Chart of the Day: Digital Marketing statistics - Converting leads to customers remains a top marketing priority over the next 12 months - part 1 of 10
It is important to know how sales and marketing are evolving, and how/ when this will affect your business. There are various marketing and sales priorities to think about when outlining your business strategy and initial planning but it is also important to know its challenges and how to face these.
Marketers are making the leap into visual content creation while salespeople are slowly shifting from the hard-seller stereotype to a more trusted advisor.
- Brian Halligan CEO HubSpot
In this chart series, I will breakdown the HubSpot 'State of Inbound 2017' report for all your sales and marketing needs - taking you through section by section and breaking down its results.
The 10 areas that will be covered are:
Top business priorities
Inbound marketing priorities and challenges
Sales priorities and challenges
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How you can get more bang for your buck on Google shopping
The truth is competing in Google Shopping is hard, but if you are a retailer it is fundamental to success online, considering that more advertising spend is now spent on Google Shopping than Google Search in the USA.
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There are 7 main strategies that you can implement to maximize your success on Google Shopping.
First, segment your campaigns by branded and non- branded search queries. You will find that performance will vary considerably between the two so it's important to change your bids…
Are your video ads optimized to their full potential to improve audience watch time and engagement rates?
If no was your answer, then this is the article for you!
It's easy to get lost or confused in the array of technology that is now readily available for marketing your brand or product online. The benefits of video marketing can provide effective ways to advertise your product - with your creatively the only limit to success.
But how can I improve my video ad performance?
There are three key processes that help optimize video ad performance. Video ads now exist as a powerful marketing medium that maintains double digit growth at ever increasing accessibility and availability. Still, marketers often do not seem to leverage its full potential. Let's look at some ways of achieving this without breaking the bank.
1. Focus on the Right Metrics
As much as 70% of marketers say that video performs better…
5 sources and a process to help identify a penalty which reduces yours organic search traffic
Given the importance of organic search to many businesses, keeping on top of the latest ranking factors for SEO and, in particular, the changes to Google's ranking algorithms and webspam penalties, is a major concern for most businesses and a full-time job for many today.
If it's not your full-time job, discovering about a penalty will be a nasty shock and the names of the different webspam penalties can be confusing. To help keep marketers up-to-date with the changes that matter, we regularly update our 7 Steps guides summarising the latest changes and in this post we recommend 5 sources and a process shown in an infographic.
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Marketing your restaurant is a mobile game.
The emergence of the smartphone has created a culture of connectivity. With 77% of U.S. adults population carrying around smartphones to stay connected, it makes sense that your restaurant follows suit with the big names to capitalize on this growing need to know.
If you look around at what many restaurants are trying, you will see many innovative and forward-thinking strategies that are yielding some great success. Today there are a number of ready-made app solutions that provide access to many of these features being used by the big names.
The rise of app builders now allows you to implement the same strategies used by large chains without all the necessary developer fees.
You can easily borrow some of the thinking behind the success of these big brands and develop your own mobile strategy based on what's working.
As a small business or even a string of…
At the tender age of 20 I started my digital agency Optix Solutions. 18 years on we are still going and employ almost 20 staff. Here are 5 useful tips if you're thinking of starting your own business.
At 38 and as a relative old timer of the industry, I thought it would be useful to tell my story. Hopefully I can inspire the next generation because although the internet might have changed dramatically in the time I've been going, good old common sense business fundamentals haven't.
When I started my agency back in 1999 Google and Ebay were both in a garage somewhere. Many companies didn't have websites so my job was to persuade them this Internet thing was worth investing in! 18 years on and its a little different! In that time we went through the dot com bubble bursting, the birth of ecommerce,…
Social Media Essentials: Friendless news feeds, instant article analytics, and WhatsApp hits a milestone
Welcome to our weekly summary of what's happened in social media this week. We highlight the top stories to help you stay up to date with social media, here is what caught our attention this week.
Spotlight Story: Google's friendless news feed
Google has just rolled out its own take on the news feed. They have designed a personalized stream of articles and videos based on our choices, searches, and past behavior online. In December 2016 Google launched an update to its app which included two sections:
'A feed that keeps you current on your interests like sports, news, and entertainment, and a section for your upcoming personal info, like flights, appointments and more.'
Google's news feed combines the most important news stories of the day with topics you’ve previously searched. What makes this feed different is you don't…
Chart of the day: Research shows the power of email marketing to encourage return visits
Much of the insight about how our audiences interact with us online relates to acquisition channels and conversion to sale. So, I was interested to see this research from Ecommerce personalisation platform provider Monetate which shows returning visitor behaviour related to channels.
It prompts us to evaluate returning visitor rates and their impact on sales and how we can influence them through communications using different channels. This curve shows an interesting behavioural trait where most visitors return within a short period of a week or so (if they are going to return), but others do return.
What are the implications? Monetate conclude with this takeaway:
While outreach tactics, such as targeted emails, should be concentrated within that one-week window, there’s plenty of opportunity to re-engage shoppers after that one-week window: Nearly…
Unleashing the potential of user-generated content from brands
For digitally savvy consumers, traditional ads just aren’t cutting it. Instead, consumers are looking for “social proof.” And they’re turning to their fellow consumers on social media and blogs to establish whether you have it
Dimensional Research found that 90 percent of consumers claim positive online reviews influence their purchasing decisions, while another 86 percent say the same about negative online reviews. And when those recommendations come from social media influencers, they hold even more weight. Approximately 40 percent of consumers purchase products after seeing an influencer endorse them on social sites, perhaps because over three-quarters of consumers find this kind of content more honest than advertisements.
This user-generated content is at the foundation of social proof, and it can be anything from social media posts to Yelp reviews to comments in relevant discussion forums (Quora and Reddit have amazing SEO across a breadth of topics).…
Google introduces a news stream personalized to your interests and Google searches
Google has just rolled out its latest take on the news feed for its mobile app. They have designed a personalized stream of articles and videos based on our choices, searches, and past behavior online. In December 2016 Google launched an update to its app which included two sections:
'A feed that keeps you current on your interests like sports, news, and entertainment, and a section for your upcoming personal info, like flights, appointments and more.'
Google's news feed combines the most important news stories of the day with topics you’ve previously searched. What makes this feed different is you don't need to 'friend' anyone, like posts or scroll through endless pictures of babies and ridiculous memes. Instead, Google is allowing you to discover, explore and stay connected to what matters to you.
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