Anyone near the world of content marketing understands the importance of writing. Well-chosen words strung together with care are the heart of any modern SEO strategy.
Current and topical writing in blog posts help businesses become relevant for current and prospective customers.
If you are one of those people, you probably also understand one other hard truth: A lot of the stuff we write doesn't really get read. People are busy, and it's hard to pay attention to a whole blog post and certainly a whole book with everything else clamoring for attention.
But what if a reader could read, and totally comprehend, a 300-word post in 30 seconds? Before that truck commercial is over, the whole blog is read.
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by Scott Yates
07 March 2014 17:15pm
3 comments
Creating a single view of customers across channels has long been the goal of the ambitious retail marketer.
By being able to track and analyse consumer interactions across in-store and online, a retailer can create a new level of insight into their customers and therefore market to them with an unprecedented level of accuracy and insight.
In addition, data has shown again and again that customers who interact with a brand on more than one channel are more valuable and loyal than their single channel counterparts.
However, a single view of customers isn’t as simple as just connecting online and offline databases of information. It requires significant investment in new hardware, software, staff capabilities and processes.
Before launching any project of this scale, retailers need to be aware of the possibilities and pitfalls.
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by Darryl Adie
07 March 2014 16:09pm
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It’s the round-up of weekly entertainments from around the internet that doesn’t really have a consistent name.
Instead I prefer to choose from a list of increasingly ironic or vaguely snarky titles pinned to my desktop that bear little relation to each other beyond the word ‘internet’.
In previous week’s editions I’ve toyed with the idea of keeping the introduction to this post evergreen, but I soon jettisoned that fanciful notion in order to write nothing but topical, newsworthy matters from around the globe.
That didn't really work either.
This week I’ll be trying something new. This week I’ll be going ‘super-local’ by giving you a glimpse into the latest news from the very desk of the Econsultancy content team.
Here’s the highlight of our week….
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by Christopher Ratcliff
07 March 2014 13:38pm
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It’s a common declaration; ‘Google+ is a ghost town’. The search giant has amassed huge user numbers registered on its social network, but the lights are on while nobody’s home.
The numbers seem to suggest as much, with apparently just 35% of Google+’s users active on a monthly basis, but anyone who’s a regular user will tell you the reality is more complicated than that.
The social network has hidden depths, they say. You’re just not doing it right.
In our annual review of how the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 are using social media, we’ve found that the UK’s fastest growing technology companies are flocking to Google+, to the point where it’s on a par with Facebook in terms of businesses having a presence there.
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by Ian McKee
07 March 2014 11:41am
1 comment
Qualcomm has been busy diversifying beyond chips and they now have an impressive range of software and even a smart watch.
Its smart home demo was one of my Mobile World Congress highlights and shows how technology will make our lives even easier in the coming years.
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by David Skerrett
07 March 2014 11:36am
1 comment
Another seven days have passed, so it's time again for our weekly stats roundup.
Statistics include real-time marketing, the New York Times, Financial Times, showrooming, mobile commerce, and suspicious bot traffic.
For more digital marketing stats, check out our Internet Statistics Compendium.
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by David Moth
07 March 2014 11:02am
0 comments
Relying on Google is a risky game. It always has been, but ever-increasingly over the last two years it’s becoming clear that relying heavily on Google traffic can hold an uncertain future.
I’ve seen a huge amount of brands who are performing extremely well via organic search, some are great at PPC, others social media.
Within their own specific channels they’re killing it, or perhaps more importantly making an absolute killing! But it’s getting more difficult and with more competition, comes bigger budgets and tighter margins.
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by Kevin Gibbons
07 March 2014 10:13am
5 comments
This comes from a new multi-device study, conducted by Facebook in collaboration with GfK, revealing people’s behaviour when it comes to moving across devices (smartphone, tablet and desktop) on a day-to-day basis.
It’s becoming increasingly common practice to switch to a different device, even though we may have started a task on a different one all together.
While sat at home, it’s far easier to research a product we’ve seen on television via the smartphone that’s sat within arm’s reach, than it is to walk ALL the way to another room to fire up a desktop computer and wait minutes for it to boot up. It’s a wonder we ever bought anything online before the advent of smartphones.
However for the actual purchase or completion of more seemingly complicated task, we prefer a larger screen and therefore we’re more likely to finish the task on a tablet, laptop or desktop computer.
Here are some more stats from the study, plus bonus 'real-life' photographic examples of multi-device use.
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by Christopher Ratcliff
07 March 2014 09:27am
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Online reviews are now essential to most shoppers’ purchasing decisions, and that’s exactly why you cannot afford to ignore them any longer.
Here are some common arguments against using reviews, and how to overcome them...
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by Jan Vels Jensen
06 March 2014 17:05pm
5 comments
As of February 2013, more than 25bn songs had been downloaded from the iTunes store, averaging over 15,000 songs per minute.
There is no denying the power and ubiquity of Apple’s digital music service, after all it has transformed the way that everyone on the planet consumes music.
Unfortunately iTunes is a deeply flawed experience. It's impersonal and slow, with lack of support for different file formats, a stubbornly rigid price model and no browser access.
In this ongoing series I’ll be checking out the competition to see if we can find a digital music platform that can finally trump iTunes.
Previously I looked at 7digital, this time I’ll be taking a look at Amazon MP3.
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by Christopher Ratcliff
06 March 2014 16:41pm
2 comments
