This Week in Digital Marketing – June 17, 2014

Hopefully this will turn into somewhat of a regular column, but what the point of it is to provide one place where I will feature some of the best articles I have read recently. Most of these I have tweeted recently, but since I tweet so much content, these are the cream of the crop…for this week. I also included in italics a favorite excerpt from the piece. I got this idea from Albion Almanac, whose weekly email often gives me fascinating articles to read, so check them out too!

Big Data Job Hunting: Unconventional Advice

http://ubm.io/1ludHnG

But how can you do that? First, don’t go into the interview trying to act like you have all the answers, Morris said. Second, he and his panelists proposed another tactic: Show you like to track numbers — even if it’s just the Google analytics on your blog.

That fantasy baseball habit of yours? It might just come in useful as a point of discussion. That work you did for an election campaign or fundraising drive? Now you’ve got the idea.

Digital Design & User Experience Best Practices: Happiness + Profits!

http://bit.ly/1pb4nVT

For example, I type in for “trip to Hawaii” (not an esoteric destination) into Google. I click on an organic listing for Travelocity. I end up on the site below on the left. In 2014. How crazy is that? Is it possible to make it any harder for me to give you money?

By the end of this year 1 in 4 people around the world will own a smartphone (study)

http://bit.ly/1kZeo7q

As many as 1.76 billion people will own and use a smartphone by the end of 2014, according to the latest study by marketing research firm eMarketer.

Those 1.76 billion people make up approximately 25 percent of the total world population, and also represent a 25% jump in growth when compared to 2013 smartphone adoption stats, eMarketer claims.

Google Analytics Currency setting

http://bit.ly/1q6yxcv

Google Analytics performs currency conversion if the currency code set in these two places is different. No conversion is made if there’s no currency specified in the tracking code.

11 Ideas to Grow Brand Awareness at Lightning Speed

http://bit.ly/1skfGyD

Uber provided free rides to well-connected attendees of local tech and venture capital events. They knew that these people would be very likely to share the experience with tech press and social media audiences, getting Uber’s name in front of their target audience.

For more good reading from around the web, Follow me on Twitter @whybegee.

Using the World Cup to Market Your Brand

I am a big sports fan. I love the athleticism, the competition, the narratives. Recently, I have seen major sports competitions for what they really are though – a money grab for corporate sponsorship. No matter what country wins the World Cup, Nike, Adidas, Budweiser, and Coke are sure to come out the real victors.

Now that we have accepted this reality, it’s time to capitalize. Nike proved in London 2012 that you don’t need to be an official sponsor to use the games to promote your brand.  But you do not even need to be on TV to do this.

For example, I work with all kinds of brands where the World Cup provides a creative moment to market and sell product packages. The easiest to think about in my opinion is email campaigns, so let’s focus on that, though social media, display, and other kinds of marketing could certainly be utilized here.

On Saturday June 14, England plays Italy. Though I am not in either country, we could use this game to market our own product. Imagine that we are an online shoe etailer. Let’s get some creative going with shoes in the color and design of the England flag on one side “going toe to toe” with shoes in the color and design of the Italian flag. Perhaps an even more direct example is if we were now a men’s suits etailer, since those two specific countries happen to be capitals of men’s fashion. Let’s have a “match” in our email between British suit makers and Italian suit makers. You could even say that, based whomever wins that game, suits from the winning country are X% discounted for 24 hours. The idea here is to use this huge current event to connect your brand to it. In doing this, your brand is contemporary and hip, while also seeming playful. Most people on the planet take an interest in the World Cup and are rooting for at least one country to win, so why shouldn’t your brand?

I used that game as an example, but clearly you could adjust to specific games with teams or products you want to focus on. This is easy in the first part of the tournament when we already know all the matchups. Once the next round comes, you will have to be on it and turn around the creative very quickly. It is worth it though because that quick response time just adds to the cool factor of your brand.

The final step here is to go into uber-patriot mode. If you champion Americanism, then every day America has a game, send a patriotic email to your customers with “support our boys in Brazil” messaging, while including some related products. Invite people to watch the game with your brand by using social media during the game to connect the events of the game to your audience and brand. Be creative. Be playful. It is my understanding that you can’t actually say World Cup, but there are ways of obviously referencing it without blatantly saying it. The easiest might just be to include a soccer ball somewhere in the email! Poof! Now everyone knows what you are talking about.

On that note, though I have my doubts about how far they will get, but Go US Men’s National Team!