A key mobile design trend in 2013
Mobile usage is only going one way. Up. Rapidly.
[caption id="attachment_9550" align="aligncenter" width="537" caption="UK mobile adoption exploding: 27 million regular users, 54% of all mobile users. Source: Comscore."][/caption]
But how good are the experiences we're building for customers? Designing experiences on mobile is challenging because of the form factor and because it's a relatively new design approach with the tools and technologies evolving fast. Brands also want to get to market fast.
Today's mobile designs often fail to differentiate brands
These challenges can lead to some "screen scrape" design approaches where every site looks similar, with little differentiation of brand or experience. These 4 retail sites show this:
Don't get be wrong, these sites show a lot of features of good…
8 key issues to review to make sure your blog supports company goals
This is the second in a series of blog posts aimed at helping business bloggers. The first post explored getting started and avoiding writer's block, sometimes an issue at this time of year. In this post, René Power examines the key elements of a successful business blog.
If you're running a business targeting other businesses in 2012, it is likely you have either read about or been advised to introduce a blog to your website. The benefits of business blogging are much chronicled - Dave and Chris both covered it from a commercial and SEO viewpoint.
But with a bewildering choice of over 250 million websites and 130 million blogs (with five million new ones coming online every year), your customers don't have a lot of time or attention. How does a corporate blog attract and retain readers? (Statistics…
Are your customers sunny sharers or walled worriers?
Value/Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: McCann London Facebook Page
Our customers are understandably worried about how the data they provide online is used and protected. But how worried are they really? How do their attitudes to privacy vary and how can we reassure them? This should be a concern to all marketers who collect and use data online, which must be the majority of marketers today.
I thought this was a really useful piece of global research based on a 6,525 sample in the US and five other markets with qualitative research from twelve markets.
Which are the main consumer privacy concerns?
The study has a lot of rich detail about specific consumer concerns and the actions they take. For example, this data shows that a sizeable proportion of customers prefer to closely control their online privacy.
…
A planned approach to make better use of video marketing
Video has now become a staple part of many business’ marketing toolkits, but there are still plenty out there who are yet to jump on the horse.
This guide is designed to help you get on that (still pretty young and frisky) horse and quickly. It is not an exhaustive guide instead we will point you to the resources you need to get your first video out there.
1. Work out how video will support your goals
Don't use video marketing because everybody else is. Instead, start with what are you trying to achieve as a business in 2012?
Your video marketing efforts should part of your marketing plan - an engagement tactic to support your goals. You should not be creating a video just because others are. Of course take a look at what your competitors are doing as well as…
5 reasons why you don't and 10 reasons why you could
Surely it's obvious, with today's digital marketing platforms like search and social networks, desktop and mobile web applications that you need a digital marketing strategy?
I don't think so, the obvious isn't always obvious, or practical to make happen, or even considered necessary. So, a couple of weeks ago we asked readers of SmartInsights.com whether their company, or if they work for an agency or are a consultant, their typical clients have one. These are the shocking? results...
Thank you if you voted or shared this post, we had around 110 responses, so a fair number, although we have no sample frame of who since it's just an informal poll.
As I suspected, there has been little change since we asked the exact same question back in 2010 as the chart below shows. This suggests that…
5 actions to minimise the impact of an address change
In my last post I summarized 9 common headaches to watch for when you change email service provider. This time I'm drilling down into the first of these, guidance to manage changing your from email address.
This guidance is valid too for other occasions when you change your from email address. Such as a change in branding, company mergers and acquisitions, moving transaction emails from your eCommerce system to your marketing system, or simply sorting out some historical oddities in your identity.
Your from email details are made up of the from display name and from address, such as 'Acme Offer <
[email protected]>'. The display name is 'Acme Offer' and from email address
[email protected].
In this post I'm concentrating on deliverability issues connected with change of email address, rather than consideration of what makes effective from email information, as this is a subject…
7 quick win ideas for your Google Adwords campaigns
At this time of year, search marketers are inundated with requests to push out new offers, react quickly to competitors’ promotions and, above all, maintain traffic levels and search engine visibility. However, January could be a great time for paid search marketers to beef up and fine-tune their Adwords campaigns in time for 2012 - I'll concentrate on quick wins for Google Adwords.
Here’s a list of housekeeping tasks and potential areas for expansion to investigate, once (if) the new year rush quietens down:
1. Run and review search query reports: If you have been pre-occupied with pushing out timely seasonal campaigns over Q4 then you may not have had time to review the actual searches that have triggered your ads.
If that sounds familiar, consider running a search query report. You may be surprised at the queries being entered, and by isolating frequently-repeated one,…
A roundup of what the experts say
[caption id="attachment_9311" align="alignright" width="322" caption="photo from UTC.edu"][/caption]
It's the end of the first week January and most of the influential bloggers / "experts" have published their predictions for what will change in the world of SEO in 2012. Rather than add to the noise and because most of the authors are far more knowledgable than I am I have decided to filter the predictions and give you the 3 most likely predictions of 2012 (in my opinion)
These are four best SEO 2012 roundups if you missed them:
Econsultancy
Search Engine Land
Search Engine Journal
SEOMOZ
1. Social Media Influence Will Impact Search Results
It will come as no surprise to most, indeed looking back, it's over a year since I reported "Official: Facebook and Twitter do influence rankings". Still, in 2012, precisely how metrics and engagement…
Benchmark the priority areas for your digital marketing strategy
The fact is, there isn't a perfect time for any benchmarking, so now as good a time as any to take a little time to reflect on your team or your organisations strenghts and weaknesses and how you feel that's bearing up against your top 2 or 3 competitors. So much changes in a year, internally and externally, and there's a lot to be said for a pragmatic review to ensure that your focus and undoubtedly limited resources are in the right place for 2012.
With this in mind, we decided to create a new Internet marketing benchmark tool for our Expert members.
What exactly do you health check?
[caption id="attachment_9345" align="alignright" width="271"] The Healthcheck tool now available to Expert members[/caption]
It's a little like going to a health clinic for a check-up, we believe, there…
By
05 Jan 2012
6 personal resolutions that apply to all online marketers
Just before the New Year, I had the pleasure of participating in a Focus.com webinar with Andrew Kordek of Trendline Interactive and Stefan Eyram of ClickMail, regarding email marketing trends for 2012. Below are five resolutions for the coming year which either came directly from that webinar or were inspired by it. Thanks to Stefan and Andrew for the insight and inspiration for this post!
1 Stop talking like a rocket scientist
We keep telling people social media marketing isn’t rocket science and then we use words like “integration” which sounds exactly like what a rocket scientist would say! It’s not that the words or terms are inherently bad, it’s just that we assume people actually know what they mean.
What we should be focusing on is putting online marketing (regardless of the channel) into context for people. This means using a little more…
