Here’s a rundown of what’s coming up, some of which requires a fee and some which is completely free  – so no excuses!

1. ClickZ Live San Francisco | August 29-31

ClickZ Live is our original digital marketing event series (you may remember us as SES Conference & Expo) that has been running for over 20 years.

Taking an advanced deep-dive into all aspects of digital marketing our all new accelerator session will enable you and your team to execute your campaigns faster, smarter and more efficiently than ever before.

Training workshops take place on day one and the main event with over 40 trainers and speakers takes place on August 30-31 .

Topics: Mobile, SEO, PPC, Content, Analytics, Data, B2B, Email, Social, Attribution, Conversion Rate Optimization

Speakers include:

Pricing & tickets:

Passes range from $695 for a day pass to $1,495 for the full three days. (Prices rise on August 12)

Find out more here.

2. Shift San Francisco | August 30

Launched in London in May, Shift is our latest series of events which focuses on digital transformation, disruption and leadership.

Bringing together senior marketers and business leaders Shift’s agenda will look at how you can harness, protect and grow your business by tackling digital disruption head on.

Topics: Responding to Disruption, Unlocking the Trapped Value of Digital, Building a Company that Stands Out, Disrupts and Changes Lives, Marketing in a Digital Age, Conquering the Data Mountain, Digital Transformation Survival Guide

Speakers:

Pricing & tickets:

There are a limited number of complimentary VIP passes still available to senior client/brand side marketers.

One day passes are $995. (Prices rise on August 12)

Find out more here.

3. The ClickZ Intelligence Forum | August 31 – FREE

Join the ClickZ Intelligence team and special guests from Google and Southwest Airlines (plus more TBC) for an exclusive look into the latest trends and actionable tactics to succeed in the digital world.

Drawing insights from a series of in-depth reports and research published by our analysts, this half-day forum will provide you with a comprehensive overview backed up by in-depth analytical research and statistics of the latest opportunities and trends you need to be aware of.

Topics: Telling your Story through Data, The Art of Digital Engagement, The Latest Trends in Digital, VR & AR, The Future of Digital

Speakers:

Pricing & tickets:

The ClickZ Intelligence Forum is open to all, however there are only 100 places available. Places are filling up fast so request your pass today!

A wait-list will be available.

Find out more here.

Photo credit: jfew via Visualhunt.com / CC BY-NC-ND

In case you hadn’t noticed, the digital world is all around us. For those people still trying to fend off the ‘future’ by disengaging from the digital world, the tide is turning. It’s now getting harder and harder to do everyday things like pay a gas bill, book a holiday or apply for a job without some kind of digital presence.

In some parts of the world – like China – you can’t even get a taxi these days unless you are connected to the internet.

In the words of Bill Heslop: “You can’t stop progress.” That quote might be lost on anyone who is not Australian, but in the two years since I attended my first ClickZ Live event, the digital landscape has changed phenomenally and there are no signs it’s going to slow down anytime soon.

How digital marketing today goes beyond goats screaming like humans

Have you ever Googled “goats screaming like humans”? This was a key theme of the opening keynote at ClickZ Live Hong Kong in 2014. It was delivered by Jason Oke who at the time was the regional managing director, Asia-Pacific, Red Fuse Communications.

I haven’t forgotten this presentation because essentially, Oke was saying that if you were a brand like Coca-Cola, your marketing competition was no longer Pepsi.

Your biggest worry as a marketer was thinking about how to engage the distracted consumer from the endless hours of content around cats that do all sorts of strange things, dogs that know when they are in trouble, and goats screaming like humans.

Here’s one of many YouTube videos devoted to the goats. This one has had more then 30 million views.

And it didn’t stop with the goats. The viral nature of these videos prompted a range of further uploads of goats interspersed in the music videos of Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus and Whitney Houston.

Yes, in 2014, these goats had digital marketers staying awake at night.

Oke’s message was short and blunt. In 2014, the party had moved online, and a brand could either attend the party, or remain unnoticed in the shadows.

What’s the marketing value of a contact lens that can measure glucose levels?

At that same conference, ClickZ Asia contributor Mandeep Grover talked about the revolutionary opportunities for marketers around wearable technologies and the Internet of Things.

He talked about the capabilities of some of these new technologies where, for example, a contact lens could measure the blood sugar levels of a person from their tears. Was he talking about the ‘future’? No. This was technology right here already, in the now.

*Source: Google

This sort of technology, alongside other health initiatives like fit bits, is a boon for marketers in terms of the additional data they can collect from individual consumers. Imagine the kind of personalized policies a health insurer can now market to individual consumers, based on that data. Yes, big data has been a key theme for some time now, but now that the industry has got better at collecting, and refining it, what should marketers be doing with it?

