How to develop a marketing strategy for expanding globally
Globalisation is no longer an obscure term reserved for academics: it is a very real and ever growing phenomenon affecting most people and businesses all over the world. In the digital arena, this means that a company's website also needs to be a part of the global mix. If you'd like to focus on trading and exporting your products and services worldwide, you need to have a solid international digital marketing strategy in place.
The aim of this post is to highlight a wide range of considerations that need to be addressed in order to tailor your strategy to a global target market. The areas that will be focused on are: website design, international SEO, international PPC and international social media marketing.
International Digital Marketing Considerations
Before looking into the international best practices of each of these areas, there are some important points to bear in…
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27 Dec 2016
Are you using hashtags correctly?
The discipline of marketing is filled with jargon, especially within digital marketing where constant technological change causes prevailing shifts in the landscape. Never have there been more three letter acronyms (TLA).
The elusive ‘hashtag’ symbol, which most people know from entering conference calls, still causes confusion amongst my clients and peers when used on social media platforms. Not so much what they are but when and how to use them. The approach laid out here is by no means an all-encompassing thesis study, merely a brief attempt to demystify the matter in my own subjective opinion.
Hashtags, although used in IT since the seventies in a different context, were popularised by Twitter in the late noughties as a way of clustering similar topics into easily retrievable categories, i.e. search #summer to find all conversations categorised as a ‘summer’ topic. This enables you to join conversations on topics that…
How to boost CRO for non-ecommerce sites
When you think of Conversion Rate Optimisation and AB testing, what comes to mind first is probably ecommerce websites, product pages, baskets and checkouts.
But the scope of optimisation programs is much wider than this. We work with several brands, from car dealership groups to home improvement to charities, where the objective is to create a lead, usually via a form – the sale or activity happens in a branch, over the phone or in a customer’s home, rather than on the website.
The challenges when optimising these lead generation sites can be quite different to e-commerce. Here are some of the things we’ve learned over the years.
1. There is no such thing as ‘best practice’ in a lead generation websites
Arguably, there’s no such thing as best practice on any website, but, still, there are some conventions and expectations around checkouts and product pages that…
Creating Pricing Strategies for Different Objectives
How much does it cost?
This is one of the first questions that customers have when they see something they like, whether 'on the high street' or in an e-commerce store. That is why if there is a key decision a business has to make, it is pricing strategy. Price will define a great proportion of your attractiveness in the eyes of the customers, your revenue, and eventually your profits.
As with other marketing areas, pricing strategies have developed considerably lately. In this article we are going to give you an overview about them and in addition, some valuable insights for applying them to accomplish your objectives.
What to think about when making pricing decisions?
As an essential marketing decision, pricing affects…
How you can replicate the success of the most engaging brands on Instagram
When it comes to social media marketing, Instagram continues to be one of the most successful platforms available to brands. But with so many users and so many different brands using it, some more successfully than others, it can be difficult to stand out from the crowd. In this blog post, I’m going to share with you some of the best examples of successful brands on Instagram and what you can learn from them to improve your own Instagram presence.
Oreo: speed drawing
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Your LinkedIn and social media audience is an asset. Focus on nurturing relationships with them before you start worrying about how well you're managing your social media channels.
Between 75% and 97% of buyers are on-line, researching the type of services you provide right now and approximately 52% of them will buy something, immediately, as a result of this research. In fact, a recent study of social media demographics by author, marketer and speaker @WarrenKnight, indicates that 88% of all Pinterest users purchased a product they'd pinned. However, with many Pinterest users following big brands, it's not going to be easy for you to be included in the list of companies who benefit from this activity unless you've built and nurtured an audience.
There is a growing movement, on the web, of marketing experts, who are suggesting that even some of the most revered social…
What to avoid when looking for Ecommerce payment solutions
For most ecommerce retailers, payment gateways are seen as a necessary evil. Yes, they help you accept payments from your customers, but they’re not at the top of your list of organizations you like working with. They’ve developed a reputation of being sleazy, money-grubbing middlemen that take advantage of retailers, both big and small.
Some modern payment gateways, like Stripe, Braintree, and Sezzle, are finding ways to create more value for retailers and they’ve developed good reputations because of that. But problems remain. And if payment gateways want to shake their negative image within the e-commerce community, these are the five things they should focus on improving first.
1. They’re too expensive.
Payment gateways have long been rebuked by retailers for their high processing costs. The average rate today is 2.9% + 30c per transaction for online, or card-not-present, transactions. These costs…
Marketing Automation offers the key to effectively nurturing leads through the customer's journey
According to a research published by Smart Insights in 2016, 47% of businesses don't have a digital marketing strategy. The findings show that businesses have a big challenge structuring their digital marketing strategy and knowing where to start.
So, how about we start by laying down some of the groundwork that you need to lay down in order to create and implement aworld-class digital marketing strategy.
The strategy includes 4 key stages of the Smart Insights RACE framework - plus the initial Plan stage. Just in case you're not familiar with RACE, the stages are as follows:
1. Plan:
This stage involves creating the overall strategy with SMART goals and measurable KPIs to run your digital marketing strategy.
2. Reach:
Most customer’s journey’s begin through doing personal research instead of simply talking to a sales person. This means that providing content to feed this…
Marketing Automation works best when you are constantly innovating
You, yes you. You're that marketing manager that is using your automation platform to do all your basic tasks. But you're not using it for anything else. Why? I don't know. There are so many elements of marketing automation you could be using, I imagine you don't know where to start. So I'm going to tell you where to start.
Marketing automation isn't going to take your job anytime soon.
My favourite expression from the unaware marketer is "oh but marketing automation will put me out of a job". I can assure you, used correctly, it will not. However, if you continue to use a marketing automation platform like a brain, that is to say only use 10% of it, you could be out of a job for not producing the results you anticipated from your MA platform.
It amazed me in the recent…
Automating your marketing is key in such a busy marketing period, find out how RedEye’s Head of Future email suggests it is done
Summer is long gone and the Bank Holidays have been exhausted for the year. While ‘normal’ people start to stress about when to put their central heating back on, us marketers are in full planning and panic mode. Two key events loom before us: Black Friday Weekend, and of course the run up to Christmas. It’s all become rather stressful.
With more and more focus on the few weekends left of the year before sales season takes over, it’s more crucial than ever for brands to implement perfectly executed, strategic marketing experiences for shoppers on the approach to Christmas. Brands are not only at war with their competitors, but with the expectations from previous years’ performances and their customer’s expectations (all searching for the next big bargain).
Take a little…
