Erik Qualman's Blog, page 529

4 Missing Pieces in Your Company’s Content Marketing

Some brands do it better than the rest.

One example is, Coca Cola, which continues to develop a strong community online through its well thought and well executed content marketing campaigns.

Marketers and advertisers alike know that the golden rule of making it in this competitive arena is through making great content. That’s why most businesses have continued to strive and thrive in this area such as Coca-Cola which has been successful in creating and implementing engaging contents, giving them a higher leverage when it comes to the market, and having a greater recall when it comes to their consumers.

These advantages that they’ve developed through their effective content have been very helpful, not only for their sales, but also in developing a community of loyal consumers worldwide.

Although Coca Cola has been victorious on finding the pulse of their market, not all companies can follow and compete with the great minds behind their content marketing team. In fact, despite most attempts of companies, their relentless efforts continue to be unsuccessful.

Let’s explore what most companies could’ve they done wrong? We’ve listed down some of the things that they might have been continuously overlooking and which may be the key to creating engaging content online.

1. Get to know your audience

Although most companies have dedicated their time to know their consumers, they might have failed to notice some of the most important details that could’ve been vital to creating a more effective campaign. Hobbies, interests, or even the pet peeves of the market counts and has to be taken into consideration. For an instance, for Coca Cola’s First Day of School campaign, they have observed that most students tend to use their mobile phones instead of socializing, so to break the ice, they have invented the friendly cap, which made their consumers interact with one another in real life as opposed to simply connecting online.

2. Tap into the consumers emotions

Never underestimate the power of emotions. Advertisements and campaigns that dig into a personal level through arousing various feelings to their audience are proven to be more effective and unforgettable. For an instance, a campaign created by Coca Cola for the Filipino Overseas Workers has gone wildly viral as they flew in OFWs from different parts of the world and brought them back to their families. The campaign has immediately become viral because it has elicited strong emotions from the audience.

3. Stimulate your consumers’ creativity

Today’s consumers are no longer mindless ‘just getting in the trend’ population. As both technology and the times advances, so is the market. The consumers become more mindful of their choices and online connections to the brand they love become more apparent online. From veganism to actually counting down the calories, the public has slowly turned into rational consumers, thinking and digging down into details before buying something. This kind of thinking has been the anchor for Coca Cola’s weight loss campaign. Although the thoughts are very contrasting of each other, as soda makes one heavier, they were able to push the idea through and create a positive video promoting health to their consumers.

4. Go beyond the media

Contents and campaigns can always go beyond the usual websites and media. Providing experiences through on-ground events and activations, creating compelling videos and e-mails – these are only some of the ways that a company can explore when it comes to creating a strong campaign that would create a difference for their audience and consumers.

Image Credit: Flickr, Creative Commons: Chris Nielsen, Anna Anjos

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4 Proven Marketing Techniques You Should Try

Marketing is all about how you present your message to the audience. From that understanding you can see why saying that anything is a “foolproof” marketing plan is a horrible simplification. All marketing plans have their weaknesses and flaws, but some are much more suited to some situations than others. If you’re considering alternative marketing techniques, then you should be looking at what has worked for companies in the past to drive their marketing campaigns viral. Here’s a few marketing techniques that you should look into experimenting with.

1. Less Selling, More Humor: There are customers who actively go on the internet to look at funny ads on YouTube. To them, it’s not about the product, it’s about the entertainment value. Dialing up your entertainment value and dialing down the cold-selling tone will always get you more views and shares. The problem with this is that it can backfire horribly. If a group perceives your advertisement as being patronizing or downright mean, you can face some serious social media fallout for it. For a large company this might not be such a disastrous situation, but it could brand a small company negatively for years to come. To avoid this problem, make sure you do all the research pertaining to your ads and your target demographic.

2. Become an Expert: Expert opinions go a long way both in regular life and in academic circles. This method may require a lot of research on your part as well as interpretation of papers or other technical data. If you are versed in understanding information presented about your niche and can repackage this in a more palatable form for the average Everyman reader, then you’ll have managed to start on the path of becoming an expert. Free information is never a bad thing and your customers will appreciate that you’ve offering them such a valuable resource for free.

