‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.’ T.S. Elliot – The Rock
Now, more than ever, all forward thinking enterprises realise the vital necessity of understanding their markets, customers, prospective customers, competitors and the environmental drivers which shape them all.
Yet now, more than ever, with data analysts, analytics and big data all just a fingertip away, those thirsting for this intelligence in the information supplied by these analysts and even specialist research organisations find themselves frustrated by their inability to deliver the key insights and competitive advantages that they are desperately looking for.
Why is this, and how can this situation be resolved?
In fact, the last thing this starts with is information. What you do not want, need, hunger and thirst for is information, even if you think you do. The problem for you and for businesses like yours in this, in the first quarter of the 21st century, is not too little information it is far, far, far too much. You, like most of us, are drowning in information.
In fact, the last thing this starts with is information. What you do not want, need, hunger and thirst for is information, even if you think you do.
What you want is intelligence.
That gleaming nugget of data, that essence distilled from the reams of information that provides the inspiration which enables you to develop the original, informed, insightful, and unique strategic response.
But you will be very lucky indeed if those responsible for your market intelligence, analysis and insights are able to fulfil this requirement, and especially if you start from the normal starting point for a research project, the research brief.
In fact the best starting point is too often missed by those responsible for drawing up the brief. You need first of all to consider your key strategic objectives. Implicit within these will be key questions that you need answers to if you are to realise those aims, mission and objectives.
You need to begin by finding a way to articulate these questions and this is especially challenging as they relate to what you don’t know rather than what you do. However it is worth persevering with as it is these questions that will inform your initial specification of requirements in relation to research and the key intelligence that you need to derive from it.
Once you have these you can then turn your attention to the research brief. A good research brief, well grounded in the key strategic issues facing the company, will set out:
– A problem or issues statement noting exactly what it is that the research seeks to address.
– A clear understanding of how the results will be applied commercially.
– The research objectives which state clearly and concisely the information that is required.
– Terms of reference for the study covering areas such as who is to be interviewed, the size of the sample, the start and stop dates, and any other mechanical or process issues. And finally and most importantly:
– The de-brief requirements.
All of these elements are important but it’s this last point in the brief that is one of the major keys to the relative success of the whole research project and the key to getting the very best ROI on your research investment.
You need to state that you want to see not simply the reporting of their findings and the information involved, but their analysis too. You want them to begin to prompt and provoke your thinking and the thinking of your colleagues by making recommendations, highlighting insights, challenging existing interpretations and, yes, even being provocative.
You need to state that you want to see not simply the reporting of their findings and the information involved, but their analysis too.
And you must demand that the pick out the kernel of intelligence that you are seeking in the detail of their de-brief report.
You must then demand a de-brief workshop that builds on their presentation and, ideally, facilitated by them so that they can provoke, challenge, suggest, recommend and lead you to develop your strategy, plan, tactics, positioning, or whatever it is that you need to do to make the research data actionable, practical and of direct and immediate use to your organisation.
For sure many responsible for doing gathering data will balk at this proposal, but some will relish the challenge. And it is those that can help you realise and capitalise on the true value of your intelligence investment. Only then can you begin to recover the knowledge you have lost in the information.
Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an easily scalable resource, no fixed costs, no hidden overheads and a team that can not only devise solutions and manage projects, but also take on downstream work such as research, copywriting and design management. All seamlessly integrated to provide a win-win solution – in-house marketing resources with outsourced cost savings.Click on the strategic insights below for some more chatter from the Coussins team.
