The magic of creative briefs

Back in the days when I was a young, ambitious advertising executive, I once spent a whole week learning how to write a creative brief. Yes really – a complete full-on Monday-Friday in a hotel, up at 7, bed in the small hours and non-stop presentations, lectures and exercises in between.

Why did they think it worth it?

It must have cost the ad agency I worked for a fortune, but they knew it was worth it. A good creative brief produces thoroughbred creative work. A poor one leads to work that looks like an old donkey. It gets cobbled together and then gets chopped and changed as everyone’s thinking develops on the hoof. (There’s nothing like some finished design work to make people realise, “What we really want to say is…..”)

Why it’s still worth it

Last week, I was reminded again of just how powerful a well-written creative…

We love this quality infographic - well worth 5 minutes to read through it - it's great to see the inbound model becoming more popular with marketers too. A few highlights of the infographic: People are opting out of our lists - email and phone 86% of people skip TV ads Inbound marketing costs less than interruptive outbound

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Facebook is the fundamental ingredient, says Facebook

I read this interesting article earlier this week on Ad Age, Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook's Chief Operating Officer) speaking at the Association of National Advertisers in Phoenix last week. Sandberg had a few key messages to share which I've summarised here: Make marketing (and business) "social by design" - yet given her position at Facebook she is really saying make your marketing "Facebook by design"? For Facebook not only is overall sharing doubling every year via "Zuckerberg's Law," she noted, but the number of daily fan page "likes" also has doubled in the past year to 100 million daily "If you look at the numbers for almost any brand, but certainly any brand that's invested any time or effort on Facebook, the number of people who are your Facebook friends massively dwarfs the number of people who visit your website," "So I think one of the questions this industry…

Use content and data to connect with customers With companies like Silverpop, Genius and Office Autopilot, it's become much easier to develop a serious semi-automated approach to email marketing - and one that can dove-tail with a much wider content marketing or social strategy without draining all of your time. We noticed that Silverpop pulled together this presentation, embedded below, this is also worth look.

Here's the Silverpop take-aways…

It's easier than ever to leverage data, and there's more than you might first think: Inferred Customer Data - learn by listening Implicit - monitoring blogs, social networks and customer communities Explicit - or Behavioural Data - learn by measuring You know the old adage: Sell the sizzle, not the steak. There's a new rule: Educate with grilling tips, recipes and wine pairing Appreciate the link between social and email, the sharing and re-purposing of content. Arguably those that interact and open your email are the most likely…

We've posted before about the importance of persona's and understanding the consumer properly, your consumer, well enough over getting lost in tactics and techniques first. This info-graphic again re-enforces how it's this - not "social media", "content marketing" or "SEO" that has to come first. Ask the right questions and design social, contact and channel strategies around that. Who is my consumer (or persona type)? Where are they, online more specifically (we covered this broadly in our digital radar)? What motivates them to be interested in my industry, why do they care? How do they consume content, and what do they value, in terms of topics and formats - how do I map that? Why will they care for my brand in their world, what unmet needs to they have that I can help solve? When you know your consumer, everything else can fall in to place. By breaking consumers into persona types…

I'm hoping to offer some insight into how a small but growing and ambitious multi-channel retailer intends to use social media to promote our online brand, The Emporium Direct - I am by no means an expert in social media nor is my organisation's present social media activity up there in comparison to the big brands.  But I do run our marketing, therefore I can share hands-on experience on what has worked for us and what we're planning. Before I get to how we're using social media, here is a brief snapshot of our organisation.

Company Background

We have a large High Street store in Maldon, Essex and a growing e-commerce business, The Emporium Direct.  Like many, we originally started trading on eBay, then moved onto Amazon and eventually our own website. Marketplace tips Our success has been down to the following: (more…)…

A six stage approach to keyword research for SEO

In Part Two of this 12 part guide to website optimisation, I explored competitor analysis for SEO. I continue our SEO theme in this guide where I will look at approaches I use to evaluate keyword performance and carry out keyword research. I hope you find the approaches interesting and I’ll be interested to hear how they differ in the approaches and tools you use, so please do leave comments and share this with your networks to encourage discussion. It’s a common mistake to focus keyword research on what’s out there in the market without taking into consideration what’s already on your Website. True insight is gained by combining these two data streams together. I like to segment intelligent keyword research for SEO into six stages: Identify which keywords your competitors rank highly for and why (covered in my previous post on Competitor analysis…

Dispelling the consumer myth of what is involved in creating an account

Overview

In one of my earlier posts I explored the different approaches to handling new customer checkout on e-commerce sites. The approach of forcing new customers to either register or create an account in order to checkout has been around for many years, and in the earlier post I outline why you shouldn’t force new customers to have to register at the start of the checkout process. In this article I provide 2 rare but extremely valuable techniques that retailers can use to increase their new customer conversion rate, with one of the techniques provided by ASOS who were featured in the original article.

Technique 1 – simply ask for a password during checkout

As I described on my original post, the difference between a guest checkout and a registration/account creation checkout can usually be narrowed down to just 1 piece of…

Six examples of how to use Facebook company pages for B2B marketing

In my previous post on B2B Facebook page marketing, I outlined the emerging and evolving case for adding Facebook to your B2B marketing arsenal and offered some advice on the type of strategies you might adopt. Here, I'll run through a number of current Facebook sites which show how B2B companies might use the platform to promote their business. Solid B2B success stories in social media remain few and far between - especially when it comes to Facebook. So, by way of follow up, I wanted to showcase some B2B examples. Despite all the talk of Facebook becoming more mainstream in business, successful B2B case studies are actually pretty thin on the ground. Not surprisingly there is an abundance of consumer examples to choice from. The top five Facebook sites (based on likes) include Coca Cola, Starbucks, Oreo, Red Bull and…

7 ways to optimise for strong product pages

This article touches on specific items for product pages, assuming basic on-page optimisation processes have been followed, we have covered these in my  Smart Insights On-Page optimisation Guide if you're not familiar with these basics.

1 Check Products have Unique URLs

Ecommerce systems are complex, they have a lot to do and unfortunately are not usually designed with things like Unique product URL's in mind. An example of what I mean by this could be: www.example.com/product-1.html = The primary shortest product URL you can visit to see the product www.example.com/category-1/product-1.html = Navigating to the product page after viewing a category page www.example.com.category-1/sub-category-1/product-1.html = Navigating through two categories before selecting the product Each of the pages above are unique to Search Engines as the URL's are different. However, the content on each will be exactly the same. To ensure you are not display all these duplicate pages to Google…