How Curated Content Performance Beats Original Content

Having the original versus curated content debate? Here's research to help you. Advantages and disadvantages of original vs curated content are presented.

The post How Curated Content Performance Beats Original Content appeared first on Heidi Cohen.

What is online reputation management and should you use it?

“You’re getting a bad rep, young man. Smoking in the toilets. Bunking off early. Listening to rock and roll music. What are you rebelling against?”

“What have you got?” you reply as you kick-start your motorcycle and zoom off to an early death, leaving a trail of dust and alienated friends behind you.

You think you’re so cool, and you probably are, however your brand isn’t in the business of selling cool... Unless of course your business happens to sell air conditioning units or Ray Bans... Unfortunately your business sells bespoke handcrafted scratching posts for kittens, so that argument is moot.

You’re giving the wrong impression. 

And by ‘wrong’ I mean one that you didn’t want to give when your started out and continues to develop.

Reputation management is about creating a perception of your brand, one that you’re happy to cultivate and present to the general public and one that falls in line with your own goals.

Why is reputation management important?

Because a poor reputation can damage sales. 

Say your restaurant has a few bad online reviews from your early days. Things may have significantly improved since those apprehensive first steps but because those reviews happened to be widely read and shared, they linger near the search engine results page whenever someone Google searches your restaurant name.

A bad online reputation can stick like glue. 

A more extreme example is if you have an unpredictable chairman who offhandedly makes a comment that your products are “total crap”. You can then expect your brand to lose £122m and close 330 shops.

If you Google search for ‘Ratners’ right now, most of the results are for ‘crap-gate’.

Some companies are so massive that they’ll always be divisive. Even at Apple’s peak, there was always an enclave of people that outright detested the hype around each product launch and midnight queue.

Now Apple is defending itself against two major high-profile news stories surrounding the security of its iCloud and forcibly inflicting a new U2 album on the world.

Apple has enough good will in the bank to weather the storm and there are enough people out there who will never give up their iPhones (this writer included) thanks to previous form and the strength of its products.

Apple has this credit of goodwill because of its reputation management.

Can reputation be managed?

People will say bad things about your business no matter what you do. Dollar Shave Club has one of the most instantly likeable campaigns from the last few years, but if you read the comments on this content marketing strategy article you’ll see that it still has its detractors.

Sometimes trash-talk is unfair, sometimes it’s entirely justified. Unfortunately we don’t have a lie detector built into our brains so whenever we read anything negative about a brand we have no reason not to believe it.

All it takes is for one disgruntled customer to kick up a stink on Twitter and soon a storm will erupt around your poor customer service and end up trending for the remainder of the day and then end up on ruthlessly eviscerating round-ups of social media fails.

Reputation can be managed though. 

It’s all about how you plan your brand awareness and how you deal with the fallout when something goes wrong.

What can you do to manage reputation?

Some reputations can be damaged through poor customer service or poor products. Some company names can be tarnished because of their own poor working conditions or unethical practices.

If your brand is one of the above, then these are problems endemic to the business you’ve built. If you don’t want people to complain about your crappy products, make better ones. If you don’t want people to protest the opening of your new dirt-cheap high street fashion shop, then stop exploiting people.

For the rest of the brands out there trying to do good and providing a quality service or product, there are many practices you can undertake to manage your reputation.

Social media

The public face of your brand. Here is where your previously anonymous company, which has been pumping out dry-bones press releases for years, suddenly adopts a voice and personality. 

Your customers now have a channel that they can communicate with you on and you in turn can respond to them.

Giving customer service on social isn’t really an option anymore. You will be asked questions on it, and if you can answer those questions (and complaints) in a speedy, personal and helpful manner then you’ll be on to a winner.

@ChristopherRCLF Hi Christopher, our Tottenham branch is open 10-4 on Sunday. Thanks, Clare

— B&Q Help (@bandq_help) September 19, 2014

Social customer service is a massive subject so check out this best practice guide for further guidance.  

Of course social isn’t just about customer care, it’s about presenting your best possible side. The personable, helpful, entertaining and most of all engaging side, that people will connect with, share and foster a deeper loyalty with.

Don’t just communicate with the people who @mention you directly. It’s also vitally important to monitor social media for indirect mentions of your brand name. It’s a startling statistic that 31% of tweets containing company names don’t include their Twitter handle.

It’s naïve to expect every single customer that deals with your company to be 100% happy with their experience. As streamlined, well strategised or well trained your customer service teams are, there will always be human error.

The key is to be able to deal with unhappy customers as swiftly and as satisfactorily as possible.

Reviews

You can’t stop someone posting a bad review on your site or on TripAdvisor, nor should you. In fact the most important thing to do is allow customer reviews on your site in the first place.

User reviews increase conversion, they eliminate doubts other customers may have about your service or product, and customers are more likely to purchase from a site which has user reviews.

If you have negative reviews, don’t ignore them. Engage with the commenter and make amends. If the commenter doesn’t reply, well then at least the last word was yours.

If your site is flooded with bad reviews, well the bigger picture is that there’s clearly something wrong and you need to have a major rethink about your service.

Here’s Graham Charlton’s guide to why online reviews work so well.

Blogging

Running a blog can be a great way to maintain a positive brand perception. Much like your social media profile it shows your more human side. It can be a personal introduction to the personalities behind the brand, it can give insight into your operations or way of thinking, it can be entertaining, funny or helpful. 

The other bonus for doing this is that it provides regular content which you can publicise on social channels and also fills up search engine results pages with your own controlled content when a searcher types in your brand name.

Engage your community

Galvanise your fans. Make them a part of your brand. Thanks to YouTube, Vine, Instagram and other social video platforms it’s become incredibly easy to develop creative relationships with followers on social. 

Either partnering with a creator to make a video, or running a competition where you ask users to submit their own videos, which you will then publicise on your channels, will help drive loyalty, create brand ambassadors and prove how community focused you are.

LEGO has a fantastic commitment to community and this even extends to giving its fans the chance to design and make decisions on the sets it produces.

Here are some best practice tips on how to best use Vine and Instagram for brands.

Is it ethical?

It depends on how you’re using it. The methods above are totally above board and are examples of good brand management. However they are also subject to abuse. 

Say the SERPS for your brand name are filled with negative reviews. Running a campaign where you flood the SERP with perfectly search engine optimised blog posts and knocking the negative reviews off the page makes perfect business sense.

However you are directly tricking future customers into your using your product, manipulating the SERPs artificially and putting off the inevitable - the need for you to actually solve the problems of your business rather than cover up the holes with a bit of masking tape.

