Getting face-to-face with your audience

By Lee Clark, President, Nye & Associates

On this day in 1948 the original Land Rover debuted at an automotive trade show in Amsterdam. The Land Rover has changed considerably over the years. Trade shows, however, essentially remain the same.

While other forms of media and technology offer great avenues to help reach, educate and influence buyers, there is no greater value than that of a face-to-face conversation between manufacturer (or manufacturer rep) and buyer.

According to The Role of and Value of Face-to-Face Interaction, a 2012 CEIR (Center for Exhibition Industry Research ) study, 48 percent of trade show attendees said face-to-face interactions at exhibits during exhibitions, conventions and annual meetings are more valuable today than two years ago, and 43 percent anticipate this setting will be more valuable over the next two years.

While it’s clearly important to keep abreast of new marketing trends that could potentially impact your bottom line, let’s not forget about the original social network: face-to-face interaction. Nye & Associates supports our client's trade show efforts in a variety of innovative ways. To learn more, give us a shout.

On target, and tracking

 By Lee Clark, President, Nye & Associates

The U.S. military uses this term when targets are engaged, whether they are friend or foe. The same term could be used in marketing. Are you effectively targeting and tracking results from your online advertising campaigns using Google Analytics and UTM tags? What’s a UTM tag you ask?

UTM tags are helpful for identifying where traffic comes from, especially if the traffic comes via a banner ad or other source without referrer data. UTM tags should not be used for direct HTML links, as they pass referrer data automatically to Google Analytics. Instead, UTM tags should be used for PPC, ad campaigns, email campaigns and other links that don’t pass referrer data.

A UTM tag is a tracking marker appended to a URL, and is recognized by Google Analytics as a dimension, just like average time on site, for example. UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module. In 2005, Google purchased Urchin and rebranded it Google Analytics.

Here is an example URL with UTM tags:

http://www.google.com/?utm_source=sourceexample&utm_medium=mediumexample&utm_campaign=campaignexample

Common parameters include:


• Campaign Source: utm_source; usually the site, such as Facebook or blog

• Campaign Medium: (utm_medium; how the link was published, such as a banner ad or tweet

• Campaign Term: (utm_term; to identify the paid keywords for search campaigns

• Campaign Content: (utm_content; use to differentiate ads

• Campaign Name: (utm_name; for ad campaign names, such as ‘FacebookMay2012′ or ‘sedanbannerad’

UTM tags can be used in almost any type of marketing campaign, from PPC advertising to social sharing. However, if a user copy and pastes a link with UTM tags and uses it in a different medium (e.g. Copying a hyperlink from an email newsletter and sharing it via Twitter), the link’s original UTM tags may be maintained.  Additionally, UTM tags don’t have to be used in Google Adwords campaigns – just enable auto-tagging of links.

For all your marketing needs, including Internet and mobile marketing, we invite you get in touch with us (and yes, we just used a UTM tag for tracking).

Infographics & Namibia

 By Jennifer S. Worrell, Account Executive, Nye & Associates

I recently traveled to Namibia in Africa for a multi-day run through the desert.

We wanted to share a few stats from the trip here via infographic. Infographics are a great way to communicate a lot of information visually and quickly.

Let us know if our team can make one for you.