENT, are a vital piece of the holiday marketing mix.

Here are 6 key elements to keep top of mind for holiday campaign planning!

1) Evaluate Your Campaigns from the Past. Take the time to understand which past holiday campaigns and ongoing campaigns have generated the most success and ask the question “why?” What was the messaging? What days were the ads running? What targeting methodology was used? What yielded the most traffic to your site? What generated the highest conversion rate? Did your efforts increase in-store traffic? What about an increase in social media?

2) Plan your Budget. Your budget should account for a long tail campaign that begins end of October/early November and spikes on key purchasing dates. Review your holiday sales trends from 2011 and make a note of your highest sales days during the holidays. Compare this to the most profitable days in ecommerce from 2011: Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Free Ship Days. Create an excel document that takes both trends into account and map out daily budgets for the duration of your holiday campaign.

3) Keep Holiday Campaign Messaging Consistent. Build on past messaging successes and make it better for the holidays. Remember to make sure that your holiday messaging matches across all your marketing channels. This means ensuring the promos offered in ads match the language on your site and social media outlets.

4) Landing Pages Must Complement Your Campaign. Make sure you present a clear and clean purchasing path for consumers. Don’t bait and switch users; make sure that specific product pages or product landing pages match the product featured in your ad. The language on your landing pages should complement the language and tone used in your advertising outreach and it should include a full description of product/service information – the more information the better recall for the user in the long run. Last, but not least, keep the transaction process simple - three steps and done!

5) Venture into Mobile. You can’t turn a blind eye to mobile this holiday. More and more consumers will be searching on the go as they attempt to feed their need for instant gratification. Mobile offers a perfect opportunity to geo-target consumers. Make sure you have a mobile/tablet friendly site and that your paid search ads extend to mobile platforms. (NTENT is now available on mobile. Ask how you can be featured on mobile today.

6) Leverage Your Existing Consumer Connections. Leverage consumer connections you already have and kick your outbound email campaigns and social media efforts into high gear! Existing consumer databases and social media connections present ideal opportunities to convert consumers this holiday. They already have some level of interest in what you have to offer and would welcome suggestions and ideas this holiday season. Make a calendar of when you intend to send out email blasts and social media pushes. Consider special offers for consumers who have made purchases in the past.

Keep these 6 tips in mind as you kick your holiday campaigns into gear. Remember, you can’t view marketing efforts in a vacuum; online campaigns should be looked at as a piece of the pie that works collectively to generate awareness, drive in-store traffic and increase online conversions. Getting your brand/product/services in front of consumers early, online and on mobile is crucial to holiday sales success.

Need help preparing for the holidays? Ask Us. Whatever your budget, one of NTENT’s dedicated account managers will be on call to help you prepare the perfect holiday campaign.

NTENT account managers are always available to help you with campaign management and other optimization strategies - customerservice@ntent.com or call 212.967.9502.

6 Hot Topics in Affecting Small and Medium Enterprises (Part 1 of 6)

In 2013, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in The United States are at the core of the United States’ economy[1]. As the quantity of small and medium-sized businesses increases, so to does the demand for pertinent and reliable data. NTENT has initiated its mission to provide valuable information on SMEs, and compiled a list of six hot topics affecting small and medium businesses. This list will empower you to broaden your business, and stay up to speed for success in today’s market.

 

Hot Topic #1 Distribution and Gaining Awareness

 

It is critical that your small or medium-sized business take advantage of your small size, compared to larger businesses in the market. SMEs have an advantage over larger enterprises, in their ability to act quicker in multiple contexts. Whereas larger businesses must confer a plethora of resources before making an executive decision, small and medium-sized businesses can make decisions more quickly. The ability of SMEs to make “quicker moves” brings us to our next subtopic: spreading brand name.

 

SMEs can spread their brand name in a variety of ways, across multiple platforms. Partnering with larger companies is one way to gain awareness; and this can help position your company in a larger spotlight. In doing so, your company will also gain access to the larger company’s consumer base, which provides you with the larger businesses’ benefits. Another method of spreading brand name is through contextualization of quotations. In other words: the repackaging of quotes into content in order to expand your reach. This brings us to our next Hot Topic, “re-using and re-purposing content.”

