MarCom Professional

Customers love to be loved. In fact, we tend to shy away from companies who dislike us in some way. Only last week, after 9 years of loyal custom, I cancelled my Annual Membership with the RAC; I had found I could get an equivalent breakdown service for a quarter of the price. I rang the RAC and said I wanted to cancel my membership. I was asked why and I explained I had found an alternative supplier. I was then told my membership would be cancelled in 30 days. I wasn't asked any further questions, nor was any attempt made to keep me as a customer. In other words, they were just collecting "data" for themselves and I was treated just like a number; I'm glad I left and I won't be going back. More...

I got a bit of a shock last night. Before attending last night's Convergence Conversation, held at Ingenious Media, I thought the outlook was bleak for businesses of all shapes, sizes and sectors; I left with a real sense of the challenge the marketers face in trying to reach a nation that will be forced, in the coming months, to save rather than spend.

On one thing all last night's attendees agreed on, evidence of the slowdown is already there for all to see. Consumers are finding it harder every day to justify spending their diminishing funds on anything other than the essentials, and the situation will worsen in the coming months. More...

Aren’t digital video recorders great: they let you watch what you want when you want, and the best part is you no longer have to sit through tiresome adverts? Well, ITV certainly doesn’t think so, but its desperation to force ads onto viewers could easily backfire.

Now that people are fast forwarding through the ad breaks, ITV are eager to find a way of shoehorning ads into the programmes themselves, and are currently trialling a new ad overlay technology, which enables logos and messages to be embedded on blank surfaces (such as a wall, the sky or someone’s forehead) during programmes. More...

I can’t help that a business opportunity is passing me by.

Since I wrote the blog posting two weeks ago on online importing as a way of saving cash and buying tech kit before it was available in the UK this blog has been catapulted to the top of search rankings for the phrase ”online importer” (currently no 1 on google.co.uk and no 2 on google.com).

Google Analytics reports that wannabe "online importer"-web searchers are finding the posting by the bucket load. It almost seems unfair that countless advertisers have pitched for the search term yet none appears in the top three search terms in Google’s index. More...

Google Insights for Search provides additional features aimed to help advertisers and marketers understand search patterns and visitors' behaviour.

Google Insights for Search allows you, for example, to determine the seasonality of any market, or establish the geographical distribution of a given search term.

The ability to obtain this type of data is precious and surely gives you an edge over your competition, whether you need to fine-tune your pay per click ads, evaluate the market potential of your next business venture, or find popular keyphrases for your SEO campaigns.

Below are some examples of how Google Insights for Search can be used for market research. More...

For the non-search marketers reading this blog, Sphinn is a niche search marketing social media site - it's essentially Digg or Reddit for those of us who work in search. The "What's New" page of Sphinn on Friday afternoon inspired me. Around lunchtime in the UK you always start to see a lot spam submissions. Today's submissions, however, were a bit different - less spam and more a case of "What are they thinking?"

The following examples come from search marketers submitting real content - to the completely wrong market.

What do I mean? Well...

Ok, so you reckon that it's a good idea to have a button advertising your blog's RSS feeds on your blog. More...