How to get ahead of the ecommerce competition by keyword research, referral marketing, competitor analysis and viral marketing
In this post, we'll outline 4 marketing growth hacks to help ecommerce business, the tools to achieve this and how to use them.
1. Keyword Research
Knowing better keywords to target is one way to achieve growth successfully. When you run keyword research there are a lot of words that’ll show up on the results, but not all of them will be a good choice for your niche, so you have to aim for the right one. Having the right keywords in your SEO strategy will give you better content and a high(er) chance to rank in search. Targeting the keywords your potential audience use to find you and your content will make you easier to find. But take note that that is not enough to rank, in other SERPs there are chances…
Chart of the day: PDFs are the best content type for attracting sign-ups on a landing page.
Participants were randomly assigned in an experiment by ConversionXL. The team then even did a complicated ANOVA (analysis of variance), but in brief: PDF, followed by web content is the best content formats when also compared with video, for attracting sign-ups.
Why? I can assume that although people don't mind watching videos, there is a scramble for the headphones on the office, or simply people would prefer to read something, in their own time. Here at Smart Insights, we host PDF resources and web-hosted resources, which you can read directly from our site, so as the person responsible for member content alongside our very own Dave Chaffey, I was very interested in this research.
What did ConversionXL conclude? They concluded that PDF's and web content convert much more…
Review your approach to email marketing by reviewing the latest trends
Email marketing is THE evergreen channel which is usually so effective in many sectors that is usually in the top 3 most effective channels driving website visits leads and sales. So, it's important each year to assess new email marketing techniques and the email capabilities you are exploiting.
Drilling down into your own data, and analysing it as a team, can help you get to grips with what you need to refine in 2018. But, sometimes, you need to take a breather from all that analysis and get some fresh perspectives.
In our email marketing trends guide, in partnership with Pure360, you get just that. Unique insights from some of the UK’s leading industry experts. Experienced views that will help you refocus your strategy and kick-start your planning.
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Learn how to craft a customer-centric email sequence that engages and converts with personalized content
Content marketing - in fact, all things content - seemed to be all the rage in 2017. Companies and agencies pushed out more emails and content than ever before. And the commentary keeps rolling in, especially from social channels. But now, what content you serve up, to whom, and when, needs to be your most pressing concern. Because while your prospects may be seeing lots of content, it may not be the right content - content that will inform, engage, invite action and ultimately lift your conversions and revenues.
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Let’s keep in mind the goals of content marketing, which are to:
Create a positive brand connection
Segment your…
The challenges marketers face overcoming the hyperbole and mysticism that surrounds machine learning and AI
The marketing industry is abuzz with talk of how marketing applications of machine learning and AI will make us more effective and change the way we do our marketing. The problem is that while we’re all keen to embrace innovation and get a competitive edge (which machine learning most definitely provides), for many of us it sounds inaccessible and beyond our typical marketing capability.
However, within the next five years, we believe machine learning will become an everyday skill that marketers will be expected to possess, built into our software and processes as standard. The challenge for marketers today is in overcoming the hyperbole and mysticism that surrounds machine learning and AI, to understand what it might mean to them.
It helps to first look at one of the main issues we marketers face - data. Too…
Chart of the Day: A survey of the effectiveness of organic and paid activities for charities including benchmarks for paid media, social media, and email marketing
This isn't brand new research, but since I know we have a fair few members who manage digital marketing for not-for-profits and charities I thought I would share it since I'm unaware of similar benchmarks in the UK. It's always useful to compare effectiveness and response of media with others in your sector and country. In this case, it's a really good report based on survey response from charities based in the US, but I think it's of wider interest.
There is a great deal of analysis in this report in individual graphs for each channel and for website conversion, but here we'll just cover the summary.
You can see that there is a useful analysis of fundraising which has a…
Examples and best practice advice on how to maximise your digital marketing reach with an integrated PPC and SEO approach.
When it comes to digital marketing, pay per click (PPC) advertising and search engine optimisation (SEO) are arguably two sides of the same coin. However, all too often companies will focus on one at the expense of the other.
At ClickThrough Marketing we provide an integrated digital marketing approach. Working with large-scale e-commerce sites, we have learnt the importance of combining PPC and SEO activities to gain greater client and market insight as well as streamline our own internal activities.
Here, we look at four ways in which PPC and SEO can work together to deliver better results across the board.
1. Finding SEO opportunities with PPC data
There are many ways in which PPC can support SEO and digital marketers should explore ways…
What is the price of love - £2.00 or £2.50?
'Roses at Triple the Price’ day is approaching. But this year, particularly for heterosexual couples, Valentine’s Day will be exceptional. 2018 marks the platinum anniversary (100 years) of women receiving the right to vote in the UK. Well, at least 8.5 million women - at the time, forty percent of the total UK adult population.
The Representation of the People Act 1918 gave men aged 21 the vote. Great Britain was still at war so as a concession, men aged 19 on active service could also vote.
Women had to be aged over 30, own a property or married to a man who was a homeowner. Alternatively, they had to be at university or previously studied at one.
If true equality would have been applied, with all women aged over 21 getting the vote, women would have become a larger [proportion] of the electorate…
While new digital marketing techniques are constantly emerging, the old standbys remain great strategies to attract new customers
People love free stuff, giveaways, and contests. Remember Warren Buffett’s $1 billion March Madness challenge? Even though the odds were abysmal (about 1 in 9.2 quintillion), more than a million people still got excited to compete.
There’s a reason why these types of contests and giveaways work so well: They build excitement and attract potential customers. If the giveaway is newsworthy (even if it’s not $1 billion-newsworthy), it still creates buzz and encourages people to share among friends.
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Social Media and Branding
Social media has the power to transform the way we connect with brands and one another.…
3 key ways to streamline your martech stack and maximize the value of your marketing toolkit
Martech is about finding the right tools to help you reach specific outcomes. Paring down to only the necessary tools will help you control your budget, extract more value from each tool, and see what you've been missing. Streamlining your tech stack starts with three steps.
It’s not always true that more options bring greater success. New advances in technology, data analytics, and marketing automation can often create the illusion that we need the latest and greatest tools and force marketers to believe they must keep adding tools to their repertoire to avoid falling behind the competition — or out of touch with customers.
But more isn’t always better. Companies often don't fully understand the capabilities of their in-house information, ending up with either extraneous marketing software or not enough. Too many or too few tools can…
