A reminder of Facebook's changes during October
Since a relative lull of announcements about new developments in August and September Facebook has been busy with releasing a bunch of updates since and some are well worth knowing about. The biggest from an advertiser perspective is the launch of Lead Ads and Facebook retail listings, but the one that will get the most media coverage once rolled out is the so-called Dislike or “Emotion” buttons. Local business verification is also an important one for many brands.
Here’s a quick roundup with links to articles that explain the topic in more depth.
Facebook Lead Ads
Lead Ads look like other Facebook ads except that when you hit the call-to-action button you stay on Facebook with a Facebook form collecting the customer data. This is particularly useful on mobile as it reduces the load time an external page is likely to suffer and enables Facebook to auto-fill many…
Gamification can potentially revolutionize your content marketing strategy – examples and tips to show how to apply it
Content marketing is predicted to continue to be a key strategy in digital marketing and marketers will soon start looking for new solutions to create fun and engaging content. Many of them are already interested in gamification – analyst Gartner expects that by 2016, gamified strategies will become standard practice for driving brand engagement and fostering consumer loyalty. Here are a few tips to help you realize the potential gamification holds for revolutionizing your content marketing strategy.
The basics
First of all, what is gamification? It's basically application of game mechanisms to non-gaming activities and contexts. Gamification is of great use to areas of business which depend on engagement and motivation – for instance training, project management, recruitment or marketing.
Rewarding players with points and badges or…
Use these less well-known Social Media tools and Hacks to Get Things Done
The world of social media is a busy place. A very busy place. And this means that it can often feel like you're shouting into the wind with your social media campaigns. Indeed, if you approach social media without a strategy and without the right tools, your social media activity may amount to exactly this.
The good news, however, is that, as social media has grown, more and more tools have become available that can help the shrewd social media marketer do their job more effectively. These include tools for scheduling posts, tracking follower/fan demographics, refining content, creating social media calendars, and much, much more.
It’s hard to imagine running a decent social media marketing campaign without using at least some of these tools. And the very best social media marketers often use a variety of tools and make sure…
If you want a strong team you'll need to treat them right: 6 techniques to build a cohesive culture
A recent article about Amazon’s work culture shocked many, including the company’s CEO Jeff Bezos himself.
Regardless of what’s really happening at Amazon, this ongoing situation should serve as a cautionary tale of what happens when a company’s public image doesn’t appear to align with its employees’ experiences.
Big companies such as Amazon, Apple, and Walmart can weather bad press because of the value they deliver. Consumers might shake their heads at reports of demeaning worker treatment, but they’re not going to stop buying iPhones or cancel their Prime subscriptions.
But for the rest of us, ongoing internal unrest will undoubtedly hurt external output. You can’t expect overworked, underappreciated employees to consistently deliver high-quality products. You can’t expect the public to overlook…
How to use Tentpole Marketing tactics to grow social buzz around events big and small
Think of a movie that hasn’t come out yet. A big movie, that’s making a lot of noise at the moment. This is a movie that’s probably already cost a lot of money to make and it’s a good bet that the studio is expecting to turn a pretty healthy profit on. In fact, this is exactly why they want you to know about it weeks, or even months, before it goes on general release.
Chances are that after it's finished showing in cinemas, the studio would love you to continue to show an interest in the film, perhaps even buying the video game, t-shirt, poster or any other number of related merchandise. Perhaps by now you’re already talking to your friends about the possibility of a sequel.
As…
Marketers think people have short attention spans - TV shows us they don't
It’s often said that we are living in a new “Golden Age of TV”. There literally seems to be too much great television to watch... Whether you like gritty crime stories, or historical dramas or comedy series, there are inventive, compelling, “binge-worthy” TV shows coming out all the time – and not just on “television,” but now on streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime.
Today, TV is driving the cultural conversation more than movies or music or any other art forms: people identify by what types of shows they watch and they create a sense of community by comparing notes on social media about which latest developments happened during their latest session of binge watching. With all of the critical, cultural and financial attention going to TV shows today, companies like Netflix and Amazon and other online companies…
How and why brands should embrace Instagram for marketing
In most countries, Facebook is both king and queen of social media. According to the latest statistics from Pew Research, 72% of American adults use Facebook. But that growth has been relatively stagnant over the past 3 years. When you consider Facebook's organic reach of 6%, the potential audience size becomes much smaller. Organic reach on Instagram, on the other hand, is growing rapidly. Early indications also suggest that Instagram users are more receptive to branded content. Given Facebook own Instagram, it's hardly a competition. However, it does matter which is more effective when it comes to deciding where your time and marketing budget should be spent.
According to this infographic from EcommerceCEO, now is the perfect time for marketers to consider Instagram. Engagement is 58X higher on Instagram and brands can reach 100% of their followers. Only 36% of marketers currently use Instagram,…
Use these 17 points to check your email service provider has all the features you need to produce fully optimised email marketing campaigns
Optimising your email marketing is no easy task, if it was, everyone would be getting fantastic results from their email campaigns.
A major factor in either facilitating or constraining how effective your emails are is the functionality available in your "Email service provider (ESP)", which today is often called "Marketing Automation" or "Marketing Cloud" services. To help select the best fit of provider based on the most important features or 'functionality', we have produced this handy Email service provider checklist to see if your email service provider is providing you with all the features you need. For members, we also have a more detailed guide for choosing your email service provider.
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Welcome to the real self-service economy
Consumers want to be in control. They show a clear preference for self-service solutions, both in planning a purchase, the purchase itself and possible questions afterwards. Smart companies try to anticipate this trend because it is in the mutual interest of businesses and their customers.
The use of customer data is absolutely indispensable as this will improve the customer experience in every phase of the purchase process. Tweet This
This evolution doesn’t mean the end of the traditional 'human' customer service. The need for a safety net with personal contact still exists. This contact can be organized by the companies themselves, but it may also mean contact with other customers.
These are some of the conclusions from a worldwide study conducted over the past few months in collaboration with SSI (fieldwork) and No Problem! (translation partner). The study included ten countries from all around the world.
The results of…
Stop whining and start winning with the power of integrated digital brand experiences
Aren’t marketers often a bunch of whiners? I listen to myself sometimes, comparing how complex marketing is now, the speed of change... I can make it sound negative, and it isn’t, in a post-digital world brands have never had opportunity like this. Honestly, I believe that.
Post-digital? It makes me smile when I hear that, only because I agree with the term. We have watched ‘digital’ be both the underdog to above the line advertising and, from a channel perspective, have seen how it’s come to dominate through search and social. And now I feel it’s totally irrelevant to even talk about digital. It’s risky, dangerous and misleading. We are post-digital for one simple reason…
Everything is digital
It really is. We know of course that mobile and social media have changed the ‘how’ and ‘where’ in people learning more about…
