Big Data Analytics: evidence-based decision making
Demos of New Analytics Tools transforming information to insight to competitive advantage
When & Where:
- Thurs 24 Sept Stillorgan Park (aka Talbot Stillorgan) Hotel, Dublin &
- Tues 29 Sept Kingsley Hotel, Cork
This event is targeted at managers in Business and Technology who are keen to know how Big Data Analytics can rapidly deliver competitive advantage for their business. Attendees will have an opportunity to experience hands-on demonstrators of analytics tools which were co-developed by CeADAR with Irish companies showing how Big Data Analytics is unlocking hidden value and delivering competitive advantage.
Programme:
| 08:00-08:30 | Continental breakfast and exhibition of Big Data Analytics demonstrators |
| 08:30-08:40 | Welcome & introduction Edward McDonnell, Director CeADAR |
| 08:40-09:00 | Contextual Data Visualisation with Wearable Augmented RealityStephen Keegan, Daqri, Smart-Helmet Core Experiences and Applications |
| 09:00-09:30 | Case studies· David Harland, CEO Omnicom Media Group· Maurice Lynch, CEO Nathean |
| 09:30-09:45 | Overview of analytics tools co-developed with Industry & CeADAR |
| 09:45-11:00 | Hands-on exhibition of Big Data Analytics demonstrators |
Dublin Event Thurs 24 Sept 2015 8:00/8:30am – 11am
https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/big-data-analytics-evidence-based-decision-making-tickets-18346353437
Cork Event Tues 29 Sept 2015 8:00/8:30am – 11am
https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/big-data-analytics-evidence-based-decision-making-tickets-18363024300
The event is hosted by Centre for Applied Data Analytics (CeADAR) which is a market-focussed technology centre for the development, and deployment of analytic technology and innovation. The Centre is a joint initiative between Enterprise Ireland and the IDA.
Your Digital Marketing Strategy – Just Do It!
You probably have a website already, you might be sending out emails or be active on social media. Maybe you’ve tried adwords? So the business is investing resources already in online marketing but is it getting the best bang for your buck? How do you know?
If you’re not working in the context of a cohesive online marketing strategy, then it’s most likely that you’re wasting time and money. Let’s put it like this; if you were sailing a boat you’d be navigating in a specific direction and all the resources on the boat would be used to take you where you plan to go – without that focus and target; energy will be wasted and you could effectively land anywhere. It’s no different for your online marketing strategy – without an agreed destination and route, you can’t reach the right place.
So how does an SME develop a Digital Marketing strategy?
The first step involves the preliminary research needed to formulate a strategy. Few SME’s have the necessary resources and expertise to do this entirely inhouse. Most will need to work closely with a digital marketing agency. However these guides will bring you up-to-speed with the key issues, help you to identify the questions that need to be considered and the information you need to gather – to develop a comprehensive strategy.
The Snapshot
- Research and analyse your target market
- Review your internal capabilities
- Identify your digital marketing goals.
- Research and benchmark your existing Digital Marketing performance
- Analyse what your competitors are doing online
- Document the key components of your Digital Marketing strategy
- Develop an implementation plan
Your Target Market has a Personality
You need to clearly identify your ideal ‘online’ target customer. It’s useful to put together ‘Buyer Personas’ or fictional characterisations of your ideal target customer. Their pain points / business challenges, their online sources of key information, social media usage, marketing messages they respond to?
What’s your Digital Temperature?
Reviewing your own Internet capabilities is like taking your own ‘Digital’ temperature. provide a checklist to help you assess your readiness. Another key element of readiness is the extent to which you can resource the process inhouse or need to partner up.
What would Success Look Like?
Remember GIGO – Garbage In Garbage Out? You need to commit to resourcing your Digital Marketing properly, upskilling the team and implementing activities consistently – then it will generate the required return over time. Identify specific goals for your Digital Marketing Strategy so that you can develop Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) and track them regularly e.g. achieve website conversion rate of 5% on all site traffic in 6 months.
Benchmark Performance
What’s the story right now? A ‘Situational Analysis’ will review current activities, consider what’s working, review the website, for example; is it mobile friendly, fast enough, optimised for Google? What leads do you get, from where? Often SME’s are not sure what works as the outcomes of activity are not tracked nor reported. This needs to be addressed and performance measurements need to be put in place.
