Market Targeting

You don’t need Millennials to tell you that mobile sites matter. Mobile usage is slowly taking over desktop, and there are no signs of slowing down. Just this year, we saw the scales significantly tip towards mobile, taking 51% of the digital media time pie, compared to a 42% share for desktop. Some best practices from desktop web design carry over to mobile principles, but it would be a mistake to treat them as the same animal. As Will Critchlow, founder and CEO of Distilled, said, “Don’t build things differently; build different things.”

Mobile apps have taken the world by storm. In Apple’s App store alone there are more than a million, and according to some research we’re spending more of our time online using them than anything else. Despite what some say about the value of apps for businesses, though, I’m still not convinced it’s a good investment for everyone.

We hear a lot about how email open rates are a vanity metric that shouldn’t be trusted, but the truth is if you can’t get prospects to open your emails, your email marketing will fail. Here’s just a few reasons why not doing enough to create awesome email subject lines can spell email marketing doom.

Privacy, especially on the Internet, is something that’s prevalent in the minds of just about everyone. And when the finger isn’t being pointed towards certain government organizations, people are quick to get out their pitchforks and head for marketers and the organizations that “sell your data.”

As we fly through another year (is it really almost May already?!), the emergence of social media platforms continues its upward growth. We are seeing a shift in the need for businesses to implement some sort of social media marketing from a suggestion to a necessity.

Up until now, targeting your ads on Facebook to those who have visited your site had to be done through a third-party company, like AdRoll. Yes, remarketing — that’s what I’m talking about. As excited as I am that it’s finally available to advertisers, I can’t believe it’s taken this long. But it’s powerful and everything I could’ve hoped for.

Recently I attended “Don’t be a 5-Second Site,” an AMA San Antonio-hosted meetup where presenter Brittany Tradup of Robot Creative spoke on the challenges of web writing. Tradup shared some great tips on writing for the web, and I want to add more context around the entire subject of website copywriting.

After using Facebook Ads regularly for the last five months, there’s a lot I’ve found to love. There’s also a few things that make me want to pull my hair out. Hair-pulling aside, the ubiquity of Facebook makes it an incredibly powerful advertising medium with enough targeting options to keep anyone busy with A/B testing.

The wedding industry banks billions every year and the marketing machine behind it is impressive and the envy of any good marketer. But I’m in the group of nine million American couples planning to get married in the next 12 months. And I hate wedding marketing.

With its signature yellow border and glossy pages, National Geographic is a staple of every classroom and magazine basket in America, but its beginnings are humble. In order to make the magazine a success, its founders and writers had to get creative — and their tactics sound familiar…