Chart of the day: Online advertising grew 11.5% like-for-like in the first half of 2017 in Europe.

€2.6 billion spend on advertising was added during the first half of the year, across search, display and classifieds/ directories. Research by IAB and IHS Markit shows marketers are increasing online advertising spending. The report focuses on advertising in Europe only. In this chart of the day blog post, I will update you on latest research by IAB Europe and IHS Markit, with charts from their Adex Benchmark from the first half of 2017. Search advertising is leading and display advertising has grown the fastest, interestingly online video is up 20%. As shown in the chart above, search advertising dominates online ad spend, but there is a huge jump in growth of over 13% for display advertising. …

10 statistics and reasons why you should turn your marketing attention to baby boomers

Baby boomers are born between 1946 and 1964, there are around 74.9 million baby boomers. That's an audience of 74.9 million that need to be reached. They made up almost 40 percent of the nation’s population. Because of the buzz built around millennials, it has become easy to market to that generation. But what about baby boomers, how are marketers reaching them and seeing an ROI? Marketers will usually be looking to reach one of the following generations to promote their product or service: Baby boomers – born between 1946-1964 Generation X – born between 1965-1980 Millennials – born between 1981-2000 The generation that often gets overlooked is baby boomers. More importantly, this generation now constitutes the wealthiest age group this century. But marketers find boomers difficult to target. One key reason it is so hard to target this generation…

Chart of the Day: How do Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon make their money?

In this article, I defined Eight online revenue models along with how they are calculated, so they could be applied to new revenue models of startups. In this chart of the day, we can see a comparison of the four / five dominant digital brands sometimes known as GAFA of FAMGA or even the frightful five. Of these five digital businesses, it's no surprise to see that Alphabet (Google companies including their research and development) and Facebook are dominated by ad sales. Apple sales are dominated by product sales with iPhone much more important that Mac laptops and iPad. Data services like iTunes and storage are still relatively small (11%). Amazon is different to the other four in that it focuses on online retail, yet this is less…

The best digital marketing tips from 2017 at the 3XE conference

The 3XE Search – Digital Marketing Conference, was one out of a series of three educational conferences focused on different aspects of digital marketing. The event took place at Croke Park, Dublin, home to Gaelic Athletic Association, it provided an eye-catching and functional venue for the conference. Focusing specifically on Search marketing the day consisted of presentations from leading digital professionals from all over the world, broken up with selected workshops on how to plan and implement your digital marketing campaigns. The 3XE Digital series has grown massively over the last few years and has become a must-attend event for digital marketers. With a total of 15 presentations covering all elements of Search, the expert advice we picked up was second to none. A key theme throughout the day was the changing way in which consumers use search and the introduction of…

Chart of the Day: Do you know how to convert your audience into buying customers this Cyber Monday?

It seems that Cyber Monday is only thought of as the 'little sister' of Black Friday, but last year Cyber Monday brought in $3.45 billion in sales. So, how can you influence your audience to buy your products? What is it they're looking for? Sometimes offering a % off discount on products and services simply isn't enough because they can wait until discounted sales happen again for Summer, New Year or even Christmas campaigns. Research by Global Web Index shows the features that would increase the likelihood of a consumer buying a product online.

When shopping online, which of these features would most increase your likelihood of buying a product?

79% of respondents stated that free delivery would be their main influence. Often we find ourselves buying products in online sales, but the delivery charges are almost as much…

A newly launched SaaS will be up against hefty competition and numerous potential customers who have seen it all before.

The owners and administrators of the service can get a quick leg up by following a few tried and true SaaS growth strategies. Compare your strategy against the checklist below, and you’ll be better prepared to achieve your marketing goals for launching your SaaS. [si_guide_block id="100244" title="Download Premium Resource – Product launch Playbook" description="Launch a product using RACE planning to structure your marketing activities. A marketing playbook defines the key messages, types of communications, best practices and optimisation techniques that should be used to maximise return-on-investment for different marketing objectives."/]

1. Get a Plan Together

Too many SaaS marketers try to wing it. They assume they’ll be able to form their plan as they go. They put out a campaign, check the analytics, test the…

Chart of the day: Pound for pound, TV advertising provides the biggest return

According to an independent study commisioned by Thinkbox and conducted by Ebiquity and Gain theory, Television advertising provides the biggest return on investment compared to other forms of advertising. TV ads created 71% of advertising generated profits, whilst online display only created 1%. The average ad-generated profit created by TV ads was £4.20. In the age of digital, TV advertising still dominates return on investment, but it's also providing a far higher return than radio and out of home ads too. TV ads provide the biggest return, providing a safe option for advertisers, however, it's also the most expensive form of advertising, even if a dip in advertising revenues has led to networks charging slightly less for advertising. Recent research by Nielsen has also found that half of US-TV…

Chart of the Day: What is digital strategy?How many in business simply see digital as equalling IT?

Helping businesses create and implement digital marketing strategies is one of our main aims at Smart Insights. While it's straightforward for us as marketers to define digital marketing strategy in terms of different digital communications to support goals of increasing online leads and sales, defining digital strategy is more difficult. The reason is that for many business managers 'digital' is still often simply taken to mean 'technology' or IT. I was reminded of this limited understanding of 'digital' in the wider business when reviewing this PwC report on organizational Digital IQ, now in its 10th year. In this report survey, respondents are IT managers, CIOs and general business managers. This visual shows how businesses struggle to define 'digital' in a consistent way. When asked to select from one definition of digital, these were the…

How to hire an amazing editor and save your brand from embarrassing gaffes and find your content groove

In today's fast-moving world of internet publishing, speed often wins over accuracy. While it may seem we're all getting more lenient with typos, misspellings, and obvious grammatical mistakes, the truth is that our mistakes are still noticed. Individual customer impressions matter, and, if the mistakes go viral, they could have a more amplified negative brand effect than ever before. Just ask the poor brands that ended up on this unfortunate countdown list full of "eggregious" mistakes "thier" surely not proud of. Hiring an editor brings about a host of benefits, including a reduction in writing and grammatical mistakes and an increase in high-quality content. Most brands and agencies don’t have an editor, but how many can say they haven’t missed spelling or grammatical errors? It’s not a 'nice' to have; it’s a must-have. [si_guide_block id="85104" title="Download…

What can we expect from the wearables market in 2018? These are the top wearable statistics to inform your 2018 technology and media innovations strategy

The wearable technology market is a hot topic of discussion among many marketers. But it still feels unclear for some brands how they can adapt their marketing strategy to this new trend. According to a report from Juniper Research, wearable advertising spend is estimated to reach $68.7 million by 2019. opening up new opportunities for marketers.

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