On Wikipedia last week there was a featured article about If Day, a staged Nazi invasion of Winnipeg in Canada. Organised by the Greater Winnipeg Victory Loan Organization, its objective was to increase the purchasing of Victory Bonds, helping the Canadian government to fund the war effort. To this end, it has to be remembered as one of the most audacious and elaborate fundraising (and experiential marketing) campaigns in living memory.

The organisers certainly had realism in their minds, there was a staged fire fight between troops and volunteers dressed as German soldiers (the costumes having been loaned from Hollywood studios), tanks rolled down the main streets, there were mock bombings, radio broadcasts and even key officials in the local government were taken as political prisoners.

With a marketing message of “It Must Not Happen Here” the one day campaign had the desired effect. From an initial investment of C$3,000, around C$3.2m of Victory Bonds were purchased in a single day within the city.

Imagine ‘If Day’ Today – The Digital Invasion

By now you’re probably thankful for a history lesson about a fascinating, but relatively unknown event during the Second World War, but my question would be how such a campaign could look in today’s digital world?

If you remove the moral and ethical objections to scaremongering the public into buying bonds, the If Day campaign is a great example of a large scale, innovative and creative experiential campaign. If held today, the organisers would be looking for a digital strategy to run simultaneously in order to maximise the engagement and of course, the returns. How such a multichannel strategy could be shaped is wholly conjecture, but on considering the event, here are some ideas.

Before the Invasion

Giving advance warning to the target audience isn’t just the first step in encouraging engagement but may also a good opportunity to establish that the event is a “simulation” – nobody wants a War of the Worlds situation. An email campaign, using creative along the lines of an intelligence dossier, providing this advance warning could provide this a number of weeks before, followed by a more “hastily scrawled” email the day before announcing the imminent arrival is one option. Social media could be used to spread ‘rumours’ of an invasion leading up to the event, using character profiles of intelligence personnel on the ground would be a way to add depth to the story.

During the Invasion

In a world where there is constant demand for news and events Twitter would be the ideal place to post updates about the progress of the invasion.

YouTube would also be the ideal place to collate video from the event, and with the ingress of smartphones in today’s population, would be an excellent way to encourage user generated content. There would also be opportunities to use Facebook and Google+ to push key group participation during the day, the creation of a ‘Resistance’ would be just one of the ways to build fans rapidly. To further enhance the reach of the event, background takeover ads on high traffic websites would help to drive traffic and raise awareness.

Of course a website would sit at the heart of the invasion promoted through paid and organic search. A progress map, showing street by street the advance of the enemy troops would just be one element of functionality. To make the most of user’s content, a forum, where people can tell their stories, post videos and photos could also be included.

Following the Invasion

The original If Day was built on the premise that people could “buy back” their province by purchasing victory bonds and in this modern day equivalent, this goal would remain. Subsequently the strategy would have to shift from reporting news, to encouraging purchasing behaviour.

With the invasion complete, email could yet again play a part, split testing a Lord Kitchener-esque “your city needs you” and a “vive la resistance” creative would be just one of the ways to optimise the returns. Undoubtedly, leveraging the fan base and followers built on social platforms would also be essential to drive traffic to the campaign website.

On this website, the progress map, which initially showed the advance of the invasion could now become transactional and interactive, giving citizens the ability to “buy back” individual streets (representing bonds) and slowly push the invading force out of the city.

With website analytics, monitoring and assessing the success of the campaign would be significantly easier, and with multichannel funnel reporting would give much greater insight into how users engaged with the campaign. Naturally, the data and contacts captured during the campaign would shape the next drive for Victory Bonds, although the concept would have to change – a second invasion would be much less impactful.

A Hypothetical Example

Undoubtedly such an event could not happen again, not only is it unethical to use such tactics to encourage purchasing behaviour, but the budgets would be incomprehensible. Taking all of that into account however, it does provide a neat hypothetical example of a great campaign concept that would benefit from a digital strategy, incorporating elements of email, social media and search marketing as well as website functionality.

The post If Day – A Digital Strategy for a Simulated Invasion appeared first on Coast Digital.

I’m running the 10K for personal reasons, having lost family members to cancer and seen close relatives battle and win (and in some cases continue to battle) different types of cancer. Ultimately I’m running it for my family, my children and my community. I really hope that one day, cancer is no more than the common cold is to us currently. Whilst this all sounds very dramatic; the Race for Life is also a fun event, and a great excuse to dress entirely in pink for a day!

