A round-up of our advice and alerts from June 2014

Colin Green, Marketing Director, Land Rover UK stressed the importance of integration when he stated that:

“Truly Integrated Marketing is the holy grail for the marketeer. ”

However, it seems that integration is easier said than done. Our research on Managing Digital Marketing showed that many are making efforts to improve integration across the many marketing channels today. Given these challenges, in our strategy posts this month we have focused on articles discussing how to improve integration.

Strategy and planning advice

Improving integrated digital marketing Three examples of integrated campaigns How to create an integrated marketing campaign

Social media marketing alerts

Talkwalker - a review of a new, free social media monitoring tool Influencer marketing - Bryony Thomas explains her recommended strategic approach to influencer marketing. 17 LinkedIn Profile tips - this infographic was one of our most popular…

How much does it cost to market a mobile app?

As a starting point for creating a budget for an app you need to be clear on the benefits for business and consumer of investing in the app. Why does your business need a mobile app distinct from a mobile responsive website? These reasons include: The need to offer a mobile-optimized experience for your users, whether: shoppers, readers, and social network communities. For example, Zappos offers its smartphone users to shop via a mobile app. A desire to create a stand-alone mobile app business with a free-to-play, ad-based or subscription-based business model. Games, useful apps and news services fall into this category. The necessity to establish the brand’s presence in a mobile domain. Games and useful tools help users continue to interact with the brand on mobile devices. For example, Lego and McDonalds offers free smartphone games for kids. Once the benefits are agreed…

Is mobile marketing getting enough investment?

SEMPO's 9th report on the State of Search Marketing highlighted that mobile marketing is a priority for respondents. As a result, SEMPO created a separate Mobile Search Trends infographic to showcase the findings which we feature here. Agencies and clients who took part in this survey shared their views on mobile marketing: 8 out of 10 respondents plan to include mobile marketing in their plans though have only allocated 3% of their overall budget goes into to this. The main objective of mobile search is unsurprisingly to generate leads through mobile marketing. Agencies ranked 'geotargeting' as the top technique to help with mobile marketing, compared to insight from Google's Universal Analytics support for cross-device tracking according to  companies.

 Additional resources on mobile marketing on Smart Insights

Mobile Marketing Strategy Guide Mobile statistics summary …

Avoiding common 6 pitfalls of marketing campaign planning

In my previous post reviewing techniques for digital marketing integration post I touched on the three major challenges to integrating digital marketing: planning, people and agencies. In this article I will look in more detail at these challenges as they relate to  marketing campaigns, giving suggestions on how they can be avoided through better management. To help make the campaign successful it can help to think about what can go wrong in the planning and execution and then avoid these pitfalls. In this post I'll show 6 pitfalls that I’ve seen with campaign planning - each of the following pitfalls is directly aligned to one of six stages of creating an integrated campaign covered in the Smart Insights marketing campaign planning/briefing template which I will describe more fully in a later post: 1. Campaign goals and tracking. 2. Target audience,…

What is influencer marketing and how to use it?

Buying decisions, particularly high-value or complex ones, are not made in isolation.You need to know who your buyers are talking to, and get those people on side. You need to know who’s on their team, and get them on yours. That is how I define influencer marketing. In this post I'll show how you can use it in practice by mapping third parties to the buying decision to plan your influencer marketing.

Why is influencer marketing important?

The source of a message is often as important as the message itself... The opinions of others are sought during a buying decision for two main reasons: people may wish to shortcut the process by asking someone they think knows the subject well, and secondly, they may look for reassurance that their decision is sound. This is why you’ll hear marketers talk about including ‘influencers’ as part of your wider audience.…

3 essential requirements for a more strategic marketing planning approach

To compete today, a company needs a unique brand story if it’s going to really have success at capturing and maintaining a clear competitive edge over other organizations in its niche. This brand story has to resonate with your customers and play to their desires, passions and needs. But how can this be created? I believe that the best way to achieve this is by creating and implementing a systematic process of research with the framework of something called strategic planning. In this article I will cover the 3 techniques which can help support a more strategic approach.

1. Make time for Marketing Research and Planning

The most important quality that an organization needs if it wants to make understanding its customers a key part of its long term strategic planning is the development of a deep understanding of those customers real needs. You will have to get to…

Incorporating the 4Cs of integrating digital marketing into marketing campaigns

Do you know the “4Cs” of integrated campaigns? When thinking about how to create a successful integrated marketing campaign, Pickton and Broderick’s 4 Cs explained in their book Integrated Marketing Communications can be a handy test. They outline the four key concerns that need to be addressed in order to give your campaign a chance of reaching its goals. The 4Cs are: Coherence – different communications are logically connected? Consistency – multiple messages support and reinforce, and are not contradictory? Continuity – communications are connected and consistent through time? Complementary – synergistic, or the sum of the parts is greater than the whole? In this post we take a look at three high-profile campaigns, and offer an insight into their results related to the 4Cs .

02: Be More Dog

O2’s foray into 4G advertising asked us "to be more dog". The overall message of the campaign is that life in the digital…

How and when to use A/B or Multivariate Test Design

When running a testing programme you will have to decide for each test whether it should be run as an A/B test or a multivariate test. The decisions you make when designing your experiments will significantly impact important variables such as the depth of the insights, the speed of testing and delivering winning variations and therefore the impact of your testing efforts.

The 1,024 Variation Test

So when should we run that 1,024 variation multivariate test (Google actually did this)  and when would an A/B test be more appropriate? First, let’s consider some of the important variables: Time to test - The number of variations in your experiment will affect the length that your test needs to run. Traffic required - Your traffic volumes will also determine how quickly you…

A guide to best practices in video scripting and production to convert more prospects to customers

It happens to far too many businesses. They decide to make their first video, with the idea that it will bring in more customers, get shared by influencers, and maybe even go viral. What’s wrong with this picture? They're set to fail... To avoid this, I've taken all the mistakes I've seen made and highlighted 12 best practice tips, tools and techniques to help create a more effective, higher impact video.

1. Identify ways which highlight your video will fail - ask yourself these questions

While video can be a great medium for achieving these top-of-funnel marketing goals, I see three key ways in which this sets you up for failure: 1. ‘Bringing in customers’ and ‘engaging influencers’ tend to be slippery goals. How many more customers should it bring in? Which influencers are going to…

Plus examples of good and poor practice in writing ad copy

Paid search advertising provides an opportunity for almost any business to improve their visibility in the SERPs. But creating an advert and setting it live isn’t enough. As Google continues on its mission to deliver only the highest quality search results, its rules around what adverts are generated and where they appear are ever stricter. It is therefore essential that marketers do all they can to ensure their advert is seen – and that people click on it. One of the simplest ways to achieve this is to write better AdWords ads.

Seven Tips to improve your Adwords campaigns

Here are seven tips particularly relevant in my experience to small and medium businesses (SMEs/SMBs). I've illustrated the tips with examples to show the details you must consider to make your AdWords ads effective.

 Tip 1 - be relevant

This might seem obvious but it’s absolutely vital that…