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Marketers still not sure how to fully exploit the digital channel
Mar 17th
Making more effective use of digital channels is the key challenge for UK marketers this year, according to new research from Experian, with improved targeting and access to internal resource being the major drivers for digital success.
The research, which polls the views of senior marketers across a range of major market sectors, revealed that although investing in digital was a priority, many marketers do not fully understand how best to exploit the channel.
Making better use of digital channels was a high priority for 85% of respondents, a clear demonstration of its accepted role in the marketing mix. However, 74% claimed to want to use digital channels even more effectively.
Digital now encompasses everything from email to banner advertising to video and social networks, and not all mediums are right for all advertisers.
While 70% of respondents cited customer retention as a high priority for 2010, 58% said the main focus for the year is customer acquisition. And those organisations ramping up acquisition activity are doing so in an increasingly targeted fashion, applying insight to add greater intelligence to making selections and developing relevant messages.
Two thirds of marketers plan to focus on trigger-based activity to drive contacts with more timely and relevant offers, while 83% want to use customer insight to target new customers more effectively.
Jim Hodgkins, managing director of Experian Marketing Services, says that the degree of personalisation and up-to-the-minute relevance possible via digital channels means using deep customer insight to get targeting right will be one of the key drivers of digital success in 2010.
Yet the focus on digital coupled with a desire to use digital channels more effectively highlights the need for marketers to really understand and drive value from such channels – not simply engage with them because of perceived competitor peer pressure.
What marketers should be focusing on is understanding which channels work for the individual customer and using this data insight, combined with marketing platforms and analytics, to create integrated marketing campaigns that blend the use of traditional and digital channels appropriately, adds Hodgkins.
It is clear that marketers continue to face significant challenges in 2010, with two thirds claiming to be under pressure to deliver results with lower budgets.
However, a greater challenge is the availability of skilled internal resource – an issue that could impact on marketers’ digital aspirations. Sixty three per cent of respondents felt a lack of internal resource could limit their ability to deliver against objectives, indicating that the effects of cutbacks within marketing departments are continuing to be being felt.
Hodgkins said, “Despite the fact that there’s evidence of a slight recovery in marketing budgets and spend for 2010, many marketers are still facing resource challenges. This squeeze on resources could threaten drives to use digital channels more effectively or see marketers looking to automate operational aspects of the marketing process and turn to external consultants to support key projects.”
Happy 25th birthday .com
Mar 16th
Technology. Brilliant isn’t it. Can you believe it only started about 25 years ago?
Perhaps it’s an exaggeration, technology isn’t just defined as the internet, although sometimes it certainly seems that way.
The internet, 25 years old today, has fundamentally changed the way that marketers do their jobs for ever. It’s brought advertising to the mass market and put digital in everyone’s pocket.
The first ever internet address ending in .com was registered 25 years ago by a Massachusetts-based company called Symbolics. By the end of 1985, there were a total of six .com web addresses.
However, the ‘world wide web’ as we know it didn’t exist for several years afterwards, when Sir Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) began working on the project, creating the world’s first website in 1991.
These days, around tens of thousands of .com addresses are registered every day and more than 300 million of the .com sites created since March 1985 are no longer active.
The .com domain is the responsibility of Verisign, as is the .net domain, which was created at the same time as .com in January 1985.
However, it seems that surfers in the UK aren’t as attached to the .com domain as they are the .uk domain. According to a recent report from Nominet, the domain name registrar for the UK, 77 per cent of UK consumers would choose a .uk website over a .com site.
Nominet also said that there are now more than eight million .uk websites registered.
Today, there are 668,000 dot-coms registered every month, according to the BBC. Current top internet properties include names like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook and eBay - none of which were registered until the late 1990s.
And apart from those sites that many people frequent, pretty much anyone who anyone has a website.
Microsoft’s Bing team puts the amount of web pages at “over one trillion”.
And Google has already indexed more than one trillion discrete web addresses.
There are more addresses than there are people on Earth. The current global population stands at more than 6.7 billion.
