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October 12,2016ByDAVID VEGA

Facebook to Launch Its Office Communication Tool ‘Facebook at Work’

Brands . social media

The software, called Facebook at Work, will allow employees to send professional messages and share documents during work hours. AKA the Slacker competitor. Will be rolling out today! Facebook at Work isn’t a real-time collaboration tool like Google Docs and Spreadsheets–you won’t be able to work on documents simultaneously. However, employees will be able to share documents and post messages securely among their company network. Employees with companies using Facebook at Work will find that their work account is only visible to others within the organization. However, they will still be able to access public content on regular Facebook. Users will also be able to connect their work and personal accounts, enabling them to switch back and forth between the two. Employers will not have access to employee usernames or passwords. Will a familiar interface entice employees to get more active in workplace social networks? We will find out soon. Read More. David Vega, Tridence...

September 26,2016ByDAVID VEGA

87% of people turn to SEARCH first to get things done.

Brands . social media

New Consumer Behavior Data: 87% of people turn to SEARCH first to get things done. Mobile is key. Result: As marketers we have to connect the information we provide across screens, channels, and formats. And search, particularly on mobile, is where to start. By anticipating people’s needs, you can ensure you’re meeting people in their micro-moments with relevant and useful information. Contact Tridence to review your online Branding Needs and review our BOL special before time is up. Read More: mobile-search-consumer-behavior-data...

September 13,2016ByDAVID VEGA

Understanding the difference between Sales and Marketing

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It’s easy to confuse marketing and sales together. Both, after all, follow a single overarching goal: to increase your brand or business. Especially in small businesses, one person may be responsible for both sides of achieving that goal. However, their similarities do not make the two concepts identical. In fact, they are different in a variety of ways. Understanding the difference between sales and marketing can help businesses improve their operations, and work with experts in each area to maximize their success. The Basic Concept of Marketing Marketing, at its core, is deceptively simple: it aims to raise awareness of your brand or business to a potential target audience. Done strategically, that awareness can help you grow your business, through a streamlined process. That process is best explained with a simple digital marketing example. Imagine your site. Building that website, in other words, is a marketing responsibility. In addition, marketing efforts also have to include driving traffic to that website effectively. Through search engine optimization, social media, and other digital channels, you can build a digital marketing strategy that accomplish that fact. What happens next, however, is the most common source of confusion for many small businesses. This is where marketing and sales intersect. How Marketing Ties into Sales When visitors go to your website, some of them will be ready to immediately make a purchase. In that case, no sales efforts will be necessary. But in most cases, they are interested enough in your brand to learn more, but not quite interested enough to immediately convert into a customer. An effective website captures these visitors for more targeted sales efforts. Through sign up forms, newsletter subscriptions, and other tactics, it gathers the contact information of interested members of your target audience, turning them into leads. Once they enter your database, more specific sales efforts are possible. Marketing, in other words, supports your sales efforts. It adds leads to your database, which can be nurtured or ready for the sales call. One leads to another, but both are far from identical. Understanding the Difference Between Sales and Marketing The above paragraph lays bare the core difference between marketing and sales. The former is responsible for everything that leads up to the point when a member of your target audience becomes a lead. Once they take that action, sales takes over. To accomplish its goal of lead generation, effective marketing focuses on educating its audience and establishing your brand as a thought leader and credible source in its industry. Sales, on the other hand, are focused on a more direct selling pitch of the benefits of your product or service for your target audience. Both of course, have to be integrated to be successful. If your marketing tactics promise one thing and your sales team pitches another, your leads will experience cognitive dissonance and become less likely to follow through with a purchase. Only an integrated and consistent message can encourage your leads to eventually follow through and become customers. Finding the Expert Help You Need In its simplest form, marketing aims to generate leads, while sales aims to convert these leads into customers. Understanding what your business needs to accomplish increases your chances of finding external help to achieve your goals. That, in turn, requires an analysis of your current sales efforts. If you are looking for more potential sales prospects to increase your business, we’d love to have a word. Contact us today to learn how our marketing expertise can support (but not replace) your sales success. Author: Kerin Donahue ...

