In a move which would surprise only the most unobservant of software analysts, Salesforce has acquired ExactTarget for a reported $2.5 billion.

Salesforce’s acquisition of ExactTarget is a continuation of the trend we detailed last year in which we observed a sharp increase rise in acquisitions in the marketing automation space.

Towards the end of 2012, ExactTarget bolstered its B2B offering by acquiring marketing automation platform, Pardot. This mirrored moves by the likes of Eloqua and Marketo who have made similar overtures towards B2C opportunities.

In acquiring ExactTarget, Salesforce continues its march to dominate the CRM landscape. The deal is another example of the boom in cloud-based marketing software that Salesforce has acquired in this space in recent years – the most notable of which was Buddy Media for $689 million in early 2012.

Behind today’s announcement is the appreciation that marketing budgets are set to skyrocket over the next few years:

“Marketing was the fastest growing CRM category in 2012, growing at 21% (more than four times the software industry forecast norm in 2012),” said Yvonne Genovese, managing VP, Gartner’s Marketing Leaders Research. “We believe this growth will continue and marketing will be the largest growing CRM category through 2017.”

More importantly, the CMO is expected to spend more on technology than the CIO by 2017.

As such, CRM needs to become increasingly sophisticated at not only identifying and engaging with prospects pre-purchase, but also managing and tracking those relationships on multiple brand touchpoints as they develop.

The mega-vendors with some mega-omissions

Whilst Salesforce has a significant product suite across social media listening (Radian6), social publishing (Buddy Media), social advertising (Social.com) and the acquisition of ExactTarget will provide newfound marketing automation and campaign management capabilities, it remains to be seen how well-poised they are for the increasing demand from both consumers and business customers that can only be met by sophisticated decisioning capabilities.

From an operational standpoint, campaign management solutions continue to be predicated upon complex, rules-based systems which are poorly placed for the myriad and varied multi-channel customer interactions in both B2B and B2C. Rules-based systems are often limited by crude segmentation based off of incomplete customer profiles and a limited pool of structured data around products or campaign messages. This in turn leads to increasingly poor returns on delivering the best offer or proposition to customers.

Curiously, the mega-vendors in the space continue to ignore the advent of content marketing which has the potential to significantly impact customer engagement, advocacy and retention for organisations.

idio’s focuses on solving these current marketing technology omissions where the interests being responded to are more dynamic, where companies know less about a prospect (than a customer) and where content really matters (more than structured data). idio’s decision engine manages, optimizes and personalizes the experiences that can be delivered through content marketing.

As such, idio sees a massive opportunity to become a strategic partner to the likes of Salesforce – who are amassing the capabilities to enable the next generation of CMOs to create engaging customer-centric experiences – but lack the content and customer intelligence to power these ‘always-on’ marketing activities.

Let’s hope Neolane and Responsys will take heed, also.

The post Salesforce acquires ExactTarget: still no decisioning capabilities appeared first on idio.

With any opinion piece on the ever-popular topic of ‘The Future of Media’, the author has the luxury of knowing that readers will have read so many other future-gazing opinion pieces  that he or she will most likely not be held to account for their own contribution to the morass.

As such, not much more needs to be said about the disaggregation of media, the challenges of building sustainable models in publishing, the struggle of media publishers and creators of every variety to find commercial value of their content, etc. Similarly, no-one really needs another piece on the history of media or the current state of media.

That said, with a ‘Future of Digital Media’ breakfast event happening later this month, we thought it would be no bad thing to float three starting-point thoughts which we believe will significantly influence the consumption and purchase of media in the near-future.

These three pillars of thought that we believe every publisher should consider for the future are:

• Content
• Insight
• Personalization

Insight is everything

Every behaviour in digital can be tracked and measured. The same goes for content.

The marketing world is becoming increasingly data-focused. It is likely that the next generation of CMOs will not just be creatives, but also data scientists standing in the control room of their organisation, with dashboards of live data flowing in from sales, marketing, and customer service activity.

