News and Blog

We all know the importance of digital marketing. Since people now access most information online and through applications, this is the most influential way to reach new consumers. Despite it's importance, some of us have trouble understanding is how social media impacts the bottom line. Getting your brand out there to gain awareness and mind share is great, but you're missing out on a greater opportunity to boost sales if you don't have an easily actionable path to purchase.

1. Let people know you exist, organically. 
First, people need to discover you. Reach your target organically through strategic partnerships. Find influential people and/or brands that are like-minded and aesthetically similar to your brand to collaborate with. The right partnership will increase your awareness and following and grow your consumer base . 

Giftbit, a company that operates a digital gift card marketplace for online retailers, is launching a new product today at TechCrunch Disrupt SF that will enable merchants to easily create their own custom currency — meaning gift cards, promo codes and refund credits — without having to build their own, internal systems. Available as an API, the new service drops into the checkout flow on the retailer’s website. Meanwhile, a web application also allows non-technical users — like the company’s biz dev team, for example — to create promo codes on the fly, as needed.

For several years, Giftbit has run a profit-generating gift card marketplace, which is how it was able to identify this gap in the market. Traditional gift card networks, like Blackhawk and Incomm, haven’t addressed the e-commerce space, as they’ve historically focused on brick-and-mortar businesses, instead.

1. Social Links May or May Not Boost Your Search Rank
Okay, social signals pertaining to a profile’s authority are out, but does Google consider links published on social accounts to be credible backlinks? When a blog post goes viral on Twitter, do those new links boost the post’s search ranking?

Many marketers believe that links to your website via social media accounts do have a major impact on your rankings.

2. Social Media Profiles Rank in Search Engines
While social shares may or may not affect a webpage’s position in search listings, your social profiles definitely influence the content of your search results. In fact, social media profiles are often amongst the top results in search listings for brand names.

It’s been declared “The Year of Mobile” for so many years that we’ve forgotten what it means, but it’s time to call it. The industry has revolutionized and the dust has cleared. Mobile commerce sales have tripled since 2012. That’s 30 percent of all e commerce sales, and it’s expected to rise to 43 percent of all e commerce sales by 2019 — which means a brave new world for retailers.
Companies need to figure out how best to meet the needs of customers who want the ease of buying goods and services on their phones — and that means deciding whether to throw your spend behind optimizing your mobile website or investing budget in creating a branded mobile app.