Beat the Competition Online
No matter what business you are in – you have competition that you need to beat. What are your real-world competitors doing online? This knowledge will give you insights on areas / niches for you to differentiate your online business. What CMS do they employ? Is their Website well optimised? Keywords they perform for? Regularly publishing content on their sites? Active on social media – where, what are they saying? Running paid ads? Employing email marketing – what messaging / offers / how often?
Companies are often surprised to find that their competitors have paid for adwords to appear when their business name is searched (i.e. Company A’s ads appear when the name of Company B is searched) Don’t sit back and let the competition get the leads!
Remember sometimes your competitors online are different to your real-world competitors e.g. if you sell industrial weighing machines you may find that Weight Watchers weighing scales are all over google and blocking the top search results! So you may need a strategy that combats that issue.
Document Your Strategy
Armed with the above insights and a firm marketing budget you can formulate your Digital Marketing approach. You will be able to answer “the what” in terms of goals, “the who” (buyer personas) and the “with what” in terms of Digital Channels (SEO, Paid Ads, Email, Social, Blog etc.) You’ll also be clear on resourcing.
Finally – you need to implement your Strategy through action plans. We recommend a quarterly tactical planning cycle, as business is dynamic and this gives you the opportunity to ensure activities are still aligned with the agreed strategy on a regular basis.
This blog post was written by Inspiration Marketing who can be contacted at 01- 2303184. Click here for their Full Digital Marketing Strategy Guide
Irish Domain Registry | Optimise Fund
IEDR, the Irish Domain Registry who administer and manage all .ie domain addresses, is running its Optimise Fund this year. The Fund has been setup to help Irish Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and Micro Enterprises to improve their online presence and increase their use of e-commerce.
Recent research by IEDR has found that while 63% of Irish SMEs and Micro-Enterprises have a website, 91% of these are unable to process online sales, and 54% are not setup to be viewed properly on mobile, and are thus not fully utilising the internet to drive growth in their business. The Optimise Fund works with business owners to plan, develop and implement significant web enhancements and e-commerce capabilities to their existing websites.
Any SME or Micro-Enterprises can apply for their share of this year’s Fund, valued at €150,000, by filling out a short entry form on http://www.iedr.ie/optimise by 15 May 2015. This deadline is expected to be extended and the latest information will be on the website.
We’d appreciate if you could forward this information, and the attached info sheet to your members, and place details of the Fund on your website.
Further information is also available in their promotional video fronted by Francis Brennan, presenter of RTE’s At Your Service here – http://www.bit.ly/optimise2015
Information Security Ireland | Conference | 11th May, TCD
Infosecurity Ireland is partnering with the US-based FIDO Alliance by holding a free seminar for companies in Ireland on the FIDO standards of online authentication on 11th May 2015 in the Science Gallery, TCD, Dublin.
The FIDO (Fast Identity Online) Alliance is a non-profit organisation formed in 2012 to address the lack of interoperability among strong authentication devices. They plan to change the nature of authentication by developing specifications that define an open, scalable, interoperable set of mechanisms that supplant reliance on passwords to securely authenticate users of online services.
Energy Efficient & Cost Effective IT Infrastructure Seminar
The Irish Internet Association are inviting leading Irish businesses owners, their CIOs/CTOs to attend an exciting upcoming seminar on best practice IT infrastructure for energy efficiency. There are significant returns for your business in terms of reduced energy costs but also tax advantages for the initial IT infrastructural investment. This seminar brings together a superb line up of industry thought-leaders and practitioners who will share their experiences and expertise to inform your energy/IT Strategy.
Event Date : Monday 30 March 2015
Time : 1.30pm – 5.30pm
Location : The Westin Hotel, Dublin 2
Speakers Include:
- Majella Kelleher, Head of Energy Demand Management, SEAI.
- Dr Martin Collier, Director of the Rince Institute, Dublin City University.
- Colin Curtis, Global Sustainability Manager, Dimension Data.
- Domhnaill Hernon,Head of the Efficiency Energy Transfer (ηET) Department at Bell Labs.
- John Shaw, CIO of Kingspan.
- Michael McGivern, Tax Partner, RSM Farrell Grant Sparks
Click here to find out more about this seminar and to book your place!
Please contact Ailbhe@iia.ie if you have any problems or queries.
SEO in the Semantic Era (Part 5 of 6)
John Coburn of PraxisNow continues his sequence of posts on “SEO in the Semantic Era” with article 5 of 6 “The Role of SEO in Your Online Sales Process”
If you’ve been following this series of articles up to now, you will know that, more than ever before, search optimising your content is a key way to align it with different stages of the buyer cycle. Note that this does not deal with how strong your value proposition is, how compellingly you present it or how effective your post lead capture follow-up process is.
