Plan, manage and optimize your Google AdWords campaigns with this new template for managing your PPC marketing

Google AdWords is a fantastic way for businesses of all sizes to drive relevant visitors to their website generating new enquiries or online sales. The beauty of AdWords is that it is really flexible and puts most of the control into your hands, so no matter which products/services you are selling you can get started within an hour or two even with the most modest of marketing budgets. And here is where the many problems of AdWords start and why some businesses miss out because a quick trial fails since they don't work to optimise their campaigns... "While it is very easy for anybody to set up and run their own AdWords campaigns, it is also just as easy for your campaigns to take a life of their own, spending your hard earned marketing budget on driving…

Now mobile is the norm, marketers need to re-think how they approach a broad range of tactics

By the end of last year there were 2 billion mobile users worldwide. This amounts to 400% growth in just a decade and the figure is bound to have increased since this date. 80% of internet users access it via their mobile phones and this should be a huge warning signal to all businesses that their marketing, sales and communications strategies must all have a 'mobile-first' focus. All business owners have had it drummed into them that their website must be responsive, it’s what customers expect, and whilst this is true , it can’t stop there. Your entire strategy needs to be based on the assumption that users could be viewing your online communications, emails, social posts and more from practically any device, and more than likely a smartphone or tablet. How is…

Chart of the Day: It's never good to compare yourself to others - except when it comes to Email Marketing.

Benchmarking your email marketing is extremely important. It is pivotal to know if you are outperforming your sector or if you need to adjust your tactics. If you work in B2B then the key stat you need to pay attention to is the fact that B2B retail has an open rate of 24.24% and the click rate is 4.75%. Whereas B2C - Other is slightly lower with an open rate of 22.64% and click rate of 4.04%. Email benchmarking is discussed in greater detail in our post, Email Statistics - 2017 update. Source: Email marketing benchmark reports 2017 Sample Size: 1.5 billion emails over 2016 Recommended Resource: Email Marketing Guide …

Roundup of the 3 big AdWords changes announced in the past week

In the midst of the fallout of last month's exposé in the Times that ads on Google Display Network (GDN) were appearing on terrorist or pornographic websites, Google has been busy making announcements about how they're helping brands and being transparent with their metrics. In a brilliant move to increase the data at users fingertips, or a desperate ploy to detract from the fallout from the revelations about GDN (delete according to your take on the Google ads debacle), Google have just announced two new metrics they'll be providing to AdWords users. They've also introduced a close variants feature which changes how exact match keywords work.

Unique Reach Metric

To show users how many people are really seeing their ad content, they've created the new 'unique reach' metric. This allows you to see the number of unique users and average impressions-per-user across…

Is SMS is included in your marketing strategy?

It has been predicted that by the end of 2017 a massive 4.77 billion people globally will own a mobile phone! Now that is a staggering statistic. It has also been reported that 63% of smartphone owners keep their devices with them for all but one hour of their waking day (MarketingTech, 2016). Our phones are always glued to our hands and what better way to target mobile users than by texting them? So why is SMS so rarely utilised by so many marketers? It’s underuse by businesses is quite staggering, with 64% of customers believing that companies should utilise text messaging more (SAP, 2015) and, provided permission has been sought, 83% don’t find SMS intrusive provided the message is relevant to them (SAP, 2015). Let’s be honest, SMS has had a difficult past which has tarnished its reputation. It wasn’t too long ago…

Chart of the day: The biggest challenges for growing email list size include increasing sign-up rate and improving content

New research from Ascend2 found that improving email sign-up conversion rate and improving content quality and relevancy are both the biggest challenges for marketers when it comes to their email marketing list. The research also found that improving list hygiene and reducing unsubscribe rates are also important. Naturally, conversion rate increases are the biggest challenge but content is important to marketers, who realise that quality, relevancy and value of content is key to email marketing. It ultimately is what will encourage customers to interact with the brand. Source: Ascend2 - Email List Growth Trends  Sample: 255 respondents split between B2B and B2C, most in a senior role (such as manager) Recommended resource: Email Marketing Pre-Send checklist (Expert member resource) …

The why and how of omni-channel B2B marketing

Omni-channel marketing is a buzz phrase that is used interchangeably with other phrases such as cross-channel marketing; multichannel marketing and my preferred term integrated marketing. Omni-channel is a complex, customer-centric approach to marketing. It's all about thinking holistically in terms of customer experience, interactions, and messaging. From a B2B perspective, it is about being relevant in all the places a customer wants or expects to find you. This, although the use of ‘omni’ implies it, doesn’t necessarily mean everywhere!

A seamless omni-channel experience

What does a seamless omni-channel experience look like? It looks connected and joined up. That is to say if, on a given day or week, you visited a website, a Facebook page, saw an ad (print, banner or retargeted), received an email, saw a POS in-store, they would be all be talking about the same thing. Omni-channel marketing works totally irrespective of the channel rather than merely…

How to avoid the common pitfalls of B2B marketing campaigns

As a marketer with practical experience within the B2B space as well as working as a trainer, teaching a number of digital marketing subjects, means I have direct access to marketers and business owners. I've noticed a number of issues and themes have appeared quite frequently over the last 12 to 18 months. When coming up with the 10 mistakes for this guide I brainstormed with Dave and his team and it was a much wider list! We boiled down to 10 themes that I have explored in detail, giving you some background into what they are and examples which you may sympathize with or are currently experiencing. The advice to tackle these issues includes a mini do to list to help shape your actions plans, and it goes without saying that there are more practical and detailed resources within the Smart Insights…

Use these Social Media Analysis Tools to better understand your customers

With the advent of digital marketing trends, social media analysis has become crucial to monitor the multitude of audience interactions towards the different products and services. Today, there are more than 500 tools in the market to measure a campaign’s performance on the different social media platforms. By 2020, the size of social media analysis tools in the market is expected to exceed 5 billion dollars. Before this happens, here are five of the best tools of today that will help you manage your social media channels more effectively:

1- Keyhole

Keyhole is an all-in-one social media analytics platform that tries to spare users from the hassle of manually switching from one tool to another. It takes note of the keywords users provide across several platforms, and then follows the…

Chart of the Day: New research shows average Moz Domain Authority across industry

Domain Authority is a metric created by Moz (a provider of SEO tools), which logarithmically ranks websites ability to rank in search engines on a scale from 1 to 100. It's an extremely useful metric for SEOs, because they can judge the value of getting a link from a site based on its domain authority. To calculate domain authority Domain Authority, Moz use over 40 signals from the website and match it to the results of machine learning against Google's algorithm to best model how search engine results are generated. It is therefore, important to pay attention to domain authority, as it is probably the most accurate metric out there for how likely your site is to be ranking in search engines and drawing in large volumes of organic traffic. Its value as a metric also extends to helping you see…