A Basic Digital Marketing Formula

There are so many different pieces and options in the world of digital marketing that it can sometimes be difficult to maintain a well-informed “big picture” outlook.  That's particularly true when you're just starting out, swimming in what feels like an infinite sea of internet marketing info and ideas.

You Might Also Be Interested In: Snapchat Marketing

At its core, though, digital marketing isn't really that complicated it can appear to be that way. There's a simple basic formula that underlies just about everything we do.  After you strip away all of the bells and whistles and start looking at principles, there are three things in which we're really interested in.

Traffic.  In order to make sales, you need customers.  In order to create customers you need prospects.  Traffic is one of the “big three”, you can't make money if you aren't driving traffic to your website and blog, or connecting eyeballs to your offers or what it is you do.

Conversion. After you get the traffic, you need to persuade those individuals to make a purchase or to take some other action that puts money in your pocket.  That's conversion and nothing good happens without it.

Money.  Every time someone makes a purchase or “does the right thing”, you need to make sure you're set up to make money.  This is the end goal of the whole pursuit.  How much you make per sale or per action matters.

What happens when we put it all together?

Traffic x Rate of Conversion x $/Conversion = Gross Profit

When you get down to the basics of it all, it's pretty obvious how digital marketing works!

Feel free to visit Social Media MasterPiece to learn more about digital marketing and how they can help increase your company's profit online.

Snapchat Marketing: Understanding how to maximize Snapchat and boost sales

Even though Snapchat isn't looked as a premier social media marketing platform there are a lot of brands and marketers making it work for there audience's. Snapchat has over 26 million active users with over 150 million snaps sent per day. A snap is a picture taken and sent within the app. 

You Might Also Be Interested In: Top 5 Social BookMarking Sites

Marketo created the following infographic guide for brands that are looking to use Snapchat for the first time or for marketers who are currently seeking to use Snapchat more effectively. The app's core users are women coming in at a whopping 70%! In addition, the core audience is between 13-25 years old, so from a marketing point of view it can be challenging if you're potential clientele does not fall into those demographics but the upside for brands that do can be extremely beneficial to your marketing success. 

Some of the Recommendations that you can use Snapchat marketing to increase sales include contests, new product sneak peaks, behind the scenes, coupons and many more. Bottom line is Snapchat is another social media platform that growing exponentially with a huge audience of people and if used correctly it can grow your companies audience immensely to boost sales.

Feel free to visit Social Media MasterPiece to learn more about social media marketing and which social networking platform will work best for what your company needs.

So who do you think is winning the Sochi Social Gold?

The Sochi Olymics for 2014 have been a big hit for social conversations and challenging for most to keep up with for stats but thanks to UberVu and Hootsuite they have been keeping up with the social conversations for the 2014 Sochi Olymics to find out what has been and continues to be social buzzing. They've tracked the top 3 issues being discussed, from opening ceremonies to the closing ceremonies and every event in between. Check out what topics have been analyzed to see what social cares about most and what's making the biggest splash with its very own gold medal. 

Click to Enlarge Image

Google Places Adds 1,000 New Categories For International Business Listings

Just announced in a Google discussion forum thread, Google's Business Community manager Jade Wang stated that Google has increased the number of business categories available to businesses outside of the United States.

Wang stated: Based on merchant feedback, we've been working to improve business categories. One of the key areas we thought we could quickly improve is expanding the breadth of available categories globally.

Over 1,000 new categories are now available in the Places dashboard. These categories are now available globally and translated to every language Google Supports. 

If you're like most people wondering, what the heck took so long? Jade goes on to explain: "Imagine you’re planning a trip to Greece. When you search from the US, you’ll probably be using English, and you’ll see the categories of Greek businesses in English. However, those businesses in Greece were probably set in Greek using Places for Business in Greek. This means the Places for Business team has to translate and associate categories in many languages. As you can imagine, this can become very complicated very quickly." 

It's great that Google does listen to feedback but it's even better when they take action to make changes based on merchant feedback. So dive in to the new dashboard and send your feedback to Google because they are listening.

Lego Company is given strong marketing advice from 7 year old

Ms. Charlotte may only be 7 years old but she knows how to think outside the box and pick up on things that even executives of multi-million dollar corporations leave out. Worded very patiently for her age she clearly understands business strategies. Via @SocImages

Message states the following: 

"Dear Lego company:

My name is Charlotte. I am 7 years old and I love legos but I don’t like that there are more Lego boy people and barely any Lego girls.
Today I went to a store and saw legos in two sections the girls pink and the boys blue. All the girls did was sit at home, go to the beach, and shop, and they had no jobs but the boys went on adventures, worked, saved people, and had jobs, even swam with sharks. 
I want you to make more Lego girl people and let them go on adventures and have fun ok!?!
Thank you.

