#the urge to just make every piece of media i consume into my entire personality ugh

[scattered-winter]

Give us the rant my liege

(tagging @vulpinesaint because they wanted to see this as well)

ok this is. gonna get long. and im not gonna be holding anything back. and as someone who suffers from chronic Too Nice disease i need to put that disclaimer beforehand with the additional disclaimer that these are all just my opinions that have been largely brought about by my own personal experiences so im not speaking for the entire community when i give this rant.

now with all that out of the way. let me welcome you to the land of aroace WRATH

the first thing i want to say is that most of the things I'm angry abt in fandom's general treatment/views of aro/ace people are actually extensions of the general societal views toward sex and romance as a whole. I'll go more in depth as we go but I'm choosing to focus more on the fandom side of things for now since it's a lot easier to be angry at something so trivial compared to the entire (western) society that's structured against people like me.

one of the biggest things I've seen a lot in fandom/creator spaces is the urge to give every character a romantic relationship that's more "powerful" or "deep" than platonic/familial relationships. this is of course an extension of amanormativity in society as a whole, because the belief that romance is the Goal (tm) is so deeply set into society that it's taken me years of introspection and research to come to terms and find joy in my aromanticism. but it's the concept of characters not being able to be happy, or find fulfillment, or being lonely for the rest of their lives because they don't have a romantic partner. and I wish I could say queers in fandom were generally more accepting of the idea of characters never finding (or even wanting) romance but that's so far from the case because often it's queer people who are pushing this idea of romance and marriage being the Goal.

and with all the above in mind, aro/ace representation is really hard to find. I can probably count the canon aro/ace characters in any media I've ever consumed on one hand (which ofc doesn't say much about the whole scope of aro/ace rep because that's just from what I've seen/read and there's probably more out there that I've never gotten to). and the thing that really upsets me in particular is how, even in the rare instances where we do get representation, fandom collectively ignores it to shove the character into romantic/sexual relationships in fanworks. like. y'all have literally every single character to ship around with and yet y'all also take the one win we have too. smh. and then my Personal Favorite thing (/s) is when someone points out the erasure, allos' go-to thing to say is "well, ace people can still have sex! aro people can still be in relationships!!" y'all are missing the point.

I also can't think of any media I've ever seen where it's unapologetically aro/ace ?? there are quite a few pieces of media that are explicitly, unapologetically queer that I hold sooo close to my chest, but there's nothing for aro/aces outside of like. children's shows. where the romance is minor enough that it can be ignored. and not to be dramatic but I would kill a man for a piece of adult aro/ace media that actually showed the joys and connections within the communities. even media with queer representation tends to lean into the "sex/romance is what makes us human" thing, which I can't even fault the creators for because that's what society as a whole--even queer society--says, too. and of course it's unfair to hold queer media to a higher standard than normal, and that's not what I'm trying to do. it's just. even when I'm watching/reading something meant for queer people, it's still not entirely for me, yknow?? and I think I can feel disappointed about that and also not hold queer media up to a ridiculous standard.

which brings me to more of the irl shit ig !! for all the anger against people saying that aros will be alone their whole lives, there's also some truth to that, but not in the way you'd initially think. I'm not lonely because I want a girlfriend and I'm sad because I don't. I'm lonely because my whole family is going to get married. all my siblings. all my friends. they're all going to find a romantic partner, and/or a marriage, and as "just" a friend, I'm suddenly not as important as their partner. there's this idea that marriages/romantic partnerships always have to come before hobbies, careers, friends, and anything else. and if someone prioritizes something else over romance, they're "selfish." there's also this idea that breakups can only happen if one side of the partnership did something wrong. that sometimes a relationship just isn't working, or they're just not compatible (and neither side is at fault for that.) and this idea of romance and marriage being The Most Important Thing Ever is what makes me lonelier than anything. because even as a kid in school, I lost friends because they got a boyfriend and girlfriend and suddenly that was more important than anything else. including me. and as more and more of my friends and siblings get married, it's only going to get worse because I'm not as important to them anymore. and that's something I'm gonna have to deal with, even though I love being aro and there's nothing I would rather be.

[rainbowsky]

Final round-up of fan fic asks

I've gotten a few more interesting responses to the fan fic discussion so I'm going to round them all up here. This will be my final post on the topic until/unless there's a dramatic new development, or a particularly notable response I want to highlight. Thanks to everyone who brought their thoughts and experiences to the topic. I hope everyone at least feels heard.

The biggest piece of advice that I would like to offer is for everyone to focus on what they love rather than what they hate. If we all did that, the world would be a better place. Alongside that, I'd like to remind everyone to please support authors whose work you like. It's so important. Give them a kudos, give them a nice comment, recommend their work to others. You never know what kind of grief and harassment they are dealing with to bring you these great stories, and our support means a lot.

This is in reference to previous posts here and here.

Anonymous asked:

With regard to fandom and fan fic issue, my years of experience being part of very large fandoms has led me to believe that big accounts are v important in facilitating and enforcing the general consensus of the whole fandom. Unless there will be big accs who'll remind everyone of being respectful & just not being a dick over other's preferences, nothing will change.

This is also the reason why I think certain solo fandoms have adapted weird and twisted narratives as their general fandom story because no big acc has tried to police them & and say hey pls be rational. Whether we like it or not, in a place where how far voices, ideas, tweets, posts get heard is based on the number of followers you have, big accs will have the power and influence in creating/curating/shifting the narratives.

So, if you want to know why your/our fandom thinks like this in general, look at what big accs are tweeting/posting, look at what ideas & values they follow, look at their preferences or how strongly they react to certain situations. it's taxing and toxic for big accs given the nature of social media these days, but it's also the reality of system, the more followers/audience you have, the more influence you will have.

So to anyone reading this I hope we all practice more restraint and reflection before we post anything. Remember that words, no matter what medium you write it in, will always carry weight.

So true. It is easy - even for myself who spends a fair chunk of time answering people's asks - to forget that people can sometimes be impressionable and what we say can influence people whether that's our intent or not. I get used to thinking of myself as a regular guy just doing my own thing when sometimes my thoughts and words go well beyond where I initially posted them.

I think it's important for us to be careful what we say, and it's equally important to be careful what we take from what other people say. Especially when it comes to big claims. Always get a second, third, fourth opinion and don't be afraid to ask for clarification if something doesn't sit right or sounds confusing.

It's also important to reflect on how our words and actions might affect other people's experience of fandom, and err on the side of 'live and let live' wherever possible. It's great to have our own preferences and to champion them, but we should try to do so in a way that leaves space for other people and perspectives.

The more unique perspectives and the more friendly, open dialog there is, the healthier the community will be as a whole.

There's nothing wrong with encouraging and guiding growth in the particular areas we are interested in, as long as it doesn't step on, oppress or attack those who are peacefully enjoying something different.

Anonymous 2 asked: bjyx fans attacking gdgdbaby for including zsww/lsfy dynamics in an event named bjyx then turning right around and attacking the zsww/lsfy event organizer for excluding bjyx? god, can you hear my facepalm and sigh of resignation and incredulity from over there? im genuinely not surprised that they're trying to drive an entire part of the fandom out by disgusting them (and me) with these immature tactics. i believe what im about to say next will sound quite bait-y and i respect your decision 1/?

should you choose not to post this. but i do know that it is not only me, in fact there are many out there, that is of this opinion. we just dont talk about it on twitter to avoid the potential mess it will bring lol. okay, here goes nothing. (do note that im talking about the majority here, not every single person is like this) so bjyx fans tend to be cishet females whereas zsww/lsfy fans are more diverse in terms of age and gender, and most of them are part of the queer community too 2/?

i would like to clarify that most of these zsww/lsfy fans are not dynamic exclusive (in the sense that they are friendly and interact with all ggdd fans) they just prefer to "identify" themselves as zsww/lsfy fans (on twitter specifically) just to form a distinction from bjyx fans who mostly are dynamic exclusive (as in; they do not consume non-bjyx content, and straightup refuse to interact with non-bjyx fans, often blocking them). as a result, id say that the zsww/lsfy communiy is way more 3/?

mature and respectful (after all, they're mostly queer people talking about a queer ship) whereas many problems in this fandom, such as the homophobia, adamantly insisting on "drawing lines" between dynamics, stem from the bjyx exclusive fans, comprised of cishet females who "may not know better". so, it is of no surprise to me that they're resorting to these immature tactics of calling gg unsavory names, and organizing retaliatory events with controversial topics in an attempt to "purify". 4/4

I trust that you have arrived at that theory through your own experience and observation. I haven't personally spent much time immersed in this stuff so I can't claim to have any real insight or expertise. If you say that's your experience of it, then at the very least that's how you've seen things up to this point.

I just want to say that I think we should always be careful about making assumptions about people's age, gender/gender identity, etc.

There are plenty of good reasons to avoid doing that; because those assumptions could be very wrong, because those assumptions are often laced with ageism, sexism, etc., because those assumptions - even when correct - might not be an accurate basis for the conclusions we draw.

But the primary reason I recommend avoiding those type of assumptions is because anything that enables us to clump a group of people together in our minds like that will tend to make them easier to demonize and dehumanize. They are no longer individuals who are each responsible for their own unique perspectives, they are now 'the X group' who is known for 'A B C series of easily attackable ideas or behaviors'.

If we attribute undesirable traits and behaviors to a group of people we feel opposed to in some way, that makes us feel more righteous and justified in behaving unfairly toward them, dismissing their humanity and warring with them. It's just risky behavior to engage in, even when it's well-intentioned.

There might actually be some truth to what you're saying. It could very well be that most of these people are young, inexperienced, heteronormative, etc. but if that's the case then we should try to use those traits to better understand and empathize rather than to better dismiss and discredit.

Just my two cents on that.

It can be really frustrating dealing with what feels like other people attacking us, trying to oppress us, etc. - especially when there are more of them than there are of us. In my experience the best solutions to that sort of problem are generally the ones that focus on what we are doing and want to do rather than what they are doing that we don't want them to do.

As I am always preaching, we can't control what other people say, do or think. The only thing we have any control over is what we say, do and think (and how we respond to what they say, do and think).

I have found in my experience that the moment I step out of a conflict mindset and instead step into a problem-solving mindset, everything starts to come together. I feel better, my outlook is more positive, I can begin to see solutions and allies rather than problems and enemies, and most of all, I become more focused on what I am doing than what others are doing.

So I would recommend everyone who is invested in resolving these conflicts focus on that. "How can we best showcase and encourage the types of stories we enjoy?" instead of "How can we stop these other people from doing things we dislike?"

Anonymous 3 asked:

Hello again! It’s anon #3 from the fanfic post. I really do appreciate reading your thoughts on various issues like this, so thank you for always taking time to write in depth. As for supporting without going to war, the simplest way has always been to just show appreciation for the creators, hype them up. Kudos are the easiest way on ao3 but comments in addition are great. This goes for all content—art, fics, vids..etc. Creators love to see and read how people react to their content. Sharing is also great, fic recs are very helpful, just be cautious with art and reposting though. Hope this helps a bit!

Thanks so much, Anon. I think this is excellent advice. And it's true that appreciation is great, but helping to expand the audience is also great. Recommending stories, pointing people to the pages/websites of artists we like (as opposed to reposting), sharing our own ideas and approaches, encouraging people to try new things... all of this helps build healthier communities.

And here's another one: WRITE! DRAW! CREATE!

I urge anyone with creative interests or talents to bring their voices to the community because we all can benefit from hearing from you.

Thanks again everyone for sharing your thoughts on this issue. I hope that over time we can all work in positive ways to improve the situation.

I think this subject has been well-covered now so I'm going to retire it for the time being. If anyone still feels they want to discuss it further please feel free to message me privately. Thanks.

[alo-piss-trancy]

Ok hi, I didn't wanna say anything, but please don't write knifeplay/bloodplay for Yuri. I def don't wanna spoil anything, but it's learned on a certain route that Yuri has a s*lf h*rm problem (I'll leave it at that).

You honestly seem like you're not trying to be a jerk with this ask, so I'm going to do my best to answer this as politely as possible without compromising my personal beliefs on the matter. This is going to be long and a little serious, but please note I'm not attacking you or trying to start a debate. I'm just laying all my thoughts on this down at once so I make myself clear, because a short answer would leave a lot of nuance out.

I understand what you're trying to do here. For the record though, I also considered that a pretty massive spoiler and I did not appreciate that at all. Even if you all think you're 'helping', don't do that again. Y/uri was pretty much the only character I'd managed to avoid most spoilers on and you killed the surprise for me. This game is already so full of fluffy 'filler' in the beginning that I don't have a ton of big plot points to look forward to in each route.

Now, I realise this is a very delicate topic and incredibly triggering to some people, especially with those two things combined. I am 100% willing to tag it with just about any variation needed to ensure you or others affected can blacklist/block it and never have to see a word of it in the future. I'd also be happy to go back and tag that original text post I made if needed. I mean that. You all are welcome to ask me to tag things anytime, and so long as you're polite about it I'm perfectly willing to oblige to the best of my ability in future posts! If I occasionally forget, just toss me a light reminder and I'll jump into editing and add it in.

That said, I want to make it clear that I am very firmly against censorship. I'm willing to take all necessary precautions to ensure people can curate their experiences on this blog and AO3, but at the end of the day I can still post whatever fictional stuff I choose to. As can anyone else. Same goes for more formally published media.

Now, it's entirely possible I would have gotten to that part of the game and decided 'oh dang, I'm not so enthused about that fic idea anymore...'. My whims and ideas change frequently, and what you mentioned is a heavy topic with a lot to unpack and process. It's also entirely possible that future plot would only provide more fuel.

Fyi, when I originally mentioned the knifeplay I was actually thinking a lot more along the lines of her doing it to the protagonist, not the reverse. But for the record, if I did choose to write it with focus on Y/uri, I would still be well within my rights to.

This next part of my answer is going to address some heavy topics, this is your warning!!!

