What’s new in Marketing – April 2013

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.

• The latest inbound content marketing research Inbound marketing is only Five! Marked by the Fifth annual Hubspot report, see our summary of this 175 page report to see the tactics which are working and the challenges to be managed.
• Benchmarking content marketing - in this post I summarise the state of managing content marketing from our informal poll and Lee Odden's content marketing webcast. To help marketers manage the process of content marketing we released a new guide to managing content marketing by James Carson who has extensive experience as a publisher.Lee shared this report from Altimeter which is a great way of reviewing where your content marketing management is now and where it need to get to.

Social media marketing

• Twitter ad targeting was launched - Twitter becomes more Google Adwords-like with the ability to target by keyword, but it’s still not open to all businesses.

• Facebook Promoted Pages - we have a tutorial from Marie Page on this new feature which is gradually being rolled out to more marketers.

Search marketing

• 5 approaches to improve Google+ Our new commentator on the intersection of search and social marketing, Rhian Simms, shared examples of 5 approaches based on her learnings from Brighton SEO. If you’re involved in SEO, don’t miss the round-up of presentations at the end of this post if you couldn’t attend.
• A briefing on Rel=“me” - A tutorial on using Google+ to protect your brand using this new Google authorship technique.

User experience, analytics and conversion optimisation

• 3 new features in Google’s Realtime analytics - Dan Barker’s post reminds us when it useful to use real time reporting for site tracking and what these features add.

• 2 new tools in Google Analytics Social Report - this alert is about a minor update, but reminds us of the insights available in Google’s Social Reports.
• Universal Analytics vs Google Analytics - This is a question every business should be asking in 2013 if they're serious about actionable business insights. Read our summary post for the Pros and Cons and check out what others are doing.

Email marketing and CRM

• Proving the ROI of Email marketing - Mark Brownlow’s summary shows that email marketing is second only to organic SEO for ROI. This is the approximate £ return for every £ spent according to the UK DMA.

• Email campaign tracking with Google Analytics - not a new technique, but it seemed popular as a refresher since this doesn’t happen by default so is often missed on many sites I review.