July 19,2016ByDAVID VEGA

3 Ways to Level Up Your Marketing With Pokemon Go. SM Marketing

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Catch all the Pokemon masters you can with these three marketing strategies. Source: 3 Ways to Level Up Your Marketing With Pokemon Go...

July 7,2016ByDAVID VEGA

15 Hidden Snapchat Hacks & Features You’ll Wish You Knew About Sooner.

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Snapchat, the one-to-one messaging app with more than 150 million daily active users, has earned a reputation for fast growth and innovation. But despite its success, it isn’t the most user-friendly app I’ve ever played around with. Many of its best features are so buried within the app that a lot of people don’t even know they exist. In March 2016, Snapchat added even more features in their release of a new version, and some of these features have totally reshaped how people use the app in the first place. For example, did you know that you can use Snapchat to make a live video call? Or that you can add emojis to your Snapchat videos — and make it so they move and scale with specific objects? What about the trick where you can save data by turning the app on to “travel mode”? There are a whole lot of cool things you can do with Snapchat that you may not have known about. But before we jump into them, it’s important that you know the basics. Already have the basics down? Read on for some more advanced tips and features. Note: Before getting started, make sure you’re operating on the latest version of Snapchat. At the time of posting, the latest version is 9.33.0.0. 15 Hidden Snapchat Hacks & Features 1) Use Snapchat for voice and video calls. One of the biggest changes Snapchat made during its most recent update in March 2016 was the addition of a voice and video chat feature. There are two ways you can use voice and video chats: By sending 10-second recordings (of your voice or a video of you), or by “calling” them to start a live voice or video chat lasting any amount of time. The voice and video call functionality is located within Snapchat’s chat feature, so you’ll need to open up a chat conversation with someone to begin. If you’ve updated your Snapchat app, you’ll see the phone icon and a video icon below the chat box. To leave a 10-second voice or video message, hold down on the voice or video call icon and it will begin recording immediately. When you release the button by picking your finger up from the screen, the recording will stop and send immediately with no do-overs. In other words, make sure you’re ready to record and send the voice or video message before you begin. To start a live voice or video call, just tap the voice or video call icon and it’ll begin ringing the other person immediately. If they don’t answer within a few seconds, you’ll see a pop-up notification asking you if you’d like to send a voice or video message instead. These voice and video messages are identical to the 10-second voice and video messages described above. Here’s a GIF showing what it looks like to live video call another user: Note: Voice and video chat will only work if both you and the person you’re trying to call have updated their app to the most recent version. Also, remember that there’s no verification once you tap or hold down on one of the icons — it’ll start ringing or recording right away. (I learned this the hard way when I tapped the video icon accidentally.) Otherwise, it’s a very intuitive and easy-to-use functionality. 2) Turn on two filters at once. Can’t choose between giving your photo a blue hue and letting your friends know you’re going 0 mph? Thankfully, you don’t have to make that difficult decision. You can use both filters at the same time with a very simple trick. To add a second filter to a photo, all you have to do is hold the screen with one finger and swipe left or right with another to find your second filter. (To add that first filter, just swipe your finger left or right over your photo to rotate among them until you settle on one.) https://vine.co/v/eEl6z3q5UUM/embed/simple 3) Add, resize, and rotate emojis and stickers to your photos. If you’re looking to dress up your Snapchats outside of the text box, you can add an emoji (or five) and place them anywhere you want on your photo or video. In addition to the emojis you’re probably familiar with, Snapchat added 200 new stickers in May 2016 that are similar to the stickers that are so popular in other messaging apps like Facebook Messenger. These new stickers are super cute — everything from cacti to snarky kittens to walruses celebrating Hump Day. To access the emojis and stickers, start by taking your photo in Snapchat. Then, tap on the folded paper icon on the top of your screen next to the “T” text icon. Scroll through the available stickers and emojis until you find the one you want. Tap on it to add it to your photo, and then use your finger to move it around. You can use two fingers to rotate it or resize it by pinching and zooming. Add as many emojis and stickers as you’d like. To delete a sticker or emoji, simply drag it to the trash icon, which appears in place of the folded paper icon once you hold your finger down on the emoji in question. Another creative way to use emojis on Snapchat? Create your own filters using some of the more transparent emojis by enlarging them until they cover the whole screen. 4) “Pin” emojis to objects in your videos. In addition to adding stationary emojis and stickers to your Snapchat videos, you can also “pin” — or attach — emojis and stickers to different objects in your video. This allows the emoji to automatically move, rotate, and scale with whatever object you pinned it to. To “pin” an emoji or sticker to an object in a video, start by recording your video in Snapchat first. Then, tap on the folded paper icon on the top of your screen, located to the left of the “T” icon. Scroll through the available emojis and stickers until you find the one you want. Tap on it to add it to your photo, and then use your finger to move it, and...

