CaliberPulse

Nearly 90 percent of U.S. households have access to the Internet. Two-thirds of homes with Internet access have Wi-Fi network. More than half of Americans 12 years and older have a Facebook page. These are just some of the highlights that Arbitron, a radio rating and media research company, and Edison Research released in the results of their recent survey, Navigating Digital Platforms. The survey combines a cross section of previous research spanning thirteen years of inquiries into traditional, new, and digital media preferences and user habits. Here are the three top takeaway trends, discoveries, and significant implications that will affect marketing decisions today and tomorrow.

To market effectively to a target audience, organizations must not only capture the attention of the audience, but do so with a message that resonates with their specific age group and characteristics. Every generation has its own distinct set of characteristics that are developed from their social environment in their prevenient years. Research has shown that each generational group has different values and beliefs regarding family, career, work/life balance, training and development, loyalty, gender roles, and expectations of a leader. Marketers should note that these generational preferences and social values influence purchasing behavior as much as common demographic factors such as income, education, and gender.

When delivering a branded message, the goal is to reinforce the image of your company or client. Using a consistent set of graphics, layout choices, and color palette in messaging reassures the receiver that what they are receiving is genuine and the message can be trusted. The simplest way to reinforce a brand online is to use the company's logo. Using a brand’s logo throughout the company’s social media and website helps to establish an official presence, even if the overall look and feel of the sites are ultimately dictated by the social sites. Using consistent branding via website, Facebook and Twitter pages emphasizes to visitors that what they are experiencing is an authentic message that can be trusted. So, what happens when one of those messaging venues suddenly strips away the look and feel of the brand?

We have yet another answer for the ever-present challenge of how to stimulate more interaction on Facebook. Facebook recently introduced a new feature that allows page administrators to build interaction by polling. This added feature allows social site managers to not only survey their fans to find useful information, but it can also be used to reinforce message strategy via questions.

Though our vehicles of communication have changed, proper etiquette remains a key to successful interactions. In this three-part series, we will provide tips to help you become more etiquette savvy with Facebook, Twitter, and sharing tools such as Digg, Delicious and Reddit. In the first post of the series, we offered suggestions for managing your Facebook profile and tips to keep you on the appropriate social networking etiquette path. In this second post of the series, we will offer the etiquette guidance to follow for your Twitter presence.

Effective marketing professionals are constantly monitoring and questioning how they are spending their marketing budget, if their messaging is reaching the right audience, and how to develop ways to track the effectiveness of their tactics. With the availability of web statistics – Google Analytics for websites, Hootsuite Analytics for Twitter, and Insights for Facebook – a business is able to see who is viewing their online marketing content, how often they visit the site, and even how long they stayed on the site. Measuring the effectiveness of offline marketing can be more difficult. To gauge the effectiveness of offline advertising (print ads, brochures, postcards, etc.) marketers can create ways to track their reach, similar to what is being done with internet marketing.

Newspaper layoffs; One reporter on three beats; The journalism landscape has changed and the practice of public relations has to change with it. These days getting a lead story comes down to relationships. Or, does it? Perhaps it comes down to seeing the right lead at the right time, to putting yourself and your client in the way of opportunity. PR pros must be more “plugged in” than ever before. HARO will help. HARO, or Help A Reporter Out, has changed the way public relations professionals pitch journalists. Over 5,000 journalists nationwide use HARO to locate experts for on-air interviews, article quotes, and more via an email blast distributed to over 56,000 resources three times a day. The best part: HARO is free.

A press release is often considered a tool used to inform members of the media about an event, update, or new information that would make a useful story for their readers. While this is certainly true, a press release is also content on the internet that can be used to draw people searching for certain keywords and phrases to your website. Search engine optimization (SEO) isn’t just for the text embedded in a website. All communications, including press releases, can be “tagged” with key words to receive priority placement in organic searches and therefore drive users to your message and content. A press release can be optimized for searches by including key words and phrases and adding relevant links to the text.

JC Penney recently got its proverbial hand slapped by Google and has been banished to the bottom of organic search result listings. The company’s website was utilizing practices that while not illegal, are considered unethical in the practice of online search methods. These unethical practices are known as “black-hat” tactics, and while they can boost organic search rankings temporarily, they can also hurt the brand and reputation. Presumably such a well-known brand would have experts on their team that would know better than to engage in these strategies and only use “white-hat” or universally accepted practices. However, the company claims they were unaware anything unethical was taking pl

The Caliber team recently participated in a half-day virtual conference by Vocus, titled: “Social Media. So What?” One of the keynote speakers, Scott Stratten, gave an insightful talk reminding us that every employee is a marketer, and engaging with customers online improves your brand enormously. Stratten’s views on marketing inspired many industry professionals, including our friend and respected colleague, Abbie S. Fink. Today, we are happy to share her guest blog post, which provides some thoughtful insight on Stratten’s new book, “UnMarketing.”

96% of visitors to a website don’t become customers or engage during their first visit. How do you bring them back? The old advertising adage used to be that a potential customer needed to hear, read, and/or see your message three times before they engage in your product or service. The latest statistic is that it can take up to seven digital interactions with people before they become a customer. How can you speed up this process? By retargeting, also called retracking or remarketing (by Google). Retargeting is an online marketing technique that focuses on people who visit a website. When a user visits a website, a cookie tags a code from the site and is placed on the visitor’s browser to allow an advertiser to target that consumer as they interact online. For example, if someone visits Overstock.com and places something in a cart but leaves the site without purchasing it, a cookie is placed on the visitor’s browser. That user may find that while visiting another site, an ad for Overstock appears featuring the very item they placed in the cart. The next time they see an Overstock ad on another site it may even offer that same item at a discounted price.

Research on eco-marketing has shown that women and men receive “green” messaging very differently. For marketers promoting green products, it is important to note this key challenge to creating messaging. Let’s take a brief look at consumer perceptions on the “green movement,” and why marketers must make note of these major incongruities. According to a recent survey from Crowd Science’s Just Ask!, women are the primary household spenders (80-85 percent of retail consumer goods) and prefer to be spoken to as a caretaker concerned about the fate of their environment. Unlike most men, women are driven by product reviews, real life improvements, and what it means to them and their families to live a sustainable lifestyle.