3. Tweet like you mean it: Social media interaction with customers is as at an all-time high as more businesses are leaning towards social media to generate a rapport with their target audience and learn from their dislikes. Interaction with your customer base usually revolves around a particular tweet, either by yourself or by a customer. Instead of letting customers dictate the pace of your interactions, taking the initiative and tweeting first will spawn interactions with a large volume of your follower base. This will help you to build your interaction level and grow your visibility as well.

4. Don’t Count out Email Yet: Dozens of social media gurus have stated unequivocally that email marketing is dead. It really isn’t, you just have to be a lot more competitive in what you offer your readers through email than you had before. Personalized emails and emails that focus on a specific theme and make your audience feel engaged is what you should be going for. Dispense with the small talk and get down to the meat of the matter. Your readers probably don’t have the time or the effort to read sixteen pages of email to get the point you’re making. Be concise and make them feel as though they’re important and you’d be surprised at the kind of return email marketing still has in it. 

Try the Old as Well as the New

Marketing techniques don’t stay stagnant forever, and there are much wilder ways out there to make customer impact. You can probably do a case study on the more bizarre ways that companies got their name out into the mainstream. These four are tried and tested methods that do work if done properly. The hardest part is getting started on them.

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Let’s Talk Brand Signals and SEO

Everyone wants to rank higher on search engines most notably Google (For the rest of this article I’m going to refer to search engines as Google because it’s easier).

Higher search ranking leads to more website visits, more likes, and ultimately more sales.

SEO is both a very complex topic which I could write a multiple part series on if anyone wants to read such a thing.

The TLDR version of my SEO guide would be that you need to cover your bases (Tags, back links etc..) but also make sure that every thing you do fits under the same brand so that you can take advantage of what are being called “Brand Signals.”

I always like to start with a definition so for the sake of this article and any time you hear me discuss brand signals from now on, I define brand signals as :

Anything that shows Google you’re a real person and not part of some shady spam scam (say that 3 times fast).

Oftentimes people complain that there are too many social networks, which may or may not be true. What is true is that establishing a presence for yourself or your business across all of these platforms, will send a strong brand signal. Especially if you are consistently producing content.

So whether you are a job seeker, looking for a promotion or own your own business you are a brand.

We could get into the whole idea of branding but what it means is really unique for each and every person depending on their career, personality, and goals.

For the sake of this article and SEO you are a brand, much like the local waitress/actress/singer at my favorite Starbucks here in Los Angeles.

What can you do to send the correct job signals to take advantage of brand signals and rank high in Google?

I’m glad you asked.

1. Have a correctly tagged personal website. This doesn’t have to be fancy, or expensive. In fact, you can even create an ugly WordPress site yourself without even knowing how to code. The most important thing is that there is a website with your name on it in some capacity. Spammers hate committing to websites which is why they use fly by night sites that disappear if you’re ever doing market research.

2. Pick 3-5 social media platforms and link them together. I don’t care what they are, but by linking your social networking together you form an even stronger brand signal. Especially if you use the exact same name on each platform. This doesn’t work so well if your Twitter is David Justin, your Facebook is Justin Plumbers and your Instagram is LovesThe Dodgers.

3. Publish content weekly, if not daily. The more you publish content under your brand, the more brand signals created especially if you continue to tag everything with the appropriate tags.

So to Re-cap:

Brand Signals are anything that shows google there is a real person posting not a scamming spammer.

Brand Signals are important because they help tell Google what to filter out and what to show people.

The more you link your brand across the various sites and produce specific and tagged content the more brand signals you will create and the easier it will be find you online.

Hope that helps,

Jon Lee

 

 

 

 

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Somehow Teen Girls Get the Coolest Wearable Out There

Wired – Jewelbots are bracelets with programmable plastic flowers made for middle-school girls. They’re also the most interesting wearable I’ve seen this year.

Their creators describe them as “friendships bracelets that teach girls to code.” Compared to a gleaming Apple Watch or even an entry-level Fitbit, the Jewelbot hardware is primitive: a semi-translucent plastic flower charm that slides onto a hair tie–like elastic bracelet. The functionality is basic, too. The charms talk to each other over Bluetooth, and using a Jewelbots smartphone app, youngsters can program their charms to vibrate or light up when their friends are nearby. But despite their apparent simplicity, Jewelbots exhibit some truly fresh thinking about wearable technology. And with a little imagination, they hint at devices far more interesting than today’s computer watches.