Want to increase your sales and customer engagement in 3 simple steps? How you ask? By creating compelling content in a way your customers can understand. Did you know: The lifespan of a tweet is a mere half an hour? To connect with your audience, you need powerful words and actions to break through the…
Read more
This week we’re taking a look at project planning. You can read our blog post on five reasons to add project planning (back on) to your list here but before you do, please take part in our poll of the week, just for fun! Why is project planning and management important to you? It helps me…
Read more
The digital landscape is constantly changing. Jump back 15 years and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook hadn’t even been created. Go back 10 years, and no Instagram – that’s right, instagrammable wasn’t even a word! Over the years we’ve seen digital trends come and go, and yet there’s no coming and going in this area. Video…
Read more
April 2021 / 5 minute read Abraham Lincoln once famously said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. While maybe not the fastest axe sharpener, Lincoln was certainly sharp when it came to his process. Copywriting is a big part of what we…
Read more
March 2021 / 5 minute read Digital newsletters are a great marketing communications tool, they’re powerful, they work and they’re super low cost too. They’re a great way of communicating and a highly effective way of linking to, re-cycling or highlighting your content. You may have customers that you need to update regularly, or encourage…
Read more
February 2021 / 5 minute read Whilst organising and managing client events isn’t exactly a stress-free task, it is one that can be extremely rewarding in terms of marketing strategy, especially during these times where how we host and organise events has had to change drastically – from the physical in-person to virtual. So as…
Read more
February 2021 / 5 minute read Checking your work is important. Like it or not, people judge us for the way we articulate subjects – they form an impression of us – whether as an individual, brand or organisation – negative or positive, from how we communicate in written form. Writing always needs to be…
Read more
Excellent question. To optimise your website for voice search SEO, create your content around longer, question-based phrases, remembering to keep your answer to around 29 words. Like this is. That’s the short answer. But if you’re really going to hack VSSEO you should probably understand why exactly that’s the case. 50% of all internet queries…
Read more
‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.’ T.S. Elliot – The Rock Now, more than ever, all forward thinking enterprises realise the vital necessity of understanding their markets, customers, prospective customers, competitors and the environmental drivers which shape them all. Yet now, more than ever, with data analysts, analytics and big data all…
Read more
We all know how important planning any project is, but for some reason it always ends up at the bottom of our list – and sometimes it doesn’t even make the list! Of course, no one likes to admit it – but sometimes you just don’t want to do it. And we’ve been there, we’ll…
Read more
Having composed a piece of copy, it can be all too tempting to save and send without giving it another moment’s thought. Let’s face it, proofreading is hardly the most exciting of tasks; but we all know that it’s a key part of copywriting – don’t we?! The arguments for proofreading are relatively obvious. Typos,…
Read more
It’s weird to think of a time when Twitter, or the rest of the digital world for that matter, wasn’t bombarded with those little slanted noughts and crosses grids. But the truth is, there really was a time when the mighty Twitter was just a string of texts with no collective association to similar tweets. …
Read more
The term content marketing – the process of creating and sharing relevant media and written content consistently in order to attract and retain customers – has gained popularity in the past few years (although, in reality the process has been around for much, much longer!), so we thought we take a look at five of…
Read more
If you’ve seen Don McMillan’s “Life After Death by PowerPoint” – a very funny exploration of some of the tempting features of PowerPoint – then you’ll know some common habits that are a sure-fire way to leave your audience either irritated, confused or just plain bored. Seven years on and you still see the same…
Read more
After scaring ourselves with the looming threat of a robot invasion in the form of Siri, Google, Alexa and possibly even a real-life Sonny (for those of you who enjoyed the 2004 film, I,Robot) we thought with it being one of the top trends for 2018, we’d talk a little bit about voice search SEO…
Read more
The key to a successful project is planning, so when it comes to beginning any project, a project plan should be the very first thing on your list. You’re in a rush and anxious to get started, and so it might seem counter-intuitive to delay the start of your project, that’s understandable. But we assure…
Read more
When it comes to developing your cross-channel marketing communications strategy, it’s all too easy to look at digital as an add-on. Something you have to do too. But, you see, we strongly believe that’s the wrong approach. Because we believe that digital really is the core. If you think of it like an avocado –…
Read more
