SMEs with limited time and budget should follow these simple strategies to get results in 2017
Your website is the face of your company’s digital marketing strategy, yet one of the most common critiques today is that websites are too complicated. Sometimes it’s a case of gamification taken too far or overuse of the popular, but visually intense parallax format – a busy website, overdesigned or poorly formatted is simply difficult to use. What’s more, creating such a site, and maintaining an equally deep marketing presence on social media or via email, is time-consuming and may not pay off.
A critique that we encounter far less often in the digital marketing world, is that a website is overly simple, but that doesn’t mean such sites don’t exist. Rather, the overly simple website tends to be described differently: they choose unattractive fonts, lack visual interest, or don’t implement their content effectively.
Look at these…
Chart of the Day: A conversion funnel example from the loans sector
A different format of chart for today, showing analysis and modelling for digital marketing rather than statistics on adoption or benchmarks.
The recommended Smart Insights approach for creating achievable marketing plans is centred on creating realistic forecasts of leads, sales and revenue in the year ahead based on conversion-funnel model spreadsheets with the contribution of different channels shown in this digital marketing planning spreadsheet.
This example shows how in some types of business, like the financial services sector, it's important to take into account multichannel behaviour as the decision will be influenced by different channels such as web-phone-branch and the customer journey will involve switching between them.
This is a useful visualisation that adds more detail to a ROPO analysis by breaking out different channels in each vertical bar and…
Customer surveys may not be exciting, but they're still crucial to business success
Customer surveys are a traditional marketing research method. The advancement of technology has attempted to push them to the side in favour of other means, such as email. However, there are many reasons not to renounce this particular practice and instead, see them as an addition to the typical advanced strategy. Customer surveys are not a novelty, but they are still relevant in today’s digital marketing environment. Here are 10 good reasons to convince you.
1. Offer Better Services
The primary purpose of any customer survey is getting feedback from clients. However, this feedback is only the means to an end. Just collecting your client’s opinion is useless if you don’t do anything with it. The expected outcome of any marketing research is an improvement. If you have struggled to…
Chart of the Day: How email ROI compares to other channels
The below chart illustrates that email delivers a steady stream of return for your investment. Email is generally underrated in regards to investment compared to Paid Search (PPC) or the other channels.
In the chart we can see that 73% of respondents rate email marketing ROI as either 'excellent' or 'good', compared to PPC which comes out at 59%. These are impressive statistics, but imagine the results if email marketing received the same investment as the other channels or even it diversifies into tactical marketing automation.
One question I have with this chart, is how accurate the calculation of investment is in email? It can be difficult to calculate, because there are different factors attributing to a email send. But most importantly,…
Using rigorous A/B testing to optimize your lead capture rate
Now, many people think opt-in forms are annoying and don’t belong on a website. Truth be told - I’ve seen a lot of bad popups and other types of sign up forms that just don’t belong on any website.
I get the frustration many people have with these forms. However, there is one simple reason why you should use them on your website - they work!
There will always be haters no matter what you do, but in this post I’ll share my very best tips and tricks I’ve learned by analyzing millions of sessions, so you can decrease the number of haters and increase the number of leads.
Why use opt-in forms?
I know I’ve already answered this question in short, but I want to elaborate and give you some examples.
…
Chart of the day: Celebrities and influencers on YouTube lead the way with earnings.
YouTubers with over 7 million followers are earning $300,000 on average, Facebook and Instagram accounts with over 7 million followers are also getting over half that amount too.
Even just 100 thousand followers on Twitter can lead to earnings of around $2000, but on YouTube an average of $12,500. Twitter seems to be on the cheaper end, whilst YouTube is the most expensive platform for influencer marketing.
Posts on Facebook can cost $75000 for influencers who have over 3 million followers.
Source: The Economist
Our expert level resource, Influencer Outreach Guide shows you how to use to find and monitor influencers using social media
Find out more about the rise of influencer marketing
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Long-term strategies to boost the revenue of your online store
The days of customers relying on brick-and-mortar shops are long gone. Recent years have seen the rise of e-commerce, with consumers usually choosing to do business with companies that cater to and understand their individual needs.
To compete with the seemingly limitless e-commerce options out there, it’s essential to leverage digital marketing to engender customer trust and stand out in a sea of copycats.
That’s what we’ve done at Expedia. We spent years identifying the individual components that add up to a successful e-commerce business model. These proven strategies will help you differentiate your company and make long-term success an achievable reality.
Integrate Your Data
When it comes to cultivating consumer trust and loyalty, nothing beats the proper use of good data — it’s key to personalizing your approach. Perhaps overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data available, many companies fail to take full advantage of…
Adapting the Growth/Share Matrix to Marketing
The Growth/Share Matrix is a business strategy tool that's been around for years, but it remains a useful way to think strategically about where you make investments and allocate company budgets. Although it's a general business strategy tool, it can be very useful for thinking about allocating marketing spend and so it is as important for marketers as it is for boards making big strategy decisions. The model is also known as the BCG model, the acronym of the group that created it.
The model involves mapping business divisions or products across two key dimensions; Market Share and Market Growth, which then maps them into one of four quadrants. Products/Divisions operating with low market share in a low-growth market are dogs, those operating with a high market share in a low-growth market are cash cows. Divisions or products serving a high growth market but without…
How to develop a marketing strategy for expanding globally
Globalisation is no longer an obscure term reserved for academics: it is a very real and ever growing phenomenon affecting most people and businesses all over the world. In the digital arena, this means that a company's website also needs to be a part of the global mix. If you'd like to focus on trading and exporting your products and services worldwide, you need to have a solid international digital marketing strategy in place.
The aim of this post is to highlight a wide range of considerations that need to be addressed in order to tailor your strategy to a global target market. The areas that will be focused on are: website design, international SEO, international PPC and international social media marketing.
International Digital Marketing Considerations
Before looking into the international best practices of each of these areas, there are some important points to bear in…
Expert Ecommerce and Portal Development Agency, PureNet, reveals its top 7 Ecommerce Trends for 2017!
We've drawn on our decade of experience delivering solutions to B2C and B2B businesses such as The Royal British Legion, Krispy Kreme, Saddleback, LighterLife and Puzzler and immersion of all aspects of ecommerce to analyse and define its key predictions.
1. Digital Payment Types
With the likes of Apple Pay, Amazon Pay and PayPal customers are no longer having to take our their card to complete an online transaction, orders can be made with a fingerprint or online pin number. In 2016, more and more customers adopted digital payment types through all channels, using their phones, cards and even watches to complete contactless payments – this is set to continue and expand in 2017 where, PureNet predicts that every customer will expect to be able to complete…
