Guidelines and research on how businesses can create a digital strategy

So, you know the importance of digital marketing is increasing all the time and you’re actively using it, trying to integrate it with your other marketing activities. Where next? How high can you reach? How about aiming high? Your competitors may well be. Can you reach digital nirvana?! In 2015 we have updated our 7 Steps to Digital Marketing infographic to share the latest research from businesses who contributed to our Digital Marketing 2015 research report. We hope you find the infographic useful and it helps you a little on your journey to improvement or even enlightenment, one step at a time! To help you take the first steps, the first part of the infographic links to these articles explaining key techniques to kickstart your digital marketing SWOT analysis for the digital…

and if not, why not?

There is only ever one pot of money for investments in marketing, so it can seem it is spread more thinly each year as you need to engage customers across more digital touchpoints. Worse still, the size of the pot may shrink as budgets are cut. So, it's a challenging decision as to where to invest wisely. In our Managing Digital Marketing 2015 we did ask about investments in different types of media and developing digital experiences, but we also thought we would turn the question on its head by asking where the frustrations were with investment in time or budget. We asked respondents where they felt there was insufficient investment which highlighted some common frustrations. You can see that respondents naturally felt there were a number of areas of underinvestment. That's…

What does the 'Relevance Score' actually mean?

Importance: [rating=4] (for Facebook advertisers) Recommended link:  Facebook for Business Advertising - new 'Relevance Score'  Facebook have introduced a new metric to help Advertisers refine and optimise their ads. They advise that it's not to be used as a single metric to review the effectiveness of your campaign, but is clearly a way to help them deliver more relevant ads which increase earnings in a similar way to Google's Quality Score. It's being positioned by Facebook for use in ad optimisation and testing to: 'Reach your audiences at lower cost, and to test and learn about your ad creative and ad targeting. But understand that having a good relevance score is not an end unto itself.'

So what does this new Facebook Metric look like?

The relevance score will be calculated when a Facebook Ad has been served more than…

5 areas to invest in, to improve your online audience engagement

Never in the history of marketing have methods changed so rapidly; the fluid nature of the Internet requires constant innovation and flexibility. While 2015 will bring plenty of changes in the coming months, there are a number of things you can do now to maximize your success using some available tools.

Tip 1: Invest in 'Contextual Marketing'

OutMarket CEO, You Mon Tsang, believes 'contextual marketing' is the key to Internet marketing success this year. In other words, you should be pursuing data-driven marketing that leverages the information you’re able to gather from your customers. He claims this will allow you to 'deliver personalized and relevant content at the right place, at the right time.' The question is, how do you accurately gather that information? Depending on the tools you have available, it might be as simple as tracking social…

A tool for evaluating the customer decision journey

Today the consumer is like a bird, flying from branch to branch, collecting evidence each time they [sic] land[s]. Or maybe like 'a hawk surveying the scene and then swooping when the time (and price) is right.' (Dave Chaffey’s comment at the bottom of Danyl Bosomworth’s post) There is no doubt that the consumer decision journey is still evolving as people adapt to ever changing technologies, and the corresponding online information sources for decision-making that are available... 'The average number of information sources used by shoppers doubled from 2010 to 2011', Professor David Bell. This new approach to a decision journey attempts to highlight the complex and non-linear paths that people can take when discovering and purchasing products or services. It's not a linear process any longer, so important to note when interpreting the journey, that a person can start at any…

Get ideas for how you use LinkedIn by checking against these practical tips.

If you are new to LinkedIn or looking for some quick reminders to powerful it can be, Hubspot's infographic provides 33 nuggets to help you become more effective when using LinkedIn More resources on LinkedIn A-Z of LinkedIn Marketing 17 LinkedIn Profile Tips Smarter LinkedIn Marketing Guide   [si_guide_block id="25525" title="Smarter LinkedIn Marketing Guide" description="Create a more strategic approach to using LinkedIn using our guide packed with examples and guidance"/]…

Tools for benchmarking and comparing average media mix or percentage of different traffic sources between websites

Naturally all digital marketers want more (quality) traffic. This begs the question where do we find this traffic? What is our optimal mix of online media? One approach to answering this question is to turn to the traffic sources report in Google Analytics. Where Google Analytics benchmarking once again presents your mix of referrers relative to others in your category. Your relative performance is shown under the Audience menu accessed via the Benchmarking option like so:

If you're not familiar with these, the four main traffic sources reported at this level in Google Analytics are:

Search traffic – This is separated into natural or organic and paid search (Adwords) Referral traffic – This is traffic from other sites which have direct links to your site Direct traffic – Direct traffic results…

Optimising and connecting customer touch points

Marketing expert Dr. Jeffrey Lant, says that in order to penetrate a consumer’s consciousness with your brand, and to make significant penetration in a given market, you have to make contact with the prospect a minimum of seven times. These seven “touch points” don’t have to be dedicated sales outreach, but refer to the different ways consumers interact with your brand: browsing your mobile site, for example is a touch point, as is receiving a flyer or trawling through your social channels. Although this “Rule of Seven” is not absolute, it gives marketers an idea of the kind of effort and variety it takes to make an impression on a potential customer. With the dawn of the digital age, the numerous channels and devices available for interaction mean that optimising each consumer touch point is more important than ever. It has…

A summary of new research giving the CMO viewpoint 

In our Managing Digital Marketing 2015 report we summarised our recent research into the changes to processes, structure and teams needed for managing digital marketing. A broader viewpoint is available in this new research, The Next Era of Marketing (free download, registration needed) from The Economist sponsored by Marketo. This new report included responses from senior marketers in larger organisations worldwide. 478 CMOs and senior marketing executives worldwide were survey. More than 50% of respondents hold the CMO title or top marketing position. Respondents wee located in North America (33%), Europe (30%), Asia-Pacific (29%) and Rest of World—which encompasses Africa and Latin America (9%). More than 50% of survey respondents (52%) hail from companies with more than US$500m in revenue; 20% have revenue of over US $5bn. Here's my brief summary to the implications of the report.

Changes to the structure of the marketing organisation

A…

5 core elements for your content marketing strategy and best practices for content outsourcing

According to Content Marketing Institute, more than 80% of B2B marketers and more than 70% of B2C marketers used content marketing for their online businesses last year. The results of this investigation have been published in B2B Content Marketing: 2015 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends ? North America and proved the fact content marketing tactics become a significant part of successful marketing strategy. More than 50% of B2B marketers plan to increase content marketing spending in 2015; they are ready to accept the challenge and start awesome content creation, distribution, optimization, analyzing and managing. It often happens that content creation and development is not a core skill for a marketer, and it can be quite difficult to cope with. The…