Mediaboss Marketing

How do you ensure that potential customers come across your business at the right stage of the buying process? Digital Marketing trainer Ethan Giles of novi.digital explains.

Ethan will run the Digital Marketing Skills course on March 25th and 26th at Prolific Norths HQ on Princess Street, Manchester. We turned to him to provide a bit more detail on SEO and PPC strategy ahead of the session.

Each day there are 5.6 billion daily searches on Google alone, which provides a great opportunity to increase your website traffic, if you employ the right strategy.

But what is the right strategy? Consider that these potential customers will be in different stages of the buying process - some might just search for information or inspiration whilst others might have already made the purchasing decision and are now comparing their options.

There are two main ways you can take advantage of search engines - SEO or PPC. Both have their merits and both have their challenges, so make sure you understand them before you define your strategy.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) means you work on your website to ensure it is tailored towards users search queries. For example, if somebody searches for SEO training Manchester, Prolific North would want people to find their website as it is relevant for their training session. SEO is focused on the natural search results - those results on the search page that are not paid for.

Pay Per Click (PPC) is a form of advertising that search engines like Google offer in a number of different forms. With PPC, you tell the search engine what search terms or keywords you want your ads to appear for, and write relevant advertising. As the name suggests, you only pay when your ads are clicked, and you decide how much youre willing to pay.

Its free!Thats right, you dont have to pay to do SEO - apart from the cost of time of course.

Unlike PPC, you dont need to pay to appear in the natural or organic search listings, you just have to be well-optimised for user searches. Even tracking tools like Google Analytics or Google Search Console, which allow you to measure your SEO effectiveness, are free.

You can be creativeTheres an opportunity for you to be creative, as a big part of SEO is content and writing good quality content that users will care about.

This will help you stretch your businesss creative muscles. In addition, the usability of your site, including what it looks like and how it works, are important for SEO.

88%Organic results attract 88% of all clicks. So if you neglect your SEO and dont appear often or consistently, and rely on PPC instead, youre missing out on the vast majority of clicks and therefore a high proportion of potential customers.

CompetitiveIts not enough to simply have a website and expect this to be an effective SEO strategy. If you do your SEO properly, this will allow you to remain competitive and can often allow you to punch above your weight against larger competitors with bigger budgets.

SEO is about doing something really well, not about spending more money.

DirectUnlike SEO or other forms of advertising such as print, radio or TV, PPC allows you to directly target your customers by defining when your ads are shown and to who they are shown to.

There is no other form of marketing that is so effective at targeting relevant and engaged potential customers.

Cost effectiveYou manage your own costs and pay only per click. This means you can ensure that you only pay enough to ensure your ads generate an effective return on investment.

Unlike traditional forms of advertising, you have greater control of how much you spend, what you spend it on, and ultimately whether that spend generates results or not.

QuickPPC can generate instant results. If you were to set up a campaign now, you could expect to start seeing website visits within hours. This means that you can spend money and expect instant results without having to spend a long time working on campaigns.

SlowIt can take a long time before your SEO efforts start to generate results - changes you make today could take up to six months to start working. If youre looking to make a big difference in a short space of time, then SEO wont be an effective strategy for you.

ComplexSEO can often appear complex to newcomers - it combines multiple skillsets such as creative writing, web development, data analysis and even graphic design.

However, with expert training or expert support, SEO can often become easier as these complexities are explained or managed.

Lack of controlUnlike PPC, you do not directly control what search results you appear for. While you can optimise for particular terms, ultimately the search engine decides what is relevant and what is not.

You also cant control international targeting, so you may appear in search results in countries that are not relevant for your business.

CompetitionThe amount you have to pay to get clicks for ads will be defined by your competition and how much they are willing to pay. So if you are up against competition with bigger budgets or with a lack of understanding of their own profit margins, you may be quickly priced out of securing customers.

Too much controlSmall changes you make could make drastic differences to your bottom line. For example, you could increase your budgets tenfold in just a few clicks, or show your ad for irrelevant searches or in a location you cannot serve.

Google provides some security against this, but its recommended that you get proper training from experts before you pursue PPC.

Time investmentTo get PPC right, you need to invest time to manage your campaigns. Its not as simple as setting your campaigns up and leaving them to run without further changes.

PPC requires management and optimisation and things can change daily depending on your marketplace. This means that PPC can soak up time as well as the cost of the clicks. However, there are intelligent things you can do to avoid spending a long time within the PPC platform and its important that you prioritise on the things that will make the biggest difference.

