Brad Sharenow I ReachLocal NYC Internet Marketing Consultant

Facebook Mobile Statistics - {INFOGRAPHIC}

With the Facebook IPO coming, Socialbakers Facebook analytics provider of statistical data of the world's largest social networking website examined the mobile penetration of Facebook users. With 901 million users there is 488 million users (54%) that access Facebook by a mobile device.

According to Socialbakers, the biggest facebook mobile countries are:

1. United States
2. Indonesia
3. India
4. United Kingdom
5. Mexico
6. Brazil
7. Germany
8. France
9. Turkey
10. Canada

Brad Sharenow, Senior Internet Marketing Consultant with ReachLocal NYC helping businesses acquire, manage, retain online customers through online marketing strategies.

Give him a call at (877) 411-3777 to schedule a Free Consultation

Remarketing Targets Previous Site Visitors And Increases Conversions

When small businesses think about paid advertising online, 99.9% of them think about one thing: Google AdWords. Not to speak negatively of this venerable platform, but AdWords isn’t always (or even often) the answer:

• It takes a substantial monthly ad budget to generate enough conversions to move the dial.
• In some niches, keywords are too expensive for small firms to compete.
• In other niches, search volume is too low to generate ROI.

If you’re looking for an advertising model with a higher probability of success, look to one of the best-kept secrets in Internet marketing: Remarketing.

How Remarketing Works

Remarketing is a form of advertising based on two rock-solid principles:

1. Your best sales prospects are people who have already visited your website.
2. The most efficient ad campaign targets your best sales prospects.

This is how remarketing works:

When visitors come to your site a cookie is dropped in their browser that adds them to your remarketing list for a given period of time. When visitors subsequently visit websites within the remarketing ad network, they will see an ad for your company. Studies suggest that remarketing can increase conversion by at least 50% versus traditional pay-per-click advertising.

Why Remarketing Works

Not every visitor who comes to your site is ready to take action. In fact, for most sites, the vast majority of visitors are in research mode rather than purchase mode. Think about your own online behavior. What percentage of sites do you visit with the express intention of buying or providing your contact information for follow up?

Remarketing strengthens brand awareness. Remarketing ads give visitors a gentle reminder that they visited your site. These reminders increase the likelihood they will remember you when they are ready to take action.

Putting Together a Remarketing Campaign

There are several remarketing services that offer full remarketing campaign support; Google recently added a remarketing service to its AdWords platform as well.

Remarketing can be simple or complex depending on how broadly or narrowly you segment visitors. General ads can be served to all site visitors, or ads with specific calls to action can be served to visitors who come to a particular are of the site or who exhibit a particular onsite behavior. The components of a remarketing campaign include:

• Devising a strategy
• Creating ads in a variety of sizes, with calls to action corresponding to visitor segmentation (if any)
• Tracking results to determine the most effective ads
• Continual refinement of the remarketing campaign

On the creative end, it’s important to know the sizes of all ads that will be displayed. Some advertisers display extremely small images, which limits your ability to describe a call-to-action or even include your logo. Larger ads can accommodate a more detailed message and powerful branding. However, even those small and simple ads can be very effective.

Who Should Use Remarketing?

Every small business should investigate remarketing carefully, because an incremental increase in conversions can have a dramatic impact on the bottom line. Small businesses can capitalize on remarketing as well, particularly ones with high-value products and services, and/or customers that have high lifetime value.

Have you considered adding Remarketing to your online advertising strategies?

Contact NYC internet marketing consultant Brad Sharenow, to find out how to create an online marketing strategy. Set up a free consultation for your NYC business, by calling (877) 411-3777 today.

Google Places Announces New Tool To Manage Multiple Locations

Google has announced a new upgraded bulk management tool for Google Places. Businesses and local search marketers will have an easier time managing multiple locations. The challenges of managing multiple businesses in the real world can sometimes carry over online.

The new features explained by Google include:

• “Edit one or more of your listings’ data at once
• Search through your listings, filtering by specific information or for listings with errors
• Upload new listings using a data file or by adding them individually within the interface
• Tell us how we can improve this new interface by clicking the “Give Feedback” link”

Here are 2 Google video tutorials explaining the new features:

The first video is for new users not allowed to do bulk uploads yet, and the second is for already-verified users.