That means there are about 150 web addresses per person in the world.
Translated: If you spent just one minute reading every website in existence, you’d be kept busy for 31,000 years. Without any sleep!
Mark Higginson, director of analytics for Nielsen Online, said the global online population had jumped 16 per cent since last year.
“Approximately 1.46 billion people worldwide now use the internet which represents a solid 16 per cent increase from the previous year’s estimate (1.26 billion in 2007),” he told news.com.au.
The largest internet population belongs to China, which claims to have more users online – 338 million - than there were people in the US.
IWS combines data from the UN’s International Telecommunications Union, Nielsen Online, GfK and US Census Bureau.
Its latest global figures puts the number of internet users in the world at 1,596,270,108.
That’s just 23.8 per cent of the estimated 6,0706,993,152 people in the world.
And it will continue only continue to get bigger.
“In terms of the future, we anticipate mobile to contribute significantly to internet usage,” Mr Higginson said.
Google 99.9% sure it will shut China site: good news for Yahoo and Bing?
Mar 15th
Talks with China over censorship have got Google nowhere fast and the search engine giant is now “99.9%” certain to shut its Chinese search engine, according to weekend reports. But what will its China exit mean for other search brands and furthermore, search advertising?
If there were a set of traffic lights blocking Google competitors wishing to expand in China with a red light, it’d now turn green – or at least yellow.
There are more than 380 million internet users in China and the search engine market is now estimated to be worth over $1.5 billion. And it’s still growing! At a phenomenal rate, actually. From 2006 to 2010, it is expected to see a compound annual growth in excess of 30%.
But the Chinese internet market is still relatively young, and as the rest of the nation starts to get online, the size of its search market is set to rocket. Is it really a good idea for Google to get out?
Google seems to be holding its search engine to ransom. It’s annoyed it can’t get what it wants, but what Google is perhaps failing to realise is, if it exits China, it will lose a massive slice of the potential search marketing pie and could open the road for Yahoo to overtake it in the usage stakes.
Yahoo and Microsoft are on the path of assault and Bing is already doing incredibly well. Imagine if it goes into China and cleans up, picking up where Google left off. There’s a whole search worked out there, censorship or not, there’ll now be a huge gap in the search market in China.
Even though Yahoo has been present in China for some time, it has never enjoyed the popularity it would like – but China remains somewhat of an untapped market in an economy that is crying out for reform and change.
American brands have always performed well in China, with the Generation Y Chinese looking to align themselves with western values and ideals (it’s the stuff they see on TV after all).
Furthermore, Chinese internet users aren’t just searching for MP3s and playing online games. Over the next five years, the number of businesses launching their ads through Chinese search engines is predicted to increase at a rate of 17% annually, according to Backbone IT Group.
It says that online spending in China is finally starting to take hold: “Chinese internet users spent over $35 million online in 2006; an increase of almost 50% from 2005. Recent events in China, such as the Beijing 2008 Olympics further increased levels of online promotion and attracting even more advertisement opportunities.”
Google, if it does decide to leave China, will leave a 20% market share up for grabs – Baidu currently has a 65% share while Yahoo shares 15% with Sohu and Sogou.
Although holding great promise, the Chinese online market has proved difficult ground for many Western companies. The barriers to entry to the Chinese market are many – complex language, unique culture and a different legal system. But it’s not impossible to break into. Yahoo and Bing could certainly use the extra 20% share and advertisers would probably find it cheaper…Google could miss out on millions.
As China’s Minister of Industry and Information Technology, Li Yizhong said: “If you don’t respect Chinese laws, you are unfriendly and irresponsible, and the consequences will be on you.”
Everything marketers need to know about the social media landscape
Mar 12th
Are you tired of wondering what this ‘social media’ thing is all about?
Do you want to know how it can help you?
Well wonder no more! Created for CMO.com by client 97th Floor, a new chart promises to guide you through the choppy and unsure waters of social networks and how to create social media strategy!
