In previous years, Dave Chaffey has spoken at the eCircle conferences, but this year was different since eCircle is now part of  Teradata .

In 2012 they acquired Ecircle and Aprimo of which Ecircle’s core business is email marketing solutions and Aprimo, Market Leader in cloud base integrated marketing solutions.

I attended to take a look at some of the latest approaches on ECRM/Marketing Automation/Email Marketing/Big Data and we will share some of the most useful Slideshares when they’re available.

In the keynote, the VP of Teradata Ecircle Volker Wiewer along with International President Herman Wimmer gave their view on Integrated marketing in 2013 and highlighted the ongoing challenge of:

‘Choosing the right channel, communicating with the client that there is not an off-the-shelf solution and providing the right solution to meet the goals of the company’.

They shared many strategies, case studies and insight from clients which showed approaches to overcoming this – we have some examples below.

Creating a marketing roadmap

During their presentation, they shared their marketing roadmap and outlined 4 rules to success:

• 1. Diversity rules
• 2. Deliver channel with creativity
• 3, Test, learn, and stop fast
• 4. Get the right partner (inside and out)

If you’d like more information on developing a ‘Marketing roadmap’ we have developed this for Expert members – our system is available in our Marketing Strategy Toolkit.

Homing on on ‘creativity, they showed Netflix as a great case study. Started in 1997 providing video rentals and through analysing customer behaviour and video engagement, they unwrapped demand for streamed content and shifted their core business. Then in 2013, released their own exclusive series ‘House of Cards’.

Another case study, was Aviva who used ‘ customer data’ in an app to reward motorists:

The app monitors driving patterns and speed which the consumer opts in to, and in  return they could be be rewarded with a 20% discount.

They also shared their views on evolving roles and strategies from 2013 and beyond:

• Marketing roles are changing as they are accountable for revenue; P&L responsibility and revenue generation. Also that Marketers are becoming Data Scientists.
• ‘Connected consumer’ is more demanding for clients now, and there are more data touchpoints to manage the brand and sell products. This creates opportunities if managed well and there are great tools to support this.
• Measuring and analysing data-  we can plan and budget our workflow through integrating 1. Digital asset management 2. Communication management and 3. Digital message execution.
• ‘Big data’ provides many opportunities  (new data sources, structures, insights and analytical capaibilties) and they reinforced the need to ‘optimise the business model as change impacts business and talked about ‘ sensoreconony’. Herman Winner also reinforced that ‘technology is not the solution to our problems, its more and around data and  embracing it and ‘ Big Data brings online analytics to the off-line analytics world!’.
• Success is around experimenting with channels and learning and acting

We will update this post with the Slideshares and do some posts on the most useful case studies as they become available.

Modern marketers have always had to take Google+ seriously, because of Google’s dominance in Search. Yet, there are other reasons too… with the proliferation of Android users on mobile (now 900 million Android activations, up on the 400 million last year); Chrome with its 750 million browser users and now the reported growth of Google+ to 343 million users – there are more and more reasons to keep a very close eye on what Google are doing. Not to mention Google Glass.

It’s always been tempting to just focus on Facebook and to a lesser extent Twitter for B2C social media marketing and advertising, and given that Facebook shrugged off rumours of Facebook fatigue with large user increases in 2012 (now over 640m users) it’s still tempting to do so. Google+ is the second largest social network and ahead of Twitter for a year now in terms of active users  and they are not letting up on developing their platform. A cursory glance at 5 key features launched this week at Google’s I/O 2013 will reveal why.

Remember that new features inspire more usage and more consumers, so brands and their marketing teams naturally follow suit…

• 1. Related hashtags – this is likely the most important for content marketers. Hashtags are no longer just for Instagram and Twitter. The new, and optional, related hashtags feature lets Google+ analyse posts and in turn recommend hashtags.

  A menu in the corner of each post display hashtags, clicking on them will reveal related items based on Google’s search and social sources. Similarly, trending hashtags will be displayed in the right hand corner of the newly updated Google+ Stream. Already a huge opportunity for brands?