Jewelbots was co-founded by Sara Chipps, Brooke Moreland, and Maria Paula Saba. Chipps is a developer and co-founder of Girl Develop It, a nonprofit that teaches women to code. Moreland is an entrepreneur with experience in high-tech fashion products, and Saba is a graduate of NYU’s ITP program, now studying Bluetooth and Arduino as a post-doc fellow. But before Jewelbots was a product, it was a shared ambition. More than any particular feature or function, the group wanted to build something that would get teenage girls interested in programming.

The idea took shape over several years. The group started by looking at products like MySpace and Minecraft that had successfully enticed kids to dabble in code. “We kind of wanted to reverse engineer that,” Chipps says. These examples were reassuring. They proved that if kids are genuinely interested in an outcome or effect—building a unique Minecraft structure, say, or tricking out their Myspace profiles—they won’t shy away from code as a means to achieve it.

That just left the question of the desired effect. Initially, the creators imagined Jewelbots as digital ornament that could be programmed to match girls’ outfits. But the verdict from talking to prospective preteen users was negative. “They were like,’That sounds really stupid, and I would never use that,’” Chipps says. Instead, the girls always returned to two themes: friendship and communication.

This isn’t surprising. As the Jewelbots founders were reminded by company adviser Amy Jo Kim, a longtime researcher of online communities, middle school is an age where everyone is tribal. The enmities and allegiances that form and dissolve in a single day rival anything that might be taught in European history class. What’s more, teens and preteens crave ways to make these connections visible. That settled things. Where other wearables had sought to reinvent the watch, Jewelbots followed a different template: the friendship bracelet.

Using the Jewelbots smartphone app, a girl can assign a friend one of eight different colors. When they’re nearby, both of their charms light up that color. They can assign other friends to other colors; if they’re hanging out in a group, all their Jewelbots bangles turn into pulsing rainbow flair. The charm also doubles as a button which can be used to send haptic messages to friends in a particular color group (the message presumably drafted in accordance with a phenomenally complex code developed by the cohort at an earlier time.) All these features are set up through a smartphone app, but the Jewelbots stay connected through a Bluetooth mesh network, independent of Wi-Fi or cell towers. “The way we designed it is that girls never need their phones,” Chipps says.

There’s much more Jewelbots can do if girls care to figure it out. The smartphone app is meant to be a simple point of entry, but by plugging their charm into their computer, girls can use Arduino software to hook up their Jewelbots to just about anything. Maybe someone wants hers to glow green every time she gets a new follower on Instagram, or to vibrate when her dog leaves the yard. Both possible, and totally doable for a novice coder, Chipps says. With this more advanced use, the Jewelbot becomes a personal node linked up to the greater world of open-source hardware and software. “That’s where we’re really hoping to drive the girls,” Chipps says.

Jewelbots are a thoughtfully constructed Trojan Horse for getting young girls to think about programming. The company’s Kickstarter campaign has raised $90,000. But the bracelets might also have worthwhile lessons for other wearable makers.

One intriguing aspect of Jewelbots is the way they unite fashion and function. With a typical smartwatch, fashion and function are separate. The watch may look nice, and it may be useful, but these two concerns don’t have much to do with one another. With Jewelbots, the functionalityenhances the fashion. A Jewelbot is the rare wearable that becomes prettier when it’s working. The glowing charm not only lets you know a friend is nearby but also makes this fact visible to those around you. Insofar as jewelry is fundamentally about sending signals to other people, that’s an important distinction.

An example might help illustrate what I’m getting at. We can imagine a fitness tracker that works by the same principle. This hypothetical band is studded with LEDs, but out of the box, it’s programmed to shine a single color. Only as you achieve your personal fitness goals do you unlock other colors, which you can display on your bracelet as you desire. Higher-level achievement unlocks rare, brilliant, eye-catching colors and patterns. The more committed you become to your fitness, in other words, the more attractive this piece of jewelry becomes. Fashion and function reinforce one another. This sort of thing won’t appeal to everyone, but as wearable makers try to crack the delicate problem of combining utility and ornament, it seems like an idea worth exploring.

The other compelling thing about Jewelbots is more straightforward: It’s how much they’re able to do with so little hardware. Each charm is capable of networking with other charms and of a limited form of input and output. They’re vastly less expensive than most other wearables—you can get two charms by pledging $60 to Kickstarter—and they’re made to be tinkered with. If nothing else, Jewelbots are a reminder that high-definition screens aren’t the only way to convey information on the wrist. The watch is an obvious model for a wearable, but it’s not the only one.