From Charlotte"

Charlotte's words wisdom hopefully inspires the Lego Company to make some immediate changes to there current marketing campaigns. 
Do you see the Lego Company responding to Charlotte's request anytime soon?

Results of Mobile App use of 2013

If you had a mobile app created or in use for during 2013 you were probably someone that benefited from the huge increase of mobile app market usage for 2013. According to Flurry Analytics the results came in for last year showing Mobile-app use increased by 115% for year over year growth.

The biggest growth was in messaging and social apps with an increase of 203%. Next in line was utilities and productivity grew 149%. Coming in last place but still seeing a small increase was news and magazines with a rise of 31% year over year.

Mobile App Use 2013 Year over Year Growth: Click to Enlarge

If you have a consistently growing online audience for your current blog or website you might want to heavily consider adding a mobile app to your social media marketing strategy. Contact a social media consultant at Social Media MasterPiece to see if a mobile-app is right for your marketing campaign.

Also share with us your opinions on the mobile app market. Do you think we will continue to see this trend in 2014?

Top 5 Social BookMarking Sites

Which Social Bookmarking site is best for you?

Every social media marketing strategy should include a list of social bookmarking sites that allow you to not only save your favorite websites but to also boost your search engine ranking. 

In this post I will share the power of each platform, website metrics and which sites are appropriate for your marketing objectives. 

1) Pinterest- is a social media platform that allows you to Pin (upload) photos to a profile that you can share publicly online. Pinterest does not allow you to create back links but it does recognize the image name which will create 'extra credit' relevancy for search engines as they crawl through the internet. Pinterest launched back in 2010 and now has more that 70 million users! According to Business Insider Pinterest is valued at $2 billion. In addition, since Pinterest is a Do follow site you can also implement SEO within the description of every posted Pin. If you have a lot of visual content for example Restaurants, Jewelery Stores, Artists, Designers, etc. Pinterest should be #1 on your list for your social media marketing strategy but anyone can take advantage of this power social media platform.

Look at how 'Jewelry Lady' Amanda Holland leverages Pinterest to create relevant great content for customers and designer enthusiasts will love.


Page Rank: 9
Global Traffic Rank:  27
USA Traffic Rank: 12


2) Google Bookmarks- is a bookmarking service offered by Google which will allow you store your favorite websites to there server and you will be able to access them at any time and anywhere you have internet access. The most important aspect in terms of marketing strategy is using their service to bookmark your own personal websites and creating SMO descriptions when bookmarking your own content. 

Everyone understands and knows the power of the Almighty Google, make sure you are giving them as many opportunities as possible to index your website. 

Page Rank: 9
Global Traffic Rank: 1 
USA Traffic Rank: 1 


 3) Flickr- is a image sharing site similar to Pinterest. You can upload images in real time, create collection homepages, and promote your business through a visionary approach. Flickr has over 87 million users with 3.5 million photos uploaded daily. A necessary step using Flickr is uploading your photos and tagging your images to maximize using their platform. 

Besides the organic traffic you could potentially generate from search engines, your tags are the keywords that will pull your images when people are searching on Flickr. Flickr was purchased by Yahoo! in 2005 for $35 million.

Page Rank: 9
Global Traffic Rank: 70
USA Traffic Rank: 53

 4) Bibsonomy- is a social bookmarking and publication-sharing system. As with most social bookmarking services you can choose your descriptions and tags freely. 

Bibsonomy was created back in 2006 and is a high page rank site that will add to your list of backlinks increasing your ranking on organic search results. Bibsonomy also supports the integration of different communities and people by offering a social platform for literature exchange. 

Page Rank: 7
Global Traffic Rank: 5379
USA Traffic Rank: 36338

5) Yahoo! Bookmarks- is a bookmarking service offered by Yahoo! There social bookmarking service is a great way to gain some extra "link juice" for your website SERP and have access to your favorite websites and personal websites. 
Since Yahoo! is one of the top 4 search engines on the web having a backlink from Yahoo! is a must have part of your social media marketing strategy. 

Page Rank: 6
Global Traffic Rank: 4
USA Traffic Rank: 4

We hope this posts adds some value to your current  social marketing goals. If you would like to learn more about social bookmarking contact a social media consultant today for a free 30 minute session at www.socialmediamasterpiece.com