Display Marketing – INO.com Financial Advertising Blog

New Ad Placement – Blog Alert Sponsorship

We have received some great initial feedback for a relatively new ad placement. Our Blog Alert Sponsorship is a text-based slot prominently displayed in each of our Blog Alert emails. The alerts go out to approximately 66K traders who have requested an email every time we publish a blog post by INO.com founder, Adam Hewison, or any of our other distinguished traders and contributors.

As multiple alerts could be sent in a single day, this placement is priced on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis.

Specs:

Headline: Max 60 characters with hyperlink
Body: Max 360 characters
Link Line: Max. 60 characters with hyperlink

Do you think this placement would be good fit for your offer? I’d love to talk with you about this position and discuss how we can help boost traffic and add volume to your lead-gen or sales campaigns.

Best,

Bob Fladung
Director of Advertising
INO.com, Inc.

Content Building with INO Contributors

Posted by Bob Fladung

If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand times… “Content Is King.”

These words were first spoken by Bill Gates in 1996, during the internet’s infancy. With only a small percentage of businesses holding an online presence, content, any content for that matter, could generate traffic.

Once Google hit the scene in 1998, it changed the way that consumers and businesses searched for and used information. Although content is still important, relevancy and value are heavily weighted factors when it comes to search engine rankings and overall visitor satisfaction.

Content must be relevant to a search query and provide the visitor with enough information so that they do not feel as if their time was unfairly wasted. By ensuring this high-quality content, a publisher can please the SEO Gods and also foster relationships with prospective customers.

Content creation, good content creation, is not easy. It takes knowledgeable writers time to craft a high-quality piece that truly feeds the interest of an audience. In December 2014, we selected 6 writers to form our INO Contributor Team. These writers and analysts, from all backgrounds, regularly contribute content for their prospective trading area. So far, we have heard great feedback from our Traders Blog visitors and our affiliate marketers alike.

INO.com Contributor Team

Adam Feik – Energies Matt Thalman – ETFs

Aibek Burabayev – Metals George Yacik – Fed & Interest Rates

William Cikos – Equities Lior Alkalay – Forex

These contributors will help drive new traffic to INO.com.

What does that mean for you? It means a fresh pool of potential lead takers for your service/product and unique pageviews for display campaigns.

We are looking to distribute much more content from our INO.com contributors and we know it will ultimately help our advertisers!

Best,

Bob Fladung
Director of Advertising
INO.com, Inc.

Making The Most of Social Media with a Small Team

Posted by Bob Fladung

The web is such an incredible place. What started as a new and exciting way to distribute information from business to consumer, has now evolved into a free flow of communication between business to consumer, consumer to business, and consumer to consumer. Cultivating positive relationships with customers in this era means successfully utilizing social media. So, the question becomes, can you handle it? If you’re a small company with limited resources, this task may seem daunting, but with the right tools and prioritization, it can be done!

Here are three suggestions to help you manage your brand and social media reputation regardless of your limited manpower.

1) Have Presence Where Presence Is Due!

There are over 200 notable social media networking sites worldwide. Trying to promote and protect your brand on all of these sites would be very difficult and not very efficient. Although there is a possibility that your company will be discussed on some of the lesser-known sites, you should focus your efforts on the big players and those sites that are a close match for your industry type.

Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have a combined 3.4 billion registered users. Those four platforms should be on the top of your social media priority list due to their reach alone. Then, you can consider sites with lower site registration volume if they reach your active target audience.

2) Let Tools Do Your Dirty Work

Social media tools can help a small team prepare, execute, and analyze successful campaigns. What may have taken days, can potentially be reduced to mere hours. Instead of teeing up content on multiple social media sites, these tools allow you to sync and schedule messaging on top of consolidating analytics and reputation reports.

Tweetdeck and HootSuite are two popular tools that allow social media managers to create content and schedule distribution. These management tools can perform multiple tasks and keep you organized in one platform.

3) Monitor Your Reputation & Let Your Customers Spread The Word!

It is essential that you know what people are saying about your brand. Is there one customer with a bad experience who is using social media to vent? Maybe reaching out to that individual could help make them happy, clear up any confusion and quiet them. It may be that simple step that makes you look like a social media hero, instead of a total zero.

