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.

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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…

Daunting, time-consuming and expensive. Or is it?

Doing any form of research doesn't always need to be so costly, here are five options to help you recruit participants for surveys.

I've also produced an article on how to get B2B survey responses, the focus of this post is helping you to find B2C participants for your research. We all know that one of the hardest parts of doing any research is often something which is undervalued and that's finding respondents to take part. More importantly getting the right respondents for your research is even harder. Research is essential to help get insight into a variety of business functions. and luckily the word of market research is maturing which means that there are loads of tools available that can help you. I've put together a list below of some of the most reliable places to find respondents for B2C research including surveys, focus groups, depth interviews…

The right hosting really does matter for any business owner who wants to be online and easily discoverable

When first setting up a website, most people simply carry out a web search and choose one of the top options. However, setting up a website for your business should involve a little more consideration. You need the right domain to suit your business and crucially you need quality, reliable web hosting. Without hosting, you have no online presence. Web hosting is the service which allows your website to be posted on the internet. If it isn’t on the internet, it’s entirely useless. Web hosting service providers offer the technology and services to keep your site online and viewable on the Internet while ensuring your website loads quickly and is secure. Website hosting providers store your website on their servers and ensure it is accessible 24/7, if they’re a quality provider. The right hosting…

Digital Asset Management (DAM) software is a business process management solution which provides you with a centralized online hub to create, manage, share, track and find digital assets

Each year, more than 160 million Americans watch the Super Bowl on television. Given the huge viewership, 30-second commercials are highly coveted, despite a cost of $5 million per spot (not including the cost of production). In 2018 the list of big spending advertisers included; Budweiser, Coca-Cola, Hyundai, M&M’s, Pepsi, Stella Artois and several others. Now imagine if the Budweiser ad featured the wrong logo or an embarrassing typo pointing viewers to a competitor’s website. Fortunately, this didn’t happen, but it is every marketer's nightmare. A Super Bowl commercial is a digital asset, made up of other digital assets, including; the logo, font, images, music, video, and other elements. All of it must be carefully managed to help tell the brand story. Every day, there are…

Why qualitative App Analytics is like finding money in your old jeans

We’ve all been there. You wake up one morning, all of your go-to jeans are dirty so you reach out to one of the older bunch. And then... JACKPOT! You find a well-forgotten $100 bill in your jeans’ back pocket. Ah, that feeling. Okay, but what does is it have to do with mobile marketing? Great question. Well, there’s a new mobile app analytics solution called Qualitative Analytics, that you need to familiarize yourselves with ASAP. This solution will allow you to find “hidden treasures” (like money in the back pocket) within your product’s data. These treasures can then be translated into real money via actionable insights on your marketing/monetization initiatives. We'll explain: Qualitative Analytics solutions provide you with tools like user session recordings and touch…

Shared knowledge is the new currency of scale

The workplace has changed in spectacular ways since the turn-of-the-century. The biggest development is the increased importance of knowledge. Knowledge has become the most valuable commodity in almost every industry from food services to SAAS development. Workplaces that create a culture conducive to knowledge sharing are going to thrive in the coming years. How do you create a workplace that revolves around knowledge sharing? Here are some tips to achieve this goal. [si_guide_block id="5676" title="Download FREE Resource – Digital marketing plan template" description="Our popular marketing planning template built on the Smart Insights RACE planning system."/]

Reward successful teams more than individuals

Most traditional workplace models focus on rewarding individual employees for their contributions. While this approach can motivate employees to work harder and be more innovative, it…