Basic Tips and Tricks Every Business and Marketer Can Use to Prove The Source of Campaign ROI

Whether or not your business is advertising, you’re always marketing. Every phone call, mailer, coupon, Facebook post, email… everything is a representation of your brand. Knowing what marketing piece works and especially what doesn’t, reveals what steps to take in the future. Numbers don’t lie. The analytical success and failures of your pieces cannot be ignored. In order to hone your marketing efforts, tracking, both print and digital, is no longer an option, it’s a mandatory, tedious process, but like everything, there are tricks to marketing campaign tracking.

Track Everything

Your marketing pieces aren’t just advertising, they’re raw data! Phone Calls, emails, web banners, social media posts, mail pieces, billboards, TV commercials, radio spots -- every campaign can, and should, be monitored to the…

Understanding Google’s latest research on micro-moments and the implications for your marketing

It’s no secret that mobile has dramatically impacted how we do business and how consumers interact with brands online - the latest mobile adoption data indicates that mobile is still on course to overtake fixed internet access and that mobile ad spending accounts for 49% of digital ad spending. As a result of this mobile shift, Google has conducted some interesting ethnographic research over the last year to explore how consumer behaviour is changing and gain an understanding into the needs of real people. Some of the stand out insights from the research includes: 82% of smartphone users use their phones to influence a purchase decision in a store 62% of smartphone users are more likely to take action right away to solve an unexpected problem or task because they have a smartphone 90% of smartphone users have used their phone to…

Provide a narrative and continue the story to delight your audience and have an effective video campaign

You’ve got your cup of coffee in one hand and your prop list in the other. You still need to send out a dozen tweets and find a new actor because your top choice canceled at the last moment. Your director made some scripting tweaks that require rewrites. The list goes on. Planning and marketing your video can feel like the opposite of Hollywood glamour. But when you boil it down, digital marketing and the movies actually have a lot in common. Whether it’s a comedy that makes your cheeks sore from laughing or a tearjerker that leaves you blubbering in your car on the way home, great movies change viewers’ lives by taking them on an emotional journey. Your video can do the exact same thing by forming a relationship with attendees, providing a narrative…

Agility is the key to staying at the cutting edge of a changing industry

We live in a world full of ever-evolving technology. Marketers don’t have the luxury of relying on a single technique for very long. Things change quickly, from new products to innovative technology to customer expectations. The days of keeping the same marketing techniques for years are over. It’s a new era for businesses across all industries, and you must adapt quickly to survive the shifting ecosystem. That’s where agile marketing comes into play.

What is Agile Digital Marketing?

The definition of agile digital marketing is notoriously hard to pin down, but Jim Ewel of AgileMarketing.net this definition: Agile Marketing is an approach to marketing that takes its inspiration from Agile Development and that values Responding to change over following a plan Rapid iterations over Big-Bang campaigns Testing and data over opinions and conventions Numerous small experiments over a few large bets Individuals and interactions over target markets Collaboration…

Data-driven marketing: How to tackle the tricky topic of trust

Thanks to a convergence of tools and technologies, marketers today have unprecedented access to consumer data. This has opened up a world of new opportunities for marketers, who are now better able to identify the consumers who are interested in their products and also establish what their preferences are in terms of how they are engaged. Marketers have never been more capable of delivering the right message at the right time. However, while basic data such as the browsing history and past purchases are easy to obtain, rich data such as a person’s interests cannot be collected without cooperation from the consumer. And while customers were historically fairly liberal about the sharing of their personal data, there has been a noticeable changing of attitudes in recent years. This affects the data-customer-relationship. 'The important thing to remember…

While you may have thorough buyer personas sketched out for your customers, there may be one piece of the puzzle that you’re missing: behavioural psychology.

Behavioural psychology often dictates how people make choices, whether it’s what to order at a restaurant or whether to subscribe to a company’s email newsletter. Within your digital channels, you can incorporate certain principles of behavioural psychology into your strategy in order to keep your marketing customer-centered, engaging, and conversion-driven. This will help turn your website visitors into conversions.

Anchoring

This is a principle of behavioural psychology that guides people towards context clues when making decisions. Oftentimes, your audience is unsure about how much time or money they should spend on a certain product or service, and when that’s the case, they turn to context clues to help them decide and usually settle on a middle ground. Incorporate anchoring into your digital marketing strategy by adding an “extreme”…

Customer reviews and social content are powerful decision-making tools so why make consumers search for them elsewhere?

The rise in holiday and hotel research conducted online, and the popularity of social media, presents an opportunity for the hotel industry. Word-of-mouth communication has a positive influence on brand awareness, brand attitude change, purchase intentions, product evaluations and consumer expectations. TripAdvisor’s 2015 TripBarometer report found that 90% of consumers rely on ratings of accommodation on a review site. This was the second most important factor impacting booking decisions behind price. Also 85% of consumers also rely on photos and videos online. To take advantage of this trend, hotels should use electronic word-of-mouth and user-generated content to supplement their primary marketing communication messages. Many of the large travel and tourism brands have adopted user generated content. Taking a quick look at the big three UK online travel agents, Booking.com, Expedia and Hotel.com, all of them…

Lolcats to London Fashion Week: social engagement with AwesomeWall

I (Marie) worked with the team from We Make Awesome Sh a few weeks ago for an outdoor music event. Whilst I was working on social media, the Awesome Sh team were busy building the “AwesomeWall”. So much more than a bunch of hashtagged word-based tweets, the wall surfaced images from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram were uploaded and hashtagged throughout the event. To my mind this marks another step change in tools for live user engagement for brands. I asked the team to do us a little guest blog about the story behind the technology:

It all started with a Lolcats hack

AwesomeWall was born from the internet’s love of cats. It started as a quick hack from the We Make Awesome Sh (WMAS) team back in 2011. Seizing on tech opportunities as they offer themselves up, right after the release of the Instagram API, they built …

Compare cost-effectiveness with volume or leads and sales generated

In this post, I'm taking another look at some data points from our 2015 research, in association with the TFM&A where we asked marketers which were the most effective online media. The research showed the ongoing importance of the core digital marketing channels and Email Marketing rated highly or very effective by 51% of respondents, followed by SEO (44%) and Adwords (34%). Organic use of social media wasn’t far behind with 32%, but with only 21% believing paid social media was effective. In terms of cost or return for buck, SEO was seen as the most effective by 50% of our respondents. Our respondents rated SEO as the most highest-rated channel for generating leads…

Informed consent and transparency will be hallmarks of GDPR

This blog is part 2 in our series on the marketing implications of the new GDPR. See part one here. Informed or explicit consent and transparency are key issues for the final version of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that’s set to be agreed before the close of 2015. In a recent report commissioned by regulator Ofcom and written by German-based consultancy WIK-Consult, the authors note that it’s important to recognise that within the EU informed consent is needed both for placing cookies or similar tracking devices on a user’s device. The current laws and regulations in this area are the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) (Amendment) Regulations 2011 as well as the Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC. The forthcoming GDPR also provides for a higher level of…