Why You Should Use Bots to Supercharge Your MarTech Strategy this Year
How long do we have before AI-powered bots become the primary channel for us to read and share content on? From newspapers and magazines to social media and apps, what does the future of content have in store for us?
Unlike traditional media and the printed press which stayed stagnant for decades, it’s no secret that the digital marketplace as we know it changes drastically on a year to year basis.
With the evolution of how we create and consume content, however, staying in the game goes hand in hand with staying on top of the changing types and hacks of content marketing. After all, meeting audiences where they are and how they like it is what will make or break you.
For the past few months, marketing gurus like Rand Fishkin and Neil Patel have been emphasizing on how…
SMEs needn't be left behind by new Marketing Automation technology
A dismal 37 percent of shoppers say that the average retailer “gets” them. It’s perhaps for this reason that consumers spend a lot of time researching online before making a purchasing decision offline. And for the first time ever, - as data shows - there are more online sales than in brick and mortar stores in some sectors.
The difference is that the new kids on the block - the ecommerce guys - are making use of technology to improve the customer journey, which is one of the most critical factors to keeping customers and attracting more business.
In fact, C-suite executives reckon four particular technologies will be key for marketing success in the future:
Cloud computing and services
Mobile solutions
The Internet of Things
Cognitive tools
This article examines the top marketing trends for 2017 that are specifically related to these four technologies,…
Chart of the Day: The importance of having quality marketing data
Data is the not-so-secret weapon of each and every marketer across the land. Data-driven marketing takes the guesswork out of your daily decision making. Should you place more budget into Facebook Ads, more resource into email marketing or cancel your latest campaign early? It's hard to know unless you have accurate data at hand to inform your decision-making.
In a recent research report, Ascend2 asked marketing influencers "what are the most important objectives of a marketing data strategy?" Leading the way with 62% was improving marketing data quality. This result is encouraging because if you don't have accurate data you could be making worse decisions than if you had no data at all.
In a follow-up question, they asked "What are the most critical challenges to achieving marketing…
A review of different frameworks covering the customer journey, brand and content
Today, consumers do not search, engage and consume information within individual channels while making purchase decisions. Their journeys are fluid and choices are influenced by multiple channels, devices and screens, and a vast array of content, both online and offline. Therefore the challenge for businesses today is to understand how their customers behave and to establish a multichannel marketing strategy to effectively communicate with prospects in the right channel, at the right time. The frameworks and digital marketing models I review in this post can help build communications around the consumer rather than a product.
With the advent of the internet and the ongoing evolution of the media landscape, businesses are having to continuously play catch-up whilst the gap between consumer behaviour and business-readiness has never been greater:
…
How to avoid the costly data analysis mistakes that most marketers make
If you're a digital marketer, you can't failed to have noticed—there’s been a seismic data shift over the last several years that encourages empirical marketing based on data and analytics. The sentiment underlying this shift seems to be that if you think your art and copy are good, then you better have the stats to prove it.
This evidence-based approach is heartening in many ways, but many people are still learning how to apply its principles. Just because you have the numbers, doesn’t mean you know how to apply them. In this short article, I want to look at three 'boneheaded' ways that people are looking at their data and offer some suggestions to help put your data analysis back on track.
You’re Not Doing It At All
Sadly, a lot of people are in this category. But I get it. Again, the…
Marketers are expected to take full control of the customer experience in the coming years
The Economist Intelligence Unit asked 499 (one can't help but think they were aiming for 500) Chief Marketing Officers and Senior Marketing Execs about how they saw marketing evolving, and also conducted some in-depth, one on one interviews with CMOs from leading brands such as Unilever and JPMorgan Chase. They were looking to find out what key technologies and trends will drive change in the marketing industry over the next four years, and the results make for interesting reading.
Here we've summarised some of the key findings for marketers, but if you want the full report you can sign up to download it.
Hottest tech trends for marketers
The chart below is in many ways not all that surprising. Mobile has been a massive trend in marketing for years now, and makes up over half of web traffic. The…
These massive trends will change E-commerce marketing this year
We are now well into 2017. If you are to develop a winning e-commerce marketing strategy you'll need to start planning now. E-commerce continues to grow rapidly, but with the huge market acting as a magnet to brands large and small, competition will ramp up faster than the total growth of the market. This means customers will be harder to win, easier to lose and fussier on price and user experience.
To avoid falling behind the ever more fierce competition, you will need to both be aware of and benefit from the latest trends in e-commerce. These megatrends are global, have huge implications, and are not going to go away anytime soon. Ecommerce marketers will have to integrate them into their planning to be successful this year And if any of you think you can get away without creating a detailed plan - remember that…
20 marketing stats for 2020
2020 now looms ahead of us, emerging from over the long-term planning horizon. For years marketers have envisaged 2020 as a distant realm where consumers are empowered, companies responsive and new technologies like virtual reality and the Internet of Things ubiquitous. Now it isn't actually far off, less than three years. Marketers, therefore, need to stop imagining 2020 as some distant concept and start planning for it as business reality.
To help you construct your plan, we've put together this list of 20 marketing stats showing what the state of the market will be in various areas, from search to social to VR, will be in 2020. These predictions can then help you decide where to allocate resources and spot possible opportunities for your business.
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For more marketing statistics…
Your post-B2B event checklist
Momentum can be an uncommonly powerful force. Rarely will the opportunity to leverage it in the business world be greater than in the aftermath of an inspiring corporate event that your company has hosted. If all has gone as envisioned — and why wouldn’t it? — your team has bolstered relationships with established customers, and your brand has made a favorable initial impression on prospects.
Returns on this marketing investment can only increase with some strategic and timely follow-up outreach. This is where there’s a disconnect between potential and reality, however: Industry research shows that 75 to 80 percent of leads are not followed up on after an event or exhibition.
This failure to capitalize is catastrophic to marketing objectives. Time and effort have been expended without maximizing the benefit, and legitimizing an investment in similar future events becomes a more substantial challenge.
Here’s the fix: Make sure follow-up strategies are discussed…
Chart of the Day: Many clients and agencies aren't using Martech tools for marketing attribution.
Attribution isn't very glamorous. But it's critical to evaluating ad spend, proving ROI and optimizing your marketing mix to get the most bang for your buck.
Because of this, marketers should be using the best technologies available to help them attribute marketing effectiveness as accurately as possible. But research by Adroll shows that shockingly almost half of agencies and close to half of clients are using spreadsheets and manual attribution processes, rather than using vendor technology or an independent third party.
This report also shows where marketers are using tech for attribution, it's overwhelmingly vendor technology. This tech can be useful, but as recent analytics errors at Facebook have shown, it can result in over-reporting. Third party attribution tools can provide a less biased picture, although these can't be used for certain platforms which are 'walled gardens' where the…
