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July 21, 2014
What can the best business apps on the market teach us?
A great mobile app adds that little something extra consumers just don’t get from a desktop or mobile site. Offering instant information and efficient access to products, an app can increase loyalty by providing the consumer with an immediate handheld solution. A well-designed app well allied to a wider integrated multi-channel retail policy can offer both consumers and brands with huge benefits. Here are 10 inspiring business apps that do just that.
Debenhams
The Debenhams mobile app offers customers a simpler alternative to the department store’s desktop and mobile sites, allowing them to swiftly shop the full Debenhams collection. The app enables users to scan barcodes while shopping in-store to check for sizes and prices as well as read other…
SMS is not just for promotion. Have you fully considered the possibilities of text marketing to grow your business?
What is the Marketing Mix?
For those unfamiliar with the 7Ps of the marketing mix, imagine your business represented in the form of a cake – yummy. All businesses will have different ingredients that make up their cake
Some cakes (businesses) will be different sizes. The marketing mix studies 7 ingredients to your business: product, price, promotion, place, process, people and physical evidence, assessing how each of them perform.
Despite primarily being a communications tool, SMS can add value in all areas of the marketing mix. This post illustrates how SMS can be used to make your cake taste better and make customers want more of it!
7 ingredients for SMS
1. Product/Service
SMS is a great way of adding a personal touch to your product or service;…
Integrating online marketing into marketing communications is the key to success & longevity
The head of the world’s largest PR firm, Edelman, declared recently that the marketing industry has its business backward. That marketing has a “short-term and broken model”. And, he’s saying, it doesn’t have to be this way. Where brands could originally only reach and stimulate consumers through advertising or promotional marketing, we’re seeing brands such as American Express, Coke, Red Bull and Dove all creating content rich stories, integrated into much wider campaigns, to enable connections in consumer news feeds.
Annoyingly Edelman is pointing to “marketing” but referencing the advertising model specifically, but the point is still great if viewed in a wider context.
“I see the emergence of a new paradigm, which is ‘communications marketing’ instead of ‘marketing communications.’”
Richard Edelman, CEO, Edelman
Of course Edelman is encouraging a PR or journalistic mindset of ‘communications’ vs…
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…
New research showing the most cost-effective techniques
Do you work in Higher Education, and interested to learn how digital marketing is driving student enrolments? Fathom has released the findings from their first quarterly EDU Standard Marketing Report to share how the sector is using the latest developments in SEO and paid search statistics in the sector, plus online advertising and email marketing trends.
Key takeaways in the infographic highlights:
Mobile marketing accounts for 15% of conversion strategies
Paid Search from Google and Bing drove 50% of the enquiries.
40% of leads from paid advertising were attributed to non-branded search.
You can download the Fathom Q1 2014 EDU Standard Marketing Report for more indepth results.…
A round-up of our advice and alerts from June 2014
Colin Green, Marketing Director, Land Rover UK stressed the importance of integration when he stated that:
“Truly Integrated Marketing is the holy grail for the marketeer. ”
However, it seems that integration is easier said than done. Our research on Managing Digital Marketing showed that many are making efforts to improve integration across the many marketing channels today.
Given these challenges, in our strategy posts this month we have focused on articles discussing how to improve integration.
Strategy and planning advice
Improving integrated digital marketing
Three examples of integrated campaigns
How to create an integrated marketing campaign
Talkwalker - a review of a new, free social media monitoring tool
Influencer marketing - Bryony Thomas explains her recommended strategic approach to influencer marketing.
17 LinkedIn Profile tips - this infographic was one of our most popular…
Why benchmarking is essential to fill the digital marketing gap
In theory, analytics can tell you anything you want to know about your last digital promotion - except whether or not it was successful... For example, analytics may tell you?
Your conversion rate was 3%. Is that good?
Engagement is down. Is it down across your competitive set or is it just you?
Redemption rate exceeded targets by 10%. Was the bar set too low?
You won't get these insights from your digital marketing analytics because all they can give you are your numbers, which are meaningless unless you have something to compare them to. Benchmarking tools provide answers by plotting your data against the industry-specific averages for hundreds of metrics. You'll know what objective success looks like. You'll know if you achieved it. And you'll know how your promotion fared versus the…
5 Franchising Q&As with a look at opportunities in Australia
Becoming a small business owner has grown into one of the hottest topics in the world business news in the past few years. With an over 90% prosperity in the franchise sector, running your own business is a one-way ticket to success. Yet, the unlimited power which franchise enterprises hold is often deeply buried under a messy pile of obscure researches and heavy statistics. Understanding the basics of franchising is the first step towards starting a successful business. This article will give answers to the top most asked franchising questions helping you improve your organisational and personal management skills.
Q1. What is a Franchise?
Franchise is generally an authorisation granted by a company or product owner which gives a person the right to market a specific service or product by using the trade name or trademark of another business. The authorised person is…
Boo hoo: “ Learning from the largest European dot-com failure
This in-depth case study of Boo.com features in the last few editions of my book Digital marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice - it's based is based on story of Boo.com failure from the excellent book "Boo Hoo - a dotcom story"
"Unless we raise $20 million by midnight, boo.com is dead"
So said boo.com CEO Ernst Malmsten, on May 18th 2000. Half the investment was raised, but this was too little, too late, and at midnight, less than a year after its launch, Boo.com closed. The headlines in the Financial Times, the next day read: "Boo.com collapses as Investors refuse funds; Online Sports retailer becomes Europe's first big Internet casualty".
The boo.com case remains a valuable case study for all types of businesses, since it doesn't only illustrate the challenges of managing E-commerce for a clothes retailer, but rather highlights failings in E-commerce strategy and management…
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June 18, 2014
What can we learn from these examples of failed digital marketing strategies?
There is a tendency for both brands and agencies to accentuate the positive in case studies and write-ups of campaigns and case studies. It’s understandable to take this positive approach to hide bad news out of sight of investors, clients and consumers. However, we can often learn more when marketing failures are reviewed. In this article I’ll take a look at 4 examples of digital strategy failures that highlight good practices by showing poor practices.
1. Boo.com
Despite the fact that boo.com went spectacularly bust over a decade ago, it still offers a unique insight into one of the biggest and most costly digital business failures in European history. Boo.com aimed to become a first-to-market global brand selling sportswear and designer clothes. The business launched in 18 countries in the autumn of…
