Simon Swan's interview with Nick Eubanks on mastering keyword research

To ensure the success of any digital plan requires putting the right building blocks in place to guarantee you’re developing your strategy from the ground up. In a recent blog article I discussed the importance of ensuring your website has a sound information architecture and introduced you to the tool Screaming Frog. Another key building block is to ensure your strategy is targeting the right keywords and phrases based on your objectives as well as who and what audience you’re looking to target. Keyword Research is an essential requirement as part of digital strategy and can be applied for a number of different digital tactics such as SEO, PPC, Affiliate or Social media This visual from Moz.com on SEO fundamentals clarifies the level of importance any digital marketer should give to mastering the art of keyword research for SEO. …

Five recommendations for approaching digital innovation in order to serve the customer better

Through using digital technology and media, customers have found new ways to communicate, consume and share. They now measure the performance of organisations and the brand experience based on the standards set by ‘digital natives’ such as Amazon or Uber. Customers expect the same rapid response times, a seamless omnichannel experience and real-time information from every other organisation they do business with. While most traditional organisations now have customer-centricity and enhancing the customer experience high on their strategic agenda, they’re at a distinct disadvantage as few of these organisations have been built around the customer’s needs or with an ‘outside-in’ approach. Digital start-ups, on the other hand, have customer-centricity at their very core which gives them the edge on customer experience. Why digital disruptors have the edge…

7 examples of landing page design techniques inspired by the growth in mobile usage

The technological progress of the 21st century has made  online users more choosy and difficult to interest than ever before. If we take a look at the evolution of the web, it becomes almost impossible to believe that it all began with a simple networking protocol more than 20 years ago. And nobody was complaining of poor navigation or unappealing visualization back then. Growth in mobile device usage has sparked many changes to the way we approach landing page design which I'll review in this article. Due to the ongoing improvements of the digital market, every business tries to find the most effective and eye-catching landing page solution. All of the companies ask themselves if there are some fresh ideas to win the hearts of prospective customers. If you're creating a website for your business or…

Email Still Outperforms Social Media for Engaging Your Customers

With some exceptions, social media has really poor engagement rates (people clicking links and taking action). And many companies are wasting their precious marketing budgets on an audience that rarely sees their posts, and when they do, is distracted and often uninvolved. The proof is in the numbers: email campaigns see 50-100 times the click rates that Facebook and Twitter do. If you’re after traffic that convert, clicks, comments, opts-in, and takes a credit card out to actually buy your product- you can’t afford to ignore the power of email. Take Max for example… Max wants to start selling a personal finance product online. He is an incredibly successful financial advisor in his town, and he’d like to share his wisdom with a broader audience. Max gets off to a good start by writing detailed and informative blog posts that are relevant to his target customer. Unfortunately,…

Which explainer video animation style is right for your business?

There has been a boom in the use of animated video in digital marketing. When executed well-animated videos can engage audiences through high quality content, SEO benefits and give an excellent way to communicate a large amount of information to your audience in a small amount of time. Explainer videos are an increasingly popular form of content marketing which tell a story explaining visually how a product or brand helps different personas. In this post I start by  giving some tips to help create 'explainers' and then give examples of effective explainers.

9 tips for animated video planning

You can hire freelancers, a small creative agency or an animation production studio or even use some online DIY animation tools. All of them have different budget's, time scales and outcomes so when you are considering your animated video, here's some things to consider. 1. Do you want…

A summary of the 2015 ranking factors analysis

Value: [rating=5] Recommended link: Moz SEO Ranking factors 2015 edition SEOs everywhere have now been following the SEOmoz (now Moz) ranking factors for a very long time - I think I start recommending them in training ten years ago in 2005! Over time, the analysis has become more complex with a move from trusted experts' opinion to additional correlation based analysis. In many ways, I prefer the original breakdown of on and off page factors for its simplicity - as shown below, but there are many more factors to consider now of course. You can get the full detailed report from the link above. In this summary I highlight the main ranking factors, with a brief analysis of the implications for marketers who aren't full-time SEO.

The Experts' opinions on ranking factors

The best quick summary on ranking factors for non-specialists is, for me, still the Experts' analysis. Here's…

Does branding really matter when it comes to your SEO ranking?

How does brand affect your SEO ranking? This is a question that’s often pondered upon by webmasters. Most fail to make a connection between the two at all. Any webmaster who knows how Google algorithms and indexing work recognizes that there’s no way to measure the popularity of a brand. Yet, there’s constant talk of brand and its relationship to SEO ranking. Before I start explaining about brand and its relation, let's go through Amit Singhal’s post on building high-quality sites. He mentioned a list of questions that should we keep in mind before creating quality websites. In the below image, most of the questions can be answered in just two points: 1. Brand 2. Expert author Going through these questions will help you determine whether the site is branded. For instance,…

5 areas you need to look at to improve your ecommerce

As digital marketers, we spend a lot of our time perfecting landing pages and ad copies. We also hire the best writers for our content. I am not here to say that those dollars are spent in vain. But when everything’s said and done, these efforts and dollars are all spent to produce a conversion. When it comes to eCommerce, this sale/conversion has to happen via the shopping cart that leads to the checkout page. I am afraid that the shopping cart is where most marketers fall short and thus lose what they have gained with great pains. In this post, I am going to list exactly what you should do to get all those sales and optimize your shopping cart to perfection, in order to boost conversions.

1.    Best Shopping Cart Design

The shopping cart is an integral part of the shopping experience.…

4 Agile Marketing Experts give their views on what it takes

Unfortunately, too many marketers have confused ad-hoc social media promotions with genuine agile marketing. While the original concept of ‘agile’ as a way of working was first popularised in the world of software development, it wasn’t until recently when applied to the realm of social media that we’ve started to talk about ‘agile marketing’. Certainly real-time engagement with your customers can get you noticed. Oreo Cookies, for example, is famous for its ‘dunk in the dark’ tweet during the Super Bowl power outage. The success of Oreo Cookies has spurred many brands to attempt their own quick turnaround content for social media, which has often got them noticed in the wrong kind of way. From barely thought-out newsjacking attempts, to the sloppy creation of ham-fisted memes, poor execution has helped make agile marketing a…

Measuring the effectiveness of your Content Marketing Strategy

Our recent research with HubSpot on Competing on Content Marketing in 2015 identified that measurement of content marketing ROI was one of the main challenges of managing Content Marketing today - rated as a challenge by 51% of respondents. Our Expert member guide on Measuring Content Marketing ROI by Stephen Bateman gives the full technical detail on how to calculate the profitability of content marketing using analytics. In this post, we share the advice of five content marketing specialists. According to Daniel Rowles, from Target Internet, one of the greatest opportunities and advantages of content marketing is that we can create, deploy, measure and improve quickly and easily. Daniel explains that 'having well defined online objectives means that then our content marketing can be measured and ROI calculated relatively easily.…