Maria is also running for family reasons, her Gran having been diagnosed with cancer about 2 years ago. Thanks to them spotting it quickly and treating her rapidly she’s now in remission and is back to normal!  On asking Maria about her motivations she said “I feel it’s my duty to raise money so that no-one has to lose a grandparent, parent, sibling or friend. “ Maria is also aiming to complete the 5K in less than 30 mins – a challenging target that with a little dedication I’m sure she’ll be able to achieve!

To sponsor me: http://www.raceforlifesponsorme.org/kellyandkaty

To sponsor Maria: http://www.raceforlifesponsorme.org/flisstia1

Naturally we will be posting photos of us during and after the event – after I have filtered out those of me looking too “puffed out” of course!!

The post Running the Race for Life – Summer 2013 appeared first on Coast Digital.

Attending the event from the Coast Digital online marketing team with me were were Liam Shepherd and Mike Hall. This was the second BrightonSEO conference I’d attended, and my first with Coast Digital. The format this year was new with three rooms filled with talks. This made it tough to decide on which presentations we had to miss and which we would watch later on BrightonSEO’s website (there will be videos of them available).

We were all keen to watch the Ex-Google employees Q&A session, along with the Bing presentation, and so made the decision to stay in the main hall for the day. These talks gave us great insight into both search engines and Dave Coplin from Bing (in my opinion) gave the talk of the day entitled “Future Forward”.

Apart from the talks I’ve mentioned there were countless other presentations that really delivered:-

My Highlights of the Day

• Hannah Smith from Distilled gave a great presentation called “Go Big or Go Home” she detailed about how spending a lot of time on “big” content releases gave them big results. Although I didn’t agree with everything she spoke about, the main point of her presentation was valuable and it helped me think about great new ways to build brand reputations.
• Geoff White from Channel 4 News gave a presentation titled “How to Pitch to Journalists” this was my second favourite presentation of the day and Geoff spoke a lot of sense about the news and how they select stories for their programmes. As well as being engaging and interesting, it gave me a lot to think about in terms of our clients (big and small) and how best to approach third parties in order to market our clients business more efficiently helping them to get better results.
• My final highlight was Rich Falconer from LBi who had the horrific task of following Dave Coplin’s presentation and although he had a shaky start he really delivered. Rich’s presentation was “SEO as Part of a Multi-signal Search Strategy” and was excellent; he spoke about the more technical aspects of SEO and the reason I found this talk so interesting was that he spent part of it talking about tools to help sites convert their visitors better. I loved this section because even though SEO is important to get traffic to your sites, CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) is necessary to help convert them.

We all found the day to be extremely enjoyable and well-organised and would like to offer a huge thank you to all of the speakers and to Kelvin Newman for organising such an excellent event. On the whole there were plenty of actionable tips and tricks to take away, and it was a great opportunity to listen to other people’s perspectives on the current state of search, and what the future holds for the industry.

The post My Day at BrightonSEO 2013 appeared first on Coast Digital.

This ‘gaming’ of the system exploits the fundamental principle that links count as a ‘vote’ in favour of a particular webpage. As a result link building has revolved around ‘voting’ for pages using optimised anchor texts, through such methods as directory submissions, article marketing and paid linking. If I’m honest, it’s a practice that I have never wholly agreed with because I find myself asking where and how this adds any value apart from temporarily improving rankings in the SERPs.

Algorithm Updates

At some point in their career, all SEOs have used these tactics and have had to adapt as Google has changed the ‘game.’ Herein lies another issue with ‘gaming’ the system, Google have the power to undo all the hard work invested in such tactics in a single algorithm update, take the Google Panda update for example.

I’ve never been too worried that my sites would fall foul of these updates, even when the world started receiving Webmaster Tools notifications warning of “unnatural link profiles”. This is because:

1. On the scale of ‘white hat’ to ‘black hat’ link building, everything I do is firmly in the white camp. If Google are going to do anything, they will focus on those shady black hat SEOs.
2. If by any chance I would get hit, it would force not only me, but all SEOs to clean up their act and come up with a system that is a little more honest and a lot more useful.

The latest buzzword in the industry is ‘Content Marketing’ and if I’m honest I’m none too thrilled about it. I love the idea of creating awesome, original content but still we are gaming the system. I would love to sit and tell you that I create this content because it’s useful to consumers, but it isn’t really is it? Maybe 1 piece of content in 20 will be truly awesome. We are doing it for the links. That is all. Link building should be a great source of relevant, valuable referrals for your clients, not a graveyard of content (that is rarely written by the professional in that industry) with links that eventually do more harm than good.

