What's Hot In Digital: February 2016

The Smart Insights View

Keep up with the latest changes in digital marketing by taking a look at some of the most important blogs, news, updates and resources from the last month.

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The Smart Insights View

Need to know about the latest changes that matter in digital marketing? Here, Dr. Dave Chaffey, editor of the Smart Insights resources gives his personal assessment of the most significant changes this month.

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Digital Transformation definition

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For anyone thinking of embarking on a Digital Transformation project in 2016 we try to pin down its scope.

New Smart Insights Feature: The Community

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Smart Insights members will see a new feature, the community. It will let people pose questions and discuss digital marketing topics.

Unboxing our new toolkits

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We've redesigned the members area based on member feedback - all resources are now available in a separate toolkit which also has a benchmark tool and sample elearning

What is customer lifecycle marketing?

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Lifecycle marketing, as its name suggests, involves studying the whole customer journey in an integrated way, from first contact to customer relationship management rather than narrowly focusing on a given campaign, channel or metric.

The BIG Platform Changes

To maintain visibility of your brand and grow engagement with your online audiences you need to keep on top of the latest features and algorithm updates big five technology platforms, that's Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. These platforms innovate relentlessly, with new changes daily. We monitor these and here alert you to the changes that really matter so you can assess the relevance of these to you.

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Facebook announced it will change the way it calculates post reach to account for user feedback.

EU-US Privacy Shield – Data watchdog rejects privacy deal

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In an unexpected move, the EU announced a new deal to allow transatlantic data transfers to continue.

Twitter release new ad product: First view

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Twitter announce a new type of video ad that lets brands take over the top spot on Twitter for 24 hours.

Twitter new’s algorithm based timeline starting to roll out

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Twitter tweaks timeline to show most engaging Tweets top

Google Remove Sidebar Ads Worldwide [@smartinsights Alert]

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Adwords bidding landscape has changed as Google confirm the right sidebar on desktop SERP is to be removed.

6 Essential new plug-ins for Google Analytics [#SmartInsights alert]

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Google's new Autotrack plugin library for the first time provides a quality, Google Authorised library providing a simple way to record 'clicks out' as events and also has some great new features

Google launches AMP listings in mobile SERPS

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Google has started rolling out Accelerated mobile pages to certain mobile search results.

Facebook announces all publishers will be able to use Instant Articles

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Facebook’s Instant Articles is only nine months old. But, given its great success over that gestation period, Facebook has now deemed it developed enough to be unleashed on publishers of all stripes.

Sharing your questions and comments

We're keen to help by answering your questions, so anything that's bugging you do ask via our Answers forum or your preferred social network. Here's the pick of the Q&A for this month - do get involved and share your expertise too!

Definitions or difference between ‘strategy’ and ‘plan’

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Our members discuss the subtle but important differences between strategy and planning

Can Brand TLDs help us reinvent our digital strategy?

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The top level domain expansion program is the biggest change to the internet since its inception. We discuss how the change offers an opportunity for businesses.

Our latest analysis and recommendations for Premium members

To keep Smart Insights members at the cutting-edge of digital we update our content each week as new resources or updates to existing guides, templates or training modules.

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In January 2016, the main resources for Expert members are to support planning with our Forecasting guide and Excel budgeting spreadsheet. We've also updated our 'handy' cheatsheet which covers all the latest changes on the main platforms like Facebook, Google and Twitter - so you can review you're using all the relevant promotional techniques. For all members, we have a guide to digital marketing frameworks - mainly to support professional students studying for qualifications.