Digital Marketing Expertise - Intermediate
I find when reviewing online marketing strategies in student assignments or real-world live assignments that the different aspects of strategy often aren’t well integrated.
Although online marketing strategies are usually well structured into the SOSTAC® structure featured in our online marketing strategy template, the sections aren’t often well related. It’s not clear how each strategy is supporting a goal or the analysis on which its based.
A simple method of showing the integration and providing a one pager summary of the digital strategy summary is to use a table set out as below with separate columns for SMARTER goals (see end of page), substantation (based on the situation analysis) and strategies. This can also include the KPIs for success.
Whether it’s upgrading hosting, improving your URL structure or simplifying information architecture upgrades to your web presence are inevitable for every company.
As more companies reach the limits of their current web investments, many are worried that significant change will impact their organic listings and SEO performance. I’ve even seen a company maintaining two websites, frightened that merging would reduce their organic rankings, even though it was near impossible for users to find anything.
Whether you are an in-house marketer or an agency specialist, in my experience if you are able to plan ahead and factor in SEO migration tactics to your project you will find a smooth transition. Often the very fact you engage with the search engines can provide improved rankings on the other side.
In this article I look at 5 tactics to help you in the event of a large scale migration or upgrade.
- Benchmark your current performance
- Befriend your search engine
- Cherish your most valuable links
- Limit the impact
- Manage the bounce.
Step 1 – Benchmark your current performance
Sounds obvious but do you know exactly how visible your site is currently? To effectively establish your current … » Read our full article
In the days of Heraclitus, mobile messages involved horses. But his wise words about the constancy of change apply so well to mobile email.
Mobile long meant a senior executive armed with a BlackBerry that turned HTML email into something suited to a modern art exhibition.
Email designers scratched their heads and hoped the problem would go away. Email marketers took solace in the fact that most audiences were BlackBerry-free. Then along came the iPhone and mobile email has never been the same.
Keeping your head in the sand is no longer an option: mobile email is one of the four trends driving email marketing change. This post explores the challenges and solutions for the forward-thinking marketer.
A tool to measure social media presence – for sector and competitor research
Social Media Metrics have to date mainly focused on the view of their effectiveness from inside the company. At Evonomie we’ve been looking for a while for an external qualitative method to measure companies’ online activities as part of a strategic review.
Internal or in-company quantitative methods are in abundance and focus on activity, surveys and return on investment (ROI). These are certainly valid metrics and there is a comprehensive list in Jim Sterne’s book Social Media Metrics. The real question when conducting research is how can you capture the metrics if you’re outside the company? You don’t have access to their analytics so need to make a judgement on what’s important and whether the information is available.
Benefits of benchmarking competitor use of social media
Reasons we want to measure the social media activity from an external perspective include:
- The review competitors’ activity, their strengths and weaknesses
- To understand where and how the market segment is using social media
- To identify opportunities
- To identify threats
- To review new markets companies may consider moving into
One of our aims at Smart Insights is to make marketers aware of the many software tools that can be used to take advantage of the unique communications benefits of digital media.
Ultimately, these software tools should help customers too. Website personalization or behavioural targeting tools are an interesting class of tools since they can benefit both companies and customers, yet there are privacy concerns about how the data is collected is used.
This category of website personalization and behavioural targeting tools is also interesting since everyone still quotes the Amazon personalized recommendation “collaborative filtering” technique – read paper describing the algorithm. Most are still wowed by the accuracy of the technique (apart from when buying gifts for others…), but it doesn’t seem to give rise to too many privacy complaints.
Magiq dynamic website personalization software
When I bumped into Malcolm Duckett at the last Econsultancy Masterclass presenting Magiq I was interested to know more. I know Malcolm from many meetings at the Emetrics Marketing Optimization summit where he was .
Here’s my interview with Malcolm which presents the benefits and issues of managing this type of software.
Benefits of dynamic
… » Read our full article
