By Emily Kanter

In today’s holistic, integrated marketing-climate, a press release can now serve many more purposes than just getting a busy New York Times reporter to return your calls, tweets, and/or e-mails. Online press-releases can improve SEO by building backlinks, and sending them through social-media outlets can spread a company’s branding as well. And these are just two of the additional uses.

Still, there are different tactics to remember in order to maximize the effectiveness of an online press-release. In a recent Hubspot webinar entitled “The Science of PR,” the company’s social-media scientist, Dan Zarrella, and PR Newswire’s VP of Social Media, Sarah Skerik, presented valuable data then will tell you when and how to publish online press releases for various purposes.  Read more...

By Josh Cline

Is every single one of your Facebook and Twitter posts delivering something that your target market will find valuable, or are you posting items in social media just to put something there? The answer will likely determine the future of your social-media marketing efforts.

In a recent Harvard Business Review blog-post, Brian Solis relates how he had once attended a presentation by a Facebook sales-representative and was shocked at his useless recommendation:  Read more...

The following is the second in a series of posts about high tech marketing strategy based on Crossing the Chasm.

It’s Strategy Stupid.

This should be obvious, but it’s not.

We’re enamored with the next shiny thing to realize that the basic fundamentals are even more important than ever.

Marketing is about markets. Strategy.

Do you remember the four Ps? The core principals of marketing:

• Product
• Price
• Promotion
• Place

These principles guide all marketing activities, including crossing the chasm from early adopter to mainstream.  Read more...

The following is the first of several posts about high tech business and marketing strategy, based on the bible of high tech marketing, Crossing the Chasm.

As The Cline Group CEO, Josh Cline likes to say, we frequently put the cart before the horse, developing a plan before engaging in a strategy.

We can’t implement a promotional plan before we understand the decision making cycle and just how technology is adopted. Selling to different audiences require different business strategies.

In order to plan throughout the entire technology adoption lifecycle. In order to develop a plan, first we should understand how technology is adopted.  Read more...

By Daniel Goldstein

Your website may be duplicating its own content without you even realizing it – and thereby possibly causing negative effects on your search-engine marketing performance.

Say that you are a company that sells widgets. One of your pages will list all of the widgets, say, by price in descending order while another will show them grouped by color. Most of the time, each specific widget will have its own product description – and therefore all of the product descriptions will be the same on both of the aforementioned pages. In other words, both of the pages of your website will have the same content.  Read more...

One of the things I’ve always advocated when consulting clients or internally is to measure business outcomes, not just activities.

Digital marketing has actually made tracking actual business results much easier and much more accountable than print or telephone channels.

In digital marketing, this requires web analytics. There are several types of analytics, but the most popular is click-stream, which tracks actual clicks and visits.

Many of us have Google Analytics or other click-stream tracking set up … but many of us probably have never checked it.

This is a huge mistake. By measuring our web data, we can:  Read more...