Have you heard of Zappos? They're a US online retailer mega brand largely unknown in the UK - more often referred to as a social media pioneer in marketing circles (for Twitter usage particularly). Yet, dig a little deeper and it becomes clear that a significant strategy is under-pinning their success, and it's not all about social networks. It does however start to become obvious as to why social media know-how is natural to them and necessary to help drive marketing. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos says simply "€œWe pay more attention to our customers"€. It"€™s this simple, profound mentality that has led to Amazon purchasing Zappos for a staggering $1.2bn in Nov 2009. Tony goes on, "€œPeople may not remember exactly what you did or what you said, but they will always remember how you made them feel"€. This is the essence of how Zappos have achieved their phenomenal success. Apparently, it wasn"t…

With checkout abandonment increasing to a staggering 48% in the UK according to Coremetrics, there is a clear need for many retailers to pore over this report and extract the key insights. The Econsultancy Guide to Checkout Optimisation report is structured around the different steps of the process and contains 70 tips. The best feature of the report IMO is a checklist in the appendix which lists all 70 with prompts of what to look for when comparing to the competition. If you run an Ecommerce site print this out and fill it in! In my brief review I highlight 5 of the less obvious tips which I picked up, which apply to most types of site. Let's start the review with...

What we don't like / what's missing?

The report has a fixation on abandonment (naturally), so focuses relentlessly on reducing this rate, so missing some opportunities. I believe that recommendations on any…

We love this book, Get Content. Get Customers by Joe Pulizzi and Newt Barrett because content is at the heart of today's marketing and it does a fantastic job of explaining the why and the how of online content marketing. The authors advice is summarised in the top 10 content marketing lessons which we review at the end of this post. If you need to push content up the agenda in your organisation, and many need this, then we definitely recommend this book, but with one caveat we give at the end of this review. I think it succeeds because it blends both practical, structured advice on creating a content strategy, plus many small, but specific case studies from many sectors to inspire you to develop a content strategy.

The B.E.S.T. formula

As an example of the structured practical guidance, we liked this formula for creating a content marketing roadmap. B.E.S.T stands…