Some businesses can pay reviewers to leave positive reviews on sites where the negative ones are becoming detrimental to the business. Again, this leads to the same problem as above.

Generally speaking, customers can see right through fake positive reviews, especially if they follow a few terrible ones. This does absolutely nothing for your own integrity and people will end up not trusting you.

Unethical reputation management will ultimately do you more harm than good.

Further reading for beginners

During my first year at Econsultancy I’ve been making a point of writing beginner’s guides to any new terms or phrases I find particularly baffling, or that I might suspect other people may find baffling too. 

The following related articles should help clear up a few things...

• Content marketing 
• Conversion rate optimisation 
• Growth hacking
• Scarcity marketing

How time tracking can improve productivity and morale

Time tracking is a fact of agency life. You do some work, you record your time. This is logical because you’re charging by the hour: tot up the hours done at the end of the month and you can send an invoice.

But time tracking is something that in-house marketers seem to have never got on with. Surely the only point of doing it is for management to monitor how long your tea breaks take?

If they introduce time tracking, what will the next step be? Rationing of biscuits? A maximum number of loo breaks? 

This idea misses something very important: for some activities tracking time is the only way of measuring and improving return on investment.

And at the end of the day, that’s what your boss (and his boss) care about.

For more on this topic, read our post on the best time to review a project.

What’s the ROI of your blog? Only time tracking can tell you

According to Lord Kelvin:

If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it

Everyone blogs nowadays. It’s a standard piece of advice that even managers in large organisations are happy to take and dish out.

Want to improve your online visibility? Easy, start a blog. Contribute to it regularly, get the articles out there on social media, do a bit of PR and soon you’ll be diving into piles of cash like Scrooge McDuck.

That advice is all well and good, but after months of hard graft how do you know that your blog is a success? Well, there’s only one way to prove the success of a medium and that’s by answering this question:

Did this make us more profit than any other medium we could have used?

Profit, of course, means analysing both revenue and cost. You can probably look at your web analytics software to find the revenue side of the equation, but that’s just the vanity metric.

To find the value of the actionable metric you also need to work out cost. But how can you work that out? You’re not paying a marketing agency for their expertise or a publisher for their space, so what’s the cost of maintaining a blog?

There are some people who would say it’s free because you haven’t paid anybody for the exposure. But this is wrong.

For every minute somebody spends writing a blog post they could have been working with other media. Designing an ad, say, or cold calling prospects.

They were paid their salary for each one of those minutes spent researching, brainstorming, writing, and publishing their blog posts.

Which means that knowing how long all of those activities took is the only way to measure the cost of your blog, and so how profitable it is. And the only way of measuring how long blogging takes is by tracking time.

Of course blogging isn’t the only activity that has time as its main cost element. The main cost of community management is time. The same for speaking at a conference or putting together a whitepaper.

Even with traditional advertising you need to add a time to figure out the true cost of a campaign - your team’s wages were being paid during every meeting they sat in. 

So the only way you can tell your boss that your blog - or ad campaign, or conference, or any other marketing activity -  is truly profitable is by tracking time. And which is more powerful for your boss to hear: 'more marketing budget should hopefully make us more money' or 'expanding the marketing budget will make us more profitable, and this is how'?

Tracking time improves efficiency

Let’s say your blog is profitable (you know this because you’ve started tracking the time spent on it). Bosses, of course, are never happy with just being profitable. They always want to know how something can be more profitable.

How does that work with a blog? You could ask for extra budget for guest blogging elsewhere or for a link building campaign, but extra spend is always risky. The easiest way to increase profit is usually to become more efficient. 

Let’s say you look at your time tracker for the past few months and notice it takes you four hours to write a blog post from start to finish.

Using this knowledge you can push yourself over the next few weeks to bring that average down to three and a half, then three. You reduce your costs - without reducing quality of course - and so increase your profit.

Another example could be improving meetings. We all feel like we spend too long in meetings and have all resolved at some point to reduce that time. But how long is 'long enough' for a regular meeting?

Your answer to that question might be very different to mine. But if you track time you can set a measurable goal:

Our weekly catch-up meeting with the sales team takes an hour. Let’s cut that down to 30 minutes. There are four of us there, so that will save us 104 man hours every year.

Agencies use lessons from tracking time to improve efficiency in all sorts of ways, from cutting down the length of meetings to getting specialist training that reduces skills gaps. In-house marketers could start learning those same lessons in exactly the same way.

Time tracking helps you remove bottlenecks

We’re all busy people, but some people seem to work longer hours than others. It might be that they’re extra-dedicated, but it might be that they have too much work.

It’s very important for a manager to know the difference, because one behaviour points to a high-performing team member but the other is a sign of low morale in the months to come. So how do you tell the difference? 

If you track how people spend their time and analyse the patterns in that data you can find out whether they’re in the office until 8pm because they want to be, or because they feel they need to be. Then you can take action to help their training or to discuss their workload.

Either way, tracking your team’s time gives you the data you need to improve their performance and their happiness.

You can also use that data to identify bottlenecks in your projects, and so improve your team’s performance as a whole. This is part of what makes time tracking great for improving a team’s efficiency.

It doesn’t stop there!

I think that being able to track ROI on an aspect of your marketing that other people really struggle to provide value on, improving your efficiency, and removing bottlenecks in your team’s work is reason enough to start tracking your time.

But there are all sorts of other benefits as well:

• Agencies use time tracking to inform their estimates. If you start tracking yours then like them you will be better able to set clients’ (AKA your boss’s) expectations about deadlines.
• Ever been told off for taking too long on a project when you know it’s because of scope creep, but been unable to prove it? If you track the time spent on each task you’ll be able to back up your case.
• Want to improve your own productivity? Analyse your own working week in the same way as suggested for your blog and you might be surprised at where you can save time - and exactly how much.

Without numbers, you can’t set goals

Both measuring ROI and improving your efficiency are great examples of setting goals that make a real difference to your business.

In both cases, they will help your team to get better and to shine in the eyes of the people you report to. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in a large corporation or a small business, these are the kinds of actions that will help cement your reputation.

And if you’re using the data you get from time tracking to help your team members become more efficient you’ll also end up with a happier team. Tracking your time can also help you reach your personal goals in productivity, efficiency, and how your boss perceives your work.

But if you don’t track your time accurately, these kinds of improvements will be beyond your reach. As the quote at the start of this post says, if you don’t measure it you can’t improve it.

