Archive | Marketing RSS feed for this section

The Big Tease: Getting Us Hooked on Super Bowl Commercials Before the Game

I hate television commercials, and I’m willing to bet you do, too. They’re annoying, they’re unrealistic, and perhaps most infuriating of all, they always air much louder than the actual show you were engrossed in before the break.

With my DVR, I can get around this. There’s nothing I love more than being able to fast-forward through the commercials. It makes me feel like I have the upper hand on the advertisers. That I’m beating them at their own game.

And this makes the advertisers very, very sad. Indeed, as traditional television viewership has declined, so has advertising revenue. The television ad market dipped 21.2% between 2008 and 20091, and since then it hasn’t exactly made a comeback.

But there remains one time of year where the advertisers can still beat me at my own game. One very special day where they know that they have nearly all of America’s attention…

Leave a comment Continue Reading →

Twitter Tutorial: Using Hashtags

There are a handful of words that never fail to make me hungry, and one of those words is “hashtag.” Whenever I lay eyes on that word, visions of perfectly browned shredded potatoes come dancing through my mind.

Sadly, a hashtag couldn’t be further removed from a hashbrown. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing, because when’s the last time a potato did so much for your marketing strategy?

If you’ve been on Twitter for any length of time, you’ve seen a hashtag in action. A hashtag is any word or phrase preceded by a # symbol. The hashtag is used to denote key topics, similar to the way a tag is used on a blog…

Leave a comment Continue Reading →

When Is A Brand Big Enough To Go Small?

AMC has just released a new poster marketing the return of season five of their seminal show Mad Men – and it’s already got the design world lining up to take sides.

If you’ve never before seen it, Mad Men is a dramatic series set in the 1960s at a fictional advertising agency in New York. It deals with shifting social norms, especially as experienced through the show’s main character, Don Draper.

The minimalist poster depicts a black and white silhouette of a man in a suit falling headfirst through a white and grey negative space. At the bottom, red and black text simply reads “March 25.” …

Leave a comment Continue Reading →

When to Publish a Blog Post

Content is key to blogging, as is timing. So say you have that blog post ready to go — when should you publish it? The answer for you depends on your specific market, and what you’re looking for (more views? more engagement?). But there are some key facts from research done by Dan Zarrella (@danzarrella), searchengineland.com (@sengineland) and HubSpot. And now KissMetrics has assembled a nice way to view it all in one place with one of their (dare I say famous?) infographics.

The main takeaways? Most users read blogs in the morning. The average blog gets the most traffic on Mondays, and the most comments on Saturdays. Check out the infographic below:

Leave a comment Continue Reading →

New Year’s Resolutions, 2012

I’m torn when it comes to New Year’s resolutions — I like the idea of having goals, and I hate people setting themselves up to fail.Resolutions should be achievable, and I like action items to help move us toward that goal, whether it’s increasing business sales or losing some extra holiday pounds.

There’s nothing like January 1st to make us all evaluate how we could do things differently in the next year. Here are 3 actionable New Year’s resolutions for your business:

22 Comments Continue Reading →