The same will go for the next generation of editors, journalists and producers.

As soulless as it sounds, everything in content creation/publishing needs to be (nay, will be) more data-focused. Publishers who have historically had intuitive grasps on what their audience want (having served it to them for years) will find that they are either corroborated or undermined by new levels of real-time reader insight.

The Mail Online intuitively understands their readership’s predilections for Kim Karshadian and ‘cankles’ well. Very well. Yet, they too are becoming relentlessly data-focussed.

However, just having data isn’t enough. ‘Actionable data’ – insight by another name – that can be used to make informed editorial and operational decisions that aren’t totally mechanised is imperative.

Leaps are being made in content analytics which mean publishers can begin to step away from ‘most viewed pages’ and ‘most shared articles’ to ‘most popular topics’. After all, it’s one thing to know that an article on ‘John McCain confident of identifying good guys in Syria’ is the most well-read article of the hour/ minute/[insert your temporal unit of choice here], but it’s another to understand what about the article made it popular (was it – looking at the topics exposed at the bottom of the article – ‘Obama’, ‘United States of America’ or ‘Al Qaeda in Iraq’?) and for whom.

Content analytics will allow publishers to start building detailed reader profiles (At an individual and aggregate level), analyse reader feedback for trends, and personalise content and product propositions. Ultimately, better insight on reader behaviours and interests, will allow for publishers to create more engaging consumption experiences for their audiences.

Personalization is a necessity, not a gimmick

In a bid to cut through the noise, consumers will expect better curated and personalized experiences.

There are now something like 72 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. Over 450 million tweets per day are created. There are several times more webpages than people in the world.

There is simply too much content out there – both good and bad – for us to comfortably consume each day. There is far more happening online than any one of us can follow. The limiting factor, then, is not what is created but rather the amount of attention we can pay to it.

Publishers will need to become smarter with regards to understanding each reader, their wants and needs, their interests and behaviours to serve to them the most engaging piece of content.

Personalization in media continues to be predicated upon a mixture of explicit and implicit behaviours. Examples of explicit personalization include newsletters that are personalized based on recipients choices of delivery schedule (daily, weekly, monthly etc) or ‘my page’/’my stories’ where readers can register for content preferences or save articles for later.

Perhaps the most interesting leaps in media are going to be in the area of implicit personalization where the mechanisms of personalization employed by websites are resulting in an increasing number of editorial decisions being taken by computer algorithms—many of which are under the control of external companies—and by end users.

These include leaps in ‘contextual recommendations’ – links to contextually-related content such as other videos, photo and content, ‘collaborative filtering’ where content is displayed to readers based on what other readers have also viewed and ‘profile-based recommendations’ where content recommendations are based on implicitly determined preferences on user profiles and onsite behaviour.

Most usefully, more contextually-relevant content will lead to better targeted products and services around that content.

Content Marketing

Publishers are in the business of creating content.

That content is no longer valued by consumers, but it is to brands.

The explosion of ‘content marketing’ as a discipline used by brands who have an audience that is hungry to be entertained, informed and helped – but not necessarily sold to – means that content producers and publishers have a massive opportunity to partner with brands and expose their content to new audiences.

Whilst some brands will have the agencies or in-house competency to produce vast swathes of content, syndication is becoming an increasingly common strategy by brands who want to shortcut the operational and commercial costs of moving from ‘push marketing’ to ‘pull marketing’.

Several notable examples include:

• Pepsi is republishing content from AP, Reuters and Billboard (amongst others)
• Johnson & Johnson worked with Mayo Clinic Medical Edge and McClatchy-Tribune newspapers to produce content for their mobile medical app, BLACKBAG
• CondeNast partnering with Vogue Fashion Festival

As brands continue their march to become publishers, expect the lines between media and brands to be blurred.