Which means that instead of being a management tool for weeding out people who aren’t working as hard as some bloke from HR thinks they should, time trackers might just be the best tool available for helping your team and making them happier.

For more on agency life, read our post on how the agency model is changing or download the Top 100 Agencies Report.

SEO: why more content isn't always the answer

Content is very important for SEO, but this should also come with caveats, as simply creating more and more isn't always the answer. 

Following on from yesterday's post on sub-domain conflicts, here I'll look at a few examples where brands' content-led pages are harming their search rankings.

Content and sub-domain conflicts

Brands will often house their news and other content on sub-domains. This is not necessarily a bad idea, but it needs to be implemented with the overall search strategy in mind. 

For example, Barclays has an Ask Barclays section which is heavy on content, answering various customer questions. 

This is no bad idea in itself, and clearly has its uses for the site's visitors, but it is also harming Barclays' search rankings, as this page often ranks more highly than other pages on the site. 

The chart below shows this conflict between 'Ask Barclays' and the main homepage for the term 'switch banks', a valuable one to own on Google. 

The homepage was ranking on the top two pages of Google between January and May this year, after this the Ask Barclays pages are forcing it out of the SERPs for much of the time. 

(Click image for larger version)

 

In another example, from Morrisons, we can see that its content-led sub domain Your Morrisons isn't necessarily helping here. 

For such a broad term, I think Morrisons would prefer to show visitors its homepage, and it has solved this part of the problem at least, since traffic to your.morrisons.com redirects to morrisons.com. 

However, this doesn't necessarily solve the SEO issue, and we can see that this sub-domain conflict is affecting the homepage's rankings for the term. 

(Click image for larger version)

EE

If you were EE, which page would you want to rank for 'apple iphone'? The main shop page or the help section? 

The shop page seems to have been battling with its help pages for search rankings over the last eight months, though it does rally just in time for the new iPhone launch. 

 

However, as I write this post, EE is down on page three of Google for the term, with all of its rivals ranking higher. So it has to spend money on PPC for visibility: 

Monarch

It's a similar story for budget airline Monarch, with its blog content seemingly affecting search rankings. 

Looking at the chart, there's a lot going on here. The main site did edge into page one for the term 'sharm el-sheikh city breaks' for a while but has ended up on page six of Google. This is nowhere for all but the most determined searcher. 

In conclusion...

In all of these examples, the decision to create more content was seemingly taken without considering the effects it may have on search rankings. 

This has led to sites creating sub-domains which cannibalise the search rankings of other pages which are more likely to convert visitors. 

This doesn't mean that sites shouldn't create more content. As Editor of a blog which creates value for the business, I can see that there are more pros than cons, if done well. 

However, simply creating more content without fitting it into an overall strategy will not produce the intended benefits.

Google is only going to index one page per search term from any site, so it's important to decide which page you'd like to rank, and provide clear signals to Google to this effect. 

We do this by using internal links and having hub or dedicated pages for the terms we target and using internal links to send this message to Google. 

For example, if we rank for 'content marketing guide' we want to send searchers to a relevant report on the topic, or perthaps to a page showing available training courses.

Other times, if we have no report or training which matches, we'll try to ensure that the most useful blog post ranks for the term. The key is to have a coordinated strategy so that different teams and departments are not competing for the same search rankings. 

Start Me Up! Acquire: starting a new affiliate business

In our regular Start Me Up feature we rarely feature new agency-side ventures.

However, with Acquire we're making an exception and that's because the affiliate management company's founder is Tom Wright, 2013 winner of The Digitals Rising Star award.

We caught up to ask him what it's like to start your own affiliate business.

In one sentence, what is your product/service?

Acquire is a boutique affiliate management business.

What problem(s) does it solve?

The affiliate marketing industry is experiencing exponential year-on-year growth, with more and more publishers, technologies and opportunities entering the arena every week.

For any business trading online, affiliate marketing’s increasing complexity commands greater attention, understanding and application if they are to maximise their return from this lucrative channel. 

Acquire has been set up as a boutique affiliate management business to lend unwavering focus to the affiliate channel on behalf of an advertiser.

The infrastructure of affiliate marketing is largely automated through the affiliate network, which has resulted in a noticeable complacency among existing agencies to rely on this automation as the complete service, becoming reactive instead of proactive and being just another questionable layer in the supply chain.

Just because this format exists does not mean it’s good enough. So when we started to conceptualise Acquire, not only were we faced with modernising the way affiliate programs are managed to benefit from the industry’s growth, we were also faced with reaffirming the value of the affiliate management agency within the performance marketing stack. 

For us it was a clear decision to make Acquire a boutique style business. In order to deliver on what we defined as the blueprints of superb service, we would need to ensure every client we worked with received the time required to deliver that service. This is why we will only be working with between four to six clients (depending on size) whilst it’s just Tom and I.

If and when we want to grow, we'll look first to bring on board a specialist, who in turn brings extra capacity. We are positioned as a premium business following on from our mission to deliver outstanding work and a service head and shoulders above our competitors.

We don’t want our clients to be just another name on a long list that feel overpromised and under delivered. We believe the agency came into existence to harbour specialists, experience, relationships and knowledge – with this comes a responsibility to keep everyone on their toes and feeling challenged. We believe a boutique format honours this responsibility and allows for great work to flourish.

Tom Wright and Tom Holland, founders of Acquire.

What are your immediate goals?

Business wise, we’re currently focusing on establishing relationships with our first clients who will form our founding client base. Service wise, we’re knitting together all available opportunities from publishers, tech partners and networks to spot gaps and allow us to assist in the development of the landscape. 

What were the biggest challenges involved in building the tech or your team?

I think the hardest part was being brave enough to remain true to our original vision and challenge the existing agency model that has a functioning track record. We’ve made it to launch day true to our original mission statement, with everything materialising in alignment to our vision.

As a service-based business, it will be immediately noticeable if we don’t follow through on our promises, this commitment to quality will ensure a high standard of service. 

How will the company make money?

We charge our clients a fixed monthly management fee with a commission tied to the performance of the program. 

Who is in your team?

For now it’s the tale of two Toms. Tom Wright, a previous director at GDM Digital, and Tom Holland, previous publisher manager at Affiliate Window. 

Where would you like to be in one, three and five years’ time?

One year: We’d like to have our first account director and potentially an additional specialist working on four to six accounts. Three years: we aim to have our peak structure of one AD, three specialists, Tom and myself working on between eight to 12 accounts.

