Our monthly summary of advice and developments to help manage online marketing

Strategy and planning

Early to mid March saw the annual SXSW conference take place in Austin, Texas. This is increasingly influential in highlighting marketing trends and technology. Thanks to David Sealey for his summary of 5 inspiring lessons from marketing. If you’re following the latest trends, then I also recommend Altimeter’s take on the technologies that matter from SXSW.

This year it seems that Omnichannel is the new term for managing multichannel marketing to emphasise the growing importance of social media marketing. If it’s new to you or you’re looking for examples, read more in our Introduction to Omnichannel marketing and these examples of Omnichannel retail.

One of our most popular posts on planning this month is an Digital media introduction infographic courtesy of Hallam Internet Marketing.

We think this is a…

Unless you're one of the lucky few, work can become monotonous. Same commute. Same desk. Same issues. For this reason I leapt at the opportunity to head out to Austin Texas for South by South-West (SXSW) Interactive. Four days of inspiring learning and informal networking followed and I'd recommend that if you ever get the chance to go, take it. It's difficult to download everything that you experience at SXSW into a single presentation or post. Rather than give a travel log or diary entry on the events, I hope to offer some inspiration from my notes. I've picked 5 of the things that made me really sit up and pay attention and then after each item I've posted questions designed to inspire you on how to improve your job, business or life. Ultimately I want my post to inspire you to build or improve…

Trends in marketing with the best potential for commercial growth

Update: My review of 22 Digital Marketing Trends 2014 Throughout the year I’m asked about What’s New, What’s Hot and What’s Next. This is one of the reasons why we’ve created the [What’s New in Marketing" updates, to give a monthly summary to help people working in marketing and using digital technologies see the latest developments which really matter. So much of what’s discussed daily in digital marketing is useful or interesting, but just noise. In this review I will focus on the major trends which we think will be significant in 2013. What’s "significant’? These are marketing activities where we expect to see the most increased investment and focus in 2013. The activities will gain the funding since they will have the biggest impact in creating additional leads and sales and strengthening brands. It doesn’t focus on the latest new Ecommerce…

"Need-to-know" changes in July 2012

In this “fat-free” round-up we update you to what we see as the biggest changes from the last month in the world of digital marketing. You’ll certainly know some, if not most already, but we hope it will be worth scanning to see whether you missed anything which could affect the way you approach marketing in future. These alerts are mainly changes on the platforms like Facebook and Google which are so important to digital marketing, but we also include a selection of our most popular briefings on best practice in managing and planning marketing. I thought the biggest news this month was the announcement of availability of Google Glass and the new gestural interfaces we cover in the UX section below. Is this what we'll be seeing out of our window this time next year?

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How engaged are users of different social platforms?

Back in June 2011, we shared an infographic showing what happens in 60 seconds in social media, now we're updating it with a new infographic from Social JumpStart. This one has some additions including Pinterest showing that for all our current interest in Pinterest it's nothing compared to YouTube.  It's a pity they haven't included Google+ either.

It certainly summarises the challenges we face today as marketers and consumers of content today!

How do you find this - exciting? or scary? I find it both - to be involved in such a dynamic area, but which presents huge challenges in being first and getting cut-through. I created a companion post taming the social media firehose which shared ideas on tools I used to keep up-to-date.

Here…

More predictions for marketing using digital technology platforms in 2012

Wow: it’s 2012. Now thoughts naturally turn to the future. What might this year hold for the world of Digital Marketing? Of course none of us knows for sure. The rapid pace of change and the accompanying opportunities and threats facing players in the digital/tech space are, in large part, what makes it all so exciting. And hard to predict. But it’s always fun to guess… I used to think that being a futurist would be quite a good gig; you know: fly in to somewhere nice, speculate a little about what might happen, pocket the fee, then fly out and keep a low profile elsewhere while none of it came true…? I’ve realised though, that to do this you’ve really got to keep running (see George Clooney’s character in the excellent Up In The…

12 digital marketing fundamentals to get right in 2012

At the turn of the year, it’s always worth reflecting on the opportunities and challenges ahead to help shape priorities for marketing. In a recent talk for AdTech London, I identified 12 marketing trends, available in the Slideshare embed at the end of the post. In this post I’ll highlight some of the main opportunities and I've added links to our posts and guides to help you think through your strategy. We've kept this post available on the blog for historical reference, for the most up-to-date marketing trends see our 2015 Digital Marketing trends predictions.

Most important marketing trend for 2012 : creating a cross-channel engagement strategy

We can be sure that there will be will be lots of announcements of exciting innovations and marketing trends in all of the search and social networks within in 2012. We look forward to covering them within our alerts, but they can…

What are the implications for marketing priorities?

I was recently listening to an interesting talk by Dave Wieneke where he looked at the way brands need to change how they engage with consumers. One of the nuggets he shared, looked at the relative importance of company Facebook page visits against their main website visits. So I dug into the original data - 2011 research from Webtrends and Adgregate (PDF) and it tells a very interesting story I thought was worth summarising. For many companies now, particularly those with non-transactional sites, visitor figures are in decline, while their Facebook visitors are growing. I thought I would share this here, since it prompts important questions of how serious companies are about creating a strategy to engage their audiences through Facebook and whether they are allocating the right level of resources between website management and Facebook, either too much or too little. It also…

Are we too fond of shiny new technologies?

I read this great post by Seth Godin, it coincidentally arrived as an alert in my inbox within minutes of my talking to a college about a guy (who knows a guy) wanting to run a campaign using a 'new type of QR code'. Don't get me wrong, I love the marketing opportunities from QR codes and blogged around the topic several months ago and although the concept is seriously interesting for marketers, I still don't see a common QR code reader making it easy enough for the consumer to adopt, which in turn doesn't make it viable technology to leverage for marketing. At least in my opinion, and as things stand today. The idea of another type of QR code only adds complexity - it is also possibly damaging to a brand experience through user…

Apple's Lion Operating System is the shape (or feel) of things to come...

Apple are making a big deal out of the multi-touch gestures that allow you to manipulate the interface in their new desktop OS (Lion)  released this week. Lessons they’ve learnt from the iPad are rapidly impacting their other devices and software. Something Microsoft has perhaps been a bit slow doing following the success of their Xbox Kinect. Still I suspect it won’t be too much longer before a motion sensor approach to interaction is established for the desktop. All these steps towards more ‘natural’, less mediated, methods of control and experience got me thinking. How do we develop this physicality further? Can we capture taste, weight and texture in the digital environment? Clearly these things are physically impossible on the simple web pages…