New report highlights opportunities for companies to attract global trade online
Against a backdrop of a challenging economic times in domestic markets, many companies are looking at opportunities for international expansion.
In our recent white paper, Web Magnetism: Attracting Global Trade Online we review the opportunities and look at how companies are responding. This post gives a summary of our main findings.
1. Use of the Internet to drive overseas sales
Our research showed that, surprisingly, 64% of senior decision makers do not recognise the Internet in their top three avenues for driving overseas trade. The survey, conducted in Q2 2012, analysed attitudes amongst 350 senior decision makers in ‘large enterprises’, defined as companies with 200 employees or more, spread across the UK.
The white paper demonstrates that UK businesses seem to be missing out on a golden…
5 practical actions and an example you can follow
Google+ is continuing to gather momentum, with more than 170 million users or more depending on who you listen to. At the same time though, there's a lot of discussion around the number of active users and unconfirmed data that user engagement is weak. There's no question that Google+ hasn't arrived 'main-stream' yet, but we think the growth of it now warrants some attention when planning your content marketing, even if you keep the investment modest.
What's so special about Google+?
Guy Kawasaki said that Google+ is for "passions," that's what differentiates it, and though that's maybe a little vague and consumer orientated, the notion of it makes good sense.
"Businesses should jump on Google+ because it’s the Wild West, so you can stake your claim, as opposed to breaking through the noise on Twitter and Facebook." Guy Kawasaki
Google+ is very different to Twitter…
Enewsletters are still the main online direct to customer communications tool, so it pays to invest time and thought in a decent template.
Over the past few years of running email marketing training courses I have reviewed hundreds of enewsletter templates and often see the same basic errors. Individually they often aren't important, but if several good practice features are missed, they can definitely adversely affect the experience or response rates.
Three best practice enewsletter template examples
Good practice will naturally vary according to sector. The two main enewsletter styles are B2C retail-style for transactional sites featuring products and information-led for business-to-business, relationship development and publishing. We will look at and example from each.
1 B2C transactional newsletter example
2 B2B informational newsletter example
3 Professional services/membership enewsletter
Added this since I wrote…
Precision App network targeting, simple messaging and a great brand are key to WWF’s success
I've created this campaign summary since it shows just how effective a mobile ad campaign can be when it's well targeted and delivers a strong, simple message. It's based on a more in-depth case study of a WWF Sweden campaign available from Google.
The fact that WWF already had a well-respected brand in Sweden at the time of the campaign didn’t hurt either - existing high brand recognition was undoubtedly a factor in making this loyal donor recruitment campaign a huge success.
WWF’s campaign results are truly impressive, showing +25% increase in mobile conversion compared with WWF’s total conversions across all platforms.
The campaign results were good enough to convince WWF to abandon other advertising channels and increase mobile investment by 400%, focusing exclusively on the AdMob…
Our review of backlink analysis software tools and web services
Link analysis has always been an integral part to search marketing efforts. As with all marketing, you need to benchmark where you are and what your competitors are doing in order to put the right work in place and also to track performance. Within the last two years this process has become easier with a wider range of tools now available to aid you.
Search specialists will definitely know all of these and many more, but this list is aimed more at client-side marketers who want to benchmark their link quality against competitors, review SEO agency performance and spot opportunities for partnering with other sites, for example blogger outreach.
Comparison of data quality of backlink analysis tools
Added references to this excellent review of data quality from backlink analysis tools from Richard Baxter at SEOGadget. Don't purchase a subscription or use…
The 5Cs for setting up an affiliate programme
Affiliate marketing continues to flourish as a key digital marketing tactic supporting a wide range of e-commerce sectors driving new revenue streams, and according to the IAB, the sector is now worth over £4bn. A recent Econsultancy affiliate report highlighted the growing importance of affiliate marketing with key insights including:
48% of affiliates drive at least £5k per month for merchants, compared to only 31% of affiliates who were generating this much revenue in 2009.
30% of affiliates are now sending at least 20,000 visitors a month to merchants' websites
Affiliate Action Plan: the 5 C's
I've put together an affiliate action plan covering 5 key elements you should consider when managing a program, they are: Competitor analysis, Commercials, Creatives, Communication & Campaign Analysis. Some of the actions listed are to help your affiliate program stand out from the competition.
1. Competitor analysis - Before…
An introduction to the main social signals used by search engines and how this changes SEO
If you have followed the first 9 steps in this SEO series, you’ll have picked up tips on what have been the core elements of SEO since the optimisation of organic search listings began. In step 10 we move on to one of the newer components of SEO, one that is increasing in importance and likely to have a greater impact as search engines evolve from thinking about optimisation to rewarding interaction and influence.
Social media signals started to play a part in search engine algorithms back in December 2010 but it wasn’t until 2011 that the likes of Google really started to pay attention and dedicate more effort to indexing social content and using social signals to boost content in search results. For a neat…
A review of Google's key site quality-related algorithm changes in 2012
You will have heard that the Google update known as ‘Penguin’ was rolled out earlier this year; the 24th April 2012 to be precise. It came at a time when Google had rolled out a number of other updates, some more significant than others.
Given the negative effect on ranking for some sites there has naturally been an awful lot written about the Penguin update, however I can’t help but feel that there has been some confusion over what Penguin addressed and how to tell if you were a victim or not.
In this post I will discuss just what Penguin is likely to have affected, the other updates around this time (that some webmasters could have confused with Penguin), and what to do to recover if you have been affected by these updates.
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09 Jul 2012
H&M show how to engage an audience with Google+
Google has just produced a great new case study on how H&M are using Google+.
H&M are a useful example to look at to learn approaches to marketing in Google+ since it has been successful in building a relatively large audience of nearly 1 million followers.
Miriam Tappert, Global Social Media Manager at H&M, explains the objectives for setting up the brand’s Google+ page were simple;
“To be where our customers are, have a dialogue and share the latest fashion.”
This case illustrates a couple of core digital marketing principles:
1. Ensure you track your target audience's media consumption patterns and establish a strong presence in those media
2. Tailor your content to each medium, while maintaining integration with the wider communication strategy. Following the media neutral planning rule 'play to each medium’s strengths' optimises message relevance and effectiveness.
H&M uses Google+ to engage its audience
H&M has integrated…
4 techniques to reduce duplicate site content
Although we still hear a lot of recommendations on how to optimise pages and the importance of links from other sites to improve rankings, we don't hear so many recommendations about reducing the amount of duplicate content. This seems to be a neglected area of SEO advice, so this refresher highlights some of the techniques to avoid duplicate content.
What is duplicate content?
Duplicate content is where different pages on a site are interpreted as similar by Google. As a result, pages can be discarded or down-weighted in Google's index so that they won't rank. In its webmaster tools guidance, Google says:
Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin. Examples of non-malicious duplicate content could include: discussion forums that can generate both regular and stripped-down…
