What’s New in Marketing? January 2013

Facebook Graph Search, Vine and Google Analytics Gallery are the biggest announcements

January is the time of year when many look again at their priorities for the year ahead. To help with this, Smart Insights ran a series of 8 free webinars on January 9th. If you would like to take a look, you can still view the #MarketingPriorities2013 Webcasts and Slideshares. Continuing the theme, Expert commentator Annmarie Hanlon will be speaking in February in a webcast on how to create the Perfect Marketing Plan.

The brand new online brand of note in January was Vine. From the people who brought us 140 character tweets, so that we could say more with less, come 6 second videos. It’s based on technology Twitter purchased in 2012. It’s good to see some brands have been agile enough to trial the format, but I’m sure others will have larger, more strategic “fish to fry”. Revolution has some examples of which this caught my eye:

View:

A trip down #Gap advertising memory lane for our #firstpost on Vine. vine.co/v/b5PeYQOLuLj

— Gap (@Gap) January 25, 2013

Of course, Facebook Graph Search which we cover in our social media section will have a much bigger impact eventually. Or will it?

Strategy and planning

• Perhaps the biggest news in January was actually just before Christmas and may have been missed as companies wound down for the break. The news was Oracle’s $871million acquisition of Eloqua and the implications for development of a new series of marketing cloud type solutions. In this post, Paul Fennemore takes a look at the implications of marketing clouds and the main options available: The Growth in Combined Marketing Cloud Solutions
• In January 2013 we updated our free digital marketing healthcheck. In this post, Dan Bosomworth explains how to [set priorities for 2013]((http://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-healthcheck) using it and our other tools in our toolkit. We’ve updated it line with member feedback to enable you to save and review your scores and recommendations.
• Ecommerce Trends 2013 - Jill Rob and I compiled this post of trends in Ecommerce covering the latest mobile commerce adoption figures and continued growth in Ecommerce according to the IMRG:

In a separate post I showed how to use Cause-and-effect or Ishikawa fishbone diagrams for Ecommerce analysis.

Social media marketing

• How will Facebook’s new Graph Search affect marketers? Thanks to Cartlon Jefferis for his in-depth briefing.
• LinkedIn passes 200 million member milestone - with new users being added at an average rate of two per second (or 172,800 per day) but closes two core services which was a surprise to many.

Expert commentators Jon Paget and Marie Page also had good practical posts on community management tools and Reviewing Social Media Effectiveness.

Search marketing

• A 10 step AdWord Audit. Without proper management, AdWords can get very expensive and, over time, lose its effect. AdWords specialist Paul Coulter explains that’s why you need to do periodic audits of your AdWords program. For a more in-depth look at getting the most from AdWords, see our 7 Steps Guide to AdWords Success Ebook which we have just updated for 2013.
• Ranking Tools recommendations. With discussion on our LinkedIn Group about the latest Google Panda update, these Smart Insights Answers Discussion Forum answers covered tools for reviewing ranking impact.

User experience, analytics and conversion optimisation

• New Google Analytics Solutions Gallery - This is a handy new set of tools to help customise reports to a business.
• Are you a Datavore?. A post arguing for more data-driven decisions. This infographic based on research from Nesta from their useful report, Rise of the Datavores, shows that many rely on intuition alone when making marketing decisions. I wondered how this compared to Smart Insights readers, see the poll results to find out whether our readers are more balanced.
• Mobile use statistics - One of our most popular posts in January showing the interest in managing mobile use.

Email marketing and CRM

• 7 Key issues in CRM to include in your plans for 2013
• Growth of marketing cloud services
• Seven not-so-sexy email marketing tasks for 2013