How to keep your content strategy cutting edge
We’re entering a new era of content marketing, and if you’re like the majority of content marketers out there, you probably haven’t adapted. Competition is fierce, and if you want to remain relevant and visible for your target audience, you have to reimagine your strategy for the new challenges and opportunities that exist. Influential forces like Google and basic consumer preferences are beginning to weed out the slow adapters, so now’s the time to adjust your campaign and forge a course for the future of content marketing.
The New Era of Content Marketing
What is this new era of content marketing and why is it important? There aren’t many landmark changes that have spurred this shift; instead, it’s the result of a number of gradually evolving technologies and shifting market trends coming together to establish new content marketing norms. Some of the biggest influencers include:
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Investing in social is all well and good, but you need a strategy first if you want it to get results
New data from the CMO's survey of 2016 report shows how major companies are planning on big increases in social media spending in coming years, yet are failing to properly integrate it into their digital strategies.
As you can see from the table below, social media spending is set to double from 10% of marketing budgets to 20% in coming years. B2C services are the biggest social spenders, with a full quarter of marketing budgets to be allocated to social by 2021.
When asked about how effectively their companies are integrating their social media efforts with the overall marketing strategy CMOs are pretty damning. Although there has been a very slight uptick of the past…
Cadbury smashed its campaign targets and enhanced engagement by betting half its digital budget on Snapchat
With pressure on ad budgets, deciding where to spend your marketing dollars is as tricky as ever. When it comes to FMCG brands, TV is still often seen as the safe bet, the 'no one gets fired for buying IBM' option. But primetime TV slots are expensive and harder to quantify in terms of value when there are only ratings measures without direct measures of response via engagement or clickthrough rate or conversions as available for online marketing. For this reason and to reach audiences who are online, many businesses who convert their customers online (eCommerce, SaaS, news sites, gaming etc.) have moved the majority of their ad budgets to digital formats in recent years. It's easy to see why. You can track links, measure traffic, work out the conversion rate and thus establish what…
Trust on social media is very low, you'll need to be honest if you want to win it back
In the fast-moving world of social media, brands are constantly competing for attention. Organic page reach has been nerfed by Facebook, whilst Twitter is full of people shouting ever more regularly in an attempt to be heard, making it easy to be crowded out.
Sometimes it can be tempting to try any tactic to generate engagement, but your customers aren't stupid, and won't be fooled by marketing gimmicks. What is more, you should be presenting yourself as open and honest, and only by being transparent will you achieve this.
The CIM have put together this infographic on brand transparency on social media, which shows how little trust many users have in brands. The only way to reverse this and win trust is to be honest with your customers and be consistently up front about any…
Essential lessons from the top B2B brands across different verticals
Trackmaven analysed the social media content from 316 leading B2B brands on the 5 largest social networks over the past 12 months, so you can benchmark your own B2B social media efforts against some of the best in the industry. If you work in B2C rather than B2B you can read our write up on the B2C social media report instead.
B2C Social Media audience size by industry
There are big differences between industries when it comes to audience size, but in large part these are probably explained by how well the industries are suited to social media . Professional services does so well because although it's B2B it is offering a product (jobs) which a massive number of people are going to be interested in. There are always going to be more people wanting to look at jobs postings than…
Are there any worthwhile Pokémon GO marketing applications for brands? Hell, Yes.
Like millions throughout the world I have been sucked into the hype surrounding what I now know as 'Puke-a-Mon Go'. The web has been ‘paraflinched’ with articles lauding how the game targets ‘millennial’ aged zombies who can play Puke-a-Mon Go whilst walking recklessly across lanes of traffic or over cliffs.
In addition to brand sponsorship opportunities as described below, Puke-a-Mon Go boosts profitable in-game purchases. Not insignificant since Euromonitor International projects the 2016 global mobile in-game purchase market to grow some twenty per cent, reaching $29.8bn /£22.5bn..
Planet Earth – 7bn people – gotta catch ’em all
Puke-a-Mon Go quickly clocked up in excess of 30 million downloads. At its peak, Candy Crush drew an audience of 20 million users. It even rivalled social network downloads.
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Preventing churn is key to improving revenue
For subscription-based businesses like SaaS companies, churn rate is a crucial metric that determines overall performance. Simply put, churn rate is the rate at which customers cut ties with your service during a given period. This percentage gives you a clear idea about your customer retention, which is an important factor defining a company’s success. Looking at the below chart you'll see that the lower the churn rate, the better your business is performing.
Importance of Churn Rate in SAAS
Churn rate is easily one of the most essential metrics when measuring the performance of SaaS businesses. Totango reports that the fastest-growing companies will reduce churn rate less than 5%. For SaaS companies, a lot of time and money is spent on acquiring customers. Since this investment pays off over time, the…
Selling to your existing customers is much easier than attracting new ones. So keep them coming back.
Do you want more returning customers? The kind of customers who spend more and visit more often?
Then a loyalty program could be the perfect tool to add to your customer retention arsenal.
Why? You may ask. Let’s start with the most reasonable fact: because it makes you more money. That is, of course, if you do it the right way.
Here’s a quick stat that’s worth remembering: Keeping a current customer costs you 3-10 times less than acquiring a new one, depending on the industry you are in. According to WordStream, small businesses spend between $9,000 and $10,000 trying to attract new customers on Google paid search campaigns in just each month on average. Just image how much more efficient you could be if you could switch that re-activating existing customers and getting repeat…
Pokemon Go beats top social Apps for engagement
The hype-machine is very much in gear when it comes to Pokémon GO. We've seen at the top of the app store for downloads since it came out, and all manner of viral videos involving it. You may have heard about the number of Pokémon GO downloads which are astounding with over 65 million downloads and 10 percent of Android users who have downloaded the game.
But it doesn't look like GO is just a quick 'flash in the pan'. People are doing a lot more than just downloading it. According to data from SimilarWeb, Pokémon GO is the leading app for daily engagement time in the US right now. It's users are on the app for an incredible 43 minutes a day, double other engaging platforms like Instagram and Snapchat and four times what Facebook messenger manages.
These are pretty amazing engagement stats, and whilst Pokémon…
The connected customer
On average, the British household owns over 7 internet devices and unsurprisingly, smartphones are the most common followed by laptops and tablets. More than 60% of all email opens are with a smartphone (Communicator Benchmarking Report 2016), with 50% of all mobile searches conducted in the hope of finding local results and 61% of those searches result in a purchase being made according to Search Engine Watch. The customer is more connected than ever and this is changing buyer behaviour.
A change in behaviour means a change in strategy
A change in behaviour means an impact on the customer journey. Journeys are no longer linear –now we must focus on the multiple touch points to create the ultimate customer experience. The change in customer journey has developed a change in consumer behaviour and expectations, meaning brands need to evolve their products to be one step ahead to stay competitive;…
