Your buyers want to be guided towards the path of least resistance
Let me ask you a question.
Do you know what part you play in your Buyer’s Journey?
Let’s take the “Journey” part literally: are you the road, the final destination, the map or the signs? Let me tell you what you are: you’re the guide. You’re the one who chooses the road, and you need to make sure that all the things that your travelers may need are there at the moment they need them.
Planning great content, and making it work, is just like that. Besides being interesting and of high quality, your content needs to be timed just right to generate the most impact. It must be in the correct place, at the correct time.
In your Buyer’s Journey, you have a clear goal: to point your prospects in the…
Chart of the Day: What clickthrough rate can new Facebook advertisers expect?
With declining reach in organic Facebook posts, we are seeing competition on Facebook hot up. Last September Sheryl Sandberg announced that Facebook had passed the 4 million advertiser milestone and that was only 6 months after the 3 million milestone was passed...
If you're thinking about investing in Facebook advertising you will want to model the return on marketing investment to make the business case. Knowing average clickthrough rates can help you make the case. Facebook's own Ad Manager will enable you to estimate reach, but what clickthrough rate can you expect on Facebook?
This new research from WordStream's Facebook advertising customers shows that across sectors clickthrough rates (CTRs) vary from around 0.5% through to 1.6%.
More advertisers naturally means more competition, so you will need to model the average Cost…
An ineffective brand strategy is likely blocking your success in digital marketing, here's 3 factors for success
We take it for granted that digital channel management is a core marketing activity now, and yet our own recent survey highlighted that a digital strategy isn’t a ubiquitous component of everyone’s marketing plan, as much as we might think it ought to be. But, let’s say that it is, that we’ve all got a solid digital strategy, that we’re using frameworks like RACE - are we done? I’d suggest far from it - and that there is a bigger issue at hand blocking your digital success, which is often surprisingly "missing-in-action" and that’s a coherent brand strategy.
In fact, brand strategy is an obvious yet secret ingredient for modern digital marketing which most companies that I meet or work with simply don’t have an eye on, there’s no solution in place…
Wow your customers with ingenious and useful personalisation
As 21st-century marketers, part of our job is to always wonder: What do I need to do to create compelling and engaging experiences for customers and clients, with our company? It requires an ever circumspect awareness to know what will not only satisfy customer expectations but “wow” them along your sales funnel.
That answer to that question is changing all the time, particularly with the rapid advancement of technology. One such critical trend to practice and be aware of is customer-centricity, and personalization. Loosely speaking, customer centricity is the principle, and personalization is how you put it into action with your company’s digital presence and relationship to your customers.
In the age of data saturation, we as consumers want our experiences online to be relevant, to be adapted and shaped around our interests. Every major development in how we use the internet, from search engines to…
How to Successfully Transition to an E-commerce Revenue Model
Reduced shelf space has spared no product category. Giant retailers like Target have been steadily reducing items they stock on their shelves to cut down on the number of items filling up their storerooms. While reducing shelf space might make life easier for retailers, it's making things tough on product manufacturers.
Manufacturers in prime categories like baby and maternity products have reason to be worried. Destination Maternity, for example, recorded a net loss of $1.5 million in its fiscal third quarter, and its revenue fell from $119.5 million in the previous quarter to $102.6 million. Same-store sales dropped by 3.5 percent, and the company’s relationships ended with Gordmans, Sears, and Kohl's due to the closure of leased departments or the retailers' efforts to scale back.
Shelf space is…
Chart of the Day: What challenges you when it comes to email marketing? Part 3 of 4.
For email marketers, there will always be aspects of email marketing that are a challenge. This is the third of my four part series pertaining to issues faced in email marketing.
We will be looking at the following during the course of the series:
Targeting & Segmenting
Subscriber list growth
Tracking results
Main email marketing goal.
The third challenge in the series is "Tracking results". Tracking results isn't necessarily the issue, but knowing what to track is. Having the correct Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is extremely important because you need to know if your campaign has performed well. But metrics vary from business to business.
In the chart, we see that the Subscriber list growth is the highest metric tracked at 25% and on the other end of the spectrum is the open rates…
The Managing Director of Royal Mail's Data Services shares his insights into the true cost of poor-quality customer data.
As more marketers work to improve ROI and address new data regulations, the true costs of poor-quality customer data are about to become clear
New research into the use and management of customer data from Royal Mail Data Services reveals that UK organisations estimate poor-quality customer data is costing them an average of 6% of their annual revenues. So how can marketers and data experts finally clean up their customer data to improve overall operational efficiency and campaign effectiveness and comply with data protection regulations?
Marketers face a data dilemma
Today’s marketers rely on good-quality contact data above all else to ensure the success of a campaign’s performance. Yet despite reporting data quality as having the biggest impact on campaign response and conversion rates,…
Chart of the day: Analysis of email errors and subject lines suggest Monday is the worst day for email sending
In a study by Boomerang App in late 2016, Monday is found to be the day to avoid sending emails
The research found that the day with the most subject errors on average was a Monday.
Response rates also fell by 14% for emails which contained such errors and emails with errors received a 29% reply rate compared with 34% for error-free emails.
The research also went on to find that emails sent on a Monday were also the most negative.
Source: Boomerang
Sample/ Data source: Subject lines from more than 250,000 emails were passed through an automated grammar-checking library and reported by day
Recommended resource: Use our Email Marketing Broadcast Checklist before you send your next email
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Rise above cyclical trends and avoid hopping on bandwagons - Remember the fundamentals of brand strategy instead.
The first two months of the year are done and dusted. Time to roll up your sleeves and get on with another 10 months of chasing the weekly releases of ‘must-have’ marketing fads promising to shatter disruptive technologies and methodologies (as announced as being disruptive the previous weeks).
With so many fads from start-up Davids as well as established marketing Goliaths that promise to help show clients or bosses results, it’s going to be challenging... Just keeping up to date will force you to place marketing tactics before longer-term strategy considerations.
However, before you totally write-off strategic planning, here are five branding strategic thinking tips that can actually help you assess whether the latest ‘big thing’ enhances, or detracts from your core brand messaging, philosophy and delivery.
1- Brand purpose
Beyond obvious platitudes such as, “the purpose of…
Stay ahead of these major marketing trends to retain your edge over the competition this year
Marketing moves fast. Fads come and go, but big shifts in technology change the whole marketing landscape. The launch of the iPhone and the growth of social networks in the late 2000's massively disrupted the whole marketing landscape, just like the massive adoption of PCs did in the mid to late 90's, and TV did in the 50's and 60's.
At the moment marketers are firmly concentrated on the latest big technological fads like chatbots, virtual reality and augmented reality. It remains to be seen whether these will create real value for marketers beyond a few niche applications, or if they are just over-hyped by virtue of their novelty. However, it is possible to identify some big changes in how marketers are using existing technology, and these major shifts have serious implications for brands in…