 

Next Article  6 Hot Topics Affecting Small and Medium Enterprises (Part 2 of 6).

 

Written by: Erica Solomon

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[1] Office of the United States Trade Representative 

 

NTENT Joins the Debate on Cookies Wars and a Shifting Search Landscape at OMMA Global

 

Adweek is one of the industries most anticipated events and this year NTENT will take the stage and join in a few debates surrounding two of digital hottest topics at OMMA Global.

 

 

 

 

 

Hot Topic #1: Colin Jeavons, President and CEO of NTENT will host a breakout session titled, “Strategies for Adapting to the Shifting Search Landscape " on Monday, September 23^rd in New York at 11 am. This workshop will discuss evolving trends in search from semantics to entity search and will give marketers the insights they need to adapt their strategies in the evolving search landscape.

 

 

 

 

Hot Topic #2:  Jeavons will sit in as a “panelist” of a courtroom-style debate on “Cookie Wars: Is It Time To Face Up To The Post-Cookie World?” on Monday, September 23^rd at 4:45 pm EST. This debate, hosted by Wendy Davis, will ask the hard hitting questions surrounding third party cookie tracking.  Stay tuned for this lively discussion between: James Green , CEO, Magnetic, Marc Groman , Executive Director, General Counsel, Network Advertising Initiative, Colin Jeavons , President and CEO, NTENT and Dave Reed , SVP, Revenue Operations, Mediamath.

 

 

Can’t attend? No worries. Join the conversation by following us at @VSWFeatureLink #ommachat. 

 

NTENT is PSYCHED to be an Official Sponsor at One of AdWeek's Hottest Events - #IABMIXX

New York AdWeek (#AWX) always packs a punch and this year we’ll be on the scene to cover all the happenings.  We are thrilled to be an official sponsor at one of the weeks most anticipated events, IAB MIXX!  Every year IAB aims to please, 2013 will be no exception.

 

Here are 6 reasons to get excited about #IABMIXX:

1. Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo! will be speaking on day 2



2. Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP will share his strategic vision on how to advertise in today’s world



3. Dave Luhr and Colleen DeCourcy of Wieden+Kennedy will give their perspectives on how to define advertising in today’s world



4. Opportunity to discover industry trends and learn new strategies from trendsetting media experts



5. Chance to meet and network with thousands of like-minded media professionals



6. NTENT unveils our new ad creative at IABMIXX. Here is a sneak peek!



7.  

 

 

Are you unable to attend? No worries! Follow us at @VSWFeatureLink #IABMIXX to get the inside scoop. 

Tech Talks: Q&A with NTENT's VP of Research, Gavin Matthews & Senior Ontologist, Max Petrenko

We sat down with Gavin Matthews, VP of Research and Max Petrenko, Senior Ontologist, to discuss their recent research paper presented at the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence to discover how NTENT’ semantic technology is leading the way in making the web a more relevant place for consumers, advertisers and online publishers.

 

 

Q: What were you presenting?

 

 

A: Our seven-page research paper explained aspects of our semantic vertical search technology, and how it is also used to power our conceptual advert matching.  We went into some details of the structure of our ontology, and language-specific lexicons, and how they allow us to detect the concepts used in an article, advert or user query.  Although this is always a moving target, we gave a snapshot of the sort of tools we use to development and maintain the ontology, and ensure quality in our knowledge resources.  The NTENT knowledge resources is the product of 25 person-years of effort over the last decade; the size, depth and breadth of semantic coverage gives NTENT a tremendous competitive edge.  

 

 

The paper was published in the proceedings of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, and presented in Las Vegas as part of the Intelligent Linguistic Technology track, the main workshop on Natural Language Processing at that conference.

 

 

 

 

Q: What was the significance?

 

 

 

A: We feel that delivering a research paper on what makes our semantic technology truly semantic and our ontology truly ontological has had significant benefits.  The terms “semantics” and “ontology” have a precise technical meaning, but they are becoming used more and more loosely at analytic and business venues and are often misinterpreted.  It is common to encounter systems described as “semantic” that have no direct representation of meaning, or “ontologies” that turn out either to be mere taxonomies, or to be very small and domain-specific.