David v Goliath – staying relevant through digital partnerships

Finding clever ways to use this data to engage with consumers on a very personal level is every marketer’s dream. And those doing it well are startups. They are small and agile and can constantly evolve to meet changing consumer needs and purchase behaviors. Which is why clever businesses are working hard to partner with them. A keynote case study at our Hong Kong event in 2015 looked at AIA’s accelerator programme in Hong Kong.

The insurance industry is one of several sectors at particular risk of losing relevancy to disruptive technologies.

Alyssa Tam, director, AIA Edge, AIA Group, said a key objective of the AIA accelerator programme was to be able to learn and understand what was happening outside.

“Because at the end of the day, we want to stay relevant. We are a very successful company, and we want to continue to be that for the years to come,” she said.

Using data and mobile to ‘power moments that matter’

Which brings us to 2016. What do screaming goats, micro-chipped contact lenses and big business partnering with startups have to do with all of this? Digital marketing is constantly evolving. It means people in the industry, new or old to it, are always learning, exchanging ideas and sharing the challenges that so much constant change brings about. In 2016, key trends have gone beyond mobile being a point of engagement for brands, but how to use the device to enhance consumer experiences – and how to deliver a service in an ‘always on’ world.

At ClickZ Live Hong Kong this year, Brian Wong, the 25-year-old founder and CEO of Kiip will be discussing just that – how the connected consumer is changing the face of advertising. His startup helps connect brands with consumers at their most receptive – being rewarded in a moment of achievement.

His app is a great example of the integration of mobile, data personalization, and the disruptive force of the startup community.

Wong is one of more than 50 chief marketing officers, industry specialists and digital marketers from some of Asia’s biggest names in the industry joining us ClickZ Live Hong Kong on August 3&4 at the Mira Hotel.

Video marketing, digital disruption and transformation, B2B and B2C marketing, ecommerce, omnichannel strategies, digital communications, brand strategy and programmatic buying are just some of the other key themes you’ll learn more about at our amazing event.

Hope to see you there.

For more information on ClickZ Live Hong Kong, to download the agenda or buy tickets, visit our event website here.

Today we have the most expensive AdWords keywords, a new site testing tool from Google, and a look at whether Google factors in anchor text in internal links.

Google’s next mobile update will factor in page speed

Mobile page speed isn’t currently used as a ranking factor by Google, but that will change with the next mobile friendly update.

Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed this at a recent Search Marketing Summit in Sydney. Though he wasn’t giving dates away, it appears this update is a matter of months away.

What are the most expensive keywords in the US?

Our columnist Chris Lake has compiled a list of the most expensive AdWords keywords in the US. (We have the same list from the UK too).

What have we learnt? Well, the US keywords are much more expensive than those in the UK. The top US keyword is upwards of four times more expensive than the equivalent across the Atlantic.

Also, whereas gambling terms dominate in the UK, it’s legal keywords in the States. 78% are legal terms, including nine of the top ten.

A new mobile-friendly testing tool

Google has just launched this tool, based upon the Page Speed Insights tool.

The tool tests and gives a score for these three things:

• Mobile friendliness
• Mobile speed
• Desktop speed

Google will also send you a report detailing the reasons for your scores and suggestions for improvement. Looks like Google needs to work on that desktop score ;)

Does Google count anchor text in internal links?

Shaun Anderson from Hobo Web carried out an interesting experiment looking at whether the anchor text used in internal links is used as a ranking factor by Google.

The answer seems to be yes. Please read Shaun’s blog for the full details, but he essentially linked to a page on his site which didn’t contain the keywords used in the anchor text linking to it.

The page then ranked for that keyword, and stopped ranking when the link was removed.

A useful recap of Google I/O

There was lots to digest from Google I/O and Google has helpfully listed and explained the various announcements on the Webmaster Central Blog.

They are:

• Rich cards
• New Search Console reports
• Real-time indexing
• More detail on Accelerated Mobile Pages
• A new and improved Structured Data Testing Tool
• App Indexing’s migration to Firebase
• App streaming
• A revamp of developer documentation

And finally, the launch of ClickZ Intelligence…

Last week saw the launch of ClickZ Intelligence, a new service providing a range of reports aimed at digital marketing pros.

There’ll be some dedicated SEO and PPC reports further down the line, but for now we have reports on social customer service, ecommerce checkout, customer journeys, mobile ads, AI, and mobile commerce (see Rebecca Sentance’s look at this report from a search perspective).

We’re in a seminal moment, said Google chief executive (CEO) Sundar Pichai kicking off the company’s annual I/O Conference in San Francisco.

