Specialists in digital marketing, web applications and web design.
Take control by reducing WILFING and other timesappers “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction” Isaac Newton And, of course every inaction has, well, an equal and opposite non-reaction. If we don’t work on the right marketing priorities, if we lack focus on the right marketing activities, then you won’t get the ... | Read more →
A quick guide to finding out A recent article published on Optify highlighted some surprising data on use of PPC which stated: 57 percent of (B2B) marketers spent no time on Pay Per Click, and only 4 percent spend more than 15 hours per week. I found this a surprising statement and it made me wonder ... | Read more →
Brands owners: cut the red tape for commercial success I recently spent a few days in and around a large global brand, a business that we’ve started working with and are still learning about. A business with an enviable brand reputation and standing that evokes immediate feelings of quality and luxury, ... | Read more →
S**t happens… There’s a lot of discussion in the press after the hacking of Burger King’s Twitter account, and more recently the same has happened to Jeep, as it has many brands before. What are the implications? It’s time for brands to step up The talk now of course is about security, protecting ... | Read more →
Whether you listen to those critics who condemn many of Joey’s actions or you create your own opinion of him, there’s no denying he’s a complex character. And it’s these complexities that make him a difficult individual to define, which begs the question…just how well do you actually know Joey ... | Read more →
The urgent need for risk-taking and creativity in marketing I recently attended Seth Godin’s presentation around his new book, the The Icarus Deception, a ‘Penguin Live’ event. I’ve been meaning to sit down and consider what I learned from it so that I could share it, so here are my key learnings ... | Read more →
In November each year thousands of Moustaches are sprouting on the faces of the men around the world to help raise awareness and money for Prostate Cancer UK, and why would it be any different at First 10. This year the guys from First 10 embraced the growth of facial hair ... | Read more →
7 tips to effectively promote your infographics Last week I gave tips about creating effective marketing infographics. But creating an infographic isn’t enough, to generate the return you’ll obviously have to promote it. You’ll want to do this since infographics are primarily useful for promoting your knowledge around a topic by being ... | Read more →
A checklist of 10 things you must get right when creating infographics for marketing You’ll be all to familiar with infographics, so I won’t bore you with an explanation. Some argue that infographics can only be about data visualised (charts, comparisons, Venn diagrams, graphs, flow-charts etc). Suffice to say that we ... | Read more →
Publishing quality content is what matters when it comes to driving visitors and conversions to your site. To encourage this, along with sales and sales leads, it’s essential to provide users with good quality, original content that informs them of their exact requirements. This process will also help your site ... | Read more →
Why you should consider writing an ebook and how to approach it? The use of smartphones and tablets has increased immensely along with ebook readership, in the UK: • 28 million people own a smartphone • 18.5 million people own a PC/laptop • 4 million people own a tablet • 3 million people own an ... | Read more →
This is a great infographic – communicating 5 principles of B2B lead generation, it’s useful for any company marketing to business buyers. There’s some good basic reminders on here, here’s our favourite in Mobile (principle #5) - click to call: have a clickable phone number as well as a form. It’s these simple ... | Read more →
Red Bull: A lesson in modern marketing? I was debating writing this post, after all there’s so much written about the Red Bull Stratos mission in the 2 days since it was finally completed. Yet I’ve not seen much written about how the event supports branding and marketing. I think there ... | Read more →
The big data opportunity – 4 key parts towards creating a strategy Today’s growth in interest in “big data” represents a phenomenal opportunity for creative and forward-thinking marketers. On the one hand big data is arguably nothing new, relative to any moment in time we’ve had too much data to be ... | Read more →
Haphazard social media adoption is putting your brand at risk A report earlier this year from Altimeter raises some interesting questions around how well brands are prepared to control social media as it proliferates throughout the organisation. It’s an interesting and important question, since unlike any other marketing tactic, social media ... | Read more →
A more effective way to utilise online paid media spend? Since we’re still firmly in the midst of a recession, it is still the challenge for businesses to grow and invest wisely. Hopefully this doesn’t mean you have stopped testing new ideas / channels. While this post isn’t covering anything amazingly ... | Read more →
Spredfast release Social Engagement Index Report which shows different company roles for managing social media status updates Value/Importance: ★★★ Recommended link: Download 30 page PDF research summary – registration required Our commentary This report from Spredfast highlights some interesting trends in how businesses are utilising social media channels. The title is a little misleading since it ... | Read more →
An infographic showing how to plan and manage inbound marketing I’m a big fan of the inbound marketing model, sometimes incorrectly referred to by the narrower marketing activities of content marketing or social media marketing. Inbound incorporates both content and social media marketing and more. Although there is a lot of advice ... | Read more →
Google research shows changing patterns of digital media and content consumption Recent research from Google offers new insight beyond the consumer’s shift to mobile, revealing how consumers view content across a number of devices – tablets, smartphones, PC’s and of course TV. After polling 1,611 people in the US, over 8,000 hours of activity ... | Read more →
An introduction to issues to consider when starting a social listening or social media monitoring programme In previous posts, we have shown the vast number of options when choosing social listening software (250 according to this report). But any tool is only as good as the process used to take advantage ... | Read more →
