The only marketing left

"Content is the only marketing left", suggests Seth Godin. I think that statement has never been truer, if marketing is about respecting and teaching your customers to believe in you over other brands. I'd say it is, these days. Seth has argued for years that this is the basis of new marketing, a wave of other thought leaders have backed this too - David Meerman-Scott and Gary Vaynerchuck being just two of them. Someone becomes a fan, follower, lead or customer because you help them feel better about their world, it makes more sense and they are able to make decisions about something.

So, where are the marketers?

Thinking how we can apply this to our businesses, I wonder where exactly have the marketers gone, then! All we hear these days is how to leverage communications channels like email or social media, or exploit SEO… as if there's a…

Encouraging focus on conversion optimisation has to be the way forward

For many companies, driving traffic to their websites is still the ultimate goal.It's the way they measure the strength of their brand, and the the effectiveness of their campaigns. There’s nothing wrong with this, as long as we understand that traffic is not the holy grail and certainly not the only purpose of interactive marketing. All kinds of marketing can be used for all business goals, depending on context, and sheer visitor numbers really don’t mean anything by themselves. For transactional sites in retail, travel and financial service the conversion points are obvious and there is much more focus on conversion optimisation. But many, many businesses don't fall into this category and they're not tracking the many forms of conversion. All types of sites have many micro-conversions that could be measured, but often aren't. However, the excessive focus on traffic in…

Our interview with Richard Dennys, Marketing Director of Qype on how marketing drives growth at Qype

Founded in 2006, Qype is Europe’s largest site for user-generated reviews and recommendations of places, events and experiences. Qype has 18 million unique users per month and over 2.2 million user-generated reviews covering business categories in more than 166,000 cities with locations worldwide. Qype allows users to search for and read reviews about a restaurant, shop, service or experience and, with the Qype App, which has been downloaded over 1 million times, users can read and add reviews on their phone and use the application as a personal sat-nav to find places nearby. Available in seven different languages, Qype is a pan-European local review site able to offer its international users a multi-lingual platform. We talked to Richard Dennys, marketing director of…

According to content curation experts Curata, 48% of marketers are using content curation as a part of their marketing strategy. Are you?

As advocates of content marketing, we enjoyed this brief, but intriguing report on the adoption of content curation, it certainly adds fuel to the fire that content marketing must be taken seriously by marketers, and we're seeing more companies doing it according to HiveFire, the company behind Curata. In case you're not 100% sure what content curation is, our definition is that Content curation is the process of finding, organising and sharing content online. It's important that content curation and content origination are both part of a content marketing strategy - it has to be a mix. So this blog post is content curation! The key benefit of content curation…

I've had several meetings over the last week that have prompted this post - hearing misconceptions that getting into social media is somehow free, fast and a return is to be somehow expected. I don't think so. It's not that social media marketing is hard, I feel it requires more joined up thinking and, like any investment, it needs fore-thought. Social media is cheap (if not free). This is the biggest one, I feel. Social media isn't at all free - there are simple a vast number of free tools to help you, a big difference. This is the classic problem now, social media seems to be about the tools, so in conversation we talk about Facebook, You Tube, Flickr, Stumblupon, Twitter, Wordpress blogs etc - but that isn't social media marketing. Social media marketing is people, real people with real interactions, albeit digitally. So - you need a plan, a…

Online Customer Experience and Branding - an example of integrating the website and social presence

Today, with so many prospects and customers interacting with you online, I believe your brand really is greatly influenced by  the Online Customer Experience you develop. But I think many don't see how a website can support and especially enhance their brand. In this posts I'll share an approach I use with businesses and I hope you can adapt this model for your own business or your clients - it's classic brand marketing.

Brand value mapping

The first stage is to understand where a brand is right now.  I was recently discussing this approach with my class for marketing students in Derby. As a starting point we did a brand mapping activity for different companies. The areas highlighted in red are the key review areas for your online brand.

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I came across this post by Jeremiah Owyang. His comments resonated with me regarding what I too have noticed is the mis-use of micro-blog media - namely Twitter. Whereas Jeremiah sees it as over-using Twitter, becoming reliant on it, I wonder if it's a symptomatic content issue with sales promotion thinking being a big example. In that case Twitter is but the most recent channel to suffer mis-use.

Are you short serving your audience?

Jermiah comments "I’m seeing an unbalance in how individuals are trying to get the word out, and an excess focus on micro tools, resulting in some bad behaviours". It's a serious point because if so you only hurt your own brand as your audience will refuse your messages and content and go elsewhere.

What's causing this problem?

Jeremiah calls it shish kebab in his analogy, essentially serving…

It's always useful to be able to compare the way your marketing budget split to others for different marketing approaches. Particularly if changes in allocation are highlighted and ideally if the budgets are for similar companies. A new international survey from Econsultancy and SAS helps with this. With permission, this post includes a summary of the main findings of the report:  Marketing Budgets 2011 and charts of the budget mix.

Summary of marketing budgets report

The main insights from the report for me are: Marketing budgets overall are up, in digital 72% of companies are investing more and 26% in offline channels - great news and indicative of a more upbeat feeling for the future, maybe? On average, digital budgets are being increased by 35% over last year, so a big increase. The continuing growth of investment into social channels is a big theme 75% companies investing more, though interestingly it's the area that companies…

A case study of why many companies continue to buy links

Value: [rating=4] Our commentary: Well, the answer to the question, as with many tricky #digitalmarketing questions, is "it depends". I prompted to write this post, to alert you to a really interesting new piece in the New York Times shows both sides of the story - the publicity has caused a penalty. It's a massive company - JC Penney - an $18 billion company,  that's featured. This is a big a case of Google SPAM as when BMW were delisted from Google several years ago. Through using paid links as their strategy JC Penney have been very successful. As the NYT puts it: The company bested millions of sites — and not just in searches for dresses, bedding and area rugs. For months, it was consistently at or near the top in searches for “skinny jeans,” “home decor,” “comforter sets,” “furniture” and dozens of…

Great examples of websites with effective online value propositions (OVPs)

"Why should I do business with you online?" is the question on the subconscious minds of all site visitors and especially first time visitors. I believe the design has to emphasise your key offers and why we should do business with you online rather than via another channel or a competitor. I call this an Online Value Proposition. I'm always on the lookout for sites that do this well, so thought it would be handy to present some examples here from different sectors. I like the example on the left from O2 which they use in the area of the site where visitors are viewing phones. It has links to the main parts of the proposition to help support the decision and highlight it with a good hook, image and…