The key trends that business-to-business marketers need to act on in 2017
Since we're now well into 2017, it's a natural time for all marketers to review the marketing tactics they've used this year and assess their approaches against other businesses in the sector. For marketers involved in the B2B sector, there are some particularly pressing issues which, if they can be addressed will help 'feed the funnel' and develop more quality leads.
A good starting point for reviewing the trends that will make an impact next year is to think through innovation across all the main digital marketing channels. In our article on marketing trends for 2017, we asked marketers to assess the techniques which would give them the biggest uplift on business in 2017. The results show that the top rated techniques which should get focus next year are closely aligned with B2B sector, which has for the past…
Chart of the Day: We all know we should send targeted email marketing - so why aren't we?
"Good advice is always certain to be ignored, but that’s no reason not to give it."
― Agatha Christie
From being young we are given good advice like, "don't eat mud", "fire is hot" or "don't eat too many sweets". I don't know about you, but I still ate mud, burnt my finger and binged on sherbert. Now we are adults, we are still given advice and email marketing is no different. We know that targeted marketing has a better Return on Investment (ROI) and engagement rate, but why don't we all do it?
In the below chart, we see that a plurality of companies across almost all industries still have no targeting and everyone gets the same message. Publishing and media seem to be the worst, at 56%. Whereas Online Advertising Network has 28% using…
Hyper-personalisation is the future of email marketing
It’s well known that anything that’s tailored fits better. Be that a three-piece suit or your communications with your customers, in fact, companies who send automated emails are 133% more likely to send relevant messages that correspond with a customer’s purchase cycle.
“Companies who send automated emails are 133% more likely to send relevant messages that correspond with a customer’s purchase cycle. – Lenskold and Pedowitz Groups”
Today, we’re going to give you a smart insight into how one of our customers, a domain name reseller sends automated cross sales emails to their customers by making use of dynamic segments and content.
Problem: Our customer had the business need of cross-selling related domain names after a customer had purchased a specific domain name.
Opportunity: Use advanced segment definitions to optimize…
People, not technology are still the key determinant of success.
Technology is constantly changing the way we live. From self-driving cars and omnipresent chatbots to automated marketing tools, it sometimes feels like humans are being edged out by our robotic overlords instead of fulfilling "the promise that technology allows humans to be better humans."
At least we still have the market cornered on artistic pursuits, right? Sort of.
The music world was shaken up when researchers at Sony’s Computer Science Laboratory managed to create two original songs using software known as Flow Machines. The programs analyzed a massive database of existing music and then churned out two tunes based on detected patterns. The first song, “Daddy’s Car,” sounds a bit like an uninspired Beatles track.
While technophiles around the world celebrated it as a landmark moment for artificial intelligence, they ignored one glaring aspect of the project: A French musician wrote the lyrics…
Chart of the day: Marketers aim to measure video and other digital media performance with cost per acquisition
Most use site traffic and ROI to measure performance, but marketers expect to continue to use site traffic, ROI and also use cost per acquisition.
Only half of marketers measure using ROI, which means there is a heavy reliance on using site traffic as the main measurement. Overall there is a lack of ROI measurement and sales lift per ad dollar spent is also low at just 3 in 10 using this method, with 4 in 10 expecting to use it within the next 2-3 years. Measurement is often an after-thought and doesn't get the resources required to use advanced metrics such as calculating ROI, and therefore relies on cruder metrics such as site traffic. This is a false economy,…
Adidas just made a colossal bet that could be a game changer, or a catastrophic mistake.
Last week, Adidas announced they were going all-in on digital advertising.
Chief Executive Kasper Rorsted said he was going to ditch TV ads and instead spend 100% of his budget on digital to capture younger consumers, a crucial demographic for the sports clothing line.
This way, he said, Adidas would quadruple e-commerce revenues by 2020.
“All of our engagement with the consumer is through digital media and we believe in the next three years we can take our online business from approximately one billion (euro) to four billion (euro) and create a much more direct engagement with consumers," he said.
Predictably, the internet exploded.
It was a hell of a time to bet all your chips on digital marketing, said critics. Digital ad giants Facebook and Google are now embroiled in full-blown scandals and a quick glance at today’s CampaignLive reveals…
JP Morgan Chase found it was advertising on 388,000 sites to no effect. Brands using programmatic advertising need to sit up and take notice.
Over the past several years we've seen programmatic ad spend saw, Icarus-like, to dizzying heights. At the start of this year, UK programmatic spend was predicted to increase by over 30% in 2017, whilst US programmatic ad spend has tripled since 2014, becoming the single fastest growing ad medium. So-called gurus predicted this trend would continue, by doing what so-called gurus always do and assuming the future will resemble an extrapolated version of the past. Hence the predictions that programmatic spend will double by 2020, reaching an incredible $42 billion dollars globally. But the present has got in the way.
Ever since The Times uncovered programmatic ads for major brands appearing on the websites of far-right hate groups or terrorists (See Mercedes Advert on an IS video below), brands have…
We asked content marketing expert Stephen Bateman about how he uses the RACE framework to structure marketing campaigns for clients
Q. Yourself and Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights recently scoped out a project to improve the inbound marketing programme of a B2B telecommunications firm. Can you give us an idea of how RACE was utilised to scope out and plan the project?
Yes, the firm in question had been getting content from its agency for its inbound marketing programme for more than 18 months, and the team used the content to get “attention” from prospective buyers, but failed to generate the potential volume of qualified leads (MQL) they expected.
There are lots of reasons why the team felt underwhelmed by their content marketing and inbound marketing programmes, but this is what happened over time: The team kicked off its inbound marketing programme, with a documented strategy that identified goals, audiences, content, process and…
Chart of the Day: Social Media spend has always fallen well below predictions
Making predictions is easy. Identify a trend and extrapolate to your heart's content. So long as you don't actually check what you predicted against the real world data when the time comes, then you're in the clear.
Except when some killjoy comes along and goes and plots your predictions against what actually happened for four years in a row and found your predictions were consistently overshooting reality.
That's what happened when the CMO survey asked 388 top US marketing execs about their actual and predicted social media spend. The CMOs consistently predicted higher social media spending than was actually the case, and if they were meeting their predictions they would be spending close to twice as much on social media marketing as they are at current.
So why is this? It could…
AdWords promises new update will save time, boost CRO and reduce CPA
Google have announced a series of new features for AdWords aimed at making dynamic search ads more effective. Dynamic search ads are the AdWords product which creates ads dynamically based on website content, rather than manually setting up keywords on which to bid. The idea is this allows businesses to not miss opportunities they wouldn't have known to bid on with a manually set up keyword-based campaign. It also means when the website content is updated the search ads automatically update, so there is no risk of having out of date ad copy after site updates.
Google has pressed ahead with the announcement despite the hurricane of negative PR whipped up by the revelations regarding ads being placed by YouTube and Google Display Network on unacceptable content, such as terrorist propaganda or far right groups. Because search ads don't appear on sites (only…
