1.  Can you COPE? COPE, as in Create Once Publish Everywhere. Originally this phrase was simply a sell for clever publishing software. It’s now become shorthand for planning and creating content that can be published and re-used across many platforms, ideally cutting the cost of creation, production and (especially) translation and localisation. Lately we’ve heard it bandied about a lot in editorial meetings. Obviously if you are going to publish the same content (or elements of the same content) across many platforms, you’ll need to indulge in some pretty sophisticated content planning work first. If your company operates in a series of content silos, with one team ‘doing email’ and another responsible for ‘social’, you’ll struggle to get this off the ground. But if you can join your internal content owners up to develop a truly inclusive content strategy, then COPE may well prove efficient for you. On a practical level, for written content, this will usually mean coming up with highly adaptive modular copy formats that everyone signs off on and subscribes to. Cue stakeholder pistols at dawn…  2. Post-Panda SEO for peanuts? You can’t stuff your content with keywords any more. So what now? Those whose businesses stand or fall on their search results are out there trying to source content that will both keep customers engaged and satisfy a Google algorithm that rewards content quality. But how much are they willing to invest in it really? As far as we can see, the SEO copywriting market has polarised. While we can report a recent large influx of clients prepared to invest in quality copywriting, along with the editorial planning, format work and quality control that requires, we also notice a proliferation of extremely low-cost content providers. There will always be people prepared to churn out repurposed gobbledegook for buttons (£6.50 for 700 words, anyone?) and also those who insist that software could “seriously, like, replace Shakespeare”. But the truth is that anyone who is prepared to write you an on-brand, optimised, customer-facing, usable piece of content, mapped to your business objectives, legally compliant, sub-edited and proofread for a fiver, is either living in a country where that’s a day’s wages, living off a trust fund or has repurposed it from someone else’s work. Really good content costs. Sorry. 3. Micro-content fixes The rise of the copy nudge. The double-dip has forced companies to focus even more on the bottom line. So what content gives the greatest return on investment? Last year we started suggesting that budget-strapped content owners identified quick copy fixes with high ROI. After all, if your conversions increase as a result of your emails, then why not focus on a more compelling email sign-up, or on messages which dissuade customers from unsubscribing? Re-working a key call to action, a button, or split-testing the benefits on a product page is quick to do, requires minimal design input and can produce instant results. The king of all quick copy fixes is the online form. We have case studies showing up to a 35% increase in conversions from fixing the reassurance and instructional text in transactional areas. So maybe instead of that big ambitious content migration, you should simply ‘sweat the small stuff’ instead? 4.  Mobile, tablet and yet more mobile Making content mobile and tablet friendly is definitely what’s keeping content owners up at night. Last year, Jakob Nielsen revealed that content is twice as hard to understand on a mobile device. "When reading from an iPhone-sized screen, comprehension scores for complex web content were 48% of desktop monitor scores," he reported. So what is the answer? In short: write short, clear sentences. What’s the problem? This is very hard to do well, especially when summarising the terms and conditions of a home contents insurance policy. And what about tablet? While we’re still in learning mode as to what works best, certain content issues are already pretty clear. Overly-long lists and menus, information ‘too small to tap’ and serving up splash screens are all out. It appears you do need a distinct content approach for tablet after all… 5. Govern or be damned "Quality is doing it right when no one is looking," said Henry Ford. Unfortunately, all the best editorial set-ups rely on lots of people looking. Looking, editing, checking, and then looking again in fact. While most content teams weren’t initially set up with anything like this kind of QA process in place, we are seeing a rise in demand for content training and guidelines which support governance and help benchmark content quality. For many clients this is ensuring that (a) best-practice samples and execution guidelines exist for each content typeand (b) someone is making sure they actually get followed. For others, this means regular content auditing followed up by training and mentoring. It’s fantastic to finally see the old-school rigour of print publishing being embraced by the digital world. Better content should come of it. 6. Content ideas brainstorm boom The trend to embrace content marketing as a discipline in itself continues apace. But this is primarily an editorial endeavour. And great editorial depends on an ongoing flow of high-quality ideas. When the ideas run out, it’s all over. As original ideas can be hard to find (especially for the more complex B2B brands), the ability to brainstorm clever content ideas, formats and executions has become powerful content-marketing currency. What marketers are after is ‘ideas with legs’, workable series of content that can be replicated week after week without flagging. Content mapped to customer needs and interests that is truly useful, usable and builds long-tail relationships. In his post-Panda blog post  Google fellow Amit Singhal advises content owners to avoid ‘mass produced’ content that is ‘shallow in nature’, and to strive for high-quality ‘original content’. He urges us to produce articles full of ‘interesting information that is beyond obvious’ and remove low-quality content from our websites. And this is the biggest content trend of all: the culling of poor-quality content is finally beginning to happen. And we can’t wait to see the results...  

