5 contrarian Steve Jobs quotes all marketers can learn from
“Why join the navy when you can be a pirate?"
Just one of many great quotes from Steve Jobs and one that sets the scene for my post.
For me Steve Jobs is/was/always will be a marketing genius. His untimely death has got me thinking about what I have learned from his approach to marketing.
The growth of Apple and popularity of its brand has to make Steve Jobs one of the best, if not totally counter-intuitive, marketers that ever lived. After all, from a marketing perspective Apple goes against a lot of conventional marketing wisdom. So here's what I think we can
1) Be original, unconventional and unfashionable, even: Though the prolific buy-cycle of Apple products by its raving fans seem to reflect the worst element of the waste of the Western consumer, it…
LinkedIn brings in status updates for companies
Value/Importance: [rating=5] for B2B!
Recommended link: LinkedIn announcement
Example of new LinkedIn "Company Activity" status updates
Our commentary on the new company status updates
If you use LinkedIn to market your business to other businesses you may remember that LinkedIn introduced Company Follow about 18 months ago. It allows you to setup a company page like in Facebook and others can follow it.
LinkedIn explain:
“Keep in mind your status updates can be up to 500 characters long and can support URLs with multimedia as well. Given that any LinkedIn member can comment, like or share your Company’s status update, this is a great way to build engagement with customers, potential employees and prospects alike”.
To switch on this feature - administrators should read this. I just added an update about this change to our page which…
Using touchpoint analysis and surveys to find how much email really contributes
Since many email marketing services focus their reporting on open and click rates it can be difficult to show how email is influencing leads or purchase and so invest in putting more resources into email marketing to test, learn and refine.
From opens and clicks to value generated per email campaign
If you are using email marketing to drive visits to a transactional web site you are in a much better position to make the business case since you can use analytics or the email system itself to show sales generated by email. The you can start comparing the effectiveness of emails and reviewing their value through using measures like Revenue generated per 1000 emails sent, much more meaningful than open and click rates.
Using attribution modeling for email marketing
Since reporting in many email service providers is based on a…
Facebook announcements at Advertising Week, 02/10/2011
There were a couple of new features trailed for Facebook this week that this alert covers. They're in the "coming real soon" category and the only info that others are reporting on is this post on the Official Facebook Studio site. Details are a bit "thin on the ground right now", so we will look at them in more detail once full access is live.
#1 New Page Insights
A new suite of metrics are to be opened up by Facebook in the "coming weeks", the two metrics are focussed around the extended reach of your page / content, giving you insights into how friends of fans interact with your content as well as metrics such as virality & engagement to each post. The aim is to empower businesses / page owners to further undertand…
6 reasons why B2B marketing can succeed on Facebook
There is a growing premise in business marketing that whilst your website is your shop window to the world, you increasingly need to promote yourself and engage with your audience where your audience congregates. AKA "Swim with the Fishes". So, with well over 600 million users, where better than Facebook?
The case for using Facebook for B2B marketing
1. You just can’t argue with the numbers. Whether it's 600 or 700 million, Facebook is the perfect place to cast the net wide. It is reasonable to assume that some of your target customers will be using the site in some way, shape or form. Mostly, though, for real time information and recommendations - which proves the continued importance of good relationships and word of mouth.
2. Facebook is viral by design. You want your content to spread, get it on Facebook. If it is any…
If you use Google Analytics, and your site gets any traffic from search engines, you will love the latest feature they've just added, which was announced on the Webmaster Tools Blog on 4th October.
Here are the stats you used to get when looking at a 'Search Engine Keywords' report:
keyword
number of visits
pages per visit
average time on site
% new visits
bounce rate
So, you could see that you had (say) 50,000 visits for the word 'laptops', but you were left asking questions like "so what?", "is that good, or bad?", and left looking at other tools to try and answer those questions.
So What's New?
Now, here is one of the new 'Search Engine Optimisation: Queries' reports:
I've highlighted the exciting bits there:
The red circles are new pieces of data they've added (from 'Webmaster Tools')
The pink arrows point to a single example of an instantly actionable piece of…
New data show how number of reviews can lift conversion rate
In the first generation of social commerce, measuring the sales impact of adding reviews to a site was enough. But now it’s time to dig deeper into the real ROI of social. Our ability to measure the ROI of social hasn’t always kept up with the latest developments. We can all count fans, likes and retweets, but businesses often struggle when it comes to tying these figures to their revenue.
This is one of the great advantages of including reviews in your social commerce strategy: with a little effort, it’s possible to track almost every part of their impact.
Why does review volume matter?
By now, most businesses understand that reviews can help conversion. But, what volume is needed to help conversion? Is a handful of reviews enough or should you aim for a minimum number of reviews?
If a few reviews deliver…
6 key questions to ask about how a brand uses social media
I work in the travel industry which, most of the time, seems like a great place to be for a digital marketer. It lends itself to rich, original content and has allowed the pioneering (but not always dominant) brands to develop online in ways never before possible with traditional media (think of brands such as Travel Zoo and Trip Advisor).
On the other hand the travel industry is being squeezed from all sides, (costs are rising almost everywhere let alone in travel) whilst the industry becomes increasingly fragmented and even more competitive. It’s also an industry which has had the way it does business entirely turned on its head thanks to the wide scale adoption of the internet.
In this post, I share my experiences from our initial work with social…
All users of retailers are familiar with the Amazon recommendations on books, but personalisation and recommendations services aren’t only relevant to retailers. This interview shows that recommendations engines are also increasingly used online by publishers and bloggers. Publishers are using these tools to increase engagement with their site while also increasing revenue through serving paid links to relevant sites.
I was interested to hear of this tool since it’s not only relevant to publishers, but also provides a way for marketers to increase reach and engage an audience through the type of content consumed based on a cost-per-click (CPC) model. Think of it as working similar to the Google content network. Here's an example, from the footer of Techradar which uses this service.
In the interview that follows I ask about the marketing benefits, users…
Google ROPO study provides a great way to visualise customer behaviour
Value/Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Google-GfK-Vodafone study
ROPO is a term coined to describe research published by Google in this study meaning “Research Online Purchase Offline” (although it Research Offline-Purchase Online is another behaviour which can also be important.
This study reviewed the role of the internet in the decision process for mobile & broadband contracts involving the Vodafone website and stores in Germany based on a panel of 16,000 web users and questionnaires about their intent and purchase.
For both of these services, the contract was signed online by around a third of the audience. However, a significant proportion signed the contract offline.
Marketing implications of ROPO visualisation
The matrix presented above is a great framework for evaluating and summarizing multichannel behaviour since it also shows…
