To succeed your start-up must be lean. These are key principles to apply to marketing

Around the world, thousands of new businesses with exciting new ideas for original products start up every day. To say most of them fail is an understatement. The reality is the vast majority fail. Yet some go on to transform the way we live, eat, shop, work and pay for things. Start-ups are remaking the modern business landscape by disrupting established players. It's an exciting time to work for a start-up, or even better to be a founder. However, that doesn't change the incredibly slim odds of success.

Why do Start-ups fail?

Start-ups fail for all sorts of different reasons. But they all suffer from a set of problems which more often than not are the primary reason for their failure. Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, David Collis, outlines these problems as suffering from a…

This post examines common reasons for content marketing failure and introduces a 7 step content marketing strategy framework to mitigate the problem

Many businesses are now actively using content marketing, but it seems that there is potential for these initiatives to fail. According to the Smart Insights - HubSpot’s  Managing Content Marketing Europe 2016 research as many as 72% of marketers rated their content marketing as "limited," “basic" or "inconsistent.” 

In another survey from the CMI examining content marketing usage and effectiveness, a mere 32% of those polled describe their organisation’s content marketing as “sophisticated or mature”, with just 34% saying they are effective. 

In the same report, conducted by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, the effectiveness of B2B…

Content Marketing is evolving into an era of hyper-personalisation

One of the more advanced pieces of advice we tend to give to people looking to improve their content marketing is to make better use of personalisation. It's easy to see why. If you can target people will content that is far more likely to appeal to them based on what they're interested it, then they're far more likely to engage with that content, spend longer on the site and once you've hooked them in you can set about trying to convert. It's a simple narrative based on simple logic. But does it hold up to rigorous analysis? When we're A/B testing various different types of messaging on Smart Insights, it's not always the one that you'd logically think should work best that ends up performing optimally. The best way to find out the answer is to test, test and then test again. To…

How to make sure your backend is SEO friendly

Most SEO guidelines focus on off-page SEO. Little attention is given to optimizing your website backend for SEO. Without an optimized website, off-page SEO campaigns are all in vain. As with any project, the success of an SEO campaign starts with mastering and flawlessly executing the fundamentals. Digital marketing involves having well-optimized online real estate and then letting the world know about it. The success of your online business, therefore, rests on building a solid website backend that is optimized for performance and usability. What does an SEO-friendly backend look like? Here are some issues to pay attention to:

Clean Code

Page loading speed has become a significant Google ranking factor. Google users are an impatient lot and will quickly exit a site that takes much time to load. In fact, 25% of your visitors will have left your site if your site takes more than four seconds…

Optimise your landing page designs to boost your conversion rate

Landing pages are a vital conversion trigger within the Customer Journey. Typically, they are used within internet marketing campaigns that use Calls To Action, and are a core component of online advertising too. Indeed, Hubspot’s Marketing Benchmarks From 7,000 Businesses report identified that companies experience an increase of 55% in leads when increasing their number of landing pages from 10 to 15. So it’s about volume, then? Well, not entirely. There is no point in having lots of landing pages if they do not convert. Generating and capturing leads is critical to the sales process. Therefore, converting the traffic on your landing pages effectively and efficiently has to be the goal. These aspects are fundamental to business growth. Quite simply, if you are going to invest time, resource and money into driving traffic to your landing pages, then you must ensure that…