It depends whether you’re content sharing or starting conversation With so much written about the importance of marketing automation these days, the argument has touched on social media many times. It makes sense too as social media becomes more important, we want to use social media more within our personal or brand ... | Read more →
It’s said a picture says a thousand words, if so, it stands to reason a moving picture says much, much more. Whether it’s an advert, a moving image, or a video, whichever you choose, people have a ferocious craving for it. The popularity of YouTube has helped make videos, whatever ... | Read more →
Google+ with Google Apps, a platform for business? I’ve written recently about Google+ as the true social network and so it’s particularly fascinating to read this announcement today about Bringing Google+ to Work – it’s a very exciting step for Google considering their already significant progress into Cloud based business applications ... | Read more →
Why marketers aren’t giving social media marketing the credit it deserves Despite how important social media has become to marketers, Adobe are suggesting that it still isn’t being recognized for driving website traffic, engagement and conversions like it should be. The solution, Adobe suggest, might be as simple as making adjustments ... | Read more →
A reminder about the importance of Google’s 2012 Venice update and Google+ Local for local business services Did you notice how, earlier in the year, the results Google produced for local queries changed dramatically to give even more prominence to local search? We thought it was worth a reminder, because quite ... | Read more →
Showing how Facebook apps can increase engagement – will we see these due in Google+ soon? A new report from social media software vendor Wildfire (recently acquired by Google) uses some of their latest data to offer a few useful tips for Facebook marketers. You can dig into the case studies ... | Read more →
5 marketing tips from a Premiership footballer After a prolific rise to almost 1.7m Twitter followers in about 10 months, it appears that Joey Barton knows a thing or two about social media, or at least he has a natural handle on it. At First 10, we’ve been working with Joey for about ... | Read more →
Differentiation vs Amplification We shared Seth Godin’s Circles of Marketing blog post a couple of weeks ago, it captured our attention because of the simplicity of the message, the focus on the fundamentals, Seth’s always good at that. The marketing paradox We believe that Seth has described something of a modern marketing paradox, ... | Read more →
He has done it again... Usain Bolt secured his position as the world's fastest man by taking the London 2012 Olympic Gold in the mens 100 metres last night. Running a new Olympic record, and the second fastest 100 metres sprint ever... 9.63 seconds. Did you know that his shoelace ... | Read more →
Google Shopping US shows new strategic plays from Google You may have read my post introducing Google Shopping last week on the changes coming to what is currently called Google Product. It has been interesting to watch the noise unfold on the subject. Google is already rolling out their user experience updates in ... | Read more →
5 practical actions and an example you can follow Google+ is continuing to gather momentum, with more than 170 million users or more depending on who you listen to. At the same time though, there’s a lot of discussion around the number of active users and unconfirmed data that user engagement is ... | Read more →
Using AlternativeTo to find better ways of working If you are anything like me, you like to find new tools and ways to improve what you are doing. Software, apps and online services are often ways to aid in process changes, but searching the web, looking for reviews etc can make ... | Read more →
Recommendations on managing today’s media in a new report from the Altimeter Group Altimeter’s new report, “The Converged Media Imperative: How Brands Must Combine Paid, Owned and Earned Media” by Rebecca Lieb and Jeremiah Owyang is very good read. I’ll summarise it with this quote highlighting three obvious and simple words that will not ... | Read more →
Introducing Google’s new retail strategies If you’re a veteran of “Internet marketing”, you’ll remember Froogle, Google’s shopping search engine which presented products freely submitted by retailers using XML feeds. In 2007, this became Google Product Search and you may have heard this is now being rebranded to Google Shopping. The Google announcement explains: “We ... | Read more →
Bulmers: Facebook fans are worth £3.82 more than non-fans “What is the value of a Like?” is understandably still a common question. There’s some interesting coverage regarding Facebook Fan value at the moment, the ‘ROI of social media’ is always a hot topic, after all. Research conducted by TNS and We Are ... | Read more →
Using RACE to structure your social analytics Social analytics is still relatively new and yet there are already many tools offering to give you the insights to empower your marketing. Often, these tools won’t give you a full picture of how your social media marketing is contributing to your business since they ... | Read more →
24 checks to help focus your digital marketing budget I’ve been reminded a few times during the last month that we’re at “that” time of year. A time where many of us get our budgets reigned back for us (or we’re at least asked to). It got me thinking that this ... | Read more →
Lady Gaga’s Littlemonsters.com crowns her social media empire Lady Gaga is renowned for her prolific following in Twitter (near 27m) and Facebook (52m Likes), Google+ (near 3m) – as well as Tumblr and recently her first pic on Instagram. Let’s not forget there’s also a plethora of fan sites and endless ... | Read more →
4 techniques to reduce duplicate site content Although we still hear a lot of recommendations on how to optimise pages and the importance of links from other sites to improve rankings, we don’t hear so many recommendations about reducing the amount of duplicate content. This seems to be a neglected area ... | Read more →
Bing Updates Webmaster Tools & Brings Back Site Explorer Value/Importance: ★★★★ Recommended link: Bing Webmaster Tools Our commentary Bing have made a huge number of updates to their webmaster platform in an update they have called Phoenix (original). The changes cover the following areas of their platform: New : Link Explorer New: User Experience New: SEO Reports New: SEO Analyzer New: ... | Read more →