Looking back at the past 17(!?) years, Pichai discussed Google’s evolution to the live audience of 7,000. As technology gets more sophisticated, he sees artificial intelligence (AI) playing a huge role in the company’s next 17 years.

“Leveraging our state-of-the-art capabilities in machine learning and AI, we truly want to take the next step in being more assistive to our user. Today, we are announcing the Google Assistant,” said Pichai, one of the only people in the world who’s allowed to use the “L” word on Search Engine Watch. “We think of it as building each user their own individual Google.”

Right now, 20% of Google searches are queried by voice. Google Assistant is the next step in that, combining voice search with the rest of Google’s AI capabilities. For example, if you were standing in front of that giant bean in Chicago, you could ask, “Who designed this?” without any mention of where you are; Google already knows.

What separates Google Assistant from other digital assistants is its various integrations, including Uber, Fandango and OpenTable. While Siri can tell you what time The Jungle Book is playing, you can’t actually purchase tickets through her.

Another new product is Google Home, the search giant’s answer to the Amazon Echo. Like Alexa, Google Home – which is customizable with different fabrics, materials and colors to match your home aesthetic – can play music and TV shows, and control various aspects of your connected home.

“What makes Google Home really shine is that it has search built in,” added Mario Queiroz, vice president of product management at Google. “It draws on 17 years of innovation to answer questions, which are difficult for other assistants to handle.”

Google Home is meant to be a more intelligent version of AI, able to answer both your generic (“How much fat is an avocado?”) and personal (“What time is my flight on Sunday?”) questions. That same level of personalization will be applied to Allo, a messaging app that will be available this summer.

Allo is a bit like the GIF-heavy Peach app (RIP) with Google’s AI built in. The suggested responses will be, rather than canned replies, based on what your past responses have been, to both text and images.

“The more you use Allo, the better the suggestions become. The suggestions will be unique to you,” said Erik Kay, Google’s engineering director.

Other features include a built-in Google Assistant – which allows you to book a restaurant on OpenTable directly in the app while messaging, for instance – and Whisper and Shout, complementary features that amplify your reaction, making it larger or smaller.

Other highlights from the Google I/O keynote include:

• An upcoming video calling app, Duo, will includes a live stream of the person calling, allowing you to potentially gauge their mood. For instance, if my boss Graham was calling me with Duo, I’d be able to see if he looked really angry and ready to yell at me for using the word “leverage” earlier.
• More details of Android N were revealed. Among them are the introduction of the Vulkan graphics API to Google’s mobile platform; a “Clear All” button to simultaneously dismiss all active apps; and split-screen and picture-in-picture modes for multitasking.
• Google is building a virtual reality (VR) platform, Daydream, on top of Android N. Unlike Cardboard, which works with any smartphone, Daydream will only work on new phones with specially-built sensors and screens. The platform will include VR versions of Google properties such as YouTube, StreetView, and Play Movies, in addition to Netflix and Electronic Arts.
• Android Wear, Google’s smart watch, will be updated to include a tiny keyboard, the ability to show data from any application, and automatic activity activation. For example, if you start running, an icon will pop up asking if you want to play your workout playlist on Spotify.
• Google has also announced a new mobile analytics platform, which Sophie Loras has covered in detail here: Google launches Firebox.

Amy Nicholson, managing editor at content strategy agency Sticky Content, says it’s time for businesses to install their own great content leaders, who can bring together expertise from every division in their company to create a great content strategy.

ClickZ caught up with Amy to find out more in advance of her talk at this year’s Shift event.

Why is now the time for businesses to install a great content leader?

Because content is bigger, faster and stronger than it’s ever been, and it deserves the respect of its own department. Why? It’s not a conceit or a vanity project – content makes people money. And its value is easier to prove than ever.

Content is everywhere – on dozens of channels that didn’t exist 10 years ago and performing 1,000 functions that cannot be limited to the old marketing and PR pots we’re used to. We’re not just talking about another slew of “10 winter skincare dos and don’ts” either, we’re talking sophisticated personalisation models, heavily optimised transactional processes and gorgeous, immersive video. Content is everything.

Because it’s such a powerful force, it needs a firm hand. It needs someone who can work across these divisions with enough influence to make real changes and enough strategic thinking to see the cumulative impact. It needs someone who can draw the distinction between useful, valuable content and something that adds to the noise.

But unfortunately for a lot of companies – especially the big, old ones – the structure they’re working in doesn’t support this change in thinking.

So they might have someone in digital or even IT looking after the back end of the website, product teams managing product pages, and then SEO, CRM and marketing teams doing a load more work besides, with no one at the top pulling all of these crucial operations together.

Where might an organisation that doesn’t have a dedicated content leader find someone within their company who fits the bill?

