Marketing strategy can use privacy as a strength, not a weakness

There has been a lot of controversy about data and privacy for businesses and consumers alike in 2018.This has been highlighted by the introduction of GDPR in the EU on May 25th, which has heightened consumers’ concerns about privacy. When you look at recent incidents such as Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, companies have been alerted to ensuring that regulations are met and revenue is not affected. In this article, I’m going to look at ways that businesses can see data privacy regulations as a marketing tool. I’ll include good and bad examples to help drive some points home. [si_guide_block id="37500" title="Download Premium Resource – Managing Customer Data to Improve Marketing ROI" description="Improve marketing data management to compete through insight"/]

Let’s look at an example of where the response to privacy by marketing, perhaps goes too far,…

What makes a successful blog? If you think the answer is number of views, you may or may not be right

Some blogs are there to convert, others to promote awareness and some are there to encourage conversation. Regardless of what your metrics are for judging a blog’s success, one thing is for sure, you always strive to improve your performance. Majority of bloggers and marketers are judging a blog post on an individual level. While it does provide information on best and worst performing blogs it does very little in informing your strategy going forward. [si_guide_block id="85104" title="Download FREE Resource – Top 10 common content marketing mistakes" description="Grow your audience and build interest and leads by avoiding these common mistakes. With so much content being produced, it's important your content marketing strategy cuts through. Our content marketing mistakes guide reveals the most common mistakes, but more importantly what to…

Here are some SEO Tactics that will be sure to help improve your ranking

Broadly, SEO is any activity that helps you improve your ranking on search engines such as Google, Bing, and others. With 3.9 billion internet users and over 3.3 billion searches being performed each day, securing a good rank isn’t easy. And that’s exactly why SEO techniques are so important for businesses. [si_guide_block id="80207" title="Download FREE Resource – 10 business-limiting SEO mistakes " description="The search engine optimisation (SEO) mistakes to avoid and what to do instead. Google's engineers have said there are at least 200 'ranking signals' which affect whether you can rank above your competitors or not for searches which will bring you new business. To make SEO even more challenging, many of them change frequently in Google's algorithm updates. So, it can be really tough…

Many marketers and businesses don’t really put together a detailed strategy to outline their blogging objectives

Content marketing is well-known as one of the most effective forms of business promotion; and out of all content marketing tactics, blogging is arguably the best-performing and most cost-effective tactic. In my latest Quick Win for Smart Insights, I show you how to develop a blogging strategy from start to finish. You’ll learn: Why blogging is such an effective form of content marketing How to set quality objectives for your blogging strategy How to perform content and keyword research to improve your content How to put together an editorial calendar and come up with great headlines and topics for your blog How to create a promotional strategy for your blog to improve your overall results As well as how to measure your results from blogging so you can improve your blogging strategy and…

Are you using YouTube to market your business?

As one of the biggest search engines in the world and the second biggest website in the world, it’s definitely the place to be. A YouTube channel can help you reach a much wider audience, generate more traffic, more engagement, and more leads and conversions.

So since we’re in the age of video marketing right now, here’s how to become a better YouTube marketer:

Start by developing a schedule

Consistency is always important in content marketing, but it’s really important with YouTube marketing. If you’re posting a video now, another one in a month, the third after another couple of months and so on, you won’t be able to get very far or get subscribers or traffic.

The first step in building a successful YouTube channel is a posting schedule; determine a realistic frequency and plan your content ahead…

9 Tools You Can Use to Spy on Your Competitors

Businesses that focus on their target audiences, ideal buyer personas and customer pain points are ahead of the marketing game. But they’re still missing a crucial step to success. Failing to thoroughly investigate what your competition is doing - and how they’re doing it - can leave you in the dark and in a permanent state of second place. Fortunately, it’s not difficult to spy on your competitors. Simply studying their websites can give insights into what they’re doing right and wrong, and what you can do better. Take it a step further, and go deep into your competitor analysis by searching for their backlinks, studying their email marketing funnels and researching what kind of paid and organic search keywords they’re focusing on. Need some resources to get started? Here are seven tools you can use to spy on your competitors. …

Over half of the leading marketing teams report they are using AI in some way, and 57% of teams believe that AI is necessary to support their strategies and sales goals

It’s no surprise that AI technology is all the rage in nearly every marketing department these days. According to Forrester’s report on AI adoption, a shocking 94% of respondents believed that AI-driven marketing would be very valuable to their company. And yet, over 67% of participants also reported they had concerns and obstacles that stood in the way of AI adoption.

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The benefits of AI technology in marketing…

Sales guru Jim Rohn aptly said:

‘Success is neither magical nor mysterious; it’s the natural consequence of consistently applying the fundamentals.’

I agree wholeheartedly. In order to sell better online you need to know the fundamentals, or essentials, of persuasive selling. These same principles apply whether you’re selling face-to-face or on a website. Only by doing so will you achieve your overarching merchandising goals: more add-to-carts and conversions, triggered by higher click-throughs on your website’s sales pages. In this post I cover essential selling practices. I discuss best practices and optimisation techniques separately.

Start with the essentials

For us humans, the essentials are food, water and rest. For online merchandising, selling essentials are more emotion-based, and include: Understanding your prospects needs and desires Earning the trust of your visitors Using persuasive selling tactics Tailoring your pitch to your shopper’s stage Creating a Product Finder tool Offering proactive customer support

Understanding your prospects

Here’s another saying…

An outline of creative best practices across YouTube, Facebook and Twitter

The social media landscape may be constantly changing but one element remains consistent: content is king. However whilst content itself may be an essential component of any social media strategy, the creative formats and best practices for each platform are often quite different and not always transferable across one another. There are many helpful guides, blog posts and resources to help digital marketers stay on track but I thought it worthwhile highlighting some of key creative best practices for YouTube, Facebook and Twitter in the form of a quick, bullet-point checklist. This is by no means a definitive list but hopefully a decent top-level guide and primer for anyone new to producing social creative. [si_guide_block id="5768" title="Social media marketing strategy guide" description="Take your social media marketing strategy to the next level with our Premium-level guide. You'll learn how to…

How link reclamation is the best way to save SEO rankings

Link building is one of the most talked-about subjects in SEO and digital marketing. As a search term, it’s maintained a pretty constant popularity (after peaking in 2012 right around the first Penguin release). A lot of the conversation surrounding backlinks and link building is centered on how to build new ones, and that’s a good conversation to have. But it’s missing an important part of backlinks: maintaining existing links. Here’s the Google Trends graph for “link building” over the last 5 years:

What is Link Reclamation?

Link reclamation is the process of finding broken or removed links to your site and fixing and replacing them with updated URLs. While not as flashy as link building, link reclamation is a vital part of getting the most out of your link profile and maintaining…