Guidance and examples for Buying Guides relevant for other sectors too

‘Buying Guide’ or 'Buyer's Guide' content are a common SEO tactic particularly amongst retailer ecommerce sites, but they can be used in other types of site too such as financial services. They're popular since they tick many of the boxes for effective on page SEO. They're naturally rich in keywords, dense in character count and recognisably original, it’s an easy target to hit on your SEO checklist. They also enable you to link to your main target category and popular product pages with relevant anchor text, so boosting their effectiveness.

Potential customers also love Buying Guides, since, done well, they’re a great research resource in the early ‘information gathering’ stages of the purchasing decision process.

If they provide great advice and a good experience in navigating them,…

Impact and usage of Tripadvisor for companies marketing in the tourism sector

MediaMosaic have compiled a useful Infographic on Tripadvisor, collated from  sources including Comscore, Tripadvisor and Forbes to provide insight into marketing travel destinations. As the tourism industry is growing, WWTC forecasts that by 2023 it will be worth 10% of global GDP and creates 115 bn for the UK economy each year - it's still a growing sector. Marketers working in tourism are seizing the opportunity to use Tripadvisor to promote their services, holiday destinations, accommodation, attractions flights  and restaurants to name afew. Tripadvisor connects with a large audience; content is viewed by 300m people monthly across other sites,  has more than 20m registered members and 60m reviews. We feel that Mediamosaic's Infographic is a great resource to show…

A briefing on how 13 of the most significant algorithm changes impact SEO ranking

As you may have heard, Google has released a major update to its algorithm which has seen a significant impact on search results in the UK and the US. Penguin 2.0 released on the 22nd May 2013 is the latest in a long line of updates made by Google aimed at improving search results presented to the user. Although Google has made several changes to its Penguin algorithm over the past year, this latest update is perhaps the most significant and has changed the way Google bots rank all pages on a site not just the homepage. The algorithms are designed to highlight only the best results from a search term and Penguin 2.0 has been created to weed out paid for content that masquerades as ‘real’ content such as advertorials, sponsored content etc so that the user finds…

Making your brand promises matter

"Move from [product] differentiation to actually making a difference" Umair Haque, the director of the Havas Media Labs and Harvard Business Review blogger

Earning your way into a consumer's heart is something that we know is important. Helping consumers feel something positive is the goal, convincing someone of purchase can only be an easier win as a result, surely?

The case for this being important, I think we'd agree, has never been as strong, when so much of marketing success hinges on forming connections with consumers, earning even seconds of their valuable time.

This at a time when despite the billions of £/$'s spent on marketing, Haque's latest report states that consumers just don't care - 73% of people don't care if the brands in their life disappeared tomorrow. Ouch, and yet so obvious. If consumers are that indifferent, then we have to make them feel, we have to…

Questions to ask to improve the quality of online customer service by social media

With 44% of the adults now using the web to share grievances the importance of delivering a good quality of customer service across channels is self-evident. Frank Eliason blazed the trail for best practice in delivering customer support by social media  some years ago now, demonstrating how social platforms had the potential to usher in a new age of customer service. But some five years later a growing number of commentators are voicing their disappointment that the revolution has never materialised, including a recent feature on MyCustomer.com by IBM’s Guy Stephens. So what has happened? Was social media customer support a flash in the pan? Did our initial excitement blind us to the fundamental impracticalities of…

Marketing Automation Tool recommendations

Value/Importance: [rating=4]

Recommended link: B2B Marketing Automation Tools 2013: Marketers Guide

We thought it would be helpful to share this new free report since we have had several recent questions on our Answers forum about selecting CRM and Marketing Automation systems - CRM seems preferred as a term in the UK.

Can anyone recommend a marketing automation solution?Selecting a CRM DatabaseCRM tool recommendations

This guide provides many practical tips, checklists and advice for companies seeking to source the right marketing automation tool, ideas to overcome barriers and challenges, information to help justify the requirement for it and to find out the major players, and trends.

The 61 page document collates findings from primary and secondary research including interviews with marketing adopters, vendors of marketing automation and leading industry leaders.

You can access the full report to…

Content planning made easy

Over the past 18 months to two years it seems there has been ever-increasing volume of advice on content marketing. You would have to have been on a very long holiday or living under a rock to not notice how content marketing is a huge topic and an industry worth $44 billion and that's just in the United States. While there are many posts exhorting us to "create awesome content" there is a big practical challenge of how you plan and resource this content creation. One specific problem many of us face is how to encourage other specialists in our companies to create content which we have covered in this post based on a discussion on persuading others in your company to create content for you. I wanted to add to this by reviewing the issue of when you're face with a blank piece of paper…..what content…

Improve efficiency and effectivness through IMM

As marketers, we know that integration across media, channels and campaigns is important, but it's not discussed as often as practices and examples of individual channels. So I thought it would be interesting to summarise this talk by Lorna Loney, Senior Applications Consultant for Teradata Applications (Aprimo). She gave an insightful presentation at Connect2013 in London, on 'Integrated marketing management, you can also download her full presentation here on Integrated Marketing Management. The focus of her presentation was on how poor internal structures, systems, processes and a lack of integration across the organisation can impact the customer experience and marketing/business performance. This diagram shows the nature of the challenge.

Marketing challenges

From her experience, she has seen many marketing challenges which include: inefficient and manual processes poor internal audit trails poor performance management lack of processes to manage problems and lack of…

Changing your mindset to make yourself more valuable

Back in 2012, I wrote a blog post,  Time to create your own future, it referred to the gradual cultural change facing our global economy, in part due to the recent global recession but also moving away from the Industrial era and moving towards a more globally connected economy. It questioned how many more of us are beginning to change our working culture, how more of us are taking charge of our own destiny, or, even working for organisations, how you can change your mindset to make yourself more indispensable?.

Godin's reference to PERL

In the book Linchpin '"How to drive your career and create a remarkable future", Godin refers to a system used by corporations synonymous within the industrial era and a system that still…

Using Adobe Edge Reflow for RWD

In a recent blog post we wrote an article on the importance of taking a content-centric approach to responsive web design (RWD) in order to future proof your site from the endless stream of new devices of various shapes, sizes and resolutions. In this follow-up MMT Digital’s CTO, James Cannings, talks about new tools to help in this process. James spoke about this approach passionately at Internet World earlier this year. Everybody we speak to (or has responded to our blog posts) agrees with the responsive approach in principle, but there are problems with many implementations... The reality is that many responsive websites are still built with the key breakpoints set at device specific resolutions (e.g. the pixel width of an iPad in landscape mode) rather than setting the breakpoints where your content 'breaks' (or just doesn’t look great on…