Content for social media success

Micro content, I keep hearing this term and thought it’d be useful to explore what it means; why content marketing is evolving and diversifying and what the practical applications of micro content are for marketing.

Essentially, micro content is as it sounds - short form content. Typically low cost, high value content appropriate to social channels. To all intents and purpose it’s social media content.

It’s not that detailed articles or long form, rich content are any less important, it’s simply a case of being relevant to the social media platform in question, and accessible to an ever detached consumer who’s on the move with a low attention span for your brand.

Social and mobile are leading the change

As the world shifts towards mobile devices, and accessing information via social networks on a mobile, micro content becomes a more important and…

A summary of new research showing the level of investment in digital marketing in 2014

It's always useful to be able to compare the way your marketing budget is divided between different digital tactics. Particularly if changes in allocation are highlighted and ideally if the budgets are for similar companies.

The fifth annual international survey from Econsultancy and Responsys Marketing Budgets 2014 helps with the first question. Over 600 businesses participated in the survey, note that some of these were agencies estimating their clients' investments.

This summary post includes what I believe to be the three most useful insights from the report Marketing Budgets 2014: Effectiveness, Measurement and Allocation Report.

Proportion of marketing budget allocated to digital channels

[caption id="attachment_35349" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Proportion of marketing budget spent on digital marketing. Source: Econsultancy 2014.[/caption]

This chart suggests that if you are…

Out with the Old, In with the…Old.  Why Dynamic pricing is even more relevant today

Dynamic pricing is a price-setting approach relying on data analysis and flexibility. It allows to shape and control price changes on the fly, depending on customer’s previous interactions with the website and his general profile. Items like past searches and purchases, location, time and date of previous searches and purchases are taken into account to generate a personalised offer. Dynamic pricing has been around for nearly 15 years when retailers like Amazon started testing this. So, this isn’t a new practice but each year that technology advances, so does the way we use dynamic pricing. As a business owner, the opportunities for delivering more relevant propositions has improved. From search history to previous purchases, customer location to general tastes, it allows a business owner to personalise its offer on a user…

Ideas for developing your digital marketing skills

In previous posts we have looked at how marketers can stay relevant by developing their digital marketing skills. Simon Swan asked Are you a T-Shaped Marketer? which is an interesting way of reviewing the depth and breadth of your digital marketing skills and I summarised another infographic showing how the modern marketer needs to be Part Scientist and Part Artist. We also interviewed online recruiters to find out what industries were looking for when employing digital staff and reviewed typical digital marketing roles in our marketing job descriptions outlines. 

In this infographic, we look at social media marketing skills . This shows how soft skills such as listening, nurturing and patience are just as important as some of the hard, technical skills. We're not sure they need to be 'superpowers' though!

…

And avoid boring brand content

One of the key challenges in content marketing is being able to create enough great content. Great? OK, maybe that’s vague, I mean relevant, engaging and it works. Great means different things to a financial services company than say, a BBQ grill manufacturer, a basmati rice brand or sports clothing manufacturer.

The truth is we all have the same challenge when it come to content creation and content marketing - creating dull content is a choice, it’s your choice.

“If people aren’t talking about you, they’re not talking about you for a reason. And the reason isn’t that they dislike you. They’re not talking about you because you’re boring.” ~ Seth Godin

People first...

Use your imagination, take a step back and think about your target audience, not your brand. What your audience needs over what you want to promote. It’s this return to people where it get’s so much…

Statistics on consumer psychology on Ecommerce sites

Have you ever wondered about which are the biggest consumer concerns that are a barrier to online purchase? For example, what is the perception if your website page is slow to load, what consumers actually think about your videos or if on-line vouchers affect the decision to buy. Of course, the best way is to ask consumer direct, by a panel of customers or through conducting a usability test. But as a quick alternative, check out the research we have compiled in the new Vouchercloud infographic on consumer buying psychology. The findings tell you some of the 'statistics and habits behind the clicks': 31% of consumers would be more likely to buy a product after watching a video since it reinforces their confidence, and 41% would abandon the shopping cart if there were hidden charges. More…

Taking the example of using rich snippets for hotels

In my experience, many local businesses miss out on the opportunity of SEO since they don't focus their efforts in the use and implementation of structured data.

Rich snippets on SERPs attract the attention of users and this means that the CTR is improved than the ones of your competitors.

In this guide I will take the example of Hotels to show how structured data can be used. Let's take an example. Here are 2 cases, decide which one would grab your attention.

Case 1

Case 2

We should note, that at least for now, the appearance of rich snippets on SERPs…

What's New in Marketing? January 2014

The end of January already! Does anyone not think that? The end of the month means it’s time for our regular roundup of the major developments that affect marketing and our pick of our advice on the latest practices. When I speak with marketers I’m often asked “what’s new”, “what matters” and “what’s next” and “what matters” so I hope our summary helps answer some of these questions to save you having to sift through the content avalanche. I also hear that it’s getting more difficult to keep up-to-date, so in our recent research on managing digital marketing I was curious to know how marketers found this. Of marketers completing the survey a majority (55%) found it challenging, with over a quarter (27%) stating that it had become more difficult recently. Nearly a quarter said it was easy - good for them - I’d like to know…

A tutorial with examples and ideas of what to test

Prominently displaying why users should buy from you rather than a competitor is extremely important for any business look to increases online sales, particularly in retail, but it applies across many other sites. As Bryan Eisenberg, author of Always Be Testing can Call To Action explains in this punchy clip, testing value propositions can have a massive impact on conversion. [youtubevideoembedder id="ps7bB9-ksMY"] Bryan Eisenberg On Unique Value Propositions (1m45s) >> As Bryan says: "If you're not doing this, you're wasting your time" Given this, value propositions are something that I love to test. Smart Insights have covered the importance and examples of value propositions in other posts on their hub page, here I'm going to focus on testing, looking at retail Ecommerce examples.  I will looking at testing and optimisation point of view, starting with a review of…

Dave suggested I write something important this week, something for marketers in 2014, after all we’ve just updated our health-check tool, and recognise that our audience are looking ahead and busy planning for success this year, so that makes sense. My post from a year ago did just that, my advice was to focus on (1) content and (2) customer journeys across mobile channels. Proven advice I think? It’s interesting as those two things also came out top in an informal Smart Insights survey that we ran in early December. So am I to sugar coat the same advice and ideas differently this year? On the one hand yes, it’s still super relevant, but it’s missing some thing else for 2014.

I wake up worrying about marketing

I hope that you do too? I genuinely do worry. I run an agency with paying clients, their happiness is my focus, so it’s…