And do you know the worst thing about it? The companies with the bigger budgets can afford to spend the most money on higher quantities of content. The result? The bigger brands win.

On a completely related side note I will say that I loved the Venice update. Thanks Google!!

Conclusion or Result

So now I’m coming to the part of this post where I am sure you are expecting some sort of conclusion or result. Well I don’t have either of those. What I do have however is a deep longing for a difference in the link algorithm. This is where I believe Citation links and Co-Occurrence can help me out.

Currently if I want a link I will identify the site I want the link from and perform a nice bit of outreach to see if I can get it. Usually by offering something in return (a guest post usually). Consider how many people are doing this every single day? How on earth is this a fair and just system?

How about this:

Mr Smith is writing a marketing report for his site and wants to reference within the report a conference his company attended. Mr SEO knows that this conference was a big deal in the industry and as such has created a piece of content which demonstrates a truly wonderful breakdown of the day on a client’s site. Through the glory of social media Mr Smith finds this content and without even contacting Mr SEO decides to link to it. This then catches on with further links and interactions on social media to the client’s site.

All Mr SEO has done, is create an excellent piece of content and allowed it to be found.

I have read many blog posts over the last year (especially on SEOmoz) and there is a lot of talk regarding ‘content marketing’ with the main message being very much the Field of Dreams tagline “If you build it, they will come”.

Let’s hope this becomes an actual practice instead of a tagline.

The post Link Building – Don’t Hate The Player, Hate The Game appeared first on Coast Digital.

The Gym’s offering is attractive for a number of reasons and its USPs have helped to define it in a crowded marketplace. For me, it was appealing because I didn’t want a long term, expensive contract and The Gym’s no contract, low price and simplicity suited me perfectly, I was in.

Starting the sign up process online was easy enough, but during the signup process I was called away and never completed the transaction. Not to worry, The Gym had already collected my email address during the process and sent me the following email a short time later:

•  Well structured – short, sharp copy, good imagery and a scannable format
•  Contained a number of reasons to join – benefit driven messaging
•  Used persuasive language – encouraging me towards a positive outcome
•  Had a strong call to action – “join online now”
•  Contained ways to get in contact and find further information if needed – not just about the sell

The simplicity of this email is what makes it so effective and undoubtedly, it will encourage many people that drop out during the sign up process to complete. This process certainly worked for me. I am now a fully fledged member of the gym, let’s hope I don’t receive an email in a couple of months asking why I haven’t been!

The post Email Remarketing – You’re Doing it Right! appeared first on Coast Digital.

Google Universal Analytics

It’s been talked about for a while but Google Universal Analytics has finally been released into public beta, which is great news for everyone in search. Google has been working hard to improve the service which drags data from multiple platforms. The result is that analytics will now show more in depth customer journeys, for example – if people are finding your business on mobile, looking again on a tablet and finally purchasing from a laptop. Ultimately it gives a deeper level of insight into how people are looking at websites and more widely, consumer behaviour.

GOMO Tool

On the subject of mobile devices, Google has also launched their GOMO tool. This has been talked about for a while now but the site is finally live. Using data you input (or import from Adwords) you can now calculate:

• The ROI your mobile site is generating; whether from orders made from calling your business
• How many apps are being downloaded from your mobile ads
• Cross device purchases and sole mobile purchases
• How many people are finding your store online for the first time

Although a lot of this information isn’t directly from mobile sales, it does provide valuable insight as into how people are interacting with you through mobile. This could be the closest you can get to determining the true value of your mobile site, and could help in understanding how many leads your mobile site could be generating.

Send to Kindle Button

Social sharing is also growing and now there’s yet another new button. Amazon have recently released the Send to Kindle button, meaning that if you’ve seen an article you like the look of but don’t have the time to read it immediately, you press the Kindle button and it will be sent to your Kindle/ Kindle App for you to read later on. We think this will be most effective for whitepapers or more extensive articles that you can’t give the proper attention to when you see it. You will need a Kindle account to use this service, but it’s definitely worth spending a bit of time signing up, considering the time you’ll save in the future.

Something for the future?

People realise the necessity nowadays to have an online presence which is fantastic news for the search industry, with the growing number of businesses online however, certain issues can be created, particularly with copyright. Google’s algorithm is improving at how it reads images, but it isn’t great, this opens the door for people to use other websites images that they’ve not purchased or taken themselves. Luckily there is a new tool (still in testing) that can help you take the matter into your own hands. Image Raider has been designed to scan websites to see if anyone has taken your images. As it’s still in testing it isn’t perfect, but at the minute the service is free so it’s worth taking advantage of.

