Should your CEO be blogging?
Should your CEO have a blog separate from your company’s blog? Although it does depend on sector, it’s an increasingly important question, since many CEOs are emerging (or are already well established) as the 'public face' of the organizations they lead.
Richard Branson (Virgin Group), George Colony (Forrest Research), Mark Cuban (Dallas Mavericks) and Martha Heller (Heller Search Associates) are only a few of the many chief executives who have successfully taken to digital media to communicate on a more informal basis to employees, customers and other stakeholders. Many of these also run a LinkedIn blog shared via LinkedIn Pulse alongside their personal presence.
Pros and Cons of running a blog
Here’s a look at some of the pros and cons for CEOs contemplating a blog of their own:
Pros of CEO blog
These include:
It gives your company a personal touch. Any effort that helps to humanize your brand should be strongly considered.…
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August 6, 2014
Techniques and tools to improve video effectiveness
Embedding video into your website is an effective way of engaging visitors and making your brand stand out in a text-heavy internet world.
In fact, the popularity of internet videos is increasing so much that by 2015, it’s estimated that videos will make up 55% of all internet traffic.
However, simply including a video in your website and hoping for the best is not enough. You need to test how well your visitors are engaging with your videos and make changes if necessary.
There are several online services that offer web performance tracking. Most offer a free trial period, with the option of upgrading at a later date.
Using Quantitative Tools to Test Performance: Google Analytics and Crazy Egg
Google Analytics profiles your users’ onsite engagement metrics. These include: average time spent on a page, average visit duration and average pages per visit.
Every time a user visits a page,…
Quick ideas to increase your followers
With over 70 million Pinterest users, which grew by 58% in 2013, then it's definitely a social media platform to evaluate to see if it fits your business and demographics. See our in-depth Pinterest marketing guide by Rhian Simms and Liz Edwards for more details.
In sectors where visual identity of products is important Pinterest can be influential:
Did you know that 'a Pin is repinned on average 10x compared to a Tweet, which is typically retweeted less than 1%?'
If you are fairly new to Pinterest and looking to grow your Followers to share your boards, then here are some practical steps:
Use high impact, high quality, colourful images - those with medium lightness are 20x more likely to be repinned.
Comment on the most popular pins to be noticed.
Give positive comments about those you are mentioning.
Use other social media platforms and offline channels to promote your presence…
9 tips on how to boost readership for a small business blog
Are you struggling to attract a significant amount of traffic to your blog? If the answer to this question is yes, there are a number of tactics smaller businesses can use to gain a loyal readership and achieve the goals you desire for your business blog.
Increased traffic provides the visibility you need to engage with a wider audience and sell the services or products you offer. Without traffic, your efforts for creating useful content are all made in vain.
If your blog is struggling to attract the attention it deserves, read on. My helpful tips provide a set of beneficial strategies used by the top marketers across the globe.
Tip 1. Regular content
For starters, create an effective content calendar with a range of compelling topics to be published frequently and to a specific schedule. To boost your blog’s traffic you need to connect…
A guide to best practices in video scripting and production to convert more prospects to customers
It happens to far too many businesses. They decide to make their first video, with the idea that it will bring in more customers, get shared by influencers, and maybe even go viral. What’s wrong with this picture? They're set to fail... To avoid this, I've taken all the mistakes I've seen made and highlighted 12 best practice tips, tools and techniques to help create a more effective, higher impact video.
1. Identify ways which highlight your video will fail - ask yourself these questions
While video can be a great medium for achieving these top-of-funnel marketing goals, I see three key ways in which this sets you up for failure:
1. ‘Bringing in customers’ and ‘engaging influencers’ tend to be slippery goals. How many more customers should it bring in? Which influencers are going to…
Is User-generated content in advertising the ultimate in brand advocacy?
"So now all we need is a load of people with cameras to tell everyone else how great our product is..."
Recently, in the US, Coke launched what’s being hailed as ‘the world’s first TV ad made completely with user-generated content’. The ad was produced by W+K and was made up of short videos filmed on the fly by real customers/brand advocates, whereby Coke asked the question: “What does it feel like when you take a sip of Coke?” And thus, the ‘AHH Effect’ ad was born…
[youtubevideoembedder id="XokGFN86ljc"]
Whilst the slight advertising cynic in me wonders whether there are a few rather contrived elements to the content, one has to temper that with the notion that hardcore Coke fans really would do all sorts of crazy sh.. for the chance to be in a TV ad with such a hugely potential reach.…
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June 17, 2014
Including video marketing examples inspired by The World Cup
A quick browse of the current Mashable Viral Video Chart reveals an unsurprising trend – with the World Cup well under way, marketers from across a wide number of industries are looking to the forthcoming tournament to generate a buzz around their products.
At the time of writing, this offering from Samsung Mobile advertising the new Galaxy S5 was leading the way over the last 7 days. (more…)…
How to increase communications relevance through more personalised, contextual messages based on customer insight
Data is the key to understanding your customers and delivering new insights, but data in itself is just a series of 1s and 0s until you can bring meaning and interpretation.
Knowing and understanding your data is the first step in delivering relevant communications and customer value, as you turn raw data into information and then actionable insight. Starting this journey however can be a difficult step as highlighted in the 2013 Teradata Data-Driven Marketing Survey which stated:
‘Nearly 50 percent of marketers agree that data is the most underutilised asset in their organisation, with less than 10 percent saying they currently use what data they have in a systematic way’
Where to start?
There are several ways to data discovery and data…
How Pinterest can drive revenue for e-commerce
Since its launch three years ago, Pinterest now has over 70 million users and it has proved itself to be more than just a platform to drive brand awareness through visual displays, pinning and sharing products, infographics or other boards. Both it's volume of pinners and the success of Cyber weekend has shown that e-commerce sites are reaping tangible sales benefits. Last weekend, Pinterest referrals tripled e-commerce sites' revenue. The boards are driving traffic on and off-line, via websites and into stores.
'78% of the retailers in the site’s 2013 Top 500 Guide are active on Pinterest', which shows the investment by retailers to take advantage of Pinterest.
Interested in ideas for increasing traffic to your website via Pinterest or increasing pins to your boards, then these campaigns may give you some inspiration? Pinterest has more…
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May 23, 2014
On 3rd April 2014 Google announced that the clock is ticking until they automatically upgrade all Product Listing Ad campaigns into Google Shopping Campaigns. The timeframe they have outlined is August 2014.
Therefore we recommend that you make this switch manually before the end of July as otherwise Google will take the liberty of doing it for you.
Shopping campaigns were released in beta mode in October 2013 and then fully in February 2014.
There are many aspects to shopping campaigns that are consistent with product listing ads:
The ads are matched to user searches based on your product inventory data feed that you send to the Google Merchant Centre rather than being triggered by keywords that the advertiser sets.
From a shoppers perspective they look identical - the ads show an image of your product, the product name and price and there is the option to add…
