Slightly off theme for the Digital Lookout but this is pretty amazing. Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry present their version of the future of digital technology and communication tools. Forget the space taking, power sapping, Microsoft Surface, you dont need it when you can have all the same functionality on any flat wall. Minority Report here we come!
Friday, August 28, 2009
Asset Managers – focus on the ’social’ aspects of your email marketing for excellent ROI
from:http://www.stevepnewman.com
Regular visitors to my blog have noted that much of my recent comment has revolved around social media and how it could be utilised by financial services companies. Comments such as these make me reflect on why I cover certain topics in such details. With hindsight, I think it is fair to say that I, like much of the other media out there, (and no I don’t consider myself the next Woodward or Bernstein by a VERY long way), have to a certain extent been caught up in the ongoing hype around social media. Having said that as I have commented in the past, I review my blog analytics regularly and would say in my defence that these posts have been extremely popular with Asset Managers, Banks, Publishers and Agencies alike.
My recommendation however, particularly to Asset Managers, is that they should first of all focus on their email marketing strategies. I say this with a degree of justification from my perspective as much of the email marketing work I see in the Asset Management space both here in Europe and the US could be improved in many ways.
Of course working with my own clients, this is something I am always working with them towards and, rather bizarrely, I have been able to scratch the social media itch for many of them through simply analysing the results of their mailings.
To explain, one of the areas I pay particular attention to is the extent to which messages are seemingly opened and clicked on by individuals. As a general rule of thumb, I say that if an email recipient has clicked on a link on more than five occasions the email has likely been forwarded on to their team or colleague for review. In some instances this ‘peer’ endorsement (they have after all judged it worthy of forwarding on) can be integral in the communication going viral – sometimes to such an extent that clients are simply astounded at the reach into the marketplace they are able to achieve.
To quantify this, I did some long term campaign analysis for a client recently and out of the 10,000+ clicks their campaigns had received over the last 3 months, 12% could be attributed to one individual email address. Simply put, should this person unsubscribe or move companies, this particular Asset Managers email marketing efforts would be significantly damaged. Needless to say this particular individual is now receiving V.I.P treatment from the Asset Management Sales Manager in question.
Careful management of your email marketing particularly those of you involved in the B2B adviser space can prove extremely lucrative for your businesses. Indeed, I have written about this in detail previously and have included links to relevant articles below:
Thursday, August 27, 2009
AIM Awards 2009
A great night was had by all at the 3rd All Ireland Marketing Awards(AIMs) which took place in The Burlington last night. Lots of Cybercom clients were shortlisted including Diageo (Carlsberg, Guinness and Bushmills), Coca Cola (Sprite & Powerade), Ulster Bank, Vodafone and Guinness Storehouse. Diageo took home the main digital gong of the evening with the eMarketing Award going to The Bushmills Trek. The campaign was a pleasure to work on in collaboration with Wilson Hartnell PR and it was wonderful to receive such an accolade. It was one of four nominations Cybercom clients received in this category.
Our heartiest congratulations to all the winners last night, especially our own clients who won awards. These include Ulster Bank in the Sponsorship Management category, The Guinness Storehouse in the Tourism Marketing category, Coca Cola Ireland for Sprite (JD Quench) in the Advertising Campaign category and Coca-Cola Bottlers in the Corporate Social Responsibility category. The AIMs are rapidly becoming the Oscars of the Irish Marketing world and congratulations to the Marketing Institude for organising the highlight of the awards season.
Social Media Marketing Tops Digital Marketing Tactics for 2009
With concerns over the recession and its impact on marketing, we decided to run a TopRank Reader Poll to discover reader (and their networks) preferences fordigital marketing tactics in 2009. Companies world-wide are cutting costs as well as looking for creative, high impact and accountable marketing. Our amazing readers both on Online Marketing Blog and followers at @leeodden helped uncover the top tactics.
Over the past 11 days 532 readers have cast 1559 votes for their 3 top digital marketing tactics for 2009 with Blogging, Twitter and Search Engine Optimization topping the list. Equally interesting was that out of the top 10 tactics, 6 fall into the category of Social Media Marketing. See the full list below along with other statistics about where voters came from as well as info about the readership of Online Marketing Blog.
The question we asked was, “What 3 digital marketing channels & tactics will you emphasize in 2009?” Here are the top ten tactics selected:
- Blogging (34%)
- Microblogging (Twitter) (29%)
- Search engine optimization (28%)
- Social network participation (Facebook, LinkedIn) (26%)
- Email marketing (17%)
- Social media monitoring & outreach (17%)
- Pay per click (14%)
- Blogger relations (12%)
- Video marketing (10%)
- Social media advertising (7%)
See results for the full poll of 45 different digital marketing tactics here.
Other stats and observations about this poll:
All 45 tactics received at least one vote, even “no holds barred spam”. Email marketing rated higher than PPC which is surprising given the budgets spent on PPC vs email. Some tactics are much easier to implement than others, or less expensive, which may explain a few of the top choices, such as Twitter.
Corporate web sites don’t rate in the top ten tactics. Does this mean the death of company web sites? At least in their current form it does. Some companies are succumbing to the social media perspective to extremes, like the Skittlessite which has been simplified to a page of search results from Twitter on the Skittles name. Others are adding social features to their company sites to compliment existing messaging and functionality. I suggest somewhere in the middle is where many companies will end up by 3rd or 4th quarter this year.
For promotion on Twitter, we generated a unique URL through Cli.gs, which offers some handy statistics as well as URL shortening. See the image on the right for the traffic to the Cli.gs URL, promoted exclusively on Twitter and the countries that traffic came from.
