Category Archives: Mobile Marketing

What Should Be Included In Your Music Marketing Mix

Mobile Marketing, Music Marketing, Social Media Marketing, ,

marketing-in-music Not that long ago, getting into the music industry meant getting a home-recorded tape into the hands of the right person in a record company or hoping that you’d be discovered at a showcase or local gig. For several reasons, for example the rise in digital sales and the increasing amounts of artists creating their own independent labels, the music industry has changed a lot and thus so has the requirements of musicians.

Music

In order to be able to make a lasting impact on the music industry, a band or artist needs a music marketing team with knowledge, connections and the flexibility to create an individual strategy just for them. The amount of radio plays a single gets is still important as it means more exposure and gets the music to the masses to encourage them to buy the music or even see one of the artist or band’s shows, so a music marketing team must be have a great working relationship with several radio stations to increase the likelihood of the music being played on air.

Even though the majority of sales is via downloads nowadays, the radio is still a very strong promotional tool for gaining new fans, getting exposure for your latest single and even generating more ticket sales for shows. It really is a case of ‘it’s who you know, not what you know’, so a music marketing team needs to be have good connections in the whole of the entertainment industry and know the right people to speak to. As there are so many new artists trying to crack into the music industry, a music marketing team should be able to create a unique and bespoke marketing plan for you that gets your music to your target audience and to the radios and shows that they will listen to or watch.

Bespoke Works

Part of creating a bespoke marketing plan is finding a studio and producer that fits in with your individual needs as well as your budget. Just a few years ago, artists could be in debt to their record companies as they were using recording studios, photographers and music video directors that they couldn’t afford but their record company had connections to.

Your marketing team should also find you the right graphics for the visual side of your campaign and photographers for your promotional shoots that share your vision so that your image is presented in a way that is true to you. Again, a marketing team should also make sure that they fit in with your budget. All of this means that music marketing team puts the power back into the hands of the artists and they get treated as individuals.

Package

Finally, a music marketing package should help drive and direct publishing and distribution so that the artists and musicians have full security and their work is copyrighted, and they receive their fair share of royalties. Your marketing team should give you creative freedom and control over the direction you want to take your music whilst giving you the best advice, connections and selling you to the most important people- the fans.

By Cormac Reynolds

Natasha Bennett currently works for Quite Great a Music PR Company specialising In Music promotion, band promotion and Entertainment in the UK. Natasha uses her vast industry knowledge to contribute as a writer to a variety of publications across music, business, magazines and blogs.

How To Beat the Google Hummingbird Update

Blogging, content marketing, Hummingbird algorithm, Mobile Marketing, responsive web design, SEO, Small Business Marketing

The Google Hummingbird update is the biggest change in the search algorithm since 2001 and as with any update it is always a good idea to look at how your site could be affected by it and how you can combat those problems. The good news is that even though this is a major update it will not affect your website quite the way you thought, so in all honesty it should be that bit easier to beat it as will now be explained.

Be mobile.

A major part of this update is that it really does improve what happens with mobile search as Google rightfully realize that more people are using their smartphones on the move. What this means is that if you want to beat it, then you are going to need a mobile website because without it you stand to lose out as your site will just be lost in the vastness of those results pages.

Get a responsive site template.

If your site has been penalized with this update, then one thing you can do is to get in touch with your designer and ask them if you can be set up with a responsive design template. The reason why this is important is because it will mean that your site looks so much better on mobile phones as it means that your website will automatically be resized as soon as they land on it. By seeing you are prepared for these changes it should ultimately mean that your site stands a better chance of ranking higher.

Long tailed keywords.

However, perhaps the best way to beat this Hummingbird update is to spend some time looking at long tailed keywords as the main aim, aside from mobile search, is to improve the results that you get when you ask a question. This means that you should perhaps get in touch with your SEO company and get them to do some work on this area because if some clever work is done with regard to these keywords it should mean that your website will rank higher.

Use white-hat techniques.

Even though it is not directly mentioned in updates, it is still the case that your website should only use white-hat techniques or you stand to be punished. This update may be a major one, but it does still include various aspects of the older updates such as Panda and Penguin and Penguin 2.0 in particular would hit black-hat websites hard and the same applies here.

In short, when it comes to trying to beating this Hummingbird update it does involve you using special templates to enhance the viewing experience for somebody that is using their phone and also it places more importance on keywords than ever before. Generally speaking there may not be that much you have to do to your website in order to survive, but if you are unsure about anything remember to talk to a professional who can guide you through the process and advise you correctly on what your next step should be.

