Fresh Business Thinking Guide to Digital

GUIDE TO DIGITAL

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FreshBusinessThinking

Martha Lane Fox:

The importance of digital skills How to deliver online success

Reaching millennials with technology

Increasing business productivity

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FRESH BUSINESS THINKING

CONTRIBUTORS

Contributors:

Lynette Lisle Lynette is the content manager for Fresh Business Thinking and Techbubbles, regularly producing email newsletters, articles, news stories, blogs and interviews.

Francesca James Francesca is a published author, journalist and blogger specialising in social media and technology for business. Francesca runs Fresh Content, a content creation business that writes and produces content for brands online.

Catherine Parkin Catherine Parkin, Sales Director at Tactical Solutions, has almost two decades’ client-side and field marketing agency experience. Having joined Mars as Territory Sales Manager in the mid-Nineties, Catherine worked her way up to the role of National Account Manager (Food) Multiples during the subsequent seven years. Catherine is now the Sales Director for Tactical Solutions.

Simone Schuurer Simone Schuurer has 5+ years’ experience managing pay-per-click accounts and is today the EMEA Community Manager for Bing Ads.

Bradley Howard Bradley Howard is Head of Digital Media at Endava, responsible for the technology and business strategies for Digital Media.

GUIDE TO DIGITAL MARKETING

Jamie Gordon Jamie Gordon is VP Consumer Anthropology at Northstar Research Partners, a leading global full-service market research and consulting firm

Jonathan Davies Jonathan completed a degree in Journalism at the University of Glamorgan (now the University of South Wales) before joining the Fresh Content team in May 2013.

James Bunkin An experienced Talent Acquisition expert, James is a trusted advisor within the fabric of the digital marketplace in London and Europe.

Lyndon Wood Lyndon setup his first business at the age of 19 in August 1990 at the start of the big recession with zero capital and no qualifications after leaving school at the age of 14, and has built his insurance business Constructaquote.com and Moorhouse Group to be a UK top 100 insurance broker specialising in the SME market both online and offline. Lyndon still owns 100% of the business today.

Jasper Martens Jasper Martens is the Head of Marketing and Communications at Simply Business, a role he’s held since January 2013. He Joined Simply Business as a Search Manager in November 2009. Prior to his role at Simply Business, Martens worked in the Netherlands as the SEO manager for two Dutch online promotional websites where he was responsible for optimising 25,000 promotional products across the company.

Emma Mulqueeny Emma is the founder of Rewired State and Young Rewired State. Rewired State is the largest independent developer network in the UK with over 800 software developers and designers, bringing about digital innovation and revolution through rapid prototyping events (hack days).

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FRESH BUSINESS THINKING

CONTENTS

On the cover: 12 Reaching millennials

with technology

34 Martha Lane Fox:

The importance of digital skills

32 How to deliver online success

46 Increasing business productivity

Also in the magazine: 6 Why are digital skills so important?

8 Bing Ads 14 Increasing your digital footprint 20 PPC and your business 22 PPC v SEO 24 Succeed in digital world 26 The power of Peer Index

30 The Digital Marketing Show 38 Get innovative 40 Gen Y and supermarket shopping 48 Vine for businesses 50 The modern digital marketers 52 Go Global or Go Local?

GUIDE TO DIGITAL MARKETING

Why Digital?

While businesses that were ‘born digital’ – such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook and technology companies such as Apple, Dell, and Microsoft are leading the way in digital marketing – to survive businesses of all sizes need to be ‘Digitally Competitive’.

Accelerated growth in mobile devices, smart phones and tablets, means that digital opportunities will present themselves in every industry sector.

Our world is changing rapidly and every business needs to keep up with this rate of change.

This publication has been produced in association with Microsoft and www.digitalmarketingshow.co.uk and looks at some of the key issues that every business is facing: We hope you find it useful.

Nick James

Content and Creative: Marcus Leach

Managing Editor

Francesca James

Editor

Kira Slepchenkova

Designer and Illustrator

Nick James

Publisher

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FRESH BUSINESS THINKING

DIGITAL SKILLS

By Emma Mulqueeny, Working World I have a bugbear – children are not being taught digital literacy in our schools. Cue a chorus from parents exclaiming ‘What? But my children know more about technology that I do’. Let’s be clear, what I’m talking about here isn’t the ability of children to use shiny products; knowing how to consume software products certainly isn’t the same as being digitally literate.

By digital literacy I’m talking about understanding how the web works. Merely consuming technology does not make young people digitally literate. We must strive to be a nation of producers, not just consumers.

Current (cautionary) approaches result in children being taught to fear the internet rather than understand it. The decision by many schools to restrict internet access, rather than enabling it, means we are disempowering children and preventing them from understanding what digital citizenship means.

And do we really want to fail generations by neglecting to teach basic programming skills?

As well as negatively impacting youngsters themselves, the problems caused by a lack of digital education manifest themselves when they go out in the big wide world – when businesses look to employ adequately skilled people.

The message from business is clear – too few school and university leavers come to them with the right skills for industry. One managing director of a creative technology company I spoke with recently told me that, on average, it takes him eight months to train a graduate to the level required for his business.

And he’s not alone. There are programming jobs – thousands of them – without adequately skilled people to fill them and this will only going get worse as more children leave school without 21st century basic working skills.

Digital literacy should be as core in learning as numeracy and literacy. Whilst ‘computeracy’ is a terrible term – it should be understood to be as fundamental as Maths, and taught accordingly.

GUIDE TO DIGITAL MARKETING

Discussions around reinventing the ICT GCSE are all well and good, but GCSE age is too late.

The benefits of engaging children from a young age in any form of education are well proven and the same is true for digital education.

We are falling behind other countries by doing nothing more than shaking our heads at the problem (and perhaps attending a one-day course on coding).

The industry simply moves too fast for traditional teaching methods, and some of the solutions being mooted in schools only focus on ideation – coming up with an idea for an app, then outsourcing its creation.

Here’s how I suggest we overcome the problem: Teach ‘computeracy’ as a part of the core curriculum from year five.

Stop thinking of it as a nice-to-have and understand that it is a human right to be digitally literate.

• • •

Encourage every child you know age ten or under to become digital makers – find

and use those online resources, for example Mozilla’s web maker – designed for everyone, let it be natural.

Fight hard, ask your school, don’t think it is being dealt with – it is not.

Learn how to teach basic programming and computational thinking and offer your services – in the same way you would go and listen to kids reading.

Set the exam boards work on changing the structure and content of computer science GCSEs/EBACCs and A Levels, but be prepared that this will be a long-burn slowwin until we have taught the basics to the junior school kid. ■

• • •

Emma Mulqueeny is chief executive of Young Rewired State. She’ll deliver a keynote speech on open education at ‘Digital 2013’ – Welsh Government-led digital event at the Celtic Manor on 3rd June 2013.

Register for your free place at the event here.

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FRESH BUSINESS THINKING

ADVERTORIAL

Bing Ads Every day, millions of people use search engines to find out more about a given topic, product or service.

Bing Ads is a robust collection of tools and information that you can use to place ads for your business on the web. You can use Bing Ads to:

Because of the enormity of the internet today, many of these internet searchers don’t look past the first few search results that a search engine returns to them.

As a result, competition among business owners to appear in these choice spots is fierce.

Reach potentially millions of customers by advertising on Bing and Yahoo! Search.

Control your advertising costs because you set a budget for each campaign and you only pay when someone clicks your ad.

But it’s not as complicated as you may think…

In fact it only takes a few minutes to create an online ad campaign that puts your businesses products and services in front of the people who are searching for them.

Follow Bing Ads

• • • • • • •

Import your Google AdWords campaigns into your Bing Ads account.

Quickly fine-tune your campaigns by running built-in performance reports.

Research keywords and demographics for your target market.

Save time and effort by managing your Bing and Yahoo! campaigns in one place.

Increase the return on your advertising spend!

GUIDE TO DIGITAL MARKETING

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Why Bing Ads? There are 20.5 million unique UK searchers on the Yahoo! Bing Network—including 4 million who do not use Google.* * comScore qSearch (custom), March 2013.

Bing shows more ads at the top of the page (above the organic results) than Google for most searches. That means advertisers have a greater chance of winning one of those coveted top spots. (WordStream)

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Bathroom retailer achieves 25% lower cost per click with Bing Ads.

Online digital photo service gains impressive ROI with Bing Ads

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FRESH BUSINESS THINKING

MILLENNIAL TECHNOLOGY

Reaching Millennials with Technology

By Jamie Gordon, Northstar Research Partners If you have read Daniel Pink’s book, A Whole New Mind, or Richard Florida’s Rise of The Creative Class, you will learn about how we are entering a conceptual age where economies are increasingly driven by the creation of new ideas, systems and business models. That trend is increasingly evident among Millennials, who are now either entering, or are well tenured, in the work force and among the savviest of consumers. They are not, however, just consumers and workers, but social networkers and social creatures that seek human connections, are active in causes and initiatives they believe in and are motivated to get things done!

In a world where advancements in technology have revolutionized our ability to connect, network, share ideas, collaborate and mobilize, influence and relevance has become rooted in the ability to conceive new ideas or expressions, actively promote, persuade and activate others to create and collaborate alongside them.

What this means for brands – especially those trying to connect to Millennials – is that we are quickly moving from an influencer-driven economy to one that is activation-driven. It is a crowd-sourced, collective-inspired experience. Activators are masters at mobilizing the ideas and behaviors needed to succeed in the conceptual age.

