Marketing Week Live

Marketing Week Live 2014 held in June at London's Olympia, encompassing all aspects of marketing from digital, to print and retail marketing. MWL 2014 was intelligently split into five zones based on the core challenges marketers face; Convert, Engage, Experience, Personality and Understand and was hosted by key industry publication - Marketing Week. The range of keynote speakers and conferences available was impressive and covered customer insight, the power of digital, social and mobile, content marketing, integrating marketing channels and immersive brand experience. The addition of the MWL Leadership Programme provided a dedicated section of content directed at Marketing heads, chiefs and directors. This concept ensured that the event added value to all levels and the sessions were really popular.

Marketing Week Live Talks

 Omnichannel marketing is of growing importance in retail marketing. No longer a trend, developing a fully integrated retail marketing campaign that incorporates apps, digital, print, in-store events and direct mail is vital for the success of retail brands. Claude Nahon, President - MOOD International presented a retail focused look at 'The heart of the omnichannel brand strategy for a truly connected store'. Claude strongly believes that in-store marketing must provide a sense of theatre to capture attention and prove effective. Gamification is a great way to encourage your customers to interact with your brand on and offline. With this in mind we suggest you look at the potential to add gamification to loyalty schemes through use of a mobile app. For example vouchers can be added to the app for use at the checkout, by scanning certain POS units throughout the store, which not only drives in-store traffic to designated points, but also reinforces the chosen message. This could be extended to include exclusive recipes or competitions available by scanning set POS displays. The options are endless and with the growing popularity of augmented reality, interactive POS is a not to be missed opportunity.

Marketing Week Live Exhibition 2014

Julia Monro, Head of Social Media & PR - Pret A Manger shared six fundamentals for great social media management. Her two core themes were to look beyond selling and provide an 'entertainer' that can see the opportunity for engagement within a wide range of real-world events and situations and use the platforms to understand your customers. Julia advises that you keep social media management in-house, describing social media as the first point of call for your customers. We would advise linking POS to social media to increase traffic both in-store and online, by encouraging consumers to share pictures of their meal or DIY project, completed using a group of items available in store with offers. A further offer could be issued to each online contribution to encourage further in-store traffic and brand loyalty. Social media should always add value to your customer and providing access to new products prior to launch, or exclusive offers or expertise will ensure that customers keep following your chosen call to action. As a final note on social media, we would advise that you always answer feedback, good or bad and listen to sentiment levels as a guide for not only your marketing plan, but also to shape product development and operations. 

Gaz Battersby, Creative Director - Epiphany talked about the importance of great content marketing. Gaz stated that great content adds value to the reader and is available across multiple channels. With approximately 55% more traffic for blogging companies, the potential is clear. Great content goes beyond providing information or calls to action, great content can enhance your SEO and powers your social media channel through sharable and high quality copy. Retail brands could harness this marketing technique on their blogs by utilising celebrity or guest bloggers, for example celebrity chefs, respected designers, mixologists, builders, stylists or thought leaders in your sector. These figure-heads should not only talk about the benefit of your products and services, but also tips for new trends or insider knowledge that would interest your target audience. This will ensure that readers keep consuming your content and can be used to drive traffic in-store. 

M&M World - Immersive Retail Marketing

Marketing Week Live was packed full of valuable information, high quality exhibitors and engaging show features. We will definitely by visiting again next year. Our only critique would be that the retail marketing content and zone needed a little more focus as it was overshadowed by the other zones a little, but I am sure this will balance for next year.

Top tips from Marketing Week Live 2014:

1. Use omnichannel marketing to drive in-store traffic and improve brand loyalty by linking app, loyalty schemes, POS, direct marketing and social media.
2. Use social media to add value to your audience rather than as a showcase for your 'best side'.
3. Grow your blog content by including exclusive information from opinion leaders and respected experts.
4. Always respond to feedback on social media, they have cared enough to give you the opportunity to respond, use it to secure their relationship.
5. Use POS to drive social media traffic with interactive functionality and exclusive content, that can then in turn increase traffic in-store holistically. 

As experts in Retail Marketing and with the Clockworx Design Agency dedicated to app, digital marketing and 3D design, send us your brief today to find out what unique solutions we can offer to solve your challenge.

Maria Parker-Harris

Group marketing Co-ordinator

The SPS Group 

www.spsgroup.co.uk

Improve your SEO in 2014 - A Review

Improve your SEO in 2014 was held at the Greenhouse Hotel in Bournemouth on the 25th February 2014. The location was perfect for the event and we were bowled over to receive such a friendly welcome from the team at Lexis Click. The seminar was pitched to explain key changes to SEO lead by the Google updates. As I am sure you remember, we have spoken avidly about the Penguin, Panda and Hummingbird updates and the implications for your business, but we were interested to understand the changes in semantic search for our content marketing strategy. 

