OK. Buckle in. I’ve been saving up a number of digital business resources to share and its coming down to the wire for 2014. Here’s a collection of resources on digital strategy, social media, online engagement, tools, video and industry trends.
For your holiday reading pleasure and beyond…
Strategy
- Brian Solis’ (Altimeter) 2014 State of Digital Transformation Report – Well produced and thoughtful. Must read for anyone working in or with companies trying to transform their business model to be Digital First.
- Creating a Culture of Content (Altimeter Group) – Fantastic piece that talks about what support systems you need to build within your organization to create and sustain a culture of content. The success criteria on Slide 12 are fantastic. Report attached.
- 50 Charts on the Future of Marketing and Technology (Percolate) – Some beautiful charts and graphs about technology and platform trends in the marketing/digital space.
On Objectives and Goal Setting
- http://moz.com/blog/marketing-resolutions-moving-from-lag-to-lead
- An interesting perspective on lagging objectives and an alternative approach. Written by Dr. Pete of Moz.
Social Media Effectiveness
- Great study on Twitter Engagement from the folks at Stone Temple Consulting.
- A few known truths here cemented in by further evidence as well as some new learnings. You can even digest the study in multiple formats, including video and info graphic!
- Track Maven’s Fortune 500 Instagram Report
- Great report from the folks who deal with massive amounts of brand analytics from Instagram on a daily basis. Always great to get insight into how brands are becoming successful on this platform.
- Track Maven’s Facebook Report
- Another very useful report from the folks at Track Maven. Some useful tips to make sense of the Las Vegas Marketing Fiesta that is Facebook.
Video
- Video Email Templates | Guide to Using Video in Email | Wistia
- YouTube Ads Rewind: A Look Back at the Year’s Best – Think with Google
- Evolution of TV Report – Google report on the factors changing television. Even though this is a vendor sponsored piece, what’s great about it is they do lay bare much of their strategy here and you can really get a picture of how content, mobile devices, web and social come together.
- If you’re interested in the report above but want insights not tainted by vendors, also check out Will Critchlow’s talk from ThoughtWorks Paradigm Shift, Beyond Permission.
- Essential Video Marketing Trends – Percolate
- A lighter version of the TV report with a bit more focus on the different families of tools and technologies in the mix. Less advertiser focused. Great visuals and charts worth borrowing.
Nice Examples of Tools for Online Engagement
- Great blogs about Infographics and Data Visualization http://visualoop.com/blogs
- Just when you get tired of infographics, someone curates a great site like this to show you how many crazy things you can do with them.
- Interactive Tools – Customer Journey to Online Purchase by Google https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/tools/customer-journey-to-online-purchase
- Topically this is interesting to me because its relevant to me as a marketer. Overall I’m just loving Think With Google’s use of interactive tools on the blog.
Online-to-Offline (020) and why we should care
If you’re already versed in what O2O is about, this may or may not be useful. For those who are not, this set of articles is really to inform about some in-market-tests taking place as we speak which are bound to change the nature of projects we work on for clients, particularly if they are in B2C industries that involve storefronts of any kind.
For many consumer oriented businesses, one of the most expensive challenges of the last 50 years has been bridging the effectiveness of advertising impressions to buying behavior. People spend most of their disposable income locally, but retailers and other local service providers have often been blind to how online media influences their in-store traffic and behavior. The big ad players, namely Facebook and Google have been racing to get their solutions for in-store conversion tracking into the market; as you can imagine, these solutions rely heavily on your smartphone and location based services.
Here are a few brief pieces that describe how these pilot programs will roll out:
- http://adwords.blogspot.com/2014/12/measure-more-improving-estimated-total.html
- http://searchengineland.com/google-store-visits-estimated-conversions-metric-adwords-211254
- http://marketingland.com/google-store-visits-part-larger-trend-toward-metrics-really-matter-111731
- http://atlassolutions.com/2014/12/18/atlas-insights-series-most-conversions-occur-without-a-click/