Columnist Rebecca Lieb, writes in her article about some content marketing trends. The first trend is about content strategy and user experience. Second trend is all about machine generated content. The third trend is about contextual content. The fourth one is about paid search, native advertising, recommendation engines, asking users to share, paid promotion on social networks and last but not the least is the ad Spend vs. content investment. Read more at: http://marketingland.com/5-content-trends-watch-140102

Landing pages help any business in taking inbound marketing steps which in turn helps in increased conversions. It is better when paired with good campaigns via paid search and social advertising. Rose de Fremery (founder of lowercase d consulting) writes in her blog about some ways to create a convincing landing page. Read more at: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/insidecrm/thinking-of-setting-up-landing-pages-here-are-5-things-you-should-know-first-69632

Social media advertising helps businesses to find new clients. It is estimated that the revenue of social media advertising revenue would reach to $8.4 billion in 2015. Social media advertising targets relevant users before they even begin their search. Every business house uses online advertising, but, after the decline of banner ad, they are searching for alternatives. Nowadays, paid search is gaining importance. Advertisers look up to social networks because of advanced targeting option reliable conversion tracking, and prevalence of mobile devices. Advanced targeting include: Interest targeting, Behavioral or Connection targeting, Custom targeting, and Lookalike targeting. Read more at: http://marketingland.com/social-media-advertising-set-explode-next-3-years-121691

Thanks to enhanced campaigns, the role of paid search has been changing. Paid search helps to expand company's footprint on a search engine result pages and increases visibility as consumers often cast their eye towards the largest visual element when we go through a website. With new technology and devices like laptops, tablets and smartphones marketers must plan ads in a way that it reaches the consumers in the search context that the they prefer. Users set ads to appear according to three general events:  

• The time of day when the customer conducts a search       
• The device type on which the consumer is accessing the search     
• The location in which the ad is served 

The benefit is streamlining campaign so that ads that used to require separate campaigns, can now be handled in a single campaign. Marketers can increase campaign bids during the times of day when customers are more likely to search for a product. Enhanced campaigns has not only benefitted marketers but also the customer as their convenience is taken into account. Read more at: 

http://www.cmswire.com/cms/analytics/maximizing-your-enhanced-marketing-campaigns-029244.php 

The performance metrics for ads shown against brand and generic queries can differ majorly, many advertisers choose to analyze these two categories separately. Many advertisers with paid search campaigns advertise on queries mentioning their brand (e.g., “Motorola smartphone” for Motorola) and also on generic searches (e.g., “smartphone reviews”). A new feature is introduced, that automatically identifies brand-aware paid search clicks tracked in Google Analytics,to make analysis of brand and generic performance easier. It involves a combination of signals (including the click through-rate, text string, domain name and others) to identify query terms showing awareness of the brand. Back in 2012, George Michie from the Rimm-Kaufmann Group, a leading online marketing agency, called analyzing brand and generic paid search together “the cardinal sin of paid search”. To know more go to:http://analytics.blogspot.com/2014/06/segmenting-brand-and-generic-paid.html