July 1,2016ByDAVID VEGA

Sharing is Caring: Facebook’s News Feed Algorithm Update

Brands . social media

In a post to the Facebook blog on Wednesday, June 29, 2106, Facebook announced yet another update to their ever-changing News Feed algorithm. As much as Facebook has grown in the past years it has struggled to find a comfortable balance between its business/advertising sector and users. We’ve reported on the changes Facebook made to the organic reach of business pages in the past. This time around, Facebook is making the organic reach of business page’s even more dependant on the amount of shares it receives. Lars Backstrom, Facebook’s Engineering Director, had this to say: “We’ve heard from our community that people are still worried about missing important updates from the friends they care about. For people with many connections this is particularly important, as there are a lot of stories for them to see each day. So we are updating News Feed over the coming weeks so that the things posted by the friends you care about are higher up in your News Feed.” Facebook has always stated that its goal is to help people keep in touch with their family and friends. Their priority has always been to keep you connected to the people, places, and things you want to be connected to. Still, people are worried about missing important updates from the friends they care about says Facebook. If you weren’t aware before, the Facebook News Feed has two overarching goals: 1) To inform. People expect to see updates that are relevant to them whether it be about friends or family, or current events. This of course varies from person to person, but the News Feed is constantly trying to figure out what news is relevant to you. 2) To entertain. Facebook tries to sprinkle in updates that are entertaining to you. For some of your friends that might be news about a celebrity or a brand, or an exciting live video. But entertainment will always be behind updates from your personal network. How will this affect your Facebook business page? Over the coming weeks Facebook anticipates that this update may cause the reach and referral traffic for business pages to decline (once again). But this depends on your page’s audience composition. For example, if a lot of your referral traffic to your website comes from your audience sharing your content and their friends liking/commenting on it then you shouldn’t see much of a decline. In other words, Facebook encourages Pages to post things that their audience are likely to share with their friends. What is Facebook’s reasoning behind this change? If people aren’t able to rely on Facebook to keep them updated with friends and family then they might switch to a platform that will. Snapchat is certainly biting at their heels. How can I prepare my Facebook Page for this change? First I’ll say that if you’ve successfully adapted to Facebook’s algorithm changes thus far you don’t have too much to worry about. If you’re seeing a decent amount of engagement — sharing being the most important — then you shouldn’t see much of a change. Take the time to audit your Facebook Page’s past posts to see what kind of content has received the most engagement. Note the type of content, format, visuals, length, time of day, etc — and build on top of those successes. If your posts haven’t been seeing much engagement lately definitely don’t expect to see any improvement going forward with this new update. There must be an even greater focus on driving traffic back to your own website and building your email list. There must be an even greater focus on growing your own assets, like an email list. A few ways this can be accomplished is: Social contests. Fun and engaging, social contests like, vote contests, photo contests, Instagram hashtag contests and others are a great way to collect leads through social media. Social promotions are still one of the most effective way of capitalizing on a large social media audience. Lead generation. Employ tools like popups or landing pages on your website to capture visitor information through the use of lead magnets. Traffic that moves from your Facebook page to your website can be captured and added to profit-generating email lists. Going forward, Facebook’s relationship with businesses is looking a little cloudy in my opinion. The social media giant is still trying to figure out how to keep their users connected while balancing it with advertising. We’ve all been witness to the evolving and pivoting nature of social media and it’s an important reminder that relying on third party platforms can be risky. The way these platforms deal with businesses and advertising can change in an instant and leave you with a 3% organic reach. Written By : Jordan Lore...