Look for people who really know your customers. Sometimes you’ll find great content people in marketing, customer service, or digital. Find someone who can, without bias, balance your customers’ needs with those of your business.

You can outsource a lot of your content strategy, but not all of it. Any organisation that wants to do better at content needs to remember you’ve got to keep some of the work at home – usually the bits that draw directly on your business strategy.

That said, a smart content agency can help on almost every element of the execution – from helping you define and shape your tone of voice, coming up with some brilliant, creative ideas and also helping in distribution and measurement.

But that big, overall direction has to come from you.

What are businesses getting wrong with their content strategies?

They don’t appreciate how wide and deep they need to go. A real content strategy defines everything it touches.

So it’s not an editorial calendar or a CRM plan. It’s not a tone of voice, an attribution model, some templates or guidelines. It’s not just a spreadsheet (no matter how hot the colour coding) or a meeting agenda. It’s the idea that ties all of those things, and plenty more besides, together.

The other thing that tripwires content projects of all kinds is the people. Shooting some video or writing some nice blogs is the easy bit – getting the right people on board first and making sure the strategy actually gets executed is the much more nebulous (but much more valuable) work.

For that, you’ll need someone who can balance creative and commercial needs with a really clear sense of how to get things done.

Good content is always collaborative. We’re not writing novels here, we’re selling things on the internet. You need a varied, skilled and ego-free squad to do that really well.

What trends should content marketers be aware of for 2016?

Content marketers should spend less time worrying about trends and more about figuring out what’s actually going to make their customers’ lives better.

Sort your CRM out, then worry about whether or not you need a better presence on Snapchat, or whether or not VR is A Thing.

Who should attend your session at Shift?

Anyone who’s not sure if they’re taking content seriously enough. And anyone who’s sure they’re not, but isn’t quite sure what to do about it.

Don’t miss Amy’s session ‘7 behaviours of brilliant content leaders’ at ClickZ & SEW’s flagship event Shift, taking place from 24^th to 25^th May.

Food Tube is part of the Jamie Oliver Media Group and it was launched in 2013, as a new way to present food recipes, both in an informative and entertaining angle, hoping to transform the traditional format that we’ve known from Jamie Oliver since then.

Thus, Food Tube became the food channel that combined recipes, tutorials, funny videos and guest collaborations, leading to 2.3 million followers and 210.577.027 views (as of May 10th)

How did it attract such an engaged audience and what can we learn from its success?

Please note: Richard Herd, Head of Food Tube, will also be speaking about YouTube and video storytelling at our Shift event in London on May 25.

The power of YouTube

Video content has seen a significant rise over the years and according to Cisco, video traffic will be 80% of all consumer Internet traffic in 2019.

YouTube has significantly contributed to the trend of video consumption and more specifically, the food industry was among its most popular categories. According to a report by Tubular Labs and Google, food videos generated almost 11 billion views on YouTube last year, as it was the biggest platform for food content, while Facebook was second.

Focusing on the medium

When creating content for YouTube, it is important to focus on the specific medium and the challenges may be even bigger when transitioning from TV content to digital content.

Despite the numerous available recipes for TV, Jamie Oliver and his team had to adapt to YouTube and the different expectations its audience has.

Videos had to become shorter, more appealing and more diverse, in order to maintain the audience’s interest.

The numerous available online options for food lovers make it harder for every online foot network and that’s when creativity is required to keep the subscribers engaged with the channel.

Treating recipe like a story

The art of storytelling can be powerful on social media and Food Tube quickly realised how a story can transform any type of content. Thus, it started treating each recipe like a story, creating a unique perspective, adding the needed authenticity, but also the personal element that will make the content relevant to the audience.

A modern digital channel should not just deliver what is expected from it, but rather try to produce content that will make it stand out from the rest.

Storytelling offers to every channel the ability to differentiate from its competitors and thus, prove whether it can attract a bigger audience.

Reaching a younger audience

Food Tube is focusing on YouTube to reach a younger target group, as a recent Tubular report indicates that 71% of the food audience on YouTube is aged between 18 and 34.

What’s more, a research by Millward Brown Digital, Firefly, and Google reports that people aged between 18 and 34 watch 30% more food content on YouTube compared to other demographics, which proves why many publishers seek for the attention of this loyal and highly engaged audience.

Mixing content

A successful YouTube channel should focus on providing interesting and valuable content in order to maintain the highly sought engagement.

There is no strategy that fits every channel and that’s why Food Tube keeps experimenting with several topics for its videos, while it also keeps several established categories as the most frequent ones (1 minute tips, 15 minute meals, Jamie’s super food, etc).

What’s more, Food Tube focuses on the most popular holidays and celebrations to provide relevant content, from Easter and Halloween, to Father’s Day, or Pancake Day.

