6 Tips for Being Relevant to your Target Group

I hope you all had a wonderful Labor Day Weekend and that you had a chance to think about all your design and business ideas. Here’s my idea: Why not start putting into practice the best marketing ideas that can benefit your design education, your company, your search ranking, and/or your reputation? Let’s check out these 6 tips for being relevant to your Target Group.

It’s vital to refresh your ideas every few months so that you’re not trying to attract publicity and attention with stale, outdated approaches that only serve to date your company. Whether you’re finding better ways to embrace mobile content or experimenting with ad retargeting, your education and perhaps your company as well will prosper by adding in these best marketing practices.

1. Embrace Retargeted Ads

This growing trend is a reminder of just how versatile online advertising can be. Retargeted ads identify people who have come to your website before without taking any definitive action and give them a pitch tailored to second, third, or even fourth-time visitors.

For example, if you sell mosquito repellent, your ad might say, “Don’t get eaten alive this summer—remember this mosquito repellent you looked at last week?” or something along those lines.

Read more

Five Ways to Succeed at Marketing Automation

Many businesses have embraced the idea of marketing automation in hopes of gaining a larger customer base. In theory, marketing automation sounds like a great idea – personalize your pitch to your target audience in hopes of making a connection that leads to a sale.

However, there are many things to consider when executing a successful plan. If you plan to invest in a marketing automation program, you need to understand what is successful and what is not in order to see your efforts pay off.

It helps to begin with a strong concept of what marketing automation is. Marketing automation is a combination of software and marketing tactics that deliver personalized content to clients in order to gain their business. Consider a company like Amazon, which emails clients lists of products they may be interested in after making a purchase on the site.

Amazon tailors its home page based on the buyer’s interests and sends out surveys after a sale is complete. Amazon has proven success in marketing automation and is certainly a company to emulate. Here are five ways to implement a successful marketing automation program to watch your business succeed.

Read more

Patrick Barrett on Great Work

Patrick Barrett is currently the Director of Product at TrendKit, a Public Relations analytics company. At TrendKite, Patrick focuses his efforts on making the product easy to use and visually appealing using his extensive UX knowledge to provide a visual analytics platform.

Prior to this, he worked at Spredfast on social media publishing for big agencies as the Director of Consumer Experiences. Additionally, Patrick has experience working in the fields of crowdfunding and social good at Greater Good Labs, and extensive experience in social commerce, e-commerce, and consumer-generated content at Bazaarvoice.

How do you define Great Work? 

Great Work is a combination of work that results in great products and personally rewarding work experiences.

Great products for me, the ones I want to build, strike a balance between frivolity and utility that creates an engaged user base that will drive the metrics important to your business. Think of a stop sign as being a product of pure utility and Pokemon Go as one of pure frivolity…I want to build products that fall somewhere between the two.

Read more

Google Keyword Quota Exceeded – What’s Next?

Yesterday I posted a bunch of keywords to my account (about 70,000) but realized that I was being stupid and crazy, so today I tried to do some house-cleaning. I deleted the old campaign and created a new one. So when you have the Google Keyword Quota Exceeded – What’s Next?

This campaign has 63 ad groups and about 200 keywords per ad group.

I’m trying to make the campaign active and I get a message telling me “Keyword Quota Exceeded” … How can this be – Is Google still looking at my old keywords?”

When I hear reports of AdWords accounts with keywords numbering in the 10s of thousands, I have to gasp in amazement. I find it incredible that advertisers feel the need to create campaigns with so many keywords that AdWords has to cap their account.

Quite frankly, I’m amazed that people think such a large campaign can actually be managed properly. I can’t believe that any more than a small percentage of your keywords are actually making any money.

Read more