This month, Econsultancy published a study 'Marketing Budgets 2013 Report' which looks into how companies are allocating their online and offline marketing budgets in 2013. More than 800 companies were surveyed between December 2012 and February 2013. Of the 800 companies surveyed, 71% of businesses plan to increase their digital marketing budgets and those businesses plan to increase their budget by 28%, on average.

What does this mean for you? Online marketing is an important marketing channel and will be growing in importance throughout 2013. Interestingly, among the various online marketing opportunities, content marketing is the big winner. 70% of businesses surveyed are increasing their content marketing budgets, putting content marketing in the lead. SEO and email marketing are close behind content marketing with 65% of businesses increasing those budgets in 2013. Content marketing and SEO work hand-in-hand to earn new customers for you.

Another fun fact: According to eMarketer, a top marketing industry data compilation company, worldwide online sales reached the $1 Trillion milestone in 2012. What’s more, eMarketer predicts that e-commerce sales will grow to $1.3 trillion in 2013. For smart business owners, the growth of online sales can only mean the growth of online marketing, since it is online marketing that pushes potential customers directly to your website.

Call us if you would like to implement better, stronger, more diverse online marketing campaigns in 2013.

You Cannot Stop the Movement Towards Mobile

88% of searches are still done on desktops. Growth in search, however, is being driven by mobile phones and tablets. 10% of online retail dollars spent in Q3 2012 were on mobile devices, according to the latest e-commerce research from comScore. Mobile search is anticipated to increase to an even more substantial 12-13% during Q4 2012, and from there, it will only continue to climb.

What does this mean for you? Now is the time for businesses to prepare for the smartphone/tablet onrush. You will be behind the curve if you wait much longer to join the mobile marketplace. Call us to find out how you can prepare for the onslaught of mobile commerce.

Tag Your Traffic

Google Tag Manager lets you add and update your website tags, easily and for free, whenever you want, without commandeering the IT folks’ time. Google Tags are snippets of code that are usually placed in the head of a page (but can be placed anywhere) which enable 3rd-party tracking, analysis and reporting. Google Analytics and other analytics platforms can be tagged, but remarketing, conversion tracking, affiliates and advanced customer insight services utilize tags as well.

Why would I want to use tags to track anything?, you wonder. Well, tag management is a concept that was born out of the increasing need for more agile marketing measurement and tracking ability. Managing and making changes to HTML can be tedious and time-consuming for your web developer. Why divert the energy of your human capital when you can simply insert a tag and let the analytics follow?! HTML can take a long time; Google Tag Manager makes it easy.

By Michael Pingree

Pinson Digital's Inbound Marketing News is your monthly source to keep you up to date on the latest trends in inbound marketing. You will know about emerging trends in inbound marketing and we will explain how those trends can be put to use in your business.

Authorship May Improve Search Engine Rankings

Lately, “Authorship” and “AuthorRank” have been hot topics, but what do these elusive words really mean? It means that you can link your content to your Google+ profile. This way, your content appears in the search engines next to your beaming face, your name, and the number of people in your Google+ circles. 

What does this mean for you? It serves as a good reminder that, now more than ever, social media is a central part of a diversified marketing strategy that is built on a foundation of quality content.

By Michael Pingree

Pinson Digital LLC Search News is your monthly source to keep you up to date on the latest trends in inbound marketing. You’ll know about emerging trends in online marketing and we’ll explain how those trends can be put to use in your business. 

On September 18, Google announced they would be rolling out another Panda refresh. Panda is Google's code name for a series of updates they started in 2011 that remove low quality content from Google's search index. This latest refresh is expected to only impact less than 0.7% of search results. So what does this mean for you? It serves as a good reminder that you should have a diversified and well-rounded marketing strategy that is built on a foundation of quality content. Make the content on your website useful and informative. To learn more about ways to take your content marketing program to the next level, give us a call. 

Pinson Digital LLC Search News is your monthly source to keep you up to date on the latest trends in search engine marketing. You’ll know about emerging trends in online marketing and we’ll explain how those trends can be put to use in your business. 

Today's Mozcast is Hot and Stormy...

Google is constantly updating its search algorithms. SEOMoz recently launched a metric and website, appropriately dubbed Mozcast, to track the frequency and level of changes. 

Search engine optimization is all about optimizing your website so that Google can find your content, think 'this is great stuff!' and put it on the first page for your prospects. Mozcast is a great tool for determining whether ranking changes you see are systemic or, happening only to you. In these 5-day and 30-day Mozcast reports, changes are portrayed in terms of the weather. A hot and stormy day means that Google is changing rankings! 

If we notice your ranking is falling...and the Mozcast is Cool with Clear Skies, we’ll know that your campaign changes are not due to Google making changes, but rather, we need to pay close attention to your specific campaign to get you back on top, where you ought to be. 

A reminder about some of the important recent news of the past couple of months...