Millennials are at the core of this activationinspired mindset and let’s not forget the role

communication technology has had towards creating that. This generation is by far the most empowered by access to information and to one another. They have embraced virtual knowledge sharing and networking platforms to connect to one another and activate/participate in a culture of entrepreneurship and change.

They are spearheading the conceptual economy empowered by technology.

Social networking platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn provide unparalleled connection resources. Online media platforms like YouTube, Twitter, WordPress and Reddit also provide more consumer-content driven mediums for reaching millions in mere moments.

Millennials have the ‘power to create their

own media influences rather than being subject to them and that has, in a nutshell, changed the nature of the required dialogue with brands.

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GUIDE TO DIGITAL MARKETING

There are several distinct implications for seeding brand relevance among Millennials. Using technology to facilitate connections is an absolute must and can be utilized in a number of ethos-oriented contexts.

Here are a few examples:

Facilitate a meaningful dialogue:

Be a source of stability: For brands who have

Empower their ambitions: Be a source

of support and inspiration and provide platforms that help forward their entrepreneurial spirit. Perhaps your marketing team should take a stroll on Kickstarter.com and fund some great Millennial business propositions, or have an online platform of your own that provides opportunities for customers to have your brand company support a creative or business endeavour that is in line with your brand ideals.

sustained over time, longevity is an asset and can have strong emotional resonance with this generation who has seen a lot of turmoil in their young lives. Authenticity – a hallmark of brand value for Millennials, starts with having a heritage to call upon. You can put your brand heritage in the hands of Millennial customers by creating and spreading content using online resources. How accurate and evocative of your heritage is your brand or company’s Wikipedia entry (you have one, right)? Perhaps you can create a Pinterest presence through brand ambassadors that showcases your product timeline history – ideal if you are a brand operating in the apparel/retail or food and beverage spaces.

Millennials respect a genuine interest in being heard and making meaningful contributions based on a reciprocal exchange of information.

Online and mobile platforms are designed for dialogue and creative exchange and who better to help you evolve than a generation committed to new concepts and ideas?

Allow them to participate by creating connections between your brand teams and your customers. For example: are you monitoring your Twitter mentions and able to activate CRM regarding to both positives and negative tweets about your brand? Do you have an online forum on your website for customers to give you ideas like at mystarbucksideas.com? Are you giving bloggers the ‘inside scoop’ that they can share with their virtual audiences? ■

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FRESH BUSINESS THINKING

DIGITAL FOOTPRINT

Increasing Your Digital Footprint

By Simone Schuurer, Microsoft Ever wondered how to compete with large business for a top position? Wondered how your website could drive more sales? What bloggers can do for your SEO? Earlier this year the Microsoft team looked at how maternity wear company ‘more 4 mums’ could increase their digital footprint.

Read on to see what recommendations they made.

Lynn Hogg started her business more 4 mums in 2008 after a career in the hotel industry to be able to combine work with raising small children. Inspired by this new phase in her life she decided to sell affordable maternity wear and accessories. Initially she sold her products on eBay but launched a website when business picked up. The main audience she aims at is women between the age of 25 and 45. Busi-

ness concentrates on the UK market but more 4 mums does ship to the rest of Europe as well.

Lynn is looking to expand the business further now her children are at school, to use her site as the single selling point, increase her product range and move her office and storage out of her home. She signed up for the Digital Marketing Makeover as she hopes to receive some advice which will help her to boost business during this next move.

She would like to develop an inclusive marketing strategy to ensure the maximum number of potential customers reach her site. more 4 mums operates in a competitive niche with large corporate companies as well as smaller niche players. Lynn wants to make sure her business stands out and attracts customers.

Advertising efforts so far

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GUIDE TO DIGITAL MARKETING

Lynn has started to create a digital footprint for her business by creating a Facebook page, by signing up for Pinterest, Twitter and by writing for her blog, she also has listed products for review at My Family Club. Fairs are used to raise brand awareness but also to do market research. Alumni societies and – in the future – larger employers are being approached with staff discounts. Lynn made a start with PPC advertising and set up a mobile search advertising campaign. She loves some clever tricks on how to best move on with this.

Pay-Per-Click: How to compete for top search engine positions with large competitors?

Bid on variations of keywords that may face less competition.

The main PPC struggle Lynn told us she is facing is finding ways to compete with large brands.

She asked us to help her ads show in top positions. It’s a great question. The key is to bid on a variety of keywords and on keywords that are maybe a bit longer and receive a little less traffic as the big, obvious ones but that also bidded on less. In PPC terms this is also called ‘the long tail’. There’s a whole bunch of other ways to describe what more 4 mums sells – breastfeeding vest tops, long sleeved nursing tops, maternity nursing tops. There are a few ways to find these extra keywords to target: 1.

Brainstorm ideas – which of your products are best sellers or are the most profitable for you? What’s the best way to describe them? Consider targeting keywords like these – as bringing more traffic to these products will make you the most money.

2.

Review competitors websites – How do they describe products? What keywords do they target?

Another thing Lynn could do is write really appealing ad copy emphasising why customers should buy from her business opposed to the competition. Read some tips on writing effective ad copy to get you started. Great ads can increase the click through rate (CTR) which has an impact on how high in the rankings your ad appears.

Use negative keywords to Increase Relevance and Save Budget

3.

Use a tool like Bing Ads Intelligence to get keyword suggestions – this can give you an idea of how much budget you’ll spend as well as how much traffic you can get, so it can help you to understand whether or not a keyword is likely to be cost-effective for you.

You can find information on how to use this free tool here.

Negative keywords are a specific word or phrase that helps to prevent your ad from being displayed to customers who are unlikely to click your ad. For example if you’d bid on the word ‘fashion’ you can add as a negative keyword the word ‘week’ to avoid tons of people seeing your ad when fashion week is on. If many people see your ad but do not click, your CTR drops which has a negative impact on your ranking. Adding negative keywords often has the opposite effect.

Lynn can use search query reports to get inspiration for her negative keywords. A search query report shows you what keywords people are using that causes your ads to display. With this impressions and click data, you can refine your keyword and negative keyword lists for your ad groups. So if your ad was displayed for a search that is not relevant to you, consider adding it to that ad group or campaign as a negative keyword. This article explains how to add negative keywords to your search campaign.

Besides it is really revealing to see what terminology your customers use to find what you sell – great keyword ideas are to be had too!

Make sure you don’t compete with your own ad groups too. If you have an ad group ‘maternity dresses’ add ‘maternity trousers’ and ‘maternity tops’ as negative keywords.

Write great, appealing ad copy

SEO – Five landing page tips to lead

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FRESH BUSINESS THINKING

DIGITAL FOOTPRINT

PPC Tips & Timing

Today •

Start bidding on a larger variety of keywords. To appear more often in the top search results.

•

•

•

Weekly •

Start adding negative keywords to improve the CTR of your ads. This will also help the position of your ads.

Use search query reports to find negative keywords and add these to your campaigns. Especially invaluable if you use broad match.

•

Start using all three match types but instead of general broad match use broad match modifier to have more control on what your ad shows up for. Read a great blog post on it here.

Start using some Bing Ads reports to find out what works and what not in your campaign. & make amendments. A step by step explanation.

•

Pause keywords that don’t perform very well.

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Start reading the Bing Ads blog to get the latest PPC tips.

Your business is the perfect candidate for using Bing’s demographic targeting – you’re targeting mums 25-45, It’s highly recommendable using this form of targeting. You can target ads via the settings section of Bing Ads in Targeting Options.

Bi-Weekly •

Find out which ads have a low CTR and replace these with new ads.

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Do you have campaigns going on budget pause regularly and others under-spending? Switch budget between these campaigns – especially ensure high converting campaigns have enough budget.

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Use search query reports to new keywords and to find out what is really trending.

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Check the offers and USPs competitors use in their ads. Amend your ads if need be.

Monthly •

Review your campaign structure – is it still broken down enough with only highly relevant ads and keywords in each ad group?

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Are there products on your site you’re not already advertising? Add them in!

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There are probably times of day you convert better. You could spend your budget wisely by advertising then. You can do this in the settings section (Days/Time) of Bing Ads (all our targeting options including time of day)

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Check if each ad group has at least three ads.

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Ensure there aren’t duplicate keywords in your account. You could be competing against yourself, driving up costs.

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Are there any peaks coming up soon from your Seasonality Calendar? If so, optimise 6 weeks in advance.

GUIDE TO DIGITAL MARKETING

There are plenty of other tips and tricks to make your search campaign an effective marketing and sales generating machine for you.

As to not overwhelm anyone with advice we’ve organised the tips in the below schedule which shows what Lynn should look into today and what other search activities she could start building into something of a routine.

Another way to use the community to her advantage is by participating in forums. Find out which forums are used by the more 4 mums target demographic and start joining a discussion. Lynn needs to make sure that she’s joining in in a meaningful way – i.e. actually helping other users – which may mean that she can’t always mention her company. Once she is considered a valuable member of the community occasionally links to her website will offend no-one and forum users they are actually far more likely to follow the link and buy from her, because they know they can trust her.

SEO / Social – Quality bloggers and

SEO – More consistency and a clear

meaningful forum participation

brand identity on the website to lure in

The tactics that Lynn is using (guest posting and sending out products for review) are good.

