A practical approach to creating more effective content

Whether you are running a large scale publishing website, ecommerce site or simply a blog, today's marketing has a common theme; the requirement for amazing content to encourage engagement and sharing leading to sales. Utilising members from your marketing, PR & editorial team to form ideas for your site or client requires effective use of a meeting or thought shower as some people would say [a new term for the editor, apparently a politically correct version of brainstorm]. As with all meetings without the right structure they can quickly become a waste of time, hopefully the steps below will help you achieve a productive thought shower.

Thought shower prerequisites - understand current content marketing

Any meeting requires preparation, but equally this doesn’t need to be over engineered. Insights are key to empowering people in this thought shower. Answering the following questions about your existing content marketing…

We're now in a constantly changing digital landscape

Did you see this Comscore report about "Digital Omnivores"?  I think it's really useful for marketers.  Not because the information is revolutionary in any way, but because it's offering some seriously hard facts that can be taken to management to support business cases, marketing planning and ideas generation for marketing. It may help to have this in light of your own analytics, maybe it can help inform decisions that you're thinking of making, or even realise that you need to make. Increased WiFi availability and mobile broadband adoption in countries like the U.S., Australia and the U.K. are driving connectivity. Mobile phones already drive digital traffic around the world, while tablets are gaining steam. Tablets traditionally required a WiFi connection to access the Internet, whereas now they're increasingly driving traffic using mobile broadband access…

Scribblers shows how content marketing can be integrated into the Facebook timeline and website to help generate sales

I think case studies are a great way to learn; to discover techniques to improve marketing. In this example, we look at how online retailer Scribblers blends Facebook, email and web as one part of effective use of social media marketing.

About the case study company

Scribblers is a successful online retailer supplying calligraphers throughout the world with stock and advice ‘to meet all their calligraphy needs’. You can read a more detailed version of this case study also.

Scribblers uses an integrated mix of digital communication channels to reach and engage its niche target market. A combination of Facebook advertising and social marketing, occasional specialist magazine articles and shows, and a continuous presence in search using Google Adwords and SEO, is effective in driving new visitors to its website hub and Facebook…

Making the case for a winning localisation strategy

In my experience, many companies give localisation very little thought until growth begins to stagnate and they are forced to look at additional revenue from international markets. So what happens when you have exhausted the potential in your domestic market? Organisations are generally faced with two choices: 1. Develop new products or services to get more traction in your own back yard 2. Sell your existing products or services on a global scale Since developing innovative products and services can be an expensive, high-risk strategy, it is not surprising that companies will opt to tap into international markets as a preference. What may surprise you, however, is that very few have any sort of strategy around their localisation programs and so they eventually lose out to savvy competitors who were quicker at adapting to selling to a global audience.

Making the business case for localisation

Convincing Finance Directors…

This infographic shows why Wordpress wins "hands down"

I'm often asked this question by marketers taking their first steps into blogging as an individual or for their companies. These days I always answer without hesitation "Wordpress"! My justification is based around the experience you can create (Wordpress has great themes or is readily tailored); ease-of-use (as easy as Word or Pages); extensibility (plug-ins?); scalability (can it grow with us?); support (many agencies and freelance developers support it) and cost (it's open source, you only have hosting costs). This infographic provides a more qualitative assessment to support these arguments. The market share figures really show how Wordpress dominates. The average day sees an average 500,000 new posts on Wordpress.com, not to mention the many sites, like Smart Insights that run a bespoke hosted version for their blog or full content management system. If you're a…

Setting the right goals and KPIs for using internal company networks to support social business

Social networking has altered the way companies engage with their customers, changing their approach to areas such as customer service and brand management. Leading organisations have been taking the concepts of social networking and using them to transform the way they engage with their employees and partners, in areas as diverse as Sales, R&D, Communications and Marketing. Organisations are now adopting company or enterprise social networks on a much larger scale and company-wide initiatives are increasingly common. This results in a corresponding demand for provable success and measurable benefits. In line with this, the approach for measurement of business value of company social networks has also matured, comparable to how measures related to the web channel evolved from simply tracking the number of visitors to showing how those visits were turning into revenue. …

4 issues to consider for successful link-building

There are many parallels in digital marketing where the knowledge we acquire and learn can be transferred and applied to other online marketing tools and tactics. Over the past eights years, I have managed affiliate programs for start-up companies operating in different market sectors and have been fortunate enough to have gained experience with a "hands-on" approach rather than outsourcing the management of the affiliate programs. More recently, I have been focusing my online skillset in learning the art of SEO campaigns - and my current employers have provided me with a platform to deliver and implement a strategy for the organisation. What I quickly began to find is there are a number of common similarities in affiliate marketing and devising a link-building campaign. purpose being to provide similarities between running an affiliate marketing program and a link building campaign.

1. What's your USP?

Before you commence an affiliate/link building strategy it's…

5 reasons why organisations should develop their own online communities

In this multi-channel digital world within which organisations now operate, social engagement is a priority for many. With the growing use of social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest many companies see their communities as solely developing on these social networks. But should their online communities be limited to the social networks? This recent social media benchmark research from the CIM showed that just a quarter of companies have their own proprietary online community. So, in this post, I'll be looking at why this may be limiting your options for engagement through social media.

Is Social Media Marketing a burden for organisations?

Organisations have been attracted by participating on the public social sites through the promise of greater brand and business engagement, but for many, whether their investments are delivering…

An introduction to increasing visibility in Google for your Facebook page

Value/Importance: [rating=4] Recommended link: Free Distilled SEO for Facebook Guide

Our summary of the Distilled advice on Facebook page SEO

We thought we’d flag this new guide on Facebook from Distilled since it gives some good free, basic advice on how to increase the visibility of your Facebook page in Google. It’s NOT a guide for SEOs, rather it’s an introduction for business owners. You can download a short PDF at the link above which summarises this video: …

5 simple techniques to consider to increase your Twitter following

I’m often asked how you can build followers on Twitter. The truth is that there isn’t any secret to doing this and buying followers or using autofollow systems is a short sighted cheat which isn’t a good idea. Buying followers is like hiring people to line up outside your bar to make it look busy. You might get some new people lining up because of the crowd, but if your bar sucks, they won’t be staying no matter how many people you’ve paid to get in line. Leveraging Twitter for your brand marketing simply takes hard work and effort. Here are five ways I've found effective to build your brand on Twitter:

#1 Participate in chats

There are regularly scheduled Twitter chats on just about any subject you can think of. Whether its industries or special interests, there’s a good bet there’s a regular…