Showing how integrating personalisation and automation can deliver a more personal experience

Long gone are the days when a website was a 'one size fits all' online brochure.  Now your web presence needs to play a fundamental role not just in reaching prospects, but also leading them through a personalised customer journey toward conversion to customers and long-term engagement.

According to Econsultancy, 77% of companies are currently planning to increase their digital marketing spend in 2016.  Whilst 38% of companies are focussed most heavily on acquisition, 62% recognise that retention is either as important or more important.  It’s vital to remember that getting visitors to a website through acquisition tools is an expensive exercise if you don’t also successfully convert the customer and grow your customer equity.   Estimates of how much it costs to acquire a new customer vary wildly from the conservative 3 times to an eye-watering…

Did you know this data is available? Many don't!

In a couple of recent consulting workshops with our members, I've recommended this report Google Analytics report (shown below), but the marketing managers I was working with were unaware of it and, more to the point, they thought they were really useful. I find similar in training workshops too.

What is this data and why is it useful?

The chart shows that you can see the Male / Female breakdown for your site visitors and you can also see the age breakdown too. It's useful for both B2B and B2C. It becomes more interesting when you compare it to the profile of traditional customers acquired by other channels - this prompts questions as to whether you are reaching new audiences online or similar audiences. The data…

Social media strategy and planning essentials

This is part 9 of my Smart Insights 12 part social media series. In the last part we looked at reporting for social media; in this blog, I discuss what tools you can use to help plan and manage your social campaigns. Please note that this list isn’t exhaustive. There’s a wide range of tools available, and each person I know uses a different mix depending on business needs. This blog aims to show you the types of tool you need to evaluate; you should then do your own research to find out what gives you're the functionality you need.

Measurement tools

Let’s start by getting the fundamentals put in place. To do social media intelligently, you need to underpin your planning and decision making with accurate data.

Google Analytics campaign tracking

My first port of call is always web analytics + URL campaign tracking. I’m going to…

Many businesses are trying to integrate digital and traditional marketing, but only 1 in 20 have achieved full optimisation.

Today's chart of the day comes from our 2016 research into managing digital marketing, which asked 1096 marketers from around the world about their experiences of managing the challenges of digital. One particularly important finding from the report was the poor state of integration between digital and traditional channels. There can be no doubting that this is important. Customers increasingly spend their time online and assess content digitally, making digital marketing ever more important. Yet some brands are starting to think traditional channels have become under-rated as a result and starting to question if they've over-invested in digital. Whether one channel is more important than the other is an irrelevant question; clearly both are of immense importance and which one is more important will vary between businesses. The key thing is that they should…

In today's innovative economy, businesses need to embrace digital transformation to stay ahead.

According to new research from The Economist, Britain and America are the most innovative major economies. This is great news for the economy as a whole, but it means businesses within the economy can't afford to be complacent. With increased innovativeness comes increased competition for established businesses. Thus they need to embark on digital transformation programs if they haven't already. Staying still is not an option. It is also interesting how China is 'punching about its weight' when it comes to innovation plotted against GDP per capita. This again should be a warning to major brands to expect stiff competition from China's emerging digital champions, who are using the lessons they've learnt appealing to price-conscious mobile consumers in their home market. Both East and West can learn from each other.

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You may be focusing on the wrong metrics and missing the most important KPIs

As a digital marketing professional, you may have once expected that your job would involve a lot of creativity – you’d spend your days creating innovative advertisements, writing engaging copy, maybe even crafting catchy memes. And of course, you do work on these tasks, but unless your company has a committed marketing analytics professional on staff, you also likely spend much of your day surrounded by numbers, working hard to assess the effectiveness of your campaigns. All those numbers, taken together, are known as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Unfortunately, sometimes the numbers piling up on your desk indicate that your marketing strategy isn’t working out as well as you’d hoped. That’s when it’s time to take your ad campaigns and KPIs back to the drawing board. Here are a few analytics strategies you can try to kick start your…

Get the right strategy in place before you start testing

Starting and running a conversion programme is all about asking the right questions. The questions you want to ask of the tests themselves, but also the questions you need to ask yourself and your team to get the most out of the programme. Here are our 18 chronological questions to ask yourself and your team if you have recently started a conversion optimisation programme.

Before you test

1. Are a broad range of specialisms feeding into the optimisation programme?

The most effective optimisation programmes need input from strategists, user-centred designers, front end developers, copywriters and analysts.

2. What sources are you using to feed into the ideation process?

Typically the highest quality tests (i.e. the ones that will deliver the biggest uplifts and/or provide the greatest insight into the business) make use of a number of the following techniques/sources: persuasion/emotion/trust (PET), heuristics, user research (remote or moderated)…

Which digital marketing activities you should keep in-house or outsource?

The companies that continue to move to a more integrated digital model while managing their Digital Transformation process, may be left wondering which activities are best to be outsourced and which are preferable to keep in-house. It is very common for companies to outsource at least part of their digital capability, but this is likely to affect how well they can move to an integrated model. But what are the particular disciplines most suited to outsourcing and what is preferable to keep in-house?

The ‘Slow Burners’ vs. Campaign Based

When we think of digital marketing activities, there are many that need to be managed, but let’s consider the following eight key disciplines covering paid-owned and earned media and managing the customer experience should sit within an organisation: 1. Email marketing 2. Social Media 3. Paid Search 4. SEO 5. Display advertising and retargeting 6.…

Marketers know the strategies that are most effective but have trouble implementing them.

For me the most interesting finding from our recent research into digital skills wasn't that only 14% of marketers think their any good at mobile marketing, or that there is evidence of a major skills gap with employers reporting difficulties hiring for a number of digital marketing roles. From my perspective the single most interesting finding was the huge disconnect between what marketers think are the most effective strategies for improving digital marketing effectiveness across their organisation, and what the organisations are actually doing. The chart below shows what over 700 marketing professionals think are the most effective methods for improving digital marketing effectiveness across their company. We see that top is a planned approach which uses analytics and continuous optimisation, and bottom reactive unplanned approach. Only 14% thought the unplanned approach was effective. …

The current state of the digital marketing skills landscape.

The results from our survey of over 700 marketing professionals are in! The responses have allowed us to develop a picture of the current state of digital marketing skills. They come from across the UK and US, but were predominantly from UK marketers, so help us to accurately understand the digital skills landscape of the UK marketing industry in 2016. Marketers tend to fancy themselves as fairly skilled in strategy, content marketing and social media marketing. Although interestingly no one area had over 50% ranking themselves as skilled or highly skilled, and a considerable 38% also said they wanted to improve their strategy and planning skills. This was the skill marketers were most likely to say they wanted to improve. At the other end of the spectrum, there is a real shortage of more technical expertise like coding, mobile marketing and graphic design. A…