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60% of businesses plan to increase marketing budgets in 2014 [infographic]

Marketers are more likely to be increasing their overall marketing budgets for the year ahead than at any time since the launch of our first Marketing Budgets Report during the height of the economic crisis. 

The Marketing Budgets Report 2014, published by Econsultancy and sponsored by Responsys, is based on a survey of more than 600 company and agency marketers, carried out in December 2013 and January 2014.

This infographic presents some of the key findings from the report…

Facebook: don’t Look Back in anger

It was on the day I published an article called Dissecting the ‘death of Facebook’, where I pulled together all the negatively spun reports on Facebook of late and tried to add some balance to the argument, that Facebook announced its revenue for 2013 as $7.9bn, an overall increase of 55% year-on-year.

Suddenly my measly defence of Facebook seemed a little bit pathetic.

Then just a few days later, without warning, these little video links started appearing on our news feeds: Facebook a Look Back. 62 second long videos of all of our personal histories as told through the eyes of Facebook. 

Facebook has used its ‘bigger than big’ data, accrued over ten years of existence, to create something completely unique and personalised for every single one of its user. Not just for the users in the UK either, worldwide.

That’s 757m daily active Facebook users worldwide, each receiving a minute-long, personalised love letter from Facebook. It’s an incredible achievement and a massive PR assualt directed at every single one of us. It seems the rumours of Facebook’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.

I talked to some experts today about what they thought of Facebook’s 10th anniversary present to its users, but first a little of my own experience.

How to use free wi-fi for social marketing and analytics

When it comes to wi-fi, customers expect free, fast and legally compliant access wherever they are, from retail outlets to bars, restaurants and leisure facilities. 

This is far from a new development, and our always-on society has created a strong international wi-fi market, which is expected to be worth more than $93 billion by 2018, according to a recent report by Markets and Markets.

That’s great news for the consumer, and for the wi-fi providers, but to date it has offered little in the way of value for the venues that provide it.

However, the balance is now beginning to be addressed through social wi-fi, which offers venues a range of advantages that can help to build profit and develop a loyal customer base. 

MENA ecommerce by the numbers

In 2013, 30m people were shopping online in MENA according to PayPal. This was an increase of 65% from 2011.

Saudi Arabia was the top buying country in a region of high average income per capita (e.g. more than $100k in Qatar).

But what of the rest of the region? How does it compare with the rest of the world and what sort of numbers are we talking about?

In this post I’ve rounded up some stats shared by the COO of Aramex, Iyad Kamal, at MetaPack’s Delivery Conference this week.

How are marketers coping with (not provided)?

69% of marketers claim that they focus on conversion rates and performance metrics when coping with their loss of Google keyword data.

This comes from the 2014 Industry Survey published by Moz.

By moving towards making all searches secure, Google has taken away most of the organic search-term data from its Analytics tool, thereby leaving the rather cryptic ‘(not provided)’ as the top keyword in the search terms driving traffic to your site.

10 advantages of selling on Ozon, Tmall and Allegro

There are many brands who have not considered selling on marketplaces like eBay and Amazon, let alone Ozon, Tmall and Allegro. 

But it’s an opportunity only the foolish would dismiss out of hand. For many brands it can bring in another big chunk of revenue if done well and a customised page on eBay for example, doesn’t necessarily devalue a brand’s image. 

BMW is one example of a company that successfully dipped its toe and then plunged into marketplaces. In fact, BMW used eBay before it had any of its own ecommerce functionality.

I attended the MetaPack Delivery Conference this week and heard from Al Gerrie of We Are Pentagon about the advantages of selling on marketplaces and what brands should look out for.

He also gave some detail on emerging marketplaces in growth areas such as Russia and China.

So what is there to know?

Facebook: 10 years to redefine 10 words

Facebook is 10. Every publisher on the internet is covering it because it’s important to all of us, even those that have drifted away from the platform recognise its astounding reach. 

At 1.2bn users (more than the global population of 1850) its audience dwarfs that of other social networks and its recent financial results bear that out with $2.59bn in revenue.

I wanted to look quickly at Facebook’s history but from a different angle than other blogs. Wordwise, I’m struck by how social media has enabled a seemingly constant and varied arpeggio of coinage.

The word of the year and new additions to the OED are spread faster than they ever were, via networks like Facebook and Twitter. 

So, I’m looking at 10 words that have been redefined by Facebook over 10 years. And to add some relevant content, I’ll include some trivia, too.

Seven useful Google tips for bloggers & publishers

Blogging ain’t easy, especially when you’re starting from scratch, but there are many tools available that can make your life easier and potentially help drive more traffic to your site than you expected.

First I’ll make one thing abundantly clear, and this is a caveat you’ll read on any respectable website regarding SEO, if there’s one overarching factor that you should always consider when producing content, it’s quality. 

Always ask yourself “is the content I’m uploading to the web useful, entertaining, informative, engaging or innovative?” If it isn’t at least one of those things then you’re never going to achieve any gains in traffic, audience growth or authority.

There are of course exceptions to the rule and it’s difficult sometimes to remain objective when it comes to certain seemingly low-quality websites. But then if these websites are successful, they’re obviously catering for a certain demand.

Of course if you’re also someone who spends all day creating animated unicorn GIFs then I take my hat off to you. As I said, there are always exceptions to the rule and objectivity is hard.

Anyway, no matter what you’re publishing there are some brilliant and relatively simple ways that Google can help your content be seen, be indexed quickly and keep you out of trouble.

The 10 most shared ads of Super Bowl 2014 are…

Scroll down to see the entire list, but first, here are the major stats.

According to Unruly’s Viral Video Chart, Budweiser’s ‘Puppy Love’ was the most shared ad of Super Bowl XLVIII with close to 1.4m shares so far. This makes it the sixth most shared Super Bowl ad of all time… so far.

The Anheuser–Busch InBev brand also took the second spot and has finally eclipsed Volkswagen as the most shared brand of all time. Although Volkswagen’s Star Wars themed ‘The Force’ still sits at number one in the top 20 most shared Super Bowl ads of all time chart.

This is the second year running that Budweiser has topped the table. Last year’s ‘Brotherhood’ advert is currently the third most shared Super Bowl ad of all time, with 2.8m shares. 1.5m of which it achieved by Super Bowl Monday.

The travel industry: airlines slow to adopt responsive design

The travel industry has experienced a great deal of upheaval in years characterised by swift change in customer habits and the impressive unwillingness of many companies to adapt.

To be fair, travel companies have come a long way in the past three to four years. Apps are now common place for airlines and some airports and travel websites are starting to adopt responsively designed websites.

In this post I’ll be taking a look at some recent studies into the mobile strategies of travel companies and airlines.

I’ll be pondering what the best approach is for these companies and whether in fact there’s no sense in avoiding apps or responsive websites, given their respective parts to play in the customer journey.

Paper: the future of Facebook?

Alongside record earnings figures, one of the big pieces of news to come out of Facebook’s recent Q4 earnings call was the launch of Paper, a new publishing app from its creative labs division. 

Paper itself is a fairly straightforward news-curation/publishing app, but its launch and recent comments from Mark Zuckerberg about further releases in the near future paint a fascinating picture of Facebook’s possible future, one which may be quite different from the ubiquitous social platform we’re all so familiar with.

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