The purchaser reigns supreme For Redken, a hair-care brand and L’Oreal subsidiary, the purchaser rules the day. The company demonstrated its commitment by funneling funds toward a third-party research effort last May before it embarked on a large mobile initiative. It was a key decision that helped the company better understand its industry; for instance, Redken learned that 16% of the hair-care sector uses iPads and tablets, with the former predominating. Of that percentage, 44% skewed towards a younger age bracket.  The company also learned that 63% of hair-care professionals owned smartphones, a finding that had Kress skeptical. Hairstylists have “always been late adopters,” she said. “They don’t sit at a computer. They’re never online.” Not so the modern stylist. The findings prompted the company to design mobile strategies unique to its three target groups: Cosmetology students, Hairdressers. Consumers. However, this still allowed it to apply an overall strategy to make the most of Redken’s existing network and existing purchaser behaviors. Next the company identified business objectives for each group because, like its mobile strategies, no one objective unified all. Approach to students For its student target group, education was Redken’s goal. The company used its nationwide network of franchise schools, and because it had learned that iPads predominated among that group, created an educational site designed especially for that device. Emphasizing responsive design in its approach and understanding that visual learners compose its audience, Redken produced 100+ videos for the site and partnered with YouTube to stream the videos in a cost-effective manner.  The results? The company has saved on textbooks it formerly published for its schools. Redken has also saved on time and labor because it finds it easier to update the site than to revise textbooks. Plus, applications to its schools are up, and the company can now capture student data in a way not available to it in the past. Approach to stylists Although stylists are now online more often, they’re still on their feet during most of the workday. That understanding pushed Redken to focus their attention on apps informed by stylists’ habits and what actually takes place in a salon. Following the customer journey, for example, a stylist’s client would first decide on a color shade. Hair swatches are typically used during this step, but Redken created an app that displays different hair colors: Most people follow routine and gravitate toward the same 10-15 shades, but Redken wanted to expand that selection to include its underperforming products so it began integrating those products into the formulas for the dyes that stylists would have to mix. Finally, its app incorporated a look-book feature that allows stylists to capture cuts and dyes they’ve done in the past to not only show off their work, but also to give clients options. Throughout the mobile push, the company was focused on frequency or how many times their app was used, not how many times it was downloaded. “We didn’t want to just have a download party,” said Kress.   The results? Redken saw a 13% increase in the usage of its underperforming products, as well as an 18% jump in the sales of new products. (The app gave the company another forum in which it could showcase new products, Kress said.) It also saved costs because the company no longer had to print books that featured its hair-color formulas. Approach to consumers Here Kress was adamant about Redken’s attitude toward the wide swath of consumers it targets (women age 18 and older): “We are not ecommerce,” she said. “We believe in the hair stylist and the hair professional, so it’s really about driving consumers to the salons and services to buy our product”. To that end, the company had to make a choice: Did it want to focus its attention on a mobile website or an app to get consumers to salons? Redken chose the former, with Kress supporting Redken’s decision by leaning heavily on the recent finding that more Facebook traffic arrives via the mobile site than through the company’s app. She explained how Redken partnered with Google for paid search and SEO, which yielded the perhaps unsurprising finding that Saturday is the most popular day for mobile traffic seeking salons. Other results? The company learned that 18% of traffic to Redken.com is via a mobile device. There’s also been a 22% rise in visitors using the company’s salon-locator feature. Conclusion 1. Know your audience. Conduct thorough research, said Kress. While ComScore data is valuable, you shouldn’t rely on it alone. 2. Understand the technology but don’t get caught up in it. The hype around Pinterest is exciting and important to follow, she said, but marketers should be more cautious in their approaches. 3. Evolve. Of all the platforms, Kress believes mobile changes the fastest, and marketers should be flexible about their strategies and workflow.

