Defining ROI and the digital skills gap are major challenges

An online survey of 100 marketing leaders, the B2B Leaders report in association with Circle Research, involved Marketing Directors, Heads of Marketing and Marketing with an average 15 years experience, reporting into board or leadership teams and controlling a total of £188m. The survey delved into brand management, demonstrating ROI, managing a team effectively and personal reputation. For more specific detail on Content Marketing, see our separate post on B2B Content Marketing trends for 2014. The findings have been summarised in this infographic, we have shared for our readers working in B2B marketing to provide context if you are looking to understand typical B2B priorities for the next 12 months and how to develop marketers skills and training accordingly. …

A briefing and examples of how to use Twitter Cards to boost leads and sales

With the recent Initial Public Offering (IPO) of Twitter on the New York Stock Exchange,  there has been a great deal of attention on the micro-blogging site and how it plans to increase its profitability (likely through advertising) to satisfy hungry investors. Although there has been much publicity regarding the company's recent move to preview images directly within a timeline feed (seemingly a move to court advertisers who can push their brands more), the introduction of 'Twitter Cards' in June 2012 seems to have gone almost unnoticed and still represents a missed opportunity for brands and bloggers alike who are yet to take advantage of them.

Twitter cards

The power of Twitter cards cannot be overstated. Twitter says: ;They make it possible for you to attach media experiences to Tweets that link to your…

Our monthly round-up of the developments that matter in digital marketing

The main platform developments to be aware of this month were in Twitter and LinkedIn - see the posts in our social media section for details.  Given that we're well into Planning season for many companies, our strategy advice focuses on goal setting and KPIs.

Dan Bosomworth also reviewed the BIG strategic questions to help get focus as you refine your customer acquisition, conversion and retention strategies.

Strategy and planning

Setting realistic goals, objectives and KPIs are at the heart of effective marketing planning and management, so this month, as part of our #PlanToSucceed campaign we have advised on best practices for creating marketing dashboards for performance management in these posts. Here’s a visual summary of some of the tools we reviewed with links to more detail.

From SMART to SMARTER marketing objectives

The differences between marketing objectives and goals…
In Part 1, we looked at the main features of YouTube Analytics (YTA) and how they can be used to a) build an audience and b) improve the engagement of your existing audience. In this article, we are going to look in more detail at 5 of the key reporting features available in YTA. To get ideas and inspiration on creating the right type of videos and YouTube brand channel to maximise video plays and sales, see our new guide to YouTube Marketing. Recommended Guide: Smarter YouTube Marketing Create a content plan and setup your brand channel correctly to make better use of YouTube. Download our YouTube Marketing Guide.

1 Youtube Traffic Source…

Using staff email signatures to communicate your brand messages - a case study of British Red Cross

My journey with staff Email Media started 3 years ago when I rocked up to start a new job and had a loooooong list of induction meetings, one being with my Email Media Account Manager Tamsin. Now I will admit something here, I like to think that I have a good understanding of email marketing, transactional email, and trigger emails, but I was feeling slightly red-faced that I didn’t know much about what you could do with your employee emails.

Email Media is simply a technology that links up with your employee email system such as Outlook, google apps or lotus notes etc., it adds dynamic (and trackable) footers and headers to all employee emails which supports the brand and your business objectives.

In my role at the time I used Email media to support revenue,…

5 Legal ways to contact Facebook winners

When Facebook updated their promotion guidelines this past August, they casually removed the rule that stated brands could not contact promotion winners on Facebook via status updates, private messages, chat, etc. This rule was kind of a hassle, especially for businesses with multiple promotion winners to notify, so pretty much everyone we know was glad to see it go. With this rule no longer in existence, some of our users have asked: What’s the best way to contact contest winners now? In today’s blog post, we cover not one, but five great and totally legal ways to contact Facebook promotion winners.

5 Tips for contacting your Facebook winners

Here they are:

1. Post a status update

One simple way to contact promotion winners is to create a post on your Timeline and announce your winners in it. For example, the post would read: 'Congrats Winner Name! You’ve won our…

Our 7 key questions to ask yourself and your team

This post is the second in a short series looking to help give a focus to improve digital marketing effectiveness. In the first I defined 7 strategic questions to increase site traffic as part of a customer acquisition strategy. In the final post I review customer retention and engagement strategy, while in this post, I look at 7 key questions to increase conversion. Naturally, all site owners want to increase conversion, but it's really tough to do this in practice for a mature site. Yes, there are some great examples of using testing to improve conversion, like those we see on Marketing Experiments, WhichTestWon or the $300 million button. To achieve these improvements almost certainly means you've already made the case for working on conversion rate optimisation and have the people, process and tools in place to help make these…

New research shows effectiveness and best practices for CRO across 7 key CRO techniques

Do you know the RedEye annual Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) report? It has now been produced for 5 years in conjunction with Econsultancy. Since the name was changed it has been instrumental in encouraging adoption of CRO and highlighting best practices. The latest practices in CRO are shown by the infographic below which summarises the popularity and effectiveness of different CRO techniques. Use it to review your approach. Ask... 1. Does your company have someone responsible for CRO? Encouragingly, 79% of businesses do? 2. Is there a structured programme of testing and improvements? This is poor, only 26% of companies do suggesting defined responsibility doesn't mean there is a programme in place. 3. Are you using A/B testing? This is the most popular method of structured testing with prioritisation of tests important to success. 4. Should we run usability tests? It's rated as highly valuable by 55%,…

7 must-check questions for your acquisition strategy

All site owners are looking to reach more prospects, existing customers and raise awareness about their products through a website or other online presence. So, there is plenty of advice on how to increase site traffic through the 6 main online communications channels. Although you can definitely gain improvements in volume of acquisition through optimising how use these channels like SEO, advertising or social media marketing, you may be missing parts of the bigger picture that will make your online marketing more effective. To help you think through how to improve your site traffic, Dave Chaffey and I  have developed these seven key questions to help improve your results. We hope they're helpful - let us know how you find them. You can find more detailed guidance in the Reach section of our RACE digital marketing planning course. This is the first in a short series…

10 essential requirements when selecting a new marketing agency

Selecting an agency from a short list - using the scorecard and transparent process

In the first post in this series I outlined 8 options to shortlist alternative marketing agencies as part of the process of managing pitches to select an agency. In this post, I look at the next step, covering 10 steps or requirements, that in my experience, help make the pitching process run smoothly and help towards selecting the best agency.

These tips support using the agency selection scorecard we have developed to help marketers review potential agency partners on both a qualitative and quantitative basis as part of the pitching process. You'll see that some of the evaluation criteria are more relevant to initial short listing whilst others are more relevant to a detailed pitch evaluation.

We have kept all criteria on one…