Category Social marketing practice

June 28, 2014,  Brand marketing, News, Public Relations practice, Sales practice, Social marketing practice, Sponsorship News  One comment

According to Nike, this year’s spike in sales of its merchandise can be attributed to its World Cup marketing platform ‘Risk Everything’ campaign that’s helped it achieve a 13% increase in sales to £4.34bn in the three months to 31 May.

Nike is not a sponsor of the FIFA World Cup and these rights are held by rival Adidas.

Nike ramped up its marketing spend in the period, spearheaded by ambassadors Wayne Rooney, Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar Jr ahead of the start of the World Cup in Brazil.

The company didn’t strip out marketing spend but said that a 36% increase in ‘demand creation’ expenses was driven by marketing support...

June 23, 2014,  Guru in a Bottle, High Impact Marketing that Gets Results, Marketing practice, Social marketing practice  No comments

CPM metrics could be a thing of the past as website owners look at delivering more than eye balls to advertisers.

The traditional metric of cost per 1,000 page views (CPM) relies on the advertiser paying the website owner in advance to showcase their ad on the website for a certain number of times that the web page is accessed by visitors to the site.

Typically, CPM rates ranged between £4-£10 per 1,000 page views and could be more for reaching niche audiences. Website owners that sell traditional advertising on their sites have to be prepared to show advertisers detailed reports of page view visits and click-through rates in order to cash in on the traffic to the site.

Adv...

May 1, 2014,  Consumer behaviour, Guru in a Bottle, Social marketing practice  No comments

Seven days a week, 24 hours a day, hundreds of millions of consumers around the world cross national borders without a second thought – and often without realising that they’ve done anything unusual. This community scours the web for the ideas, products and relationships that they might not be able to find easily – if at all – where they live.

This borderless community makes up a virtual “Eighth Continent” that’s rapidly accelerating beyond 1bn inhabitants. And it exists wherever a PC/tablet, desktop, mobile phone or TV set top box hooks to the web...

February 12, 2014,  Essential Law for Marketers, News, Social marketing practice  No comments

Entrepreneur, lawyer and international deal-maker Clive Rich spotted a gap in the market for delivering high quality legal services to small-medium sized companies at the fraction of the fees that would normally be charged by a high street law firm.

The difference was that this legal advice would be delivered online and LawBite the brand was born.

But rather than go to a private equity provider or a bank in order to bankroll the new venture, Rich decided to use crowd sourcing to finance the enterprise.

In fact, seeking investment from the same small-medium sized companies that would want to use these legal services in the first place was a stroke of genius.

This deceptively s...

January 16, 2014,  Consumer behaviour, Essential Law for Marketers, High Impact Marketing that Gets Results, Social marketing practice, The Art of Influencing and Selling  No comments

Mobile device adoption is growing exponentially and if you look at almost any industry metric the trajectory for mobile growth over the next five years is stratospheric.

In fact, it’s so ubiquitous it’s hard to image a time when there wasn’t a cacophony of cheesy ringtones chirping happily away in the pockets and handbags of its owners signalling another email, text message or in-coming call.

Along with the growth of the mobile platform has been a lot of hot air and nonsense about mobile marketing or what it’s now more frequently referred to as m-marketing.

Myth #1: To do mobile marketing you need an app

This is the biggest myth and a few years’ ago a bunch of devel...

January 15, 2014,  Events, Guru in a Bottle, Marketing practice, Public Relations practice, Social marketing practice  No comments

This week, our friends at Vocus hosted a fascinating webinar that looked at how to build better relationships with bloggers and the media with a bunch of experts in the field.

Sharing their thoughts on this and other topics were Ben Davis, content and community producer at eConsultancy, Chris Dawson, co-founder and publisher of Tamebay, San Sharma, digital manager at small-business community Enterprise Nation and John Hayes, an expert in email marketing and social media at Vocus.

We covered the following areas in the webinar which you can listen to here by registering your details.

These are some of my own thoughts to the questions that were asked in the webinar which I ho...

January 12, 2014,  Consumer behaviour, Essential Law for Marketers, Legal update, News, Social marketing practice  No comments

One of the most engaging and powerful aspects of B2C and B2B customer marketing and communications is prize promotions, competitions, promotions and incentives.

And they are also some of the most difficult things to get right, requiring an understanding of a complex web of competition, data protection, and media laws and regulations as discussed in Essential Law for Marketers.

However, given the appetite of regulators to want to tighten data protection across a number of areas including sales and marketing practices, the use of prize promotions, competitions, promotions and incentives as a way of lead generation is the latest to fall victim of new controls.

As I discussed a ...

January 7, 2014,  Consumer behaviour, High Impact Marketing that Gets Results, Marketing practice, Social marketing practice  No comments

As more consumers are engaging with brands on social platforms, it’s essential that brands start to develop their own online personalities depending on the digital platform in order to help build lasting relationships with their desired customer, client and supporter segments.

This ‘personality transplant’ that brands undertake often involves using brief snippets of conversation and humor to engage with their desired audiences in much the same way as Guru in a Bottle does!

And this isn’t as silly as it sounds.

According to a report from strategy consultants Bain & Company, consumers who engage with businesses through social media channels are likely to spend 20-40% more mo...

December 19, 2013,  Events, Guru in a Bottle, High Impact Marketing that Gets Results, Marketing practice, News, Social marketing practice  2 comments

Wherever you happen to live and work in the world, one thing is clear.

The outlook for 2014 is uncertain. But that shouldn’t dampen any attempt to see what the future holds for most of us next year, which is now only a few weeks’ away.

It’s easy to spot the negatives for our working future: technology has led to a world of ever-growing fragmentation where billions of people connected across the world are continuously bombarded with requests; a future where the virtual nature of nascent technology will leave many deeply isolated and craving physical relationships; a future where globalisation has created a dividing line between winners and losers; a world where the undercl...

December 13, 2013,  News, Social marketing practice, The Art of Influencing and Selling  No comments

According to a new report by regulator Ofcom, UK shoppers topped the list of those that spend comparatively more money shopping online compared with consumers in other countries.

The International Communications Market Report compared the availability, take-up and use of services in the UK and 16 other countries and analysed the responses of over 9,000 consumers across nine countries.

Researchers found that the UK had the highest per capita spend online in 2012, at £1,175, which was up 16% year on year. It was also 35% more than Australia, the second highest country of the eight considered on this metric, and 77% more than the US in third place.

UK consumers were spending ...