February 17,2016ByDAVID VEGA

HOW TO SPEED UP YOUR PAGE LOAD TIME

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So, you have been reading our blog and have armed yourself with the best skills in ensuring that your conversion rate is as high as you need it to be. But wait a minute, Your analytics show you different results after all. But why? Have you thought about your page load time? Let’s discuss why Page load time is important and check my 9 actionable tips to optimized load time of your site. What is Page Load Time and Why Does It Matter? Page load time is the time taken for a page in your site to open. Technically speaking, this is the speed at which a webpage or media content is downloaded from website hosting servers and displayed on the requesting web browser. For you to better understand what page load time is in terms of user experience and website performance, there are three core aspects that you need to know: Your browser response to page load requests The view within the duration for delivering requested material from the website hosts to the browser The view of the end-users as the requested web page renders on the browser. Here is why page load time matters One: Page Speed effects Return On Investment (ROI) A report by the Aberdeen Group has showed that having instantaneous website response rate leads to maximum conversion rates. Additionally, every 1 second delay in the page load time reduces customer satisfaction by 16%, page views by 11% and conversion rate by 7%. Clearly, having a website that loads instantaneously is sort of difficult. So, does this mean that you are doomed? No. There is an allowance. At least 83% of people expect a page to load within three seconds or less. After this, the one second delay effects as mentioned above come into play. If you don’t stick to the 3-second window, then you risk an abandonment rate of over 40%. To put this in monetary perspective, let me show you this: If an e-commerce is making $100,000 per day, just one second delay in the page load time could potentially result in $2.5 million loss in sales per year. Let’s understand this with an example of a Case Study: In 2012, TagMan ran a test to find out the exact correlation between page load time and conversion rate. It was found that these two elements had a very significant relationship that eventually affected sales in a business. To better represent these effects, the researchers measured how average paid-load time a user experienced affected his chances of converting. The result: At two seconds, the conversion rate peaked, after which it dropped by 6.7% with each additional second. Here is a graph displaying the results: What this means for your business: As much as there is the safe three-second limit, try your best to hit a maximum page load time of two seconds as the research by TagMan showed. Two: Page Speed Directly Affects Your SEO, Brand Image and User Experience In terms of brand image and user experience, research has showed that 46% of visitors who fail to get through your site due to slow loading times will definitely tell their friends about the same. Additionally, 44% of your site visitors will develop a negative image of the company if the site crashes or has loads slowly. With regards to SEO and ranking, as of late 2010, Google announced that site speed was a new signal it introduced to its organic search-ranking algorithm. Now, you know what page load time is, why it matters to your business let’s discuss 9 Ways to decrease your page load time. 1 Get The Right Server For Your Website Currently, despite the existence of many web servers, people are still torn between IIS and Apache. Well, we understand that you definitely want the best for your website and this is okay. The big question is: Yes the web server has been rated as the best. But, is it good enough for you? Before you settle on any web server, you need to ask yourself what exactly you are looking for based on your website’s needs. Let’s look at how you do this. How To Choose The Right Server Before settling on a web server, there are certain factors that you need to consider. This choice is of course based on cost, capabilities, support and other factors. Generally, failure to make these considerations will affect your site performance. Let’s look at a few main factors. One: Technology When assessing the technological requirements for your server, there are certain areas that you need to look at. Operating System Do you remember the example we gave on Apache and IIS being the best in the market? Their use depends on your operating system. If you need to host ASP.NET code, Microsoft IIS or MS SQL for example, you have no choice but to use Microsoft Windows Dedicated Server. Conversely, if you want to run an open source stack such as Ruby On Rails or Apache/php/mysql, you should use a Linux server. Performance If you run a heavy website that has chat servers, virtualization or specialized applications for example, you need to use a multi-processor server. A good example is the dual Xeon server. This means that if you use a single-processor server yet you run heavy material on your website, all because you want to cut on costs, you could end up losing on revenue. Web Server and Database Server If your website’s architecture is power hungry, for example Ruby, Windows or Java, then you need to find a server with plenty of RAM. Bandwidth Bandwidth is basically the amount of data that can be transmitted in a fixed amount of time. This means that for you to have a website that does not hang and loads fast, you need to have a bandwidth wide enough to handle your data. For example, if you host multimedia such as flash videos and images. Two: Budget Although not directly proportional to page load time,...