Sometimes people's kinks are a way to take a thing that is personally scary or upsetting to them and find a way to reverse it. To find pleasure or power or get used to the idea of the awful thing in a safe, controlled fashion. I'm not going to go into the full details on this because there's plenty of explanation and research elsewhere already written up, as well as an excellent book on the subject, and I'm not turning this blog into a discourse debate. But I needed to mention it for my point.

There are plenty of stories that could be explored with Y/uri in this context. Did she have this kink before the self harm events started and it was completely unrelated, or did she develop it afterwards? How did she discover it beforehand? If developed afterwards, did it start out as another way of harming mixed with pleasure in a self-destructive way, often done sloppily and without proper technique? Or was it strictly used as almost exposure therapy to deal with those urges and thoughts in a safer, more contained scenario, maybe even allowing the partner she trusted to wield the knife to prove their bond/reinforce that she can be loved without being hurt deeply, that she is worthy of affection and trust and loyalty. Maybe this finally helps give Y/uri a tool to embrace her 'weirdness' without harming herself and others. Or, what if she thinks it can be a useful tool and is sure she's ready, but partway through the scene she gets triggered or has flashbacks... how does she deal with it? How does her partner? Can it be overcome with effort, research, and taking things slowly, or does she realize this kink is actually completely off the table for her?

What if she has this kink and is excited to try it, but her partner isn't? How does she take that rejection? Or do her poor social skills mean she skipped negotiation to begin with and attempted it in the middle of a vanilla session? Would her partner freak out or even get mad, or try to swallow their fear and let her do it so they don't hurt/offend her, even at the cost of their own comfort?

This topic also opens a ton of potential plots for darkfic, but I'll refrain from discussing that out of respect for you and others.

So as you can see, there's much more to explore than 'Knife=Hot'. I believe those discussions and ideas are necessary and provide important fuel for thought when explored fictionally, especially since mainstream media doesn't cover a lot of them.

~~~

I feel I should take a second to clarify knifeplay for those who may be unaware. It doesn't always equate to actual cutting/drawing blood. That can be an aspect, but usually only by those far more experienced and, you know, actually into that. A lot of participants don't actually go that far. Mostly, it's either about the physical sensation of the knife touching you at all, or the adrenaline/controlled fear and intimate trust of a partner bringing an object like that so close/teasing you with it.

In fact, it's frequently advised in those circles (especially to newcomers) to use a dull butterknife instead, because it simulates the same feelings of metal on skin/can dig in a little without any real risk of cutting/drawing blood. Even if one chooses to use a different knife, it's still pretty common to dull the blade, or some people even substitute with a closed pair of scissors (combined with the partner blindfolded, you can't really tell it apart from the real thing).

These versions of knifeplay are well controlled and ultimately pretty harmless, so long as both parties know what they're doing and stay alert. And more experienced players with sharper knives are even more cautious/have studied extensively to know where/how deep to go without risking scarring/serious injury.

Remember the golden rules of kink: Safe. Sane. Consensual.

With those in place, it is not nearly the same as self harm. Just as controlled, consensual, well-negotiated BDSM with safewords, respected boundaries and a trusted partner is never in the same league as abuse.

~~~

Now that that's out of the way, back to my point:

There's no perfect representation or narrative for everyone, in any group (be that gender/sexuality/triggered by certain things, etc). Every human being is different, everyone interprets media differently, and everyone takes away different elements from stories.

What one person in a particular group may find cathartic, relateable, or painful but necessary food for thought, another may find completely repulsive, personally hurtful, offensive, something they can't stand to hear. And guess what? Both of those can be true at the same time. One side is not immediately right over the other.

There are queer characters or interpretations of them in fics that I vehemently despise, might even find hurtful or sickening and think 'how can anyone create this, it's insufferable! People in 'my group' aren't like that, it's a horrible representation. I can't relate to it at all!' But you know what? Other people can and do, may find comfort in those exact narratives and experiences, may heal their pain instead of inflicting more. And that's great. It's what they needed or wanted and if I don't like it, I click away and do my best to avoid it.

There are specific tropes and narrative themes I personally cannot get through without being triggered into anxiety attacks or dragged back to bad times and places in my life. Sometimes I see them tackled in ways that are hurtful or seem insensitive to me. But I recognise that for someone else, it's exactly what they needed to see to get through that or come to terms with it, or see a way they wish that thing could play out. I would never dream of telling those people they aren't allowed to enjoy it, OR telling the creator of that piece of media or a tv show 'Hey ummm please don't use this plot because it turns me into a human wreck for a week'. Because it's not remotely my place to do so. They can create whatever they want, they have no responsibility towards me or my well being. A few might be kind enough to include a warning at the beginning of that episode or in the description, but they are in no way required to. It's up to me to curate my experience and try to keep my guard up/research what might have those tropes, and in the rare occasions I get blindsided, yeah, it hurts like hell. I struggle, I might even backslide a bit. But I just have to try my best to deal with it and make a note to be more careful next time. Because you can't control the world around you, not even the online world, and you have absolutely no right to. The only right you have is to protect yourself without infringing on other people's boundaries/rights.

And there's also another important point. There doesn't have to be a big important point or explanation for why a creator creates something, or why consumers can enjoy that creation! If someone wants to create a plotline with all of my triggers used in the most 'insensitive', 'wrong', pointless ways possible, strictly for Entertainment or pure kink material instead of some deep dissection of the issues involved? They can go hog wild!!! They are 100% allowed to do so on this earth, and I can't (and wouldn't want to) do a thing to stop them.

One person can read a kink fic and it hits a very emotional theme for them/they think it explores a deep topic well. Another person can read that same fic and get nothing out of it except their rocks off. Both of those readers are completely equal and 'allowed' to enjoy that fic. Both reasons are completely valid reasons for why the creator was 'allowed' to post/create that fic in the first place. Nobody needs permission, nobody has to answer to anybody except themselves. Period. This extends to any topic, any type of fic.

Yes, even for things I find absolutely abhorrent and insensitive and don't understand/want to read ever. I may resent everything about its existence, but I will defend to death the creator's right to make it exist in the first place.

It only affects me if I let it affect me. If someone's making content I despise or am upset by and can't handle, I can choose to ignore or avoid them, blacklist those tags, I can block them and move on with my day. I can do anything within my own bubble, but the second I consider going into their bubble and saying they can't make that thing, I am in the wrong. Because I'm not respecting their space and rights.

If someone makes cookies with ingredients I'm highly allergic to, pastes the ingredient warnings all over the box where I read them, and I still eat one, would anyone cheer me on for blaming them when I have a reaction? Would anyone think it was remotely okay of me to start calling up every bakery in town and saying they weren't allowed to bake those cookies EVER, because some people somewhere might be allergic?

No. They'd tell me I was crossing the line, because I'm infringing on other people's boundaries and lives. I'm expecting everybody else to take responsibility for something that, while horrible and painful, was my fault for touching.

Now, if someone sets out unlabelled cookies not realizing I'm allergic to something in them, and I eat it and have a reaction, that sucks. It's an awful experience. But is it the baker's fault? As long as they didn't do it maliciously, not really. They can be advised politely to label it in the future, and I can do my best to remember to ask/be more cautious next time I come across something I'm unsure of, but they're still allowed to bake those cookies for themselves and others.

