From our friends at www.digitalmindmap.com
Sunday, 24 June 2012
Wednesday, 18 April 2012
Doing Digital - Going Mobile
The Whole World’s Gone Global!
The
late 20th and early 21st centuries were typified by
fundamental changes in consumer behaviour and in markets. These were largely enabled
by two significant technological advances; the Personal Computer and the
Internet.
The
first allowed users in business, and later the home, to access unrivalled
computing power, without the restrictions and control of an IT department.
Secondly,
during this period, the Internet evolved into a fully functional platform for
global information exchange, communications and commerce.
Mobile
technology represents the third wave of this technological tsunami and builds
upon it. It puts significant, compact computer processing power literally
in the hands of all of us, connecting everything together across the World Wide
Web.
It is
estimated that about 30% of the world’s 7 Billion population have access to the
Internet, while globally there are about 5.8 billion mobile subscriptions. In
the UK there are now more mobile devices than people! Imagine the potential
that this level of technology penetration gives to marketers.
A striking
feature of Mobile and Mobile Marketing is its ubiquity. Mobile devices are
always connected and in contact. This allows consumers to access the
functionality that they want, at the time, location and in the form in which
they want it.
We are moving
away from a world where media owners and marketers strive to get their message
across just at the times and places of their choosing. Whether in advertising,
news or entertainment, the consumer is now the final arbiter.
As consumers,
we increasingly expect to be addressed and serviced as individuals, rather than
just ‘one of the crowd’. We are conceptually moving from ‘one market of a
million’ to ‘a million markets of one’.
A far cry
from the days when Henry Ford offered his cars in ‘any color you want, as long
as it’s black’!
In time, I believe that the mobile devices of today will evolve to become a
kind of digital ‘Swiss army knife of the future. Imagine a device which; holds
your money and id, captures or delivers media, communicates, navigates, scans,
entertains, informs and educates.
Geo-location
allows our Mobile device to be ‘aware’ of where it is and what is around it.
With a device that goes everywhere with the consumer and which ‘knows’ where
they are, there are many potential benefits for advertisers. Combining geo-targeted
Mobile advertising with known customer data, for example from a web based CRM
system, can provide highly relevant messaging which will add value to the recipient.
Delivered through a Concierge or PA application, services can be envisaged that advise the consumer of where to go and what to do, based on their location and predicted or specified preferences and tastes.
Delivered through a Concierge or PA application, services can be envisaged that advise the consumer of where to go and what to do, based on their location and predicted or specified preferences and tastes.
A further
growth area will be in the case where the Mobile device acts as a ‘Social
Object Controller’. With the development of web 3.0, more and more ‘inanimate’
objects will have web connectivity. These will include; cars, household
appliances, games and media devices. In future, most of these will interact
with, or be accessible and controllable from, the consumer’s Mobile device(s).
Consider a
retail environment where your Mobile ‘knew’ where you were and could guide your
shopping trip to nearby outlets and stores which stocked the items in which you
were interested, alerted staff when you had arrived in the shop, performed a
price-check and delivered personalised
offers, discounts and deals, uniquely tailored to you.
Imagine a
world where your car not only had a sat-nav but would also generate active
recommendations for restaurants, rest stops and places of interest en route,
all based on your personal preferences and diary. When it became time for a vehicle
service, the embedded Mobile device could notify the driver, contact the garage
to inform them of areas for attention, and book the appointment. Bugatti Veyron
technology today – in most vehicles in the future.
In a recent
discussion with some of my students, these ideas raised some concerns about
safety and security, with so much of a user’s personal information on one
Mobile device. Today, with services such as Apple’s iCloud it is possible to
remotely locate, lock or wipe a misplaced iPhone. Compare that with the
nightmare of trying to contact all of the credit, debit and store card
companies, after your purse or wallet is lost or stolen.
At present,
many of these predictions may seem far-fetched or fanciful. In the past, many
of us marvelled at the first ‘green screen’ PC’s, mobile phones the size and
weight of a house-brick and even ‘Space Invaders’ or ‘Pong’ on the games
machine in our local pub.
In future,
the next generation of consumers will adopt and adapt to ubiquitous Mobile
devices as an accepted and expected aspect of everyday life.
I, for one,
can’t wait to join them!
