Marketing Articles

The team at Horizon Marketing Group is continuously researching and analyzing the latest trends in digital marketing. Below are some helpful articles we’ve written on methods and tactics we implement for our clients everyday. If you would like to use the article, please credit Horizon Marketing Group and provide a link back to our site. Remember to check back frequently for updates.

The Secrets of Online Chat: Creating Two-Way Communication

In an age where brands are becoming more and more interactive, marketing is all about communication—that is, brands must create an engaging experience with consumers that affords them the ability to provide feedback and personally identify with the brand. Recently, marketers are discovering the power of LiveChats and other real-time internet communication platforms to create stronger relationships with current and potential customers to ultimately make them feel valued and aid in the decision-making process.
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Gain a Competitive Advantage with Search Engine Marketing

For top marketing professionals, search engine marketing is a critical component to creating and developing efficient branding strategies and generating offline and online conversions. And while SEM initiatives have been known to deliver positive results in all of these areas, companies can be doing more to maximize the profitability and success of these campaigns. Through an effective balancing of resources and the establishment of a repeatable process, companies will see a short-term improvement in conversions, and will also build an extendable search strategy that can be used to drive future growth.
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Marketing During the Holiday Season

This coming holiday season, retail stores are bracing for drastic reductions in consumer spending. Current economic conditions have led to a decrease in consumer confidence, causing individuals to be more cautious with their extra income as the holidays quickly approach. To compensate for the anticipated decline of sales, retailers must devise creative and unique ways of selling merchandise both online and offline to make it through the end of the year.
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Drive Revenue Through Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is a proven interactive pay-for-performance marketing strategy designed to drive revenue via strategic partnerships with Affiliates (ie. websites aligned with a specific audience). As a Brand, the primary objective is to leverage an Affiliate's audience to drive relevant traffic to their website for the purpose of sales and/or lead conversion. Affiliates are compensated when a consumer completes a conversion based upon a pre-determined action(s) set by the Brand/Seller.
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Increasing Conversions for Online Business

The process of encouraging consumers to complete an online checkout continues to grow more and more difficult for online retailers and/or service providers. It is one thing to drive traffic to a website and quite another entirely to lead consumers to make purchases with a few, simple clicks. It is imperative that online retailers design their sites in ways that will increase conversion rates.
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Generating Word of Mouth

Following the internet revolution in the 1990's, advertising and marketing professionals recognized the need to engage consumers' help with the branding of their products and services to consumers—a reality that has led to the dramatic increase in word of mouth marketing (WOMM) campaigns. With the increasing popularity of online social networks, declining consumer confidence and riskiness, and the general distrust of marketing messages, a brand’s image is ultimately becoming defined by consumers’ perceptions of that brand, as opposed to carefully crafted branding campaigns. These perceptions circulate fluently throughout certain populations bolstered by the power of WOMM, which centers upon an individual’s personal recommendations of brands, products, and/or services.
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How to Increase Your Open Rate

One of the greatest strengths of marketing with email is the ability to track and measure the success of each publication. Perhaps the most fundamental method for measuring the success of an email campaign is to monitor the open rate. The open rate is a reflection of the number of people who actually opened your email and looked at it. The higher the open rate, the more people who opened your email and in theory, have received your communication. If your message was compelling enough for your recipient to take the action you are requesting, you will have achieved your email marketing goal.
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Community Involvement Generates Stronger Consumer Loyalty

In conjunction with a growing concern for the environment, consumers are becoming increasingly conscious of poverty, unemployment, and other social issues that are emerging from the recent financial crisis. Charitable organizations are seeking donations from households, individuals, and businesses in order to sponsor their events and improve conditions in local communities.
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Striking A Chord With Consumers: Reaching Markets Through Music

Regardless of ethnicity, language, race, or gender, consumers all over the world listen to music as a form of entertainment, and marketers are beginning to catch onto the potential to reach their target markets by sponsoring concerts and local musical events.
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Social Media Complements Email for a Diverse e-Marketing Mix

With social networks and online communities growing in popularity by the day it's inevitable that new forms of messaging are created and adapted to along the way. For example, social media and instant messaging provide users with a direct, clear channel of uninterrupted conversation, as opposed to the one-way messages through e-mail.
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What Makes an Effective Online PR Campaign?

Over the past several years we have witnessed a substantial shift in the business landscape from traditional marketing to businesses placing more and more resources into online strategies. With more of the public using the internet everyday it is important for businesses to take Public Relations just as seriously online as they do offline. But how does one measure the effectiveness of an online PR campaign?
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Locating Profitable Consumers: The Benefits of Geo-targeting Pay-Per-Click

Sure, many companies today are involved in the execution of pay-per-click campaigns to drive traffic to their websites and generate online sales. Yet where most of them fail is in their ability to create low-cost campaigns by targeting select audiences in select geographical areas.
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Financial Professionals Making the Most of International Markets

In recent years, globalization has been at the forefront of business discussions, and not as a mere coffee table conversation piece. Rather, financial professionals and executives are expressing genuine concerns as to how their companies will be able to effectively compete on an international level with others that have a wider range of available resources.
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Mobile Marketing with Email

Mobile phones are just as common today as email addresses. With only a few exceptions it’s safe to say that a significant portion of your target market is cell phone owners. As technology evolves, even the most basic phones are starting to be equipped with email capabilities.
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Closing the Loop with Email Marketing

Creating a closed loop marketing environment means bringing multiple activities, that normally function on a separate basis, together to create a mechanism that works in unison to reach a successful end result. When it comes to defining "success" your sales team might have a much different answer than your marketing department.
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Privacy Protection Policies: The Key to Consumer Confidence

With the advent of new technological capabilities, consumers are taking extra precautions to ensure that their personally identifiable information does not slip into the wrong hands. Social networks such as Facebook and MySpace are being used more and more by marketers for target advertising purposes and consumer behavior data collection.
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Search Engine Strategies for Online Retailers

The effects of rising gas prices extend far beyond the oil and travel industries; restaurants, retail stores, and major coffee houses around the nation are experiencing declining sales as consumers are forced to cut spending and reduce driving.
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Using Marketing as a Solution to Declining Sales

With the word “recession” circulating among consumers and businesses across the nation, financial professionals and corporations are slashing jobs, cutting costs, and struggling to find creative ways to retain their existing customer base. In times of economic failure, leaders fail to realize the power of relationship and interactive marketing to leverage profitable current and potential consumers to stay ahead of competition and differentiate a brand.
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