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What are the essential skills for modern marketers? [infographic]

Looking to future proof your CV? Want to make sure your marketing team has the right mix of talent?

Our recent Skills of the Modern Marketer report defines the skills that senior marketers are seeking for their team. Both the broad knowledge areas and the deep vertical skills needed to be successful in marketing. 

As Neil Perkin’s blog post on the report mentioned last week, we also found a surprising focus on soft skills – in particular, adaptability, inquisitiveness and willingness to collaborate.

We created this infographic to summarise the findings of the report, based on interviews and a survey with senior level marketers. 

13 ecommerce best practice lessons from AO.com

We’re often looking for examples of good, and not so good, practice in ecommerce for our reports and articles, and there are a few sites you can generally rely on for the former.  One of these in AO.com, formerly Appliances Online. The company was launched 14 years ago and its recent IPO valued it at […]

#GiveGregTheHoliday: Twitter, agile marketing and holidays in Vegas

As this article is being published, Greg, the mystery security guard at the centre of today’s hottest twitter trend #GiveGregTheHoliday is, by all accounts, still asleep.

What better way to showcase the speed required to make the most of agile marketing? 

As I write this, I’m fully aware of how contrived it is. I’m leaping on a hashtag in an effort to squeeze a few ounces of sweet traffic in my direction, but I’m far from the worst example. 

When can Facebook advertising challenge Google?

As Google approaches its 16th birthday, it is virtually impossible to question its value to online businesses.  

Over the last decade, companies from almost every sector have used the search giant to grow and reach customers that were previously inaccessible.

But with costs and competition rising, when can we look to Facebook as a real alternative?

I thought it would share some of my experiences to help invest your budget in the most effective way.

Email marketing segmentation: dead man walking?

It seems like the staple diet of a digital marketing blogger is to declare something dead, or not dead, or cleverly D.E.A.D.

Only this week, our David Moth wrote a piece on email marketing’s rude health (email is not dead). 

I think the reason we’re obsessed with the death of marketing technology is because, despite the pace of change in digital, there are many age-old marketing principles that remain absolute. 

Relevance, timeliness, perhaps more broadly the four, five or seven Ps – these will ever remain in the marketing canon. 

And, of course, no matter how sophisticated technology becomes, there will still exist businesses that don’t get the marketing mix right. 

However, despite all this, I am interested in areas of marketing that might undergo automation and sophistication to the point where they require little work. 

What I foresee is the perfection of certain disciplines (e.g. marketing automation) throwing light on new priorities, such as a renewed interest in conversion rate optimisation or data cleanliness.

With marketing as a department more powerful than ever, why would the amount of work decrease? Surely we’re sticking our elbows out, and our oars into every part of the org? 

So, what about email segmentation? Will there be a time when it’s no longer a core skill, something to be done actively by marketers? Will technology take care of it for us?

15 quick tips for a successful YouTube strategy

The pace of social video sharing has almost doubled in 12 months and 42% of video shares now happen in the first three days of launch.

This is according to new research from Unruly published today. The Social Diffusion Curve measures the lifecycle of a viral video. In particular the speed of social diffusion for the top 4,000 videos in social video, 

In April last year it was found that a quarter of the average online branded video’s shares occur in the first three days of its launch. This has nearly doubled to 42% in just 12 months.

Has (not provided) become a major barrier to effective SEO?

The restriction of keyword referral data has had a major impact on SEO, with marketers seeing it as the second biggest obstacle to search success. 

An inability to see this data has prevented marketers from optimising their organic search campaigns as they had done in the past. 

Our UK Search Engine Marketing Benchmark Report 2014, produced in association with Latitude, has surveyed companies and agencies about their attitudes to the almost total loss of organic keyword data. 

Simple Twitter experiments to restore that boxfresh feeling

There is nothing sadder than reflecting on the earlier days of a community or service and complaining about how much things have changed.

So let’s just take it for granted that there’s an element of that in this but not dwell too much. 

Instead, I’d like to focus on something more important: how you shake things up when the timeline that used to delight and inform you begins to feel saggy and boring.

Think of it like marriage-counselling for a tool that many of us spend more time with than our significant others.

(If you have your own tips, let me know.)

Three key takeaways from the new Econsultancy Mobile Maturity Briefing

A few years ago businesses could be forgiven for their failure to react quickly enough to the massive shift to mobile technologies, as it was difficult to predict just how big an impact smartphones would have on the customer journey.

However new research from Econsultancy and Adobe shows that even now many companies still haven’t implemented an effective mobile strategy.

In fact only a third of respondents (36%) agree that they have a mobile strategy compared to 45% who disagree.

The Finding the Path to Mobile Maturity Briefing provides data and insights for those wishing to benchmark their own activities around mobile, and to elevate the importance of related business initiatives within their organisations.

The report is based on a global survey of 600 client-side and agency marketers carried out in March and April 2014.

Here are three key findings: 

What are the best social media marketing campaigns of all time?

What are the best social media marketing campaigns of all time?

First of all, let me justify the use of the phrase ‘of all time’ by looking at Facebook specifically.

Facebook was available at Harvard in winter 2004 and then over time was extended to some other schools and institutions. In September 2006, anybody could join.

I was considered a late adopter at my university in the UK when I finally joined in early 2007. In late 2007, Facebook had 100,000 business pages.

Ten years on from The Facebook’s foundation (and remember MySpace launched earlier, in August 2003), we’re looking at a form of media that is truly mature.

In the last ten years Facebook has gone from this…

Q&A: Scott Monty on Ford’s social media strategy

Social media is a major part of Ford’s continued evolution in digital and in many cases features some of its most groundbreaking work.  

Ford was the first automobile manufacturer to reveal a vehicle on Facebook, it was the first brand on Google+ and it runs perhaps one of the most uniquely enjoyable and surprising Vine accounts.

Last month I wrote about why Ford’s social media strategy is so good, in which I discussed Ford’s various social channels and how it expertly tailors its output and connects to each channel’s audience with the right content and tone of voice.

At the helm of this strategy is Scott Monty, Ford’s global digital & multimedia communications manager. Within just a few years Scott has transformed the 110 year old car manufacturer into one of the most successful brands in digital and social.

I recently had the opportunity to interview Scott Monty for the blog and he had the following to say about Ford’s social media strategy, the challenges the company faces and Ford’s overall digital transformation.

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