Archive | Marketing RSS feed for this section

Facebook to Adopt the Hashtag?

Posted on May 7, 2013 by in Advertising, Facebook, Marketing, Twitter

You may have heard: hashtags aren’t just for Twitter anymore.

And you, like me, may have noticed their proliferation over the past several months — Instagram recognizes them, as does Pinterest and Google+. Flickr, in fact, has recently added hashtag functionality. They appear on everything from billboards, to television commercials, to news articles, to cola bottle labels — it truly seems that I can’t go anywhere, online and off, without seeing them anymore.

Their gaining traction across a variety of platforms proves that at some point, hashtags ceased being a way for people to aggregate and organize content on Twitter, and became a standardized way for people to aggregate and organize anything — at least on the Internet.

But there’s one place where hashtags haven’t been adopted, and it perhaps has the biggest reach of all…

Leave a comment • Continue Reading →

The Rise of “Native Advertising”

Posted on May 2, 2013 by in Advertising, Marketing, Usability, Websites

We’ve heard of all types of advertising before — but what the heck is native advertising?

If you’ve never heard the term before, don’t worry: it’s only recently been widely adopted by the advertising community. But get ready to hear a lot more about it, because native advertising will define the next phase of our collective user experience online.

Leave a comment • Continue Reading →

The Secret Door: A Social Media Marketing Win

Posted on April 29, 2013 by in Google, Integrated Marketing Campaigns, Marketing, Raves, Social Media, Tech, Tools, Websites

No doubt you’ve played with Google Maps’ Street View before. It can be handy when looking up addresses, or for checking out neighborhoods you’re interested in living in, or even for scoping out the places you used to live.

But what I didn’t fully understand until recently was how limiting of a name “Street View” actually is. Over several years and with the help of countless volunteers who have contributed 360-degree “photo spheres,” Google has amassed a litany of panoramas that go way beyond just street-level. And they’re all available for the whole world to see.

One of the coolest ways to check out these views is through an interactive experience called “The Secret Door”…

Leave a comment • Continue Reading →

Social Sharing Equals Success in Email Marketing

Posted on April 22, 2013 by in Email, Facebook, LinkedIn, Marketing, Social Media

Social media is over-hyped. I get that.

It feels like you can’t open a marketing email anymore without seeing buttons urging you to share the email content across social media channels. Sharing buttons seem so ubiquitous, one starts to wonder if they’re even effective. Have they simply become visual noise that people have learned to ignore on their screen, like display or text ads?

1 Comment • Continue Reading →

Six Steps to Successful Inbound Marketing

Posted on April 2, 2013 by in Blogging, Integrated Marketing Campaigns, Marketing, SEO

Here at Dowitcher Designs we we deal a lot with matters of inbound marketing — that is, when leads or potential customers come to you.

And let me tell you, success starts with careful, precise planning. After all, in order to achieve your goals you must establish them first. But being that inbound marketing is a results-focused process, it seems like many businesses just want to skip right to the results without, you know, working for them.

Leave a comment • Continue Reading →

Coca-Cola Finds Online Buzz Doesn’t Boost Sales, then Defends Social Media as ‘Crucial’

Posted on March 25, 2013 by in Advertising, Integrated Marketing Campaigns, Marketing, Social Media

So you’ve probably heard the news that Coca-Cola executives delivered last Monday at the Advertising Research Foundation’s conference in New York. Coca-Cola’s study found that online buzz did not directly impact their short term sales. The social media world was immediately abuzz. Two days later we heard from Wendy Clark, senior VP-integrated marketing, who says social media is crucial to Coca-Cola’s marketing.

People have been voicing off on this topic for the past week, and we figured it’s time to weigh in ourselves. Is generating online buzz not worth the effort? Or is social media ‘crucial’? Which is it?

Leave a comment • Continue Reading →

The Visual Power of Infographics

Posted on January 31, 2013 by in Branding, Design, Marketing

They’re everywhere on the internet these days. As ubiquitous as cat photos. You’ve even seen them here, on this very blog — we like to use neat-looking ones to help illustrate key points.

I’m talking about infographics. A combination of the words information and graphics, infographics are “graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge intended to present complex information quickly and clearly.” 1

To put it in simpler terms: People like pictures.

Leave a comment • Continue Reading →

What the Obama Campaign’s Email Marketing Taught Us – And What It Didn’t

Posted on January 24, 2013 by in Email, Marketing

Have you ever received an email with “Hey” as the subject line? I’m sure you have. From a close friend, right? Or maybe your partner, wondering if you can stop at the grocery store and pick up a few things on the way home.

But have you ever gotten an email with “Hey” as the subject line from an official company, organization, or public figure? Say, perhaps, the president of the United States?

Leave a comment • Continue Reading →

Facebook and the Future of Relationships in Social Media

Posted on December 17, 2012 by in Advertising, Facebook, Marketing, Social Media, Social Networks

About a month ago, Facebook quietly rolled out Relationship Pages.

This means that if you’re in a relationship with someone who also has a profile on Facebook, you can now visit Facebook.com/us to see a virtual archive of your history as a couple — at least, your history as seen by Facebook. Every post made on each others’ wall, every tagged photo, every mutual friend, every event attended together — it’s all logged as a memory on your shared timeline.

Leave a comment • Continue Reading →

Communication is Your Key to Social Strategy

Posted on November 19, 2012 by in Marketing, Social Media, Social Networks

Ever since we’ve had social media, we’ve had social media marketing. I get it. It’s important. You have to go where your customers are, right? You have to follow the trends, or your business will get left in the dust.

But here’s the thing: most businesses are doing it wrong.

1 Comment • Continue Reading →
Older posts