In essence, practically any piece of content can be search optimised for any stage in the buyer cycle. That is not to say that it will make the grade required to induce buyer action to progress to the next qualification step in your sales process.
Second Process
So, to add a greater degree of objectivity to search-optimising content, we now have a second process to consider – your sales process. So “content” actually has two overlaid processes to which it should align – your buyer cycle and your sales process. Not an easy thing to do – unless you’ve done all the planning and process mapping work in advance. Then it’s a piece of cake!
The Role of SEO in Your Online Sales Process
Two processes isn’t necessarily a bad thing! It means that you have a wider range of search targets than perhaps you had realised.
Whether you chose to optimise the same piece of content for both processes, or use separate content for each process, either way, it is important to know that, although an individual buyer may enter your sales process at any stage, there is always an alignment with the corresponding buyer cycle stage. But they are not the same.
The search behaviours are very often different between the two processes.
For example, let’s say you sell “antibodies” (a blood protein used in medical research – there are thousands of different types).
In the Awareness stage of the buyer cycle, a buyer may conduct a search for “types of cancer antibody used in research” or “cancer research antibodies” or “antibodies used in oncology”.
Clearly the buyer is early-stage as they are only “finding out” and you may have content that helps them do this – as well as guide them to the next stage in their journey. But your goal at this stage of their buyer cycle is to drill a bit deeper to find out what kind of cancer research they are doing and match it to the exact antibody that meets their need. You will do that in your content.
However, another searcher at a similar stage in the buyer cycle might have alternatively typed in “suppliers of cancer research antibodies” or “Best research antibody for . . . cancer” or “research antibodies with . . . function”. These search queries imply an intent, even though the searcher is still is discovery mode.
Persona Language and Semantic SEO
Search optimising content for these separate search behaviours requires you to have pre-empted [possibly multiple] persona language variations. With traditional SEO, this meant researching and creating a keyword list.
With semantic SEO, it means researching and capturing a wider persona language that does not just consist of keywords, but includes things such as problems and solutions that your target buyer has and how those problems and solutions are articulated including general and specific searches, paraphrasing and the many long tail variants that may occur.
SEO traditionalists may see this as pointless. That’s because they are thinking of SEO as a keyword-based discipline. In the semantic era, that’s like looking at television in black and white. There is so much more happening out there beyond simple keyword searches. Indeed, central to this is Google’s clear determination that content that is optimised for keywords alone does not confer relevance. That changes everything – more on this in the final installment of this series.
What does a Digital Sales process look like?
Although not within the scope of this article, it is worth getting a feel for what your digital sales process might look like. It is similar to a buyer cycle, but more focused on you as a seller. The stages can be simplified into six areas:
ATTRACT – ENGAGE – CAPTURE – NURTURE – ACQUIRE – GROW
If you would like to explore the above stages in more detail, take 10 minutes out to read about them at: http://www.praxisnow.ie/digital-marketing/
Is SEO Getting More Complex
SEO has been complex for several years. For those who though it was simple, perhaps the absence of results are telling. Much of the methods that companies used to fool Google over the years are now detectable by Google’s indexing algorithm. Old ways of SEO are simply not effective nowadays.
Nevertheless, SEO is perfectly doable by every company who chooses to learn how to do it correctly. This does not mean that you must try to reverse-engineer Google’s algorithm or spend every living moment trying to keep up to date with every change that comes about. In SEO, the key is to be about three to five steps back from the “bleeding edge”. Let others do the painful figuring out! Too far back and you will fail. Too far forward and you will find SEO a black hole that will sink as much resource as you are willing to throw at it.
With a good SEO process, a responsible attitude to what the search engines are trying to do (present the most relevant content), and a considered methodology for staying up-to-date without getting completely overpowered by the mountains of available information (most of which is obsolete), SEO can be your biggest and most effective sales channel or sales lead generation source. But you have work to do first!