Especially in today’s connected world, every customer’s voice can be heard and those voices must matter! From a simple “like,” to a comment that shows you care, each touchpoint is an opportunity to build a relationship. If your customers are your biggest fans, they will act as your “street team,” spreading your brand name and praising your products or services. So, by monitoring your reputation and interacting with clients, one single social media manager can create hundreds or thousands of word-of-mouth connections. Social media can present awesome opportunities to show your current customers that you appreciate them and show new customers how amazing you are. It doesn’t take a team of social media managers to create genuine relationships with customers which helps lead to new business.

There is nothing social about a company that stays silent. Thankfully, you don’t need a ton of voices. You shouldn’t have a ton of voices! Just one — a strong company personality that mimics the brand voice. Even small companies can benefit from the social scene with little manpower by following just a few little tips.

Best wishes and merry marketing,

Bob Fladung
Director of Advertising
INO.com, Inc.

December Inventory Available

Posted by Bob Fladung

During the month of December we have limited inventory set aside for new client testing. Our 728×90 Leaderboards are prominently located on our exchange and market pages. We can accept multiple ad formats, geo-target or cap impressions upon client request.

If you’ve been waiting to test a creative at a promotional price to a premium audience, here is your chance! Contact me today to reserve these impressions.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Bob Fladung
Director of Advertising
INO.com, Inc.

Display Isn’t Dead. Just Look For The Pulse.

Posted by Bob Fladung

“Display is dead!”

It’s something you occasionally hear from digital marketers, but is it true? Does this type of advertising not play a role in the conversion process?

Display Advertising Matters

If a site visitor rarely clicks on a banner ad, then how exactly does this medium move the buyer down the conversion funnel?

A study published by Kireyev, Pauwels, and Gupta from Harvard University found that display ads make an invisible, yet important impact. As a result of tracking improvements, marketers believe that they can use quantifiable metrics to gauge campaign success. Looking at it superficially, you would think that if the click-through rate (CTR) and the attributed conversion rate are not up to par, the campaign should be deemed a failure. However, when you step back to examine the dynamics and the interconnectivity of multiple channel types, you can see how display plays a bigger role than the statistics of the display campaign would suggest.

Harvard researchers have found that display advertising leads to an increase in search volume, clicks, and ultimately conversions. However, because tracking does not give attribution credit, the conversion appears to come from the last click rather than the entire process the user has been exposed to, which would include display advertisement exposure.

Researchers also found that there is almost a two-week lag time between when the user was exposed to a display ad and when they actively started searching for that product or company. They also discovered that ad viewability was more strongly correlated with conversions than it was for clicks. If the ad was located below the fold or was displayed on a page with many other competitive ad positions, the campaign conversion stats suffered at a greater rate than the reported click stats.

Display Leads To Search

Yahoo Search & Display experts found that after users saw a personal finance display ad, search activity rose more than 200%.

This research proposes that although display advertising is more difficult to quantify than simple display metrics would suggest, there is firm data to support that display exposure will lead to a lift in a brand’s search traffic.

Selecting the right publisher to run your display marketing is just as important as deciding to leverage search marketing together with other marketing channels to obtain maximum conversions. Be sure that the publisher is limiting the number of advertisements and sponsorships that may be seen on one page at any one time. Also, ask if all ad positions are above the fold, considering that ad viewability should be given great attention. The publisher should also be willing to work with advertisers to geotarget, cap impressions, and provide accurate and timely statistics.

Above all, make sure the publisher makes sense for your company or offer! Unless you are using behavioral display, the publisher’s content is of ultimate importance. Who is visiting this site and are they your target market? Picking the right publisher will make or break a campaign, but understanding the capabilities and priorities of the publisher will help protect and ramp up your ROI.

Use Display Advertising To Leverage Conversions

Although granular tracking may show decent user engagement for interactive banners, it’s imperative that advertisers consider display as just a piece of the big marketing puzzle. Clicks and last attributed conversion tracking may not scream that a campaign is a winner, but a well-targeted campaign with a respected publisher who puts all possible tools in place to ensure a client’s success is definitely a worthy contender for your advertising budget.

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Bob Fladung
Director of Advertising
INO.com, Inc.

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Kireyev, P., Pauwels, K., & Gupta, S. “Do Display Ads Influence Search? Attribution and Dynamics in Online Advertising.” Harvard Working Papers, February 28, 2013.

Yahoo Search & Display. Atlas Digital Marketing Insight 2009.

Lipsman, A., “For Display Ads, Being Seen Matters More than Being Clicked” 4/24/12. ComScores.