Although industry doom-mongering suggests otherwise, for publishers that capitalize on the progress in content analytics, personalization and brands looking licensable content there has never been a better time.

On Thursday June 20th, idio is hosting a Future of Digital Media breakfast in Westminster, London with two industry figureheads from the AOP and DMG Media. For more details, please contact us. 

The post The Future of Digital Media appeared first on idio.

C-Spire’s offshoot brand Vu, releases truly personalised News App

Vu, a new brand created by C-Spire, America’s largest private telco company, has been setup to enable the company to build on their existing ability to truly understand their customers and provide them with tailored, personalised content to their mobile. Vu have just released a free iPhone and Android News App that finds, organises and delivers content from numerous news sources across the internet and serves it to the user based on their reading habits and news preferences.

The more a user interacts with the Vu App, the more it understands what you are interested in. The result is that the user gets more of the news articles they do want and less of the ones they don’t. This is only made possible through the application of idio, a software plug-in that learns from the user’s browsing habits within the app and then recommends content from across the web based on these preferences.

The Vū Mobile launch, comes after a successful project with C-Spire which saw personalised content  improve email engagement by over 600% (case study here)

The application of the idio technology is not only reserved for the new Vu app, but is in fact used across multiple channels for Vu’s parent brand, C-Spire. Through the use of idio, C-Spire (who pride themselves on providing a ‘personalised wireless’ experience) have seen a 6x increase in open rates of emails and doubled the click through rate over non personalised and generic content communications. Vu is a natural extension of the application of a personalised experience through the understanding of customers and the supply of a customer specific news feed.

The app went live last Friday and within the first 4 days it achieved 9,000 users, which resulted in 135,000 pieces of content/articles being read. This deep understanding of users and the subsequent recommendation of relevant articles to be read next, is only possible through the application of idio’s technology, which in the past 4 days has made over 100,000 unique recommendations to users for the types of content they will be interested in.

As the video demonstrates, the app has a fast, user friendly interface and also comes with article saving and sharing features. Content can also be synced across multiple iOS devices and you can save articles to read later via a web browser, giving a truly personalised multi channel, multi platform experience.

Vū Mobile can be downloaded from the Apple Store and Google Play.

idio is a software plugin that integrates with brand’s existing software to analyse all customer interactions across email, social media and websites to get a real-time and in-depth view of each customer. This insight is then used to seed unique and personalised content to each customer via branded communications. If you are interested in incorporating idio technology for your brand, please get in contact via sales@idioplatform.com

The post You are what you read: Vū Mobile personalises your world with the help of idio appeared first on idio.

We are seeing a shift in the role of a CMO: from creative to analyst, from ideas person to metrics person. Not that CMOs will lose their creative edge – that is vital –  but given the rise of digital, and therefore automation, an ability to take a measurement-based approach is fundamental to understanding customer behaviour and building successful marketing activity.

Content – an oft-used and rarely defined term – is of prime importance to the modern marketer. It is the means by which customers find your proposition online (search or social recommendation). Quality and relevant content engages the audience, because it is interesting, useful, or entertaining. It also helps retain customers. Whether you are blogging, tweeting, writing white papers, or shooting viral videos, you are in the process of content marketing: publishing content in order to fulfil a commercial objective.

When you are creating high volumes of content, or curating content, or just listening to social media content, it is vital to understand, structure and measure. (For a later post, we will look at Content Marketing ROI)

What is Content Analytics?

Content analytics is the process of structuring previously unstructured content, by extracting new information.  It is the process of measuring content.  The output – the measurements – is in the form of metadata that describes that content. This can include the topics, people, places, companies and concepts in the content, sentiment towards aspects of the content, and the language of that content.

How is Content Analytics useful for marketers?