• 2. Updated news stream – it’d be more accurate to say re-built, as this is a whole new experience. A new multi-column design allows users to scan multiple posts at once. Photos and videos can still span multiple columns, and new animations include a pop-out box when you want to share. You’d expect this feature to drive more scanning, more content consumption and more lightweight interactions such as sharing. That said, this news comes at the same time that Facebook has shifted its Timeline design to a single column!

“It’s not about design, it’s about depth,” Vic Gundotra – Google I/O 2013.

• 3. Hangouts App – a new standalone messaging app for iOS, Android and Google Chrome will encompass Google Talk, Google+ Messenger, and the original Google+ Hangout video chatting service. Designed to take on Apple’s FaceTime, maybe? The unveiling of Hangouts as a unified messenger service has been expected.

  Hangouts displays a list of conversations not contacts with those threads lasting as long as several months or a year, users will be able to delete their history as they please. Icons on the bottom of the screen indicate when friends are typing and how long they’ve been in the conversation.

• 4. Advanced photo editing – Google’s alert to how much we love creating and sharing imagery, naturally. Google can automatically choose your best photo, silo-ing images that are blurry or badly exposed. It also figures out which images would be most important to you based on the people in the photo. New editing features include skin softening, noise reduction and auto enhance. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The key point is that Google wants to draw users in with useful features.

• 5. Free cloud storage – just as Google did with Gmail, the new features come with 15Gb of free cloud storage as standard. Another key feature attractive to the public – and no doubt of significant use to Android users generating imagery on the smartphones.

Did you know that companies can now use marketing messages and promotions on their Facebook page cover? This gives opportunities for front cover pages to become more engaging using offers and call to actions to fit in with their social media goals.

Looking to promote an event, run a competition, poll or coupon promotion? You can now promote it through your timeline cover alongside apps like Shortstack or other social media campaign tools). Remember though, that you should check the Facebook Page guidelines.

So we decided to review some Facebook timeline covers to showcase the different ways you can enhance your company page. Please share your views and other examples with us.

• Next is an engaging page. They use their timeline to showcase their latest range of clothes, with competitions and very visual showcase of their catalogues.

They could make more use of their ‘Next’ icon which contains offers and competitions and could be more prominent on their timeline or as it’s own CTA. It looks like they are using it to drive online traffic rather than in-store.

• British Airways

Focusing on their customers – whether it’s been highlighted as concerns or important to the buyer, their timeline focuses on onflight food services with a lighthearted interacting survey to find out ‘ Your Flavour’.  I’m a Meringue Mauder – a subtly sweet superhero!.

On a serious note, they provide information on their technical expertise with their ‘aeroplane followers’ and are cleverly integrating it with Pinterest. Really thinking about their customers!.

• Matalan. A simple cover focusing on customer service, competitions, capturing emails for future mailings and showcasing their clothes. Keep it current as the competition has ended!

• Muse. Clear promotions here.

Creative timeline – to listen to their music for their new album:

Merchandise store is prominent along with latest news on the band.

• Screwfix, largest UK supplier of tradeware tools and hardware, use their Facebook cover to primarly promote their in-store events and Tradeshow charity.  The cover is a little confusing, since it mixes competitions with some key products, but they are trying to make more use of opportunities for more promotion.

• Kit Kat. Reinforce the Kit Kat brand for supporting Fairtrade chocolate and engage Fans and Likes with timebound competitions.

So time to think about:

• What your aims of your Facebook page are? 
• Why will new customers come to your page and how will you drive traffic to it?
• How is it is different to your other online channels?
• Why will your customers visit and engage on your site? What are you looking to achieve with your customers  - Advocacy, repeat purchase, long standing relationship?
• Is it part of an integrated campaign…

For B2B companies now realising the phenomenal lead generation opportunities offered by LinkedIn, a bigger question now looms;

 “How do I optimise my presence to make it efficient and effective”

LinkedIn success requires an investment of time and resources

Jan Vermeiren’s Four steps to getting more from LinkedIn reveals the intensity of activity required to harness the valuable opportunities on this business network.

Reading through his Ebook, you can see the detail and granularity required to achieve success. It becomes clear that, as you adopt these best practices, LinkedIn requires attention. You can’t just dip in and out.

Like all social media, you need to devote constant and focused attention if you are going to succeed in creating value.

Where are you in the LinkedIn adoption maturity cycle?

