Facebook dominates social media by audience reach AND engagement
We all know Facebook is the most popular social network. Yet it's useful to be reminded how important it is since it helps us prioritise our marketing focus accordingly. This comScore 'Digital Future in Focus' report shows the importance of Facebook in an interesting format since it shows levels of audience engagement with the platform compared to reach.
By comparing Reach on the X-axis against Engagement on the Y-axis we can see how far ahead Facebook is compared to the other social networks. This data is for a younger US audience, but the report shows a similar pattern for an older audience and the 'Future in Focus' series covers other countries too. Note that this picture could be considered a little misleading if it was…
Five ways to supercharge your Facebook video ad campaigns for your brand
Facebook is now pretty much a ubiquitous presence in many of our lives. The platform now has over 1.65 billion monthly users and is considered so influential that it was even accused of affecting the outcome of the US presidential election.
What’s been fascinating to see is how Facebook has evolved as a mobile + video-first platform over the last couple of years. Of the 1+ billion people on Facebook every day, 100 million hours of video is consumed. Emerging social apps such as Snapchat have redefined how video is consumed on mobile (from clunky and expensive to quick and informal) and Facebook themselves point to the 2015 ALS ice bucket challenge as a turning point for social video proliferation. The trend proved just how simple and easy it was for anyone to upload video online, whether it was…
Will 2017 really be the 'year of video'?
Year after year marketers are presented with the same rallying cry: this is the year of video. However, it's become crystal clear that 2017 may very well represent the turning point for video marketing as we know it. The rise of video isn't exactly a secret among the many trends of content marketing. Video has been traditionally associated with a high barrier to entry, questionable ROI and a somewhat heavy investment in terms of time and resources.
The good news for marketers? Times have changed.
The bad news? Those who don't hop on the video bandwagon sooner rather than later may very well get left behind.
Why Marketers Must Get On Board with Video
The numbers don't lie: video is on course to dominate the web in terms of reach and traffic. According to a report by Cisco released last year, video is projected to account…
Use these 'Voice of the Customer' Tools to gather qualitative data on your customers
Web analytics can provide the what, the when and the how, but struggle to deliver the why and the rationale which explains the numbers from your analytics tool. 'Voice of the Customer' tools can run continuously in the background, be focused on specific pages or be time-based, gathering detailed feedback on barriers to conversion, design issues, user confusion – all useful and actionable insight for marketers.
These tools allow you to go beyond the quantitative insight of analytics tools and provide a deeper layer of site visitor feedback. Tools in this category are growing in popularity and include general website feedback, crowd sourced product opinions and exit survey functionality.
Key things to consider before purchasing and using these tools:
Be careful not to request too much data. Just like us, users are put off by surveys that are pages…
Chart of the Day: Snapchat was the most used social media app for twice as many people in 2016.
Today's Chart of the Day is influenced by the latest news of Snapchat trialing two new features to increase a marketer return on their ad spend on the channel.
But before we get into the new features (scroll to under the chart if you can't wait), this chart from the infinite dial 2016 report from Edison research shows that while Facebook is the most used social media channel by a significant margin, Snapchat is the only brand to make major gains when compared to 2015 by moving from 4% of users to 8%. This is only made more incredible for Snapchat when you consider that Facebook, Linkedin and Pinterest had their share reduced and Instagram remained the same. For more information on snapchat, see our article on Snapchat Marketing Stats.
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We are in the age of the smart customer
Customer experience is defined as the sum total of conscious events, as a coordinated series of interactions between a customer and a brand to accomplish anything. Above all words - a customer experience is defined by the customer, for the customer, at each touch-point, each time. — Esteban Kolsky, Gartner.
The Age of the Customer is not just a passing fad; it certainly isn’t just this year’s marketing buzzword. The phrase, coined by Forrester back in 2011, refers to the massive power shift since the digital revolution exploded into our lives, and refers to how technology, social media, and mobile information exchange are affecting customer service, product development and marketing. It alludes to the fact that 40% of customers have a high willingness and ability to shift their spend. In particular, it refers to this period now in which businesses will be…
Chart of the Day: The Fashion and Sports Industries are getting the most out of the Instagram community
Instagram's popularity seems never ending, and every time a new feature is released the opportunities for brands to reach audiences keep growing. In the last year, Instagram has introduced us to Stories, Instagram Live, Stickers, Mulitple photos and video in one post and much more. While the top followed accounts are dominated by celebrity accounts with Selena Gomez leading the way (if you discount the official Instagram account) top B2C/retail brands have been able to capitalise on this too.
If you are new to Instagram or even if you're not The Rock's account is a personal favourite, it really shows how a personality has used the platform to promote himself as a brand.
In todays chart of the day, I ranked the 10 most followed brands on Instagram excluding celebrities.
At the top of the…
How you can significantly increase the ROI of your marketing videos
“Did you see that video everyone is talking about?!” You probably hear this at least once a week. People these days are just as crazy about online video as they were about moving pictures in the days of the silent silver screen, and streaming video is only getting more popular. You still have time to get ahead of the curve — and your competitors — but you need a game plan.
If you aren’t sure whether online video content is a priority for your marketing needs, you should know that 64 percent of consumers are more likely to pull the trigger on a purchase after watching a video about the product. Video is already a vital piece of any digital marketing campaign, and yet many businesses focus on the wrong elements because they don’t have a video marketing strategy in…
Chart of the day: Dark posts are mot expensive than boosted posts on Facebook, whilst boosted posts are shared more.
Research has found that dark posts have less interaction and cost more than boosted posts. Dark posts are a term for posts that only go to a certain section of a Facebook page's fans. They therefore don't appear on the page, just in certain followers newsfeeds. Who the post is shown to is determined by the page- you may seek to only target followers of only a certain demographic or those with certain interests.
The study found:
Boosted posts on average received over 70% than dark post, but receive more likes on average.
Marketers also promoted dark posts for longer, with an average of 42 days for dark posts and 27 days for boosted posts
However dark ads were less shareable and less cost-effective.
Most ads…
An ineffective brand strategy is likely blocking your success in digital marketing, here's 3 factors for success
We take it for granted that digital channel management is a core marketing activity now, and yet our own recent survey highlighted that a digital strategy isn’t a ubiquitous component of everyone’s marketing plan, as much as we might think it ought to be. But, let’s say that it is, that we’ve all got a solid digital strategy, that we’re using frameworks like RACE - are we done? I’d suggest far from it - and that there is a bigger issue at hand blocking your digital success, which is often surprisingly "missing-in-action" and that’s a coherent brand strategy.
In fact, brand strategy is an obvious yet secret ingredient for modern digital marketing which most companies that I meet or work with simply don’t have an eye on, there’s no solution in place…
