The Leapup Compass
(Marketing secrets revealed here)
2022 Digital Advertising Outlook: Stricter Privacy Rules, Reduced App Data Sharing and the Demise of Cookies
In February 2022, Facebook’s (aka Meta’s) stock price took a nosedive in part to reaction from the news that the number of users to the platform has plateaued. But that’s not Meta’s only problem. Privacy policy and regulatory trends are also impacting ad sales revenue...
How to Revamp Your Marketing Under COVID-19: Advice for CEOs
One of the many priorities facing CEOs faced with the COVID-19 outbreak is adjusting their marketing plans for 2020 and 2021. This shutdown has been more immediate and widespread than the Great Depression, the 2008-2009 recession and the dot com bust before that. Many...
Google’s Mobile-First Indexing: What It Means For Your Business
Google has been transitioning site and content indexing to be “mobile-first” since 2018. What this means is that the content displaying on the mobile version of your site will now serve as the basis for Google’s index versus the old desktop-version based index....
Google SERP Ranking Positions: The Increasing Importance of Page One
Despite the mindshare now devoted to social media, there’s no doubt that organic traffic is still the number one source of new visits and new customers to most brand websites. So the importance of staying on page one for the search engine results relevant to your...
To App – or not to App? That is the question…
By Annie Ellicott Many of my clients are asking “shouldn’t we be building a mobile application”? Research from Localytics highlights the high attrition rate of new users for apps. The Localytics survey results showed that 58 percent of users “churn,” or become...
Power to the Consumer: Why User Intent Matters More Than Ever
Do you wonder why social media usage and texting is chewing up smartphone screen time? Why the hottest tech trends are wearables, self-driving cars and virtual reality? Why sales of selfie sticks and hoverboards are on the upswing? Does this look like a pattern to...
The Top 10 Marketing Tools I Can’t Live Without
In the ever changing, every evolving, revolutionary times we live in if you are a marketing professional in 2019, it is challenging to say the least just finding out about (let alone prioritizing between) the latest and greatest marketing tools. From subscriptions to...
Ad Relevance Scores, User Engagement and Advertising ROI
Any marketing professional steeped in the details of online advertising and SEM needs to understand the impact of ad relevancy in determining the cost and ultimately the return-on-investment of an advertising spend. Ad relevancy like content relevancy is another...
Search Ranking Factors: What Matters NOW and Where is Search Headed?
I get asked frequently, "what factors are driving search engine ranking and results TODAY and what about tomorrow?" With so many (200) factors now in the algorithm, the increase in Millennials use of social networks for discovery (vs use of search engines) and the...
Mobile Responsiveness: 5 Best Practices In Mobile Design and User Experience
Since 2015, Google algorithm updates have factored a site's mobile responsiveness into the elements determining search engine ranking position (SERP). While this only affects mobile search results and in effect, rewards sites for large text not requiring...
Measuring the True Business Value of Social Media Engagement & Social Selling
There’s little doubt that measuring the impact of social media marketing on business ROI - leads, sales and revenue - is a hot topic of conversation. Numerous researchers have found that tying social media engagement to ROI is challenging to say the least for...
Using Streaming Video for Masterful Marketing
The fragmentation of the media market notched up one more level as “broadcast” now embraces anyone with any number of Facebook Live, Youtube Live or other streaming apps on their phone. From the bite-sized providers of up-to-the-minute headlines from NowThisNews or...
Building Thriving Online Communities: 5 Best Practices With Proven Results
Having been at the marketing helm during the transition of Women.com from a career women’s site to a mainstream portal for women of all ages and backgrounds, I learned a lot about attracting visitors, creating an audience, engaging segments by interest and developing...
The Evolving Behavior of Consumers Searching Online
I am a huge fan of all research showing how technology is affecting consumer habits, preferences and consumption of content online. Having witnessed how women adapted to the internet at Women.com and later doing research with a client around how different generations...
5 Amazing Tips: Marketing Via Online Video
The consumption of online video continues to grow at an accelerated rate fueled by increased penetration of smartphones, lower costs for video editing solutions, increased adoption of social media and streaming technologies by consumers and proliferation of video...
The Growing Trend Toward Social Search
By Annie Ellicott As the ever-evolving complexity of SEO continues to escalate, one important trend worth noting is the increasing shift of consumer behavior from using search engines for queries to using social networks for search. YouTube is now the second largest...
Advertising Trends Worth Watching : The Latest On The Revolution
By Annie Ellicott Anyone who has been paying attention knows that marketing, as we once knew it, is gone, gone, gone. From the banner to the cookie, from QR codes to the impression, so much has just come – and GONE. Entire social networks...
Successful Inbound Marketing For SMB’s (aka Small – Medium Sized Businesses)
By Annie Ellicott If you are a small or medium business, how are you using “inbound marketing” to drive qualified traffic back to your site for leads and sales conversions? Enterprise businesses are able to tap into pools of current customer relationships to mine...
Why Video WORKS As a Marketing Medium
By Annie Ellicott Everyone recognizes the increasing influence of video in our lives. We have all become avid consumers as YouTube, Vimeo and other platforms for sharing have grown, new formats have evolved (e.g 6 second videos on Vine), video advertising has exploded...
