How to make crucial decisions regarding your retargeting budget.

Decisions, decisions, decisions; it can be difficult making the right choice when considering how to spend your remarketing budget with Facebook or Google. Where most PPC managers go wrong is the actual decision-making process. It is crucial understand what you should consider before making a decision. [si_guide_block id="87521" title="Access Member Quick Win: How to do Facebook retargeting right" description="Learn when and how to use Facebook's different retargeting options with Gareth Roberts."]

1.       Consider your message - carefully crafted second chances

The whole idea of remarketing is to give advertisers a second chance to hook someone who has visited their site, but not bought anything, there may be a number of reasons for this: The website is bland, clunky, dated, not functional - let's not get sidetracked into the importance of functional and appealing landing pages, but it is important to…

How to build your brand on Instagram

Great social media strategies need continuous follower growth, engagement, and actions, e.g. clicks. And Instagram just might be your best opportunity for achieving this quickly. SEO should always be an important part of your online marketing strategy. But let's face it, you're unlikely to beat the big brands with enormous budgets for a spot on page one of Google's search results anytime soon. Source: ArthurStock This is why social media can be a powerful ally to smaller brands when trying to grow your reach and presence online. You don't need a huge budget to still be effective, using, for instance, Facebook ads. But as powerful and inexpensive as these can be, the sad truth is that organic reach and engagement on Facebook has plateaued in recent years.

Where to Turn? Instagram.

Consider some statistics compiled by…

3 Tips to Ensure the Success of Your Guerrilla Marketing Efforts

Guerrilla marking can be defined as “an innovative, unconventional, and low-cost marketing technique aimed at obtaining maximum exposure for a product.” Lower cost and increased exposure — that’s the dream, right? To illustrate with a modern, classic example, in 2012, Dollar Shave Club nailed guerrilla marketing with its viral YouTube video. For just $4,500, the company created a surprising and funny commercial that went viral in 72 hours. Although consumers see more than 2,900 media messages every day, the sad truth is they will only remember four of them. DSC managed to remain one of those memorable four for a long time, all thanks to a relatively inexpensive video. If that kind of return is possible, why even bother with marketing initiatives that yield lower returns?

Guerrilla Tactics Expand Your Reach

Most marketing — traditional and digital — is about scalability and input/output; it costs…

Brand storytelling examples showing how a successful brand story takes consumers on a hero’s journey

No one’s heart is wooed by product capabilities and financials alone. What you need is a good story — it’s the key to making your brand a living, breathing thing. Investors, employees, and consumers will rally around a story, and the best business leaders understand that storytelling has the power to change minds and spark action.

Take High Brew Coffee, for example. Its story could easily have been about its product: canned cold-brew coffee. But that’s not very original, and it certainly doesn’t capture the imagination. Instead, High Brew’s story is all about adventure — founder David Smith was inspired to start the business after enjoying cold-brew coffee during warm nights navigating the Caribbean on a sailboat with his family.

When investing in content marketing, it’s necessary to go beyond describing what…

How to build the right marketing technology stack for your business

It's now a lot more common to talk about choosing 'martech stacks' and rightly so, given the impact that technology, data and insight can have on marketing today.  The popularity of the concept of a martech stack has grown out of the categorisation of marketing technology based on Scott Brinker’s Martech landscape and others such as our Digital Tools wheel. Businesses have always considered their portfolio of business IT applications for operations such as finance, logistics and marketing, but traditionally, they have been controlled by IT teams who have managed a limited number of ‘enterprise resource planning’ systems such as SAP. With the growth in cloud based SaaS, it has become far easier for individual departments and, in particular, marketing, who need to manage many digital marketing channels like search and social media marketing, to deploy their own solutions. …

How you can develop a brand which lets you stand out from the competition

A business can have the best product or service in the world and offer it at the best price and still fail. Why is that? Because they fail to differentiate themselves from the competition and show a clear and compelling reason why potential clients should do business with them. The key is creating a solid differentiation strategy that will set you apart in the marketplace and show prospects why it’d be foolish to go anywhere else. Business differentiation is the process of making your firm stand out in a crowded field of me-too competitors and a differentiation strategy is the guidebook for how to do it. As a digital marketer, you can do this efficiently and cost-effectively using a variety of digital tools. This blog post will show you how. Developing and implementing a differentiation strategy is a five-step process…

Headless commerce means performing updates and tests is easier and quicker.

All enterprise e-commerce platforms were created in the era of desktop screens running web browsers. The assumption that desktop browsers would be the main audience for commerce was baked into the architecture of the platform. At the time, no one dreamed of all of the places customers would one day make purchases or that we would be shopping on screens of every size using mobile and wearable tech — or with no screen at all, as with Google Home or Amazon Echo smart speakers. Now, we buy directly from social media feeds like Instagram and Twitter or from inside applications such as Snapchat. With more digitally enabled and networked devices added to our environment every week, the only safe assumption we can make is that there's no way to know the complete picture of commerce channels. You’ve probably noticed big changes in the…

Local tactics are the keys to consumer loyalty in a mobile-first world

For bricks-and-mortar businesses, loyalty programs have been a staple for decades, whether in the form of punch cards promising a free item, special sale offerings, or the now ubiquitous loyalty cards that we scan at grocery stores, pet stores, and everywhere in between. Simply put, customers think that loyalty programs are effective at getting them to return. It’s no surprise, then, that as ecommerce rose to prominence, many online businesses also instituted some variation of the loyalty program. A problem arises today, however, when businesses think that the only way to drive customer loyalty is through such programs. But what are the alternatives? Customers are increasingly burdened by a jumble of key rings, codes, and email subscriptions telling them about special offerings and it can be a little overwhelming. There has to be another way. One alternative to the traditional…

Follow these SEO trends for better rankings in 2017

SEO is a very volatile industry because of the many changes that take place in the Google algorithm within a period. The algorithm set in place this month may not be the same the next. It is an always evolving algorithm that encourages SEO specialists to stay on their toes and keep abreast with updates. Now we are well into 2017, it has become more important for specialists to look out for trends that can affect search rankings for their keywords this year.

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Although aiming…

The Future of British Trade with Europe: A Light at the End of the Chunnel?

With Article 50 having been triggered recently by UK Prime Minister Theresa May, Brexit is now actually happening and calls for a revote can be forgotten. The negotiations are officially underway, and guess what, uncertainty still lingers in the air like a dense, London fog. So, what lies ahead for British business owners?

Building bridges by building tunnels

When the Channel Tunnel connecting Folkestone, England and Coquelles, France was opened in 1994, it was seen as a symbol of unity between the UK and mainland Europe. Though the idea of connecting the two landmasses was rejected for years by the British during the height of their empire, minds were changed as the new economic realities of the world started to take shape after World War II. Today, there is no question as to the importance of such a tunnel.…