Digital Marketing Blog

Data from 1,000+ marketers identifies the #1 enemy of marketing integration

Econsultancy’s report on marketing integration won’t be published until Integrated Marketing Week in June, but we wanted to preview some of the top line findings from our survey of over 1,000 marketers and agency pros.

In this post, we look at the building blocks of integration and its number one enemy, human nature (and what to do about it.)

by Stefan Tornquist 16 May 2013 16:06pm 8 comments

Curate, shape and grow: cultivating your connected TV garden

When it comes to the Connected TV landscape, it truly is a wilderness out there.

Change in how we’re consuming media provides tremendous opportunity for both publishers and content creators looking to reach audiencea.

However, platform fragmentation and a myriad of technical and business constraints ensure that it’s never been so easy to get lost in the cost and complexity.

by Luke Gaydon 16 May 2013 13:57pm 0 comments

Five lovely new features that mean Google Plus is about to take hold

Here's a brief summary of the main G+ improvements in effect today.

We at Econsultancy think it now has the chops to garner more users, and these features may enable the platform to take hold...

by Ben Davis 16 May 2013 12:15pm 17 comments

How BMW uses Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+

Over the past few months I've been looking at how different global brands make use of the main social networks, but so far I've neglected the auto industry.

I've rectified that this week by turning the spotlight on BMW, which as it turns out has a surprisingly strong Facebook presence.

This post follows on from similar articles focusing on brands such as Coca-Cola, Nike, Red Bull, Microsoft and Ikea.

And without further ado, here's a quick look at how BMW uses Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+...

by David Moth 16 May 2013 11:15am 3 comments

How should publishers respond to link removal requests?

Thanks again to Panda, Penguin etc, it seems many webmasters are panicking about links they have obtained in the past, or have been pulled up by Google as a result of over-zealous link building.

As a result, we are receiving many more link removal requests than we ever used to, ten or so in the past couple of months.

To be frank, these requests are annoying, and I'm also a little put out that they see this blog as a risk to them. Chris Lake touched upon this recently and, as he says, 'a lot of folks seem to have a bad case of The Fear'.

I thought it was worth exploring this issue in more detail, so I've asked a few SEO experts for their views...

by Graham Charlton 16 May 2013 10:34am 9 comments

Ecommerce stats: online shopping in the Middle East

The Middle East and North Africa edition of our Internet Statistics Compendium has seen some interesting updates over the past few months, with some fascinating insights into ecommerce across the region.

This post gives a general overview of the online retail numbers and brands which are proving significant in the Middle East. For further details of the many specific trends and developments within respective MENA markets, check out the latest edition of our ISC.

by Luke Richards 16 May 2013 09:48am 4 comments

A case for UX testing and Agile

A recent report, published here on the Econsultancy blog, revealed a staggering 45% of companies aren't performing any UX testing when developing a creative project.

Whether it's a website or an app, user experience (UX) is an important factor in both the success, and the scalability of a product.

Together with the flexibility of the Agile approach to development, it can help you to build a better, more satisfying product.

by Rita Auta 16 May 2013 09:36am 4 comments

Six ways you can fail at data driven marketing

Data driven marketing is not as much easy as we think.

You’ve heard the buzzword, and you probably think you’re doing data driven marketing as we speak. But the reality of the situation is that most marketers aren’t actually data driven.

Taking Peter Drucker’s “What gets measured, gets managed” at face value is dangerous. Mere measurement isn’t actually enough. Data driven marketers measure for the right reasons.

And so, with that in mind, here are six reasons you (might) fail at data driven marketing.

by Pratik Dholakiya 15 May 2013 16:44pm 4 comments

Why events are the last bastion of integrated marketing

We can tell the last ten items a consumer bought on our site and we can tell the open rate of our email marketing campaigns, but few of us can say how long any one visitor at our event booth spent there and what they picked up.

The swag, a brochure, your business card, your hot intern’s telephone number, which was it?

This not-knowing is weird, says Liz Miller, overseer of daily operations at the CMO Council (CMOC), a global affinity network of top brand marketers. “Since when did a marketer get shy?” she asked recently.

by Cielo Lutino 15 May 2013 13:51pm 2 comments

Six basic tips for improving homepage product banners

Providing tailored product recommendations is a proven way of boosting online sales, with two-thirds of companies (66%) stating that personalisation improves both customer experience and business performance.

Speaking at a Screen Pages ecommerce event recently, Emailvision personalisation director Neil Hamilton ran through some best practice tips for how to create effective homepage product recommendation banners.

The effectiveness of these blocks can be improved using personalisation, whereby the products shown are specifically tailored to the customer based on their past on-site behaviour.

Our new Realities of Personalisation Report, published in association with Monetate, found that just 30% of businesses currently personalise their websites based on a visitor’s previous behaviour, so a majority of businesses are yet to implement the technology.

by David Moth 15 May 2013 13:09pm 0 comments