FOLDEN eMarketing Blog

Websites especially for brands are an originary online marketing mean without an equivalent in the offline world, maybe comparible to flagshipstores. The importance of brand websites is caused by the presence and the instrument is content marketing. Brand websites are defined by particular presences on the web and presences within social networks. Too, the lately introduced social media aggregator for enterprises and brands JustAbout.co and the rising social commerce and networking service Pinterest may be seen as part of it.

Usually the effectiveness of such marketing instruments is taken into question. Now the market research companies Accenture, comScore and dunnhumbyUSA have surveyed the subject in a groundbreaking study. The results are higher purchases by visitors of brand websites on average and additionally higher purchases within the categories visited. On the other site visitors of brand websites do have advantages by saving 8 % on average, which is caused by available coupons or similar options.

The most importand factors of successful brand websites are a brand message, up to date content as well as engaging content like coupons or promotions, product demonstrations and downloads.

Below is an excerpt of the study followed by the presentation of the study itself including a download link.

Brand Websites Create Retail Store Buyers

Are Your CPG Brands Maximizing the Return on Your Digital Investment?

FOLDEN.INFO Directory Sources: Document Sharing, Business Networking – Market Research, Studies

Without doubt innovation is an important factor and in product development an alternative to the imitation of successful products. This is shown by the rising of Pinterest, a young social network already capturing the attention of online marketing.

For a couple of time the occurances around Pinterest are observed by this site and informational sources have been gathered. Now an up to date study by Shareaholic announced that the service has climbed up to place 5 in its referral traffic statistics, traffic from direct links beyond search: Pinterest | Social Media ROI | Earned Media | Cost of Loyal User. This importance is also shown within an infographic published just a couple of days before by Econsultancy: Pinterest’s role as a referrer for retailers grows: infographic.

So what is Pinterest? Pinterest is a social media service combining bookmarking and social networking components. The idea is some kind of pinboard to be used to post images, comment and share these images. These images refer to its sources, which lead to the described phenomenon of referral traffic. Because most of these images refer to products Pinterest is well described by the terms social commerce and social shopping as well. Here is the self introduction of Pinterest to be found at About.

Astonishingly compared to the social networking phenomenon in general, which at least in part may be characterized by fast communications is the fact that communications is less important to the members of Pinterest. Whereas typical forms of social media communications like following do exist, these kind of communications is less important according to interviews and research.

What’s behind the Pinterest craze? 15 super-users share their thoughts

Who’s Using Pinterest? Yup, It’s Mostly Ladies

In the same way astonishing is the fact that there is still an invitation needed to participate. But this may be achieved by submitting an email address at the site and already 4 million members do put this fact into perspective and suppose that achieving a membership must be easy. But at the same time it shows that the service is still in an early stage and that the service despite of investors seems not have defined finally its business model. Nevertheless a growing amount of articles do discuss business opportunities.

Pinterest: A Beginner’s Guide to the Hot New Social Network

How to Use Pinterest to Market Your Business

Pinterest: 13 Tips and Tricks for Cutting Edge Users

Last but not least and reminding of the context at the top regarding innovation and imitation there already comes up at least one service having a similar look like Pinterest. Taking into mind the fact that Pinterest is used to 80 % by women it is a counterpart for men called Gentlemint.

FOLDEN.INFO Directory Sources: Social Media – Social Commerce – Social Networking

The internet marketing review and directory update February includes the topics Internet Marketing and Advertising, Online Market Research and eLearning. Below follows a brief analysis of up to date internet marketing trends.

Internet Marketing and Online Advertising Innovations

The internet marketing innovations and new services of the February update in part are reflecting the mainstream of the development and are in part located in niches or bringing the advantages of the digital world to conventional marketing channels. Examples for the latter are adstruc offering a network for out of home media or ifbyphone with its voice marketing automation solution. Doing such in the frame of the younger development is Qriously, a mobile marketing and analysis service bringing sentiment analysis to the mobile world by substituting mobile advertising with questions.

The up to date mainstream in online marketing aka trend is served by data marketing services and services located at the sources of data, which means social media marketing and monitoring. Like it has been described in the article study about cases of data utilization in online marketing a whole new infrastructure is needed to process the large amount of data available today and such services now do arise. To be named there is Trendrr providing data to be used for ad targeting and other purposes.

An interesting announcement in this context came from 33Across, also mentioned within an article lately for its study on the effectiveness of targeting based on social graphs. The company announced having acquired TYNT, another social media analytics company, and by this doing possess 1.25 billion social and interest graph data sets and now possessing more such data sets than Facebook, Google and Microsoft.

According to the importance of this issue new social media analytics services are well represented within the social media marketing rubric. These are React.com, Track Social, Trendiction and specialized on the music business musicmetric. Furthermore there are SocialMedia-Live und SocialBro specialized on Facebook and Twitter. A popularity of chart services by the way has been observed for online music.

Update February: Internet Marketing and Online Advertising Innovations

Online Market Research and Data Services

In online market research data services have been presented at first. Here platforms arose to aggregate and exchange data. This is a continuing trend going along with services specialized on other disciplines like benchmarking. And like the phrase about the need of a new infrastructure suggests new data platforms and marketplaces have been launched, Kasabi and Singly.

Update February: Online Market Research and Data Services

eLearning, Online Courses and eLearning Solutions

Independent to the data services trend is elearning, another strong growth segment of the electronic commerce. eLearning today is present in most different reaches and with most different services offering most different means. An ongoing strong development has to be expected with the growing implicitness of new media usage and ubiquity of the internet. Probably and by the integration of television and information sources available online the term edutainment will need a new definition in the near future.

The update on elearning includes expert information services, services to access and create seminars and webinars, online services for scholars as well as a numerous amount of online university courses and last but not least elearning solutions.

Update February: eLearning, Online Courses and eLearning Solutions