Yes that is reading like an infomercial on purpose – because frankly, there’s no excuse any more to avoid using social media.
The Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, won Cannes’ Media Person of the Year this week, Twitter launched an ad platform and MySpace announced a major site overhaul. So there’s never been a better time to understand social media and how it can work for you (and your client).
The CMO’s guide to the social landscape, takes all the major social media sites in the US and analyzes their capabilities in four sectors: customer communication, brand exposure, driving traffic to your site, and SEOs.
For the full social media ‘cheat sheet’ click here
Prepare for more Twitter attacks, only 21% of users are ‘true’ users
Mar 11th
Only 21% of Twitter users are ‘true Twitter users’ according to a new report from Barracuda Networks, does that mean that everyone else a) got bored or b) are hackers?
A true Twitter User as someone who has three main attributes:
· Has at least 10 followers
· Follows at least 10 people
· Has tweeted at least 10 times
The Twitter growth rate spiked at 21.17% in April 2009 due to what is known as the ‘Twitter Red Carpet Era’.
This falls between November 2008 and April 2009 and is the period of time during which a handful of ‘celebrities’ – including 27 of the top 50 and 48 of the top 100 most followed Twitter users – joined.
In the beginning of 2008, Twitter was growing approximately 0.31% per month. By November 2008, that growth increased to 1.95% per month.
After December 2008, Twitter’s growth exploded from nearly two percent per month, and rising to approximately three-to-four percent per month, before finally peaking at nearly 20% per month in April 2009.
At the end of the ‘Twitter Red Carpet Era,’ growth appears to have normalized, dropping back to 0.34% by December 2009.
Barracuda’s 2009 Annual Report, Twitter’s Red Carpet Era – Celebrities and Criminals’, reveals data from three areas: Twitter trends and tracking, Web threats and trends, and email spam and viruses.
The report drills down into 2009’s fastest growing social networking application Twitter, and reviews growth drivers, usage trends and the overall Twitter crime rate.
Barracuda Labs analyzed more than 19 million Twitter accounts, both legitimate and malicious, for frequency and content of tweets, user-to-user interactions, and each account’s overall activity level.
The report also revealed that 49% of Twitter users, and 48 of the top 100 most followed Twitter users, joined during the Twitter Red Carpet Era[2], indicating the significant impact celebrities have on the social networking landscape as they bring their real-world fans over to Twitter.
During the Twitter Red Carpet Era, the Twitter Crime Rate increased 66% and continued to escalate reaching 12% in October 2009, indicating one in eight accounts created was deemed to be malicious, suspicious or otherwise misused and subsequently suspended.
Social networking platforms like Twitter and Facebook provide a perfect opportunity for attackers to find their victims, leveraging what users assume to be a ‘safe’ environment. Attackers employ various techniques to build up their follower list, poison trending topic threads, or initiate other campaigns which can increase the visibility of their tweets, and therefore draw users in to suspicious sites, malicious downloads or other malevolent activity.
As social networks continue to gain momentum – and millions of users – there is no doubt that criminals will look to create more sophisticated and serious social engineering attacks against unsuspecting users.
SEO - beyond the page
Mar 11th
Bruce Townsend, ecommerce software supplier, Actinic
As a search engine optimisation specialist, people often ask if I can guarantee to get their web pages into top three positions on Google. The answer of course is, ‘no’ – at least, not for useful phrases that lots of people are actually searching for. Anyone who gives such a guarantee is either focussing on the wrong phrases, or using questionable techniques that could backfire in a big way.
For any given phrase there are plainly only three top three places, and probably hundreds or even thousands of web pages competing for them. Moreover, with Google’s heavy emphasis on inbound links, rankings take time to build.
That doesn’t mean that top rankings are no longer achievable. But it’s not a short-term ambition, and it cannot be guaranteed.
Fortunately, it’s no longer just your web pages that can get you into search.
All the main search engine listings now incorporate results from a variety of sources, not just web pages. They include images, video and news; links from blogs and social bookmarking networking sites like del.icio.us, Facebook and Twitter; and in the case of Google, product listings and results from Google Maps.
