All online businesses need to move quickly to embrace a multi-channel strategy
All of us online business owners agree that our website visitors and paying customers are, by far, our most important asset.
It makes sense. Everything we do is targeted towards satisfying prospects, gaining their trust and hopefully, convert them in to paying and recurring customers. That’s why most of our marketing and sales efforts are focused on bringing visitors to our website (or app).
To convert this great story into industry terms, business pros live and breathe conversion rates and ROI metrics.
One important conversion enabler (or ROI generator, if you’d like) is related to the business’s customer communication strategy. I’ll focus on this one, in this article.
Online customer communication is a wide topic: It covers customer technical support, online chatting with prospects, answering frequent questions on different channels and much, much more.
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What is a content discovery network and why should digital marketers be using them?
It is not fair to make your users wait. The bottom line is that content marketers are at greater risk if they fail to reach their audience quickly since Google have confirmed that site speed is a ranking factor. Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a new way of amplifying the delivery of your content. It is a system that provides faster and safer internet experience. Believe me; it has all the potential to add value to your content marketing objectives.
Why use a CDN?
Content delivery is crucial to marketing success. After hours of time spent thinking on a theme for a good article, you should work on ways to deliver it quickly.
Globaldots indicates the loss in conversion rate as -7%, per one-second delay.
You cannot afford to have a slow loading page. This is where a CDN comes…
Examples of content that gets results on social media
Content still remains the strongest element of any marketing strategy. In fact, about 70 percent B2B marketers plan to create more content in 2017 compared to 2016. Whether you are a B2B or B2C brand, staying current with the content marketing best practices will ensure you achieve your goals quickly and efficiently. A good way to stay updated with the latest trends is to see how the top brands are leveraging content and how they have benefited from them.
If you are a seasoned content marketer, you can get clues about which adjustments need to be made to your content strategies to get better results. If you are new to content marketing, you can learn from the big shots and get started with your content marketing endeavors.
Now let us see what the top brands are doing to get the desired attention:
1. Content…
Why influencer marketing will go from strength to strength this year
If you thought influencer marketing was big in 2016, you thought wrong. At its core, Influencer Marketing is about to explode this year. This year, marketers are doubling down on their influencer marketing efforts, increasing their budgets to include the tactic as a strategic piece of their overall marketing mix. With newer types of marketing methods being introduced each day, influencer marketing is likely to stay in the limelight.
A recent survey has it that around 84% marketers have at least one influencer marketing campaign planned for 2017. Simply put, the Influencer marketing is a type of marketing that focuses on using key leaders to drive their brand’s message to the larger market segment. In other words, it helps you concentrate on the central figures in marketing rather than focusing on marketing as a niche. These key leaders can be…
Here are the 3 most important reasons why you should pay attention to your ecommerce personalization strategy today more than ever before
If your team is like most ecommerce organizations these days, you have already made some progress in your personalization journey by serving relevant content to your ideal customer groups and optimizing experiences that you serve. The ability to deliver true 1-to-1 personalized experiences across all channels has been the dream of every marketer — personalization increases loyalty, drives higher conversions and grows revenue.
Unfortunately, it has been incredibly difficult to deliver on individualized experiences at scale and various attempts at personalization over the past four decades have failed, resulting in greater unpredictability in revenue. With recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), this changes. It’s finally possible for brands and retailers to deliver on the promises of 1-to-1 personalization and serve the ideal experience to their each of their customers…
Get Ahead With an Integrated Marketing Campaign
Integrated marketing campaigns bring different channels together to deliver a message that helps the customer to properly identify the brand or product being promoted.
One of the best examples of an integrated marketing campaign done right is from Compare the Market and their meerkat. By creating a toy that customers could own, the campaign went far deeper than a mere advertising campaign on TV or the internet.
The fun and friendly characters have helped turn insurance into something that even children can connect to and after a year, the campaign had helped to increase the market share of Compare the Market by 76%.
According to David Pickton and Dr Amanda Broderick, authors of Integrated Marketing Communications, there are four essential C’s that need to be followed in order to craft an integrated campaign. For anyone looking for ways to create a successful strategy of their…
Adblockers are here to stay. Marketers need to wake up to a new era
Sixty-three percent of users ages 18 to 34 are using ad-blocking software when viewing digital content, and 41 percent of internet users overall block ads. Just last year, PageFair published a report on ad-block rates that provided unprecedented insight into how many users utilize ad-blocking software when they browse the web. For example, ad blocking cost publishers around $22 billion during 2015, and U.S. ad blocking grew by 48 percent to a staggering 45 million active users as of June that same year. This widespread usage of ad-blocking methods has created a demographic that marketers can’t reach with traditional digital marketing strategies.
Especially because advertising is the way content on the web is financially supported, ad blocking can have a negative effect on marketing efforts. “Many of the most popular tools marketers use to measure and…
How Marketers can use Google Zero Moment of Truth model
I first had the idea for this blog 2 years ago. Man oh man, take a second to consider how the landscape has changed over the past 3 years… Every other business is an app start-up, Vine withered and died, the leader of the free world uses Twitter to start wars and robots are taking over the feckin’ world.
Yet still, there are plenty of marketers who don’t know about Google’s ZMOT and one thing still remains true: one of the biggest challenges facing marketers today is how to keep up with their customers.
With the above in mind, I thought it was worth refreshing and reposting this blog for those marketers who are still trying to find that sweet-spot between permission-based content marketing and driving conversion online.
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Chart of the day: Usability testing budgets have increased in 2016 compared with 2015, in an early-2017 study by Usertesting.com
Budgets are either increasing or staying the same for most respondents, budgets are only decreasing for such a small amount of respondents. This shows businesses value usability testing and the benefits user experience research brings. For industries such as market research, who are seeing reductions in budget, it's a pleasure to see user research budgets increase.
Most respondents also indicated that a change in attitude or simply no change/ no reason was leading to the budget change.
The study also found that the majority of respondents have no fixed budget (40%) for usability testing.
Source: UserTesting.com
Sample: 2,238 professionals across a number of industries who are in some way involved in user research
Recommended resource: Digital Experience Mangement Toolkit
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Taking a more systematic approach to discover why your website visitors are not converting
What’s stopping you from converting more of your website visitors into sales or leads right now? One of the reasons, that we'll explore in this article, is a lack of tangible insight. There’s often a mistaken understanding that analytics and insights are one and the same, or that viewing charts and tables will provide answers when often the right question itself hasn’t yet been asked.
Analytics will only take you so far in understanding your website visitors using averages and actions taken but they won’t give nearly enough insights into why those actions were taken.
To uncover why your non-converters are leaving your website you can create hypotheses based on watching user session replays (recordings of them browsing of your site), look at screen mouse and click based heat maps to see where people are loitering and clicking, run…
