Chart of the day: New research highlights the top marketing skills for career progression

This research is from a report which is a collaboration between Smart Insights and The IDM. Its goal was to help marketers understand the skills needed to improve in their careers and to help employers understand the range of skills they need to develop. Respondents include Smart Insights members, thanks if you took part! This first chart shows the importance based on time spent on current activities by marketers. It shows the wide range of skills needed and highlights the need for marketers looking for new jobs to demonstrate planning, data analysis and project management skills. The second chart is more useful since it highlights the skills gap, comparing the skills that marketers have now against those they aspire to develop in the future. …

The average CPC paid by Google search advertisers for keywords that included their own brand name rose 30% Y/Y in Q2 2018 whilst desktop organic search visits fell 5%

Benchmarking company performance against goals and competitors is vital in understanding your current cut-through in digital, market share and potential revenue losses. It also helps identify opportunities in digital and set a KPI driven 90-day digital marketing strategy or campaign to improve current performance and achieve digital excellence. New research from Merkle's Digital Marketing Report Q2 2018 shows benchmarks for paid and organic search and social media reach, click through and cost. We've summarised the most important (and surprising) statistics below:

Paid search benchmarks 2018

  The use of Google Shopping ads for ecommerce and online retailers is vital. Shopping ads expose your brand's products in a visual element on SERPs, which includes brand name and pricing. Google shopping ads…

Managing the changes brought about by AI applications is the next big challenge for marketers

Artificial intelligence applications are already becoming a mainstay within marketing teams across the globe. With pickup levels of AI marketing initiatives already much higher than you might think. From interviews with 100 senior marketers from a wide range of industries, we found that 55% of companies are either currently implementing or actively investigating some form of AI initiative within their marketing practices. Meaning, AI is already shaking things up in the industry. Unsurprisingly, this inevitable rise of AI technologies in marketing is causing a major shift in the way companies work. With more and more companies looking to adopt a data-centric approach to meet the demand for more effective digital marketing. Nonetheless, there remains to be a clear consensus on the extent of the changes that AI will bring to marketing. Leaving many companies and marketers in the dark…

Learn the value of chat interactions for your business

Here’s the first thing to know about chat, and online communication in general: direct, real-time human interaction improves brand engagement. Granted, people who know the exact product or service they want don’t need help. But these people are the minority. Most people either need considerable help or want ‘just in time’ assistance - the answer to a quick question or concern that, once addressed, will increase their confidence and likelihood to buy. A second reason why having chat is essential in an e-commerce context: chat usage lifts conversions and revenues. In my experience consulting on over a dozen mid-sized and larger e-commerce websites that do and don’t offer chat, I’ve found that visitors who chatted converted at roughly 12 - 15%, while visitors didn’t chat converted in the 1.5 - 2.0% range. That’s roughly an 8X increase,…

Find out the most effective steps that will help you grow your company and generate leads

With software development setting records every year, it is easy to see why SaaS presents a lucrative opportunity for entrepreneurs. But like in every other business, you need to have a sound plan if you want to grow. Luckily, new technologies allow for the creation of new software and enable companies in this niche to grow more rapidly. So, what are the marketing strategies that can help your SaaS business get the most out of its lead generation efforts? Take a look at our tips below. [si_guide_block id="5676" title="Download FREE Resource – Digital marketing plan template" description="Our popular marketing planning template built on the Smart Insights RACE planning system."/]

Content marketing

Everybody knows that content is the king. If that is so, why wouldn’t you use his majesty to attract more visitors to your website? The thing with content…

Chart of the Day: Brands and Agencies Struggle to Trust AI with Budget Allocation

Business success demands a balanced approach when it comes to decision making – objective analysis and subjective experience. Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the hottest tools to improve the scale and quality of our data analysis, but research from Albert Technologies has shed light on what tasks marketers are having difficulty letting go of. Polling brand and agency marketers on their adoption of AI, both groups agreed that budget allocation was one of their hardest tasks to relinquish. Brand marketers had the most difficulty handing over campaign analysis, while agency marketers wanted to hold on to their audience segmentation. These attitudes may be the result of AI systems having varied levels of automation. Marketers are likely more open to systems they can use to improve their analysis…

Every blogger wants one thing more than anything: more traffic

In order to increase your traffic and keep growing, you need to get creative and you need to leverage a lot of different platforms and channels. There is a lot of competition when it comes to content, so in order to stand out and reach your audience, you don’t just need quality, but also a strong promotional strategy. In my latest Quick Win for Smart Insights, I show you how you can build such a strategy by listing all of the main methods of promoting a blog. You’ll get to learn: The top free ways of promoting your blog, such as social media strategies and how to maximise your traffic from social media, search engine optimisation tips, and other effective free tactics The top paid ways of promoting a blog, including PPC ads, social media ads, content syndication platforms, and more …

Chart of the Day: How do your Adwords campaigns compare?

Do you know what a top-performing AdWords campaign looks like? The new Paid Search Benchmark 2018 report by Adthena is a useful compilation of ad spend and performance, cost and competition and competitive diversity across the UK, US, and Australian paid search landscape.

Access the full Paid Search Benchmark 2018 report.

This report benchmarks ad spend and performance in search, and encompasses data from over 140 million paid search ads, 135,000 advertisers, and 5.6 million search terms in the US, UK, and Australia, revealing global search trends and category-specific insights.

Mobile vs Desktop average CTR

Knowing what device your potential audience is using for their search query is important. you need to make sure your desired landing pages are optimized for mobile use (not that it shouldn't be anyway), but if you're paying for a user's click you want to be getting their…

3 Keys to creating a really effective call to action

The call to action, or CTA, is the darling of the digital scene, a must-have for marketers in every webpage or piece of content. But don’t be distracted by their trendiness; CTAs are far from new...

A CTA is simply another way to express an age-old marketing question: "What do we want our target audience to do?” In turn, CTAs are only the latest iteration of the many techniques used to transform customers from strangers into friends.

[si_guide_block id="74453" title="Growth hacking guide" description="How to start and sustain a more agile approach to grow your business and optimise your online marketing"/]

While we've been making CTAs for centuries, that doesn’t mean they are a walk in the park. Many business owners and brand designers trip up when they try to turn their beautifully crafted websites into tools that actually…

Improve your skills to become a 'T-shaped Marketer' via these free online courses and tutorials

When we look at where to focus our free blog content at Smart Insights, our main aim or filter we use is that the content must help digital marketers plan, manage and optimize their business results or improve their digital skills. This is also what our member content, in our guides focuses on too - starting with digital strategies and planning templates then more specialized marketing tactics like email marketing, social media, SEO, video and many more digital skills. [si_quick_block id="117459" title="Marketing careers and skills development workbook" description="Tools and techniques to give you clarity on your future path, skills development and position yourself to attract the employers you want to work for."] Of course, there is a lot of great free, structured online courses around developing digital skills, so we thought it would help to share our thoughts…