Cycling has really picked up momentum in the UK. British success has made the sport more popular than ever and search volumes are rising.
Inspired by the imminent Grand Depart of Le Tour de France from Leeds in early July, we’ve looked into the search marketing (SEO and PPC) performance of a range of brands in cycling to see how they’re set up to take advantage of this summer’s biking boom.
This blog post is based on a presentation given at last week’s BrightonSEO entitled ‘Cool shit you can do with WordPress’ but to call it that I’ll have to check if we’re allowed to say it first.
Depending on what the headline above says right now will let you know the outcome of that little query.
I’ve covered WordPress extensively on the blog, taking new users through sign-up, the best responsive templates and SEO best practice, but there are always more tips and tricks to learn.
Patrick Hathaway is the SEO consultant at Hit Reach and he had these tips to offer on how you can make the most out of the WordPress platform.
Last week I managed to catch myself watching Digby Jones: The New Troubleshooter on BBC2 for the second time in the series.
One thing that really caught my attention with this show was the focus on an ‘old-school’ industry struggling to come to terms with modern technology.
This modern technology being the internet, something that I first used 20 years ago.
A lacklustre performance by advertisers at this year’s Super Bowl (29% year-over-year decrease) saw shares drop 24.2% from the previous quarter.
The average share rate (the percentage of people watching an ad who also shared it) dropped from 2.9% last quarter to 2.6%.
This is the first time that online shares of advertisements aired during the Super Bowl have decreased year-on-year.
These figures come from the latest Unruly Social Video Report, which analyses current social video advertising trends over the last three months.
There are obvious benefits to endless aisle technology, click and collect and a single view of stock. However, there are other in-store considerations when trying to improve customer service.
How to increase speed of service in-store? How to increase customer and staff satisfaction? Online and offline considerations continue to blur, as ecommerce benefits from bricks and mortar, and vice versa.
Stuart McMillan, Deputy Head of Ecommerce at Schuh, is a regular commenter on the Econsultancy blog and kindly showed a few of the Econsultancy team around Schuh’s Marble Arch store in London last week.
With in-store customer experience and flexible fulfillment increasingly on the agenda for retailers, here’s a round-up of what I learned from Schuh.
In February of this year Facebook turned 10, and what a wild ride it has taken all of us on.
Retailers, brands and celebrities (for the sake of this article these three groups will be referred to as ‘retailers’) quickly realised Facebook was the go to social media channel, stimulating brand buzz and developing direct consumer relationships. Facebook was the social golden child.
Now, these very same Retailers are accusing Facebook of intentionally reducing ‘organic reach’ purely for commercial gain.
While the retailers’ accusation of Facebook is convenient, there are two sides to this story.
If you are looking solely at Western countries for new mobile innovations, you are looking in the wrong place.
Asia is where to look for new and interesting insights into our mobile future.
China and India, in particular, with their large populations and geographies are seeing new mobile innovations take off. We can learn a lot from Asia, which is the largest mobile market in the world.
Here are just a few examples…
A different digital world is on the horizon: one of sensors and beacons ready to pinpoint our location to within a few inches.
And marketers are eager to take advantage of this new opportunity.
Only these last few inches of marketing aren’t about sales opportunities and customer conversions. They are about trust and relationships.
New research from Wisemetrics shows that while on average many pages have seen a drop in organic reach, the top 1% of pages still reached 82% of their fans, more than five times the average.
Marketers around the globe have been making dissatisfied rumblings about Facebook organic reach for a while now. The general consensus being: You’ve got to pay to play.
That doesn’t mean that we’ve got to pay Facebook though…
It has been said that, “great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events and small minds discuss people.” But any discussion about doing business in China cannot help but talk about people.
According to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) by the end of 2013 there were 618m internet users in China. This is around 46% of the population. 500m people use mobile devices to connect to the internet and 302m people are e-shoppers.
But I don’t want to focus on discussing people, although it is quite clear that is a barometer of business in China. I want to discuss some ideas as to how to connect with these people.
What ways can brands from outside China reach these people?
In this final part of the multimedia content strategy series, it’s time to think about how these concepts fit into our different content publishing platforms.
In the last two instalments of this series, I’ve talked about customer journey, big ideas, content formats, and size.
Now, in this final part, it’s time to think about how these concepts fit into our different content publishing platforms.
We need to consider where our different content pieces will be published, and how this effects our interaction with the customer journey.
The sheer size of the Chinese ecommerce market makes it an enticing challenge for many Western businesses.
And to give an idea of exactly why brands like Burberry, ASOS and Selfridges are hoping to expand East, I’ve rounded up some stats which reveal the scale of the opportunity for online retail in China.
This post gives a good foundation for any ecommerce professionals with an interest in the Chinese market, and in future posts I’ll take a look at the major players within the industry, including Alibaba Group, Tencent and Baidu.
Or for more information, read our posts looking at how to approach social marketing in China and 30+ interesting stats about mobile commerce in APAC…