My radar is always up for smart apps to manage my daily consulting tasks, marketing routines and digital habits. I’ve made a list of my favorite tools that seamlessly facilitate the processes – I can’t even imagine how much longer or less productive my day, and sometimes night, would be without some of them.
(I’m adding a link to the tools I use most often.)
Online advertising tools: PPC, Retargeting and Display
I’m sure you have your own ideas about some marketing apps I’ve overlooked, like Salesforce Marketing Cloud, so feel free to mention them by leaving a comment below.
When we launched Timely almost 2 years ago there were no other tools that would automatically figure out the best time for a Tweet to go out.
For me it’s sad news as Timely (http://timely.is) helped me manage my hectic world of social media with its one of the most beautiful and easiest UI. I want to thank all the creators behind Timely- @ebloch, @assaf, @jeromegn and @davidjohn - one day you guys helped me reach out half a million people with one tweet.
“The best part about launching new products was the fact that we did it all independently.” @shaziv for @inc – bit.ly/SuHQzb
Having a mobile version of a website is not enough. What retailers need to think about is what mobile shoppers require and try to deliver it in a simple package. ~ Huffington Post.
Mobile commerce is expected to reach $31 billion by 2016. ~ Forrester.
Still deciding between building iOS/Android apps and creating a mobile site? Another important question is how to overcome the most common pitfalls in development? Over the last several months I’ve created a bunch of mobile development case studies on DB Best Chronicles and in this post I’d like to share some really smart mobile projects.
Mobile-Friendly Pissing Contests – This iOS app is built on Cocos2d – a 2d game engine for iPhone/iPad /iPod Touch that’s fast and easy to deploy.
An Awesome Coloring App for iPad - The app comes with a predefined set of coloring templates. A couple of other useful features – a color palette, automated saving, the export and reset buttons.
A Travel App for iOS – The app lets you manage your declarable travel purchases in multicurrencies.
A Note-Taking Application for iPad - The app lets you to write, scribble, add pictures, and even sound notes that reflect your mood – with nothing more than a finger. Tools used: Dragon SDK for voice recognition and picture-in-picture (PiP) technology.
A Video Streaming App for Android – A custom video player that supports https media streaming and allows watching video in any way you like, including the fast forward, pause, resume options.
Unity 3D Engine for video game development - Unity’s development environment runs on Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X, and the games it produces can be run on Windows, Mac, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii, iOS and Android.
Custom Developed iOS Graphics Library – It uses mesh-warping algorithm (Bezier curve for warping the images and various effects) and bilinear interpolation (for filling in missing pixels).
“Our original goal with the series was the explore the underbelly of startup and technology culture: the buzz words, the outrageous personalities, the money being funneled into what often turns out to be absolute nonsense. These ideas need to be brought to the public’s eye; more importantly, these ideas need to made fun of.”
99designs founder Matt Mickiewicz (@MattMickiewicz) looks for inspiration at companies that are really good at user experience design, such as MailChimp, and disruptive companies who have the guts to challenge the status quo. He believes that too many people are taking funding as the end goal of their businesses but instead it should be building a profitable and successful company.
99designs is a crowdsourcing marketplace where “designers from all walks of life can find opportunity and compete on a level playing field – where they can show off their work, improve their skills, communicate with peers and win new clients.”
Tom Arnold pitches @PetHub in another great episode of GeekWire’s The Elevator Pitch, the show where entrepreneurs pitch their business plans in the 43 seconds it takes to ride to the top of Seattle’s Space Needle. The PetHub app stores your pet’s medical, training and social information allowing you to connect it to a physical, phone-scannable pet ID tag.
Useful resources on how to grab investors’ attention:
Once again I put together a list of several important upcoming events and dates that you might want to consider and add to your calendar.
Content Marketing World 2012 – takes place on September 4 – 6, 2012 at the Columbus Convention Center, Columbus, Ohio. the largest gathering of content marketing professionals in the world. OUR 2011 EVENT brought together over 600 marketing professionals from 18 different countries. Twitter: @Junta42 and #cmworld.
TechCrunch Disrupt – one of the most anticipated technology conferences of the year. This September 8-12, TechCrunch will be bringing Disrupt back to San Francisco to reveal an all new slate of outstanding startups, influential speakers, guests, and more to the stage.
Dreamforce – Salesforce’s annual user & developer conference coming September 18-21 in San Francisco. Hundreds of best practice sessions, spectacular keynotes, and networking events make Dreamforce the cloud computing event of the year.
