The urgent need for risk-taking and creativity in marketing

I recently attended Seth Godin's presentation around his new book, the The Icarus Deception, a 'Penguin Live' event. I've been meaning to sit down and consider what I learned from it so that I could share it, so here are my key learnings from the man himself…

Icarus who?

If you don't know the reason for the name, The Icarus Deception, it centres around the myth of Icarus. You will know he ignored his father’s instructions not to fly too close to the sun, resulting in his home-made wings over-heating and ultimately in a fatal crash into the sea. Icarus, flew to close to the sun, he got burned, simple, that's the part everyone knows. The less known part of the myth is that Icarus was also warned about getting too close to the sea, about flying too low.…

Facebook Graph Search, Vine and Google Analytics Gallery are the biggest announcements

January is the time of year when many look again at their priorities for the year ahead. To help with this, Smart Insights ran a series of 8 free webinars on January 9th. If you would like to take a look, you can still view the #MarketingPriorities2013 Webcasts and Slideshares. Continuing the theme, Expert commentator Annmarie Hanlon will be speaking in February in a webcast on how to create the Perfect Marketing Plan. The brand new online brand of note in January was Vine. From the people who brought us 140 character tweets, so that we could say more with less, come 6 second videos. It’s based on technology Twitter purchased in 2012. It’s good to see some brands have been agile enough to trial the format, but I’m sure others will have larger, more…

Google Analytics 'Share Assets' for sharing report customisations within or between companies

I’m not sure if many people have discovered the ‘Share Assets’ option/button within the Profile menu of Google Analytics yet, but I only spotted it at the end of last year. With the launch of Google's New Analytics Solution Gallery which Dave has introduced we thought a reminder about this 'hidden feature' would be useful.

What is Share Assets?

Share Assets gives you a quick way to It’s a handy way of viewing and sharing all segments, custom reports and dashboards from one place. Select the configurations you want to share and then share the URL. The data relevant to each site in the profile isn't shared, it's only the customisation. How long has that been there? I'm not sure, but I'm a regular user, so not long. It certainly makes sharing configurations so quick and easy now. Really handy if you have…

Using social media monitoring to evaluate the success of your digital marketing campaigns and reach your goals

When planning your digital marketing strategy or campaigns, you probably have a range of targets and goals for social media in mind that you are hoping to achieve, and that will help you measure your success. But how do you assess whether you are reaching these goals in practice? In this post I will outline the type of goals to consider and tools and techniques to assess success. For example, you might consider one or a combination of the following as goals when approaching integrating social in your business: Increase in followers/fans Increase in requests for information Increase in leads Increase in sales (of a specific product/service, or of everything, or perhaps in a specific market). Social media monitoring allows you to add another string to your bow, so to speak, by allowing you to…

The new Google Analytics Solutions Gallery tools

Value: [rating=3] Recommended link: Google Analytics Solutions Gallery Google Analytics offers many features to customise its reports to a business, which is great for a free tool. But I know from running Google Analytics training courses that many of the customisation tools aren’t used, so reports aren't really tailored to a business and different users in the business. I think this is mainly down to the time and specialist input needed for customisation. Google are obviously aware of this issue since they have created a new set of tools within their Solutions Gallery to help users with customisation. I think this is a great initiative and will be useful both to marketers at companies and consultants and agencies improving reporting for their clients.

What type of customisations are available?

Customisation are available for three different types of assets…

Defining the four pillars of successful content

Many digital marketers are talking about 2013 being the year when Content Marketing becomes a priority. There’s been a lot of focus on tactical elements of content marketing, so in this blog post I will take a look at what I see as the foundations of a sound content strategy. A comprehensive content strategy project would also involve outlining a plan for content process, such as workflow and maintenance, but in this post we’re going to focus on the foundations of good content. To simplify content marketing to a manageable area you can work on, I see four main areas of a content marketing strategy that need to defined to create content useful for your audience and to give a return on investment to a business.

1. Customers’ goals

Questions to ask include: Who are you…

The Age of Context - our Anticipatory and Personalised future

A great reminder from tech commentator Robert Scoble speaking to a recent conference showing how digital marketers should create experiences in context.

According to Scoble, context is…

Knowing your customer in deep detail

A personalised experience based on where you are

A new way to work, do more faster

Midem Visionary Monday: The Age of Context from Robert Scoble

One specific trend he pulls out is, integrating Wearable Computing which he predicts will combine:

Big Data

Computation

Sensor Data

Social Network Data

Location Data

It was interesting to see this example of social context available specifically for brands working in the winery industry from Vintank.

Thanks to @Jas…

The popularity of video has led to a resurgence in interest in marketing using webcasting as a way to reach and engage business audiences, particularly given the reductions in travel budgets.   In this interview I ask Charlie Blackburn of webcasting service provider BrightTALK to take me through the options and give us some examples of what works.

Are webinars still effective?

Q. Webinars are still a core technique for engaging professional business-to-business audiences, but I think most would say they're suffering from burn out and it's more difficult to get audiences to attend. I expect you to say this isn't the case, but how do you show new clients there is still an appetite from decision makers for webinars. [Answer: Charlie Blackburn, Co-Founder BrightTALK] You're right that I don't agree. The obvious analogy is the continued growth of audiences watching videos, both online and increasingly…

Reviewing your Adwords campaigns to make them more effective

Paid search marketing using AdWords for cost per click (CPC) advertising can be a very effective way to bring targeted customers to your website. By targeting specific keywords, you can capture customers that are in a more advanced stage of the buying cycle and have a need that your product or service can fill. Without proper management, AdWords can get very expensive and, over time, lose its effect. That’s why you need to do periodic audits of your AdWords program. Performing a AdWords audit serves a few functions, but the main goal is to maximize the impact of your campaigns and, ultimately, your costs per conversion and return on investment (ROI). A mismanaged campaign can cost you more money than you need to spend and can also result in missed business opportunities. Below are some…

A new report reviewing how we use data to take business decisions

One of my passions within digital marketing has always been around improving online activities using the data available on online customer interactions. It's why we're called Smart Insights and a lot of our posts and guides show how to make the most of this data by asking the right questions to improve performance and take the right investment decisions. But this focus on data-driven improvement is a mindset and not one that everyone in marketing holds; it's not necessarily why they went into marketing as a career or they feel they must rely more on intuition and gut feel. This infographic based on research from Nesta from their useful report, Rise of the Datavores, shows that Datacores are surprisingly rare. I wondered how this compared to Smart Insights readers, so please let us know in this poll.   How…