Now, if I deliberately baked cookies with an ingredient that people are very frequently allergic to (ex. peanuts) and set it out in a crowded buffet without a warning label, that's a jerk move. That's intentionally trying to cause harm to others. But simply baking that flavour of cookies still isn't a crime or harmful by itself.

~~~

I'll be honest, I'm running out of steam and I think I've said most of what I have to say, so I'll wrap it up. I want to reiterate that I'm not ripping into you with this long answer, anon! I understand why you sent me what you did and I'm trying not to come off as harsh. I'm happy to go back and tag things and will tag anything else similar in the future!!! But at the end of the day, regardless of whether I personally end up writing that fic or not, or even want to after I get to that plot, I don't agree with telling anyone they can't/shouldn't write it at all. I wanted to try and explain my viewpoint thoroughly, and I hope you can respect that, just as I'll respect and try to accommodate you and other followers. This is the only time I'll really get up on a soapbox like this, and I have no interest in debating these things on my blog further, but it is a topic I've been passionate about all my life so I'm afraid I'm not budging on it.

[idreamtofmanderleyagain]

“Dark Fantasies” and Other Assumptions

Ever since that Labyrinth post started going around, I’m seeing a lot of think pieces on “dark fantasies,” the psychology behind them, people’s right to have them, etc. etc.

In the context I’ve been seeing, phrases like “dark fantasy” seems to implicate that villain/heroine fandom (or Labyrinth fandom in this case) is almost exclusively a space intended to explore romantic fantasies that involve some degree of abuse.

Many times it seems these sentiments are coming from people who are themselves entirely outside of villain/heroine fandoms.

I have a few questions for tumblr. 

Is the mere idea of an adult Sarah and Jareth coming together romantically years after the events of the film really one of these “dark fantasies?”

Have any of you ever actually engaged on a consistent basis with any of the material of Labyrinth fandom, or villain/heroine ships in general?

Speaking as someone who almost exclusively resides in villain/heroine fandom and has been a Labyrinth fan for literally the entire span of my memory, I have to say that I have never considered my fandom spaces to be something that I should feel guilty about, or should have to explain to anyone. I have never felt as though I was exploring some dark urge in me to witness abusive implications along with my romance. Quite the opposite, in fact.

What I can tell you is this: I really like some fucking character drama and suspense in my fiction, and I also really love romances. By nature, I wish to have both things in my stories.

The dynamic between a villain and a heroine in a romance primarily involves two characters who are in some way in opposition to each other, and who find themselves gravitating towards one-and-other despite that fact. That is the core basis of why this particular dynamic is compelling to the majority of people who consume it.

This does not require domestic abuse to accomplish. 

Now, it’s very true that you will find a good handful of fanfictions which do involve abuse or bodice-ripper type dynamics. Dark fantasies like the types described above certainly do exist within these spaces. However, it’s not possible to blanket that kind of depiction over the entirety of Labyrinth fandom or villain/heroine fandoms.

In fact, a good majority of the time, the women who create content in these spaces are quite intentionally equalizing dynamics of power with already powerful men, depicting heroines exploring their own sexuality in the face of judgement, greater understandings of the self, and emotional healing. 

Sometimes we do express darkness in the form of ambiguity and initial distrust, or the villain embodies a darkness which is something outside of the domestic romantic space. Sometimes darkness just means the presence of fear before a relationship begins.

Indeed, many times the real abuser happens to be the male hero. That is a very important point, because in real life, abuse always comes at the hands of regular “good” men. There are no real vampires, or goblin kings, or phantoms to menace us. So it makes quite a lot of sense that women might be drawn to exciting male figures in fiction, and feel the need to depict him as a contrast from the men who resemble ones they’ve met in real life.

This is not a “dark fantasy” that we need to speak of in hushed tones, or attempt to defend in pitying language for all the poor girls who just really need to explore fictionalized abuse for their own personal catharsis (not that I have a problem with people who do). 

This is not my secret dark side. This is not something I do in a clandestine way to explore something within my own psyche. I participate in these fandoms pretty damn comfortable in the knowledge that I am not interested in writing or consuming romanticized abuse for my OTPs. When it’s relevant to do so I might deal with the subject, or deal with non-romantic dynamics that start off with the potential for trouble, but the intent is always to go forward with happiness, health and safety as the ultimate goal.

Please stop framing my favorite ships and fandoms as if they are something so deeply other that you must explain the psychology of a large group of women in order to understand, as if we were all a monolith and every individual’s personal tastes are all 100% part of one cohesive mass experience which can be summed up off the cuff on somebody’s woefully under-researched social media post. 

We’re perfectly capable of exploring the psychology (and issues!) of our own fandoms if we wish to, and I don’t know that the opinions of people with no personal understanding of these spaces are welcome anymore.

[thereddeath2093-blog]

2020A_CW-210 personal blog post

DOOM

By Steven Bunch

                 I spend a lot of time thinking about doom. It’s a rather abstract concept to preoccupy oneself with, but still I find myself living a “doomed” life. I listen to doom metal, I watch movies and TV shows full of doomed people on doomed worlds, I fantasize about the doom of the planet and my own personal doom. It even gets so much more specific to the point of absurdity; my favorite rapper is MF DOOM, my favorite super villain is Dr. Doom, I even play DOOM the video game.

               Half of my time spent thinking about doom, is trying to understand what the word itself really means. What is doom? What does it mean to be doomed? This as you can imagine inspires all sorts of philosophical questions about life and death, fate and inevitability, as well as many others. For all my pondering, I can’t really come up with a solid answer or something definitive. Sure, I could go with a typical dictionary definition of the idea, but it is more than that to me. It encompasses too much to be summarized and completed in a single or simple string of sentences. It’s an aesthetic, an ideology, and a state of being to me, something transcendental unto itself.

               The aesthetics of Doom are easily recognized but much like the idea itself, abstract and difficult to definitively explain. There are rather obvious tropes and visual elements that appear in art and media that are representative of what I’m talking about; ruined buildings, smoke filled skies, destroyed cities, dead bodies, anything apocalyptic really. However, the idea is much deeper than that. A piece of art, or anything visual, that can inspire feelings of dread, despair, or hopelessness exemplify this aesthetic in its purest forms. This has a place in the greater sense of the word and the idea of Doom itself.

               The ideology of Doom, unlike a lot of ideologies, is not one that is readily “chosen” in the same way one might choose to be a democrat or one would take up the cause of conservation. This is a kind of mentality that people usually fall into, and more so often than they might realize. Unlike the aforementioned aesthetics, the ideology is easily explained and familiar to most people. While chiefly the mentality is signified by feelings of doom or feeling doomed, it is a little more complicated than that. A true ideology of doom comes when this mentality is reflected out into the world as a whole rather than the individual. More than a simple feeling of personal helplessness, an ideology of doom encompasses the whole of humanity, to see the entire human race as doomed. As you can imagine, this is not a particularly hot-take, especially these days. That being said, embracing this fact would be the key difference between someone who is merely cynical and someone who is waiting with baited breathe for the apocalypse. Which is essentially what I’m talking about.

               People would scarcely admit to themselves, and even more so to each other, that they want the world to end. But the fact of the matter is that most people on some level do. Being a “doomer” has even become a popular internet meme. You get a sense of this feeling anytime someone has a particularly fashionable doomsday prophecy or something like this virus breaks out. People talk about “what if this gets worse?” and “what if this is the ‘big one’?” and they do so in very practical sensible ways, but it’s not hard to see something under the practical nervous façade everyone displays. There’s a part of it that is exciting to everyone. There’s a little voice in every one’s head that says “well fuck, if the world ends, I don’t have to go to work on Monday”.

Now that might seem rather funny like a Sunday newspaper comic, but there’s something deep in the psychology of that mindset. People don’t want to have to go to work, but more than that, they don’t want to be expected to participate in the societal machine that makes people go to work and earn money. Part of being an adult is accepting and fulfilling obligations that are somewhat thrust upon you from outside regardless of how one feels about those particular obligations. People are to a degree forced to participate in a society that they don’t agree with, or at the very least, do not like their position in. An apocalypse frees the shit scrubber and the burger flipper to eat his boss and give a finger to the man free of any guilt of any financial or typical consequence. All of us have someone higher on us on the ladder we wouldn’t mind making a meal out of.

Naturally this all extends outside of working relationships and obligations, but to the far reaches of civilization as a whole. Every person from pauper to prince is well aware, that the “system” in place is not only incredibly flawed and corrupt, but also antithetical to the very human soul itself. Obvious injustices such as bigotry, war, poverty; as well as little things like traffic, wasted time, rudeness, all support the notion that something is wrong .“The system” as your local pothead would call it, isn’t designed to crush people into machines and thoughtless consuming automatons, but one can’t be faulted for believing it so, considering how often said system produces such hollow beings. One of the mindset of “Doom” recognizes that the easiest way for these things to change, if they can be changed, is to wipe the slate clean entirely.

                This is the point where most people will close this page because I’m starting to sound like a cultist of some kind. But, those people aren’t remiss to do so. This is the kind of mentality that leads people into cults. Nearly every cult is a “doomsday” cult of some kind. Even Christianity for all its pomp and circumstance, is hardly ever different. Some of the most colorful and interesting passages of the Bible come from the book of Revelations and the prophecy for the end of the world. That’s how natural this all is, how prevalent it is in the human psyche. We have always been waiting for the end of the world, because unlike most animals, we are very poignantly aware of our own mortality, and this awareness manifest itself in strange ways. The strangest of all being embracement.

               This leads to my final point about Doom itself as a state of being, the embracement of death. Now again, I’m not trying to get all death-cult on you, but there is something to be said for not only accepting one’s own mortality, but embracing it. The fact of the matter is, life sucks, and not just these days or in a particular circumstance. Life, on the whole, is a tragedy. We are born into fragile bodies against our will, bodies that will very slowly decay with us trapped inside them. We are born into families we do not choose, with people who do not know but are entrusted with our entire existence, and then as an adult expected to serve someone else entirely. We are expected to work and struggle and to get sick and to suffer until we are physically incapable anymore. And if you whine about it, there will always be someone to chime in and remind you that your particular suffering isn’t even close to the breadth of suffering humans can experience because “someone always has it worse”. This is a world where a good death is considered “getting old”, which is essentially just fermenting and rotting longer than anybody else.  

               To be “Doomed” in this sense is a recognition and rejection of fighting these things. If we are all going to die, then there can be no “good death”. All death is natural, all the world is transient, a passing image. Nothing, least of all people, last forever. You spend a lot more time dead than alive in the grand scheme of things, and in that, being dead is more of the default state. That’s not to say that this is a suicidal feeling at all. This isn’t some philosophy of suicide in so much as it is a philosophy of embracing the inevitable end of all things. Someone in the “doomed” state of being isn’t going to go out and seek the end of their own life, but they aren’t the kind of person to shy away from it either. They allow themselves to fall away and let go of life’s worries much more readily. There is a reason that coming to terms with one’s own mortality is a huge part of Zen and eastern spiritual learning.

Why would you shy away from death and doom if the world is a bag of ass and you’re going to die anyway?

        ��      After many hours wasted thinking, I have come to the conclusion that this is where I draw my artistic inspiration from. All of my world view is painted with a funeral veil. I find myself obsessed with the aesthetics of doom because I constantly live in that state of being. I can’t help but feel a compulsion to drive this aesthetic as far as I can. I feel the innate urge to draw visions of monsters, destroyed cities, and the sky shredded by cosmic terror so naturally. I can’t help but express this feeling through my artwork. Something within me wants to say to people, or remind them; “hey, not only are things like suffering and death very real, but sometimes they are the only thing that is. They are inevitable and they shouldn’t not be cowered from, but embraced and mastered.”

Now, maybe I’m projecting too much. (I tried not to be too first person, oh well). Perhaps I’m just trying to explain my own morbid fascinations I can’t otherwise do so with. Maybe I’m just too edgy for my own good or it’s because I have a very strong belief in the afterlife. Though it’s not out of the realm of possibility that there’s just some people out there (myself chiefly included) who are just sort of depressing, death obsessed freaks. However, I gamble a stamp, that considering how many depressing death obsessed freaks are really out there in the world, that I’m not entirely off-base when I talk about these things being prevalent in the subconscious of the human race as a whole. I believe something deep in the human psyche craves a change, craves destruction to make way for something new. Something in each of us wants these things no matter the cost, something in each of us, craves Doom.

[fanaticwritings]

His Secret - CHAPTER 1

Sam Winchester x Reader [AU]

A/N: This series was lowkey inspired by a book I read and also another favorite character of mine. (Bonus points to those who can guess which character I’m talking about XD) Thanks to @dancing-the-hellfire-rumba for being kind enough to brainstorm and lay the story line out with me. Couldn’t have done this without your help <3 The aesthetic was made by me, pictures courtesy of pinterest.  I am really really excited about this series and hope you guys like it too.

my masterlist

word count: 1.9k

warnings: implied smut and loads of backstory

S A M

Sam Winchester twisted the key and the car whirred to life. The steering wheel felt smooth under his hand, spinning at the lightest touch. The XXW Mary sped out of the parking lot and Sam pushed down on the accelerator. The car roared and lurched forward. In the matter of a few seconds it was breaking lightning speed. It screeched as Sam made turn after turn, testing the limits of the beautiful black vehicle.

The car was the newest product of his brother’s, Dean Winchester's company and equipped with technology from his own. Sam made another swift turn at the next corner, as the road widened out ahead of him. He was almost there. The sky grew darker as night settled in, the tall buildings almost camouflaging into the velvet of the obsidian sky. He pulled to a stop in front of the hall, heart thudding against his chest. In spite of having done this for four consecutive years, he hadn't gotten used to it. He stepped out onto the red carpet and was instantly greeted by shouts and blinding camera flashes. Sam stood there for a heartbeat, letting the cameras capture his dazzling smile and then handed the car keys to the valet. The paparazzi followed him, as he made his way up the stairs of the hall. "The car looks new, Mr. Winchester. New item the Winchester Mobile Ltd. bringing out this year?" "Yeah. It's equipped with some of the latest Winchester Tech and is easy on the eyes," he answered, flashing a brilliant smile. He could see the headlines tomorrow. Sam Winchester confirms launch of the XXW Mary. He continued to talk about the car for the next few minutes, letting the cameras and microphones record his words. It was all he had to do for publicity. Draw them in and hype it up. He made his way up the stairs, determined to get away from the swarm of paparazzi. "What's the next big thing for Winchester Corp?" "Who are you dating?" They quizzed him mercilessly but he didn't take the bait- Only smiled and winked at them. He was thankful when he reached the top and walked into the hall, leaving the wave of cameras behind him. He was immediately greeted by Dean, his brother and also the most important person in his life. "Hiya, Sammy," Dean said, embracing him. He smiled at him appreciatively and for a moment Sam was whisked back in time. Jo Harvelle, Dean’s girlfriend, stood beside him, smiling. Sam embraced her too. Guests continued to pour in behind him. Associates of the corps, big names in the city and a few family members. Media partners were present too and were walking around, talking to the guests. Every year, the Winchester brothers held a benefit in the memory of their loving mother on her birthday. The proceeds of the benefit would all be donated to “Wings“- a charitable foundation, which looked after orphaned/abandoned children and underprivileged mothers-to-be. Sam spotted Castiel Novak standing with Mr. Azel, one of the oldest associates of the corporation. Cas was one of the most senior members of the company and also happened to be Sam and Dean's best friend. His blue eyes instantly lit up at the sight of his tall friend. Sam greeted Mr. Azel too, extending a polite hand. Mr. Azel shook his hand firmly. He had a very unsettling smile but one that Sam was used to, having had to do business with him for the longest time. He excused himself politely and ran into yet another associate. He was getting desperate now. He was listening to the elderly associate intently but his hazel eyes darted around the hall, in search for someone else. There she was, leaning against an ivory pillar, drinking champagne from a delicate glass. His nerves calmed on their own accord. He made his way to her quickly and before she could even say anything, pulled her into a warm embrace. "Heya to you too, handsome," she said when he finally pulled away from her. Y/N. The love of his life. She looked resplendent in the silver gown that shimmered into gold when she moved. The delicate rings of diamond that looped through her ears, accentuated her features perfectly. Her hair was in an up do, a few loose curls making look even more enticing. It was mesmerising, but nothing compared to the beauty that she herself was. Y/N grounded him and understood him like no one else. It hadn't taken him long to fall for her. "Late to your own event, Mr. Winchester?," she teased, glancing at an imaginary watch on her hand. "Yup," he said, winking at her. "Finished with the meet and greet?" She asked again. He wanted to kiss her but it was too crowded for it to be possible. Besides, news reporters were around. "Sadly, no. Don't you see the crowd?" he replied, gesturing at the public. She made a face at that and he fell even more in love with her in that instant, if that was even possible. "You go finish with that and come back to me soon," she commanded. He would incline to her request at this very instant if he could. He nodded his head in acknowledgement before kissing her cheek lightly, unable to resist the urge and then walked away. He had to talk a lot throughout the evening, something he grew easily tired of. It was in his job description to do so, but he couldn't for the life of him, ever get used to it. Running such a giant company was no piece of cake. He loved his company, there was no doubt about it. He poured his heart and soul into the work he did and never questioned it. However, there were certain aspects to it that he couldn’t help but dislike. Winchester Corp was founded and owned by John Winchester, Sam and Dean's father, until the great tragedy that befell them. Everybody had heard the story one too many times. On the fateful night of November 2nd, 1985, the Winchester House caught on fire. Both Mary and John Winchester, did not make it. John had escorted Dean and Sam outside, who were six and two years old at the time, respectively. The fire had consumed half of the house by then and John had rushed in to rescue an unconscious Mary. 