Overall, there were 36,144 visits to the Poll blog post over 11 days. Visitors came primarily from: United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia and spent an average of 2 minutes and 27 seconds on the poll.
The breakdown of traffic sources for the poll include (stats from Clicky):
- Direct 13,010
- Search 12,198
- Links 5,335
- Social Media 4,654
- RSS Reader 652
- Email 295
- Ads 3
The large number of visitors compared to the number of respondents resulted in about a 1% response rate. For a one question poll, that’s low and undoubtedly, the large number of options (45 digital marketing tactics) may have been overwhelming.
Feedback on the poll ranged from (”3 tactics is not enough” to “There are way too many options to choose from” to suggestions for additional tactics including providing APIs and livestreaming content.
By now, most companies (we hope) have their 2009 online marketing plans in place. Does this ranked order of tactics mean you should change up your online marketing mix? The answer is that digital marketing tactics should match the needs of the situation, company resources, the target market and end consumer preferences. The proper tactical mix for an digital marketing program could be anything from the 45 tactics listed in the poll and still be successful as long as they support a valid strategy.
Some companies are prepared for digital and social media marketing programs and many are not. To get “ready”, companies need to develop strategic plans and get up to speed on both best and worst practices. This TopRank Reader Poll on Digital Marketing Tactics indicates a strong interest in social media marketing. Whether those methods of reaching and communicating with customers reconciles with existing marketing plans or not, companies would do well to allocate resources to some level of ongoing education, testing and development of expertise in the social media space.
Were the results surprising to you? Right on? We’d love to read your feedback and discussion. While future versions of this poll will actually be a multi-question survey, we’d love to get your feedback on making it a better tool for you.
With concerns over the recession and its impact on marketing, we decided to run a TopRank Reader Poll to discover reader (and their networks) preferences fordigital marketing tactics in 2009. Companies world-wide are cutting costs as well as looking for creative, high impact and accountable marketing. Our amazing readers both on Online Marketing Blog and followers at @leeodden helped uncover the top tactics.
Over the past 11 days 532 readers have cast 1559 votes for their 3 top digital marketing tactics for 2009 with Blogging, Twitter and Search Engine Optimization topping the list. Equally interesting was that out of the top 10 tactics, 6 fall into the category of Social Media Marketing. See the full list below along with other statistics about where voters came from as well as info about the readership of Online Marketing Blog.
The question we asked was, “What 3 digital marketing channels & tactics will you emphasize in 2009?” Here are the top ten tactics selected:
- Blogging (34%)
- Microblogging (Twitter) (29%)
- Search engine optimization (28%)
- Social network participation (Facebook, LinkedIn) (26%)
- Email marketing (17%)
- Social media monitoring & outreach (17%)
- Pay per click (14%)
- Blogger relations (12%)
- Video marketing (10%)
- Social media advertising (7%)
See results for the full poll of 45 different digital marketing tactics here.
Other stats and observations about this poll:
All 45 tactics received at least one vote, even “no holds barred spam”. Email marketing rated higher than PPC which is surprising given the budgets spent on PPC vs email. Some tactics are much easier to implement than others, or less expensive, which may explain a few of the top choices, such as Twitter.
Corporate web sites don’t rate in the top ten tactics. Does this mean the death of company web sites? At least in their current form it does. Some companies are succumbing to the social media perspective to extremes, like the Skittlessite which has been simplified to a page of search results from Twitter on the Skittles name. Others are adding social features to their company sites to compliment existing messaging and functionality. I suggest somewhere in the middle is where many companies will end up by 3rd or 4th quarter this year.
For promotion on Twitter, we generated a unique URL through Cli.gs, which offers some handy statistics as well as URL shortening. See the image on the right for the traffic to the Cli.gs URL, promoted exclusively on Twitter and the countries that traffic came from.
Overall, there were 36,144 visits to the Poll blog post over 11 days. Visitors came primarily from: United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia and spent an average of 2 minutes and 27 seconds on the poll.
The breakdown of traffic sources for the poll include (stats from Clicky):
- Direct 13,010
- Search 12,198
- Links 5,335
- Social Media 4,654
- RSS Reader 652
- Email 295
- Ads 3
The large number of visitors compared to the number of respondents resulted in about a 1% response rate. For a one question poll, that’s low and undoubtedly, the large number of options (45 digital marketing tactics) may have been overwhelming.
Feedback on the poll ranged from (”3 tactics is not enough” to “There are way too many options to choose from” to suggestions for additional tactics including providing APIs and livestreaming content.
By now, most companies (we hope) have their 2009 online marketing plans in place. Does this ranked order of tactics mean you should change up your online marketing mix? The answer is that digital marketing tactics should match the needs of the situation, company resources, the target market and end consumer preferences. The proper tactical mix for an digital marketing program could be anything from the 45 tactics listed in the poll and still be successful as long as they support a valid strategy.
Some companies are prepared for digital and social media marketing programs and many are not. To get “ready”, companies need to develop strategic plans and get up to speed on both best and worst practices. This TopRank Reader Poll on Digital Marketing Tactics indicates a strong interest in social media marketing. Whether those methods of reaching and communicating with customers reconciles with existing marketing plans or not, companies would do well to allocate resources to some level of ongoing education, testing and development of expertise in the social media space.
Were the results surprising to you? Right on? We’d love to read your feedback and discussion. While future versions of this poll will actually be a multi-question survey, we’d love to get your feedback on making it a better tool for you.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Thursday, August 6, 2009
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