Which tests are important to your mobile App's success

The success of your app relies on thorough testing and Customer Experience Analytics to reveal the friction points in the mobile user experience. As Kirk Knoernschild and Sean Kenefick, Gartner Analysts put it: 'Delivering quality mobile applications requires that organizations have access to a wide array of devices and perform many types of tests. To fulfill these needs, organizations must use several testing solutions'.   With so much competition for mobile apps. The apps that are left standing tall throughout it all are the ones who undergo thorough testing. Your mobile app strategy needs to intertwine fluidly with a testing strategy. This is not web testing on a desktop with a few different Operating Systems. These are platforms, different devices and different markets; Among other things of course.

Mobile Testing

In order to create a comprehensive mobile strategy, you must include various elements for testing as well as network infrastructure. You…

5 key questions to help develop your Twitter strategy

Following the initial public offering for Twitter valuing the company at $140 billion, we now find ourselves wondering  how the social network will become profitable, and how it can help our businesses to profit.

The truth is, despite now having over 280 million monthly users, Twitter is not profitable - yet.

But there is opportunity for your business... The ability to share updates, disseminate content to prospects, customers, influencers or even just people who are interested in your brand, presents you with the perfect tool for real-time brand awareness.

Of course we know there are also many other advantages of Twitter including service, lead generation and relationship building, with many great examples of brands using Twitter for customer care.

So in fact the questions you should be asking are not only how…

Tips for integrating video as part of content marketing

"The next big thing in content marketing is video,"

...so said, nearly everyone in 2013.

Rather than attempt to convince you of this as a consumer of brands or a business, in this article I'd like to show and advise as to how as part of integrated content strategy, video content can work hard for you and deliver results.

The growing popularity of online video

Online video is big business and it's visibility and the demand for it is statistically astounding. The Content Marketing Institute report the following stats to help paint a picture:

On-line video has increased eightfold in five years.In 2016 the gigabyte equivalent of all the movies ever made in the history of film will move across networks every 3 minutes.It will take 6million years to watch all the video that will uploaded in one month, in 2016.Video will be 55% of all internet…

Which processes and tools does it take to make Inbound Marketing effective?

Companies are still trying to understand and make the business case to focus on Inbound Marketing, to secure resources for content or educate others on the difference between Inbound vs Outbound marketing. We thought this infographic from Salesforce Pardot sheds some light onto this with survey findings summarised from HubSpot's survey. For example, 92% of companies who blog multiple times a day, report it is key to acquiring customers.  It also highlights well the difference between inbound and outbound marketing and free tools in the marketplace across blogging, SEO, analytics, social and webinars. Interested in ideas for your campaigns, read Rene Power's 10 examples of …

Managing the Content Marketing Avalanche

Managing Content Marketing can often feel like getting caught in a relentless wave that you can’t fight against, so when speaking at the #B2Bconf from B2B Marketing managing this challenge is what I chose as my theme. I selected 10 key areas to help with planning in the year ahead based on the latest research and my experiences of content marketing. Most who work within B2B Marketing have bought into the power of content marketing to create leads, indeed any marketer who has worked in B2B industries for some time will tell you that they practised Content Marketing before Joe Pulizzi and the Content Marketing Institute created the category. In this post I’ll give a brief summary and recommendations based on the research and trends I covered in my talk with links to more detail. My Slideshare is embedded at the end of this post.

Trend 1: A planned,…

Brands and businesses using social data to inform their social media strategy

However, in more instances than ever before, social data is also being used in other areas of the business, and social media has evolved from just being a vehicle for marketing. ‘Social business’ and ‘social across the enterprise’ are now commonplace phrases in modern business terminology. 

Why become a social business?

Social media is changing the way people connect, and is changing the relationship between consumers and brands. Becoming a social business means looking beyond social media to understand how it can benefit your business and change the way you operate. IBM’s statement on their website couldn’t have put it better:

'When you inspire your workforce to innovate and collaborate more productively, you create tangible business value. When you anticipate needs and deliver exceptional experiences, you delight your customers and create advocates. When you integrate…

A guide to setting high-level goals to keep your marketing on track

The range of marketing channels available today and the rate at which they change drives to us to work longer, harder and more efficiently...  it can often feel like you are ice skating uphill. The challenge can seem even harder if realistic goals aren't set to base your plans around.  The lack of goals and just a constant, never-ending journey of 'change' can mean that we miss out on the rewards of achievement. My time spent as part of growing a marketing agency with smaller and larger multi billion dollar companies has taught me that both benefit businesses and staff benefit from moving to clearer goals.

Goals are different to objectives and KPIs

Even in my relatively short time in marketing (9 years), I have seen the rise of data, analytics, information and I…

Which channels do consumers prefer in the omnichannel world?

Last month Mitel commissioned this research which gives an interesting consumer perspective on how they like to contact brands and gain customer service today. The survey delved into channel preference, consumer frustrations, motivations and important factors when contacting a company. It was interesting that '70% would switch companies due to poor experience over customer service' and 'the contact centre has a major influence on this'. Though as expected, the highest frustration was paying for premium rates. How many times have we as consumers put the phone down? Their infographic below highlights these key findings and Mitel's report can be downloaded for further survey findings. …

Blending personas and personalities to increase conversions in email marketing [Part 1]

It’s a well-known fact that some of the greatest results can be gained by combining personalisation and persuasive architecture to deliver what the customer wants. In this 2 part post I will look at approaches to leverage 2 types of buyer personas to use to increase conversions within your email marketing programme. When combining both of these buyer persona styles we’re ensuring that we deliver not only the copy, TOV, and offers/merchandise that our buyer wants and expects from us but we’re also delivering the experience that will enable them to convert according to their temperament. So let’s look at the two different types of Buyer Personas. For clarity's sake, I’m labelling them differently to how they’re labelled elsewhere: Persona: This addresses the motivation (i.e. what the buyer needs, what are their challenges and goals, what motivates them  etc) Personality: This addresses their temperament (i.e…

The essential ingredients of a B2B Digital Strategy

Professional service marketing has rarely ever been about creating immediate business transactions. It's always been a long-term effort of building reputation, demonstrating capabilities and showcasing credibility through opinion and thought leadership.

Whilst content marketing and promotion through social media remains a core activity of professional services digital marketing, most marketers experience a rapidly expanding gap between the demand for material and their ability to consistently execute on that demand internally. The sources of thought leadership content are usually the practising professionals, who are often too busy and aligned with managing ongoing client caseloads and maintaining existing client bases.

Given the economic pressure on firms to maintain – and improve – profitability, as with most initiatives, developing a digital strategy tends to be viewed as less important than shorter-term business development methods. But whilst most professional service…