January 12,2016ByDAVID VEGA

4 Ways Social Media Advertising Will Help Your Small Business Grow

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Social Media Advertising For Small Businesses The research firm Clutch polled small businesses of varying sizes recently to determine how they used social media in their business. One of the findings that stuck out to us as a missed opportunity for the majority of companies polled is their collective approach to social media advertising. While 30 percent of the responding business owners planned to increase their investment in social media ads, the majority did not. Fifty-nine percent of the small businesses planned to either remain flat, decrease their spend, or not advertise at all on social over the next 12 months. When compared to Search and Display advertising on Google, social media advertising offers a cost-effective way to generate online leads, increase sales, boost search rankings and raise brand awareness. Following Facebook’s changes to its algorithm in April of last year–which now serves organic posts to only 2 percent of your followers as compared to 20 percent previously–it’s also become a necessary part of doing business and being heard from online. More on those ways that social media advertising will help your small business grow are below. 1.) Generating Cost-Effective Leads: Social Media Advertising–specifically on Facebook–helps generate leads in the form of email signups and website traffic at a fraction of the cost of Google Adwords. Advertising on Facebook also helps you better target your vertical audience and remarket within the newsfeed to people who have visited your website at a highly affordable pricepoint. 2.) Increasing Sales: Advertising on social allows you to put your message in front of people or audiences who are most likely to purchase from you. It also creates the opportunity for word of mouth advertising from those who like, share, or comment on your ad; serving as a recommendation for your product or brand throughout their respective social networks and leading to increased sales. 3.) Boosting Search Ranking: An investment in Twitter Advertising these days is also an investment in boosting your Google ranking. Recently, Google and Twitter announced a partnership to index tweets, allowing Twitter to now have an effect on SEO. So where you might not have seen as much value in advertising for Twitter followers in the past, now some new opportunities exist as accounts with larger “social authority” are being rewarded in terms of page rank. 4.) Raising Brand Awareness: Whether it’s sponsoring a post on Twitter, boosting a post on Facebook, advertising for more likes or followers, or simply using a social platform to promote a product, social media advertising is critical in helping small business raise brand awareness. There are 156.5 million US users on Facebook and the average user spends 29 minutes daily on Facebook. The more investment you put into platforms where your customers spend their time, the more chance you have of increasing market share and growing your business. -Author: Brendan Bowers...

November 27,2015ByDAVID VEGA

Why Instagram’s latest update is important to you!

Brands . social media

Instagram released an update today that changes the experience for creators and users....

