aimClear® Search Marketing Blog

Since we published our post (Did $10 Million In Destination Marketing Make Duluth Famous?) I’ve enjoyed stimulating exchanges with folks we respect. To those who reached out, thank you! We received a number of thought-provoking questions. These inquiries resonated with us, because the very idea was to inspire dialog. We thought our readers would find some of the questions and answers interesting.  Read the rest of this entry »

[Study notes, 10/26: There is now a followup post to this study: Visit Duluth, aimClear’s Study, Frank Questions & Answers Also, here is Google's documentation regarding use of "+" and "-" signs in Insights For Search queries. Use of these standard operators are documented in this study.]

We live in a marketing world where it’s possible to evaluate brands based on empirical demographic data culled from massive penetration of digital channels. To our international search and social marketing readers, we hope you find this article’s approach to profiling our region’s tourism brand-penetration a useful methodology to use with your clients. To Duluth’s people, aimClear offers the study as a contribution to this glorious city and the wonderful community that spawned our company.  The study is presented in four parts:

• What We Wanted To Know
• The Methodology
• The Results
• The Data

What We Wanted To Know
Over the last ten years, VisitDuluth, our city’s official promotional agency, has spent over ten million dollars of tourism tax on convention sales and destination marketing. We thought the investment was significant enough to bear study.

Tourism leaders publicize increased revenue Duluth’s destination marketing brings to our local economy year over year. Trending revenue is an important component to measuring the success of our tourism tax investments. That’s not what this study is about. There is no public discussion about how the Duluth brand is growing out there in the larger world and how it rates compared to other cities. This study is intended to fill that discussion gap. Here are some of the questions we set out to answer: Read the rest of this entry »

During the summer of 2010, an interesting international client encouraged us to take a look beyond our borders and check out where Facebook was popular in other parts of the world. With Facebook’s 500 million (at the time) users easily eclipsing the total U.S. population, it was clear that the phenomenon was not limited to our country, and we wondered how far it might continue to grow before eventually maxing out. The research project enlightened our team to the massively extending global reach of the still-young social network… and what a difference a year makes, as Facebook approaches 700 million users worldwide, wins a true social search patent, and prepares to launch what may be the definitive cloud-based music service.

While it seems Facebook continues to reign supreme across most of the wired globe, we also got to thinking that it’s not enough to gauge international social media activity by  how much of a population is on Facebook. If you really want to understand, connect with and market to demographics in another country, you have to get familiar with their homegrown channels. What other networks already have a stronghold in each country? Where is Facebook “uncool?”

This post kicks off a series of country-specific social networks overviews, complete with best practices, advertising opportunities, and example demographic targets. Up first under our microscope is the “OG” Google social network, Orkut. Read the rest of this entry »

With March Madness upon us, we decide to have a little fun and research which NCAA Division I basketball conferences sport the the highest percentage of underage students who are stupid enough to admit it on Facebook. Read on for the dirt! Read the rest of this entry »

Attendees sat stunned at #SMX East as Baris Gultekin, Group Product Manager, Google AdWords, Google, Inc. clarified that the ubiquitous AdWords Keyword Tool now only provides keywords Google deems “commercial.” It’s been obvious anyway by degraded results over the last few weeks. This represents a shift of seismic proportions to those who utilize the tool for demographic research purposes, in and outside of AdWords. Here’s an overview of what we just lost and how to get the data anyway. [Author's Note 1/1/2011: The KW tool has been updated. After reading this post, head over to our coverage of AdWords keyword tool fixes.] Read the rest of this entry »