Financial services marketing

SUMMARY: Taking the time to improve SEO on the website provides many benefits -- improved organic search traffic being the most obvious result -- but the lessons learned and website improvement can really boost paid search efforts as well.

Find out how a community bank embarked on a year-long program to fix a troublesome website, improve SEO, and even lift paid traffic from its PPC campaigns by 360%. Read the entire process, and learn how the marketing team is incorporating social media into the overall effort. read the complete case study

SUMMARY: Big brands are buying up ad space in virtual worlds like crazy because of their popularity and Web 2.0 buzz. But not everyone is content to leave it at that.

Wells Fargo started participating in one virtual world nearly two years ago but then decided to host their own as a separate download application. The tactic has helped them add tens of thousands of emails from the 16-to-24-year-old target demographic to their database. read the complete article

SUMMARY: Whether you are in financial services or retail, we think you'll find this story inspirational. Discover how the marketing team behind a small local bank created an entirely new idea of what retail could be. Ten years later Umpqua Bank is a large publicly held-chain. Yet, even after being named Top Retail Bank last year, the creative team continues to refine their vision of what next generation retail can be. We call it Retail 2.0. Check out our behind the scenes interview. read the complete interview

SUMMARY: Tests. Tests. Tests. From mobile to customer ratings, eyetracking to email, marketers are busy conducting all sorts of tests. We asked speakers from recent ad:tech conferences to tell us what they’ve done and what challenges they’ve seen.

Includes tests from 20th Century Fox, Panasonic, Golfsmith International, Yahoo!, JG Wentworth and more. Here are their secrets ... read the complete article

By Publisher Anne Holland

Last year Wachovia improved the results of their house ads almost twenty-fold. It's a big gain for their revenues because house ads (ads for your own offers that run on your own site) clicks are far more likely to convert than ads run anywhere else on the Web.

Ilieva Ageenko, Wachovia's VP & Director of Emerging Applications, told me in her gorgeous Cuban accent how they did it. "We were guessing in most... read the complete blog post