On the back of the recent affiliate wins, Fiona Robertson (nee MacPherson) has been hired by bigmouthmedia to head up the Affiliates and Performance service. As well as running the team that works on the affiliate campaigns, Robertson will be responsible for the overall growth strategy of bigmouthmedia’s affiliate and performance offering. Bigmouthmedia’s current affiliate clients include Best Western, Habitat, Macdonald Hotels and Kwik Fit Insurance, amongst many others.

Fiona, who sits on the IAB’s Affiliate Marketing Council, has over 6 years experience in affiliate and digital channel marketing and her most recent positions have been at WPP’s MediaCom and Glasgow-based Equator as Senior Affiliate Manager, where she developed affiliate and direct response strategies for a number of high profile clients. Fiona’s main focus will be to integrate affiliate marketing fully into the overall bigmouthmedia offering, spotting key areas for growth and ensuring that affiliate strategies fit seamlessly within the clients’ business models.

“We are delighted for Fiona to be joining the bigmouthmedia team”, said Robin Richmond, head of Digital at bigmouthmedia. “Her experience building performance-led strategies will be of massive benefit to our clients affiliate marketing campaigns. We are also seeing a definite uptake on our affiliates and performance services offering by new and existing clients as part of more comprehensive cross-digital marketing packages. Companies are becoming more aware of the synergies and added value that a single supplier can bring on board, and the recent growth of bigmouthmedia’s affiliates and cross-digital teams is a reflection of this new market trend”.

Bigmouthmedia reports that Google’s latest changes to its trademark policy will make pay-per-click advertising more attractive for comparison sites.

The press conference announcement means that from September 14th 2010 the UK will now follow Google’s existing US AdWords policy, which allows any advertiser to use trademarked keywords within their advert text in some cases. Using trademarked terms in advertising copy will remain outlawed in mainland Europe, but following the rule change keywords will no longer be protected from others bidding on them.

“Aggregators will now have the ability to use brand names in their adverts. This is likely to improve their click-through rates and quality score, and will therefore make it more attractive for such operations to bid on brand terms,” said Lyndsay Menzies, Chief Operations Officer at bigmouthmedia.

“In the UK the news may have a large impact on brand bids in industries such as finance, travel and electronics. While advertisers in mainland Europe will be unable to put trademarked terms in the advertising copy of their campaigns, the changes are still likely to have a big impact on brand budgets.”

Bigmouthmedia believes that Google’s decision to allow anyone to bid for trademarked keywords across Europe is widely predicted to lead to price rises in the markets affected. When this happened in the UK – where the policy change was first rolled out in 2008 – bidding on some brand terms increased by as much as 500% in the short term. The hike was relatively short lived mainly due to British brands’ unwillingness to get involved in bidding wars, although this may not be the case in other European countries and brand bidding may break out in earnest.

Via EPR Network
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Leading international healthcare provider, Bupa, has selected bigmouthmedia, Europe’s largest and most experienced digital marketing agency, to lead its search marketing strategy.

The new deal will see bigmouthmedia take on a major search engine optimisation programme which will involve Bupa’s key UK websites. The project, which will be the company’s most extensive digital marketing campaign so far to date, and is designed to deliver significant growth to the international healthcare provider over the next three years.

“We’re delighted to be working with a brand of Bupa’s quality. Having worked side-by-side to create an ambitious search marketing strategy, we’re now looking forward to getting our teeth into what promises to be a particularly exciting project,” said Scott Boocock, major account director at bigmouthmedia.

David Lengen, head of digital communications at Bupa added, “Search is an essential element of Bupa’s strategy to becoming recognised as a global healthcare leader. Bigmouthmedia will help us to position the brand f r o m being purely about health insurance into the broader health and wellbeing sphere, where so much of Bupa’s expertise lies.”

With its team of over 200 online professionals and experts across the fields of SEO, PPC, social media marketing, affiliate marketing, display advertising, online pr and copywriting along with an existing client base which includes many major household brand names, bigmouthmedia is ideally positioned to take on and help drive this exciting project to increase Bupa’s online presence to become a global leader in healthcare and wellbeing.

A bigmouthmedia survey has revealed that more than three quarters of the UK’s big brands do not understand the value of a visitor via mobile compared to other digital channels

The research, which polled the views of key decision makers at a raft of leading UK companies, shows that despite a significant 89.2% of respondents sharing the belief that mobile marketing will become increasingly important over the next 12 months, very few have fully embraced the channel. Reflecting the uncertainty with which many businesses regard the emerging the field, 70.3% of those surveyed currently don’t have any engagement with mobile marketing at all.

“We are at a critical point in the evolution of mobile marketing. A growing group of organisations are starting to derive competitive advantage from their early mover status in the channel, yet the vast majority of companies have yet to gauge the impact it is likely to have on their business,” said Simon Heyes, Head of International Sales Operations at Bigmouthmedia.

“There are no benefits to be derived from being slow on the uptake. With the mobile channel set to become increasingly influential over the next few years, companies need to move now, engage with the medium and start building the campaigns that are going to keep them ahead of the game.”

Despite an apparent lack of engagement with the channel the research revealed a keen awareness of the potential advantages, with 75.7% of respondents citing increased brand awareness as the main benefit of undertaking mobile marketing, and 67.6% believing increased customer engagement to also be a major benefit. Over 60% also believed that increased traffic, leads and sales were also a major driver.

