What’s New in Marketing? September 2014

Our round-up of the latest advice and developments in digital marketing with a focus on customer experience and trends this month

This month we published The Managing Customer Journeys Report 2014, a new research report in conjunction with Ecommerce Expo. It’s a free download for all members via our Customer Experience Strategy page which also contains details of the talk and this visual to help you assess your approach to managing customer experience.

We were keen to commission this research since, with the increase in the complexity of the path to purchase across Paid, Owned and Earned media it’s becoming more difficult and more important to manage customer experiences!

It focuses on approaches to managing customer experiences and suggests how businesses are progressing across these experience management maturity levels.

• Digital Marketing Trends 2015 - Dave Chaffey’s annual prediction of the marketing trends that will be important in the year ahead. For 2015 he suggests 10 different types of cutting-edge digital marketing tools and techniques to help grow a business.
• The latest Gartner marketing Hype Cycles - also focusing on future trends, we reviewed the Gartner Digital Marketing Hype Cycle for 2014.

• Highlights from the Smart Insights #DigitalImpact2014 conference - a summary of the talks on Digital Transformation covered by our speakers.

Social media marketing

• Obtaining CMO buy-in for social media - Four ways to prove the value of social media to encourage investment.
• What to do if you run out of ideas for content marketing strategy - recommends how to reinvigorate a content marketing programme and win buy-in for future investment.

Search marketing

• A summary of the latest combined content marketing and SEO practices
• 10 common and costly PPC mistakes - avoid those common PPC Mistakes to maximise your campaigns.
• Long or short-form content: which is best? A chart from our #DigitalInsights series suggesting which length of copy is most shareable across social media.

User experience, analytics and conversion optimisation

• 17 ways to F**k-up your AB Testing - #DigitalImpact2014 speaker Craig Sullivan explains ways to avoid dumb AB testing mistakes.
• Google Analytics Benchmarking Returns - we alerted readers to this feature which helps compare your traffic sources and mobile vs desktop audience split to others in your sector to make the business case for investment in digital marketing .

• 5 Website Personalization Myths - Are these myths about deploying web personalisation tools holding you back?
• Case study - how Domino’s Pizza create mobile experiences - a preview of his talk at #DigitalImpact2014 from Nick Dutch, Head of Digital at Domino’s Pizza UK.

Email marketing and CRM

• 7 BIG questions to drive customer engagement
• Do you have a customer retention plan? A summary of the what, why and how of creating a retention plan according to Andrew Campbell, author or our new retention strategy guide.
• Getting more personal with B2B Email marketing.

A B2B case study showing how to create relevant, personal emails on a global scale through Email personalisation.

Harriet Mitchell of RS Components shows how a B2B company with 1.6 million customers and 500,000 products lines from 2,500 suppliers manage to deliver relevant personalised email content across 30 markets in 20 languages consistently, effectively and in a scalable way?