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News & analysis on digital marketing & analytics

Mr. Hymen Lipman, “The Father of Modern Content Editing” – This Day in SEO History: Vol. 4

By Steve Kozak | April 4, 2012

Welcome back for another educational and whacky edition of “This Day in SEO History!” Did you know that March 30th marks the 154th anniversary of the patent for a pencil featuring a built-in eraser, invented by Mr. Hymen Lipman in 1858?

I know what you’re thinking; Slymenstra Hymen was that woman (?) who used to sing and fire-dance for the heavy metal band, Gwar. Well, my friend – that is incorrect… Although she may have had a built-in-eraser attached somewhere to that costume…

Before Lipman invented the pencil-with-eraser, people were having big trouble when they created content. The SEO world owes Hymen a big shout-out because his content-editing tool was the beginning of word processing & content management systems. Today, online marketers edit website content to increase search engine rankings and to add-in strong keywords.

Check out This Day in SEO History: Vol. 4 – “The Father of Content Editing,” written and starring our own Father of Content, Daiv Whaley, and produced by the most rockin’ production intern in the world, Victoria Wilhelm.

Happy unofficial Annual Pencil Day, everybody!

Shoot us a comment below to give us your take on SEO History! And don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel. Thanks for watching, and stay tuned for more educational <and historical> content from Fathom!

Your Crash Course on Buyer Personas

By Caroline Bogart | April 3, 2012

In today’s competitive buyer-driven business world, it’s more important than ever to really understand your customers at a deeper level. That’s where buyer personas come in handy. But do you know what buyer personas are or how you can use them? And do you know why they’re important to incorporate into your online marketing efforts?

What is a buyer persona?

Not to be confused with a target market, a buyer persona is a group of people within a target market who share common demographics, problems, desires, motivations, goals and needs. Personas go beyond the basic demographics and help you get personal with customers.

Why are buyer personas important?

Personas help you develop and market content to someone rather than to everyone. Why is that important? Creating a piece of content that addresses the needs of everyone is difficult, if not impossible. While it might work in some instances, in most cases you won’t truly be able to connect, build trust and influence anyone if you’re writing for everyone. You need to be able to address specific needs of specific types of people individually.

How do you develop personas?

There are many different ways to develop personas and at Fathom, we’ve been developing personas based on four buying personalities: Methodical, Competitive, Spontaneous and Humanistic. No matter how you decide go about this, you’ll need to understand what each personas goals are when they come to your website, what they’re influenced by, what motivates them, as well as basic demographic information to help you visualize this person.

What do you do with personas?

Now that you’ve developed your personas, what are you supposed to do with them? Pretty much everything! Everything about your online marketing efforts can be tied to personas. Website content, social media outreach, calls to action, pay per click campaigns, email campaigns, video marketing, and more, can all use the help of personas.  With the right buyer personas identified, you can develop the targeted messages needed to help your business succeed.

Big Data, Big Hype? How To Harness It

By Jeff Herrmann | April 3, 2012

You need a full-blown process, team, partner to do it right. All aspects are critical.

 

Interest in “Big Data” is exploding. According to Google Insights, relative search volume for the term big data has increased steadily over the past year (see chart below). The high point was last Thursday when President Obama made his proclamation about big data.

 

There are lots of players in the mix, from storage and processing to boutique analytics firms and automation partners like Marketo.

Data analytics has been democratized. The access to and ability to process Big Data has opened up a big opportunity for commerce and industry. Naturally, the source of this ever-growing Big Data is the increasing volume of activity happening online.

However, my 15 years at The Nielsen Company taught me a profound respect for the quality of data and the rigorous methodology needed to make informed decisions. You need the right partners across the entire spectrum of this process.

Each player has a unique approach to apply to each part of the process; however, business owners need to keep in mind that it’s the results that matter—profitable revenue.

Below is a quick overview of what you need in place to execute a Big-Data strategy well.

1. First, a big driver of Big Data for business is a dynamic and consistently thoughtful inbound marketing strategy. Businesses must have great content, be optimized for search, and engage in a social media strategy to communicate with potential customers and generate leads. This process emits digital signals which are the critical inputs for the big-data movement. With this data you can then supercharge RPM (revenue performance management) platforms, e.g. by protecting organic search-engine rankings from drops associated with over-optimization.
2. Next, one has to collect all the signals—digital and even analog—to analyze and synthesize the data to develop insights leading to action.
3. Segmentation is next. Your insights must go beyond a binary measure of who’s hot and who’s not. Knowing your personas and identifying the state of buyer consideration leads you to step 4.
4. Targeting. You must develop custom messaging and enhanced treatment to continue nurturing or send buyers into a sales process for conversion. This output should also be continuously kicked back to refine #1.

The result
Following this process end-to-end with the right partners creates leads that convert and profitable revenue for marketing that even a CFO would love.

If you want more information, ping us to hear more about our new VisiOne 4CAST program.

Stay tuned: We’ll also soon be publishing a case study/white paper about a client’s success with Fathom’s results-driven predictive marketing in a heavily regulated and intensely competitive environment.

Affiliate Marketing – The Era of Making Money Online Has Evolved to Mobile & Tablets

By Courtney Demko | April 2, 2012

Tablet traffic increased 229% over the 2011 holiday season. Mobile devices are projected to outnumber humans in 2012. By 2016, Cisco predicts that there will be 10 billion mobile-connected devices around the world. As an affiliate, this should mean one thing to you: make sure all of your websites are mobile-friendly. If they aren’t, you are missing out on traffic and potential sales.

Here are 3 reasons why mobile affiliate marketing is rapidly growing:

• Creativity with conversion paths – Mobile devices create the ability to connect with users instantly via phone/text message. For example, instead of using a lead form for car insurance offers why not run a pay-per-call offer where a user can just click the number and contact an agent instantly?
• Opportunities – Unlike search (dominated by Google) or social (dominated by Facebook), mobile is still very fragmented with dozens of self-serve ad networks. In addition, there are a ton of different ad types out there, including display, interstitials, and more!
• Supply outgrowing demand – While traffic sources like search and social have stagnated, mobile is being fueled by faster mobile data transfers. Fortunately for affiliates, this means traffic will remain cheap while big brands struggle to decide if mobile is right for them.

We are looking for affiliates who have the drive and talent to succeed via mobile: Apply Here

Fathom Now Offers Interactive Video Experience – INGAGE: Interactive Engagement

By Steve Kozak | March 30, 2012

Did you know that Fathom now offers an interactive video solution? We call it Fathom INGAGE: “Interactive Engagement.” You may be asking yourself, “What, exactly, is an interactive video?”

Interactive videos are clickable video players that allow the viewer to choose an individual path throughout the video, leading to heightened view times up to 5X  longer than linear business video, and increased conversions by an average of 35%.

So, how is this done? Interactive clickable objects within the player itself allow the user to choose the next preferred video to view. And not only do these buttons provide viewers with complete control of their video destiny, but they also can be hyperlinked to external websites, such as product pages, checkout pages and even landing pages.

And the best part? These applications are designed to convert! The implementation of form fields within the player itself tie leads directly to the video!
Through detailed analytics, you’ll gain valuable insight into audience viewing behavior, such as number of views and average length of time spent watching.

You’ll access critical-path and decision-point information, such as:

• Percentage of viewers who requested more information
• How many users stopped viewing from each individual clip
• The most and least popular path taken from each clip
• (Most importantly) Conversion rates per clip.

Check out the interactive player above, and shoot us a comment below to let us know how you think an interactive video solution could help enhance the user experience of your site! And don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel. Thanks for watching, and stay tuned for more educational content from Fathom!