What’s New in Marketing? September 2012

A scannable summary of developments marketers using digital marketing need to know

New digital technology

• Autographer - a new category of wearable device announced - while Autographer isn’t a platform for marketing, it does highlight a trend towards wearable mobile devices which are increasingly used as part of “life-streaming”. There are possibilities for integrating this into campaigns as map-based mashups have been.

  Autographer is different from other wearable devices in that it can automatically capture and store thousands of high resolution photos based on motion-sensing intelligence. It has five sensors and GPS capability which show when to take a photo based on subtle changes in light, colour, motion, direction and temperature. All of these parameters are recorded too.

Disclosure: I’m mentioning this launch since I’ve been involved in advising on the marketing of the product, but also because it’s a real innovation and it’s good to see a British company launch a cutting-edge tech product. This article in The Independent explains how OMG, the Oxford-based technology business is working with media agency BBH to launch the product.

Of course the iPhone5 was also launched in September, but I think most reading this will know about this! The iPhone 5 has a different screen resolution to previous models taller at 1136-by-640 pixels, compared with 960-by-640, so you may start seeing this recorded in your analytics. Here are the implications for design - more testing of apps and designs required unfortunately.

Social media marketing - changes from 3 of the main networks

• Facebook introduced a paid version of offers - Previously available free-of-charge, but not used widely, expect to see more coupon-based offers to redeem online or offline now Facebook is charging for them as part of their advertising feature. Marie Page wrote a post for Smart Insights readers sharing results of a first test for the feature.
• Twitter improve ad targeting options - This new feature of Facebook-like “Interest targeting” makes Twitter much more suitable for small business ad campaigns. In the alert we also show you where to find campaign ideas and a useful Twitter marketing guide from Twitter.
• B2B: LinkedIn updates company pages- The LinkedIn blog of 06/09 highlighted the redesign of these pages which shows new opportunities for promoting products.To help B2B marketers make better use of social media and inbound marketing, this month we launched a new ebook, Brilliant B2B Digital Marketing featured in this post by Rene Power explaining Why B2B companies need a Digital Marketing strategy.

Search marketing - new SEO advice and a new budgeting option in AdWords

• 66 tips from #brightonseo- Along with ThinkVisibility in Leeds and SAScon in Manchester, Brighton SEO has become one of the most popular search events for discussing the latest approaches in search, social media and analytics. Personally, I think it’s great to see these home-grown conferences (and similar ones in other countries) doing well compared to conferences where experts are jetted in from overseas to tell us how to do it.This is one of the best compilation of tips, for the hot topic of mobile SEO, I recommend checking out this this deck from Aleyda Solis.

• The single best piece of SEO advice - an interesting question with great answers voted up by many SEOs on Quora. With 12,000 views it shows Quora is still active in certain niches.
• New AdWords Shared budgets option - Shared budgets can make it easier to match your AdWords spending with how your business allocates marketing budget.

User experience, analytics and conversion optimisation

• A new timesaver for Google Analytics users - Here I explain how shortcuts give you quick access to your favourite reports and customisations. Time comparisons have also become much more user-friendly for time comparisons. Awesome, but about time!
• A call-to-action for investing in conversion rate optimisation - A short video case study of how an international company manages conversion-rate-optimisation
• Ship Early, Ship Often - This "inside story" shows how Facebook Test and Improve and discusses the implications for companies without their resource

Email marketing and CRM

• Email Look Book 2012 - if you work in email marketing, you can check out the latest campaigns and approaches from Responsys.
• Behavioural email marketing - also known as Event-triggered email marketing this technique still isn’t used as much as it could or should be. In this post, Mark Brownlow asks 6 questions for your trigger emails.

This summary was created by Dave Chaffey of Online marketing strategy advice site SmartInsights.com.