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15 Aug 2016
Take the Opposite approach to Digital Transformation
“The one constant of change is that it’s always for someone else...except it's not.”
Today's customers demand to be recognized across every channel, whether online or offline. They don't care about which part of the company they are dealing with, to them, there's only one brand. Yet, companies continue to give customers a disconnected experience, with sales, service and marketing each working to engage the audience on their own, without coordinating their efforts. It makes customers frustrated, disengaged and disloyal. In a 2013 research study by Oracle, 89% of customers said they had switched brands due to a bad customer experience.
The convergence of technology and behavior is only accelerating and the butterfly effect it causes is transformative and disruptive. Markets are shifting to such extent that they open the door to innovation with new products, services and ways of doing business becoming the norm as…
Millenials have grown up, so marketers must look to Gen Z for the next batch of malleable young minds. Problem is, Gen Z has it's own agenda.
It is with great sadness and regret that I have to announce the imminent demise of a magnificent era defined by a much loved and well know group we call the Millennials.
How we all loved how playful millennials lived more in their heads than in reality. We adored their naivety believing a single Europe for all would be embraced by a UK struggling to redefine its identity. We blushed as they exposed their bits on Tinder all in the name of love. We smiled as they swallowed click bait headlines.
Opticians worldwide will always give thanks for their dedication to staring at smart devices, resulting in a global demand for new prescription lenses. And of course, we salute…
Simple messaging, clean design and the use of white space to steer the eye are key to effective email designs.
While many companies do email marketing effectively, the ones that don’t often are slow to learn from their mistakes. Companies will spend big marketing budgets only to be disappointed with their results, and are often left unaware of what went wrong with the campaign. One key to getting your email marketing campaign right, is to have a full understanding of what exactly people find or do not find engaging with your emails.
Easy SMTP and EyeQuant teamed up together to evaluate a number of different email marketing campaigns using their heat map software. They used the results of their evaluations and created an infographic which you can see below.
The heat map analysis allowed them to understand how customers are engaging or not engaging with their emails. As you can see in the…
Use these tools to find and curate quality content
Content marketing continues to grow in importance with brands investing more in both content generation and distribution. These tools help with a wide variety of tasks for content generation from ideas for headlines and blog articles to easy-to-use image and video tools and grammar checking.
Key things to consider before purchasing and using these tools:
The tools we’ve listed here are a useful starting point but there are dozens of others, with new ones appearing all the time. It’s useful to ask your content team what tasks they do on a daily basis and/or find repetitive. The chances are there is a tool to help.
Whilst many of these tools come with a small price tag, it’s easy to rack up a long list of tools that are rarely used. Consider using these tools, where appropriate, within your publishing processes to formalise their…
How to get your mobile strategy back on track
Next-generation mobile strategies depend on having a solid data strategy. Consumers have little tolerance for generic content that doesn’t speak directly to their interests, so most Fortune 500 companies have shifted toward customized experiences. Good user experiences revolve around effective personalization, and you need high-quality customer intelligence in order to provide that.
Data allows you to better understand your customers, and smart data builds trust. Traditional tools such as geofencing and wireless access points, among other technologies, create a picture of people’s behaviors so you can sell to them according to their circumstances. Modern marketing strategies are adaptive, shifting as they gather more details about audiences.
The way you market to someone browsing your app at home is different from how you’d approach them in your physical store. You might entice…
Social media is massively disrupting the online news industry
The era of online publishers may be coming to its end. More and more statistics are showing that people receive news from sites such as Facebook rather than going to traditional media sources. Furthermore, once people read news from social outlets, they generally discuss the stories on their on Facebook and Twitter pages rather than on the sites where the pieces originated. This means, online publishers are losing traffic as a result of social media rather than experiencing further growth.
Since Facebook announced its new “Instant Articles” feature, which allows anyone to publish articles almost automatically, the threat is becoming even more real. After all, if anyone can produce content with automatic access to a built-in audience as well as conversational tools, why would anyone ever need authentic online news sources?
This is the dilemma the industry is currently facing--and the signs are…
How to make sure Google knows about your content
Even if you’re arachnophobic, there’s one kind of spider you want on your website. Search bots. These ‘spiders’ crawl through your pages looking for what to show search engine users and save a cached image of what they find. When someone enters a search query, results are pulled from content the bot has cached. Without search spiders, your site is invisible to Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines.
Wrap your head around this: Google has more than 39 billion webpages cached. That number took a sharp dip starting in early June, 2016 (down from a peak of nearly 52 billion indexed pages in May, 2015), but it’s still huge. That’s one of the reasons Google doesn’t cache EVERYTHING. Another is quality – the search engine policies what it shows. Link farms, spam, and black hat SEO often land sites on blacklists.…
There is a link but not in the way some marketers like to think.
One question that refuses to go away in search marketing is how social signals impact organic ranking. Google tells us there’s not much going on here but a large section of marketers seem to think otherwise. And, let’s face it, this wouldn’t be the first time Google has held back from giving us marketers the whole picture.
So what’s the real deal with social signals and search marketing? Well, there is a genuine link between the two – but not in the way some marketers like to think.
What does Google say about social signals?
Not a great deal. It’s one of those topics the search giant likes to keep close to its chest. That said, the few comments we have had from Google say social signals are not a direct ranking factor.
In 2014, before Matt Cutts disappeared, he shed…
A study highlighting the generational differences between technology buyers has revealed that some techniques will not work for everyone.
Why do generational differences matter?
The research was conducted to answer the question of what content works and for whom. Good marketers challenge the way they work and the methods they use, what could work, or did work might not be what always works. Marketing is about trying and adapting techniques and tailoring the marketing to effectively get to the end goal of having more clients and customers.
Baby boomers (1946-1964) tend to use case studies and articles by industry analysts, and as shown through their preference for face to face meetings and vendors websites: this generation simply want the facts.
Generation X-ers (1965-1977) value tradeshows and conferences as well as recommendations from peers.
…
A review of the popularity and effectiveness of different CRO approaches
Segmentation and targeting are so important to delivering relevant marketing messages which boost conversion, yet the research suggests that many digital marketers are leaving money on the table because they are not serious enough about segmentation and targeting. In this article, I'll describe research we commissioned to understand the effectiveness of different approaches for segmentation and targeting as part of CRO. I noticed that another recent study has shown a similar situation in the US where 76% of marketing execs say they don't target with Behavioural targeting data according to a Razorfish study.
After 25 years in data-driven marketing, I’m biased, but the facts speak for themselves. The graph below is from the RedEye Whitepaper 'The 7 best ways to improve website conversion and sales for larger e-commerce businesses'.
It shows that for website conversion segmentation is more highly rated compared with,…
