6 tips for a successful agency partnership
Over the last 7 years, I've had experience of working with various different traditional and digital marketing agencies. Whilst one agency’s skill set may differ from another, what I have found to be consistent is the way in which many agencies operate and how clients can get the best from a working relationship with them.
Working with a marketing agency should be a collaborative relationship. With digital marketing moving at such a frightening pace, it’s important to work closely with an agency and allow them to provide strategic insight and know-how whilst acting as an extension of the client’s in-house team.
In this post I’d like to share a few thoughts on how you, as a client, can establish a productive working relationship with your digital marketing agency so you can...
1. Set out your goals and…
25 tips on selecting staff for digital roles
In this post we share some tips and advice to help you if you're looking to develop your career in digital marketing, or if you're involved in recruiting into digital roles.
The advice is based on interviews I completed with specialists from three leading recruitment sepecialists: Dan Boneham at Michael Page: Jonathan Hirst at Network Marketing and Mark Lennox at UK Job Advertising Site OnlyMarketingjobs.com.
We completed these interviews when developing our new Guide to digital marketing job roles and the accompanying infographic showing the opportunities from digital marketing jobs that supports it. We created this summary for the infographic, but there was far more in-depth advice from the interviews we thought was useful too.
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7 steps to getting an edge through marketing
We asked ourselves this question of our own business this week - how will our own agency, First 10, grow commercial success in digital marketing as well as deliver that as a service to our clients? How will we walk the talk, too.
We wrote down the key seven factors to help us avoid those false gods of advertising (in any shape) and dedicated sales people who so often plague our industry. We came up with a list in order of importance - and we liked it - so I thought I'd share it with you since I think it applies to marketing across different types of businesses…
Improve the product (or service) - having worked in senior positions both client and agency side I cannot stress how this is the most important way to improve commercial success. Marketing is baked in. Sounds obvious, right.…
A 3 Phased Approach to integrating Content and SEO Audits
In every book about Content Strategy, the recommended process will have an audit as one of the first steps; this is much the same as for Search Engine Optimisation. Granted, there are some specific technical aspects of SEO – particularly regarding server-side issues – that aren't related to content, but SEO audits will also cover onpage issues that need to be forwarded to product or editorial teams. As these disciplines merge, it is useful to get these groups working together, and it saves time to do onpage SEO and content auditing in one go. Thus I suggest combining the audit process as I'll explain here.
Phase One: Gathering Through Crawling
Using Xenu & Excel
Content Strategy books seem slightly wary of using crawlers for content audits. In Content Strategy for the Web, Kristina Halvorson writes (p.48):
"During the audit process… technology can…
7 key strategy considerations for expanding into new markets using the Internet
One of the many benefits the Internet has unlocked is the ability to expand into new markets. The lack of palpable borders means customers around the world shop across countries and continents without so much as noticing where their latest purchase will be shipped from.
E-commerce giants realised several years ago that accelerating growth meant increasing the focus on their international operations. They started offering tailored experiences to customers around the world, carefully studying the so-called ‘BRIC’ markets, and developing local operations where it made sense. Today, Amazon has dedicated sites in 9 countries, including Japan, and smaller players often consider international operations from the onset.
But what is a blessing can become a curse and international expansion needs to be planned and thought through carefully. Offering products or services…
A review of process and tools available for online competitor analysis
Although we know it’s important to analyse how your own website is performing in terms of visitor numbers, customer demographics and conversion rate, we should remember that it's important to look outwards too.
Competitive intelligence analysis can tell you how you are performing relative to your competitors and provide some insight into their visitor numbers, audience plus marketing and search strategies.
Effective competitor intelligence analysis can provide real actionable insights that just aren’t possible using standard web analytics tools such as Site Catalyst, Google Analytics or Webtrends. By understanding more clearly as to what your competitors are doing, you can make more insightful decisions about what to do with your online marketing activities.
Key benefits of conducting online competitive analysis
You can apply competitive intelligence analysis allows you to gain insight on:
Competitor activity -gain insight into the activities and tactics of your competitors.
Questions that…
Move to "implied consent" useful for informing other site cookie policy decisions?
Value/Importance: [rating=4] (For UK marketers)
Recommended link: ICO announcement
Through 2011 and 2012 we kept marketers informed on how they should respond to new European privacy legislation and how it relates to the UK in particular. In our last post on the topic in 2012 we summarised the action the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) is taking on enforcement now the law is in force (from May 2012). There is a clear shift on previous announcements from “mandatory opt-in” to “informed consent” (to simplify).
If you’ve been following the cookie privacy developments to inform what you do on your site or for clients, then the latest announcement is very interesting. It’s from the ICO themselves explaining how they are changing their message such that they can now gain analytics insight from users.
Here's the 'before and after' for the ICO…
The urgent need for risk-taking and creativity in marketing
I recently attended Seth Godin's presentation around his new book, the The Icarus Deception, a 'Penguin Live' event.
I've been meaning to sit down and consider what I learned from it so that I could share it, so here are my key learnings from the man himself…
Icarus who?
If you don't know the reason for the name, The Icarus Deception, it centres around the myth of Icarus. You will know he ignored his father’s instructions not to fly too close to the sun, resulting in his home-made wings over-heating and ultimately in a fatal crash into the sea. Icarus, flew to close to the sun, he got burned, simple, that's the part everyone knows.
The less known part of the myth is that Icarus was also warned about getting too close to the sea, about flying too low.…
Facebook Graph Search, Vine and Google Analytics Gallery are the biggest announcements
January is the time of year when many look again at their priorities for the year ahead. To help with this, Smart Insights ran a series of 8 free webinars on January 9th. If you would like to take a look, you can still view the #MarketingPriorities2013 Webcasts and Slideshares. Continuing the theme, Expert commentator Annmarie Hanlon will be speaking in February in a webcast on how to create the Perfect Marketing Plan.
The brand new online brand of note in January was Vine. From the people who brought us 140 character tweets, so that we could say more with less, come 6 second videos. It’s based on technology Twitter purchased in 2012. It’s good to see some brands have been agile enough to trial the format, but I’m sure others will have larger, more…
The new Google Analytics Solutions Gallery tools
Value: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Google Analytics Solutions Gallery
Google Analytics offers many features to customise its reports to a business, which is great for a free tool. But I know from running Google Analytics training courses that many of the customisation tools aren’t used, so reports aren't really tailored to a business and different users in the business. I think this is mainly down to the time and specialist input needed for customisation.
Google are obviously aware of this issue since they have created a new set of tools within their Solutions Gallery to help users with customisation. I think this is a great initiative and will be useful both to marketers at companies and consultants and agencies improving reporting for their clients.
What type of customisations are available?
Customisation are available for three different types of assets…
