Everything you need to know about what has happened in social media marketing this week
Spotlight story: Twitter is becoming a tv channel
Video continues to take over social media as the preferred mode of content. And live streaming has grown rapidly over the past year becoming a key part of many leading brands marketing strategies. Twitter ramped up their video effort this year. In May, Twitter announced it would be live streaming video 24 hours a day, 7 days a week inside its app and desktop site. This shift towards mobile means that video is now Twitter’s largest revenue-generating ad format partnering with key brands such as BuzzFeed, The Verge and Bloomberg.
This week Twitter partnered with the All England Lawn Tennis Club to live stream its Wimbledon Channel. Allowing tennis fans around the world to tune in and watch matches daily, as well as covering news and interviews.
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Be proactive not reactive: Five simple steps to protect your brand reputation from future cyber attacks
On Friday 12th May, a global coordinated ransomware 'attack' began, affecting thousands of large and small private and public sector businesses. The attacks most high-profile victim, the NHS, suffered incredibly by way of operational business functionality, but also by way of business reputation.
Cybersecurity firm Secarma are warning businesses, large and small, that prevention is key to avoiding future attacks, and according to research from the Kaspersky Lab, 90% of businesses underestimate the threat of malware to their business continuity and brand reputation. A cyber attack on a business can be hugely detrimental to the longevity of that business.
According to IBM, small and mid-sized organisations are hit by 62% of all cyber-attacks, and unfortunately, the US' National Cyber Security Alliance reported that 60% of small businesses are unable to sustain their…
Examples of the best brand Instagram accounts and what we can learn from them
It's clear that Instagram isn't just a social network for posting cool views with filters or the odd selfie anymore. Instagram now has a whopping 700 million monthly active users and has evolved into a platform that can visually represent a brand. There are some brands out there that are doing really well on Instagram and we wanted to see why they are so successful. Use these 6 brands to help inform your own Instagram strategy and hopefully inspire you.
Adidas
A obvious brand to start with is Adidas. With over 15 million followers they have a very high influence within Instagram. They use their Instagram account to generate awareness of the brand and their range of products. They do this by sharing visual content and videos to drive more enthusiasm for Adidas products. Every image includes an adidas product,…
Which are the technologies that are dominating the Marketing Automation space?
Did you know that when it comes to marketing automation, just six technologies hold more than half of the market share? Well, now you do – courtesy of competitive intelligence and lead generation company SimilarTech and inbound marketing agency Bold Digital Architects.
The two companies recently teamed up to create a report on the State of Marketing Automation in 2017 and managed to draw up a couple of interesting conclusions.
Before we go into further detail, here’s a short overview for your convenience:
Six biggest technologies hold a total of 57 per cent of the market share.
A total of 482,765 websites have been using marketing automation technology last year, representing an increase in usage.
With more than a fifth of market share (21 per cent), Hubspot has the single largest market share.
B2B companies are most inclined on using marketing…
Chart of the Day: Is your use of influencer marketing mainly campaign-based or continuous or always-on?
Our Managing digital marketing 2017 research report showed that integrating marketing campaign activities remains a major challenge, so it was interesting to see a new report from Traackr reviewing integration of influencer marketing. Their new report specifically considers influencer marketing in one sector, B2B technology, but references this research from a wider sample on the maturity of influencer marketing integration.
Similar to our research, it shows that integrated 'always' on programmes are rare, instead it's more common to have campaign-based programmes. It's understandable that much influencer marketing is campaign-based since that makes it easier to manage as part of campaign activities. The report from Mark Schaefer and Evy Wilkins also considers the role of 'micro-influencers' which I'm a strong believer in. The report interviews several tech marketers including Nicole…
The Instagram tactics of the top US companies
The Fortune 500 is, put simply, a list of the 500 most valuable US companies based on revenue. These are all enormous businesses, with trillions in combined revenue. It's a mix of all different kinds of businesses, so some will be digital leaders whilst others may be laggards. TrackMaven have analysed the official Instagram accounts of all the Fortune 500 companies which use the platform. By doing so, they've given us an insight into how top brands use Instagram, but also reveals some mistakes that they're making, so you can learn from their mistakes as well as their triumphs.
How many top US companies use Instagram?
Fortune 500 companies are ranked by revenue, and interestingly we see that the higher revenue companies are considerably more likely to use Instagram. It's also worth noting that even among the top 100 the adoption rates are still only slightly over…
Examples of how build your ecommerce brand in a changing landscape
Research suggests many people are getting fed up of being ‘sold to’ thanks to incessant retargeting, yet we’re buying online more than ever before. That’s the oxymoron of our current ecommerce industry — how to sell, without seeming to sell.
In a saturated marketplace, marketers need to create more immersive shopping and retail experiences. Largely, ecommerce brands are evolving to meet the demands of the fractured user journey and the fractious user.
How?
Big brands tend to throw all their money and weight at influencers and programmatic advertising, whereas smaller brands focus on communities and stories. New retailers periodically flood the markets, capitalizing on the latest consumer trends and cashing in on the ‘fad economy’.
So what ecommerce evolution (or devolution), can we expect in the coming year? (Before you read on — check out our marketing megatrends for 2017 to be fully…
6 examples showing the power of parallax-based designs to engage and impress at the same time
Parallax scrolling is undoubtedly one of the most popular recent web design trends that first surfaced several years ago and is still common on certain types of site. Parallax gives a visual effect to add a feeling of depth to the visual presentation of content or projects.
Parallax is the effect that we can come around on a daily basis. Just pay attention to the way everything moves around while driving a car. The clouds in the sky appear to move at a slower pace than the houses and trees in the foreground. That is how the technique is achieved in the natural environment. Have you ever thought about this? Impressive, right? However, that's not the point of this article. Since all of us are involved in online marketing and web design, let's find out how to use the parallax scrolling effect…
Chart of the Day: Email Personalization in 2017
Dynamic content is broadly viewed as highly effective in the world of email marketing. For anyone not sure what this buzzword means:
Dynamic content involves a web page or email communication that is created in real time, often with reference to a database query, in response to a user request.
In the chart below, we see that dynamic content in email marketing is the most effective of personalization tactics. But what is interesting is taht personalized email content based on software/machine learning is 58% effective. People are capitalizing on using machine learning to deliver highly relevant content to marketing emails. This is definitely a trend to look out for.
Want to start to personalize your emails? Find out how in our article; 1 to 1 dynamic content personalisation is the future of email marketing.
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A case study in how to reduce the time spent preparing and deploying brand emails.
Most ecommerce retailers run a permutation of some or all of the following platforms and systems; ecommerce software, CMS, CRM and each of them store valuable data about their customers or products. This data can and should be leveraged in your marketing endeavors. Today, we’ll let you know how fashion retailer Brandshop did just that using the ExpertSender platform.
Brandshop is a Russian multi-channel (online and offline) fashion retailer that sells a wide range of products from over 100 world famous brands, including clothing, accessories, footwear, and beauty products.
Problem: Brandshop wanted to save their marketing team some serious time in the email creative creation process. They wanted to find a way to make use of their extensive website content library within their email campaigns to drive sales…