Now that youre aware of both advantages and pitfalls of SEO and PPC, lets get back to the initial question, which one do I use?

The answer is, it depends. I wish there was a simple, universal answer but this is the beauty of it: it depends on your objectives.

What are the needs of your business? How much time can you invest? Whats your budget? And do you have the right skills in-house?

Depending on how you answer these questions, you might even look at a combined approach where you use both SEO and PPC together. In my experience, there are massive benefits to managing them holistically as it allows for the advantages of one to make up for the pitfalls of the other.

If you could use with more hands-on advice on search marketing tailored to your business, Ethan hosts regular workshops at Prolific North where we delve into just that. Browse the next available sessions here.

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SEO and PPC - making the correct choice - Prolific North

TLDR: The Essential Online Marketing Blueprint Bundle is just that a road map to using the webs most important platforms to help drive your marketing efforts, all for just $29.99.

Online users love visual contentbut do you know how much? And are you aware of the importance of landing in Position Zero in online search rankings? 2020 is here and theres a lot to learn, even for those who think theyre got the ins and outs of digital marketing on lock.

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The collection brings together six courses that serve as a road map for hungry digital marketers looking to run better campaigns and make more money in 2020.

After the Content Marketing: The Strategy to Market in Minutes course sets the stage, youll start diving into more specialized areas for connecting and motivating potential customers into action.

From email campaigns (Email Etiquette for Digital Marketers) to SEO (The Ultimate SEO Blueprint: How to Easily Rank #1 on Google) to building your own affiliate marketing team (The Ultimate Affiliate Marketing Step-by-Step Blueprint), this step-by-step playbook detailing the precise messaging and procedures that work for each medium is an invaluable aid.

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Read next: AirPods can damage your hearing heres how Apple could prevent it

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Online marketing is always changing. Stay current with this $29.99 training collection. - The Next Web

Here, Ted Mann, CEO of Slyce, discusses the arrival of part recognition for visual search. Slyce specializes in visual product search. Previously, Ted founded the SnipSnap coupon app, InJersey hyperlocal network, and was a writer and editor at Gannett.

One of the most challenging experiences in retail is shopping for parts. Whether youre walking into a home improvement store looking for a 1.75-inch hex bolt, replacing a headlamp bulb in your car, or even finding the right missing Lego brick to complete a replica of the Millennium Falcon, its like searching for a needle in a haystack at most retailers.

The problem comes down to being able to identify the specific features and attributes of the part in question, and then being able to track it down amidst the thousands of part SKUs many retailers carry. This isnt just an issue for customers looking for replacement parts; its just as much of a headache for store associates. Helping customers find parts is such a pain point that many store employees will simply avoid the most SKU-dense aisles, like the Fastener aisle at many home improvement stores.

Outside of the customer interactions, the part-recognition quandary rears its head in other places: looking up parts without barcodes at point-of-sale is a regular, time-sucking task; decontaminating bays where the parts have been misplaced in the wrong bins and bays is a daily to-do; and enabling car mechanics to find the right replacement part when theyre working on an engine block is an especially tough obstacle.

Visual search, the technology that identifies products from photos, has long been thought to be an intriguing solution to the part-recognition challenge. Everyone from Amazon to Ferguson has invested in technology designed to enable customers and employees to find parts with their camera. Only, youve likely not seen one of these solutions in the market yet. For a short 1-month period, Amazon added a Part Finder mode to their visual search camera, but soon after removed it. While Amazon hasnt publicly commented on the reversal, testing of the feature was cumbersome and limited. Users needed to scan a part with a coin as a reference object for size, and even if you got over this hurdle, the feature only IDd a small number of screws and nuts.

Visual search for parts, it turns out, is more challenging than the technology is for, say, fashion or furniture. The reason comes down to training data. With fashion retail, visual search players ranging from Amazon to Pinterest to Slyce have been able to mine a rich trove of product photography to train deep-learning models to recognize both the features and tags associated with products, as well as overall image similarity. This enables camera search, as well as numerous other visual search applications like finding visually similar products when something is out of stock, or enriching product metadata to improve SEO and search. But the same visual-search experiences have been a challenge for part recognition mainly due to the dearth of imagery of the parts.

It would be tempting to jump to the solution of simply photographing all parts. However, early work in visual search for parts quickly revealed issues with this approach. For starters, smaller parts can have minute differences in size, or attributes like thread count and finish. Even if a retailer had a parts length and width in their metadata, these specifications might not match the end-to-end dimensions of the actual part but rather the size of smaller piece (think the shaft of a hex bolt). What was needed was a highly constrained environment, where the products could be photographed with ideal lighting to illuminate the product features and reduce any penumbral shadows, and where multiple measurements could be collected from a fixed camera.

