Nike

Optimising PPC landing pages for Christmas

During the run-up to Christmas, which companies are bidding on paid search terms for the most popular products, and which have the most effective landing pages?

I took a look at paid search in my beginner’s guide what is paid search (PPC) and why do you need it? last month, and since then I’ve been a lot more attuned to this method of search engine marketing.

However I’ve also realised that PPC ads are for nothing, and a complete waste of searcher’s time and an advertiser’s money, if conversion isn’t happening.

Which UK retailers provide the best tablet UX?

Topshop is the top UK retailer for tablet user experience, according to the latest research by QUISMA, in which 10 top UK retailers were compared in terms of their tablet sites. 

Topshop, Adidas and Nike provide the easiest to use websites for tablet users, whereas Zara and H&M performed poorly when it came to helping consumers navigate their sites.

Shall we blindly take QUISMA’s word for it? Nah. Where’s the fun in that?

Let’s have a look at some of the individual sites ourselves to see if we agree…

Fight club! Instagram’s 15 second video vs. Vine’s six seconds

It has often been said in filmic terms that if a story can’t be told in 90 minutes than it’s not worth telling. Try telling that to The Godfather.

However this certainly rings true on some level, especially in advertising where you’re engaging with a customer or selling a product rather than telling a sprawling, expansive story of gun violence and enemy disposal. 

Who does benefit from the longer format? For a customer it’s good to keep things brief, nobody needs to sit through another colossal Thomson marathon, but conversely six second Vines may seem too short for the purpose. 

Six seconds may be the prime length for our fleeting attention spans, but for marketing, this truncated length can be too much of a handicap to get a brand message across.

Perhaps, for this reason, the 15 second Instagram video is a far more effective method and may explain why there was a dip in Vine usage during its launch period. Let’s investigate…

10 awesome digital marketing campaigns from Nike

Following on from Andrew Warren-Payne’s post looking at various digital marketing campaigns from McDonald’s, I thought it would be interesting to take a similar look at one of the world’s biggest sport brands. Nike has achieved a great deal of brand exposure from its excellent digital campaigns, particularly through social, and here are 10 of […]

Five ways to create marketing worth sharing

Don Draper has left the building is an announcement bound to dismay any woman with a pulse, but it should hearten marketers.

That’s because Don Draper represents the old school of marketing, said Tom Fishburne, CEO of Marketoon Studios, at Integrated Marketing Week earlier this month.

In the Draper model, marketers decided what the brand stood for and what its strategy was. Every touch point with the customer was controlled.

Today those touch points have exploded and marketers have far less control, said Fishburne. To succeed in such an environment, we need to create marketing worth sharing, he continued, outlining five guiding principles.

10 major brands with dreadful Google+ pages

Google+ is an interesting conundrum as many people feel obliged to use it in the face of any logic and just because “it’s Google”.

We’re all sitting around expecting that one day Google will unveil its true purpose and all the effort will have been worthwhile, but at the moment I feel that blind optimism is one of the only things keeping it going.

Admittedly the latest updates have improved the usability somewhat and Hangouts are certainly an interesting feature, but in the face of the sheer amount of time spent on Facebook and Twitter’s increasingly important role as a news platform it does seem that G+ is floundering while trying to work out what purpose it actually serves.

Normal users don’t need to fret about this problem and can wait for Google to lure them in with a killer new feature, however for brands it raises a bit of a dilemma.

Six examples of mobile marketing excellence

To celebrate the launch of our new digital marketing and ecommerce awards, #TheDigitals, I’ve rounded up six brilliant examples of innovation in mobile.

It follows a recent post that flagged up five great examples of social media marketing excellence.

To avoid any accusations of bias, these are all examples that fall outside the eligibility period for the current awards, but give an idea of the sort of thing we are looking for.

#TheDigitals are the new awards that recognise the best in digital marketing and ecommerce. Award entries must be submitted online before the deadline March 13, 2013.

Six interesting examples of gamification in ecommerce

The video game industry is worth more than $100bn worldwide, so it’s no surprise that businesses are using gamification to try to boost sales.

The idea is that by adding gaming elements to the sales process, such as small challenges and rewards, you can increase customer loyalty and advocacy.  

As in every game or competition, the participants have to be motivated by a worthwhile reward. It’s also true that the greater the reward, the more you can ask people to do to earn the reward.

Last year Gamification CEO Gabe Zichermann said that the reward customers most valued was status above their peers. His justification was people are already used to being rewarded with additional titles and status while playing video games.

Obviously gamification isn’t necessarily suited to every company, as it could end up undermining the brand values.

But it can also reap huge rewards. So here are six examples of brands using gamification in ecommerce…

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