Review your digital skills to get tailored recommendations to improve your marketing skills and business results
We are constantly updating content, improving the quality of our site for members and bringing new guides and tools to help your marketing needs.
We have recently updated our capability grader, which allows you to rate and score your company's digital marketing strategy and planning ability via the RACE framework. Today, we have also launched the companion Personalized Learning Plan which will assess your personal digital marketing skills. and is available to all members, from free to premium.
This new feature is available to all Smart Insights members. Be one of the first to get your Personalized Learning Plan.
What is the purpose of the Personalized Learning Plan
Our new tool enables you to:
Do a quick self-assessment of your skills across 25 key digital marketing activities marketing defined in…
What does your email font say about your brand?
No email marketer EVER says, “I am happy with my email design and the ROI it brings.” Because the day you say so, you stop being successful. From start to eternity (and even beyond) email marketers are in constant search for something new to delight their subscribers.
Right from experimenting with an embedded video to including certain interactive elements, email marketers are looking for the next best thing. But in the quest for finding the “next best thing”, most email marketers oversee the potential of experimenting with colors and fonts or say typography in emails.
How Fonts Can Affect Email Engagement – An Analysis
An email is made up of basically a header image, email copy, and footer. So in short, a combination (and appropriate placement) of colors, text, and images make an email interesting. While colors are based on the brand personality,…
Chart of the Day: Millennials (18-34 year olds) utilize a greater range of channels before purchasing products online than Gen-X and Baby Boomers
As consumers, we are more savvy with our purchases that ever before. By the time we have finally decided to buy a particular product we will have spent a good chunk of time researching our options to try and find the best deal we can for the product that suits our needs.
In research conducted by Salesforce surveying 4,000 consumers across the UK, USA and Canada, it was found that while the respondents spent most of their time researching on the internet before purchasing online they also spent a significant amount of time using multiple channels including email, in person, on mobile apps and more.
Interestingly, there are significant differences between the behavior of millennials, Gen-X and Baby Bloomers. Millennials seems to not favor a particular channel after using websites with…
Plus examples of what make an effective explainer video
Oscar Wilde used to say that experience is the name we give to our mistakes. However, you don’t need to be as seasoned as good ol’ Oscar to know that. When it comes to video marketing, you can’t afford to make those mistakes in the first place. Especially when it comes to creating explainer videos.
Developing explainer videos capable of summing up who you are in under 90 secs can be truly challenging. You can’t go into it blindfolded and full-out swinging – you need to have some certainties from the get go.
But before diving into the specifics and giving you some much-needed insight on the things that you should never do, there’s a question that perhaps you might be asking yourself right now:
Where exactly do explainer videos fit into my marketing strategy?
Well,…
Do you work in SEO? This infographic maps out the skills you need to develop
SEO combines such a huge range of skills it is tricky to know where to start when looking to enhance your abilities. For those people looking to make a career in SEO, they need to make sure they're covering all bases and not neglecting any areas of their skills. If they focus entirely on outreach, they might lose some of their technical expertise, whilst if they do nothing but look at analytics all day they won't be building links.
If you're looking to move up the career ladder an exec to a manager to a departmental head, then check out this infographic to see what skills you'll need to focus on most at different stages.
If you're interested in developing your digital skills more broadly, did you know we have a free research report on digital marketing…
Social Media Essentials: 5 updates to inform your social media strategy
It has been an exciting week in social media, we have seen Prince George trending on Twitter as Britain followed him on his first day at school, YouTube update their look, LinkedIn have a useful salary comparison tool and Facebook is finally looking to merge Instagram stories with Facebook stories. Check out these 5 social media updates that could help inform your own social media strategy.
1. Spotlight story: Instagram Stories hits desktop
Instagram Stories have announced they will now allow desktop web users to view Stories, and will soon allow you to post to Stories too. Instagram has already copied all of Snapchats' best bits and has now taken it one step further offering something Snapchat can't.
Similar to the mobile version, Instagram explains that you’ll see stories at the top of your feed, and you can tap to watch them. To skip…
How to effectively use hashtags on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram
Hashtags, you either love them or hate them. Having become part of our culture, we use them every day on social media. As more social platforms use hashtags it has become confusing on how and when to use them.
In this post, we are going to look at how many hashtags you should be using and which ones are best to help you expand your reach beyond your followers.
What is a hashtag?
Firstly let's look at what a hashtag actually is. The correct definition of a hashtag according to the Oxford dictionary is:
'A word or phrase preceded by a hash sign (#), used on social media websites and applications, especially Twitter, to identify messages on a specific topic'.
The evolution of the hashtag in marketing started in 2007 when Twitter used them to categorize discussed topics. Now, Hashtags are used worldwide making it…
How B2B marketers can deliver compelling content journeys to keep a buyer's attention
Did you know 775,000,000 customers visited an IKEA store last year?
How can we take the success of IKEA and their journey through home decor and meatballs and apply this to B2B content marketing? Easy - think about everything IKEA do right and apply it in your own unique way!
For instance, consider these key approaches to B2B content marketing from IKEA's layout:
Package related assets together
Let prospects preview content before filling in a form
Provide a one-way logical pathway (this allows more time, and money, spent on your product/service)
Ikea's floor arrows direct you in your shopping journey, B2B marketers need to consider the sequencing flow and whether content (products) are aligned with the buying journey.
And, as a modern marketer, you rely on content to fuel your funnel and generate qualified demand. But what if you could turn…
Which tools and sites do you use to keep up with digital marketing?
The idea for our new guide for marketing agencies ‘keeping up with digital’ came from a conversation that the Smart Insights team and I had earlier this year - around how agencies often struggle to ‘encode’ a way of refreshing their digital knowledge within the business.
Agencies that I speak to or work with will often say that they know that staying on top of all the opportunities that new or evolved digital technologies, platforms, media, techniques - and more - can help them and their clients.
It’s a ’good thing’ to do.
But they find it hard to put a structured approach to that together. Hence the guide.
As we worked on the new resource we realised that many of the most useful digital marketing sites and tools that we recommend are also relevant for other types of marketing…
Chart of the Day: Do you need a separate, defined digital marketing plan or should it be integrated with your marketing strategy?
In 2017 you will often hear that we live and work in a post-digital world. That is to say since consumers naturally use a mix of traditional and digital media, as businesses, we shouldn't treat digital media and communications separately from other media and they should be integrated.
'Post-digital' is a compelling idea and I certainly believe that integration of digital activities into all marketing activities is essential, but what is the reality in businesses?
Our recently published research report Managing Digital Marketing in 2017 in collaboration with Technology for Marketing 2017 (where we'll be exhibiting and I'll be speaking on the 27th and 28th of September), shows an interesting pattern of how businesses manage digital marketing through a planned approach:
The green sector…