The cookie misnomer Everyone is talking about the run-up to May 26, when the ePrivacy Directive will begin being enforced by the Information Commissioner in the UK. The attention paid has been impressive, and we know that significant companies are taking critical steps behind the scenes. But we need to flag a problem.   Somehow, the term ‘cookie’ has crept into the conversation like an insidious little worm, eating its way into headlines, distracting the market and potentially sending well-intended companies sprinting in the wrong direction during this critical last stretch.  To be clear, we’re talking about compliance with the amended e-Privacy Directive. The portion of the Directive that applies to cookies is in fact written much more broadly and requires consent for non-essential tracking, regardless of whether or not a cookie is involved. Yet we hear the Directive referred to as the ‘Cookie Directive,’ and the ‘Cookie Law.’ Companies have sprung up selling ‘Cookie Solutions,’ and providing ‘Cookie Audits.’ We have fantastic new ‘Cookie Policies’ and detailed breakdowns of the functions of each cookie.   All of this is helpful in as much as it moves the ball incrementally forward. The danger is that our choice of words can end up putting horse blinders on our approach to compliance.  Cookies, tags and trackers As a lens through which to view tracking activity on your own site, a focus on cookies, to the exclusion of other technologies, is both incomplete and exhausting.   Tags are the central tracking element, not cookies. Many companies track the consumer using an alternative technology, like a flash object. In addition, an emerging class of trackers are beginning to use technologies like device fingerprinting.   These companies use tags, but do not leave behind any tracking object on the computer and as a result are typically invisible to web scanning technologies. Because of these gaps, a ‘Cookie Audit’ will frequently miss as much as 40% of tracking activity, a clearly unsustainable result for companies that wish to comply with the law. A complete dump of all cookies set on a site can also quickly become overwhelming. One company can set one cookie or 12, there is no pattern. And a large organisation with a portfolio of domains, or any company with an ad supported site, can easily have 100 or more trackers, each setting one to 12 cookies.   500 or more cookies are not at all uncommon. Further, it is often impossible to distinguish the specific purpose of individual cookies, with their cryptic names and randomised values. We’re talking about a massive undertaking, and for what benefit? You need to understand who is on your site, and what they are doing with data. Not the particular differences between these two cookies (and yes, they are real): a)name: __utmc, value: 46026228 b)name: __utmb, value: 46026228.1.10.1330142291 It can be very helpful to know which cookies are being set, but the cookies should not be the focal point of your analysis, or you will spend hundreds of hours diving down rat holes with questionable returns.   Instead, you need to up level your assessment to the companies that are tracking the user. Each company has distinct attributes relevant to your assessment, including: The categories of information they collect. Their business model. Data retention policy. Whether or not they have a properly functioning opt-out. Whether or not they engage in online behavioural advertising. The types of tracking technologies they are using, including tags, cookies, and flash objects. Whether or not ALL of their tracking activities can be considered ‘strictly necessary’ under the Directive. All of this information should be rolled together into a clear position on whether or not each company requires consent. You can do this yourself, or you can work with a company like Evidon, but whoever you use, be sure you don’t find yourself lost in a maze of cookies.  Tracking activity and the consumer When it comes to the consumer, again, cookies should not be the focus.  It makes no sense to inform them of just the tracking activity that uses cookies.   Disclosures that leap directly into a breakdown of each cookie are replacing a problem created by legal geeks (privacy policies) with a problem created by real geeks (technical explanations of hundreds of cookies).   The inability of most people to comprehend the dense legal language in a privacy policy is one of top reasons we’re in this mess today, but at least privacy policies are written in English. You must engage the consumer in a dialogue about tracking that is happening on your site to comply with the law and that dialogue must be specific, but there is no reason to leap directly to the logical extreme. Again, they need to know who is tracking them on your site and what they are doing with data. Your priority should be experimenting with interfaces that simplify the presentation of this information as much as possible, rather than running a microscope over the particulars of each cookie.   When discussing cookies, be sure to provide context. Include the company behind each cookie, with links to more information about that company’s practices. In the EU, our clients will be deploying consent solutions that make it clear to the consumer that tracking is taking place, using visual tools like the orange bar and Cookie Consent button on the bottom of the page below. Step 1: Consumer visits site and reads about the tracking taking place as well as their options. Step 2: If the consumer clicks on the Cookie Consent button, they will have access to a breakdown of the categories of tracking activity, including Essential, Analytics and Customisation, and Advertising.   They can withdraw consent for the latter two categories of tracking, as they are subject to the Directive, or they can click an arrow to read more about the tracking in each category. Step 3: If they click an arrow, they will see a list of the companies tracking them in each category along with the purpose of their tracking and can withdraw consent from individual companies. When taken together, these tools allow a company to have comfort that they have acquired the implied consent of the consumer. With all of this said, I want to be clear about the importance that cookies play as a part of your compliance game plan for the ePrivacy Directive. But do yourself a favour and strike any reference to the ‘Cookie Law.’  I still haven’t seen a copy of that law.

