Facebook is at the forefront of marketing technology innovation
Mark Zuckerberg was on stage yesterday at this year's Facebook for developers conference, showing off some nifty new software and coming out with some rather clever ideas for augmented reality products. Here we ask which innovations do marketers need to be aware of and plan for?
Perhaps most important of all isn't the new innovations he announced, but what he re-iterated. He made it clear he is sticking to Facebook's 10-year road map, which was launched last year and again given prominence in this year's conference.
The roadmap looks deceptively simple, but it reveals a whole host of different strategies and new technologies that Facebook will be investing in. You can click on the image below to see a higher resolution version.
There are a few extremely interesting things worth noting from…
How to bridge the advanced analytics knowledge gap
Today's marketing industry is becoming more metrics-driven by the day. If you're a marketer setting up a digital marketing campaign, one of your first major steps involves building a solid marketing strategy (see our toolkit that helps you do this), while becoming familiar with Google Analytics is a typical next step (see our GA toolkit).
But once you get your web strategy going and feel more comfortable with Google Analytics, you might notice that your day-to-day work demands a deeper understanding of user intentions, preferences, and usage patterns. You might begin to ask questions about your users that are more difficult to answer, such as which paths users take on your website, how to do advanced segmentation, how to correlate data outside of Google Analytics, and so on.
Marketers today are awash in customer data. Knowing what an individual consumer is doing where…
Up your slack game with these time-saving tools
What better way to boost marketing and sales productivity than using a productivity tool? Slack now has over 4 million users, and many marketing and sales tools have used that opportunity to reach more users by building integrations.
The good news for marketers and sales personnel is that you can now get more work done without having to leave your Slack channels. This article summarises what you can do with these 10 great Slack integrations.
GrowthBot
I’m beginning with GrowthBot because it is a severely underestimated chat based marketing tool that can help you with content ideas, keyword research and monitoring your competition.
Once you have integrated the tool, you simply have to say “Hello” to have it suggest a dozen or so questions that you can then use as queries. Some interesting questions are “What…
The 14 top rated digital marketing techniques for 2017 according to Smart Insights readers
[Editor's note: Dave Chaffey has now updated his predictions for 2018: Read Digital Marketing Trends to act on in 2018]
In this article, I'll take an in-depth look at what I see as the most significant trends in digital marketing for the year ahead. But, it's not only my view, since I have 'crowdsourced' the importance of the different trends rated by the popularity of each trend.
For all members of Smart Insights, we also have a more detailed free download of the marketing megatrends for 2017, which are 9 digital marketing and martech megatrends will help give you an edge in 2017. In the download we discuss machine learning and artificial intelligence, which for me is the biggest trend in marketing right now. Machine learning techniques apply across many of the techniques we discuss in this post including Big Data,…
Chart of the day: social media marketing and content marketing budgets are expected to increase more than any other channel in 2017
Marketers were asked to indicate whether particular types of marketing would either stay the same, increase or decrease in a survey of over 3,000 client-side marketing professionals. The findings show the importance of social, content and personalisation within marketing strategies and budgets.
Personalisation and video marketing are also big priorities for marketers.
Display advertising and paid search are expected to have the biggest decreases (13% each) whilst affiliate marketing budgets are the most likely to stay the same.
Previously we might have expected content marketing to have been top, but social and content are the power duo. This isn't surprising as social media keeps pushing its way to the top of marketing plans. It's also good to see email marketing is at least maintaining…
Flybe and Honda are fined £83,000 for breaking data rules
The EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is coming into effect in May 2018 and businesses have to prepare for this new rigorous regulation. Because of this, companies are beginning to panic and the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) will not tolerate misuse of people's personal information. These two examples of email reactivation campaigns attracting fines is a warning to all businesses since this is a tactic which is commonly used by marketers to re-engage inactive email subscribers using the techniques in our best practices guide to e-mail engagement.
In August 2016, Flybe sent emails with the subject line, "Are your details correct?" to over 3.3 million people in their database, who had previously opted out of marketing emails. The ICO have now fined the airline £70,000 for breaking the Privacy and Electronic Communication Regulations (PECR) - read enforcement notice and fine details.
In a…
Marketing dashboards that can help you report on and analyze your marketing efforts
Like it or not, today's CMOs are married to metrics. They have to be.
From closely tracking traffic to understanding which channels may be leaking potential leads, failure to make data-driven decisions continues to be the bane of many of today's marketers. As a result, global spending on data-based marketing continues to rise and is similarly expected to spike in 2017.
As we delve deeper into an era of marketing dominating by metrics and big data, modern CMOs can't afford not to have some serious tools on deck to summarise the impact of their digital marketing. This rings especially true to understanding any combination of the following:
Which marketing channels are worth scaling and are likewise providing a positive ROI
Where leads are dropping off within your marketing funnels
Which messages and campaigns are resonating with leads versus those…
The key trends that business-to-business marketers need to act on in 2017
Since we're now well into 2017, it's a natural time for all marketers to review the marketing tactics they've used this year and assess their approaches against other businesses in the sector. For marketers involved in the B2B sector, there are some particularly pressing issues which, if they can be addressed will help 'feed the funnel' and develop more quality leads.
A good starting point for reviewing the trends that will make an impact next year is to think through innovation across all the main digital marketing channels. In our article on marketing trends for 2017, we asked marketers to assess the techniques which would give them the biggest uplift on business in 2017. The results show that the top rated techniques which should get focus next year are closely aligned with B2B sector, which has for the past…
People, not technology are still the key determinant of success.
Technology is constantly changing the way we live. From self-driving cars and omnipresent chatbots to automated marketing tools, it sometimes feels like humans are being edged out by our robotic overlords instead of fulfilling "the promise that technology allows humans to be better humans."
At least we still have the market cornered on artistic pursuits, right? Sort of.
The music world was shaken up when researchers at Sony’s Computer Science Laboratory managed to create two original songs using software known as Flow Machines. The programs analyzed a massive database of existing music and then churned out two tunes based on detected patterns. The first song, “Daddy’s Car,” sounds a bit like an uninspired Beatles track.
While technophiles around the world celebrated it as a landmark moment for artificial intelligence, they ignored one glaring aspect of the project: A French musician wrote the lyrics…
Chart of the day: Marketers aim to measure video and other digital media performance with cost per acquisition
Most use site traffic and ROI to measure performance, but marketers expect to continue to use site traffic, ROI and also use cost per acquisition.
Only half of marketers measure using ROI, which means there is a heavy reliance on using site traffic as the main measurement. Overall there is a lack of ROI measurement and sales lift per ad dollar spent is also low at just 3 in 10 using this method, with 4 in 10 expecting to use it within the next 2-3 years. Measurement is often an after-thought and doesn't get the resources required to use advanced metrics such as calculating ROI, and therefore relies on cruder metrics such as site traffic. This is a false economy,…