ADTECH, London - September 19-20. The event brings together leaders who are also doers shaping the industry: the exhibition presents progressive, innovative solutions and the conference features insights from high performing brand marketers.
SEMcamp 2012 – September 28, Kiev, Ukraine. Featured speakers: Craig Bradford SEO Consultant at Distilled and Vlad Voskresensky (InvisibleCRM).
Search Marketing Expo – SMX East 2012 - Oct. 2-4, 2012. Workshops will be held Monday, October 1, 2012 at the Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers. SMX is programmed by the search marketing authorities who edit the leading news blog Search Engine Land and who have years of experience educating search marketers.
O’Reilly’s Strata Conference + Hadoop World in New York (Oct 23-25), Strata Conference in London (Oct 1-2), and Strata Rx (Oct 16-17). Strata is where the leading minds in big data converge to map out the future, share their experiences and expertise, and learn from the people driving the data revolution. If you want to tap into the opportunity that big data presents, be at Strata.
User Experience Russia 2012 - October 11-13, Moscow. A space for communication between people, promoting the initiatives, technologies, products and services, improving the quality life of people in Russia, Europe and worldwide. Speakers: Dmitry Satin, Jeroen van Geel, Sanzhar Kettebekov, Louis Rosenfeld.
Pubcon Las Vegas 2012 - Week of October 15 – 18, 2012 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Pubcon It will be “the biggest and boldest gathering of search and social media innovators we have ever assembled, offering an unrivaled highly-productive conference experience at cost-effective rates, andwith the leading technology and online marketing visionaries.” Hashtag on Twitter: #Pubcon
eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit - Stockholm, Sweden October, 15-16. Marketers, web analysts and BI experts have been meeting at eMetrics since 2002 to learn how to increase the return on online investments – join the discussion.
Investor Day Central and Eastern Europe - takes place on October 18-19th, 2012 in Kiev, Ukraine. This year the Conference will be held at the exhibition hall “ACCO International”. More than 2,000 participants from Central and Eastern Europe, United States and Canada are expected to attend the event.
The Inbound Marketing Summit 2012 - October 23-24, Boston, The leading event for digital and social marketing professionals is bigger and better than ever! With experts like Chris Brogan, Dorie Clark, and Tim Hayden, keynotes from JetBlue and Razorfish, three great tracks, cool demos and networking with FutureM, IMS is the hub for the new Enterprise Marketing.
#SMWF N.America - in its 3rd year, #SMWF N.America is set to return to New York on November 27th & 28thas a two day conference providing top-level strategic advice and social media marketing insight around how to engage customers, manage brand perceptions, empower employees and open new un-tapped audiences through diverse social media channels.
The Usability Week 2012 Conference (Nielsen Norman Group) - The conference visits several of the world’s great cities, providing ample incentive to continue networking offsite at world-class restaurants, clubs, and attractions. San Francisco: September 23-28, 2012, London: October 14-19, 2012, Seattle: November 5-9, 2012.
LeWeb 2012 Paris. The #1 internet event in Europe, 3500 participants 76 countries. December 4-5-6.
PS: BlogWorldExpo – January 6 – 8, 2013, Las Vegas, NVRio All-Suite Hotel & Casino. The Future of Content, Commerce and Community. Bloggers, podcasters, WebTV producers and social media ninjas.
I use LinkedIn every day. I like the way they’ve created their ad campaign creation wizard. Easy and straightforward. Here’s a tutorial about starting your first advertising campaign on LinkedIn.
Step 1: Name and Ad Creation
You can create up to 15 ad variations to test which image and text performs best.
Ad campaign creation tips:
For best results, your Destination URL should be specific to the product or service that you’re advertising, as opposed to your homepage.
An image can help your Ad draw more interest among your target audience. Ads with images get up to 20% more clicks.
Find what resonates best with your audience by testing multiple variations of your Ad campaign – try different images or headlines.
Want to draw more attention to your Ad? Try making your headline into a question.
Keep it relevant. Make sure your ad destination makes sense with your ad copy.
Step 2: Targeting
You can target by job title and function, by industry and company size, by seniority and age, and by LinkedIn Groups.
LinkedIn audience targeting tips:
Having at least 2 targeting criteria will help your ad reach the right audience.
Avoid going too narrow – a good rule of thumb is an audience size over 100,000 members.
Try testing a campaign just for Groups. Target as many groups as possible with a common theme and highlight your theme in the ad copy.
Ensure you reach your right audience by targeting on Job Function and Seniority.