Peter Rees DipM FCIM FRSA MCIPR MIDM, Chartered Marketer
Principal
Principal
City Digital Marketing Academy
Thursday, 16 February 2012
Monday, 6 February 2012
EXCLUSIVE - e-interview with Dr. Dave Chaffey
After many months in the planning, I am delighted to post this EXCLUSIVE interview with stellar Digital Marketer Dr Dave Chaffey, to whom very many thanks!!
Dr Dave Chaffey is CEO and co-founder of Smart Insights (www.smartinsights.com), a digital
marketing advice site that helps businesses succeed online. He is author of 5
bestselling books on Ecommerce including Internet
Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice and has been recognised as
one of 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have shaped the future of Marketing.
Question 1: Many companies and
managers today are overwhelmed with all the hype around Digital Marketing. What
practical advice would you give them, to help get started in this area?
Yes, I think
many “rabbits in the headlights” moments with the growing pace of change and
the speed at which the key players introduce new features. The great thing
about digital marketing is that you can “dive in” and start small by creating a
blog or Facebook page. The problem is, you’ll often then lurch to the next
latest hype to see whether that helps. It’s currently Google+ and Pinterest for
example, this time last year it was Quora. None of these will help build
commercial growth if you don’t get the marketing fundamentals right.
At
SmartInsights.com we're firm believers in a planned, structured approach to
help make sure your online marketing activities are aligned with business
objectives. Planning also really helps you prioritise on the areas you can have
the biggest impact, maybe opportunities in tactics that competitors have
ignored. It's also essential to get inside customers’ minds to see what they
think, feel and do online and work out how that connects with your brand.
It’s crazy
really, with how much is invested in digital media today, how few have a
planned approach. We asked this question in a post about digital planning a couple of years ago and were not surprised to see that the
majority have an ad-hoc approach. We repeated this informal poll again this
year and found there was little change:
So, my
practical advice is “don’t just jump in”, think about what you want to achieve
and how you’re going to position yourself online, to differentiate yourself. A
practical tip here, is to improve how you communicate your value proposition
across your website and social outposts. If you’re an established brand this is
less necessary, but if you’re starting out, it’s essential.
See our advice on crafting an online value proposition (OVP).
Question 4: What steps can companies
take to measure and validate the returns that they get from their Digital
Marketing investment?
See our advice on crafting an online value proposition (OVP).
Question 2: What place do Social Media
tools have in the Digital Marketing Mix? Are they simply additional advertising
channels or something more?
Sure, you
can think of social media platforms as advertising channels, but as you know
Peter, that’s completely missing the point. We had an interesting discussion of this topic on our LinkedIn Group just yesterday.
A student
studying digital marketing was asking about the scope of social media and their
relevance to marketing. The short definition from my book is that
"Social media encourage audience
participation, interaction and sharing"
You can see
that doesn’t sit at all well with advertising; we all know we don’t want to be
advertised to when we’re socialising. That’s not to say that advertising on the
social platforms doesn’t have value in raising awareness and connecting with
advocates, far from it. But social media has an impact across the whole of
digital marketing mix as you suggest.
Jen Law, one
of our expert members expressed it better, saying “Social media is about conversations, community, connecting with
personalities and building relationships. It is not just a broadcast channel or
a sales and marketing tool”.
I think it’s
interesting that in 2011-12 we are seeing company response to social media
growing up and many now see it more broadly and are thinking how best to
harness social media marketing across the business. We’re seeing companies talk
about broader management of social media. In the same discussion, Paul
Fennemore, a social media specialist, said:
A purist would say 'social media' is
media. In this case Web2.0 interactive, real-time based media
including: Video, Blogs, Wikis, Gaming, Photos, Music and so on.
However, social media has come to mean than this and is not a good term for what it represents, Social Media Marketing, Social Commerce, Social Business, Social Enterprise are better terms depending on the context.
However, social media has come to mean than this and is not a good term for what it represents, Social Media Marketing, Social Commerce, Social Business, Social Enterprise are better terms depending on the context.
Here, the
CEO of Burberry talks about how fundamental social media are to the way they
operate today:
Question 3: Today, consumers are
exposed to a vast amount of data. How can marketers make it easier for them to
find and hear what they need and filter out extraneous messages and information,
from all the noise?
Analytics is
a passion of mine thanks to my background as a scientist when I was studying in
the 1980s. It’s one of the reasons why I was attracted to Internet marketing as
it was known in the mid 1990s. It seemed to offer an opportunity to understand
our customers much better and deliver relevance in our communications to help
secure better business outcomes and ROI on our media investments. Yet, sadly I
think most companies fail to filter out the noise.