In the premiere episode of the latest season of South Park, viewers watched as South Park characters deliberately triggered responses from Alexa, Google and Siri smart devices. Which, of course, are voice-activated devices that many viewers of the show own. This resulted in rather profane comments from those smart home devices (not to be repeated…
Read more
Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past year, you’ve heard of GDPR – but just in case you’ve managed to miss it, GDPR refers to the General Data Protection Regulation, and it’s coming into effect on May 25th, this year. Now, what you may well be less familiar with is the ‘how will…
Read more
Whether you’re consumer focused or B2B, selling products or services, employing five people or five million, one thing is certain across the board. What’s that? Well, as our heading might have oh so slightly given away (whoops!), it’s the benefit you’ll see in maintaining a consistent brand identity. Of course, the concept of a brand…
Read more
In this video blog, Ricky talks about the ‘the mystery button’ and why it’s such a poor example of marketing and selling. Coussins Associates Video Blog: The Mystery Button from Coussins Associates on Vimeo. Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an…
Read more
It’s a question we get time and time again here at Coussins Associates, “what does outsourced marketing mean for me?”. So, in an attempt to set the record straight as they say, we thought we’d take a look at our top five benefits of outsourced marketing, and how it can help your business to become…
Read more
Time is scarce, workloads are piling, emotions are high – whatever the justification for a poor brief, trust us, it’s really not worth it. Yes, in theory, you might be saving time and effort short term (one more brew, one more gossip about what Jill got up to on the weekend), but what you’ll not…
Read moreOur clients range from major multinational companies and public sector organisations to small local businesses – all across a wide variety of industry sectors.
First step, take the hassle out of project management and planning by getting a clever little piece of software to do if for you. Yes, it might take a bit of time to learn and get yourself familiar with, but in the long run, when projects come your way – bang! You’ll have sorted out those fancy looking, colour coded Gantt charts out in no time.
Just like you have a project leader to take charge and ultimately be the decision-maker, having someone specifically to take charge of the project plan means you’re less likely to end up with an out of date project plan, because everyone thought everyone else was doing it.
Make it easier on your team and avoid everyone looking shiftily at their feet when the project plan is mentioned, by having one person take on that responsibility.
Side-note: You may also notice communication amongst the team improves too…
Project management is not only pro-active (carefully planning out future tasks), but also re-active. Unexpected things will come up and potentially throw a curveball at your carefully constructed plan, but hey, that’s ok – that’s why you’ve already nailed motivational reason #1 (get yourself some project software).
All you have to do is go back to your project plan, update the appropriate fields, et voila! you’ll either know how best to get your project back on track, or how you might need to rethink or delay your timeline or reallocate your resources.
When you’ve got several projects on the go it’s not always easy to see which individual task on your list should be the one to tackle first. Project planning helps you and your team see who’s doing what and when so you can know who’s dependent on a particular task – avoiding project hold-ups because Sally didn’t realise that the task at the bottom of her list was crucial to everyone else’s work.
Quite often projects are commissioned on the basis of a fixed budget and we all know that efficiency of resources will help keep those costs down. So project planning is vital on this front to ensure you’re managing your team to optimal efficiency, whilst balancing it with all the other projects you’ve currently got going on.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that project planning is not only an investment that benefits your team, but also rather importantly, your client. Which, when only 29% of businesses are likely to deliver projects to budget*, makes for a pretty big differentiator.
So there we have it – 5 reasons why you should really put project planning back on your list of things to do, with regular check-ups of course. But if, after all that, you’re still not sure how you’ll fit it in, why not come and have a chat with us or check out this post on how to get started with your project plan.
We’re very accustomed to project planning, here at Coussins Associates – and we’ve been asked by a few clients to help with the management and planning of theirs. If you’d like to know a bit more, or just want to chat about some of your options, get in touch by contacting us via this link, here.
* KPMG, Project Management Survey, 2017
Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an easily scalable resource, no fixed costs, no hidden overheads and a team that can not only devise solutions and manage projects, but also take on downstream work such as research, copywriting and design management. All seamlessly integrated to provide a win-win solution – in-house marketing resources with outsourced cost savings.Click on the strategic insights below for some more chatter from the Coussins team.
