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We have always maintained that digital marketing does not exist in isolation. It is part of the bigger whole that is marketing. But digital has undeniably brought new aspects to that whole. So what if we were to reconstitute marketing as it is today with digital and classic fully fused? What would that look like?
Here follows our Modern Marketing Manifesto with its suggested twelve constituents. Its aim is to outline why we believe marketing is increasingly valuable and to define what it is to be a modern marketer....
UK plumber Charlie Mullins' Pimlico Plumbers which has a reputation for being head-and-shoulders above the rest when it comes to marketing. He explains his tricks to get yourself noticed....
Even those that don't use his firm for their plumbing needs will, in all probability, have watched or read about him on television, online or in newspapers. Here are his top tips on how to make a small business stand out in a crowded marketplace....
As competition grew in the late 1960s and the phone stopped ringing, ad agencies turned to their public relations cousins and asked for help to stand out. From the mid ‘60s on, this took the form of pumping out press releases and cultivating media to cover agency activities. The vast majority of the content was announcing new clients an agency had picked up and awards won at the ever-increasing number of shows.
Both of these items quickly became table-stakes material, contributing no real differentiation for the agencies. Sadly, the biggest innovation agencies introduced in subsequent decades was hiring public relations professionals to work in-house.
All this did was reduce cost as these folks brought little new to the equation. The result is advertising agencies have confused public relations with brand building for the past 50 years. Do not get me wrong: Public relations has a part to play in ensuring an advertising agency is top of mind. However, most public relations practiced by agencies remain incredibly traditional and shockingly boring for an industry that prides itself on creativity. Avi Dan, founder of Avidan Strategies, wrote in a Forbes article that agencies that hire a public relations firm as a way to solve new business struggles are soon disappointed....
Content is the fuel of social interaction on the Web: Nearly one-quarter (23%) of all social media messages and one-half (47%) of industry-specific social messages contain links to content, according to a new study by AOL and Nielsen. The amount of content shared via social media varies by channel: - 42% of all Twitter posts contain content-sharing links; 73% of Twitter posts related to a specific industry (auto, tech, finance, and entertainment) contain sharing links. - 41% of all blog posts contain content-sharing links; 64% of industry-specific blog posts contain such links. - 12% of all Facebook posts contain content content-sharing links; 22% of industry-specific Facebook posts contain such links....
A comprehensive study from market research firm Vision Critical indicates just how important social media is (and will continue to be) for brands, especially when considering product sales. Called From Social to Sale: 8 Questions to Ask Your Customers, the report reveals — based on 6,000+ survey respondents — that consumers are often more likely to purchase items after seeing them and/or interacting with posts about them on the social media platforms Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
More specifically, “4 in 10 social media users have purchased an item online or in-store after sharing or favoriting it on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest,” according to the report. Additionally, it found that Pinterest is the site most likely to drive “spontaneous purchasing.”
An article about the report on Cantech Letter summarized some key findings, noting that “social media drives both in-store and online purchases in almost equal numbers. 38% of people who have liked, shared or commented on a product on Facebook have gone on to buy the product. And 43% of people who have favorited or shared a product on any social media platform ultimately purchased it. Facebook is still king in terms of volume, with 75% of respondents logging in daily, compared with 17% for Twitter and Pinterest.”...
...Social media disasters occur for a number of reasons, the first being that your company probably messed up. It may not have been intentional, but something, somewhere down the line, went wrong enough for someone to complain and it was enough for others to vocalize that complaint en masse. One mistake is all it takes for social media to turn against your brand.
No one is perfect and you can't expect to please everyone all the time, so the best trick is to be prepared for how to handle things if your company finds itself under attack in the social realm. Here are three examples of companies who were attacked by social media and how they handled, or should have handled the situation. Learn from their mistakes or successes so you can stay on social media's good side....
Your website is the hub of your inbound marketing efforts. Every piece of content you create or campaign you run should be designed to drive traffic to your website and landing pages, giving you the chance to convert visitors into leads and customers. It makes sense, then, to start by looking at insights from your web analytics platform, such as Google’s free Google Analytics, or a paid platform like HubSpot .
Let's review the 8 essential metrics you should be tracking on your website and its landing pages, and how you can use these metrics to optimize and improve your website’s performance....