Coming soon: the final article in this series – article 6 of 6: “New SEO Considerations in the Semantic Era” coming shortly
This blog post was written by John Coburn (PraxisNow) who can be contacted at 01-2360076. PraxisNow runs two SEO Certification Groups – each 4 weeks in duration: (1) Beginner to Intermediate SEO, and (2) Advanced SEO – details at www.praxisnow.ie/seo-training/. If you would like more information on Content Marketing and the digital challenge, check out their annual briefing at: www.praxisnow.ie/digital-marketing-2015/
Previous articles in this series
(1) Introducing Semantic Search
(2) Semantic Search in Action
(3) Content Marketing in the Semantic Search Era
SEO in the semantic Era (Part 4 of 6)
John Coburn of PraxisNow continues his sequence of posts on “SEO in the Semantic Era” with article 4 of 6 “The Role of SEO in the Buyer Cycle”
The Role of SEO in the Buyer Cycle
SEO is often seen as just another digital marketing channel. Indeed, the perception is that it is getting more and more difficult to acquire a worthwhile organic search footprint in your served market due to increased competition and exponential levels of “information noise”. Both of these views are flawed.
Actually, SEO is getting easier! Just because the rules change regularly does not mean that it is getting more difficult. It is getting better in fact. Google in particular is doing a better job now than it ever could before, of weeding out less relevant content and bringing more relevant content to the fore. So, if your content is more relevant, and you can prove it, Google is taking care of all the less relevant, potentially competitive information noise for you. Voila – easier! All you’ve got to do is prove it.
Buyer and Seller Goals in the Buyer Cycle
Most digital marketers are aware of the idea of a “buyer cycle”; a sequence of steps that a typical buyer will go through from point of first contact with you to the point of becoming a customer and ultimately, a repeat customer. These stages are often compressed into four core steps – Awareness, Interest, Consideration and Decision. Sometimes a fifth step is added as Referral. During each of these buyer cycle stages, both buyers and sellers have different, yet aligned goals.
Awareness and SEO
At the Awareness stage, buyers are in discovery mode. They are researching, learning and observing. At this Awareness stage, the goal of the seller is not just to get discovered but to expose a need in the mind of the buyer. Very often, a buyer at the Awareness stage may not realise that they have an actual need until they discover something new that triggers realisation of the need.
SEO is perhaps the single most important digital channel at the Awareness stage for a simple reason. According to Forrester, somewhere between 88% and 92% of both online and offline purchases, start with a search. That’s where you will get discovered more of the time by those who don’t know you.
Interest and SEO
At the Interest stage, buyers with needs are seeking possible solutions to those needs. The seller’s goal at this stage is therefore to present their solution to the buyer’s need in the form of a value proposition.
If you’ve been successful at the Awareness stage, then you have some unique opportunities presented to you through clever use of your content. A potential buyer doesn’t stop searching just because they’ve found you. They will go on searching – but if you’ve piqued their interest and have exposed a new problem they might have or a solution to a recognised problem, then using your early stage content, you have the opportunity to plant some additional search criteria in your buyers mind that brings them closer and closer to the details of your solution.
In this instance, you will have already wrapped up the organic listings for the search queries you are suggesting and will be the most prominent player in the search results as the buyer explores the next level of detail. You are also helping the buyer to think in your terms and giving them the vocabulary they need to effectively explore potential solutions. This is a great use of SEO.
SEO in the Consideration Stage
At the Consideration stage, your buyer has a more clearly defined, evolved set of needs and an overview of potential solutions. Their goal now is to compare available solutions perhaps taking a wider view of potential solutions at a more analytical level. At this stage, the Seller’s goal is thus to differentiate; to ensure that the buyer is presented with compelling reasons that move the buyer closer to a favourable decision. This suggests the type and nature of content which you might produce and optimise for the Consideration stage in the buyer cycle such as case studies, comparisons, benchmarks and performance reports, testimonials, special reports, thought leaderships papers etc… All of which can be optimised for organic search which may even intercept traffic at a late stage in the buyer cycle who missed you in the earlier stages.
SEO in the Decision Stage
During the decision stage, the buyer is ready to buy and the seller’s goal is to convert. Before buying, a buyer may do one last trawl using search in an attempt to find content that supports or refutes the credibility, quality and referencability of your solution. All these potential buyer search motivations provide excellent scope to cover your bases using SEO.
Aligning Content to Stages in the Buyer Cycle
Buyer requirements for content at different stages of the buyer cycle vary in accordance with the nature of the sale (simple or complex), the type of purchase (emotional or rational) and the degree to which the buyer has a well defined or poorly defined purchase process.
Your first point of contact with a buyer may occur at any stage of the buyer cycle. Early contact at the Awareness stage may improve your ability to influence the buyer’s journey in a way that favours your solution. In contrast, late contact at the Consideration stage may involve you as a comparison only, since a decision in principle may have already been taken. In this later situation, it is significantly more difficult for you to make the sale. Nevertheless, value-driven, compelling content is the key to unlocking buyer engagement and involving them in your selling process.
