Recent analysis has highlighted how more often than not, longer-form content out-performs short-form.

The introduction of "Panda" changed the search landscape quite drastically. No longer was awful, poorly written content dancing around at the top of the SERPs, instead it is wallowing away in the "double digitted" results pages. The ever-present Brian Dean over at Backlinko recently conducted some analysis of over 1 million Google search results, to answer the question... Which factors correlate with first page search engine rankings? It's a great piece, so I'd recommend checking it out. But one of the most pertinent takeaways for us here at Smart Insights, were the findings around content length. It's something as a editors and content creators we wrestle with on a daily basis. Something that comes as no surprise is that there is a blatant correlation between…

Trust on social media is very low, you'll need to be honest if you want to win it back

In the fast-moving world of social media, brands are constantly competing for attention. Organic page reach has been nerfed by Facebook, whilst Twitter is full of people shouting ever more regularly in an attempt to be heard, making it easy to be crowded out. Sometimes it can be tempting to try any tactic to generate engagement, but your customers aren't stupid, and won't be fooled by marketing gimmicks. What is more, you should be presenting yourself as open and honest, and only by being transparent will you achieve this. The CIM have put together this infographic on brand transparency on social media, which shows how little trust many users have in brands. The only way to reverse this and win trust is to be honest with your customers and be consistently up front about any…

With more than 100 billion calls expected to be made to businesses each year, here's a break-down of what is driving them.

Recently, Invoca published their Call Intelligence Index 2016 where they dissected the most influential marketing channels for driving calls to businesses. It doesn't come as a shock to many that digital marketing outperforms more traditional forms of marketing, such as Newspapers, TV & Directory. Again, somewhat unsurprisingly, mobile search outperforms all other channels of marketing by quite some distance. With over 48% of all calls to businesses coming from mobile search, it again highlights the growing importance and impact it has over our world. The ability to wrap CTA's such as Google’s call-only ad types and click-to-call buttons have proven too convenient to ignore. Desktop search comes in as the second highest driver of calls to businesses, accounting for…

Essential lessons from the top B2B brands across different verticals

Trackmaven analysed the social media content from 316 leading B2B brands on the 5 largest social networks over the past 12 months, so you can benchmark your own B2B social media efforts against some of the best in the industry. If you work in B2C rather than B2B you can read our write up on the B2C social media report instead.

B2C Social Media audience size by industry

There are big differences between industries when it comes to audience size, but in large part these are probably explained by how well the industries are suited to social media . Professional services does so well because although it's B2B it is offering a product (jobs) which a massive number of people are going to be interested in. There are always going to be more people wanting to look at jobs postings than…

How to deliver successful email campaigns with little or no HTML knowledge

Email campaigns tend to be the bread and butter of what marketers do. They typically have high conversion rates compared to other marketing channels and are a quick and easy way to stay in touch with your contact lists. However, marketing staff are spending way too much time developing emails and not enough time focusing on activities that will give them a better ROI, such as future planning and developing successful data practices (according to the 2016 Email Industry Census). How long does it typically take for your staff, or you, to build an email? In Litmus’ ‘State of Email Production’ report the answers ranged from a few days to between one and two weeks, with 64% of participants being more likely to spend weeks rather than days. That’s a lot of time invested in something that will take…

More than half of app users allow push notifications

Every wondered just how many app users enable push notifications? Well, wonder no more. It's crucial in the busy mobile app marketplace to use notifications sensitively to increase engagement and retention of app users, so this benchmark stat is surely good news to many app developers and marketers. Data: MIDIA Research Source: https://www.midiaresearch.com This chart has been produced with data from 5 leading app vendors, which represent over 65,000 apps worldwide. Further insights from MIDIA Research also include: Travel and transport sectors have the highest push notification opt in rates. As opt in rates vary across verticals some sectors such as food and drink suffer low opt in rates, which could be because the app content isn't time or location specific. More apps than ever are asking users to allow push notifications, which although rates are currently stable,…

An example of separating the Wheat from the Chaff and Why BANT isn't dead

Lead qualification criteria are characteristics that help to classify a lead by the degree of its willingness and readiness to buy. As a result of this qualification, one can distinguish, in terms of making a purchase, the leads with the most and least potential: hot, warm, and cold. In lead generation there are usually two stages of qualification: marketing and sales qualification. The first one is done by a team responsible for a marketing activity. The sales qualification is done to confirm the information from a sales perspective. Ideally, a number of marketing and sales qualified leads must coincide. If a sales department rejects lots of leads, you most likely need to correct your marketing qualification criteria or to add a new criterion. Of course, sometimes it happens that the criteria are correct, but a sales department determines, through reasons…

Are there any worthwhile Pokémon GO marketing applications for brands? Hell, Yes.

Like millions throughout the world I have been sucked into the hype surrounding what I now know as 'Puke-a-Mon Go'.  The web has been ‘paraflinched’ with articles lauding how the game targets ‘millennial’ aged zombies who can play Puke-a-Mon Go whilst walking recklessly across lanes of traffic or over cliffs.

In addition to brand sponsorship opportunities as described below, Puke-a-Mon Go boosts profitable in-game purchases. Not insignificant since Euromonitor International projects the 2016 global mobile in-game purchase market to grow some twenty per cent, reaching $29.8bn /£22.5bn..

Planet Earth – 7bn people – gotta catch ’em all

Puke-a-Mon Go quickly clocked up in excess of 30 million downloads.  At its peak, Candy Crush drew an audience of 20 million users. It even rivalled social network downloads.

These tools will help you deliver better market research

Nowadays there is a great variety of different useful tools for market researchers that are free to use. Today you can use such instruments to enhance your business and significantly improve effectiveness of your work. But the wide selection means it is possible to waste your precious time for searching the best instrument among the abundance of useful online tools. To save you time, we have already made a list of the top 10 market research tools. These tools were chosen because of their free access, ease of use and comprehensive capabilities.

1. Google Alerts

Google Alerts is the most popular monitoring tool, and its interface is quite intuitive and easy. All you need is to enter the keywords for monitoring and indicate the sources (News, Blogs, Videos, and Discussions),…

Does your SaaS business measure these key metrics?

New research from Totango reveals the metrics that are being tracked by most Saas businesses. Their survey of over 300 SaaS businesses found that whilst the vast majority measure basic metrics like churn and web visitors, surprisingly few measure customer retention cost. Retention cost is important for SaaS businesses, because churn rates make a huge difference to long-term profitability. It's good to see 80% of SaaS businesses measuring churn, as this is crucial to long growth, as this post on ideas to reduce SaaS churn shows. Really that figure should be closer to 100%. If you're not measuring churn then your setting yourself up to fail. For reviewing benchmarks of actual performance there are some great compilations including these SaaS business metrics in an updated Google Sheet from Nathan Latka…