There are
certainly technical challenges with attributing influence to multiple media
across complex customer journeys and how we use cookies to do this. I also
think the web analytics systems as designed, are mostly designed “by geeks, for
geeks” and they’re not structured around the questions that marketers ask –
that’s why we’ve developed guides to step marketers through these questions on
SmartInsights.com. But the bigger problems are todo with the classic governance
issues of people, process and systems. You need the right KPIs, dashboards
tailored to your business and a regular review/action process. Out-of-the box,
the analytics or social listening tools don’t give you this. Some big companies
do get this right, here’s one example we covered:
To answer
you’re question directly, I recommend these steps:
- Define value of outcomes on your site – setup goals in Google Analytics with values assigned to represent value.
- Put in place tracking of all media, on and offline, with consistent marketing source codes
- With this in place start using rarely used measures like revenue or goal value per visit and $Index value
- Understand, at a granular level which media including sites, search terms, placement and creative create value for you.
- Maximise value, prioritising the media with the best conversion rates and ROI.
- Understand more complex journeys through multichannel funnels so you are crediting assists earlier in the journey rather than just “last click wins”
- Find solutions to assess the value within social media marketing – 1 to 6 will help, but specialist tools are still needed!
Question 5: As the Web evolves into
the Cloud and becomes even more pervasive, what changes do you predict for Marketing,
resulting from the growth of mobile and the ubiquitous connection of less
animate objects?
A
challenging question to end! Regardless of the cloud, I think many don’t have a
good conception of the their creative assets and how to make them most
effective. We still have this mental idea of creative placed on our site or an
advertisers site we need to use to get our message across. In 2007, I think
there was a lot of discussion of “atomisation” and I think this is a better way
to think of creative assets today.
My colleague, Dan Bosomworth on
SmartInsights.com likes to call these “social objects” and they are the
fundamental units for effective content
marketing today. They are incredibly
effective in some markets such as tech products and fashion. Companies like
Hubspot, Eloqua in B2B, ASOS, Burberry in Fashion are masters in creating
effective assets and campaigns around these which expand their reach and
preference and link through to commercial goals. There are examples from many
sectors though.
For me a solid content marketing strategy is key to online
success today and it’s fundamental to success in search, social, email marketing
and conversion. It unifies brand communications in disparate channels. So if
you don’t have a content strategy you’re falling behind.
We find
discussions of the potential of mobile marketing are some of the most popular
on our blog, whether this is about QR codes, mobile apps or effective mobile
design. It certainly gives increased opportunities for connecting with
consumers in a more personal way, but I can’t see examples where how a company
deploys mobile marketing has transformed their brand in the way that content
and social media have for some of the examples above.
At some levels a mobile
or tablet device is just an alternative to the desktop platformand gives a
channel choice for similar content and experience. It doesn’t give so many
brands so many new opportunities to engage. But I’d like to hear of more
examples, particularly around proximity or location-based marketing with
experiential marketing events. This is
where it can give companies an edge.
Looking
further into the future, more objects will be web-enabled whether that’s cars,
household items or people! PR Smith talked about this in our Emarketing
Excellence book as earlier as 2001 about the Post-PC customer.
We haven’t seen
real progress in this area although the Verichip was touted as an implantable RFID chip. Health and privacy concerns seemed to
have stopped it and I’m not too sorry about that – I think we all need to
unplug sometime!
It will happen, but “not in my lifetime”.
Useful links and resources:
If readers
of this post would like to learn more about digital marketing, we've created a
framework on Smart Insights which can help marketers explore a topic without
being reliant on Google or Wikipedia.
Here are the starting points I'd
recommend:
Our home page has a widget
we developed based on the PRACE framework to explore
over 200 digital marketing techniques
For a quick scan of all
techniques try our Best Practices review- grouped in 25 key marketing activities
We also have a Digital Marketing Strategy Guide and simplified
marketing planning framework.
Find out more about our Ebooksand training courses.
Thank you Dr Chaffey!
Tuesday, 31 January 2012
(UN)SATISFACTORY? ENHANCING LIFE CHANCES BY IMPROVING ‘SATISFACTORY’ SCHOOLS
Becky Francis, RSA Director of Education
December 2011
A report from our friends at the RSA.
Download it HERE
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