By Grant Garcia, Account Coordinator

Google is bringing its Instant Preview feature to ads. Digital marketing professionals will need to focus more on post-click optimization with strong landing pages and clear conversion fields. They’ll also need to organize tightly themed ad groups with fewer keywords.

Google gave the search engine landscape a significant makeover last September by offering Instant Previews for organic search results. Users no longer had to click through listings to find what they were looking for. Instead, they were able to efficiently view different websites without the back-and-forth navigation. It took several months, but now Google is adding Instant Previews to its ads as well.

This will be great for users who previously had poor post-click ad experiences. The question is whether online advertisers will also benefit from this new feature. According to the Google AdWords blog, Instant Previews for ads will help digital marketers attract highly-qualified traffic, and Ben Gomes, Google Instant’s lead engineer, suggests that Instant Previews for organic search had an opt-out rate of just 2%. Will opt-out rates for paid search be similar? Our sense is that it’s still too early to tell if this new feature will have large enough adoption rates to impact advertisers positively or negatively.

Posted by: Grant Garcia, Marketing Coordinator

Facebook users can now book airline tickets through Delta Airlines without leaving the popular networking site. Delta is the first travel company to implement a social commerce channel on Facebook, opening up new possibilities for the ways in which travel is booked online.

After navigating to the “Book a Trip” tab on Delta’s Facebook page, users click on a virtual ticket window to find and book a flight. Delta Air Lines then requests permission to access the user’s basic Facebook data. This information allows the user to book tickets with friends and share their travel plans in their friends’ news feeds.

While this is a revolutionary first step into social commerce for the travel industry, Facebook has been facing privacy concerns lately, and some users have been hesitant to share their personal information on the site. This lack of trust may discourage Facebook members from using Delta’s service.  We’ll have to wait and see how popular this new online ticketing tool becomes and how many travel companies follow suit.

Posted by: Grant Garcia, Marketing Coordinator

Historically, email has been a great way to effectively maintain customer contact, while also providing useful industry news and resources. However, because online marketing is evolving and becoming more competitive, inboxes are overflowing with messages that are poorly targeted and irrelevant to users. How, then, do you get your message to rise above the clutter? Incorporating social media and mobile marketing into your email programs can enhance contact with customers at different touch points, while also encouraging interaction.

Companies are utilizing social media calls to action within their email marketing campaigns but are lagging in the implementation of mobile-optimized email. Business emails often include the “Like us on Facebook” or “Follow us on Twitter” buttons, but that’s not enough. According to a recent eROI survey, 63% of marketers say that they’re not even measuring the use of mobile devices for email subscribers. In the same survey, nearly 15% of marketers said that optimizing email marketing for mobile is not important. These statistics are frightening considering that 70 million smartphones are currently in use, with predictions that they will overtake traditional phones within the next 12 months, according to Technewsworld.com.

Posted by: Grant Garcia, Marketing Coordinator

It’s more important than ever for businesses to effectively interact with their customers using social media. Here are five tips businesses should follow when implementing social media strategies:

1. Remember transparency. Make sure content posted on social media networks is representative of the brand. Most information can be seen by anyone, including people who don’t fall into a target audience group. There are countless horror stories of companies that have posted updates to their pages without considering who was reading.

2. Create value. Posting relevant content can build a business’s reputation as a thought leader and source of valuable information. Remember that it’s important to post content that is useful for the audience, not just content that serves the brand.

3. Encourage involvement. Create an interactive atmosphere where the audience can learn about your business, while also sharing their opinion about industry news. Posting comments and engaging in conversation will increase audience involvement and branding efforts.

4. Listen. Social media channels can act as a valuable source of feedback. Genuine concerns or complaints about your company’s products or services should be followed up on.  Make sure to take customer insights into consideration when strategizing and improving marketing efforts.

5. Post regularly. Maintaining multiple social media networks can be time consuming, but it’s necessary for enhancing customer relationships. Without regular posts the audience will have no reason to stay engaged.