Enter the Part Finder Kiosk, one of the first devices created to capture distributed training data of parts. The device, unveiled at the National Retail Federations 2020 Expo, enables a part retailer to quickly capture imagery of a part from multiple angles and orientations, and dynamically add it to a metric-learning visual search model to essentially teach the system to recognize new parts. The device is compact enough to enable the product photography to take place in warehouses and stores, so that parts dont need to be shipped to a remote studio.

Even more valuable than its ability to collect imagery and training data is the kiosks recognition mode. Customers and store associates can place any part that has been trained into the devices lightbox and get an instant, exact-match recognition of the part. Home Depot utilizes this kiosk, branded Drop & Find, in their stores to aid customers and store associates in identifying fasteners and finding the exact bay and bin they are located. With 90%-exact match on more than 5,000 fasteners sold in store, it is helping solve the age-old problem for customers, and giving the retailer extraordinary customer satisfaction scores.

NAPA Auto Parts is another retailer leveraging visual search for parts. Automotive parts come in a wide variety of sizes, though. So while the Part Finder Kiosk helps deliver NAPA know-how for many SKUs sold in store, NAPA is also leveraging visual search technology via mobile to help customers, store associates and auto technicians to quickly find and order replacement parts.

Similar to NAPA, Industrial companies ranging from Bosch to Daimler have begun utilizing mobile part recognition within their factories and warehouses. Typically the technology is integrated as a camera mode, where the end user snaps a photograph of a part to either find an exact match or a candidate part set. Similar to the kiosk solution, the most effective mobile solutions have required the collection of part training data to seed the models. Visual search software providers typically have an application that the retailer or industrial-part company can use to photograph the parts from a variety of angles. In addition to photographing the parts in isolation, it is common to also photograph the parts in situ (whether in the undercarriage of a car, in a manufacturing machine, or inside an oil rig) in order to create training data for a visual search index specific to that environment.

While it is still early days for part recognition, the technology is now delivering the same level of accuracy that visual search for fashion and furniture reached only two years ago. And just as visual search for fashion quickly became table stakes for most apparel retailers, it is sure to see similar rapid adoption among home improvement, auto, and industrial companies. Early adopters are initially embracing the mobile and in-aisle kiosk solutions. But soon, expect to see part recognition at point-of-sale and on assembly lines. Anywhere a customer or employee encounters the challenge of figuring what is this thing is fair game.

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Visual Search for Part Recognition Arrives - Which PLM

George Zimmerman, the Sanford, Florida, neighborhood watch volunteer who was acquitted of the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012, and his lawyer have filed a $100 million lawsuit against prosecutors, Martin's family, their attorney and a book publisher over allegations that one of the trial's key witnesses was "an imposter."

Zimmerman's civil attorney Larry Klayman filed the multi-million lawsuit in Polk County Circuit Court in Florida.

Klayman alleges in the 36-page lawsuit, where Zimmerman is the sole plaintiff, that Martin's parents Sybrina Ford and Tracy Martin as well as their attorney Ben Crump falsely inserted Rachel Jeantel into the case after the Sanford Police Department closed the investigation in March 2012 as "self-defense."

In this April 3, 2019, file photo, Sybrina Fulton participates in a panel at the National Action Network Convention in New York.

The lawsuit claims then 18-year-old Jeantel was "an imposter and fake witness" and the catalyst to get Zimmerman arrested and charged with the murder of Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman was cleared of all charges after the weeks-long televised trial.

"Defendants, each and every one of them, as individuals and through their employment and agencies, have worked in concert to deprive Zimmerman of his constitutional and other related legal rights," according to the lawsuit.

Trayvon Martin was walking back to his father's house on Feb. 26, 2012, after purchasing Skittles and a beverage from a nearby 7-Eleven. The now 36-year-old Zimmerman, who is half white and Hispanic, testified at the murder trial that he was suspicious of 17-year-old Martin, who was walking in the Twin Lakes community wearing a hoodie and talking on a cellphone. Trayvon Martin was unarmed.

Jeantel testified during the June 2013 trial that she was on the phone with Trayvon Martin and he "complained" that "a man looked creepy" was watching him.

In this March 23, 2012, file photo, Jayve Montgomery holds up an electronic picture of Trayvon Martin on an iPad during a march and rally in Chicago in support of the 17-year-old's family.