Want to increase your sales and customer engagement in 3 simple steps? How you ask? By creating compelling content in a way your customers can understand. Did you know: The lifespan of a tweet is a mere half an hour? To connect with your audience, you need powerful words and actions to break through the…
Read more This week we’re taking a look at project planning. You can read our blog post on five reasons to add project planning (back on) to your list here but before you do, please take part in our poll of the week, just for fun! Why is project planning and management important to you? It helps me…
Read more The digital landscape is constantly changing. Jump back 15 years and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook hadn’t even been created. Go back 10 years, and no Instagram – that’s right, instagrammable wasn’t even a word! Over the years we’ve seen digital trends come and go, and yet there’s no coming and going in this area. Video…
Read more April 2021 / 5 minute read Abraham Lincoln once famously said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. While maybe not the fastest axe sharpener, Lincoln was certainly sharp when it came to his process. Copywriting is a big part of what we…
Read more March 2021 / 5 minute read Digital newsletters are a great marketing communications tool, they’re powerful, they work and they’re super low cost too. They’re a great way of communicating and a highly effective way of linking to, re-cycling or highlighting your content. You may have customers that you need to update regularly, or encourage…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Whilst organising and managing client events isn’t exactly a stress-free task, it is one that can be extremely rewarding in terms of marketing strategy, especially during these times where how we host and organise events has had to change drastically – from the physical in-person to virtual. So as…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Checking your work is important. Like it or not, people judge us for the way we articulate subjects – they form an impression of us – whether as an individual, brand or organisation – negative or positive, from how we communicate in written form. Writing always needs to be…
Read more Excellent question. To optimise your website for voice search SEO, create your content around longer, question-based phrases, remembering to keep your answer to around 29 words. Like this is. That’s the short answer. But if you’re really going to hack VSSEO you should probably understand why exactly that’s the case. 50% of all internet queries…
Read more ‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.’ T.S. Elliot – The Rock Now, more than ever, all forward thinking enterprises realise the vital necessity of understanding their markets, customers, prospective customers, competitors and the environmental drivers which shape them all. Yet now, more than ever, with data analysts, analytics and big data all…
Read more We all know how important planning any project is, but for some reason it always ends up at the bottom of our list – and sometimes it doesn’t even make the list! Of course, no one likes to admit it – but sometimes you just don’t want to do it. And we’ve been there, we’ll…
Read more Having composed a piece of copy, it can be all too tempting to save and send without giving it another moment’s thought. Let’s face it, proofreading is hardly the most exciting of tasks; but we all know that it’s a key part of copywriting – don’t we?! The arguments for proofreading are relatively obvious. Typos,…
Read more It’s weird to think of a time when Twitter, or the rest of the digital world for that matter, wasn’t bombarded with those little slanted noughts and crosses grids. But the truth is, there really was a time when the mighty Twitter was just a string of texts with no collective association to similar tweets. …
Read more The term content marketing – the process of creating and sharing relevant media and written content consistently in order to attract and retain customers – has gained popularity in the past few years (although, in reality the process has been around for much, much longer!), so we thought we take a look at five of…
Read more If you’ve seen Don McMillan’s “Life After Death by PowerPoint” – a very funny exploration of some of the tempting features of PowerPoint – then you’ll know some common habits that are a sure-fire way to leave your audience either irritated, confused or just plain bored. Seven years on and you still see the same…
Read more After scaring ourselves with the looming threat of a robot invasion in the form of Siri, Google, Alexa and possibly even a real-life Sonny (for those of you who enjoyed the 2004 film, I,Robot) we thought with it being one of the top trends for 2018, we’d talk a little bit about voice search SEO…
Read more The key to a successful project is planning, so when it comes to beginning any project, a project plan should be the very first thing on your list. You’re in a rush and anxious to get started, and so it might seem counter-intuitive to delay the start of your project, that’s understandable. But we assure…