A new social commerce report shows the potential UK retailers that do not offer customers recommendations could be missing out on £9 billion in extra revenue according to a new report by nToklo. It seems that although ‘social commerce’ is an established concept, many retailers aren’t fully tapping into it. There’s no ... | Read more →
Takeaways from IBM’s global survey of marketers Each year IBM interviews several hundred marketers to get a flavour of what the collective challenges, successes, fears and opportunities are. It’s interesting reading and always somehow comforting and inspiring to know you’re not alone In this post I’ve picked out 7 of the key ... | Read more →
Our summary of the new advice from Google on SEO for startups and small sites You’ve probably heard of the Penguin series of updates that have negatively affected rankings for many companies. It’s worth being aware that last week we had the release of Penguin 3.8 which impacts 1% of global ... | Read more →
A practical approach to creating more effective content Whether you are running a large scale publishing website, ecommerce site or simply a blog, today’s marketing has a common theme; the requirement for amazing content to encourage engagement and sharing leading to sales. Utilising members from your marketing, PR & editorial team to ... | Read more →
We’re now in a constantly changing digital landscape Did you see this Comscore report about “Digital Omnivores”? I think it’s really useful for marketers. Not because the information is revolutionary in any way, but because it’s offering some seriously hard facts that can be taken to management to support business cases, marketing planning and ... | Read more →
New report highlights the top luxury brands and the challenge of ongoing engagement Firstly, it’s important to remember that the luxury market really has been slow to adapt to social media marketing. Largely ignoring the channel in the early days, most likely since it’s nothing akin to the world that luxury ... | Read more →
Explainer videos for marketing story telling I’m writing this post about explainer videos since we’ve just created a new explainer for Smart Insights, which you can see below. At the same time I thought it was worth showing how you could use explainer videos in your own marketing. Here’s our new explainer ... | Read more →
New Research Shows Key Ranking Factors for the UK Value/Importance: ★★★★ Recommended link: Search Metrics 2012 Ranking Factor Report Our commentary The volume of data and number crunching to form this guide is remarkable. It’s based on analysis of 10,000 selected top-keywords, 300,000 websites and millions of links, shares and tweets from within the Searchmetrics database. It ... | Read more →
Why are brands killing the Facebook conversation? June 2012 update – a new service for benchmarking Facebook customer service: On June 20th at LeWeb, Socialbakers introduced a new service, Socially Devoted, which gives an idea of what are good and bad levels of customer service within Facebook. Here is the worst from the retail category ... | Read more →
Why are brands killing the Facebook conversation? June 2012 update – a new service for benchmarking Facebook customer service: On June 20th at LeWeb, Socialbakers introduced a new service, Socially Devoted, which gives an idea of what are good and bad levels of customer service within Facebook. Here is the worst from the retail category ... | Read more →
Or is it simply a case that we’ve now no excuse, fellow marketers? I’ve seen this graphic (below) appear a few times now and the general consensus appears to be: “wow – how insanely complicated is social media” see an example here. I really disagree that this is in any way negative, so much so ... | Read more →
Using segmentation to make your social media marketing relevant We’ve mentioned the value of Forrester’s technographics ladder before. It’s a useful tool. Aimia, a Canadian company who specialise in loyalty management, have created a segmentation model that analyses the behavioral drivers of trust and control to identify six social media persona types – these ... | Read more →
Three examples including the new Smart Insights digital marketing ‘health check’ I’ve been meaning for some time to write about using interactive tools within your digital marketing. I think it’s something that’s hugely effective; I’ve used these for years and it still seem surprisingly uncommon given their potential. My reminder to talk ... | Read more →
A mobile development dilemma We know instinctively the time is now to take mobile seriously. But as your prepare have you considered what exactly you’re preparing for? A mobile app or mobile site? Though mobile site browsing outnumbers app users, those app users consume 2.4 times more impressions! So what do you do? ... | Read more →
Ideas to improve the effectiveness of your AdWords creative In a traditional advertising sense, your AdWords text is your creative, your broadcast to the world aimed at helping (or is that interrupting) people on their journey as they use Google. As you’ll know, copy in AdWords is so important since it affects ... | Read more →
…and, is it relevant anyway? We’ve all heard this term, integrated marketing communications or IMC (yes it has an acronym!). Yet is it relevant I wonder, shouldn’t marketing be integrated by definition? Integrated states the obvious! Marketing of old was relatively simple, from a marketer’s perspective advertising was straightforward, retail wasn’t complicated ... | Read more →
Orientate content around people at different stages of purchase intent Since I’m always pushing the importance of content marketing and creating infographics about how to use content marketing, it’s interesting to see the questions marketers ask about them. This week a client asked me a great and simple question this week… “I understand creating ... | Read more →
ifttt : what is it and how can I use it as a marketer? Short for “If This Then That“, ifttt is an online service that allows easy management of social services. We’ve heard more marketers mentioning it recently, so thought it was worth sharing to see whether it could help ... | Read more →
Chris Brogan shares the virtues of Google+ Interesting that after his recent book on Google+, and then announcing he’s no longer using LinkedIn, there’s an infographic helping the US social media guru promote Google’s social network – and specifically its use for business. Though I’m cynical, it is an interesting infographic and it ... | Read more →
