14 practical marketing ideas to trial for 2014

From social media marketing to Google Analytics

Feeling jolly at Christmas, I wanted to be useful . And thought, if you find a little time in-between now and the New Year, it’s a good opportunity to do a little social media housekeeping. Here are immediate future’s top 14 recommendations (seriously, we are doing our tidy up too!) that will improve your social footprint no end. Get them all done and you’ll hit the ground running in January!

1. 
   

   Verify your Google profile – Google+ made huge advances this year but try some simple updates. If you haven’t already, customise your URL so your company page is legitimate and easier to find and share.

   
   


2. 
   

   Prepare for a crisis – While it’s quiet, take a step back and look at the risks and vulnerabilities in social. Where could you improve? How will you go about making change? Who else in your company could you tempt with mince pies to get some advice? And save your social posts using the lovely Social Safe – http://bit.ly/savesocial -‘just in case’

   
   


3. 
   

   Read “Share This Too” – A great book on social. And not just because we are co-authors, but because it has insights from over 30 of the leading practitioners in social media and PR! (it’s produced by the CiPR too)

   
   


4. 
   

   Test Twitter Cards – Get to grips with Twitter’s Lead Generation Cards; these allow you to collect leads directly from tweets. Christmas is a great time to trial new things, and these have no form for users to fill in – an added bonus!

   
   


5. 
   

   Review existing content – Now is a good time to look back at resources and images. How do they look? Are they all on brand? Dig into your audiences and plan ahead to deliver the hard-hitting content that they want. Be creative. Experiment!

   
   


6. 
   

   Take a Google Analytics course – Insights are everything. Make the most of your time off over Christmas and brush up on your analytical skills. It used to cost $50 but now you can learn for free!

   
   


7. 
   

   Do more with LinkedIn – Sponsored Updates let businesses promote any post from their company page directly into a specific demographics’ news feed. It’s the coolest thing since sliced bread, and leaves a trail of breadcrumbs for your customers to follow.

   
   


8. 
   

   Champion your success – Had a good year? Tell your colleagues about it! Show-off your work with internal presentations, newsletter and creative comms using Vine, videos, infographics… Celebrate your social success!

   
   


9. 
   

   Competitor analysis – Step back to get a better view of the landscape. Take stock of threats and opportunities and work them into a viable framework to build up your online strategy.

   
   


10. 
    

    Play with video – Now you can create and edit videos on the Instagram app as well as photos. And what’s more, these videos exceed the 6 second restriction of Vine, so it’s worth testing which platforms work best for you.

    
    


11. 
    

    Get on the right side of the law – The UK legal system wasn’t made with social in mind so it has had to adapt. Get better prepared for legislation in 2014 with our free resource (including real life examples of what not to do, it’s well worth a read!) Download Risky Business: How to stay legal when using social media.

    
    


12. 
    

    Lay down the law – Once you’re aware of the legal risks, you’ll no doubt want to get your housekeeping in order. Download The Social Media Policy Workbook to draft your new company policy; it covers everything from changing passwords to protecting the company against liability caused by your workforce.

    
    


13. 
    

    Cut your losses – Think about the platforms that you’re using; do they suit your brand? Are you reaching your audience effectively? Close down redundant profiles and re-focus your efforts on active sites.

    
    


14. 
    

    Surf the net for inspiration – This is a great time to do a bit of research. Some casual surfing can land you with great ideas for the next twelve months. Start by checking out what competitors have been up to!

    
    

So there you have it. 2013 was the year that Twitter went public, Facebook launched Graph Search, and Instagram allowed video and Direct Messages. Next year looks to be more eventful. So getting a few of these tasks done will stand you in great stead for 2014. And do shout of you need a bit of advice! I am happy to help.

All the best for 2014!

from Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/managing-digital-marketing/personal-career-development/14-practical-marketing-ideas-2014/

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Designing out of “Stuck”

via Digital Strategy http://digitalstrategy.typepad.com/digital_strategy/2013/12/designing-out-of-stuck.html

6 Email marketing trends for 2014

In webinar we covered Six Trends showing techniques and examples businesses can use in 2014 to increase the value of Email marketing.

The six trends, if you want to fast forward, are:

• Trend 1 – More Email 5


• Trend 2 –Offline gets digital 16


• Trend 3 – Majority mobile 21


• Trend 4 – Video 33


• Trend 5 – Open rate retires 37


• Trend 6 – Intelligent inboxes 40

Email marketing trends 2014 from Smart Insights

This Slideshare was presented as a webinar by Tim Watson of Zettasphere at the Smart Insights Digital Marketing Priorities 2014 summit.

You can view all 6 recordings from the Digital Marketing 2014 Summit here.

from Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/email-marketing/email-communications-strategy/email-marketing-trends-2014/

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How to Select and Prioritise Your Testing

What’s wrong with endless button colour testing?

Disclosure: We DO test buttons. Size, prominence, copy, positioning and very occasionally, colour.

However, in many cases there are higher value tests that we could be running. There will almost always be constraints that limit the number of tests that you can run, based on design & developer effort, a limited number of conversions, limitations of your tools, etc. Therefore prioritising your tests is absolutely crucial. Where can you get the most bang for your buck? In this post I will share the most important things to consider when choosing what to test.

Selecting What to Test

If you’ve been working on Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) projects for any length of time you’ll know that there is a huge range of ways to capture insights on user behaviour. No matter which tools/techniques you use, here are the three areas you absolutely must have covered.