Read more When it comes to developing your cross-channel marketing communications strategy, it’s all too easy to look at digital as an add-on. Something you have to do too. But, you see, we strongly believe that’s the wrong approach. Because we believe that digital really is the core. If you think of it like an avocado –…
Read more In the premiere episode of the latest season of South Park, viewers watched as South Park characters deliberately triggered responses from Alexa, Google and Siri smart devices. Which, of course, are voice-activated devices that many viewers of the show own. This resulted in rather profane comments from those smart home devices (not to be repeated…
Read more Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past year, you’ve heard of GDPR – but just in case you’ve managed to miss it, GDPR refers to the General Data Protection Regulation, and it’s coming into effect on May 25th, this year. Now, what you may well be less familiar with is the ‘how will…
Read more Whether you’re consumer focused or B2B, selling products or services, employing five people or five million, one thing is certain across the board. What’s that? Well, as our heading might have oh so slightly given away (whoops!), it’s the benefit you’ll see in maintaining a consistent brand identity. Of course, the concept of a brand…
Read more In this video blog, Ricky talks about the ‘the mystery button’ and why it’s such a poor example of marketing and selling. Coussins Associates Video Blog: The Mystery Button from Coussins Associates on Vimeo. Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an…
Read more It’s a question we get time and time again here at Coussins Associates, “what does outsourced marketing mean for me?”. So, in an attempt to set the record straight as they say, we thought we’d take a look at our top five benefits of outsourced marketing, and how it can help your business to become…
Read more Time is scarce, workloads are piling, emotions are high – whatever the justification for a poor brief, trust us, it’s really not worth it. Yes, in theory, you might be saving time and effort short term (one more brew, one more gossip about what Jill got up to on the weekend), but what you’ll not…
Read moreOur clients range from major multinational companies and public sector organisations to small local businesses – all across a wide variety of industry sectors.
Strictly speaking though, the origin of hashtags (outside the US catalogues – where it was used to signify part numbers and phones – we all recall the ‘joy’ of automated phone calls, “please enter your reference number, followed by the hash key…”) can be traced back to Internet Relay Chat networks (a bit like instant messaging) during the late ’80s. Used for similar purposes as today, they were used to group channels or topics. The first use in social media, however, didn’t happen until around two decades – yes, you read that right – later.
In fact, it wasn’t until 2007 that the first use of a hashtag (as we know it now) was recorded. 11 years later and hashtags are everywhere; all over social media from Facebook to Instagram and occasionally even popping up in everyday speech (hashtag please don’t).
And for that we can be thankful to Chris Messina – ex-Google, ex-Uber and open source advocator. On the 23rd August 2007, Chris posted the following message on Twitter:
And from there, the hashtag was born. Interestingly though, it took Twitter nearly two years to adopt their use as a way to categorise and access tweets from the Twitter search bar. During these two years, hashtags were used to spread awareness of forest fires, conferences and were also associated with Obama’s 2008 election campaign with #YesWeCan.
Other famous hashtag campaigns since that momentous fateful August day include: #ShareACoke which saw Coca Cola bottles with personalised names on them, #nomakeupselfie by Cancer Research UK, the #icebucketchallenge for the ALS Association, Always’ #LikeAGirl and #ThisGirlCan by Sport England.
What’s noticeable is that the majority of these campaigns have three things in common:
Hashtags are not just about tagging or grouping conversations anymore, like they were back in the ‘80s, or even in the early days of their 2007 reinvention. Whether we like it or not, those that can find themselves easily rolling off the tongue and into everyday conversations are those that are more likely to succeed as a ‘brand’.
Funnily enough, the more awareness real brands can get out of their hashtag campaigns outside of social media i.e. the more people talk about the campaign offline, the more interaction and traction they’re likely to get with their audience online. Successful hashtag campaigns, therefore, are not just limited to the digital world and it would be a mistake to think otherwise.
Moral of this history lesson? Never underestimate the power of that little symbol known as the hashtag.
Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an easily scalable resource, no fixed costs, no hidden overheads and a team that can not only devise solutions and manage projects, but also take on downstream work such as research, copywriting and design management. All seamlessly integrated to provide a win-win solution – in-house marketing resources with outsourced cost savings.
Click on the strategic insights below for some more chatter from the Coussins team.
Want to increase your sales and customer engagement in 3 simple steps? How you ask? By creating compelling content in a way your customers can understand. Did you know: The lifespan of a tweet is a mere half an hour? To connect with your audience, you need powerful words and actions to break through the…
Read more This week we’re taking a look at project planning. You can read our blog post on five reasons to add project planning (back on) to your list here but before you do, please take part in our poll of the week, just for fun! Why is project planning and management important to you? It helps me…
Read more The digital landscape is constantly changing. Jump back 15 years and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook hadn’t even been created. Go back 10 years, and no Instagram – that’s right, instagrammable wasn’t even a word! Over the years we’ve seen digital trends come and go, and yet there’s no coming and going in this area. Video…
Read more April 2021 / 5 minute read Abraham Lincoln once famously said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. While maybe not the fastest axe sharpener, Lincoln was certainly sharp when it came to his process. Copywriting is a big part of what we…
Read more March 2021 / 5 minute read Digital newsletters are a great marketing communications tool, they’re powerful, they work and they’re super low cost too. They’re a great way of communicating and a highly effective way of linking to, re-cycling or highlighting your content. You may have customers that you need to update regularly, or encourage…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Whilst organising and managing client events isn’t exactly a stress-free task, it is one that can be extremely rewarding in terms of marketing strategy, especially during these times where how we host and organise events has had to change drastically – from the physical in-person to virtual. So as…
Read more February 2021 / 5 minute read Checking your work is important. Like it or not, people judge us for the way we articulate subjects – they form an impression of us – whether as an individual, brand or organisation – negative or positive, from how we communicate in written form. Writing always needs to be…
Read more Excellent question. To optimise your website for voice search SEO, create your content around longer, question-based phrases, remembering to keep your answer to around 29 words. Like this is. That’s the short answer. But if you’re really going to hack VSSEO you should probably understand why exactly that’s the case. 50% of all internet queries…
Read more ‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.’ T.S. Elliot – The Rock Now, more than ever, all forward thinking enterprises realise the vital necessity of understanding their markets, customers, prospective customers, competitors and the environmental drivers which shape them all. Yet now, more than ever, with data analysts, analytics and big data all…
Read more We all know how important planning any project is, but for some reason it always ends up at the bottom of our list – and sometimes it doesn’t even make the list! Of course, no one likes to admit it – but sometimes you just don’t want to do it. And we’ve been there, we’ll…
Read more Having composed a piece of copy, it can be all too tempting to save and send without giving it another moment’s thought. Let’s face it, proofreading is hardly the most exciting of tasks; but we all know that it’s a key part of copywriting – don’t we?! The arguments for proofreading are relatively obvious. Typos,…
Read more It’s weird to think of a time when Twitter, or the rest of the digital world for that matter, wasn’t bombarded with those little slanted noughts and crosses grids. But the truth is, there really was a time when the mighty Twitter was just a string of texts with no collective association to similar tweets. …
Read more The term content marketing – the process of creating and sharing relevant media and written content consistently in order to attract and retain customers – has gained popularity in the past few years (although, in reality the process has been around for much, much longer!), so we thought we take a look at five of…
Read more If you’ve seen Don McMillan’s “Life After Death by PowerPoint” – a very funny exploration of some of the tempting features of PowerPoint – then you’ll know some common habits that are a sure-fire way to leave your audience either irritated, confused or just plain bored. Seven years on and you still see the same…
