Our roundup of research insights and best practice advice from the month
Doesn’t time fly? On the 30th April 2013 the WWW was officially twenty years old. How it’s changed and what a “wild ride it’s been” as someone @replied when I shared this. We certainly owe a debt of gratitude to Sir Tim Berner’s Lee, not only for the invention, but also his dedication to keeping it open through his work with the The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and other non-commercial organisations.
As always, this summary is based on updates in 5 key areas of online marketing.
Strategy and planning
The evolving skills of the modern marketer - one of most popular posts this month shows in a visual way what success on today’s WWW requires, particularly with integrating with other channels of course.
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Tint gives businesses an easy way to bring Social Media Feeds to their websites
Value: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Tint Gallery example
Last year, Chris Soames highlighted that companies are looking for ways to aggregate their social media content in one branded area, which we refer to as 'Social Hubs'.
There are already platforms or technology to support this, but recently Tint (http://www.tintup.com) has been getting rave reviews such as this intro from Rip Empson at TechCrunch. He explains how USC graduates, Tim Sae Koo, Nikhil Aitharaju, Eunice Noh and Ryo Chiba launched Tint in December 2012 as a simple, DIY platform that helps brands aggregate, curate and display social media feeds from multiple networks on their websites, in their mobile apps, Facebook pages and event displays.
So, it helps brands create social hubs on top of their digital properties. Businesses can link their Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest,…
Hubspot survey shows challenges and even greater opportunities for Inbound Marketing
Value: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Inbound Marketing Research, Update European Edition Now Available
Marketing in Europe? Hubspot have just released their European report on Inbound marketing, after gathering insight from over 400 Marketers in Europe to find out the key tips and strategies of how Inbound Marketing is successfully adopted, priorities and challenges this year. It also shows comparisons between marketing in Europe Vs the US.
Top 3 sources for lead generation for European Marketers is Social Media, SEO and Blogs!
Inbound Marketing is no longer the latest ‘buzzword’ since companies have been implementing it for years now since digital and social media marketing channels have been available. The question is: how effective is it? The notable shift from ‘interruptive…
Building a website that predicts the future (sorry no lottery numbers included)
You will have heard a lot about responsive web design (RWD) over the last 12 months, everyone seems to have an opinion about this hot topic. This post discusses the issue from a different viewpoint, showing the importance of creating responsive websites for devices yet to be invented.
Often posts on responsive web design explain what it is and the benefits of this approach. Here, however, we focus on the best, and in our opinion the only, way to design a responsive website to avoid this problem...
Responsive design has gone the way of the Discman!
As with other web technologies, the more popular and common responsive web design becomes, the more we expect from it. Let’s have a bit of nostalgia to make our point.
For those…
How today's Global Digital Marketing Leaders can get closer to their customers
There’s really no better way for global digital marketing leaders to learn about marketing to a new international market, or emerging market than by living in one, or two, or by visiting. I noticed that Marc Benioff of Salesforce has recently kicked of a Company Customer Tour and last year visited hundreds of customers worldwide
Although The Internet, makes doing business in an international context far easier than ever before there is still a need for close customer understanding from personal contact. Having recently moved from Egypt, Cairo, to Qatar, Doha, previously having lived in the UK and working virtually with counties in Latin America, Russia, Central Eastern Europe and Asia, as part of a multinational marketing team, I have a few year’s experience of…
What does Facebook Home mean for Marketers?
Mark Zuckerberg finally unveiled Facebook's mobile device strategy earlier in April.
After a continuous swirl of rumours speculating the arrival of the Facebook phone from when All Things D first reported on project ‘Buffy’ back in 2011, rather than building its own smartphone, as originally anticipated, Facebook has launched Home, its new software for Android operating systems.
The app will see users’ traditional home screen and menu replaced with ‘CoverFeed’, which displays Facebook notifications, images and message.
So why the decision to create software rather than hardware?
Free to download, the app can effectively be accessed by any of the 680m mobile users who own an Android device. As Zuckerberg said himself: 'We're not building a phone, and we're not…
The Modern Marketer is Part Scientist and Part Artist? Are you balanced?
On a daily basis, social and digital marketing platforms are evolving and developing. In the same way, Marketers are embracing these changes through upskilling or using their hidden skills.
This Infographic, from SalesForce and Pardot, visualises the new Marketer as having two sides to their skillset as an 'Artist' and 'Scientist' - balancing creativity and analytical skills. This has always been true, but the Scientist is more to the fore today? For example, Social Media = (Artist) and Manage your digital Relationships + (Scientist).
As well as being part artist, part scientist, modern marketers also increasingly have some of the most ridiculous job titles.…
Check the effectiveness of your company page with the new mobile page layout
Value/Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Facebook new mobile layout
Our commentary on the new Facebook mobile design
Facebook has always worked hard to optimise mobile customer experience since this is a common access mode. In this update announced on 23rd April it has updated company pages so its users can find information efficiently on their mobile devices.
It's now live and these are some of the changes we can expect to benefit from:
More prominence of most used features and information such as photos and location - relevant for multichannel retailers.
The Top page now includes our 'Likes, Call Message and Share'.
Page owners will see benefits including their important posts (offers and videos) appearing higher on their page on mobile devices and easier switching between public and admin views.
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Practical advice on WHO you need to execute your content marketing strategy
Many content roles I see are the domain of trained Journalists and Copywriters, but this doesn’t always add up. On the web, many of the best examples of engaging content, and certainly the most sharable, are visual in nature, and often application based. Thus creating content teams made up of skilled writers will limit success.
If you have a large site, with hundreds (or perhaps thousands) of product pages that need writing, then hiring copywriters to get the job done makes good sense. But if you’re also looking to create a good blog, regular email newsletters and possibly applications that integrate with social networks, then you’re going to need some Designer / Development resource as well.
If things are going to be promoted well, then a Community / Outreach Manager would be useful. Finally, to measure…
Reviewing the role of social media in CRM
Most brands understand the concept of promotion using social media but few understand how to attribute value in the same way as traditional broadcast media.
With the rise of the internet, customers have more choice and have access to more information. Not only are customers far more media savvy and less likely to buy into brand marketing, but they are making more and more purchase decisions based on their value set rather than need alone.
This works the same way for B2B as well as B2C brands, whether it be a product or service, we like to buy from a brand based on need fit but also our experience of the organisation. Factors such as personal recommendations, customer service experience and how well the brand values match our own are now key triggers for deciding on a brand's worth.
The traditional purchase process
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