Top takeaways from the content marketing/SEO workshop at Digital Impact

Earlier in September I attended Digital Impact - Smart Insights’ inaugural digital marketing conference at the Cavendish Conference Centre in London. And as expected, it was a festival of all things digital, with presentations and workshops on a variety of topics including ecommerce strategy, digital transformation, paid search best practices and mobile strategy. You can get an excellent summary/ review of the whole day.

For this post, I want focus on another key technique for Digital Impact and one that was the subject of a workshop in the afternoon hosted by ClickThrough. [slideshare id=39289618&doc=searchcontentmarketingsept2014v4-withoutpresenternotes-140919083858-phpapp01]

Where is SEO now?

Before delving into the workshop, a few facts were shared with the audience to confirm the current state of SEO: Google are continually fighting poor content and spam Google’s ranking criteria has…

Recommendations for a 1 hour brand audit process

There could be a number of reasons for carrying out your brand audit and there are as many metrics to be considered in order to get the answers, as far as the reception of your brand is concerned. Your brand needs to stand out and a regular brand audit will make sure that you stay different. So, what is included in a brand audit? The process involves a number of elements which would I will explain. You may be looking to acquire more customers, or your business may have taken a downwards slope, or maybe your revenue is going down. No matter what, even if your business is doing well, it is essential to do a regular online brand audit [see this Smart Insights brand audit template for a suggested structure to…

New security vulnerability potentially “bigger than Heartbleed” - are you prepared?

Importance: [rating=3] Recommended link: Register summary of security vulnerability We wouldn’t typically report security vulnerabilities to our readers since they are more relevant for an IT audience to act on, but after the Heartbleed security bug from April 2014, many mainstream news outlets are reporting this, so you may well be asked about what you’re doing about it to protect customer data! Remember that Heartbleed was linked to personal data breaches at Community Health Systems, a US hospital group that manages more than 200 hospitals, Canada’s tax agency, UK parenting website Mumsnet and the developers of Call of Duty...

What is Shellshock?

Shellshock is a vulnerability to systems within the ‘bash’ shell processor which runs on different versions of UNIX/Linux. Since Apple OS X uses a derivative of this it could cause developers…

Tools to uncover competitor video content approaches

In the past, competitor analysis meant hours of trawling through your competitors’ social media sites and building time-consuming reports. Nowadays, SaaS based systems can do some of  the hard work for you. All you need to do is log on, input your competitor details and see for yourself exactly what’s going on behind the scenes. Some systems are free and do not even require a login. In this post you will find out about some great tools that will help you uncover great video marketing strategies and ideas.

Changing landscape of video strategy

After Google, YouTube is the internet’s second largest search engine. A growing number of viewers are beginning to subscribe to business channels too. In fact, the number of people subscribing daily has increase three-fold since 2013. As more businesses start to tap into the power…

 Halloween marketing party tricks - you are never too old

The holidays are coming. However, holiday shopping no longer waits until Black Friday or even the month of November to get underway. Instead, to get ahead of this holiday season, smart businesses must consider their marketing kick-offs much earlier. This makes Halloween an excellent starting point for the 2014 holiday season. Halloween isn’t just for kids anymore whichever country you're planning your Halloween campaigns for. In fact, according to the US National Retail Federation, 71.5% of adults plan to celebrate or otherwise participate in Halloween-related activities this year. This means that there’s no specific demographic for Halloween, and chances are you can profit from this knowledge.

Ideas for marketing Halloween

Is your business ready? Looking for ways to incorporate Halloween into your company’s marketing strategy? Look no farther. Check out…

Should we give our content more personality - the most common feature of the most shareable content?

We talk about targeted and relevant content for our audience, though can we cross the line with humour and show our personal side, or does it have to be  ‘corporate’?  Some companies play it safe and keep it less personal where others show more personality with humour, if it aligns with their brand and tone of voice.  Once we share content then we know that we can’t remove it, so is there any research to help us?

Which are the top 3 emotions we invoke in our social media content?

Over 10,000 top most shareable articles were analysed by Buzzsumo and the topic and tone matched to an emotion as shown in the chart. Interestingly, ‘the top 3 invoked emotions are awe, laughter and amusement.' …

How do you build long-term relationships with customers using digital media?

"Open conversations generate loyalty, sales and most of all, learning... for both sides". Seth Godin Achieving engagement with a customer or fan base is not so much about tactics such as Facebook or tools like Radian6, but how these are best leveraged to enable meaningful interaction with the consumer. As Seth describes in the quote above, open and maintain conversation, ask questions, listen, build better products and market in a more relevant way - add value to the relationship with the consumer. To create these conversations and build relationships is challenging - the biggest challenge in marketing perhaps. There are no quick tips we can give here, but we can offer this structure which will step you through the decisions you need to make to work towards long-term relationships. We also have a new guide by Andrew Campbell describing how to create a customer…

Tesco International use viral videos to make an impact at a low cost

At our #DigitalImpact2014 conference a range of brands shared their successes and hiccups on Digital Transformation. One example that stood out for me, and I thought would be interesting to share, is this international marketing campaign. The marketing challenge for this campaign was that Tesco, although a household name in the UK, is entering new markets with its online grocery delivery service without a good level of awareness. It is looking to raise awareness amongst a younger generation who are using TV less than traditionally. Part of the solution was these humorous,  lighthearted Youtube videos, which This example shows how these videos 'went viral' in Poland. It's a great example of a campaign to show how entertaining and tongue in cheek content can appeal to different cultures. It started off as a low budget trial in Poland, and the videos reached…

Is this the Perfect Marketing Agency exec?

We love this new infographic just posted on The Agency Post. It's simply fun! You could say it prompts ideas of what makes a good, functional, responsive agency that is following the latest digital marketing best practices, but it's just fun really. As the creator explains: "Both agencies and clients say they value creativity, expertise in emerging trends, and product and service innovation in an agency. However, the day-to-day of maintaining and collaborating between two teams makes a single email or request seem like the thing standing between your agency and that next review. With this narrow view, an agency metamorphosizes into a Frankenstein-like monster — one that fulfills a client’s every need and want". This seems to cover all of the current agency buzzwords nicely, from sub-sonic hearing needed for real-time social media listening to the…

Content strategy approval – how to win buy-in for your ideas

So, you’ve completed the research and fully understand the business focuses and audience. You’ve created the personas, organised the brainstorms and come up with a host of creative content to set the web on fire. Now all you have to do is pitch the ideas and get the buy-in of your client or MD. Easy huh? Well, not always. Part of the reason this can be harder than necessary is because some people struggle to understand that off-page content, in particular, is not designed to be a sales pitch. (It almost doesn’t matter what you write about, as long as the article is interesting, and the link is relevant and appears naturally.) It is therefore imperative to explain the true purpose of each piece of content from the very beginning and…