Could an adult version of Jewelbots make sense? Sure. Here’s another hypothetical product. You have a leather bracelet braided with five elegant digital beads. One lights up red every time you get an email from work. Another glows green when your significant other is trying to get ahold of you. You’ve linked one up with the Dark Sky weather app on your phone; it flashes blue ten minutes before it’s going to rain. You’ve set another to vibrate every hour, on the hour, to mark the time. The other beads ambiently track other interests: stock prices, physical activity, home energy usage.

But notification charms are just the start. Other beads build on Jewelbots’ idea of mesh-based proximity to open up all sorts of interesting functionality. A dedicated photo-sharing bead coordinates with others like it, automatically flagging pics from group outings and pooling them for everyone to check out later. A flirting bead links up to your dating profile and pulses a pattern when you’re in the vicinity of someone with similar interests. Beads become the new apps, orchestrating nuanced and complex real-world interactions that don’t require smartphones or screens.

OK, ok, digital charm bracelets may never replace smartphones. But wearables are still a wide-open category, and it never hurts to entertain new ideas. For her part, Chipps does think there’s wider potential for programmable, mesh-networking wearables; she and her co-founders have already applied for a patent on their particular implementation. For now, though, they’re content to serve their current demographic. “We’re starting with teenage girls because we think they’re the awesomest,” Chipps says. Come to think of it, they might be ideal wearable users. After all, what group loves jewelry and technology more?

Image from Wired

Article by Kyle Vanhemert for Wired

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Use Social Media to Brush up on Men’s Health Needs

Women know they can find all kinds of beauty tips, latest fashions and hair and makeup trends on social media. But men can, too.

Men, just like women, can turn to social media for any information regarding health and grooming needs.

Social media is full of the latest male grooming, health and fashion trends, information on particular issues and ways to spruce up their appearance.

Where should men look for health and grooming needs?

Start with the Big Names

Any of the social media big names are a great start for searching health and grooming needs.

Among them:

• Instagram – Instagram is great for following fashion trends, your favorite brands and designers and trends like men’s hair or even facial hair trends. With Instagram’s images, it’s easy to see what’s trendy.

• Twitter – If there is a particular fashion, health or grooming trend you want to check out and learn more about, use Twitter. You can hashtag things like ab-workouts or hair-loss, and you will have tons of great information at the ready.

• YouTube – Use YouTube for anything you’re searching as a how to … You can look up how to tie a certain way or what hair cut suits your age and face shape. With the videos, everything is explained right there for you in a demo.

• Facebook – Not only can you follow certain sites and individuals, like your fitness trainer, but you can also ask your friends their opinions and favorites, like where they buy their suits or where they go for a sports massage.

More Options Available

If you’re still in search of help, look to:

• Blogs – Follow some blogs that interest you, and you will be in the know of what you need to take care of yourself. There are probably as many men’s fashion, grooming and health blogs out there as there are for women; you should have no problems finding some that suit your needs. Whether you subscribe to them or just check in every now and then, you’ll have a lot of up to date information though blogs.

• Search topics – If you’re wondering about something, do a search on it. For instance, you can search hair loss prevention, and your search engine will find numbers of articles and information for you. As the following article looks at, search hair loss and you’ll come up with pieces like “Men and Hair Loss: 9 Tips for Prevention and Treatment.” Of course, you may get some irrelevant hits and things that don’t pertain to you, but don’t forget about your search engines.

The bottom line; men, don’t overlook social media as a great source of information on any grooming, health or fashion need you’re interested in.

It’s all there for you!

Photo credit: Image courtesy of stockimages at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Surprise! Amazon posts a profit, shares jump 18%

CNN - Amazon reported a surprise profit for the second quarter.
Sales jumped 20% and the company earned $92 million. A year ago it lost $126 million.

Wall Street went bonkers over the news. Shares soared over 18% at one point after the closing bell — giving Amazon a bigger market cap than Wal-Mart, which was worth $233.5 billion when the market closed. And for now Amazon is worth about $264 billion, but that will change when the market opens Friday.

Analysts had expected Amazon to post a loss.

