Most notable online trends reported in this month’s market highlights are as follows:

• The top 5 websites (Google, Bing, Facebook, Yahoo! and BBC) remain unchanged; their reach is 95.55% of the UK online market!
• Google Search is still the stickiest search brand with an average reach of 81.5% followed by Google Image Search (28%); Yahoo! Search and Bing share approx 18% of reach
• Ebay remains number 1 for ecommerce reach; it reaches 45.9% (18.5m) of the active UK audience
• The highest % increase in reach comes from the Co-Operative (+58%) in the top ecommerce sites of the month
• The Co-Operative and Nectar replace Gumtree and John Lewis in the top ecommerce sites this month

View the full Online Market Highlights – March 2010

Most notable online trends reported are as follows:

• The top 15 sites remain virtually unchanged
• 35-49 audience shows the largest increase month on month
• The top 5 sites reach 95% of the total online universe with Bing/MSN/Windows Live in second place after Facebook
• Member communities represent the most time spent online by consumers
• Google Search is the ‘stickiest’ online brand
• World of Warcraft is the number one application, in terms of average time spent on applications online
• Ebay remains number one in the e-commerce category

View the full Online Market Highlights – February 2010

As of June 2010, News International will be charging £1 to access The Times and Sunday Times Online for a day’s subscription; or £2 for a week’s subscription.

News International chief executive, Rebekah Brooks, also hinted that its other titles, the Sun and the News of the World, would follow with a paywall model.

This is a landmark moment as both The Times and The Sunday Times are set to become the first UK national newspapers to charge for access to all of their online content. The Financial Times is currently charging for a large bulk of its online content.

As ad revenues fall, this is seen by many as a necessary business move, but of course it is commonly regarded as a high risk strategy as many competitor online newspapers will not be following suit.

Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International, said:

“We expect to attract a growing base of loyal customers that are committed and engaged with our titles.  We are building on the excellence of our newspapers and offering digital access to our journalism at a price that everyone can afford.”

The Time Online currently attains 1.22 million readers per day. If we were to assume that only 5% of these readers convert to the paywall model, it would yield £1.83m if they each buy a £1 daily subscription. At a 10% conversion rate, it would net £3.66m per month for both papers. Whereas if the weekly subscription was selected,  revenues would be reduced.

Emarketeers are thrilled to announce the launch of a brand new partnership with The Guardian. Designed to add even more value to our current training programmes, the Guardian Media Academy is providing focused short courses which help individuals and businesses to realize their true potential.

Held at the newly built and highly impressive Guardian headquarters in Kings Cross, the day long training sessions will focus on improving key digital skills such as Search Engine Optimisation, Digital Copywriting and Social Media.

The Media Academy is endorsed and recommended by Steve Busfield, the head of Media & Technology at Guardian news and media, who is passionate about the need for businesses and professionals to keep evolving in line with the ever changing online landscape.

Visit, Guardian Media Academy to see the full course portfolio and dates.

Back in the 1996, my first “proper” job after leaving college was at Nat. West Bank working as a project assistant on a high profile project with IBM. I worked among a team of specialists who spoke a completely different language to me – full of acronyms and jargon.

I was responsible for all documentation within a PRINCE2 environment and had to write minutes from meetings; I was awestruck (and slightly panicked) by my lack of familiarity with this jargon. I realised that this was the way things were heading and that I had better get to grips with this new language if I was to survive.

Years later, this digital or online language has become commonplace, so much so, that it has infiltrated the English dictionary. To Google a phrase, or to blog about a topic is ubiquitous in every day speak, even among the less digitally minded.

So in 2009, have we reached a point where being savvy in the online world is not so much a benefit but more of a requirement?

With the UK online audience at around 35 million* which amounts to around 70% of the UK population, you simply cannot ignore the degree to which the web has infiltrated our lives as consumers or businesses. Compared with other European countries, the UK has the most active online audience; on average we spend 34.4* hours per month online (* comScore, Dec ‘08).

Let’s also remember that estimates are somewhat distorted by the fact that some of us use our mobile phones to surf the web, so the figures above are probably understated.

So what does that tell us about getting educated in digital?

As a consumer, whether we are renewing our car insurance, doing our weekly Tesco shopping or researching our summer holidays, it is usually easier and sometimes more cost effective doing it online. Being able to carry out the above tasks is almost a given nowadays. And in the workplace, if your job requires you to be online, being web savvy is completely taken for granted by employers.