Henry Hernandez is a veteran, father and CEO of an Austin SEO company. You can learn more about Henry by checking out his Google+ Page.

reelWebDesign.com Becomes A Yext® Certified Partner & Adapts to Change

Content creation, content marketing, Google glass, Mobile Marketing, Organic SEO, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Technology, The Importance Of Content Creators, Video marketing, Web Design, , , , ,

google-hummingbirdAs the SEO world has recently been turned on its head by the new Penguin 2.1 and Hummingbird algorithm we at reelWebDesign.com are compelled to focus more on two areas:

  1. Helping small businesses with local SEO (getting you found locally on the web with geographically driven keywords and intentions in mind).
  2. Helping you with social media marketing and content production.

Our focus will be in these two areas more than ever and it will benefit your business and ours in many ways.
How?
Google’s new algorithm is centered around people and helping them find what they are looking for. In essence they have bcome the new ASK.com (even though they’d never admit it), but where ASK had failed to deliver good results Google claims that they will deliver excellent results, and who am I to argue with them as they do own the worlds largest search engine!  So content is what we are going to focus on for our clients. However, many local businesses like pizza parlors and locksmiths don’t need to answer a lot of questions for their consumers and others just don’t have time or money to create fresh content, for these businesses they just need to be found! That’s the second part of Google’s algorithm: where having citations is more important than ever (a citation is basically a listing on any of the major local directories and social networks on the web i.e. Foursquare, Yelp, zagat, 8Coupons, Citysearch etc.).  So we have partnered with Yext to make it inexpensive, consistent and easy to implement.  Note: Consistency is extremely important as the search engines will see the same business as a separate entity if listed with different names, phone numbers or addresses.  This inconsistency will water down your search or ‘Google juice’, thereby lowering your ranking.

In addition to teaming up with Yext® we are offering a free Google plus/places listing optimization as part of our local SEO plan.  Google, as no surprise, values it’s own social networks, Google Plus and Google Places over all others. We believe this focus on providing relevant content, social media management and marketing and local SEO with Yext® as our partner will provide excellent results for all new and current customers.  Please watch the video below about the Yext® service.

responsive_web_designer

Our focus will also be to deliver responsive or mobile ready web design (responsive web design is developing a website that changes or responds to diferent sized screens for a better user experience.  Example: Our website is responsive and will appear differently on your laptop, tablet and phone).  

Why responsive/mobile ready?

mobile-search-dataAnalytics firm BIA/Kelsey has predicted that mobile search queries will overtake desktop queries by 2015. If your website isn’t mobile ready then you’ll be missing out on the larger piece of search.  Compound this with the push in the SEO world to focus more on local search and you’ll understand that mobile search is the area of largest growth and the best bet for acquiring new customers from this point forward.

Social Media

So where does social media fit into the equation? Social media is similar to the old word of mouth marketing… on steroids! It allows for your message to be broadcast to countless people in an extremely fast fashion.  It also helps with search engine rankings.  The more a post is shared the more the search engines see it as valuable. Google+, although an underused social network by most,  is extremely important as Google values it above all other social networks. For this reason we post your message to the main 4 driving forces on the social web: Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.  If you have a blog we’ll also post your article/blog post to various other networks as well including: Delicious, StumbleUpon, Plurk, Newsvine, Scoopit, Diigo, Folk and Hubpages to name a few.  This will not only boost your viewership but also your Alexa rating which influences search engine ranking as well.  It is from the social networks that search engines are able to personalize your user expereince and give you results that are customized for your personal liking’s.  So as you can see social media is an extremely important factor in online marketing and its value to both people and search engines is growing more important every year.

Conclusion

It’s been a tumultuous year in search marketing but I believe I know where it is all headed and I see why Google is doing this great transition. With Google watches, glasses and more voice search integration on the horizon the way we perform and undertake search is going to change dramatically. Search will move more towards speech and visual cues with geographical underpinnings wrapped around your personal likes and dislikes i.e. personalized mobile search.  People will be asking more questions about: ‘what’s in the area’, ‘how to do things’, ‘what do you know about this’ and ‘what’s going on now that I would like’.  From this information, surprisingly, we can see that small businesses do have a future as there will be more of a need to discover and cater to micro-niches.  So as long as we, small businesses, focus on a niche and excel at it we can have a successful life as Google and other social networks will actually be driving people towards us.

The future brings more focus to everything, the question is what will your business focus on, and our job at reelWebDesign.com will be to find you your appropriate crowd through all of our partner networks including our latest, Yext®.

By Peter Marino owner of reelWebDesign.com, a company helping small businesses find their niche.

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