Klayman, who founded the nonprofit watchdog organization Judicial Watch, alleges that Jeantel's half-sister Brittany Diamond Eugene was actually on the phone with Martin during the deadly encounter and later "coached" Jeantel on how to testify, according to the lawsuit. He said these allegations partly stem from newly discovered evidence in the upcoming film "The Trayvon Hoax: Unmasking the Witness Fraud that Divided America" from director Joel Gilbert.

Eugene's lawyer, Rod Vereen, vehemently denies the claims that she acted in concert to coerce Jeantel to act as a stand-in witness.

She doesnt know Trayvon Martin. She doesnt know Rachel Jeantel. Shes not the half-sister. She knows nothing about this case at all. She didnt write any letters. She didnt do anything, Vereen told ABC News.

Crump responded to the lawsuit in a statement, saying, "This tale defies all logic, and its time to close the door on these baseless imaginings. This plaintiff continues to display a callous disregard for everyone but himself, revictimizing individuals whose lives were shattered by his own misguided actions. He would have us believe that he is the innocent victim of a deep conspiracy, despite the complete lack of any credible evidence to support his outlandish claims."

He added, I have every confidence that this unfounded and reckless lawsuit will be revealed for what it is another failed attempt to defend the indefensible and a shameless attempt to profit off the lives and grief of others."

Vereen is warning Klayman to retract the lawsuit within the state's allotted time frame of 21 days or face further legal actions.

"Hes going to find himself being disbarred. The Florida Bar doesnt take too well to frivolous lawsuits that throws peoples lives into disarray," said Vereen. "I would urge that lawyer to do his due diligence and take our pleadings seriously because there will be no backtracking or crawfishing once we file."

Tracy Martin attends the Trayvon Martin 4th Annual Day Of Remembrance and Peace Walk in Miami Gardens, Fla., Feb. 6, 2016.

George Zimmerman waits for his defense counsel to arrive in Seminole circuit court, on the 11th day of his murder trial in the 2012 death of Trayvon Martin, June 24, 2013 in Sanford, Fla.

Other named defendants in the lawsuit include Eugene, current and former Florida prosecutors Bernie de la Rionda, John Guy, Angela Corey, The State of Florida and Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE). Klayman alleges that all parties "either have known about or should have known about the witness fraud, obstructed justice, or lied repeatedly under oath in order to cover up their knowledge of the witness fraud."

HarperCollins Publishers LLC was also named as a defendant for publishing Crump's book in October 2019 with defamatory claims against Zimmerman, according to the lawsuit.

FDLE has not been served the lawsuit, a spokesperson told ABC News. Request for comment from the other defendants were not immediately returned.

The Florida Bar criticized Klayman for posting the lawsuit on his website without redacting the addresses of the defendants and other charges, according to the complaint obtained by ABC News. Klayman has not returned ABC News' request for comment.

George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch volunteer who sparked a national uproar by shooting Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teenager to death, is pictured in this Seminole County, Florida, Sheriff's Office booking photograph taken on April 11, 2012.

Since Zimmerman's acquittal, he has attempted to sell the gun he used to kill Trayvon Martin, sold confederate artwork to raise money for a supposed "Muslim free gun store" and pleaded no contest for threatening and harassing a private investigator who reached out to him to see if he would participate in a film about the 2012 shooting.

Trayvon Martin's mother, Sybrina Fulton, became a prominent member of the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of her sons death and has said that her sons memory lives on as part of the movement along with that of several unarmed black people who were killed by law enforcement.

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George Zimmerman files $100M lawsuit against Trayvon Martin's ...

George Zimmerman, who in 2013 was acquitted of charges in the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, is suing Martin's family and others for $100 million, theMiami Herald reports.

Martin's mother, Sybrina Fulton, is the lead defendant in Zimmerman's lawsuit filed in Polk County Circuit Court. Also being sued are the former prosecutors in the previous Zimmerman case, and Harper Collins, which published a book written by Ben Crump, the attorney who represented Martin's family.

Prosecutors during the 2013 trial said that Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, was not justified in shooting and killing the unarmed black teenager, while Zimmerman claims he was acting in self-defense. Thejury found himnot guilty of second-degree murder.

Zimmerman's new lawsuit, the Herald reports, cites "information in a documentary about the case that accuses the Martin family of engineering false testimony." He's reportedly seeking $100 million in civil damages and alleging defamation, abuse of civil process, and conspiracy.

Crumpin a statementdescribed the lawsuit as "reckless" and "another failed attempt to defend the indefensible and a shameless attempt to profit off the lives and grief of others."

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George Zimmerman is suing Trayvon Martin's family