By our fifth year we'll look to expand our services to cater for our clients' international efforts. The digital landscape, let alone the affiliate space, moves rapidly, so it’s hard to see where the industry will be, let alone Acquire.

I think the key thing to remember is that we’re building the business to adapt and unfold as the industry does, keeping our service current and valuable.

Other than your own, what are your favourite websites / apps / tools?

I love Elf Yourself. Shamelessly.

The Venn Diagram of Multichannel Marketing Channels

If there’s one thing I’ve learned this year it is this: share a vaguely useful colourful chart on social media channels, and your ship will come in.

With that in mind, I have created yet another visualisation, this time dedicated to multichannel marketing. 

There are so many different ways of reaching customers these days, and I wanted to provide a really straightforward overview of some of the most important routes to market. 

So without further ado, here’s the chart. Click on the image to see a bigger version...

A few brief notes

• I’ve probably forgotten to include some incredibly obvious marketing channel. Be sure to let me know when you spot it!
• For the purposes of clarity I have taken a wide-angled view. ‘Websites’ is a catch-all word that covers a lot of owned media, and perhaps a bunch of earned too. 'Stores' might be relevant for retailers, but not for other offline businesses ('Offices'). Also, my focus is on channels / platforms, as opposed to marketing techniques (e.g. 'behavioural').
• If in doubt I will have placed a channel in what I consider to be the most suitable area, even if it could live elsewhere. Yes, PR can generate leads, but it mainly aims to raise awareness and positiviely shift consumer perceptions. 
• Offline lives at the top, and online is at the bottom. Don’t read anything into that – it’s just the way I poured my thoughts onto the page. That said, offline advertising spend is still many times larger than online... let's assume that it still works.
• While I’m on the subject of measurement: it isn’t always easy, especially in an offline world. The most difficult area is the offline / brand side (TV, print, radio, outdoor). It takes time, it requires the dark art of extrapolation, and it isn’t cheap. By contrast, the online / sales side is much more straightforward, much quicker, and – for that matter – much more accurate. I was going to illustrate this on the diagram, but it looked messy, so I didn't. 
• Moving on to data, the offline / brand side does not normally bother with too much targeting, whereas the online / sales side relies on data to drive results. As TV evolves this should change, but for now there’s still a great deal of shotgun marketing going on. This does not imply that retargeting is flawless… it isn’t.
• Note that mobile lives slap bang in the middle of everything. I firmly believe that mobile is the glue that binds online and offline channels together, and it is also the most likely solution to our measurement headaches, should anybody want to solve the problem. I've also thrown 'Content' in there, as it is a channel in its own right.
• Some fonts are bigger than others. Largely this is to do with space constraints, and to separate one channel from another, though there is some semblance of meaning. Visual designers can give me a good thrashing in due course.   

Anyway, I hope this proves useful as a top-down view of what is an increasingly complex multichannel marketing landscape. My colleague Ben suggested that in future it may look like a big grey circle, and he's probably right (though perhaps the colour will be tie-dye, or something less dull). 

If you have feedback then do leave a comment below, or otherwise send word via Twitter. I'll do another iteration at some point. Probably.

Digital Marketing – What Are The Top Goals And Challenges?

Last week I attended the ExactTarget Connections conference with nearly 10,000 other digital marketers. And all of us were looking to find out the best way to reach and convert new customers. Just ahead of the conference, MarketingCharts.com previewed this research from ExactTarget, conducted by Forrester and uncovered that “meeting the expectations of the always-connected customer” was the biggest challenge. This was reported as the number one challenge by 15% of the digital marketers surveyed. The second biggest challenge was “executing consistent digital campaigns that drive business outcomes.” This was reported by 14% of the digital marketers as the top [...]

The post Digital Marketing – What Are The Top Goals And Challenges? appeared first on B2B Marketing Insider.

Facebook Atlas: what you need to know

Here's a brief introduction to Atlas by Facebook, the network's new ad platform of sorts.

Facebook was already selling ads in other apps via its Audience Network, which has been in beta since April 2014.

This Audience Network allows advertisers to promote their apps in other apps using banner, interstitial or native units and all the targeting data Facebook can stump up.

But now, with Atlas, Facebook is extending this to websites, too. All that Facebook data will be used to sell ads outside of the network and these will be seen by Facebook users. The idea is that this data will increase the effectiveness of ads by allowing greater tracking of users. 

In a blog post entitled ‘Meet the new Atlas’ it’s clear that Atlas is promoting itself as the network that allows advertisers to get round the cookie tracking problem that mobile brings.

In the words of its head, Erik Johnson:

People spend more time on more devices than ever before. This shift in consumer behavior has had a profound impact on a consumer’s path to purchase, both online and in stores. And today’s technology for ad serving and measurement – cookies – are flawed when used alone. Cookies don’t work on mobile, are becoming less accurate in demographic targeting and can’t easily or accurately measure the customer purchase funnel across browsers and devices or into the offline world.

People-based marketing solves these problems.

So although the platform isn’t mobile only, a lot of its power comes from its ability to target at a people level, on mobile or desktop.

Logging into Facebook on mobile will register/identify that device and allow ads to be served when other apps request one. The data Facebook has about its users can also allow for the most appropriate ad to be served, much like their in-network ads. The Omnicom Group has already jumped on board. 

Targeting, serving and measuring across devices is the aim and the selling point of Atlas, with Facebook's own photo-sharing service set to be included, too.

Facebook users’ identity will remain anonymous to advertisers and publishers but this probably won’t allay the fears of some users as to how much of their data is shared.

Despite the inevitable grumbles about privacy, if the platform is as successful as expected (given the increase in mobile spend) Atlas could see Facebook increase its share of mobile ad revenue, currently estimated at around 18%, and narrow the gap to Google (at around 50%).

Looking at data from Econsultancy's Cross-Channel Marketing Report, produced with Oracle, around 75% of companies surveyed indicated that they have some sort of strategy in place in 2014 for integrating mobile into broader marketing campaigns, an increase of 16% since 2013. This surely indicates growth in mobile spend is continuing.

A Mary Meeker chart comparing time spent with media and money spent on advertising also hints at growth to come. Below the chart is recreated with UK data. Of total time spent with media, mobile represents 20%, yet only 7% of ad spend. Converted into GBP, that’s a £1.9bn gap.

For more information see Econsultancy's report, The New Mobile Display Ecosystem.

How First Direct handles social customer service

It matters little whether you’re a shoe retailer or an online bank, if your brand operates a social channel, consumers will want to talk to you on it.