Content analytics brings a whole raft of benefits to your marketing strategy:

• Understand your customer on a granular level

Thanks to semantic and sentiment analysis, no longer are you limited to simply aggregate level ‘page views’ and ‘bounce rates’.  Now that you know what each page ‘says’ – i.e. the places, the topics and the sentiments within it – you can build tag-clouds of preferences around each customer as they read that page. This in turn enables you to determine the tastes and even begin to predict the intent of the customer.

• Extract more value from your social media community

Data-mining your social media communities for the topics, sentiments and locations of their conversations mean you can build a richer profile of each person on your customer database. This might include their interests, their most shared links and indeed the details of others in their extended network.  As a result, you can begin to identify brand advocates and influencers very quickly and much more effectively than just crudely going after those with the largest ‘follower count’.

• Quickly identify trends amongst your customer base

When you are subject to thousands of in-bound communications from your customers – be it online reviews or email correspondence – content analytics help immeasurably in filtering and giving structure to the information you receive.  If certain words are being used or a particular sentiment is articulated frequently, you can identify these trends and react accordingly, be it in a customer support capacity or for PR purposes.

• Reuse and curate content

Every business should be authoring in-house content as part of their content marketing efforts. However, high-quality, original editorial really costs – even more so if part of a long-term strategy. One way to reduce cost per article is through analysing and curating content from partner organisations (or other external sources) which are pertinent to your target market. If done effectively, content curation can establish you as an authoritative source of information in your particular niche and be used as a tool for industry and market insight.

• Customer-centric marketing

Once you can know what a piece of content is about and are able to determine the interests of individual customers and prospects in your audience – you are now in a position to offer each person the piece of content that is most relevant to them.  This ability to segment your audience and deliver personalised propositions is a powerful marketing asset.

Where now…

The need for content analytics to be a part of a marketer’s arsenal is more important than ever now that marketing channels are becoming increasingly digitised and the volume of content a company deals with on a daily basis grows.

By adding metadata to content, it becomes better optimised for search engines, content delivery and analytics systems. This, in turn, means it can be measured.  As a result, you can formulate a content marketing strategy that is structured, scalable and with demonstrable ROI.

In the long run, it is this move towards a more data-focused treatment of content that will revolutionize your digital strategy, deliver actionable customer intelligence and create long-term customer relationships.

The post How CMOs can use Content Analytics appeared first on idio.

Last month, idio held its ‘Future of Financial Services’ breakfast with talks from Graham Nisbet (CIO and Head of IT, Lloyds International Retail Group) and Helen Stevenson (former Group Marketing Director, Lloyds Group).

Over the course of the morning, Graham and Helen took the audience through nearly two decade’s worth of combined experience and insight from working in the financial services industry.

Whilst both speakers examined financial services through a different professional lens; Helen – as a marketing director – often focussed on the conflicting imperatives of financial services and their customers –  and Graham – as an IT director – shone a light on the technical highs and lows of powering an international financial services group; they unified in the importance of content as a conduit to gain stronger customer relationships, greater brand awareness, foster a strong differentiation to competitors and to ultimately learn more about customer intent.

Awareness is not the issue, trust is.

In most cases, Britain’s great financial service providers do not suffer for lack of brand awareness. In fact, in the wake of various financial scandals and – in Northern Rock’s case – collapses, some have become notorious!

In light of this, two imperatives for any financial services business – whether an emergent pretender or an established institute – is to create (and maintain) authority and foster long-term customer relationships. Apart from the occasional PR furores that make the news, both of these imperatives are being challenged as customer interactions with banks are facilitated online, and thus becoming increasingly functional (based on efficiency and utility) rather than relational. This phenomenon is further exacerbated by online deal aggregators that aggregate the best deals for financial products and thereby become an intermediary between the customer and  financial service brands.

“Two imperatives for any financial services business…maintain authority and foster long-term customer relationships”

There is no doubt that as a remedy to this, improved offline experience with branches will be important in fostering a closer brand-customer relationship. But what to do to build trust and authority in the  increasingly sophisticated e-banking environment?

