Our round-up of the latest advice and developments in digital marketing with a focus on customer experience and trends this month
This month we published The Managing Customer Journeys Report 2014, a new research report in conjunction with Ecommerce Expo. It’s a free download for all members via our Customer Experience Strategy page which also contains details of the talk and this visual to help you assess your approach to managing customer experience.
We were keen to commission this research since, with the increase in the complexity of the path to purchase across Paid, Owned and Earned media it’s becoming more difficult and more important to manage customer experiences!
It focuses on approaches to managing customer experiences and suggests how businesses are progressing across these experience management maturity levels.
Digital Marketing Trends 2015 - Dave Chaffey’s annual prediction of the marketing trends that will be important in…
Top takeaways from the content marketing/SEO workshop at Digital Impact
Earlier in September I attended Digital Impact - Smart Insights’ inaugural digital marketing conference at the Cavendish Conference Centre in London. And as expected, it was a festival of all things digital, with presentations and workshops on a variety of topics including ecommerce strategy, digital transformation, paid search best practices and mobile strategy. You can get an excellent summary/ review of the whole day.
For this post, I want focus on another key technique for Digital Impact and one that was the subject of a workshop in the afternoon hosted by ClickThrough.
[slideshare id=39289618&doc=searchcontentmarketingsept2014v4-withoutpresenternotes-140919083858-phpapp01]
Where is SEO now?
Before delving into the workshop, a few facts were shared with the audience to confirm the current state of SEO:
Google are continually fighting poor content and spam
Google’s ranking criteria has…
Recommendations for a 1 hour brand audit process
There could be a number of reasons for carrying out your brand audit and there are as many metrics to be considered in order to get the answers, as far as the reception of your brand is concerned.
Your brand needs to stand out and a regular brand audit will make sure that you stay different.
So, what is included in a brand audit? The process involves a number of elements which would I will explain. You may be looking to acquire more customers, or your business may have taken a downwards slope, or maybe your revenue is going down. No matter what, even if your business is doing well, it is essential to do a regular online brand audit [see this Smart Insights brand audit template for a suggested structure to…
New security vulnerability potentially “bigger than Heartbleed” - are you prepared?
Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Register summary of security vulnerability
We wouldn’t typically report security vulnerabilities to our readers since they are more relevant for an IT audience to act on, but after the Heartbleed security bug from April 2014, many mainstream news outlets are reporting this, so you may well be asked about what you’re doing about it to protect customer data!
Remember that Heartbleed was linked to personal data breaches at Community Health Systems, a US hospital group that manages more than 200 hospitals, Canada’s tax agency, UK parenting website Mumsnet and the developers of Call of Duty...
What is Shellshock?
Shellshock is a vulnerability to systems within the ‘bash’ shell processor which runs on different versions of UNIX/Linux. Since Apple OS X uses a derivative of this it could cause developers…
How do you build long-term relationships with customers using digital media?
"Open conversations generate loyalty, sales and most of all, learning... for both sides".
Seth Godin
Achieving engagement with a customer or fan base is not so much about tactics such as Facebook or tools like Radian6, but how these are best leveraged to enable meaningful interaction with the consumer. As Seth describes in the quote above, open and maintain conversation, ask questions, listen, build better products and market in a more relevant way - add value to the relationship with the consumer. To create these conversations and build relationships is challenging - the biggest challenge in marketing perhaps. There are no quick tips we can give here, but we can offer this structure which will step you through the decisions you need to make to work towards long-term relationships.
We also have a new guide by Andrew Campbell describing how to create a customer…
Is this the Perfect Marketing Agency exec?
We love this new infographic just posted on The Agency Post. It's simply fun! You could say it prompts ideas of what makes a good, functional, responsive agency that is following the latest digital marketing best practices, but it's just fun really.
As the creator explains:
"Both agencies and clients say they value creativity, expertise in emerging trends, and product and service innovation in an agency. However, the day-to-day of maintaining and collaborating between two teams makes a single email or request seem like the thing standing between your agency and that next review. With this narrow view, an agency metamorphosizes into a Frankenstein-like monster — one that fulfills a client’s every need and want".
This seems to cover all of the current agency buzzwords nicely, from sub-sonic hearing needed for real-time social media listening to the…
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23 Sep 2014
6 Essential parts of a marketing campaign
In a previous post I gave these examples of 6 common problems which can kill a marketing campaign. This post is a companion to that article and shows what you should include in a marketing campaign plan.
The structure I outline in this post is based on this Smart Insights marketing campaign planning template originally developed by Dave Chaffey when he was a tutor on the Integrated E-marketing campaigns training workshops for the CIM and then updated in his books. More recently, it’s been extended for Smart Insights Expert members in association with First 10 and is used by us on a regular basis on planning client marketing campaigns.
The recommended structure of the campaign and the questions to ask at each step are:
1. Campaign goals and tracking. What are we trying to achieve through our campaign and how will we know when we achieve it?
Here you define…
#DigitalImpact2014 transforming your digital world
Our showreel gives the vibe of our first conference held in London on 17th September 2014 based on Smart Insights members who attended, speakers and partners.
In a previous post, we gave a visual, Twitter picture summary of the recent Smart Insights Digital Marketing conference. In this post, I've summarised what I thought were the most useful insights from listening to the speakers, linked to more detailed posts from some of the speakers. I listened to speakers from start-ups to large corporations sharing best practice, their mistakes and insight into how we can manage digital transformation; from planning, to managing and optimization.
My colleague Dave introduced the conference, by sharing key models (PR Smith's SOSTAC® and Smart Insights RACE) on how to plan for digital transformation through structured models. He showed how John Lewis ranks as the No…
Four ways to prove the value of social media to your CMO
So you have ambitious plans for a new social media program that will build brand buzz and drive business impact? There’s just one problem: you need a big budget to match your big dreams. Though social media budgets are projected to double in the next five years, many social media marketers still report feeling underfunded. How can you convince your senior marketing leadership to invest in social?
4 Steps to gaining social media buy-in
These proven tactics can help you prove the value of your social media efforts and win buy-in from your CMO.
Step 1. Prove social media ROI through direct sales. Social media ROI: often talked about, but rarely proven. But if you want your CMO to increase your funding, you’ll need hard numbers that demonstrate your impact on the bottom line. Use your web analytics platform to …
A visual summary of Smart Insights members' conference
Well that's a relief! I think it's fair to say our first conference went pretty well judging by the Twitter comments and other feedback. Many thanks if you attended the event and got involved in the sharing. I've compiled a quick "best of" starting with some general feedback and then looking at highlights of individual talks.
If you're an Expert member of Smart Insights and weren't able to attend, we'll be making the slides available on the site next week, we'll let you know :)
It was great we had a full-house and I was delighted to see attendees from many industries across Europe and beyond - I spoke to Smart Insights Expert members from Denmark, Ireland, Switzerland, Italy even Australia! and I think there were more countries besides.
مؤتمر رائع جدا بحضور أحد أهم خبراء #التسويق_الإلكتروني في العالم @DaveChaffey #digitalimpact2014 …
