Fuelling Business Growth with Digital Marketing

What’s New in Marketing? February 2014 roundup

Each month we look to keep the focus of our actionable advice from the Smart Insights blog on new approaches to grow business across the customer touchpoints of the RACE Planning framework.

In our roundup of marketing developments and advice from February 2014 we have a strong focus on how marketing can support growth across RACE starting with Growth Hacking and Fuelling Growth. I presented our research on approaches companies can use to fuel growth in my keynote this week at the Technology for Marketing and Advertising 2014 conference - the organisers made nice use of Storify for a summary of the event. We also met many Smart Insights members at our stand - it was great to chat to listen to feedback and get new ideas for content and services.

In the talk I couldn’t resist using the analogy of how Virgin Galactic propels itself to approach escape velocity (pretty amazing video) as it will for the first time this year with paying passengers.

PLAN: Digital marketing strategy and planning

• Improving marketing using Growth hacking - we first introduced the concept of growth hacking and how it applied to marketing around a year ago. In this new post, Simon Swan explains four key steps to developing a growth hacking mindset based on the leading book on the topic.

• 5 new Smart consumer devices that will be popular in 2015 - keeping an eye on emerging tech which may offer new ways to engage consumers is an essential task marketers today. To help you keep ahead Sam Melton looks at some of the bleeding-edge approaches.

• What will fuels business growth using digital marketing in 2014? - This page collects the resources related to the research and the Fuelling Marketing Success talks to download if you were at the event, or if you couldn’t make it.

REACH and ACT: Social media marketing

• Social syndication tools - in this popular post how we use different tools to efficiently manage social sharing.

Luisa Milic, wrote a related article explaining best practices for social media monitoring

• New Facebook feature - CTA buttons on posts - Marie Page steps us through the new calls-to-action that are now available.
• Superpowers of the Social Media Marketer - An infographic showing how soft skills such as listening, nurturing and patience are just as important as some of the hard, technical skills.

REACH and ACT: Content and Search marketing

• Content marketing ideas to fuel SEO and brand engagement - Dan’s post explains how to tap an endless supply of content creation ideas AND avoid boring content.
• Google AdWords exam tips - a handy post for any agency or client-side search specialist considering taking these essential exams shared by Chris Redhead who has completed them recently. Thanks Chris!
• Optimising Google Display Network ad spend - an in depth article by Marc Weisinger giving 4 key steps to improve results when using ads displayed on Google’s partner publisher sites, for example using remarketing.

CONVERT: User experience, analytics and conversion optimisation

• Optimising Ecommerce websites for mobile - 6 Best Practices for increasing conversion for retail E-commerce websites on mobile devices.
• Examples of effective product demonstration videos - Neil Davidson’s pick of 6 of the world’s most creative demonstration videos.

ENGAGE: Email marketing and CRM

• Integrating email into content marketing - Email marketing is a technique that has been used for far longer than content marketing as defined today. But the two should work hand-in-hand as Tim Watson explains in this post relating email marketing to our content marketing matrix.

• Applying Big Data to marketing - struggling to understand how Big Data can support marketing in smaller businesses? We asked marketing data management specialist Jim Roberts to explain the options for different types of data.
• Email best practices 2014 - a really useful infographic helping email marketers review their use of email tactics based on new research from Pure 360 and PlanToEngage.

I hope this summary is useful to inspire ideas for your growth - personal or business!