As I discovered in last week’s investigation into how 20 top UK retailers handle social customer service, the most successful brands are the ones that are not only quick to respond, but also genuinely helpful and clearly written with personality.

This is all well and good in retail, where perhaps it’s more acceptable to adopt a more relaxed, fun tone of voice, but how difficult is it for a financial services brand to not only maintain an efficient customer service channel that fully complies with banking regulations that’s also human?

Today I talked to senior communications manager Amanda Brown at First Direct to gain some insight into how the online and telephone based bank handles customers on social. 

Afterwards check out my own investigation into how 16 retail banks handle social customer care.

Can you tell us what you feel are the benefits of providing social customer service? 

One of the key benefits has to be that it offers customers a quick and easy way to have their questions and issues answered. On most occasions a query can be answered with no need to call or log onto internet banking to send a secure message. The majority of tweets received are answered in less than 15 minutes, 24 hours a day. 

@imstilllookin It's always nice to get though to a human instead of a robot! Thanks Graham, have a great day ^DR

— first direct help (@firstdirecthelp) September 26, 2014

Do you think customer care should extend across all social channels? 

Personally no because an organization would need to ensure that they can explore a conversation with a person within a social space, not all sites such as snap chat would permit this. 

Do you think customer service teams need specific training on how to deliver customer care on social? Do you think the same team should handle all enquiries regardless of channel? 

Training is vital for anyone handling queries via social media not only to ensure consistency in the service being provided but also consistency in brand tone so a customer know they're talking to first direct whether they're calling us on the phone or contacting the bank in social channels. 

It's essential that responding teams are passionate about giving customers a great experience every time they contact you however, there are different skills associated with responding in different channels so our teams currently don't handle calls and digital channels at the same time. 

@ShadeyAcres Sorry you weren't put through to the right team but glad he was helpful anyway! Did you get everything sorted on the call? ^NB

— first direct help (@firstdirecthelp) September 24, 2014

At first direct do you have an optimum time for responding? Is there a certain tone of voice, or adherence to personalisation that your team is required to adopt? 

We always put quality over quantity and promote this across the team and so don't have a target to respond to a tweet. We do however expect that every tweet to be handled on average within 15 minutes and on most occasions the average response time is 10 minutes. 

The responding team all adhere to our brand guidelines, this ensures that the team responds and represents the brand for what we stand for. Just like a telephone call we love to build rapport with our customers and show our human side. 

.@LittleFrill Why thanks. Wait, you did mean us, right? Is… is there somebody else?

— first direct (@firstdirect) September 25, 2014

How do you handle more sensitive enquiries (such as ones where account details and security info is needed)? Do you find that customers mind being moved to a different channel for this?

When we have to speak to a customer about more sensitive topics we take them offline and ask them to send us via email their name and postcode so that we can locate them on our systems and call them back. Our Bio on twitter states that we will never ask for any bank details and may only ask for name and postcode, this manages expectations from the outset. 

We do find that the majority of customers understand why we need to take them offline and are happy to be called by us. We find this is well received mainly because we explain our reasons for doing so. 

@firstdirecthelp ok thank you

— Steve (@yogurtspy) September 23, 2014

We make it clear that the same person who has tweeted them is the same person who will call them back, we ensure that it is clear we are taking ownership for the query through to resolution which helps the transition from twitter to telephone.   

@VickyGooden Hi Vicky, of course. I'll keep an eye out for your email and confirm once received. ^VB

— first direct help (@firstdirecthelp) September 22, 2014

Do you have any best practice tips for other companies wishing to improve their social customer service?

We have found that a quick response with a genuine human approach to help and service is the best way to help. We have built a strong service reputation, which means pulling out all of the stops to help our customers.

Training is key; we spend lots of time with our team ensuring they are confident to handle any queries. We have seen great results from training provided. Investing this time pays dividends to the service our customers receive.

Taking ownership is also good practice, if we receive a query that we are not able to easily resolve we will assign this to one person who will see this through to resolution.

Here at first direct we have a “no machines” approach, social customer service is no different. We do not copy and paste any content for our tweets and we make sure that all of our replies are bespoke to a customer query. Treating every tweet with a human touch, genuine warmth and showing that we care is key to the success of our resolution.  

@gravitywinner69 We pride ourselves on it Augustus! ^BA

— first direct help (@firstdirecthelp) September 24, 2014

For more insight, find out what social customer service is really worth in statistics.

How conflicts between sub-domains can harm your search rankings

Brands have sub-domains for a variety of reasons - to separate their sites for different audiences, to split their offerings, and so on. 

However, this can lead to conflict between the main and sub-domains if this strategy is not applied properly. 

Before Google ended clustering in search results, this may well have worked well for brands, allowing them greater visibility in search results. 

In this post, I'll show these sub-domain conflicts are affecting Ladbrokes, Coral, Oasis, ASOS and Barclay's. 

Sub-domains and gambling sites

Several gambling brands have sub-domains for their various products. In this case, Ladbrokes has sub-domains for casino, sports betting and poker. 

However, these different domains (and departments) seem to be competing against each other for search rankings. 

This has harmed Ladbrokes' search positions, as the chart shows. Having ranked on the first page for the first few months of the year, it's rankings have fluctuated and now it's on page three for 'poker bet'. 

(Click image for larger version)

We see something similar on this chart, for the keyword 'place bet'.

It's a very broad phrase, and could therefore be relevant to several of Ladbrokes' sub-domains. This chart shows six sub-domains competing for the term. 

As you can see, they all can't rank at once, so they're almost taking turns to be the Ladbrokes URL returned for that search. 

This is no good for any of them, and Ladbrokes needs to decide which page it wants to rank for that phrase. 

(Click image for larger version)

 

Here for 'horse racing newbury' Coral's news pages are competing with its betting pages for the term. 

Presumably, Coral would rather direct search traffic to a page where they can bet straight away, rather than news articles. 

(Click image for larger version)

It's the same for 'Goodwood betting', a very valuable term to rank for. 

Here, conflict between the homepage and news pages means that rankings for the term have fluctuated wildly. 

Indeed, the news pages seem to have been more popular with Google, the reverse of what Coral would want.

For the Glorious Goodwood meeting at the end of July, which is when Google searches for this term peak every year, the news site was the highest ranking of Coral's pages. A missed opportunity. 

(Click image for larger version)

Again, we have the news site competing with the betting pages for the term 'Chelsea bet'. 

(Click image for larger version)

For Ladbrokes and Coral, these conflicts between sub-domains are harming search rankings for some very valuable keywords, which indicate an intent to purchase on the part of the searcher. 

