Should I jump to the bandwagon of DM? What are the latest trends?

Marketing is undergoing a period of intense change as a consequence of the technological development we have been living, creating  what is so called digital revolution that has marked the new behavioural patterns of individuals.This digital revolution has created a new group of people that have been involved by this new technology: Digital Natives. 
In order to attract this new generation, marketers needed to enter in the digital world, creating new techniques; having to find new places where to stick advertising and becoming a very competitive market that tries to understand the audience.
All of us agree that the future seems to be full of new technological devices, which is one of the reasons why Digital Marketing is always evolving. But we cannot be sure of how is the future going to be but give our opinions of what we think it would be in 5, 10 or 15 years. In the next video Bonin Bough explains how he sees the future of marketing with all this new technologies.

According to MSN, the new media consumption landscape will be:

• Media consumption will become less collective and more individual
• Sophisticated, multiple pathways to individual consumers will develop
• All media relationships will become interactive to a greater or lesser extent
• Consumers will increasingly determine their own use of media in a much more complete fashion, including deciding when they will accept marketing messages and when they won’t
• Metrics which measure ‘viewing’ rather than ‘engagement’ will disappear.

What is true is that no matter how these technologies will develop, we cannot stay stuck and we have to always catch up with what is coming, now we have to understand the new trends for this year and Dave Chaffey predicts what is coming for this 2011 creating a list with 11 of the most important trends:

Trend 1 Content / engagement strategy

The key to acquiring to costumers through SEO and social media is part of inbound. It’s also essential to keep customers engaged with a brand via different touchpoints like the website, “social outposts”, email marketing and apps. And of course, it’s not just text content, video content, podcasts, apps all to match all preferences. It’s been good to see increased attention on content strategy in 2010 with several new books on the topic. Since I believe it’s so important to success online, that’s why it’s Number 1.

Trend 2 Digital Marketing Optimisation

In the beginning there was search engine optimisation, then conversion rate optimisation and social media optimisation (hate that term). The analytical tools available to digital marketers enable analysis and optimisation of performance as provided by many agencies in these fields. Integration of toolsets through APIs and XML feeds has supported the growth of a rich set of free and paid tools. See the Google Analytics Application Gallery for the wealth of tools available.

Trend 3 Right Touching

Our prospects and customers increasingly use multiple channels when selecting products and services switching between digital media and traditional media. So it’s important to understand their preferences and facilitate switching from print to online and vice versa. Since outbound contacts are still vital in selecting the right print or email message frequency and message according to position in the lifecycle helps repeat sales. Smart companies have developed an automated email lifecycle with the right business rules to maximise engagement and sale.

Trend 4 Social media marketing

You may have heard of this… People don’t go online to “surf the web” today, they “Facebook”. Every company needs a Facebook strategy and the right resources to manage it unless their brand is so badly perceived it will do more harm than good. Nestle? For other companies, B2B? Twitter may be more important. We’ll look at some examples that show that success in an individual social media is achieved by understanding what you want to achieve from each channel, a clear idea of the value proposition and then resourcing it to deliver. But it’s underpinned by having the right content and touch strategies to integrate with other channels.

Trend 5 The resurgence of display advertising

Resurgence may be overstating it but many companies have found the newer remarketing and retargeting options available through established ad networks and Google’s new Adwords Remarketing feature effective. Using weighted attribution studies can also help establish the value of the display advertising halo effect.

Trend 6 Mobile Strategy

The growth in use of Apple App store has been phenomenal, increasing by several billions of downloads in 2010. Meanwhile other handset manufacturers are achieving success with apps, although Apple still has over two thirds of the market by download.

Trend 7 Googlization

In many countries, including the UK Google still drives the majority of traffic or it should if you get your SEO and PPC right. It’s increasingly important for generating awareness and display through the new Googled Display (formerly content) network too which in 2010 saw remarketing added. Google is so important for most pureplays that you could say you need a specific “Google Strategy”. A Google strategy requires an intimate understanding of your online marketplace or ecosystem. Oftentimes partnering, PR and contextual advertising can help you by thinking beyond your own SERPs position.

Trend 8 Online channel integration

With growth of importance of social media channels it has been suggested that email marketing is dead or less relevant. My belief is the two work best in an integrated way. To get ideas on the best strategies to achieve this I recommend signing up to Social Email Marketing.

Trend 9 Touchpoint attribution

Since online conversion to sale may occur over several site visits, it’s important to analyse and attribute sale to all of the channels that contributed, not just the last click. Online marketers have been grappling with this for a long time, but in 2010 these cases show that more companies got on top of this.

Trend 10 Privacy wars

Many of the keys to success online have a dirty secret – they rely on cookies. From Google Analytics to Remarketing to on-site personalisation, persistent cookies are needed to track and target behaviour.

But the media are intent on scaring consumers about threats to their privacy so unless marketers take action we’re going to lose some of the greatest benefits of online medias which will negatively effect marketers.

Trend 11 Digital marketing = Marketing?

We can no longer call digital media new now. With an increasing amount of media consumption and media spend migrating online, some are suggesting we don’t need a separate discipline of digital marketing, we don’t need separate digital strategies, but integration is the name of the game.

If you want to se the slide presentation he showed for Manchester University click here

What do you think guys do you agree with him or do you see more trends coming? see you next time ciaoo!

The winning PITCH!!

A PITCH: The set of activities intended to persuade someone to buy a product or take a specific course of action.

Having to pitch is not only about communicate your ideas it is about selling and convincing someone to trust on your idea.

A good pitch must contain the core information about your product (idea):

1. What is about?
2. Why it will appeal to audiences and which audience will appeal?
3. Explain the producer’s information.

