How I boosted my lead generation with visitor tracking software, in conjunction with blogging, pay per click, email and social media outreach.
When you’re growing an audience, and converting website visitors into customers, you need a watertight marketing funnel.
The sad truth is that most of us convert less than 5 per cent of our website visitors into contacts, meaning that more than 95% of visitors leave our sites, potentially never to be seen again.
So what steps can we take to improve our website marketing, tighten up our funnel, and generate more leads from what we have already?
I faced this challenge earlier this year, and have written this post to share my experience with you.
My website was only four months old, so I had insufficient visitor data in Analytics, and I was up against a tight deadline. My challenge was that I needed to…
Day 4 of our 5 days of Successful Content Marketing Series with Sticky Content
Today’s the day you start generating ideas and populating your calendar.
Hold a brainstorm. Sit round as a team, look at what the competition are doing, look at what you’ve done before, look at who you’re trying to reach. Start jotting things down on Post-its: literally anything that comes to mind.
[Editor's note: Readers who don't know it, check out the Smart Insights Content Marketing Matrix which was designed for sessions to brainstorm content marketing].
At this point, no idea is a bad idea, but make sure you’re generating solid concepts and not simply coming up with themes. A good idea is specific, with a clear angle that can be summarised in a neat elevator pitch. A theme is an area you want to write about, perhaps many times. So…
Day 2 in our 5 days to Successful Content Marketing Series
Yesterday I introduced our mini series by reviewing the key content marketing strategy questions. Today's advice is all about working out how your brand and business offering can extend into a content proposition. What kind of content can you credibly create, and how can this content support your business goals?
Think of a classic sales funnel, such as AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action). Your content marketing activity will typically be most valuable around the Attention and Interest top end, where search and social tend to be the key triggers of engagement.
So ask yourself: what kind of content can we create that the people we’re trying to reach might care about, or be prepared to offer a click or an email address for? For a quick answer to…
Day 1 - Answer the key content marketing strategy questions
In this practical, 5 day series, I'll help define a 'quick-and-dirty' 5-day plan to help towards improving your content marketing strategy, without spending a fortune on paid media content distribution.
I've said this series is 'quick and dirty' since we believe that The perfect is often enemy of the good. When it comes to content strategy, it’s easy to spend a vast amount of time thinking about what you’re going to do and worrying about how to get it just right… without actually getting any content created or distributed.
But there comes a time when the Why needs to turn into the How. If you wait for all your strategic ducks to line up in a perfectly formed row, there’s a good chance the opportunity that content offers your business will…
How to create a marketing plan to launch your mobile app in three simple stages
Creating an app is a major accomplishment, but sadly not a guarantee of riches and rewards. If you want to make any money from your carefully crafted creation, you will need a solid and effective app marketing launch plan. Here is how you I believe you should create a plan based on my experience of app launches.If you want to make your app a success, promotion should start way before you’re ready to launch. It’s no good developing a beautiful app if no one ever learns of its existence, so it is vital to have a detailed plan in place of how to market your product and get it turning over a profit as quickly as possible.
Where to start with your…
Over half of businesses don't have any defined responsibility for multichannel customer experience
In our recent research, in collaboration with eCommerce Expo, on Managing Online Customer Experiences, one of the main challenges we wanted to investigate, is who is responsible for managing experiences - both online and across multiple channels.
Given that we are reaching and interacting with consumers across a multitude of touchpoints, all businesses are looking for the best ways to influence and engage with our consumers, to 'maximise conversion from lead to sale and customer loyalty'. But who is responsible for this?
Over 52.6% of respondents had no defined responsibility for managing for managing the Customer Experience
Well we think this is shocking, but understandable? What are the implications? Well, they're the same with any lack of management and likely include:
No / poor KPIs for evaluating Customer Experience
No / poor process for reviewing and improving…
Responsive Web Design is expected by consumers and backed by Google
With the continued rise in mobile usage, and 'with 25% of internet users only using mobile devices', companies are adopting responsive design. Responsive design is typically more cost effective than maintaining different versions of our websites for various devices - even Google are recommending this as best practice from an SEO and experience POV. That's why we use it at Smart Insights!
Note though that the thinking "mobile responsive design is always the best option" may be oversimplistic. Yes it may be for smaller businesses, but for larger businesses who want to maximise conversion and experience adaptive design may be best. Our recent research on managing customer journeys shows that although responsive designs dominate adaptive is a valid alternative.
Still we felt that this infographic from Verve does a great job of raising awareness…
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29 Sep 2014
Tools to uncover competitor video content approaches
In the past, competitor analysis meant hours of trawling through your competitors’ social media sites and building time-consuming reports.
Nowadays, SaaS based systems can do some of the hard work for you. All you need to do is log on, input your competitor details and see for yourself exactly what’s going on behind the scenes. Some systems are free and do not even require a login.
In this post you will find out about some great tools that will help you uncover great video marketing strategies and ideas.
Changing landscape of video strategy
After Google, YouTube is the internet’s second largest search engine. A growing number of viewers are beginning to subscribe to business channels too. In fact, the number of people subscribing daily has increase three-fold since 2013.
As more businesses start to tap into the power…
Halloween marketing party tricks - you are never too old
The holidays are coming. However, holiday shopping no longer waits until Black Friday or even the month of November to get underway. Instead, to get ahead of this holiday season, smart businesses must consider their marketing kick-offs much earlier. This makes Halloween an excellent starting point for the 2014 holiday season.
Halloween isn’t just for kids anymore whichever country you're planning your Halloween campaigns for. In fact, according to the US National Retail Federation, 71.5% of adults plan to celebrate or otherwise participate in Halloween-related activities this year. This means that there’s no specific demographic for Halloween, and chances are you can profit from this knowledge.
Ideas for marketing Halloween
Is your business ready? Looking for ways to incorporate Halloween into your company’s marketing strategy? Look no farther. Check out…
Tesco International use viral videos to make an impact at a low cost
At our #DigitalImpact2014 conference a range of brands shared their successes and hiccups on Digital Transformation. One example that stood out for me, and I thought would be interesting to share, is this international marketing campaign.
The marketing challenge for this campaign was that Tesco, although a household name in the UK, is entering new markets with its online grocery delivery service without a good level of awareness. It is looking to raise awareness amongst a younger generation who are using TV less than traditionally. Part of the solution was these humorous, lighthearted Youtube videos, which
This example shows how these videos 'went viral' in Poland. It's a great example of a campaign to show how entertaining and tongue in cheek content can appeal to different cultures. It started off as a low budget trial in Poland, and the videos reached…
