Best of 2016

As we near the end of the year we've taken a dive through our Google Analytics account and picked out our most popular marketing blogs from this year. Crack open the mulled wine, put your feet up and enjoy!

1. Usable Trends for Your 2016 Marketing Strategy Our annual trends updates are always popular, and predictions for this year included mobile, personalisation, content marketing, video, emerging platforms, automation, and customer centricity. Pretty spot on, it seems! Keep an eye on our blog over the coming days for our run-down on 2017 trends to maximise.
2. How Websites Audits Could Improve Your Search Ranking One of our most popular services remains the website SEO audit and healthcheck, due to the visibility it can uncover and opportunity it opens up to fix your rankings in Google.
3. How Targeted is Targeting? Ideal for any Facebook marketers and advertisers - this piece looked at Facebook interests and advert preferences, and how to ensure your own targeting is as accurate as possible.
4. 8 Benefits of Planning Our most recent full-length post was all about the importance of planning for 2017 and 8 key benefits that business owners might be missing, all in one handy infographic.
5. 8 Top Valentine's Day Campaigns We shared some of the top campaigns from Ted Baker, Virgin Trains, Tesco, Marmite, Not on the High Street and more.
6. Get Set for Success We made September the month for success planning with our bundle giveaway including kick-off strategy session, website audit and stationery bundle, for one lucky winner.
7. Made.com IoT Showroom in Birmingham Made,com launched a pop-up showroom this autumn in Birmingham with a clever 'internet of things' twist. We were there for the inside scoop!
8. Advent - Understand Your Web Analytics Our tips on how to interpret your website analytics and the main KPIs to look out for was one of the most popular posts from our 2016 marketing advent calendar.
9. Hi, I'm Luke We were pleased to welcome BCU graduate Luke as our first Digital Marketing intern. Luke is now a contributing author and guest blogger for Realise.
10. Our Collaboration with HDK Marketing This summer we launched our working collaboration with B2B specialist agency HDK Marketing, opening up new areas of expertise to our clients.
11. The Importance of Business Vision This post is ideal for any business owner looking to learn how to create a vision statement and understand why creating a business vision is so important.
12. Brighton SEO - 5 Key Takeaways We brought you a run-down of our key takeaways from Brighton SEO conference in April 2016, including how to avoid clickbait headlines, brand storytelling and tracking.

Finally, our free marketing tips and tricks advent calendar received some great feedback this year.

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Thanks to all clients, colleagues and contacts we've worked with in 2016, and here's to continued success in 2017!

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