Introducing Google’s new retail strategies

If you're a veteran of "Internet marketing", you'll remember Froogle, Google's shopping search engine which presented products freely submitted by retailers using XML feeds. In 2007, this became Google Product Search and you may have heard this is now being rebranded to Google Shopping. The Google announcement explains: "We are starting to transition Google Product Search in the U.S. to a purely commercial model built on Product Listing Ads. This new product discovery experience will be called Google Shopping and the transition will be complete this fall".    While Google Product will officially becoming, Google Shopping the more significant changes outlined below will only affect US product feeds & users for now. There is no date as yet for a wider roll out, but it's rumoured to be early 2013. However what Google does in the USA almost certainly makes it way across the seas. This is often a good thing…

How alternative models of the customer journey can help us build more realistic media plans and experiences

A couple of weeks ago I rolled out one of my favourite slides, the Forrester ‘spaghetti’ view of the online customer journey. I’m fond of Forrester’s reworking of the traditional sales funnel for the digital age. On the one hand, the reworked sales funnel probably is a more accurate picture of the way that people make purchase decisions online. But it isn’t easy to see how it would drive sensible digital strategies back in the real world:

To help gain better insight, we need to add the time dimension. Research can can show that decision times vary a lot by category and they're not short. This research…

Giving social business a human dimension

Over the past 15 years at IBM, Luis Suarez has carved out a reputation as a thought leader in knowledge management and more recently, in social business. He is currently the company’s knowledge manager, community builder and social software evangelist. IBM were one of the first companies to coign the term social business and it’s a core part of their Smarter Planet campaign.

What is social business?

Suarez is the first to admit that ‘social business’ isn’t really anything new. “To me, social business is a philosophical movement where you redefine the way you do business with your customers following a people-centric approach next to a customer-centred approach - where it’s not you telling the customer’s what they need or what they should have, it’s the customers telling you what they need that you need to…

Subject lines most popular, but landing pages and targeting most effective

Here's some interesting new research for Email marketers from the MarketingSherpa 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report:

The reason for the popularity of subject line testing is obvious, that's easier! The research shows that it's worth finding/making the time to become more sophisticated in targeting and tweaking landing pages, that's harder.  …

Our review of backlink analysis software tools and web services

Link analysis has always been an integral part to search marketing efforts. As with all marketing, you need to benchmark where you are and what your competitors are doing in order to put the right work in place and also to track performance. Within the last two years this process has become easier with a wider range of tools now available to aid you.

Search specialists will definitely know all of these and many more, but this list is aimed more at client-side marketers who want to benchmark their link quality against competitors, review SEO agency performance and spot opportunities for partnering with other sites, for example blogger outreach.

Comparison of data quality of backlink analysis tools

Added references to this excellent review of data quality from backlink analysis tools from Richard Baxter at SEOGadget. Don't purchase a subscription or use…

 The 5Cs for setting up an affiliate programme

Affiliate marketing continues to flourish as a key digital marketing tactic supporting a wide range of e-commerce sectors driving new revenue streams, and according to the IAB, the sector is now worth over £4bn. A recent Econsultancy affiliate report  highlighted the growing importance of affiliate marketing with key insights including: 48% of affiliates drive at least £5k per month for merchants, compared to only 31% of affiliates who were generating this much revenue in 2009. 30% of affiliates are now sending at least 20,000 visitors a month to merchants' websites

Affiliate Action Plan: the 5 C's

I've put together an affiliate action plan covering 5 key elements you should consider when managing a program, they are: Competitor analysis, Commercials, Creatives, Communication & Campaign Analysis. Some of the actions listed are to help your affiliate program stand out from the competition.

1. Competitor analysis - Before…

5 Ideas to reinvigorate your social media interactions

Every social media marketer reaches a plateau in terms of the way they interact with their audience. It’s a state where you’ve been active for quite a while and have garnered a respectable number of fans and followers who you're interacting with in a set way. Being on a plateau isn’t bad - it’s comfortable, steady, and it’s a good state to be at if you’re planning your next move. However, there are also some dangers of spending too much time on a plateau. Being too comfortable is a one way street to complacency, so while you’re free to bask in your respectable accomplishments, don’t stay on it for too long. Always be on the lookout for new social media heights that you can reach. Not sure where to start? Below are some practical ideas you…

Step Two - Talk

In this article we continue to explain the 6-step Conversion Architecture model we discussed in Part 1, which dealt with Step One – “Analyse”.  This 6-step process has been developed over the last 10 years of our work to become the foundation of all our clients’ projects.  

Step Two - Talk

If step one focused on data analysis from analytics, the ‘talk’ phase is all about the human analysis. In other words, you’ve perused all the hard stats, now you need to gain a more qualitative insight. You are not the audience for your website. Looks obvious when it’s written down, but I see websites every day that have clearly been created with little consideration for the customer. You need to understand your audience so you can construct a targeted strategy. I mean, truly understand them. You can look…

10 tests for social media usage which show social business maturity

We have spent the last five years trying to convince companies to engage with social media. From initial scepticism (‘this is all very interesting but it’s really not for us’), interest and enthusiasm for social media in the UK and other countries has grown rapidly over the last 18 months. The CIM social media benchmark research shows that the majority of companies now have some type of social media presence. However, most remain at an experimental/testing the water stage of social media maturity. Many view social media as another broadcasting channel for talking AT rather than WITH customers. Very few organisations have developed an integrated and coordinated Social Media Strategy fully aligned with and supportive of core business goals and objectives. Social media pitfalls remain common and suggest a company limited in…

New research shows social media use maturing in large companies

International brands who have a presence in many countries have a bigger challenge in managing social media marketing than companies who focus on a single market. The Third Annual Burson-Marsteller Global Social Media Check-up reviewed 100 companies in the Fortune Global 100 for their use of popular social networking platforms including: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and, for the first time, Google Plus and Pinterest. Companies were located as follows: U.S. = 29 companies Europe = 45 companies, Asia-Pacific = 23 companies Latin America = 3 companies Here's what I took from the infographic: Section 1. c 10 million social mentions a month. That's around 100,000 mentions per brand per month. Section 2. Branded YouTube content is increasing with 79% having a branded YouTube channel with an average of 2 million views. Section 3. A relatively good level of engagement (79%), response (70%) and updating…