It hasn’t been around all that long, many companies both large and small have adopted it but many have also shied away. If you are on the fence or just starting to get your toes wet, here are 20 things about social media marketing that you didn’t know....
Continuing with our series of educational resources for internet marketers (view our last post on 10 eBooks Internet Marketers Must Read in 2013), we’ve put together a list of our 10 favorite blogs. These are the blogs that share the latest research, thought leadership and best practices from some of today’s most respected marketers in landing page optimization, content marketing, search engine marketing and analytics.
Put these in your RSS reader and check them daily.Here’s the list...
Within his recent LinkLove presentation, Will Critchlow talked about this idea of becoming a ‘full stack marketer’ and it’s an idea that resonates here at Distilled and the kind of direction we are working towards as a company.
When it comes to being a smarter online marketer, it’s important to start thinking beyond SEO, particularly when it comes to analytics. Even if your job is just that, you can learn from other channels and the data they provide. If your client or company does more than just search engine optimisation, then they they need to be tracking as much of these efforts as possible.
With a new Analytics module now live in DistilledU, this post serves as an introduction to tracking different marketing channels such as - Organic search - Paid search and display - Email marketing - Social - Conversion rate optimisation...
In this age of noise, it’s critical that your message cuts through the static and connects with customers.That’s why persona research is an essential part of your overall content marketing strategy – to ensure your content is speaking to, and connecting with, the right people.
Persona research is as much an art as it is a science. In Raven’s recent post “48 tips for SEO newbies from 48 experienced SEOs,” Sarah Peters says this about content: “Know your audience/customer, first and foremost. What do they need? What are they searching for? How much do they know already? Where do they gather? What do they value? Find out, and then give them that.”That’s awesome advice, and it’s really the core concept behind persona research. In this post, I’d like to walk you through my process of using this research to create targeted content....
Don Draper has left the building is an announcement bound to dismay any woman with a pulse, but it should hearten marketers.That’s because Don Draper represents the old school of marketing, said Tom Fishburne, CEO of Marketoon Studios, at Integrated Marketing Week earlier this month.In the Draper model, marketers decided what the brand stood for and what its strategy was. Every touch point with the customer was controlled.Today those touch points have exploded and marketers have far less control, said Fishburne. To succeed in such an environment, we need to create marketing worth sharing, he continued, outlining five guiding principles....
While social media has contributed many great things to marketers, all of the good stuff doesn’t come without its own baggage. We have talked about the good side of social media for marketing a lot on this blog, but we have under-reported on the negative aspects that social media has brought to the marketing industry. Stepping back to think about it, these seven negatives are clearly consequences of the growth of social media as a marketing discipline. Here are 7 Reasons Social Media Is Bad for Marketing...
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Corporations are expanding efforts for a breakthrough innovation in social media to beat the heat on the competition mapping. Usage of social media is changing enormously as days pass and so does the marketing gimmicks. So, what’s hot on the table for the second half of 2013?
Some of the TOP social media strategies to look for the rest of 2013...
Here’s a specific example of how we are leveraging our attendance at a conference to create value and interest in our current and potential clients.
Our company focuses upon Cybersecurity, and there is a conference called BlackHat that has become a mecca for hackers, hackivists, and those who are involved in the security industry. Many of our customers are under budget constraints and can’t attend conferences,
so while going to training and seminars at the conference this year our security engineers will be leveraging social media to make sure that our customers and followers can virtually gain access to the latest trends and exploits....
Social media has a problem and it needs to be addressed now. The truth is that a majority of social media strategies employed by some of the best brands out there aren't linking activity to business ROI...
What are the 7 Success Factors? There's a difference between a social media and social business strategy. Social media are the channels where information and people are connected via two-way platforms. Social media strategy defines programs specific to networks and the corresponding activity within and around each. Altimeter's definition of a successful Social Business Strategy (SBS) is one that aligns with the strategic business goals and has alignment and support throughout the organization.
You don't need to get the book to learn what the most advanced companies learned to prioritize. Following are the 7 aspects each shared to successfully champion and scale social media through the organization and earn executive support along the way...