UK marketers are using digital marketing freelancers more than other countries. In March 2012, the UK became the second biggest hirer of digital marketing talent, up from fourth in March 2011, just behind the US. The UK is also the fifth biggest country when it comes to supplying digital marketing freelancers. Video is on the up When we drill down and look at the types of jobs that are increasingly being outsourced, it is interesting to note that video is the big mover year-on-year. Videography was the second fastest growing skill in the last year (272% increase), followed by Video Production (253%) and Video Editing (233%). Requirements for infographics spiralled in the last 12 months too with a monumental 552% increase. However that growth has slowed recently and there was no change in demand from February to March this year. The only skill to see a drop in demand over the last year was Newsletters (-12%). Though in the month from February to March we saw less demand for SEM (-39%), Newsletters (-15%), eBooks (-9%) and Affiliate Marketing (-9%).  Job Post Count by Skills MOM % change YOY% change Internet Marketing 17.2% 186.0% Blogs -4.1% 138.7% Social Media Marketing 15.9% 105.8% SEO 3.5% 105.7% SEM -39.0% 89.6% Video Production 6.1% 253.3% Video Editing 5.1% 232.5% Banner Ads -5.0% 231.3% Facebook 8.5% 31.5% Email Marketing 10.9% 57.4% eBooks -8.9% 62.8% Affiliate Marketing -8.8% 7.9% Videography 39.9% 272.3% Infographics 0.0% 552.0% Newsletters -14.5% -11.8% Twitter 18.5% 0.8% Google+ 17.7%   Three reasons for increased demand A common reaction to this growth in demand would be to question why this is happening. For me, when it comes to digital marketing, there are three key reasons: Economy. There is no doubt that the difficult economic conditions over the last few years has put strain on marketing budgets. Using freelancers is a good way to control costs, especially when there are freezes on hiring additional full time headcount.  Flexibility. Marketing disciplines and campaigns are far more varied in this digital age. It is often hard for marketing teams and agencies to predict what skills will be needed from one month to the next.  Specialisms. Following on from this last point, it is often necessary to have a specific specialist for a specific task. Hiring a freelancer who has the necessary skills that might be missing in the agency or in-house department is a much more effective way to manage this. We’ll continue to chart these trends, identify areas where there is significant change and will include these in future monthly posts.