If time is limited she would do well to focus on going to the quality bloggers. Lynn says she likes engaging with the community. A smart approach would be to iden­tify some important mother-bloggers and ask them to guest blog.

This may take some time but the links from influential bloggers are likely to be worth more to search engines. If she picks the right bloggers, chances are that she will get traffic directly from the blog.

style savvy shoppers!

Other PPC tips and how and when to look out for them:

Participating in relevant forums can be great for your SEO

Lynn would love her website to be more productive and it to be the single selling point. Our team of experts identified two areas which she could optimize to this objective: 1.

Be more consistent: Consistency on your site looks professional and instills trust. A few tips to make the site look more consistent:

• • •

Add to cart buttons and products should all be in line Main category boxes should be a consistent size and Different fonts shouldn’t be used without a clear purpose (e.g. because it’s part of a logo or headings are always a different font).

2.

Design a strong brand identity: A consistent, streamlined site is likely to appeal to the target audience and instils trust. The site could look more consistent and use high quality, stylish photography even if the emphasis of the business is on value.

The logo could look sharper and be better designed – for the social networks it needs to be ▶ resized to fit the profile boxes.

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FRESH BUSINESS THINKING

DIGITAL FOOTPRINT

customers straight to sales

You may have the best PPC campaigns in the world but if your landing pages aren’t great, you will not convert. Here are 5 top tips: 1.

Checkout Process: ensure your checkout process is simple – state how many steps there are until they’ve bought their items and where they are in the process. Throughout the process, keep them encouraged by showing positive testimonials and images. Do not show links that will take them off your site! Check this link for further ideas.

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2.

Step into your customer’s shoes – e.g. if you sell nursing tops, anticipate that they will want to know the material so as not to aggravate baby’s skin. New mums may not have a clue what breast pump they will need so look at adding a ‘Most Popular’ icon to some products.

3.

Have main items above the fold e.g. do not have an ‘Add to Cart’ below the fold where customers have to scroll to get to it.

4.

Have good clear headers at the top of each page to reassure the searcher that they are in the right place and include a benefit e.g.

Stunning Maternity Tops – 10% Off Today!

5.

Do not clutter your webpages with content – this will stress searchers – keep the page as clear as possible but with the content they need to navigate through.

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FRESH BUSINESS THINKING

PAY-PER-CLICK

PPC and your busine

By Simone Schuurer, Microsoft Guaranteed exposure

Immediate results

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) guarantees your search ads shows up on the search engine results page when a potential customer searches for a certain keyword that you bid on – although obviously your bids have to be reasonable and your ads and landing pages of a good quality too.

We’ll explain to you in future blog posts in this series how you can set up a successful search campaign and how any business with any budget can make this work for them. Around 80% of clicks come from the top three search results which are paid for ads. For new businesses PPC also offers the opportunity to be seen alongside more established competitors.

The same day your campaign is created and live you get exposure. There is no need – such as with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts to wait for weeks to start to see the impact.

That doesn’t mean there is no place for SEO, we’ll touch upon that soon! PPC campaigns are also very easy to adjust. For example if you have a sale on with offers changing every day it is easy to adjust your ad copy daily. You can also be very fast to respond to whatever is happening in the market – if there is a sudden demand for a product (wellingtons opposed to paddling pools in the UK this year) you can refocus your advertising budgets and amend your ad copy quickly to benefit from real-time customer needs.

It helps you reach a relevant audience The user seeing your ad already has a certain amount of intent (as is usually not the case with newspaper, radio or TV ads) because they are looking for the keywords that showed your ad.

Pay per click is thus very effective in sending relevant traffic to your website. On the relevance topic; you can even target customers that are a certain distance away from your business and let them contact you by adding your contact details to the ad. How cool is that – especially in a time where many people search on their phone when they look for something to serve their needs nearby?

GUIDE TO DIGITAL MARKETING

ess You can work with a set budget PPC advertising allows you to run an effective and targeted campaign whilst you stay in control of your budget. To start with you only pay for those ads someone clicked on. When you create your PPC account you get a few options on how you’d like to manage your budget.

We’ll dive deeper into this topic in posts to come but it comes down to the fact that you can control your maximum spend per month and decide how you’d like to use your budget across that month. PPC can also be relatively cheap. If you offer a niche product for which there is a demand you can generate traffic to your site for potentially very little money.

Return on investment – It is possible to closely measure the impact of your campaign allowing you to improve areas that do not work very well and expand on areas that are really driving new customers, sales, leads or whatever else it is you set as your goal, enabling you to control the return on your advertising investment. PPC allows you to test various ads at the same time

which can also inform your other marketing activities on what ad copy hits the spot with your customers – improving marketing effectiveness beyond your PPC efforts.

What about branding?

Branding has got a place in the purchasing funnel – how you do it is a decision you should make. Bidding on your brand often targets customers early on in their decision making process which does not always lead to direct sales but tells them you are a player to consider when they are researching and making up their mind. Branding happens also whilst you are after your other specific PPC goals as people will see your brand name in your ads (you should include it!) when they search for keywords you bid on.

So there you have it: I think PPC can help relevant customers find your business, even when they are on the go. New and small businesses can show up side-by-side competitors seducing competitor’s potential customers with their own USPs. You don’t have to wait – you can show the world your ads today and you can measure exactly what works and what doesn’t work, informing you where your money is best spend. It doesn’t have to cost the world and you don’t have to worry about spend spiralling out of control either.

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PPC V SEO

Benefits of PPC Paid for listings have some strong advantages such as immediate results, control over the ad copy, being able to amend ad copy quickly, reaching a targeted audience and you can closely measure results.

Benefits of SEO

By Simone Schuurer, Microsoft What are organic listings?

If your site is showing up on search engine result pages and you haven’t set up a pay per click account, chances are you are looking at an organic listing (unless you have an unknown beneficiary that is doing PPC for you).

Organic listings are generated by an algorithm and a set of rules devised by the search engine to find the most relevant results on the web. The task of attempting to help a website rank higher in the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) when certain keywords are typed in is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

What are paid listings?

These are sponsored links, which are paid for per click by advertisers. Paid search is in essence an auction for advertising space on a SERP. Advertisers place bids on how much they are willing to pay the search engine for a click-through to their website. The bids help determine where the advertiser’s ad appears, from the top position, all the way down through the right hand side of the page. The position of an ad is also influenced by the relevancy of the advert to the keyword. Our previous blog post touched about the specific benefits of pay per click (PPC) advertising. If you’re interested to advertise on the Yahoo! Bing network you can set up an account here.

So where organic listings appear as a result of an algorithm and a set of rules devised by the seaфrch engine to find the most relevant results on the web (aided by search engine optimisation efforts) paid per click listings appear as a result of paid advertising efforts.

To me (no expert in this field) the main benefits of SEO seem to be that organic results are ‘free’ (although you may pay for someone to look after your SEO) results take much longer to show than paid for results but will keep doing so whilst PPC is reliant on a budget. So you’re looking at long-term cost effective positioning.

Benefits of combining the two Both PPC and SEO are search engine marketing techniques and have the joined goal of improving your web presence. They both have unique advantages that will help you achieve your online goals.

When using both techniques at the same time each method can benefit from the other 1.

PPC teaches which ad copy is most successful and you can split-test landing pages – knowledge you can use to the benefit of your SEO efforts.

2.

Clear landing pages with strong content will benefit your PPC efforts (you can better link ads to precise pages which increases ROI).

3.

You can learn from your PPC efforts which keywords perform best and push these in your SEO efforts.

4.

The other way around you can look on your site which words your customers use most and use this information to fine tune your PPC efforts.

5.

By using both SEO and PPC you also have a better chance to dominate the search engine results. Dominating the organic and paid search results will greatly increase traffic, and give the impression that you’re an established presence in a particular market. Dominating both organic as well as paid for results can also be priceless when your business has to combat negative PR – you’ll have a good chance to share your side of the story.

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Excel London 26-28 November

To survive businesses of all sizes need to be digitally competitive The digital marketing show will give you THE EDGE

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g tin ng i ke ar ket l M ar ta h M dia ting gi rc Me rke Di a a l g M Se cia tin ile t So b ke n o ar te M on il M C a Em

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FRESH BUSINESS THINKING

DIGITAL MARKETING SHOW

Digital Marketing Show

Clark goes on to say that: ‘Although we have crossed the ‘adoption gap’ we are certainly still in the early majority phase and this means that marketers are faced with new challenges to understand developments that can allow them to harness digital into their marketing strategy.’

for the ‘majority’ of marketers

‘That’s why we’ve created The Digital Marketing Show, we’ve lined up a tech-savvy group of speakers who want to pass on their knowledge, experience and tips to businesses and marketers who want to succeed in a digital world.’

By Nick James, Freshy Made Content ‘The fastest growing companies and marketing superstars are digital marketing powerhouses but the majority of businesses are playing catch-up’ according to Ray Clark from www.digitalmarketingshow.co.uk.

In consumer marketing the Rogers adoption curve identifies five different consumer types; Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority and Laggards.

Combined the Innovators and Early Adopters traditionally represent just 16% of a market; the big numbers come with the Early Majority and the Late Majority (as the names suggest).

Although this is not perfectly replicated in a business-to-business market place it is certainly true that businesses of all sizes are waking up to the fact that they want to avoid the ‘digital graveyard’ where even big brands such as; Comet, Jessops and HMV are buried.