Creating compelling content that is search targeted at each stage in the buyer cycle is a powerful piece of your online armoury provided it results in getting you found based on search behaviours that are specific to different buyer cycle stages. For example, in the early stages, search behaviours may be focussed on process or methodology – aligned to content such as guides, e-books, infographics. Late stage examples may be focused on comparisons or return on investment calculators which imply an imminent decision.
SEO, and in particular semantic SEO which focuses optimisation on problems and solutions, is the process by which your content successfully intercepts your targeted persona’s search behaviours. Irrespective of how compelling your content is or how effective your prospective customer journeys are, if your content cannot be found on the biggest of all the digital channels – organic search, the your content asset will never reach its potential. With semantic SEO, you are maximising your content’s distribution potential, not just as a part of your website infrastructure, but as part of a wider distribution ecosystem that includes optimised content being deployed and distributed through third party direct and indirect channels.
The next article in this series – article 5 of 6: “The Role of SEO in Your Online Sales Process”
This blog post was written by John Coburn (PraxisNow) who can be contacted at 01-2360076. PraxisNow runs two SEO Certification Groups – each 4 weeks in duration: (1) Beginner to Intermediate SEO, and (2) Advanced SEO – details at www.praxisnow.ie/seo-training/. If you would like more information on Content Marketing and the digital challenge, check out their annual briefing at: www.praxisnow.ie/digital-marketing-2015/
Previous articles in this series
(1) Introducing Semantic Search
(2) Semantic Search in Action
(3) Content Marketing in the Semantic Search Era
eMail Marketing 101
It’s a good idea to regularly check how your current marketing activities are performing for you. In this blog we want to show you how to get the most out of your email marketing campaigns.
Content is currently king so what better way to get people engaged in your content than email marketing! (If you think social beats email, Kissmetrics reported that Facebook and Twitter combined make up 0.2% of all emails sent on a daily basis) Here in Dara Creative, we use Campaign Monitor for our email campaigns.
Subject Lines – Short & snappy wins the open rates
According to a report by Adestra, emails that had a subject line with fewer than 10 characters had an open rate of 58%. While that’s a whopper of a statistic, it can be hard to keep subject lines that short and snappy. We would recommend a maximum of 50 characters for your subject line, but you’ll have to experiment to see what works for your campaigns.
Content – Entice them with snippets
People love free stuff but instead of giving everything away just give a taster. While you may have an amazing blog post or want people to download a whitepaper give a short blurb about it in your email and direct people towards your website. By doing this you can keep their attention for longer and get them more interested in your brand.
Testing – The more you test, the better!
Testing is a must. In Dara Creative, we A/B test the subject line in every email campaign. As subject lines can be tricky to get right, it’s a good idea to test. By testing you’ll start to get an idea about what people respond to. In Campaign Monitor you can test the subject line, the entire email content or the sender field. A nifty thing Campaign Monitor does, for the subject line at least, is it tells you how many extra opens and clicks you got because of your A/B testing.
Link Your Google Analytics – Data is your friend
One of the most important things to do before you set up your first campaign is to link your account with Google Analytics. By doing this you can attribute site traffic to your campaign instead of just speculating that it may have driven X number of visitors.
- In Campaign Monitor, click on your client settings on the right-hand side of the page and select Google Analytics Integration.
- Tick ‘Enable Google Analytics Integration’
- Insert the domain you want to track (yourwebsite.com)
- Name the campaign source – this what will show up in Google Analytics when you search your campaigns
Reports – Sure who doesn’t love reports!
While you may be rolling your eyes, you should always do a report roughly 4 – 7 days after you send out an email campaign. It’s good to keep an eye on who’s opening and clicking on your emails but did you know there’s more reports?
In Campaign Monitor there’s lots of nifty reports such as email link overlay, worldview and email client usage:
- Email Link Overlay is quite a cool report as it shows you the email you sent but adds in the percentage of unique clicks for each link whether it was a text link, button link or image link.
- Worldview, well, you can see where exactly in the world people opened, clicked and shared your email from.
- Email Client Usage tells you what email client people use (gmail, outlook, apple mail) and which had the most opens. Why is this useful? It can help you gauge a few things such as how many people are reading my email on the go, should I invest in a mobile friendly email template or is there a reason why certain email clients perform better than others. As noted in our Responsive Web Design blog, 75% of the Irish population will have a smartphone by the end of 2013 so these reports can help you decide if a mobile or responsive template is for you.
