Thank you to all our readers and writers for sharing in 2013!

In our last monthly round-up of the year I want to thank all our writers who have shared their insights across the year, particularly our regular writers, so in this summary of advice from December, I have thanked some of our most regular contributors alongside their most popular posts on the latest developments.

The most significant platform for developments this month to be aware of this month are in the SEO (mobile) and Email (Gmail) sections.

Many thanks also if you’re a regular reader too, especially if you have shared, asked or answered questions or commented via the site or a social network. Through “spreading the word” you have helped us grow and share our advice and insights more widely - 82% YoY on uniques the analytics tells us - so many thanks!

Do let us know of anything you'd like to…

Key questions to ask and insights to use when deciding on the best investment of your precious time and money

Using the latest insights showing how consumers and businesses are using digital media and technology is powerful in helping decide where you need to invest more/less time or budget. Using the right insights can also make an impact when presenting to colleagues or clients about improvements to marketing. In this post, I round-up some of the significant stats from 2013 which show the big trends in consumer behaviour across different digital platforms and channels that will help you question your priorities in 2014. If you’re looking for specific insights about a particular channel or network, perhaps in a region or country, we compile these together to make them easier for our members to find when creating presentations - see our Online marketing usage statistics and our online marketing benchmarks compilation.

Social…

7 steps to a better project estimate brief and costing

Whether you use spreadsheets or an automated / integrated marketing project management service platform, the important thing is to get your estimating discipline right from the start. Whether you're developing an estimate for in-house digital projects or for your clients, a lack of accurate estimating will lead to an impact on your profitability and credibility for future projects. By ‘accurate’ I mean estimates that factor in all the resources / roles and time that will be required to meet the project objectives and at rates that the business has set to achieve a desired profit. Underestimating the time required, the numbers of people involved and / or the level of seniority or experience required on a project is sometimes done deliberately (in the belief that only low costs will attract new work). That’s a commercial decision for you to make but my…

Interest in the value of Big Data continues into 2014

I'm not sure whether to be impressed by this infographic or annoyed. It shows both what's powerful about infographics and their weaknesses.

With the right headline, data and design, infographics can help raise awareness of an issue and associate a brand with a theme.  Kudos to McKinsey for getting the basics right, leading to it being shared by tens of thousands on Slideshare - interesting they're getting good exposure using the new infographic feature on Slideshare, maybe just because it's new. Expect Slideshare to be polluted by a lot of infographics in 2014....

Anyway, here's the infographic in question, weaknesses to follow...

The biggest weakness is that the claim of the headline isn't backed up by the data and worse still, the data sources they use are out of date - 2011 - heinous! Not…

22 Digital Marketing techniques that demand attention

Update: I update this post annually with a new poll on the techniques that readers think is important. You can see the latest poll in this post on Digital Marketing Trends for 2015 - in the article I have also covered what I see as 30 of the top tools for managing and optimising digital marketing in 2015. Many of the trends I identified below will remain key digital marketing activities in 2015. Each year, I review the latest trends in Digital Marketing to help define digital technologies and marketing techniques which will give options for companies to grow their businesses. In 2013 we reviewed top-level digital marketing trends, asking which trends will give the greatest commercial benefits, this year I drill down to the next level to give more specific practical recommendations to increase effectiveness.

What are the major trends in digital marketing for the year ahead?

To…

Defining ROI and the digital skills gap are major challenges

An online survey of 100 marketing leaders, the B2B Leaders report in association with Circle Research, involved Marketing Directors, Heads of Marketing and Marketing with an average 15 years experience, reporting into board or leadership teams and controlling a total of £188m. The survey delved into brand management, demonstrating ROI, managing a team effectively and personal reputation. For more specific detail on Content Marketing, see our separate post on B2B Content Marketing trends for 2014. The findings have been summarised in this infographic, we have shared for our readers working in B2B marketing to provide context if you are looking to understand typical B2B priorities for the next 12 months and how to develop marketers skills and training accordingly. …

Our monthly round-up of the developments that matter in digital marketing

The main platform developments to be aware of this month were in Twitter and LinkedIn - see the posts in our social media section for details.  Given that we're well into Planning season for many companies, our strategy advice focuses on goal setting and KPIs.

Dan Bosomworth also reviewed the BIG strategic questions to help get focus as you refine your customer acquisition, conversion and retention strategies.

Strategy and planning

Setting realistic goals, objectives and KPIs are at the heart of effective marketing planning and management, so this month, as part of our #PlanToSucceed campaign we have advised on best practices for creating marketing dashboards for performance management in these posts. Here’s a visual summary of some of the tools we reviewed with links to more detail.

From SMART to SMARTER marketing objectives

The differences between marketing objectives and goals…

Our 7 key questions to ask yourself and your team

This post is the second in a short series looking to help give a focus to improve digital marketing effectiveness. In the first I defined 7 strategic questions to increase site traffic as part of a customer acquisition strategy. In the final post I review customer retention and engagement strategy, while in this post, I look at 7 key questions to increase conversion. Naturally, all site owners want to increase conversion, but it's really tough to do this in practice for a mature site. Yes, there are some great examples of using testing to improve conversion, like those we see on Marketing Experiments, WhichTestWon or the $300 million button. To achieve these improvements almost certainly means you've already made the case for working on conversion rate optimisation and have the people, process and tools in place to help make these…

10 essential requirements when selecting a new marketing agency

Selecting an agency from a short list - using the scorecard and transparent process

In the first post in this series I outlined 8 options to shortlist alternative marketing agencies as part of the process of managing pitches to select an agency. In this post, I look at the next step, covering 10 steps or requirements, that in my experience, help make the pitching process run smoothly and help towards selecting the best agency.

These tips support using the agency selection scorecard we have developed to help marketers review potential agency partners on both a qualitative and quantitative basis as part of the pitching process. You'll see that some of the evaluation criteria are more relevant to initial short listing whilst others are more relevant to a detailed pitch evaluation.

We have kept all criteria on one…

Why you need a Content Engagement Calendar in 2014

2014 is almost upon us and it’s that time of year when we all start to look forward and plan marketing activities for the coming year. Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past two years, you’ll be all too familiar with the fact that content marketing is on the rise. In fact, 64% of UK marketers are planning to increase their budget for content marketing next year, and according to Forbes, the top marketing job in 2014 will be a Director of Content. If these stats are anything to go by, we better fasten our seat belts and knuckle down to do some strategic planning on what content to publish during the coming year, and decide which websites and publications to target so that your content contains the right messages and…