Amazon is famously tight-lipped about its operations, so it’s unclear exactly which products contributed to last quarter’s gains. During a call with investors, company execs would not give specifics, and said only that Amazon Prime subscriber growth was faster outside the U.S.

For the third quarter, Amazon hinted that Prime Day — a 24-hour sales extravaganza held last week — would be a source of increased membership.

“We’re thrilled with the results of Prime Day,” Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said. “New prime members signed up in higher rates than we’ve ever seen.”

Another product that may have been a big contributor to profits was its cloud business, Amazon Web Services. Sales from AWS grew 81% to $1.8 billion, while profit skyrocketed 408% to $391 million.

Analysts and investors are heavily interested in this portion of Amazon’s business because of the proliferation of mobile devices. One of Amazon’s newest AWS products lets developers test mobile apps within hundreds of real phones.

Bankers were also pleased by the growth in sales of Amazon’s electronics and other general merchandise (EGM) segment, which came in well above expectations.

“We think EGM (especially in the U.S.) is the best proxy for overall commerce growth for Amazon as it is generally a catch-all category for everything outside Media, and growth here accelerated sequentially second quarter in a row,” Jefferies’ research team wrote shortly after earnings were released.

Article by Hope King for CNN

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Is WordPress Becoming Obsolete?

There are a lot of reasons developers and designers new and old to the scene love WordPress. When the WordPress framework is uploaded onto your own hosting, it affords developers access to hundreds of thousands of themes and tools to make not just building, but updating and managing a website (even a large one) a breeze. WordPress also gives you the ability to neatly create full-site backups in seconds, and to transfer, upload, or download massive amounts of content with the click of a button.

But are the days of WordPress becoming numbered? It used to be that it dominated the list of top 10 website builders, but as Wix, Weebly, and now dozens of other website builders crack onto the scene, WordPress’ domination of the market share of 74 million websites is being steadily chipped away. Here’s a breakdown of major competitors, and why their unique strategies may contribute to the ultimate decline of WordPress.

Via pixabay.com

Wix

Wix is the elephant in the room. At only $4 a month, it compares easily in cost to a self-hosted wordpress website, and offers easy drag-and-drop website building for those who might not be so code-savvy… just like Squarespace. They’ll also give you a free domain name just for signing up.

It allows you to track membership to your site, to create and send newsletters, and even to create an app of your site. It offers stellar ecommerce services, and offers a truly exhaustive roster of support for users: support staff, forums, knowledgebases, and more. Like Squarespace, everything is internally updated, removing any concern about compatibility issues.

Wix offers a massive and fully comprehensive library of themes which, though they may only rarely push the envelope design-wise, can easily be made more visually interesting once selected. One key failing of Wix  is that its templates aren’t responsive… but to account for this, it offers users access to a mobile version of their site which is fully editable. Another failing is that you cannot easily switch between templates, meaning you’ll lose all your content and data if you decide to switch.

Wix was founded in 2006, but had gained a major market share as early as 2010. Of all of the major website builders, it is the only one listed on NASDAQ, and has a polished history of being able to generate investment capital to launch new initiatives. Wix has a market share of 67 million users.

 

Squarespace

Squarespace is, simply put, easier to use and customize for your average layman. While self-hosted WordPress sites offer virtually infinite customization, more and more people are wanting to cut out the middle-man (the web developer) and make a website themselves. Squarespace’s tools are, simply, easier to use. There is virtually no learning curve, and you need to do less double-checking to ensure things appear how you want, because with Squarespace, what you see is what you get.

Squarespace also has a better system of support, and also offers dedicated support. Rather than offering over 100,000 themes and plugins all created by individual users, the Squarespace team has built their own tools all of a consistent quality, and has uploaded specific tutorials (video and text) to help users learn to work with them. Being a closed system, they also manage their own software updates. Anyone who’s worked with WordPress before knows that update compatibility issues can literally leave a website dead in the water.

Squarespace only offers a few templates, but they easily compare to (or outperform) many popular WordPress templates. If you want to shift your template, you can do so with the click of a button and not lose any content. Their templates are also automatically responsive, and beautifully so.

So, for some types of website builders, and absolutely for those who don’t like the uncertainty of potential update issues, Squarespace actually has a small leg up over WordPress in terms of usability.

Squarespace was founded in 2004, but really began blowing up in 2011. It has a current market share of almost 2 million users, which is growing rapidly.