A recent study by Oglivy suggests that social media users aren’t showing advocacy or passion for most of the brands that they follow.
What I want to do in this post is take a look at the research behind that assertion and posit an alternative explanation for the chasm between brand advocacy expression on social media and its expression in real life.
Methodology This study looked at between 6 and 7 million social media mentions of 22 major brands and eight feature films in four countries (United States, China, Brazil, and the United Kingdom). They assessed five product categories: coffee, hotels, fashion retail, movies, and skincare....
The best overall brands in health and beauty, and food and beverage categories are Crest, Gillette, and Dove; and Kellogg, Heinz, and Kraft, respectively, according to a pair of new Forrester rankings based on online surveys this year of 4,500 adults. The Boston-based market research firm argues that brand health comes from the extent to which it is trusted, remarkable, unmistakable, and essential. If you turn that into an acronym, you get Forrester's TRUE formula for brand equity....
Let's face it. Animals rule the Internet. Between LOLcats and upside-down dogs, people just can't get enough cute. Even serious news stories can't compare to the viral power of a sneezing panda or giggling slow loris.
In the world of social media, animals have been tweeting with more than just their beaks. They've been updating Facebook and YouTube accounts as well. The human faces behind these animal status updates spend precious time managing fictional animal accounts, but many have more online followers than major media outlets.We've collected the most popular animal social media accounts and compared their fan bases to those of prominent media organizations. The results should shed some light on the Internet's priorities. Cute. Even serious news stories can't compare to the viral power of pets....
Many online marketers get too wrapped up in measuring data that, though useful, is not the most important for understanding how your website is performing as a marketing channel.I say that because each investment of your time, money, and people should have a very solid ROI expectation attached to it. Without ROI, there's no pot at the end of rainbow, so you have to focus on those activities/metrics that provide the largest gains.Therefore, here are five online marketing metrics you should be looking at every day....
Content Marketing is the New SEO. Having a Content Marketing strategy for your online business is key to SEO success in 2013. However, Content Marketing should be done correctly by following certain guidelines. Below is an infographic which shows the Do’s and Dont’s of Content Marketing....
...It’s the stuff of every content marketer’s nightmares – this never-ending demand for more content. Despite all our best intentions, we never catch up. There is not enough time, resources, or budget to get ahead of the curve. Instead of an inspired chef creating delectable dishes to delight our audience, we become short order cooks, ceaselessly churning out quick-fix meals that the beast swallows whole without so much as a thank-you-very-much.So how do you keep ahead of the “beast” and save yourself from getting trampled or devoured?...
Sure, you have a business, but whether you sell a product or a service, you must provide SERVICE. What makes you so much different from your competitor that your prospects are knocking down your door? Or are they?
Solving problems is your real product not your widget or your services. Anyone and everyone does that. It is you, your service and your ability to meet the customer/prospect needs that will drive your business.You already know that people buy from people. You are “people” not just your brand or your company. It is your responsibility to meet needs, solve issues and instill a level of comfort and trust with your audience.
The buying decision occurs in the emotional environment.“Too many business owners and sales people try to sell their product or service, neglecting the fact that their customer is a person. In fact, the customer is a person who has feelings, influences and a mind of their own. They want to be connected with, and to trust and believe the person from which they are buying.” Rebecca Wilson....
As a content marketer, there are always questions you need to ask yourself and your clients in order to maximize your content. Ross Simmonds shares his. One of the ways I’ve helped clients achieve success is by really getting into the weeds of their work. I try to immerse myself into what they’re doing and what people think of them so I can identify what content is actually going to move the needle.
Here are three of the questions I always ask...
Stats indicate that while marketers know why they need to be active on social media, they don’t necessarily know how. Only 37 per cent think their Facebook efforts are effective – that’s barely more than one in three! Most are still unsure of social media best practice or how to develop effective strategies – creating a social strategy is still a major concern for 83 per cent of marketers.
Even more shockingly, only about one in four agreed they were even able to measure their social activities.It seems marketers are being social. They’re just not very good at it.We’re still destined for social success.There are, however, some positive indicators. Marketers have indicated at least 10 benefits of social media marketing – and the results aren’t half bad....
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Check out this new marketing manifesto and see if you can put it into action in your social marketing.