How to Hire A Social Media Intern or Assistant Without Kicking Yourself Afterwards
By Annie Ellicott My clients are ALL in need of more hands on deck on the marketing front. Many have decided to take on part time or fulltime help to resource their increasing demand for daily support on the social media front. From responding to customer questions,...
“Not Provided”: How to Grapple with Google Hiding Organic Keywords
By Annie Ellicott Back in October of 2011, Google began to hide the keywords from visibility to site owners for any visits to sites by users logged into their Google accounts. More recently, on September 23rd 2013, Google turned OFF the switch entirely for ALL organic...
Content Curation: Let the Games Begin!
By Annie Ellicott A key element to inbound marketing today is becoming an influential voice in your industry. Think bees to honey...with multiple "flavors" of honey. No longer is producing a superior product or creating a more dominant distribution strategy enough to...
HTML 5 and SEO: Why Should You Care?
By Annie Ellicott You’ve probably been hearings about Html 5 which began being adopted by web developers a couple of years ago… What is Html 5 and how is it different from today’s version of html? The last version of Html (4.01) was launched in 1999 so this new...
Mobile Responsive Design: The Pro’s and the Con’s
By Annie Ellicott Almost a year ago, Google announced its preference for responsively designed web sites, allowing sharing of SEO value of desktop-delivered content with mobile-delivered content. Responsive web design is all the rage in the mobile site developer realm...
5 “Do’s and Don’ts” When Designing and Delivering a Winning Content Strategy
By Annie Ellicott I could have titled this blog post “it’s all about the relationship” because when it comes down to it, that little statement just says it all. A content strategy is useless if it is not relevant, timely and targeted. Think of what your close friends...
Facebook Advertising: Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down?
By Annie Ellicott Update: April 11, 2013 Since I last wrote about Facebook advertising, the social media site has launched a number of new advertising products allowing targeting of Facebook users by platform (mobile-only and desktop-only ads). Yesterday, their...
Data, Data, Data: What’s a Girl To Do?
By Annie Ellicott Hubspot recently released their Top 20 Marketing Trends for 2013 and #14 is “Marketing Technology Evolves”. Not quite revolutionary in concept… however what the author (CTO Dharmesh Shah) points out is that with the porting and syndicating of content...
Is Google’s Disavow Tool a WOW?
By Annie Ellicott Natural links = Good. Unnatural/Artificial/Paid links = Bad. In mid October, Google finally released (after BING interestingly), their new Disavow tool. This tool allows site owners (and yes, you must be at the admin level of “site owner” in...
Five Favorite Tech Friends for Travel Businesses
By Annie Ellicott Editors pics! These platforms provide strong opportunities in both traffic, SEO authority and relevance for anyone with a stand-alone travel brand looking to increase visibility and “shareability” online. Get found @: Pinterest Leveraging the...
3 Ways to Slay the Social Media Beast
By Annie Ellicott Real simple, social media? NOT! I was at one of my favorite social media conferences with Chris Brogan earlier this year and I just have to say, it’s not a small challenge to wrap your head around all the apps, tools, platforms, measurement...
Is SEO dead?
By Annie Ellicott That was the question posed by Ken Krogue in his July 2012 post in Forbes “The Death Of SEO: The Rise of Social, PR, And Real Content” which stirred up so much controversy among marketers this July. Actually, I take that back. It wasn’t a question,...
Storify
Storify is so much fun. Watch what stories are floating up in the social world, monitor trends, get creative and create your own tableau of hot topics you want to wake up the world with. Fun and utilitarian. What could be better?
Klout
Track your brand's klout score across the social web to surpass your competitors and ensure you are keeping up with the search algorithm's social tracking for SERP. What's your score?
Followerwonk
A useful and powerful tool to track your Twitter followers, analyze their behavior and find influencers in your space. Recently acquired by SEOMoz...hint, hint.
Search Engine Land
Danny Sullivan's blog on all things search gives you the inside track on the latest trends from one of the web's best and first experts in SEO. Read on!
Marketing VOX
The latest news regarding advertising strategies, brand campaigns, technical marketing enhancements, marketing events and vehicle ROI from editors who really know their stuff. Check it out...
Social Media Examiner
A straightforward and tremendously valuable source for research, tips, tools and best practice recommendations for all things social. Follow them and don't miss a social media beat!
Take the PLUNGE …unlock the value of the social web
Like. Tweet. Link. Publish. Let Leapup help you adjust as the world of social networks, media and apps are changing your consumers' learning and communication pathways and habits. Learn more... Today, we need to evolve as marketeers with this new world and shift our...
Fear NOT …embrace technology for better marketing
Marketing's new BFF? IT. Yep. Technology. Gotta have it. Learn more... Being in San Francisco at the tech epicenter, we've been watching the convergence of technology and marketing increase. Search algorithms now factor in more and more signals based on tags, coding...
4 Reasons Why Waiting to Go Mobile is a BAD Idea
Once the new smartphones got really smart and their technology improved to provide superior display of browser-based content, it seemed like the pressure to create mobile sites eased a bit. But did it? Not really. Now that nearly half of all mobile web users ages...