Taking place at Excel in November the Digital Marketing Show businesses and brands will be able to learn from experts in the comprehensive seminar and conference theatres and then find suppliers under the same roof.

The Digital Marketing Show isn’t just for the larger brands who are rethinking their digital strategies - just 33% of small to medium-sized companies have a digital presence at all and only 14% sell their products online.

In a recent interview with Fresh Business Thinking, Martha Lane Fox, founder of lastminute.com and the Government’s digital champion said: ‘businesses should think internet first’.

The Digital Marketing Show will be the place to go for marketers and business owners looking for information, ideas and advice as to where to focus their digital marketing energies.

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GUIDE TO DIGITAL MARKETING

Soundbites:

‘Just 33% of small to medium-sized companies have a digital presence at all and only 14% sell their products online.’

Malcolm Graham: It is hard to think of any business that would not benefit from a good and well ranked website.

Customers expect companies to have a good website these days. if you have no digital presence this will create suspicion and concern amongst your customers and staff. At the very least build a good website and secure a ranking on Google for the name of your business.

Social Media is a low cost marketing channel that can add a lot of value to your business. Every pound you spend on Digital Marketing should generate five for you in the long term. If you run a business with no digital presence you could be missing a huge opportunity.

Alexia Leachman: If you’re not present online, you’re effectively stifling the potential of your business. People live online these days and that’s where you need to be to serve your customer.

Getting the digital piece right can really set you apart from your competitors because it’s still something that’s not as widespread as it should be.

Louise Findlay Wilson: It is a tragic shame that so few smaller companies have grasped the possibilities of digital media and selling online, especially when both of these tools are not influenced by a company’s size. I know it can seem overwhelming but I’d argue that digital marketing plays into the hands of the smaller, more nimble business. It really levels the corporate playing field. Those who fail to look at, let alone master, the online space are missing a massive commercial trick.

Nichola Stott: Setting up and managing an online presence can be a daunting prospect for small to medium-sized companies, and although it is true that the vast majority of purchase still take place offline. It is vital to understand the 40% of consumers’ research their purchase online before completing their transaction offline. Without an online presence small to medium businesses could be losing out on customers at the research phase.

Michael Tinmouth: Personalised customer service is a key differentiator for small businesses - the big multinationals can never hope to have the relationship with their customers that you have. With over 26m active daily Facebook users in the UK and 10m users of Twitter and LinkedIn your customers are online and if you’re not engaging with them where they want to hangout then you’re missing opportunities to talk to them, listen to their feedback and praise and ultimately to make sales.

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DIGITAL MARKETING SHOW

The power of Peer Index

By Lynette Lisle, Fresh Business Thinking There are endless possibilities in discovering new information on people, places and subject areas as a result of the social web.

Whether an established authority, expert, journalist, academic or a capable amateur, how can you determine who is really influential in a certain niche?

PeerIndex is a web technology company that is algorithmically mapping out the social web by evaluating and understanding the social capital a person has built online. I spoke to Azeem Azhar, CEO of Peer Index to find out the importance of identifying, ranking, and scoring the influence one has on others.

Could tell us a bit about yourself and your background?

I founded PeerIndex in 2009. I’ve been launching and building internet services since 1993 when I put my University newspaper on Gopher. Since then, my career has covered journalism (at the Economist and The Guardian), strategy (at the BBC and Reuters) and more than a decade of start-ups. I’m a wanna-

be maths geek with an interest in the Vietnam War and innovation, and live in North London with my wife and three kids.

What is PeerIndex? Could you give a brief summary of how it works, who should use it and why?

PeerIndex is a social analytics company applying the science of influence to social data to create valuable consumer insight for brands.

Our team includes experts from the fields of marketing, consumer insight, big data, machine learning and consumer internet, and we have worked with 60+ blue chip clients like Ford, Samsung and Virgin Media on helping them to engage their key influencers and understand their communities. Any brand that wants actionable insight on who in their community is influential, in which topics and how best to engage with them should come talk to us. We achieve our results by flushing over 1 billion social signals through our analytics engine every day and creating predictive indicators and influence segments based on this data.

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voice, we’re finally able to understand how influence flows and make the value exchange between consumers and brands more rewarding and personal on both ends.

Why should I care about whether I am being influential in a certain specific subject area?

How is PeerIndex different from Klout and Kred?

From the very beginning, we’ve been very focused on understanding influence in context.

It’s not enough to have a single score indicating someone’s influence - it’s all about the topics and communities a user is influential in.

What do you mean by Influence?

When we say influence, we mean a layered concept – it’s not about a single score. Influence needs to be seen in context, which brings into play dimensions like location, activity level and topics. To that effect, the PeerIndex scoring incorporates over 300 topics, which allow us to identify exactly which subject areas the user is influential in. At a high level, it is all about the social capital which has long existed in human relationships. Until social media, however, it’s been really hard to identify and quantify, because it was hidden in pub conversations, telephone calls, exchanges between colleagues and so on. Now, with ever more people adopting social media and finding their

As an individual, it’s a really good way to identify the things you clearly have some pull in – if you’re at all interested in personal branding, which is becoming more and more essential these days, you need to know where your topical strengths lie. You probably already (think you) know, so you influence profile is a good way to ensure your self-perception and how others see you are actually aligned. This also goes for brands, although here the right phrasing would be to ensure your brand goals and social community align.

How can this be beneficial and useful for brands?

You invest time and budget into building your social media communities. There’s no question that having an active presence online is now essential, but justifiably, the question of ROI comes up time and time again in the board room. In order to do social properly, brands need to understand that influence is the key enabler to achieving social ROI. Without understanding who to focus your limited resources on, you cannot scale your marketing campaigns successfully and may very well end up wasting your money on social media noise, not impact. PeerIndex’ influence scores and topic methodology provide the framework that allows you to segment your audience according to your brand footprint – enabling you to understand the individuals that make up your audience, not just what messages they are broadcasting. From this point, brands can build truly customer centric communications and lasting advocacy relationships with the influencers in their community, finally giving meaning to the thousands of likes and follow▶ ers they have amassed.

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What is a good score?

The best answer would be ‘it depends’, but I understand this isn’t useful. To reframe the question, let’s ask what a good score is for a brand who wants to find out whom to talk to. In that case, we’d say any followers and fans with a score between 40 and 90 are a great start. These users range from influential in niches with reasonable reach to highly respected subject matter experts – but they’re not hard-to-get-a-hold-of celebrities with scores in the 90s. A great way to think about this is by identifying your campaign goal: do you want to achieve high reach or is strong influence and relationship building your aim? If it’s the former, someone like Lady Gaga who has massive reach (and a high PeerIndex) would be a great catch if you can get her to engage with your content – which is a challenge. On the other hand, if you want to reach an engaged network of people, you want to go through ‘the long tail of influence’ – those influencers with a PeerIndex of about 60+ who are highly trusted topical experts and have a strong connection to their followers. Naturally, there will be more of these than there are of the celebrities segment, so you’ll very likely be surprised at the reach you can potentially achieve through them. Again, what is ‘good’ depends on your goals, which is a question we work through with our clients.

How should a business work to improve their score? Is it all about followers?

First off, it’s absolutely not all about followers, or celebrity. As I outlined above, influence is a layered concept, and our data science team invests a major part of their time into making sure the PeerIndex algorithm works on this level of sophistication. To that end we employ the highest standards of machine learning and natural language processing methods and continuously invest in our proprietary analytics engine – both on a software and hardware basis. As with Google’s search algorithm, there’s no way to game it with cheap tricks like buying followers or similar spamming techniques. And as with Google, the best thing to do is to be as interesting online as you are offline. Make sure your content matches your brand goals and personality. Identify what content your com-

munity is interested in. Give them ownership, which in turn will make them engage with your brand. These are all things that should have a positive impact on your score – but more importantly, on your bottom line.

What would negatively affect a score?

As with the answer above – the less interesting your content is, the less you listen to your audience and the less engagement you generate, the lower your score will be. Obviously, I can’t reveal the inner workings of our algorithm here as it’s our IP. Keep in mind that the score

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will be a reflection of your influence, and think of it as one of the outcomes, not the aims of your brand’s activity. It’s all about understanding the PeerIndex score as a framework to put the users of the social web into context and cut through the noise.

Do you think that social influence will one day become the primary method to drive word-of-mouth marketing?

It already is! Social influence is the key thing driving word of mouth marketing, it’s the holy grail. If your WOM campaign is getting a lot

of buzz from people with no influence, it won’t go very far. To rephrase the question, do I think that PeerIndex’ social influence score will become the primary method behind word-ofmouth marketing: In order to know who to focus your brand’s budget and attention on, and thus create the most amount of earned media and value possible, you need to be able to identify the key influencers and what they are interested in. To do this, there needs to be a reliable, valid measurement of influence – which PeerIndex scores are. We allow brands to understand the people making up their community, and segment who will move the dial most if a relationship can be built with them. We also tell brands which content will be most useful to build these bonds, and those bonds are what will drive word-of-mouth. So yes, I believe that our insights and scores will become the primary method underpinning word-of-mouth marketing – and much more – in the future.

What’s next for PeerIndex?

