Businesses need to properly measure social ROI, or stop wasting their time on it.
What's the point in doing something you're not sure is going to work? Well there's plenty of good reasons. You might have a great feeling about it. You might feel like you have to give it a try, or else you'll never know. You might think failure is just success in progress, or other nice luvie dovie sentiments, and honestly believe you'd better give this thing a go and if it doesn't work then it's just a great learning experience.
All perfectly noble reasons. However, what usually isn't a good reason for doing something is because everyone else is. Yet that seems to be the picture we see when it comes to brand's use of social media, according to marketing consultancy the Brand Gym.
Shockingly, 62% of brands are only using social media because it makes them look…
Dan Grech Interviews Teri Rosenbaum, Uber's Head of Email in the UK & Ireland for the latest edition of 'No BS Email Marketing'
[Editor's note: This interview is a taster for a new, free guide : No BS Email Marketing, 2nd edition. It's a great resource for all marketers interested in email and CRM. You can download it for free today from here].
I’m an email marketing manager for Uber in the UK and Ireland, with a focus on communicating with our drivers. Prior to this, I spent seven years at a small app startup in Southwest London, where I ended up doing a lot of email. I’ve been at Uber for almost a year - since last September. One of my major achievements here has been winning an award for customer obsession. I guess it’s my…
Expanded Text Ads re-write the Ad Words rulebook. Don't miss out on their benefits.
Google’s new Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) have been a real game-changer for pay-per-click marketers, rewriting the rules for AdWords best practice and forcing users to adapt. Almost doubling the character count allows greater opportunity to create engaging, unique content, and with Google reporting increased click-through rates of 20-30% during beta testing, it’s a development that PPC managers cannot afford to ignore.
The search engine giant will be shifting to the expanded format permanently, phasing out ‘standard’ ads by the end of January 2017. Any experienced AdWords marketer worth their salt will appreciate the need to lead the pack and nail their ETA game before competitors know what’s hit them, so here’s a brief guide to doing just that.
What inspired the change?
It’s been 16 years since AdWords…
Dirty data leads to costly mistakes. Here's how to prevent them
A co-worker once told me the sort of horror story that causes marketers to wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night.
In a previous position at a large technology company, he and his team generated numerous leads through conferences and trade shows. The field marketing managers would send the leads to their marketing operations team via CSV files, and the operations team would use the information to follow up with these leads. The data came in varied formats and was not always clean or easily segmented.
In one unfortunate case, the marketing operations team mistakenly uploaded a file containing 500 software industry leads under the service provider category in their system. The leads were routed into the service provider channel, and all 500 of them received a service provider newsletter rather than a software email. Needless to…
Innovative First Car Quote project stalls just before launch
You'll know that Facebook is the largest social media network in the world with over 1.13 billion daily active users and 1.03 billion mobile daily active users. Advertising on Facebook has major advantages as companies can proactively target individuals based on their profile, that’s their gender, age, location and many other demographics. You can even target users based on their favourite TV programmes. Advertising IS Facebook’s business, looking at the revenue for the last quarter that was 6,239 billion US dollars, which represents a 63% increase since 2015.
Whilst Facebook captures more data than any other network, it has detailed policies on how the data can be used. It states “Advertisers are responsible for understanding and complying with all applicable laws and regulations. Failure to comply may result in a variety of consequences, including the cancellation of ads you have placed and…
Which are the best options to increase reach for online retail sites?
The answers to these key questions for online retailers are revealed in the Custora Ecommerce Pulse which summarises online retail sales sources by channel.
Although retailers will know their current mix of traffic which is driving sales, it's always useful to benchmark this mix against others. This chart gives the latest data from 2016 to inform your strategy into 2017. If you are under-performing in some channels, this benchmark enables you to compare to see what is possible.
If you apply the 70-20-10 rule, this chart shows that 70% of your effort should go into the 3 main channels or organic search, paid search or CPC and Email marketing. Affiliate marketing is also important.
When interpreting this source, it's worth remembering that these stats don't show traffic…
Ad-blockers are a major threat to digital publishers- but help is at hand!
Whether you’re an online publisher, advertiser or even simply a consumer, the ramifications of blocking internet advertising will be massive. In fact, according to a recent study by PageFair, the publishing industry suffered a $21.8 billion loss from blocked revenue due to ad-blocking software last year. As a result, the war between publishers and advertisers is only continuing to intensify. There are steps that can be taken to overcome the issues created by this technology. Below are seven popular strategies that online publications have turned to in a bid to fight against the rising numbers of ad-blocking users.
1. Ask Users to Turn Off Their Ad-Blocking
“Thanks for coming to Forbes. Please turn off your ad blocker in order to continue. To thank you for doing so, we’re…
If you haven’t started your holiday planning yet, it’s time to push the panic button.
Email marketers often don’t get pulled into the planning process until the end and then it’s often an afterthought or emergency: “Yeah, just send another email”. When email is an afterthought instead of the engine, you’re setting yourself up to fail.
Don’t sit on the sidelines and wait for the coach to send you in. Develop your own plan, including copy and contact strategies. It should fit into the overall brand strategy, but it needs to be your design because you have your own revenue and goals to meet.
Develop your Black Friday strategy now
Although many consumers have already started shopping, Black Friday is still the official kick-off for the season. Locking down your strategy now gives you time to test it and have it in place. You’ll be ready to start building your base of subscribers from the fresh…
Free coaching for Ecommerce marketers from Rand Fishkin of Moz and other industry experts at International Ecommerce Day
The Ecommerce world is so crowded with a glut of content and different providers competing fiercely. What’s more, ecommerce marketers often are rushing to implement the latest tactics and technology, which can leave creating a proper strategy and plan being neglected.
There are lots of blog articles, infographics and tutorials about how to build a successful digital business. The problem with this is that there are too many people blogging for the sake of attracting traffic and clicks, and they don’t always offer the best business advice. This means it can be hard for marketers to know what pieces of advice will be useful, and which won’t be.
But, of course, you need to be connected to the latest trends in order to make your business grow and apply innovative techniques to drive up your sales.
One…
Hidden navigation menus, such as hamburger menus negatively affect discoverability, increase task time and perceived difficulty of the tasks.
Quantitative user testing studies aren't as common as qualitative studies in the world of User Experience Research, but this brilliant study by Nielsen Norman Group (NNG) with 179 participants found that hidden menus, such as hamburger menus led to worse discoverability on both desktop and mobile devices.
Methodology
The study by NNG used remote unmoderated testing, which involves users recording their screen and voice at home, whilst working through instructions. Six live websites were tested across desktop and mobile, including three types of navigation:
Hidden navigation: where the main navigation is placed under an icon (e.g. hamburger) and the user is required to click or hover over the icon to display the navigation
Visible navigation: main navigation shown clearly in a navigation bar
Combo navigation: a combination…
