The Blog - Where Business Collides with Human Nature

This particular marketing chart shows how social media accounts does little to influence decisions while peer recommendations is an important influence. 

What it does not tell you is whether the vendors use social media tools to connect and add value or instead used in traditional methods similar to broadcasting.  However, the study also demonstrates that buyers feel that vendors’ social activity can help establish a company’s credibility.

MarketingCharts.com article refers to the survey:

There appears to be demand for more marketing technology, according to the report, as more than 4 in 10 feel that their existing stack is out-of-date and insufficient."

Any successful entrepreneur has a dashboard which shows measures of guerrilla marketing success at any moment throughout the week. The terminology changes depending on the type of business and culture.  Metrics, KPI (Key Performance Indicators) or MOSvT (Measures Of Success vs. Target).

Recent research shows that B2B (Business to Business) buyers are looking for ten things when visiting a website.  

This survey can become your checklist for serving those who visit you online.

"Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003, according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt. That’s something like five exabytes of data, he says."  “The real issue is user-generated content,” Schmidt said. He noted that pictures, instant messages, and tweets all add to this.

What are the average conversion rates for your industry?  This marketing research chart from MarketingSherpa will give you reason to cheer or leave you depressed.

If you are in a retail business, you are more interested in the purchase than getting them to subscribe. Non profits have the most difficult time because they don't typically offer value, they are hoping for a donation.

Why professional and financial services are the top on the chart may be directly related to the dedication of professional online agencies. 

In this week's chart from Marketing Sherpa, they compare survey responses for top sources of traffic, and conversion of website visitors.

Test website load time with these free software tools from Google or Pingdom.  The debate about what page elements and/or widgets on your website effects the Google rankings continues.  Google talks about website speed vs. ranking and says that sites with delayed load time will effect the rankings in search engines results pages. The longer your site takes to load the lower the rankings will get in Google.

While site speed is part of the consideration, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page.

Youtube marketing by the numbers.  As you can see, the video has been seen almost 57 million times and was uploaded on May 1, 2011.  This video on Youtube offers links in the video description area to the website, Twitter and Facebook fan page.

The video is not "professional" in that it does not has perfect lighting, perfect sound nor a studio setting.  I am sure those who are professionals who will critique the video marketing project as a marginal production.