Review and improve your UX on mobile using the Smart Insights  RACE Planning Framework

Should we be focusing our mobile marketing activities on the device, or the consumer? Allow me to rewind the clock, briefly, and explain why this matters: Back in 2004, when I got started in mobile, our expectations about a great mobile customer experience were blinkered by the capabilities of the handset. Nokia dominated the handset market, with 9 of the top 10 best selling handsets that year - some came with a colour display, most provided polyphonic ringtones, (very) basic games, and desktop tools.  But no camera, no Bluetooth. The ‘mobile internet’ was a tedious affair delivered on a smaller screen, accessed via an even smaller keypad, over patchy 3G coverage, using WAP (‘Wireless Application Protocol’, or ‘WAP is crap’ for short).  Hats off to the brands that tackled mobile then - usually focussing on…

New infographic shows key stats to bear in mind when building your digital marketing strategy

Now that mobile accounts for over half of all web traffic and the mobile web is beginning to mature, it's important that marketers fully understand the ramifications of the seismic shift in device use. This infographic gives a few quick and useful ideas for getting started. It's based around the idea that the key to success with mobile marketing is to be there, bit quick and be noticed.  These are certainly useful areas to base the basics of your strategy around, although there is obviously a lot more to mobile marketing that that! If you're currently looking at your mobile marketing strategy, then check out our newly updated 7 steps mobile marketing guide. Thanks to Katapult for publishing this infographic…

Attention is a currency. We spend it. We earn it. And, sometimes we waste it.

Experience is something special. It’s all the rage at the moment, yet, we often talk about it as is if it’s a thing. But, as we know, deep down, the best things in life aren’t things, they’re experiences. One of things that makes it so hard to make experience a strategic and actionable part of our work is that the word “experience” means so many things to so many different people across so many aspects of the organization. We continue to think operationally, which prevents us from feeling empathetically, which stops us from acting experientially.  To CMOs or brand managers, experience may be something creative, whether it’s a campaign, a viral video, an online journey, an event, a physical escapade, fantastic packaging,…

Showing the huge impact of mobile marketing across web, social, display and email

The rapid rise of smartphone and tablet adoption has affected almost every aspect of digital marketing. The impact ranges from the most recent Advanced Mobile Pages to Google's smartphone search results through to the lower conversion rates on smartphones, use of social media on mobile and ensuring that our emails are mobile-friendly. In our latest infographic with JBH Marketing, we've brought together all the most important changes in a single infographic to highlight the areas needing attention. The tipping point has now been passed, and large sites like Google and Facebook are now seeing a considerable majority of their traffic coming from mobile devices. …

New study shows how shoppers are using their Smartphones in store

We're all familiar with 'showrooming', where people visit a shop to compare products and then buy it online later, often at a cheaper price. Until a few years ago, buying online generally entailed going home, logging on and remembering exactly what is was you fancied buying back when you were in store. Easily done with big ticket items like laptops, fridges or bikes, but not so easy with products like clothes or food. Generally by the time you get home you've forgotten exactly what it was you were looking at. But the massive advance in mobile technology over the past few years means that now pretty much every consumer has a computer in their pocket capable of checking prices in seconds. No longer is there any need to remember what you were looking at for when you get home, the whole showrooming…

A new report by renowned digital marketing analyst Rebecca Lieb points to the decline of banner ads and the opportunity it represents for content marketers.

Advertising effectiveness is declining. Savvy web users are installing ad-blockers in droves with Adblock use in Europe over 30% in some countries, whilst everyone is developing 'banner blindness' with their own internal ad-blockers, which is also known by its more common name, the human brain. The move to mobile makes it harder to deliver effective ads without being obtrusive and increasing concerns about data privacy mean some consumers are in no mood to hand over their details. This might sound like bad news for digital marketers, but it actually opens up a whole world of opportunities for doing things differently and reaching customers more effectively. For content marketers specifically, it means budgets will continue to tilt in their favor, and greater demands will be put on content marketing departments, as…

AusAustralia's digial ad spend may be where the rest of the world is headed.

Australia currently has the highest digital ad spend per user in the world and by 2018 projections saw that more than 50% of their total advertising budgets will be dedicated to both online and mobile. As Australian marketers have increased spending in digital advertising, they have struggled to engage their consumers. Why is this you might ask? Studies show that 81% of all Australian consumers currently use ad blocking software so that as much as one in five consumers will not see any digital ads over a 30 day span. On top of all that Australia has the lowest click-through rates for banner ads throughout the world. So you might ask yourself why exactly Australian marketers still continue to spend when their consumers are not engage through the digital medium. Australian consumers are buying more connected devices to suit…

What Google AMP Means & How You As A Content Marketer Can Adapt

If you’re a web marketer, chances are you’ve heard about Google’s recent AMP project. If not, here’s the rundown: AMP stands for “accelerated mobile pages,” and it’s Google’s most recent attempt to streamline mobile content for marketers and users everywhere. While most marketers are greeting AMP with enthusiasm, there’s no doubt that it will change web marketing in a big way. Here’s what you need to know about the major Google shift, and what it means for your web content. First, I’ll go more into defining, and then give you a how-to of sorts.

What is AMP?

According to industry experts analysing the launch like Search Engine Journal and Smart Insights, AMP is Google’s response to the launch of Facebook Instant Articles – an innovative feature that went live in 2014 and allowed users to access a selection of…

The social media from brands you see is only the tip of the iceberg. Over 90% of social is 1:1

A new report from Spredfast shows how massive the disparity is between how much content you see posted by brands on social media and the vast amount of 1:1 social media customer care they are constantly involved in. They studied the fourth quarter activity and performance of 50 major brands for their 'state of social' study. One of the most interesting finding in the research is how much of big brand's social content is 1:1 interactions rather than broadcasting to the whole followership.

1:1 Vs 1: many

The research examined every tweet from top brands accounts and sub-accounts (e.g. @ebay and @AskEbay), a total of 1.3 million pieces of content. The results show quite how critical social customer care has become. Overall, 93% of tweets in 2015 were not meant to be seen by…

The campaign to be the most powerful person in the world has generated some cutting edge marketing tactics

I don't need to tell you the current round of US primaries to decide on the two parties presidential candidates have the commentariat in a bit of a tizz. Trump has stolen the show by saying things candidates to lead the world's foremost superpower really shouldn't be saying. We've had arguments over the size of hands (and what that represents), un-becoming spats involving the candidates wives and announcements of policies so ludicrous you'd think a ten-year-old could do a better job of running a campaign: Exhibit 1: Trump's plan to ban all Muslims until quote 'we can figure out what is going on'. We're not here to get involved in the actual politics of the US election, but if you look at some of the big trends emerging from US politics you can draw out some genuinely…