With Halloween fast approaching this coming Saturday, along with it comes the usual wave of last-minute costumers eager to make a cleaver, funny or scary splash on the 31st. “Halloween” is consistently trending on Twitter, and there is an exponential jump in Halloween-related searches, so now is the time for savvy marketers to pull something out of their bags of tricks.
Zeta Marketing Solutions for the Halloween holiday
Top seasonal retailers HalloweenMart and Spirit Halloween have a web-based retail environment in dire need of a refresh.
HalloweenMart suffers from a bland layout, with no notable call-to-action, compounded with oversized images that further distract from the product listings.
Spirit is at the opposite end of the spectrum, having an overwhelming number of category listings, field entries and a harsh color scheme.
Create a revamped website based entirely on a dynamic usability study, whilst conforming to their established brand identity and product lines.
To drive additional traffic, the retailers should create some branded content for distribution directly to customers
A photo-editing suite that “Creeps-out” a portrait you upload, inserting some Halloween-themed images (smoke, bats, pumpkins, etc.) on top of your picture
While costume retailers seem to be fairly active on twitter (smart move) the other important aspect of Halloween (Candy) has gone unrepresented.
Hershey’s, arguably the largest candy brand worldwide, has no active twitter presence. While they do have a corporate profile, there have been no updates at all.
Mars also has failed to create a Twitter profile.
Both brands should take obvious first steps (Create optimized twitter profiles, update constantly, and link to profile on website homepage, etc.)
Tweets should highlight seasonal recipes created solely with their products.
Costumeideazone.com; the first site that appears in organic search results on Google under “Halloween Costume Ideas” should make better usage of their company Twitter account to build brand awareness and drive traffic to their site.
Currently the account has only 13 Tweets and 14 followers
To foster fans’ creativity; Costumeideazone.com should host a Twitter based contest where users submit their most unique, original and creative ideas with the winning costume being furnished by costumezone.com or a partner
The contest will be cross-promoted on the costumeideazone.com where users can submit their entries and ultimately vote on the winning idea
Costumeideazone.com should offer weekly newsletters via email marketing throughout the month of October in anticipation of their highest traffic month
Capture visitor’s email addresses by partnering with a site that actually sells costumes such as halloweenexpress.com to offer discounts and specials
Rumors and noises have abounded for years, but like a mid-summer cacophony of cicadas, the decibel on legislation of online advertising is ratcheting higher. And the voices are not making music to the ears of ROI marketers. As BusinessWeek reported last Thursday, pending legislation may threaten to turn the lights out on targeted ads using third party cookies.
Make no mistake about it. Google is a for-profit corporation. And as such, they can and will make decisions that improve their bottom line even if those same decisions potentially mean a decrease in the end-user’s experience (not to mention outrage on the part of big brands).
As I read through Forrester’s recent Wave Report on listening platforms and think through some of the innovative conversations we’ve been having with clients and colleagues, a simple thought has begun to manifest itself.
Working for an agency isn’t easy. You’ve got to balance multiple clients, multiple deliverables, and in some cases, multiple lines of service. In addition, sales and administrative duties also get in the way of actual work. This tends to be the case regardless of the particular marketing channel in scope (media buying, paid search, email, SEO, social media, dev, creative, etc).
The transition from legacy, offline marketing to a more metrics and ROI-focused online marketing approach is well underway. There are examples of this shift all over the place, but one of the true trail blazers is Century21 Real Estate.
Adobe recently announced that they are working on ways to bring Flash-enabled video and animation to TV sets around the world, and they’ve already partnered with television media titans like Comcast and Netflix. This is just one of many mainstream efforts to bring interactivity to the world’s largest mainstream media channel, and sooner or later, one of these efforts is going to pan out.
There are many ways to redirect a web page, but few are SEO friendly, and even fewer can be tracked through Google Analytics. Here I’m going to show you a way of tracking 301 redirects with Google Analytics.
1) About SEO Friendly Redirects
Typically a 301 redirect, the most SEO friendly type of redirect, is setup on the server level via the .htaccess file or httpd.conf file. These are easy ways of setting up 301 redirects, but they don’t allow tracking via Google Analytics. So we’re going to setup our 301 redirect at the page level using scripting.
Every so often, I’ll talk to a company or two that utterly and completely reaffirms my belief that some large companies are still very fuzzy on the true meaning of social media.
Here are some examples that help illustrate this stance…