Read more After scaring ourselves with the looming threat of a robot invasion in the form of Siri, Google, Alexa and possibly even a real-life Sonny (for those of you who enjoyed the 2004 film, I,Robot) we thought with it being one of the top trends for 2018, we’d talk a little bit about voice search SEO…
Read more The key to a successful project is planning, so when it comes to beginning any project, a project plan should be the very first thing on your list. You’re in a rush and anxious to get started, and so it might seem counter-intuitive to delay the start of your project, that’s understandable. But we assure…
Read more When it comes to developing your cross-channel marketing communications strategy, it’s all too easy to look at digital as an add-on. Something you have to do too. But, you see, we strongly believe that’s the wrong approach. Because we believe that digital really is the core. If you think of it like an avocado –…
Read more In the premiere episode of the latest season of South Park, viewers watched as South Park characters deliberately triggered responses from Alexa, Google and Siri smart devices. Which, of course, are voice-activated devices that many viewers of the show own. This resulted in rather profane comments from those smart home devices (not to be repeated…
Read more Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past year, you’ve heard of GDPR – but just in case you’ve managed to miss it, GDPR refers to the General Data Protection Regulation, and it’s coming into effect on May 25th, this year. Now, what you may well be less familiar with is the ‘how will…
Read more Whether you’re consumer focused or B2B, selling products or services, employing five people or five million, one thing is certain across the board. What’s that? Well, as our heading might have oh so slightly given away (whoops!), it’s the benefit you’ll see in maintaining a consistent brand identity. Of course, the concept of a brand…
Read more In this video blog, Ricky talks about the ‘the mystery button’ and why it’s such a poor example of marketing and selling. Coussins Associates Video Blog: The Mystery Button from Coussins Associates on Vimeo. Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an…
Read more It’s a question we get time and time again here at Coussins Associates, “what does outsourced marketing mean for me?”. So, in an attempt to set the record straight as they say, we thought we’d take a look at our top five benefits of outsourced marketing, and how it can help your business to become…
Read more Time is scarce, workloads are piling, emotions are high – whatever the justification for a poor brief, trust us, it’s really not worth it. Yes, in theory, you might be saving time and effort short term (one more brew, one more gossip about what Jill got up to on the weekend), but what you’ll not…
Read moreOur clients range from major multinational companies and public sector organisations to small local businesses – all across a wide variety of industry sectors.
Firstly, a brief introduction into what voice search SEO actually is. Like with regular SEO, it’s about making your website, social media platform, blog etc. as search-friendly as possible so that the little spider-bots that crawl through your content and decide whether it matches a searcher’s query, can label your content as worthy of a higher ranking. Where voice search differs to its text-counterpart though, is in the keywords used to identify whether your content is more suited to the search query than a competitor’s.
You see, when we type our search queries we tend to keep things short, for example, if we’re looking for a local watering-hole on a mobile device, we might type “pubs near me”, but if we were to pick up our phone and start talking to it, it might look a bit more like this:
Spot the difference? You’ll notice that in comparison to the text-based searches, voice-search queries are greater in length and tend to form sentences too. When you use your voice to search, you’re crafting your search query as if you were talking to someone on the street (minus the please and thank you, of course).
Whilst nearly 90% of text searches consisting of 1 – 4 words, voice-based searches average 5 – 10 words in length, so you’re going to have to change your approach of targeting specific keywords.*
Voice search requests are more specific than just a collection of keywords put together – often the case for text-based searches – and this is a huge benefit to us marketers. Why? Well because voice search is a properly formed sentence and not just a jumble of words, a degree of intent emerges. Someone who asks “what are the top ten cameras?” is less likely to be set on buying something in that very moment, than someone who asks “where can I buy a camera?”.
If you can better understand what the customer is looking for, and tailor your content accordingly so you can feature higher up in the SERP, then you’re doing digital marketing right. Contrast this with text-based searches e.g. “top compact cameras” and this type of analytics just isn’t as easily attainable.
By thinking of conversational language as the crème de la crème for voice searches, one way to rank higher in SERPs is to do exactly what the searcher is doing and use conversational language throughout your content.
