Chart of the Day: Top festive adverts on Youtube since November 1st.
Take a stroll into any retail store and you will instantly know that the festive season is upon us once again. Thanksgiving is less than two weeks away in the US and on this side of the Atlantic the burnt circles remain across the country from bonfire night. Both these events give the green light to marketers across the top retail brands to release their Christmas adverts. These adverts can make or break a brand during the holiday season, whether it is based on humour, humility or emotion the bottom line come January will be - did it increase sales based on last year.
Since November 1st, the six Christmas adverts that have been first to launch include John Lewis, Argos & Burberry. It's been hard to miss the now yearly flurry of social media activity for the latest John Lewis Advert #BusterTheBoxer (67k likes…
Reddit users don't take too kindly to self-promotion, but they love quality content when they see it.
Are you tired of the same old marketing channels and want to try something new?
Reddit might be just the thing you were looking for. It's a place where users share interesting news, cool links and insightful comments.
Sounds perfect, right? Sure, but there's a catch.
Reddit users are a community that hates advertising. If you fail to follow the “reddiquette”, your content will get downvoted and you might easily get banned.
But if you do it right, you'll be on your way to tapping into the potential of the platform and generating a stream of targeted traffic to your website.
Here are 10 actionable tips to help you make the most out of Reddit for your marketing strategy.
1. How it works
Reddit is a platform where people…
Key lessons for brands emerge from the most anticipated ad of the holiday season
On initial viewing the John Lewis’ £7m Xmas 2016 commercial tells a quaint story of a girl whose trampoline becomes popular with the local wildlife community.
Set against a backing track of Randy Crawford’s ‘One Day I’ll Fly Away’. The commercial features a Boxer dog in a typical Middle-England home. The dog enviously stares out of a living room window as it watches two wild foxes, a badger, a squirrel and a hedgehog liberally jumping on a trampoline built by the household’s father for his daughter.
Come Christmas morning Buster (the Boxer dog) pushes aside a surprised Bridget (the daughter) to merrily jump on trampoline all for itself.
Given a tumultuous political year, John Lewis’s customer director Craig Inglis said:
“You could say 2016 has certainly been quite a year. We…
How the ‘brains' behind the 45th President of the United States turned out to be a robot
In 1973 I went to a cinema in London to see “Westworld” starring Yul Brynner. Last week I watched the first episode of the 2016 TV series remake. As with the movie, the series concerns a future where robots act as hosts at a Wild West theme park.
Hosting paying human guests, the bots are so realistic that it is difficult to spot the difference between them and the humans. The bots play the roles of cowboys and citizens of highly realistic frontier towns - enabling humans who visit the theme park, to act out their greatest fantasies. The interesting thing about the programme is whether, guests who, given the chance to act out no-limits fantasies choose to shoot bad guys – have flings – start a brawls at saloons – or…
A New Definition of Edgerank
Facebook Pages are not what they used to be.
It may (or may not) come as a surprise to discover that only a tiny proportion of the content published by Pages that you “Like” actually reaches your News Feed. Some studies put this percentage (known as “reach”) at as little as 2%. Even the most optimistic of studies suggest that little over 11% of a Page’s fans will see its content.
This is due to the existence of a filtering mechanism Facebook uses that employs a complex algorithm. Without the algorithm in place you’d be overwhelmed with something like 1,500 posts a day on your News Feed. And a lot of those would be from brand Pages.
Facebook is well aware that users like to see content from friends and family first, and dislike a News Feed cluttered with promotional messages from…
Businesses need to properly measure social ROI, or stop wasting their time on it.
What's the point in doing something you're not sure is going to work? Well there's plenty of good reasons. You might have a great feeling about it. You might feel like you have to give it a try, or else you'll never know. You might think failure is just success in progress, or other nice luvie dovie sentiments, and honestly believe you'd better give this thing a go and if it doesn't work then it's just a great learning experience.
All perfectly noble reasons. However, what usually isn't a good reason for doing something is because everyone else is. Yet that seems to be the picture we see when it comes to brand's use of social media, according to marketing consultancy the Brand Gym.
Shockingly, 62% of brands are only using social media because it makes them look…
Conversational research takes social listening to the next stage
It is more important than ever now to raise brand awareness through conversations. Modern consumers are not as susceptible to advertising and product placement as in the past. Therefore, smart marketers generate brand awareness via influential social media strategies.
Good social media marketing depends on how thorough the keyword research is. It is important to use the best keywords in context, and then monitor them to see how effective they are. Also, the strategy should also employ "social listening." It is a way of getting real-time feedback relating to keywords to perfect the long-term marketing campaign.
The point of using the tactics mentioned above is to monitor your brand’s appeal and efficacy on social networks. Brand monitoring will help your company to gain a distinct leg up over the competition.
Now let’s look at how you can monitor your brand through a useful tactic…
How can online marketers handle the new challenges with the help of one KPI – Customer Lifetime Value?
Marketers are facing a new era in online retail, combining both technology and customer-centricity. It might not be a new thing for most of you and yet a survey shows that most companies are in “digital denial”, not accepting that it is tools and technologies now to help marketers acquire and retain their customers. Important as it is, one-to-one personalization is a challenge as well, which Chloë Thomas indicates in her recent book.
Why that matters in eCommerce?
Customers are more demanding than ever. eCommerce is more competitive than ever. Marketing tools, channels and data flows are more overwhelming than ever.
Online retail marketers today need to be present at the right time with the right message to the right prospect.
So how can we address that?
Let’s try an ACKNOWLEDGE – LEARN – ACT –…
A B2B case study showing how to create relevant, personal emails on a global scale.
Email marketing has undergone a transformation lately. The giants of online retail have set a precedent for sending relevant, timely email communications with content tailored to each customer on an individual basis.
Now the rest of us must follow, meeting the high expectations to which online consumers have become accustomed.
No longer is it enough to ‘batch and blast’ a single message to a contact list and hope that some will find it exciting….we must learn what each individual customer finds interesting and send them content to meet their requirements. Email personalisation is undoubtedly here to stay.
Improving personalisation as part of your email strategy however is not straightforward. It requires a significant increase in content production and an even greater amount of data. Even for companies with simple business models and minimal product lines, the deployment of personalised email content can…
If your open and click rates are dropping, you'll need to re-think your strategy
You had the best intentions; you worked diligently to get those conversions and build your email marketing list; you vowed to run a quality campaign and build relationships with your prospects, turning them into happy customers. Somehow it all went wrong. Your analytics are telling you that only a small percentage of your emails are opened, that you have been marked as spam by many of those subscribers you worked so hard to get.
Crossing the Line
Somewhere along the way, you crossed the line and became a harassment rather than a value. And you didn’t even recognize that you had done it. Is it fatal? No. But as you recover from this, you will need to understand how it happened so you never make the same mistake again.
How to Recognize You Have Become a Spammer
Be honest with yourself.…