PeerIndex has some exciting news coming up in the next few weeks – we’d be happy to tell you more about this in a sneak peek. We’re hard at work to offer brands the tools they need to cope with social data and the challenges social media at scale brings. Over 400 brands now have audiences of 500k+ on Twitter alone, and we know they are struggling to make sense of their communities. Achieving customer understanding is the cornerstone to extracting the true value from social media – it’s the only way to know what the thousands of likes and followers actually mean. Questions like ‘Who is influential and worth focusing on?’, ‘Does my Twitter community match my brand goals?’ and ‘What are my most important followers interested in?’, are big unanswered elephants in the room. Existing tools focus too much on simplistic message tracking and ‘social listening’ and we want to fill the obvious gap that marketing teams are finding in their analytics suites.

There’s too much data and not enough insight, and we’re going to change that!

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DIGITAL MARKETING SHOW

The Digital Marketing Show

By Jonathan Davies, Fresh Content

Businesses are being held back by their lack of basic digital skills. According to a recent report by Booz & Company, 25%of business owners say their employees don’t have even the basic digital skills needed to use the internet for business, and just over a third (34%) of businesses consider their employees to be ‘digitally savvy’.

The lack of digital skills are restricting these businesses’ ability to grow. Currently, just 14% of businesses sell their product and services online. Nowadays, the need for an online presence is crucial because people are increasingly taking to the web to make purchasing decisions and look for information about businesses, products and services. The report also finds that shoppers prefer to make purchases on smaller business websites, rather than larger businesses. The younger generation are particularly prolific online; Cisco have found that half of UK college/university students say they prefer to shop online more than in person.

More than 15 billion hours is spent on online retail across the world per month and UK consumers are world leaders in terms of how much

time and money they spend online. Research has shown that in 2011, £1,083 was spent per head on online shopping in the UK - over £300 more than Europe’s next biggest spenders, Sweden (£747), and almost £250 more the world’s next biggest spenders, Australia (£842).

In December 2012, The Huffington Post reported that online shopping overtook physical sales for the first time. According to Econsultancy, UK customers spent 14 million hours online and made 113 million visits to online retail websites.

The market for online retail and marketing is growing in the UK. Booz & Company have predicted that £18.8 billion could be injected into UK businesses total annual turnover if all businesses sold and marketed their products online.

The Digital Marketing Show offers a deep insight into how digital skills can fulfil your marketing needs. Over three days, 150 expert speakers will cover every aspect of digital marketing. The experts will use case studies and up-to-date advice on ‘now’ and the future of digital marketing in this educational experience for marketers of all levels.

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ONLINE SUCCESS

Seeding Content For Online Success

By Lyndon Wood, SunZu Twitter is great for ‘seeding’ quality content.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty, I’d like to take a moment to explain exactly what content seeding is.

In a nutshell, the goal of seeding is to distribute content across the web by using blogs, online communities and social media channels. The more visible your content is, the more likely it is to be shared with a wider audience, thus helping to establish your brand as an authority online and driving traffic back to your website.

Founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, has said that ‘people have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people’. Sharing online content has now become an important part of modern life. To further back up this claim, did you know that someone tweets a link to a New York Times story once every four seconds?

Imagine if they were doing that with your businesses content!! OK, so I know that’s an unobtainable goal for most, but if you managed to enjoy even just a thousandth of the success of the NYT then your business is likely to be substantially more visible on line than it is today.

But what makes content likeable and shareable?

Well, there’s no secret formula if that’s what you were hoping for. If you frequent social media sites regularly then you’ll know that all sorts of things go viral, from cute kittens to angry adolescents.

However, while there’s no one recipe for producing shareable content, there are a few ways that you can edge the viral bets in your favour:

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Get trendy: One of the best ways to get your content shared socially is by commenting on real-time industry news.

If you hear about a breaking story then your business can ride on its popularity by offering commentary and a unique perspective. If the story trends socially on platforms like Twitter this can lead to increased views, traffic and enhanced search engine optimisation (SEO) for your business and website.

Get Visual:

It’s important to note that not all content needs to be textual. Infographics have recently taken the social media sphere by storm and are shared left right and centre.

Visually stimulating infographics provide a great way for businesses to communicate weighty data and complex processes in a way that’s easily digestible (& shareable). They can be used to explain a plethora of topics so long as you have the data to back them up.

If your business has recently undertaken some research, why not display your findings via an attractive infographic?

Get Creative: Most people click on links shared via social because of the title. Sometimes, people even retweet a link and share it with their entire network without even reading the post, basing their decision solely on the fact that the title engaged, humoured or interested them.

Whatever the type of content you choose to create ensure that you take the time to craft an eye catching title. Don’t be afraid to be controversial or daring with your titles. Regardless of the topic of the post, make the reader wonder what the content is about. And then bobs your uncle, their eyes are on your content.

To sum up, it’s every marketer’s Holy Grail to create a piece of content that is liked, shared and forwarded globally.

Although there are no guarantees when it comes to creating viral content, with a little thought and preparation you can certainly improve the chances of your content getting shared across the web.

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MARTHA LANE FOX

GUIDE TO DIGITAL MARKETING

An interview with dotcom pioneer Martha Lane Fox

By Francesca James, Fresh Content Recently I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing the youngest female member of the lords – Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho – a true dotcom pioneer and business inspiration.

Martha co-founded Europe’s largest travel and leisure website lastminute.com with Brent Hoberman in 1998, they took it public in 2000 and sold it in 2005. In March 2013 he was appointed a crossbench peer in the House of Lords in March 2013, she’s currently the UK’s Digital Champion and chair of Go On UK, a coalition of public and private sector partners that are helping millions more people and organisations online.

I had a few burning questions that I wanted to ask her about digital skills and their importance to entrepreneurialism and economic prosperity in the UK, here’s what she had to say:

Francesca James: Why are digital skills so important?

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho: I think I’ve been on record as saying before that you can’t be a proper citizen if you don’t know how to use the internet and I mean by that, that you are missing out on so many of the benefits of being online. So we know that you save money online, you’re more likely to get work, your children will do better at school, you’ll feel more connected to people around you, so, I think it’s incredibly important that we make sure as many people as possible are able to enjoy all of the massive benefits of the web.

Francesca James: What would your top tips be for a business looking to become successful in 2013?

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho: Well, I’d think I’d steal from Google; not a bad place to start, and Google taught you about thinking about things ‘internet first’. If I was starting a business now, I would definitely be thinking ‘internet first’ whatever that business was, even if you were going to have a shop, think about what actually does the internet allow you to do at the heart of your business. Is it talking to your suppliers, is ▶

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it talking to your customers, is it allowing you to do a bunch of other stuff that I wouldn’t be clever enough to think of. So, I think ‘internet first’, that’s really important.

And then secondly, I think just get going on some social media. I know you use it, I know that I use it, and I think it can be enormously rewarding for businesses of any size or scale, partly to talk to your customers, partly to see what your competitors are doing, to get news and to be able to have a community of people in an easy and accessible way.

Francesca James: You’re a true dotcom pioneer and business inspiration but if you had to go back and do it all again is there anything you would do differently?

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho : Goodness me! There are so many things everybody says that about starting a business, ‘oh I make a million different mistakes every day’, but I think that there’s perhaps 2 or 3 big things. Both Brent, who was my co-founder of Lastminute. com and I would say that we always underestimated how complicated technology was, always. And even now I think as many more technologies are off the shelf or some things are easier it’s still easy to underestimate the complexity of building a news site, doing something difficult, doing something innovative. At that time in the UK it was very hard to hire great digital skilled people ; it’s still pretty hard to hire them so I think I would personally put more time, energy and resources into the planning tech carefully, learning about it and being a bit more realistic in our expectations.

That’s probably the first thing.

I think the second thing is that, if you think back to the beginning of Lastminute.com there was no Google, let alone Facebook, let alone Twitter, let alone all of the other myriad of emerging social networks, and I think that we spent a lot of time and attention as you will know building PR and building momentum that way and building our brand. But it came at a cost; it came at a personal cost and it also I think came at a cost of, was Lastminute.com me and Brent, just me or just Brent, or was it a business? I think now we would be a lot

smarter about being ‘out there’ on networks and not using just that offline media.

Francesca James: What one thing would you say is the most important digital skill an entrepreneur needs?

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho: I think that if you had to narrow it down to one digital skill, it sounds a bit macro but actually it’s so important, it’s putting your brain into a digital space. So even if your business doesn’t feel like it’s a completely online business, really think about what are the bits of your business that are affected digitally, what could you do more efficient digitally, how could you reach your customers; going back to that ‘internet first’ idea. But also another important reason which is that your customers in the future, the kids of today are only thinking digitally and they’re thinking ‘digitally first’. So it’s very, very important that you are building longevity into your business to be able to think in that way.

Francesca James: Just 33% of small – to medium – sized companies have a digital presence and only 14% sell their products online.

What do you think is holding the UK back from being a global digital power?

Baroness LaneFox of Soho: Those numbers are really important and you’re quite right to highlight them. We did some work with Lloyds Bank that came out with them and I was absolutely amazed that only 14% were using the internet to effectively sell. Think of the opportunities of reaching new markets, but also talking to your suppliers, not just selling stuff to your customers but also improving your supply chain, improving your processes and all the other bits and pieces.

I think it’s a whole number of things holding us back. I think we have had a lot of attention in this country on infra-

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structure, governments’ made some bold commitments on broadband, we haven’t had the same focus on skills; we haven’t had it as a focus for individuals, but we also haven’t had it as a focus for businesses or charities. That to me is the bit of the puzzle that we now need to sharply think about. I think it’s a lot of different pieces of the puzzle; there’s no one thing that is going to sort it out, but for me it’s about really going back to what are the benefits for small businesses.

