How Big Data enables the relationship between data types to be explored

In my previous article in this series exploring the application of Big Data to marketing, I looked at how the Velocity component of Big Data provides greater understanding of your customers, improving marketing performance. In this post, I will explore the third of the 3 Vs, the potential impact of Variety on Marketing Variety covers the multiple types of data that are now available from the established structured data of tables and columns, with defined elements and values, to the many unstructured free format types of data. In recent years the amount of unstructured data and machine generated data is increasing at an exponential rate, being the major proportion (>80%) of the vast volumes of data now in existence. So what does this…

Part 3 in a series showing how Big Data can support marketing

In my previous article in this series exploring the application of Big Data to marketing, I looked at how the Volume component of Big Data provides breadth and depth to your understanding of your customers. In this post, I will explore the second of the 3 Vs, the potential impact of Velocity on Marketing.

Let’s first look at what we mean by Velocity and put down a simple definition of ‘Velocity is the speed of data growth/change’.

In the last few years, the accumulation of data has grown at an astonishing rate, with the amount of data increasing by 2.5 exabytes each day or 40% annually at current rates and accelerating.

The big question is, what does velocity mean for businesses looking to tap into it and does this speed of growth/change…

How does your use of key email tactics compare?

Following on from the post by Becky Hesilridge summarising adoption and examples of different email marketing strategies, Pure 360 have released an infographic from their research to share more insight on how email marketing is being used in 2014. Companies were asked how they are are using email marketing, and if they have an email marketing strategy. 57% have an email marketing strategy, and 65% feed back on results. The sector most likely to have a strategy is the Retail Sector and the fourth most likely to be implementing one. Thanks to Becky Hesilridge for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Becky…

4 quick tips for shorter, successful social updates

My dream is to open a clothing store for online marketers. So content marketers can wear t-shirts with the slogan "I repurposed this from a blog post". And copywriters will proudly declare "I kept it short".

Short is beautiful in the online world.

Though that's not quite correct. The right length for text depends on many factors. But if you can make your text shorter while communicating the same message, then that's a good thing.

Why?

Because you don't have a lot of time to capture attention and draw people into and through your text...whether it's a blog post or a product description, email copy or a sales page.

Cutting text down is a particular issue when you have a character limit or space is at a premium, such as with a Tweet or subject line. It's one of the many topics I cover in a new Smart Insights video…

Continuing our briefing on how to apply Big Data for Marketing

In the first post in this short series I gave an introduction to using Big Data for marketing.  That introductory post included an overview of the concept and looked at the three core elements Volume, Velocity and Variety. In this second post in the series, I will look at the impact of the increase volumes of data associated with Big Data - what does this mean in practice for real-world marketing? Of the 3 V’s, Volume is the easiest to relate to Big Data, as it is about the amount of data, which as of 2012 stood at ~2.5 zettabytes and is expected to grow to almost 7.9 zettabytes by 2015. It is however a controversial area with many differing opinions on what constitutes ‘big volume’. To my 5 year…

Introducing The App Map - a useful tool to compare different social media marketing services

With the incorporation of social media in many parts of business, from sales to customer service to marketing and more, the social software market has also advanced to support various job functions. These systems provide a variety of capabilities, including social media monitoring, CRM, social advertising and collaboration.

As these applications are all called 'social business,' such a diverse product landscape can create a lot of confusion for buyers.

However, this situation also presents many benefits. First of all, social app vendors are working hard to deliver very advanced tools for understanding your audience and/or followers, helping you find opportunities you might not have been able to spot on your own or with more traditional methods.

Customers have already adapted to being serviced via social, and it’s the social software vendors who are enabling sales, customer…

4 inspiring examples of B2B companies harnessing social media for B2B marketing

In our 7 Steps B2B Digital Marketing Guide we show the importance of tailoring planning and content generation and curation around the specific needs of business-to-business (B2B) buyers when positioning B2B products and services. In this post I will look at more examples of B2B companies making good use of social media.

Social media and business are two phrases that have sat uncomfortably for several years; I think for good reason. I think about my own use of social media going back before 2008 to when the major platforms developed into mass audience participation, real-time news and networking sites, and the ways in which people use them. Business applications of social media do appear to have been shoehorned in as an afterthought.

In previous posts, we talked about the importance of curating content and creating great original content and offered…

Big Data, Big Analytics, Big Automation, Big Noise?

When I first started my career, storage was not at today’s inexpensive levels and one of the big challenges was utilising the space available in efficient an ingenious ways. Over the years the price has plummeted with space becoming freely available and available data growing exponentially. In recent years the ability to use this data has become possible with development of Big Data removing the historic problems of storage and access in reasonable, practical timescales. But what does this storage potential mean for marketers? Is it just more data? Many I speak to are wondering about the applications and this is also suggested by Dave Chaffey's review of Online marketing trends for 2014 where Big Data was voted as having the third biggest commercial potential for Smart Insights readers. In this post and a short series, I'll be exploring how the increase of available, ever…

A summary of research findings on email communications strategies

At Pure360 we work with a lot of marketers with different aims, objectives and strategies. To gauge the current state of email marketing strategies used, we recently completed this in-depth email strategy research based on a survey in partnership with PlanToEngage.

Over 600 email marketers responded, giving us a wide range of results. Results fell into the following categories; strategy, best practice and measurement & reporting.

The results were surprising; indicating that many email marketers are not currently practicing their email marketing with a strategy in place. Therefore many of the practices which would logically follow such as an editorial calendar or automated campaigns are also not being practiced.

Email Strategy

Having a clear and focused email strategy is vitally important to your marketing mix; without a well-defined strategy your email marketing ROI is likely to suffer. This may seem fairly…

Examples and the Pros and Cons of Parallax Web Design

We are all more aware than ever that web design styles are shifting  towards user experience as opposed user tasks and usability. Users demand to be engaged, entertained, educated and enticed into absorbing content online. Parallax web design, used in the right context, has the ability to deliver a really strong connection to an online brand experience, based on the interactivity of the website, the journey and the focus, realism and context given to the content or product. Often, examples of Parallax web design focus on product examples, such as Google's Nexus 7 page, but I hope to show in this post that there are opportunities for other types of organisations such as B2B businesses or charities to use Parallax design for deeper engagement. The examples show that Parallax design can offer a more interactive version of infographics, better suited to…