What’s New in Marketing? December 2013

Thank you to all our readers and writers for sharing in 2013!

In our last monthly round-up of the year I want to thank all our writers who have shared their insights across the year, particularly our regular writers, so in this summary of advice from December, I have thanked some of our most regular contributors alongside their most popular posts on the latest developments.

The most significant platform for developments this month to be aware of this month are in the SEO (mobile) and Email (Gmail) sections.

Many thanks also if you’re a regular reader too, especially if you have shared, asked or answered questions or commented via the site or a social network. Through “spreading the word” you have helped us grow and share our advice and insights more widely - 82% YoY on uniques the analytics tells us - so many thanks!

Do let us know of anything you'd like to see more or less of in 2014 in the comments or via the Contact Us.

So, it's Happy Holidays! I hope you enjoy the break, if you’re taking one, if not I hope the trading or studying between Christmas and New Year goes well for you!

Strategy and planning

• Digital Marketing statistics 2014 - A new post from me, summarising, 10 must-know digital marketing statistics to inform your marketing in 2014. The most important? This new research from Adobe reminding us to use attribution (assists) if we want to prove the full value of social media and other forms of inbound marketing.

• Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning - STP - Annmarie Hanlon, one of our regular contributors on strategy, and author of our guide to creating a marketing plan highlights one of the most useful and rightly popular marketing planning frameworks.

• Plan To Succeed by avoiding common marketing mistakes - a popular Slideshare in the autumn created by regular writer on strategy and branding, Dan Bosomworth.

Social media marketing

• Which social network drives the most traffic? - Susanne Colwyn, our blog editor shares the latest insights showing where you should focus your social media efforts. Many thanks to Susanne for her efforts in editing 100s of posts and keeping smiling!

• Best Hashtag tools?. Hashtags are now a key part of the lingua franca of social media, and, as this post shows are now core to all social networks. So knowing how your customers and competitors are using them can help your social media marketing. This post from regular contributor Chris Soames explains 3 of the tools and the comments add more.

• Custom Audiences in Facebook. Regular adviser on Facebook Marie Page has another of her excellent in-depth tutorials, on another powerful, but neglected Facebook marketing technique.

Search marketing

• Getting mobile SEO right in 2014 - I have an update on a new tool from Google to check your mobile experience isn’t damaging your SEO, or your user’s experience.

• How to use the Structured Data Mark-up Helper for E-Commerce Sites - another technique that will be important in 2014, is already if you’re a retailer.

• SEO in 2014 - one of our summit event from James Gurd - it links to other recordings of webcasts.

User experience, analytics and conversion optimisation

• 12 months in digital marketing - a roundup of some of the main developments in design and user experience from Robert Yardley, a regular contributor on this topic.

• Improving mobile shopping experiences in 2014 Another forward-looking post from Rob Thurner our expert commentator on mobile marketing.

• Creating an estimate for a digital design project - thanks to Mark Kelly for his regular contributions on managing agency activities better.

Email marketing and CRM

• The impact of Gmail’s move to default image display?. From regular email marketing contributor Tim Watson

• Blending Persona in Email - great to see the Persona concept applied to email - it is as often as it could be. Thanks to Kath Pay for explaining why.

• CRM 2014 - the challenges and opportunities according to Neil Davey of MyCustomer.com.

• What if Santa was an Email marketer - Finally, some “festive fun” to end the year from Mark Brownlow who has been working hard on a new copywriting course we will launch in 2014.