By adopting an editorial model towards marketing, that is to say, publishing regular articles and pieces of content to engage customers and prospects. Content marketing, by another name:

To become an authority, you must not only be known as a source of expert information, but an authority that supports your content with facts, outside viewpoints, credible data, and even the opinions (and counter opinions) from other recognized authorities. Curating content from third-party sources can make a brand a go-to source for industry expertise (whilst looking impartial) and building a large stock of published content affords more opportunities for prospective customers to find a financial service brands earlier in the discovery phase when they are trying to find an expert answer to a particular question or need.

By providing a compelling a reason to return to brand sites regularly – to read new material – financial services are more likely to establish trust, encourage conversions and develop a long-term customer relationship. More importantly, content marketing offers an invaluable opportunity for customers to become advocates – sharing branded content on social networks and adding a layer of trust by becoming impartial validators of your services.

Content as a service and differentiator

Helen noted that in early days of the post-Lloyds TSB merger, repeated market surveys were reporting a discernible increase in ‘awareness’, whilst differentiation from competitors would dropped to an ‘all time low’.

Lloyds TSB would eventually recover by initiating “thousands” of customer-service improvement initiatives (for example, Lloyds TSB were the first to send SMS alerts when customers were close to overdraft), however the appreciation that a higher ‘appreciation’ does not necessarily convert to improved consideration.

Branded content provides a distinct way for any business to separate themselves from the pack.

Whereas once upon a time, someone looking to invest their money might have used the services of a financial advisor, much of the knowledge can now be found online. Content-based newsletters or sites don’t just push particular products, but instead instruct and educate (think: ‘Five things to know when buying your first property’ or ‘How to maximise your credit score’) in the way an advisor might. A pertinent example is American Express Open Forum which is a content-based portal delivering daily articles around the issues of being a small business owner or a working professional.

Content for insight

Graham’s own experiences  further compounded the view that financial services is an industry that is replete with actionable data:

This is only set to increase as content analytics opens up the opportunity to learn more about customers, their lifestyles, interests and – most importantly – what they intend to do with their savings.

The post The Future of Financial Services appeared first on idio.

NewsCred recently acquired the once-darling Daylife (Michael Arrington was an investor), in a move that seems to have been largely about integrating their image licensing platform to complement the text content service that NewsCred delivers. That was a super smart move, as it was probably Daylife’s key asset, and will allow NewsCred clients to really easily incorporate images in their marketing. (Anyone who has dealt with a newspaper’s syndication team regarding image licensing will know the fog of gloom that can rapidly descend…)

This investment is a bet that content marketing is going to eat a decent portion of traditional ad budgets. Greycroft Partners, one of the VCs that are funding NewsCred say:

“more than 30% of marketers’ budgets will be devoted to content marketing this year.”

So, content marketing is here, and budgets are shifting fast. But my key point is that as marketeers become more aware and comfortable with the principles of content marketing, the ominous ROI discussion will follow rapidly. It’s great to understand and believe in the tenets of marketing through relevant, interesting and genuinely useful content, rather than constant bombardment of product offers, but how do you tell your boss it is going to move the bottom line?

At idio, we love partnering with companies like NewsCred, because they believe in the value of quality content to attract, engage and retain customers. idio provides a perfect follow-on to this investment, delivering two key value propositions for companies that use content marketing:

1. Building real-time contextual intelligence about every single person that engages with that content, across multiple channels. By analysing what people read, create and share, idio learns about their needs and preferences, and predicts what they might need next. This customer intelligence is synched back to the client CRM for use in various insight projects and ongoing campaign management.
2. Delivering personalised content recommendations, across multiple channels. idio uses the contextual intelligence it is building about every person, to predict which content items are most likely to interest and engage each individual. This content is then delivered through whichever channel the client requires – web, social, email, or mobile. idio doesn’t need to own or control those channels, but simply integrates with existing web content management systems, email service providers and social management tools. And then, of course, idio reports on the increases in engagement and conversion that result from delivering the right content at the right time, to the right person, on the right channel.