Some great things have happened recently in search and it’s a sign that there’s more to come. Hopefully you’ve seen something useful you can take away today and other things that will help you out in the future, come back soon for further roundups from the industry.

The post What’s New in Digital Marketing? appeared first on Coast Digital.

I’m sure this is a familiar scenario for many marketing managers; your agency is doing great work for you and the results are good, but despite this you still have difficulty convincing the company at large of your strategy and why they should invest time and money into your marketing efforts.

If you’re facing similar obstacles, then I have 3 valuable tips on how you can change the perception of digital within your business, get your company to understand why your online strategy is important and what it means to them:

1. Don’t keep your agency to yourself

I appreciate that sales teams, managers and directors are all extremely busy people, but if you can grab a couple of hours in their diaries, your agency will be able to make it a worthwhile use of their time.

If possible, try and round-up the key stakeholders in your business and put your agency in front of them. I recently had an excellent day with one of my clients when I was given the opportunity to present to their senior management team and explain what the activity we’d been undertaking meant to them, and how important it was to their bottom line.

The presentation involved a top-level overview of what digital marketing is and how the work we’ve been undertaking has impacted the number of leads we have generated for them. Once you can have your agency clearly demonstrate strategy, tactics and results to your stakeholders, you are able to achieve much more engagement from them and a greater understanding of how they can play a part in the creation of content, social activity and how their involvement can ultimately help growth.

2. Showcase your results

As a marketing manager, you will usually have to provide your senior management team with weekly/monthly results and reports on activity, but sometimes these reports can be quite in-depth and primarily for the marketing manager to digest.

To get the ‘wow factor’ from the excellent results your agency has achieved, why not get the agency to present the growth figures in an easily digestible slide deck?

I began my recent presentation with some quick-fire results, showing phenomenal growth in traffic, and more importantly leads into the business.

The results themselves are impressive, and explaining clearly and concisely to non-marketers how these results were achieved proved the value of their investment in digital marketing.

Outlining to them how they can contribute to the digital strategy by getting involved with blogging, site content and social activity is far easier once they can see how this impacts the results that matter most to them – profit!

3. Excite them about the future

Your digital agency should not only be able to present historic results and show how these were achieved, but also be innovative and creative about the future of digital.

It’ll help your cause no end if your agency can show that they are well on top of future developments in SEO, PPC and social media marketing. Giving the stakeholders a clear picture of how future developments, in particular the growth of mobile, will impact their business should inspire them to buy into your marketing strategy and give them confidence to invest both time and money into digital marketing going forward.

I’d really like to thank the team from Total Landlord Insurance for taking the time out of their busy schedule to let me help them understand digital and what it means to them. I’ll leave you with some feedback from Natalie Crane, Marketing and Communications Manager:

“Russ provided a lively and interesting presentation, which gave our sales team a real insight into the intricacies of digital marketing and the progress we have made toward achieving our business objectives using digital tactics.

Our staff members found it helpful and enlightening. It gave them an opportunity to get the answers to some of their burning questions and gave them a greater appreciation of the efforts of the Marketing department.

It has certainly assisted in the process of gaining buy-in from internal staff members for any new digital ideas and concepts we introduce.”

The post Get Internal Buy-in for Your Digital Marketing Strategy appeared first on Coast Digital.

Here are some of our tips of how you can incorporate digital marketing the next time you’re exhibiting.

1. Make your exhibition team social

You’re going to have a team manning your business stand over the course of the exhibition. Ensure that the members of your team are proactive on Twitter using mobile devices; sharing thoughts and opinions, accompanied by photos of what they discover at the exhibition. Whilst of course remembering to tell people where your business’ stand is located!

Be sure to use the exhibitions assigned hashtag in all tweets to make certain that what you’re sharing is visible to all attendees who are also following the hashtag.

Looking forward to taking part in the panel debate at #TFMA2013, 12pm tomorrow. “Who Will Win the Search Engine Battle.. Google or Facebook?

— Mike Hall (@MikeHallSEO) February 26, 2013

2. Are you presenting?

If you have a speaking slot at the exhibition then make the most of the opportunity by incorporating digital elements in your presentation. That way you can ensure that your presentation achieves much wider coverage by reaching your target audience outside of the room, as well as giving you the ability to capture the data of those who attended in a more convenient way.

