How to Successfully Transition to an E-commerce Revenue Model
Reduced shelf space has spared no product category. Giant retailers like Target have been steadily reducing items they stock on their shelves to cut down on the number of items filling up their storerooms. While reducing shelf space might make life easier for retailers, it's making things tough on product manufacturers.
Manufacturers in prime categories like baby and maternity products have reason to be worried. Destination Maternity, for example, recorded a net loss of $1.5 million in its fiscal third quarter, and its revenue fell from $119.5 million in the previous quarter to $102.6 million. Same-store sales dropped by 3.5 percent, and the company’s relationships ended with Gordmans, Sears, and Kohl's due to the closure of leased departments or the retailers' efforts to scale back.
Shelf space is…
Finding creative ways to market a product that isn’t going to get millions of social shares
Going viral. It’s the dream of so many digital marketers. If you could just get one video, one blog post, one social media infographic to go viral. Then your campaign (or product or client) would be a total success.
But what can you do when going viral isn’t an option? How can you use digital marketing techniques to successfully reach an audience that needs your product, but might not be willing to admit it on their social networks?
It’s a challenge, but it can be done. And with great success. Take one example: Brickell Men’s Products.
This luxury men’s skincare brand was started with a heavy dose of reality. The story of the company’s founding starts with Josh - one of the co-founders - being teased by…
To succeed with content marketing you have to have a well thought out strategy
Your peers have been telling you for years that you need to invest in content marketing. They tell you it’s the highest returning investment you can make and that your internet presence depends on your company’s ability to leverage high-ranking publishing platforms and specific SEO techniques. Are you ready to listen? If so, you need a plan. This blog will walk you through the basic steps of getting started with your first content marketing campaign.
Grasping the True Value of Content Marketing
As a business owner or marketer, you probably like numbers. So let’s look at the value of content marketing from a quantifiable standpoint. And what better place to start than by seeing what your peers – who are already heavily invested in content marketing – think.
According…
Chart of the Day: How often do Americans open and send emails per day?
The American worker spends a lot of time checking their email. All across the country people are spending large blocks of their workday in their inbox. But what exactly does the typical American inbox at work look like?
Email marketing company Reachmail surveyed one thousand American workers who consider email significant to their job. The survey focused on 4 core areas relating to email use at work:
How often American’s are checking their email at work
How many emails they send per day
How quickly that they respond to emails
How many emails are unread in a typical inbox
The goal of the survey was to get a better look at how American’s deal with email while at work. As a result of the survey, they discovered several interesting trends.
Checking Email
The survey found that 54% of Americans check…
Utilize these important trends this year if you have a niche product
Niche businesses usually cater to a relatively small and well-defined market by tapping an unmet demand. For example, Lefty’s store is a good example of niche business as it sells products for left handed people. Other examples of niche businesses include GetOutfitted, YearBook Innovation, and boutique consulting firms which provide consulting services to specific industries. Google, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are all examples of niche technology businesses which went on to become mass business later.
Niche businesses need to do focused marketing to become profitable as they serve a small segment of the market. Traditionally, niche marketers have used demand based marketing methods such as Pay-per-click advertising and focused industry events for promoting their products or services. However, advancement…
The secrets to personal branding success
Good branding can make or break your success: it stands for companies, and it stands for personal brands as well. Nowadays, personal branding is more important than ever, particularly if you are an entrepreneur or solopreneur, or if you work in a company. In this blog post, I want to show you the best way to start building up your personal brand in 2017.
Why personal branding?
Personal branding has become almost a necessity in recent years, especially for people in certain niches. The reason for that is other people that you come into contact with, particularly clients and employers will likely also check your online persona.
By building up your personal brand, you’ll be able to put your best foot forward online – which will also influence your success in the real world as well.
As an entrepreneur, there are even more benefits to creating a personal brand.…
Content marketing works, but measuring content marketing ROI is challenging
In the Smart Insights-Hubspot research into content marketing in Europe, 44.4% of marketing managers who responded to the survey, say they struggle to measure the return on their content marketing investment.
[caption id="attachment_34135" align="aligncenter" width="550"] 44.4% of marketing managers struggle to measure content ROI[/caption]
This inability to measure the ROI of content marketing confirms a need for more guidance on how to calculate the cost of content marketing and measure the return on investment.
In this post I want to walk you through a simple but effective costing model, and show you how, by breaking out the component costs of content into labour, production and distribution, you can work out your content marketing cost, which provides the basis for evaluating your content marketing…
Tie your audience down with Anchor content
As the Smart Insights - HubSpot Content Marketing 2016 research shows, content now forms an essential element of nearly everything we do as marketers. Planning, creating and distributing great quality content is not just the domain of content marketers; it covers email, advertising, CRM and just about anything else we’re involved in. Content excellence is now so crucial to how we communicate and gain traction with consumers that it’s become an important priority for many marketers in 2016 and beyond.
Yet, despite its importance, gaining consumers' attention is becoming more and more difficult. In an attention economy, that’s become increasingly competitive, ‘content shock’ the incessant deluge of mediocre content that is blinding audiences to brands’ content efforts - means that content has to have genuine quality and relevance to achieve cut-through.
The rise of ad blocking software, the decrease in organic reach on…
Chart of the day: 3 of the top 5 Youtube Adverts from January are over 2 minutes long
Earlier this week news came down the marketing grapevine that Youtube/Google was going to no longer support unskippable 30-second ads in a move that they describe as "providing a better ads experience for users online". This change is scheduled for 2018, so there is still plenty of time to use this type of Ads if you already have them in your upcoming campaign plans.
Come 2018, Youtube will still offer unskippable Ads but of the 6 seconds variety. Less annoying (and much less mobile data) for the user but will cause a rethink to many brand's video strategies.
I am very interested in how brands will adopt to the standard of skippable and 6 seconds unskippable ads and move away from the 2-3 minute mini-movies that are a trend of the last 12 months.
This change will also challenge creative agencies be…
Practical ideas and tools to improve influencer marketing
Ever wondered why Dr. Phil bears an influence over its audience? The simple answer is because he was able to impose his knowledge and expertise in psychology through an effective medium. There may be better doctors than Dr. Phil. However, the fact that he was featured on Oprah, whose show reaches out to millions of viewers on a regular basis, gives him an edge over other practitioners. As more people hear his advice to his patients and the fact that Oprah vouches for his expertise quickly made him an influential psychologist.
The anatomy of influence
There are lots of things marketers can learn from Dr. Phil as an example of influencer marketing. Being knowledgeable about a particular subject does not automatically make you an online thought leader. Moreover, writing comprehensive and high-quality posts about your…
