Our first night in the city for Internet Week and we had the chance to check out Media Math’s panel on how technology is changing the advertsing world. The panel consisted of marketers from Kayak.com, Lot18, Loreal, Gilt City, and Yahoo & Yext/CapOne. Interestingly, print and television was still getting a good focus of ad dollars and a challenge to measure. Recent web companies like Kayak have crossed over from the web to start doing television. Yet, they’re approaching it with the same critical eye that the web has enabled. The always...

We recently had the opportunity to grab lunch with one of the admins for the State of Montana's official Facebook page.  At ~98K fans (at the time of this writing) the Montana fan page is extremely active. Each week there are several updates by admins, dozens of posts from fans and hundreds of 'likes' and comments. This got us wondering what type of Facebook presence the other 49 states have. Does every state have an official page? If so, what are they doing with it? And do they all enjoy a huge following of highly engaged fans like Montana? ...

If you Google around for different QR code services it's tough to sift thru the noise to find a great option. One of our core beliefs at Digital Wax Works is that you should be testing and measuring your marketing efforts. With that in mind, we were on the hunt for a QR service that had solid analytics built into it while being easy for our clients to manage.    And we found it in Delivr.    Here's 7 reasons why: Generates multiple free QR Codes and a clean dashboard to manage them through Offers the ability...

Nielsen predicted that 1 in 2 Americans will have a smartphone by the end of 2011. With the number of smartphone users growing exponentially, there now exists a cheap way to marry active participation with marketing efforts using QR codes. While not a new concept in digital marketing circles,  QR stands for "Quick Response", and is an increasingly powerful way to add a visual "link" to your website from the physical world. Think of it kinda like a bar scanner on your phone that can return a website, contact info, or a social media channel. How QR technology...

Physics and marketing. People and science. Emotions and mathematics. Do they have anything in common? Over 300 years ago, Isaac Newton developed his theories of how objects big and small dance with each other and the invisible laws that govern their interactions. But what if we were to think about a brand's force in the market place through the idea of Newton's famous equation for force? (Force = mass x acceleration or the famous F = ma) We know this law intuitively after about the age of 2. Run into a wall (large mass) and the rate at which your speed changes...

Is bidding on keywords really worth the investment if your landing page isn't laid out well? If you're using paid search you quickly see how increasingly expensive it is to arrest someone's attention online. In this medium, you are no longer competing just against your peers in bidding on keywords. You're also having to compete for attention against organic search results, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Trying to cut through that noise costs more and more money. (Which is still the #1 reason for having great content on your website). Web usability research shows that you have a...

Is email dead to the interactive marketer in this day and age of social media? Hardly. Earlier this afternoon we listened to a great webinar on "The Science of Email Marketing" from Dan Zarella over at HubSpot. They partnered up with MailChimp (our favorite email marketing service) to comb through over 9.5 billion data points to get a sense of where email marketing stands today. Some surprising insights included:  The best days (and time) of the week to send emails - Weekends and early morning Ideal number of emails to send out - The more the better Mobile...

The fall semester at Montana State University is winding down and we finished up with our class covering Online Marketing.  When it came to the section on Social Media, questions from the students included: "Should we be on Facebook?" "I don't get Twitter, do I have to do it?" "What impact do user reviews have?" Fortunately, Forrester Research provides a free tool using some basic demographic info to help guide these decisions.  If you're using a Persona to form your web strategy, this comes in pretty handy, as you'll...

We recently taught a course for Montana State University around social media and the web. We had a class full of entrepreneurs who were looking to get more out of their online presence and a simple exercise proved quite helpful for getting the class inside the head of their target market. Definition: A persona includes an informal picture (written description usually) of your target market based on market research, demographics, and psychographics. In short, you start with the basics to "create" your ideal customer and finish up trying to understand their needs. (See Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs...

First off, here's a couple quick definitions that marketers commonly use: Primary Research This is on the ground work collecting data either through interviews, focus groups, or surveys. Tons of firms specialize in this and it's typically pretty pricey. There is also much debate about how good this can be for new innovative products, as customers very rarely can articulate what they want. They're much better at reacting and saying what they don't like about the status quo. Case in point: Apple doesn't do focus groups. Secondary Research These insights come from "secondary"...