Small businesses can use video to boost awareness, leads and sales using these 6 tips
Cisco recently predicted that video content will account for 69% of all consumer internet traffic this year.
This is the last call for all marketers who until now have avoided video content, convinced that it's just a fad or that creating professional videos takes way too much time, effort and money. Well, here's a piece of good news: video marketing today is within reach of all kinds of companies, including small businesses looking for novel ways to spice up their online marketing activities. How to develop a video marketing strategy that works? Here are 6 key tips to help your small business develop a video marketing strategy.
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1. Know your sector…
What is B2i marketing and how can it help you make your marketing smarter?
You’ve heard of B2B and B2C - But what about B2i? B2B marketers and strategists are quickly adopting this emerging trend that puts their businesses in direct contact with their clients’ end-consumers: from business to individual.
As the world becomes more interconnected, businesses are beginning to understand that they must think beyond the needs of their immediate clients and consider their clients’ clients as well. Sure, they still might sell directly to the CEOs, CIOs, and other C-suite executives. But their solutions must address their clients’ core needs, which always go back to the individual consumer.
Most people assume that the “I” in B2i is for “internet.” But B2i isn’t about online marketing. B2i demands a holistic view of a client’s business, especially as companies create new business models to…
Chart of the Day: Utilizing digital to drive consumers into store sees a resurgence with Retailers
Customers are increasingly expecting retailers to give them the convenience of browsing online from where ever they are; in the car, in a bar, from Wichita...you get the idea. This ability to visit a store, find the same products at the same price and take it home at the point of purchase with no waiting or delivery charges, can make or break a consumer's choice to spend their hard earned money. In the last few years, many high street brands are embracing multichannel here in the UK e.g. Argos, Debenhams and Next to name a few but many others aren't.
In this research from RSR Research, we see that while the primary role of digital channels is to sell products,…
Do You Understand the Company's Expectations on Your Digital Marketing Team?
"I now realize that my team and I did the exact contrary of what management expected from us." This could be the post-mortem quote of most digital marketing teams that got downsized or swallowed by another team. Truth is that finding the appropriate positioning for a digital marketing team is hard. Fortunately, this post helps you fulfill the two conditions for leading a new digital marketing team to success:
Positioning your team appropriately.
Linking your activity to business results.
Your First Task: Marketing Your Own Team
I remember discussing with the leader of a marketing team from a large European telecom operator. During our exchanges, we identified 7 other teams working on digital marketing topics in this mobile operator company! There were the corporate level teams, the country-level teams, the digital marketing and the traditional marketing teams, split by market: enterprise vs…
What kinds of post are best for building a site's traffic and reputation?
No matter what kind of site you’re running or what your online goals are, you need a strong stream of content to keep your momentum moving forward. Most website builders already encourage you to start and maintain an active blog, but you need to take it upon yourself to follow through; publishing more content (and better content) will attract more people to your site (through multiple channels, including search engines, social media, and direct visitors) and will encourage more conversions and customer retention as well. But what kinds of posts are best for building a site’s visibility and reputation?
What Makes a Blog Post “Good”?
Let’s first examine some criteria we can use to classify a blog post as “good” or “effective:”
First, your post needs to grab attention. If your headlines don’t stand out, or if your topics…
Research shows most important factors for selecting martech
Marketers now have many, many potential marketing technologies they can deploy as shown by our 30 categories of martech relevant for all businesses serious about growth and optimisation. Selecting any type of new marketing technology is a serious businesses since although many services today offer paying monthly, collection of data and integration with other systems mean that although it's easy to switch providers in theory, in practice it often isn't. Of course, this depends whether it is a mission-critical systems like CRMs, which involve a lengthy migration between platforms compared to AB testing tools which can be switched relatively easily.
This research from Trustradius covers the factors that are important in taking a decision.
The research shows that buyers want hands-on experience with the product and insights from customers. Product demos and free trials were the best…
Key lessons from the Strategy and Innovation World Forum
Robert Jones, our research analyst and I headed off to London last week to go to the Strategy and Innovation World Forum, set up by World Forum Disrupt. The Innovation Directors were attending in force, and with talks from the global heads of innovation from Santander, BT, UNICEF, Vodaphone and other world leading businesses there were plenty of interesting lessons to be gleaned.
With over 32 different speakers over the two days of the forum, it would be a bit of an information overload, if I tried to convey everything that was discussed at the event. But it did offer some great insights into the cutting edge of innovation strategy, so I've tried to distil the top 8 talks into just a few bite-sized takeaways that you can learn from and implement when developing your own innovation strategy.
Setting Strategies for uncertain times - …
Chart of the Day: Gmail inbox placement and read rates
In 2013, Google rolled out its restructure of the Gmail inbox and introduced their tabs layout. Back then email marketers believed it would be the "death of email marketing". So we are nearly 4 years since the launch, how are marketing emails performing in the Promotions tab?
In the chart below, we see that Promotions has an Inbox Placement Rate (IPR) of 84.5%. We can also see that the read rate is the lowest of all the tabs, at a low 19.2%.
This tells us that out of all the promotion emails, in the tab, only 19% are read. So 81% of marketing emails will be simply deleted/unread. So if you land in the Promotions tab, chances of getting read are very slim.
What can i do?
First, check if you need…
A case Study showing how to use App Store listing testing to boost downloads
On my first day at work my CEO at CallApp gave me a compelling challenge when he turned to me and said, “We need to increase the numbers of users downloading our app on day seven (an acceptable measuring metric), as quickly as we can." The first thing I did was analyze the numbers in order to figure out where I should put my efforts in order to maximize the results and show improvement.
After crunching the numbers, I decided that the best place to start was in trying to improve our conversion rate in Google Play Store. I will try to give you an idea of why I chose this route and what store conversion is all about.
There are several options for downloading the app but the most common is through Google Play Store (for android users).…
Customers now demand personalisation and relevance at every stage of the buying process.
It seems as though every report we read has been written by someone with a different name for the business era that we’re in right now. We’re sticking with Forrester’s 2011 term, the Age of the Customer. However, terms such as the Digital Age, the Social Media Age, the Age of Recommendation, the SMART Age, all seem to be interchangeable.
Whatever we choose to call it though, each name relates to the explosion of technology in society, how it is affecting businesses, and how businesses are being forced to adapt to the new demands of this high-tech era. They refer to the effects that technology, social media, and efficient information exchange are having on product development and marketing. In particular, they refer to a period in which businesses are transitioning to become more agile and customer-obsessed than ever before.
We’ve…
