In the latest episode of Moz.com‘s podcast series, Whiteboard Friday, Rand Fishkin addresses how to do competitive research that will provide data that will enable you to improve your own SO position by responding to what you find in the competitive data. Fishkin reports, “By comparing top pages data from multiple sources against one another, you can get some really cool, powerful advanced SEO opportunities in your content and keyword targeting.” Fishkin identifies five bits of data that that can be found by analyzing competitive sites and that will help you: 1. Top pages by number... [...]

Steven Casey says, “We’ve all seen the ubiquitous martech slides: Thousands of company logos crammed into a single graphic that is both useless and illuminating. Useless as any sort of planning or evaluation tool — but also illuminating because it shows what we all know to be true from first-hand experience: The B2B marketing tech landscape is confusing, and getting worse every day. To help B2B marketers make smart technology choices in the midst of such chaos, Forrester has just published the TechRadar™: B2B Marketing Technologies, Q3 2016. In this report, we evaluate the current state... [...]

Samantha Ngo says, “It was social’s time and the living was easy. For years, B2C marketers told us that they didn’t need to make a business case for their social investments because budgets were easy to come by; social was rapidly growing and brands clamored to be present on social networks. But a decade later, executive teams are demanding proof of social ROI. In fact, Forrester received 132 inquiries on the topic of measuring social’s success in the past year alone. Have your answers at the ready. Use a business case to proactively address management’s concerns by mapping how social... [...]

Peter O’Neill says, “We know you B2B marketing execs are not in denial. You get that 74% of business buyers conduct more than half of their research online before making an offline purchase — and that 59% of those same business buyers prefer not to interact with a sales rep as their primary source of information. You need to transform from an inside-out (company, product service) perspective to an outside-in (customer, outcome, context) view. Like all transformations, this is brilliant in theory but daunting in practice. Well, come to the Forrester B2B Marketing Forum on October... [...]

Tamar Weinberg says, “It’s not a test. These new ad-free pages on Facebook are official. In fact, if you’ve navigated to a brand page on Facebook, you may have seen it already. The brand pages focus on the brand and put ads on the sidelines. The new layout is crisp, clean and gives the brand a little more prominence. A spokesperson from Facebook said, “We’ve introduced a new design for Pages on desktop to make it easier for people to learn about and interact with businesses on Facebook, including a new column for tab navigation and a more prominent call-to-action button.” The layout... [...]

Barry Levine, from MarketingLand, says, “Native ads can be very effective in attracting reader attention because their content relates to the surrounding editorial content, and their visual style helps them blend in. But a new study, out today, finds that most of them blend in too much, possibly tricking readers into thinking they’re not ads. The Online Trust Alliance (OTA)’s Native Advertising Assessment looked at the 100 top news websites by unique monthly visitors, of which 69 percent had one or more native ads on their home pages. The sites included such major publishers as ABC News,... [...]

In planning a marketing strategy, product vendors and merchants need accurate information about the use of various media by their target prospective buyers. Gina Fleming, of the Forrester research group, explains, “To build a successful social media program you need to understand your audience’s social media behaviors and preferences. We just released our 2016 results for Forrester’s Social Technographics model, and it does just that. It shows how important social should be in your marketing plans based on how important social tools are in your customers’ life cycle. We group consumers... [...]

If you are looking for free traffic strategies that build your traffic better than SEO, you may want to check out this new product called TrafficFresh. Many online marketers long for the “good old days” when eager people, just getting to know the internet, clicked on every link they came across. Back then, traffic was easy. Now, unless you pay for it, traffic is getting hard to find. But TrafficFresh changes all that. It’s a desktop application that helps you get plenty of free traffic by leveraging the major players in your niches, using its ‘Sky Scraper’ strategy,... [...]

Knowing how you audience responds to your marketing is critical to your success. All smart marketers seek feedback so they don’t have to guess about their clients’ needs. You should be soliciting feedback, and so should IM NewsWatch. We want to know what you think about the news we provide. And what should we be providing that isn’t yet on our radar? That’s why we are inviting you to participate in this annual feedback harvest. Tell us what you think. What can we do to help you more? Please share your insights in a short survey here:  IMNW Feedback Survey.  [...]

Brad Callen has released new software (AK Elite) to help authors and publishers create books that will sell nicely on Kindle. Unlike offline bookstores with their hard copy books, Kindle is wide open for new authors and publishers. And don’t let the label “publisher” bother you. Hire someone to ghost write a book for you; that makes you a publisher. Many marketing consultants tell you that the first step to selling a lot of Kindle books is getting reviews. Reviews are certainly helpful, but Callen says they aren’t necessary to get top ranking. If you understand why the current... [...]