What’s Hot in the World of Digital Marketing?

Here’s a quick note of some of the more exciting companies I encountered at TFM&A 2014:

cloud.IQ

cloud.IQ specialises in cart recovery. On average 75% of online shoppers abandon purchases at some point during the sales process (so-called “dropped baskets”). cloud.IQ’s software lets you track site visitors and automatically remarket to them if they abandon. Typically, this allows you to convert 21% of lost sales back to completion. A 21% increase in conversion rate from installing a simple piece of software can’t be bad.  www.cloud-iq.co.uk 

uberVU 

uberVU has been around for some time now, but it’s so important that it’s worth a mention.

Every day there are something like 400 million tweets, 500 million active Google plus accounts and 3.2 billion likes and comments.

How do you cut through all of that noise to find out who’s saying what about you, where people are talking about the things you’re interested in and where to find those key influencers ie people with zillions of followers who might be persuaded to become advocates for your cause?

uberVU provides a listening platform which will capture all this information and serve it up to you in the form of easy to understand tables and graphs. One of the most exciting start-ups of recent years, the company was founded by Romanian entrepreneur, Vladimir Oane, and has recently been acquired by HootSuite. www.ubervu.com

Squiz  

Squiz offers a content management system (CMS) which flexes the information shown on your website according to the behaviour of the user. So rather than the user having to work hard to look for the information that they want, once a pattern of behaviour has been established, the software brings up content that is relevant to the user. It also remembers the user’s profile for the next time that they visit and presents that information to them on the homepage. And if they’ve given you their e-mail address, it can automatically fire off a series of e-mails containing relevant information after they’ve left. Again, all this information is selected from content you have already uploaded without you having to do anything. www.squiz.net/uk

Infinity

Infinity is aimed at businesses where enquirers and prospects tend to go onto the website and then pick up the phone. Typically, plumbing, electrical, architects, travel, cleaning and other services might fall into this category. Infinity allows these businesses to measure the marketing cost per lead much more accurately than was previously possible. It does this by offering an enquirer a unique telephone number via the website that is specific to them. The software links this phone number back to the keywords the enquirer used in Google to find the business in the first place. So the business can then tell which keywords are driving phone calls and which aren’t working. www.infinity-tracking.com

Lead Forensics

Lead Forensics is aimed at the B2B market. 98% of the visitors to most websites don’t leave their details. Lead forensics has developed software which will enable you to find out who’s been looking at your website and follow up with them. For privacy reasons it doesn’t actually give you the individual’s name, but it will give you a business name, phone number, physical address, industry, turnover and number of employees. You can then contact this company in the knowledge that they are currently in the market for your product or service and the keywords they’ve been searching against will enable you to find out what the problem is that you might be able to help with.  www.leadforensics.com

There were also a number of start-ups touting their wares at the Show. Here are a couple of the more interesting ones:-

Moment.Us

Moment.Us is clever piece of mobile software which allows brands to engage with customers via music. We all know what a powerful influence music can be on our mood and behaviour. Moment.Us allows brands understand the musical identity of their customers and use this information to drive loyalty and increase engagement by playing that music back to them at critical moments. (It all sounds scarily like manipulation to me, but let’s watch this space and see if it comes to be accepted in the marketplace.) www.wearemoment.us

Livinglens

Livinglens has created a new piece of software which enables brands to manage their video archives more efficiently. The average brand has between 700 to 2,000 hours of video footage sitting around in its archives but, short of playing it back,  no way of finding out what’s on it. Living lens has developed a simple system which enables you to interrogate the archive by searching for keywords spoken on the video. This saves between 80 to 90% of the time it takes to search by conventional means.  www.living-lens.tv

So what are the themes here? Well, there’s cloud.IQ and one or two similar companies aimed improving returns from ecommerce…..a number of companies offering niche products to improve the performance of your website and integrate it better into the rest of your business……and there’s a lot of activity around social media listening ie software to help you analyse all that noise out there and pick out what’s relevant.

And it will be interesting to see if either Moment.Us or Livinglens make the grade …