Bigmouthmedia’s survey – conducted amongst a large group of large and medium sized enterprises – showed that just 5.4% companies describe themselves as being “heavily involved” in mobile marketing at the current time. Another statistic to emerge is that while they considered the channel increasingly influential, 75% of the respondents claimed not to know the relative value of a visitor from mobile compared to other channels.

“What is clear from our research is that while the vast majority of businesses accept that mobile is going to become a critical part of the marketing mix, there is a great deal of uncertainty over how to approach the channel, and in particular how to get buy in from the wider organisation. Companies know they need to get on board the mobile bandwagon, but a lack of clear understanding is holding many back from exploiting its potential,” said Heyes.

Bigmouthmedia has been shortlisted for two awards at the prestigious 2010 Travolution Awards. Judges at the awards – which recognise excellence in the travel marketing industry – handed Europe’s largest independent digital marketing company nominations in two critical categories.

Bigmouthmedia’s work with British Airways has seen the industry-leading campaign placed amongst the front runners to carry off the 2010 trophy for Best Use of Search Engine Optimisation, while the agency’s successful strategy for Macdonald Hotels has seen it named amongst the contenders for the Best Use of Affiliate Marketing prize.

Anneli Ritari, senior travel strategist at bigmouthmedia, said: “We’re delighted to have been nominated in two categories. The team has worked closely with both BA and Macdonald Hotels to deliver what have been two extremely effective strategies and we’re very pleased that all their effort and innovation has been recognised in this manner. It’s a real boost for everyone involved.”

For their winning campaign bigmouthmedia and British Airways partnered again to launch an ambitious search campaign integrating SEO and PPC aimed at improving SEO rankings, reducing PPC spend and ensuring PPC budget was used tactically to drive incremental sales volume. Their strategy, which carefully matched business objectives, achieved, cross-channel synergies to maximise ROI and budget efficiencies and delivered excellent results, including 31% reduction in paid search CPA, 87% reduction in PPC spend for certain keywords and 400% increase in number one ranking positions for “flights to <destination>” keywords.

The proactive affiliate marketing campaign which bigmouthmedia put together for Macdonald Hotels based around the use of bespoke offers and improving coverage of hotel name and brand-hybrid terms achieved equally strong results. In addition to improved ROI across all online channels the strategy saw average booking values increased by 13.9% and drove a 110% year-on-year increase in revenue from the affiliate channel for the group.

Bigmouthmedia has called upon the Financial Services Authority to introduce new rules to govern the selling of finance products online.

Speaking at the annual bigmouthmedia Finance Summit in London, finance strategist Chris Cathcart unveiled the results of a new consumer survey showing that 77% of web users believe that online financial advertising is neither honest nor straight-forward. The research – conducted in partnership with Financial Marketing UK – revealed that a clear majority of respondents mistrust the sector.

“The Financial Services Authority has to recognise that the web marketplace presents a unique range of challenges for the finance sector and that continuing to ignore the issue is no longer an option. They must step up to the plate and help organisations by providing a detailed set of guidelines governing selling online if we are to avoid what could end up as a compliance nightmare,” said Cathcart, bigmouthmedia’s senior finance strategist.

Consumers also displayed similar levels of mistrust and suspicion when it comes to the financial figures such as interest rates and potential savings gains displayed on websites. A resounding 65% of respondents categorically stated that they do not trust such numbers and cannot make decisions based upon them.

When asked to identify the product categories they found troublesome to research online, consumers identified the most significant challenges as arising when investigating investment opportunities. A compelling 65% said they found researching investment products either “fairly confusing” or “very confusing”, whereas 80% said they had little or no problems evaluating car insurance deals on the web.

Results from the research indicate that language could play a significant role in the confusion. An overwhelming 98% of respondents believe that the terms and conditions governing products and services sold online should be in plain English rather than the complex legal jargon currently used in the majority of contracts.

“The evidence couldn’t be any clearer: the majority of consumers distrust the finance sector and there is a lot of work to do to win that confidence back. Wording terms and conditions in a manner they can understand would be a major step towards achieving this,” added Cathcart.

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Bigmouthmedia has again been named the UK’s number 1 SEO and PPC agency in the New Media Age Marketing Services Guide for 2010.

This is the second year in a row that the agency has topped the prestigious chart, widely regarded as the definitive guide to the UK’s digital marketing landscape. The NMA league table is ranked on the basis of income, with bigmouthmedia’s range of big brand client wins, cross-channel expertise and experienced management team cited as being key to the company’s industry-leading status.

“Like every industry the search sector has faced a lot of challenges recently, but despite difficult economic circumstances the blend of effectiveness and measurable ROI that online marketing provides is still proving a winning combination,” said Phil Gripton, Managing Director of bigmouthmedia UK.

“We’re delighted that the company’s continued progress has been recognised. It is a tribute to the dedicated, skilled and passionate team that underpins everything we do at bigmouthmedia.”

Highlighting the international expertise offered by bigmouthmedia’s offices both in the UK and across the US, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, France and Spain, New Media Age attributed the company’s success, despite challenging trading conditions, to its reputation for digital marketing expertise and a strong social media offering.

Moving forwards the agency’s digital, technological and creative capacity is set to expand following bigmouthmedia’s merger with LBi, which is due to be completed in July. The combined agency will be the world’s largest marketing and technology agency. Announced in February the deal was brokered to address a changing climate where clients are increasingly looking for best in class agencies with the capacity to cover all aspects of digital marketing.