At the very start of the year I thought that it might be interesting to look at the home pages of some of the world’s biggest technology companies and try to pull out the big themes that they are addressing at the beginning of 2013.
More specifically I looked at the central panel (above the fold which is the prime real estate to get your message across). This was frequently a scrolling panel with 3 or 4 messages and so I have picked the one which I think best reflects a common theme across the panels. (more…)
In today’s multi channel world to reach increasingly connected prospects, a company needs to provide a user journey across channels and platforms that are part of their target audience’s world.
Indeed, marketers are increasingly aware of the need to connect with so-called “consumers of information” through the savvy use of data and targeted engagement strategies. But are they doing it effectively?
The Digiday/Acxiom State of the Industry study found that while most marketers want to understand their customers and engage with them with bespoke experiences “in this era of the empowered consumer”, the majority haven’t yet found the optimal way of tapping into user data effectively.
Did you know that that 40% of web visitors never return to a website after a bad browsing experience? Businesses by and large have come to understand the value of creating compelling content for attracting and retaining web visitors. But it is also important to ensure that a website is designed in a way that it offers a compelling user journey.
You surely don’t want your visitors to head to the exit door of your web real estate as soon as they have entered, right? (more…)
‘Big data’, relevancy and personalisation have been all the talk in the digital marketing world over the past year. But while marketers by and large have acknowledged the rising demand for content and services specifically tailored to the individual, the actual implementation has been seen as near impossible, mostly due to the segmentation limitations of existing social websites. This is now starting to change. Guess who is leading the way? (more…)
While business social media engagement was all the hype in the first few years following the advent of Facebook and the subsequent like, now the big digital marketing debate is centred around the monetary value of social media – something that is admittedly tricky to measure in absolute terms. As we asked in a previous blog post, exactly how do retweets translate into clients and how do you determine the direct impact of social media on the bottom line? (more…)
“Social media is cool… but what’s the ROI?” This is the first question that is sure to pop in the mind of a CEO upon the very mention of “social”. And rightly so. No self-respecting marketing officer should approach social media without a clear view of the objectives of using the channel in question and an estimate of the impact social marketing activities would have on the bottom line. But while the objectives are fairly easy to set right, linking ‘likes’ to sales seems to be quite a challenge, even for the most seasoned of marketers. (more…)
Dan Zarrella, HubSpot’s Social Media Scientist, issued a little teaser last week. He wrote on Twitter:
The cryptic message generated a storm of questions about the nature of Zarrella’s new brainchild but he kept his recent ‘social media lab’ activities secret. That is, until the beginning of this week, when he announced the birth of TweetCharts – a free analytics tool, which in his own words is “designed to be a simple way for you to quickly and easily obtain Twitter data on any hashtag, username, word, phrase, or URL.”
We spent a bit of time playing with the tool and here’s what we found. (more…)
2012 will be the year when new technologies such as marketing automation will go from cool to critical and CMOs will become data analytics geeks, according to a recent survey conducted by one of the leading market research companies.
In B2B Marketing Trends and Predictions for 2012, a report aimed at marketing leadership professionals, Forrester predicts that, as the volume of data continues to explode, marketing directors will come to realise the importance of data analytics in their efforts to get insight into the needs of their prospects and clients, and turn that intelligence into business insights. (more…)
Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, you name it… Ask any digital marketer, and they’ll tell you that the proliferation of social platforms often requires them to approach new online social opportunities with a certain degree of experimentation. And that should come as no surprise.
It takes a while to master a social network’s quirks and fit them into your overall marketing strategy, and yet in the last few years we’ve seen marketers jump on the social media bandwagon without a definitive way of measuring performance. However, this trend is now being reversed, according to two authoritative digital marketing reports, with marketers investing more and more in web analytics technology. (more…)
When speaking to marketing directors and business owners, one of the most common questions I am asked is – ‘Is all of this measurable?’ We are living in a world where ROI is at the heart of every business process and marketing is not an exception. (more…)