Not my voice banging on about why it’s a good idea. Everybody knows that I think the internet is great. It’s about what is relevant if you’re running a small butchers, what is relevant if you’re a builder, what is relevant if you’re a fireman, what is relevant if you another business person or volunteer in a business or whatever the thing is. I think that that’s now what we need to think about carefully.

Francesca James: With Lastminute.com you were genuinely innovative in business – who are your innovation heroes?

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho: I think that my innovation heroes come from a wide variety of sources. I studied history, so I like all those moment s in history when things changed and I studied classics, so I like to going back right into the dawn of time and looking at the beginnings of the political system. There were a hell of a lot of innovators around then, people literally inventing how we still use democracy and the wider political scene today and that is a quite remarkable thing and you can always take inspiration from that.

Obviously Tim Burners-Lee and what he did with the World Wide Web being a UK computer scientist is also quite remarkable.

But there are a huge number of women as well who have done innovative things across time, particularly with computer science.

Ada Lovelace, step daughter of Lord Byron; she was very, very important

working with Charles Babbage on his first computer and you only have to take one look at the lovely portrait that we have of her to get inspired as a young woman who is also worked in computing.

But, having recently gone into the House of Lords, I’m also incredibly excited to meet Baroness Trumpington. She is the oldest female member of the House of Lords, and I am the youngest female member and she cracked the Enigma Code working at Bletchley Park. So I am hoping I can spend some time with her and suck out how she did that incredible piece of ‘sort of’ innovation in her lifetime.

Francesca James: You’re the youngest female member of Lords – Baroness LaneFox of Soho – Who should be Lord or Lady of Old Street?

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho : Ha ha!

There is one; Lord Nat Wei of Shoreditch. He’s actually the youngest member of the House of Lords and he was made a conservative peer because he was responsible for the big society when this government came in. So Lord Wei of Shoreditch is pretty close to Old Street, but I’m going to choose another Lord or Lady.

I’m the chairman of a really smart little startup called Make It Up. Alice Taylor started that; she’s a very smart woman who knows all about gaming, and at Make It Up we are creating a world of physical games for kids and online games. You can print out the characters that you are using in the online game; it’s really smart so I think that Alice should definitely be Lady of Old Street roundabout, that’s where Make It Up are based.

Francesca James: Apart from you and Lord Sugar, are there any other Lords or Ladies on Twitter?

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho: There are a few actually, and I was surprised because I didn’t know very many. There is a very nice woman which I don’t know but look forward to meet called Elizabeth Berridge who is a Conservative peer and she tweets occasionally. There are actually quite a few other peers, so maybe I will set up a Lords list ▶ that people can follow.

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Francesca James: If you were able to get one message out to UK PLC to encourage them to build digital skills, what would it be?

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho: Everybody can do something to help. Go On UK is a charity that I founded bringing the corporate sector together to help build the UK’s digital skills.

These are big organisations like Lloyds Bank, EE, Talk Talk, The post Office all of whom committing to do things in either their own organisations or in the wider communities to help get people online. It doesn’t have to just be people in their corporate lives, everybody can help. If you know somebody that can’t use the internet, sit down with them and show them the benefits.

I think that’s the single thing that I would like to re-emphasize that we all need to work together to make this a digitally remarkable place.

Francesca James: Why don’t you think we have yet seen a British Google or Facebook?

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho: ‘Yet’ is the key bit of that sentence – I like that part. Again there’s lot and lots of factors and I’m not always an expert in the macro economics of it but my take on it would be a couple of things.

Firstly, we are pretty good at inventing stuff in the UK actually. We have lots of small businesses, we have lots of small digital start-ups but because we are English speaking, because we are close to America and have go those close links American companies swoop in and buy them very fast. People tend to sell before they get to scale and you could argue that Lastminute.com has been guilty of that

too. I think that is a very big reason you know, Google looks about and says, ‘Hmm what’s that interesting company? We are going to snap it up!’ Look at the Summly sale recently.

The second thing is, I love the BBC and I’m a 100% signed up supported to it, but I think we have to recognise that we have a very ,very vibrant public sector within the BBC and a lot of technical innovation has perhaps historically happened in there as opposed to out in the commercial sector. So you could argue that our Facebook or Google of scale is the BBC, because they have done a massive amount of stuff online and the iPlayer you could argue is one of the most influential and interesting pieces of technology around the world so I think that is a secondary reason.

But third of all perhaps this one is a bit more controversial, there’s a cultural kind of ambition that I think we need to be better at building in this country. I think we need to aim for the longer term, I think we need to encourage entrepreneurs’ to build businesses that will last 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 100 years and that I think is a much more slow moving, much more systemic piece of work. But that I think is how we will really create the big scale companies of the future.

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MARKETING INNOVATION

Get innovative!

by Bradley Howard, Endava Bradley Howard, Head of Digital Media at Endava, explains that organisations need to embrace a culture of marketing innovation to deliver long-term success According to the Consortium for Service Innovation, the definition of innovation ranges from ‘introduction of something new’ to ‘something substantially different’. History is littered with examples of companies that didn’t innovate – where competitors have come along and eaten their lunch and worse. Recent victims, including Blockbusters, HMV and Comet, may have survived if they had innovated and tried to do something different.

Organisations should constantly ask themselves ‘what can I do that is substantially different to improve my service, product, function or role?’ The problem is that most people don’t

like change. Doing nothing is easy. But if you keep delivering the same offerings in the same way as you’ve always done, tomorrow will be the same as yesterday and next year will be the same as last year. Competitors will appear with their improved products and services, while your revenues decline.

Challenges Innovation is inherently risky and unknown and this is not helped by the inherently risk adverse nature of Western corporate culture. So we need to innovate, in a less risky way. It’s a difficult balance. The maxim ‘Companies have to die in order to be reborn’ doesn’t help innovative thinking. It’s also hard to innovate when things are going well – and this is possibly one of Apple’s biggest challenges.

Achieving a culture of innovation is difficult.

Most people aren’t paid to go to work solely to think of new services, products, methods or practices. We’ve all met people who will strictly work eight hours a day or their specific job role.

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I’ve heard people say, ‘It’s not my role to innovate.’ Everyone should be thinking of innovation. If you’re a sales or marketing person, ask is there a new type of system or technique that would help you?

Think of innovative companies such as Google, Dyson and Amazon. People want to work for them as they all seem to offer a great environment where you spend eight hours a day – and get paid for it. Irene Rosenfeld, the CEO of Kraft, described Kraft as a ‘40 billion dollar start up’.

Creating a culture of innovation inside a company with over a hundred thousand employees is always going to be challenging, especially when there was such a ‘safe’ culture before Rosenfeld took over the company.

Solutions It’s difficult to think about the future – for most of us, our minds aren’t wired this way. To make it easier, look retrospectively using scenarios and consider the following: What digital media tools or systems will you use to help productivity in five years time?

How will customers be using your website in two years time?

How can the user enter all these details without using the keyboard?

How can you protect a secure service without a cumbersome password?

Identify your most useful smartphone app (it’s interesting to do this collectively) and establish how to integrate this with your company’s app.

We recently ran a client workshop where the first question was, ‘With so many users on social media, should we still build a .com website?’ These types of challenging questions are fundamental to promoting an innovative mind set through an organisation.

It’s often easier to be external to the team or the organisation to improve their products.

The next time you are holding a brainstorming session, invite at least one person from another team – someone you rarely work with.

They’ll come up with ideas that your current team won’t have thought of. Innovation re-

• • • • •

quires both the risk of looking externally, and the mind-set of an external party.

Hold the session somewhere completely different – such a supplier or partner’s office.

Interestingly, the kinds of digital companies that are considered innovative (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.) all facilitate third party meetings in their offices. Many companies offer communication channels for partners and customers to send suggestions to senior managers. Tesco promote their feedback website on every till receipt.

Sometimes it’s a human reaction to think that a product or service is so well used and ingrained that there’s nothing else that can be invented.

Take tomato soup, bank accounts or chocolate bars as three examples. Heinz, Barclays and Cadbury all offer personalised products respectively – whether it’s the labelling or the photo on the debit card – this has created significant viral marketing value for all companies.

Incentivise innovation At my previous employer, all staff were given bonuses for writing patents for the organisation. We received different amounts for producing new concepts, filing them, and whether those filings turned into accepted patents. The highest reward was given if the patent was commercially exploited. Create a culture where you have regular innovation sessions outside of work hours, which will always generate a number of good ideas, and keep the innovation culture fresh.

Conclusion Innovation must not be just a one off exercise, but an ongoing process, as great ideas will always be copied by your competition. For continued success, ensure that you are ahead of the herd by accelerating innovative change initiatives and respond swiftly to new opportunities. ■

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FRESH BUSINESS THINKING

GENERATION Y

Gen Y and supermarket shopping

By Catherine Parkin, Tactical Solutions As part of my role, I spend a lot of time visiting different supermarkets. I can see that the nature of shopping in the UK is changing. The days of the big weekly shop are in decline; now we see a large number of smaller shops, driven by convenience. These are often topped up with a bigger shop for essentials, but this is often done online and delivered to home.

