Social Media Essentials: Facebook hit a new milestone, Instagram lets you reply live streams and Messenger just got more fun
Firstly, Happy Social Media Day! This day, launched by Mashable eight years ago to recognize and celebrate social media’s impact on global communication. The way social networks impact our personal and professional lives is far greater than many would have anticipated. Each week there are new updates and developments in social media, opening up new opportunities for businesses.
To celebrate all things social, here are 6 updates we saw happen this week that could help inform your social media strategy and help keep you up-to-date with what's happened in the world of social media.
1. Facebook community-building tools
Facebook has rolled out some great new tools for group admins that will help them manage their groups more effectively. The aim of rolling out theses changes are to help group admins…
Localization means more than just translation, you must adapt to meet your audience's needs
Selling to a worldwide audience at first might seem like the ideal way to increase your profits, but if you don’t get your messaging right you could end up talking your way out of increased revenue.
Retail E-commerce sales reached 7.4% of all retail sales in 2016, and is set to continue rising for the foreseeable future. It is predicted to increase to over $4 trillion by 2020, making up 15% of all retail spending globally; much of this percentage comes from international sales. Currently the UK holds the highest percentage of online shoppers at 15.4% of all retail sales, followed by China (13.8%), Norway (11.5%) and Finland (10.8%), and the leading destination for those sales is the United States, followed by China, the UK and Germany. By 2020, nearly…
A how-to guide for campaign reporting with examples
One of the most important (but often overlooked) aspects of digital marketing is setting up your analytics properly. It’s a little bit technical but easy to do once you understand a few simple steps and see why it’s so important.
Being able to track where your visitors are coming from is a valuable opportunity to improve your engagement and your ROI during the campaign. Additionally, when you benchmark your campaign performance you will be able to improve your campaigns in the future, and budget more effectively. It’s worth investing a little time in analytics!
In this post, we’ll show you how to use Google Analytics to track visits to your website or landing page. This is the critical first step in being able to understand how your campaign is performing.
Once you can accurately see where your visitors are coming from, you’ll be able to build more…
6 steps to getting more from your meetings
Meetings are a necessity for most business operations, especially marketing, where independent campaigns are running simultaneously under the same broad goals. You’ll need to gather your team to brainstorm new ideas, update each other on individual progress, come together for mutual tasks, and follow up after a campaign’s end to review and evaluate what comes next. In an ideal world, every meeting would instantly bring each team member up to speed and give them the resources they need to continue their work.
Unfortunately, this is not an ideal world. Most marketing meetings end up wasting time in at least one dimension, whether that’s by straying off topic, disrupting people from work, hosting too many people, or lacking any actionable conclusion. David Grady explains some of the mechanics in this TED Talk, and in recent years, meetings have come under the microscope of other…
Chart of the Day: After years of global growth, online ad spend outstrips TV spend for the first time
Online ad-spend surpassed TV spend in several mature markets a few years back. But now we have reached the watershed moment where online ad spend is higher than TV spend globally.
This spectacular growth makes it an interesting time to work in digital marketing. But we are seeing the lion's share of this growth to just two providers, creating a 'digital duopoly'. This may create a less competitive market, which could be bad news for advertisers in the long run.
Source: KPCB Internet Trends 2017
Data Source: Zenith Advertising Data Forecast
Recommended Toolkit: Marketing Technology and Innovation
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How to use data to optimise your multi-channel marketing
Multi-channel marketing provides businesses with the opportunity to engage with consumers across a variety of different fronts, tailoring messages for specific groups while maintaining a consistent message and brand. But it’s not simply a matter of sending your message blindly out into the ether – to achieve true success over multiple channels you need to make effective use of the data at your disposal.
This article demystifies this process, helping you understand what this data is, where you need to find it and what you need to do with it. As with all marketing, a little bit of considered thought at the start of the campaign makes a real difference in the result.
Tracking your data
This may seem obvious, but the actual obtaining of your data is the most important place to start and tracking a campaign is really the only way to determine…
Sajjad Bhojani, Head of Multi Channel Marketing and Developments outlines the Dunelm process for digital strategy creation
Our recent research on managing online channels shows that many businesses still don't have a digital strategy, although a good proportion now do. Our templates and guides give ideas on how to structure digital plans, but there is also the question of what is the best process for developing online and multichannel plans and reviewing performance against targets. To help answer this question I spoke to Sajjad Bhojani,
when he was Head of Multi Channel Marketing and Development at Dunelm and asked to explains their process for strategy creation and ongoing management of online channels. (This case study was originally in 2014, but we're sharing again to fit in with our multichannel marketing theme, since there are some interesting learnings).
Dunelm is the UK’s largest…
Developing your startup pitch
The perfect startup pitch helps entrepreneurs separate their companies from a growing amount of competition. Startup activity in the United States increased in 2016, continuing an upward trend that began in 2015, according to the Kauffman Foundation. All of this comes after startup activity reached its lowest point in the last 20 years in 2014.
A more competitive market reinforces the notion that startups need more than a good business idea to become successful — entrepreneurs must convince others to invest in their business. Making that case persuasively is as much science as it is art.
The following sections offer some guidelines and examples for developing the perfect startup pitch.
How to Make a Startup Pitch
Research
Make sure you research and double-check every detail of your presentation. You should have an understanding of your product or service, the market and how these two areas interact.
“What is your competitive advantage?”…
Chart of the Day: Annual churn hits 23% in the high-tech industry
Email marketing is a vital channel for B2B marketers. Providing a high ROI when compared to other marketing channels. Which drives us, marketers, to spend many hours creating engaging content for our target personas. After all this effort when you're ready to hit the send, are you sure that your data is accurate?
A recent study by Salesforce found that the rate at which B2B marketers were able to grow their email lists looks relatively healthy. In the High Tech and Retail sectors, the growth is as high as 21%. On the face of it, most marketers would take a 21% growth rate each year.
Average Annual Growth by Vertical and Department
But this is only one side of the story. The report also looks at…
Chart of the Day: Don't forget your Lead Scoring
We all know about Email Marketing Automation, but what is Lead Scoring?
In the chart, we can see that Email Automation is the most popular at 65.50%, which is expected. The chart also shows how little people either know or use lead scoring, as it's only at 11.80%.
Lead scoring is an excellent way of ranking prospects using a scoring method. These scores will help sales teams to prioritise leads or which should be nurtured by marketing more.
In the beginning of the process, marketing and sales need to work together to decide on what their ideal prospect is and what we want them to do on your site. And then assign or detract points from the prospects score for doing those activities. For example:
Visited Pricing Page = 20 points
Visited Blog = 1 point
Visited Careers Page = -20 points
Each time a prospect visits one of these…