As businesses adopt LinkedIn as a lead generation tool, the investment of time and resource increases commensurately. Companies move from an ad hoc approach to one that is more managed as they scale up to answer questions, join discussions and pilot campaigns to test the waters.

As LinkedIn deployment becomes integral to the lead generation mix, organisations typically become more embedded in the network. The greater your results, the more deeply you are involved in discussions, groups, creating content and answering questions – delivering the value to your customers that will generate more referrals and  ultimately leads. As your presence matures and your programme formalises into an integrated, goal focused initiative, you also need to balance lead generation with resource and time. Fine tuning your activity to enhance performance ensures efficiency, maximising your ROI.

Structure your LinkedIn activity to manage performance

Instead of thinking about LinkedIn in terms of tactical elements, such as groups, profiles or content, examine the whole flow of your actions from content to qualified lead.

For example, how does content travel through groups, what are the triggers that develop connections and what motivates a connection to make contact?

By putting a structure on the way information, engagement and motivations to connect flow through to deliver a lead, you can create a path of activity you can measure, evaluate and optimise.

Thinking of your LinkedIn activity as a funnel helps you understand how to harness activities that motivate your connections and bring you leads; also identifying the most valuable actions for future growth and relationships.

Benchmarking through ‘the funnel’ creates tools to supercharge your presence

Improving performance requires effective benchmarking.

Measuring activity as you progress through the funnel isolates the content that works, the relationships that generate leads and even the influencers who will advocate your brand.

And, like all online marketing, this framework allows you to test and optimise. For instance;

•  Does content delivered as graphics inspire more shares than a white paper?
• Does one specific group increase data capture on your landing pages?
• Or are there an optimal number of discussions to maintain your presence and be useful?

Suggested benchmarking approaches

Benchmarking aims to evaluate the effectiveness of your LinkedIn activity and to focus on whatever delivers the best outcomes. Suggested benchmarks include:

•  Front of mind
  • What type or format of content inspires the most likes, shares or discussions
  • What is the optimal frequency of content
  • What discussions increase reach, connections and followers (to the company page)
• Lead nurturing
  • Which of your connections have the most amount of influence
  • What discussions are regularly useful to your prospects
  • What is the optimum number of posts in groups
• Lead generation
  • What groups/ discussions generate the greatest click throughs to your website
  • Which landing pages maximise data capture and from which activities do they come
  • What activity drives the most qualified or quality leads.

Of course, every organisation will have different goals and requirements across the funnel. But, by looking at the way you acquire customers, you can quickly determine which activity delivers you the greatest value in the most efficient way.

Thanks to Katy Howell for sharing her advice and opinions in this post. Katy is MD at immediate future, helping brands like Sony, Indesit, Tealeaf, Festo, Staples and JD Williams adopt, integrate, and deploy social media. You can follow her on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn recently announced that they now have over 225 million users.  A reminder that LinkedIn gives opportunities to connect and communicate for both individuals and businesses across more than 200 countries. In this post, we will look at some of the main features that are available for individuals and businesses on LinkedIn.

26 LinkedIn features

These are the main features we think you need to be aware of on LinkedIn. Review which of these LinkedIn features you use to see how you can make more use of LinkedIn.

Note that some features you may have heard about have been withdrawn by LinkedIn that you may not be aware of (*).