 

The Bottom Line

Has the introduction of these competitors actually hurt WordPress’ share of the market? Probably not… yet. But Alexa will tell you that Wix ranks 250th globally for visits, which is no mean feat! And with their new ad campaigns likely to be reeling in more visitors, it’s likely that WordPress may become the choice purely for experienced developers, while the larger numbers of the html-incompetent choosing options like Wix or Squarespace.

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Walk Towards Social Media for Better Health

An old saying is that when your feet hurt, your whole body hurts. So when your feet feel good, well, your whole body will thank you.

Foot issues afflict Americans, with a study from The American Podiatric Medical Association’s (APMA) finding that about 77 percent of American adults have some sort of food pain.

Often foot issues can not only cause discomfort, but they can affect quality of life, restricting activities and doing things you love, even effecting work and home life.

Foot issues can also lead to other problems, like back, hip or knee problems. But you don’t have to live this way.

Here are some things to do and ways to do it:

• As the following article notes, find a good podiatry practice and see a doctor. The same study said that – Among those who have visited a podiatrist, 88 percent said their podiatrist was able to quickly provide a clear diagnosis, and 76 percent said their podiatrist was able to prescribe an effective treatment regimen and/or medication that helped their foot- or ankle-related issues improve or go away;

• Practice the prescribed treatment – Whether it’s medicine or physical therapy or simply inserts in your shoes, follow through with what the podiatrist recommends;

• Be kind to yourself – If you know certain things will bother you and your feet, be prepared. Maybe a new pair of shoes and inserts is in order if you are about to visit Disneyland with your family. Take time to rest your feet as well.

Social Networking is a Good Step to Take

• A great place to start is on your social media – Ask your Facebook friends if they have a trusted podiatrist. This will give you some options in your area that you can further research;

• Research some of your symptoms and/or your condition – Twitter is an excellent tool for finding articles related to what you need. Whether it’s before your visit or after, Twitter can point you to some great information.

• Use YouTube for finding some exercises – If you need modifications to your fitness plan or are searching for some stretches for your feet, take a look at YouTube. You’ll find some demonstrations showing correct methods and exercises. However, be sure you go to a reputable source so you get accurate instruction.

• Connect with others – You could find some social media support whether on Facebook or some other forums to share experiences, what has worked and what hasn’t.

Use social media to help you on your journey to better foot health.

Every step of the way matters to getting your feet feeling good again.

Photo credit: Image courtesy of satit_srihin at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Amazon Expands Its On-Demand Home Services Marketplace, Adds Support For Custom Service Requests

TechCrunch - Amazon Home Services, Amazon’s own Angie’s List competitor of sorts, which connects consumers with service professionals in their area, is expanding to more markets. According to a company announcement this morning, Amazon Home Services is today available in 15 metro regions across the U.S. The site also now features over 15 million service listings, which cover 900 different types of pro services.

Image from Amazon via TechCrunch

Consumers can use Amazon Home Services in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Miami, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, San Jose and Washington D.C., says Amazon. There’s also lighter coverage in other regions, the company indicates by way of a map on its Home Services website.

Image from Amazon via TechCrunch

Amazon’s move into local services began in earnest this March, when it rebranded its “Amazon Local Services” as “Amazon Home Services.” Before this time, the site had only offered a limited number of service offerings in select markets, following a quieter rollout of local handyman service listings back in 2014. The original idea was to offer a marketplace for services that would exist alongside Amazon’s product listings. For example, if a consumer bought a big-screen TV, they could be pointed to a local installation service to help them mount it in their living room.

Originally, the services were offered to consumers in larger metros, including New York and L.A., as well as Amazon’s hometown of Seattle.

However, with the March rebranding, Amazon began to offer a variety of pro services that expanded beyond those that would make sense as add-ons to product purchases. At launch, the site offered services in categories like Home Improvement, Lawn & Garden, Automotive, Computer & Electronics, and Lessons. There was even a “More” category which was introduced as sort of a catch-all to things that otherwise wouldn’t fit in the other groupings. Here, you could find niche services like “goat grazing” or “singing performances,” at times.

Today, Amazon is reporting a few metrics on the performance of this Home Services vertical, noting that its service pros average 4.71 out of 5 stars, and 92 percent of customers say they would recommend Home Services to a friend. During the first half of this month, Amazon says it received nearly two times the number of orders fulfilled in June, and in the last three months, the number of new applications from service pros also increased by four times.

