Five great reasons to use Google Display Ads.

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As the design team at Shark was finishing some new display ads, we thought we'd take a moment to answer a common question that, as a Vermont digital marketing agency, we hear a lot: Why should I use Google display ads for my business?

Reach – The Google Display Network is made up of over two million websites, videos, and apps where your ads can appear, reaching 90% of Internet users in the world. This includes hundreds of large sites, like YouTube or the New York Times, as well as thousands of smaller sites, many of which are frequented by your target audience.
Targeting – Ads are displayed if a user searches a certain keyword, visits a website related to your industry, or meets a criteria of demographics, interests, and location. Shark works hand in hand with clients to tailor digital display ad campaigns around their specific customer personas.
Positioning – The easiest way to get into a consumer's mind is to be first. Display ads are visual, engaging messages that are geared toward gaining impressions and building brand awareness. Whether you are launching a new startup or looking to keep an old brand relevant, the Google display network gives you an entry into the consumer's mind and more chance to create a branded impression than say, plain old text ads.
Remarketing – What is remarketing? Remarketing takes place when a user sees your ad after visiting your website. Remarketing conversion rates actually increase over time, so the more a user sees your ads after considering your brand, the more likely they are to complete a sale.
Competition – Let's be honest: everyone else is already doing it. The Google Display Network is today's digital marketplace, so if the consumer doesn't know you exist, then you've already lost.

If you're looking for a certified Google Partner agency to design and manage display advertising for your business, then contact Shark today.

Beautiful new attorney marketing infographic from Shark team - Emily Ryder and Maddie Stern.

Worker's Comp marketing for law firms is not easy. But Madeline and Emily worked through the copy and design ...and the client, Brady/Callahan to create a new, informative infographic that's perfect for social media marketing and some digital PR.

Digital Marketing Ideas: A Quick Hit List for the New Year from Shark

Well it is official, 2015 is here. and as we finished up year-end digital marketing reports we included a short executive brief for our clients. Nothing long winded here: Our Digital To-Dos are short, sweet and give busy clients something to snack on.

2015 DIGITAL TO DOS:

DISPLAY — Display ads are turning out to be the bread & butter and a core metric for SEM campaigns. Display ads enable your business to reach people beyond search pages and, even if they are not clicked, 27% of the time their impression still triggers a follow-up search around that brand.

SOCIAL — Gone are the days when your company could get by without social media. With Google now factoring social content in its organic results, managing your posts, comments, articles, and feeds demands far more attention to the quality of your SEO efforts.

MOBILE — With smart phone displays increasing in size and more people than ever using their mobile phones as their main gateway to search the web, optimizing your website means having a well-designed mobile interface via a mobile app or responsive web design. And don’t forget that your digital ads need mobile targeting as well.

CONTENT — Content marketing is predicted to grow exponentially in 2015. But watch out, because simply pumping out repurposed or low value content can actually be harmful to your brand. Digital press releases are one way to push articles and news quickly across news engines and social media; and when they point back to your website, they work wonders for SEO.

SEO — Updates to the Google algorithm have leveled the playing field and allow high-quality websites to shine. No longer can companies purchase shady back-links or stuff content with keywords in order to increase ranking. In 2015, your business should incorporate fresh content, use of long-tail keywords, quality back-links, and descriptive tagging in order to increase SEO.

Shark Releases New Social Media Marketing Infographic

Social media marketing simplified with Attract, Engage, Convert, Monitor model.

Burlington, VT—Award-winning creative and digital marketing agency, Shark Communications, has published a new, simplified, strategic chart for managing social media.The model is presented in the form of a colorful infographic,created by Shark in response to many of the agency’s executive-level clients looking for a more simplified perspective on social media marketing. By organizing social media initiatives into four key marketing categories: Attract, Engage, Convert, and Monitor. The infographic serves as a simplified visual strategy for managing social media marketing.

In the social media infographic, the Attract phase is defined as the widest part of the social media sales funnel and at this point, the primary goal is to distribute content that’s engaging and connected to your brand. The Engage phase involves messages directed towards people who are actively hunting for a solution. It’s the time to sculpt marketing around your products and services, referring them to dedicated web or landing pages. Convert means turning followers into customers with highly targeted and optimized content and landing pages built around a specific action. And, at the foundation of all social media marketing, there’s the need to Monitor, evaluate, and make adjustments to your next social media initiatives.
As Shark Creative Director, Peter Jacobs, notes, “Digital marketing can be earned, owned, or paid media. With paid media, the goals, overall strategy, and the ROI are often clear and understandable to the client. But with earned — or social — media (and especially client-managed social media marketing), the whole process seems less objective and a bit more ‘shotgun-like’ in approach. We then designed the infographic around some simple, strategic marketing phases so that it’s broad and easily understood.”

