A Customer Data Platform looks to fulfil that age-old promise of centralizing all the customer data, and it is looking good

Marketers know that data management is the key to data-driven marketing. Traditional methods for trying to bring customer data together into a “360 customer view”, failed to solve the complete problem. But there is a new player in town, and its called Customer Data Platform (CDP). Now it is knocking on your door. Should you let it in? [si_guide_block id="5508" title="Email marketing strategy guide" description="Use our email marketing guide to review your email marketing strategy using the best communications strategy, targeting and marketing automation."]

Bringing together customer data in a CDP

An un-siloed and full view of the customer is not a new concept. Yet the 360 customer view has always turned out to be the just out of reach for the marketer. Custom MarTech integration projects are known to be an especially…

Are you tapping into Customer Psychology for your marketing?

Kahneman popularised System 1 and System 2 decision-making in his book, "thinking fast and slow" - but how can marketers use this Scientific theory in their marketing? Last year I was faced with a fairly every day dilemma, my partner and I were going through the process of buying an IKEA kitchen at home, I'd dropped and smashed my iPhone screen, rendering it unusable (I replaced it with a much cheaper android phone)and I wanted to go on holiday to Italy (Turin). The dilemma was: Did I need an iPhone? Could I hold off on the holiday to Italy? The kitchen was the biggest decision, it was over £4000 in cost - it took time to research what we wanted and plan the whole thing with IKEA. Arranging delivery, getting the whole thing installed. It's a major project and being without a kitchen…

Don't make your customers wait for your site to load

As desirable of a quality patience is, it is the last thing you should expect from clients visiting your website. Just making them wait one second extra can drastically reduce customer satisfaction and cause conversions to nosedive. If that’s not enough, since 2010, Google has taken site speed into consideration in its ranking algorithm. Nothing reeks of unprofessionalism more than trying to find a company and their website is too slow or does not load properly. Research shows that for every extra second of loading time you lose 10-15% of web visitors. For most SMEs that equates to millions in lost revenue. This is something any business focused on CRO needs to keep in mind. This comprehensive guide with eight steps you can take to decrease your load time may help you speed things up. …

Most businesses owners understand the significance of having superb content for their company websites, but when it comes to web hosting, they either fail to take it seriously or they are just blank

My last article for Smart Insights covered the basics of website hosting, so, in this follow up article, I use past experiences (good and bad!) to help you choose the most ideal web hosting service for your business. Some people, like me, resorted to finding a solution by choosing a hosting company that was based on price, not value. The results of such a lazy approach were disappointing, to say the least! So what should be done? When you decide to set up your website, it is imperative to get the right domain that will perfectly suit your business. Another reason why you should get some reliable and quality web hosting.

Why hosting?

Did you know that without hosting you don’t…

Chart of the Day: How do your Adwords campaigns compare?

Do you know what a top-performing AdWords campaign looks like? The new Paid Search Benchmark 2018 report by Adthena is a useful compilation of ad spend and performance, cost and competition and competitive diversity across the UK, US, and Australian paid search landscape.

Access the full Paid Search Benchmark 2018 report.

This report benchmarks ad spend and performance in search, and encompasses data from over 140 million paid search ads, 135,000 advertisers, and 5.6 million search terms in the US, UK, and Australia, revealing global search trends and category-specific insights.

Mobile vs Desktop average CTR

Knowing what device your potential audience is using for their search query is important. you need to make sure your desired landing pages are optimized for mobile use (not that it shouldn't be anyway), but if you're paying for a user's click you want to be getting their…

Branding is indispensable for businesses, big or small, new or old

Branding defines a business’s identity; it is how a business presents itself to the world. But branding is much more than fancy logos and catchy taglines – it captures the ethos of a business and guides its journey. Branding is also important for positioning and the subsequent competitive advantages. If you do not brand yourself, others will. That’s the reality, so new businesses would do well to take control of the narrative right from the time of launch so that others cannot slot them or define the space they can be in. Let’s look at some ways to transform a new business into a trustworthy and successful brand.

[si_guide_block id="5750" title="Download our Premium Resource – Brand vision and identity playbook" description="This playbook will enable you to define your approach to review and define your brand identity to make it more appealing to customers.…

Using urgency as a tool to drive conversions

Successful marketing strategies focus on changing the way target audiences behave. To do this well, marketers need to understand how people think. It’s no wonder, then, that the most effective marketing principles have their basis in psychology. One of the most relevant psychological principles that can be applied to eCommerce is urgency.  In this blog post, we unpick the psychology of urgency and show you nine ways you can use it to increase conversions.

How urgency influences behavior

When a task is urgent, people are more likely to act on it. Interestingly, this is even the case when the sense of urgency is artificially created. Five experiments in a 2018 study showed when unimportant tasks are characterized by spurious urgency (e.g. an illusion of expiration) people are more likely to perform them over more important tasks. This psychological principle is called the “mere urgency effect”. Marketers in…

Our round-up from the inaugural digital event

Last week I attended the very first Nottingham Digital Summit, conceived, managed and led by local agency Hallam to champion digital excellence in the city of Nottingham. The event included an interesting mix of inspiration, innovation and insight across a range of digital disciplines, from UX and SEO through to content marketing and design. What’s more, the conference supported a good cause, raising over £15,000 for Framework, a Nottingham-based housing association dedicated to delivering opportunities to homeless and vulnerable people across the East Midlands. There was a lot to take in and digest from the summit and the Hallam team did a brilliant job of summarising in detail all the different sessions. I would recommend taking the time to review these individual round-ups, which also include links to the speakers and their slides. With this in mind, rather than providing a…

What skills should each of your employees have? Create the marketing dream team with the right skills, knowledge and employee enthusiasm

We have recently updated our Digital Marketing Job Descriptions and Roles guide to help businesses of all sizes recruit the right talent for their digital team.

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These practical descriptions will help you create a marketing team structure that has all the necessary skills your business needs to make the most out of every opportunity. But, we have also seen a fun infographic created by the Website Group, which explains a marketing dream team in lego characters.We like this, but what do you think? Courtesy of: The…

Do your lead scoring right and it will drive sales through the roof

Lead scoring - it's one of those terms which raises eyebrows outside the world of marketing, and rolls eyes within. Do it right and it will drive sales through the roof – but it's so easy to get it wrong. And, when you get it wrong, you go haring off down dead ends while hot prospects cool off unnoticed. That's why I’ve teamed up with Smart Insights to create a comprehensive Lead Scoring Guide that will help you land quick wins through great lead scoring. Our guide includes: What lead scoring is (and why your business needs it! An introduction to the different types of leads How to define lead qualification stages in B2B marketing Steps towards implementing lead scoring A guide to progressive profiling How to avoid common lead-scoring pitfalls [si_guide_block id="116978" title="Download PREMIUM Resource – Lead scoring…