The latest in marketing from November 2012
November is now synonymous with Movember in many countries. Have you heard the story of Movember’s growth? It’s been great to see the growth of this cause in recent years. This year it seems that every other person is supporting it. It’s an interesting story of how Movember has grown from 30 Mo Bros in Melbourne, Australia in 2003 to 854,288 Mo Bros and Sistas worldwide in 2011.
Our friends at First 10 have a Movember team page, one of over 30,000 teams in the UK taking part to raise money. With the Dads of two of the Smart Insights team members affected by Prostate Cancer it’s close to our hearts too.
Strategy and planning
There’s a diverse mix of free tools available to support analysis for planning; one of the enjoyable aspects of working in digital marketing today. In…
An introduction to good practices for Welcome mails
To make your welcome emails work well, start by thinking through the range of motives that lie behind someone visiting your website and signing up for email? Let’s look at one example: A prospective customer has searched online, Facebooked friends for recommendations and ended up visiting your site, they haven’t purchased but have signed up for email.
Putting this into a real life context; a customer walks into your store, browses through several different items but doesn’t buy anything. In their way out they ask if you can send them further information about the products they were looking at.
Would a salesperson watch them walk away or would they take some time to tell them why they should buy from you, the great range that you have, present a few customer favourites or highlight your no quibble returns policy and help them make their mind…
Is there really a best length for an email subject line?
Yes, there is an answer to the question of what is the right length for a subject line. In the words of Deep Thought, "you're probably not going to like it". Nonetheless, I am going to tell you.
In case you don't know, Deep Thought is the computer in Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, built to answer the ultimate question of "what is the meaning of life, the universe and everything".
Deep Thought was the most powerful computer ever made and took some millennium to work out the answer, it is after all a difficult question. Needless to say great expectation and excitement built up around the day the answer would be given.
On that day Deep Thought announced there was indeed an answer, but warned that his makers would probably not like it. Deep Thought pronounced the answer as the number…
Although interacting through social media can be time-consuming, stressful even, many aspects can be automated or you can rely on organic sharing. In other words, with just a little bit of setup work and steady management from a company you can reap the rewards without so much effort. Businesses often get caught up in the hype of scheduling tools, analytics, and the numbers game, and while this is important, there are other techniques.
Now don’t get me wrong—scheduling tools and careful Social Media analysis is great, and in many cases necessary. You want to make things easier, and these tools really are helpful. However, there are also ways that you can get your friends and followers to do a little bit of promotion and work for you. All it takes it a little bit of preparation.
How to make sure you’re using the built-in advantages of Social Media?
If you want to stop…
Social Business Index 2012 shows Top 20 Social Businesses worldwide
Through 2012 there has been a shift from discussing narrow social media tactics such as engaging audiences through social networks to broader strategies of integrating social interactions between customers, employees and partners across business processes as social business. At the start of the year, as one example of a social business leader, we shared this video from Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts where she explains her vision of how Social Business will transform her brand.
This new infographic shared by Forbes shows the World’s Top 20 social brands as rated by the Dachis Group Social Business Index. Most of the organisations are US-based, but there are some European and Asian businesses further down the list.
To find out more about the scope of social business see this post from Jim Hamill, where…
New techniques to assess the impact of Facebook ads on conversions
Value (larger businesses): [rating=4] (smaller companies): [rating=1]
Recommended link: Techcrunch summary
With recent research being used to assert by Forrester and Business Insider that Facebook and Twitter Do Almost Nothing for Sales, this is an interesting measurement initiative by Facebook that urgently needs to prove to advertisers and shareholders alike that Facebook does influence sales.
The measurement approaches applies to Facebook advertising rather than wider Facebook marketing using company pages. There is certainly a need to prove the value of Facebook advertising with high profile advertisers like GM terminating a $10 million investment in Facebook advertising earlier in the year.
The new ad tracking options in Facebook
1. View tags give a method of placing cookies on users’ devices where they view a Facebook ad. View Tags are supported for Marketplace ads and Premium ads in Self Serve. I’ve marked this feature as…
An introduction to responsive website design for marketers
The Olympics were fantastic this year, the atmosphere was electric and the performances were first class (not to mention Danny Boyle's staggering opening ceremony).
The only problem that I had was that I kept on missing the first and last 5 metres of each race. You see, my television is very old, and can’t cope with content that has been created for the panoramic screen. If only my television was as responsive as an increasing number of websites...
So What is the Responsive Web?
Responsive Website Design (RWD) is a concept widely attributed to Ethan Marcotte, who takes inspiration from the experimental movement Responsive Architecture (see pioneering Nicholas Negroponte for further reading).
The aim of RWD is to create one website design that adapts to each environment that it is being viewed in. Whether being viewed from a traditional PC browser, or perhaps a new android tablet,…
... and who isn't?
Google+ can no longer really be called "new" since it was launched over 18 months ago and is now estimated to have 400 million users of which 100 million are active.
To mark the launch of the new guide to Smarter Marketing using Google+, which I have written with Liz Edwards, the end of this post shows 10 examples of brands who are active on Google+ and using it to sell through daily promotions mixed with other interactive content. But this isn't the whole story of Google+, some brands don't seem convinced or perhaps they or their agencies aren't organised enough to communicate regularly. So we thought we'd start with these...
Examples of brands who AREN'T using Google+ actively
As we were preparing the guide we noticed that many companies have been unable to sustain their commitment to Google+. Surprising when you think of their scale and the…
5 Reasons why Facebook Edgerank shouldn't be taken for granted and how to improve it
Each time you check your Facebook account, it’s a given that you’re going
to check your News Feed. Why? Because you want to know what's going on with
your friends, what new things they’re checking out, and how you can be a part of it.
But Facebook doesn’t let you see everything each of your 500 friends is doing. It would end up being such a huge, fast-moving mess on your feed that reading an update would tire you out. This is why Facebook introduced Edgerank.
What is Facebook Edgerank?
Edgerank is an algorithm Facebook uses in order to determine what should appear on a user’s News Feed by looking at your interactions and your interests so that it can show you what you most…
Is that really the case?
This headline from Business Insider has to be the most misleading of the year for me. It’s certainly engaging, but what's it based upon? When Andy Lloyd Gordon shared it through Twitter yesterday I couldn’t resist clicking to see what this claim was based on.
The report by Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester Research showed that less than 1 percent of the online transactions amongst US customers could be traced to a social media post.
The article states:
"Social tactics are not meaningful sales drivers.
While the hype around social networks as a driver of influence in eCommerce continues to capture the attention of online executives, the truth is that social continues to struggle and registers as a barely negligible source of sales for either new or repeat buyers.
In fact, fewer than 1% of transactions for both new and repeat shoppers could…
