Our monthly summary of the biggest ‘need to know’ developments in digital marketing

In this month’s round-up, the two main alerts are in the sections about search marketing (notifying about a major Google algorithm update) and social media marketing (an alert about the impending Facebook brand page change). We start by looking at advice on applying two classic marketing planning techniques.

Strategy and planning

Applying Pareto’s 80:20 rule to marketing - this post proved one of the most popular of the month - many find Pareto’s rule familiar! Examples of TOWS analysis. Everyone in business knows about SWOT analysis, but I find when training that, relatively few know the much more powerful TOWS analysis that helps you plan forwards rather than look backwards. In this post I take another look at the technique.

Social media marketing

Mistakes to avoid when creating…

21 Internet trends from the annual KPCB trends report

For anybody that doesn’t know, Mary Meeker is rightly famed for her intelligent selection and presentation of the key trends of digital business, so today we’re sharing a summary of her latest report with what we’ve jumped out to us from a marketing perspective - it's hot off the press this week. The full deck is 164 slides, I found I needed two coffees...

Our summary

Mobile, mobile, mobile. We're all going mobile in a hurry. This is where Meeker's report has focused for the last few years. The Internet as a whole is growing, led by developing countries of course, and mobile is growing faster. Video is growing in power for brands who seize it. Television viewers are evolving to embrace the second screen for interactive content, while also ditching TV for online video content. …

5 Findings from the Social Media Examiner 2014 report

Are you interested to find out where other marketers are focusing their efforts on social media to grow their business? Which techniques are proving effective and why? This regular, annual report from the Social Media Examiner is a useful summary of what is effective from over 2,500 marketers, so in this summary I cover  5  main findings from the report, which can be downloaded from the Social Media Examiner's website.

1. Benefits of Social Media?

In terms of business benefits, the top two benefits are increasing exposure (brand awareness) and driving additional traffic. '92% of marketers have increased their exposure through social media and 80% had positive results in terms traffic'. The graph below shows the range of benefits:

Respondents share their benefits…

An example showing recommended changes for cover image, tabs and apps

As previously notified on Smart Insights, in March Facebook announced there would be a major update to its Facebook brand pages. It has now confirmed that by 6 June all Facebook brand Pages (note brand Pages, not personal Profiles which changed a while ago now) will have a new look. A number of Pages have already been invited to switch on the new timeline design and I've been having a good poke around to share what I've found. As always I'm using the Musicademy Page to illustrate the changes.

Overview of changes

Firstly, whilst it does look quite different, there isn't any majorly different functionality. Facebook has simply moved things around a bit. But inevitably there are some implications for things such as cover image, tabs and apps. The first thing you'll notice is that there is now a single column for posts and that…

How to build your email list using viral promotions

When building your email list, or indeed any lists for direct marketing, it is best practice to grow them organically, but of course that’s easier said than done and additional incentives will help grow a list more rapidly and can encourage sale as part of sales promotion. Social media will help amplify your promotions further. Running viral promotions via social media, such as contests and sweepstakes and the other examples I will show in this post, are the perfect example of how social media can both increase engagement with prospects and clients as well as building your email list organically. Before I explore the various viral promotions that you could utilise, we need to acknowledge the common pitfalls with viral promotions strategy and how to avoid them. Prize hunters not paying customers Viral promotions can attract the wrong type of prospects. There are always going to be those who will…

SEO techniques and tools that support effective SEO for 2014 and beyond

Earlier in the month I attended the SMX search marketing event in London, and as with last year, SMX 2014 offered a huge amount of knowledge and insights from a wide variety of speakers from agencies, search engines, bloggers and brands. There was a lot a take in over the two days so for this post I’ve decided to highlight five topics that really stood out:

1. Focus on user experience and engagement as well as links

Whilst links are most certainly not dead as influencing ranking, it’s clear that search engines like Google have been attempting to look beyond links for some time. So, to show the relevance and quality of a website or piece of content and therefore webmasters and marketers alike need to consider not only their thinking around link-building but other emerging ranking factors, too. In a session on Long-Term SEO: How To…

10+ tips to plan, build and share more engaging quizzes

This New York Times article highlights the reasons behind the growing popularity in online quizzes amongst consumers. Quizzes are great fun and can be an excellent way to drive traffic, but not all quizzes are created equal. There is a certain art to building and distributing a quiz that must be perfected in order to maximize the effect of your efforts. After analyzing over 1000 quizzes built using Interact, here’s what I’ve learned.

Building a quiz

1. Get the name right

80% of people make a decision about whether or not they should check out an article based on the title. That’s why you should spend a minimum of 20% of your time researching and testing out headlines. When Upworthy first began their rise to power, they became famous for their '25 Headline' approach, in which…

The growth in Semantic markup for SEO

It’s been almost a year since Google started to encrypt searches and keyword data began to disappear from website analytics reports. During that time, site owners and marketing managers have gone through the various stages of grief. Initially, businesses were in denial and attempted to grab their keyword data from any available source including using Google Webmaster Tools keyword data, internal site search and other search engines, in an attempt to build up a picture of their referring keyword traffic. This proved to be less useful than expected and search marketers increasingly became angry at Google, accusing the company of being hypocritical and attributing the decision to a cynical attempt to get more people using Adwords. However, marketers may have unknowingly benefited from the lack of keyword data in their reports as it allowed them to focus on creating valuable content which would be beneficial…

A review of 9 new features in Google's consumer search behaviour insight tool

When the Google Keyword Tool was removed and replaced with the Keyword Planner, approximately a year ago, the ability for marketers to filter traffic estimates by device was lost. It was no longer possible to see the volume of searches by consumers made on mobile devices including smartphone and tablet. However, with the introduction of nine new features to the Google Keyword Planner Tool last month, users will now have greater insight into mobile device volumes, mobile trends, enhanced location breakdowns and how this data trends over time. In this post, I’m going to focus on the mobile and location enhancements, which offer some really useful data and allows us to consider how we can optimise our sites more effectively for mobile and tablet searchers.

Contribution of search volume for keywords by device

From the nine new features…

How Pinterest can drive revenue for e-commerce

Since its launch three years ago, Pinterest now has over 70 million users and it has proved itself to be more than just a platform to drive brand awareness through visual displays, pinning and sharing products, infographics or other boards. Both it's volume of pinners and the success of Cyber weekend has shown that e-commerce sites are reaping tangible sales benefits. Last weekend, Pinterest referrals tripled e-commerce sites' revenue. The boards are driving traffic on and off-line, via websites and into stores. '78% of the retailers in the site’s 2013 Top 500 Guide are active on Pinterest', which shows the investment by retailers to take advantage of Pinterest. Interested in ideas for increasing traffic to your website via Pinterest or increasing pins to your boards, then these campaigns may give you some inspiration? Pinterest has more…