At the professional marketer level, having offline marketing skills is rarely considered enough to land a marketing manager’s job. With search engine marketing as the granddad of digital marketing and the newer social media marketing revolution almost at full throttle, the majority of employers will require candidates for marketing positions to fully understand and embrace digital marketing.

In the same vein, “getting digital” in business is crucial. We have long since passed the need to have a website simply because you have to. For a number of years, businesses have been migrating from offline to online as it is more cost effective, easier to measure results and often yields a better return on investment.
Successful businesses know they need to be cleverer than simply having a website if they want to get noticed.

Investing in online marketing in order to better generate sales or brand reach has proven its worth time and time again. If online marketing skills are lacking within an organisation, it is crucial to invest in online marketing training in order to educate staff.

Having worked in web design and development for over a decade, I’ve watched small businesses launch websites with next to no marketing strategy or expenditure. These small businesses soon fell by the way side despite my constant reminders that they required a marketing strategy – be it offline or online!

The Government clearly knows that getting digital is the future. The Digital Britain Report was published in June 2009 as a plan to secure Britain’s place at the forefront of the global digital economy. Giving universal access to broadband, enhancing the digital delivery of public services and getting the right solution to digital content rights are only some of the issues highlighted in the plan.

So, clearly, the mantra being spoken, whether you’re an employer recruiting staff or a business trading online is: “Get smart, get digital”. Ignore it at your peril!

Any usability professional will tell you that designing and building websites in isolation of its target users could well be seriously limiting its effectiveness.

The effect of poor usability or information architecture (IA) can be seen in a number ways such as high bounce rates, poor conversion rates (aka persuasiveness), reduced ROI or simply poor brand presence.

Of course poor information architecture can also affect how your website is crawled and its search engine index inclusion efficiency.

The adoption of a structured approach to managing web projects – and the subsequent implementation of UCD – user centric design – is one step towards improving user experience. Anyone who has practiced Agile project management will tell you how users features rest on user input.

In light of the above, Emarketeers has launched a new training course: Usability & Information Architecture training.

It is aimed at anyone working on web projects who want to take a more structured approach to improving user-centricity from an information architecture and web design perspective: typically junior information architects, usability consultants, web designers, web producers or project managers.

The course is run by the fabulous Lynda Elliot who has years of usability and information architecture experience to bring to the day. Lynda will impart her theoretical and practical knowledge and promises to make it highly interactive and fun!

With over 45 million mobile phone users in the UK, mobile marketing is fast becoming a key component of any digital marketing plan.

Always at the forefront of digital marketing training, Emarketeers has launched a mobile marketing training course, the first one to take place on 16 June 2009 in Covent Garden, Central London.

Using good and bad case studies, the course will teach attendees where the real revenue potential lies in mobile comms, as well as techniques on integrating mobile into other media channels.

The 16 June course will be run by Jonathan Macdonald who has created global mobile comms strategies for names such as Unilever, IBM, BP, Vodafone and Nestle among others.

BOOK YOUR PLACE EARLY

In these hard times, there is a light at the end of the tunnel in the form of funding for training and personal development from the Learning and Skills Council (LSC).

What is the Learning and Skills council?
The Learning and Skills Council is a publicly funded organisation with a remit to improve the skills and competitiveness of the working population of England.

Who supplies funding for training?
In a short answer: The Leadership and Management Advisory Service, a regional service which offers assistance with personal development and training via its own skills brokers, Business link and private or public training providers.

How much funding is available?
The service provides funding for businesses where each business can benefit from up to £1,000 of grant support aimed at either directors or key members of the management team.

This funding is only available to EU based companies of 5 – 249 employees (full time and part time) highlighting the LSC’s desire to improve the efficiency of small to medium sized regional businesses.

How is this relevant to Emarketeers?
This is of course very relevant to Emarketeers as our training courses provide crucial skills required in the day-to-day running of digital marketing campaigns, digital projects or emerging online marketing strategies, some still at their nascent stage.

Employees who are highly skilled in these areas, for example Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) or Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing can often see a tangible increase in revenue as a result of SEO or PPC training, and it is for this very reason that the LSC is offering funding for training courses.

See further information on funding for training courses.

This year has been extremely busy for us and we hope to provide the same, if not better, level of service to all of our clients next year.

In keeping with our yearly tradition, and ever mindful of the environment, we have chosen to continue donating on a monthly basis to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

We wish you all season’s greetings and a happy, healthy and eco-friendly new year!

All the best

The Emarketeers Team