1. What is the data telling me about visitor behaviour?

This is typically but not exclusively, found through your web analytics tool. Web analytics can provide a range of insights that help you to understand where people are abandoning forms, bouncing, hitting error messages, which devices/countries/browsers are under-performing,

Key areas to consider:

• Top landing pages


• Pages with high footfall (traffic)


• Key leak or conversion points

2. What are users telling me about their experiences? What can we observe about their behaviour?

If web analytics can help us to understand ‘what’ users are doing, user research can start to fill in the picture by tackling the ‘why’ behind user behaviour on areas such as;

• Usability errors


• Relevance, persuasion, motivation


• Influential proposition messaging

3. What does the business know about customer struggles or business challenges?

Finally, don’t overlook what your business knows about customer behaviour. Often people within the business have valuable information about common user errors, feedback from social media, feedback from stores, etc.

“If only HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times more productive.” Lew Platt, CEO, Hewlett-Packard

I love this quote. It highlights the importance of setting up communication channels for feedback and suggestions. This can be a really positive process that gains support for your testing programme.

Key Sources:

• Customer service insights


• Merchandising team


• Store staff

Prioritising your tests

So now you’ve got tons of exciting ideas and you’re ready to start testing, but where to start? Here’s a few key considerations that we have found invaluable when developing our testing schedules.

1. Triage

Firstly, it’s important to identify if an issue or improvement is worth testing or can be tested. Armed with insights from regular analytics investigation, a range of user research techniques and internal feedback you’re almost certain to have more hypotheses than you can test. Some things will be too small to warrant testing and may be best implemented as a JDI (Just Do It) change, while some may require new functionality or a more comprehensive redesign that sits above testing (e.g. a full checkout redesign).

Here are the categories that we use to triage ideas/improvements:

- Just Do It (JDI) – A small changes that can be implemented without testing and monitored using analytics.

• Single Feature Test – a specific test on a single issue


• Batch Testing – a test on a range of small changes with a similar theme


• Radical Redesign Testing – A full-page redesign tested against the current version.


• Larger Redesign Projects – Improvements that are not practical to test and require a more in-depth redesign process.

Ideas might not fit neatly into one of these categories, but by thinking in this way it will help you to start thinking about the scale of issues in a pragmatic way.

2. Triangulation

Once we have classified issues into different levels we look for issues that have been identified in multiple research methods. If multiple sources confirm or strengthen the same issues we give them a higher priority.

3. Potential Impact vs Effort Required

The next step is to start to evaluate the estimated potential impact of the improvement, against the effort required to run the test. This might be the amount of design or development required, creation of test assets, test configuration, level of sign-off required, etc.

So your estimate should be based on a balance of the ‘likelihood to impact key metrics’ versus ‘effort required’.

Summary

Selecting tests based on understanding the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of user behaviour, and prioritising tests in a considered, pragmatic way you will give you the best chance of running tests that have a significant impact on key metrics that improve the overall performance of your site or business.

How do you prioritise tests in your organisation?

Thanks to Matt Lacey for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Matt Lacey is Head of Optimisation at PRWD. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.

from Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/conversion-optimisation/conversion-optimisation-strategy/select-prioritise-testing/

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What if Santa was an email marketer?

A little fun to end the year

Santa discovers his Android rendering sucks…

If Santa was an email marketer…

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  1. He’d be the only one who could claim “open rate” is a meaningful metric.

  
  

  
  


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  2. He wouldn’t have to worry about people complaining they get “too many” presents from him.

  
  

  
  


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  3. The message on the gift tag would be limited to 50 characters and always feature first-name personalization.

  
  

  
  


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  4. His detailed tests on the “best time and day to send” would have extremely conclusive results (but at least a dozen experts would try and persuade him to always send on a Tuesday at 3pm).

  
  

  
  


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  5. Around half the recipients would get their presents while out and about. Some would open them immediately, while some would wait until they got back home. And some would check the gift tags, save the valuable looking gifts for home, and dump the rest in a nearby bin.

  
  

  
  


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  6. Nobody would get any presents unless they wrote to Santa explicitly asking for them.

  
  

  
  


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  7. The gift would change in size to fit the space available under the tree.

  
  

  
  


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  8. He’d send a few presents out early, featuring different gift wrap. Then he’d wait to see which wrapping got the most opens and use the winner for the rest of Christmas.

  
  

  
  


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  9. He would always get a high open rate, even though his delivered content is often low-value or irrelevant.

  
  

  
  


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  10. Those who don’t open their parcels would get a new parcel around December 30th: same gift, but different gift tags and wrapping.

  
  

  
  


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  11. And if they didn’t open the second parcel, Santa would write and ask them if they still want a parcel next year, otherwise he’ll stop delivering.

  
  

  
  


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  12. But if he took people off his list for not opening anything for the last six months prior to his December send…he’d go bust.

  
  

  
  


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  13. The content of each parcel would be determined on a one-to-one basis, using an analysis of each recipient’s prior behavior.

  
  

  
  


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  14. He’d have excellent relations with ISPs, because nobody wants to end up on Santa’s blacklist.

  
  

  
  


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  15. He wouldn’t get many people reporting his gifts as unwanted (even though some of them are) and opting-out of future deliveries.

  
  

  
  


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  16. Experts would advise him to send a few Christmas gifts in July and August to ensure customers remain engaged with his brand.

  
  

  
  

I’ve had my fun, now it’s over to you… surely you can beat these?

Image credit: 123RF

from Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/email-marketing/santa-email-marketer/

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