Facebook Graph Search, Vine and Google Analytics Gallery are the biggest announcements
January is the time of year when many look again at their priorities for the year ahead. To help with this, Smart Insights ran a series of 8 free webinars on January 9th. If you would like to take a look, you can still view the #MarketingPriorities2013 Webcasts and Slideshares. Continuing the theme, Expert commentator Annmarie Hanlon will be speaking in February in a webcast on how to create the Perfect Marketing Plan.
The brand new online brand of note in January was Vine. From the people who brought us 140 character tweets, so that we could say more with less, come 6 second videos. It’s based on technology Twitter purchased in 2012. It’s good to see some brands have been agile enough to trial the format, but I’m sure others will have larger, more…
Use questions and filters when planning for digital - don't just follow 'what's hot'
We're just ending the period of 2013 predictions, something I am fascinated by, find useful, but also dread each year.
There are undoubtedly some great posts out there with valuable opinion and insight. Yet it can get a little overwhelming and in most cases leave you feeling a little depressed around all the things that "you should be doing." Maybe that's just me?
The thing is, in marketing (as any job role), you can't do everything, so there's no point getting anxious about the million things that you could do, prediction posts heap that pressure on; they're good and bad, in that way.
We too ran our first online summit a week ago advising on a number of topic areas and recommended priorities for 2013, (you can see the recordings and slidedecks here if you missed them). It's easy to get…
ACT Webcasts from the Smart Insights Digital Marketing Priorities 2013 summit
The two webinars from our summit focusing on interacting with new audiences using different digital channels were:
1. Mobile marketing priorities for 2013 with Rob Thurner of Burner Mobile
The agenda for this talk covered how to build mobile into your business strategy, plus more practical advice on weaving mobile into your customer journey and discovery/promotion of the mobile channels.
Related Ebook: Mobile Marketing Briefing by Rob Thurner
2. B2B Digital marketing priorities for 2013 with Rene Power of B2B Marketing
This webcast covered covered the key…
REACH webcasts from the Smart Insights Digital Marketing Priorities 2013 summit
At our recent free summit many viewers asked us to share the slide decks and recordings, so to collect them together we have a short series of posts to point you in the right direction.
There will be one for online marketing topics covering each of Reach, Act and Convert and Engage in the Smart Insights PRACE digital strategy framework.
The two webinars focusing on reaching new audiences were:
1. SEO priorities for 2013 with James Gurd of Digital Juggler
The focus of this talk by James Gurd of Digital Juggler was analysis techniques to help improve results from SEO. It also shares examples of tools to assist with SEO.
Related Ebook: 7 Step Guide to SEO
…
A review of the digital marketing year
Well, that’s the end of another, interesting but challenging year for marketers to keep up-to-date and work out how to best apply all the innovations. To help review marketing opportunities in 2013, earlier in the month I wrote this review of marketing trends for 2013. Thank you if you voted in the poll or shared the article. If you take a look, there are two clear winners for priorities.
What are your personal memories of 2012? Perhaps some of these events will ring a bell?
Check out the most important ones in your country. Google’s annual Zeitgeist this year reviewed an aggregation of over one trillion Google searches.
YouTube also has a Year in Rewind tailored for your country (http://youtube.com/rewind).
All of the main providers of digital marketing platforms have been active…
Good User Experience = Good Customer Service = More Sales
Christmas shopping has begun and with it, the stress! And no, I haven’t been shopping offline at all, I’ve been shopping online! But this time of the year always brings to the fore one of the most obvious issues that many Ecommerce Managers have control of, but yet remains to be one of the most lacking in terms of solutions.
Picture this: you go into a store where a very nice assistant helps you find everything you need to purchase. You’re thinking “Great! All my Christmas shopping done in an hour!”.
You walk on up to the till point where the assistant starts totting up all of your purchases, but the sales assistant then suddenly tells you that you can’t actually pay at their till unless you have a specific device. So you…
The latest in marketing from November 2012
November is now synonymous with Movember in many countries. Have you heard the story of Movember’s growth? It’s been great to see the growth of this cause in recent years. This year it seems that every other person is supporting it. It’s an interesting story of how Movember has grown from 30 Mo Bros in Melbourne, Australia in 2003 to 854,288 Mo Bros and Sistas worldwide in 2011.
Our friends at First 10 have a Movember team page, one of over 30,000 teams in the UK taking part to raise money. With the Dads of two of the Smart Insights team members affected by Prostate Cancer it’s close to our hearts too.
Strategy and planning
There’s a diverse mix of free tools available to support analysis for planning; one of the enjoyable aspects of working in digital marketing today. In…
Our summary of the latest developments to be aware of from October 2012
The most obvious developments in October were the introduction of new hardware platforms that you couldn’t fail to miss, thanks to coverage in the main stream media. We cover these in our user experience and conversion section where we also have reviews covering the business relevance of two major Google Analytics developments.
Although there was a flurry of new feature announcements in October after the summer “break” which we cover below, we believe that defining a strategic approach to marketing is what is most important and this is where we start our summary.
On a lighter note, this video simulation This video simulation of the way we will use our phones in 2025 was one of our most popular posts in October, although many felt it didn’t give a positive image of life or marketing in the future…
…
Examples of how to communicate your offer effectively
Simply put, value propositions are the reasons retailers use to persuade us to buy products or services from them rather than competitors. From a retailer's perspective we also consider them sales tools. This includes benefits provided by products/services or even the website, functionality, customer service, loyalty schemes etc.
This tends to be done really well by retailers offline, but for some reason online value proposition (OVPs) becomes a watery-at-best version – and this is something that is quite possibly MORE important online than offline.
One common theme that I’m sure many can resonate with is that website owners will often say ‘I thought the designers would do that’. But here’s the thing: most designers have studied design, not marketing. Typically, when you ask for them to design an ad, you usually provide…
An introduction to segmenting Ecommerce site visitors to increase conversion rates
We humans tend to stick with what we know. That can lead to great things as we specialize (the invention of the light bulb and the telephone for instance). But it can also lead to diminishing returns, especially when our business requires us to deliver results across a variety of disciplines.
For online merchants, familiarity with the methods for driving website traffic often creates a tendency to get caught up in driving more and more traffic. As an industry, we’re starting to see increased focus on optimizing conversion rates as an alternative to chasing increasingly expensive sources of traffic coming from SEO, PPC, email, and social campaigns.
But as with most relatively new fields, venturing into conversion optimization can be daunting, and it can be hard to figure out where to start. A good place to start is by figuring out where…
