The power of branding in the multi-channel retail world
Victor Hugo once said that “no army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come”. In many ways brands can be equally as powerful, inspiring loyalty, love and of course sales! However it’s easy for companies to overlook the power and value of their brands in the frantic search for smarter technology and smarter ways of doing business.
Good branding holds the key to cutting through an increasingly fragmented media landscape to ensure a product is front of mind at the moment a consumer decides it is time to buy.
Outlined below are a few tips on branding in today’s more complex and fast moving world.
Enough with the complexity already!
In Scott Brinkers Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic below we see a bewildering array of different marketing technology vendors but what’s striking here is that each of these companies represent a technology…
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03 Jun 2015
A review of best practices in video marketing for different parts of the customer lifecycle
Our society has bred consumers who want to receive maximum information with minimal effort. So it’s no surprise that videos telling snappy and engaging stories – at approximately 24 frames (images) per second are quickly becoming one of the most effective ways to engage customers with a brand.
Sophie Rayers is Director of Marketing EMEA at Brightcove, notes: 'Video is the future of content marketing. That is, if it isn’t already the present. Although creating video content often requires more time and investment up front than other digital marketing assets, the results from a marketing and sales generation perspective are often easier to measure and evaluate'.
In 2014, Brightcove commissioned a study with Aberdeen Group to examine the return on investment (ROI) from video…
How to build a marketing automation programme to score leads
How do you know which leads to follow up, when to follow up and what's relevant to communicate based on where leads are in the sales funnel? These are challenges for any business using inbound marketing to generate demand and manage leads. Lead scoring is a vital methodology to ensure your leads are sales-qualified, ready for your sales team to follow up, so they are not left dormant and become missed sales.
The research from Snapapp and RingLead identifies that over 44% of companies have active lead scoring programs yet 32% are not successful with their programs. It goes on to say that companies will automatically fail if they do not address their data cleaning and accuracy, and shares both scoring indicators and how to improve your programs through a scoring hierarchy.
As well as planning…
How to generate leads from small B2B audiences in a niche market
Dominating a niche B2B market generally reduces competition, reduces price pressure and the ‘me too mentality’ brings a supplier closer to their customers and increases their loyalty. So why do so few companies make a success of niche marketing? What are the challenges associated with lead generation? What is the best combination of marketing tactics to achieve success?
Niche market definition
First let’s define a niche B2B market – the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) defines it as ‘A clearly defined segment of the market. It is about satisfying a specific customer need that is, in general, not covered by any major competitors’. Philip Kotler defines a niche as ‘a portion of the market in which individuals possess homogeneous needs and characteristics and the latter are not covered by the general offer…
Techniques to create a more customer-focused content plan
As marketers, we know the value of a good online presence. We often talk about the importance of Google and of understanding the algorithms that govern the way businesses appear and are ranked in the Google search results. But we rarely talk about the rules that govern the algorithms themselves.
Since it’s inception in 1997, Google has strived to ‘organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’. From Panda (content) to Penguin (links) and Hummingbird (semantics), algorithm updates are intended to help Google to identify those pieces of content which are most likely to meet the searcher’s needs.
All of this culminates in a simple lesson for us all:
If you want to be successful online, you need to provide the highest quality, most useful, most relevant content to suit your target audience’s needs.
Online…
4 copywriting tips for optimising your product pages
In ecommerce, as in life, there are those who are unsuccessful, those who are successful, and there are those that are exceptionally successful. Given the choice, which one of these three groups would you choose to emulate with your own ecommerce business?
There are of course many factors that come into play when determining whether your business becomes the next big thing, or last year’s forgotten disaster – product quality, customer service and price points to name just a few. But how well you handle the product copywriting on your website is one thing that can have a massive impact on how successful your business is.
To help ensure that your product descriptions are successful in turning web users into customers, you could do far worse than attempt to emulate the techniques and methods of those online businesses that are already hugely successful. So who…
Creative tips to plan Vine videos for marketing
If you’re a pro marketer, you must already know that the best advertisements are the shortest (usually 30 seconds long). For some reason, (and let’s not blame everything on technology yet) as time goes on and new generations are born, the attention spans seem to be reducing. So, if your customer loves smart phones, uses Netflix, and owns several different portable devices, his attention span may be shorter than you think.
Like any professional marketer, we could use these odd transformations in time to our advantage. How? Think: applications!
You’d want to market where the crowds are, and clearly that’s not the television anymore. Recently, many companies have been using Twitter’s video uploading application Vine to produce and share creative 6-second videos of their products. That’s right. You get only six seconds to make an impact. Used well, it could be the best shortest ad you’ve…
The Fails and Fixes of using SMS for marketing
As consumers are more on the move, shopping and researching using their mobile devices, getting their attention with SMS is a good option many marketers may be underusing. Yet...
Engagement rates for SMS/Text are 6-8x higher than emails and 90% of SMS texts are read within 3 minutes of receipt.
This infographic from West Interactive shows however that even though it's a good medium, there are dangers lurking since mobile users are highly aware of unsolicited texts and opt-out rates can be high. It recommends to ' Co-ordinate your messages across your channels, be aware of country specific legislation and test load times for a good UX.'
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Digital marketing tools to support your content marketing
The importance of content marketing in a business cannot be overlooked especially since we have to work hard to engage our audiences rather than pushing messages to them. Long gone are the days where creating billboard ads and radio spots were enough to get your business to the next level. Today, consumers want more and they like to have content they can relate to in order to feel a part of your business.
Content can help you to craft a story about your business to help you connect further with your customers and to share your unique values, showcasing the personality of your brand.
It's not easy to get started with your content marketing strategy. Before any success story can be realized, a business needs to have the right tools in place to be in a better position to…
How to respond to your Twitter interactions to increase engagement
Twitter users have high expectations and if you have a Twitter presence, regardless of whether you are using it as a platform for customer service or brand awareness, then it's important to respond quickly and appropriately, or it could be damaging to your brand.
Did you know that only 15% of the FTSE 250 companies respond to tweets? this is worrying given that 17% of consumers are using this channel to ask questions to leading brands.
Like any social media channel, you should only post content if you have a strategy and the resources to interact in a two-way conversation to engage with your followers. Leadsift's research has drawn up a snappy visual to provide a toolkit for responding to your Tweeters to maximise engagement.
So how should…
