Our framework for owning marketing success
Thanks for your comments and shares for our new Marketing Growth Wheel, it was good to see that many found this useful. We'll be going into more depth on how to apply this in our guides and templates for members in future. By way of an introduction, I wanted to explain a bit more about our thinking behind it; why there is a need for a planned approach to digital marketing, yet the majority don't have a plan.
Perhaps, the best way to explain the need for a planned approach to give you the right focus is through this...
A Typical conversation about digital marketing:
A person: "How do I get more traffic?"
Me: "Do you need more traffic?"
A person: "Yeah, of course, we always want more traffic!"
Me: "Hmmm, sure. Is that the priority though? Isn't the real question around commercial growth and the priorities in [digital] marketing…
My ideas on how to deal with unpredictability in email marketing in the year ahead
As your local Greek philosopher never tires of telling you, the only constant is change.
Many industry experts devote the occasional post or two in January to predicting how email marketing will develop this year.
Instead, I'd like to look at what we might do to better exploit or cope with the dynamic nature of the email and online marketing environment in 2012. Because change isn't always as predictable as we'd like it to be.
Please chime in with your own ideas!
1. Revisit the basics
Like every year, vendors and the media will regale us in 2012 with all sorts of clever things you can do with your email marketing. Clever things that can bring great results, such as shopping cart abandonment emails that pull in £250 in sales for each £1 invested.
Not everyone can access the necessary tools,…
What are the implications for posting updates to brand Facebook pages?
Value/Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Edge Rank Checker
And the answer is…
“The average Post Lifetime for a Facebook Brand Page Update is 3 hours and 7 minutes"
This nugget is baed on considering that each individual Post has a “lifetime”. A Post is considered dead when the growth in engagement is less than 10% of the largest growth of engagement between hourly snapshots.
This data was sampled for EdgeRankChecker customers for the month of December, 2011 across 500+ Pages and over 30,000 individual Posts. The average Page size was approximately 140,000. Page size was not found to effect this.
Of course averages, are just well, averages. So the study also looked at individual pages, Average Post Lifetimes for individual Pages were also examined: some Pages averaged a Post Lifetime of approximately 10…
Tips on Marketplace Conversion Rate Optimisation from Matt Ogborne
We all know that Amazon and eBay are the powerhouses where almost everyone now shops at some point or other. I've no data to support that, but I imagine, every web user has at least visited these sites once. We also know that they both have very successful marketplaces where many retailers, particularly SME retailers sell their products, often in parallel with their own retail site.
Given this, it's always surprised me that relatively little is written (beyond the Dummies guides) on how companies can optimise their sales on these sites. Especially since conversion rate optimisation (CRO) for retailers is such a hot topic.
Dan Barker recently introduced me to Matthew Ogborne, a specialist who helps small and medium businesses sell more on Amazon and eBay when I was sourcing someone…
Part 5 in James Gurd's website optimisation series
In Part Five of this SEO series, I'll show how to improve page titles and meta descriptions to increase traffic from natural search. This type of testing should be an integral part of any optimisation program and these two elements are often overlooked.
As many of you will know, there are two key elements that appear in every listing, regardless of whether or not you have optimised your webpages to display targeted content:
Page title
Meta description
Why is this important?
It's simple, the words that people see on search engines results pages (SERPs) influences their click decision. The more persuasive the copy and the closer it appeals to the needs of the searcher, the greater the propensity to click. Google rewards pages which have a higher relative click through rate since this is a positive relevance signal. Furthermore, the title…
Our framework for marketing success
You may remember our strategic RACE framework which we created to provide a means to contextualise digital marketing tactics. We've developed this with a new visual to show a planning and management process to use on marketing projects.
Our new Growth Wheel infographic developed in collaboration with First 10 Digital, aims to provide a visual way to think about your marketing planning focused on creating commercial growth by integrating digital channels.
About the Marketing Growth Wheel
Our Growth Wheel uses a standard SOSTAC® approach to planning, but applied to using digital technologies and channels to create growth for a company. It's based on our experience in planning and implementation for many projects we've been involved with over the…
New Global survey reveals variation in Facebook ad clickthrough rates and cost per click
Value/Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: TBG Digital UK
TBG Digital are one of the largest agencies managing Facebook advertising campaigns worldwide, so it’s interesting to see their summary of trends in effectiveness in Facebook advertising across different sectors. This new research, released today, is based on 326 billion impressions for 266 clients across 205 countries.
Facebook advertising clickthrough rates
Although we only have an index rather than absolute clickthrough rates, it’s interesting to see that clickthrough varies dramatically across sector:
As would be expected lifestyle-related sectors are highest, but transactional sectors like Retail, Travel and Computer and Electronics aren’t significantly lower. As might be expected Finance is at the base of the league table.
Facebook advertising cost-per-click (CPC) rates
Again it would be good to have…
5 ideas to start your brand revolution in 2012
We're still in the midst of 2012 predictions, they're everywhere at the moment, mostly describing what's already out there. I'm not a futurologist, and if I am honest, I prefer to plan for the less predictable since that's what usually happens.
One trend I do observe, is how much marketing is changing (again, and faster). This is leaving a chasm of opportunity for the right organisations to step up. It has serious implications though... are you and your brand the revolutionary, or destined to be the cast-off of someone else's revolution? We've built our Marketing Manifesto of some of the changes that we think will help you falling into the chasm, but here I expand on some of these ideas.
So what's wrong with marketing?
It's one word: management, or lack of it. I believe that digital marketing…
Update relevant to Facebook advertisers
Value/Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended link: ReadWriteWeb reporting - describing change on 10th January
This is a relatively minor change within Facebook unless you’re actively advertising since it will affect your reach and costs. The main difference is that sponsored stories are now featured in each users news feed, so giving more chance to increase visibility.
The importance of Sponsored Stories is that they are like recommendations to friends of your fans - they appear in the ad. They can appear for apps and checkins, but the two most common types are:
Page Like. One of your fans liked one of your Page posts in the last seven days.
Page post Like. Someone liked your Page directly from Facebook or from the Like Box on your website at any point in time.
Marketing implications of the update
If you’re not using Sponsored Stories this is another argument…
Currently available on Google.com only
Importance: [rating=5]
Value: [rating=1]
Source: Google Official Blog annoucement
Make no mistake, Google's bold start to 2012, announced this week will have a massive impact on digital marketing in the years ahead if it retains its current form. Although the change has been widely covered, even in the main stream media, you may not have seen it yet since it's not available, in local engines the UK, Europe or elsewhere. We will let you know when it is.
How big a change is this?
If you've seen the Google.com site you'll know it's a big change for the user experience and the way companies gain visibility - so it will have big marketing implications we think. But in our discussions at Smart Insights, we've been arguing about how big the impact will be. It does depend on the type of search…