The post NewsCred gets $15m investment: Content Marketing gets serious. appeared first on idio.

(In other shocking news, Israel and Palestine will not be very happy with each other, and bankers will continue to be hated. Ok, now I am being facetious. But seriously…)

Same Old Big Data

Firstly, big data has been here for a long time. If you speak to anyone in marketing at a major bank or telco (or any large company for that matter, although those two sectors have been at the forefront of data marketing) they will tell you that they have dealt with big data for decades. Yes, now we are seeing a shift as publicly available data via social networks is through the roof, and other industries realizing the treasure-trove of data that is available to them, inside and outside their CRM programmes. And yes, we are now getting to the point where there is a large array of tools to enable this, and a popularist appeal to creating meaning from raw data. Big data was around before social data, but now it has become sexy.

Big Data, Big Science

And the ignominiously dubbed “geek” has now become a Data Scientist.

At idio, we are hiring software engineers with postgraduate academic specialisms in Data Science, Machine Learning and Linguistics, but it amazes me the knee-jerk reaction to Big Data that is prevalent in the recruitment sector. Suddenly, every run-of-the-mill web developer has pimped his (or increasingly, fortunately, her) CV to include often dubious references to Data Science, Cloud Computing, and other Big Data buzzwords.

Our CTO, James Griffin, can wax lyrical about the details, drivers and dynamics of this shift that has been dubbed Big Data. But as he regularly points out, the approach and theory actually harks back a hundred or so years to the early days of processing Census data.

So, it’s not new. But yes, it is big and clever. And in 2013, unfortunately, getting biggerer.

The boring conversation is that the data is bigger. The exciting conversation is that the insight, and the value to businesses and consumers is also getting bigger.

For more delectable opining about biggerer data, and perhaps even a glimpse at how we use it to deliver great client results, just ping us.

The post Big Data Gets Biggerer appeared first on idio.

On Weds 23rd, thirty intrepid telco markeeters braved the inclement weather to meet in Westminster to hear Peter Crayfourd (Head of Customer Lifecycle Strategy, Orange Group) and Aly Richards (idio, CXO and former Head of CRM, O2) discuss the revolutions that are happening with the world of telco.

Drawing upon nearly two decades in the telco world – working across ntl, 3 and Orange – Peter Crayfourd explained in ‘Always Engaged’ the organisation and technological shifts needed to put the customer at the heart of telco operations, and in particular the necessity to move from business-centric goals (e.g. increase revenue, shift product) to CRM thinking (sustain engagement, increase positive sentiment). Key to this, Peter maintained, was tracking customer interactions over a longer period of time, over as many channels as possible – not just the activities within customer contact centres.

Customer Experience is the sum of all experiences a customer has with a supplier of goods or services over the duration of their relationship with that supplier

The problem is telco companies aren’t tracking every customer interaction, let alone over  a sustained period. Rather, telco insight and operational strategies are calculated from ‘snap shots’ of a particular sample of customers, usually taken every 15mins over very narrow criteria (such as, how strong network signals are, how many products have sold, how many calls made) . Whereas, Peter was at pains to explain the need to track customers on an individual level for as long as they are a customer. This required a shift, not just in corporate culture, but also systems that can handle the vast amounts of interaction data that comes from tracking telco customers; in call-centres, on websites, across email and in the social cloud.

Aly Richards carried on the theme of continual engagement, examining how the efficacy of the Next-Best-Action technology installed in every telco organisation – which suggest on-the-fly scripts to call centre agents based on known customer data which suggest the best proposition to make, and how a US wireless telco called C-Spire (client) were using ‘Next-Best-Content’ to build on the limitations of NBA.

Telcos have run out of things to say

Aly explained that although Next-Best-Action had been a boon to telcos in the last decade, the initial successes of the technology would eventually stall as NBA is completely reliant on a limited product range to offer each customer.

