Marketers and industry experts worldwide have proclaimed each year to be the “Year of Mobile” for about the last six years or so.  There’s no refuting the fact that we now live in a mobile and multi-screen world.  An optimized mobile presence is no longer an option for today’s marketers.  Here’s a look at key areas to consider when integrating mobile into your marketing mix. A Multi-Screen World There are three main screens potential customers are consuming digital content on: smartphones, tablets and PCs. Consumption patterns are different on each device.  For example, sma ..read more

For local marketers, finding your audience has always been a challenge. Incorporating geofencing into your campaigns can help solve this problem by honing in consumers already in your area. To begin, Geofencing  is a form of Location Based Marketing (LBM) that will trigger a response on mobile devices when they are within a targeted area. More simply put, businesses will alert your mobile devices when you are near their location. For example, when you are in an Uber or Lyft, businesses on the map during your ride appear and disappear as you near them, spreading awareness of services you p ..read more

Companies across the world have long been looking for creative new ways to market their brands. In 2021, Marketing teams must ask themselves, “how can we reach out and find our customers in a socially distant world?” A Chinese video streaming company, Bilibili, found a unique way to do just that. Using thousands of drones, Bilibili staged a colorful light show advertising the one year anniversary of a video game release. The show culminated in a gigantic QR code floating in the night sky above Shanghai. When scanned the QR code linked to the company’s homepage, driving a unique form of referra ..read more

Email may not get as much attention as social media but it remains the most important communication tool for marketers. This is especially true when you consider email users are expected to hit 3.9 billion by the end of this year and 4.4 billion by 2023 (Statista, 2019).  Email marketing has significantly evolved in the past four decades and it is still going strong with persistent advancements in the field. Emails in 2020 will be accessible for all users, as well as machines, easy to scan & digest and customized for each individual subscriber. This will enable you to reach, connect and st ..read more

So far in this series, we’ve discussed how to use Google Analytics to track and view user behavior on the site as well as how to measure goals with Analytics and Google Tag Manager. This last entry will focus on another tool from Google called Firebase which, among other things, brings Google’s robust tracking capabilities to mobile apps. If you don’t have an app: don’t worry. Firebase provides plenty of support for hosting apps and setting up payment systems as well, so as long as you have a developer build the application, Google will facilitate the rest. In this article, we will focus on ho ..read more

What is Google’s Mobile-First Index? Google has recently announced their decision to switch to a mobile first index because of continued growth and dominance of mobile search and internet usage. Currently, Google has just one index which is based on desktop sites, the Googlebot crawls the desktop site and gathers data and information about the desktop and mobile site, but does not create a new index based on mobile sites. With the new mobile-first index, rather than basing the index on desktop sites, Google will be basing the index on mobile sites. Google will begin using the mobile version of ..read more

With the rise of smartphones has come increased mobile searches, and 2015 marked the first year when mobile searches out-numbered desktop searches in the U.S. Within our always-on, connected world, mobile’s impact has destroyed the linear customer journey, changed the way users make purchase decisions and has been very good at creating micro-moments. In fact: 82% of smartphone users use a search engine when looking for a local business1 50% of consumers who conduct a local search on their smartphone visit a store within a day, and 18% of those searches lead to a purchase within a day.2 Thi ..read more

Hi guys! As the sun sets on day two of MozCon 2015 (OK, not literally; I’m so far north that it looks like early afternoon from my hotel window), I have pulled together the six insights from the day’s lectures that I found most tantalizing (and I hope you’ll agree). You’ll notice that I sourced these six points from only three of today’s speakers; this isn’t because none of the others had anything to say (far from it), but because my dual interests in 1. the web’s larger trends, and 2. the tactics I can use on behalf of my clients tends to keep these posts cleaved to the hard-data stuff, and t ..read more

Anvil’s Paid Media Team weighs in on the current status and long-term plan of the Facebook Exchange There is a lot of speculation around the longevity of the Facebook Exchange and if it will continue to be supported by the social media giant. Industry insiders speculate that it will be shut down in 2015, while other vendors with close ties to Facebook say that it depends on who you talk to. According to them, the overall consensus within Facebook’s walls is that the FBX is “full steam ahead” for the foreseeable future. What does this all mean for marketers? Anvil’s paid media team has the pros ..read more

Leaders across social media, digital and content marketing descended upon San Diego in late March for Social Media Marketing World 2015. With sessions covering the latest marketing tactics across major social platforms, advance paid media techniques, video marketing strategies, content marketing and mobile, attendees came away armed with the latest industry information to advance in their social media marketing efforts. Beginning with the keynote from Social Media Examiner founder Michael Stelzner, trends in social media marketing for 2015 were clearly defined. To remain competitive, brands wi ..read more