• 1.Activity Broadcast. Activity shared on your LinkedIn page and viewed by others, depending on the settings chosen. This includes group membership, comments, profile changes and application downloads. It will show when you change your profile, make recommendations or follow companies, etc.
• 2. Ads. LinkedIn has targeted ads which enable you to post pay-per-click ads to target users by their role. They can be text ads or video ads which can be AB tested to find the most effective ad creative and message.
• 3.Apps (*). Applications were provided as options to share your content from other sites seamlessly on your profile. The Amazon reading list app, Slideshare and WordPress blog sharing tools were the best known. Apps are no longer available, but a similar feature is now available when editing the profile summary.
• 4. Advanced Search. You can find influencers to connect with using this approach rather than standard search which works best for known connections.
• 5. Ask Questions (*). A feature to ask Questions where other members could reply. This feature was removed end of January 2013. Many companies are now turning to Quora as an alternative.
• 6. Company Page. A page on LinkedIn where a company can list their products and services and share promotions, news and content through Status updates. More recent than Facebook brand pages and less widely used. We cover the best way to setup a profile in Step 1 of the guide.
• 7.Connections. Members in your network on LinkedIn who you invited or have invited to connect with and follow. Through connecting you will receive their status updates.
• 8.Contact info. Links to your websites are available in the Contact Info section of your profile. Unfortunately, these now require a click to be seen by profile viewers, but don’t forget to include your sites or other social networks.
• 9. Endorsements. These are endorsements for skills on individual profiles. They only require a single click so recommendations are a deeper level of endorsement.
• 10.Events. Event organisers could post their events and encourage attendees to note their attendance. This was withdrawn in November 2012. Many companies are now turning to Google+ Events as an alternative.
• 11.Followers. LinkedIn members can follow companies to keep abreast of their activity which will be displayed in your LinkedIn Home page in personal settings. You can choose to unfollow them by selecting ‘Profile Following’ and ‘Unfollow’.
• 12. Group. A separate community discussion area created to discuss and share information around a topic.
• 13.InMail. A paid membership service which enables you to send a message to members you are not connected with.
• 14.Network and connections. Your network is the people you contact through your connections, consisting of 1st degree, 2nd degree and 3rd degree connections including members of our groups. 1st degree: people you have chosen to connect with; 2nd degree: contact of a 1st degree connection i.e. a friend of a friend. To connect, request an introduction through your 1st degree connection. 3rd degree: contact of your 2nd degree connection.
• 15.Polls. Create a poll to share with your status updates or within a Group.
• 16.Plugins. Use these widgets available from the LinkedIn developer page to embed content from LinkedIn on your site or blog to encourage interaction on LinkedIn.
• 17.Profile organiser. A paid LinkedIn premium service used for managing contacts.
• 18.Profile page. The home page for an individual member where they can summarise their career and information shared on LinkedIn. There are ‘public’ and ‘private settings’. We cover the best way to setup a profile in Step 1 of the guide.
• 19.Recommendations. Recommendations are short written reviews of individuals from colleagues, customers or other partners.
• 20. Signal. Available from the ‘More’ menu, this is a useful tool for following streams within your sector since you can select by keyword and source of updates.
• 21.Skills. LinkedIn Skills shows the popularity of different roles and examples of the most followed networkers within them.
• 22.Tags. Use to categorise connections, so that you can follow-up with them using a message.
• 23.Today. LinkedIn Today highlights the most popular updates on specific topics, so is useful for keeping up-to-date and finding content worthwhile sharing.
• 24.Updates. Status updates are available via the company page and member’s pages, for members to share advice, stories and opinions of interest with their connections. In company accounts, followers can be targeted by Industry, size, job function, seniority and location, employees and / non employees and statistics are available on the engagement with the posts.
• 25.URL. When editing the profile summary you can add a URL for some web services like Slideshare, WordPress and YouTube. This enables you to embed content in a similar way to the retired apps feature.
• 26.Widgets. Widgets help you integrate LinkedIn with your website or blog. You can encourage people to connect with individuals or share your content through sharing widgets.

Since features change through time, we alert members to major new features, before we add them to this guide on our blog via the LinkedIn Marketing hub.

We have given many recommendations on managing content marketing in posts and guides this year, including how to plan the content, be creative and allocate the resources to manage the content.

This infographic explains how to engage through copy. It highlights 3 main approaches to how to improve your blog by building a ‘captivated audience’: 1. Building your audience 2. Use social media to drive traffic to your blog and 3. Increasing your subscriber account.

The infographic is from two of our favourite blogs, Blueglass and Copyblogger. It gives a nice simple refresher. If you don’t know these sites, they’re worth checking out.

Viewers who are yet to subscribe to your YouTube channel and visit your channel page, can now be greeted by a video telling them why they should hit the subscribe button. This is an opportunity to show these potential subscribers what you do, and why they should sign up.

