Our roundup of research insights and best practice advice from the month

Doesn’t time fly? On the 30th April 2013 the WWW was officially twenty years old. How it’s changed and what a “wild ride it’s been” as someone @replied when I shared this. We certainly owe a debt of gratitude to Sir Tim Berner’s Lee, not only for the invention, but also his dedication to keeping it open through his work with the The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and other non-commercial organisations.

As always, this summary is based on updates in 5 key areas of online marketing.

Strategy and planning

The evolving skills of the modern marketer - one of most popular posts this month shows in a visual way what success on today’s WWW requires, particularly with integrating with other channels of course. …

Hubspot survey shows challenges and even greater opportunities for Inbound Marketing

Value: [rating=4]

Recommended link: Inbound Marketing Research, Update European Edition Now Available

Marketing in Europe? Hubspot have just released their European report on Inbound marketing, after gathering insight from over 400 Marketers in Europe to find out the key tips and strategies of how Inbound Marketing is successfully adopted, priorities and challenges this year. It also shows comparisons between marketing in Europe Vs the US.

Top 3 sources for lead generation for European Marketers is Social Media, SEO and Blogs!

 

Inbound Marketing is no longer the latest ‘buzzword’ since companies have been implementing it for years now since digital and social media marketing channels have been available. The question is: how effective is it? The notable shift from ‘interruptive…

A case study of marketing for start-ups with low/no budgets

In our current and future enterprises, we all have the duty and obligation to generate new customers for our services or products. To maintain our dream and vision, unfortunately, despite being an absolute truth, the main barrier for start-up companies is the lack of capital for investment. Case studies of how Nike, Sony and McDonalds invest in brand marketing isn't too relevant - although you are also aiming to build your brand! However, facing this financial limitation, we can use online marketing in our favour to take the first steps in overcoming the investment barrier. Here are some ideas based on our experience of creating an online presence on a shoestring budget.

1. Initial contact to start building contacts

Building initial contacts on an email list is what our initial success was based on. These were our 'Early adopters.' To begin with, we do…

How are companies managing content marketing today?

Lee Odden gave a great webcast on Creative Content marketing for Smart Insights on the 12th April - thanks if you attended and many thanks Lee for your great insights! If you want to catch up on Lee's advice and examples you can review it at the end of this post. A couple of quotes from Lee to live by in your content marketing that I picked out are: @leeodden's formula for successful #contentmarketing: "Ask people to share something, then recognise or reward them: ow.ly/k02xK — Dr Dave Chaffey (@DaveChaffey) April 12, 2013   and "Successful #contentmarketing is Creative + Social + Optimised" @leeodden of @toprank — Dr Dave Chaffey (@DaveChaffey) April 12, 2013   I also wanted to share the results of some of the polls that Lee and I devised for the webcast. These Votes are good for increasing the…

5 ways of encouraging Disruptive Innovation

Disruptive innovation is no longer the exception, it’s becoming the rule as category incumbents are swept aside by new entrants. Just look at Blackberry, Blockbuster, Borders, Kodak and even Polaroid – all erstwhile “innovative” companies that somehow missed opportunities to leapfrog to the next big thing in subsequent innovation that is often digitally fuelled. Memorex can be added to this infamous listing, once darling of the US stock market, when its innovative pipeline under a new CEO ran dry in a most spectacular way embarrassing its entire board. This is by no way an isolated example. If we’re not proactively driving disruption in a systemic manner, we’ll eventually need to react to it or confront reality. Most Leaders however, aren’t prepared for the challenges of leading through such prolonged periods of uncertainty and the often accompanying…

Strategic Marketing Planning Reviews – Using  simple frameworks to answer ‘where are we now?’

The start to any strategic process must be an appraisal of the current state of play. When answering the ‘where are we now’ question, key activities need to take place. These activities have been enhanced through digital technology and the information explosion that has resulted from the valuable resource that is the World Wide Web. However at the same time, this availability of information and data does not necessarily mean anything unless you can use this information to create insight. In this post, I will focus on 4 aspects of digital strategy that should be reviewed in the crucial first phase of strategic marketing planning. The majority of this activity you can argue would occur as part of any internal analysis, however in exploring opportunities and threats it is essential to consider these four areas in terms of…

The key developments in digital marketing in February 2013

It’s not every month a new currency is launched. In February Amazon announced a new virtual currency called Amazon Coins (a genius moniker) and an interesting promotion where customers will be given money (virtual). Watch out from May onwards. Some are calling it the Bank of Jeff… Image credit: Mashable

Strategy and planning

Did you notice the emergence of the term “growth hacking” for describing a “new” marketing approach in 2012 and continuing into the start of 2013? I initially dismissed it as a fad most relevant for SaaS (Software as a Service) / single product startup businesses. But recently, I’ve noticed some new job descriptions in this area which prompted me to take another look. In particular, I noticed that The Guardian is currently advertising for a Head of Growth Hacking…

Examples showing how to help conversions after shoppers click Add to cart or Basket

When you run an ecommerce website, marketing doesn’t stop when your customer clicks the “Buy now” button.  According to research by the Baymard Institute, the average online shopping cart abandonment rate is 66.22%. In order to encourage your online customers to input their credit card information, and complete the purchasing track, you need to keep marketing to them throughout the entire process.

Here are 5 tips on how to convert your online customers

1. Use informative product pages The more information you provide on your product pages, the more likely your customers will complete their sales. Check out this product page from ModCloth and the wealth of information it provides to the customer: An engaging product description with a tab containing additional details. Information on product…

Personalisation 101 - how to increase customer engagement and conversion rates by "Sense and Respond" to Digital Body Language

In this post I hope to give a practical guide to website personalisation, to show you how to improve customer engagement and increase your conversion rates. Apart from the well-known Amazon example, many other types of business are now seeing the benefits of personalisation.

easyJet increased their conversion rate enormously through personalisation. During the easyJet January sale 2012, they delivered a personalised home page to each of their 2.5 million customers and converted five sales per second. (They used the Sitecore Customer Engagement Platform).

John Lewis said that their personalised site was a key factor in increasing Christmas sales by 27.9%. Personalisation is important to business and customer alike and no doubt you have already seen it feature high up in the…

7 steps to getting an edge through marketing

We asked ourselves this question of our own business this week - how will our own agency, First 10, grow commercial success in digital marketing as well as deliver that as a service to our clients? How will we walk the talk, too. We wrote down the key seven factors to help us avoid those false gods of advertising (in any shape) and dedicated sales people who so often plague our industry. We came up with a list in order of importance - and we liked it - so I thought I'd share it with you since I think it applies to marketing across different types of businesses… Improve the product (or service) - having worked in senior positions both client and agency side I cannot stress how this is the most important way to improve commercial success. Marketing is baked in. Sounds obvious, right.…