There are only so many mobile packages or services a call operator can offer you, before you have heard them all. This explains the drop in conversions and accepted propositions for most telcos who run extended campaigns using NBA.

As C-Spire found, using content in digital comms extends the conversation with their customer base and prospects beyond simply trumpeting on about a particular product offering. This made recipients of their emails more likely to engage with C-Spire on favourable terms and not just engage when there was a problem.

Content allows telcos to continue to ‘talk’ to customers about lifestyle interests without necessarily being limited to a small product pool. Futhermore, through content curation, telcos are able to have enough content to have an ongoing conversation with customers, whatever their interests.

Content as a service

C-Spire pride themselves on their brand promise of ‘Personalised Wireless’.

The next extension of the their personalised service brand was to make content a service. Not just publishing content, but actually using personalisation as value proposition to encourage customers to continually engage with C-Spire.

Through using idio’s platform, C-Spire were able to curate and publish content around a wide variety of topics a typical C-Spire customer would be interested in. This in turn was personalised on the web and in emails based on what each customer was reading on-site and sharing on social media. As such, the content was providing utility to each customer by providing them with content which was personalised to their particular interests such as ‘politics’, ‘sport’ and ‘faith’.

Data And Insight from content

The result from having engaged readers on multiple channels is that you can learn a huge amount about your market.

By understanding what each piece of content is talking about by using content analytics, C-Spire can build very detailed customer profiles (insight graphs) of every individual user based on what content they are consuming online.

This in turn was useful for segmentation and campaigns as it allows C-Spire to bracket customers beyond the usual data such as product bought, age, geography and begin to target those with similar or very specific interests.

____________________________________________________________________________

For those interested in learning more, Aly Richards will be running a ‘Future of Telco Marketing’ webinar on Thurs 14th February at 10AM. If you would like to sign-up, please go here

The post The Future of Telco Marketing appeared first on idio.

The new reality of multi-channel customer engagement means customers are more vocal and more informed than ever before. Telecoms marketeers and modern marketing strategies have to evolve in light of the rapidly changing shape of consumer behaviours to capitalise on this complexity, gain greater returns and earn longer-term customer relationships.

On Wednesday 23rd January, idio will be holding its thirteenth industry breakfast on ‘The Future of Telco Marketing’ with Peter Crayfourd speaking  on how telcos can define an end-to-end 360 view of the customer experience to power more relevant and timely communications, and Aly will show how idio enabled US telco C-Spire to deliver on their brand promise of ‘Personalised Wireless’ through daily news emails personalised to individual customer interests.

Peter is Head of Customer Lifecycle Experience at Orange Group. Prior to the role at Orange, Peter spent seven years with 3 in the UK focussing on customer engagement strategy and proposition development.

Aly has over twenty years experience implementing customer relationship management solutions for blue-chip companies, and was previously Head of CRM at O2. Aly is currently Chief Experience Officer at idio.

This is event is for digital marketeers and CRM professionals working for telco brands.

Places are very limited, so please RSVP as soon as possible.

The post The Future of Telco Marketing with Peter Crayfourd and Aly Richards – Wednesday January 23rd appeared first on idio.

Perfect partners

The professional separation between SEOs and Content Marketers in some organisations never fails to stop intriguing me.

At one prestigious agency I was at last month, I learnt that there was next to no dialogue between their SEO core and their Content division.

I found this incredible. Hopefully, as content marketing continues to mature as a practice, agencies and in-house marketing teams will begin to see the value of co-operating and co-labouring with their SEO and content teams, for both strategic and commercial imperatives.

This is particularly important as creative, marketing and PR agencies shift to becoming the much-vaunted, all-conquering ‘Customer Engagement Agency’.