Home Services was also a featured promotion during Amazon’s Prime Day sales event, and that boosted orders by 20 times.

However, Amazon has not provided hard numbers about how many services consumers have booked, or the transaction volume it’s seeing.

Image from Amazon via TechCrunch

Today, the company notes that it’s now offering two different ways for consumers to shop Home Services: custom and pre-packaged services. The introduction of custom services means that customers can describe their needs using text and photos and then submit this request in order to get estimates from local pros. This new option will accompany the pre-packaged service listings which include standard things, like home entertainment setup or central air installation, for instance.

On the updated website, customers can create their custom requests for bids by first selecting a profession from a drop-down box – like “contractor” or “painter” – and then fill out a simple online form to submit their request.

The custom services have a different fee structure, Amazon’s site says. While pre-packaged services include a 5 percent transaction fee and 15 percent platform fee, custom services are 5 percent and 10 percent, respectively. A third category, recurring services, is 5 percent for each fee. Meanwhile, monthly subscription fees and background check fees are waived through year-end as Amazon gets the marketplace off the ground.

Amazon deducts the fees as a percentage of the service price, excluding any taxes.

Amazon Home Services competes not only with sites like Angie’s List, but is also competitive with Craigslist and other providers of local business information like Yelp or Google’s business listings.

For consumers, the draw is that Amazon is the place that you shop for anything – not just products – and it says that its pros’ prices are the same as they would be if you dialed them direct.

Article by Sarah Perez for TechCrunch

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Tag-Team SMS Marketing and Social Media

When it comes to the ultimate marketing partnership, SMS and social media are helping put brands all across the country in the spotlight.

From brand awareness to customer outreach, SMS and social media are taking the idea of marketing to a whole new level.

Here are a handful of ways SMS and social media marketing are helping to build the strongest brands possible:

U.S. Companies Using an SMS/Social Media Strategy

Well-rounded campaigning is the key to success, especially in today’s competitive marketing climate.

As a result, some of the most influential brands in the country use a combination of both SMS and social media to get the marketing job done.

Among them:

• Delta Airlines – The country and the world’s largest airline helps travelers keep their loved ones informed about their journeys by providing SMS alerts. In addition, the airline also provides travel updates on Facebook for users who have their accounts connected to their phones. Both of these techniques help Delta make its brand more visible.

• PayPal – Just about everyone’s favorite form of online payment now allows customers to send and request payments using SMS. To help promote this new form of payment, PayPal is spreading the word via its Twitter handle.

• Amazon – The largest online retailer in the world now uses SMS text alerts to notify customers when their orders are delivered. On top of that, Amazon promotes its text alert service as well as its new streaming movie and TV service on sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Although these U.S. companies hit global success with the help of SMS and social media marketing, businesses of any kind can increase brand awareness using the same marketing partnership.

Platform Flexibility

As the article, “Using SMS marketing in conjunction with social media” notes, marketing gives brands the flexibility to advertise across multiple platforms.

For example, businesses can include SMS keywords in their social media posts that link to deals and promotions.

The reverse is also true.

Businesses can encourage mobile customers to follow their social activities by including “Follow Us” links in their SMS campaigns. This kind of platform flexibility gives even the smallest brands unparalleled customer outreach.

Brand Recognition

Increasing brand recognition in today’s competitive marketing environment is more difficult than ever before. Businesses are using just about every resource available to reach new customers and keep current customers informed.

With the SMS and social media partnership, brands can reach customers from two different angles.

Through engaging SMS keywords advertised both in-store and online as well as social media posts promoting brand awareness, the marketing partnership can increase brand recognition faster than traditional campaigning.

Conversion Rates

Social media and mobile marketing are two of the most trusted forms of customer outreach.

Recipients are more willing to opt-in to marketing campaigns when they originate from their mobile device or social media account. Why?

Well, these two marketing arenas are more personal than traditional forms of mass marketing. And, with increased trust comes increased conversion rates.

Whether customers opt-in to a social promotion or text an SMS keyword for more information on a product, the SMS/social partnership gets the conversion ball rolling.

When brands tag-team their marketing endeavors with SMS and social media, it helps take some of the guesswork out if campaigning.

Photo credit: Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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