“The first major update since 2007″ Well, that’s what Google say, so it’s an indication of how important this could be for digital marketers. It was 2007 when Google launched Universal Search, how time flies. 2012 sees the launch of a new upgrade called Knowledge Graph. In this alert we’ve summarised what ... | Read more →
Generating ideas of content types to engage We’ve had this graphic on a Post-It note in our office for months; it’s a natural follow-on from our inbound marketing funnel infographic. We created it to help your own brainstorming on content ideas to engage customers and encourage sharing. Though we’re fans of Eloqua’s ... | Read more →
A new look and less features for GWT Importance: ★★ Recommended link: Google Webmaster Blog announcing the new design Our commentary In the past 3-4 weeks Google have made various changes to the Google Webmaster Tool platform, including, more recently, updates to the design. The new design implementation is focused on bringing the platform into ... | Read more →
Are you taking apps seriously in your marketing? The big mobile manufacturer and software brands, like Apple, Google and Samsung, are adding more and more functionality to mobile phones. From games, to shopping, travel, social and even health. We also know that the by 2014 we’re expecting more surf time to ... | Read more →
Thinking like Sun Tzu to improve your strategic position This is the second part to last week’s interpretation of how Sun Tzu’s Art of War can be applied to digital marketing - thanks for the comments and shares on the first part! Here I’ll cover three ways in which applying Sun Tzu’s Art of ... | Read more →
What can an ancient text do to help your digital marketing? This is a question that Dave and I were discussing recently, and we decided the answer was “quite a lot actually” and that a fun and (hopefully!) interesting post might be useful. In this post, I’ll summarise broadly what I took ... | Read more →
The future of the social consumer This is an interesting social commerce infographic by ecommerce provider, Gloople. We’re aware of the growth in the social commerce space and there’s some interesting data here to hammer home the scale and potential for brands that retail online. It’s also broader than you might think… | Read more →
Ideas for making Google Adwords ads more effective I’ve found when managing Pay Per Click (PPC), that it’s a channel, much like SEO, in that it attracts intelligent people to manage accounts and it can quickly become extremely complex. Alternatively, it’s easy to experiment in an No doubt you will have seen ... | Read more →
Early studies reveal a mixed message Value: ★★★ Recommended link: Simply Measured Timeline engagement data Dave has recently covered 9 recommendations for the new Facebook Timeline pages for brands. These switched over on the 30 March 2012. The question is, has this new platform helped or hindered marketers? Some light is shed on this ... | Read more →
Customer over corporate-led communications We’re currently hiring at First 10. A friend asked me what kind of roles we’re looking to fill. My response was, “two brand journalists“. She was puzzled, “do you mean PRs“, she said? “…aren’t there loads of people in marketing who can write?” My response: “Not really, ... | Read more →
Google Targets Low Quality Sites Again Source : Google Inside Search Blog Importance : ★★★★ Our Commentary Google has started the rollout of a small algorithm update targeting poor quality websites. It’s been dubbed Penguin by SearchEngineLand. The techniques Google are targeting as part of this update are not new and Google has been combating them for ... | Read more →
The 4 most important tools for LinkedIn & your business LinkedIn is the most important social networks for B2B marketers who are taking online marketing seriously, particularly in the UK and US. LinkedIn now has an array of tools to help bridge the gap between the network and your own website, ... | Read more →
5 ideas for creating effective content on your website We talk a lot in our posts about the importance of content and inbound marketing, that being central to success and a how blog is the key for building a central repository of useful, insightful or entertaining content for your website visitors. A ... | Read more →
KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid A now established process within some of the world’s mega brands, social listening is now a highly competitive market in itself. With so many experts and software options it can be difficult to decide what option is best for you. While social listening creates many opportunities I believe it ... | Read more →
While researching for a presentation I was delivered for a client, I found these two videos from the Google Inside Search website which really made me sit back and realise how much the web, technology, marketing, and human interaction with technology has evolved, even in my relatively short career its has drastically ... | Read more →
Google Shares 5 Common SEO Mistakes This video was recently published on the Google Webmaster Tools blog. It’s a great insight for small businesses or those new to SEO about some of the common strategic mistakes made by website owners. The video concludes with 6 tips which I find most useful since ... | Read more →
What is the true meaning of online influence? We hear a lot about influence now, it’s a commonplace term when we’re talking about social media marketing. With so many tools available to help us understand what that means and what to do – tools such as Klout, Kred, PeerIndex, and Radian6 ... | Read more →
Infographic showing the growth of Slideshare Here’s an interesting infographic from Slideshare, reminding us of their reach to professionals, and those marketing to professionals. Are you using Slideshare? Some of the active B2B marketers put it to really good use as an external hub for their content: See Eloqua, and the less creative Dell. 7 ... | Read more →
Are you dormant, testing, co-ordinating, optimizing or empowering? On Smart Insights, Paul Fennemore recently recommended his social media adoption framework which was popular, so I thought I’d alert you to a new approach to review social media maturity. Forrester have released a report that offers a social maturity model to help illustrate the ... | Read more →
A tutorial on reviewing consumer search behaviour in the 2nd Largest Search Engine in the World As you’ll know, YouTube is the second largest search engine behind Google in many countries. It’s the number one ranked entertainment site and 3rd most visited in the UK by Hitwise. Given this and since popular videos ... | Read more →
