Creating more relevant personalised communications

Receiving messages from a company you have never spoken to can be annoying and intrusive at best, often referred to as spam. Therefore, gaining permission to speak is a critical element in building a relationship with your customers, but using this right to broadcast the same communication to all customers will eventually turn your message to “noise”. Having a conversation is not a one way speech, but an interactive communication which listens and speaks to, not at the customer. Within the travel and tourism industry the need to provide the personal touch is a key differentiator of single and smaller hotel chains, with the service and attention to detail making the experience memorable and distinctive. This unique and distinguishing service is often carried across to the digital world, with some very elegant, evocative images and…

What’s New in Marketing? July 2014 roundup

How to achieve Digital Transformation in businesses has been a hot topic through 2014 and this month we have focused our advice on this. To help get focus and review current use of digital we created this roadmap so you can summarise where you are now and where you need to be in future. It’s taken from our new Digital Transformation guide for Expert members.

Strategy and planning

Our strategy and planning posts also focus on transformation: What is Digital Transformation? - Annmarie Hanlon introduces the concept and gives examples in this post. Digital to account for 75% of all marketing spend in 5 years - the need to manage transformation is shown in this post by Dan Bosomworth of new research from Accenture. Insourcing vs outsourcing for digital marketing - James Carson asks “Which digital marketing activities you should keep inhouse or…

New report reveals the effectiveness of different Facebook retargeting options

Value/Importance: [rating=3] Recommended link: Facebook ad research With the continued decline in organic reach in Facebook, opportunities for brands to get visibility for their brand page status updates is getting severely limited. According to this Social@Ogilvy report, the organic reach of brands’ posts may soon reach zero, meaning that brands will no longer be able to reach their Facebook fans at zero cost. They recommend advertising as one option, which begs the question of the clickthrough rates and costs of Facebook ads. This new report from Facebook retargeting service AdRoll provides useful data for brands to make the case for investment in Facebook advertising. The research shows that overall clickthrough rates of both News Feed targeting on desktop and mobile were significantly better than general web retargeting according to the report, with desktop…

How to simplify your website localisation project

A decade or two ago the extent of most business's online strategies would have been whether or not to bother having a website. Now there are all sorts of things to consider, from social media marketing to optimising for mobile and, if you are looking to reach an international audience, localising your website. Localisation can be a huge project but there are ways to simplify the process. It can also be hugely important when it comes to reaching new markets. The World Wide Web theoretically puts the whole world at your fingertips but in practice there are cultural and linguistic barriers to overcome. There's a temptation to think that a single English language website will suffice but numerous studies have shown this is not the case. A survey by Eurobarometer found that only 18% of EU…

Mobile apps to manage your digital marketing life

The modern marketer can reap massive benefits from the mobile app revolution.  Useful marketing software is becoming increasingly available in app form, making tools and data readily available on the go.  From uploading blog posts to tracking campaign metrics, apps allow marketers to access information at their fingertips quickly and conveniently.

But of all the apps available, which are the best for the marketer, and particularly the digital marketer?  I’ve put together a list of the apps I find most useful, both to keep up-to-date personally, but also to manage company social network activity.

The Best Social Media Management Apps

Founded back in 2008, Hootsuite is a popular…

Is Content Marketing Headed for a Tech Revolution?

Are you ready for the fourth wave of content marketing? According to Scott Brinker: “the fourth wave of content marketing, now emerging, is the proliferation of interactive content with responsive web marketing apps.” In Scott’s ebook, The New Brand of Marketing Scott argues that marketing is now a technical discipline where art gives way to code. Whereas that might sound like a huge leap, it’s got to be worth hearing out and this article introducing it is a great read, I’ll summarise and expand on this below.

So what are the three waves preceding this?

We know content marketing is pretty popular and interest in it has grown dramatically in the last couple of years…. So what’s the story of the first wave? If we agree to share the waves view that in the chart above? The…

A Google update affecting local searches

Value/Importance: [rating=5] (for local marketers) Recommended link: SearchEngineLand announcement Well, Pigeon would seem a logical follow-on from Google’s Hummingbird update. There seems to be an avian connection and it could change the search “pecking order” (sorry)… Note that while Hummingbird, like Panda and Panda and Penguin, were terms coined by Google, this isn’t an official term. Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Journal has introduced the term to explain it on the Search Engine Land article above since Google haven’t given a defined name yet.

What do marketers need to know about Google Pigeon?

This algorithm update will only be relevant if your business targets local searches for a product or service in a location, for example through a store or office It’s a major change which Google told search Engine Land, links: “deeper into their web search capabilities, including the hundreds…

A review of the in-page Chrome extension for Google Analytics Value: [rating=3] Recommended link: Google Analytics InPage Extension for Chrome This tool came out at the end of June, so it’s not brand new, but we think it’s still worth an alert since although it has been released for a month, it’s had fewer than 60,000 downloads - not many considering the number of people that use Google Analytics… Maybe this is because it doesn’t add much to the existing Google Analytics In-Page Analytics feature which you access from the bottom of the “Behaviour” menu in Google Analytics.

How to setup the Page Analytics Chrome extension

To setup the tool simply: Download the Chrome extension and enable the extension by clicking on the button in your toolbar. Make sure you are signed-in with the relevant Google Analytics account with a profile for the site you want to review. Load up the page you want…

 

Are Facebook Admins not paying enough attention to the data behind their Reach figures?

I've been digging down a little deeper into Facebook Insights of late trying to get a handle on the organic reach issue with the current incarnation of the algorithm. I had this theory that whilst a lot of Page Admins were breezily talking about how their reach had not been throttled in recent months and were still regularly reaching over 50% of fans, that in fact they were reading their data wrongly. I've watched really popular posts of mine in recent months and a cursory look at the Insights data does indeed suggest that some posts are reaching an awful lot of people. Here's our top performing Facebook post of recent months (it used to drag an image through but I imagine the original link author has since removed it). …

5 examples of retail home page good practice

Great ecommerce websites are likely to be based on personal preference. But many would agree there are common practices for persuasive design that should be tested, if you're not using them already. In this post, I take a look at a range of less well-known small to medium business ecommerce websites where I have deconstructed the practices to suggest a shortlist of 'must have features' for the homepage. It's part one of a series of posts, next I'll be looking at category pages. Of course, in a blog article there is a limit on what can be sensibly covered. See the relevant Smart Insights guide for more details. Recommended Guide: Ecommerce Design Patterns Use our wireframes and examples to test and create more persuasive Ecommerce designs to boost retail sales. Download our Ecommerce Design Bible.

Home page feature…