Millennials want the same thing as every other age group, it's just the channels for delivering it that have changed

They have youth, influence, and spending power. They can also spot BS from a mile away, and it’s not easy to win their hearts. EContent even predicts that Millennials – or Generation Y – will "become the world’s most powerful customers". Indeed, it seems that the demographic has reached an important point where its purchasing power is approaching its peak. [si_guide_block id="35932" title="Download our Individual Member Resource – Smarter Instagram marketing guide" description="Our Smarter Instagram marketing guide will help you tap into the consumer activity on Instagram to use it to grow your business."/] It’s also a huge generation, born anytime between the early 1980s and 2000. Of course, there are major differences in life experience and expectations between someone born in ‘83 and someone born in ‘99, but the important…

Reasons why you should consider text message marketing as part of your customer communications

As more brands look to target customers on the move, SMS is becoming an increasingly essential part of effective multi-channel marketing. However, with few digital marketing agencies featuring SMS as a core offering, their clients are potentially missing out on communications with customers and increased ROI. Organisations mistakenly believe that mobile marketing requires heavy investment in apps and does not allow for personalised, targeted communication and lacks strong analysis to support ROI. The reality is that access to mobile communications is far easier than perceived and gaining access to mobile consumers (smartphone and non-smartphone) can be as simple as sending a personalised, targeted text message. The means to instigate two-way SMS messaging between a company and their mobile users is essential to building a brand in households around the world provided consumer privacy is protected through legal requirements…

Use a selection of these tools to boost the quality of the content you write

Writing relevant and user-friendly content is harder than it seems. You need to ensure that your text reads clearly and with no mistakes in order to maximize the impact of your message. It’s a real balancing act, which is why a range of content writing tools have been developed to ease your writing journey. Here are 29 of the best online content writing tools to help with all manner of different writing challenges, such as grammar, spelling, writing for SEO and copy editing.

1. Hemingway App

Hemingway App is a very practical application which assesses the readability of your writing by analyzing things like grammar, vocabulary, punctuation and sentence structure. The clever software points out any weaknesses in the text and offers appropriate corrections to enhance it.

2. Readability Test Tool

This readability tool allows you to test a variety…

Are you struggling to measure the impact of your email program and is reporting taking too much time?

Then, you might want to consider tracking your email efforts in Google Analytics (GA). Here are ten rock-solid, performance-driven reasons why you should do just that:

1. Capture Email KPIs After the Click

“Don't skip this part - what happens after that email click will either deliver high conversions or kill the most valuable offer you ever had.”

Avinash Kaushik, Digital Marketing Evangelist, Google

Most Email Service Providers (ESPs) offer a fairly standard set of metrics that track the performance of your email, including open, click-through, bounce rates and unsubscribe rates.

What is really rare?

Insights about user behavior after the click.

Why would you need after-click insights?

Email is a core digital channel and marketers spend a great deal of time building their mailing lists. In fact, list building is a top challenge for most marketing specialists. Because it…

Digital tactics can be a boon for bricks and mortar retailers

Within many multichannel retailers, digital teams work primarily to e-commerce KPIs – traffic, conversion, units per order, unit value and so on. As a consequence, digital activity that might benefit the physical store estate is often deprioritized or completely ignored. However, digital marketing presents some of the best opportunities to drive footfall and in-store sales. [si_guide_block id="30829" title="Multichannel retail proposition audit and competitor benchmarking template" description="Review and improve the effectiveness of your e-commerce site's capability, including how it integrates with the other channels that are part of today's omnichannel retail."] Here’s a checklist of 5 things you can do straight away:

1. Improve the store-related areas of your website

It’s likely that a large number of your visitors are already looking for store information on your website or app. First, make sure that your store locator is up to scratch, especially for mobile users, and make sure…

5 ways to develop a better marketing automation strategy

In the age of automation, it’s easy for businesses to rest on machine efficiency while eschewing strategy. After all, if you can use a few software programs to send your emails, schedule your social media, and initiate Push notifications, why not use all of them? The underlying theory is maximum outreach, maximum results, but that simply isn’t true. Instead, businesses would do better to narrow the scope of their automation practices and develop a well-focused strategy that focuses on meaningful contact rather than just maximum contact. Employ the programs at your disposal, but don’t overwhelm your customers. [si_guide_block id="144584" title="Free Guide: Win more customers" description="Learn how to create an integrated marketing communications and automation strategy with our free guide, written in partnership with Salesforce."] For a digital marketing strategy that drives sales home, consider these five tips. With the right suite of programs and a…

Don't let your B2B site lose you leads by making these five basic mistakes

There are literally millions of business to business websites out there, but not all of them are as efficient as they could be. The purpose of creating and managing a B2B website is mainly to engage with your audience and turn them from passive viewers into active clients. So, why is it so hard to engage the audience that visits your website? Firstly, most of the B2B websites don’t respect a set of basic rules that ensure success. They usually focus on the wrong thing, forgetting about the audience. A B2B website is, of course, a way for you to present and advertise your business, but it should be much more than that. [si_guide_block id="85722" title="Free Resource: 10 B2B marketing mistakes" description="Everyone makes mistakes! Over the last 20 years, we have consulted and trained with many B2B businesses which…

A review of 2 social sharing count tools showing which competitor content types are most popular

Part of the process of defining a content marketing strategy for your business is to evaluate the performance of your competitors’ content marketing and SEO efforts. The insight you can glean from what both direct and indirect competitors are doing will allow you to build a picture of the type of content activity, strategies and tactics that are working for others in your industry and what, as a result, might best work for you. In short, a competitor analysis can tell you: The content types and ideas getting most traction measured by number of shares or backlinks Content gaps in your plans compared to competitors, evaluated using the Smart Insights content marketing matrix for examples Competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, and the opportunities and threats from the wider market - a …

Social media strategy and planning essentials -  Recommended dashboards and tools for creating social media marketing reports for different reporting periods

This is part 8 of my Smart Insights 12 part social media series. In the last part we looked at resource planning for social media; in this blog, I discuss what data you should capture and report to measure the impact of your social media marketing campaigns. To frame the conversation, I’ll cover four different type of report: Daily dashboard Weekly KPI report Monthly roll-up report Quarterly strategy review

Reporting scope and goals

It’s important to understand the context, and limitations, for reporting. The data you have access to depends upon your business resources and scale of social activity. For example, many small businesses don’t have subscriptions to social media monitoring tools like Audiense and Buzzsumo, so won’t be able to include data from these in their regular reports. Focus on what data you…

The pain of finding B2B survey and user research respondents is real. Here are 6 solutions including free and paid services.

Finding relevant survey respondents for market research projects can be hard and the cost can be eye watering too, particularly if you're in a specialist B2B niche or you need senior respondents. We all know that one of the hardest parts of doing any B2B research is often something which is undervalued- “getting respondents” and more importantly “getting the right respondents”. So you’re running a survey and it’s pretty niche, say you’re looking for B2B respondents purely for research rather than lead generation – where do you start? Where do you actually go for respondents? We’ve scoured the web and even given some of these a try, for our 6 ways to find B2B survey respondents.

Option 1: Google Consumer Surveys

It might be branded “consumer surveys” but they have lots of B2B publishers…