Social Media is still a new and scary world to many people and companies. Its a relatively new tool to the marketing world which is, without doubt, changing the way we work and live. For small businesses, in particular, social media can be a daunting place. This crib-sheet from FlowTown is designed to help small ... | Read more →
A tutorial showing how to find the keyword qualifiers that Google prompts searchers with There are a good set of tools available that aim to make compiling keywords easier; we have documented a range of keyphrase analysis tools, but you still need to filter and refine. We find that, these days, ... | Read more →
Which are the most popular search engines I should target in each country? Its not often I look at trends data but its good to do every quarter. The popularity of search engines does change and within this blended search like video, images, local search is becoming more important. My comments below ... | Read more →
New data shows how slow is too slow Conversion rate optimisation specialists have been recently shared two new pieces of research which show that page load speed should be a concern for all. I thought I’d summarise them here as a reminder that speed matters! The first shows data shared by Walmart ... | Read more →
Creativity paves the way to commercial success Let’s face it, in the grand scheme of things, people don’t care about brands that much, they care about themselves. As individuals busy in our own worlds, we care about what we want, need, worry about or want to solve. It stands to reason then, ... | Read more →
Not Provided search queries will affect how your report on your search engine marketing Source : Google Inside Search Blog Importance : ★★★★ Our Commentary A recent announcment on the Google Inside Search blog post confirmed Google’s plans to roll out encrypted search across local Google services (.co.uk, .fr, .de etc). You may recall this ... | Read more →
Are free press release websites worth using? The question of whether to use free press release websites is a common one amongst many hands-on marketers trying to get a benefit for SEO and PR… Quickly followed by how many of these should we use and is it worth paying? To help answer ... | Read more →
Tap into the potential of niche social media communities Social media marketing still represents a key opportunity for most of us, despite the hype that’s only been intensifying since 2009. You might feel you’ve missed the boat, that you should be doing more. Depending on your progress, your market and your competitors, ... | Read more →
It’s not all about you, you, you Marketing offers, hooks, lead generation or calls-to-action, whatever language you use, are fundamentally not about you. Although there is a LOT of discussion of page layout and call-to-action testing, for me this is the biggest block to get over. What I’ve observed in many ... | Read more →
4 Social Hub Examples As the number of social networks increases, brands have started to look at ways in which they can bring all their social networks into their brand owned websites. Contrast this with the more common situation where the only reference to social media on the main site are ... | Read more →
An infographic showing how to use content marketing to grow your business What do you do at a time when paid-for media is neither reliable nor scalable, earned media is super-competitve and owned media properties require constant investment to engage your visitors? We believe you should do one thing, first and ... | Read more →
To celebrate the launch of our new social media strategy guide, Dave and I thought we’d share our top 21 tips to help with social media planning. We’d love to hear your thoughts from recent experience, too… This post follows on from the new research on how businesses use social media ... | Read more →
A review of the main web crowdsourcing services for marketing, design and development These service sound scarier than than the title suggests. I’m sure many consultants, agencies and companies are using services such as oDesk and 99Designs already. But I thought these were worth grouping and sharing for those not in ... | Read more →
Using nofollow tags to support SEO Nofollow tags are important in SEO, but I find many marketers I speak to haven’t heard of the approach. That’s understandable since you would only expect SEO specialists to be aware of them. However, I think they are a useful concept to understand as a “hands-on” ... | Read more →
A new infographic to help you create content people want to share Content marketing facts from the infographic 26% + of B2B marketing budgets are invested in content 79% of marketers use article publication as a tactic 52% use video 62% of companies outsource their content marketing Brand awareness and customer acquisition are the two main ... | Read more →
Inbound, content or social marketing - here's the blueprint We're asked a lot about the basics, the framework or the blueprint for content, inbound or social media marketing. Well - here's our answer in the form of an infographic. I wrote a lot more detail about this here on the Smart ... | Read more →
An infographic explaining how inbound marketing works together with content marketing Whether you call it inbound marketing, social media marketing or content marketing, we’re broadly referring to the same thing; at least that’s how we see it. Dave and I believe that inbound marketing starts with considered, quality content, well published and ... | Read more →
A short guide to help review if and how you use Pinterest Prompted by interest in my first post on the marketing opportunities for Pinterest a couple of weeks ago, I thought a more considered ideas post might be useful. So I’ve summarised the key points that I feel are relevant ... | Read more →
Questions to ask to make sure you’re following the best approach to social sharing Social Sharing tools are the technology behind embedding of buttons and other widgets onto your website to encourage social sharing, recommending or bookmarking within your site and blog. Despite their ability to spread your content, increase your traffic ... | Read more →
7 techniques to drive website interactions that generate leads and how to measure them We find that there’s lots of discussion online about how to reach and convert audiences, but not so much about encouraging the softer interactions. We reference this as “Act” within the RACE framework, it’s about encouraging interactions ... | Read more →
If you’re thinking of hiring an SEO or are an SEO – this is a must browse Earlier in January, you may have seen a useful piece of research completed by SEOmoz that looked into the costs and service structure of SEO agencies. I’ve included that below, but the main reason for ... | Read more →