To find out, we at Searchmetrics studied the Google+ visibility of the top 13 UK national newspaper websites and ten leading US counterparts. We checked each newspaper to see if it had a Google+ page, how many followers it had and finally how often  content from its web site is recommended (through the +1 button), using our global social media database. Comparing the data we found three key points:   The Financial Times has most followers  As of 26 April 2012,  the FT had by far the most followers of the newspapers we looked at, with 637,724 having the newspaper’s brand page in their Google+ ‘Circles’. Next up was the New York Times with 370,043, the Wall Street Journal with 173,993 and The Guardian with 130,629. The Daily Mail, normally at the top of any web charts, had just 53,110, behind the likes of The Independent (108,969). The FT’s high percentage of international coverage could be a significant factor in its leadership when it comes to followers. Google + is expanding incredibly rapidly in the UK We originally analysed the UK papers on Google+ in w/c 19th March, while for the US papers it was on 2nd April. When we updated the data for this blog post, we found that the growth has been impressive. From 372,159 followers in March, the FT has added over 250,000 followers to bring it up to 637,724 by 26 April 2012. Other UK papers have made similar gains, while the U.S. papers we studied show less rapid growth (over an obviously shorter time period). However despite this growth there are still four national UK newspapers,  The Times, Sun, Daily Express and Daily Star, without Google+ pages, meaning they are missing out on potential followers and traffic. SiteGrowth in followers: FT: 42% growth (372,159 to 637,724). The Guardian: 42% growth (75,255 to 130,629). Daily Mail: 33% growth (35,490 to 53,110). Wall Street Journal: 14% growth (149,905 to 173,993). New York Times: 3% growth (360,032 to 370,043). Following isn’t the same as sharing While the FT has the largest number of followers this doesn’t necessarily equate to content sharing,possibly due to its paywall restrictions. Our weekly data shows that content from the New York Times (nytimes.com) and Daily Mail (Dailymail.co.uk) websites received the most +1 recommendations. Nytimes.com, which drops its paywall for links from Google+ and other sites, received an average of 26,665 +1s per week, while in the UK the Dailymail.co.uk averaged a weekly 10,493 +1s.   We all know that getting your content shared or recommended on social networks such as Google+  helps to generate traffic. But, the search industry is increasingly aware that it also has an impact on how sites rank and are positioned in search results. Google is now showing personalised search results which incorporate online content that people’s Google+ followers have recommended, and its "rel=author" mark-up feature is now highlighting content from specific authors in searches using the author’s Google+ accounts. I think we can expect more of the same. So media owners and other big brands who are not fully embracing Google+ need to get in on the act.

"Well, we didn't get nearly the number of leads we wanted to from our LinkedIn Group this quarter but at least we got some good branding out of it." Sound familiar? You could replace the words LinkedIn Group with trade show booth and you get my point. Branding is not enough to create sales. Nor is branding—or its "kissing social cousin" engagement—able to produce customer behavior (e.g. business leads). Why? Because they are rarely executed as processes aimed at producing behavioral outcomes. Branding and engagement use tools like creativity to create, at best, brand name recall and preference. Hence, direct response must be added in to social engagement campaigns for leads and sales to manifest. It doesn't "just happen." It's What Has Always Worked The Web and social media are built for direct response and that's where we're heading as an industry. In fact direct response is where the ecommerce action has been since day one. Witness the multi-billion dollar affiliate marketing industry, Google Adwords. These innovations fueled rapid growth of ecommerce in the early days. "We're all direct marketers now. The Web is one big direct marketing machine and everyone is invited to the party," says Mike Moran, formerly of IBM, a distinguished engineer and author of Do it Wrong Quickly, who says marketers come from two distinct backgrounds: Brand marketers are the ones whose work you see on TV. They are all about branding, brand image, brand awareness—use whatever word you want—and their success has made Coca-Cola and many other consumer products into household names. Direct marketers are decidedly less sexy ... constantly searching for the next idea that increases response. They are all about sales, and couldn't care less about brand image as long as the cash register rings. Moran says social engagement marketers with an interest in driving sales have much to learn from the practice of direct response marketing. David Ogilvy said this too. In short direct response works and it's never been more needed by those of us with things to sell online. Customers Expect Proof, Upfront, for Free Based on my own research while writing my book I've come to discover that people are buying in business-to-business and business-to-consumer contexts using social media. Yes, they're buying as a result of content marketing. However, customers only purchase when the business behind the content is willing to prove the effectiveness of the product or service (in some small