As we approach the end of 2013’s first quarter, David will take a look at how the top digital predictions for the year are shaping up and, more importantly, what we need to watch out for and concentrate on over the coming months.
14. B3
3. Ambassadors are the new Brand
Managers brands
• Evangelists build
• Use them to spread your messages, at light speed, and with authority
• Ambassadors know ambassadors
• Your social media is starving, ambassadors will help you feed it
33. B3
Content Marketing Framework
Content
Content Audit Shareable Informative User Generated
Site Structure Roadmap
Document Content Content Content
Document
• Typography • Brainstorming • Research Q&A on • Reviews – • Where does content • Monthly or weekly
• Readability • Competitor Analysis Yahoo Answers, implementation, need to go (blog or content plan
• Spelling/grammar • Examples & Quora, Facebook, incentivisation etc Q&A etc) • Special events &
• Shareability screenshots from Twitter • Q&A section or Q&A • How should the calendar
competitors • Search for questions on product pages etc sections be structured • Blog calendar
• Keyword use
in Analytics data & • Forums, blog • Design & UI • PR calendar
• Copyscape report on
keyword tool data comments, guest blog • Interlinking between
stolen content
• Gap Analysis of posts, in-depth content sections
• Social media shares
current content reviews • Examples &
• Examples & • Examples & screenshots from
screenshots from screenshots from competitors
competitors etc competitors etc
34. B3
So, for 2013
• Do your research
• Don’t forget your customers – they’re always
changing, and getting smarter and smarter
• Find and engage with your brand ambassadors
• Think social, local and mobile
• Get everything you can out of what you’ve got
• Use your owned and earned media before you pay for any
35. B3
Sources
• Comscore • Wipro
• Deloitte • SeoMoz
• Emarketer • Smart Insights
• Forrester • HubSpot
• Google • Dave Brailsford
• Opus Research • Albert Einstein
• Nielsen
I am sure you didn’t need me to tell you that So Lo Mo breaks down to Social Local and Mobile, but the critical point here is how these 3 things work together and have impacted on marketing, communications (both brand and personal), purchasing patterns and general consumer behaviourThe thinking behind SoLoMo is that your digital content and apps should be built from the ground up taking advantage of the capability of the device. The purest example of this is the social check-in service Foursquare, which wouldn’t exist without the idea of location. In theory, marketers should be able to attain much higher levels of engagement when apps are built with geo-targeting layered within a user's social network.
SocialPhenomenal rise in social networking sites and, importantly, use over the last 5-6 years,
Rise of the ‘Death Star’ – facebook will continue to dominate as other social networks exist as much smaller niche operators around specific communities of interestFacebook:Monthly active users now total nearly 850 million (some stats say 1.2bn)488 million users regularly uses facebook mobile app85% of women are annoyed with their friends on Facebook ;-)23% of facebook users check their account 5 times or more every dayMore than 1million websites have integrated with facebook in various waysAs of 2012, 17 billion location-tagged posts and check-ins were logged.80 percent of social media users prefer to connect with brands through FacebookA whopping 77 percent of B2C companies, and 43 percent of B2B companies, acquired customers from Facebook. (source: Business2Community)There is a very strong belief that the Facebook flotation will, along with making some very very rich Americans, mean that Facebook has the necessary money to fund the development of its functionality and user experience – and that, now it has to answer to shareholders, you can be pretty sure that a fair old slice of this functionality will revolve around developing brand, marketing and engagement revenue opportunities.However, there are other players who are not insignificant - but do not want to get into the vagaries and detail of social networks right now as that is not that basis of this presentation
Local – not into reading points out from slides but will make an exception here:Slight word of caution – US based numbers, but that’s not too big an issue, we often follow from a tech usage point of viewSources – Comscore, Deloitte, Emarketer, Forrester, Google, Opus Reaearch, Pew Internet, American Life Project
Beware the hype“Mobile to overtake fixed Internet access by 2014” –this is a global stat and is heavily skewed by the Asian and African countries where mobile penetration is very high and desktop relatively lowSo, delve into your data and understand how, where and why users are using their mobile devices and build your strategies around that use, for example: Which brings me on to my next point
Big Data is data that is too large, complex and dynamic for any conventional data tools to capture, store, manage and analyze. The right use of Big Data allows analysts to spot trends and gives niche insights that help create value and innovation much faster than conventional methods. Big Data drawing insight from new sources• 10% is structured, 90% is unstructured• It’s primarily ‘human information’ – Emails – Videos – Posts / tweets – Call centre transcripts – Et al• Name, address, email address are hygiene• Transaction data is merely factual data• Big Data spots early trends & insights But what about all that small data!!!!