Stephen Bavister - Managing Director at Lexis Click started by stating that an effective website should be easy to find, regularly recommended, easy to use and returnable. We absolutely agree, especially in the case of our client brands. Your website is often the first impression of your brand for your consumers and the key is to encourage engagement as you are with interactive and theatrical retail marketing campaigns. Do an honest user experience audit of your website. Start with consumer behavior motivation and track their journey. Are your products easy to find? Yes? How about on a mobile, or tablet? Are there clear social calls to action? Is your blog relevant to your consumers? Does it add value by giving them information first or offering incentives such as special offers or range previews? 

So let's start at the basics, Stephen spoke about bad SEO practices such as meta keywords, keyword spamming, manual submissions and poor link building. How many of you still use these lazy and outdated techniques in the hope of a prime Google Page 1 listing? Google's updates have changed the rules of SEO completely and for the better. Searching is now personalised based on context and vocal phrasing, which delivers accurate and useful results. What we present on our website contributes to the Google user experience and this is not something that Google takes lightly. In order to ensure successful SEO, your website should have high quality and share-able content, without duplicate content, and removal of all poor quality back links.

But there is more to the story than just content. Search has changed and Google glasses are set to further change the way we search. Key words have been replaced by phrases and questions which Google then translates into personalised semantic listings. A great way to utilise this change is to answer key search questions within your blog. We often use blog posts to tackle an industry or consumer challenge, so ensure that you write the copy in a more targeted way to improve your SEO. Did you know that websites with a blog receive 55% more traffic than those without?  Ensure that you own and regularly update the Google local listings for your business and include opening hours, event times or other relevant content that will enhance the consumer search experience. 

Page optimisation is really important to your SEO. Stephen advised that the perfect page optimisation should have a H1 headline, an image with the appropriate search term as the file name, no more than four scattered keywords and a relevant URL structure for the page. Throughout your website you should complete a technical audit and SWOT analysis and test page loading times as Google penalises poor user experience. Ensure that your page has clear calls to action and can answer Who, What and Why easily, with consistent next clicks and content that matches the user's intent. Engaging content is also vital to the user experience, providing downloadable content or media such as video that links to YouTube (the second largest search engine) are really effective methods. 

Finally social media interaction is one of the key ways that Google judges your content. Google+ is crawled and indexed in real time and author searches utilise your Google+ circles and profile image. Your website should be updated regularly and consistently, with clear social media page links to encourage sharing. Provide context on your landing page such as contact details, menus and offers. Segment your traffic by topics and track their journey through your website on all platforms. Consider your target market, how do they search, what are they looking for and build your content strategy from there. Following these tips should set you on the right path to great SEO, that enhances you innovative and engaging retail marketing campaigns.

Top tips from Improve your SEO in 2014:

1. Test your website across all platforms and with user experience in mind.
2. Is your content relevant? Does it answer key user search questions? Does it add value to the user?
3. Explore page optimisation for more effective SEO.
4. Be social! Ensure your content is updated consistently and is easy to share.
5. Make sure you have claimed and regularly update your Google local pages, as this is often the first thing users find in the search listings. 

Improve your SEO in 2014 was interesting and added new perspectives to the SEO debate. The team were friendly and the content was interactive. 

Maria Parker-Harris

Group marketing Co-ordinator

The SPS Group 

www.thespsgroup.co.uk

#contentmarketing #digital #digital marketing #Google #search #retailmarketing #social media #thespsgroup #SEO

Storytelling Across Platforms - A review

The Chartered Institute of Marketing South West – Storytelling across Platforms talk was held at the Bournemouth University Executive Business Centre. With great opportunity for networking prior to the talk, this event was seamlessly organised. The venue was purpose build for lectures, which allowed the speaker to connect well with the audience and display digital content that the whole room could easily see and hear.

Paul Sheehy from Folk Digital was a dynamic and inspiring speaker, weaving tales of social media with great visual examples. Paul’s reconstruction of O2 and Tesco mobile’s Twitter rap with Dorset CIM Ambassador Matt Desmier was simply brilliant. Whilst the crowd were crying with laughter, the point was clearly made. Not all social engagement should push products or sales, telling a story that is interesting and relevant can be much more effective for reaching your campaign goals. Paul spoke of the rise of personalisation over SEO as a trend for our campaign futures. We were all asked to take on the role of Alfred, a twenty something looking for that perfect engagement ring.  Two videos were shown for two jewellers, one spoke of product, cut, quality and range available. The other spoke of passion, business heritage and of inspiration. The winner was clear – all Alfreds chose the latter jewellers.

