May: Insight from the top read articles on ClickZ

At the end of each month, we analyze the top read articles on ClickZ to find out what’s trending, and to give you an insight into what our readers – your customers – are thinking.

Social Media Management

Social media management was a strong trend this month, with both of our top two articles covering the topic from different angles.

The first, ‘Five universal principles of social media engagement for businesses’ provided practical strategic advice to marketers and was structured around the following:

1. Have a solid strategy in place

2. Be persistent and patient

3. Roll out the red carpet for your audience

4. Be available, responsive and engaging

5. Show the human side of your brand

The second – ‘10 indispensable online tools for managing your social presence’ focused on the technology social media managers need to execute that strategy stressing the demand that marketers have for quick online tools to help them manage and analyze their social impact and footprint.

Artificial Intelligence

Recent developments in the technology behind artificial intelligence, along with the new products revealed at Google’s developer conference, I/O, have meant the topic performed strongly this month.

Marketers are interested to know how these developments affect them, and how they can prepare. ‘The shock of the new: Artificial Intelligence and the future of digital marketing’ was in the top 5 for page views and #2 for dwell time – a key indicator of reader engagement.

A key takeaways was that Google stated that it will not go “100% machine learning” with its search algorithms, primarily because it becomes impossible to debug a machine if you don’t understand its processes. Human activity will remain essential to Google, as it will to most other companies.

Marketing is about communicating with people. Therefore, the input of each campaign will likely remain human, and the output will, of necessity, involve human interaction. It is in the processes of marketing that we will see a fundamental shift.

Email Marketing

Email marketing continues to be a hugely popular topic, with our readers particularly interested in the mobile-first angle provided by our Deputy Editor Rebecca Sentence – ‘the revival of email newsletters and the rise of mobile-first email’.

The difficult and often technical nature of mobile optimization makes it another marketing trend that our readers are particularly interested in.

Topics of particular interest include:

• The use of automation to tailor newsletters to a specific audience

• Optimizing newsletters for on-the-go

• The use of responsive mobile-aware templates

• The revival of email newsletters

• Mobile-first emaiil

#socialmedia #ArtificialIntelligence #Email