Inbound Marketing - is it affecting you?

Just as you think you are getting to grips with the vagaries of your clients – including their marketing departments – you suddenly start getting new requests in new projects and radical changes wanted in older projects. It’s hard to adjust to the pace of change for all aspects of iMedia design let alone tune in to how digital communication is changing the way people interact with information. Once people’s behaviour changes, you can bet that marketing will home in on that and devise different strategies to attract potential clients’ attention.

That’s what inbound marketing is all about. It’s a reaction to people’s changing behaviour patterns particularly when they use social media channels. What’s more, marketing devises strategies and analytics to show that they are having better success than before with people’s behaviour. So not only do you have to change the style of interaction (interface and look and feel), but you have to check results in a way that your clients want and create reports for them. All these add to your time and cost of development. It’ll help if you understand what is driving your own clients to do this. A good intro to the concepts and stats of inbound marketing can be found at: Outsourced Marketing blog 22 May 2014, How B2B Inbound Marketing Compares With Outbound.

You just need to know a couple of basics. Outbound marketing tries to influence potential customers through face-to-face interaction, adverts, press, news stories etc. They are the more traditional approaches. Inbound marketing is more subtle. It doesn’t try to blatantly sell a service or product. It informs the potential customer about the service or product, it shows reactions from people who have used these, it makes sure more detailed information is available and ratified when a person is ready to probe for more, it builds the confidence in the brand and its online presence and waits for the person to be ready to buy. These changes in tactics line up better with the online behaviour of people who don’t want to have a hard sell approach. They can opt out of that easily online ... and do.

This is why content becomes so important. It is being used to influence a conversion process from fact-finding research ... to customer ... then to loyal customer. It reflects the journey a person makes from general search to trusting a company. The person is at a distance, so the interaction is different. Sites that reflect this journey approach can be seen at Discerning Digital, where they define the process as

1. Attract
2. Convert
3. Close
4. Delight

Mogility (28 May 2014) also reflects this conversion process based on customer satisfaction with every experience of the digital environment.

High quality content that is refreshed and kept current helps the conversion process, according to Parker-Wilks Marketing, and trustemedia.

Yes, it still is all about generating leads but in a different way. Julie Topka, 9 April 2014 in TME Marketing, cites 7 steps to the perfect marketing plan, that includes inbound marketing. Interestingly she encourages you to focus on prospects not customers although you have to have built quite a strong understanding of the niche of potential customers as your first task. Again, the good quality and applicability of the content features strongly.

Hopefully this intro to inbound marketing will allow you to better understand where some of the requests from your clients originate. Your clients, in turn, will build a better trust with you if you demonstrate understanding. Perhaps we can all learn from this inbound strategy?!

Digital Marketing and Social Media - repositioning ... so take note

There are many moans when someone mentions that the marketing bods want to get involved in designing the digital offerings of a company, not least from the developers who may well be contracted to do the job. Marketeers are pushy. They have strong self-belief. They make demands. They use stats that are hard to undermine. They talk in terms of the consumers and business returns. They have wide-ranging influence as stakeholders. They stir up the politics in a company. They make the job harder.

Well, some of those things are difficult pills to swallow but marketeers do try to understand their consumers' behaviour for the sake of the business, so they can actually act in your favour too.

We all recognise that the digital landscape has evolved dramatically since it went business mainstream through the Net. Now we have to take into account social media, mobile devices and types of use and user. The new landscape has affected delivery methods as mentioned last week. But how to tune those delivery methods to suit the emerging consumer use – now that's what marketeers see as part of their job.

Stuart Crow in B2B marketing in 2014: Predictions Marketure (31st Jan 2014), may make you quake. He summarises five trends he sees as affecting the digital landscape for the rest of the year.

