4 Ways to Step Up Your Digital Marketing in 2014

Written by CT Moore on December 22, 2013. Posted in Paid Search, SEO, Social Media.

It’s the the final stretch of 2013, and you might be already be thinking about New Year’s resolutions. And if you’re a marketer or an entrepreneur, you’re certainly thinking about how you’re going to do business in 2014 — new markets you’re going to crack in to, new campaigns you’re going to launch, new partnerships you’re going to strike up. In fact, you’ve probably already forgotten about 2013, and have had your eye (almost) exclusively on the future for some weeks now.

3 Ways to Step-Up Your Ecommerce Game in 2014

Written by CT Moore on December 12, 2013. Posted in Paid Search, SEO, Social Media.

So it’s a little late in the game for me to start telling what you should do (or could’ve done) to get the most out of your ecommerce strategy for the holidays. Thanksgivukkah is a distant memory, and there’s only a dozen or so shopping days left before the presents under the tree day, so you don’t have that much time to start tweaking and optimizing campaigns in any meaningful matter.

Come 2014, though, you’re going to be looking at your ecommerce conversions and starting to think forward to how you’re going to sustain or maximize your their growth in the new year. Well, here’s a few tips and tactics you might’ve not employed over the last year that can give you that extra ecommerce edge in 2014.

Targeting Options Across Different Online Channels

Written by CT Moore on March 7, 2012. Posted in Paid Search, SEO, Social Media.

So maybe you have an online budget and it’s time to build a strategy. Or maybe you have to build a strategy so that you can lobby the purse-holder for a budget to work with. How do you determine what channels are best suited for your goals?

Well, each online channel offers a distinct form of user targeting, and how you target someone is going to affect how they react, respond, and/or convert. So it’s helpful to first understand each of these major targeting methods, and from there decide which online marketing channels are most compatible with your goals.

Mobile PPC Strategies – Interview with Laura Garrido

Written by CT Moore on January 23, 2012. Posted in Mobile, Paid Search.

With such high expectations for mobile advertising this year, marketers have a lot to consider — from high-level mobile ad strategy and deployment to working out a mobile budget. Well, with Google as the #1 mobile site destination, one thing is clear enough: mobile PPC will likely be part of any mobile advertising strategy.

Recently, I got to ask Laura Garrido about her experience with mobile PPC. Laura leads the PPC team at NVI, a search marketing and social media agency in Montreal. So she’s overseen strategy and deployment for all their clients’ mobile search campaigns. During our chat, Laura touches on:

Why to invest in mobile PPC
How to budget for mobile PPC
Which verticals perform best in mobile search
and how mobile PPC strategies can differ from desktop ones

Budgeting Ad Spend Across Mobile Channels

Written by CT Moore on January 12, 2012. Posted in Mobile, Paid Search, SEO.

With all the talk about mobile ad opportunities, marketers are faced with some tough questions: just how do you go about diverting ad budget from other channels an allotting to mobile?

Well, before you can do that, you have to understand just what mobile channels are relevant to your business. From there, you can take a measured risk approach by diverting ad spend from a variety of channels and re-allotting them over to their respective mobile counterparts.

Mobile Ad Opportunities in 2012

Written by CT Moore on January 5, 2012. Posted in Paid Search.

So every year since 1990-something, people have been predicting that the following year was going to be the year of mobile. Whether 2012 will turn out to be the year of mobile or not is anyone’s guess, but two things that are certain are (1) mobile has definitely gone mainstream and, as a result, (2) it’s therefore an ad medium that any serious marketer has to take, well, seriously.

This couldn’t be more truer than in the US. Indeed, if you consider some of the numbers release by Nielsen in their State of the Media: Mobile Media Report Q3 2011, there is a clear and present opportunity for advertisers to target mobile user through both mobile search and mobile app ad networks.

So it’s not a question of whether you should be investing in mobiles advertising. It’s a question of how much you should be investing in mobile (and maybe even whether you should be diverting budgets from other channels).

How PPC Can Support Organic SEO Rankings

Written by CT Moore on December 28, 2011. Posted in Paid Search, SEO.

One of the most obvious way that PPC can support SEO is with helping your brand show up in the SERPs for the most competitive searches. Now, I’m saying “show up” rather than “rank” because there is nothing PPC can do to directly increase your organic rankings.

What PPC can do, however, is offer you an opportunity to at least have your (branded) listing appear alongside the organic SERPs for keywords that you don’t yet rank on.

Using PPC to Find New SEO Opportunities

Written by CT Moore on December 1, 2011. Posted in Paid Search, SEO.

In many ways, it makes sense to treat paid and organic search as two completely separate beasts. For example:

Both PPC and SEO require their own set of expertise and have their own KPIs
PPC yields more short-term/immediate results, while SEO is a long-term strategy (it takes time to rank organically)
SEO allows you to build long-term equity because your rankings do not depend on whether you’re bidding on keywords and impressions
User who click on paid listings are not necessarily the same users who click on organic ones

The list can go on, but the point is that it’s easy/tempting to want to treat the two channels as distinct. However, because both PPC and SEO target users through the same medium (i.e. search engines), the two can be coordinated to support each other and maximize results. Specifically, PPC efforts can be used to enrich and inform your SEO strategy.