He never made it back. 

The police had confirmed that it had been an accident. The power lines had short circuited somehow and that was it. Winchester Corp saw it's downfall after the tragedy, with nobody to man it. None of the associates owned enough share in the company to become the next owner. All the beneficiaries were passed down to Sam and Dean, according to the company policy, but they were not of age. Until either of the sons became of age, the organisation was ruled to be in charge of their uncle Bobby Singer. He couldn’t help the company much, having had to deal with his own issues at the time. Winchester Corp was almost on the verge of bankruptcy, having managed on the shoulders of a few faithful associates, until Sam and Dean who were just 19 and 15, took the wheel into their own hands. They then began to restore the company back to its full glory. Ten years later, Winchester Tech- lead by Sam and Winchester Automobile Pt. Ltd.- lead by Dean, united under the Winchester Corp brand, became two of the biggest companies in the world. The brothers seem to have moved on with their lives, to the world. But only their closest knew that their past still haunted them. The benefit came to an end after Sam declared the final funds they had managed to raised, with Dean clapping by his side cheerfully. The cheque was handed over to the representative from the charity and after a few drinks, the crowd parted. "Finally," Y/N said as she walked over to Sam, the gown shimmering at her every step. Sam was in awe. It was only them, Dean and Jo now.   Sam smiled down at her as she looped her arm through his and they walked outside, along with Dean and Jo. Sam and Dean talked alone for a while, immersed deep in the conversation while Y/N and Jo chatted with each other. Sam was still distracted by her, he had barely seen her all week and hadn’t been able to spend any time with her today either. Their timings rarely matched. She would be called for work randomly and he had a company to man. How they still managed to love each other, was something neither of them knew. Maybe, some things were just meant to be. Finally, Sam and Dean broke apart and made their way to their respective cars. "Come home with me?" Sam whispered to her when they were finally alone by the car, brushing his lips against her ear. She nodded a yes, clearly having missed him too. She wanted to say something, it shone in her eyes but she chose not to. Sam didn’t press her. The city blurred around them as they drove by. Y/N looked out the window the entire time, barely saying anything. Sam stole occasional glances at her and she looked beautiful then too. If he could, he'd stop the car right now and show her just how much he had missed her. "Look at the road, Winchester," she murmured, not sparing him a glance. Sam smiled as he pulled into the parking lot. The moment they were at the two storey house, Sam slammed himself against Y/n and sealed her lips with a kiss. Frantic hands found her waist and he pulled her close until not even a hair width of distance separated them. God, he had missed her so much. Later, they lay in bed, holding each other.

"You okay?" she asked him, pulling herself to him. Y/N knew all too well how being social took a toll on him. It was tiring, pretending to be someone he wasn't- all smiles and perfect posture. There was no way around it though and he tried his best to get used to it. It was slow and painful but he tried. There was also something else on his mind, however. "Yeah, I'm fine. Go to sleep, baby. You have to wake up early tomorrow," he said, curling her hair behind her ear. "I’m proud of you," she murmured, sighing deeply. Sam smiled at her and pecked her forehead. Her words had assured him, somehow. A moment later, she was fast asleep. Sam waited an hour, listening to her rhythmic breathing and soft snores. He smiled internally. How he had gotten so lucky, he'd never know. If two months ago someone would've told him that he was going to meet the love of his life, he would've laughed at them. He got up gingerly, shifting incredibly slowly so as to not wake her up. She mumbled something in her sleep as he placed her back on the bed. She shifted a little and then stilled again. Making sure that she was still asleep, Sam put on a t-shirt, a jacket and a pair of tracks. He pocketed his phone and a wad of cash that he carefully took out of his safe. He closed the door slowly, watching Y/N all the while. He watched the slow rise and fall of her chest. He almost didn't want to leave her; it was a feeling he had to push away every time. He locked the door behind him with a soft click. Soon, he was out the door and past the gates of the large villa. The security guards didn’t stop him. They were used to this. He pulled his hoodie over his head in a way that shadowed his face completely and trudged off into the night. // Feedback is my elixir, people! Please please let me know what you think of this fic!! It’s what keeps me going. Leave a comment/ ask <33 //

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The Best Luxury Marketing Strategies

email marketing campaign strategy

Have you ever seen a Facebook ad for Chanel? Or an Instagram ad for Lamborghini?

Me neither. That’s because luxury marketing strategies don’t follow the same rules as mass-market brands.

Selling to high-end consumers requires a different approach. But that doesn’t mean popular digital channels are off-limits.

SEO, PPC, even some social media sites can drive online sales for your luxury brand.

Today, I’m going to show you exactly how to take your luxury brand online with the best luxury marketing strategies.

What Qualifies as a Luxury Brand?

Gucci, Rolex, Ferrari. For the most part, you know luxury brands when you hear them.

But what does it take for a brand to qualify as a luxury? In my opinion, it’s down to the three Es: Expensive, Excellent, and Exclusive.

Luxury products are synonymous with high price tags. This is the most common indicator of luxury, but it is also the most misleading. Just because something costs thousands of dollars doesn’t mean it’s luxury.

That’s why luxury products also need to be excellent. The quality has to match the price tag. Good doesn’t cut it in the luxury category; a brand has to be at the very top of the market.

Luxury fashion is created by the best designers in the world. The best engineers create luxury cars. Ditto for timepieces.

Finally, luxury products have to be exclusive. It’s not a luxury product if everyone has one. Often, exclusivity is achieved by price. A ten thousand dollar handbag is well out of reach of the majority of consumers. But brands can also achieve exclusivity by selling a limited number of products. Or they can do both, like Supreme.

Luxury Marketing Trends

According to Statista, the global luxury goods market will increase from $285.1 billion in 2020 to $388 billion in 2025.

Despite what you might think, online sales of personal luxury goods are growing, too. McKinsey estimates 8% of all luxury sales are made online or around €20 billion. That’s a five-fold increase from 2009. What’s more, the majority (almost 80%) of purchases made in-store are influenced by digital.

The consultancy expects online luxury sales to triple by 2025 when almost one in five personal luxury sales will happen online.

Digital channels will be essential for luxury brands going forward. The pandemic hit department stores hard and forced luxury consumers to buy online more than before.

BCG predicts the e-commerce boom will continue in the future both for inspiration and for transactions.

Going digital will also be key to meeting today’s new luxury consumers and those of tomorrow. Millennials, who are entering their peak earning years, and Gen Z, many of whom are just entering the workforce, have grown up in the digital era and expect brands to have an online presence as high-quality as their products.

All that’s to say: digital marketing must be a key part of a luxury brand’s strategy going forward.

Luxury Brand Marketing Strategies

Here’s the thing, luxury marketing isn’t synonymous with digital marketing…yet.

Until now, luxury brands have been able to rely on full-page ads in premium magazines, billboards in duty-free stores, and high-end, high budget TV ads.

Not any more.

To survive in the increasingly competitive luxury space and attract new customers, luxury brands must understand what the luxury consumer wants from a brand and how digital can help them get there.

From SEO to PPC, apps to AR, there are loads of marketing strategies to explore.

Understand the Luxury Customer

The first step in developing a luxury marketing strategy is to understand your audience. Enter buyer personas.  

A buyer persona is a detailed description of your ideal consumer. It will include their age, demographic, job, hobbies, salary, and anything else relevant. The more detail you can include, the better.

Here’s an example of a luxury consumer persona from Stella Rising.

Keep in mind; you may not have just one buyer persona. If several different groups of people buy your products, you’ll need to develop a buyer persona for each of them.

Detailed buyer personas help your brand understand precisely who your customers are and what they want from your brand.

They will allow you to better communicate with your customers and focus your marketing efforts.

Develop Your Digital Luxury Marketing Strategy

Now you understand who your customers are and what they want from your brand, you can build a marketing strategy that will drive results.

Start by thinking about the channels you want to target. This could be a social media platform you want to pay particular attention to; it could be Google; it could even be a custom app.

Focus on one or two to start with, particularly if your luxury brand is new to digital marketing.

Next, define your goals. This may be increasing brand awareness, but a better and more measurable goal is an increase in sales. (It’s also easier to measure sales increase.)

Finally, work out how you’re going to measure your success. If you’re going to use SEO to increase revenue, for instance, find out how much revenue Google and Bing are responsible for right now. If you don’t already have Google Analytics tracking in place, now’s the time to set it up.

Experimental vs. Traditional Marketing

Most marketers are aware of traditional luxury marketing tactics. Full-page ads in premium magazines or weighty direct mail pieces are a luxury marketer’s bread and butter.

But those strategies won’t cut it in an increasingly digital world.

Many brands consider digital marketing experimental in itself. But I urge luxury brands to go beyond standard digital marketing tactics and explore more experimental channels.

One option is a brand app. Apps offer brands a way to speak to users directly through their smartphones. Your app could be as simple as a mobile responsive version of your website.

Or you could take things even further by integrating augmented reality features. Burberry, for instance, has launched an AR shopping tool that lets consumers see Burberry products in their surrounding environment.

Chanel has combined offline marketing with digital marketing in a holiday popup event at The Standard in New York. An AR app, which could be accessed on the Chanel website or via Snapchat, brought the popup to life.

Role of Loyalty in Luxury Marketing

Luxury brands have loyal consumers. This is important because the more loyal your customers, the less marketing you have to do.

Don’t worry; I’m not recommending creating a loyalty program. That could devalue your luxury brand.

Rather, you need to turn consumers into fiercely loyal brand advocates. One way to do that is through the quality of your products. Another way is through the quality of your marketing.

You can also partner with influencers on social media channels. Influencer marketing is incredibly cost-effective and, if done well, can put your brand in front of the right kind of consumers.

Just make sure to find influencers who already operate in the luxury space and whose audience buys the products they promote. Aspirational jet-setting influencers are a dime a dozen.

You want to work with the few who have the audience to back it up. Otherwise, you won’t see results.

Develop a Targeted Luxury Marketing Keyword Strategy

Whether you’re running an SEO campaign or a PPC campaign (or both), I recommend developing a highly targeted luxury marketing keyword strategy.

Start by targeting high-conversion keywords. Sure, attracting consumers in the research phase of their journey is important. But for the sake of your ROI, you’re going to want to target consumers who are ready to purchase.

The CPCs of luxury marketing terms can be expensive, given the competition and the price of products.

Try to advertise as the “top watch maker” on Google, and you’ll pay $80 per click. Ouch.

Or $50 to advertise as one of the best luxury compact cars.

If you want to see a return on your investment, focusing on high-intent keywords is essential.

You’ll also need to make careful use of your negative keyword list.

Unless you’re using negative keywords, you aren’t really in control over what terms your brand will appear. The last thing you want is for ads for your luxury brand to start showing up in searches containing “discount,” “sale,” or “free.”

The kind of consumer that clicks on those ads won’t match your buyer persona. Here’s how to add negative keywords to your ads.

Luxury Marketing Content Campaigns

A huge part of luxury marketing revolves around storytelling. Whether it’s the history of your brand or the craftsmanship of your products, you probably have a lot to say.

This makes content marketing campaigns a must for luxury brands.

What should you write about exactly? Well, apart from telling your brand story, I recommend using long-form content to help consumers find the right product for them.

Buying a luxury product is often a big decision, and consumers research their choices thoroughly before committing. Buying guides put your brand front and center for consideration while providing value and establishing a relationship even before the purchase has been made.

This is a strategy my team at NP Digital adopted for a prominent jewelry retailer that wanted to increase online sales.

We wrote a comprehensive piece of content about finding the perfect engagement ring that helped traffic from search engines to grow from 20% of all traffic to 30% of all traffic in the first six months of our partnership.

Your content can continue to add value for customers after purchase. Detailed guides on using and caring for luxury products make for excellent blog posts that can increase brand loyalty while attracting even more consumers.

Use the keywords you’ve discovered above to guide your content creation process. You’ll want to make sure there’s some form of content for every key term, whether that’s a category page, a blog post, or something else entirely.

SEO For Luxury Brands

Search engines are massive traffic drivers for luxury brands and play an important role in both the research and purchase phase of the consumer journey.

Yet, they are consistently undertilized by luxury brands. It doesn’t help that luxury brands tend to have poorly designed (but very good looking) websites and a lack of content for Google to crawl.

As I said above, creating new content is critical for luxury brands who want to succeed online. Targeting new, high-intent keywords is also important.

But you shouldn’t forget about the more technical aspects of SEO, like optimizing category pages. Or off-page factors, like building links.

The more time and effort you devote to understanding and implementing SEO, the more revenue your store should generate. For instance, we increase the revenue of our luxury jewelry client by 21% through SEO.

While Google should be your focus, don’t forget about Bing. Users of Microsoft’s search engine tend to be more affluent, with 25% of users having an income in the top 25%. It makes sense to focus some efforts on Bing SEO.

Conclusion

The luxury market is changing.

Luxury marketing can no longer be confined to TV channels, billboards, and glossy magazines. Now is the time to take your luxury brand digital and invest in SEO, PPC, and whatever social media your consumers use.

So here’s my question to you:

What will be the first digital channel you use to promote your luxury brand?

Google

[along-the-devils-backbone]

It’s so fucking heartbreaking -- soul-crushing even -- to see a parent become your absolute worst nightmare. 

This is a person that is supposed to teach you right from wrong. They’re supposed to teach you what to expect from the future, and how to prepare for it. They’re the person you come to when you have questions, need help, or want to talk about something serious. You’re not supposed to be afraid of them, or heaven forbid, hate them. 

Yet I know so many, who do. 

I have had friends that were kicked out of their homes for loving someone of the same sex. Their parents thought that their faith was more important than their own child’s well-being. They didn’t care what happened to them after they left, and just forgot they existed. 

