Creative Content Marketing with Lee Odden: Connecting Brands with Receptive Consumers
This Friday April 12th 2013, join Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Online Marketing and author of Optimize for a free Smart Insights webcast on Creative Content Marketing - view here. In this post Lee introduces 5 ideas for creative content marketing and will expand on these with examples and more tips in the webcast.
In the webcast Lee will teach webinar participants how to Get Better Results with Creative Content Marketing. It’s a topic he knows well, in practice at his agency and as a marketing thought leader sharing his content framework at major industry events from London, England to New York City.
Alongside conversion rate optimisation, content marketing is this year’s top priority for digital marketers. It’s no wonder; companies are tripping over themselves to be noticed over the deafening din of marketing noise facing an increasingly attention-deficit consumer.
In…
Social media: why you need to consider ROE on Social Media
The days and ways of traditional marketing are changing. While companies are still pumping hard cash into print, TV and radio ads, Social Media has become a key ingredient of any marketing plan. However, there is a major difference.
While in traditional marketing, once the ad/s have hit the medium, there is not much one can do but, to sit there and calculate the return on investment (ROI) using various campaign measurement metrics. On Social Media it is a different story altogether. As Social Media is always alive', the marketers need to remember that they have to engage with the customer 24/7 and 365 days of the year. This 'constant contact' allows you to approach, respond and react in real time.
Hence to achieve better results a continuous effort has to be made by businesses to satisfy the ever intelligent customer on…
Ensure you have the right #smalldata foundations in place before you begin looking for answers in #bigdata
You can't have failed to have noticed the interest in Big Data. Of course, there have been people debating whether this is actually a worthwhile term. After all, “big data” is just data… but bigger...
Once the concept becomes more widely applied, it will probably go back to being just data, but the increase in the amount of data available made it necessary for some to make the distinction. Like most marketing technology terms it is useful good to have a word to show the value of the concept.
Applying Big Data principles to affiliate marketing
Simply put, I think that the more data you have, and the better you become at analysing it, the better it is for you and your business. After all, a decision…
How Big Data and Predictive Analytics improve marketing
Predictive Analysis research and 'Big Data' is helping companies to improve their marketing, through accessing multiple sources of data and employing specialist staff to 'understand the data', providing actionable data which Marketers and Decision-makers can use to improve performance.
This IBM and the Aberdeen Group 'Big Data for Marketing' research set out to identify the ‘Best in Class’ practices for companies providing accurate information in an efficient way, to support key Decision-makers and their planning processes.
The Infographic below summarises the top strategies, results and capabilities:
It highlights that it has helped companies to become more efficient, improve their decision-making and overall performance, through actionable high quality data analysis. The detailed report draws out the technologies and business…
Nested Comments are currently a "work-in-progress"
Facebook rolled out yet another change in the last couple of weeks which enables nested replies.
My understanding was that the new feature was only being rolled out to pages with over 10,000 fans, however I was offered it last week so clicked the "like" button. Beware that it doesn't really work on mobile but on the desktop version it is potentially a useful feature for posts with multiple comments and responses.
If you haven't seen the above notification then go to Edit Page and Manage Permissions. From there tick "Replies".
Now I can totally see the sense of nested replies in that people can easily respond directly to comments without the need for an @name before the comment and the resultant scroll up the page to read the original…
Ideas for improving Basket Abandonment Emails that are relevant to other types of email follow-up
On a recent webinar, a question was posed that I thought was worth a second look:
'On an abandonment programme, sending a discount to encourage a purchase may not necessarily be a good idea, so what would be a good hook to get their interest peeked again?'.
This touches on another subject; the inevitable decline in response rates for basket abandonment emails. Some argue against this, but it is inevitable. I consider basket abandonment emails as just another product and therefore they will inevitably follow the same path as any other product, as illustrated in the classic graph below.
So, what can you do to ensure that your results do not decline?
5 Tips to improve email response rates for basket abandonment
Tip 1 The Basics
Please excuse me…
Google Analytics adds Data Hub and Trackbacks to the Activity Stream Reports
Value/Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Google Analytics post: the Activity Stream in Social Reports
In March 2012, we highlighted Google’s new Social Analytics as they were then described in the Beta we were reviewing. In August 2012 the Social Analytics feature became part of the Social Reports we now see in Google Analytics as a standard feature.
This latest update to Social Report has two new additions:
1. Data hub activity - This feature, shown below, was originally available through a drilldown, so isn’t entirely new, but is now highlighted in the menu as Data hub activity.
It's an interesting reminder from an SEO perspective that Google is able to track comment activity on a blog. If you're setting up a blog it's worth using a Google Data Hub partner. I recommend using Disqus which we use, or Livefyre.
…
Examples of how to use the new widget, event and mobile segmentation features
Google Analytics 'Realtime' features launched almost 2 years ago, and brought plenty of practical benefits to tool. For example, see these 5 ways to use Google Analytics Realtime from the excellent Helen Birch.
The set of Realtime tools has now been updated with some very useful extras. Here are my 3 favourite updates, and a couple of reasons you may choose to use them:
Realtime Dashboard Widgets.
Realtime Event Reports.
Realtime Segmentation by Desktop / Mobile / Tablet.
Here are some screengrabs and notes on each of the changes:
New Feature 1. Realtime Dashboard Widgets:
Google have added ‘realtime’ widgets to dashboards. The tool to add those looks like this:
Here’s how they look within the dashboard:
(minor note: ‘dimensions’ aren’t yet working for me there. I presume they’re fixing this)
New Feature…
Learning from Zig Ziglar and Marc Benioff
As a busy marketer working client-side, you'll often hear yourself - and others - talk about not having enough time. That there aren't enough hours in the day. I know from my own (sometimes painful) experiences, when I sometimes sit working on the wrong stuff at 1 AM, that this is rubbish - that we all get the same minutes in the day, it's how we choose to spend them that matters. I believe that it's a matter of focus.
The challenge of focus
Seth Godin recently wrote about FOMO (fear of missing out) and it really resonated from a marketing perspective. Passionate marketers often run themselves and each other ragged, worrying if we're all missing out on the latest insight, learning, app, model, idea, case study or news piece. I understand that, it's often…
YouTube passes 1 billion monthly users showing the opportunity for video marketing
We think video is still an underused marketing tool for companies given its popularity with consumers and the many options for video marketing. As our new 7 Steps guide to video marketing explains, enthusiastic adopters are using it to improve SEO rankings, site engagement and customer conversion. Our guide shows how to create and implement a strategy to make the most of the opportunity from video marketing.
As an example of this opportunity, Paul Roger's recent post on using products to increase conversion rate showed the power of video to persuade consumers about a product. For example, Matt Lawson, Head of Conversion at ao.com explains:
“Video gives us the opportunity to wow our customers and this in turn delivers results. We have tested and proven that when someone watches our video reviews they’re 120.5%…