This new feature is just one part of the new “One Channel’ design that YouTube started rolling out in March 2013. The core benefit of this new design is that your channel will have a uniform look across devices. Other useful features include the ability to create playlists and the ability to link to associated channels straight from your channel homepage. The most exciting feature, as far as creativity goes, is definitely the trailer feature. Here’s one nice example of a channel featuring it:

This trailer lasts 1:21. It introduces the viewer to some of the star players. It uses extremely emotive music and uses visual highlights of football matches – bringing all of the excitement of a game together.

You can find out all about One Channel here.

Other example YouTube channels already using the trailer feature

There are a few channels already on the One Channel set up who are using the trailer feature. Here are some examples to give you a taster of what others are doing with the opportunity. Click on the image to view the channel.

As these videos are only set to play for non subscribers and actually on a channel page they are not embeddable so you will need to click on the videos to go to the YouTube channels to watch:

Mystery Guitar Man

This guy makes a range of videos involving animation, stop motion, music and so on. His trailer is 30 seconds long and demonstrates some of the visual techniques he uses, as well as using voiceover narration to explain.

Indy Mogul

The Indy Mogul trailer is almost a minute and a half long. It is a great example of making a trailer informative on a practical level because it tells viewers exactly what they can find on the channel and when. It also makes use of the opportunity to give the visitor a call to action – it tells you what to look at next (i.e. another one of their videos).

Young Hollywood Network

This trailer is nearly two minutes long and drops a lot of names! The video demonstrates exactly what the channel is about, what types of celebrities the channel will feature and a taster of some of the live music the channel features. The call to action is simply to subscribe.

How to make a great Youtube channel trailer

A poorly produced trailer will force viewers to click away from your page immediately. If you are going to use a trailer it is therefore essential that you make the most of it. Here are our top 5 tips for producing a trailer that is second to none.

1. Length

Keep it short. 30 seconds to a minute maximum. This is enough time to get across a lot of information but not so long that viewers will switch off. The old rule still applies; your first 10 seconds are the most important and you need to hook the audience in at that point.

2. Give a sense of who you are

Obviously there is no one way to do this as we are all unique. However, you need to be sure that your trailer portrays a good and accurate sense of who you are, what you do and what you have to offer new subscribers. Screen test your trailer with a focus group audience and get feedback. This is worth getting right.

3. Emotion

To quote Bill Woolery: ‘a feature documentary has emotional moments, but a trailer is basically one emotional moment from beginning to end.” Your trailer needs to engage your audience on an emotional level – this emotion needs to be congruent with what your channel is about and the response you want from your audience.

4. Answer important questions

Your audience wants an idea of what kind of videos you create in terms of theme and style. The trailer is also an opportunity to introduce the audience to important characters (if appropriate) from you channels videos. It may also be a chance to introduce the audience to your characters motivations (again, if appropriate). Finally, you need to tell your audience why they should be watching your videos and why they should be watching them now.

5. Speed/momentum

Professional movie trailers are fast paced and pick up momentum about half way through. They are exciting which is what makes them so engaging.

This year, Facebook ran their ‘Facebook Studio Awards‘  to highlight the brands who are leveraging Facebook well and executed creative marketing campaigns, without the use of paid advertising.

We thought his alert would be useful to inspire ideas for Facebook pages you manage, so we have categorised the winning pages in different business categories.

The Top award was ‘Blue’ for Oreo’s 100th anniversary campaign –  with 100 ads over 100 days, sharing news stories projected on Times Square Billboards which were crowdsourced in real-time by their Fans.

Generated over 1 million Facebook interactions in 100 days and shares. Source: Facebook

We have categorised the award-winning campaigns so you can get your ‘creative juices flowing’ and read more about creative concept, execution and results!.

Consumables

• AT&T and BBDO for ‘You’ve Got a Case‘ (Gold award)

Film, Cinema and TV

• Intel/Toshiba and Pereira & O’Dell for ‘The Beauty Inside‘ (Silver award)
• Turner Network Television for ‘Dallas on TNT‘ (Gold award)
• Universal Studio for ’Ted Facebook Page‘ (Silver award)

Tourism

• Graubunden Tourism and Jung von Matt/Limmat for ‘A Little Village Goes Global‘(Gold award)
  

Insurance

• Allstate and Leo Burnett for ‘Mayhem 2012‘ (Gold award)