Personalisation is key for social media interaction. Ensuring that your audience buy into your brand on a long term and engaged basis, rather than your message being drowned out in the daily storm of digital noise. Consumers are becoming wise to social media strategy and are bored of pushed products and sales pitches, preferring two-way dialogue, interesting calls to action and opportunity for exclusive content or experience. Consumers are demanding added value from their engagement, which if offered successfully can secure long-term positive brand alliance.

Here are the top tips from Storytelling Across Platforms:

1    Put people not products at the heart of what you are doing. Your audience are all unique, what is the method of communication that best suits them?

2    Speak to the heart not the head. The heart leads with emotional response, which the head will remember and share.

3    Why do you do what you do? What is your central reason or passion? This is key for brand engagement as the audience can relate and trust in this passion.

4    Don’t be restrained by traditional content. Sometimes what appears to be unrelated content, can actually promote the strongest brand response.

5    Finally ensure all content is genuine, interesting and adds value to the reader. Digital spam is blocked in a mind overpopulated with information and communication.

By Maria Parker - Harris

 Group Marketing Co-ordinator

The SPS Group

www.thespsgroup.co.uk

Folk Digital - http://www.wearefolk.com/
CIM South West - http://www.cimsouthwest.co.uk/

#folkdigital #contentmarketing #digitalmarketing #socialmedia #CIM #storytelling

Let's Do Digital 2013 - A review

Let’s Do Digital held at the Southampton City College Hub by Bournemouth Digital Agency Adido was an inspiring and forward looking event. The themes of the day were changes to search functions and social media. Speakers from Google, Microsoft Bing, Linkedin, RNLI, Adidio and Santander entertained the crowd with powerful insights and tips for the future. The next twelve months are set to be very exciting! Delegates also attended workshops covering analytics, website development, effective content creation and integrated campaign planning.

The event’s killer headline was Google’s voice search, which saw the crowd shouting Ok Google! The voice search not only understands your exact search criteria, replying audibly with intelligent results, but can also associate following searches. The demonstration was to search for top New York Hotels, which listed them by location and Trip Adviser reviews. The following question was: ‘Where are the bars and clubs?’ The results showed the best bars and clubs in the near vicinity of the previous search results. So how does this affect us as digital marketers? Well with users now searching for full sentences and linking follow up searches, key words are no longer the top factor for good SEO. Copy needs to consider the developing full sentence voice search style.

The crowd went wild when learning about the impact Google Glasses will have when released to the public (scheduled for early 2014). Users will be able to utilise Augmented Reality technology alongside, social media, image capturing and search functionality, all weighing less than the average pair of sunglasses. Another innovation from Google is the Google Now app which intuitively presents information before you search for it, using previous common search queries and intelligent data tracking. Google Now tells you how long your journey to work will take before you even ask. It is fair to say Google stole the show with the demonstrative style in comparison to Microsoft Bing’s sales pitch approach. Although Bing raised some excellent points about the personalisation of search results through intuitive big data. Personalisation is definitely the buzzword of 2014 and Microsoft Bing have nailed the concept with their paid experience.

LinkedIn revealed the forthcoming changes to business pages. There will be the opportunity to add pages for divisions, departments and teams, which interlink to create amazing networking opportunities and targeting options. This could revolutionise the way B2B social interaction is completed, allowing for online speed networking (the corporate hospitality trend of 2014). Microsoft have counteracted this notion with Yammer, Bing’s answer to LinkedIn. The options for Office 365 integration and share points are excellent, but the pricing is more complex than that of LinkedIn.

Top tips from Let's Do Digital:

1.       Really start to think about your content and the way new search technology will use this for your SEO.

 
2.       Consider the use of liquid content alongside linked content to really engage the user with clear calls to action, don’t overload with purchase or product messages.
 
3.       Start speed networking. Try to regularly get involved with conversations in your industry or engage with your industry’s eco system.
 
4.       Don’t sent digital junkmail. Be realistic, is this content adding value to the reader? Is it ugly, sales lead, pushing product or branding? Target, profile and engage is the steps to building a long- term relationship.
 
5.       And finally, nothing beats a cute animal picture for boosting engagement, which RNLI refer to as the animal klaxon. Don’t fight it, innovate it! See my token animal klaxon above.

Let’s Do Digital was an informative and social event that left me with some excellent perspective and insight. My only niggle was that event timings weren’t followed and this left the afternoon very rushed.

By Maria Parker - Harris

 Group Marketing Co-ordinator

The SPS Group

www.thespsgroup.co.uk

Let's Do Digital - http://www.dodigitalbetter.com/

#letsdodigital #digitalmarketing #socialmedia #SEO #hummingbird #Google #animalklaxon