Interesting online media trends for 2011 & 2012 Value/Importance: ★★★★ Recommended link: eFrontier Our commentary A fantastic report from eFrontier, looking back over 2011 and with an interesting outlook on 2012. The report covers, in great detail, the spending patterns globally and across multiple platforms (Google vs Facebook for example) for their client base. ... | Read more →
An infographic emphasising the future skills gap for “data scientists” I blogged recently and mentioned the importance of new skills being brought into your marketing team, and especially people with computer and mathematical science qualifications being of increasing importance. I noticed this infographic and thought it was useful for their emphasis of the importance of ... | Read more →
Our round-up of the best advice on how marketers should respond to the Google Search plus Your World integration Most are dubbing the latest changes to Google’s search engine as some of the largest since its launch. The integration of Google+ with the the new Search plus Your World certainly has ... | Read more →
8 practical techniques you can apply today to increase your online audience There’s much talk and some great examples, around how to best use social media to grow your reach online. But, how do you tackle boosting the audience you reach in a planned, structured way. We’ve picked what we feel ... | Read more →
Here's a simple infographic that we've created with Smart Insights to demonstrate how we see the often mentioned 'inbound effect' that relates to earning permission prior to sale. We reckon content is marketing's last real stand to do just that. | Read more →
A 5 step process using 90-day time-boxes to help implement your plans The start of a new year always brings a period of reflection and forward planning. New strategies are created and exciting initiatives are launched. It’s often the case though, that plans and strategies end up in drawers, little changes and ... | Read more →
Our framework for owning marketing success Thanks for your comments and shares for our new Marketing Growth Wheel, it was good to see that many found this useful. We’ll be going into more depth on how to apply this in our guides and templates for members in future. By way of an ... | Read more →
Our framework for marketing success You may remember our strategic RACE framework which we created to provide a means to contextualise digital marketing tactics. We’ve developed this with a new visual to show a planning and management process to use on marketing projects. Our new Growth Wheel infographic developed in collaboration with ... | Read more →
5 ideas to start your brand revolution in 2012 We’re still in the midst of 2012 predictions, they’re everywhere at the moment, mostly describing what’s already out there. I’m not a futurologist, and if I am honest, I prefer to plan for the less predictable since that’s what usually happens. One trend ... | Read more →
Update relevant to Facebook advertisers Value/Importance: ★★★ Recommended link: ReadWriteWeb reporting – describing change on 10th January Our commentary on this update This is a relatively minor change within Facebook unless you’re actively advertising since it will affect your reach and costs. The main difference is that sponsored stories are now featured in each ... | Read more →
A roundup of what the experts say photo from UTC.edu It’s the end of the first week January and most of the influential bloggers / “experts” have published their predictions for what will change in the world of SEO in 2012. Rather than add to the noise and because most of the authors are ... | Read more →
How do you benchmark the priority areas? The fact is, there isn’t a perfect time for any benchmarking – yet January always has has that feel about it, so it’s as good a time as any to take a little time to reflect on your team or your organisations strenghts and ... | Read more →
Benchmark the priority areas for your digital marketing strategy The fact is, there isn’t a perfect time for any benchmarking, so now as good a time as any to take a little time to reflect on your team or your organisations strenghts and weaknesses and how you feel that’s bearing up against your ... | Read more →
New infographic showing the top 12 countries worldwide We all know the importance of Facebook to our own lives and in our country, but what about international usage? We found there were some surprises in this data that Michele Caivano, the creator of this infographic, alerted us to. Did you realise the ... | Read more →
Facebook accounts for 52% of sharing on the web New AddThis report for social sharing during 2011 AddThis, the social share bar tool used by more than 11m websites and 1.2Bn users, with their owners Clearspring, have followed the popularity of their 2010 report with a new 2011 update – see the ... | Read more →
Infographics to give you ideas for managing the new marketing Infographics seem to be a popular way to learn and share statistics and marketing approaches. We’ve been selective in sharing 1 or 2 infographics a month during 2011, focusing on those with a clear learning about the impact of a new ... | Read more →
5 DIY options for identifying duplicate content to improve SEO SEOs talk a lot about why duplicate content matters and what to do about it, marketers don’t tend to. I think an understanding of duplicate content is important to all marketers who manage SEO so they can ask the right questions of ... | Read more →
And what to do about it Social media is not a standalone skill-set, nor is it even a vocation in its own right. It’s a mindset, a set of specific tools and most importantly, it’s a process weaved into content and social media marketing. Our post showing the scope of Social ... | Read more →
User features get serious enhancement Value/Importance: ★★★★★ Recommended link: Twitter video Our commentary on the New Twitter Twitter has unveiled a major redesign today which will be rolling out slowly. There are four key elements to the changes: New homepage timeline Better way to see anything related to you Interface for easily finding context for hashtags New user ... | Read more →
Whilst it’s not the best designed infographic, it contains some really interesting stats. The “offline conversations” stat is intriguing, we’ve not all changed so much then! I’m not sure how you separate ’WOM” from ‘social media though’, it’s all people sharing information? | Read more →
