Online Marketing Madness — Strategic Reads for January 2017
This is part of a regular series of PlusROI posts that provide a collection of links to useful marketing resources and actionable strategies to help you grow your business. Curated by Nevin Thompson (@NevinYYJ), Rian Bowden and Rob Cooper (@robertecooper).
The Best Moz Posts of 2016
Moz is one of the most highly-regarded and popular sources of news and up-to-date resources for online marketers, and their “best of 2016” article should not be missed.
There is a wealth of links here, including the top Moz posts by unique visits, top posts by number of comments, and top posts by “thumbs up.” If you want to know what SEO practices are no longer effective in 2017, you can learn it here. The single-most important tip for improving web traffic? It’s here, too.
Learn how to choose a domain name, the latest title-tag guidelines or how to automate Google Analytics reporting with Google Sheets. There are dozens of useful links here that well help you up your online marketing game.
Have You Been Affected By Facebook’s “Erroneous Metrics”?
In the final months of 2016 Facebook made four separate announcements about providing advertisers with “erroneous metrics” to measure the impact of their marketing activities.
Facebook’s miscalculations have big implications if you rely on Facebook for advertising and customer engagement. Without the accurate data, it’s impossible to really tell if your marketing efforts on Facebook are paying off.
On top of that, Facebook is frequently criticized for being secretive about how it calculates its metrics… or even which metrics were bogus and needed to be fixed.
However, Marketing Land has created a list of everything Facebook has admitted about its measurement errors. Check it and see if you have been affected.
LinkedIn Launches “Sponsored Inmail”
LinkedIn has launched “Sponsored Inmail”, a paid feature that lets marketers connect with LinkedIn’s 476 million users in order to send unsolicited messages and advertising.
Sponsored InMail relies on LinkedIn’s InMail messaging system, and offers both self-serve and full-service campaigns. This new ad offering from LinkedIn should be of interest to anyone doing B2B marketing because both open and click-through rates are relatively high.
Will You Soon Be Hiring Bots to Engage With Customers?
“Chat bots” are running amok on WeChat, a popular Chinese social network that’s sort of like Facebook.
On WeChat, chat bots, software programs designed to simulate conversation with human users, like, follow, and even comment on articles to inflate numbers on behalf of companies and scammers. In some cases, these chat bots even build real relationships with humans.
While Facebook doesn’t permit this sort of behavior, as artificial intelligence improves, the use of chat bots in marketing is inevitable.
So, what challenges and opportunities do chat bots present for online marketers?
Got a Question About Online Marketing?
We’re always happy to answer quick questions about pnline marketing – just fire us a note!