1. Agile Marketing Now this seems to advocate very fast design to be responsive without planning. Failure but cheap failure appears to be acceptable.
2. SEO is dead: Long live the content king Search Engine Optimisation becomes Search EXPERIENCE Optimisation. He cites the changes in Google search techniques, where keywords and links are no longer used as measures for ranking but relevance to topic and not back-linking are rated more, as indicators of content becoming important.
3. One to unite them all This looks at the trend of digital analytics companies buying up competitors to create a single source for analytics. This consolidation practice usually means that the segment of the market is maturing enough for bigger players to emerge. How do you get your analytics now and what will happen in the near future? This gerrymandering may have strong consequences.
4. Content will do some serious harm to some B2B brands Consumers have demands now in relation to the amount and relevance of content they sign up to. Those that get this wrong will fall.
5. Unresponsive=Untenable This echoes last week’s blog here about responsive design. Business has to address the plethora of devices used and in the manner that is suitable for their use.

Stuart is canny enough to then tell you not to trust the experts (meaning his comments), but it'll be good to see if they emerge as important and for us to consider them in the light they are given. He doesn't cover social media as such and so we'll point you to some other sites that do.

Social Media guidelines and principles for digital use are now common. They have been drafted in response to the worry that social media is unregulated and can, and has been, used negatively as well as positively. Are you having to take note of your clients' social media guidelines of use yet? Do you as a company have such guidelines? A useful starting point might be Dan Thornton’s compilation of the Best Business Social Media Guidelines (7th Feb 2014), so you know what might hit you.

This use and user focus is not going to go away. We ignore it at our peril. However, there's so much going on and at such a pace, that you won't be able to get everything right for the moving market. You'll need to adjust and make your digital applications quickly adjustable too. Maybe Stuart's epithet, 'unresponsive=untenable' can have wider meaning in our context.

Content marketing and the print versus infographics debate

We’ve all come across the mantra ‘content is king’ but have we really understood what that implies in the digital world? Yes, we understand that consumers skim and scan online information more than printed mediums. Their behaviour has changed, driven by the need to make faster decisions whilst faced with masses of available data. Another mantra we’ve come across is ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ but that has been hard to prove until now.

Enter the ‘infographic’: a structured visual analysis of a lot of information presented in a visual way. These might look easy to understand and relate to, but they represent a lot of hard analysis of data and the facility to represent this graphically. These are increasingly important skills that have been neglected. Infographics don’t come cheap but they can pay for themselves in the number of people who look at them, the time spent with them and the number of recommendations they get for others to look at them. All these aspects ring the bells for content marketers.

Take for example Accenture’s Infographic of their report for ‘Turbulence for the CMO: Charting a path for the seamless customer experience’, which is based on their survey in 2012 of CMO Insights. We’ll draw your attention to point number 3, 65% of CMOs say digital focus of the company is important but only 7% sat their performance is leading edge. And, point 5 where they want to drive digital orientation throughout the company but 16% meet internal barriers. Equally, apart from those stats and what they mean to us in the digital industry, the medium of the infographic itself is significant. There’s a good deal of synthesis of data presented graphically.

The principle that you need to ‘entertain and educate’ with your content was strongly expressed in the 2013 Content and Marketing Show as discussed in Quba’s blog 12th November, ‘Entertainment, Eyeballs and Personas: insights from the 2013 Content and Marketing Show’.

Doesn’t the concept of infographics (also referred to as data visualisations) meet this principle if handled correctly? Just look at the buzz around Time & Space Visualiser: The story and history of Doctor Who as data visualisations, a book by Paul Smith about Dr. Who that has been controversial for its comedic look and feel (infographic?). Isn’t it designed to entertain and educate?

Where is this leading? Well, Shell Robshaw-Bryan has strong views in her analysis of ‘9 Marketing Insights to Drive Online Success in 2014’, 28th Oct. 2013, where her 9th point emphasises creativity, agility and innovation are needed to grab and hold the attention of audiences. Would infographics fit here? Actually they might help answer some of her other points too – all worth noting.

The rise of ‘Instagram’ and ‘Pinterest’ as social media offshoots is causing a stir in marketing circles too. Instagram is more visually driven while Pinterest lends itself better to sharing visuals than Tweets allowed. There are interesting stats on these at Digit*ally, where more infographics are evident on the Content Marketing page.