November 20,2015ByDAVID VEGA

6 Ways to Supercharge Your Email Marketing with PPC (and Vice Versa)

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Here are the top six ways your paid search and email marketing programs can work hand-in-hand: Paid Search and Email Marketing Programs 1. Use paid search to fuel your email list Paid search is the perfect way to re-fuel your funnel with brand-new, qualified prospects. Through pay-per-click (PPC), you can display your ads to searchers who are actively looking for your products and services. If they click through to your website, you can attain their email details one of three ways: Set up an email address sign-up form as your primary conversion goal. You can do something simple, like “sign up for more information,” or go the extra mile and offer an incentive like a whitepaper download, complimentary trial, or free quote. Capture your buyer’s email address during the purchasing process. You convinced someone to convert right off the bat? Nice — just don’t forget to snag their email as they check out. This is the perfect way to create a list to target for upsells, cross-sells, or replacement purchases in the future. Didn’t convince them to convert during their initial visit? Don’t despair! You can include a secondary call to action on your landing page to solicit their email address for future nurtures. Entice them to fill out the sign-up form by offering to keep them in the loop on upcoming sales or providing free shipping on future orders. Constant Contact customers can easily add a sign-up form to any page of their website to make it easy for people to opt in to their list. Find out how. 2. Test your calls-to-action and offer with paid search Your emails may have incredible open rates, but if they don’t include a compelling call to action (CTA), you’ve wasted a great headline. Because CTAs are the most crucial component in driving email conversions, our team here at WordStream has devoted a great deal of time and research to crafting persuasive CTAs. However, we don’t just guess whether or not they will be a slam dunk with our target audience — we test. At this point we’re pretty good with the predictions, but there are definitely times that we miss the mark. To avoid these frustrating flops, we now test all new CTA/offer ideas on PPC landing pages before we use them for emails. This strategy is fairly low-risk because it doesn’t hit a huge group of people at once. Instead, we can monitor their behavior and pivot quickly if the test does not yield positive results. A few years ago, our go-to CTA was “sign up for a free trial of WordStream Advisor.” Definitely not the most star-studded offer, but we felt like it was getting the job done just fine. Then, we had the brilliant idea of building the AdWords Grader, a free tool that analyzes an AdWords account and spits out a report card showing users exactly which sections of their account need a little extra love. We were pretty confident that “Get Your FREE Report Today” would be a more compelling CTA, since the offer was directly in-line with the help most people were looking for, but plenty of people were skeptical of the change. We knew that rolling it out across the board was a risky move, so instead we opted to test the waters by running it in a paid search campaign. At a 5X conversion rate, results were so stellar that we had all of the data we needed to get the green light to offer it in our email campaigns. You can test different calls to actions in your email marketing, as well. With an email marketing service like Constant Contact, you’ll have access to valuable metrics like opens and clicks to see how you’re different calls to action are performing. Learn more. 3. Upload your email lists to run identity-based PPC ads Identify-based marketing is all the rage nowadays. In fact, now that it’s available on various networks, our founder Larry Kim goes as far as to say that it’s “the most important trend happening in PPC today.” I must admit, I’m inclined to agree. It’s the perfect convergence of PPC and email marketing. Here’s how it works: Advertisers can upload targeted email lists into AdWords (through Customer Match), Twitter and Facebook to serve ads/establish bids that are customized specifically for that prospect segment. If you’re currently running email marketing campaigns, you’ve probably already segmented them into specific groupings based on their stage of the purchase journey. You can export these lists from your email marketing accounts and reuse them for your PPC campaigns and voila, you’ve cut a huge chunk of time out of the setup process! 4. Leverage remarketing ads to hammer your offer home As tempting as it is to pummel your prospects’ inboxes with offers, it usually just earns you an “unsubscribe” or an “automatically move to junk mail” label. In fact, I have refused to talk to sales guys who clutter my inbox, even if I was originally completely gung-ho about their product. That said, data shows that people are more likely to follow through with a purchase if they see a brand’s name repeatedly. This creates a tough challenge for email marketers, who are desperate to keep their brands top-of-mind for prospects without driving them crazy. Rather than spamming their inboxes to stay fresh in prospects’ minds, run remarketing campaigns so your ads appear while they are browsing the internet (you can target anyone who has visited your site!). These ads are less intrusive than emails and have proven to be incredibly effective. As you can see below, the more someone sees these ads, the more likely they are to complete a conversion. If you rely on remarketing for branding purposes, it’s safe to reduce your email frequency. Prospects will no longer be jaded by your incessant emails and will be more likely to read the few high-quality messages that you send. Here are some tips for finding the right email sending frequency. 5. Test...