4 Things to consider when writing page titles In our recent post giving 21 simple SEO ideas we said how important titles are. Here we go into a bit more depth to show how non SEO specialists writing web copy can improve SEO through refining their page titles within the SERPs. Titles are ... | Read more →
A process for content mapping and workflow I’ve posted a few weeks ago on marketing automation and also this week on lead nurturing, the concept is reliant on having great content at each and every stage, so I thought a post might offer some further insight. It’s also easier than you think, ... | Read more →
Are you cultivating the leads who are not ready to buy today? 80% of the leads who don’t buy from you will go to buy from someone else according to Eloqua, or more specifically Steve Woods, their CTO, in his excellent book Digital Body Language. It’s shocking in one sense, since it means ... | Read more →
Slideshare: a part of the hub-and-spoke approach I think many readers will be familiar with Slideshare, a business-to-business (mostly) presentation sharing website which enables organisations to upload their PowerPoint presentations (or Mac Keynote) and Word documents and share them with the world. It’s an excellent way to showcase your thought leadership ... | Read more →
Manchester United show the way I posted last week about Facebook and their (I feel) vastly over-stating of the value of Facebook as a part of the marketing mix. Now, this week I read that Manchester United are building their own, not-so-small social network for an estimated 350m supporters and a total ... | Read more →
An Inbound Marketing infographic to help you build your business case! By no means a new term to most marketers, it was called Permission Marketing by Seth Godin many years ago and more recently it has been known as Inbound Marketing / Content Marketing thanks to Hub Spot & the hugely successful Inbound ... | Read more →
Facebook is the fundamental ingredient, says Facebook I read this interesting article earlier this week on Ad Age, Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer) speaking at the Association of National Advertisers in Phoenix last week. Sandberg had a few key messages to share which I’ve summarised here: Make marketing (and business) “social by ... | Read more →
Use content and data to connect with customers With companies like Silverpop, Genius and Office Autopilot, it’s become much easier to develop a serious semi-automated approach to email marketing – and one that can dove-tail with a much wider content marketing or social strategy without draining all of your time. We ... | Read more →
We’ve posted before about the importance of persona’s and understanding the consumer properly, your consumer, well enough over getting lost in tactics and techniques first. This info-graphic again re-enforces how it’s this – not “social media”, “content marketing” or “SEO” that has to come first. Ask the right questions and ... | Read more →
Comscore data highlights consumer mobile behaviour More than 72 million Americans accessed social networking sites or blogs via their mobile devices in August, 37% up year-on-year from the same time last year, according to data via comScore. Here are 5 quick observations we can pull out of their data: Nearly one-third of all ... | Read more →
Covering Basic SEO, Social and Mobile SEO Value: ★★★★ Source: Internet Advertising Bureau Guide for Retailers Our commentary: Running online retail sites presents a whole raft of specific complexities for businesses, whether its systems, process or marketing related . While only focusing on the marketing (specifically SEO, PPC & Social aspects of running a ... | Read more →
If we agree that engaging with brands in social media is a good thing, then how can we do it better? With participation in social media being a key area to in building brand reputation, Weber Shandwick offer their nine tips to build brand sociability. Anything that you would add? Related Posts: Brand-building with ... | Read more →
Our 7 key questions to ask yourself and your team Naturally, all site owners want to increase conversion, but it’s really tough to do this in practice. Yes, there are some great examples of using testing to improve conversion, like those we see on Marketing Experiments, WhichTestWon or the $300 million button. To achieve ... | Read more →
New way of reviewing keyword and landing page relevance Value/Importance: ★★★★ Recommended link: Source – Official Google Announcement Our commentary Yet another algorithm update from Google, this time relating to Pay Per Click. The new updates are to help Google set a better Quality Score based on keyword relevance & landing page relevance. Just as a reminder, ... | Read more →
5 contrarian Steve Jobs quotes all marketers can learn from “Why join the navy when you can be a pirate?” - is one of many great quotes from Steve Jobs and one that sets the scene for my post. For me Steve Jobs is/was/always will be a marketing genius. His untimely death ... | Read more →
Facebook announcements at Advertising Week, 02/10/2011 There were a couple of new features trailed for Facebook this week that this alert covers. They’re in the “coming real soon” category and the only info that others are reporting on is this post on the Official Facebook Studio site. Details are a bit ... | Read more →
7 must-check questions for your acquisition strategy All site owners are looking to reach more prospects, existing customers and raise awareness about their products through a website or other online presence. So, there is plenty of advice on how to increase site traffic through the 6 main online communications channels. Although you ... | Read more →
3 tools to find out the most popular and relevant topics Before we look at tools for finding the best hashtags for twitter growth, I thought it best to explain what a hashtag is (I still often get asked this when talking to clients): A hash tag is simply a way for ... | Read more →
There are countless blogs & online resources that exist now but sometimes its great to disconnect from the world wide web & read a book! There are three books I would personally recommend to anyone new to marketing online & for those in need of inspiration... Search Engine Optimization: An Hour ... | Read more →
Facebook features heavily – but Twitter a surprise? Value/Importance: ★★★ Recommended tool: Add This Services Important if you value sharing in different global markets We thought it would be useful to share this free tool available from Add This, the company behind one of the webs most popular sharing bar. Remember that companies such ... | Read more →
