Facebook have just released their 2019 report on social trends. The conversation topics that grew in 2018, compared with 2017, include sustainable living, wellness, escapism in media and experiences, and connection to tech. Whatever your business, staying in touch with social trends is a wise move. However ridiculous those trends may be. What’s in Facebook’s […]
Your brand is beautiful. You know investing money in it makes sense, to grow awareness and support other areas of the marketing strategy. You’ll feel when it’s working and when it’s not because you know your brand inside out. But dude, we HAVE to measure our results. Number one: it helps us make decisions in […]
Our customer service teams are the front line for our businesses. They’re often the first (and nearly always the most important) influence on how our customers view us. How they talk is how our brand talks. This means our tone of voice must be influenced by them, but they also need to be aware of […]
In October 2019, Google’s BERT algorithm update rolled out to all searches, all languages and all countries. BERT is natural language processing (NLP) technology, which grows Google’s understanding and treatment of context. Prepositions – like to, from, on – are now a big focus. Tiny words, often overlooked but hugely important for nuances like ‘train […]
Behavioural science gives us thousands of studies about how people act. It’s particularly useful for marketers because self-reporting is notoriously unreliable, so surveys can’t be the only source of our customer research. From these studies, we can glean a few directives for our marketing that don’t require hours upon hours of reading dense research papers. […]
The phrase ‘customer feedforward’ may make you feel sick. I admit I feel a little queasy myself. But it’s a subtle yet important distinction from the traditional customer feedback. What the frack is customer feedforward? I saw this phrase quoted from Thomas Barta, co-author of The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader. And I forgive […]
Expertise, authority and trustworthiness (EAT). Those should really be the keywords for anyone’s content production, but they are in fact the Google quality score rules. Particularly on pages that deal with transactions or high-stakes advice. EAT and page quality have always been important but algorithm changes over the last year reflect Google’s insistence that EAT […]
Sprint is a concept often used in agile development teams to deliver projects in a continuous, iterative way. Each part of a big project is broken into sprints – a set block of time in which all planning, development, testing and review happens. I’ve used this approach for optimising a customer journey design within a […]
When anyone talks about the societal detriment brought about by social media, it’s likely that doing things ‘for likes’ will be mentioned. Posting a picture of every meal before eating it, cold, for the likes. Gym selfies, for the likes. Shelfies, for the likes. It’s been the subject of dystopian (but seemingly impending) fantasy in […]
In such an obvious move that I can’t believe I didn’t see it coming, Instagram will start phasing paid posts into the Explore tab. Explore is where millions of us spend aimless hours scrolling and tapping, scrolling and tapping. Until now, Instagram has filled Explore with algorithmically curated content designed to delight our personal tastes. […]