Best practices in carousel design for effective web marketing
Carousels are an extremely popular element on home pages, intended to display a variety of content in an aesthetically pleasing way. Since I’m based in Australia, they’re more often called “Sliders”, others call them “rotating banners”. The inclusion of a carousel is probably one of the most common requests I get from clients during design revisions:
“Can we put a carousel there?”
Sure, why not you may say, they look great right? With the gentle animations and dreamy transitions, who wouldn’t want to sit there and admire it. But more often than not I think that carousels are wasted real estate, done poorly, and highly unusable.
While carousels are still a very popular tool, I’m actually noticing a decline in their use on larger sites who are often leaders in modern design/layout techniques. Still, the trend decline will take a while to hit the majority…
Options for incorporating video into your Powerpoint presentations
Powerpoint is a bit like Marmite. You either love it or hate it. However, the same person can love Powerpoint one day and hate it the next - because it all depends on who has put the presentation together and how they present it.
An innovative way to make the most of Powerpoint is to use video to enhance the visual potential of the medium. There are a number of different ways that you can use video to make a presentation more engaging. Here are some of our favourite ideas.
Using video in your face-to-face Powerpoint presentations
If you use Powerpoint to deliver presentations at meetings or conferences, there are ways that you can use video to liven up your visual aid. Your other option is to completely waste the opportunity and use Powerpoint to display a list of bullet points (you know exactly what I…
The perils of Professional Services websites and ten tips on how to avoid the common mistakes.
As we continue to move towards an online world where more and more visits will come from mobile devices, we still have thousands of professional firms either with a poor online presence or even more alarmingly without ANY website at all.
In this post I'll talk about some of the common problems I see daily in professional services websites when benchmarking against competitors. Whether it's sites for accountants, solicitors, law firms or even marketing agencies and consultants, these problems are surprisingly common.
The 10 most common mistakes and how to avoid them
Mistaking Landing Pages with History Pages. Websites should be for the benefit of the visitor, not the client’s ego. Buyers of Professional Services have other concerns first before they care how long you have been in business, how many…
The Who, Why and Where of using QR or action codes for marketing
We've had a lot of interest in our previous posts on using QR codes for marketing which shows their potential, but I've had a nagging doubt in my mind about the response rates - no one seems to be sharing success stories. Either it's working fantastically well for QR code vendors and brands and they're keeping it close to their chests or they're embarrassed.
Recent reports by Comscore, help with answering the response rate question and also gives an idea of the level of adoption amongst different demographics together with interesting data on how QR codes are being used, hence the title of this post.
This summary reviews consumer pull - adoption rates in the US, UK and Europe, but this is also driven by company push as they use QR codes more in their campaigns - we have…
New research and examples show how the latest QR code approaches integrate with video and Ecommerce
I’ve been taking a look at some of the latest examples of integrating print with digital through ads and statistics of action code usage in the US. You may know action codes as QR codes, but we're increasingly seeing Action codes used as a generic term for this direct response technique, since QR codes, although the dominant form of action code are technology specific and there other options such as Blippar and Microsoft Tag.
Statistics on action code usage
Nellymoser, Inc., a mobile marketing and technology services company, has some interesting insight on the use of action codes in magazine advertising. To understand how these mobile action codes are being used in magazines, Nellymoser surveyed every issue of the top 100 U.S. magazines by circulation in 2011 and the first six months of 2012. I use the term…
New EE site launches to promote new high-speed mobile access
Potential short-term impact: [rating=2]
Recommended link: Guardian introduction to 4G launch
Our commentary on 4G launch
Compared to some developed countries, the UK has limited high-speed mobile connectivity. This has now changed. Well at least in 4 UK cities, that's London, Bristol, Cardiff and Birmingham who now have access.
Brand “EE”, which is now the the UK’s largest mobile network as owner of the Orange and T-Mobile brands, has made the country’s first 4G service live and is promising to roll it out to 16 cities before Christmas. The initial coverage will be for around 20 million people. The Guardian reports that, as part of the launch, 700 shops which are currently branded Orange, T-Mobile and Everything Everywhere, will be renovated and have the EE brand added to their shopfront alongside the other…
Google research shows changing patterns of digital media and content consumption
Recent research from Google offers new insight beyond the consumer's shift to mobile, revealing how consumers view content across a number of devices - tablets, smartphones, PC's and of course TV.
After polling 1,611 people in the US, over 8,000 hours of activity and 15,738 media interactions, the study reveals that the story here is one of integration when it comes to users accessing your web content. 90% of all of media consumption, equivalent to 4.4 hours per day, is happening across tablets, smartphones, PC's and of course TV. The remaining 10% is split across paper, press and radio.
This not only has implications for how content, services and web applications are designed, but how you plan journeys across them.
Smartphones and apps are used for a relatively short duration at 17 minutes per day…
9 Questions to ask when choosing a behavioural email provider
The benefits of using behavioural email marketing to engage with existing contacts are well established. If you've decided to take the plunge, it’s important you find the right service for your business. Knowing what to ask a potential provider will help identify whether the service they provide is the one you need. However, before you start talking to any third-party about what they do, first ensure you are 100% clear on what it is you want.
Behavioural email? Remarketing ? Operational & transactional triggers?
There is often confusion between true behavioural email and other simpler forms of triggered email. A detailed description can be found in a white paper from 2 years ago that I think still holds weight; but in simple terms an operational or transaction email responds to an action with a general communication; remarketing targets users based on actions…
Showing how Facebook apps can increase engagement - will we see these due in Google+ soon?
A new report from social media software vendor Wildfire (recently acquired by Google) uses some of their latest data to offer a few useful tips for Facebook marketers. You can dig into the case studies in the report right here.
We're sharing it, since it's not just about Facebook Page Likes, it's about deeper engagement with a social media application hosted by Wildfire such as competition and quizzes and includes examples. Can we expect these types of applications in Google+ soon?
It defines three levels of engagement with the app: joiners who participate (83%); sharers who simply share (15%) and advocates who share and advocates who share and then encourage others to participate (1.5%). So this gives some figures to benchmark against and help build…
Measures to benchmark engagement of Facebook brand pages
Some interesting insight was published by Social Bakers this week where they look at engagement rates of Facebook pages in the UK.
Of course, Facebook admins can see the level of engagement of their own company page through Facebook Insights which gives measures like Reach and PTAT (People talking about this). However, this doesn’t allow you to benchmark against other companies.
Social Bakers uses two simple measures of engagement that can be used to benchmark sites. The first measure, Average Post Engagement, is based on the Post average, the second, Daily Page Engagement rate is based on the total daily interactions:
The useful thing about this compilation for UK brands is that you can calculate engagement for your own Facebook page using these measures and then compare to other similar pages, or simply…