I’ve had friends that were physically abused. Used as punching bags, and ashtrays. They came to school with bruises, and split lips, and used humor to cover up their problems because it was the only way they knew how to deal with it. They constantly lived in fear of being put in the hospital or killed by their parents. 

I have had friends whose parents gaslighted them into believing that they were the problem. They would blame them for everything wrong, until that person believed it and felt like they were unworthy of anything good -- including (and especially) love from another person. When things go wrong, they blame themselves, panic, and break down because it’s just what they’re taught. They believe they deserve every bad thing that comes to them -- all because their parents were cruel enough to put the blame on their child. 

I have friends who were forced to starve because their parents couldn’t be fucked to feed them correctly. A handful of wasabi peas for dinner. Sneak an ice cream bar when they’re not looking. Watch as your parent goes to McDonalds to get themselves a meal and everyone else in the car gets a drink or nothing. They didn’t even question that that wasn’t something “normal” families did until they grew up and realized it wasn’t normal. 

I’ve had friends that were forced into diets. Their parents made them feel like the lowest of low because their hips were “too wide” or their legs were “too thick”. They were growing children! They were starved, given purely liquid diets, or made to eat laxatives. They had chains on their fridge doors, and always ended up at the nurse’s office for being exhausted and dizzy. Their parents didn’t care about them getting sick -- as long as they were pretty. As long as they were “thin”. 

I’ve had countless friends who were molested, and raped by their parents, or whose parents sat by and allowed such things to happen to them by family members. Whose parents argued AGAINST them, when they came to them for help, telling them they had been raped. Parents who told them they got what they deserved because of how they dressed, or acted, or because they were “bad children” and this was their payback. 

I have friends whose parents forced them to grow up. They became caregivers for their siblings, and personal therapists for all their parent’s problems. They were constantly inundated with worries about bills and finances, and how they were going to pay for things. They felt guilty to the point of nausea when their clothes wore down to nothing and the mere thought of asking for new clothes would come to mind. These kids made dr appointments themselves, they learned to cook as soon as they were tall enough to reach the stove/microwave. They did things because they HAD to, and now all they worry about is money, and whether or not they deserve getting something for themselves that isn’t a necessity.

I have had friends with parents so controlling that the mere idea of not having a schedule or rules now as an adult, makes them fall into a panic attack. I, personally, was terrified to stay out even fifteen minutes later with my friends, for the fear of what my dad would do when I came home. Your appearance, your food, your internet time, your everything was monitored and regulated. You had no privacy. Diaries, journals, blogs -- all were public because god forbid you keep secrets. We were our parent’s property, to be micromanaged until it was all we knew.

There are countless other kinds of parents, and some are mix-and-match with what i’ve already said... but just the idea that your parents can BE that way, breaks my heart and infuriates me. 

Some of us still live with those parents, because we can’t afford to move out, we’re their caretakers, we’re the sole income in the household, we’re disabled or chronically ill and can’t work to make our own money, we rely on them (as much as we hate it) for help. It sucks, it’s terrifying, and it fills me with an anger so big i can barely contain it and keep it in check. 

There have been times where I wanted to grab my dad by his scraggly mess of hair and beat his face against the steering wheel for the things he’s said about my friends, my beliefs, myself, and people different than himself. I wanted to hurt him. I wanted to make him stop, and it is an absolutely terrifying feeling to have an urge to be so violent towards someone you’ve been told your entire life you’re supposed to love and look up to -- and yet you have this overwhelming feeling of absolute hatred for them! 

I want to scream at these parents. To MAKE them see what festering piles of shit they are, and open their eyes so they could even TRY to reconcile, or begin to make up for what they did. 

Most of them who have been lucky enough to move out and escape, don’t even talk to their parents any more. They ignore their existence, block them on every piece of social media that they can -- even if they live in the same town, we avoid them like the plague -- because they don’t ever want to live with that kind of hurt ever again.

I have hundreds of friends who found each other due to the familiar abuse of our parents. We relate. We make each other stronger because of it. We help each other deal with the pain and the turmoil that follows it -- and I am eternally grateful for those friends -- but I would give anything to take away their abuse, To make their relationships with their parents what it should be, and to give them the lives that they deserve, instead of the ones they’re forced to live with because of it. 

This anger inside me is getting so big... I feel like it’s beginning to consume me, and i’m not entirely sure that I want to stop fanning it. I am wrathful, and vengeful, and I want to use that fire to fuel me so i can help people -- but i’m so afraid that that same fire is going to get too big. I’m terrified that it’s going to engulf me from the inside out, and i’m going to end up hurting someone because I just couldn’t handle seeing one more person being abused and just snapped. 

People don’t fucking deserve to be treated that way... ever -- and especially not by the people who were meant to protect and love them... 

[skarmorydraws]

@tyrantisterror ATOM Create-A-Kaiju Contest Entry #4: Gnashphalt

Aliases: The Tarbaby, The California Creeper, The Unstoppable Ooze

Date Discovered: September 12, 1958

Place of Origin: The La Brea Tar Pits

Notable Stomping Grounds: Western U.S. Seaboard

Height: 80 feet

Biology:

Few living things on Earth are quite as enigmatic as Gnashphalt. It is not precisely known how he was formed from the La Brea Tar Pits, for although there are Yameneon deposits in proximity to the area, no major nuclear testing has occurred near enough to Los Angeles to have affected them. It is possible that continuous geologic activity over the ages led to a buildup of Yamaneon radiation, which was in turn gradually released via disruptive mining activity when the pits were harvested for asphalt. More confusing still is how Gnashphalt even exists; while the bitumen forming most of his body IS comprised of the remains of microscopic algae and other long-expired living things, it is difficult to imagine Yamaneon radiation reanimating these materials without cells to work from. His relatively recent appearance in the geologic time scale suggests that the Yamaneon caused cells from animals that had been trapped in the tar during the Ice Age and preserved in its depths to mutate and begin regenerating haphazardly upon imbibing the radiation, taking in the tar around them to form one giant protoplasmic matrix which often struggles to form some sort of animal-like shape.

About the only identifiable features Gnashphalt can form are eyes, a mouth, and rudimentary limbs, their arrangement giving him an appearance coincidentally akin to frogs and toads. However, these features are often all he really needs - his entire matrix and the cells within work as one giant fusion of circulatory, respiratory, digestive, and nervous systems, giving him rudimentary control of his form and allowing him to move, breathe, sense his environment, and digest everything degradable he oozes over, at the same time assimilating harder things into his hulking form for personal use.

Gnashphalt is slow-moving, hauling himself along with his stubby "legs" and sometimes rolling from place to place. His name comes from his large mouth, which armed with fangs made of bones, broken PVC pipes, metal bars, splintered wooden planks, and other inedible bits of debris. This mouth can lunge forward with deceptive speed and power, inflicting a nasty, septic bite that can snap smaller mutations in two. His viscous, tarry body can also form crude, short-lived "tentacles" to attack and grab things, and mires anything that makes physical contact with it, holding fast the fists and fangs of enemy monsters and dragging in anything small enough to eat for perfunctory digestion. Aside from this, he can also secrete a foul-smelling and highly corrosive vapor, capable of melting through any material - including stone, concrete, or even metal - that hasn't been specially treated to resist oxidization; he uses this vapor to both disable and predigest bigger and/or livelier prey, allowing him to catch up to and swallow it easily.

Gnashphalt therefore adds a number of deadly powers to the standard kaiju power set:

Super strength An enhanced healing factor Immunity to radiation Sticky Touch Acid Fumes

Personality:

Gnashphalt has been compared by frantic media outlets to Pathogen, another monster dictated by hunger and wanton destructive urges. But while Pathogen exists only to consume, Gnashphalt is a more subdued type of hunger. He eats to live, rather than living to eat, but eating is basically the only thing he cares about. No other living thing matters to him except himself, and it is perhaps thankful that he eats merely to derive sustenance rather than for the sake of eating. While capable of devouring most organic matter, he prefers things that have a similar chemical consistency to tar or petroleum, and therefore gravitates towards large cities and oil refineries where these substances are plentiful. If no such substances are around, however, he'll try just about anything once, even scarfing down the contents of landfills and radioactive waste deposits at a whim.

For a time, it was assumed that Gnashphalt was much like Pathogen in that he had no emotions to speak of, just mindless hunger. His rare interactions with other kaiju have proven this notion wrong to some extent, however - he isn't mindless, just incredibly selfish and ignorant. Other monsters dislike his tendency to figuratively strong-arm his way around, carelessly oozing over other life forms and toppling or melting obstacles to reach what he wants; his answer to any problem is to either eat it or dissolve it, with no third options to speak of. That being said, he also seems to be quite aware of his durability, and engages with other monsters with a rather nonchalant air - followed by excited drooling if his opponents realize that they're not going to win. Indeed, it seems that he can sense the Yamaneon-induced mutation in other kaiju, which (in the absence of oil) appear to be just the thing to tickle his fancy, his tastebuds, and sometimes his insides - he has a habit of swallowing smaller mutations whole, enjoying the sensation of their agonized writhing inside him as they're slowly digested for hours at a time.

Despite his gluttonous nature and sheer durability, Gnashphalt has a few weaknesses which are relatively easy to exploit. Being made of an oil-based substance, he is deathly afraid of fire, and avoids heat sources such as volcanoes; a literal firewall can therefore keep him at bay although the risk of causing other fires is certainly an issue. More importantly, however, Gnashphalt is driven by his appetite rather than any form of common sense, and can be easily led away from a valuable area simply by transporting oil or tar; when dealing with other kaiju, chasing after potential food sources could also get him into fights he can't win, as some other monsters have learned to their advantage.

Gnashphalt's greatest weakness, however, is actually himself - indeed, he seems to be dimly aware that he actually requires fuel and waste to not only grow, but also to keep his own overcrowded digestive enzymes from dissolving him from within. In theory, if kept pacified in the short term, he could be managed only until all the fuel and waste in the world runs out, leaving him to "eat" himself to death later while man picks up the pieces and looks for more sustainable and environmentally friendly ways to power his global infrastructure. His time on Earth is thus limited, but when he passes, he will likely leave a cleaner and hopefully wiser world behind him.

And here’s my last entry to this awesome contest - I hope I’m not too late! I feel like it’s kind of a rush job, but I still like the concept enough to submit it anyway.

One of the archetypes that I feel has been missing from the ATOM universe is a trash monster like Hedorah or Raremon, and I decided to work with that along with addressing the lack of a slime monster archetype. (I see the Writhing Flesh, while a solid concept on its own, as not a true blob monster, more like a giant sentient tumor.) Fun fact: The “Date Discovered” references when The Blob was first released in theaters. ;)

I wanted a blob with a giant mouth pretty much right out of the gate, but after I added some crude limbs to its sides I noticed how much it looked like a frog with weird eye placement, and honestly I think it’s appropriate, seeing as some frogs are literally mouths on legs. I also wanted an “antagonist” monster this time around, though he isn’t a mindless force of pure evil so much as a stubborn, selfish, socially inept slob who just wants to pig out on trash and make other monsters’ lives miserable. I also tried to balance him out by having him not in fact spread filth like other trash monsters do but clean it up instead, even if he causes way too much collateral damage in the process; it also means he can’t stick around indefinitely because non-renewable energy and pollutants probably won’t, either. That doesn’t mean he’s not dangerous, though - just ask the small monsters he’s probably eaten. :P I wanted to color him poop-brown at one point but I decided that look wouldn’t be in good taste, and I hadn’t had a green-colored monster submitted yet, so I went with a dark sewage sludge green instead - also a subtle hint that tar used to be plant matter. ;)

Alright, with that I’m pretty much done with my entries, ‘cuz I probably won’t have the time to draw and send in another methinks. Good luck to all the entrants, and I’m sure that each and every one of them is awesome in their own right! :D

[riichardwilson]

How to Boost Engagement with Tactical Local Email Marketing

In spite of  — or perhaps because of — its age, email marketing agency remains one of the most powerful ways to accomplish outreach, retain customers, and boost engagement. Assuming you go about it the right way, that is!

When it comes to email marketing agency, the tactic’s impact never seems to halt, yet it’s one that most local businesses either don’t use or aren’t measuring. 

Don’t just take my word for it, though — the numbers on email marketing agency’s ubiquity and success don’t lie.

Per research agency Statista, the number of global active email accounts is expected to reach 5.6 billion by the end of 2020 – larger than the entire population of the United States. 

According to research conducted by marketing agency trade organization DMA, email marketing agency offers an average return on investment of approximately 4,100%. For every dollar you spend, you can expect to make $42. 

Per email marketing agency firm GetResponse, the average open rate for a welcome email is 82%. 

Research agency Statista found that 49% of users are interested in receiving brand emails on a weekly basis. 

A 2017 study by email marketing agency platform Campaign Monitor found that 66% of consumers prefer receiving branded communication via email, compared to only 23% for social media.  

As you can see, email has enormous potential for creating greater audience engagement, improving traffic, and strengthening your business’s relationships with local customers and communities. And that means it has some very real applications for local businesses. 

Let’s start with a more general overview before drilling down to the specifics.

How can email marketing agency empower local businesses?

The real strength of email lies in its capacity to boost engagement, thereby increasing traffic numbers to your client’s website. 

By effectively segmenting your audience and leveraging your understanding of what they’re looking for, you can direct qualified leads to whatever sections of the site will best resonate with them. This offers several benefits for local businesses — from an optimization perspective and beyond:

Reduced bounce rates. Users who subscribe to receive email notifications about your brand are, by definition, more interested in what you have to say. That means that properly personalized emails can generate traffic with a bounce rate considerably below average, coupled with increased time spent on page.

Higher engagement on new content.  Via targeted mailing lists, you can get content in front of audience members who are more likely to share with friends and colleagues. This provides a further boost to website traffic while also creating social engagement.

Increased lifespan for old content. Just as sharing an evergreen piece on social media can revitalize it, distributing it to the right mailing lists can breathe new life into old sections of your site.

Encourage user reviews. Online reviews are extremely important, especially for local businesses. If you maintain a digital storefront, consider embedding product review requests in their thank you emails. You can also send out personalized email blasts with the same request.

Learn more about your audience. Just as you can use mailing lists to tap your client’s audience for reviews, you can also leverage them to encourage survey responses about content preferences, helping you further guide and direct your marketing agency and optimization efforts.

Generate new content. Have an email that performed particularly well? Boost your site traffic by transforming it into on-site content. 

How to create a quality mailing list

Next, I’ll talk briefly about how you should segment and set up your mailing list.

Although your core goal here is to improve engagement with your website, email marketing agency provides several other opportunities for your brand. This all begins with building a properly-segmented mailing list. 

Signup forms

You should feature an email signup form on all relevant pages of your website (e.g. your blog, news, or resources pages), but keep it as simple as possible. The more information you ask for, the fewer signups you’re likely to receive. 

Here’s an example of BrightLocal’s email signup form that sits at the bottom of blog pages such as this one.

You might also consider popup messages urging visitors to sign up, but I would err on the side of caution here as popups can be more of a distracting deterrent than an effective conversion method.

Popup messages are rarely as interesting or engaging as you’d think. At best, they’re an irritating interruption to a user’s experience of your content, shoving your call to action in their face regardless of their intent. At worst, they can outright drive users away from your site.

If you do choose to go for a popup, ensure that it only appears on relevant pages, doesn’t interfere with mobile view, and occurs only once per site visit.

It’s also important to think about why someone would want to subscribe to your mailing list and include that in the CTA (call to action). These reasons could include special offers, coupons, or access to exclusive content.