This ensures that there is always fresh and unique content which may fit to a bigger category, without being boring or repetitive.

Creating collaborations

YouTube may be a large network on its own, but it still relies on its social side and many successful YouTube channels relied on collaborations to keep growing.

Food Tube wanted to ensure that it provides a constant stream of content to its channel and this led to the pursuit of the right collaborations that could add an additional aspect to its existing content.

Every collaboration showcases everyone’s unique personality and this helped Food Tube evolve its idea of storytelling with strong characters, such as Gennaro, Kevin Bacon, Alfie Deyes, etc.

By building bonds with food lovers all over the world, Food Tube strengthened its presence, both on Youtube, but also on other social networks, which ultimately boosted its reach, with people linking back to the videos.

Seizing the power of other social networks

YouTube may be a very popular social network for food lovers, but Facebook is approaching its popularity in the food industry year-by-year, which means that every publisher should ensure that a channel’s social presence is aligned with the rest.

Even if there is a clear preference on a specific social network and its priority on the new content, it is still important to create a solid social presence on other social networks, with Food Tube having a digital footprint on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Its social presence in numbers:

• Facebook: 542,561 likes
• Instagram: 281k followers
• Twitter: 56.2k followers
• Youtube: 2,317,797 subscribers

Despite the clear domination of its YouTube channel, it still ensures it updates all the social networks consistently, using them as a way to lead traffic back to YouTube, while they also serve as a useful way to increase its exposure and appeal to a wider audience.

Takeaway: how to appeal to the food lovers of YouTube

Food Tube may serve as a great example on how to succeed on YouTube with food videos, as it reminds us that:

• Authenticity is always appreciated
• Storytelling may be the emotional trigger that will attract users to your site
• Engagement is not easily maintained
• Every platform has its own rules and the content should be created accordingly
• Collaborations should reflect the unique personalities to the content
• Diversity in terms of content types ensures that users will stay longer on your channel
• Cross-platform promotion in other social networks can be beneficial

Richard Herd, Head of Foodtube, will be speaking about Youtube and video storytelling at our Shift event in London on May 25.

Rebecca Galambos is senior digital transformation director at the Prince’s Trust, with some valuable insights into the ‘millennial generation’ through her work. 

Rebecca will be speaking about this at our upcoming Shift event in London on May 24/25th. I’ve been asking Rebecca about what digital transformation means to her…

Can you give us a sneak preview of your presentation at Shift?

I’m going to be speaking about how digital transformation and frugal innovation are just as relevant to the third sector as to the world of commerce (arguably even more so given the tight funding environment).

How useful is the term ‘millennials’? Does it over-simplify a group of people with very disparate interests and needs? 

As with all stereotypes it is somewhat helpful but can quickly become a lazy shorthand… today more then ever the individual has to come to the fore. 

How do you target this market? What has worked for you? 

Simplicity in our branding. Bite sized communication. Meaning and depth of our messaging.

From the young people we work with, the lesson is that you have to be mobile-enabled. Good design , speed and simplicity matter. Apps that are tailored to your audience. Short, bite-sized communications Social is very important.

One important point is that young people are motivated by meaning. Whatever you are communicating, selling, or encouraging them to do has to have some meaning.

People more socially and economically aware. Inequality in wealth and opportunity is growing and roughly 800,000 young people in the UK are not in employment, education or training.

A lot of young people are very aware of socio-economic issues and are interested in products with meaning.

We also talk a lot to young people. For example, we have UX groups that try out different technology and ways of engaging with us. Then we have deeper research into how they’re feeling. Any organisation, whether selling or supporting young people, has to have a dialogue and keep it going.

What does digital transformation mean to you? 

It means nothing less then a total reinvention of an organisation’s business model through the lens of the customer whilst incorporating all the advantages which digital brings in terms of speed, agility, low cost and new models of customer interaction. 

How much of digital transformation is about technology and how much is about culture? 

There is an old saying ‘culture trumps strategy every time’ and I think that applies equally with digital.

Having said that digital also provides new and innovative ways of engaging with employees so done well can work with the grain of an organisation’s culture

What are the biggest obstacles to a successful transformation project? 

Stakeholder alignment – do the senior team share a common view of the goal…often they do superficially but once the detail emerges it can quickly be apparent that they are not aligned.  

What has worked for you at Prince’s Trust? 

Openness, innovation, frugality, light touch but inclusive governance, bring our customers (the young people) into all phases, design, development and testing.

It’s about understanding the customer journey and delivering value  for that customer. In our case, on my current programme, that means young people. I’ve been looking at simplicity, speed, and making things friction free to deliver the best possible experience. This drove me to look at transformation and digital change.

