How important is it and how well are you using it?
Marketing impact: [rating=5]
Our commentary: Now well into its third year, blended (or Universal) search is now a widely accepted & expected part of search result pages.
But is it really important? Has it improved user experience? Are businesses using it to to improve performance & engage potential customers?
First and foremost for those who are unaware of the term blended search let me explain. Search Engines for the last 3 years (at least) have refined their search results pages to enable different types of content to be displayed within the results. More often than not this will be, news, video or images.
Universal results can however include products, twitter / Facebook, forum discussions, maps & more. A good example, shown in the image to the right (each…
Your options for visualising and better understanding the combination of media that assist sale across multiple touchpoints on the "path to purchase"
Back in 2008 I did an interview with Gary Angel, an analytics consultant at Semphonic, where I asked him about attribution approaches. What he said two years on is still equally relevant:
Attribution remains a significant issue for clients. In our view, there is no one right answer to attribution. We all know that first or last doesn't cut it. But it turns out that channels interact quite differently for different organizations. It also turns out to be nightmarishly difficult to produce coherent reports on channel interactions that capture anything like reality.
Building an attribution model usually seems to involve a significant company-specific deep-dive analysis followed by the creation of a set of business attribution rules that are applied to ongoing reporting. This is an area…
Social network LinkedIn beefs up company profile pages
Aside from improvements to the user profiles and implementing Groups half-way through this year, Techcrunch have posted about the beefed up Company profile page, a feature originally launched back in April this year. Now with over 1 million company pages already, LinkedIn is clearly seeing the value and creating new ways in which to members and companies can interact within the network.
The expansion appears to not only make the network a more social place but to also provide meaningful data to users about the company, to really start opening up and provide new ways to mash-up the 75 million+ members"€™ data. We can only assume that this is something that we are going to see more of from LinkedIn.
So - what's interesting in the update?
Company profiles are getting more social. Admins can…
A simple introduction to display advertising optimization through Google
Value: [rating=4]
Our commentary: Since the acquisition of DoubleClick Google has worked at integrating it with its other services such as Google Analytics etc.
A more recent integration is into Google's Website Optimizer which allows you to run A/B split tests and easily report on the results.
Following a similar theme, this tool from Google allows you to effectively manage your display advertising on the Google Display Network based on goals you dictate which means it can include on site activity such as sales or sign ups. Checkout the video below for more information about the concept and announcement.
Recommended link: Annoucement of Display Campaign Optimiser…
Fish Where The Fish Are
Value: [rating=4]
Our commentary: Oreo is one of the most popular Facebook pages in the world, I didn't know that until today so Googled around to learn why and how they had achieved this. This video explains how that's been achieved. The strategy Beth Reilly and her team at Kraft Foods use follows the old adage of "fish where the fish are" and reach Mums on Facebook, where they are already spending their time.
Kraft Foods: How Oreo Learned to Fish Where the Fish Are, presented by Beth Reilly from GasPedal on Vimeo.
Marketing implications: I feel that the big question is how do you manage 11 MILLION fans on Facebook!? Let alone build it. That's a big community and impossible for any team to respond to every comment from every fan "€” as it turns out, Oreo don"€™t have to.
Reilly…
Here's an interesting article about a real social media case study, I've summarised what I feel are the salient points. The case study is based around a luxury hotel in Greece, so pretty 'real life' stuff.
Firstly, the hotel clearly defined its objectives:
Increase brand awareness through internet users in order to grow the prospect email database
Increase online booking as well as grow twitter followers, Facebook fans and views on You Tube based videos
The resulting campaign was only a few days long yet was very successful, amongst other stats it generated 187% increase in web traffic, 227% more people were drawn in to the booking engine and 150% more Facebook fans were recruited. And, the effects lasted for weeks after the campaign ended - which is interesting since the campaign only lasted for a few days so extremely short in social media terms.
The key take-aways from how the campaign was successful:
Targeted:…
2010 DMA National Client Email Marketing Report
Value: [rating=4]
Our commentary : I recently wrote the conclusion for the 2010 Annual Client Email report for the UK Direct Marketing Association.
Here I share what I took from the report and highlight some of the key findings through charts (click twice to read) which show the importance of email marketing and the most popular techniques. You can see that despite some of the mispronouncements that Email Marketing is Dead, Email is a key part of communications strategy for many organisations but given the competition in the inbox from rise of social media and prioritised inboxes it needs to evolve to continue to cut-through.
Marketing implications :
For me, the rate of innovation within digital marketing is one of its greatest appeals. Whether it"€™s the introduction of new technologies, marketing approaches or resulting changes in consumer behaviour, change is a constant challenge. The annual UK…
9 Tips to engage your email subscribers
Value: [rating=4]
Our commentary: This 12 page whitepaper download from Selligent (registration required) advises brands on how to tackle the ongoing challenge of the best way to engage customers with email marketing.
Marketing implications: I think these guidelines are the most useful part of the report, so I'm sharing them here with my commentary.
1. Offer a choice of communications. This is a preference centre to enable customers to receive the type of emails they want.
2. Respect permission. Double opt-in is suggested. I don't agree with this in all markets, all cases. It's essential if you're selling a list, but in a customer relationship which starts with an on-site enewsletter signup or during the checkout I think it's unecessary because the relationship is already developed.
3. Analyse, automate, segment and target. I like this call to action! But these are each individually major challenges to refine your email…
Using Google Analytics to Audit and Improve SEO
Here is a post explaining a simple way to add some extra info to your Google Analytics data to help improve your natural search traffic. In this post I hope to show you...
An explanation of what's missing from Google Analytics in terms of actionable SEO data.
How to fix it.
A free excel template so that you can play about with it yourself.
A tutorial to accompany the excel spreadsheet.
The actions to take as a result of the data.
Some suggestions for extending this further.
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Last month I gave four reasons why the status quo isn't good enough for your email marketing.
One reason was growing email competition, so it seems sensible to review some of the things you can do to ensure it's your email that gets attention in the inbox.
We'll start with the in-email factors (from line, subject line, preview pane and preheader) and then address out-of-email factors (which most people forget about).
The from line
We tend to focus on the subject line, but we also know that the name of the sender is at least as important in helping recipients decide whether an email is worth attention or not.
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