 

 

One of our priorities was to demonstrate that NTENT’s knowledge resource are much more than such a toy system, and that the language-independent conceptual structure of the ontology, married with the extensively-annotated language-dependent lexicon can be used to achieve real-world tasks of understanding the concepts used in unstructured text.  We also wanted to demonstrate the power of our automatic quality control and visualization toolkit for knowledge resources.

 

 

 

 

Q: What did you get out of the presentation?

 

 

 

A: We got some positive comments and requests for more information.  Mostly, we got the impression that no-one else in the industry was doing anything like what we do.  We were able to get NTENT’s name out there, and associate it with solid technology that’s solving real-world problems.  We also had the opportunity to attend many presentations and tutorials from a wide range of universities and companies.  These gave us some insight into how people outside NTENT are approaching the problems we face.  We were also able to make some good contacts, and find a couple of interesting leads.

 

What’s Your Holiday Campaign Plan?

It seems like just yesterday we were fully engaged with summertime activities. Then, all of a sudden back to school came into the mix and summer officially came to a close. Holiday planning is probably the last thing on your mind but the truth that savvy marketers know clock is running out. 

The last quarter of the year is usually the busiest and each passing day is bringing us closer: in 2012 online sales reached over $54.5 billion in November and December.[1]  The National Retail Federation expects a 13% increase in online retail sales this year![2] It might be painful to think about Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the last minute Christmas Bonanza now, but it’s important to jump on the holiday bandwagon early. 

Our month-by-month Holiday Campaign Planning Guide will help ease that overwhelming feeling you might have by giving you monthly goals to make sure your campaigns are in tip-top shape as you head into the holidays this year! 

Don’t let the holidays sneak up on you this year, add these 10 tips to your holiday planning checklist to ensure a successful holiday season!

1. Recruit a team of “Santa’s Helpers” to help with every aspect of holiday campaign planning


2. Review your seasonal sales cycles from the past two years


3. Conduct a campaign analysis and review every detail with a critical eye (peak days, slow days, CTR, etc.)


4. Give your business a creative audit: review branding, messaging, images and copy used in your ads.


5. Hold a brainstorming session influenced by the findings of your campaign/creative analysis. Walk away with at least three ideas for ads and three ideas for your landing pages for each campaign period (Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, etc.).


6. Get motivated to go mobile. More and more consumers are checking email, browsing the web and making purchases on mobile. You can’t afford not to be mobile optimized.


7. Define your re targeting strategy. How will you reach consumers once they have visit your site or liked you on Facebook?


8. Make enhancements to your ecommerce experience by reducing the number of clicks it takes to get to the cart.


9. Follow our monthly checklist to keep you on track


10. Use our holiday campaign worksheet to help keep you organized

Written by: Kerstin Recker, VP Marketing and Business Development

Steering Your Presence Online

Fliers, ads in a church bulletin, and hokey radio bits have been dependable ways to raise awareness about your collision business in the local community, but many people are now looking elsewhere. Web searches and mobile applications are top-of-mind among potential customers—of all ages—who might be in …

The post Steering Your Presence Online appeared first on .

http://bit.ly/17OzkXg

 

Trying to Reach Consumers? Create Engaging Content.

When it came to creating engaging and informative content for consumers, Yoast took the cake! We definitely did not see this type of engagement on the websites of the other vendors.  Yoast really showed us that they have an active subscriber base, create content worth talking about and established the fact that they have an active product development with frequent updates.  We learned a lot from reading the comments and even chimed in on a few ourselves.  Here are a few examples:

TIP – Create engaging content and give your users the opportunity to join the conversation.  If you currently do not have a lot of great content, go comment on other content of the web where you have some expertise so you can learn what topics are hot for your industry.  A great place to see what questions you may be able to answer for your fellow web citizens is ask.com.

We hope that you can apply some of these tips to your business.  If you do please let us know, we would love to hear from you.

FYI – One big difference between Yoast and the other vendors is the concept of a “focus keyword”, read up on it and we will discuss in more detail in an upcoming post.