Digital budgets increase in 2016

Good news for digital marketers where they can make the business case for more investment in digital media and technology! Over half of digital marketing departments will see growing budgets this year. Some 55% of organisations will be either increasing both their digital budget along with the overall spend or shifting existing budget to digital, leaving digital with more to play with. Only 11% are decreasing digital budgets, and less than a third are just keeping it the same. Provided you can prove ROI and justify digital spending, your budget should be fairly safe. The all important analytics will prove crucial here. Make sure to have data to hand to prove things like how much value your customer acquisition strategy is generating when you compare acquisition costs to customer lifetime value. If you're lucky you'll be in the half of digital marketers who see their budget increased…

Getting social media right for B2B marketing is tricky, but not impossible.

In today’s Internet-driven marketplace, having an online presence is non-negotiable and has become an important part of B2B marketing for almost every business. When it comes to making purchasing decisions, your potential customers use social media sites and search engines to answer questions about the products/services you sell and to get an overall sense as to who you are, what you do and what others think about you. Social media can help B2B companies by putting them in charge of their virtual identities. Far from being simply about status updates, social media is used most effectively as a brand shaper; a way to establish your company’s reputation and expertise, and to build a following based upon exceptional customer service.

Use social media to educate

For larger B2B businesses in…

Here is a breakdown of the most expensive keywords across some of the major industries.

Last year Google earned a staggering $67.39bn (97% of their revenue ) through their online pay-per-click advertising and with this set to increase this year, let's have a look at the keywords helping to reach this outrageous total. Perhaps understandably, the most expensive keywords come from the legal sector. With some of the huge fees involved in certain cases, firms clearly see value in bidding serious money in the hope of landing their next prospective clients. The highest cost per click on the list is "Best Mesothelioma Lawyer", which at $935.71 a click generates leads from Asbestos related incidents. This does seem an insane amount of money to fork out for a click, not even a guaranteed conversion, but considering the average mesothelioma settlement is usually in excess of…

How marketers can use a range of skills to boost their careers

As digital marketing (and marketing in general) continues to evolve, so does the thinking associated with what makes a modern marketer. There have been numerous posts about T-shaped marketing, the Pi-shaped marketer, growth hacking and even ninja rockstars! (see more silly digital marketing job titles) Whilst I’m conscious that there are already plenty of marketing buzzwords around, I nevertheless thought it worth exploring another concept: the full-stack marketer. However, I’d like to use this post to look at the full-stack marketer not as another piece of marketing jargon but more as a mind-set or working philosophy. I don’t believe the full-stack marketer is a substitute for growth hacking, T-shaped or Pi-shaped marketing. Instead, all this thinking should be considered with the same objective in mind: to give marketers a framework and opportunity to grow and develop. …

How to rank well on competitive keywords

SEO is one of the most cost effective ways to generate business. By ranking atop search engines for their target keywords, businesses can generate traffic and increase the chances of visitors buying their products and services,and build awareness of their brands. The best thing about this tactic is how affordable it is – if done correctly, SEO can produce big rewards for relatively a small investment. However, with the growth of digital marketing throughout the years, SEO has become a common tactic that most businesses employ. Competitors in the legal, real estate, pharmaceutical, and accountancy industry, acknowledged as some of the most cutthroat industries, have smartened up and learned how to leverage SEO to attract customers and hike up sales. It has reached a point that ranking on the very first page of Google can take years, if at all. Even if business owners have applied all…

5 reasons to develop a Skunkworks

As organisations embark on the journey to digital transformation, they may find their organisational structures limit innovation if they are more akin to a company geared to compete and survive in the industrial revolution era.

The problem of digital silos

A common problem in many larger organisations is that given the importance of digital marketing, digital skills are centralised in one or more locations, so creating digital silos. So pockets of digital knowledge become dispersed internally rather than creating a joined up structure with different marketing teams working on marketing activities which integrate digital marketing.

In the long-term, integrating your digital marketing team is an essential requirement for organisations wanting ro re-invent their proposition to a changing digital world, being led by disruptive digital technology and new ways to reach new audiences and new channels.

But at the same time, businesses need to stay agile and review the latest…

There's no magic formula for going viral, but there are ways to boost your chances.

You’ve heard the success stories: A brand creates content that takes off unexpectedly and elevates its reach and influence dramatically. So how do you make it happen for yourself? There’s not a magic formula, but there are steps marketers can take to increase the chances of virality. My team at Alexa analyzed a series of websites that had posts take off like wildfire. We chose the sites we did because the publish date for the viral posts directly corresponded to a rise in the hosting site’s traffic numbers. We used Alexa's competitive intelligence tool to analyze each website’s traffic, global rank, and reach.

Analysis of Mic.com

Amy Poehler – described by one journalist as a “media darling and all-around-awesome lady” – is something of a feminist icon. It’s no surprise that millennials are enamored with the…

Growth Hacker Marketing Report by Ryan Holiday - Book Review covering 4 key areas of focus for Growth Hacking

A little while back Dave Chaffey asked in a Smart Insights post, "What can businesses learn from growth hacking". This post introduced the Growth Hacking approach and how it originated in startup online businesses and explained how more traditional businesses are creating growth hacking roles to support conversion optimisation. In this post, I'm adding more depth through a review of a Growth Hacking book I've been taking a look  at recently. In Growth Hacker Marketing, Ryan Holiday explains more on this new approach which is being applied from the in the marketing departments of the smallest businesses to the largest blue-chip organisations. It prompts questions about how traditional marketing departments operate. According to Google Trends, the rise in searches associated with this new skillset is on the rise, could…

Retailers are starting to master mobile marketing

A fully optimised experience across devices is the holy grail for ecommerce and retail marketers. Getting mobile right has often been the sticking point. Now marketers are starting to get their head around what good mobile marketing looks like and are beginning to implement it. Digital Doughnut surveyed over 100 retail executives and heads of ecommerce, asking them about their mobile strategy and the resources they had in place for managing it. At a time of massive disruption by mobile in both the in-store and online retail sectors, the findings make for interesting reading.

Mobile capabilities

Now it's 2016 retailers are finally starting to really get a handle on mobile. A few years ago departments were floundering around without a strategy, but now about a third or more consider themselves advanced, and the majority of the rest consider themselves to be 'getting there'. Only 10-20% consider themselves to be behind the…