It’s finally happened -- Google has integrated local business listings and maps into its social platform, Google+. Google Places is on the way out but the complete transition hasn’t happened quite yet. Google’s latest blog post says this: 

If you are a business owner, you should continue to manage your information in Google Places for Business. You’ll still be able to verify your basic listing data, make updates, and respond to reviews. If you don’t yet have a Google+ Page for your business, we encourage you to create one now. And if you do already have one, hold tight for news on how to get it linked to your local listing. 

Once you create your Google+ Page for your business, your business can be found across Google search, maps, mobile and Google+. Zagat’s user generated reviews, using a 30 point rating scale, replace Google’s star ratings. The new layout and design put more focus on photos and reviews. Your local listing is no longer “set it and forget it.” You cannot allow your listing to get stale and you must take measures to encourage your customers to review your business. Who has the time for that? We do! We offer a local listings service and a customer review service.  

No surprises here! The winner is Google. Last year at this time, Google had 65% of the market share and now, 66%. Bing has 15% (up from 14%) and Yahoo 13% (down from 16%). Yahoo has been on a serious decline and at 13%, this is Yahoo’s lowest share ever. 

As if Google hasn’t had enough success already, it owns about 95% of market share for mobile search too. If you ever wonder why we focus most of our SEO efforts on Google, well, there you go.  

Based on the sales of smartphones and tablets, mobile marketing has a bright future and is definitely something to consider when devising your marketing strategy. Mobile marketing is still relatively new, so there’s plenty of room for growth and innovation in the mobile space.

What’s shocking? Take a look at this graph that shows how much time people spend on various advertising mediums and the percentage of advertising dollars spent for each medium. Print gets 25% of advertising spend and mobile, only 1%. Some businesses haven’t caught up with the age of the Internet! 

The Google updates will keep coming, the rules will keep changing and we will continue to stress the importance of diversification. The best protection against Google updates is diversification of online marketing, to include things like PPC, email marketing and social media marketing. Call if you want more information on any of our online marketing services. 

Pinson Digital LLC, through our strategic partnerships with best-of-breed suppliers, is an internet marketing firm specializing in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC), Social Media Management (SMM), Reputation Monitoring (RM) and Local Map Optimization (LMO) services. We will also provide  Website Design (WD) and Offset/Digital Printing (ODP) 

Pinson Digital's Search News is your monthly source to keep you up to date on the latest trends in search engine marketing. You’ll know about emerging trends in online marketing and we’ll explain how those trends can be put to use in your business. 

Though Google is known for being incredibly vague with its SEO guidelines, one thing is very clear: Google wants high quality content so users get relevant search results 100% of the time and advertisers keep coming back. 

Content marketing is all about educating and informing consumers about topics that are related to a particular industry. It's not a hard sell. The company that is the 'sponsor' of the helpful article gets its brand in front of consumers who are likely to need its services. That article sends traffic from Google and other search engines and fortifies the campaign with traffic from referrals, social media, customer reviews, word of mouth and more. 

When we market content for your campaign, we place it where it will bring value to you, the audience and the search engines. Content marketing has the added benefit of attracting high-quality natural links that are less vulnerable to Google updates, like Penguin. 

Google+ Local has replaced Google Places. However, your Google+ Local information is still managed through your Google Places for Business dashboard. 

If you have a Google+ page for your business, currently, there is no way to combine your Google+ Local page with your Google+ page. For now, you have to manage them separately. 

What's the payoff for setting up a Google+ Local page? A few things: Google+ Local pages will be indexed (Google Places pages were not). It's very likely that in the future, social signals tracked on Google+ Local pages will be displayed as local annotations in the search results and as featured recommendation positions within Google+ Local internal searches. 

Got all that?! Wouldn't it just be easier to hand off the management of your Google+ profile to us? Call us and we'll take care of it.  

There's ALWAYS something new in social media!

Due to Twitter's new restrictions on how third-party developers are permitted to use its API, the LinkedIn/Twitter partnership that began in 2009 is over. In a blog post, Ryan Roslansky, LinkedIn head of content wrote, 'If you had previously synced your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts, and selected the option to share Tweets on LinkedIn, those Tweets generated from Twitter will no longer appear on LinkedIn.' 

The ongoing patent dispute between Facebook and Yahoo has been resolved and the former enemies are now working toward an advertising and content partnership. Read Facebook Newsroom for more details. 

Facebook is reportedly planning to sell mobile ads that will target users based on the apps they've downloaded through its Facebook Connect feature. Read more about the controversial advertising strategy here. 

Google's Panda update, released over a year ago, was designed to target low quality content. In June, Google pushed out two Panda refreshes. For those of you keeping score, we’re now up to Panda 3.8.

Note that a refresh is different from an update:

• An update is a change to Google's algorithm
• A refresh reruns the existing algorithm to catch any sites that are in violation. Unlike an update, it does not change the algorithm.

The original Panda update impacted about 12% of search worldwide and the refreshes in June impacted only about 1%. This is yet another reminder of the importance of online marketing diversification and producing quality content with the end user in mind.