comScore, in an overnight report, said that for the holiday season-to-date, $10.41 billion has been spent online, marking a 4-percent decline versus the corresponding days last year, while Black Friday saw $534 million in online spending, up 1 percent. For the combination of Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday, online sales were up 2 percent relative to last year.
The Monday after Thanksgiving, popularly known as “Cyber Monday,” represents the first significant spike in online spending activity for the holiday season. The phenomenon results from Cyber Monday being the first working day following the Thanksgiving holiday and the fact that purchases from work still account for approximately half of all e-commerce spending.
Cyber Monday has historically proved to be an accurate bellwether for the overall performance of the online holiday shopping season, says the comScore report. While the year-over-year growth rates for individual online spending days vary quite significantly throughout the season, during the past few years Cyber Monday has been within a few percentage points of the final holiday season growth rate.
To read the full report, courtesty of The Center for Media Research and comScore, CLICK HERE.
Categories: Sales
Tagged: ceo info, black friday, cyber monday
There are two primary ways to get leads - push marketing and pull marketing.
A push strategy consists of pushing your message to the market through advertising and direct response campaigns. A pull strategy involves pulling prospects to you through PR, free content, word of mouth, and referral programs.
Both methods can drive excellent response rates, especially when used in tandem, but in a down economy, pull tactics are particularly effective. Why? Because right now, prospects are carefully managing their budgets and don’t want to be “sold” to. Instead, they want access to valuable information that will help them make the right choice about where to spend their money.
So the best way to leverage the current market to your advantage is to make your website an oasis of knowledge that will pull prospects to you. It will pay off!
Courtesy of InfusionSoft. Automated Follow-up Marketing.
Categories: Marketing
Tagged: ceo info, marketing tip
Over the past several weeks and months, industry gurus have offered an abundance of advice about how to refocus and weather the current economic tsunami and keep management or clients from cutting back on PR programming.
If you think I’m going to suggest that PR and marketing are not where you should seek to belt tighten, you’re right. But what I really want to focus on is trust and “keeping the faith” with stakeholders and employees during these troubled times.
The challenges of building trust have never been greater. The Wall Street meltdown, bail out, and lowest all-time approval rating for our government have lead to a prevailing sense of betrayal felt by voters, consumers, customers, workers and investors. We are living in a unique time where an unfortunate confluence of economic, social and political issues has eroded people’s trust in companies and institutions.
Public relations is the communications discipline that is critical in this environment, because the most credible source of information about a company or brand today is coming from people talking to people – peer-to-peer dialogue among stakeholders sharing personal experiences. According to Dan Gillmor, director of the Center for New Media, smart companies recognize that “PR is the new advertising and conversation is the new PR.”
To read this full article, CLICK HERE. Courtesy of PR NEWS ONLINE.
Categories: Public Relations
Tagged: ceo info, pr, Public Relations