Signup should further involve a double opt-in process, while unsubscribing should be as simple as clicking a single link. 

Segmentation

In addition to making the subscription process as simple as possible, you also want to ensure your audience has control over the type of content they see. The most common way to segment mailing lists is according to interest. 

Source: Mailchimp

As part of your overall SEO Company efforts, you’ve likely already separated your content into specific buckets — these can now form the base for different lists of subscribers. 

It may also be worthwhile to provide subscribers with the option to opt in to geo-targeted content, too, and send them emails about events and updates within their specific community. 

Social media

Integrating social channels into your email marketing agency is a natural next step. You can also use social media activity to inform your email marketing agency efforts and allow the two processes to feed into one another. Figure out what people want to know and what they’re saying, and develop content based on that. 

Beyond that, you can drive more social shares simply by making it easy to do so from within your emails, and invite local users via Facebook or Twitter.  

Consider including social badges with links to each profile at the end of your email communications, like so:

Keeping emails locally focussed

Now that we’ve established a big-picture explanation of the benefits that email marketing agency can offer, let’s discuss how to utilize it to achieve success in local search. 

Your goal here is to build a dedicated, engaged community of local customers to support your local SEO Company efforts. As such, you’re going to want to take a slightly different approach to personalization than you would with non-local email segments. 

You should still promote customer reviews. You should still share the content you’ve created for your site. Your emails should all still include calls-to-action that drive users to your website.

But you’ll also want to feature more locally-oriented content. Here are a few ideas for content to get you started with your local email marketing agency efforts: 

Updates about local or regional events

Whether you’re a local mom-and-pop shop or a national business, you can share updates about any local or regional events taking place at your stores via email. Events worth promoting could range from anything big or small — for example, a new product launch, community event, charitable efforts, or national holidays.

Struggling for ideas? Take a look at Twitter’s marketing calendar filled with hashtag-appropriate holidays, and use them as inspiration for your own in-store event. If you’re a bakery, for example, National Donut Day would provide the perfect opportunity to host an in-store event and let customers know about it via email. Even pet service providers can get involved — why not host an in-store event with relevant promos for National Pet Day?

If you aren’t already, now is the time to start hosting events and promoting them to your audience! Offline events have a whole host of benefits, but they’re also a great way to show customers that you care, and engage them online as a result.

Details about sales or store openings

Store openings and sales provide great opportunities to engage your online audience. After all, these are the kinds of things your subscribers are going to care about. If you usually host your sales online and are looking for more foot traffic, why not consider hosting an in-store only sale to benefit local customers?

When it comes to promoting store openings, don’t be afraid to get hyper-local. If you’re able to, create a mailing segment of customers who live within close range of your new store, and let them know that your business is coming to them!

Geo-targeted keywords based on region-specific queries

If you’re a larger business, you might find that customers have region-specific queries (you can use a tool like HotJar to track these on your own site, or simply Ahrefs to track search volume). Make the most of these by answering those users’ queries and emailing them out to the relevant segment.

For example, if you were McDonald’s and you discovered that users are often asking Google whether or not their nearest McDonald’s has free parking, you might email customers a short guide to parking near their local store.

Customer testimonials which make direct reference to your client’s region

You don’t always need to make a big song and dance about reviews in your email, but there’s certainly no harm in including the odd testimonial to serve as social proof. If you’ve got location-specific reviews, try turning them into email banners or visuals to promote the local store relevant to each email segment.

Using McDonald’s as an example again, if you’ve got a glowing 5-star review that says “The McDonald’s on 42nd Street, NY has world-class service!” you’ll want to use this in emails promoting your store to customers from the Manhattan area.

Including a location in a review can make testimonials that bit more compelling and, if you’re a national brand, it can help to reassure customers that each store will offer a service just as good as the others.

Promoted content from local partnered businesses

Collaborating with fellow local businesses is another surefire way to provide customers with more value. Are you a local health food store, for example? Why not partner up with a local gym to provide customers with keep-fit food and fitness plans? And perhaps those who engage with your content can benefit from discount codes when they visit your store in future?

It’s worth getting creative with the local content you provide if you’re hoping to leave a lasting impression with customers. In general, the kinds of content you’ll want to create and promote will vary based on your target audience, so knowing your customers should be the first step. Once you’ve got a good idea of what they’re looking for, play around with the ideas suggested above and see how they work for you.

How to measure success

There are several metrics that are particularly important to look at from an email marketing agency perspective. 

Some of these directly relate to SEO Company, while others are tied more to email interaction. According to Hubspot, these are:

Traffic/clickthrough rate

Conversion rate

Time on page

Bounce rate

Sharing/forwarding rate

Subscriber growth

It’s worth monitoring and measuring these metrics to ensure your email marketing agency tactics are working effectively.

Source: Mailchimp

Tools like Mailchimp provide at-a-glance looks into how your email has performed in terms of open- and click-through rates, but to find out how your campaign has impacted site traffic and beyond, you’ll need to integrate your email marketing agency efforts with Google Analytics.

Track success with Google Analytics

In order to maximize the return on your email marketing agency campaign, you’ll want to set up email tracking via Google Analytics.

Source: Mailchimp

It’s actually fairly simple once you drill down into it. 

First, if you haven’t already, you’ll need to set up a Google Analytics account. Navigate to the Google Analytics homepage and follow the process outlined there to get your account up and running and establish ownership of your website.

Once you’re all set up in Google Analytics, you can work on creating trackable links using Google’s URL builder. Using unique campaign parameters and UTM codes means you can track the success of each email directly within Google Analytics, either in the ‘Channels’ section or the ‘Campaigns’ section.

Now, it’s important to note that, by default, Google Analytics is only able to track traffic which originates from your emails. If you want to actually track metrics like open rates, you’ll need to get creative, as outlined in this blog post from Contact Monkey. 

Alternatively, you can use a tool such as Mailchimp, as mentioned above, which handles the lion’s share of tracking on its own. 

Conclusion

SEO Company and email marketing agency are more closely linked than a lot of people realize and, when used in conjunction, can help you achieve great success in the local sphere.

Be sure to 1) Create a frictionless signup process, 2) Segment your mailing list and keep it personal, 3) Promote local content, and 4) Track success. If you follow these four steps you’re almost certainly guaranteed to boost your online and in-store engagement.

The post How to Boost Engagement with Tactical Local Email Marketing appeared first on BrightLocal.

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/how-to-boost-engagement-with-tactical-local-email-marketing/ source https://scpie.tumblr.com/post/615949204866662400

[scpie]

How to Boost Engagement with Tactical Local Email Marketing

In spite of  — or perhaps because of — its age, email marketing agency remains one of the most powerful ways to accomplish outreach, retain customers, and boost engagement. Assuming you go about it the right way, that is!

When it comes to email marketing agency, the tactic’s impact never seems to halt, yet it’s one that most local businesses either don’t use or aren’t measuring. 

Don’t just take my word for it, though — the numbers on email marketing agency’s ubiquity and success don’t lie.

Per research agency Statista, the number of global active email accounts is expected to reach 5.6 billion by the end of 2020 – larger than the entire population of the United States. 

According to research conducted by marketing agency trade organization DMA, email marketing agency offers an average return on investment of approximately 4,100%. For every dollar you spend, you can expect to make $42. 

Per email marketing agency firm GetResponse, the average open rate for a welcome email is 82%. 

Research agency Statista found that 49% of users are interested in receiving brand emails on a weekly basis. 

A 2017 study by email marketing agency platform Campaign Monitor found that 66% of consumers prefer receiving branded communication via email, compared to only 23% for social media.  

As you can see, email has enormous potential for creating greater audience engagement, improving traffic, and strengthening your business’s relationships with local customers and communities. And that means it has some very real applications for local businesses. 

Let’s start with a more general overview before drilling down to the specifics.

How can email marketing agency empower local businesses?

The real strength of email lies in its capacity to boost engagement, thereby increasing traffic numbers to your client’s website. 

By effectively segmenting your audience and leveraging your understanding of what they’re looking for, you can direct qualified leads to whatever sections of the site will best resonate with them. This offers several benefits for local businesses — from an optimization perspective and beyond:

Reduced bounce rates. Users who subscribe to receive email notifications about your brand are, by definition, more interested in what you have to say. That means that properly personalized emails can generate traffic with a bounce rate considerably below average, coupled with increased time spent on page.

Higher engagement on new content.  Via targeted mailing lists, you can get content in front of audience members who are more likely to share with friends and colleagues. This provides a further boost to website traffic while also creating social engagement.

Increased lifespan for old content. Just as sharing an evergreen piece on social media can revitalize it, distributing it to the right mailing lists can breathe new life into old sections of your site.

Encourage user reviews. Online reviews are extremely important, especially for local businesses. If you maintain a digital storefront, consider embedding product review requests in their thank you emails. You can also send out personalized email blasts with the same request.

Learn more about your audience. Just as you can use mailing lists to tap your client’s audience for reviews, you can also leverage them to encourage survey responses about content preferences, helping you further guide and direct your marketing agency and optimization efforts.

Generate new content. Have an email that performed particularly well? Boost your site traffic by transforming it into on-site content. 

How to create a quality mailing list

Next, I’ll talk briefly about how you should segment and set up your mailing list.

Although your core goal here is to improve engagement with your website, email marketing agency provides several other opportunities for your brand. This all begins with building a properly-segmented mailing list. 

Signup forms

You should feature an email signup form on all relevant pages of your website (e.g. your blog, news, or resources pages), but keep it as simple as possible. The more information you ask for, the fewer signups you’re likely to receive. 

Here’s an example of BrightLocal’s email signup form that sits at the bottom of blog pages such as this one.

You might also consider popup messages urging visitors to sign up, but I would err on the side of caution here as popups can be more of a distracting deterrent than an effective conversion method.

Popup messages are rarely as interesting or engaging as you’d think. At best, they’re an irritating interruption to a user’s experience of your content, shoving your call to action in their face regardless of their intent. At worst, they can outright drive users away from your site.

If you do choose to go for a popup, ensure that it only appears on relevant pages, doesn’t interfere with mobile view, and occurs only once per site visit.

It’s also important to think about why someone would want to subscribe to your mailing list and include that in the CTA (call to action). These reasons could include special offers, coupons, or access to exclusive content.

Signup should further involve a double opt-in process, while unsubscribing should be as simple as clicking a single link. 

Segmentation

In addition to making the subscription process as simple as possible, you also want to ensure your audience has control over the type of content they see. The most common way to segment mailing lists is according to interest. 

Source: Mailchimp

As part of your overall SEO Company efforts, you’ve likely already separated your content into specific buckets — these can now form the base for different lists of subscribers. 

It may also be worthwhile to provide subscribers with the option to opt in to geo-targeted content, too, and send them emails about events and updates within their specific community. 

Social media

Integrating social channels into your email marketing agency is a natural next step. You can also use social media activity to inform your email marketing agency efforts and allow the two processes to feed into one another. Figure out what people want to know and what they’re saying, and develop content based on that. 

Beyond that, you can drive more social shares simply by making it easy to do so from within your emails, and invite local users via Facebook or Twitter.  

Consider including social badges with links to each profile at the end of your email communications, like so:

Keeping emails locally focussed

Now that we’ve established a big-picture explanation of the benefits that email marketing agency can offer, let’s discuss how to utilize it to achieve success in local search. 

Your goal here is to build a dedicated, engaged community of local customers to support your local SEO Company efforts. As such, you’re going to want to take a slightly different approach to personalization than you would with non-local email segments. 

You should still promote customer reviews. You should still share the content you’ve created for your site. Your emails should all still include calls-to-action that drive users to your website.

But you’ll also want to feature more locally-oriented content. Here are a few ideas for content to get you started with your local email marketing agency efforts: 

Updates about local or regional events

Whether you’re a local mom-and-pop shop or a national business, you can share updates about any local or regional events taking place at your stores via email. Events worth promoting could range from anything big or small — for example, a new product launch, community event, charitable efforts, or national holidays.

Struggling for ideas? Take a look at Twitter’s marketing calendar filled with hashtag-appropriate holidays, and use them as inspiration for your own in-store event. If you’re a bakery, for example, National Donut Day would provide the perfect opportunity to host an in-store event and let customers know about it via email. Even pet service providers can get involved — why not host an in-store event with relevant promos for National Pet Day?

If you aren’t already, now is the time to start hosting events and promoting them to your audience! Offline events have a whole host of benefits, but they’re also a great way to show customers that you care, and engage them online as a result.

Details about sales or store openings

Store openings and sales provide great opportunities to engage your online audience. After all, these are the kinds of things your subscribers are going to care about. If you usually host your sales online and are looking for more foot traffic, why not consider hosting an in-store only sale to benefit local customers?

When it comes to promoting store openings, don’t be afraid to get hyper-local. If you’re able to, create a mailing segment of customers who live within close range of your new store, and let them know that your business is coming to them!

Geo-targeted keywords based on region-specific queries

If you’re a larger business, you might find that customers have region-specific queries (you can use a tool like HotJar to track these on your own site, or simply Ahrefs to track search volume). Make the most of these by answering those users’ queries and emailing them out to the relevant segment.

For example, if you were McDonald’s and you discovered that users are often asking Google whether or not their nearest McDonald’s has free parking, you might email customers a short guide to parking near their local store.

Customer testimonials which make direct reference to your client’s region

You don’t always need to make a big song and dance about reviews in your email, but there’s certainly no harm in including the odd testimonial to serve as social proof. If you’ve got location-specific reviews, try turning them into email banners or visuals to promote the local store relevant to each email segment.

Using McDonald’s as an example again, if you’ve got a glowing 5-star review that says “The McDonald’s on 42nd Street, NY has world-class service!” you’ll want to use this in emails promoting your store to customers from the Manhattan area.

Including a location in a review can make testimonials that bit more compelling and, if you’re a national brand, it can help to reassure customers that each store will offer a service just as good as the others.

Promoted content from local partnered businesses

Collaborating with fellow local businesses is another surefire way to provide customers with more value. Are you a local health food store, for example? Why not partner up with a local gym to provide customers with keep-fit food and fitness plans? And perhaps those who engage with your content can benefit from discount codes when they visit your store in future?

It’s worth getting creative with the local content you provide if you’re hoping to leave a lasting impression with customers. In general, the kinds of content you’ll want to create and promote will vary based on your target audience, so knowing your customers should be the first step. Once you’ve got a good idea of what they’re looking for, play around with the ideas suggested above and see how they work for you.

