Twitter is more likely to help induce advocacy and future purchases

Value: [rating=4] Our commentary: This short piece on emarketer.com gives a review of some new research revealing that Twitter followers who "follow" a brand are more valuable at the business level than Facebook fans, who "like". For example, daily Twitter users who followed a brand were more than twice as likely as daily Facebook users to say that they felt more likely to purchase from the brand after becoming a social media follower. That pattern is similar when users where asked if the would recommend a brand. Marketing implications: Although it's not really a Twitter or Facebook question, we know that marketing and social media success is about more than one channel, or one social network, it does raise the importance of understanding the implications and being alert to these differences in your business, and specifically to your audience. …

Our recommended tools for comparing your visitor numbers against competitors

All site owners want to know "how do we compare to our rivals" in number of visitors, but of course web analytics tools don't give you that. Instead you have to turn to independent benchmarking tools. I still hear a lot of folk saying they use Alexa, but they really shouldn't unless force to - there are much better tools available - this is what we recommend. Although the main purpose of these tools is comparing trends in visitor number, they also have other less well-known features that are also helpful to marketers when completing these activities: Benchmark number of site visitors against competitors - can be useful for justifying investment in traffic building, reviewing their seasonality or comparing campaigns Review audience composition e.g. demographics for competitors Review the reach and audience of potential partner sites such as blogs or publisher sites Find basic information on…

Towards a strategy for integrating email marketing with social media

Value : [rating=4] Our commentary : The article explains that many email service providers have introduced "share to social" features enabling email marketers to include buttons to share email content through Facebook, Twitter or Linked In. While these can be useful, it's much more important to think through the overall strategy of integration between email and social and how they fit. Marketing implications : For me, the strategy implications prompted are: 1. Prioritisation. You need to prioritise your many social channel choices, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In, Blog, Community and Enewsletter to focus on the ones that works best for your audience and marketplace. E.G. Perhaps Email, Twitter and Linked-In for professional B2B marketing. It's not about providing infinite choice in most cases, it's about using the best approaches. 2. Value proposition You need to define a clear differentiated value proposition for each channel to offer…

Mashable highlight 5 growing social media trends

Value: [rating=4] Our commentary: A new breed of Q&A services are changing the way we search. Barcode scanning applications are making products social, and deal-of-the-day sites are giving us ways to save by recruiting our friends to the party. With so many studies highlighting ever-accelerating social media usage rates, the conclusion is obvious "€” social media is everywhere. This Mashable post introduces 5 big trends to consider, if you're not doing so already. Marketing implications: Think smartphones initially - 'Social scanning' where users are able to scan barcodes for price comparison or use QR codes to enter into social experiences around current location. Building on that there's 'Mobile loyalty', where smartphones are the digital repository for loyalty data but now integrate location based services as well. My favourites are 'web-based Q&A services' for intelligent information discovery like Quora, Aardvark and Facebook Questions - and also…

How do you use Google Alerts in your marketing?

Value: [rating=4] Our commentary: I think many marketers are signed up for Google Alerts and use it for the obvious, but useful. I usually recommend setting up alerts so that you're emailed when the following are included on a newly published page and first indexed by Google: 1. Your "brand" 2. Your "brand" + 3. Your "brand" +/- 4. Your "http://www.webaddress.com" 5. Any of the above for competitors 6. Any of the above for key customers (B2B) If you want to exclude your own site or any other site you can use the -site:www.yoursite.com syntax It's also worth remembering you can use negative's for example I use -books,-book since lots of retailers have pages featuring my books but I don't want to be alerted about those. Here's an example of an alert I set up a while ago on my old site: +"dave chaffey" -books -book -pdf -download -site:davechaffey.com I was prompted…

Home Depot and Jet Blue reveal the Good, Bad and the Ugly

Value: [rating=4] Our commentary: In this post from iMedia Connection they highlight the threads of two brands' consumer interactions on Facebook: one that got it right (Home Depot) and one that got it wrong (JetBlue). These conversations demonstrate what works and what doesn't, and serve as strong examples for how you can fashion your Facebook interactions based on online behavior. Marketing implications: It's not that you need huge experience in managing customer interactions online - I think these two threads provide great insight and prove just how much common sense is needed in the approach, and more than anything else, that being awake, listening and taking time to respond is what's important. It also highlights how we have to listen and interact when social networks like Facebook create a powerful (and increasingly used!) feedback loop, whether we like it or not. Recommended link: …

Our guide to benchmarking competitors for effectivness in customer acquisition, conversion and retention

In this guide, we take a look at the what, why, how and when of competitor benchmarking for digital marketing and provide a step-by-step guide showing the tools and KPIs you can use. You can download the guide or read our introduction below. Competitor Benchmarking Guide - Smart Insights

What is online competitor benchmarking?

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A new tag to manage International / Multilingual websites from Google

Value: [rating=5] Our commentary: A new asset this week for large multilingual sites or for those thinking of targeting new audiences was launched by the Google Webmaster team. It's great to see a constant stream of new features recently from this  team. The new feature is a language specifc tag "hreflang" aimed at websites / businesses that target users in various languages but under one domain (usually by using subdomains or folders - e.g. http://es.example.com or www.example.com/es/). There are often complicated issues with duplicate content with such setups that this new tool allows you to manage more efficiently. This is the format for the "hreflang" directive which will have to implemented within a CMS so will typically require bespoke coding. <link rel="€alternate"€ hreflang="a-different-language" href="http://url-of-the-different-language-page" /> The best example within this post from the Google Webmaster blog being centred around a spanish page where…

Our selection of the best 5 hacks from 17 presented by Wordstream

Value: [rating=5] Our commentary: The purpose of this alert is to point you to a great collection of techniques you may not have considered for advanced analysis to diagnose opportunities to improve your marketing and in particular Search engine Marketing within Google Analytics. It's a classic linkbait example, but nothing wrong with that and it has clearly taken a lot of effort to compile through contacting 17 Google Analytics specialists. I think it's proved popular through it's clear layout with screengrabs explaining each technique. Marketing implications: These are my picks of the techniques covered which I thought were particularly useful for advanced review of search marketing effectiveness: 1 Will Critchlow - using custom variables to determine the referring traffic source for the first visit. By default, Google Analytics only records the first visit. 2 David Harry - using custom reports to drill-down…

9 Tips to engage your email subscribers

Value: [rating=4] Our commentary: This 12 page whitepaper download from Selligent (registration required) advises brands on how to tackle the ongoing challenge of the best way to engage customers with email marketing. Marketing implications: I think these guidelines are the most useful part of the report, so I'm sharing them here with my commentary. 1. Offer a choice of communications. This is a preference centre to enable customers to receive the type of emails they want. 2. Respect permission. Double opt-in is suggested. I don't agree with this in all markets, all cases. It's essential if you're selling a list, but in a customer relationship which starts with an on-site enewsletter signup or during the checkout I think it's unecessary because the relationship is already developed. 3. Analyse, automate, segment and target. I like this call to action! But these are each individually major challenges to refine your email…