Lessons From Pet-Care Firm's Content Marketing

We help many pet care and animal welfare clients with direct marketing, and we'll be expanding our knowledge of market needs at the upcoming Animal Care Expo, March 29-April 1 in New Orleans. So we thought it especially timely to highlight a recent Direct Marketing News article about the content marketing success story of PetRelocation, a pet moving and travel service. After trying generic keyword and pay-per-click campaigns, PetRelocation decided to set up a content forum, using tools from Oracle Marketing Cloud, to address pet owner concerns, explains the DM News story. Great for customer relations, but it did a lot more. The marketing team culled popular answers from the forum to post directly on the website, for a boost to organic search results. The increase in online traffic and leads actually allowed the company to eliminate its pay-per-click ad spending. The content forum also gathered valuable testimonials that spurred lead-to-conversion. With the majority of annual revenue tied to online marketing, primarily content marketing, PetRelocation's success story should intrigue pet care marketers and B2C marketers in general. To read about it, go to http://www.dmnews.com/petrelocation-uses-content-marketing-to-drive-sales/article/404010/

Predict Your Marketing Plan Fate (Sans Crystal Ball)

It's that scary time of year when many marketers finalize plans for 2015 success, and Halloween celebrates a very different kid of future insight via black magic, spirit guides, tarot cards and the like. Now Marketo brings together those two disparate seasonal themes with "What's in the Cards," an infographic of the three factors most predictive of a marketing plan's fate, based on interviews with 400 marketers. Planning Secret No. 1: "Write Your Marketing Destiny," meaning generate a documented plan of action, clearly stating strategy and tactics, with stakeholder buy-in and individual accountability. You'll be joining 66% of marketers interviewed, who use a shared planning document to dodge the most deadly marketing failures, including constantly changing directions and priorities, lack of coordination within the marketing team, and lack of coordination between marketing and other teams. No. 2: "Add a Mix of Techniques and Channels," ranging from e-mail, social and pay-per-click to offline events. Get the right mix by analyzing audience preferences and behavior and then, of course, testing and measuring. No. 3: "The Right Calendar Makes You a Mind-Reader." Two-thirds of marketers interviewed stressed the importance of a marketing calendar, ranging from high-tech online tracking to simple whiteboard. Top calendar requirements cited were easy movement of activities, tracking of tentative vs. confirmed activities, filtering by attributes (channel, product, audience, segment) and a view of the metrics per program. Share Marketo's infographic Halloween treat with marketing team members by going to http://blog.marketo.com/2014/10/infographic-whats-in-the-cards-decide-your-marketings-fate.html

How to Rev Up Your PPC Campaigns

If you're a typical small to mid-sized business, you're likely wasting 25% of your pay-per-click marketing budget, according to a MarketingProfs report on a study by search software provider WordStream. So where's your PPC effort leaking dollars? WordStream graded the PPC activity of 500 small to mid-sized businesses in terms of account activity, ad relevancy, keyword optimization, landing page quality and mobile search to come up with five fixes for more traffic, leads and sales. Some takeaways: 1) Make mobile PPC best practices a top priority and get ahead of the over 80% of AdWords accounts that fail to create mobile-preferred ads; 2) Create market-relevant, call-to-action landing pages with conversation tracking instead of relying on a generic home page or single landing page; 3) Improve text writing and relevancy for better click-through and Google quality scoring, and watch your cost per click drop by as much as 50% and your cost per action by up to 80%; 4) Optimize your keywords with strategies like lower-CPC long-tail keywords, modified broad match keywords, and negative keywords; 5) Increase your commitment to PPC by spending at least 20 minutes a week on optimizing your Adwords account. The gain in 2014 from such fixes? Just looking at markets that AccuList USA frequently serves -- multichannel retail, automotive, computer and electronics, education, B2B and insurance -- the study estimated optimized PPC to annually yield 569 more product sales, 273 more vehicle test drive appointments, 211 added enterprise software inquiries, 202 more student inquiries, a 157 gain in B2B supplier leads, and 126 additional insurance quotes. For a helpful infographic, go to http://www.marketingprofs.com/chirp/2013/11993/five-ways-to-give-your-ppc-advertising-an-extreme-makeover-infographic