Tag Archives: brands
PSA: Luxury brands – it’s time to use content marketing to reach prospects
As Brafton has reported, affluent consumers use social media to engage with like-minded peers, share opinions among networks and connect with new business partners. However, high-brow consumers were also more likely to keep their social media lives private and hidden from plain view. Marketers who want to reach prospects with significant spending powers through social media content have to work harder to breakthrough certain barriers, but a new study conducted by Martini Media in conjunction with comScore suggests affluent consumers embrace online marketing and shopping more today than ever before. According to the study from Martini Media, affluents – buyers with annual household incomes greater than $100,000 – engaged in online holiday shopping in droves this year. In fact, the purchases made by this demographic were from luxury brands, which demonstrate that people have developed even greater trust with online shopping Continue reading
Custom content helps foster relationships with distracted consumers
Consumers rely on the internet for various reasons, and specific web properties tend to offer the most support during any given month. Sites like Google, Facebook and YouTube offer visitors invaluable sources of information, from entertainment features to educational media to social endeavors, making these sites increasingly harder to ignore. With this in mind, it’s surprising that Nielsen’s list of the Top 10 Web Brands for September 2012 show two of the three sites losing the attention of internet-users when compared to numbers recorded in March 2012. The report found Facebook is still the top site, with users spending an average of six hours, 40 minutes on the network in September 2012. However, this number is down by nearly a half-hour over the past six months. Even time spent on YouTube is down during the same time period, which is especially interesting, since video content is on the rise across the board. Continue reading
Google search updates reward fresh content, but quality required
Google’s search changes for April indicate that the company is continuing its efforts to promote fresh content on the web, but only when frequent updates are powered by high-quality articles. In its recent Inside Search blog post, the company announced three changes dedicated to promoting quality recent results. The search engine first detailed its updated “smoother ranking” for fresh content. “We want to help you find the freshest results, particularly for searches with important new web content, such as breaking news topics,” said Matt Cutts, Google’s distinguished engineer. This update mirrors the company’s previous fresh factor algorithm, which was dedicated to helping users find recent results. At the time of the algorithm’s release, Google’s Amit Singhal explained that results, “like warm cookies,” are best served fresh. He said, “Even if you don’t specify it in your search, you probably want search results that are relevant and recent.” “We have modified a classifier we use to promote fresh content to exclude fresh content identified as particularly low-quality.” -Matt Cutts Now, the company is taking freshness to a new level. A second related April algorithm update indicates Google is improvingg its freshness signal to better identify the most recent documents on the web. Still, marketers can’t regularly post content for content’s sake in an effort to gain visibility – the focus must be on finding new ideas worth publishing. The third freshness update clearly outlines that Google is working to give “no freshness boost for low-quality content.” Brands that want to see a lift in search from updated articles must focus on quality writing and topics that matter to their audiences. When done right, news content marketing from reliable content writers may help businesses maximize SEO thanks to fresh factors – especially as the company also announced a new UI for news results that emphasizes related content. But without useful and researched information, Google’s updates make clear that businesses will not see search benefits. Marketers should be thinking beyond SEO when developing content marketing campaigns that account for regular website content updates. Focusing on the user will help yield SEO results, but data shows it also boosts brands’ bottom lines. As Brafton has reported, 92 percent of businesses publishing multiple articles every day acquired customers directly through their blogs. Continue reading
