Search marketing evolves on a daily basis.
The constant introduction of new and innovative processes means that strategies can shift frequently as SEOs and marketers try to work out the best way to deal with new online environments.
From Google updates to advances in technology, the methods we use to measure the success of an SEO campaign, however, may not always be giving us the full picture.
Buried deep in newspaper reports and press releases about 2015 figures and a pessimistic outlook for retail chain Next this Easter weekend was some fundamental news.
“Next is planning to save £8m by not sending out glossy catalogues to shoppers who don’t want them” said The Telegraph on Good Friday. The money freed up would be directed into digital, it stated.
According to our friends at Google, the most searched for fashion term in 2015 was “How to walk in heels”.
This may come as a disappointment to fashion brands who have been told search is all about sales.
Customers were NOT hungrily Googling the latest pictures from catwalks in Paris or Milan and working out where they could ‘get the look’.
Every year, marketing managers identify their primary areas of focus for the coming year.
At a macro level, the same topics come up again and again – personalisation, mobile and social.
There’s a reason these three themes consistently keep recurring – their capabilities and their role in commerce marketing are continually evolving.
‘Omnichannel customer experience’ and ‘single customer view’; two terms that cause many a marketers’ eyes to roll.
There’s no doubt that these two concepts have been realised by a select few, bleeding edge brands, but they can be trotted out as best practice without much pragmatism.
Econsultancy’s Multichannel Customer Intelligence report in partnership with Station10 looks at how brands have tackled the issue of integrating data into their organisations across multiple channels.
I thought I’d treat you to some choice quotes.
When I first started working in digital marketing back in 2006, nobody cared about integrated data. Heck, “big data” hadn’t even been invented yet!
Well, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration… but the reality was that marketing efforts were often siloed, disjointed or some messy combination of the two.
So you’ve deliberated, cogitated and digested to the point that your performance marketing strategy is like a finely oiled machine.
Spend goes in at the top and leads and sales come out at the bottom.
You can plan your marketing budgets down to the nearest penny and just open your laptop to watch a series of real-time graphs and charts that keep going upwards and to the right as the month progresses, just like they did last month.
To develop an effective multichannel marketing strategy, brands have to recruit people who can do magical things with data.
But is it data analysts they want, or data scientists? And how many really know the difference?
Earlier this week I wrote an article on Econsultancy about Black Friday and whether UK retailers will abstain or get involved with the American inspired retail holiday.
Well, like in politics, a week is a long time in retail. Today might be Armistice Day in Europe, and a day of sombre reflection, but in China it’s the wildly popular Singles’ Day sales frenzy.
It’s that time of year again; the weather’s miserable, tear jerking Christmas ads are back on the telly, and everyone in British retail is trying to decide what to do about Black Friday.
The humble website is still the most popular channel for collecting customer data, although data from mobile channels is seen as the most critical for achieving overall marketing success.
This is according to our new report, Multichannel Customer Intelligence, in association with Station10, which explores how brands integrate data into their organisations and manage that data across multiple channels.
According to a recent study by Econsultancy, it seems that APAC is significantly behind North America in deploying multichannel marketing.
In this post we’ll look at some examples from the cutting edge which tell us where things are going.