A look at the keyword estimates from Google's AdWords Planner shows the value of these terms: 

Page one is the place to be to pick up this traffic, so Ladbrokes and Coral will be missing out by lingering on pages two and below for terms they are capable of ranking for. 

This lack of organic visibility may well be the reason that Ladbrokes is paying for PPC ads on most of the above terms, while Coral is also there for 'chelsea bet'. 

At £26 a click, Ladbrokes and Coral's sub-domain conflicts are costing the companies in terms of PPC spend and missed organic leads. 

Banking sites

Switch banks is a valuable term, £5 upwards according to Google. 

The chart below shows the conflict between 'Ask Barclays', its Q&A pages, and the main homepage for the term. 

As we can see, the homepage was happily ranking on the top two pages of Google between January and May this year. 

After this, the Ask Barclays pages are playing havoc with the homepage's search positions, forcing it out of the SERPs most of the time, and ranking much lower itself. 

I'm not sure what happened on May 1. Perhaps Barclays launched 'Ask Barclays' or placed it on that sub-domain.

Whatever the reason, though the content may be useful, it hasn't helped the bank's broader SEO strategy. 

(Click image for larger version)

 

In this example, Barclays' online banking start page is interfering with the homepage's rankings for the term 'banking'. 

(Click image for larger version)

Sub-domain conflicts from fashion sites

Here, the ASOS marketplace site seems to be outdoing the main site for 'wool cardigan' and the overall effect seems to be that both are brought down the rankings for the term. 

Having started out at 16 in Google, ASOS now ranks at 56 for this term. Essentially, only one site can rank for the term, so ASOS needs to decide which one is more important. 

(Click image for larger version)

 

Here, it seems to be a tag page which is interfering with Oasis' rankings for 'red cardigan' 

It's not a page the company would want to lead searchers to. Though the homepage would be better than this, Oasis would surely want to rank for a product or category page instead.  

(Click image for larger version)

So how do sites resolve these sub-domain conflicts? 

The answers are varied, and will depend on business goals.

For example, Ladbrokes may have different betting sub-domains as this helps it to measure the ROI for each department, while Coral has launched a news site, which is great from a content marketing perspective, but it hasn't considered the SEO effects.  

According to Sam Silverwood-Cope from PI-Datametrics:

There's lots of different types of sub-domain conflict here and ultimately it is the same as internal cannibalisation. It's down to appropriate sign posting, snippet content, theming, internal linking, communication between departments and having a coordinated strategy. If you walked into a shop and saw that "womenswear" was on the 1st floor and on the 5th floor, the shopper would be confused. Plus one of those areas would get more custom than the other. This is the same with a site and how Google responds to it. 

It also seems a relatively naive tactic for separate sub-domains to constantly attempt to perform for the same search term as a different department, eg "Poker" without at anytime thinking "maybe we should consolidate our efforts?". If sites want their audiences to see their different departments, then why not have easy access between folders? If they don't then perhaps the companies should have different URLs, with unique content and theming. 

There is a common theme here, and it's that sites can only rank on Google for one landing page per term.

They therefore need to decide which landing page is more valuable to them, and provide clear indications to Google to implement this. 

How 16 retail banks handle social customer service

Last week I conducted an investigation into how 20 top UK retailers handle social customer service. It was a fascinating insight into the world of Twitter customer care and revealed just how a consumer’s experience can vary from brand to brand.

This week I’m turning my attention to retail banking. 

Earlier today I interviewed First Direct’s senior communications manager Amanda Brown and learnt some best practice tips as well as guidance on what to expect from aiming a Twitter enquiry towards a bank.

Will I experience the same level of personality as I did with non-banking retail brands? Will I have to be taken to a more secure channel? Will the banking industry just be too busy to answer my question?

Let’s find out…

Quick, helpful and personal

Which of the banks responded within 15 minutes, answered my query satisfactorily and added a personal touch?

HSBC – 3 minutes

@Popdinuk Hi Christopher. It can depend on the amount and type of transfer. If sent by Faster Payments it would usually be 2-4 hours. ^BE

— HSBC UK Help (@HSBC_UK_Help) September 26, 2014

TSB – 4 minutes

@Popdinuk Hi I’m MM. If you request a Faster Payment it will normally credit the beneficiary account within 2 hours.

— TSB (@TSB) September 26, 2014

Nationwide – 5 minutes 

Really quick response, although if I’m being really picky it’s not as personable as the other examples here.

@Popdinuk Faster payment is sent almost immediately, but up to 2 hours Amie

— Nationwide UK (@AskNationwide) September 26, 2014

M&S Bank - 5 minutes

M&S answered me promptly and asked me what type of account I was referring to, as I had forgotten the information in the original tweet. 

@Popdinuk Hello Christopher, are you transferring from a Natwest bank account to an M&S Credit Card account? ^MB

— M&S Bank Help (@mandsbankhelp) September 26, 2014

@Popdinuk Funds should clear within two hours by Faster Payments. Though you may need to check with Natwest on their timescales. ^MB

— M&S Bank Help (@mandsbankhelp) September 26, 2014

Virgin Money – 9 minutes

@Popdinuk Hi Christopher, with faster payments it normally only takes 2 hours, but it can be up to close of business next working day. ^KB

— Ask Virgin Money (@AskVirginMoney) September 26, 2014

First Direct – 12 minutes

@Popdinuk Hi Christopher, it it's sent to us via faster payments the funds would normally be in your account within 2 hours ^DR

— first direct help (@firstdirecthelp) September 26, 2014

NatWest – 12 minutes

@Popdinuk Hi, you should find that the payment would credit almost immediately and always the same day. AC

— NatWest Help (@NatWest_Help) September 26, 2014

Co-operative Bank – 16 minutes

I’m including Co-operative here because it was only one minute over my own benchmark and it was helpful and friendly enough.

@popdinuk Hi, usually 2 hours as a faster payment but could take up to the end of the next working day at the maximum. Thanks - Lee

— Co-operative Bank (@CoopBankUK_help) September 26, 2014

Under an hour and spookily similar

These all came in under an hour, which is about the maximum time that I would consider good customer service on Twitter. Do you notice something familiar between these tweets?

Halifax – 41 minutes

@Popdinuk Hi, I'm GW. As you'll be making the payment from Natwest to ourselves, you'd be best to check with them for timescales.

— Halifax (@AskHalifaxBank) September 26, 2014

Lloyds – 44 minutes

@Popdinuk Hi, I'm LB. Usually the money will credit within 2 hours, but you should allow up to the close of business the next working day.

