The internet is perceived as a key resource in terms of offering information on company and brand values, it has been suggested.
According to research by GfK Roper Public Affairs for MS&L Worldwide that may highlight a need for a greater focus on internet marketing, half of global consumers see the web as important for the purpose of finding out more about brand values.
More than 6,000 consumers from the US, the UK, France, Italy, Sweden and China were polled in the survey, which revealed that six in ten American respondents believed they could find information on corporate values via blogs and message boards, with the equivalent UK figure being 45 per cent.
Mark Hass, chief executive of MS&L Worldwide, said: "Talking to executives about values and mission statements is relatively common, but asking consumers about their perspectives on what values companies should have is relatively rare."
Despite these findings, a recent survey by Forrester Research indicated that few consumers believe company blogs are trustworthy, with most preferring to rely on emails from people they know.... read full details »
Most redesign projects involving e-commerce sites are carried out for search engine optimisation reasons, new research has indicated.
Half of e-retailer redesigned their sites in the last 12 months, with most doing so for optimisation reasons, according to the survey by Internet Retailer.
A number of retailers said they wanted to better organise their home, product and category pages, with others pointing to a need for improved navigation.
About 81.7 per cent of respondents said they were anticipating higher numbers of website visitors as a result of tweaking their sites, while two-thirds said they were expecting increased sales.
However, the survey also found that less than half of e-retailers conduct regular A/B tests, while 3.3 per cent carry out multivariate testing.
Three-quarters of UK companies have a website, with one-quarter offering online ordering or booking facilities and 43 per cent providing product or price lists, according to a recent study by Eurostat.... read full details »
Search engine marketing is viewed as one of the most effective online advertising practices by the pharmaceutical sector, new research has revealed.
MarketBridge and Pharmaceutical Executive magazine sought the views of 220 executives within the pharmaceutical sector and found that search was seen as one of the best online strategies, with Web 2.0 tactics generally viewed as more risky.
The report also showed that 32 per cent of pharmaceutical firms spend between ten and 20 per cent of their marketing budgets on the web, with MarketBridge and Pharmaceutical Executive predicting further growth for this segment in the next two years.
"Digital marketing spend is expected to rise and digital has at least 'some influence' in hiring, as organisations move more towards digital marketing adoption," the report suggested.
Earlier this year, a comScore study revealed that AstraZeneca's Nexium website was the most visited pharmaceutical brand site in the US during the second quarter of 2008.... read full details »
Marketers should consider how they can enhance their website's search engine rankings by concentrating on reasonably well-optimised pages that could perform better.
This is according to Rand Fishkin of the SEOmoz blog, who suggested looking at issues such as image alt tags, the positioning of keywords within title tags and using long tail keyword modifiers to boost the SEO value of top-ranking pages further.
He also advised focusing on improving the rankings of content that appears on the second page of search engine results and creating a sitemaps.xml file that is verified with all three of the major search engines rather than just Google.
"We've seen a lot of sites ignoring Yahoo! and MSN - a big mistake! You can seriously boost your search traffic referrals from these engines by not only submitting, but verifying/registering your sitemaps with them," Mr Fishkin commented.
About 71 per cent of websites currently have a sitemap, according to the Nielsen Norman Group.... read full details »
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