Finding the right user, with the right content, at the right time is the perfect scenario. But how do we avoid our message getting distorted by Multi-Tasking?

As a marketer, we take great care in positioning our product/service/offering, which makes distractions from our message very frustrating. Following on from yesterday's Chart of the Day, the Communications Market Report from Ofcom has provided yet more nuggets of information. This time in the form of Figure 1.21, which highlights the proportion of solus vs simultaneous minutes by grouped activities. This basically means, The amount of time spent doing one communications activity over doing multiple. The segmentation of these categories can also go a little deeper, into "meshing" and "stacking", which Ofcom describes as... Meshing: When the simultaneous activities are related e.g. searching for info on a TV programme online while watching it. Stacking: When the simultaneous activities are not related e.g. instant messaging with a friend while watching…

With more than 100 billion calls expected to be made to businesses each year, here's a break-down of what is driving them.

Recently, Invoca published their Call Intelligence Index 2016 where they dissected the most influential marketing channels for driving calls to businesses. It doesn't come as a shock to many that digital marketing outperforms more traditional forms of marketing, such as Newspapers, TV & Directory. Again, somewhat unsurprisingly, mobile search outperforms all other channels of marketing by quite some distance. With over 48% of all calls to businesses coming from mobile search, it again highlights the growing importance and impact it has over our world. The ability to wrap CTA's such as Google’s call-only ad types and click-to-call buttons have proven too convenient to ignore. Desktop search comes in as the second highest driver of calls to businesses, accounting for…

With the ever changing digital landscape, where do our CMO's see the future of their marketing departments?

The economist recently published their report The path to 2020: Marketers seize the customer experience, which is based on a global survey of 499 CMOs and senior marketing executives, plus in-depth interviews with leading CMOs to research which technologies and customer trends are likely to change marketing organisations. The research eluded to some interesting trends, the first of which is that it takes into account that all CMO's have some form of strategy and a goal they are trying to achieve. At Smart Insights, we're big advocates of having a strategy in place to help you reach your goals. If you want to do a little further reading on developing your own strategy, have a read of this post. …

Pokemon Go beats top social Apps for engagement

The hype-machine is very much in gear when it comes to Pokémon GO. We've seen at the top of the app store for downloads since it came out, and all manner of viral videos involving it. You may have heard about the number of Pokémon GO downloads which are astounding with over 65 million downloads and 10 percent of Android users who have downloaded the game. But it doesn't look like GO is just a quick 'flash in the pan'. People are doing a lot more than just downloading it. According to data from SimilarWeb, Pokémon GO is the leading app for daily engagement time in the US right now. It's users are on the app for an incredible 43 minutes a day, double other engaging platforms like Instagram and Snapchat and four times what Facebook messenger manages. These are pretty amazing engagement stats, and whilst Pokémon…

The connected customer

On average, the British household owns over 7 internet devices and unsurprisingly, smartphones are the most common followed by laptops and tablets. More than 60% of all email opens are with a smartphone (Communicator Benchmarking Report 2016), with 50% of all mobile searches conducted in the hope of finding local results and 61% of those searches result in a purchase being made according to Search Engine Watch. The customer is more connected than ever and this is changing buyer behaviour.

A change in behaviour means a change in strategy

A change in behaviour means an impact on the customer journey. Journeys are no longer linear –now we must focus on the multiple touch points to create the ultimate customer experience. The change in customer journey has developed a change in consumer behaviour and expectations, meaning brands need to evolve their products to be one step ahead to stay competitive;…

Learn how to create interactive content and use it to boost your PR efforts

One of the biggest challenges that digital PR practitioners face today is getting their client noticed by customers. In addition, they work very hard at differentiating their clients from their competitors in the market with the help of social media, articles, and blogs. Customers are bombarded with volumes of information every day through their laptops, smartphones and tablets. In order to grab and hold their attention, PR professionals need to stop selling and start engaging. Herein lies the importance of interactive content. The last thing modern customers want to do is sieve through a pile of data for a small piece of pertinent information. It is, therefore, necessary for marketers and PR practitioners to whip up creative ways to not only gain audiences’ attention, but also keep them engaged.

Enter interactive content

Speaking of interactive content, here are a few interesting facts: …

Analysing time spent on various platforms highlights where engagement is going

As marketers, we're always beeing told to check out a new platform to see if it is worth the company using it to promote itself. When it comes to social networks, we tend to use size as the key metric when we assess if it will be worth using. By size me mean the number of people using the platform, but is this really the best metric? There is a massive difference between someone that logs in to a network one a month to have a quick check of their messages, and someone who spends hours a day deeply engaged with the platform. So marketers should also consider this less talked about metric shown in the chart below, hours per user per month, or HUM as I'd like to call it. As we might expect Facebook does well on this metric, but…

How to better examine customer behaviour to assess their readiness to convert

Today’s marketing funnel is a lot more intricate than it once was. There are now more elements to consider when it comes to awareness, throughout the process of lead nurturing and up until the point of sale. Before closing, buyers are exposed to your brand via a variety of touches, often spanning several devices, media formats and channels. The idea is that no matter what route your prospects take along this journey, and no matter how long the journey takes, if they remain engaged, then they’re always getting increasingly closer to the point of sales-readiness. But what does it mean for an anonymous audience member to “engage” with your brand? Richard Sedley once wrote that engagement refers to “repeated interactions that strengthen the emotional, psychological or physical investment a customer has in a brand.” This definition is just one of…

Get the basics of your onboarding strategy right

In my experience as a marketing professional, potential customers almost never just decide to walk away from a purchase - unless given sufficient reason to do so. And, if you’re wondering how a promising list of leads managed to slip through your fingers, it might be time to refocus on the basics of your onboarding strategy.

While there isn’t a definite methodology for conducting 100% watertight onboarding strategies, certain fundamentals exist that should remain top of mind during this seminal stage of your hopefully long and prosperous relationship with your customer. So, here are a few back-to-basics considerations if your leads and sales funnels are dwindling.

Is my offering correctly aligned to my market?

If your sales, marketing and product teams look to each other for the answer to this question, there’s a problem. Product alignment is the first – if not most…

Leverage the power of emotions to enhance your marketing

Every decision your customer makes consists of many conscious and subconscious emotions. The key to success in any business is an understanding of psychology and human behaviour. We all have the same basic mental triggers and needs that drive action. If we understand these psychological triggers, we can craft more effective marketing messages and increase sales. Below is an introduction to 7 important psychological and emotional triggers that can increase your sales, backed up with examples and further reading.

1. Belonging

Human nature gives most people a strong desire to belong to something; a group, a clan, a gang, a family, or a social network. Call it what you will, but very often customers purchase goods and services to show and feel a sense of belonging to their chosen ‘thing’…be it real, or fabricated. They even carry out some highly illogical activities just…