We like this simple PPC advice released by Finch on how to implement and optimize a PPC campaign for ecommerce sites, though it can be adapted across different sectors.
It's a useful checklist for those who are perhaps new to managing adword campaigns, in 9 steps for planning, execution and monitoring your campaign. For in-depth advice on how to manage and review AdWords for marketing managers working with specialists in-house or in company, see our 72 page 7 Steps to AdWords Success Guide.
Here's a summary of the tips from the infographic.
1. Optimise for visits2. Optimise for conversions3. Maximise your ad creative - see our tips4. Define your keyword management strategy5. Reveal all of your inventory.6. Target your visitors.7. Optimise for revenue8. Optimise for profit ad9. Finally, see how your adwords rank.
…
Responding to the four biggest legal risks of social media to business
With legal cases involving social media are on the rise, businesses need to manage the potential risks. To help review the challenges and solutions to managing the risks of social media, we have recently published our benchmark study on social media and the law. We hope marketers can use the data to evaluate their knowledge and establish the risks they may need to manage.
We’ve summarised the risks of social media in this infographic showing the four main risks as we see them against the awareness of the law.
We see three main takeaways from the research:
Many marketers know the risks, but don’t have company buy-in. Over 50% of companies don’t consider social media legal risks to be an issue or a priority. This was unexpected when respondents made it…
Social Business Index 2012 shows Top 20 Social Businesses worldwide
Through 2012 there has been a shift from discussing narrow social media tactics such as engaging audiences through social networks to broader strategies of integrating social interactions between customers, employees and partners across business processes as social business. At the start of the year, as one example of a social business leader, we shared this video from Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts where she explains her vision of how Social Business will transform her brand.
This new infographic shared by Forbes shows the World’s Top 20 social brands as rated by the Dachis Group Social Business Index. Most of the organisations are US-based, but there are some European and Asian businesses further down the list.
To find out more about the scope of social business see this post from Jim Hamill, where…
5 themes and 21 ideas to help create a content strategy
We'd no doubt agree that creating, sharing, distributing and promoting great content is now a very significant component of not only effective marketing, but effective brand-building today? We'd certainly suggest that it requires a key place in the strategic thinking in almost every organisation.
Perspective enables strategic thinking
As with most things when talking digital, the tactical jargon can really confuse people and I've been reminded again this week how our infographics have been really useful to people, to help think about this. The word "content" is thrown around a lot these days, most know what it means and its potential, but most are unsure as to whether they're doing it right. We suggest that it's the jumping into a down and dirty tactical perspective which causes this early confusion, the key is to elevate up and get a bigger picture view…
Find out how a recovery email campaign can boost your sales by up to 8%
SaleCycle have produced an Infographic to summarise the findings about shopping abandonment, from their September 2012 survey. 200 well-known brands were surveyed in the US and UK, including Retailers and Fashion brands such as Sony, Ralph Lauren, the Body Shop and The Office.
The aim of the survey was to discover how to send out an engaging, optimized email to shoppers abandoning the on-line sites at the point of purchase or engagement (ie. shopping cart, booking or application form). It centered around the following three questions:
Timing: How long to wait to email your warm customers?
Tone: Should we be direct or use a customer service tone?
Content/Message: What should we say in our email to convert our customers to buy?
Over 74% of shoppers abandon their shopping cart, booking or application form, so how do we get them…
Consumer research shows the importance of getting mobile experiences right
The Going Mobile 2012 research by Foolproof undertaken from November 2011 to March 2012 assessed the quality of mobile user experience based on consumers' mobile behaviour and usage patterns. The research reveals some great practical insights around what consumers expect from their mobiles:
They see it as ‘big bang’ event: mobile is creating new time and space for consumers. Time that was previously unproductive or inert is now filled with mobile interaction. What are users doing with this time? What brands are they engaging with in this new, very intimate, digital space? Which tools and services create value for them...and which are just creating noise?”
Knowing the answers to these questions can be the difference between success and failure in the design of mobile services. Mobile helps today's time poor consumers to use 'dead time' easily and efficiently.
…
Why marketers aren’t giving social media marketing the credit it deserves
Despite how important social media has become to marketers, Adobe are suggesting that it still isn’t being recognized for driving website traffic, engagement and conversions like it should be. The solution, Adobe suggest, might be as simple as making adjustments to how its contributions are captured and measured. In short, some attribution modelling might help you see social media marketing in a whole new light.
Remember that you don't need a paid service like Adobe Sitecatalyst to apply attribution thinking; you can demonstrate the value of social media marketing through Google's new Social Reports (tutorial) which helps show assisted conversions influenced by social media.
Because social marketing is still so new, and let's not forget that, best practices for measuring the effectiveness of social efforts are still evolving. We've written before about ROI of social media, the IAB also developed…
New research shows social media use maturing in large companies
International brands who have a presence in many countries have a bigger challenge in managing social media marketing than companies who focus on a single market.
The Third Annual Burson-Marsteller Global Social Media Check-up reviewed 100 companies in the Fortune Global 100 for their use of popular social networking platforms including: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and, for the first time, Google Plus and Pinterest.
Companies were located as follows:
U.S. = 29 companies
Europe = 45 companies,
Asia-Pacific = 23 companies
Latin America = 3 companies
Here's what I took from the infographic:
Section 1. c 10 million social mentions a month. That's around 100,000 mentions per brand per month.
Section 2. Branded YouTube content is increasing with 79% having a branded YouTube channel with an average of 2 million views.
Section 3. A relatively good level of engagement (79%), response (70%) and updating…
Applying PR Smith's SOSTAC® planning to digital marketing
SOSTAC® is a marketing planning model, originally developed by PR Smith in the 1990s to help marketers develop marketing plans. Paul is my co-author on Emarketing Excellence, so when we created this book it was natural to work together to show how SOSTAC® can best be applied to planning for digital marketing.
This new infographic, that I've developed with Paul and the designers at First 10, summarises the key issues to consider at each stage when developing digital marketing plans [click infographic to expand]:
See our more detailed post where we introduce how to apply the SOSTAC® template to Digital Marketing.
You can also find out more about the SOSTAC® approach for marketing planning in this Ebook: The SOSTAC® Guide - to writing the perfect plan V1.1 by PR Smith.
The "5S's and KPI's" refer to the…
This infographic shows why Wordpress wins "hands down"
I'm often asked this question by marketers taking their first steps into blogging as an individual or for their companies. These days I always answer without hesitation "Wordpress"!
My justification is based around the experience you can create (Wordpress has great themes or is readily tailored); ease-of-use (as easy as Word or Pages); extensibility (plug-ins?); scalability (can it grow with us?); support (many agencies and freelance developers support it) and cost (it's open source, you only have hosting costs).
This infographic provides a more qualitative assessment to support these arguments. The market share figures really show how Wordpress dominates. The average day sees an average 500,000 new posts on Wordpress.com, not to mention the many sites, like Smart Insights that run a bespoke hosted version for their blog or full content management system.
If you're a…