To me, transformation is combination of business process change, technology change and the change in ways of working. This used to be called change management and now we talk about transformation.

Perhaps one of the reasons for that is that we can now deliver a great package of technological change, as well as effectively restructuring teams and organisations. Only when when you put it all together and wrap around it with proper cultural change and ways of working that it really becomes attractive.

You have talk to people, no matter how good your process or methodology that you bring along is. That process is your pots and pans but its the ingredients that matter. It’s all about people and understanding whats important to them. Digital transformation starts with people.

Rebecca will be speaking about digital transformation at our Shift event in London on May 24/25th. You can also hear an interview with Rebecca on our latest Digital Marketing Podcast. 

Put simply, AR is the technology that superimposes computer generated imagery onto the real world when looked at through a portable device. But, as marketers have discovered, AR can be so much more.

AR has not only succeeded where QR codes failed, but it has quickly shut down any opinion that its technology is gimmicky. No longer is AR the stuff of ‘oh look at this funny animation protruding out of a cola can’. Now genuinely useful experiences can be achieved to help your customers, clients and service providers in a real-life practical way.

Let’s take a look at some of these experiences…

The first three examples are taken from Blippar’s own case studies:

Maybelline, L’Oreal

To promote a new line of nail polish, Maybelline ran print ads in several US magazines giving readers the unique opportunity to virtually try on the new range of colors.

The average reader engaged for more than four minutes, and more than 10% of users shared the campaign on social media. The campaign also helped Maybelline predict which colors were trending each week.

Argos

Argos made its holiday catalogue shoppable with the Blippar app by letting readers ‘blipp’ the pages to instantly buy items. This led to 21,000 customers sharing the campaign on social media, and more than 929,000 interactions were recorded over 10 weeks.

Coca-Cola & Spotify

Coca-Cola, turned its 250ml cans into portable interactive Spotify jukeboxes. Users could use their smartphone to listen to the top 50 UK songs at that moment on Spotify by holding a can up to the screen.

Healthcare

As TechRepublic reported in 2o15, AR is making itself incredibly useful in the healthcare industry. The following examples are taken from Brian Wassom’s talk at last year’s Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara:

ARnatomy

To replace the giant, unwieldy anatomy text books that all medical students have to leanr, ARnatomy uses AR to pinpoint exactly the type of bone being studied, revealing all of its information on screen and lets allows users the ability to manipulate a tangible skeletal model.

Vipaar

Vipaar is a video support solution whereby a remote surgeon could project his hands onto the display of a surgeon on site wearing AR enabled glases and point and guide the hands of the surgeon.

AccuVein

AccuVein’s Vinny Luciano states that 40% of IVs miss on the first attempt at finding a vein, so they invented a scanner that projects over skin and shows nurses and doctors where various veins, valves and bifurcations are in a patient’s body. This has been used on more than 10 million patients so far, and made finding a vein on the first attempt 3.5x more likely.

VA-ST Visor

The winner of the 2014 Google Impact Challenge was the VA-ST visor. These ‘smart specs’ are intended for use by people who are legally blind or partially sighted to help with every day tasks.

The software can be taught to recognise 3D objects and then identify them within a scene, this can help with finding lost items, navigating environments or mapping out familiar faces to aid recognition.

Current Studios’ MRI game

Getting a child to remain still for the length of an MRI can be very difficult, so Current Studios developed a tablet game for kids to play before the procedure, that measures their ability to lay still for extended periods of time. Doctors can see the child’s stats, and then determine whether they would need a general anesthetic.

The British Museum

Ben Davis covered five AR lessons from The British Museum in 2013, and it still stands as an excellent use-case.

A Gift for Athena helps Key Stage 2 (ages 7-11) children engage with the museum’s Parthenon gallery. It’s a simple uncluttered experience, that nevertheless provides deep learning opportunities thanks to a focus on narrative and puzzle-solving.

American Apparel

The in-store experience can be brought to digital life with AR. Here American Apparel uses it app to reveal tonnes of information on its products as well as showing customer reviews and providing the ability to buy the product online if it’s out of stock and to see it in ever available colour.

Pepsi

Pepsi brought some magic (and terror) to the streets of London in 2014 with its AR enabled billboard. While waiting for a bus, unwitting people would be able to see flying saucers, tigers and asteroids approaching them through the advert. Proving that AR doesn’t just have to be contained on a wearable or smartphone.

With 7.5 million views, this video is one of YouTube’s most watched advertising campaigns.

For lots more information on the changing realities of marketing, come to Shift London in May.

In a slide-show brimming with references to classic car movies, Greg Gifford raced through a host of tips and tricks that can massively improve your business’s local visibility and let you storm ahead of the competition.

