Convincing your boss to invest in content marketing

2013 is the year for 'content marketing', but as marketers we still need to work hard to convince the budget holders or our bosses to invest time and resources in this area?.

Whether it's sharing content, curating it or interpreting it?  FatJoe have highlighted some statistics (from secondary research), to support your business case in their Infographic.  

Could these stats convince your boss or budget holder?

61% of consumers more likely to buy after reading custom content90% of consumers find content useful67% of companies with a blog generate more leads than those without.

Check out our guide and template to making the business case for investment in digital marketing for a more quantitative approach and how to win the emotional arguments too.

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This research report from Quantcast is particularly interesting, especially given their specialist expertise in the display advertising category.

The premiss of their report is essentially

People who are on a website have different needs to those searching for one, yet digital marketers look to optimise for clicks in similar ways. Search advertising is an understood CPC (cost per click) model, where buyers have an intent and are served advertising that they’re interested in. In short, if you’re happy with the CPC, it works. People on a website tend to want the information on the website, not look to click a banner and leave it, there is a reason or intention to click away at the earliest opportunity - regardless of whether it’s a display ad or link. Click conversion is better aligned to where there’s purchase intent and a desire to click. This is inevitably lower down the sales funnel. Click measurement is not a…

We've all seen those lists of the world's 'Top 10 converting websites' and  thought 'what could I do to get my site to those stratospheric levels?'.

This post explains why you probably wouldn't want your site to be on one of those lists, and how you can change 'conversion rate' from a not-very-useful-at-all metric into a tool to help improve your site.

The post covers 3 simple issues every business needs to review:

What is conversion rate?Why isn't it the answer to all of the world's problems?What can you do to make conversion rate more meaningful?

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How to showcase your business through expertise and experience

We all know content marketing is important. It trends daily worldwide. There are now conferences, magazines and institutions dedicated to it. The Content Marketing Institute in the US. for one, does a nifty job of covering it all. Famously, Marketing Profs declared recently that 91% of b2b marketers profess to using content marketing for the following three reasons: to engage customers and prospects (82%); drive sales (55%); and educate the market (44%).

Tapping into the need for information

Technology, as we see daily on this site, has facilitated a significant shift in how people in business interact with the companies they buy from. We know that business professionals now use the Internet increasingly as a…

Missing a moving target – The disparity between mobile device opens and clicks, and what you can do about it

Despite the increase in number of mobile devices, only half of marketers are designing email with mobile in mind, which shows that there is a massive disconnect between a bespoke mobile design and experience that people should be receiving versus the one which they are actually getting.

In our latest research we completed detailed analysis of over 35,000 emails sent by over 119 companies in 23 sectors. This post contains an overview of the insight we gained and how you can succeed in getting your campaigns opened on the desktop, smartphone and tablet. A key finding was that across different sectors smartphone and tablet are now significant, accounting for between a fifth and a third of all opens depending on sector:

Key findings from…

5 tips showing how campaign planning prevents fires

Working in various marketing roles, I have noticed that even though we have advanced with technology to make our jobs easier, we have never been more short of time, with more jobs on our plate, and customers (internal and external) are demanding real-time updates and output work at an ever-increasing pace. When I catch up with my marketing network and ask how it’s going 'I'm fire fighting' is the common response. This article addresses the challenges of getting campaigns off the ground and gives some ideas on avoiding mistakes that I have seen in my roles and network roles over the last 9 years. We all know that integrated campaigns are the key to success, and we have all read and understood the templates that put them together. However, I found that when it was…

Examples to encourage more customers to buy via Facebook

Big or small, any merchant can sell on Facebook today by following a few simple steps. Here are a few examples of smaller businesses using Facebook promotions effectively before we get into the techniques I have seen which are effective. Nava Zahavi, a small-medium jewelry designer who started with only 100 fans on Facebook made 400% Return on Investment (ROI) selling on Facebook.Here is an example of how Nava Zahavi offers Fans vouchers in return for 'Likes'.

Source: Nava Zahavi Facebook Store

OnePiece, a Scandinavian fashion brand, had to take off its Facebook promotion after 24 hours as it sold over 1,000 pieces of the same item, and it just didn’t have…

New "Story bumping" and "Last Actor" ranking changes

Importance: [rating=3] Recommended link: Facebook news feed announcement It seems that for some businesses, gaining visibility in Facebook’s news feed is now almost as important or more important than gaining visibility in Google’s search results for your target pages. Like Google, it’s a challenge, in their briefing this week Facebook revealed how much of a challlenge it is… “Every time someone visits News Feed there are on average 1,500 potential stories from friends, people they follow and Pages for them to see, and most people don’t have enough time to see them all… we prioritize an average of 300 stories out of these 1,500 stories to show each day.”. If you’re concerned with encouraging more sharing of your content through Facebook you will know how it’s controlled by the EdgeRank based on the affinity, weight and decay of posts. Marie Page has given some great guidance on…

A checklist and examples of all the key AdWords changes you should review

2013 has seen some of the biggest shake-ups in Google AdWords to date. For example Enhanced Campaigns became mandatory on the 22nd of July, so this post looks at some of the recent changes to AdWords and how you can use them to your advantage.

Device Targeting and Bid Adjustments

The most controversial change from Enhanced Campaigns has delivered is the shake up with device targeting. In previous times, best practice has always been to target mobiles and tablets in separate campaigns (away from desktop campaigns) because they perform differently. This also allowed the advertiser control over the split in spend between tablet, mobile and desktop. The AdWords interface has now changed so dramatically that you can no longer target tablets separately because Google believe they perform in the same way as desktop devices (in my experience they don’t, but who…

Daniel Buchuk on the launch of SimilarWeb

As part of our occasional feature giving readers the low down on new tools for digital marketers to collect insight, in this post we ask Daniel Buchuk from SimilarWeb to introduce their service. SimilarWeb enables companies to benchmark performance against competitors. If you're interested in this process and other tools available, check out our post detailing competitor benchmarking services. 

During the interview, Daniel talks about the story behind SimilarWeb, why their tools are different to those in the marketplace such as Alexa or Compete and the availability of  free features.

1. What inspired you to create SimilarWeb, when there are already other competitor benchmarking tools?

There's an increasing demand for online competitive intelligence and existing high-end tools in the market are often too complex and unaffordable for the mid market. There are simply no solutions…