So as well as optimising your web pages, try some of the following:
· Upload video about your products to YouTube, optimising the title
· Save useful bookmarks, including some of your site pages, to del.icio.us
· Join Facebook and Twitter
· Build up networks of friends and followers on all of the above
· Optimise image filenames and Alt attributes
· Submit your products to Google Products
· Get listed on Google Maps
· Publish news to online PR sites
And if you do those things and constantly link back to your own web site, guess what? You will gain traffic from many more sources – and your page rankings will improve as well.
Will this ad make you switch to Bing?
Mar 11th
This new ad for Microsoft’s Bing search engine is excellent. It goes right to the heart of the problem that many internet searches often have – finding what they really want, the first time.
As I’ve said before, Microsoft underwent extensive studies into how people used search engines, and what would make them switch before it even started to design Bing. It’s answer: the decision engine.
This ad, which is brilliant, funny and really speaks to consumers about what the offering is as well as its unique sell, will get me to try out Bing for sure.
I’ve loved Google, and I loved its Parisian Love ad, but I too, am sick of the information overload.
The alternative to charging for content – and still make money
Mar 10th
Publishers are faced with an ever growing challenge as print sales slip and readers largely reluctant to pay for content online.
Sure they could start simply churning out advertorial. That would surely keep the advertisers happy, but where’s the editorial credibility or ethics?
A new tool could well be the much sought after holy grail offering to monetise content both ‘seamlessly’ and ‘ethically’.
It comes from Skimlinks, a content monetisation service that we picked up on UTalkMarketing some time ago, and now operating on more than a half million sites - blogs, newspapers, content networks and forums - worldwide.
Fans include the Mirror.co.uk, whose Head of Digital, “SkimKit places the content and the commercial opportunity together,” said Paul Hood, has praised the content and the commercial mash-up.
“The editors have complete control over the content that they’re selecting and the commercial happens automatically. We’re not missing any opportunities,” he adds cheerfully.
Skimlinks helps website publishers by automatically turning normal retailer links in their editorial content into affiliate links. Each time a user clicks through and makes a purchase, the website earns a commission from the retailer. Simples, eh?
So why is it important? Well, the service is ideal for publishers lacking the resources or capacity to harness affiliate marketing as a revenue source, in a market that industry analysts predict will grow to $4 billion in the U.S. by 2014.
Now a new desktop tool – SkimKit – aims to empower editors and bloggers to easily produce revenue-generating content in a way that critically distances them from the commercial side of the process.
The tool offers a live, searchable database of millions of products from Skimlinks’ merchants. The tool lets publishers research, find and link to products they are writing about, with immediate access to deeplinks and image URLs.
It also features a service that creates shortened, monetised links for use in Twitter and email newsletters, turning a means of communication into a potential revenue source.
While SkimKit makes the creation of content more efficient for publishers, it is also more lucrative. So, if a publisher chooses to feature a product found in the tool, they earn a commission on the sale.
“Skimlinks gives publishers a way to generate revenue streams beyond banner ads and text ad units by making the most of the commercial value of the content they are already writing,” says Alicia Navarro, CEO and co-founder of Skimlinks.
“SkimKit makes it even easier by allowing editors and bloggers to actively play a role in the monetisation process without feeling any impact on their integrity or impartiality, as they are still writing about the kinds of products and retailers they normally write about.”
Apple makes a splash with product placement
Mar 10th
The UK government has confirmed on various occasions in various proposals that it will eventually allow product placement on British TV to provide a new revenue stream for beleaguered commercial broadcasters – the time to move on this is now, as Apple as proved.
Last year, the Apple brand dominated the product placement industry with the tech giant appearing in 18 of the 44 films that topped the box office last year including Drag Me to Hell, Orphan, The Hurt Locker and Funny People.
The statistic excludes several other Apple product placements in movies that did not top the box office – Apple really is everywhere and it’s clearly a brand that’s willing to pay big bucks. So when can the UK expect to see some of that dosh?