Using longer keywords and everyday language also enables you to tap into an opportunity to be featured as a direct answer at the top of the SERPs – known as a Google featured snippet. Voice searches also tend to be local – more-so than text-based queries – so businesses would do well to ensure that they’re optimised for local searches.
If you want to see how you might do this then check the table below to see how our watering-hole analogy might work on a page. 
Voice search is an ever-growing trend as we become more and more inclined to talk to our smart devices, rather than just physically interacting with them and so it’s imperative that your business, brand or campaign isn’t missing out just because it’s not voice search friendly.
*Source: Search Engine Watch
Click on the strategic insights below for some more chatter from the Coussins team.
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This resulted in rather profane comments from those smart home devices (not to be repeated in case our mothers read this!), setting alarms for ungodly hours, as well as adding outlandish items to its owner’s shopping basket, not just in the show but also in the very living rooms of its viewers!
OK, so for most of us this resulted in an amusing practical joke of the kind you’d expect from the show and some great publicity for their new season. And for those impacted? Well, come on guys, what did you expect if you’re a fan of South Park?
But, earlier last year, a similar thought also occurred to Burger King, resulting in a far more insidious intrusion.
In the below TV ad, Burger King decided to use the ‘OK Google’ command to trigger Google Home devices to recite the ingredients of the Whopper.
At first glance, it seems quite an ingenious move on Burger King’s part. Sure, it might make anyone watching this with a smart device listen up as their device prattles on about the Whopper, but it also raises the question of whether Burger King invaded customer privacy.
Instead of the customer actively choosing when and how (mobile, tablet, desktop) to learn more about the Whopper (what Google coins a Micro-Moment), Burger King takes control of those decisions – and the customer becomes passive in this process.
It’s as if a digital display ad automatically took you to a landing page without you clicking or pressing anything. If the advertiser can do that, then all that’s left to do is to add the desired (by them) order to your shopping basket. Magic! Goal completion assured.
It’s no surprise then that Google went on to restrict the advert’s ability to set off devices, and interestingly has since been removed from Burger King’s YouTube channel. Quite rightly, Google Home users questioned whether an invasion of literally self-serving ads could soon be expected in their own homes and more disturbingly, without the all-important on/off switch.
But what are the other more socially acceptable implications of the marketing power of smart home devices that have been highlighted by Burger King and even South Park’s actions? Keep in mind that these devices are suddenly making it socially acceptable to use voice technology that’s been in our Smart Phones for some time now. So, we need to start thinking hard about this trend.
Especially when you see comScore (global leader in cross-platform measurement of audiences, advertising and consumer behaviour) predicting that by 2020, 50% of all searches will be voice searches.
If Google, Amazon Apple and Microsoft are successful then their devices are here to stay and with them, the real dawn of ubiquitous voice activated search.
So, for us marketers, it poses the question of how do we optimise our sites for voice search, and even our brand, service or product for voice activation?
Well we expect to see the big boys becoming more and more creative (and adventurous) with their SEO and advertising techniques that specifically target smart home devices and voice search and search results.
Click on the strategic insights below for some more chatter from the Coussins team.
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Read more Having composed a piece of copy, it can be all too tempting to save and send without giving it another moment’s thought. Let’s face it, proofreading is hardly the most exciting of tasks; but we all know that it’s a key part of copywriting – don’t we?! The arguments for proofreading are relatively obvious. Typos,…
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Read more In this video blog, Ricky talks about the ‘the mystery button’ and why it’s such a poor example of marketing and selling. Coussins Associates Video Blog: The Mystery Button from Coussins Associates on Vimeo. Coussins Associates have been providing outsourced marketing services for over 25 years – yikes! Our clients enjoy the benefits of an…
Read more It’s a question we get time and time again here at Coussins Associates, “what does outsourced marketing mean for me?”. So, in an attempt to set the record straight as they say, we thought we’d take a look at our top five benefits of outsourced marketing, and how it can help your business to become…
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Read moreOur clients range from major multinational companies and public sector organisations to small local businesses – all across a wide variety of industry sectors.