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Forget the content marketing backlash, it’s still a valuable tactic

There has, somewhat predictably, been a backlash against the hype that has surrounded content marketing. 

However, though the backlash is understandable, this does not mean that content marketing has ceased to be useful, far from it. 

Doug Kessler explores the issue in this excellent post, and debunks several of the arguments against.

Here, I’ve put the question to several agency and client side marketers, as well as the Econsultancy research team.  

Key Christmas trends to keep in mind this season: stats

With higher-than-usual retail activity, an abundance of free time for many people and the popularity of tech-orientated gifts, Christmas is always an interesting time for digital trends. 

The Ecommerce section of our Internet Statistics Compendium includes the best freely available Christmas e-retail data from around the web as well as our own research, and now stretches back several years.

This gives users a good overview of how people are increasingly approaching their festive shopping across digital media and platforms, and helps us make some predictions about forthcoming Christmas behaviour for 2013.

14 places to look for blogging inspiration when writer’s block strikes

Blogging doesn’t come easy. A lot of effort goes into coming up with ideas each day and spinning them out into useful articles for our lovely readers.

Some days are certainly harder than others and everyone suffers from writer’s block every now and then.

To help other bloggers through those dark times, I’ve come up with 14 places to look for inspiration when you’ve got a blank page in front of you and a looming deadline.

There are undoubtedly other tricks of the trade that I’ve neglected to mention, so please share your own sources of inspiration in the comments.

Q&A: Confused.com on handling PPC in a competitive market

2013 has seen plenty of changes to paid search, mainly driven by Google. For a brand in a competitive market like insurance, little tweaks here and there matter. 

Changes include the addition of Google’s own comparison products to the SERPs, meaning less visibility for organic results, enhanced campaigns, and changes to the style of PPC ads. 

I’ve been asking Heledd Jones, head of search marketing at Confused.com (and an Econsultancy guest blogger), about the challenges presented by these changes, and her thoughts on how PPC will evolve in the next year.

What are the possibilities with online video ad creative?

Online video has always felt to me like one of those technologies where brands have varied massively in their commitment to innovate.

That was kind of understandable until the last couple of years, as YouTube and video streaming (NetFlix, NOW TV,4OD etc) are now so pervasive.

With brands committing to more online video advertising, it’s obvious the technology will be maturing. In effect, what’s possible on your website should now be possible in an online video ad.

As web viewers aren’t captive in the same way live TV viewers are (even they can go and make a cup of tea), advertisers have to get cuter at delivering changing and tailored ad content that is essentially fun or useful enough to be voluntarily engaged with. A tall order?

Well let’s look at what can be achieved? Here are a few examples, mostly taken from Innovid, who I chatted to last week.

Reinventing, or perhaps just finessing, retail for 2014

What do customers want in a multichannel experience and how will technology help deliver it in 2014?

Customers don’t always know what it is they want, but by looking at current habits, themes will undoubtedly emerge.

Walker Sands has recently surveyed 1,000 US consumers on the future of retail. The results are interesting and give some pointers to retailers hoping to stay on consumer trend for buying habits.

Here are the best bits:

2014: the mobile SEO timebomb

Over the last four months, Google has been ramping up its publicity of a more aggressive target for mobile site performance: sub one second page load times.

Enforcement of this aspiration comes from Google’s usual source: algorithmic rewards for sites achieving this goal. You just need to look at how industry commentary has exploded around site speed issues over the last couple of years to see the impact this strategy has had.

I fully expect to see this industry focus switch to mobile-specific commentary through 2014.

Let’s take a look at the evidence, and the SEO opportunity…

What is content marketing and why do you need it?

Some time between 2010 and 2011: “We should get a Twitter account!” bellows a CEO in a boardroom after reading the term repeatedly in a broadsheet newspaper over the weekend. 

“Everyone’s on Twitter, our customers are on Twitter, we should get a Twitter account, and we should Twit at customers and tell them how great we are. We don’t want to be behind the curve on this one. Not like we were when we didn’t have a website until last year,” continues the imaginary ruddy-faced executive as he pontificates to a room full of lap-dogs and sycophants. 

“Also we should be on Facebook… Also do people still use MySpace?” 

So the company immediately got a Twitter account, and a Facebook page and a [insert name of popular social media channel here] account and it pumped as many press releases, corporate slogans and nakedly brazen ‘buy-me’ marketing bilge down the channel as it possibly could, forgetting a number of key points.

  1. It’s a channel. Traffic can, and indeed should, move both ways.
  2. Nobody gives a damn what your company has to say.
  3. Your company will run out of things to say.

Twitter and TV: ignore the stats and focus on best practice

In this post, bear with me and you’ll get a couple of case studies and some best practice from brands using TV and promoted tweet tie-ups.

Before I give you the fun stuff, I want to say that best practice is all that matters. Ignore all the stats about engagement and sales uplift.

I don’t usually advocate ignoring stats, but as B2B marketing and service industries now pervade major cities of the developed world, we are awash with stats. And stats that claim to explain general concepts, such as generic increase in purchase intent after viewing a promoted tweet that references TV, are not helpful to you.

Yes, these stats succinctly explain the perceived benefits of advertising on Twitter, but like all data, it’s only that which directly pertains to your company that is of use.

There’s no point examining averaged trends when what you’re interested in is your business. Being blinded by amazing engagement stats will mean you don’t think properly about your campaigns. The last thing you want to do is drip out a poorly conceived set of promoted tweets and have faith they will deliver ROI.

The success of your marketing and advertising is dependent entirely upon detail; detail that’s way more granular than simply what channels you decide to advertise in.

How banks can improve finance management tools and apps

Consumers’ digital experiences, including banking, are becoming more and more visual. Within the retail banking sector much is still to be done.

Most importantly banks should not judge Personal Finance Management (PFM) tools as isolated investments: rather a piece of the puzzle to build a great overall digital customer experience. 

In this article I will talk about how PFM has developed within retail banking (from a customer perspective) over the years, how we see things evolving and what banks can learn from new players. 

Google’s Ad Rank update leads to improved performance of PPC ad extensions

A paid search algorithm update by Google has led to an improvement in the performance of PPC adverts that include an ad extension.

But overall the new AdWords Ad Rank update actually caused a slight decline in ad performance.

The update, which was announced back in October, altered the way that Google determines the order of paid search ads by adding in a third variable alongside the maximum bid and quality score.

This new variable is the expected impact of ad extensions and formats, and it has apparently had a notable impact on PPC results. So in effect, the use of ad extensions and formats can now influence ad position in the SERP.

The elements that are considered when determining the potential impact of extensions and ad formats include relevance, click-through rates, and the prominence of extensions and results on the SERP.

The results of the study are summarised below, but firstly here’s a run through of the ad extensions that Google takes into account.

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