Fashion and Apparel

• Nike and AKQA for ’Nike Academy‘ (Gold award)
• Nike and R/GA for ‘1thology’ (Bronze award)

Food and Drink

• Grey Poupon and Crispin Porter+Bogusky for ‘Society of Good Taste‘(Silver award)
• Frito-Lay and OMD/Energy BBDO for ‘Do Us a Flavor‘ (Silver award)
• Heineken and Droga5 for ‘No Bollocks‘(Bronze award)
• Heineken and TBWA/NEBOKO for ‘Heineken Squad numbers’ (Bronze award)
• Parmalat and The Monkeys for ‘Reverse Robberies’ (Bronze award)
• Draftfcb Oreo and Mondelēz International, ‘Daily Twist campaign’ and Company 360 campaign. (Blue Award)

Cars

• Ford Motor Company and Team Detroit for ‘2012 Mustang Customize’ (Silver award)

Airlines

• AirAsia Australia and Publicis Mojo for ’AirAsia Friendsy‘ (Silver award)

Music

• Adam Tensta and R/GA for ‘One Copy Song’ (Bronze award)

Household items

• AkzoNobel and Reason Partners for ‘Paint Chip Names for Men‘ (Bronze award)
• P&G and Wieden+Kennedy for ‘Proud Sponsor of Mom‘ (Bronze award)

Matt Lawson is Head of Conversion at AO. In this interview he describes how they have  grown their business through keeping the web experience focused on the customer through constant feedback, review and testing. Today Appliances Online are the UK’s largest online kitchen retailer with over 4000 large appliances ready for Next Day Delivery.

Their About page is one of the best we’ve seen for showcasing the proposition and integrating customer feedback and social networking. Taking such care with the About page may not be essential for established high-street retailers, but is important for online pureplays and startups. We also like the way their masthead below the navigation showcases their proposition.

Not that Appliances Online can be called a startup any longer with annual turnover of more than £50 million. In fact, it was formed as part of DRL Limited in 2000 as an online kitchen appliance retailer by John Roberts, who remains CEO of the company today. Today DRL also provide white label kitchen appliance websites for its big brand clients like Boots, Marks and Spencer, Next, House of Fraser, Debenhams, Screw Fix, Empire Direct, Argos and B&Q including supply, distribution and customer care.

Q. How often do you review strategy?

Our overall approach to strategy is that our actions focus on our objectives. The world and the way we work changes all the time so you must be dynamic and flexible. If you are not dynamic and flexible, then you are going to fail, the world is changing all the time so always keep as up to date and savvy as possible and I think you can apply that to any decent business.

In essence, At Appliances Online, we put the customer first:

‘We strive to deliver what they want in everything we do; from our proposition to the content the see on our site’.

Q. What and how often do you review your marketplace?

Honestly? We very, very rarely look at what our competitors are doing. We always get our customers feedback and work towards what is right for them. It is not about staying one step ahead of the game and always trying to edge out the competition – what’s the point in that? We listen to the customers and reverse engineer our strategy to what is right for them.

Here is a simple example of their feedback loop with a simple Facebook reply:

Q. How do you set your goals each year? What are the KPIs?

The one common goal across our business is gut feelings. It is actions that deliver results and if someone presents an idea and it feels right then we try will run with it. In terms of KPIs, we look at profit and website experience.

Q. The business growth is impressive. What are the strategic success factors from entering this marketplace?

Simple: Understanding the customer

Q. How do you set the right levels of investment?

People often ask why we have such a large team (400+) for an online only retailer and I always relate this back to a physical store – one store could have hundreds of customers a day across the nation dealing with customers – if we were a physical chain of stores then we would need much more staff.

It is about context and we see that in our business.

Q. How important is content marketing for you?

Massive! 60% of the market buy online, do their research online etc. The only reason people would need to go into a physical store is to ask a question and we can still engage the customer and get exactly the same results without that.

Q. What steps have you taken to develop a mobile experience?

We have an extremely dedicated team who focus purely on mobile experience; we have appointed these people to concentrate solely on making this work for us and the customer. We’ve also been getting increased revenue from tablet devices too.

Q. How do you manage conversion rate improvements and the implementation of new features on the site?

We use a range of testing (multivariate, AB testing, etc.). It may not seem ground breaking but what we do is focus on customers and what they are addicted to, and then we simplify it.

