A review of the "need-to-know" developments in digital marketing in August 2013
The most significant changes in August relate to LinkedIn and Facebook marketing, so if your business is active on these social platforms, be sure to check you heard about these updates. There is also a major update to Google Analytics which we cover in our section on User experience, analytics and conversion optimisation.
Our regular roundup is delayed a little this month due to holiday time, back to the end of the month for September!
Strategy and planning
In August, we launched two new features on Smart Insights to help members with strategy and planning. These also have related free versions that can help all site visitors, so I thought worth flagging up here.
Our Online Marketing Statistics compilation is aimed at helping companies make the business case for investment in digital marketing and benchmark their performance against others. The free feature is…
What is the future for SEO?
Danyl Bosomworth suggested, a little light-heartedly, in his recent Smart Insights article ‘SEO is dead’, that one of the ideas for resetting your SEO agenda is to ‘Forget SEO and forget Google’ and in this he is absolutely correct.
SEO really only has itself to blame for the predicament in which it finds itself. Daily emails bombarding your inbox promising untold wealth from a number one position on Google, ‘guaranteed’ link building schemes that ‘Google won’t penalize’ and many other ridiculous claims have made SEO a very bad name for itself.
Of course it wasn’t always like this. There are many SEO professionals out there who have always had the best interests of clients at heart, have striven to produce good quality content and links and have generally behaved with propriety in a landscape dominated by excess and greed.
Even today you can buy…
Customer satisfaction measurement approaches from BT and Henley Business School
Customer effort score may be the new kid on the block, but just like other loyalty measurement tools such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction score (CSAT), it sharply divides opinion.
In this article I review my discussion with Professor Moira Clark from Henley Business School and BT's Dr Nicola Millard asking whether customer effort score is help or hype?
First emerging in 2008, the team behind the research, the US Corporate Executive Board (CEB), challenged the notion that companies must ‘delight’ customers and argued instead that what customers really want is to simply be given a satisfactory solution to their service issue.
Additionally, the research claimed that excessive levels of customer service (such as offering free products or services) will only make customers slightly more loyal to…
Selecting the most relevant Social Customer Care metrics
As I read through the different types of social media care metrics, how they should be interpreted, and how they relate to ROI, I was struck by one thought: who do these measures benefit?
So, I put together a quick table drawing the different metrics, categories and ROI together. The image is a bit blurry, but if you click on the table you can see where I take the different metrics, categories and ROI from the original article.
The next column is ‘Company benefit’, followed by ‘Customer benefit’, followed lastly by ‘Will this resolve the customer’s issue’.
My two observations are:
1. Quality is one of the categories that Walter Van Norden (Telus) proposes. Interestingly, there are no metrics for Quality.
2. It is obvious from the last three columns…
Benchmark response times on delivering customer service via social media
When I started writing books about Internet Marketing in 2000, I was interested to look beyond ways to use the Internet to grow leads and sales. It seemed that Internet-based customer service 'Web Self-Service' as we called it would also have a strong role.
PR Smith and I emphasised this with the 5s Goals for businesses to consider in what we now call Digital Marketing. The 5Ss are Sell, Speak (a trialogue between a brand, it’s customers and other web users), Serve, Save, Sizzle (add value to the brand.)
We advised finding the gap between customer expectations of online service against what a brand was delivering and then trying to plug that gap by improving customer service.
So, what is the state of online customer service responsiveness today, specifically through social media?
Well back in the day,…
Do colours really have an impact on conversions when it comes to web design?
Is there a 'British' web colour palette, or a Chinese one? Have web users from around the world adjusted to a Western led approach to colour and is it standardised? Within this blog, these and other questions will be assessed by GlobalMaxer’s cultural conversion expert Joe Doveton.
[caption id="attachment_29592" align="aligncenter" width="531"] Source: Visibone[/caption]
From feeling blue to shaking off a black mood, phrases can express a linguistic synaesthesia of emotions, commonly shorthand for an experience articulated through colour. By no means is this limited to English either, with most languages having their own such as the German’s 'blauer Montag' (a day off work), the French 'une peur bleue' (a morbid fear) and the Swedish 'sväva på rosa moln' (to be in love).
So, how important are the cues of colour in web…
Keep calm and keep mailing...
[caption id="attachment_29574" align="alignright" width="269"] Webmail clients from Email Client Market Share (Litmus)[/caption]
Like a lot of people of a certain age and disposition, I draw my wisdom from the novels of Douglas Adams.
For example, the front cover of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has practical advice for many marketing situations. It says:
"Don't panic"
This comes to mind whenever one of the webmail services changes something.
Each such change brings forward a host of virtual "the end is nigh" placards, with posts and articles proclaiming the Hotmail sweep feature, Gmail's priority inbox, Gmail's tabs might be the meteor that sends email marketing into extinction.
Realise the sky (probably) isn't falling
None of the numerous historical changes to webmail interfaces have significantly hurt the long-term success of email marketing.
Email marketing is in a very healthy state right now: the last…
Growing audience and sales using new types of affiliate partners
With any marketing activity you are always looking for more. More sales, more revenue, more traffic, more, more, more!
It’s no doubt the same for your affiliate programme. You might have been running your programme for a while, or might have just launched it. Regardless, affiliate recruitment is an on-going process. It should be something that you never stop doing as there will always be new and exciting affiliates emerging, or potential partnerships that you have yet to explore.
I tend to summarise the reasons for affiliate recruitment into four main areas.
The first thing you need to be sure of is that you have the biggest volume drivers on your programme. While these affiliates may only account for 20% of the programme they might contribute 80% of the sales, so make sure you…
A Solid Lead Generation System starts with a Nose for News
Whether you are a kid with crayons, a Journalist or a Content Marketer, we all have an expectation that audiences will love every sentence we write. After all, we put a lot of effort into each thought – how can the story not be perfect?
The harsh fact is that most web readers skim stories, which means that it takes even more effort to make the important points of a piece relevant, clear and arranged in a logical style.
For Content Marketers, this storytelling technique is particularly important in developing a lead generation system.
Four Tips for Content Marketers
Content marketers would do well to imitate Journalists, who by training are some of the best storytellers because they focus on the following areas:
1. Relevance. Answers to the key questions of who, what, when, where, how and why are the foundation for making a story…
