Mr Branding: September 2016

Friday, September 30, 2016

A Killer Social Media Marketing Strategy for Small Businesses - #infographic

Social media can drive business, there is no doubt about it. The 1.5 Billion monthly active Facebook users can attest to that.

Social Media can also drive traffic to a website, whether it is a blog, business website offering products, services or a non-profit organization.

The majority of an average online users time is spent on Social Media sites; whether it is the classic Facebook, Twitter or videos on YouTube or even images on Pinterest and Instagram. Social media is addictive; it can hook and engage the users and keep them occupied for hours.

Businesses love social media and the user attention it gets. Some businesses are strategic about getting their user's attention and they have a plan or strategy, while others take a deep dive, pray and hope for the best. Some businesses only rely on organic or free reach and some are willing to spend for paid social media ads to multiply their reach.

Here is a Social Media Marketing strategy that is visual and easy to understand. Take this social media strategy as a starting point, start customizing it with your goals and target audience to create your own killer strategy.

by CENT Muruganandam via Digital Information World

Retargeting: SEO & PPC Working Together

SEO and Retargeting

This article is part of an SEO series from WooRank. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

It’s no secret that SEO is an integral part of any digital marketing strategy. 44% of consumers start the shopping process with an online search, and almost a third of e-commerce traffic comes from search engines. Even if you’re primarily a brick-and-mortar shop, organic search traffic is important: Half of mobile searchers visited a store within a day of their search. So no matter what type or size of business you have, search engines are a vital source of traffic.

Unfortunately, there’s one big problem: up to 96% of organic search traffic doesn’t convert the first visit to your site. A big part of this is just the natural sales process: The vast majority of searches have informational search intent. However, there’s an effective way you can find those visitors after they leave your site when they are more likely to convert: retargeting.

Site Retargeting: Recycling Your SEO Traffic

Site retargeting (sometimes called retargeting) is, simply put, targeting users who have previously visited your website with advertisements on ad networks around the web. It most commonly refers to banner ads, but you can also retarget visitors with text ads using Google’s Search Network (note: this is not the same thing as search retargeting, which we’ll talk about in a little bit). It differs from traditional display buying in that it only targets people who have visited your site, or a specific section or page of your site instead of using some other demographic segment.

How does site retargeting work? You start by placing a retargeting pixel, a little bit of Javascript, in the footer of your site that cookies your site’s visitors. Later, when your retargeting provider encounters those users out in the wild, it will know to serve them your ads, assuming, of course, that you’re bidding high enough for those ad impressions. This gives you a chance to reach out and find potential customers when they have moved further down the sales funnel, or to even gently nudge them along, even when they’re visiting other websites.

Retargeting conversion funnel

Even better, you can put a pixel on individual pages, so you can run targeted campaigns for specific products or categories.

The result? A combination of the two most effective online marketing channels. As mentioned above, SEO traffic generally converts at around 2% (2.35% to be exact). This is considered by advertisers to be the most effective marketing channel for conversions. When you combine this traffic with display retargeting, you can double that conversion rate. Some industries, such as financial services, had conversion rates increase by almost 150 percent!

Search Retargeting: Sort of SEO but Also Sort of Not

But what if you’re a brand new site, or a smaller site that doesn’t get as much traffic as you’d like? It’s hard to retarget visitors if they don’t pass through your website in the first place. Fortunately, there’s a way you can advertise to people searching for your target keywords, even if they never pass through any of your web properties, through a process called "search retargeting." Search retargeting is like organic search marketing wrapped in a display advertising shell.

Continue reading %Retargeting: SEO & PPC Working Together%

by Maria Lopez via SitePoint

Using JOINs in MongoDB NoSQL Databases

Using $lookUp with NoSQL

Thanks to Julian Motz for kindly helping to peer review this article.

One of the biggest differences between SQL and NoSQL databases is JOIN. In relational databases, the SQL JOIN clause allows you to combine rows from two or more tables using a common field between them. For example, if you have tables of books and publishers, you can write SQL commands such as:

SELECT book.title, publisher.name
FROM book
LEFT JOIN book.publisher_id ON publisher.id;

In other words, the book table has a publisher_id field which references the id field in the publisher table.

This is practical, since a single publisher could offer thousands of books. If we ever need to update a publisher's details, we can change a single record. Data redundancy is minimized, since we don't need to repeat the publisher information for every book. The technique is known as normalization.

SQL databases offer a range of normalization and constraint features to ensure relationships are maintained.

NoSQL == No JOIN?

Not always …

Document-oriented databases such as MongoDB are designed to store denormalized data. Ideally, there should be no relationship between collections. If the same data is required in two or more documents, it must be repeated.

This can be frustrating, since there are few situations where you never need relational data. Fortunately, MongoDB 3.2 introduces a new $lookup operator which can perform a LEFT-OUTER-JOIN-like operation on two or more collections. But there's a catch …

Continue reading %Using JOINs in MongoDB NoSQL Databases%

by Craig Buckler via SitePoint