Designers design out not in. It’s a simple methodology.

One example of this is testing our customer interaction with our online video testimonials, and we found that when they watch our video, they are 120.5% more like to buy and spend 9.1% more on their order. 

So the action is to simply, encourage more customers to watch more videos!.

Q. What is the process for trading review of analytics and sales?

Aside from our analytics and testing tools we have no business reporting in the digital team, all reporting is in commercial. We don’t believe in marking our own homework.

Q. What has surprised you when reviewing consumer preferences and the results of tests?

It’s important to remember that sometimes, what you think will work, and when you really invest in an idea, it can bomb and just go completely wrong.

Always be aware that what you think can work, sometimes just doesn’t for whatever reason. It’s something to always remember and try and be prepared for.

Q. What would you recommend other E-commerce site owners test?

Just give customer perfect proposition and then reverse engineer it so it works for them.

Try and get as much feedback as you can consistently and then work around it, so it can apply to your business.

Q. What would you recommend for someone new in a role like yours – what are the top issues/areas of the site they should focus on?

Collaboration and people are the most important things to remember, no matter what position you are in in the business, I can’t stress that enough. Always remember the customer.

Q. What is your vision for the future of your service?

I do not want an awesome website. I just want a website that works. It sounds weird, but if someone tells me that they enjoyed our website because of all the cool, wizzy features and apps, then I’ll know I have failed.

I want people to use the website and for everything to just fit and be perfect, they don’t always know why it works, but it just does, it’s like the iPhone. That’s success.

There has been (yet another) exciting new development rolled out by Facebook for advertisers recently – the Lookalike audience targeting feature. As you may have read in the many announcements, Lookalikes are a way of you targeting audiences similar to your current customer database (or existing Facebook fans). In this post I thought I’d go beyond a summary of the features and show what’s involved in setting it up. Here are my experiences, do share yours!

A short guide to setting up Facebook Lookalike targeting

To access the facility you need to be using Power Editor to create your ads and manage your target audiences. Power Editor is a free Chrome plugin. It’s not the most user-friendly plugin out there but without it (or a third-party app which uses the Facebook API) you won’t be able to access Lookalikes.

About Custom Audiences

First of all you will need to create a “Custom Audience”. This has been around for a few months now. In brief, what it means is that you upload your mailing (or customer phone number list) list to Facebook to allow it to help you target your existing mailing list names via Facebook ads. This can be helpful if you want to connect with them on an additional platform or carry out more precise targeting than your email program allows. So, for instance, you could target women of a certain age who live in a particular country and have a liking for a particular thing.

So load up Power Editor. click on Audiences from the left nav panel and Create Audience>Custom Audience from the top nav panel.

Give a name and description to your list and upload the file (I’ve selected a file of emails which I’ve created as a simple CSV file with email addresses and no headers or extra rows).

Accept Facebook’s Custom Audience Terms and wait for the file to be uploaded. If you have any errors in the file a dialogue box will pop up telling you which lines are problematic. Correct that and upload the corrected file.

You will then need to wait an hour or so until the status bar changes from “Waiting” to “Ready”.

To create a lookalike audience:

1. Go to Power Editor and select the Audiences tab on the left
2. Create a custom audience using a list of email addresses, phone numbers or Facebook user IDs
3. Select this custom audience and click Create Similar Audience
4. Choose the country where you’d like to find a similar set of people and select whether you want to optimize for similarity or greater reach
5. Click Create

Other recent changes to Facebook

Relaxed rules on your cover image

You may have missed this recent change. Facebook has relaxed it’s rules on cover images. You are now allowed to post contact info, prices, a call to action and an arrow pointing to the “Like” button. Images can have a max on 20% text.

This is my first attempt at playing with the new options. You’ll see I’ve added some text and a couple of awards we have won.

Now this looks pretty horrible in some situations such as hover cards and some news feed ad units where it’s best to keep text away from edges as cover photos get cropped in certain situations. And see the mobile version below where the arrow to the Like button makes no sense. You can also see how the profile image has overlapped the little award badges too.

So I’m still playing with it. Do share any good examples that you find.