digital marketing Archives - Fluency Digital

What the Happy Meal can teach us about branding

As Clint Eastwood (playing Dirty Harry) once said, “a man’s got to know his limitations.” Switch out “man” with “brand” and “limitations” with “strengths,” and you’ve got a pretty good idea of what makes McDonald’s a marketer worth emulating. Case in point, the Big M’s revival of its classic Happy Meal toys. During the promotion, ...

Was 2018 a tough year for digital marketers?

To answer the question posed in the headline, yes – maybe a little. But not in a way that should have you worrying that you’ve chosen the wrong profession or anything. Far from it. In fact, the digital marketing scene and its practitioners are doing just fine in a financial sense. For proof, look to the ...

What you – yes, you – can do to fight ad fraud

As we speak (or, uh, “read”?), someone is out there making you look bad. And by “you,” we mean digital advertisers (and yes, that includes your pals at Fluency), and by “someone,” we mean a global army of bots controlled by… …you guessed it (or you just read the title): ad fraudsters. Wait, how can ...

Failed campaigns: When to admit defeat

That’s the funny thing about digital marketing: there just aren’t any guarantees in this business. You can have a shrewd strategy. You can read every conceivable data point. And you can kill it in content. And even then, your campaign could still fail. So what do you do? For one, as the headline suggests, you admit ...

How to email your customers without spamming them

We admit email marketing doesn’t seem all that glamorous. More than likely, you associate it with the junk that ends up in your spam folder, day in and day out. So if you’re working with a limited budget and limited time, it’s understandable that you might turn up your nose at email. After all, it’s ...

Do people actually click on native ads?

You never click on native ads, do you? If you’re a digital marketer, the answer is probably no – unless you’re curious about what the competition’s up to. As a consumer, you likely steer clear of them. So why would you expect other people to click on your native ads? It’s a fair question. But here’s a ...

Tread lightly through the social media minefield

For digital marketers, social media is a double-edged sword that can never be sheathed. Like it or not, all companies must contend with platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. There’s simply no way one can forego social media strategy and be successful. In other words, we’re all forced to wield a deadly weapon on a daily basis. ...

Will Ad Blockers haunt digital marketers forever?

Ad blockers are to digital marketers what German U-boats were to Allied naval fleets – a hidden (and dangerous) nuisance that could derail otherwise perfect planning. Unlike U-boats, though, you can’t really blame folks for using them. This makes our perpetual conflict with ad blockers that much more difficult, because we know that users have ...

Is Reddit secretly trying to become the next Facebook?

There is great unrest on Reddit. It’s because the social news aggregation website, which bills itself as “the front page of the internet,” is going through changes – and some users theorize there’s a nefarious scheme at work. As user mrv3 put it, in a post that made the coveted front page recently, “Reddit is trying ...

The truth about podcasting as a marketing tool

If you’re a business owner, you probably hear a lot about “content” these days – videos, blogs, articles, and so on. But there’s one kind of content you might be overlooking: podcasts. Despite what you might think, it’s not just a medium for true crime shows like “Serial.” It can also be a powerful tool ...