What Google Algorithm Updates Mean for Your Business

Over the past few years, Google has kept SEO experts and internet marketing consultants on their toes by releasing updates to its search algorithm. When Google makes changes to its algorithm, it can effect how frequently your business website shows up in search results.

A recent update, code-named "Panda" is meant to help Google users retrieve higher-quality content when they search online. To be sure that customers can find your business online, it's integral to pay attention to Google search updates and adjust your marketing strategy accordingly.
 

Below are three takeaways for how Google's Panda update might change your internet marketing plan:

- High-Quality Blog Content Will Be Rewarded

Google wants to help searchers circumvent low-quality, irrelevant websites guilty of using tons of keywords and other "black hat" SEO tactics to trick search engines. One way to take advantage of the Panda changes is to consistently update your business blog with well-written content. Get familiar with Google's quality guidelines and get in touch with an experienced online marketer who can help provide a high-quality blog strategy for your business.

- Keyword Stuffers Will Be Demoted

Keywords are those words and phrases that help users find your business online. In the past, marketers would “stuff” website product pages, home pages, and even blog posts with tons of keywords to attract search traffic. Texts with too many keywords are usually poorly written and tough to read, because certain phrases are repeated so many times! Now Google plans to measure the percentage of keywords on a page, and will penalize those websites that have pages with more than the optimal 3 to 5 percent keyword density.

- Paid Link Schemes Will Be Penalized

Links coming in from other websites can add value to your SEO strategy, but only if the links are coming from authoritative and relevant sources. Another "black hat" SEO tactic that marketers used in the past was paying for links that pointed to a business website. Often, these paid links would be hosted on irrelevant or poorly written websites. Now Google is cracking down on this tactic and only rewarding inbound links when there is a topical connection between the two websites and both sites have high-quality content. A great way to get inbound links to your business website is to write quality guest blog posts that you can place on other industry blogs.

Is your business prepared to weather Google’s algorithm updates? Contact NYC internet marketing consultant Brad Sharenow, to find out how to create a search-friendly online marketing strategy. Set up a free consultation for your NYC business, by calling (877) 411-3777 today.

A Round-Up of Helpful Social Media Marketing Tools

Marketing your business through social media can be overwhelming, with Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to update and track. Yet, with the help of an experienced NYC internet marketing consultant, and free or low-cost online tools, any business owner can quickly master the best practices of social media marketing.

To help you get started, here are a few of the leading tools that business owners can use to make their social media marketing more effective.

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite can streamline social media efforts by consolidating all of your profiles in one easy-to-use dashboard. Instead of logging in to multiple accounts throughout the day, you can schedule updates for multiple networks to post in the future. Hootsuite also offers monitoring tools, analytics, mobile apps, and enterprise plans for companies with multiple users collaborating on social media marketing.

1. Involver Apps

Sometimes you have a great idea for integrating social media and marketing, like offering a Facebook sign-up to pre-order a new product, but don’t know how to construct it. Involver offers applications for many social media needs, helping business build embeddable forms, design Facebook 'welcome' pages, create Facebook HTML tabs, polls, and digital coupons, and more. Check out Involver’s applications to get some great promotional ideas for your business!

1. Listorious

The best way to gain followers on Twitter is to follow other users from your account. Listorious is a great tool for discovering thought leaders in your industry or region who you can follow on Twitter. Listorious lets you search by keywords and phrases and returns results for Twitter users focusing in those areas. The search results will show you account details like user biographies and number of followers for each account. Since Listorious integrates with your Twitter account, you can quickly follow other users on the fly as you're searching.

1. Buffer

A key component of social media marketing is finding and sharing content with your followers. Buffer integrates with your web browser, mobile phone, or favorite online reader apps to let you curate your favorite content in one place. If you see a link that you want to share, then you can save it to Buffer and craft or edit your Tweet or update that introduces the link. Then, Buffer will automatically schedule the content to post to your desired social media profiles later that day.

What are your favorite tools for streamlining social media marketing? Please share any helpful resources in the comments below!