How are you measuring the success of social media? This question remains contentious to say the least. This infographic shares some insight into just how the “R” in ROI can be interpreted. We hope it helps! We also have a post from earlier in year on the goals and challenges of social ... | Read more →
Using the Geckoboard Business Dashboard for marketing Value rating: ★★★★ Recommended link: http://www.geckoboard.com/ Update – see Geckofuel Since we published the post we have had some feedback that Geckoboard looks useful, but doesn’t support social follower counts. Well it does, but by this separate additional (free) service Geockofuel. Geckoboard supports any custom data feeds ... | Read more →
Where social media marketing misses the content opportunity I’ve been thinking about the key elements of ongoing inbound marketing activities – with the goal of driving sustainable interactions beyond one campaign. Our agency, First 10, played a part in a small and successful campaign this week to help promote a local, Leeds ... | Read more →
The anatomy of a fan A genuinely useful infographic from Moontoast (they create e-commerce software for Facebook pages). This graphic reminds us on the how to market to those different levels of engaged users – all fans are not the same! Related Posts: Digital marketing strategy topic: social media Digital marketing tactic: Facebook Digital marketing technique: Facebook ... | Read more →
Advice on processes for managing crisis communications online We’ve recently seen two different formats of helpful guidance on social media governance. First, here are the recommendations from the SMI11 conference where Neil Chapman and Chris Reed share their insight into the ways BP and Eurostar, among other companies, have learned from social media ... | Read more →
A new in-depth guide from Distilled Value/Importance: ★★★★ Recommended link: http://www.distilled.net/linkbait-guide/ Our commentary We think this is one of one of the most useful free guides and workbooks for marketers published this year. Particularly relevant to SEO and E-PR it’s an in-depth guide from Distilled, complete with a workbook for running brainstorm sessions specifically for ... | Read more →
Is crowdsourcing a solution to your content problems? We’ve posted before about the importance of engaging with users, about earning the permission to market and the importance of social objects for user engagement and amplification. By engagement, I’m referring specifically here to engaging people with content to fuel sharing and search ... | Read more →
Creating a balance between sales optimisation and marketing When did you last run a campaign that sought to engage a market, to really engage and inspire potential customers rather than focusing on selling to those already in buying mode? We were discussing this several months ago and talked to Imran Farooq, another ... | Read more →
This is a great question to ask since it’s easy to get lost in the accumulation of Likes and Follows. I’m not sure of how actionable this info-graphic is though it useful to ask the question. A few observations: 10% less of the youngest demographic in Facebook Facebook perceived to be the place ... | Read more →
How do you really approach your marketing planning? After my recent post on marketing with the human factor, I’ve been thinking that most marketing today is still very product or category orientated – based entirely on what the business has to say or sell… typically it’s very features orientated and competitor ... | Read more →
A phrase often used in marketing & business meetings alike - "The Consumer". While I think it's great that businesses are starting out by thinking about "the consumer" I find it really interesting how they are often grouped into this one term. The truth is that no one consumer is ... | Read more →
Yahoo now using Bing search results in UK and Europe Importance: ★★★ (Given the dominance of Google) Recommended link: Summary of countries affected Our commentary The Yahoo & Bing alliance is old news from this time last year, but it is only recently that the affects of the alliance has started to make its ... | Read more →
The third report from the Pivot Conference and Brian Solis Pivot have surveyed 230 brand managers and marketing professionals, this is their third report from that research. The report of course is helping promote something, an event that is pitched as providing tactical methods to effectively market to the evolving social ... | Read more →
Be mindful of the content marketing trap A lot of my recent posts, and indeed a lot of what I read at the moment, are focussed around content creation and content marketing. I for one have been promoting it as the last bastion of marketing, an area where you can really ... | Read more →
Some of the best in digital marketing offer their social media advice We’re always cautious of rule-books – but when Eloqua team up with JESS3, Steve Rubel, David Armano and Scott Monty (amongst others) then it’s certainly worth stopping to read. This ProBook is an evolution of the PlayBook that was ... | Read more →
An interesting infographic reminding that consumers that typically engage with brands, albeit few of them, will not only buy more from that brand but also recommend to others – so how can you be more interesting and engaging and also remember to remain that way? Related Posts: | Read more →
Hitwise data reveals the importance of Facebook marketing for online retailers In a recent post Robin Goad of Hitwise reminds that “Facebook is the second most visited website in the UK after Google and is now the second biggest source of traffic to other websites as well. 1 in every 6 ... | Read more →
A genuine framework to operationalise your inbound (or content) marketing We’re big fans of the marketing that Eloqua do, much of it with designers JESS3, they do inbound/content marketing so well – it’s gold standard stuff in terms of best practise. Check out their Revenue Blog, Revenue SlideShare and their Revenue Stream. ... | Read more →
How do you act on the different SEO ranking factors? Did you see the recent guide to SEO ranking factors from Search Engine Land? It prompted me to think of search slightly differently & highlighted 3 areas that business often get wrong. Checkout the graphic below and overlay your own thoughts, ... | Read more →
As one of the best online campaigns in recent years (in my humble opinion) its great to see the Old Spice Man return even from just an entertainment point of view. Why it is such a good campaign Considering the inbound marketing process the Old Spice campaign pretty much ticks all the right boxes. ... | Read more →