Chart of the Day: New research reveals that the vast majority of small businesses have only a basic understanding of SEO

A recent survey by Higher Visibility asked over four hundred and twenty small business owners about how well their internal teams understand SEO, and the results paint a rather dire picture for the state of SEO in small enterprises. 180 business owners (over one-third) either didn't know or reported that their team had no understanding of SEO. While over half of respondents said their team only possessed a basic understanding of SEO. In today's competitive SEO landscape, a basic grasp really isn't going to get you very far. If you want to effectively harness the power of organic search then you need to be using the latest techniques and not making any SEO mistakes, which those without a deep knowledge of the subject are likely to make. …

The five biggest announcements from Facebook’s global developer conference

On the 18th and 19th April Facebook hosted F8, their annual global developer conference, where the technical community joined up for two days of workshops, product demos and 1:1 time with Facebook’s product experts. Whilst the content and announcements at F8 are typically geared towards developers, there is always interesting and important news that digital marketers should be aware of, too. For this post I’ve selected five top announcements but you can watch the full keynote here.

Facebook Analytics

What is this: During the F8, updates were announced for Facebook Analytics in order to help businesses better understand their customer behavior across devices and channels. This update is designed to enable businesses to measure and optimise their complete customer journey across mobile, web, bots on Messenger, and now Facebook Pages and Offline Conversions, too. Facebook will also be launching automated insights, custom dashboards, and additional…

Mobile sales are growing rapidly, but many still fail to properly account for them in their analytics.

Most Americans use mobile devices at some stage in the purchasing process, but mobile-influenced sales can be tricky to pin down. Marketers need to quantify mobile’s impact; failing to do so paints an incomplete sales picture and undervalues the ROI your mobile strategy produces. Mobile is now overtaking desktop in overall usage. Data assembled for the KPCB mobile technology trends survey shows that people spend 51 percent of their time on mobile and only 42 percent on desktop. Even more use mobile to research purchases or look for discounts. An ideal method to help pinpoint a mobile ad campaign’s effectiveness is mobile app attribution, which tracks app installs, in-app purchases, completions, and other mobile-related behaviors. The majority of marketers have a more difficult attribution challenge than tracking digital downloads. If you sell…

Chart of the Day: Digital Advertising, Content Marketing and Social Media are the most sought after skills in 2017

Research by McKinley Marketing Partners highlights the wide range of skills digital marketing teams need in 2017, varying from SEO and project management to Email and Analytics. There are a few front runners for being the most in demand skills for businesses in the USA. Digital advertising and content creation, curation and strategy are highest in demand. Social media, email and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) were close behind, highlighting the importance of an overall digital media strategy that makes the most of the content bring produced. SEO, Advertising & Social would not be very effective and very boring without a steady stream of high-quality engaging content. Interestingly Project Management is at rock bottom as the least sought-after skill but without a well-structured project plan to support the marketing strategy you will quickly find that the final product of all your hard…

3 ways that less influential influencers can help your business

Influencer marketing often focuses on harnessing major influencers who have the highest reach and authority. Such campaigns are on the rise, as we highlighted in this recent article, 84% of marketers said they would launch at least one influencer campaign within the next twelve months. Yet, collectively, other influencers can be important as advocates or detractors. Whether its fans mentioning your brand on Twitter, colleagues sharing your articles on LinkedIn, or disgruntled customers posting negative reviews, influencers are everywhere. And whilst you can’t control what the public say about you, you can engage with individuals who are your biggest fans and ensure that your customers hear their voice. The first question you might be asking is, do influencers really matter? Does your business really need them? Here are 3 examples that illustrate the difference you can make by harnessing influencers who aren't necessarily important by…

Examples of high converting calls to action to inspire your own copywriting

To succeed online you need to build an effective testing and optimising strategy that will help you to maximise conversion rates. How do you know what are the most important things for a better conversion? Versatile. scientific testing, pages optimization, various payment gateways, landing pages, and more. These factors will definitely help you to improve your bottom line by getting higher conversion rates. One of the most effective ways to boost your conversion rate is to improve your calls to action by making them more compelling. You can test many different messaging and design techniques to boost conversion, but in this article I will focus on the humble CTA to get your audience onto the next stage in the path to purchase. You can create a great CTA of any shape, style, and size. The main thing is to create CTA buttons in…

Avoid 5 common affiliate marketing pitfalls with these 5 tips

Done properly, affiliate marketing can yield many benefits for challenger brands and established brands alike. Advances in technology and consumers’ ever-increasing willingness to shop online practically guarantee a strong ROI — if you have the right plan and resources in place. Though affiliate networks do afford advertisers nearly automated marketplaces, these programs don’t run on autopilot. From commission structure and communication channels to budget, data tracking, and conversion metrics, everything needs to be fine-tuned in order to maximize ROI. Here’s what you need to know before you jump into the affiliate marketing waters.

The Benefits of a Well-Structured Affiliate Program

Affiliate programs are attractive marketing options because they’re inherently self-funding. Instead of buying advertising upfront and hoping it leads to later sales, you only pay a commission when a sale occurs via an affiliate program. A well-structured affiliate program not only delivers a significant boost in traffic to…

Chart of the Day: Research shows the importance of social networks to B2C online publishers

It's really interesting to see which digital marketing channels drive the most traffic or sales in different sectors. In retail, this compilation of top online sales channels shows that organic and paid search, email and affiliate channels dominate, with each contributing more than 10%. It's surprising that when using 'last click' attribution the contribution of social media is sub 5%, although this is an average of all categories and we can expect that in some retail categories like fashion, the percentage of sales from social media will be higher. This research of traffic sources across large publishers who use the Parsely traffic reporting platform shows a very different pattern. The first chart shows that search (orange) is the largest external traffic source, but with social not far behind (purple). Note that this traffic source breakdown is unusual…

Affiliate marketing needs to be run effectively to get the best results. Don't leave it on the back-burner.

Affiliate marketing inherently involves using middlemen — affiliates — to help bring in customers or drive conversions. Get it right and it can contribute significant online sales volume as this compilation of the top sales driving channels shows. Automating affiliate marketing comes with many positives: a marketplace of affiliates seeking you out, automatic approval of affiliates based on your company’s preferences, and cross-currency sales tracking. But to reap those benefits, it’s critical to manage your affiliate partners continually. A successful affiliate management programme following the affiliate best practices explained in the Smart Insights members' guide requires active recruiting and optimizing partners on an ongoing basis.

Avoid the “Autopilot” Trap

The mindset that affiliate programs run on “autopilot” is common but will be detrimental to your program — and might ruin it altogether. Yes, affiliate…

Facebook is at the forefront of marketing technology innovation

Mark Zuckerberg was on stage yesterday at this year's Facebook for developers conference, showing off some nifty new software and coming out with some rather clever ideas for augmented reality products. Here we ask which innovations do marketers need to be aware of and plan for? Perhaps most important of all isn't the new innovations he announced, but what he re-iterated. He made it clear he is sticking to Facebook's 10-year road map, which was launched last year and again given prominence in this year's conference. The roadmap looks deceptively simple, but it reveals a whole host of different strategies and new technologies that Facebook will be investing in. You can click on the image below to see a higher resolution version. There are a few extremely interesting things worth noting from…