Too Many Tech Options = Random Acts Of Technology

If you blink, a dozen more marketing technology providers show up. Just 5 years ago, about 150 providers could hang their hat in the marketing tech sector. Today, we count more than 3,500 marketing technology providers. With so many choices to choose from, it’s no wonder random acts of technology happen more often than not.

What’s A Random Act Of Technology (RAT)?

A RAT happens when companies throw technology at problems without a strategy. In sales and marketing, it’s one of the top reasons marketing technology ends up flopping. In research conducted in 2016, Ascend2 conducted research into application of marketing technology. They found insufficient strategy as a top barrier to achieving success with marketing technology.

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Leverage the power of the cloud to achieve better insights

The era of the cloud is in full swing. Cloud-based analytic platforms are driving automation and improving the predictive accuracy of marketing programs across all sorts of industries. With these platforms at their disposal, marketers can solve some of the key challenges that have daunted them for years, like connecting data, reporting, gathering insights, making decisions, and optimizing marketing programs.

In 2015, Gartner removed big data as an emerging technology trend, citing the fact that it has become prevalent in our lives and hence is no longer an emerging trend. Yet, McKinsey claims that less than 30 percent of the data’s value is being captured across industries. Big data’s applications will only grow as its true potential has yet to be fully tapped.

Making Decisions at the Speed of Business

Shifting to the cloud isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it proposition. It…

It seems you either have what it takes... or not

When speaking to businesses about their marketing, integration is a common challenge, whether that's integration of comms, technology or teams within a business. The latest Econsultancy / Adobe Digital Intelligence briefing sheds some light on how many businesses have achieved integration. It's encouraging to see that nearly half of businesses can confidently state: Digital Marketing permeates most of our marketing activities Kudos to the businesses that say that digital permeates all our marketing activities or that they are 'digital first'. It's less encouraging to see that this figure hasn't changed much over the last 3 years. What's more, integration is severely lacking in nearly one-fifth of companies say that digital marketing is 'very much separate'. Source: Digital Intelligence 2017 briefing Sample: 14,163 respondents globally (64% client-side) Recommended Smart Insights resource: Managing a Digital Marketing Centre of Excellence -…

Does your digital branding match your audiences search interests?

Defining the metrics of success is of the utmost importance when establishing a brand online. One of the most important metrics which define a brand’s true strength is one that is often overlooked, an audience interest graph. A brand’s true strength is the perception that it holds in the minds of its consumers. There are many metrics that online marketers use to define a brand’s success, however an audience interest graph is most often either unheard of or completely overlooked. This happens mostly because there are so many other metrics available that are easy to understand and completely misrepresented in the industry, such as monthly number of visitors, average time on page, social outreach metrics such as number of likes, shares or comments, bounce rates, click through rate, average cost per click etc. What people fail to understand is that this speaks…

Key SEO trends to plan for this year

The SEO industry can be treacherous – you never know when Google will roll out its next game-changing update. For most SEO experts, every few days is another turning point that marks the need to review one’s strategy. But even if you’re that careful, there’s still a chance that you’ll miss one of Google’s 500-600 updates in a year. There’s no sleeping on the job when it comes to SEO. If you want to secure your rankings, you need to be vigilant, adaptive, and aware of the ongoing trends in the world of search engines. Based on the updates observed last year, here are some of the trends you can expect to continue for the rest of 2017:

The Rise of Google’s Rich Answers

SEO isn’t just about snagging the top position anymore. Google has a special place on top of SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for content…

Chart of the day: Qualitative research dominates persona research and such research leads to revenue success

Most businesses are using qualitative research techniques such as interviews to create their personas, according to research by Cintell. Quantitative techniques such as surveys were found to be the least used whilst conducting qualitative interviews with customers and non-customers was found to be most popular, with more than 8 in 10 using such techniques. Interviewing overall dominated the highest results of the survey, which suggested that qualitative methods exceeded persona research goals. The research also found that 7 in 10 companies who missed revenue or lead goals did not conduct qualitative persona research. High performing companies were also more than two times likely to research the motivations of their customers. Source: Cintell Sample: 137 respondents. Popular job titles represented were Director, VP of Marketing, Chief Marketing…

Chart of the Day: Google and Facebook online ad revenue surges whilst revenue of all other providers shrink.

Healthy markets are defined by competition. Consumers have many providers to choose from, and those providers must constantly innovate to improve their service or make efficiency savings to be able to reduce their price - or else the consumers will move to a competitor which is doing so. Monopolies are terrible for consumers because they are defined by a lack of competition - hence why in most countries regulators explicitly ban companies from establishing monopolies in most sectors. But what about Duopolies? This is when a market is dominated by two large players - they still compete, but often the competition is less fierce because of the lack of other providers. As new stats from IAB, Facebook and Google show, the digital ad market is entering duopoly territory. Google and Facebook saw very healthy rises in…

How to create a digital knowledge centre which facilitates your digital transformation and helps you delight your customers.

The way brands are being built is being re-shaped. This is in large part due to consumers’ digital habits; by-passing brands completely and opting for the likes of Amazon, Google or Tripadvisor to satisfy their needs and requirements as the tools of discovery for users. So what can brands do when their market may be ripe for disruption? Start with why you exist and how you can migrate your offering, through digital transformation, in becoming a brand of authority and trust. Authority and trust are two key assets brands can build a distinct unique selling point. For brands that operate in a competitive marketplace, how the brand is perceived to a wider audience can be used as an advantage, in becoming a knowledge centre for your industry sector.

Brands as Knowledge Centres

So what is a knowledge centre? It’s…

How to avoid the costly mistakes that plague small businesses

So... you’ve started your new business or start up and 2017 is going to be your year! But not wishing to dampen your enthusiasm there are several small business marketing mistakes that can lead to your untimely downfall. To help you prevent this We’ve put together a special guide for small business andstart-upss highlighting the common mistakes not to make this year. Digital marketing excellence isn't just for big business. In our guide to small business digital marketing mistakes we've noted the top 11 digital marketing mistakes that are commonly made by small business. The guide contains not only highlights the mistakes, but also gives actionable recommendations to help you fix the issues. Our top 10 covers all stages of the RACE digital marketing planning framework so you can easily add them to your digital marketing plans in 2017. Here's an exclusive…

Chart of the day: marketers salaries vary by sector, with a huge £23,000 difference between gambling and Education.

Research into marketing salaries by MarketingWeek suggests that marketing is still often understood and is seen as a cost rather than as an investment. Agency and consultancy wages are also just second bottom on the list, whilst gambling and gaming takes centre stage right at the top. Gaming and gambling was found to be the highest paying sector for marketers with an average salary of £63,409. This was followed by consumer electronics with an average salary of £56,901 and utilities which has an average wage of £56,716. The MarketingWeek Career and Salary Survey found that the education sector earn the lowest average annual salary at just £40,117. Those in the charity and not-for-profit sector have an average salary of £42,915, however education came joint with IT as the sectors where marketers are happiest.

The survey…