Holiday Online Marketing Tips

As online marketers, we know that ecommerce will be extremely active as we close out 2010. Keeping the following online marketing tips in mind will help you to quickly catch buyers attention and lead them to your products over the competition's.

Holiday Promo Emails-
Make an effort when it comes to the subject line to draw attention from the hundreds of other emails being received during the holidays.

Start sending now and gradually increase frequency to get your brand in front of your audience, you don't want your email to get lost in the sea of promotions that are soon to follow.



Search Engine Optimization (SEO)-
Design Holiday themed pages targeted on specific Holiday keywords, this will not only pull new visitors but keep them engaged. Use Holiday keywords in the meta title, meta description, and meta keyword tags. For meta descriptions, try to incorporate a call to action or a value proposition that is specific to the holiday shopper.

Incorporate content that reflects holiday shopper needs to make their lives easier. Holiday shoppers tend to search for gift ideas, gift wrapping, and gift certificates; they are also concerned with return policies on gifts purchased, shipping changes, and delivery dates. Creating content around those topics can help pull visitors in while providing targeted content up front.

Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)-
Create new ads with Holiday keywords for meaningful differentiation, to appeal to your customer’s emotional state, and to improve Quality Score.

Remember don't promote discounted pricing if you can’t compete. Its a good idea to scan the search engine results page of your keywords for any mention of pricing from your competitors. Pricing obviously is not the only factor buyers take into consideration when shopping new products and services but now more than ever it is a sensitive factor.

Marketing and Software Technology Events for December 2010

Check out the latest events that will be taking place throughout the US and EMEA during December 2010.

US Events:

Bionetics 2010
December 1st-3rd, Boston, MA.
BIONETICS 2010 aims to provide a world-leading and unique opportunity for bringing together researchers and practitioners from diverse disciplines that seek the understanding of the fundamental principles and design strategies in biological systems and leverage those understandings to build bio-inspired systems.

For more information on the keynote speakers for this event visit: http://www.bionetics.org/index.shtml#keynotes


BRANDSconf- exploring humanization of brands
December 2nd, New York, NY.
BrandsConf is a new event taking place that will explore the “Humanization of Brands” and the underlying effects this is having on business. The conference will explore a range of topics from best practices and legal issues to the natural conflict of personal and corporate branding.

Visit http://www.brandsconf.com/ for a complete scope of what this new conference has to offer.


Interactive Local Media
December 8th-10th, Santa Clara, CA.
Interactive Local Media 2010 is BIA/Kelsey’s annual conference devoted to digital media with a local focus. This event provides a 360-degree view of the local marketplace, covering local search, Internet Yellow Pages, vertical directories, Internet video, online classifieds and mobile search.

For conference details check out: http://www.kelseygroup.com/ilm2010/index.asp


EMEA Events

GX Connect 2010
December 2nd, Amsterdam Arena
Discover new insights and ideas for your online strategy at GX Connect 2010! It's the perfect opportunity to refresh your knowledge and to update your network. New developments and cutting-edge new technologies come with a fast pace.

To learn more about this event and register go to: http://www.gxsoftware.com/en/gxconnect2010.htm


Market Research in the Mobile World
December 2nd-3rd, Berlin, Germany
This highly interactive event will bring together top researchers and practitioners to discuss new challenges and opportunities of leveraging mobile devices as a new way for collecting data and capturing real-time insights.

For more information visit: http://www.merlien.org/upcoming-events/mrmw2010.html


Twelfth International Conference on Information and Communications Security
December 15th -17th, Barcelona, Spain
The 2010 International Conference on Information and Communications Security will be the 12th event in the ICICS conference series started in 1997, which will bring together individuals involved in multiple disciplines of Information and Communications Security to foster exchange of ideas.

To see the conference outline visit: http://www.icics2010.org/conferenceoutline

House-hold modems... Are they the next "home phone"?

Personally, I stopped using a house-hold phone about ten years ago. I remember receiving a few strange looks at the time when I was asked for a home number and I said only had a cell phone. At the time though, cell phones were just becoming widely used for personal phones, but most still kept their house-hold phones rather than transferring their numbers. I remember talking to a few colleagues about seven years ago about how cool I thought it would be if we were completely wireless and didn't have to rely on a modem for internet accessibility--if some way, we could always just be in a wireless hotspot.

Wireless hotspots can be found in most coffee houses, airports, libraries and restaurants now. Some are free, and some still cost money to access, like those on airlines, but nonetheless, it is one step closer to a completely wireless environment. We can usually pick up a wireless network on our phones now in most places we visit. But what about our homes? Why do we have to have a physical modem in our homes still. Most cable companies make us pay a montly fee for them, just to have them in the house. Not only that, but they need to be plugged into an outlet, and unless you're using a router and have wireless capability, you will most likely have to setup your workspace close to the outlet. If you do have wireless on your lap top, you still need to be in the vacinity of your router so you get signal.

The good news is that that we are slowly evolving into a wireless hotspot. Last week Verizon announced that by the end of 2010, they were going to bring 4G to 39 cities in the U.S. That means that an estimated 110 million Americans will have wireless 4G coverage by years end. Verizon also hopes to extend the 4G coverage as far as the current 3G coverage by 2013, which will encompass most of the U.S. That's pretty awesome! They're not alone though. Other companies are working on LTE (Long-Term Evolution) 4G coverage as well, such as Sprint and AT&T. This is great news because a lot of new lap tops that will be coming out are said to be 4G compatible, which means that while using one of the above networks, we can finally be sans modem and router! What does this mean for our modems and routers though? Who cares!