The days of “just having a website” and trying to make it rank near the top are over; it takes more than just SEO to market to local customers. That’s not to say that local SEO isn’t important, of course, but it shouldn’t be your only consideration.

By thinking about local SEO as just one part of a wider visibility strategy, you can ensure that your business has a presence across multiple channels, not just in search. That’s better for your customers as well as for you.

In his talk, Gifford gave a run-down of other key areas to pay attention to, and how to optimise each one to target exactly the local audience you want to attract.

But first, because search is still hugely important for a local business, here are some handy tricks that Greg Gifford shared which will help you get ahead in the SEO game.

Quick tips for local SEO

Future-proof your SEO tactics

You only need to look at pizza delivery for an example of how much weight local visibility now carries in search, more than ever before. If you Google “pizza delivery”, even without specifying a location, Google will serve you local results – whether you asked for them or not.

Any algorithm changes that Google makes to its local search results have the potential to shake things up hugely, and the businesses who adapt fastest are often those who end up on top.

Google’s ‘Pigeon’ update in 2014 was a massive game-changer for local SEO, and mobile-oriented ranking changes like Mobilegeddon can have a huge impact on local given that 94% of mobile searches have local intent.

But if you live outside the US, you’re in luck (for once!): Google algorithm updates always hit the US before they roll out anywhere else, so by keeping an eye on what’s happening in the States, you can ‘future-proof’ your SEO tactics and know exactly what to do by the time the update comes to you.

And even if you live in the US, there’s still a way you can get ahead: Gifford recommends keeping an eye on Moz.com’s local search ranking factors research, an extensive survey conducted across SEO experts analysing the changes in ranking factors they have observed over the past year. This will give you the low-down on what changes search experts sense in the winds and how they recommend dealing with them.

Make your blog a local destination

Maintaining a blog is still an excellent content and SEO strategy, giving businesses a platform to publish regular, fresh and insightful content and build a relationship with their visitors.

But in the words of Greg Gifford, “Don’t just market your shit!” Make your blog a local destination; share all sorts of things that people want to read.

Visitors will be turned off by a blog that is clearly just another mouthpiece for the company to promote its products. By thoughtfully curating all sorts of valuable local content, you can turn your blog into a go-to destination, boost its visibility and build relationships and links with other local blogs and businesses.

And speaking of local businesses…

Get those local business links!

When it comes to inbound links to your website, businesses will fight tooth and nail to try and get links from sites with the most domain authority. But Greg Gifford’s tip is one that many businesses wouldn’t even consider: go after “crappy little church websites”. You know the ones, with Microsoft Word clipart and neon green Comic Sans font in the header.

These kinds of tiny hyperlocal websites have a huge amount of local relevance, and so their links carry a lot of weight. Best of all, none of your competitors will be going after them, so you can snap them up and enjoy the boost.

Increase your local SEO with inbound links from highly hyperlocal websites – even if they aren’t always of the best quality. Photo by Lincolnian, made available via CC BY-SA 2.0

Build ‘local silos’ to show up in nearby cities

If you want your site to show up in search for a city you’re not located in, Gifford recommends building what he calls ‘local silos’ targeted at nearby cities.

A silo is the name given to a system or sector that operates in isolation from others. You’ve probably heard a lot about we should be breaking down silos, but in this case, they can work to your advantage.

To build ‘local silos’, create little self-contained zones of information within your site that are based around the city or neighbourhood you want to target and optimise the heck out of them.

Publish blog posts about that city, get links back from local businesses, and make sure they point to pages within the silo; and before too long, you’ll see your silos start to rank in local searches for that area.

Building silos can be a good thing, when it comes to local SEO. Photograph by Doc Searls, made available via CC BY 2.0.

Track your Google My Business clicks

In the midst of all the cool local SEO hacks, it pays to remember the basics, like making sure your business is listed on Google My Business and your profile is complete.

Gifford also advises adding tracking parameters to your Google My Business links in order to monitor the traffic coming to your site via that page. Local SEO Guide has a good guide on how to do this with Google’s URL builder tool.

It’s also worth keeping an eye on developments with Google Posts, which Google seems to be prepping as a significant platform for business promotion, and which could possibly be the next major development in local search if Google rolls it out on a larger scale.

How to optimise your email marketing

So we’ve covered the ‘local SEO’ part of local visibility; how about the ‘beyond’? Greg Gifford’s first tip might seem a little old-school, but it’s still one of the most effective marketing tools at your disposal: email marketing.

Gifford advises making sure that you’re using a responsive email design. Brands who have fully embraced responsive emails see 55% more Clicks to Open (CTO) from mobile and 23% more from desktop compared to brands who haven’t, according to research by Yesmail.

