Does your digital brand really stand out from the competition?
Have you really considered the extent to which your online brand proposition provides something compelling to your audience on an ongoing basis? With the rapid acceleration in new technologies and channels to interact with generic and niche audiences, brands are having to adapt quickly in order to stay relevant and to their audience as well as to out-manoeuvre the competition.
For brands it is ensuring you’re playing to your strengths – are you trusted source or supplier which audiences continue to engage with over time? Are you retaining your authority within your sector and are you listening to your customers and aware of your competition? Developing a digital brand differentiation strategy is essential to retain brand identity and relevancy.
This post will focus on the concept and importance of creating ongoing engagement or 'lock-in' – explaining what it is, how it can be…
How Topshop used Instagram and Facebook to power the Topshop Fashion Catwalk
Topshop's 2014 social media campaign gives a good example of an integrating social networks. Topshop used Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to bring their live London Fashion event to a social media audience. They enlisted 5 Topshop Instagram Bloggers and strong advocates to share their pictures and videos, inviting fans to post to the hashtag #Topshopwindow.
Brands appearing at the Fashion show shared photos from the catwalk and celebs at the show, under hashtag #TopShopUnique and some Designers even took the opportunity to release their new outfits, before they hit the catwalk.
The live event was streamed to the website so fans could 'click-to-buy' whilst watching the models on the runway in the latest fashions, and even download the latest music playlist. Social comments were shown…
Customers have similar traits but are not all alike and should not be spoken to with a single message in the same manner and tone. This was initially looked at in an earlier article ‘Talk to your customers or talk to your customer?’, but once the need to communicate with and not at all your customers is understood, providing different messages/offer/content using surface level details is a tempting approach, for example splitting the message by gender and/or age group.
This approach assumes that the surface level details represent the best groups of customers which will not always be the case. Looking at the sand in the first image at first glance all the grains seems to be identical with some obvious differences becoming apparent when a more detailed…
Why is attribution modelling important?
Ever since its birth in the mid 1990s, online advertising has been lauded as the most accountable advertising medium ever, but it has taken a while to live up to the promise... The early days of measuring online display campaign effectiveness based on click-through rates alone seem excruciatingly painful to recall for example!
Fast forward to 2014 and the latest online media spend figures show that digital media spend has increased dramatically, with predictions that Digital media will account for 75% of all marketing spend in 5 years. With this kind of money comes a responsibility to ensure media spend isn’t being wasted, or at the very least to find ways of explaining how just much value is being derived from it.
More advanced digital marketeers have started looking towards attribution modelling to help better understand what their budget is doing for them and how it can be made to…
Expanding your affiliate program to the US the right way
The globalization of e-commerce, coupled with a growing American demand for British goods, has many U.K. retailers eyeing the U.S. market. And with global B2C e-commerce expected to reach $1.5 trillion this year, they’re not alone. Retailers across the world are tapping into this lucrative consumer base with sophisticated affiliate programs.
With global retail affiliates like RetailMeNot, rewardStyle, and ShopStyle gaining in popularity, homing in on consumers who crave your products is becoming easier than ever.
However, it’s important to note that not every retailer is ready for the competitive affiliate landscape across the pond as there are a number of differences you must consider when launching an affiliate program in the U.S. These include program management services, industry standards, compliance, and interactions with merchants and networks.
Without a thorough understanding of how…
28 point pre-email send checklist
We are sure that you will already know many of these email marketing best practices, so let's collectively build it up to 40!
We shouldn't give our emails that six or 12 month car service, or cut corners as we send out emails all of the time. Email Monks, email marketing designers, have saved us some time writing that important check list before we 'press the send button' , breaking it into four sections - client compatiblity, email delivery setup, inbox preview and html open preview.
So let's avoid those simple email blunders that can be avoidable by reading their tips and it would be great to build this up!
…
How do you build long-term relationships with customers using digital media?
"Open conversations generate loyalty, sales and most of all, learning... for both sides".
Seth Godin
Achieving engagement with a customer or fan base is not so much about tactics such as Facebook or tools like Radian6, but how these are best leveraged to enable meaningful interaction with the consumer. As Seth describes in the quote above, open and maintain conversation, ask questions, listen, build better products and market in a more relevant way - add value to the relationship with the consumer. To create these conversations and build relationships is challenging - the biggest challenge in marketing perhaps. There are no quick tips we can give here, but we can offer this structure which will step you through the decisions you need to make to work towards long-term relationships.
We also have a new guide by Andrew Campbell describing how to create a customer…
A visual summary of Smart Insights members' conference
Well that's a relief! I think it's fair to say our first conference went pretty well judging by the Twitter comments and other feedback. Many thanks if you attended the event and got involved in the sharing. I've compiled a quick "best of" starting with some general feedback and then looking at highlights of individual talks.
If you're an Expert member of Smart Insights and weren't able to attend, we'll be making the slides available on the site next week, we'll let you know :)
It was great we had a full-house and I was delighted to see attendees from many industries across Europe and beyond - I spoke to Smart Insights Expert members from Denmark, Ireland, Switzerland, Italy even Australia! and I think there were more countries besides.
مؤتمر رائع جدا بحضور أحد أهم خبراء #التسويق_الإلكتروني في العالم @DaveChaffey #digitalimpact2014 …
Three ways to use marketing analytics to increase sales
As there are so many options available when using data analytics, why do some businesses typically rely on one single approach? The analytical tools available for the business leader's arsenal are now better and bigger than ever before, and are targeted to generate better decision-making. Despite this, and the ability of such tools to increase conversion rates, growth and MROI (marketing return on investment), some companies seem frozen by the choices on offer.
This causes business heads to default to their usual performance-management and planning approach, and the typical result is the discovery that even advanced single methodologies have limits. The variety of audiences and activities that marketing budgets support and the diverse time limits for investment requires an approach that's a little more complex. The ideal way for companies…
How to combat marketing misbeliefs from colleagues that can kill profit
Marketers, by nature, are persuasive humans, yet sometimes they’re stifled by management’s delusions.
In my career, I’ve observed several misconceptions that interfere with effective marketing and, ultimately, prevent the company from growing and becoming more profitable. The reasons behind this are many and varied, but it usually relates to misbeliefs depending on managers' previous experiences. It might be because managers don’t believe in a certain type of marketing investment, or they might simply consider the marketing department a mere backup to the sales team.
Whatever the case, if you’ve ever approached your C-suite executives with a killer marketing plan backed by concrete principles only to be shot down because they can’t imagine doing things differently, you’re not alone. However, if you prepare for possible 'pushback', you can present sound rationales for the importance of marketing efforts.
5 Deadly Marketing Misbeliefs
Here are five common…
