Review the quality of your audience segments with this checklist

This blog post first appeared in the Arts Marketing Association’s, Journal of Arts Marketing, and we are now sharing it with Smartinsight's readers. For more free resources, case studies, research and toolkits to promote art, culture and heritage visit culturalhive website. 

In an ideal world we would treat everyone as an individual and tailor and promote our offer accordingly. But this is impractical. Treating everyone as an homogenous mass however is ineffective - one size does not fit all. Segmentation provides us with a happy medium.

Segmentation is a fantastic way of reaching different people with different messages and can vastly improve how you cater for people. It means you can be strategic about audience growth and development of audience relationships.

Get it right and segmentation should provide true market insight that will lead to tangible results in audience development,…

Mobile traffic up to 15 per cent of global internet traffic in May 2013 – up from 10 per cent in May 2012, and six per cent in May 2011.

Value/Importance: [rating=5] Recommended link: KPCB Internet Trends You may well have seen the reports from Mary Meeker, a partner at KPCB who typically releases annual surveys at the turn of the year.  In May she updated her 2013 findings, so we thought we would alert you to this latest report. KPCB Internet Trends 2013 from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers We see these as some of key highlights from her report: Growth in shared and created digital content, from documents to pictures, tweets and…

Sharing screengrab tools (including how to screen grab a really long post with a single click)

I mark a lot of student marketing assignments. It's good to see students using visuals, but I'm often surprised at how many are still using "Print Screen" to do a full screen grab when what they actually want is just a  section of a page. So here, I share three of the many screen grab tools that I use.

1. Windows Snipping Tool

This is an under utilised tool that comes free with Windows. The screen grabs below are  self explanatory as to the steps involved:

   

With this tool you can highlight text or underline/circle etc:

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Ideas on encouraging pollination to create a better experience

I spent a lot of time observing the bees - mainly because I was s*** scared of being stung and yes, bees CAN smell fear.

This was my first taste of watching 20,000 visitors, with attitude, do something that totally hooked my attention. I read voraciously and absorbed everything I could find at the library.

I was amazed at how they could engineer perfect hexagons out of wax secreted from their own bodies. I read of Their Queen and her subjects, their complex dances, their calculations of distance - always taking account of wind and the movement of the sun overhead. Like an organic machine, I watched over 50 kilos of honey come from one beehive in the hot summer of 1976 from ceaseless industry and coordination.

But one thing really stood out. That call to action,…

Google introduces new customer journey mapping tool

Have you seen Google’s new customer journey benchmarking tool for reviewing The Customer Journey to Online Purchase? I thought I would feature it at the start of our round-up of our advice from May 2013 since I haven’t seen it discussed much, perhaps because it’s built into Google's Think Insights rather than Google Analytics itself. It’s a tool to help understand media campaign attribution, i.e. which marketing channels influence lead or sale. It's based on data collected from Google Analytics, but gives a slightly different visualisation from Multichannel Funnels or Social Reports. It covers data for these countries: Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, U.K., US U.S. and these industries: Auto, B2B, Classified/Local, CPG, Edu/Gov, Finance, Health, Media, Retail, Tech and Travel. Here's an example from the travel sector in the UK:

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How well do you manage your email marketing?

I recently completed the 2013 update to the 80 page Smart Insights ‘Seven Steps to Success’ Guide on Email Marketing. As part of updating the guide I was looking to highlight best practices for email marketing. Thinking through the mistakes or omission that are often made in email programmes is one way to define the best practices, so I thought it would be helpful to pick out ten of the common gaps and errors. I have focused particularly on strategic issues that are less commonly talked about, but nevertheless I encounter fairly often in my consulting work and are most important to the success of the programme. Mistake 1. Not setting long-term Email-specific goals. Measure long-term engagement using hurdle rates or open reach. This measures customers not campaigns and considers the engagement across the whole of the database rather than just customers…

Suggestions needed for good interview style questions for a Digital Marketing Assistant position?

This was the question recently asked by David Pool in our Smartinsights Answers forum.

We had some great responses from members, both on the forum and in our LinkedIn group too. Since so many valuable tips were shared, we thought it would be useful to summarise the tips from the contributors on recruiting the right candidates with the right skills, and ensuring they can ' talk and deliver'.

If recruiting for digital marketing, or landing a role is relevant for you, you may also find our Guide on Recruitment for Digital Marketing useful. This highlights the team structures, roles, responsibilities along with additional interview techniques from recruiters.

Our summary of the interview questions

I have grouped the…

Webcast catchup and 10 of your digital strategy questions answered

Our recent webcast with PR Smith focused on digital strategy. PR Smith is the creator of the widely used SOSTAC® Planning system voted as one of the top 3 global marketing models in the CIM Centenary Poll. We know from previous polls, that around two-thirds of companies don’t have a digital strategy. Perhaps these figures aren’t surprising since others don’t even have a marketing strategy. Just tactical campaigns. So, we thought it would be useful to look at what involved with developing a digital strategy. We started by looking at the digital strategy question again. This is what we found: Just an informal poll, but showing that many still don’t have a strategy. It prompts the question whether you need a digital strategy - my previous post gives 5 reasons why you don’t and 10…

Insight from Connect2013 – the marketing roadmap and exploiting data in the right way for your business

Update 29 May 2013: Presentations now available: Volker Wiewer's and Herman Wimmer from Terradata  In previous years, Dave Chaffey has spoken at the eCircle conferences, but this year was different since eCircle is now part of  Teradata . In 2012 they acquired Ecircle and Aprimo of which Ecircle’s core business is email marketing solutions and Aprimo, Market Leader in cloud base integrated marketing solutions. I attended to take a look at some of the latest approaches on ECRM/Marketing Automation/Email Marketing/Big Data and we will share some of the most useful Slideshares when they're available. In the keynote, the VP of Teradata Ecircle Volker Wiewer along with International President Herman Wimmer gave their view on…

Signs that you need an integrated social media strategy...

The CEO wants 'a Facebook', 'a Twitter' and 'a blog'? The reason? Because they saw competitor becoming more active. Sound familiar? This request is perhaps less common than it was 5 years ago, but on the whole there is still a distinct lack of social media marketing strategy with plenty of examples of under-resourced social network pages or poor customer service delivery by social media - a problem when nearly half of adults now use the web to share grievances with brands. The key to social media success is understanding the full scope and impact of social media, defining exactly what you are looking to achieve and then creating an integrated social media strategy to maximise results.  In this blog post, I review some of these issues which are covered in more detail in our Social media marketing strategy – 7 Steps to Success Guide which I…