Higher visibility into your attribution model means sales will trust the metrics more

Is your marketing team celebrating their awesome quarter while your sales team suffers poor performance? This is usually due to a sales vs marketing attribution mismatch, particularly when marketing and sales are seen as two different entities.

Ultimately this who-gets-credit-for-this-sale struggle is getting pretty old - it’s been around for as long as sales and marketing teams have collaborated together. Could it be that a data blackbox is the root of your problem?

Calculating whether a lead was sales or marketing generated can be a pretty complicated calculation, particularly in complex B2B buying cycles where multiple teams are involved. Adroll has a good example here. Due to this complexity, sales leaders tend to distrust the data given to them by marketers and fall back to pointing fingers when things don’t…

If you have used JavaScript for your website, it is important to remember that it can thwart your intentions by preventing your site from getting indexed on Google

Just launched a dynamic website? Kudos to you! It could be your best sales move yet, presenting your best face to online prospects and convincing them to buy into your story. But if you have used JavaScript for your website, it is important to remember that it can thwart your intentions by preventing your site, or at least a part of it, from getting indexed on Google and other search engines, thus stopping it from appearing in the search results. How will your prospects visit your website if it’s nowhere in the search results? That’s why you need to ensure that your use of JavaScript isn’t impeding your SEO. But before you start asking how to do that,…

To sell products online, your e-commerce website content needs to be persuasive. Here are three metrics to measure whether it is.

We all want to be persuasive, don’t we? To influence others, to get stuff done. Most of us readily use all the tactics in our toolkit: smiling, quickly building rapport, and, over time, earning all-important trust. Then we leverage this ‘relationship equity’ to get what we want (or not). In the e-commerce selling realm, persuasiveness — not just content — is king. To crown our site a UX king we need to a) first track how persuasive our site is, and then b) employ new tactics that we hope will increase, or lift, this persuasiveness. [si_guide_block id="20212" title="Download our Individual Member Resource – E-commerce success mapping" description="This template introduces an analytical approach which we think is particularly useful for improving results from e-commerce site marketing but can be applied to other types…

Social media graphics are actually very easy to create – you just a need a little inspiration, a good source of images and a handy tool to help you turn your ideas into reality

If you’ve spent even a few minutes on social media, one thing becomes clear: people love visuals. Visual content gets more shares and greater engagement – in other words, it gets noticed and it gets people to act, whether it’s to share your post, leave a comment or click on a link. But what happens if you’re not a designer? How do you create as many social media graphics as you need to without spending a fortune? Social media graphics are actually very easy to create – you just a need a little inspiration, a good source of images and a handy tool to help you turn your ideas into reality. [si_guide_block id="82119" title="Download our Premium Resource – 10 common…

Should you invest resources and budget to attract new customers on Black Friday?

Acquiring a new customer is up to seven times more expensive than keeping an existing one. You’ve likely heard the stat quoted before and it should hopefully have resonated. But have you done anything tangible to address it? Perhaps you have, but traditionally acquisition is prioritized over retention. We put more budget, resource and scrutiny on how we attract new customers. 72% of small businesses say that they put the majority of their marketing budget on acquisition. So only 28% are spending more on retention despite it being more cost-effective. Who can really blame the 72%? Acquisition is often viewed as the major lever for growth but the numbers may suggest otherwise. [si_blog_banner_cta] According to Bain and co, a 5% increase in customer retention could increase profitability by up to 75%. Impressive right?…

86% of consumers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience, so exactly how do you go about offering them one?

Did you know that customer experience (CX) is surpassing price and product as the major brand differentiator? For many consumers, customer service and customer experience are seen as one in the same. However, customer service and experience differ just a bit. Service is a single touchpoint with a brand, while experience impacts all of the feelings and emotions associated with a brand. [si_guide_block id="86160" title="Download our Free Resource – 10 common website customer experience mistakes" description="This guide reveals examples of poor website design from different sectors which are commonly seen, but best avoided."/] 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for better customer experience. It was also recently found in a study by the Temkin Group that billion dollar a year companies who…

Practical steps and tactics to set leaders and employees up for success

The concept of employee motivation is something that organizational development professionals have been thinking about and researching for decades. Where once money and other tangible rewards were considered to be the primary ways to motivate staff, there’s since been a move towards more intrinsic rewards, such as flexible working and professional development. In 2010’s ‘Drive’, Dan Pink eloquently outlined three key factors that influence motivation: [caption id="attachment_145701" align="aligncenter" width="916"] [Image Source][/caption]Over the last few years, I’ve seen and experienced a tangible increase in the word ‘autonomy’ and other related terms and synonyms. It feels as though organizations have developed a renewed sense of duty to remind employees that they can and should be autonomous within their roles and it’s something I’d like to…

Marketers should look to form more diverse, holistic strategies capable of operating on their own schedules rather than being subject to Google's short-term outages, bugs, and penalties

For SEO marketers, Google is an unpredictable ecosystem. One day, the sun is shining and you’re basking in its favour. The next, a hurricane hits and your carefully crafted content flies out the window and is nowhere to be found. Rumours of indexing issues are at the heart of the latest troubles. Google has admitted a certain amount of delay in indexing and displaying new content, but the extent of the current problem is a mystery at best — just like a lot of Google’s behind-the-scenes activity. [si_guide_block id="122303" title="Download our Business Resource – Omnichannel marketing planning guide" description="Our omnichannel planning guide will outline the differences between omni and multichannel marketing and then help you create a strategy and roadmap for achieving your own…

An Instagram post's success is due to more than just the image you use, you need to consider a range of other factors to get your posts performing well

As a social media manager or digital marketing specialist, you want to be able to create the best Instagram post possible in order to entice your audience to buy from you and choose your brand over the competition. You need to look at all the elements and Instagram features that an audience responds best to. That’s exactly what a new study about Instagram content engagement set up to do. During this extensive study, over 7.4 million posts on Instagram were stripped apart and analyzed element by element, with the sole goal being to find the recipe for creating successful and engaging posts on this platform. [si_guide_block id="90264" title=“Access our Quick Win – How to optimize Instagram marketing" description="This Quick Win will…

If you can understand what search engines are looking for, you'll be able to ensure they identify your target topics and rank your copy for the most appropriate search terms

Entity salience is a technical topic with significant implications for the way that search engines understand content. When discussed in the context of SEO, it refers to the process by which Google makes use of machine learning to predict what a human reader will see as the most important things mentioned in a text. If those of us working in SEO and copywriting can understand what search engines are looking for, we will be better able to ensure they identify our target topics and rank our copy for the most appropriate search terms. [si_guide_block id="134895" title="Download our Individual Member Resource – SEO report template" description="This SEO report template created in PowerPoint gives you a simple structure to follow when conducting your own monthly…