However, to be fair, we will try to place the push for infographics in a wider context by mentioning that print content is not dead. Quocirca Insights, November 1st, cover ‘Print Renaissance’, in this digital world. Tangibility, Trust, Retention and Digital Integration are cited as strong reasons for not throwing print out with the bath water. After all, we are print-biased here, as you see, so how could we not promote the balance?

e-Marketing under the magnifying glass

As the number and range of e-devices increases, the strategies to reach potential customers with relevant information and offers hots up. E-marketing is at the forefront here analysing how people relate to information, predicting the trends in use, and trying out new ways to entice positive reactions from people. Marketing is driven by statistics and analytics and we should be grateful for their analysis. However, traditionally iMedia companies groan when marketing departments get in on the briefs for new products. They are demanding, no doubt about it.

If we understand where they are coming from, it'll make it easier to work with them. So, what's happening?

Marketing efforts for mobile, smart-devices and digital display are increasing in line with increasing ownership. Furthermore, more online video is a trend. This move away from traditional TV ads and transferring digital display budget to online video was a key finding of a recent report into European Digital Video Output by Adap.tv and Admonsters.

But, the biggest problem for such migration of use seems to lie in the lack of the tools for planning and measurement for such campaigns. Sounds like an opportunity for someone? Because, as we say, marketing is driven by stats and analytics, this shouldn't surprise us.

People appear to be spending less time on sites before they buy: almost two minutes less than last year. This means they want fast, efficient, transparent sites. They reject anything else as wasting their time, so be warned. Added to that, with the range and number of devices increasing, as well as the willingness to buy from mobile sources, it's not just web sites that have to be well designed and efficient or sales will be lost.

It might surprise you to find that revising your tag words for your sites can be more effective than you'd think. That's the gist of an analysis of shopping trends from Mother's Day (March 10th). Were you one of the online buyers? Has your own behaviour changed? Are you monitoring your own evolving strategies for online use within your company? You should be ahead of the general game and predict trends. See: 10 online shopping trends for Mother's Day from Netmarketing (March 7th).

For the bigger e-marketing picture, see what you think is coming true from the analysts' 2013 overview of trends they predicted in December 2012. There's quite a variety that'll tease the little grey cells. See: Inspired Marketing Predictions for 2013

The CAP Code - are you ready for March 1st?

You've probably heard through the extensive ad campaign that the ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) is getting ready to implement new rulings concerned with marketing on web sites from March 1st. The CAP Code (The UK Code of Non-Broadcast Advertising, Sales Promotion and Direct Marketing, issued by The Committee of Advertising Practice) is in its 12th edition from September 1st 2010, but awareness about its effect has been raised by an extensive campaign from the ASA - all done with donated ad space, apparently. You can get access to the CAP Code at the Committee of Advertising Practice

Essentially the new ruling extends the power of the ASA's digital remit. It allows the ASA to name and shame non-compliers, place warnings alongside the search result listings of non-compliers, force the removal of paid links/adverts to the non-compliers, refer non-compliers to the OFT (Office of Fair Trading) and/or the Business Protection from Misleading Marketing Regulators.

There's quite a debate as to whether the notorious difficulty of policing the internet will dilute or even negate these powers, but companies should make sure that they understand the implications and take the necessary steps to devise and implement a strategy for them. This might include: regular checks on your web presence (this includes social media sites too), training any employees who contribute content to digital media, update any agreements used - particularly with advertisers/agents - to reflect the changes in codes of practice.

The paid link veto is supported by Google which had its own guidelines on companies using these links to improve their search ranking but which they found difficult to enforce. In fact they have part funded the CAP Code initiative. See Changes to the CAP Code - Google finds an ally in the war on paid links by Alex Postance 28th January, at Epiphany.

The ASA work from the premise of people producing marketing that is legal, decent, honest and truthful by applying The Advertising Codes, but this applies to communication that is wider than adverts, such as competitions and use of user-generated content if pulled into and used in a company's marketing for its own benefit. See the Digital Retail Advice page of the ASA.

It's just as well to understand new moves like these to make sure you are informed and take a company stance that suits you and the legal implications. You wouldn't want to fall foul and plead ignorance as it wouldn't help, now would you?