but meaningful way) prior to the purchase. Executing this requires use of direct response. What I'm getting at here is "engaging content that provides value" does not work nearly as well as engaging content that delivers a result before the sale. That translates to solving a related problem, or giving an actual sample of a unique experience. It's the difference between telling a customer you're the best choice and proving it to them. It's the difference between ascribing characteristics to your brand as bait for customers and letting customers' actual experiences create your brand for you. "We develop brands to help customers achieve outcomes that they can’t achieve through products and services alone," says Brian Phipps, an independent brand strategy consultant. "Thus, a 'brand'  is much more than an identity, a stylized sales stimulant, a promise or a reputation. It's a deliverable that acts as a supra-product method of creating value, limited only by the brand imagination of the company." Results in Advance This idea of being less artsy, creative or funny (branding) and more useful (content-rooted direct response) is what's fueling the success of Frank Kern and his clients. The concept begins with you/your brand giving materially useful things to prospective customers---like tools and utilities that solve problems for them. This often includes multimedia, educational content that proves your worth, builds trust. In the end, prospective buyers factor the seller's ability to actually produce a result for them into consideration when the call-to-action arrives.  In this context your product is nothing more than an extension of benefits customers already received from you (for free). Your product suddenly becomes a chance to solve a prospect's nagging problem, avoid a risk or exploit an opportunity. Good deeds (deliverables) using helpful tools, advice, free samples of experiences all help buyers see your product as a logical investment rather than an expense. By providing what Mr. Kern calls "results in advance" we marketers can do something remarkable. By moving prospects closer to their goal before we ask them to buy anything we bring customers closer to joy... so much so that they appreciate what we've given them and WANT to pay us to reach their ultimate goal. What do you think? photo credit: gnackgnackgnack

This push by IBM, Amazon and others makes sense as marketers now have so much they want to analyze to make smarter and faster decisions. As highlighted in IBM's infographic below, in order to capitalize on the big data opportunity, marketers will have to: Implement rules-driven integration of disparate data Improve operating infrastructures Create a network of data-centric technology and partners Define marketing data governance Using big data to make better decisions By having the right data at their fingertips, marketers can make better decisions to: Identify high potential audiences and accurately target them Enable the right message at the right time via the right content targeting Maximize ad inventory by identifying high-value audiences across publisher properties Optimize ad media purchase and understand the value of channels higher up in the funnel As this infographic on big data comes from the IBM team, it does marry how you can optimize big data to inform marketing decisions to the specific services offered through Netezza. No matter what service you do chose, the stats and opportunities for marketers highlighted here show why big data is all the craze at the moment. Now that the deluge of information is here, it's up to you to decide how you capitalize on it.  

The Yahoo Marketing Dashboard allows small business owners to view their sites' traffic, keep track of their search rankings and monitor buzz on 8,000 sites, including Twitter and Facebook. Yahoo bills it as the "one place" to "get a clear picture of your marketing results and reputation."The base offering is free, but Yahoo is offering a number of premium add-ons for a fee. For $19.99 per month, for instance, a business owner could expand the amount of data visible through the aforementioned reputation monitoring feature. And Yahoo is trying to bring search submission back; for $9.99 per month, Yahoo says it will submit a company's website to over 100 search engines and directories. The latter is somewhat cringe-worthy, and raises questions about just how valuable Yahoo's new offering is. On the other hand, there are aspects to Yahoo's offering that it appears the company got right. For example, recognizing that Google Analytics is extremely popular, Yahoo's dashboard allows businesses to pull in their Google Analytics data.Yahoo's motivation in launching a marketing dashboard for small businesses isn't that difficult to grasp: small business is of great importance to Yahoo and its competitors, such as Google. But serving small business and keeping a small business customer happy can be difficult."The number of online marketing options are growing...It seems like a new company or a new way of reaching consumers emerges each day, and for small businesses who don’t have agencies or a lot of background support, this proliferation of options is pretty challenging to manage," Yahoo's director of product marketing for Yahoo Small Business, Shannon Parker Hane, stated.Any company that can successfully help small businesses many those challenges has the opportunity to do very well. Time will tell whether Yahoo becomes such a company, but as it tries to reinvent itself, trying to cozy up to small business probably isn't the worst idea.