How to measure success

There are several metrics that are particularly important to look at from an email marketing agency perspective. 

Some of these directly relate to SEO Company, while others are tied more to email interaction. According to Hubspot, these are:

Traffic/clickthrough rate

Conversion rate

Time on page

Bounce rate

Sharing/forwarding rate

Subscriber growth

It’s worth monitoring and measuring these metrics to ensure your email marketing agency tactics are working effectively.

Source: Mailchimp

Tools like Mailchimp provide at-a-glance looks into how your email has performed in terms of open- and click-through rates, but to find out how your campaign has impacted site traffic and beyond, you’ll need to integrate your email marketing agency efforts with Google Analytics.

Track success with Google Analytics

In order to maximize the return on your email marketing agency campaign, you’ll want to set up email tracking via Google Analytics.

Source: Mailchimp

It’s actually fairly simple once you drill down into it. 

First, if you haven’t already, you’ll need to set up a Google Analytics account. Navigate to the Google Analytics homepage and follow the process outlined there to get your account up and running and establish ownership of your website.

Once you’re all set up in Google Analytics, you can work on creating trackable links using Google’s URL builder. Using unique campaign parameters and UTM codes means you can track the success of each email directly within Google Analytics, either in the ‘Channels’ section or the ‘Campaigns’ section.

Now, it’s important to note that, by default, Google Analytics is only able to track traffic which originates from your emails. If you want to actually track metrics like open rates, you’ll need to get creative, as outlined in this blog post from Contact Monkey. 

Alternatively, you can use a tool such as Mailchimp, as mentioned above, which handles the lion’s share of tracking on its own. 

Conclusion

SEO Company and email marketing agency are more closely linked than a lot of people realize and, when used in conjunction, can help you achieve great success in the local sphere.

Be sure to 1) Create a frictionless signup process, 2) Segment your mailing list and keep it personal, 3) Promote local content, and 4) Track success. If you follow these four steps you’re almost certainly guaranteed to boost your online and in-store engagement.

The post How to Boost Engagement with Tactical Local Email Marketing appeared first on BrightLocal.

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/how-to-boost-engagement-with-tactical-local-email-marketing/

[laurelkrugerr]

How to Boost Engagement with Tactical Local Email Marketing

In spite of  — or perhaps because of — its age, email marketing agency remains one of the most powerful ways to accomplish outreach, retain customers, and boost engagement. Assuming you go about it the right way, that is!

When it comes to email marketing agency, the tactic’s impact never seems to halt, yet it’s one that most local businesses either don’t use or aren’t measuring. 

Don’t just take my word for it, though — the numbers on email marketing agency’s ubiquity and success don’t lie.

Per research agency Statista, the number of global active email accounts is expected to reach 5.6 billion by the end of 2020 – larger than the entire population of the United States. 

According to research conducted by marketing agency trade organization DMA, email marketing agency offers an average return on investment of approximately 4,100%. For every dollar you spend, you can expect to make $42. 

Per email marketing agency firm GetResponse, the average open rate for a welcome email is 82%. 

Research agency Statista found that 49% of users are interested in receiving brand emails on a weekly basis. 

A 2017 study by email marketing agency platform Campaign Monitor found that 66% of consumers prefer receiving branded communication via email, compared to only 23% for social media.  

As you can see, email has enormous potential for creating greater audience engagement, improving traffic, and strengthening your business’s relationships with local customers and communities. And that means it has some very real applications for local businesses. 

Let’s start with a more general overview before drilling down to the specifics.

How can email marketing agency empower local businesses?

The real strength of email lies in its capacity to boost engagement, thereby increasing traffic numbers to your client’s website. 

By effectively segmenting your audience and leveraging your understanding of what they’re looking for, you can direct qualified leads to whatever sections of the site will best resonate with them. This offers several benefits for local businesses — from an optimization perspective and beyond:

Reduced bounce rates. Users who subscribe to receive email notifications about your brand are, by definition, more interested in what you have to say. That means that properly personalized emails can generate traffic with a bounce rate considerably below average, coupled with increased time spent on page.

Higher engagement on new content.  Via targeted mailing lists, you can get content in front of audience members who are more likely to share with friends and colleagues. This provides a further boost to website traffic while also creating social engagement.

Increased lifespan for old content. Just as sharing an evergreen piece on social media can revitalize it, distributing it to the right mailing lists can breathe new life into old sections of your site.

Encourage user reviews. Online reviews are extremely important, especially for local businesses. If you maintain a digital storefront, consider embedding product review requests in their thank you emails. You can also send out personalized email blasts with the same request.

Learn more about your audience. Just as you can use mailing lists to tap your client’s audience for reviews, you can also leverage them to encourage survey responses about content preferences, helping you further guide and direct your marketing agency and optimization efforts.

Generate new content. Have an email that performed particularly well? Boost your site traffic by transforming it into on-site content. 

How to create a quality mailing list

Next, I’ll talk briefly about how you should segment and set up your mailing list.

Although your core goal here is to improve engagement with your website, email marketing agency provides several other opportunities for your brand. This all begins with building a properly-segmented mailing list. 

Signup forms

You should feature an email signup form on all relevant pages of your website (e.g. your blog, news, or resources pages), but keep it as simple as possible. The more information you ask for, the fewer signups you’re likely to receive. 

Here’s an example of BrightLocal’s email signup form that sits at the bottom of blog pages such as this one.

You might also consider popup messages urging visitors to sign up, but I would err on the side of caution here as popups can be more of a distracting deterrent than an effective conversion method.

Popup messages are rarely as interesting or engaging as you’d think. At best, they’re an irritating interruption to a user’s experience of your content, shoving your call to action in their face regardless of their intent. At worst, they can outright drive users away from your site.

If you do choose to go for a popup, ensure that it only appears on relevant pages, doesn’t interfere with mobile view, and occurs only once per site visit.

It’s also important to think about why someone would want to subscribe to your mailing list and include that in the CTA (call to action). These reasons could include special offers, coupons, or access to exclusive content.

Signup should further involve a double opt-in process, while unsubscribing should be as simple as clicking a single link. 

Segmentation

In addition to making the subscription process as simple as possible, you also want to ensure your audience has control over the type of content they see. The most common way to segment mailing lists is according to interest. 

Source: Mailchimp

As part of your overall SEO Company efforts, you’ve likely already separated your content into specific buckets — these can now form the base for different lists of subscribers. 

It may also be worthwhile to provide subscribers with the option to opt in to geo-targeted content, too, and send them emails about events and updates within their specific community. 

Social media

Integrating social channels into your email marketing agency is a natural next step. You can also use social media activity to inform your email marketing agency efforts and allow the two processes to feed into one another. Figure out what people want to know and what they’re saying, and develop content based on that. 

Beyond that, you can drive more social shares simply by making it easy to do so from within your emails, and invite local users via Facebook or Twitter.  

Consider including social badges with links to each profile at the end of your email communications, like so:

Keeping emails locally focussed

Now that we’ve established a big-picture explanation of the benefits that email marketing agency can offer, let’s discuss how to utilize it to achieve success in local search. 

Your goal here is to build a dedicated, engaged community of local customers to support your local SEO Company efforts. As such, you’re going to want to take a slightly different approach to personalization than you would with non-local email segments. 

You should still promote customer reviews. You should still share the content you’ve created for your site. Your emails should all still include calls-to-action that drive users to your website.

But you’ll also want to feature more locally-oriented content. Here are a few ideas for content to get you started with your local email marketing agency efforts: 

Updates about local or regional events

Whether you’re a local mom-and-pop shop or a national business, you can share updates about any local or regional events taking place at your stores via email. Events worth promoting could range from anything big or small — for example, a new product launch, community event, charitable efforts, or national holidays.

Struggling for ideas? Take a look at Twitter’s marketing calendar filled with hashtag-appropriate holidays, and use them as inspiration for your own in-store event. If you’re a bakery, for example, National Donut Day would provide the perfect opportunity to host an in-store event and let customers know about it via email. Even pet service providers can get involved — why not host an in-store event with relevant promos for National Pet Day?

If you aren’t already, now is the time to start hosting events and promoting them to your audience! Offline events have a whole host of benefits, but they’re also a great way to show customers that you care, and engage them online as a result.

Details about sales or store openings

Store openings and sales provide great opportunities to engage your online audience. After all, these are the kinds of things your subscribers are going to care about. If you usually host your sales online and are looking for more foot traffic, why not consider hosting an in-store only sale to benefit local customers?

When it comes to promoting store openings, don’t be afraid to get hyper-local. If you’re able to, create a mailing segment of customers who live within close range of your new store, and let them know that your business is coming to them!

Geo-targeted keywords based on region-specific queries

If you’re a larger business, you might find that customers have region-specific queries (you can use a tool like HotJar to track these on your own site, or simply Ahrefs to track search volume). Make the most of these by answering those users’ queries and emailing them out to the relevant segment.

For example, if you were McDonald’s and you discovered that users are often asking Google whether or not their nearest McDonald’s has free parking, you might email customers a short guide to parking near their local store.

Customer testimonials which make direct reference to your client’s region

You don’t always need to make a big song and dance about reviews in your email, but there’s certainly no harm in including the odd testimonial to serve as social proof. If you’ve got location-specific reviews, try turning them into email banners or visuals to promote the local store relevant to each email segment.

Using McDonald’s as an example again, if you’ve got a glowing 5-star review that says “The McDonald’s on 42nd Street, NY has world-class service!” you’ll want to use this in emails promoting your store to customers from the Manhattan area.

Including a location in a review can make testimonials that bit more compelling and, if you’re a national brand, it can help to reassure customers that each store will offer a service just as good as the others.

Promoted content from local partnered businesses

Collaborating with fellow local businesses is another surefire way to provide customers with more value. Are you a local health food store, for example? Why not partner up with a local gym to provide customers with keep-fit food and fitness plans? And perhaps those who engage with your content can benefit from discount codes when they visit your store in future?

It’s worth getting creative with the local content you provide if you’re hoping to leave a lasting impression with customers. In general, the kinds of content you’ll want to create and promote will vary based on your target audience, so knowing your customers should be the first step. Once you’ve got a good idea of what they’re looking for, play around with the ideas suggested above and see how they work for you.

How to measure success

There are several metrics that are particularly important to look at from an email marketing agency perspective. 

Some of these directly relate to SEO Company, while others are tied more to email interaction. According to Hubspot, these are:

Traffic/clickthrough rate

Conversion rate

Time on page

Bounce rate

Sharing/forwarding rate

Subscriber growth

It’s worth monitoring and measuring these metrics to ensure your email marketing agency tactics are working effectively.

Source: Mailchimp

Tools like Mailchimp provide at-a-glance looks into how your email has performed in terms of open- and click-through rates, but to find out how your campaign has impacted site traffic and beyond, you’ll need to integrate your email marketing agency efforts with Google Analytics.

Track success with Google Analytics

In order to maximize the return on your email marketing agency campaign, you’ll want to set up email tracking via Google Analytics.

Source: Mailchimp

It’s actually fairly simple once you drill down into it. 

First, if you haven’t already, you’ll need to set up a Google Analytics account. Navigate to the Google Analytics homepage and follow the process outlined there to get your account up and running and establish ownership of your website.

Once you’re all set up in Google Analytics, you can work on creating trackable links using Google’s URL builder. Using unique campaign parameters and UTM codes means you can track the success of each email directly within Google Analytics, either in the ‘Channels’ section or the ‘Campaigns’ section.

Now, it’s important to note that, by default, Google Analytics is only able to track traffic which originates from your emails. If you want to actually track metrics like open rates, you’ll need to get creative, as outlined in this blog post from Contact Monkey. 

Alternatively, you can use a tool such as Mailchimp, as mentioned above, which handles the lion’s share of tracking on its own. 

Conclusion

SEO Company and email marketing agency are more closely linked than a lot of people realize and, when used in conjunction, can help you achieve great success in the local sphere.

Be sure to 1) Create a frictionless signup process, 2) Segment your mailing list and keep it personal, 3) Promote local content, and 4) Track success. If you follow these four steps you’re almost certainly guaranteed to boost your online and in-store engagement.

The post How to Boost Engagement with Tactical Local Email Marketing appeared first on BrightLocal.

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/how-to-boost-engagement-with-tactical-local-email-marketing/ source https://scpie1.blogspot.com/2020/04/how-to-boost-engagement-with-tactical.html

[douglassmiith]

How to Boost Engagement with Tactical Local Email Marketing

In spite of  — or perhaps because of — its age, email marketing agency remains one of the most powerful ways to accomplish outreach, retain customers, and boost engagement. Assuming you go about it the right way, that is!

When it comes to email marketing agency, the tactic’s impact never seems to halt, yet it’s one that most local businesses either don’t use or aren’t measuring. 

Don’t just take my word for it, though — the numbers on email marketing agency’s ubiquity and success don’t lie.

Per research agency Statista, the number of global active email accounts is expected to reach 5.6 billion by the end of 2020 – larger than the entire population of the United States. 

According to research conducted by marketing agency trade organization DMA, email marketing agency offers an average return on investment of approximately 4,100%. For every dollar you spend, you can expect to make $42. 

Per email marketing agency firm GetResponse, the average open rate for a welcome email is 82%. 

Research agency Statista found that 49% of users are interested in receiving brand emails on a weekly basis. 

A 2017 study by email marketing agency platform Campaign Monitor found that 66% of consumers prefer receiving branded communication via email, compared to only 23% for social media.  

As you can see, email has enormous potential for creating greater audience engagement, improving traffic, and strengthening your business’s relationships with local customers and communities. And that means it has some very real applications for local businesses. 

Let’s start with a more general overview before drilling down to the specifics.

How can email marketing agency empower local businesses?

The real strength of email lies in its capacity to boost engagement, thereby increasing traffic numbers to your client’s website. 

By effectively segmenting your audience and leveraging your understanding of what they’re looking for, you can direct qualified leads to whatever sections of the site will best resonate with them. This offers several benefits for local businesses — from an optimization perspective and beyond:

Reduced bounce rates. Users who subscribe to receive email notifications about your brand are, by definition, more interested in what you have to say. That means that properly personalized emails can generate traffic with a bounce rate considerably below average, coupled with increased time spent on page.

Higher engagement on new content.  Via targeted mailing lists, you can get content in front of audience members who are more likely to share with friends and colleagues. This provides a further boost to website traffic while also creating social engagement.

Increased lifespan for old content. Just as sharing an evergreen piece on social media can revitalize it, distributing it to the right mailing lists can breathe new life into old sections of your site.

Encourage user reviews. Online reviews are extremely important, especially for local businesses. If you maintain a digital storefront, consider embedding product review requests in their thank you emails. You can also send out personalized email blasts with the same request.

