Back in February, Google decided to end their six-year run of experimenting with Sidebar ads, instead opting for a new format.

The rationale behind this was to move the search results to be more aligned with the Mobile experience, removing the sidebar ads and replacing them with three (sometimes four, depending on the how commercial the query is) above-the-fold ads and three at the bottom of the SERP. There were certainly a few eyebrows raised within the PPC and SEO industries, who questioned how this would impact their CPC and the organic listings. It was speculated by the PPC industry, that the cost of an AdWords campaign would increase, due to the principles of supply and demand as there is now only 6 or 7 ads, compared to the 11 ads displayed previously. [si_guide_block id="64171" title="Expert Members Access - Google AdWords" description="Today, Paid Search Marketing is highly competitive in all sectors,…

7 Steps to Content Marketing Success in 2016

In our previous infographic, 7 Steps to Digital Marketing Nirvana, we showed the success factors with creating a digital strategy to help grow a business. Since the 7 Steps format was popular, we have used the same format in this Content Marketing infographic. In it we highlight a process to help your business grow using Content Marketing, which we believe should be at the heart of your digital marketing strategy in 2016. To help you review or benchmark how well you compete with your content marketing, for each step in the infographic, I have included relevant research from our free managing Content Marketing in 2016 research report we have just published with HubSpot - thank you if you were involved in the research! The research shows the challenge of content marketing with: Over two-thirds (67%) of businesses creating more content in 2016 compared to 2015 Only 11%…

We talked to Lee Evans about how he sees ad-blocking affecting digital marketers

It's hardly surprising that digital marketers are no fans of ad-blockers. For many online publishers who make their revenue that way, it can feel like people are basically making off with their content without contributing to their revenue. As you'll know Ad blocking is on the rise as these latest stats on the popularity of ad blockers show. It's an imporant issues since in some countries, in younger age groups over one third of audiences used ad blockers. For digital marketers who work it other areas like ecommerce or marketing a SaaS product, the problem is more around missing out on large segments of their potential audience when they run ad campaigns online. But marketers need not despair, there are ways to circumvent ad-blockers,…

Use these 12 insights from ground-breaking eye-tracking research to improve your email campaigns on mobile

How much do you know about how your subscribers really perceive your emails on mobile? If the answer is not much then it’s probably time to optimise: 70% of all emails are now opened on mobile and scrolling on a touchscreen is a completely different experience to using a desktop. Users can interact with content anywhere and anytime and their location, the lighting, sounds, distractions etc. will all have an impact on how our messages are perceived. Additionally, a study by Litmus found that 80% of people will delete an email that doesn't look good on their mobile device. Although that is worrying, the good news is that there are some very simple changes that you can make to your campaigns to avoid them…

How to harness the power of user-generated content

User-generated content, whether customer reviews or visual praise for your product, can serve as superior marketing collateral. With this in mind, brands should harness the power of consumers to maximize the impact of social media marketing efforts. Social media marketing professionals understand the value of attracting customers. Much time, money, and energy is spent on marketing budgets in order to share quality content, hold product sweepstakes, and invest in attractive landing page designs to increase conversions. While these and similar efforts play a significant role in boosting social media exposure, the actual direct customer ‘voice’ in the form of user-generated content hasn’t been receiving sufficient attention in social media efforts. This is unfortunate, as content - whether in the form of a product review or a customer-uploaded photo - has immense potential for leveraging social media marketing campaigns. According to a Social Media Link infographic,…

The next best thing to an SEO crystal ball

Calculating return on SEO activity is a bit of a headache if we’re honest. With so many variables, how on earth do you confidently forecast what will happen? Forecasting anything is never going to be a simple black and white process, but compared to forecasting PPC, organic traffic is a real tough one to predict. As SEO continues to establish itself as a credible marketing channel, forecasting is going to be a requirement that at some point we’re all going to face. If you’re looking to sell big investments in SEO or gain new budget for your activity, I think it’s a pretty fair request to provide an understanding of what returns are available. That’s just good business sense / due diligence. If you’ve never had to work on a forecast before but have suddenly been asked to do one (typically these requests come last…

Go 'Above the Clutter' and see how CMOs at the top of their game run their marketing campaigns

The founder of the CMO club, Peter Krainik, has just launched a new digital series which will take us behind the scenes with top American CMOs, to find out how they run their marketing departments and successfully push through changes to make them more creative, innovative and efficient. The series offers a fun, no holds barred journey into the world of running the marketing of a huge business, whilst being refreshingly light on buzzwords and BS more generally. A new one will be coming out every Monday over at 'Above the Clutter', and also features analysis from IBM's marketing team. The first episode is now out, and takes a look at how the CMO of Home Depo stays connected with her staff and customers by taking time to work in stores so that marketing decisions are…

The anatomy of a successful website in 2016 and beyond

Digital marketing is such a fluid industry that many changes have taken place this past year alone. Consider: The Mobilegeddon threatened lots of website owners, only for it to produce less dramatic ramifications to most sites, at the very least. The latest Google search engine guidelines emphasized high-quality standards for Your Life or Your Page (YLYP) and placed more value on Expertise/Authoritativeness/Trustworthiness (E-A-T), among other changes. The emergence of personalized content such as Facebook’s Instant Articles, Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) There are probably more changes that went under the radar and developments that are about to take place soon in this field. This goes to show that digital marketing is an ever-evolving industry that requires marketers to stay abreast with the latest news to keep themselves informed about its best practices. Throughout the years, there are digital marketing practices…

Your B2B customer deserves a B2C experience like these

Comparing B2B and B2C marketing used to be an Apples-to-Oranges situation, but they’re becoming increasingly comparable. True, you don’t issue RFPs (Requests for Proposal) when you buy a Blu-ray player, and yes, a CRM decision requires a lot of research. But if you take some of the benefits that are common in B2C and implement them into your B2B space, you can create a customer experience that improves relationships and increases profits.

Three B2C Experiences to offer your business customers

Here are three things B2C experiences offer that your B2B customers might be missing out on:

1. Products or service reviews

B2B service reviews often consist of heavily starched long-form case studies and videos, which can’t hold an audience’s attention for long. Reducing the length of this information and implementing a real-time reviews feature like …

Brands can now display codes which can be scanned by users to start conversations on Facebook Messenger

Importance: [rating=4] Recommended source: Facebook's blog Facebook has announced a raft of new features for its Messenger app that promise to be rather interesting for business, as they offer opportunities for integrating messenger with their existing campaigns and utilising it for answering customer's questions. There are three new tools currently announced, which are: Messenger Codes, Messenger Usernames and Messenger Links.

How do they work?

The new codes for Messenger are just scannable codes which once picked up by your phone's camera automatically start a conversation with the brand that put out the code. Businesses could put them on all sorts of materials, be it online, in store or even business cards. It's kind of like QR codes but Facebook is gambling that by…