You can achieve increased visibility through social media by making it as easy as possible for attendees to share the facts and tips you’re already giving to them. Make them short and sweet and clearly visible so that attendees can fit them into a tweet without too much work.

When it comes to capturing the data of your attendees; create a landing page on your website prior to your presentation ready to launch with an incentive for users to give their details, maybe a whitepaper or a guide, and promote this prominently throughout the presentation. You can promote this through social media too with help from your exhibition team.

3. Blog Posts

If I was going to recommend an approach to blogging for exhibitions I’d suggest aiming to produce a minimum of two posts.

The first prior to the event, giving an overview of the exhibition and promoting it (this is a good way to tempt the exhibition organisers to share your post through their social channels). Also detailing any activities your business will be participating in whilst there; promotions, speaking slots, panel debates, etc.

The second should go live a day or two after the exhibition has finished. This way it’s soon enough to catch people whilst they’re still in a social frame of mind after all that networking. Detail your highlights of the exhibition and detail how your own business’ activities went whilst there; direct people where to download the slides from your presentations, etc. You can also include testimonials and feedback from the staff who were there manning the stand with their best bits.

4. Email Marketing

Prior to the event (a week or so) it would be beneficial to announce your attendance at the exhibition with an email. It doesn’t have to be an entirely standalone email, the announcement could quite easily be included in your monthly newsletter or another email you already have scheduled to distribute. The email should detail your stand number, along with any other relevant details with an aim to encourage readers to book an appointment with you whilst at the exhibition.

After the event, now you’re back at the office and you’ve got your big jar of business cards collected whilst at the exhibition (ensuring that you make those attendees who drop their business card in your big jar aware that you are planning to email them in the near future), follow them up with a thank you email. You’ve already got content to share from that guide you’re planning to launch following on from your presentation at the exhibition. You can promote that content within the email and then you’ll be in a great position to determine which exhibition leads are hot or cold. You could even personalise the email by signing it off from the team member they spoke to at the exhibition.

You can also encourage them to take a look at all the great content on your blog and to subscribe to get the latest industry headlines straight into their inbox.

These are just some of the methods we’ve employed to maximise the value of each exhibition using digital marketing. If you’ve got any tips of your own then let us know in the comments below!

The post 4 Tips to Improve Your Exhibition Success with Digital Marketing appeared first on Coast Digital.

Today was my turn, and I presented a slide deck giving an overview of the strengths of email marketing, how the future is looking for the channel, along with ideas and examples on how you can ensure your emails stand out in your customer’s inbox.

Take a look through my slide deck below to find out more:

The post Email Marketing – Stand out in the Inbox appeared first on Coast Digital.

The initial phase ran with two schools here in the UK; the first in Shropshire and the second in Cambridge. The results have been positive from both, with the teachers involved commenting that whilst they thought they were doing a reasonable job of educating students about social media and using it responsibly, the lessons have revealed that there was much more they could be teaching within the curriculum.

The second pilot is now underway with more schools across the UK, teaching students to use social media safely, properly and giving out data appropriately.

Why is it essential to educate pupils on the use of Social Media?

I run numerous workshops with our clients, working with sales, HR and marketing teams to show them how they can use social as a tool to benefit their roles within the company. One of the common questions I face from ‘non-believers’ is usually along the lines of…

“Why should I bother setting up an account and putting myself out there, what if it goes wrong?”

The fact of the matter is that the internet is something you can no longer ignore. If you do you are taking a much larger risk. I can almost guarantee that whenever your name is mentioned to a potential employer, client or business partner the first thing they’ll now do is to turn to Google to get a better understanding of who they’re dealing with. This is likely to include researching your personal Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts, or even your personal website.

If you decide to ignore this then you have absolutely no control of how the listings appear for your name. It may be friends uploading inappropriate photos of you on Facebook from that last night out, and without having a Facebook account you’re unable to determine the visibility of these photos. They’re out there for anyone to view and share.

Or it could even be someone who shares your name, but definitely not an individual you’d like to be associated with. If a potential employer has never met you face to face, what is to stop them assuming you are the same person at a first glance.

The only saving grace you have is that Google or Facebook haven’t been around forever. For children born today however, their entire lives digitally documented, from the first baby scans uploaded on their parents Facebook profiles, right up to their 18^th Birthday surprise party video sitting on YouTube.

For that reason it is essential that school pupils today understand the importance of information rights and how to successfully control the balance of their personal information digitally. Ultimately, they need the tools to protect their identity, so that they can portray how they want to be seen through social media.

The post UK Schools add Social Media to the Curriculum appeared first on Coast Digital.