Adding video to your emails can increase their attractiveness and interactivity, and a survey conducted by Forrester Marketing Group found that including a video in email marketing increased Click-Through Rate by 200 to 300%.

That statistic is from 2010, but more recent statistics have shown that just including the word “video” in an email subject line can raise open rates by 19% and Click-Through Rates by 65%.

Having a carefully curated list of email addresses to target can also come in handy when using Facebook Ads, as we’ll see later on.

Go beyond YouTube

If you’re going to commit to using video in your marketing strategy, Gifford has one key recommendation for you: don’t use YouTube. Instead, the video hosting service that Gifford recommends for keeping control of your content and tracking the important metrics is Wistia.

Here are some of the reasons he lists for opting for Wistia instead of YouTube or another major video host:

• Wistia provides detailed video analytics, including engagement statistics, trend graphs, and individual viewer ‘heatmaps’ which show the parts of a video each user watched, skipped and rewatched.
• You can tie user information to email addresses, and also use Wistia’s ‘Turnstile’ tool to add a form that requires users to input their email address at any point before, after or during the video.
• Wistia allows you to give your videos a custom play button, which according to Wikia’s former Director of Growth and Acquisition Casey Henry can increase your play rate by 19%.
• Similarly, you can also add a custom thumbnail to your videos, which can potentially boost your play rate by as much as 35% (and often winds up looking much nicer).
• Wistia embeds on Facebook play in the news feed, and on Twitter will expand into a Twitter card that also allows users to play them in-stream.

Facebook ads

“Facebook ads used to be the drunk guy that showed up late to the party; now, they’re the cool guy that everyone’s stoked to see,” says Gifford. And if you’re looking to gain local visibility, Facebook ads have a lot of valuable advantages.

• Facebook’s demographic targeting is incredibly diverse and exact, allowing you to target users based on location, age, gender, interests, and some mind-bogglingly specific parameters like education level, device and mobile connection.
• You can also load in email lists and use them to create a custom audience of Facebook users who have accounts registered with those addresses.
• Facebook also allows you to create Lookalike Audiences which will target new groups of people who are similar to audiences you’re already targeting.
• Facebook’s ‘local awareness ads’ are an incredibly powerful local advertising tool. Google research on local search showed that roughly 70% of users want ads customised to their city or zip code, and between 60 and 70% want ads customised to their immediate surroundings.

Facebook’s local awareness ads allow you to drop a pin on any point on a map, and ads will be shown on mobile devices within a certain radius of that point. Try dropping a map pin on your competitors, on an event or at a conference!

Use Beacons

Gifford’s final hot tip for local visibility is to use Beacons. Beacons are “small, Bluetooth-enabled hardware devices that can be installed in physical locations, like retail stores. They silently broadcast a message to any Bluetooth-enabled devices in their proximity, kind of like a lighthouse with text”, as Dan Cristo writes.

Usually Beacons require a dedicated app to work, but Beacon providers have begun setting up app networks which will allow Beacons to pop up a message on someone’s phone as long as any app in the network is running.

The apps are location-aware, so they can be tagged by the Beacon even if they aren’t running. You can then connect directly to Facebook’s API, allowing you to retarget ads at actual foot traffic.

DealerOn, Gifford’s marketing and advertising company, ran some tests with Beacon and found they led to anything from a 34.6% to a 45.7% increase in Click-Through Rate on ads. At a recent conference, the Beacon at DealerOn’s booth tagged 687 unique users.

Beacons are still an emerging technology, but they have the power to improve the customer experience and potentially revolutionise search – especially in a hyperlocal context. So watch out for opportunities and get creative with how you use them.

Is it follower numbers? The ability to find and create great content? Or just a genuine passion for transformation and digital change?

On May 24th and 25th, we’ll be hosting our new Shift event in London, and we want to find the biggest influencers online to be help us drive digital change.

The gurus and visionaries who are kindling conversation about digital leadership and the drive towards truly customer-centric business models. Senior marketers, digital gurus and business leaders tasked with implementing digital transformation and responsible for driving marketing strategy across data, digital, acquisition, search, customer experience, analytics, user experience and customer service. Anyone who wants to transform.

With this in mind, we’ve created #Digirevolution, and we want you to join us.

We’ve built a unique leaderboard that weighs up your social media credentials, examines the content you’ve been sharing and assigns you an influencer score. If you’re sharing content and using the #Digirevolution hashtag then we’ll feature you here on the blog every week until May 16th, when our top influencer will receive a free pair of tickets to the event.

We’ll be sharing your #digitrevolution tweets and comments, so join the conversation and tweet your way to the top of our digital revolution leaderboard.

What are you waiting for? Get tweeting leaders!

Interested in digital transformation, leadership and customer experience? Discover more about Shift and the #digirevolution.