A book review of Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel

This book provides a summary of current thinking in providing effective customer experiences to support commercial goals. It's not a "how to" guide, but summarises current thinking which should inform digital strategies.  So what exactly is context marketing? Essentially, it’s about combining insight about customers and prospects combined with personalisation to deliver the right content to the right audience of users at the exactly the right time to satisfy the users requirements and as Hubspot states: 'A decade ago, making personal connections with people on your website was no more than a pipe dream — the technology simply wasn’t available. Today, we have the technology to truly deliver the right message to the right person at exactly the right time. It will fundamentally change…

7 Steps for completing a blog or website Content Audit

It’s easy to forget about your website’s old content, especially if it’s getting buried under your newer posts and pages. These stagnant pieces of content might be the reason your website isn’t ranking very well on SERPs, or could even be driving away potential customers when they stumble upon them while browsing. Conducting a content audit is the best way to optimize all your current and future content to serve your audience better.

Why should you audit?

As Google’s own Matt Cutts says, it’s important to review your content to prevent it from 'going stale'. Conducting a blog or website content audit can take a lot of work, but if you’re serious about improving your website’s traffic, conversions, and user experience, it’s something you cannot and should not avoid.We found that many of their clients thought their on-page…

Including video marketing examples inspired by The World Cup

A quick browse of the current Mashable Viral Video Chart reveals an unsurprising trend – with the World Cup well under way, marketers from across a wide number of industries are looking to the forthcoming tournament to generate a buzz around their products. At the time of writing, this offering from Samsung Mobile advertising the new Galaxy S5 was leading the way over the last 7 days. (more…)…

5 techniques to integrate social media into your event marketing

Over the last decade, social media has emerged as one of the most useful platforms for finding new customers, developing your brand and expanding your business. While there’s a massive amount of social media marketing information out there, almost all of it is aimed at business-to-consumer (B2C) businesses. With the right strategy, however, social media can be an equally powerful marketing platform for B2B businesses. In this guide, we’ll show you five tactics that you can use to learn more about your upcoming trade shows, monitor your competitors, own your search engine results and connect with prospects with ease.

1. Incorporate social media into your company branding

In order for prospects to connect with you on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, they need to know how to find you. Make social media an integral part of your branding by adding your usernames and URLs to banners,…

How to avoid 5 common keyword research mistakes for Search Engine Marketing

Choosing the right keywords for your PPC campaigns and SEO can be a real challenge. For example, do you target only niche keywords you can gain visibility for or do you concentrate on the more generic keywords that are the most competitive? The key is balance. You should be targeting both types. To understand why, let’s first look at which metrics we recommend you use to categorize and value a keyword.

1. Volume and Difficulty

Volume : Number of keyword searches for the term within a given period. Difficulty: Level of competition between domains for the keyword.

Types of actionable keywords:

Common: Usually a one-word keyword with very little context. Let’s look at a search for the term 'Apple'. What information can we determine from just looking at the keyword 'Apple' about what the person was searching for? Not much. He may be looking for an iPhone…

Google MyBusiness replaces Google Places for local businesses and provides a new Google+ admin page service for all businesses

Value/Importance: [rating=2] Recommended link: Announced on 12th June 2014, this has been touted as a major change, with an in-depth review by Search Engine Land for example. But we have rated it as relatively low in value and importance for marketers since it should’t be overhyped - it doesn’t involve new options for marketing, rather it is a new labelling to be aware of. It’s an attempt by Google at providing a more unified business offering from Google. It’s a good move since it aims to reduce the confusion between Google+ for Business and Google Places which it replaces.

What you need to know / do

1. If you or your clients are looking to register a local business within Google, e.g. to be visible in Google Maps, you now need to go to…

How to use personalised product recommendations to increase Ecommerce sales

The importance of effective product recommendations cannot be ignored. When done correctly they can heavily contribute to the success of a website, both by increasing the quantity and the size of orders being placed. Studies of personalisation have revealed that, when recommendations are made intelligently, those products being recommended can enjoy conversion rates over 900% higher than sitewide averages. Amazon have famously leveraged this technique to attract a huge customer base and vast revenues - a look at their homepage will reveal a site committed to personalising its shopping experience around the needs of each and every individual customer. Today, the importance of website personalisation as a method for boosting conversion rates is recognised by most digital professionals. An Econsultancy report recently named website personalisation as 2014's top digital priority by…

16 of your questions on using the new LinkedIn features answered

It was good to get LOTS of questions on our latest BrightTALK webcast (view catchup recording) summarising the 7 latest LinkedIn updates with Danny Bermant of Brainstorm Digital.  There were over 40 questions covering the details during the session. We answered most of them, but promised to answer them in full and provide links to the slides for downloads, so here they are! I hope these are helpful. Let us know if you have any follow-up questions in the comments. For a more in-depth look at the new features and much more depth on managing LinkedIn, download our Expert members guide to LinkedIn, also by Danny. Now over to Danny for his answers.

1. Profile Organizer scrapped as premium feature, so now available to all!

Q1. Will the contact see any notes you make about them? No, you’re safe to say what you like, so long as…

Using Talkwalker Social Search for social media listening

Value: [rating=5] Recommended link:  Talkwalker Social Search Who are the most important influencers in my sector? What types of content are most popular for sharing? What social media strategies are my competitors pursuing? Answering these question is a concern for any social media marketer trying to review and identify tactics to improve their social media and content marketing. To help answer these questions there are literally hundreds of social media listening / monitoring tools options available. Of course, many of these services are paid for which rules them out for many smaller and mid-size businesses. If you were looking for free social media insight, then the two most popular tools we have previously recommended are Social mention and Topsy. For free tools, these can be a great help in finding the most influential sharers or content and the most…

How to increase communications relevance through more personalised, contextual messages based on customer insight

Data is the key to understanding your customers and delivering new insights, but data in itself is just a series of 1s and 0s until you can bring meaning and interpretation.

Knowing and understanding your data is the first step in delivering relevant communications and customer value, as you turn raw data into information and then actionable insight. Starting this journey however can be a difficult step as highlighted in the 2013 Teradata Data-Driven Marketing Survey which stated:

‘Nearly 50 percent of marketers agree that data is the most underutilised asset in their organisation, with less than 10 percent saying they currently use what data they have in a systematic way’

Where to start?

There are several ways to data discovery and data…