Italy’s government approved a decree that allows product placement on TV earlier this month. Its decision is expected to benefit Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Mediaset broadcaster and at the same time lowers the amount of advertising that pay TV players can broadcast begging the question: will product placement replace traditional TV advertising?
With more and more TV shows being watched and downloaded via the internet, product placement looks to be the silver bullet to lost revenues and a sure fire way to get your brand into the hands and infront of cosumers on the go.
Brand analysis firm Margaux Matrix estimated last month that product placement on Coronation Street could be worth up to £330,000 per week to broadcaster ITV.
Placing point-of-sale and poster advertising in key locations around the set of the show is estimated at being worth a further £230,000 on average across the episodes.
Margaux Matrix also said that if alcohol product placement was permitted it would bring in a possible £181,000 a week, representing an additional annual income of over £9 million.
This is clearly a market waiting to be exploited, as demonstrated by such brands as Apple already.
Bing is rising in the ranks but will it convince marketers?
Mar 8th
Earlier this month, Microsoft was launching an attack on Google saying its rival is anti-competitive. Today, Bing is launching an advertising assault on Google, but will all this child’s play convince marketers to come on board to this new, super-dooper decision engine?
Microsoft’s search engine may trail Google in searches, but when it comes to Fans on Facebook, the tech giant ranks number one!
To cement its position, Microsoft is set to launch a major advertising campaign that will encourage UK users to start using its Bing search engine.
The campaign will run across major TV stations – something Google only started doing last year after 10 years in the game – and will urge internet users to ‘Bing and decide’.
Microsoft wants to help searchers make more informed decisions. Of course, actually persuading people to move away from a search engine that, for many, has become synonymous with the internet is going to be a tough ask.
Bing is new, fresh and not another ‘here today and gone tomorrow’ project, according to Microsoft. Its attack on Google has been described as “trench warfare” and it won’t be over in days and months but years, warns the giant.
However, a study by Catalyst Group shows that although users like the new search engine, they are unlikely to switch.
A usability focus group, after using both engines, said they preferred Google, with only one third saying they liked Bing. That being despite the fact that 82% preferred Bing’s design, 64% preferred Bing’s organisation of features and another 64% preferred Bing’s refinement and filtering options.
With regards to relevance of results, the majority of users thought both engines preformed equally well. This goes to show how entrenched Google has become in our thinking when it comes to search.
When it came to paid ads it seems that again Bing came out top with users spending 150% more time looking at the ad space at the top of the page, possibly due to the refinement options available at the top of the page.
What makes Bing unique is its organization of results. Microsoft conducted extensive studies into how people used search engines, and what would make them switch before it even started to design Bing.
The challenge now for Microsoft is – as its own research revealed – that when choosing which search engine to use, the decision is subconscious. So even though studies show people might prefer Bing, most would stay with what they’re used to – Google.
Is that going to be the same chain of thought for advertisers and marketers?
The good news for Bing is its growing faster than Google did.
The bad news? It puts ads at bottom of the search page. Users of Bing don’t scroll through the search results as much as they would on Google because they don’t have to – by the very nature of Bing, the most relevant results are at the top. That’s the decision part…
This has consequences for ad placement. As users are less likely to scroll down, ads that are in the bottom half of the page will be seen less often hence placing a higher premium on getting a top PPC listing. This will encourage bidding wars, so it is likely that PPC rates in Bing will be higher than in Google.
But Bing is pushing hard to extend its advertising affiliate network. If advertisers are bidding more for Bing ads than Google ads, it will make Bing a more attractive proposition for affiliates than Google because an affiliate will earn more from Bing’s higher-priced ads.
In the long term, this could lead to Bing having a more extensive affiliate network than Google.
As anyone who is familiar with Microsoft knows, the company doesn’t release mature products. It instead launches to the marketplace as soon as possible and then relies on user feedback to fine-tune performance. So expect Bing to evolve, and quickly. Before you know it, we’ll be saying: “I Binged it”.
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