Henry Thomas

Digital marketing, simply put, cannot be ignored. No one is disputing the power of effective marketing. An effectively executed marketing and advertising campaign can serve the needs of any business and increase the demand for the product or service that they offer. But times have changed, and while the need for marketing is still essential, where that marketing is most effective has changed a lot. If you want to go where the people are, you need to be active online. The influence of the digital landscape, or 'cyberspace,' has been steadily growing since the 1990's, and now, just a few decades later, it is a major virtual environment for the vast majority of people on the planet. Social media, streaming content, and the ease of creating or consuming digital content have made the internet the place to be. So if you want to market to your audience online, how should you do it? In this article, we explore the top trends digital marketers should know or pr...

Social media marketing is thriving as more entrepreneurs opt for addressing a huge audience on various social media platforms. Here we give some noteworthy trends to make the most from social media marketing.   2018 was a landmark year for both technology and the social media domain. On one hand, emerging technologies like IoT and AI have evolved to strengthen their positions in the corporate world. And on the other hand, the social media network has flourished to touch our lives more effectively. As we are in the year 2020, it is fair to assume that the latter will become stronger than ever. All major social media channels have got many milestones in their journey from a pastime to necessity in society. Today, the corporate world wants to leverage the benefits of the mighty social media platform through social media marketing techniques. And therefore, it will be interesting to make a list of top social media marketing trends to watch in 2020 and beyond. 1. ...

Email marketing is a tried and true digital marketing channel. As other marketing trends come and go, email marketing remains a steady source of traffic and conversions.  Digital marketers know the power of email marketing to deliver results at lower costs than most other channels. But because most of us have been doing email marketing for so long, it can be difficult, at times, to drum up inspiration for new ideas. Over time campaigns become flat, content gets stale, and email performance begins to suffer. In order to keep that from happening, you must constantly innovate and evolve. To help get the wheels turning, here are 10 ideas to inspire or improve your next email marketing campaign.  1 - Personalize It seems like everyone is looking for ways to personalize the web experiences of their users. While personalizing website content can be a complex and daunting task, personalizing email content is quite straightforward by comparison.  T...

As the web’s oldest form of advertising, display ads have long been a standby for brands. However, over the last several years, consumers have grown increasingly fatigued with irrelevant and intrusive banner and popup ads, diminishing ad impact and ROI.   So how do you boost the power of display ads? By combining native formats, audience targeting and artificial intelligence, display ads can become an effective tool for amplifying your brand and achieving conversions, especially when combined with search campaigns. I’ve outlined some tips and insights to help you optimize your display advertising. Blend in with native formats One of the best ways to boost the impact of your display ads (and avoid reader blindness to banner ads) is to use native digital displays. Native ads appeal to readers because they blend into the core user experience by matching the look and feel of display ads to the media in which they appear – such as in social media or as recommende...

In an effort to provide advertisers with more accurate and granular ad targeting options in Display & Video 360, Google will be launching a revamped experience for environment and position targeting settings on August 26, 2019. The changes will include updated targeting settings when creating or editing items individually or in bulk, updated dimensions in Reporting and a new version of Structured Data Files (SDF) to support the targeting overhaul. While the same targeting options will continue to exist, they will appear with the new targeting controls come August. Updated environment targeting will be focused on web- or app-serving environments. The device- and position-related options will be relocated from environment targeting to a different targeting control panel. A new position targeting setting will group together all controls related to an ad’s position on a screen or in content in a new position targeting control. The position-related settings that ...

Nestlé, McDonald’s and Virgin Media have signed on to be part of a pilot program by JICWEBS to test whether or not blockchain technology can accurately deliver “end-to-end supply chain transparency and clarity” on digital ad spend. “Blockchain is a new technology being tested in many diverse industries. It’s great to be one of the first brands to gain insight into it potential in programmatic,” said Nestlé’s Head of Media Communications Steven Pollack. Why we should care The digital advertising industry has suffered from transparency challenges since its start. From programmatic ad fraud to brand safety issues, programmatic ad buyers are left to trust a network of ad tech vendors and platforms that is difficult to track with limited oversight. By implementing a blockchain — or distributed ledger technology (DTS) — JICWEBS aims to solve the most rampant challenges within the digital ad industry. “This technology offers us the opportunity to see a truly transparent...

