Live video now available to everyone on Instagram.
Instagram announced another update their platform this week. Instagram Stories will allow you to broadcast live video to your followers as well as being accessible via Explore.
Live Video for Instagram Stories is being pitched as a way to help you connect with your friends and followers who are there to share a moment with you. It is interesting that once you've stopped recording any trace that you were there will have disappeared, which may help the more camera shy of us use live video. I'm looking forward to seeing how brands adopt this new way to communicate with their audience.
Going live couldn't be easier - Just swipe right to access the camera and hit "Start Live Video". The only limitation you have is that you can only broadcast for up to an hour, which should be plenty for even the most seasoned influencer or brand. Instagram…
Google AdWords scripts are an incredibly powerful tool for managing Google AdWords campaigns and automating laborious tasks.
AdWords scripts were voted the 3rd most useful Adwords optimization tool by a panel of 41 seasoned AdWords experts.
One of those tasks is A/B testing, where it can be incredibly difficult to keep track of when all of your tests have finished in large-scale Adwords accounts. However, split testing is essential for increasing your CTR, Quality Score and conversion rates.
In this article, I’m going to be explaining how you can use AdWords scripts to monitor and report the progress of your A/B tests, so you won’t have to trawl through your data to see when your tests have finished.
I’m also going to be showing you how you can use scripts that aggregate data, so you can reach statistically significant decisions on ads faster, where individually there would not be enough data. Furthermore, I’ll…
The new design overhaul of LinkedIn is the biggest in the site's history
Importance: [rating=3] (For B2B marketers)
Recommended source: LinkedIn blog
LinkedIn have just launched the largest desktop redesign since the site was first built back in 2003. They've re-designed the whole experience from the ground up, at the same time as re-designing their mobile app. The idea is to build a site that is more intuitive, simpler and faster to use. The new layout is currently rolling out across the world and should soon be live for all users - we are seeing it for some our team, on which this review is based, but not others.
Some of the most important changes for those using LinkedIn for marketing include:
Changes to the LinkedIn feed, tweaking the algorithm to get better at showing quality content users are interested in. They've also mentioned they'll be using humans as well as algorithms to select the most…
Chart of the Day: Email benchmarking report 2016.
The DMA’s Email benchmarking report, sponsored by dotmailer, covering email performance data from 2015, has been recently released. They cover emails delivered, open, click through and click-to-open rates. But the dramatic statistic is the click-to-open rate (CTOR), which has declined to 20% in 2015 from the high of 32% in 2013. So, why the extreme decline?
Let's look at what a CTOR is first: a CTOR, used to report on the effectiveness of your email content. It is calculated by taking your unique clicks and dividing by your unique opens and multiply by 100 to get the percentage (eg: (232 unique clicks ÷ 1200 unique opens) x 100 = 19%). Now to calculate an accurate CTOR, we need accurate clicks and opens. Unfortunately, open rates aren't always an accurate reflection…
Content Recommendation Engines are used by over half of all top sites
We're all familiar with those 'around the web' sections featured at the bottom of articles in many news sites. These 'advertorial' boxes can sometimes show dubious content which hasn't been short of criticism, specially among the editorial stuff of leading publications. However, the reality is that they're a significant revenue stream for some of the biggest media sites in the web. While the proliferation of content recommendation engines as a monetization tool for sites of all sizes has been remarkable, recently Slate.com and The New Yorker decided to drop them due to links that can lead to questionable websites, run by unknown entities.
SimilarTech released new insights showing the market share of content recommendation engines to understand their popularity among the biggest US & UK media publishers online.
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Chart of the day: marketers salaries vary by sector, with a huge £23,000 difference between gambling and Education.
Research into marketing salaries by MarketingWeek suggests that marketing is still often understood and is seen as a cost rather than as an investment.
Agency and consultancy wages are also just second bottom on the list, whilst gambling and gaming takes centre stage right at the top.
Gaming and gambling was found to be the highest paying sector for marketers with an average salary of £63,409. This was followed by consumer electronics with an average salary of £56,901 and utilities which has an average wage of £56,716.
The MarketingWeek Career and Salary Survey found that the education sector earn the lowest average annual salary at just £40,117. Those in the charity and not-for-profit sector have an average salary of £42,915, however education came joint with IT as the sectors where marketers are happiest.
The survey…
Marketers should plan for every scenario, rather than only the most likely one
2016 is behind us. Marketers have their eyes set firmly on the year ahead, and will be currently drawing up their marketing plans and strategy documents for 2017. However, the vast majority of these plans will actually only plan for 1 scenario: business as usual.
It makes sense to plan for business as usual, after all, it’s impossible to predict the future so it wouldn’t make sense to base ones marketing plan around an event which may or may not happen.
Consider the following:
- The future is not pre-determined or predictable
- If it were, there would be no point taking action today, because it would have no effect on the future.
- Full information about the future is never available
But precisely because the future cannot be predicted, you shouldn’t only plan for one scenario (businesses as usual), but rather should have…
There’s no better way to start 2017 than to take stock of emerging trends in today’s continually evolving marketplace and put some best practices in place for the year ahead.
As we pause to look back on what has changed, we should take note of the improvements that are needed in order to stay on top of any new advancements. A lot has changed in the past 12 months. New marketing tools have been created and existing services improved that will continue to shape the way that we conduct marketing research. Forward thinking marketers are placing more emphasis on survey-based software in order to discover exactly what their customers want.
As political change influences the way we work and developments are made with marketing tools, it is important that we stay informed about any relevant changes.
It’s an exciting time for digital marketers with numerous online tools to help you deliver more effective…
How keep your SEO strategy up to date with the latest mobile index changes
We all are living in a mobile world. Most of us pick our phones at the moment we wake up in the morning. Mobile phones have become a part of our daily routine, from reading the daily news to reviewing emails. Now, everyone knows the role that mobile-first and responsive design plays in achieving website rankings and improving traffic. Instagram is one of the best examples of mobile-first design.
Google's desktop indexing has been around since the beginning of Google Search. But, as this Smart Insights post announcing and discussing Google's Mobile First index launch shows, it is now 'abandoned' and pushed to backup status. It's no secret that Google has rolled out its new mobile-first index. Mobile-first search indexing will focus on the mobile version of your web page than that of the desktop version. So in this…
Chart of the Day: New Survey reveals that the vast majority of B2B buyers across all generations consider mobile devices essential
If you work in B2B marketing you may have been thinking that all this 'mobile-first' lark only need apply to your B2C friends. After all, serious B2B buyers use desktops, right?
Wrong. Okay, so that's an overstatement. Of course, they use desktops, but they also use mobile. And not just the hip young millennial buyers - new research shows in even the 50+ group (baby boomers) say that a mobile device is essential to their job.
The results come from a salesforce report which asked over 7,000 business buyers about their device usage in October 2016. Because terms like 'millennial' are often poorly defined, I thought it would be worth delineating the age ranges counted as in each generation for this report. In the graph below, millennials were regarded as being 18-35, gen-Xers as…
