What functions will a Chief Experimental Officer need to do to run hypothesis-driven experiments?
When “growth hacking” first entered the scene, it provided a fresh, practical approach to marketing. Smart engineers coded innovative solutions that generated free viral shares. Stories about Dropbox’s storage rewards for sharing and Facebook’s famous growth team became models for companies everywhere.
Eventually, though, too many marketers trying to cook up schemes in growth hacking ruined it. Startups piled on the trend, slapped the term on everything they could, and turned growth hacking into a spam technique. Coders took shortcuts to scrape addresses and send semi-personalized emails, lowering the quality of communication and letting nontechnical users further dilute the practice. Every entrepreneur who managed to put together some funding tried to hack success to justify the last round.
Today, growth hacking is at best meaningless, and at worst, a direct disservice to growth. We have too many options, not enough…
Facebook launches one of its most impactful tools, making it a place where users can connect for help in the midst of crisis
This year we have seen a number of disasters globally from the Manchester attacks to hurricane Harvey. In response, Facebook has been developing ways to help users tell friends and family members they’re safe. Last week Facebook announced a new feature called Crisis Response, which will act as a central hub for all of Facebooks safety-related tools.
The central hub will include safety checks, a feature already available that many of us will have already seen. Safety checks allows Facebook users to tell friends and family members they’re safe during natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and other life-threatening incidents.
In February, Facebook, introduced Community Help, which allowed users to find and offer help to victims of a disaster. Providing resources such as water, food, or shelter. The feature has also been…
What works best in Digital Marketing today?
In our latest infographic, we show the importance of digital marketing to businesses today and the digital marketing techniques that marketers find most effective.
To create it, we blended the latest research from the best sources for digital marketing consumer adoption stats with the results from our latest Managing Digital Marketing 2017 report. It's structured in three parts: The Global Picture of consumer use; a review of benchmarks across the RACE customer lifecycle followed by research on the most effective techniques for managing Digital Marketing.
This research from Smart Insights in association with the TFM&A 2017 event explores approaches businesses use to plan and manage their investments in digital marketing. Findings and recommendations are grouped into 6 areas to improve the commercial contribution of their digital marketing.
Given that we're…
Chart of the day: 92% of NGO's have a Facebook page with only 39% have an Instagram profile.
According to new research recently published by Tech Report - Facebook is the most popular social media channel for global NGOs with 92% having a facebook page. Instagram, which was taken over by Facebook in 2012, only has 39% of NGOs creating a profile account.
How global NGOs use Social Media
Considering the nature of charities, it is important that their message is clearly portrayed, with many using visual content to provoke emotions and persuade their audience to donate, volunteer or spread awareness of global issues. This is why it is surprising that NGOs favour Twitter (72%) over Instagram (39%).
Other social platforms that aren't utilized by many NGOs include Google+ (28%) and Whatsapp (16%).
NGOs Social Media usage continent breakdown
A more in-depth look at…
How Personalization, Segmentation, and Optimization work together to create a seamless customer experience
There are three different levels to delivering personalized customer experiences: optimization, segmentation, and 1-to-1 personalization. Many of the ecommerce marketers we speak to are already using one or two of those approaches but haven’t considering how they relate to one another-so we developed a visual we call the Monetate Personalization Pyramid to help visualize the relationships between these three layers.
In this article, we’ll talk you through the Pyramid from the bottom up. If you want to find out more, sign up for Smart Insights and Monetate's Getting Personalisation Right: 10 Best Practices to Improve Conversion webinar.
Optimization
The base level of the pyramid is optimization. This describes the process of testing different approaches, analyzing the results to identify the top-performing design, and then implementing the winner. You'll know this…
Create a webinar email that encourages more sign-ups
When it comes to promoting your webinars, you just can’t beat email. We recently asked the live webinar audience how many pre-event promotional emails they send, and over 57% said they sent at least three. But, are they getting the most from those emails? On average, you have less than eight seconds to convince the reader that your message is worth spending time reading through all the way. How do you make those eight seconds work for you? These are the five elements of great event promotion emails:
1. Enticing subject line
Without a killer subject line, people may not even open your email. There is definitely an art and a science to crafting that killer subject line. The art lies in crafting a line that sounds cool enough to make people want to engage and read more. It should promise…
How to get the most from your social media strategy
Most marketing can be as disciplined, precise, and synchronized as Lipizzaner show horses. Social media marketing, though, is more like a Wild West rodeo.
Considering how untamed and unpredictable social media can be, it’s incredibly easy to make a misstep. It seems deceptively simple on the surface, but executing a successful social media campaign is quite complicated. Anything you might save in actual dollars is going to cost you in time.
Some of the confusion stems from companies trying to repurpose content on various channels instead of adjusting their approach for every platform. People want to be cutting-edge and present on every platform available, but they fail to understand what makes each channel unique.
Take something as simple as photographs, for example. People frequently use production shots — professional photos of items in a sterile white environment — on social channels. These photos are perfectly…
Chart of the day: Reporting the ROI of Social and Content Marketing proving difficult for marketers
As marketers we are constantly juggling more projects than seems possible at times - planning the next campaign, delivering the current one as well as all the BAU activity of Email, Automation, Social, linking with the sales team and meeting...oh the meetings. It can feel like your in a whirlwind even with the most well thought out plans but one of the most turbulent times can be when you need to report on the ROI of particular activities. How do you find the right data? Is it accurate? How should your present it? It's hard.
In a recent survey, TrackMaven asked marketers from 19 different industries what they were finding the most challenging when attempting to prove the ROI of their marketing. Of the many options, they could choose from attributing social and content to revenue leading the…
4 tips to send your email newsletter at the perfect time
One of the worst things you can do is send an e-newsletter at the wrong time.
If you do not pick a good time to fire off an email it will run the risk of being deleted rather quickly, because the other emails sent at the same time will make it fight for attention and all your hard work will be wasted.
This is why it drives me a bit crazy when people or companies send their email newsletters all at the same time. No one wants to check their phone in the morning and have 30 emails. Or be hit up with a bunch of emails during dinner time. Those emails run the risk of being sent straight to the trash.
After many months of deleting email newsletters sent at inopportune times, I knew there had to be a better way.…
If you have trouble tracking your data, here are 3 easy steps to fix your problem
If you have been diligently using Google Analytics and Adwords reports to track the performance of your ads and website to help optimize bids and increase conversion – good for you!
Yet you may see quite a bit of discrepancy in your data. Besides the frustration and confusion, it also makes you wonder whether you’re doing your tracking correctly. There are many factors that affect the consistency and accuracy of these reports, and not all of them are under our control.
However, if you dial in a few things, and get a better understanding of what these reports mean, you’ll be able to get a much clearer picture of your data.
So let’s look into what’s preventing you from accurately tracking your data, and what you…