A good pitch must start with a punchy and easy-to-remember description so the audience can show interest through asking key questions. A catching slogan will work great, it will explain easily the main essence of the (K.I.S.S= Keep it short and simple).

Like every other assignment, a pitch has basic guidelines that must we followed:

1. Keep it short.
2. Try to paint a story through words.
3. Have a back-up, in case what you are pitching isn’t suitable.

The structure of the Pitch.

Always formulate 3 levels of depth to pitching your idea: 5 seconds, 30 seconds, 5 minutes.

The 5 seconds version (elevator pitch) is the essence of your campaign, more o less like the short sentence that describes your campaign.

The 30 seconds version should include a brief description of your short sentences, and finally the 5 minutes version here you add the core of the paper or written proposal describing the next: how, giving the money and resources you need you will achieve your 5 seconds pitch.

And finally but not least important TEST IT!! Say the pitch to friends or people who are around you, this way you will get some feedback in order to improve your pitch.

Now go for it!! Show confidence and you will get it!

What other advice will you give to have a winning pitch?

Talk to you next week, ciaoooo guys.

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http://www.investorwords.com/3706/pitch.html#ixzz1HBRkPtxh

Friedmann J. How to make money Scriptwriting. (2002). Intellect

http://www.scottberkun.com/essays/38-how-to-pitch-an-idea/

MEASURES THAT IMPROVE CAMPAIGN PERFORMANCE

This week’s post is about finding the right tools in order to measure how your digital campaign is going and from there improve it and change it needs to be change. Let’s start.

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure”

(Bob Napler, 1960)

There is no precise way to measure the success of a campaign, but it always helps to know what are the specific results you, as a company, want to achieve…

An advantage of running a digital campaign is that it offers a degree of insight and tracking that no other channel can offers.

We can divide the whole process in three parts:

1. Performance measurement.
2. Performance diagnosis.
3. Corrective Action.

Performance Measurement.

Basically for this step you have to do what digital marketers call Web analytics.

Web analytics: The measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.

 Nowadays you have programs that collect all this data (Hybrid Methods).

The most common one and free!! Is Google Analytics,it shows you how visitors found your site and how they interact with it, you will be able to compare the behaviour and profitability of visitors who were referred from ads, keywords, search engines and emails, basically see how your whole Dig campaign is going.

You also have what is called the immediate effectiveness measures, which includes: click-through, open rates and viewing times. These tools give and immediate overview of where you are standing.

This slideshow will give you a better understanding of what I am talking about.

Performance Diagnosis.

After you get all the results from the Web analysis, the data will help you to identify the weaknesses of your campaign and determined why is it happening, in other words the whole review.

Corrective Action.

Now, we need to decide and determine what are we doing in order to change the results we have got in the review, get it done and get back to business!

The only disadvantage this measurement has is that engagement and deep brand interaction can take place online without any registered clicks.

Now, take a look to Google Analytics and tell me what do you think about it? Is it useful for you?...

Well that’s it for this week, talk to you soon guys and have a nice week.

ENGAGE YOUR AUDIENCE & BUILD DEEP RELATIONSHIPS!!

Hey there guys, guess what? The post of this week is about how to maintain a close relationship with your customers/clients in order to keep their attention and make them come back numerous times to your site, so you can make profit out of it! (that's right), so let's get started...

The first step you must do in order to start a long term relationship (I know sounds very cheesy) is to evaluate your audience, How? by answering the next questions:

1.  Who is your target audience?
2.  What are they looking for?
3.  What is the main purpose for visiting your website?

Once you have this information it will make it easier for you to start evaluating and creating your strategy for keeping your audience with you! What you aim to do is to get consumer loyalty.


Now you will have enough data to determine the needs and wants of your audience.
 Michael Steckler, director of Criteo, the world's leader company in pay per click retargeting solution said:

"If you want to develop a long term relationship with your customer in 21st century terms, you’d better find some way to be useful." 

From there you will decide the tone of your website, once you choose it you must maintain it to get the audience's credibility.


One thing very important to remember: relationship building starts the moment the visitor hits your website.


The 5 tips that you never can forget in order to maintain the attention of your target audience are:


GETTING ATTENTION:
Get visual attention from your audience, make sure your the information of your appeals visually but also give the feeling of welcome to your audience.


WHAT IS IN IT FOR THEM?
Your visitors need to find quickly answers for the questions they might have about your product or company otherwise they will loose interest immediately.

SEO (search engine optimisation):

Remember SEO is important for our website but content is more,the content is the element that makes your visitors to return for more, a good SEO considers the users not just search engines.

REASSURANCE:
Each page of your website needs to assure that the content meets the needs of your audience, in other words the website must have what they are looking for.

Placement and words used in page headings, contextual links, bullet points etc... will make it easier.


Textual Links:
Should be used to provide a customer-engaged navigation path. This allows visitors to click through finding the information that interest them the most without forcing them to think. You want visitors to have a personal experience as they interact with your website. Remember: personalise services is the trend nowadays.


This video will concluded what we have been talking about, have a look...

To know the DIG MKT trends of the current year will give a broad idea of what is the audience looking for and help you to choose a base for your Website's design model, I found the list for this 2011 click here if you want to know.


Keep in mind that in today's society all of us want to feel that we have a personal treatment a good way of doing this is to open a dialogue, as soon as you remember this you will be fine!!
Do you have any good ideas of how to start a dialogue online? Any suggestions for our community guys feel free to comment :)
This is all for this week, hope this will help you, talk to you soon guys! CIAOOOO...
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http://www.searchengineguide.com/stoney-degeyter/5-engaging-ways-to-engage-your-audience.php
http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/7194-dont-forget-the-message-4
http://www.jack-marketing.com/index.php/Glossary/relationship-marketing.htm