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The reviews are in, the numbers have been tallied, and winners and losers have been announced. Did your favorites do well?

The USA Today Ad Meter had a tie for 1st place. Since a Doritos® commercial was one that was tied for 1st, it earns the amateur filmmaker a $1 million prize. Doritos® also took 4th and 14th. Pepsi Max® did well by placing 5th, 7th and 24th. Bud Light® was the other 1st place winner.

The Ad Meter wasn’t the only source for commercial rankings. If you wanted to know which commercial did well in the social media arena, Alterian has it all calculated. A good place to get an overview of many of the major sources is at this NY Times blog article. There are numbers calculated for Kelley Blue Book searches, numbers for commercials replayed on TiVo, and numbers showing the most-watched commercial. With a record number of viewers this year, advertisers do look at these figures.

What types of commercials aired? Auto commercials took the most spots. Who doesn’t like the Star Wars themed commercial from VW? Movie trailers were also big on advertising this year. Cowboys and Aliens, Transformers, Thor, Captain America, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Rango were all some of those who shelled out the $3 million pricetag to promote their movie. There were drinks, snacks, .com, and more.

Let us know what commercials you liked and/or hated.
Doritos® winning commercial

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It you are a marketer, chances are you have come across article marketing and the myths that surround it. One of the most common myths when it comes to article marketing is that in order for an article to have link value, the links must be coming from the article body and be formed using keywords as anchor text.

Steve Shaw, an article marketing expert and founder of the popular article distribution service SubmitYourArticle.com has shared his experience and theory on that myth.

He states that with article marketing, the link to your website is usually in the resource box, rather than the article body, so you will not often encounter publishers who will allow you to link to your website from the article body.

Still, many people use article marketing as their primary marketing tool and see excellent results. Using himself as an example, Steve has been article marketing and seen his site rise from as low as the 85th ranking for a particular keyword phrase up to the #1 spot.

Certainly it is not necessary (or even allowed) to link to your own site within the article body, and yet article marketing still works.

Are Some Links More Valuable Than Others?

Yes, certainly some types of links carry more weight than others. For example, the anchor text link in an HTML resource box speaks more powerfully than a plain URL link. This is just because the link in your HTML resource box gives Google more information about what your website is about.

This is not to say that a straightforward URL link is worthless–it certainly is not. It still carries value, but just not as much value as an anchor text link.

Does Link Location On The Page Matter?

It is also reasonable to suggest that the location of the link on the page carries some weight as well. So, a link in the footer or margin of a page, or a link that is repeated on every page of a website, will not carry as much weight as a link in the main body of text on a page.

Obviously no one has access to Google’s algorithm for rankings, but it also appears that keywords that show up higher on the page carry more weight than those that appear lower down. One could therefore suppose that anchor text links appearing higher on the page carry more weight too.

To read this article in its entirety, click here.

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Every time you turn around there seems to be talk of some new video someone saw on YouTube that you just have to watch. As a marketer, you would love to hear someone on the street say that about your video. YouTube gets more than 86 percent of visits to 77 video sites in this country. That is a staggering realization.  There is no denying that video marketing can be a powerful, interactive tool for companies, but sometimes it is hard to figure out how to harness it’s viral nature. It is not enough to post a video that ends up being nothing more than an infomercial about your company or brand on YouTube and expecting it to spread like wildfire. iMedia Connection posted an interesting article on 9 New Rules for YouTube Marketing. Below are the 9 rules they list out. Check out the full article before planning your next video marketing project and come back here and share your thoughts.

9 new rules for YouTube marketing

Rule 1: YouTube marketing is the new video marketing

Rule 2: You can’t make it on YouTube alone

Rule 3: Great video content can come from anywhere

Rule 4: There is no premium video content, only popular video content

Rule 5: YouTube ads can be popular video content too

Rule 6: Keep to a schedule and theme when publishing video content

Rule 7: Think about the next action and viewer engagement

Rule 8: Cross-platform promotion and the first 24 hours are huge

Rule 9: Don’t watch comments too closely, but obsess over Insights

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Tim Itano

In the last several months, those in the homebuilding/buying/selling industry have been very busy informing every potential home-purchasing man, woman and child why now is the time to buy a new home. The obvious ones?

Low Interest Rates:
The lowest in history to be precise (at least since they’ve been recorded in the ‘30’s).

Low, Low Home Prices:
According to a Barron’s 2011 panelist, relative home prices in many areas of the country are equal to what they were 20 years ago.

More Efficient Engineering:
Green materials, Energy Star appliances, etc. are incorporated to dramatically reduce energy requirements.

Having recently shopped for new homes throughout the Chicagoland area, I would also like to point out a few significant, albeit less obvious, reasons to buy new right now.

Greater Customer Service:
With fewer overall buyers out there, I experienced a level of attentiveness like never before. Builders appreciate prospects coming out to the sales centers and treat them accordingly.

Features That Make Sense:
With overall sales volume down on every home, spec, to-be-built, whatever, builders are streamlining their focus to include just those particular attributes the public will actually pay for.