Marrying the disciplines of content marketing and SEO shouldn’t be a big ask, indeed it should be a natural partnership:

SEOs Are Perfectly Placed To Engage In Content Marketing

The skillset of SEOs matches extremely well with what it takes to win at content marketing. Both require similar processes:

1. Researching & identifying influencers and communities
2. Keyword research & analysis
3. Competitive content research
4. Creative content generation
5. Outreach and promotion
6. Analytics, measurement and tracking

Content Marketing is about utility. SEOs are the ‘good guys’.

Despite the efforts of Jeremy Shoemaker, SEO has never been sexy. In fact, most times it’s seen as downright nefarious – a dark art practised by digital marketeers which is pilloried and misunderstood.

Similarly, brands whose marketing and comms are interruptive, spammy and irrelevant have suffered the ire of consumers in many different ways.

Content Marketing reflects a different kind of strategy by brands – one where they’re only there when consumers need them or are purposefully seeking them out. In practice, this means providing relevant, educational, helpful, compelling or engaging content which meets a customer need. Brands know that branded content is not just to maintain visibility but also provide utility.

Content Marketing is revolutionising the idea of SEO  - SEO is not just serving the search engines but the people who actually use the search engines.

Likewise, SEO extends this utility by making *relevant* content, *educational* content, *helpful* content, *compelling* content or *engaging* content for findable and searchable.

Content Marketing is making SEOs look like the ‘good guys’ of marketing.

Brands want to be publishers. SEO are their publicists.

Early 2012, Coke made a very public paean to content marketing:

But it’s not just Coke that have jumped onto the content marketing bandwagon, everyone is at it:

MakeUp from L’Oreal – a one-stop shop of tips, pictures and articles for every make-up enthusiast’s needs.

Or, Red Bulletin – Red Bull’s attempt at providing an engaging editorially-driven experience for the thrill-seeker

Or, Man Of The House, a phallo-centric offering from P&G to provide utility to the domesticated man-child

All these brands are taking seriously the need to produce interest, entertaining and useful content that meets their target audience’s needs and inspires a brand-driven lifestyle.

But it’s not enough to create content, people need to read it. And this is where SEO’s excel, because – online – they are the bridge between brand content and eyeballs.

Technologies are making it easier to do both

Technologies in the SEO and content marketing space are maturing and innovating rapidly. This should be a boon to the content marketer and search engine optimiser who are looking to systems to take away the heavy lifting.

This includes:

• Content curation platforms

Amassing lots of content, whether new or republished will not guarantee high rankings alone, however content curation is a great way to gather information on a topic. For SEO writers, this information can be a source for generating original content. Websites and blogs need to be updated often to maintain viewer interest. Sometimes, however, good writing topics are difficult to come by.

Another reason to curate content is the possibility of building relationships with other people interested in your topic. As your site gains a reputation as a good source of content, more and more people will be willing to let you submit guest posts (and links) on their sites. Moreover, if your site gains enough credibility, sites may even begin referencing your posts and giving you free links.

• Automated metadata generation

But by using the myriad other meta-tags available, you are presenting Search Engine Spiders with more relevant information regarding your web site and product(s). In addition, you are increasing your chance of obtaining a higher position within the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) for that particular product. Indeed, some search engines will even use the information provided within the meta tags of your page as a description of your page and display it on SERPs. This way, visitors, who are about to click your link know exactly which product they are about to view.

However, whilst meta-data can be created and structured manually, this can become massively burdensome when dealing with large amount of content being published each day, or dealing with potentially millions of categorisable keywords and topics.

• Auto-summarisation

In short, SEOs and content marketers need to play nice – you have a lot more in common than you think.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

idio was founded specifically to change the way brands communicated with customers by making communications more relevant, personal and meaningful.

idio’s platform uses content curation, CRM decisioning, social data mining and cross-channel behavioural tracking to provide consumers with a more engaging and useful experience with brands.

For more information about our platform, please do get in touch.

The post SEO and Content Marketing: A marriage made in Heaven appeared first on idio.