Learn more about your audience. Just as you can use mailing lists to tap your client’s audience for reviews, you can also leverage them to encourage survey responses about content preferences, helping you further guide and direct your marketing agency and optimization efforts.

Generate new content. Have an email that performed particularly well? Boost your site traffic by transforming it into on-site content. 

How to create a quality mailing list

Next, I’ll talk briefly about how you should segment and set up your mailing list.

Although your core goal here is to improve engagement with your website, email marketing agency provides several other opportunities for your brand. This all begins with building a properly-segmented mailing list. 

Signup forms

You should feature an email signup form on all relevant pages of your website (e.g. your blog, news, or resources pages), but keep it as simple as possible. The more information you ask for, the fewer signups you’re likely to receive. 

Here’s an example of BrightLocal’s email signup form that sits at the bottom of blog pages such as this one.

You might also consider popup messages urging visitors to sign up, but I would err on the side of caution here as popups can be more of a distracting deterrent than an effective conversion method.

Popup messages are rarely as interesting or engaging as you’d think. At best, they’re an irritating interruption to a user’s experience of your content, shoving your call to action in their face regardless of their intent. At worst, they can outright drive users away from your site.

If you do choose to go for a popup, ensure that it only appears on relevant pages, doesn’t interfere with mobile view, and occurs only once per site visit.

It’s also important to think about why someone would want to subscribe to your mailing list and include that in the CTA (call to action). These reasons could include special offers, coupons, or access to exclusive content.

Signup should further involve a double opt-in process, while unsubscribing should be as simple as clicking a single link. 

Segmentation

In addition to making the subscription process as simple as possible, you also want to ensure your audience has control over the type of content they see. The most common way to segment mailing lists is according to interest. 

Source: Mailchimp

As part of your overall SEO Company efforts, you’ve likely already separated your content into specific buckets — these can now form the base for different lists of subscribers. 

It may also be worthwhile to provide subscribers with the option to opt in to geo-targeted content, too, and send them emails about events and updates within their specific community. 

Social media

Integrating social channels into your email marketing agency is a natural next step. You can also use social media activity to inform your email marketing agency efforts and allow the two processes to feed into one another. Figure out what people want to know and what they’re saying, and develop content based on that. 

Beyond that, you can drive more social shares simply by making it easy to do so from within your emails, and invite local users via Facebook or Twitter.  

Consider including social badges with links to each profile at the end of your email communications, like so:

Keeping emails locally focussed

Now that we’ve established a big-picture explanation of the benefits that email marketing agency can offer, let’s discuss how to utilize it to achieve success in local search. 

Your goal here is to build a dedicated, engaged community of local customers to support your local SEO Company efforts. As such, you’re going to want to take a slightly different approach to personalization than you would with non-local email segments. 

You should still promote customer reviews. You should still share the content you’ve created for your site. Your emails should all still include calls-to-action that drive users to your website.

But you’ll also want to feature more locally-oriented content. Here are a few ideas for content to get you started with your local email marketing agency efforts: 

Updates about local or regional events

Whether you’re a local mom-and-pop shop or a national business, you can share updates about any local or regional events taking place at your stores via email. Events worth promoting could range from anything big or small — for example, a new product launch, community event, charitable efforts, or national holidays.

Struggling for ideas? Take a look at Twitter’s marketing calendar filled with hashtag-appropriate holidays, and use them as inspiration for your own in-store event. If you’re a bakery, for example, National Donut Day would provide the perfect opportunity to host an in-store event and let customers know about it via email. Even pet service providers can get involved — why not host an in-store event with relevant promos for National Pet Day?

If you aren’t already, now is the time to start hosting events and promoting them to your audience! Offline events have a whole host of benefits, but they’re also a great way to show customers that you care, and engage them online as a result.

Details about sales or store openings

Store openings and sales provide great opportunities to engage your online audience. After all, these are the kinds of things your subscribers are going to care about. If you usually host your sales online and are looking for more foot traffic, why not consider hosting an in-store only sale to benefit local customers?

When it comes to promoting store openings, don’t be afraid to get hyper-local. If you’re able to, create a mailing segment of customers who live within close range of your new store, and let them know that your business is coming to them!

Geo-targeted keywords based on region-specific queries

If you’re a larger business, you might find that customers have region-specific queries (you can use a tool like HotJar to track these on your own site, or simply Ahrefs to track search volume). Make the most of these by answering those users’ queries and emailing them out to the relevant segment.

For example, if you were McDonald’s and you discovered that users are often asking Google whether or not their nearest McDonald’s has free parking, you might email customers a short guide to parking near their local store.

Customer testimonials which make direct reference to your client’s region

You don’t always need to make a big song and dance about reviews in your email, but there’s certainly no harm in including the odd testimonial to serve as social proof. If you’ve got location-specific reviews, try turning them into email banners or visuals to promote the local store relevant to each email segment.

Using McDonald’s as an example again, if you’ve got a glowing 5-star review that says “The McDonald’s on 42nd Street, NY has world-class service!” you’ll want to use this in emails promoting your store to customers from the Manhattan area.

Including a location in a review can make testimonials that bit more compelling and, if you’re a national brand, it can help to reassure customers that each store will offer a service just as good as the others.

Promoted content from local partnered businesses

Collaborating with fellow local businesses is another surefire way to provide customers with more value. Are you a local health food store, for example? Why not partner up with a local gym to provide customers with keep-fit food and fitness plans? And perhaps those who engage with your content can benefit from discount codes when they visit your store in future?

It’s worth getting creative with the local content you provide if you’re hoping to leave a lasting impression with customers. In general, the kinds of content you’ll want to create and promote will vary based on your target audience, so knowing your customers should be the first step. Once you’ve got a good idea of what they’re looking for, play around with the ideas suggested above and see how they work for you.

How to measure success

There are several metrics that are particularly important to look at from an email marketing agency perspective. 

Some of these directly relate to SEO Company, while others are tied more to email interaction. According to Hubspot, these are:

Traffic/clickthrough rate

Conversion rate

Time on page

Bounce rate

Sharing/forwarding rate

Subscriber growth

It’s worth monitoring and measuring these metrics to ensure your email marketing agency tactics are working effectively.

Source: Mailchimp

Tools like Mailchimp provide at-a-glance looks into how your email has performed in terms of open- and click-through rates, but to find out how your campaign has impacted site traffic and beyond, you’ll need to integrate your email marketing agency efforts with Google Analytics.

Track success with Google Analytics

In order to maximize the return on your email marketing agency campaign, you’ll want to set up email tracking via Google Analytics.

Source: Mailchimp

It’s actually fairly simple once you drill down into it. 

First, if you haven’t already, you’ll need to set up a Google Analytics account. Navigate to the Google Analytics homepage and follow the process outlined there to get your account up and running and establish ownership of your website.

Once you’re all set up in Google Analytics, you can work on creating trackable links using Google’s URL builder. Using unique campaign parameters and UTM codes means you can track the success of each email directly within Google Analytics, either in the ‘Channels’ section or the ‘Campaigns’ section.

Now, it’s important to note that, by default, Google Analytics is only able to track traffic which originates from your emails. If you want to actually track metrics like open rates, you’ll need to get creative, as outlined in this blog post from Contact Monkey. 

Alternatively, you can use a tool such as Mailchimp, as mentioned above, which handles the lion’s share of tracking on its own. 

Conclusion

SEO Company and email marketing agency are more closely linked than a lot of people realize and, when used in conjunction, can help you achieve great success in the local sphere.

Be sure to 1) Create a frictionless signup process, 2) Segment your mailing list and keep it personal, 3) Promote local content, and 4) Track success. If you follow these four steps you’re almost certainly guaranteed to boost your online and in-store engagement.

The post How to Boost Engagement with Tactical Local Email Marketing appeared first on BrightLocal.

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

Via http://www.scpie.org/how-to-boost-engagement-with-tactical-local-email-marketing/

source https://scpie.weebly.com/blog/how-to-boost-engagement-with-tactical-local-email-marketing

[vcfrialqa-blog]

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Social Media And Content Marketing Trends You Want to be Using

As competing for user attention with content and social media marketing gets more challenging, keeping up with the latest trends is essential for achieving ROI on your campaigns.

According to a recent survey of 344 social media managers, almost 80% of businesses use social media to post original content. Yet, just a little over half (52%) say that they achieve revenue growth through their social efforts.

What is this half doing right? They pay close attention not just to social’s role in their marketing funnel strategy, but they also track emerging trends to stay on the cusp of social relevance. By reading the signs of the times, they can adjust their strategy to keep their social media marketing effective and achieving consistent positive ROI.

To help your business stay on top, here are four social content marketing trends you can keep track of to make your social activities a lucrative component of your overall marketing mix.

Social Listening More Important for Guiding Strategy, Finding Lead Gen Opportunities

Social listening has been used in the past for two main things: establishing the current conversation surrounding a brand’s reputation and finding moments to surprise and delight consumers.

As more of our society’s most important conversations move to social media, social listening has evolved to become more akin to market research. Rather than just gathering brand sentiment data or springing marketing speak on random mentions, brands are actively prospecting for leads, gathering critical feedback data, and developing whole campaigns around becoming a part of social conversations.

A study from Clutch shows that 1 in 4 businesses use social listening to improve their products and service. 42% try to improve customer relationships, while 86% monitor ongoing customer requests, issues, questions and concerns.

Social listening has also spread from the typical confines of Facebook and Twitter to Instagram, YouTube and even Reddit.

When employing social listening for your own purposes, make sure the data you gather is shared across your entire operation. Make note of ongoing complaints regarding your brands, and also look for opportunities within subjects related to the pain points your product solves. Build your social media brand awareness and lead generation campaigns around this data for maximum effectiveness.

For example, Kleenex monitored social media for posts about someone declaring they were fighting an illness. A representative then contacted friends and family members of the person to coordinate a “Kleenex Kit” surprise package filled with get-well items.

The campaign not only helped create social buzz and generate positive conversations, but Kleenex was also able to gather data on how people cope with illness as well as rates of sickness reported through social.

Snapchat, Instagram Stories and Other Ephemeral Content Come to Center Stage

More brands are embracing the use of ephemeral content in their marketing strategy. “Ephemeral content” refers to social media posts that disappear after a limited time. For instance, Snapchat posts sent directly to followers disappear quickly after being viewed. Snapchat Story and Instagram Story posts disappear after 24 hours of being posted.

Many brands considered these platforms and temporary content types impractical or difficult to get a hang of. But, they have a strong motivation to rethink this impression, especially if they have a sizeable market within younger demographics.

Pew Research reveals that 78% of 18-24 year olds use Snapchat every single day. 71% of these users visit the platform multiple times daily! Similarly, Instagram has enjoyed an increase in daily users from 51% to 60% since introducing their “Stories” feature.

Why do younger demographics like this type of content so much? “Much of Snapchat's value comes from its support of mundane, everyday conversation among close friends,” concludes a recent study conducted at Cornell.

Ephemeral content users value the authenticity and intimacy that comes from having impermanent conversations. Instead of people broadcasting a highly polished, idealized version of themselves that will be enshrined forever on a server, they can feel like they are casually chatting with friends.

Businesses wanting to use the platforms should keep this feeling in mind when they share ephemeral content. Try to only share distinctly human moments or genuinely exciting temporary offers to your followers. For more standard promotions, you can post to your Story, which allows people to opt-in with viewing rather than being force-fed messages.

What kind of ephemeral content works best?

Promotional discounts or events that end after the post disappears

Special offers personalized towards a specific follower group

“Slice of life” moments during your operations, such as a hearty “good morning” or a picture of a butterfly landing on your windowsill

Geofilter marketing, which can be used to create gamified promotions

More Companies Looking to Partner with Micro-Influencers in Their Niche

Social media is becoming a launchpad for product discovery. Since popular accounts in communities have the most followers and therefore the most exposure potential, product recommendations from these accounts can quickly catapult awareness and demand.

Nearly 40% of Twitter users claim they have bought a product after a recommendation from someone they follow. That’s likely why 56% of brands say that influencer marketing can improve how people see them, and 48% plan on increasing their influencer marketing budgets in 2018.

However, not just any influencer collaboration will work. Look for accounts that hold attention and sway from their followers but that aren’t full-blown social celebrities. These “micro-influencers” typically have less than a million followers and much higher engagement rates from their audience.

Also, look to data from your audiences and who they tend to look to for content in their specific community. “It really depends on individual brands’ target audiences, and who those audiences trust,” explains one apparel brand CEO.

Make sure to use social listening to look out for influencer opportunities that can land in your lap. As an example, professional artist Matt Cummings began posting adorable drawings made with Posca paint pens, and other artists like PaperBeatsScissors took up the medium with fantastic results.

Now, Posca Markers are a trending topic, with users saying things like “I feel like my entire twitter feed this week has been an elaborate conspiracy to get me to buy those posca paint markers.” Yet, the brand Uni has so far failed to take notice of the traction they are getting nor recognize an opportunity with Cummings for collaboration.

Millennial Demographics Mature, Demanding More Nuanced Segmentation Strategies

“Those darn millennials” — as some of your relatives may be fond of calling them — are officially growing up. Millennial parents are now responsible for 80% of the U.S.’s annual 4 million births, for instance.

What this all means is that lumping your 25-34 year old demographic into a few standard categories is no longer going to cut it. Instead, you must recognize the differing interests, values, and subsequent purchase motivators that drive your audience behaviors.

For instance, instead of just creating a fun, youthful campaign with pop art or a “green” campaign using nature imagery, research what specific types of art or environmental causes your millennial audiences care about most.

Gathering social data on your audiences’ demographics and interest categories can help you create more accurate segments that mirror actual traits, not generational stereotypes. Then, you can build out personas based on these segments to target each piece of social content to a real category within your customer base.

“If you’re creating a campaign for a brand or product, it’s imperative to know who you’re speaking to, which users will be most engaged, and the users who will drive the success of this campaign,” urges Yuval Ben-Itzhak, CEO of Socialbakers. “In the past, this was done by guesswork or agency studies, but today it’s almost happening in real time.”

New Social Media Marketing Trends Mean Expanding Your Purview and Closely Monitoring Your Unique Datasets

If there is one persistent theme within all of these emerging social media marketing and content trends for 2018, it’s that brands are trying new things and not taking their strategy for granted.

By branching out and using your own data as a divining rod, you can guide your marketing strategy towards developing true relationships and inspiring behaviors among your audiences. That is the best way to achieve social media marketing success in the current times.

Contact Get Found Fast to help you start your social branding strategy.

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