Digital Marketing News – Latest Update 12

Our roundup of research insights and best practice advice from the month

While not strictly a digital marketing update, this is one of my favourite news stories this month just for it’s very cool geek factor. The lovely people at Disney Research have been working on a tactile 3D experience which now allows you to ‘feel’ shapes and contours of images on a screen. The technology uses vibrations which adjust to the on screen image and gives the user the experience of being able to ‘touch’ whatever is being displayed.

For those old enough to remember ‘smellyvision’ as something a tad sci-fi in its feasibility, this takes us a step closer to being able to fully interact with the images we see on our screens. And it’s just so cool too!

Strategy and planning

• If you’re fairly new to marketing and perhaps not actually a marketeer then this article from Smart Insights is a nice introduction to the AIDA model of marketing. It talks through the buying process in stages and gives hints and tips to engage customers at each stage. While we know that the buying process is more linear than the basic funnel approach, it’s a nice way to start getting your head around your approach to engaging customers.
• PR Moment discusses how important building trust is to effective engagement and talks through some simple ways to measure how you’re doing.
• Getting your key influencers to notice you is no easy feat. We all want to see the big names engage with our brand and do our marketing for us but getting them to even visit your site can be a gruelling and thankless task. This post by Tim Ferriss outlines Marc Ecko’s ‘10 rules for getting influencer attention’.

Social media marketing

• If you run competitions on Facebook you’ll probably know they’ve changed to rules about how you manage these. If you’re not yet up to speed with the changes, this article from Smart Insights gives you the lowdown.

Search marketing

• Kath Pay discusses going beyond basic personalisation to integrating search and email marketing using intelligent personalisation to enrich the customer experience. Her talk was part of the International Digital Marketing Summit who have published all of the talks on their website.

Ecommerce

• Econsultancy gives us some tips for managing the effectiveness of ecommerce videos. Yes it IS possible apparently!
• Until now Twitter has not really been a player in terms of ecommerce, but as this article discusses there are plenty of opportunities so it might be worth having a think about how you’d use it once the technology emerges. Which it will!

User experience, analytics and conversion optimisation

• We all know that data can be our best friend and worst enemy. But when it comes to making decisions base don the data we’re analysing how do take that data and use it effectively when talking to others? This post gives you some helpful advice on how to avoid making the data the only focus and how to communicate it to the people around you.

Email marketing and CRM 

• You probably don’t want to think about Christmas just yet but in marketing terms you’re already behind. To get your head in the right place Search Insights has pulled together a list of resources to help you plan, execute and effectively measure your holiday marketing campaigns.