You can also reach LinkedIn members on other websites through the LinkedIn Audience Network – a collection of partner websites that display LinkedIn Ads on their pages.
Step 3: Budget and Lead Collection Options
With LinkedIn, you can pay by clicks or impressions (stop your ads at any time).
LinkedIn Ads budget and lead generations set-up tips:
To ensure that you receive impressions, make sure your bid is within or above a suggested bid range.
LinkedIn encourages you to bid on a CPC basis so you only have to pay when a user clicks on your ad.
LinkedIn recommends using the ‘optimized’ rotation strategy (default option). It will make sure that you’re always showing the creative that is performing the best.
On this step you can opt-in for Lead Collection – the free LinkedIn Lead Collection bar will allow visitors to easily request contact from you:
1. Collect – people who click on your ads will see a lead collection bar above your website that prompts them to request contact.
2. Review – you will be notified by email when you receive a lead, and you can review the LinkedIn profile.
3. Respond – reach out with personalized messages directly from LinkedIn or by email, if the person has made it available.
On this step click Next and you’re all set with your ad campaign creation. Congratulations!
What’s Next
To start all you need is a LinkedIn account: linkedin.com/ads. By the way, it’s now possible to separate your advertising account from your personal account and invite multiple people to manage your ads – you need to use a business account.
From the 30-minute Getting Started with LinkedIn Ads webcast, you can also learn:
What makes LinkedIn Ads unique
How to create your 1st ad campaign
Best practices on ad creative, targeting, and tracking
LinkedIn Marketing Solutions: marketing.linkedin.com - tailor your content to specific audiences with Targeted Status Updates.
If you have any questions, run a search at LinkedIn Ads FAQ. Good luck!
My way of implementing newsjacking is to find stories – which not exactly will become popular – but rather have a strong potential to go viral (at least to some extent) for a particular niche or community.
As our YouTube channel recently got 20K views – mostly thanks to Oranje Supporters - it’s a good opportunity for me to share some valuable data and insights hidden in YouTube analytics reports. Hopefully this case study will help you better understand how YouTube channel analytics works and how you can use it for your video marketing.
The Views graphs show data for the content, geography and a specified date range. Available metrics: Daily, Weekly, Monthly. It’s easy to see the most popular videos and locations – you can sort by Video, Geography and Date. (The views data is updated once each day. )
3. Demographics and Top Locations
From here you can see the age range and gender distribution of your audience.
And now Top 10 locations by views:
4. Where They Watch It
The Playback Locations report (formerly known as the Discovery report in YouTube Insight) displays the page, site, or device the video was played/viewed on.
YouTube Watch Page – it’s a YouTube’s individual video page – the most common viewing page on YouTube (i.e. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rewqtyo).
Mobile Devices: Views on mobile applications (iPad, Android) and YouTube’s mobile site (m.youtube.com).
Embedded players on other websites: views of your video embedded on another website.
5. Where They Come From
The Traffic sources report shows the various sites and YouTube features through which the viewer found your video content. As you can see, there are many ways people find it: search on YouTube, click Suggested Videos, follow links from social networking sites, and so on.
For specific videos only, traffic sources are often clickable, and doing so will provide you with more granular data. For example, if you click the YouTube Search traffic source, you will be able to see what search terms people are using to find your video. This is not available at the channel level.
YouTube suggested video - views from thumbnails appearing on the side of the page of other videos or on the end screen of a video.
Mobile apps and direct traffic (unknown sources) - views of unknown referrer on mobile apps and direct traffic on the YouTube watch and channel pages. Possible origins of direct traffic include email and instant messaging clients or copying and pasting a URL into the browser.
Homepage feeds and subscriptions - views from the various feeds on the YouTube homepage and subscription features.
6. Likes and Dislikes
Which video people like or dislike? Find the answer here. Total engagement – a sum of all likes, dislikes, favorites added and removed, shares, comments and subscribes and unsubscribes for the given video.
7. Audience Retention
It’s an overall measure of our video’s ability to retain its audience. Keep in mind that Audience retention data is only available for videos. So I need to select an individual video and then see absolute or relative audience retention. In this example, one of the most popular video from my channel got average to above average metrics.
8. Other Neat Stuff
There’s also some good data on Subscribers, Favorites, Comments and Sharing but it looks like you need way more views to make sense out of these reports.
Are you looking to completely outsource your digital marketing campaigns? Hire me for your next social media, PPC, SEO, and content marketing projects.
