Chart of the Day: The vast majority of marketers are still using vanity metrics to assess content effectiveness, whilst only half are measuring the effect on sales.
A recent report by TrackMaven asked 200 marketing leaders across 19 different industries about how they measure the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. The results show that marketers are still relying on 'vanity metrics' such as likes, shares and views, rather than calculations of how the marketing has impacted the bottom line.
This needs to change if marketers are going to be able to justify future increases in budgets for new campaigns. It's no good going to the CFO with how many re-tweets you got. The only sustainable way to grow your marketing department is to be able to clearly demonstrate that is leading to increases in leads and sales, and thus contributing to the business growth.
Marketers need to invest in better analytics for measuring their success and…
How to select the right data management platform and audience profiling tools for your business
A Data Management Platform (DMP) is a place to store, sort and act upon multiple sources of online and offline data including search, social, display media, Email, CRM, Transactions (e.g. Point-of-sale). This includes first party data which the marketer collects on their site or through other customer interactions and on third party data pre-integrated into the platform, or data purchased from branded providers or lists. They also look to integrate desktop and mobile usage to provide a ‘single view of the prospect and customer’. As such they are also now commonly called Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and Identity Management Platforms (IDMP). Users of a DMP can import known (i.e. an email address) or unknown (e.g. a cookie) data and use this to define audiences or segments. The DMP will then find new customers (i.e. similar audiences)…
3 Tips to Ensure the Success of Your Guerrilla Marketing Efforts
Guerrilla marking can be defined as “an innovative, unconventional, and low-cost marketing technique aimed at obtaining maximum exposure for a product.”
Lower cost and increased exposure — that’s the dream, right?
To illustrate with a modern, classic example, in 2012, Dollar Shave Club nailed guerrilla marketing with its viral YouTube video. For just $4,500, the company created a surprising and funny commercial that went viral in 72 hours. Although consumers see more than 2,900 media messages every day, the sad truth is they will only remember four of them. DSC managed to remain one of those memorable four for a long time, all thanks to a relatively inexpensive video.
If that kind of return is possible, why even bother with marketing initiatives that yield lower returns?
Guerrilla Tactics Expand Your Reach
Most marketing — traditional and digital — is about scalability and input/output; it costs…
Chart of the day: B2B customers favor quality product information over the number of products to chose from.
B2B customers need to purchase all sorts of products. Whether they're looking to restock the stationary cupboard or bring in a new suite of marketing tools, they need to be sure that you will be making the right choice for everybody involved.
This is where research from Forester & B2BecNews comes in useful for the businesses trying to sell their products and services. B2B buyers do have similar needs to your average e-commerce consumers placing significant emphasis on how easy the website is to use, fast delivery and the usual low prices. Most importantly the results of the survey show that B2B buyers place having access to credible product details above anything else.
This is good news for marketers who are responsible for the information on their websites…
Brand storytelling examples showing how a successful brand story takes consumers on a hero’s journey
No one’s heart is wooed by product capabilities and financials alone. What you need is a good story — it’s the key to making your brand a living, breathing thing. Investors, employees, and consumers will rally around a story, and the best business leaders understand that storytelling has the power to change minds and spark action.
Take High Brew Coffee, for example. Its story could easily have been about its product: canned cold-brew coffee. But that’s not very original, and it certainly doesn’t capture the imagination. Instead, High Brew’s story is all about adventure — founder David Smith was inspired to start the business after enjoying cold-brew coffee during warm nights navigating the Caribbean on a sailboat with his family.
When investing in content marketing, it’s necessary to go beyond describing what…
Which day(s) and times work best for maximum impact for B2B and B2C?
"Which day of the week is best for sending email?" has been a common question since marketers started email marketing. As with a lot of questions about good practice, the right answer is : "it depends", but it's fun to speculate. Ideally you want your email to arrive in the inbox of as many people as possible when they're sitting at their desk or picking up emails on go via smartphone. Greater impact will also be helped when there is less competition in the inbox from other email marketers. So Saturday and Sunday can be best for this.
[si_guide_block id="5508" title="Download Paid Member Resource – Email Marketing Strategy Guide" description="This comprehensive guide shows you how to take your email marketing strategy to the next level, covering a lot more than tips to improve your creative and copy, although we do…
How to build the right marketing technology stack for your business
It's now a lot more common to talk about choosing 'martech stacks' and rightly so, given the impact that technology, data and insight can have on marketing today. The popularity of the concept of a martech stack has grown out of the categorisation of marketing technology based on Scott Brinker’s Martech landscape and others such as our Digital Tools wheel.
Businesses have always considered their portfolio of business IT applications for operations such as finance, logistics and marketing, but traditionally, they have been controlled by IT teams who have managed a limited number of ‘enterprise resource planning’ systems such as SAP. With the growth in cloud based SaaS, it has become far easier for individual departments and, in particular, marketing, who need to manage many digital marketing channels like search and social media marketing, to deploy their own solutions.
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Chart of the Day: Setting Up for Success With Email Automation
How much revenue per person, per campaign, can email automation generate for you?
The below chart covers 4 activities, winback, browse abandonment, welcome series and abandoned cart emails. It's then split into average orders from under $50 to over $200.
The best performing in 90% of the activities is the abandoned cart email, displaying from nearly $3 per person, per transaction to over $14. The only anomaly is when the order value is under $50, where the welcome email series has $2 per person, per transaction.
Source: How segmentation and automation drive email marketing success
Sample Size: U.S.–based companies sent in Q4 of 2016 — a total of 1.5 billion emails
Recommended Resource: B2B Marketing Automation Guide
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Demand remains strong for digital marketers though the supply of candidates will be tight
The proliferation of digital tools, social media, and mobile have created a world of two-way communication with buyers that’s here to stay. To keep up, companies are seeking out marketers with digital expertise at an increasing rate, according to a recent study from McKinley Marketing Partners.
The study, which surveyed over 300 marketers, reveals a healthy job market for the marketing industry overall, 19 percent growth over last year. Additionally, 44 percent of those surveyed plan to hire more marketers this year compared to only 28 percent last year.
Digital marketing continues to dominate with a projected 56 percent of hires requiring some degree of digital experience. Interestingly, 48 percent of requests for marketing talent received by McKinley Marketing Partners in 2016 required digital skills, and that figure is already on the rise this year. Creative services (35 percent)…
Are Spotify and Valve models to be followed or impossible to replicate?
We live in an age of Digital Disruption. The biggest transport provider (Uber) owns no cars, the biggest accommodation provider (Airbnb) owns no rooms, the biggest content provider (Facebook) creates no content. These new businesses have brought with them radically different models of organisational structure which was part of the reason they were able to do better than anyone before in their respective industries. Many of what were once new and exciting little start-ups, involving young folks tinkering in their garages are now massive businesses with more conventional corporate structures. Google and Apple are now two of the Worlds largest companies, and have all of the usual trappings of corporate hierarchy, like Presidents, CEOs, and managers of all different types.
But there are some companies which have retained their start-up culture and really do have radically different structures, which most marketers would…