This got me thinking: is this change down to the way we all live our lives now – time poor, convenience driven – or is it something fundamental in the way that younger generations do their shopping? Do Gen Y, as 18 – to 30-year-olds are known, still shop as we do or is this changing?

Fortunately, my colleagues in the St Ives Group at Incite have recently just conducted a wide-ranging study on Gen Y and another one on supermarket shopping habits, so we can analyse the differences.

Interestingly, there definitely do seem to be some marked differences between Gen Y and the ‘older generations’, with much of what we are seeing aligning with more general Gen Y research trends:

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Gen Y-ers do seem to be even more promiscuous than their older counterparts. On average we have seen the average number of shops per month creep to just over 4 per person. However, when we split that down we see 6.3 different retailers visited

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VS

in the last month against 3.9 for older consumers. Gen Y shops around.

In terms of reasons for trying out new supermarkets, Gen Y-ers are more likely to give reasons like ‘looking for a more convenient location’, ‘recently moved house’ and ‘looking for better loyalty scheme’. Older consumers are more likely to be looking for ‘range to cover their needs’. So lifestyle clearly plays a part; Gen Y will tend to be busier and looking for a convenient shopping experience.

When asked why they chose the supermarket that they use, Gen Y is less likely to cite reasons relating to range, price and ‘good size car park’ which I guess is a function of the less demanding nature of the life stage they are at i.e. no kids!

Gen Y consumers appear to be more open to new products/brands and are more likely to make spontaneous choices in store. Potentially there is much more scope for in-store marketing aimed at this group, something that is often missed by retailers.

This generation also seem to be

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B

• • •

more immersed in brand communications and are more likely than their older counterparts to report having seen an ad, read a review or seen some other form of information about the brand/product before buying. This is in line with our findings from the Gen Y research which outlines the thirst for knowledge in this group. Content is desired by this group on a pretty constant basis – retailers need to ask if they are satisfying this.

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They are more likely that older generation to seek recommendation from a friend or family member before making a purchase. This shows how social media influences life in that seeking advice is now the norm for this age group.

From a retailer’s point of view, the younger shopper often feels ignored as they are perceived as being lower value and not ‘sticky’. However, as we all know, decisions made in your 20s often stay with you for life. To attract and keep the shopper of the future, retailers would do well to consider the Gen Y generation today. They can, and indeed want to be, influenced and in-store and online marketing could drive profit today, and further down the line.

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FRESH BUSINESS THINKING

ADVERTORIAL

The Power of Embracing Digital

By Claire West, Fresh Business Thinking The high street has had a less than auspicious twelve months, and most acknowledge that the main culprit of failures, such as Jessops and HMV, was their inability to understand digital.

Struggling retailers like HMV and Jessops ‘failed to move with the times’ and didn’t cope with the ‘threat of the internet’. As such, and in an effort to stop the business graveyard filling up with any more household names, the Digital Marketing Show has been launched. The show, which is being held 26th to 28th November 2013 at the ExCel Campus, will aim to educate the marketing community.

“There are still far too many UK businesses who are trailing far behind in their understanding of digital. We need to come together to ensure the right action is taken to avoid any more casualties,” said Philippa Snare, Chief Marketing Officer for UK Microsoft.

Digital, on average, now drives 70% of a company’s earnings. There have been some brilliant examples of British companies who have stolen huge competitive advantage and driven customers into their stores through their use of digital media (such as John Lewis).

However this has left other brands even more exposed as they trail behind. One astonishing example of this failure is that, of our top retailers, only just over half have a website that works on a mobile device.

Many senior managers in marketing still admit that they don’t understand digital. One of the reasons is that they believe that it’s too difficult and should be owned by the techies. Harper Reed, CTO of Barack Obama’s 2012 election

campaign recently suggested that to solve that misunderstanding: “We need to drop the ‘e’ from ‘e-marketing.’”

Jeremy Waite, Head of Social Strategy, Adobe EMEA, is also supporting the initiative; “For many, digital marketing is about “Likes” and Apps, and the killing of the high street.

But those that know, see it as a whole shift of communication, that adds to and can support traditional media. The digital riptide is about embracing new and very different ways to engage with consumers. It’s about Affiliate Marketing, Internet Advertising, Web Analytics, Social Media, Search Marketing, Mobile, Email Marketing, E-commerce, Customer Experience and Content. It is no longer optional or a ‘nice to have’; it’s essential, to stay ahead of the competition.”

Andrew Ellis Founder of Like Minds (a global “Thought Leadership” platform) has described the event as; “Critical for the UK economy. It’s time that digital marketing – or what we call “Social Business” – went mainstream. This is a great opportunity for the best digital marketing brains to come together and debate how we can help make that happen.”

The Digital Marketing Show is aimed at business from all sectors – not just retail.

For more information visit: www.digitalmarketingshow.co.uk

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FRESH BUSINESS THINKING

TO-DO:

ADVERTORIAL

Increase Productivity with Microsoft

By Francesca James, Fresh Content Small business owners wear many hats and their time is regularly overly stretched. Smart business owners and entrepreneurs know that productivity is the key to success, but for those of us running our own operations, the to-do list often seems never ending and no matter how hard we work, we can’t seem to make a dent in it.

We’ve all heard the phrase ‘work smarter not harder’, but what does that really mean? And what tools can businesses harness to make the day to day running of their business that little bit easier?

While there’s no one tool that can instantaneously alleviate stress and workload entirely, there are several products that have been cleverly designed with smaller businesses in mind that can help them to get more customers cost efficiently, manage those customers effectively and power business operations with best in class (and cost effective) tools and services.

Getting More Customers: The internet is one of the few places that smaller businesses can compete on a level playing field with their larger counterparts, however, just being online isn’t enough; businesses need to make sure that they are being found by

potential customers and prospects who are looking for them.

Microsoft’s Aaron McGrath says that ‘search marketing is a good way to target qualified leads, and it’s inexpensive because you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, expressing an interest in learning more about what you’re selling.’

Businesses can advertise on the Yahoo! Bing Network for the opportunity to reach millions*of high-potential searchers in the United Kingdom. Did you know that ‘searchers on the Yahoo! Bing Network are 33% more likely to be potential buyers than the average UK searcher’ according to research released by Neislen last year**? Is this a statistic that your business can afford to ignore?

Signing up is quick and easy and those who do will have access to free telephone support and tools.

Click here.

Managing Those Customer Relationships: Once you’ve won new business via your search efforts, how are you going to manage those customers?

Juggling sales, delivery and the personal service which keeps customers coming back is no mean feat, so why not employ the services of a CRM software solution like Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM? With Microsoft Dynamics CRM, salespeople can access prospect and customer data directly from within the Microsoft Outlook cli-

ent. This means everyone can focus their time and attention on addressing customer needs, leading to more sales and income for the business, rather than wasting time searching for information.

In Outlook, email messages from prospects can be converted into opportunities and added to the sales pipeline. Every communication is tracked; which means that everyone has a complete record of interaction with the customer, so everyone can be completely up to speed on what is happening with the customer at every point of interaction. Great customer service is often a differentiator for small businesses, and Dynamics CRM makes it easy for everyone in the business to know exactly what is going on with each customer, making it possible for everyone to focus on giving their customers a great experience.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM gives you and your staff the ability to develop stronger, better relationships with prospects and customers, resulting in happier customers, and faster, more profitable sales. Dynamics CRM is available online as a service, which means that smaller businesses can focus on their busi-

ness, without having to worry about the overhead of managing IT. Customer focus is vital for businesses wanting to stay competitive during these tough economic times. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is only as useful as the information in it, and so ease of use is essential to success. Microsoft Dynamics CRM looks and feels just like the Microsoft Office apps that your employees are already familiar with, so it is easy and intuitive to use, which means that everyone can start working with it right away – working with customer contacts, leads and opportunities is as easy as working with email.

If your business already uses Microsoft Office, then Microsoft Dynamics CRM is an ideal match for your needs.

To access these cloud services, all you need is a simple internet connection. Got that already? Thought so. Click here.

Power Your Business Operations: Office 365 is Microsoft’s productivity suite. It brings cloud-based, wed-delivered flexibility, dependability and ease of use to the Office applications. No longer do you need to be chained to your desk in order to get work done, with Office 365 everything can be done on the go. Office is now available on more devices than ever before, you can achieve more on the go thanks to the streaming of a full featured version and add to all of that the ability to sync everything with those you are working with. The small business owner can’t always afford ‘big business IT’, despite wanting it. This is where Office 365 comes into play, as deploying, managing and safeguarding it couldn’t be simpler, providing small business owners with a cost-effectivew, yet highly professional and efficient IT solution.

In a world where businesses come and go on a regular basis you need to be noticed, your ‘shop window’ needs to look the best it can. And with Office 365 it couldn’t be easier showing the world how professional your business is. Through Office 365 you can create eye-catching marketing documents, create a businesslike website, branded emails, HD video conferencing and a whole lot more. A combination of tools, online services and mobile apps ensures that Office 365 caters to every of your business needs. Click here .

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*comScore qSearch (custom), December 2012. **Neislen Netratings, December 2012

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FRESH BUSINESS THINKING

POWER OF VINE

Vine lets you communicate visually For many small businesses, social media marketing has been a predominantly textbased pursuit. Now, though, the advent of Vine has placed the image front and centre – and it looks set to increase in prominence. If your marketing strategy is to remain relevant and effective, it is important that you place the visual at its heart.

