Digital Marketing Strategy, Social Media training courses, digital strategy, online marketing, mentoring, consulting
Advertising on porn sites is cheap and effective. How many brands are happy to do that though?
Twitter alerts are highly interesting. Be nice for Irish local government organisations to jump into this.
The iPhone division is bigger than DIsney, bigger than Coca Cola!
Big data, big ideas. Big hype too though.
The Checkout magazine Top 100 brands list is out. Coca-cola is top dog again but really it’s chocolate that we Irish buy a lot.
12 confectionery brands featured in the Top 100 list; Cadbury Dairy Milk (5th), Galaxy (36th), Nestlé KitKat (49th), Haribo (53rd), Maltesers (55th), Kinder (56th), Nestlé Rowntree (67th), Cadbury Roses (75th), Nestlé Aero (82nd), Cadbury Snack (87th), Cadbury Twirl (95th) and Mars (100th).
With all the huge online and offline media coverage of Red Bull in the past 12 months, Red Bull has actually dropped four places in the table to 26th from 22nd last year. Coke is 1st, Red bull 26th and Pepsi is 48th. Were I an agency I’d be pitching to Pepsi this week.
And in terms of the bad for you brands: Budweiser is still the number one off-trade alcohol brand, Blossom Hill is Ireland’s leading wine brand, Smirnoff is Ireland’s top spirit, and Silk Cut holds on to its position as Ireland’s leading tobacco brand.
So what happens when someone with about 100,000 Twitter followers Tweets about you?
Recently Jamie Heaslip tweeted a link out about a project:
It gets 9 Retweets and 11 favourites.
Since Jamie used Bit.ly as a way to link, we can measure the clicks: https://bitly.com/1eh2TAL+
So it got 1096 clicks and you can see all of them were in the first few hours and then nothing.
400 in first hour. Bit.ly timestamp is EDT, 8pm EDT = 1pm Ireland. (add a + to any Bit.ly link you see and you too can see the stats)
So 1% of Jamie’s followers clicked that link. 99% didn’t. We could argue that it was a Saturday so less clicks but sport fans might be tuned in more that day too though and just before 1pm would seem like a good time, no?
Have a look at this Tweet from Sex Siopa, a Sex Shop looking for help. Boy do they get it:
133 Retweets later and a few new followers for them. They get mentioned on Broadsheet.ie and Joe.ie and other places. They seem small and genuine so people in a way are more interested in helping them out. To date they only have 401 followers but this small fish makes a lot of waves in the big pond.
133 Retweets means that Tweet was easily shared into the timelines of 40,000 ore more people. (The average active Twitter user is followed by about 2-300 accounts.)
So being rough about the numbers, that sex shop with all their RTs got half as much reach as Jamie Heaslip’s Tweet. So you don’t necessarily need to have big numbers if you have a genuine message to share or if the message is fun or controversial or anti-establishment.
Twitter Music just launched and we can expect a glut of posts on it any second. Portent.com have this handy content idea generator where you bang in a few words and it gives you headlines for stories. I tried it with Twitter Music and odds on these will be blog posts within 24 hours.
Twitter are apparently going to rank our Tweets on quality. None, Low, Medium and eventually High. High maybe being like the “Top Tweets” you see in searches. This will allow the “Best” tweets to be seen. The worry for me is that will also allow other tweets to be hidden away. This is a bit like Facebook’s Edgerank where you don’t see all the updates from your connections but will see more updates from friends or brands you interact with more. Twitter too adopting the filter bubble. With 150k or so people on Twitter in Ireland daily and they allegedly sending out a 1 Million tweets in total, filtering may need to happen.
I’m not the only one that was wondering about “Tweetrank“. Facebook allows you to promote posts on your personal Profile on your business Page to ensure everyone sees your update. So will Twitter start doing the same? €50 and a guarantee your own followers see that Tweet of yours.
But with Edgerank doing what it does, you can pay to promote an update so everyone sees it. Is this what Twitter will do too? Pay to ensure everyone that’s connected to you sees your tweet? One of the reasons I like Twitter is that I can dictate the filtering, Facebook doesn’t give me that choice. Now if Twitter allowed people to choose No filter, medium filter, high filter, that would be a great compromise that still makes them money.
Update: August 18th 2013
Twitter is now doing surveys about prioritising your Tweets. It does feel like they are going to do some kind of filtering as the noise on the network goes up.
2012 has introduced more threats and, by extension, more opportunities for Online marketers than at any time since I started my Internet career. Coming from a search background I’ve seen first-hand some of Google’s “jarring and jolting” updates which can literally put site owners out of business. Competition Online is growing exponentially as offline spend transfers to the Web. Mobile will soon outpace desktop in absolute usage figures. These changes are forcing Online marketers to re-evaluate how they interact with their users and focus on delivering real and perceived value across the entire spectrum of Online transactions:
* Getting exposure now requires “real work” – you cant fake/hope your way to eyeballs;
* Customer service is happening online as well as offline, with more use of Social Media platforms to resolve customer issues;
* Trust is becoming more of a linchpin – Google wants us all to become “brands”, perhaps users do too;
* Users expectdemand fast usable websites across platforms – performance is more important than ever now;
* Interaction is happening on many platforms, with many interactions sharing multiple devices – web, mobile, apps etc;
Hang on! That’s a lot of words for the topic “One thing businesses should put some effort into online before 2014 comes along.” Yep it is, so here’s my one thing every business owner should do: focus on engagement. Each of the items I listed above can be considered in terms of engagement:
* What do your customers want/desire/need online? Building content that truly engages your customers and prospects builds loyalty and increases sales. Check out these guys and the cool videos they created.
