One of the most important jobs of a Digital Marketer is to understand how to create engaging and smooth user experiences targeted at well understood personas. One of the skills that I find a lot of Digital Marketers don’t possess is the understanding that unless you know how to create optimised user journeys, driving all the traffic in the world to that destination will not improve conversion rates. It behoves all marketers to research and figure out what works for their audience — and the only way to do that is to test. Because your own personal biases when creating online pathways and information flows will not translate into the ‘best’ user experience. There’s a myriad of testing tools these days on offer — a free tool that anyone can use is Google Website Optimiser. Very straight forward to run tests on variations of your webpages.

Embedded is a presentation, based on the ab tests reported on by a site called ‘Which Test Won’. It presents a whole series of tests based on a hypothesis, two test versions and goes through the winning version. Have a look through, and start analysing your own site and ask yourself the question — is the site clearly understood to users, both new and returning, in terms of who you are as a business, what you do, what problems you solve, and if they are your ideal customers why would they choose to do business with you (clear value propositions), and if they want to do business with you what are the next steps involved and how easy is it to get to the endpoint (Calls to Actions etc.). Most website do not do a good job of addressing these questions. Then of course, there’s the whole science and trial/error of testing checkout processes, landing pages, subscription and registration forms etc… This slidedeck is a good pointer to even get you thinking about it, regardless of whether you are B2B or B2C.

OnlineMarketing

Quick presentation that focuses on the need to focus firstly on your content marketing requirements and then how best to deliver that with a Content Management System

OnlineMarketing

Digital Insights has just finished up delivering three Diploma courses in Online Marketing, Sales and Digital Strategy with Dublin Business School, Griffith College Dublin, and IBAT College Dublin. These have been a great success with many large and medium sized business partners and individuals participating on the courses. They will be all run again in October 2010 so if interested please register at the various colleges. These courses have been certified by the Institute of Commercial Management (ICM) and by the Dublin Business School.

They cover in practical terms how to create an online and digital strategy that is aligned with measurable business objectives with clearly stated goals. They demonstrate to participants how to plan and research your target audiences and understand where they coalesce online and how best to create online tactical solutions that engage with them.

The courses cover how to create inbound marketing programmes based on producing compelling valuable content for your buyers, for both a B2B and B2C environment. We look at how to create awareness and demand through your content and how best to leverage social channels as a means of connecting with your prospectives and customers. As part of the course we differentiate for participants between the differnt forms of media that are used online today – and we break these down into Owned Media, Paid Media and Earned Media, and how to create your media profile based on these segmentations.

We demonstrate to participants how to design and implement paid search campaigns, search engine optimisation programmes, keyword analysis, competitor analysis, blogging strategies, podcasts, videocasts, webinars, screencasts and, relate all of these to particular buyer cycles and sales funnel activities that can help augment site conversions. We go through how businesses can leverage social media to share content, develop community and make their content more “findable”, improve customer service, acquire new customers and retain existing ones. We also show participants how to create measurement frameworks for businesses to track ROI Key Performance Indicators. We go through using the google analytics interface and how to tie this in with site conversion tracking.

These are intense 12 week courses with the aim to provide participants with a clearly defined set of practical digital skills which can be leveraged immediately at client-side marketing teams, digital and integrated agencies, and drive strategy and tactical solutions for enterprise eCommerce businesses, B2B and B2C businesses, communications and public relations organisations, owner managed businesses, and web marketing organisations.

DigitalStrategy, OnlineMarketing DigitalStrategy, OnlineMarketing, social applications, social media, Social Media Optimization, TrainingCourses, Video, Web Platforms

FriendFeed the social aggregator and now real-time sharing and commenting application has upgraded to its new Front-End interface. Up until yesterday, users could opt to use the application in beta mode, which got mixed reviews. Some of the power users such as the ubiquitous Scoble were quite positive about it. It will be interesting to see how it is viewed by the wider audience.

Initial feedback is that if you have a large amount of friends, that the real-time update is just too much and far too much noise for the regular users. I am big fan of FriendFeed, I really like the fact that you can follow people and see their aggregated footprint, providing that they are posting interesteng and sharing relevant content. I use the FriendFeed notification application that displays updates in the corner of my screen. So I tend not to use the actual friendfeed interface. The diference that I see with FriendFeed to Twitter, is that you do get exposed to more information from users in FriendFeed, depending on what services they have decided to share – for instance, GoogleReader shares, Blogs, Feeds, video and photo sites etc…but providing people are sharing and posting interesting content, one gets to see and read a lot of good, wide and varied content. This of course can be construed as a massive noise wall by users who do not want exposure to this level of detail.

But the main point, I think for FriendFeed, is that it is still a tool for users who are very technically engaged, as opposed to new users of social applications. It will be interesting to see will it become a Twitter like tool in terms of popularity. I think possibly not, as the options and levels of perceived complexity may switch people off.

That said, it’s a great application and one that will be very interesting to watch. The guys who set it up are also Google veterans who know what they are doing. Also, saw a very interesting video with their chief interactive designer with Scoble on Kyte.tv. Worth checking out to get an insight into the new changes and what is coming down the tracks.

OnlineMarketing Aggregator, Real-time computing, twitter

This is an interesting video which looks at the rate of exponential change that we are living through at the moment. Which is very good for those who love change and see opportunity in systemic upheaval and industrial flux. Maybe a bit freaky for those who dislike change.

OnlineMarketing change, exponential change, youtube