What benefits might deeper, actionable, aspect-based sentiment analysis offer for your marketing strategy and planning?

I have recently attended the Social Data Summit, which gathered prominent speakers from leading brands and organizations to discuss the latest developments in digital insights, social listening, and sentiment analysis. The first speaker Dr. Jillian Nay, a founder of the Social Intelligence Lab, challenged the audience with her presentation “Social Data Intelligence is a Mess! Let’s Fix It”. Jillian highlighted some major challenges facing the social intelligence industry that need to be addressed such as lack of standards, transparency & accountability, insufficient support for social media intelligence roles, limitation of current tools, depreciation of social networks APIs, but also acknowledged exciting progress that industry is…

A list of digital hacks and tools for full-stack marketers

First of all, think through your most tedious, low-skilled, weekly tasks. If you find them cumbersome, chances are, other marketers are bound to have felt the same frustrations as you. It's likely that, somewhere in the world, someone created the technology to help themselves and others overcome whatever the challenge at hand is. I always look at pain points as opportunities and so if there's ever something that takes a while to complete, its easy to find a solution (or a hack as some might say). In the below article, I've combined a list of marketing tools and chrome extensions that I regularly use to automate a few of my daily activities, to be more efficient and to get results faster. That's what being a full-stack marketer is all about. Getting stuff done, and getting results. "The full-stack marketer is multi-skilled. However,…

What is a content discovery network and why should digital marketers be using them?

It is not fair to make your users wait. The bottom line is that content marketers are at greater risk if they fail to reach their audience quickly since Google have confirmed that site speed is a ranking factor. Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a new way of amplifying the delivery of your content. It is a system that provides faster and safer internet experience. Believe me; it has all the potential to add value to your content marketing objectives.

Why use a CDN?

Content delivery is crucial to marketing success. After hours of time spent thinking on a theme for a good article, you should work on ways to deliver it quickly. Globaldots indicates the loss in conversion rate as -7%, per one-second delay. You cannot afford to have a slow loading page. This is where a CDN comes…

How a watermelon got 500 times more views than the President of the United States: Why Live Video offers a massive opportunity for brands willing to be creative

Live video streaming found its footing nearly a decade ago when sites like Livestream and Ustream emerged. However, back then, brand marketers felt lukewarm about the technology — bandwidth was limited, audiences were extremely niche, and the stakes of live broadcasting seemed too high. But now, with Facebook pushing the option to its huge user base, YouTube announcing the integration of mobile live streaming on its platform, and news outlets like Wall Street Journal, NBC, CBS, and Fox News trying their hand at it, brands are having a hard time resisting this now-viable marketing avenue. In fact, a recent poll found that 44 percent of executives live-streamed an event in 2015, while another 20 percent plan to…

As App Downloads fall and engagement stalls, PWAs look set to be the future of the mobile web experience.

Google has generated more than it's fair share of TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) in its time. AMPs are still fairly new but have been enthusiastically taken up by many publishers for the faster mobile experiences they offer. But now Google are pushing new kind of web page, which comes with its own TLA and offers the possibility of radically changing the way many consumers use the internet. Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) Progressive Web Apps are web pages that work more like an app (hence the name). Being web pages means they don't need to be downloaded from an App Store like Google play or Apple's App store. This removes friction from the user's journey (which Google is very keen on) and also keeps users within the Google ecosystem (If they're using a Chrome browser), which…

Search Ads are just the beginning of a big year for Apple.

The public-facing changes made to the App Store in Fall 2016 have been nothing short of monumental, but for Apple the shift marks only the beginning of a new methodology for interacting with developers and consumers. As we roll into 2017, Apple’s recent updates will begin to solidify into a new App Store hierarchy, one which will include Search Ads as a core pillar and send a friendlier message to developers. App Store Optimization experts have been preparing for a major shift in the App Store for some time now. After all, Google introduced Search Ads to the Play Store in February of 2015, themselves following in Facebook’s footsteps. Apple is methodical, though, and the inevitable rollout of ads has come to impact the entire App Store experience. First, the ads themselves. Over 65% of all app installs originate…

What we learned from implementing AMPs

This week's big development here at Smart Insights is the implementation of Accelerated Mobile Pages for our blog. If you are reading this on the standard HTML version (looks the same as normal) visit this post as an AMP to see what we have done. Over the last year, we have published updates about how Google is implementing and utilising AMPs to improve everybody's mobile web experience.

A timeline of AMP

Let me recap the main developments of AMP: December 2015 Google announced that it was seeing 16,000 new Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs) every single day. This was an impressive rate of adoption and showed the extent to which publisher wanted to attract audiences of mobile devices. February 2016 Then in February we saw Google has started rolling out Accelerated mobile pages…

This experimental new 'Podium' feature from Google hints at plans for slightly more social SERPs

Google Posts wasn't so much launched by Google, as it was quietly rolled out with little to no fan-fare. Months have passed since the feature first went live for a select few people, but still most digital marketers haven't heard of them. So what exactly are Google posts? Google Posts are short snippets of text, rather like Tweets or Facebook status updates, uploaded directly to Google rather than social networks. At the moment they are only available for US Presidential candidates, but their landing page suggests that Google aims to open them up to "verified people and organisations". You can see an example of a Google Post below for a 'brand search' on Hillary Clinton where it forms part of the Knowledge Graph on the right. …

Bigger text ads, separate device bids, responsive display ads and new ads on Google Maps

As expected, there were plenty of big announcements at the 2016 Google Performance Summit. AdWords was the star of this year’s show and Google revealed a string of big changes coming soon to the platform. There’s a clear push towards mobile with these upcoming features and plenty of reason to be excited. Here’s a quick run through of the biggest headlines to come out of the Google Summit.

1. Text ads are about to get a whole lot bigger

The most intriguing announcement from Google is that text ads are going to be bigger than ever. Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) will allow you to write two headlines of up to 30 characters, instead of the current single headline and 25-character limit. You’ll also have up to 80 characters for the newly extended description block, up from two 35-character…

What does the 'IoT' mean for Marketers?

The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the biggest trends in digital technology within the past 5 years. However, discussion of Marketing applications for IoT, has been surprisingly limited. This new infographic from Marketo, gives a nice visual introduction to opportunities for Marketers in different sectors to engage and satisfy the needs of our customers using the IoT. …