* Do you have service channels on Twitter/Facebook/Google+? Even Revenue.ie (could you be more staid?) offers customer service on Twitter!
* Are you engaging with customers to hopefully make them your Online evangelists? Offering ways for customers to review and feedback on your products is required not desired. Hands up who looked at the number of reviews in Google’s search results?
* Are you measuring how your website performs? I’m not talking how many visitors (old hat), but how quick, responsive and valuable your content is. Measuring performance is the new analytics. Check out tools like NewRelic.com and RUM, or Google Page Speed and webpagetest.org to slowly on-ramp your site. Collect qualitative data via feedback forms and surveys.
* Does your site work on mobiles and tablets as well as the desktop? Have you looked into Responsive web design, or better still Mobile First Responsive Web Design? Not only will your site look/work great across platforms, but by focusing on what’s really important you also deliver a better overall user experience.
I know there’s a lot to take in there, but each example I give places engagement at the core of how you plan and execute Online. By engaging with your users and focusing on delivering true value your Online business will succeed and flourish.
This is an example of letting other people do the work for you. I asked Paul Savage, Kieran Flanagan and David Quaid a question about Online Marketing, here are their contributions. Thanks Paul, Kieran and David.
The statement I asked them to elaborate on was: One thing businesses should put some effort into online, before 2014 comes along.
While having a website is the first step, I believe that customers now expect a little bit more when they come to the website, they want to know the story behind the business or brand. For example : There are quite a few places to buy gifts online or book hotels in Dublin, but which one has the best story, is unique, stands out from the crowd ?
Your story could come across better from having some of the following aspects :
The answer will vary a lot depending on the industry and market you’re in. For example, a typical answer would be around social or mobile. But if you are a B2B business selling medical software (random example I know), I bet there aren’t many leads coming from either of those mediums. In 2014 maybe they could get a little more from each of these e.g. build a community around medical problems to drive both awareness of their brand and prospects to their site, but the point is, how users purchase goods online is changing rapidly, but how rapidly differs between markets, something marketers should keep in mind.
For me, small to medium sized businesses can still get a lot of value from search, both paid and organic (this is across all platforms – desktop, tablet, mobile). Google’s targeting options in Adwords are becoming more complex and a lot more granular. On the other hand, SEO is definitely becoming more unreliable. If you put on your tinfoil hat for a minute, you could say those two are linked. But a working search strategy will still play a big role in most companies success in 2014. If I was going to pick one thing for businesses of this size, it would be split as follows:
For Enterprises (or in general, large businesses that hire agencies), invest in really good internal people that are truly great at digital. Spend in digital marketing is going to continue to grow. Having internal people who can manage agencies will be one of the biggest assets you can have in 2014. Agencies can be one of the biggest drains on your budget if you don’t understand what they should be doing or the metrics they should be measured against. Having digital natives in your company will really help with your long term strategy. They should be all over what digital trends are going to affect your future online marketing strategy.
Most people look at Internet Marketing in the same way that they think they understand all other marketing. Marketing is not advertising but some advertising is marketing. So if we implored people to do 1 thing between now and 2014: Stop thinking offline and start learning about online.
Forget about how amazing it would be to go viral because it probably won’t happen and it probably wouldn’t help if it did. If you’re not Nike, don’t be concerned with what Nike do and don’t do. Don’t assume your company or business has a brand. If nobody has heard of you they probably don’t care. Lead with a great product. Websites are not marketing.
Get over having a domain which you think is your brand. If people have a problem, you need to showcase the solution. Ranking well in Google is only part of the problem – knowing well what to rank for is where the solution lies. If you have a single domain name strategy, and you rely on the internet for a certain % of your business, be it 10% or 100% – then you’ve put all of your eggs in a single basket. If you can’t extend the marketing of your current website across more than one country, then go and build a new website for a new market and market it differently.
Do SEO. Do Social. Do AdWords. Everyone who says this: “My audience don’t click on AdWords” is wrong – Google make €40 billion a year by betting against that. It gets 30% of searches but it gets 50% of people because people do more than one search. Blog. Makea video. Make Different videos. Blog about them. Test. Improve. Repeat.
Brand marketers hate Google because they feel they have control. Many choose to ignore it. Remember one thing: The user chooses to search – you cannot control that but you should do everything to be searchable. Ignore search at your peril.
Stats taken from Google Adplanner so might not be brilliant.
Daily:
6-8k daily visitors from Ireland.
Monthly:
Unique visitors (estimated cookies): 160K
Unique visitors (users): 63K
Reach: 2.0%
Page views: 2.1M
Total visits: 250K
Avg visits per cookie: 1.5
Avg time on site: 11:50
Dell Social Media Toolkit for SMEs. Damned handy.
Facebook Timeline for Business Pages, no change on engagement after changing to it.
Would like to see how they do it but BBC News on Facebook can send you personalised news updates.
Finally some details on Twitter advertising.
Book from Dachis on Social Business. Out in May.
A guide to using Twitter in University Research.
Triggering Twitter engagement. Four forms.
An inside look at how Google works on changes to their search engines. Quite a bland video but the change management procedures are interesting.
Mobile websites slightly gain on apps for phones.
Faster pageloads will make you more money. Why milliseconds matter for Amazon. I love the url on the story too.