— Lloyds Bank (@AskLloydsBank) September 26, 2014

Bank of Scotland – 44 minutes

@Popdinuk Hi, I'm LB. The payment can credit within 2 hours, but you should allow up to the close of business the next working day.

— Bank of Scotland (@AskBankOfScot) September 26, 2014

All roughly sent the same time. All written in the same format. Two of them written by ‘LB’. Is it possible Halifax, Lloyds Bank and Bank of Scotland are using the same customer service team?

Bottom of the league

Here’s a round-up of the banks that could do better.

Barclays – 1 hour and 2 minutes

Just slipped over the one hour window, but full marks for personalisation and helpfulness nonetheless.

@Popdinuk Hi Christopher, it can depend on the method of payment you've chosen. It should be the same working day via faster payments. ^KS

— Barclays UK (@BarclaysOnline) September 26, 2014

Citi – 1 hour 24 minutes

I love the enthusiasm here, but unfortunately it looks like Citi doesn’t operate a Twitter customer help channel for UK customers and therefore I have to call a helpline.

@Popdinuk Great question! Are you sending the wire from a US Citibank account? ^AH

— Citi (@AskCiti) September 26, 2014

@Popdinuk Please call 0800 00 56 00 if you have an existing Citibank UK account to check their wire transfer schedules. ^AH

— Citi (@AskCiti) September 26, 2014

Santander – 5 minutes

One of the quickest here, but with other banks being able to offer me this information this tweet seemed fairly unhelpful. Perhaps if Santander had thought to @mention NatWest itself then this would’ve been better?

@Popdinuk (1/2) Hi Christopher, we would be unable to advise on the timescales of a payment coming into a Santander account..

— Santander UK Help (@santanderukhelp) September 26, 2014 

@Popdinuk (2/2) We would recommend you contact Co-operative to query this. Thanks ^SW

— Santander UK Help (@santanderukhelp) September 26, 2014

Tesco Bank – 36 minutes (and then some)

Tesco did great in telling me that it has acknowledged my tweet and is looking into it. Without realising it, I had used a specific Tesco Bank 'news' Twitter handle. I was told that somebody from the main account would come to my aid, however as I write this four hours later I have still to hear back.

Thanks for getting in touch @Popdinuk – our colleagues @Tesco will get back to you

— Tesco Bank (@TescoBankNews) September 26, 2014

Sainsbury's Bank

Sainsbury’s Bank seems to be the only UK retail bank that doesn’t operate a customer service channel on Twitter. There is an account for Sainsbury’s Bank but it acts purely for providing press releases and news for journalists.

Any customer enquiry is met with this response…

@luciebcx Hi, sorry to hear that! Please email team@sainsburysbank.co.uk and we will try to help.

— Sainsbury's Bank PR (@Sainsburys_Bank) September 26, 2014

Statistics

Which banks operate a separate customer service channel from the main Twitter account?

86% (14 out of 16) banks operate a specific customer service channel. Sainsbury’s doesn’t and all of Tesco’s enquiries are done through the main Tesco Twitter account. Although I’ve yet to see a result from this.

Which of these banks publish their opening hours in their profiles?

75% (12 out of 16) publish their opening hours. M%S Bank, Virgin Money and Tesco could all do with making this small change to their profile descriptions.

Which of these banks state that you may be required to use a more secure channel to complete an enquiry?

19% (3 out of 16) state that users may need to adopt a different channel, congratulations to HSBC, M&S Bank and First Direct for being in the minority. Many of the banks however do state that you should never tweet your bank details to them.

What have we learnt?

The most encouraging stat to come out of this entire exercise is that 100% of all the banks I contacted responded within 90 minutes and half of those were under 15 minutes.

The retail banking industry seems to be leading the way with social customer service. Only a handful need to make small changes to their profiles and perhaps one or two could have a touch more personality. 

However for the most part it’s incredibly encouraging to see such great commitment to customer service from one of the more serious sectors on one of the newest platforms.

To learn more about social and all things digital come to our Festival of Marketing event in November. A two day celebration of the modern marketing industry, featuring speakers from brands including LEGO, Tesco, Barclays, FT.com and more.

Content Marketing: Original Versus Curated Content

Having the original versus curated content debate? Here's research to help you. Advantages and disadvantages of original vs curated content are presented.

The post Content Marketing: Original Versus Curated Content  appeared first on Heidi Cohen.

Hamburger menus for mobile navigation: do they work?

Hamburger menus are ubiquitous in mobile web design, but the jury is out on whether the little three-lined icon actually works.

A lot of people hate hamburger menus because they feel not everyone knows what it means and that menu options are hidden from view.

However much of the negative feeling seems to be based on a vague notion that the icon harms the user experience, without any actual evidence to back it up.

Last week Booking.com released the findings of its own study into the use of hamburger menus and it turned out to be good news for fans of the three-lined icon.

I’ve summarised the results below along with the results of several other studies into the uses of hamburger menus, so you can make up your own mind.

For more on this topic, read our posts on 14 inspiring mobile commerce websites and 11 ways to improve the navigation on your mobile site.

Booking.com

Travel site Booking.com ran an A/B test to see whether the use of a hamburger menu harmed the user experience in anyway.

Having previously tested different variants of the icon (e.g. with a border, without a border, different colours) it was decided to see if the word ‘menu’ proved to be more user-friendly.

The original hamburger menu looked like this:

While the variant looked like this:

Both versions were exposed to millions of users around the world, in every supported language and across a variety of devices.

The results... Booking.com found that changing the icon to the word ‘menu’ had no significant impact on user behaviour. So there you have it.

The sage advice from the blog’s author:

What works for Booking.com may not work for you and your users. This is the reason we A/B test in the first place, because the findings of others, be they expert opinion, data from other websites, or hypotheses dreamt up in the pub while eating a hamburger, are all unproven until they’ve been tested against our customers, on our platform.

Exisweb

Web developer James Foster conducted the same test as Booking.com – a hamburger menu vs. the word ‘menu’.

The test ran for five days and was served to around 50,000 mobile visitors who were predominately aged under 35 and using an Apple device.

But in this test there were four different variations:

1. Bordered hamburger menu (Original, baseline design)

2. Bordered ‘menu’ button

3. Bordered icon with both hamburger and ‘menu’

4. ‘Menu’ with no border

These are the results, which show that the word ‘menu’ was clicked significantly more often than the hamburger menu, but only when it had a border.

