By Erin Wilson, Senior Account Coordinator

90octane offers up a little analysis on our favorite creative online marketing campaigns of 2010.

2010 proved to be a year for pushing the limits when it came to online media. With the enormous growth of social media and the ability of the consumers to use social media to interact with businesses, companies had to do something different to stand out. Below is the 90octane review of the most creative campaigns of 2010:

· Old Spice: The social media campaign created by Old Spice and marketing partner Weiden & Kennedy was a hit immediately. Making over 150 videos within a three day time period, the videos were tailor-made to the company’s fans on YouTube and drastically increased Old Spice’s interaction with its customers. Old Spice took ‘real time’ social media to the extreme and was able to increase Facebook interaction by 800%, website traffic by 300%, and made itself the most-viewed YouTube channel.

By Meg Archer, SEM Specialist

Don’t Discount the Power of E-mail Campaigns in Your Marketing Strategy

In a marketer’s toolbox, e-mail is a powerful tool. Last year, some experts speculated that 2011 would be the year e-mail campaigns died. Boy, were they wrong. There have been a few changes in the way e-mail campaigns are created and executed, but e-mail marketing campaigns still provide strong, measurable results. Here at 90octane, for example, we continue to see success in the quality of the conversions created by our current e-mail programs.

According to ClickZ, email campaigns that are integrated with social and mobile media create a stronger message, thus allowing customers to participate in a conversation about your brand, via the media channel of their choice. Customers may reply to an e-mail via Facebook, LinkedIn, a corporate blog or Twitter. Today, the busy B2B subscriber expects e-mails to contain pertinent information that allows them to seek out and engage with your brand via other media channels. Embedding “share with your network” (SWYN) links to e-mails has become a best practice, and according to ClickZ, is a good first step. It is also important to develop a deeper relationship with your B2B customer by understanding the business goals that drive their needs, and incorporating them into e-mail messaging. This is a critical step, and one that could significantly impact your marketing program.

Posted By: Nicole Johnson, Account Manager

Don’t Discount Bing When Planning Your 2011 SEO Marketing Strategy

The buzz about Bing has saturated the online marketing industry over the past year, yet some marketers still are not paying much attention, and fewer still are taking action. We all know what Bing is, but not everyone knows how to change a marketing strategy to accommodate the growing search engine.

Despite marketing companies’ reluctance to evolve, a new partnership between Bing and seasoned search engine vet Yahoo (a.k.a YaBing), has positioned Bing for major growth in the coming year. We are already seeing changes, and Search Engine Land recently cited a study from comScore suggesting that Bing now controls 28 percent of all search traffic on the Web.

Bing can no longer be ignored. It simply isn’t enough to focus marketing efforts on search giants like Google anymore. According to a source with Search Engine Land, the search ad network Chikita has found that marketers who choose not to optimize their sites for Bing are losing out on as much as 9% of their potential search traffic—which could also translate into lost conversions!

ReviewerOfSites.com claims that Bing searchers are more likely than Google searchers to click on an ad or listing. They also claim that online marketers who fail to optimize their site for Bing are missing out on 13% of their potential click volume.

So what to do? There are a number of Bing optimization tips out there, but here are a few we thought were most helpful, courtesy of ReviewerOfSites.com:

• Check your robot.txt file to ensure that your site is allowing the Bing spider to crawl its content.
• The type of content on your site is also important according to the Daily Tech Post. Bing favors content that is between 300 and 500 words per page and gives more importance to the page title than to the page content.
• Check to make sure all site pages are actually being indexed by the search engine. Type ‘site:www.yoursite.com’ in the Bing search box, and hit Enter.
• Include Bing webmaster tools verification code on your site.
• Run your paid campaigns in Microsoft AdCenter to target Bing searchers.

Posted by: Annie Hay, Marketing Associate

Attention all B2B Marketing and Advertising Companies:

Early bird entry deadline for the 2011 Colorado Business Management Association Gold Key Awards is

Friday, January 28th at midnight!

Companies registered by the early bird deadline will receive a $10 discount after registering but will not be required to finalize the entry until February 11th.

Posted by: Mackenzie Ross, Conversion-Driven Media Specialist

In a recent article for ClickZ, Harry Gold explored interactive television as a developing technology. As marketers, we are interested in the changing dynamic of the interactive space and always looking out for the latest innovations. It appears that cable and satellite companies are gearing up to make television more interactive using Web-based technologies. The interesting part about marketing interactively on television is the immediate access to your audience while they are engaged.

Much of the technology already exists to make the smooth transition into television and Web integration. The remote in many ways acts as a mouse, with much of the same functionality to boot. Many cable companies actually populate their guides through the Internet to provide users with up-to-date programming information. You may notice that with your cable provider you are able to access Twitter, Facebook, the weather or games. These widgets are connected to the Internet and are available now.