Get in touch with Dara Creative at hello@daracreative.ie if you have any questions about email marketing, email template design or any of their services.
This guest blog post was written by Eleanor Tallon, Digital Marketing Assistant.
Compare the leading ERP systems at the ERP HEADtoHEAD™
The 4th ERP HEADtoHEAD™ is taking place on 4th/5th March 2015 at the Carlton Hotel, Dublin Airport. The event is a one-of-a-kind opportunity to see the top ERP software vendors, all under one roof. The ERP HEADtoHEAD™ is ideal for organisations that are currently evaluating ERP systems or that plan to do so in 2015.
Each product will be demonstrated by the top ERP vendors using a single script, allowing for a true like-for-like comparison. It is an ideal opportunity for senior finance or IT executives and members of their ERP selection teams to efficiently review the leading ERP products and to learn how to manage their selection process so that risk is reduced and benefits are maximised. Attendees will gain knowledge over the two days of the event that might otherwise take months of planning and meetings to achieve.
“If you are budgeting for or about to start an ERP software replacement or upgrade project this event should not be missed. It is a unique opportunity to compare some of the leading ERP products based on a defined script, not a series of generic sales presentations. Selecting the right ERP software can radically increase the efficiency of your business. However implementing the wrong system can have serious consequences,” commented Sean Jackson, Managing Director of Lumenia, leading ERP consultants.
Products from leading ERP vendors, including SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Sage, Epicor, IFS, Access and Infor will be demonstrated. In addition, each vendor will have an individual demonstration stand, where specific project requirements can be discussed in between presentations. The event will also provide opportunities to network and compare experiences with other organisations also planning to implement ERP.
Each product will be presented once each day, with presentations taking place in three parallel streams. Attendees have the option to attend for one or two days. Special discounts apply for early bird bookings and for more than two attendees registering per company. Attendees that register for two days and attend the Wrap-up session will automatically be entered into a draw for a chance to win an Apple iPad Air.
This event will be facilitated by Lumenia, Europe’s leading independent ERP consulting organisation. Lumenia has managed over 100 ERP projects and will share project experiences and ERP selection and implementation knowledge during the event.
For further information and to register please contact Linda Davey on 091 746940 or by e-mail info@erpheadtohead.com or check out the event website www.erpheadtohead.com
Trends for Driving your Business in 2015
It’s always hard to predict what will drive and have an impact on online behavior but we have dug around the corners of the internet to uncover, what we believe to be, the main digital trends that will impact businesses in 2015.
Privacy & Data
Data has become a valuable commodity in the digital sphere. In 2014, data, and the method of gathering data, has received a bad rep due to security breaches in major applications and websites such as eBay, Snapchat and Apple’s infamous iCloud leak. In 2015, people will be more aware of the information they’re sharing and who they’re sharing it with.
There are simple measures you can put in place to give your users peace of mind:
- let people know you’re using cookies
- have an up to date privacy and cookie policy
- if there’s a user login, make sure it’s a secure connection using https instead of http
Seamless web experience
According to GSMA Intelligence, there are now 7.3 billion devices (smartphones, “dumb” phones, tablets, etc) in the world; the number of which are increasing 5 times faster than the human population. We’re interacting with a greater range of screens and sizes so it will be even more important that the experience across these devices is seamless.
By having a responsive website design, you’re creating a unified web presence. If you want to find out more about why responsive design is so important, we’ve written blogs about both responsive web design and responsive email templates.
Personalisation
As there’s so much content and noise on the internet, it can be hard for your content to break through. A study by EConsultancy and Monetate found that 94% of companies believe that personalisation ‘is critical to current and future success’. Personalisation is simple to implement: use first names in your email marketing, SMS and you can even personalise your landing pages. It’s an easy thing to do that will instantly make your customer feel more connected to your content and brand.
Content Marketing
Creating interesting, helpful and relevant content is going to be even more important for any business in 2015. It’s estimated that the amount of information available on the internet will grow by 600% by 2020; a phenomenal figure!
Content marketing and social media marketing have become synonymous with each other. It’s regularly said that organic reach on social networks is decreasing and it’s true. Not only will content have to be super targeted to your audience but will most likely need advertising spend put behind it to push it out further to your audience.
This guest blog was written by Paula Connor, Dara Creative. Get in touch with her at hello@daracreative.ie (01-6725222) if you’re interested in a responsive website or just need some advice on achieving your targets for 2015.