Shark Communications is a Burlington, Vermont-based, creative, web, and digital marketing agency founded by award-winning Creative Director, Peter Jacobs. Shark serves clients in a wide variety of industries with a strategically-planned mix of branding, marketing, web, SEO, and digital marketing solutions. From award-winning design and marketing for the 1998 US Winter Olympic Trials, to numerous radio, web, television and film awards for clients large and small, Shark’s creative excellence has received widespread recognition for clients in multiple industries. More about Shark Communications can be viewed on the agency's website at http://sharkcomm.com.

A New Social Media Marketing Strategy, In an Infographic -

2015 is right around the corner and with our new Social Media Infographic, Social Media Marketing Simplified, you'll find a a simplified understanding and strategy to get the most out of your social media marketing. The Infographic organizes social media marketing into four, easy to understand marketing phases: Attract, Engage, Convert, Monitor. You can download a PDF version here.

Hospitality, Hotel and Resort Social Media Marketing.

Mar 26, 2009 14:18 ET

Hotel Marketing, Social Media and Online Advertising Plan for The Woodstock Inn.

BURLINGTON, VT--(Marketwire - March 26, 2009) - Bringing social media, landing pages and online marketing to The Woodstock Inn's hotel marketing by Burlington, Vermont agency Shark Communications represents a marketing model increasingly being embraced by the Travel and Hospitality industry. Shark's mix of market positioning, branding and online and social media marketing is a dramatic shift from traditional hotel marketing programs that appropriate expenditures to different media without an integrated strategy.

Located in Woodstock, Vermont, which has been called "...one of America's prettiest towns," The Woodstock Inn's marketing (managed by Shark), now relies more heavily on the use of online media -- especially landing pages for the hotel's customer acquisition. The landing pages Shark develops for the Inn & Resort generally consist of simplified, organized special offers and packages that are placed on a well-optimized, single web page that then links directly to a booking engine or the Inn's central web site. Landing pages can generally be deployed relatively quickly with visitor traffic cultivated through online advertising, Search Engine Marketing, and optimized PR. To deepen and extend customer relationships, an online loyalty program linked to a branded hotel social media web site was created by Shark, which the agency then markets through popular social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter .

Despite current economic conditions, the Inn continues to realize positive results from its marketing initiatives, has recently opened a new, upscale restaurant, The Red Rooster, and is looking forward to the expected 2010 opening of a new, on-site spa.

Breakfast Briefing: Social Media in the Workplace

If you don't read legal journals, you may not realize that social media like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and others raise interesting legal questions for employers. One of Shark's clients, Burlington, Vermont-based law firm Dinse/Knapp/McAndrew, is hosting a Breakfast Briefing legal implications of social media for employers. Learn more at The Dinse Blog!

Success with Social Media

Hats off to Erika White and Eva Sollberger who helped Shark produce a spiffy little video on GEM cars (electric) for our client Green Mountain Power - check it here. We then posted it on various social media and video sharing sites and Chrysler tracked us down and wants to feature it on their web site. It helped the client understand the value of social media, especially as search engines turn their periscopes to the content on popular networks.

Should I send customers to Facebook or my own branded community?

As the social media manager at Shark, I'm starting to realize that people don’t just use social networks - they use us - or at least they want to. When I fool around on Facebook or Twitter, I am adding value to their network. Facebook serves up ads and Twitter is still searching for a way to provide some kind of revenue model. Funny thing is, the ads aren’t selling on the major platforms. It seems that the experience is different from search where the ad click-thru is much much more productive. But the whole thing has gotten me more concerned with the idea of just putting up Facebook pages and leaving potential customers in their hands. So, migrating them into private, branded networks, where we control the links, the look and feel, the ads - everything looks more like the future to me. Alex. Check it out, it's in development.

Branded Social Communities 'R Us.

On May 1 we launch a new branded social network for The Woodstock Inn and "environs" (That's french for the area). It integrates a variety of new media with a focus on migrating people off of popular media into a community that has more potential to prevent customer loss to extraneous advertising - sometimes the case on Facebook, and more power to develop customer loyalty. It integrates lots of video (Alex's push) and live Twitter feeds.

Yachtwhere.com -New Private Mobile Tracking Page

We're getting closer to launching Yachtwhere's Private Mobile Tracking Pages for the world's yachts www.yachtwhere.com or click on the image and visit!.