What’s New in Marketing? August 2013

A review of the "need-to-know" developments in digital marketing in August 2013

The most significant changes in August relate to LinkedIn and Facebook marketing, so if your business is active on these social platforms, be sure to check you heard about these updates. There is also a major update to Google Analytics which we cover in our section on User experience, analytics and conversion optimisation.

Our regular roundup is delayed a little this month due to holiday time, back to the end of the month for September!

Strategy and planning

In August, we launched two new features on Smart Insights to help members with strategy and planning. These also have related free versions that can help all site visitors, so I thought worth flagging up here.

• Our Online Marketing Statistics compilation is aimed at helping companies make the business case for investment in digital marketing and benchmark their performance against others. The free feature is our recommendation and custom search engine covering the Top 10 sites for digital marketing statistics - useful if you’re preparing a presentation.
• Our RACE Digital Strategy Qualification is a comprehensive video course which covers all aspects of creating a digital marketing plan and is based around a workbook of templates to create or refine a plan while completing the course.

The new free advice to help with planning available for Basic and Expert members is our Digital Planning Fast Start which is a mindmap and video voiceover guide based around 20 key issues that must be included in a digital marketing plan. You can also watch a Prezi of this Fast Start:

Social media marketing

• Facebook’s new competition rules - Rhian Simms summarises the implications for Facebook marketers of this relaxing of the rules.

• New LinkedIn features for B2B Marketing - our alert on two Recent LinkedIn features to help B2B marketing.
• LinkedIn Higher Ed features - only relevant if you work in this sector, but a fair proportion of our members do, so we asked Noelle Visani to summarise.
• Finding influencers on Twitter Danny Bermant summarised 4 steps to encouraging influencers using Twitter in this summary from his new Smart Insights guide to Influencer Marketing.

Search marketing

• Google AdWords changes 2013 A great roundup from Tara West of Koozai to check your approach if you invest in, or manage AdWords.
• A checklist for International SEO - One of our most popular posts on SEO in August, rightly so given the quality of this infographic from Aleyda Solis.
• A refresher on page quality for SEO - Jimmy McCann reviewed 5 steps to review your on page SEO effectiveness.

User experience, analytics and conversion optimisation

• Google Analytics Advanced Segment rollout - this is now available worldwide - my original post from the time of Google’s announcement explains why some have called this “One of the most important changes ever made to Google Analytics?”

• Tools and techniques to improve CRO - a nice round-up of tools to help with Conversion Rate Optimisation from regular contributors Conversion Rate Experts.

Email marketing and CRM

• The growing importance of Email on mobile platforms More reminders on the importance of getting email marketing right on mobile devices with the figure that 28% of Emails are Opened on mobile devices…
  but only 10% lead to clicks showing the challenge of email marketing on mobile. This is a big challenge for email marketers illustrated by this data from Litmus Email Client Share

• Mobile Email design options explained: Fluid, Skinny, Scalable, Responsive, Adaptive and Dedicated - this video summary from Tim Watson shows how different email design approaches can help with mobile email marketing.