S**t happens...

There's a lot of discussion in the press after the hacking of Burger King's Twitter account, and more recently the same has happened to Jeep, as it has many brands before. What are the implications?

It's time for brands to step up

The talk now of course is about security, protecting brands that use Twitter enabling multi-factor authentication (as Facebook do) and so on. We need to make it *safe*. Haha - Are you kidding me, aren't we missing the point? Do brands need armbands and guarantees before they feel safe in the murky and uncontrollable world of social media? This issue of security is symptomatic of the bigger problem, I feel. Let's be clear here, it's not Twitter's 'fault', they provide a free service for us all to use, if they can provide additional free features, then great (paid ones if we want…

A briefing on the Facebook Exchange (FBX)

Most social media marketers largely relied on the Facebook MarketPlace Ads to reach out to the billions of Facebook users each month. Although they were relatively effective in marketing, Facebook saw the need of introducing a better and more reliable social advertising option - The Facebook Exchange, otherwise popularly referred to as FBX. FBX is a system where Facebook sells high quality inventory ads through an auction to many marketing bidders (Real Time Bidding). It significantly helps marketers reach out to the valuable consumers on Facebook.  FBX enables advertisers to serve tracking cookies on users' browsers as they visit advertiser or publisher sites and then retarget those users with relevant ads once they enter Facebook, often for remarketing, i.e. to remind them about a retailer site they have visited for example. …

Ideas to improve the effectiveness of marketing using social media marketing platforms

Social media marketing is important; enough has been said on the matter. On the surface, many facets of social media marketing through platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ seem simple. But effective marketing goes deeper than that. Executing this marketing is a more nuanced affair. It isn't simply a matter of "doing it," there has to be a clear goal in mind, with an overarching ethos and objectives that align with that. It’s not always a matter of avoiding doing it “the wrong way.” Doing the “right thing” the wrong way can be just as worthless, so let’s let's look at some common misconceptions about how to go about marketing on social media.

1. Myth: update constantly

A social channel with nothing on it is a dead one, and nobody will want…

Introducing Card Sorting and two tools for managing it

We read a huge amount of visitor feedback from our clients’ sites. One of the most common complaints from visitors is that they can’t find what they are looking for. This is a serious problem: these visitors are actually unable to spend money. Fortunately, there are several straightforward ways of fixing the problem. One of them is to optimize the information architecture of your site. “Card sorting” is a simple technique that allows your users to do this for you. With card sorting, you write the name of each section of your site onto an index card. You then ask one of your users to arrange the cards into groups that make logical sense. If you do this with several users, you’ll start to notice trends (and new ideas) about how your…

10 tips for improving visibility for a new blog

If you already have a blog and have made it the hub of your content sharing online, then what's next?  I would like to share my top 10 tips that you can apply at any time to improve your blog’s visibility even if you have relatively limited resources for blogging. The tips are mainly intended for those new to blogging, but I hope seasoned bloggers may get some ideas or reminders from it. We are all looking for ways to improve visits to our blogs without doing extra writing!

Top 10 tips for improving your blog visibility

1. Optimize your blog for SEO Improve your keyword research.  It will help to determine what keywords need to be included in your posts. Tools such as Wordtracker, SEMRush, and Google AdWords Keyword Tool will help you choose keywords…

Every £1 said to generate £11 returns for online performance marketers

At the recent IAB Affiliate Marketing Council, the IAB released the findings of an AMC and PWC ‘Online Performance Marketing’ (OPM) Study. The study was commissioned to outline the growth and size of the affiliate marketing industry (lead generation is included in the Online Performance Marketing umbrella). The main headline was the scale of the market, it generated £9bn of transactions in 2012 in the UK. Of the £9bn, £8bn was accounted for by Affiliate Marketing. Advertisers in the arena spent £814m on OPM in the same period. This accounts for £1 spent for every £11 made.

The study found that there were between 3,000-4,000 advertisers working with 10,000 publisher websites. This resulted in 100 million transactions and 70 million leads generated. What is also promising for the…

Examples showing how to help conversions after shoppers click Add to cart or Basket

When you run an ecommerce website, marketing doesn’t stop when your customer clicks the “Buy now” button.  According to research by the Baymard Institute, the average online shopping cart abandonment rate is 66.22%. In order to encourage your online customers to input their credit card information, and complete the purchasing track, you need to keep marketing to them throughout the entire process.

Here are 5 tips on how to convert your online customers

1. Use informative product pages The more information you provide on your product pages, the more likely your customers will complete their sales. Check out this product page from ModCloth and the wealth of information it provides to the customer: An engaging product description with a tab containing additional details. Information on product…

5 approaches for success in managing social media

Social media certainly isn’t the new kid on the block anymore. And by the end of last year, it was clear that brands were beginning to grow in confidence on the platform, and find their voice. We're seeing maturity in the way that decisions are made about investment in social media and how it's managed. We talked to specialists on approaches for managing social media, these are the trends that they see. 1. Businesses will continue to shift investments away from Facebook and back to on-domain communities. “In 2013, businesses that had previously shifted marketing funds away from their traditional dot-com domain towards Facebook will reverse that trend,” predicts Rob Howard, founder and CTO of Telligent. “Research from Forrester Research, Inc., and other leading analyst firms continues to validate the need for organisations to invest in their own…

The Shape Of Things To Come? How social media should influence our campaign creativity

Noticed anything different about snowmen this winter? Of course, the Christmas episode of Dr Who might have prompted a few of us to revise the long-held perception of them as representations of jolly, portly folk prone to roaming the skies while singing.

But what about in real life? Have you noticed that the traditional and rather simple model – two balls of snow (one big, one small) a couple of twigs for arms, a carrot for a nose and lumps of coal for eyes – is changing? Across the world, a fall of snow now seems to be more a blank canvas; a chance to go out and create something inventive, different, eye-catching. And it would seem we have social media to thank for that. Thanks to our smartphones, it’s not just our neighbours…

What has email got to do with website conversion?

“WTF?” – That’s most people’s first reaction when I try and explain how important email can be for site conversion. But if you think about it logically; email is a great touchpoint for communicating with your existing customers and registrants (those that traditionally have higher conversion rates), so it makes sense that if you can maximise the impact of these visitors you can positively influence online conversion. Ultimately, deployed at the right touchpoints, email enables you to continue user journeys even when the user is not on your site. Below is a simple flow chart showing how email can aid specific user journeys to increase conversion. Whenever people talk about the elements of conversion rate optimisation (CRO) they mention MVT (or testing in general), analytics, usability, user experience (UX), databases, recommendation engines, personalisation etc… What these…