You need to be snappy

By Jasper Martens, Simply Business Twitter recently launched a new video sharing app called Vine. The service enables users to create and upload 6-second videos using their iPhone, and to share them directly to Twitter or Facebook.

Although in its infancy Vine looks set to throw the social focus very firmly onto video, and the implications for small business marketing practices are significant. We have reviewed it and summarised the important points for your business.

Six seconds is not very long. Twitter has said that the time limit ‘inspires creativity’, just like the 140 character restriction. In reality, some marketers are likely to find this artificial limit constricting – but it does provide the impetus to produce punchy, high impact messaging. Vine requires you to make your point in a strong and succinct fashion and, in this way, it offers a good lesson that is transferrable across all of your marketing channels.

Sound is key It is important to note that when Vines are embedded on Twitter, sound is disabled by default. Similarly many users will have their device set to silent. Consequently, it is important that you do not rely on sound in your Vines.

Consider sound to be an optional extra, and never an integral part of your video.

GUIDE TO DIGITAL MARKETING

Videos pause on touch Vine videos will automatically pause when the user touches them. This presents a number of important opportunities for marketers. One of the first Editors’ Pick Vines is of a magic eight-ball that displays a different solution each time the user touches it. This idea could easily be adapted to enable you to, for example, display a series of marketing messages. Think about how you can utilise the pause function to make Vine a more interactive medium.

Vine doesn’t play well with others At the moment Vine is a pretty restricted platform. The app is only available on iPad and iPhone – but, perhaps most importantly, Facebook has banned Vine connections. This means that Vine users cannot find their friends through Facebook, but it also signals a more general hostility on the part of the social networking giant. Until Vine becomes more closely intertwined with other platforms, it should be considered an exciting and useful addition to your marketing arsenal – but never the bedrock.

Vine is a symptom and a cause Vine is a clear symptom of the internet’s growing love affair with video. The moving image has become one of the cornerstones on which the web is based, and its importance is only set to grow. If you want to develop an effective online marketing strategy, video must be part of it. Similarly, Vine represents one of the first serious contenders for a simple video sharing platform. It is therefore likely to herald an even more significant shift towards video, creating a feedback loop that will put the moving image front and centre.

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FRESH BUSINESS THINKING

DIGITAL QUALITIES

C o l l a b o r a t i o n C c u l a t e S m a r t F o D i v What e r s iqualities nty vIn n o v M a kand e rqualifications E n t r e p ren t i o make n C r up a ftodays t C r i o u modern Sma r t F o digital c1usDisci I n n marketers? o v ationFor e s ria l C o l l a b o r a t i o ArticulateSmartF D i v e r s i t y I n n o v a EntrepreneurialCol C u r i o u s A r t i c u l a lineDiverisityInno EntrepreneurialCo

By James Bunkin, R/GA

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r a f t C u r i o u s A r t i c u s D i s c i p l i n e v a t i o n F o r e s i g h t neurialColl abora u e s A r t i c i e u l a t e plineDi v rrer sit y ig h k e r E n t r e p r e o n d d f t C u r i o u s F oi ciDiscipline a t io e s ig h t M a ke r labiiorationrCraft t e S m a r D 8 i i s c i p ovatiesightMtaker ollaborationCraft Rapidly changing times need people who are adaptable, innovative and who can work not on in a reactionary way, but with more strategic foresight. Not just using the latest technology, but working smarter with it.

Not everyone needs to be a pioneer, but pioneers do benefit from being surrounded by people who can think for themselves and be part of a wider message – but also craft their own individual messages. This doesn’t mean a team of individuals; it means a collaborative environment where all members understand the deliverables that are expected of them and the context in which they are there. Collaborative pioneering you might say. The modern digital marketing professional has a hard time making themselves unique and attractive to the environments in which they aspire to work.

What with the sheer volume of Digital Agencies and client side organisations in the marketplace, ranging from large global networks, to small ‘boutique’ startup shops, the messages being sent out to prospective candidates are often mixed. Often this isn’t done intentionally but is because the companies sending out these communications are themselves trying to craft their own brand and their own ‘unique offering’.

Everyone has their own agenda.

What are we? What is our offering, our message? What sort of people do we want to hire vs the sort of people we need to hire to do the work we need to do in order to do the sort of work we want to do!

All this makes it very hard for the modern day digital marketing professional (MDDMP) to know how to brand themselves. Candidates need to counter balance the fundamental craft that they have learned, with an ongoing and almost obsessive curiosity for technology and innovation. Not just in terms of the latest version of HTML, or a new tablet, but new ways of working, new ways of explaining their thinking and new ways to turn a great concept into a world class output. A passion for ideas that transcends into a passion for making things, concepts, prototypes products, and everything that happens in-between.

Classically, MDDMP are multi skilled, with experience on projects across a range of platforms and will have worked on clients of varying ambition in terms of output.

Work out what you have liked about each, what you didn’t like, how you could have done things better. Extensive research into the marketplace is vital. Assumption is a common mistake. Just because you like the work that comes out of a particular place, doesn’t mean that this is the perfect home for you. Research the culture of potential employers, the processes they use, the model they promote. Is there longevity in this place for you, are you even going to work on the ‘dream client’ that you hope for. Culture is more important. In the right culture, you can affect the collaborative process and then perhaps orchestrate going after your own dream clients or projects.

It’s important to be rooted in a skill or craft that cultivates all your other conceptual and creative output, to know where you have come from if you will, but to use this effectively and be entrepreneurial about how you position yourself in any organization, and how you become better at your passion is vital. ■

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FRESH BUSINESS THINKING

NEWS & INFORMATION

Go Global or Go Local?

Are you using the potential of local search to its full potential? Most businesses aren’t. However, businesses that target their ads locally can reach new customers in their area who are searching for a business just like theirs.

What about Global search? What are the opportunities there? International business is far easier today than it has ever been. The web is truly worldwide, and marketers can connect with potential customers and/or business partners across continents with ease and for a relatively low investment.

Did you know that there were an estimated 2,459,646,518 internet users worldwide in February 2012 (representing about 30.2% of the entire population)?

Using Bing ads, businesses can serve ads in over 30 countries/regions globally!

Plenty has been written as to whether local search triumphs over global or vice versa for marketers using search to market their businesses. However it will depend entirely on your business model and plans as to which is most valuable to you. Of course marketers can also opt to take a two pronged approach and harness the potential of both local search and global search simultaneously.

Go Global…

So, how can you market to and access the opportunities offered by some of the world’s leading economies? With paid advertising that’s how.

Bing Ads allows marketers to place search ads on the Yahoo! Bing Network; the combined advertising marketplace made up of Yahoo!, Bing, and

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syndicated partner sites.

This marketplace is rapidly expanding and offers marketers a leading suite of tools that will enable them to target impeccably across multiple geographic locations. New countries are being added to the Yahoo! Bing Network’s armoury constantly; in fact, the launch of Bing Ads Brazil is just hot off the press!

You can find more about this and other countries now available to target through Bing Ads here.

So, How Does It Work?

Location extensions that helps a company reach these local customers.

Location Extensions mean that marketers can choose to show the address of their business location that is closest to the customer and also include a local phone number alongside the standard text ad.

These extensions will show with an ad on both PC and mobile devices. Displaying local information in an ad can help drive leads and bring more customers to a business’s door.

When you target by location, Bing Ads gives you three options. You can choose to show ads to potential customers in:

The Numbers Speak For Themselves:

• All locations worldwide

Using Locations Extensions on Bing Ads has shown to increase click-through rates of ads between 8 and 16%.1

• Selected cities, metro areas, states/provinces, and countries/regions • Near a particular business or location. This is a particularly clever feature; it allows marketers to target potential customers who reside within a particular radius (5-100 miles) of a business, delivery area, or sales location.

Not only can you use Bing ads to determine where your ads will show, you can also use it to highlight locations you want to exclude from seeing your adverts. You can find out more about how to use Location Targeting here.

Go Local: Local advertising can work well for those companies who have physical stores in those different global markets; stores which they would like to encourage customers to use.

Today, consumers are doing more and more local searches. WebVisible recently found that 86% of people have used the Internet to find a local business and 72% prefer to find information on local merchants via search.

When out on their lunch break, for example, a searcher might use their phone or tablet to find a local dry cleaner, or a sushi restaurant nearby.

They might search on their PC while at work for a restaurant for dinner that night or a local florist for a special gift. Bing Ads has a helpful feature called

Imagine if you were searching for a local florist, how much more appealing would you find an ad that not only tells you what the company offers, but also provides you with their local address so that you see exactly which is closest to you and worth you clicking through to the site of?

A particularly powerful feature of Location Extensions is that the address shown to the customer is typically the business location that is closest to them.

What If I Have Multiple Business Addresses?

Fear not, Bing Ads will display the address and phone number for the location that is closest to the customer. The radius for the location display is about 50 miles. If your business doesn’t have a physical location entered that is within 50 miles of the customer, no location will be shown within the ad.

The internet really does help to level the playing field and lets businesses of all sizes (individual entrepreneurs, SMEs and/or large corporates) to act both locally and globally.

Escalating your marketing efforts to an international audience can really help to grow your company and can and will help you to reach potential customers that may not otherwise have ever discovered your business and its offering.

So, what are you waiting for, get in touch with Bing Ads today to find out how they can help to increase your businesses presence overseas.

Internal Bing Ads data, SMB and premium advertisers, November 2011 through January 2012.

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