The concept of “local search” has always been somewhat ambiguous in terms of how it’s defined, how it functions and who uses it. Broadly speaking, local search helps users locate nearby services or retailers based on physical location. Over the years, local search has improved with the widespread adoption of mobile devices and the ever-increasing accuracy of geo location services. But the lines have always been blurred. For example, does the local branch or store of a national or international corporation count as a “local” provider? And now, with the advent of one-day or even same-day delivery by giants like Amazon or WalMart, is “local” even a meaningful differentiator at all? These and other issues are the subject of The Evolving Landscape Of Local Search panel, taking place at SMX Advanced on Wednesday, June 5 in Seattle. In this session, you’ll learn that traditional SEO techniques are still integral for reaching locally targeted audiences, but other factors...

Google’s John Mueller has stated that Google’s broad core updates have not been targeting health sites. But there is a perception that some health related sites tend to be sensitive to Google updates. What kinds of changes can affect health sites while not specifically targeting health sites? User Satisfaction Metrics Google has a long history of using their log files to help deduce what kinds of web pages satisfy users for certain kinds of search queries. Factors like click through rate were used in the past for quality control, for understanding what users want. Rank Brain and Neural Matching Over the past few years Google introduced Neural Matching and Rank Brain to help Google better understand search queries (neural matching) and to help Google understand web pages better by matching pages to concepts (rank brain). In my opinion, a better understanding of what users mean when they ask a query could affect health related sites. Health topics can be divided ...

As SEO professionals, we preach to our clients and stakeholders that great SEO implementation is meant to satisfy search intent. So why don’t we bring that same logic into our location page optimization? This local SEO location page checklist covers several possible questions a website guest may have when learning about a local business. 1. NAP NAP stands for name, address, and phone number. Your NAP should be an exact match copy on your location page, Google My Business profile, and other citations. Many SEO professionals (and Google) claim that exact match isn’t as important as it used to be, while others claim that it still is. 2. Photos Everyone knows that photos are important for location pages, but so many businesses are missing important opportunities with their photos. Interior Photos This should be a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many location pages are missing interior photos. Interior photos help guests get a realistic expectation ...

SAN FRANCISCO — Discovery is a big theme at this year’s Google Marketing Live, its annual event to unveil new ads products, held in San Francisco this year. And several new ad units announced today are designed to address top-of-funnel consumer scenarios. Discovery ads,  Gallery ads  and expanded reach for Showcase Shopping ads were all unveiled at GML. These formats share the fact that they’re all highly visual, appear across multiple Google properties and are all automated, like Universal App Campaigns (now App Campaigns). Universal App Campaigns first launched in 2015 and have emerged as a model for all of Google’s newer automated formats. Google also announced a redesigned and improved Google Shopping experience. Last week, we reported on updates to the Google Ads app and new inventory for Local campaigns. Discovery ads Discovery ads are native ads that appear in multiple Google feed environments. Google’s VP of Product Mana...

There are lots of moving pieces in PPC campaigns and that can make it challenging to pinpoint the cause when performance changes. An investigation into the cause of the change can either be top-down or bottom-up. Here we’ll cover both ways to investigate the root cause and we’ll also share tools that make this process faster. The difficulty with investigating PPC performance changes What makes it so hard to know why results in PPC change is that all ads run through an auction every time a search happens and every auction has different parameters — like where the searcher is located, what time it is, what else they’ve been researching, and much more. Every time the advertiser makes a change to settings, it changes how they participate in the auction and that can lead to different outcomes for the main KPIs. A few examples: The advertiser changes their bid and this causes a change in performance because their ad is now shown for a different set of queries. The advertiser en...

Do you really need to pay a fortune to find the best SEO & PPC keywords for your business? All of them differ in features, amounts and sources of data, and, definitely, prices. But which of them do you really need? And, most importantly, do you have to fork out hundreds of dollars a month, or is there a way to cut the costs? Today we’ll explore 8 of the best free keyword research tools. Each of them best fits a  specific keyword research task  and  does the job no worse than their paid alternatives .   1. Rank Tracker To find the most ample list of keyword variations and analyze their SEO profitability. When to use:   Your best SEO keywords are often not the most obvious ones. To find real keyword gems, you need to dig out all the possible variations from multiple data sources. And this is where Rank Tracker comes in especially handy with  23 different keyword research tools  inside it: Suggestions from Google, B...