How do we establish the Return on Investment from content marketing?

This is a pretty big question we're keen to explore with you since although much is written about why we must put more effort into content marketing, there's relatively little about how you make the business case and then review content ROI and effectiveness. Important commercial questions! But, what's the best way to frame the question "What is our ROI from content marketing"? With content being everything contained on your site and then shared and syndicated to other sites and networks, it's similar to asking "How do I measure my digital marketing success outside of the paid media channels"? With that in mind, let's break it down in how you might approach it within your business or organisation. I've been discussing this with Dave and there's a lot to look at, so we'll have two posts, in the first we'll look…

A review of Majestic SEO Site Explorer

In a previous post I compared what I think are the 5 best tools to review backlinks. These show the strength of your all important backlinks against competitors. In this review we took a brief look at the Majestic SEO Backlink history which we find useful for comparing clients against competitors at a top-level. But since this time Majestic now have a new tool - the Majestic Site Explorer. Now into its 4th month of public Beta, for me, Majestic Site Explorer is a really useful tool to use when completing top level reviews of competitors. I'd also recommend it can be use d for regulary monthly or quarterly health checks for your own business and the SEO efforts of the agency. It's often compared to the similar and I think, better known tool available from SEOmoz (www.opensitexplorer.com). So I thought it…

Part 1 How content can help you succeed in the inbox

A lot of retailers are pretty good at "doing email marketing right". A nice subject line, nice offer, nice call to action, nice numbers in your campaign reports. The problem is that an awful lot of other people are competing for the reader's attention. And a lot of them are also "doing things right". Some senders are lucky to have the right kind of brand, loyalty and pricing structure to glibly ignore such competitive worries. Many do not. And the problem with "functional optimization" is it can be replicated. As competitive pressures rise, a common response is to discount more, shout louder and shout more often as we seek to grab as much attention as we can in the inbox gold rush. It's tough going. There are various alternative solutions to this problem, not least the switch to behavior-based, trigger emails, but one option is to look…

Here's a free webinar I'm sharing, arranged through our partners MMC Learning. Thanks if you attended, and thanks for your feedback if you dialled-in. I enjoyed the interactions through the chat box - at times it sounded like a fight - "Left-right-left" getting feedback on "Which Test One" type questions. We were pleased that hundreds of you signed up for the lunch time listen, although with some attending from The Maldives and Kuala Lumpur it was more like a late night listen. Unfortunately, the webinar gremlins struck and there was a global outage in our webinar suppliers which affected all webinars at this time including the US and Europe. So if you were affected, we're sorry about that, it's the first time it's happens - difficult to have a fallback for this. Still, we hope you find these slides inspire some ideas for positive action. As always feel free to ask…

Our interview with Brent Coker, creator of Webreep

I love finding out about new tools to help improve marketing, particularly when they help understand customer feedback and drive change. It's one of the reasons I got into web analytics and it's our main focus at SmartInsights.com. Of course, most web analytics tools like Google Analytics are great at telling you what customers are doing, but not so great at telling you why they are doing it and what their motivations and feelings are. Thats's why I've always been keen to share the different types of online customer feedback service available. I was recently alerted to a new tool by Brent Coker which I think adds to tools which help the "Not What, but Why?" question. It's an interesting tool for me since it's based on academic research dating back to 2004, yet is a practical real world tool with benchmarking capabilities.…

How big is social sharing? Very big!

ShareThis and Starcom MediaVest collaborate to release the first study on social sharing. The study focuses on ShareThis’ database of sharing activity for it's widget in March 2011 and includes a detailed analysis of more than 7 billion sharing signals across all major sharing channels, specifically looking at the sharing patterns of more than 300 million monthly users across the top 1,000 publisher websites of ShareThis. The analysis is based by the proportion of people who share via the different options on the widget.

Sharing is big, no surprise

Social sharing now produces an estimated 10 percent of all Internet traffic and 31 percent of referral traffic to sites from search and social. Search is around twice as big.

Facebook dominates as channel used to share

There are two sets of numbers here, this is because some content is…

A 9 step approach to help understand your global customers

Editor's note: This is the first in a series of articles giving best practice advice on International Marketing using digital media. I'm delighted that Emma Durant, a specialist consultant in this area, has agreed to share her knowledge on how to best use digital marketing channels for this; a neglected topic since many marketers are faced with this challenge. Dave Chaffey Everyone in marketing knows the importance of understanding your customers. In a way, this becomes an even more important issue when faced with a global digital strategy, as you not only need to understand them, you also need to look at their regional differences and similarities.

Step 1. Confirm your global business customers

You should already have a clear idea of who your overall target customer groups are as a business. If not, then you need to…

and is it something we should be doing?

Social media optimisation or SMO isn't a new term or a new approach, far from it. As the Wikipedia definition of SMO explains, it's been around since 2006 when the search engine marketer Danny Sullivan first used it and Rohit Bhargava developed his 5 rules of SMO which are featured at the end of this post with my suggestions on how to scope SMO activities more broadly. With many companies now having social media marketing in place, SMO is a logical next step to improve the effectiveness of social media marketing. So I thought it would be interesting to see marketers views on SMO - is it a narrow view about optimising integration with a website, is it mainly related to SEO or is it a broader view?

What do you understand by SMO?

These are the results of the poll - thank you to…

Where do you start with such a big area? "It's about relationships", says Charlene Li, founder of Altimeter Group. There are some great slides in her presentation and the overall message I hear is: are you, your business or your organisation ready for the necessary change required in a truly 'open' social media strategy? A strategy that goes beyond marketing. Our summary of the slides are below - the full presentation is inserted right at the end. There are some big themes to take on here - what's your take? Let us know.

Strategy

Learn: Invest in analytics to learn from your customers once you understand their socialgraphics. This process requires listening, having the right software in place and using metrics that are relevant to your business. Dialogue: Have the conversation with customers that they want to have, think specifically off-site and in sites and communities where they already are. Be responsive to…

SEOMoz have updated their search engine ranking factors compilation which they publish every 2 years. We think this is essential reading for everyone in digital marketing, not just SEO specialists since it shows how to best get success in SEO and what to target your agency on.  In 2009 the top 5 ranking factors were: Keyword focussed anchor text from external links External link popularity Diversity of external link sources Keyword use anywhere in title tags Trustworthiness of Domain based on Link Distance from Trusted Domains *Source - SEOMOZ Here are the key charts of ranking factors from the report [Editors note: I use this to show that page Keywords are relatively unimportant compared to anchor text and domain authority] : While early days in the research the 2011 update from SEOMOZ is formed from surveying 132 SEO professionals and correlating data…