We’re going to need a bigger door: If you’re a fintech or financial services company, you may find the big boys on Wall Street are going to come knocking as fintech/finserv acquisitions heat up. It turns out that if someone is going to eat Wall Street’s lunch, Wall Street at least wants to be the ones paying for it.
It’s not who you know, but who knows you: To attract investors and potential suitors, it helps if you have a few customers (and employees and relatives don’t count). The rest of this week’s “Best of” show that just because your marketing is working at attracting and converting customers in one area doesn’t mean that you can let off the gas elsewhere.
A new study finds a compounded increase in paid advertising click-throughs for companies already leading the organic search field. Two other pieces offer tips on maximizing the impact of email and mobile marketing strategies through effective analytics and apps, while a new Google study finds consumers are increasingly looking for results “near me” rather than the top service providers worldwide.
Until next week, keep the pedal to the metal and try not to eat Wall Street’s lunch while driving. Let’s get to it…
The Next Big Acquisition Craze: FinTech
Goldman Sachs recently predicted that an estimated $4.7 trillion in revenue and $470 billion in profits are shifting towards the surging FinTech industry, and traditional Wall Street corporations are taking the brunt of the fiscal pains. The response from Wall Street is to invest heavily in financial technology by either establishing new innovation departments in-office or by acquiring existing Silicon Valley FinTech startups. Read More
SEO: Study Shows Incremental Clicks With Branded SEO Plus PPC
The sum of the parts is actually greater than the whole, according to a new Bing Ads study on the potential impact of paid-search advertising. The numbers are clear: companies that invest in paid-search advertising while already retaining the coveted No.1 spot in organic search results will find 91% of people clicking through to their site, compared with just 60% for those who simply lead the organic search sweepstakes. Read More
Google Says “Near Me” Searches Have Doubled This Year
The local marketplace is traditionally the best venue to promote your goods and services. While the internet has expanded access to the world marketplace in just a couple of decades, Google has confirmed — via its omnipresent search engine — what everyone has suspected all along: local is where the money is. Read More
Email Marketing Critical To Success, But Users Are Selling Themselves Short (Study)
A hefty 10,000-word study of 1,300 email marketers and 48,000 companies finds that email marketing has the highest return of any marketing investment. Email service providers MailChimp and Aweber are among the leaders. Despite the widespread availability of such services, however, not all email marketers are happy with the current services available. Perhaps more surprisingly, only a minority of companies know how to properly assess email analytics in depth. Read More
No Cookies, No Problem: 4 Ways to Elevate Your Mobile Strategy
Smartphones, tablets and smartwatches are quickly taking over online consumer culture. A recent report predicts that mobile advertising investments will eclipse traditional desktop advertising by 2016. Moreover, the lion’s share of those new mobile dollars are going into apps rather than the web at large. Read More
