Marketing can suffer from a lack of flow, especially when it's interruptive in nature, but the results are impressive when the two concepts come together
As a self-confessed app junkie who automates everything possible, it’s safe to say I’m a fan of things like web personalization and marketing automation. When lead scoring, triggered emails, personalized experiences, reusable nurtures, multiplatform integration, and analytics come together to form a holistic strategy, that brand of beautiful synergy gets me excited.
All this automation doesn’t come without a cost, however. Automated engagement strategies focus primarily on email, which has inherent flaws. Email can be a highly effective channel, but it's not without its shortcomings. Those who do agree to exchange their email address for something of value don’t always see, open, or click the content they receive.
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Chart of the day: Customer Experience is the main focus for brand marketers looking to strengthen their brand marketing strategy for 2018
Branding has always been a hot topic of discussion amongst marketers, as there seem to be a number of different definitions and purposes of brand marketing that marketers can adhere to. Years ago, branding could simply be pinned down to defining a set logo, slogan, colour palette etc. However, in today’s day and age, branding has become a tad bit more complicated.
Branding can be that ‘feel-good’ emotion that your customer experience when they hear your brand name, it can be the feeling that makes them associate to your brand identity and the perception that customers get, when they see your brand.
Every year, the focus of branding and brand marketers keeps shifting, given the top marketing trends of the year and the latest developments in technology. A recent chart from…
If recent trends like “conversational marketing” and “social selling” have anything to teach us, it’s that social media has matured a great deal as a pure prospecting platform since its early days
Not to imply that anyone has truly reinvented the wheel here. For the most part, brands on social media have always used it as a means for finding and educating prospects, raising brand awareness and building communities of fans.
On the other hand, B2B marketers’ objectives in general, and on social media specifically, have been evolving.
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Bizible’s most recent State of Pipeline Marketing Report demonstrates that instead of prioritizing demand and lead…
Deciding on analogue vs digital is a crucial step in the ABM process
Although it’s a key phrase on the lips of many a Martech professional in Silicon Valley these days, account-based marketing (ABM) hasn’t always been about technology.
In its purest form, ABM is a strategy at the business marketing level - it’s about identifying the big white whales you want to snare, and investing time, money and effort into doing that, rather than casting a wider net for the minnows. In the past, it’s been largely thinking about selling to companies as a market of one.
However, the innovations of the last decade or so around IP-to-company matching, automation and retargeting, led by the likes of Kickfire, Demandbase and Terminus, have made the conversation about ABM very much one about technology.
As we know, technology is often about making things easier to do at scale. Enter “ABM at scale”.
Now that ABM is…
Benchmark your B2B lead gen activities against new research, which shows lead quality is the most prominent challenge for businesses
The State of B2B Lead Generation, a new report by Digital Doughnut, shines a light on the pain points of lead generation campaigns, helping to benchmark your activities in order to succeed.
Before taking a look at the performance of content types, it's vital to understand the maturity of your B2B lead gen campaigns.
1,042 marketers were asked to rate the maturity of different lead generation activities. 54% were confident in their capabilities stating that their content production and development was either "very advanced" or "quite advanced"."Very basic" activities include data verification and validation, measuring ROI and transferring data between CRMs.
The data shows that businesses still struggle with advanced lead gen activities. Not utilizing the opportunities available to you leads to…
80% of retailers have a welcome programme in place. So, is having the ability to push an email message to your subscriber (prospect) valuable or not?
Holistic Marketing recently analysed 80 retailers signup processes and what amazed me the most was how 87% of retailers have their subscribe below the fold, invisible to all, with the exception of those who are determined to work hard and find it.
Yet, 80% of retailers have a welcome programme in place. So, is having the ability to push an email message to your subscriber (prospect) valuable or not? It would appear that the website team says no, and the email teams say yes.
The problem, I believe is due to a disconnect between two teams and what they’re rewarded on. The email marketer fully understands the value of a subscriber, and indeed the value of a ‘new’ subscriber, who is eagerly opening, clicking and converting,…
Key steps and best practices to win with Amazon - digital advertising
In the previous post in this series (key steps and best practises to win with Amazon - Ecommerce) we looked at the exponential growth of Amazon and the share of mind it has gained globally over the last ten years, surpassing many older, more established brands with an unwavering focus on innovation and the customer experience.
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Amazon’s drive to become the ‘everything store’ has led the company to move into many new and different areas, including technology, original content and web services (BBC iPlayer and even Netflix run on Amazon!). Whilst Amazon is more widely known as an ecommerce platform, the company’s move into media and its burgeoning advertising business is starting to cause tremors…
Chart of the day: On Wednesday and Thursday last week, myself and Dave Chaffey presented at B2B Marketing Expo, In ExCel, London about auditing your Martech stack - and now new research has found that most think their marketing technology strategy is successful
Most believe their strategy is successful based on how they achieve their priorities in using martech, but there are significant challenges with data and integration across different platforms, as well as issues with getting relevant and reliable data. This could be due to a number of reasons such as a complexity of data as well as lack of training, skills, resource or time to help with these challenges.
Improving data quality is also an issue for marketers as they strive for better data and more accurate targeting.
Over half are also working on…
Are you following these simple long-tail keyword research steps to improve your SEO?
Long-tail keyword research is fundamental to SEO. It has become a focus for achieving high rankings on google search and when strategized and executed carefully, it can produce very rewarding results.
Why are Long-tail Keywords Important?
A long-tail keyword is descriptive in nature and normally consists of three or more words.
More descriptive phrases are low in cost and risk, yet offer a higher probability of conversion. And, as much as 40% of all search traffic on the internet is driven by long-tail keywords.
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Chart of the Day: Social network popularity based on share of social media minutes
You will have noticed that Facebook isn't getting the best press at the moment with the latest lack of data privacy revelations... This is on top of the latest statistics showing that Facebook usage is declining in younger audiences according to eMarketer. This raises the question for marketers that if Facebook is declining in popularity in younger age groups, are there other social networks that warrant more attention?
The latest insight from the comScore panel in their 2018 Global Digital Future in Focus comparing the overall popularity of social networks by share of time (for December 2017), suggests the options.
Most popular social networks based on share of minutes
You can see this is a sea of Facebook blue, so this shows that despite the negative media hype…