Ask any digital marketer and they will no doubt tell you that over the last few years some of the biggest trends in digital have been the rise of mobile and social and the resurgence of display but I would add another to this list.   In the last five years another noticeable trend has been that digital marketing shows are getting worse and worse. It’s not that each individual show is badly put together, or there are no good exhibitors but it seems that in the current digital landscape these shows are just too generic and irrelevant to the majority of attendees apart from perhaps those that have just entered the industry. Most of the shows have tried to address this by sectioning off their shows into digital sub-categories, so you find a “mobile area” or a “social area” which are usually demarcated with a migraine-inducing carpet, but these all feel a bit tokenistic, more of a way to hijack some buzz words rather than to give attendees something different.   I think the industry is now at the stage where these broad-brush shows should be put to rest. The different strands of digital marketing are now so specialised and often technical that the audience for something for example like content marketing and mobile marketing is not the same. And even if some attendees are interested in more than one area, these shows don’t go deep enough into the individual disciplines to offer any real value.  As is so often the case with all things digital, the US is leading the way and there are a few niche shows starting to appear that are not only shaking up the big established players but also adding something fresh into the often tired conference circuit.  Earlier in the year, I was fortunate enough to attend LeadsCon in Las Vegas, which is the world’s biggest (and possibly only) online lead generation show. Apart from the obvious fact that Las Vegas has more to offer the average conference attendee than most UK venues, the conference itself was a perfect example of how to put on a relevant and interesting show.  Online lead generation as an industry is definitely on the up in the UK. More big brands are getting involved and budgets are on the increase. Now we might not quite be at the stage where a UK online lead generation show could pull in 3,000 attendees as LeadsCon does in Vegas but judging by the number of English accents I heard, there is certainly some untapped demand in the UK market.    To test this theory, I conducted a rather unscientific study using the poll functionality on LinkedIn asking whether there was a need for an online lead generation specific show in the UK and 69% of respondents said there definitely was and 19% said there might be. If you also include all the positive comments and emails I have received subsequently maybe the time is right for the UK’s first online lead generation show? Over the next few years while the big shows might not disappear entirely expect to see a whole host of new specialist digital marketing shows popping up all over the UK.  

Old-school, broadcast-style interruption marketing will make a comeback Only now we'll be advertising our latest piece of content instead of our latest product launch. This means the content-to-promotion ratio in mast budgets will swing towards promotion. Inbound meet outbound. Depressing but true. Your content brand will be as important as your brand-brand The winners will be the brands who become famous for great content – informative, entertaining, well-written, clearly-presented insights.This means spending more on fewer pieces – which kind of runs counter to today's trend of rapid-fire info-nuggets (but they'll always have their place). It will be harder and harder to earn downloads Attention will become the most expensive commodity on the planet. The days of cranking out a mediocre eBook and getting tens of thousands of downloads are passing.This means paying more attention to the utility of every piece, it's title and subtitle and the way you sell it on the landing page and in promotions. Content production will become commoditised As every brand scales up its content efforts, it's starting to look like a contract publishing play (but digital). OF course, in every commodity market, there's room for premium players (our agency, Velocity, is much more likely to go the premium route rather than becoming a massive, global contract publisher -- but you never know).This means deciding what content can be created by a scaled-up content machine and which needs more careful crafting. We'll have to work much harder to earn people's names and contact details Less of our content will be gated. More will be sprinkled across the waters. Prospects will click away if they don't think the piece is really worth it.This means fewer forms, shorter forms and progressive profiling. It also means using lead nurturing so you can track people (or IP addresses) while they're still anonymous, then associate all that past behaviour to a name when they finally share it. Active shares will be the killer metric Getting someone to read a piece is good (click). Getting them to share it is great (tweet). Getting them to actively promote it to their followers is solid gold (ka-ching).  That means cultivating good relationships with the sharers in your market -- and rewarding them for sharing your stuff. Cross-promotion will become essential The very best target for your next piece of content is the person reading your current one. Failing to cross-promote is a big mistake today -- tomorrow it will be malpractice.This means going back to your old content regularly to sprinkle in some promotions for later content. Don't be lazy. go back and revise. Trigger events will be the new personas A trigger event turns a tepid prospect into an information-hungry beast. Marketing to personas and buying stages is important but finding your trigger events is a powerful weapon for finding people with a real need to know.This means not just identifying the trigger events for your products but crafting specific campaigns and content around them. Library marketing will be the next critical discipline We've all got pretty good at promoting a single piece of content. Now we'll need to learn to manage and market the entire resource library.This means mapping content to buying stages and surfacing the right content to the right person at the right time (not just pushing your newest, shiniest piece). Social CRM will become the core technology for most marketing departments CRM is already the logical place to hold all the marketing and sales data around each prospect. With the addition of social, you'll also be able to associate all that great social activity with this data.This means making sure your CRM is social-powered -- and that your'e set up to respond to social activity (one way that trigger events announce themselves)..  The Social Success site we worked on with Salesforce.com has lots on this. Get ready to raise your game Content marketing isn't just the secret weapon for the brotherhood of content geeks. It's everybody's now. And that means working hard to make sure your content rises to the top. The easy wins will be fewer and further between, but that just means the goodies will go the marketers who best understand the dynamics of content and work hardest to exploit that understanding.