Digital Marketing Power

Serious inbound marketers are known for their near superhuman abilities to generate leads. But these supermen and women aren’t from another planet, and they don’t have a secret identity. Instead, they utilize modern marketing tools, dig through data and adjust their tactics on a regular basis.

So how can you, too, be an inbound marketing man (or woman) of steel? Well, here are five things that make a super inbound marketer:

.

There is a continuing disconnect with people’s personal use of the internet and how they then apply digital marketing to promote their business.

The company CEO will use Google for researching and buying a new car but when it comes to optimizing his web site for ranking high in Google he struggles to see the value and perceives that building a website is all he needs to do to be “found online” and generate mountains of cash.

Read more here...

Full-service restaurant operators are aware that societal and technological changes are affecting the way people communicate and interact. We’ve become more visual than we have ever been before, helped along by sites like Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook.  That’s why deploying digital signage (DS) to help evolve your restaurant’s brand and tell a visual story about who you are and how and what you serve makes sense. It’s not only a smart move; it brings you closer to the way people communicate with each other today.

Last month, this author wrote about "How to Tell if Your Agency Sucks at Digital" and tips for selecting an agency that actually knows digital and can demonstrate their knowledge about it. Here he focuses on digital strategy and ensuring that the marketing tactics to be deployed are the right ones and will work in a unified manner to drive optimal impact on business objectives.

While the concept of steering marketing communications towards a small number of influential networkers was suggested as far back as the 1950s, it has been in the age of Web 2.0 that it has truly taken flight. As social networks continued to grow rapidly, so has interest in influence. Global companies are realising the importance of targeting high profile bloggers, journalists and celebrities, and have increasingly sought to reach out to these influencers for endorsement and to drive word-of-mouth about the brand. But FMCG brands like Snickers can easily identify popular celebrity bloggers, businesses in other fields can have a harder task to find relevant influencers. To cater for this, a new wave of influencer scoring, based on social media analytics, has emerged, most notably Klout, Kred and PeerIndex.

Today Holiday Inn, official hotel provider to the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, unveils the world’s first Augmented Reality Hotel which features a host of Britain’s top athletes. Hotel guests can use their smartphones or tablets to see London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic stars in virtual action in the reception, corridors and bedrooms of the Holiday Inn London Kensington Forum.

How the legendary brand blew up its single-slogan approach and drafted a new playbook for the digital era.

Out with old and in with the new. It’s a saying we hear a lot, but does it apply to your new year’s marketing plan? If your existing marketing mix consists of traditional strategies that fail to achieve optimal results, it’s time to make the most of the new year and add more digital marketing to your overall marketing plan.

This doesn’t mean you should completely replace what you have now, but do look at how to integrate digital strategies such as new marketing software or other tools into your current plan.

With this in mind,take a look at the following digital strategie for prime results going into 2012

CMO.com turned to its array of contributors, colleagues, and staff and asked them what they envision the new year will bring for the digital marketing world. From new shopping behavior, to making sense of big data, to social TV and a mobile majority, their range of answers is staggering. Here is what they said we can expect in the coming 12 months.

Marketers (40%) are finding that delivering a positive customer experience is harder in mobile marketing than on the web. That’s likely no surprise, but what may be troubling is that 70% of marketers describe their multichannel experience for customers as “okay” or “poor.

These findings, from a new IBM sponsored survey of more than 500 chief marketing officers and ecommerce leaders, revealed that while these leaders understand the importance of mobile, two-thirds still do not know how to define their mobile user experience.

The top three most serious issues around mobile marketing were defined as bad navigation/poor “findabilty,” screen-sizing issues and form-filling problems.

Mobile traffic continues to grow, with respondents attributing 19% of their total traffic to a mobile device. Even so, many companies continue to optimize their websites for mobile marketing and experiences, as opposed to building a mobile experience from the ground up which would provide an improved experience for the customer.

Social media is no longer a reminder or subsidiary medium. To understand and invest in this medium, marketer need to have a strategy in place, risk appetite in case of failure and a measurement system which is in sync with the brand objective.

Dos and don’ts of social media have been chalked out quite a lot of times. However, experts express that to make the medium a permanent part of the media mix without risking RoI, there are a few business rules that they can keep in mind.

Integrated digital marketers (IDMs) rely heavily on data analytics to track campaign performance over website, social, and mobile channels. To ensure each initiative is achieving the desired effect, they may track various performance management metrics, including website bounce rates; keyword performance rankings; eMail open rates; landing page conversions; visitor-to-lead, lead-to-customer, and customer retention ratios; and ad click-through-rates and costs-per-impression. Striving for perfection, IDMs rely heavily on user data to compare marketing initiatives with real-world results.

In other words, they keep their EAR to the ground.

Here are three ways to do the same:

.

5 questions to answer before developing a mobile marketing strategy for B2B and building a business case using data in Google Analytics.

Mobile phones and particularly the increasing adoption of smartphones, continue to change how people receive information, consume content and engage with others. To take advantage of the opportunities presented by these mobile devices and their expanded functionality and create an effective mobile marketing strategy, marketers must understand how consumers use them and what the implications are for content marketing, promotions, communications and purchase channels. Here are twenty-five charts of the latest research sourced from a variety of organizations to enable you to better understand how the mobile landscape has evolved so you can incorporate these changes into your marketing plans.

Saurabh Sharma, planning partner, Ogilvy & Mather China, shares his insights on the intersection between digital technology and luxury marketing. He says luxury marketers have much to gain by understanding and deploying digital technologies, especially in large markets like China and India.

On the web today, things change fast. New applications launch every day, and existing applications continue to evolve and add new features. Just this year we witnessed the debut of Google+ and the introduction of Facebook Timeline. Even the Merriam-Webster Dictionary started adding a few to its collection! Thus, while we're all learning about social media and inbound marketing as well as teaching others about it, having a resource that quickly and clearly explains all of the basic terms and applications is critically important.