Doug Kessler, who runs B2B content agency Velocity, will be speaking at next month’s Festival of Marketing.
Here, Doug talks about the content marketing backlash, the importance of quality, and the importance of tone of voice…
The Festival of Marketing is approaching, there’s not long left to buy tickets, just enough time to check out this awesome list detailing why we need you to be there.
Where else can you listen to Tulisa, Facebook and The Government Digital Service? Where else can you meet Grandmaster Flash and Alastair Campbell? Where else can you improve your digital strategy and drink champagne?
Check out the Festival website and read on for more.
The Samaritans Radar is a wonderful case study for social media use by charities.
Not only is the technology simple and useful (sending you an email when someone in your Twitter network uses a potentially concerning phrase), the campaign is equally as important in raising the profile of the charity and reminding people of its cause.
Radar has been covered widely in the news, but I’ve included some screenshots of the campaign (which is lovely from a UX viewpoint) and added some other social media campaigns from charities that have also caught my eye.
With social media becoming so important for charities, both for scale and influence, we’re set to see many more innovative campaigns across networks.
It’s nearly November so it’s time to go on a whistle stop tour of the best social campaigns we’ve seen in the past month.
Before you ask, there is zero proof of ROI in this post. That’s not what we’re here for.
I’m merely trying to highlight cool and interesting social campaigns that have emerged in the month of October.
Read on to find out what we’ve seen, or for more on this topic check out my similar posts from August and September…
At Demandware’s Xchange ‘14 conference I caught up with Jaeger’s head of ecommerce, Simon Spencelayh, to find out how the fashion retailer is improving the customer experience and its multichannel capabilities.
It’s less than a year since Jaeger relaunched its online store for the second time in less than 12 months, and only around eight months since Spencelayh started his new role.
So it’s clearly been a period of change for the company’s ecommerce team.
Here’s what we discussed…
Delighting the consumer is the number one priority for all customer-facing companies.
Right now, consumers have never had more choice, but when there’s an endless array of businesses offering similar products and services, how does any company stand out from the crowd?
By offering a personalised, relevant and completely human relationship that goes far beyond a single ecommerce transaction.
A whole lifetime relationship between a customer and a company can be fostered under the customer experience (CX) banner, but this kind of loyalty can’t exist without first shaping a sustainable consumer-centric culture and delivering them compelling experiences.
Join us at our Festival of Marketing, a two-day celebration of the modern marketing industry held in November, where we have an entire stage devoted to CX so you can learn how successful marketers optimise experiences to increase satisfaction and loyalty.
In the meantime, let’s take a look at some other useful case studies.
Most people enter the retailing business because of their love and knowledge of a particular product, or their notice of a gap in the value chain for that project.
A love of sports and fitness led to the creation of one of the largest companies in the world: Nike. But the climb to the top wasn’t easy, for Nike’s unique sneaker offerings was once a niche market.
Luckily, its merchandising abilities allowed it to become what it is today.
This week at Econsultancy Towers we hosted a few roundtables, one of which was ‘Facebook: Optimising and Measuring the world’s largest social media platform‘.
For those of you that have attended a roundtable before, you’ll be aware that we hand out a trends briefing, which is an up-to-date document on trends, pulled together by the research team before the event.
For those of you that haven’t attended a roundtable before, you’ll know what to receive when you do go.
I wanted to share the trends with you, as Facebook changes so frequently that it’s always good to keep ourselves informed. Some of this information has been written about before on the blog, but I’ve found some new reports and statistics to reiterate the importance of knowing these changes, if you’re using Facebook for your brand.
So, onwards and upwards with the three most important trends that I found.
Consumers love it when a company’s mask slips. They jump on perceived proof that businesses are all in it to rip off the customer.
PR snafus such as Sainsbury’s recent inside-outside poster are a good example of this phenomenon. Social media goes crazy.
In recent times, the move to enhanced service, partly stimulated by the commercial internet, means the mask has further to slip (but it still can). Companies aim to be transparent and friendly with customers on an increasing number of marketing and comms channels, but mistakes still occur.
Marketing automation is one area where brands must be vigilant, lest the wrong message be sent or the right message at the wrong time.
So, here’s a roundup of some ways in which marketing automation can go wrong, in social, ecommerce, email and advertising.
Store locator tools are hugely important for multichannel retailers, with their importance increasing due to the consumer shift to mobile and our reliance on digital maps for directions.
This was a point hammered home to me over the weekend when I was hopelessly wandering the streets of Catford trying to find a Tesco Superstore.
Store locator tools seem a very basic part of modern web design, yet clearly not all sites manage to get it right.
The importance of giving people useful, local information is further underlined by data published by Google.
It shows that 40% of mobile searches have local intent, while three out of four mobile searches trigger follow-up actions, whether that be further research, a store visit, a phone call, a purchase or word-of-mouth sharing.
With this in mind I’ve taken a look to see which brands have great mobile store locator tools, but first here’s a look at a few features that need to be included.
Over the weekend Google released its latest Penguin update, the first in more than a year. This follows a recent update to Panda, which took aim at thin content and aggregator sites. I asked Stephen Kenwright, head of search at Branded3, about the aims and impact of this latest update… What is Penguin 3.0? Automated […]
Every once in a while a campaign comes along that just puts a massive smile on this churlish blog team’s face.
Virgin America is having an excellent year in the digital world. In June it managed to turn the process of booking a flight into a joyous process with its brand new website (as thoroughly documented in Ben Davis’s 30 little things I love about the new Virgin America website).
It’s also excelling itself in the world of social video. I’m a huge fan of its branded Instavids.
This week sees the launch of a gigantic multichannel, world-building content campaign that is as hilarious as it is inventive. It’s also kind of boring and an expert lesson in what not to do on almost every digital channel in existence.
Welcome to BLAH Airlines. Here’s why it’s so brilliant.