I think there is still so much more we can do with the ‘small’ data we have at our disposal, even at our our fingertipsGoogle AnalyticsGoogle AdwordsSearch MetricsSpyfuSocial MentionE-consultancyForresterGartnerAnd many many other sourcesJust from the internet!! Eg. Just this morning on fb from Forrester:
Piece of research carried out by CMO Council and Lithium (social media tech firm)Again, no apologies for briefly reading this out as it demonstrates the power and influence of social media in relation to marketing communications:Look at those first 2 numbers – any self respecting marketing director will be shouting ‘go and get more brand ambassadors’ – But before you get too excited remember one key thing, you have to engage them first! And the onus is on the brand to do this, not the consumer
More on this a little later
In truth this should say, “inbound marketing will CONTINUE to rule supreme”, in the works for the definers of inbound marketing:Sharing is caring, and inbound marketing is about creating and sharing content with the world. By creating content specifically designed to appeal to your dream customers, inbound marketing attracts qualified prospects to your business and keeps them coming back for more. So why wouldn’t you? We’ll be coming back to this later as well
Macro economic factors – ‘triple dip recession’, ‘death of the high street’, Cost conscious customersSavvy shoppersDigital empowers – complete shift in the balance of powerDeals = shared/encouragedShrewd is the new lavish
Appreciate the question is a bit of a daft one, afterall who will really be throwing more and more money into advertising when there is so much change in the macro environment and there are so many opportunities in a highly targeted, highly responsive, highly measurable environment.Of course we will work smarter, who wouldn’t. But what exactly does work smarter mean?
Exhaust every piece of knowledge, information and data you have at your disposal to allow you to make informed decisionsAfterall, informed decisions are the best decisions
However, the danger of getting wrapped up in all that data and information is that everything can become a bit unreal and theoreticalGet out there where your customers are, travel the way they travel, read what they read, watch what they watch, play what they play, eat where they eat, shop where they shop, buy what they buy, live life there way, on their budget……Talk to them, learn from them
Many brands and businesses are even adopting a ‘mobile first’ approach to their digital strategies – realistically you may well need to dial up or down the Social, Local and Mobile elements depending on the brand, audience, objectives, budget etc but you should certainly be thinking ‘what is our SoLoMo strategy’?
Rate your fans – use a tool like Klout to understand how has the most influence (who shares the best for example) and reward them accordinglyGive them something to do - it’s not just about Likes, in fact it’s not about Likes at all. Ask questions, request shares, votes, genuine involvement and engagementUse exclusivity – Walmart in the US has used Mummy bloggers as product testers, flown them to HQ, asked for feedback and publishedthat feedback – all through facebookPamper them – give them exclusive products, gifts, priority access to forums, content, special eventsGo up a level – Lysol disinfectant spray in the US has 460,000 Fb fans through engaging about general hints and tips about keeping your house clean and germ free (and not just about a tile cleaner that gets rid of soap scum, which is what the baisc product does)
A terrific, and well proven lesson from Dave BrailsfordJust in case you don’t know, Dave Brailsford has two jobs. He is team principal of Team Sky, the professional cycling team containing Bradley Wiggins (2012 British Tour de France winner and Olympic champion) as well as the current Performance Pirector of British Cycling (responsible for Team GB cycling).He is obviously a highly qualified coach and is incredibly adept at getting the best out both the professional and national team he works with. However, what’s the secret of both his Olympic and professional success? This is what he says:“Firstly, you need a team with the skills and motivation to succeed”“Secondly, you need to understand what you want to achieve”“Thirdly, you need to understand where you are now”“Then, you need to put a plan in place to see how you can get from where you are now to what you want to achieve”“Also, it’s important to understand the ‘aggregation of marginal gains’. Put simply….how small improvements in a number of different aspects of what we do can have a huge impact to the overall performance of the team.”So how can we apply the aggregation of marginal gains to our every day work?
So, for example, putting this ‘aggregation of marginal gains’ into practice as far as website conversions are concerned.These numbers are just examples to demonstrate the point, and 10% isn’t exactly marginal, but the end result is certainly hugely significant in this context.If we look at 1% increase at all stages new sales will increase to 16,024, that’s 6.8%, I suspect many of us in this room would be pretty happy with that?
So back to inbound marketing – and the point about Sharing is caring, and inbound marketing is about creating and sharing content with the world. Another good way to look at inbound in relation to traditional marketing is in terms of paid v owned and earned media. Quite clearly, owned and earned media is ‘free’
Forrester defined the terms back in 2009 as Paid media as the advertising a brand purchases to leverage the channel, Owned media being a channel a brand owns such as a website, social media channels, email databaseEarned media as the word of mouth (WOM) that happens around the brand, turning the customer into the channel (or ambassador as we discussed earlier)
More specifically, we have all these digital channels to get our messages out there and engage with our audiences
And all these type of content depending on our objectives and the role of our communication, whether we are trying toEntertainInspireEducateConvince
Of course it’s not easy, what is these days? But don’t fall for the ‘thereisn’t enough time’ argument’In reality a lot of this work is being done already, it’s just not being thought about broadly enough or being used in the right ways
Don’t forget - re-use is permitted – continual replication is not.For example – a whitepaper can also be used to inform a video post, a blog post, a webinar, an outbound email, an infographic, a forum topic or thread etc. Just needs thinking about from a content marketing point of view, not just a narrow publishing point of view.Einstein was a wise man
Lots of ways of thinking about content development and content opportunities – we have our own methodology to add some structure to the process and to help guide our clients understand what is involved in content marketing and content development. And importnatly, to get past the ‘I don’t have time for this’ claim, as this helps to clarify and quantify what ‘this’ actually is.
This is my final final point, and who better to steal it from that Einstein himself.We need a lot of logic in terms of data, research and understanding of our audience and objectives.Then we must overlay it with heaps of imagination in the form of strategy and creativity.And then we start all over again.