Category: Marketing

Last Thursday I attended my first ever Salesforce event at London ExCel and well, it was something that I have never seen before. Thousands of people gathered in one place to hear what are the latest features and best practices of Salesforce, and to have a great time networking with like-minded individuals.

The event started off with a powerful keynote presentation focusing on the importance of customer experience which is I believe one of the most interesting areas of marketing at the moment. As the day went on, I got a glimpse on how Salesforce’s own AI platform – Einstein works and saw that with it’s help it is now possible to give people a completely personalised customer experience. And thanks to an enthusiastic person in an Einstein mascot, I can even say I was lucky to meet “him” in person. 🙂

Find out more about how Salesforce shared their excitement of the “Age of Customer” in Silicon’s coverage of the 2017 Salesforce World Tour London.

 

Chief marketing officer Simon Mulcahy kicked things off this morning by speaking about how the rise of the so-called fourth industrial revolution, characterised by the convergence of cloud, social, mobile and technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Thing (IoT) has changed business forever.

As the clock ticks down to GDPR implementation, every company in every industry will be studiously inspecting the laws and regulations to see how it applies to them. But across the board it seems that there’s widespread confusion as to what it covers. Does it cover existing data? How does it affect boilerplate contracts? And now the latest – is it in  force already?

According to a number of Legal and Security specialists, the GDPR technically came into force 20 days after publication in the Official Journal of the European Union. This occurred on 4th May 2016. But the fines themselves will not apply until next year.

Nevertheless, a data breach now, could incur a retrospective punishment once those fines come into law next year. An undiscovered breach, or a breach that isn’t resolved by next year, could be exposed to the higher penalties.

But the ICO themselves seem clear that the Data Protection Act is still the legislation that carries weight in the UK.

Confused? Well, the clear message here, is get prepared – make sure your data is clean, start putting opt-in principles in place and seek legal advice relevant to your business to ensure you are in the best possible position well before May 2018.

 

“Actually GDPR is in force now, but what’s not in place yet is the penalties,” said Kenyon. “So if there’s a breach now, the ICO could hold on to it and give you the penalties in May 2018,” she suggested.

With every area of marketing affected by technological improvements and new feature releases, it is hard to keep up with all the latest trends. But in case you are one of the marketers who are in the loop with everything, then there are still a number of further decisions that need to be made.

• Which of the latest trends are aligned with your company profile?
• How can these trends be integrated with your current strategy, campaigns and systems?
• Do you have the right resources and all the knowledge available to start working on the new projects?

What I would like to express here is that implementing new marketing techniques and solutions could indeed make your business more successful, however the process can be quite risky, time-consuming and stressful. But there is one component that you should not forget: Your website, that is still the most important element of your marketing strategy. Think about it, your website is the center of all your digital activities – social, blog, email, PPC and of course SEO. That is why it is important to keep your site in the best shape with up to date and optimised content. Set up a reminder for every 3 months to go over your pages and review what can be improved, what should be removed and make sure it represents the best image of your business.  

Take a look at your website, compare it to your competitors. Is it really the best it can be? Does its functionality stand up to 2017 standards? Does it do enough to showcase your brand?

 

Lately, I’ve been lucky enough to spend a lot of time at Salesforce Tower in London and it’s really got me thinking about the importance of internal marketing and employee engagement. If anyone knows how to do this, it’s Salesforce. Continue reading “Building Your Brand From the Inside Out” →

Earlier today, Dotmailer released the 2016/2017 edition of their annual marketing benchmark report ‘Hitting the Mark’, which explores best practice across top retailers in the US and UK markets. Looking at first impression welcome emails, abandoned cart emails and newsletters with recent promotions, reports like this are extremely useful in understanding what drives customer engagement and how top companies are responding to that demand.

Seeing how other companies personalise the customer experience in their emails can be an inspiration for your future campaigns and improve your overall performance. Without the right strategy, it is quite easy to go sideways and fail to deliver your message, but when it is done correctly email marketing can become your most effective asset.

 

Now more than ever, email marketing strategies must be personalised and carefully targeted to the customer. Recent research commissioned by the Direct Marketing Association and dotmailer found that consumers are now receiving an average of over 21 emails every week – leading to widespread email exhaustion.

Hitting the Mark: New report outlines the best in the email marketing industry

 

 

It is no surprise that automation, personalisation and mobile optimisation feature highly in this years Email Marketing Census from Econsultancy.

Continue reading “Three Key Findings from the 2017 Email Marketing Census” →

As years go by, we become more and more reliant on digital platforms, mobile transactions, and can’t imagine our lives without dreaming of a never breaking wi-fi connection. Customers around the world want to use quickly and smoothly working online systems, which means companies don’t have any time to waste and have to respond with fitting strategies. They need to realise which digital area is the most suitable for their strategy, and then comes the most important step of all: Find the best experts and recruit them!

The most popular digital areas of 2017 include CRM, PPC, UX, SEO and Multichannel Marketing, which means there are high demand for specialised digital marketing professionals. Forward Role Recruitment has highlighted the most highly sought after roles in digital marketing, read all about it in the Business Review article below.

 

The world of digital marketing is constantly changing and evolving. New roles are emerging as companies adapt to new customer habits and strive to stay ahead of the competition. As a result of this fluidity, some roles are more coveted than others, and some can be more difficult to hire for.

 

 

As marketing channels and techniques continue to grow and evolve along with new technologies or changing audience behaviour, we can usually assume that the old time favourite ‘The Email’ remains a steady companion for any marketer.

Yes there have been bumps in the road with the growth of social media (potentially surpassing email consumption, especially within the millenials age group) and mobile adoption (prompting a fast switch to responsive design) but overall, email marketing has remained an essential asset in the marketers ever-expanding toolkit.

But is the next bump in the road going to be an essential one for your brand? I think the idea of kinetic design is an interesting one. The purpose is to attract more attention and bring some interaction into the inbox prior to hitting a webpage.

As this article also highlights, using kinetic design where it truly adds to the experience of the user will ensure that it’s applied in the best possible way. Have fun finding out if it works well for your industry/audience!

 

Kinetic email design acts as the next stage of responsive, giving the user multiple ways to interact with the content and layout before he or she takes a committed action.

 

“Busy” is pretty much a constant state of operation for almost everyone I know. Being busy is almost a status symbol these days, a display of importance and success. But is it healthy? Do we take enough time to be unbusy?

Continue reading ““Un-Busy” Yourself: Why Quiet Time Is So Important” →

Everyone who works in the digital marketing industry must have heard of the rise of marketing automation. With tools like Pardot, segmentation, targeting and positioning quickly and easily is not a distant dream or a fairytale anymore, it is reality.

However, automation is not the only marketing technique that could benefit your business. In the article below, Marketing Tech News highlights the five break-out trends of 2017, including the emergence of AI, the usage of voice search, the modernisation of forms, the marketing opportunity in podcasting and of course, the importance of marketing automation.

After you’ve read this article, the best thing you could do is think through which one of these tools you should include in your strategy and become a part of the evolution of digital marketing.

 

Why should marketers care about forms? Well, forms represent the final step of the marketing funnel for most organisations. They’re what separates anonymous web traffic from valuable leads. This means that any improvement in the form will improve the performance of all upstream marketing activity – including PPC, SEO, content marketing, and native advertising.