But just because it achieved more clicks, does that necessarily mean it improved the user experience?

As James notes, it could be that the ‘menu’ button simply draws more attention.

Exisweb 2

In another A/B test James Foster trialled this bordered hamburger menu:

Versus this bordered ‘menu’ button:

The A/B test was run among 240,000 unique mobile users, with results showing that the ‘menu’ button was clicked by 20% more unique visitors that the hamburger button.

Interestingly, the difference was even more stark among Android users.

Those using iOS devices clicked the menu 0.77% of the time, while on Android this fell to just 0.27%.

James does note several caveats with this study, namely that the results are only from one website and that it only measures clicks on a webpage rather than intent.

Zeebox

Zeebox is a mobile app that works as a dedicated social network around TV. Its CTO Anthony Rose wrote an excellent article on The Next Web where he detailed the company’s experiment with a hamburger menu.

It should be noted that this example is slightly different to the other case studies, as it involves a side menu (also known as 'navigation drawers'), so the hamburger icon was only partially visible in the top right of the screen.

Also, Zeebox is an app whereas the other examples are all from mobile websites.

But anyway, Zeebox initially had its menu options as tabs across the top of the screen, but the decision was made to switch to a hamburger menu as it was felt that this looked cleaner.

These are the two designs:

It seems like a simple change, but in fact Zeebox found that engagement time was halved, with the conclusion being that it was a simple case of “out of sight, out of mind.”

Or to put it differently, users need to be shown the different options available to encourage them to click on things and play around with the app.

To validate these results Zeebox ran an A/B test where 15% of users saw the side navigation and 85% saw top navigation.

The results... weekly user frequency, daily frequency and time spent in app all decreased.

13 large hairy things that landed on our shores and pillaged our internet village this week

By the hoary host of Hoggoth, welcome weary traveller, to our hall.

Me and the internet have decided that retro is very on trend, so we’ve decided to begin dressing in the manner of 12th century Viking invaders. It’s certainly livened up board meetings we can tell you. 

That has nothing at all to do with this week’s miscellany of idiocy from around the web, as you’ll soon see… 

What I really want is a man who is HIDEOUSLY rich...

Yeah yeah, you think you know about web design. Unless you’re taking tips from ‘world’s celebrated business tycoon’ (which world isn’t mentioned) Prince Moosa, YOU KNOW NOTHING. 

Click the Prince's throne for a lesson in website design you'll never forget. No matter how hard you try. 

So realistic, it'll drink your leftover champagne. 

How often have you been at work and needed to construct a tiny green model of the Ghostbuster's second-fattest foe? I'm betting daily. Well worry no more! CAUTION: May contain an actual real live ghost: 

  

Literary references, but, y’know… for kids.

Some absolutely luvverly art from the very talented Ben Chen. Pop-Up Pirate is a particular fave:

  

Anything is possible

I slip a reference to this website into as many blog posts as I can, but frankly I’m still utterly astounded at the lack of people making use of the web’s most comprehensive resource.

You can quite literally do anything at Zombo.com. Anything at all. Speakers on please. 

 MEAT SOX

 I may live in London Fields, but I’m seriously gonna have to up my game. My lemon-yellow doily-cape just isn’t gonna cut it against this kind of competition. 

Hipster level: Final Boss pic.twitter.com/I6ze1TxZzf

— Rokshimmer / Andy H (@Rokshimmer) September 22, 2014 

Things on my desk right now:

• A miniature Bat-Signal.
• A small golden cat.
• Two luminous 80s sweatbands.
• A notepad with the words ‘’Wat Gwan?’ written on it in purple sharpie.

But I couldn’t live in this paradise of functional simplicity if it weren’t for modern technology, as this superlative little film shows. 

The joy of spaaaaaace

Parallax scrolling always sounded like something from outer space to me anyway, which is what makes this such an absolute joy.

Go on, waste an hour on it: 

Throw me the whip signor

Dun-da dun duuun, dun da-dun, dun da dun dun, dun da dun dun dun. And so on and so forth.

Raiders of the Lost Ark is absolutely brilliant. From Himalayan drinking competitions to Nazis with exploding heads, it’s got everything I look for in a film.

What you might not realise is just how brilliant the staging is. Steven Soderbergh does though, so he’s re-cut the whole thing as a black and white silent film. If anything, it’s even better...

I be all up in ur air, deliverin' ur amazons

When we think of our autonomous flying machine-friends, we’re usually thinking about sleek killing machines, or possibly those annoying quad copters that smack into your head in the park.

But there is a kinder, gentler side to drone tech too. One that... just... wants to... Daaaaaaaancceeee...

Dog corner

Woof! Bark! Grrrr!

What’s that boy? You’re not sure if you’re a Wetterhorn or a King Charles?

And you need to find out in the most adorable way possible? You got it, let’s check out Lili Chin’s complete guide to canines. Click the image for adorableness overload.

Woof Woof! What’s that? Timmy’s stuck down the well again? Ah, the hell with that kid, that’s the third time this month. 

Doge corner 

So cool. Very relax. 

Setting realistic social media goals

Remember not to fill up your followers' social feeds with too many updates kids. 

Malkovich? Malkovich!

The original Hodor proves that he’s an artist dammit! Click for some genuinely unsettling images.

Right, that’s it for this week. As promised, not a Viking in site.  

Me and the internet are off to rustle cabbages from Farmer MacGregor’s garden. I can’t imagine anything going wrong. See you next week!  

Five of Econsultancy's best infographics from 2014

Here's a round up of infographics, which we've created to accompany some of our survey reports this year. 

The topics we've covered include cross-channel trends, budgets, data-driven marketing and essentials skills for modern marketers.

Enjoy!

Cross-channel marketing trends

Our Cross-Channel Marketing Report looks in detail at the extent to which companies are integrating their marketing activities. 

This infographic looks at some of the key data points and trends covered in the report, which is based on a survey of almost 1,000 marketers.

Marketing budgets

The Marketing Budgets Report 2014 is based on a survey of more than 600 company and agency marketers. 

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

Data-driven marketing

Our Measurement and Analytics report found that there is an analytics skills gap which is holding back implementation. 

Skills shortages are most apparent in the use of digital analytics tools, statistical modelling and conversion rate optimisation (CRO). 

Essential skills for modern marketers

This infographic to summarise the findings of our Skills of the Modern Marketer report, based on interviews and a survey with senior level marketers. 

Key digital trends 2014

Customer experience represents the single most exciting opportunity for businesses this year, according to our 2014 Digital Trends Briefing.