Karissa Bell says, “Facebook is redesigning the way its iOS users share content from third-party apps inside of Facebook. The social network showed off a new share extension for iOS Wednesday that makes it easier for people to control what they are sharing and who they share updates with. Share extensions are used by third-party apps to allow their users to share content back to Facebook. While this functionality has existed within iOS for some time, the experience up until now hasn’t always been great, Facebook product manager Alyssa Levitz explained. “We knew we had a lot... [...]

Siobhan O’Rorke says, “It’s a tough world out there for small businesses, and making your name known to other people and industry influencers can feel like an uphill battle. Well-crafted networking emails can help you make those valuable connections. The only problem is that everyone knows that—influential people can receive hundreds of networking mails per week (or even per day), and they won’t have time to reply to everyone. The key is to stand out, but without being pushy. You want to build a genuine working relationship, so forget any notions of standardized robotic emails. They... [...]

Ben Davis says, “Cross-device conversions can now be reported at keyword-level in Google’s search, display and shopping ad products. This means advertisers can optimise for cross-device conversions within their automated bid strategies, for example looking at cost per acquisiton (CPA) across mobile, tablet and desktop. What does this mean in the context of other recent Google product updates? Marketers will further understand the impact of mobile Mobile searchers now represent the majority in a number of markets. Yet the device is under-represented when comparing conversions with desktop. If... [...]

Charlie Gilkey says, “Have you ever noticed that your content marketing activities tend to amount to doing the same types of tasks over and over? At the process level, there’s not much that changes from one blog post to the next or from one social media campaign to the next, though the content itself may change. Whether or not you’ve noticed it, your content marketing activities are a collection of workflows. I hinted at this in my last post, on how to delegate content marketing tasks. Now, let’s take a closer look at workflows, because it’s a game-changer when you shift from thinking... [...]

Rebecca Maynes says, “You are exposed to an average of 362 online display ads a day. How close are you to buying anythingwhen you see those ads? Online display ads have been around for over 20 years. They’re nothing new. But over the past 2 decades, the content, format, and messaging of display ads have changed dramatically—because they have had to! The click-through rate of that first banner ad in 1994 was 44%. CTRs have steadily declined, and were sitting at around 0.1% in 2012 for standard display ads (video and rich media excluded), according to DoubleClick. Advertisers had to do... [...]

Jessica Lorenz says, “Email marketers know that the subject line plays a vital role in the open and clickthrough rates of an email. Subject lines are the first micro-yes that a subscriber agrees to in order to continue up the sales funnel. For many, writing a powerful subject line with value-packed words and a sense of urgency will single-handedly increase open rates and lead to higher clickthrough. However, with marketing emails rendering differently across different email clients — such as Gmail or Outlook — content and images often get corrupted from the marketer’s initial concept... [...]

Doug Davidoff says, “The alignment of an organization’s sales and marketing efforts is a crucial strategic imperative for companies that desire sustainable growth. Despite the evidence of improved business performance, it’s still a rarity to find an organization that has and maintains full alignment. The good news is that the issue is getting far more attention than ever before, and more organizations are making progress. A major cause for the overall lack of progress is that while the issue of alignment is getting more strategic attention from executives, it’s still getting very... [...]

Jack Simpson says, “Any content that prompts some kind of emotion is valuable, but if you can make people laugh you’ve got a really good chance of being liked as a brand.   Being funny is a fine art, however, and in the world of marketing the thin line between comedy genius and cringe-inducement can be a dangerous one to tread. KFC’s recent re-enactment of pro surfer Mike Fanning’s shark attack prompted so much backlash from his family that the brand was forced to take it down. Perhaps the Manning family is simply devoid of fun, but there is every chance that KFC did indeed overstep... [...]

Jennifer Slegg says, “If you’re a webmaster, you probably received one of those infamous “Googlebot cannot access CSS and JS files on example.com” warning letters that Google sent out to seemingly every SEO and webmaster. This was a brand new alert from Google, although we have been hearing from the search engine about the need to ensure all resources are unblocked—including both JavaScript and CSS. There was definite confusion around these letters, supported by some of the reporting in Google Search Console. Here’s what you need to know about Google’s desire to see these... [...]

Greg Sterling says, “A new report from the Winterberry Group and IAB, “Data As Competitive Advantage,” explores the role of “big data” within organizations. While interviews and survey respondents polled for the report find data generally to be a “competitive advantage,” the results of the research overall present a more mixed picture. According to the report, marketers and publishers are having the greatest success in using first-party data to better understand their own customers. However, use of data has been less successful in advancing core business objectives (e.g., growing... [...]