A summary of the significant developments in Internet marketing for marketers to be aware of from the last month. This summary across 5 key areas of Internet marketing was created in association with Dave Chaffey of Internet marketing strategy advice site SmartInsights.com.
Social media marketing – changes from 3 of the main networks
- Facebook introduced a paid version of offers – This has been previously available free-of-charge but not used widely, expect to see more coupon-based offers to redeem online or offline now Facebook is charging for them as part of their advertising feature. Marie Page wrote a post for Smart Insights readers sharing results of a first test for the feature.
- Twitter improve ad targeting options – This new feature of Facebook-like “Interest targeting” makes Twitter much more suitable for small business ad campaigns. In the alert we also show you where to find campaign ideas and a useful Twitter marketing guide from Twitter.
- B2B: LinkedIn updates company pages– The LinkedIn blog of 06/09 highlighted the redesign of these pages which shows new opportunities for promoting products.To help B2B marketers make better use of social media and inbound marketing, this month we launched a new ebook, Brilliant B2B Digital Marketing featured in this post by Rene Power explaining Why B2B companies need a Digital Marketing strategy.
- Have a listen to our podcast Episode 37 which offers some more useful tips on getting the most out of your social platforms.
Search marketing – new SEO advice and a new budgeting option in AdWords
- 66 tips from #brightonseo– Along with ThinkVisibility in Leeds and SAScon in Manchester, Brighton SEO has become one of the most popular search events for discussing the latest approaches in search, social media and analytics. Personally, I think it’s great to see these home-grown conferences (and similar ones in other countries) doing well compared to conferences where experts are jetted in from overseas to tell us how to do it.This is one of the best compilation of tips, for the hot topic of mobile SEO, I recommend checking out this this deck from Aleyda Solis.
- BrightonSEO keynote speech – Delivered at this year’s conference by SiteVisibility CEO Jason Woodford, the keynote speech focusses on the SEO industry reputation and how we should all be trying to make the world a better place.
- The single best piece of SEO advice – An interesting question with great answers voted up by many SEOs on Quora. With 12,000 views it shows Quora is still active in certain niches.
- New AdWords Shared budgets option – Shared budgets can make it easier to match your AdWords spending with how your business allocates marketing budget.
User experience, analytics and conversion optimisation
- The iPhone5 was launched in September, as you will have heard. The iPhone 5 has a different screen resolution to previous models taller at 1136-by-640 pixels, compared with 960-by-640, so you may start seeing this recorded in your analytics. Here are the implications for design – more testing of apps and designs required unfortunately
- A new timesaver for Google Analytics users – Here I explain how shortcuts give you quick access to your favourite reports and customisations. Time comparisons have also become much more user-friendly for time comparisons. Awesome, but about time!
- 5 Google tools for digital marketers – this post covers some of Target Internet’s favourite Google tools which all digital marketers should know about.
- A call-to-action for investing in conversion rate optimisation – A short video case study of how an international company manages conversion-rate-optimisation
- Ship Early, Ship Often – This “inside story” shows how Facebook Test and Improve and discusses the implications for companies without their resource
Email marketing and CRM
- Email Look Book 2012 – if you work in email marketing, you can check out the latest campaigns and approaches from Responsys.
- Behavioural email marketing – also known as Event-triggered email marketing this technique still isn’t used as much as it could or should be. In this post, Mark Brownlow asks 6 questions for your trigger emails.