Home Sizes That Feel Right-Sized:
According to the National Association of Home Builders, the average sq. footage of a new home dropped 100 sq. feet between 2007 and 2010. My initial observation having toured a half-dozen developments this year is that the homes feel more usable, more accessible throughout.

Are you a home builder looking for a partner that can help you create an integrated marketing strategy? Stevens & Tate has provided hundreds of ROI-producing strategies for numerous industries throughout North America. From fully social-centric campaigns to more traditional ad programs and everything in between, we can help. Call us at 630-627-5200 or find us online at www.Stevens-Tate.com.

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Content is king. Content is everything on the social web – tweets, status updates, ad units, search, billboards, press releases, copy on corporate websites and blogs, etc. But succeeding in internet marketing requires much more than just content!

It’s about the right content, at the right time, to the right person in the right channel – relevant content. Relevant content:

  • adds value to the conversation
  • positions your brand as a trusted source of information
  • is authentic and believable
  • builds trust with the community
  • happens as a result of listening and acting
  • increases the reach of your messages
  • increases your organic search rankings
  • drives purchase intent

When a brand can achieve this, they will not only deepen community engagement, but they will create customer advocacy. Through real time analytics, it’s very easy to identify what content (messages) clearly resonate with the community. This is one reason why Social CRM is such a hot topic right now.

Take the first step towards improving the quality of the content on your web site or marketing messages and contact Stevens & Tate Marketing at http://www.stevens-tate.com/contact.cfm. Stevens & Tate Marketing offers print advertising, media placement services, interactive advertising, web site design, search engine marketing, social media marketing and e-mail marketing services making them a full-service marketing agency.

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For every web site owner, their most important goal is establishing exposure for their web site. While there are several ways of establishing a particular website’s presence on the internet, only a few of these can be considered as really effective or worth the effort.

One really efficient way of establishing online presence for a site is through search engine marketing. Web site owners can take advantage of search engines by getting their web sites to show up on very specific search results that are being returned whenever a person is searching for something through the use of search engines.

Any website that is receiving a huge amount of traffic into it has the much bigger chance of making more profits and generating more conversions than  one that has very minimal web exposure. In other words, higher volume of traffic is equivalent to higher percentage of sales and conversions for a site.

When it comes to getting huge volumes of traffic to a site, search engine marketing is definitely a winning medium to achieve such goal. Just imagine your web site showing up at the top listings of specific search results whenever people are searching for information exactly relevant to your site. The only problem is, that ranking a website on top of the search engine results pages is not as easy as it may sound. In fact, very few web site owners really have the adequate knowledge needed to really perform such task successfully.

Aside from search engine marketing, there is another popular medium for bringing traffic to a web site. This medium is through the use of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Social media marketing, although an extremely popular means of driving traffic to a website, this method is not as effective as getting traffic through search engines. The reason is that social media traffic is not as targeted compared to the traffic being produced through the search engines.

The very concept why search engine marketing is so effective is that because people are able to search items or information by typing in very specific keywords or terms that are exactly related and relevant to what they are searching for. Because of this system, if your web site is ranked well on top of the search results listings, then your site will no doubt be getting its share of ultra targeted traffic as a result.

With search engine marketing, you can either opt for the paid method which is popularly known as PPC or pay per click advertising, or you can stick with the method of ranking your web site at the top of the search engine results pages. Whichever approach you pursue to follow, you can still be guaranteed that what you are getting is highly targeted and quality traffic towards your web site.

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This January, marketing mainstays like FedEx, General Motors and Pepsi announced that they would be opting out of this year’s ad extravaganza, the Super Bowl.

Adverting Age has recently run an article titled Super Bowl Shuffle: Why Marketers Will Shift to ‘Platforms’, which discusses the phenomenon of advertising and the Super Bowl.

The article claims that for those looking to gauge the health of the ad industry, Super Bowl advertising is a bit of red herring. CBS is charging about $2.5 million for 30 seconds of commercial time, and rightfully so. Rarely do you get so many Americans watching one event and actually enjoying the advertising. It is a tremendous opportunity for most brand marketers and it would be foolish to look at this year’s Super Bowl as proof of either the rejuvenation of the 30-second spot or the rejection of it.

There certainly will be advertising winners (and losers) on Super Bowl Sunday but let’s hope that the Monday morning quarterback chatter doesn’t obscure the larger shift at hand for marketers this year. 2010 will be the year of the “platform” for advertisers.

Unlike a website, banner, Facebook application or 30-second spot, a platform is an always-on digital environment that allows brands to run specific or multiple programs. The goal of a platform is to meaningfully engage consumers on multiple levels. For some brands, this means creating an experience with integrated commerce. For others, it means enabling consumers to connect with each other in valuable, unexpected ways.

But for marketers, the real winners this year will be the brands who have built these platforms to engage consumers well after this year’s Super Bowl becomes a distant memory. Here are some examples of the types of platforms that are being created and executed today:

  • Community Action Platforms
  • Crowdsourcing Platforms
  • Commerce Platforms
  • Brand Experience Platforms
  • Social CRM Platforms

These are just a few examples of the kinds of platform moves brand marketers will make in 2010, but there will certainly be more — especially with the rise in mobile and emerging technologies such as “touch” and augmented reality. To read this article in its entirety, click here.

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