In the last four years, the retail environment has shifted to the point where a more expansive conversation is needed about ‘commerce’ rather than ‘shopping’.
I recently attended a talk by Jamie Peate, Global Head of Retail Strategy at McCann Worldgroup, on the key trends in retail today. Whether you’re a marketer operating in the retail sector or somewhere completely different, many of the points highlighted cuts across industries and provides a unique insight into human behaviour.
Back in 2015, McCann launched the Truth About Shopping, a longitudinal research project to study the dynamics in retail across 26 markets. Four years on, the team revisited the research and noticed that in this short time the retail environment has shifted to the point where a more expansive conversation is needed about ‘commerce’ rather than ‘shopping’.
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Today, customers are thinking about everything from…
When it comes to your blog SEO, which type of domain is the best option? We've taken a look.
Where you host your blog relative to your main site is one of the more important decisions involved with setting up a blog.
If you get the decision wrong, you may fail to get the hoped-for SEO benefits you have worked hard to convince your colleagues about. But, if you get it right you can almost immediately see new, incremental visits you wouldn't have attracted without the blog.
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The three main blog hosting options
The three options are straightforward. Let's take some examples:
1. Subfolder - http://www.domain.com/blog e.g. http://www.econsultancy.com/blog
2. Subdomain - http://blog.domain.com e.g. http://blog.zopa.com
3. Separate domain - http://www.newdomain.com e.g. I can't find a good example - can you?
So which is the best blog hosting option for SEO?
I often ask this question in my SEO classes and ask for…
A step-by-step guide to creating infographics to boost online engagement
We’ve all heard the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words”. With the rise and domination of visual-driven social media platforms like Instagram and Pinterest, these words have never been more true. Increasingly, content creators are turning to easy-to-consume visual content like infographics to engage and inform audiences.
For good reason, too - visual communication research suggests that images are more memorable than text and illustrations can aid understanding of text material, and studies on online behaviour reveal that posts on Facebook and Twitter featuring images produce much higher engagement than those without images.
While the value of infographics in digital marketing is clear, working with a graphic designer to create custom infographics can be both time-consuming and expensive. Fortunately, there…
Helping your team to develop their skills and knowledge can improve engagement, retention and business results.
Upskilling your digital marketing team should be an ongoing project if you want to ensure you’re always using the best tools and techniques, as well as getting the best results.
Far too often, companies take on a business-as-usual approach, with everyone performing their usual tasks and a lack of focus on learning. While this results in getting the job done, it doesn’t help your team grow or develop new skills.
Ensuring you put some focus on learning not only benefits each individual member of your team, it can ensure that you retain talent, grow skills that will benefit your business and bring more activities in-house in the long run.
You might think that team development needs a big budget, but there are plenty of options available that can allow you to grow people’s skills without incurring a high…
Managing all the data associated with SEO can be difficult, but Google Sheets can make it more manageable to handle and compare your data.
Managing SEO tasks requires you ti handle a lot of data. While most SEO tools obviously include their own analytics packages, it’s often awkward to gain a clear picture of your overall situation while jumping between these platforms. Enter Google Sheets.
If you didn’t know, Sheets is Google’s free cloud-based alternative to Excel. On top of easy collaboration, its main benefit for SEO professionals is direct integration with Google’s other tools. Chief among these are Keyword Planner and Search Console.
In this article, we’ll look at a number of ways you can leverage Google Sheets to manage your SEO tasks. This will include tricks to save time coordinating projects, as well as concrete ways you can find and leverage data to improve your search…
Predictive analytics can help ensure you're sending the right kind of email messages to the right customers at the right time in order to improve results.
Using predictive analytics to power up email marketing is nothing new, but it is becoming increasingly popular these days - particularly for e-commerce businesses. The reason for this is that predictive analytics help companies make smarter and faster decisions.
Check out the below graph of how predictive analytics, along with AI, help companies in different ways:
It's no surprise that email marketing features in this list as it is 40% more effective in acquiring new customers than Twitter and Facebook combined.
If you want to market smarter, predictive analysis is the way. Here's how it can power up your email marketing strategy:
Activation or acquisition
Whether you want to send a welcome email, discount…
Five steps to creating an effective process that generates results
It’s difficult to argue with the benefits that good content marketing can deliver for businesses. We have talked regularly here on Smart Insights about the opportunities provided by great content and how it fuels many inbound marketing techniques, including:
SEO
Paid search marketing
Social media marketing
Email marketing
Conversion rate optimization
However, once the overall strategy and approach have been agreed, the next step is execution. Unfortunately, creating and maintaining good quality content is not straightforward. There are often many stakeholders and dependencies across businesses, including marketing, PR, creative and legal/compliance. If you work for an agency you will also need to consider the client’s point of view, too.
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One of the trickiest elements of the…
Your website should be designed keeping in mind your audience and should ensure that it improves user experience.
Your website is one of the most important aspects of your brand’s online presence and it's important that you design it right. Your website is also the place where you nurture your bottom-of-the-funnel leads to get conversions. So, you can’t afford any website fails that might cause your prospects to bounce off your website.
Your website should be designed keeping in mind your audience and should ensure that it provides good user experience. There are a lot of other benefits of a good website design for both your business and your audience.
In this post, we will discuss why good website design is important from your audience’s perspective.
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Brand image
Your website is a reflection of your brand and everything that it stands for. It is usually one of the first things people…
Whether you outsource a deep learning solution to a vendor or bring that expertise in-house, here’s what marketers need to do to make deep learning work.
Technology continues to push the boundaries of what’s possible for marketers. While most marketing executives understand that software can drive growth, not everyone is familiar with the underlying technologies that power the latest tools.
That’s okay because your job is to put software to work, not put it together. But a basic understanding of how some of these tools work can allow you to make better decisions about where to invest your budget. With that in mind, let’s take a look at one technology that is typically accompanied by a lot of hype but little clarity: deep learning.
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Making sense of deep learning
Modern marketing teams are concentrated on full-funnel engagements and want to track every interaction prospects have with their company through the website, content, events, and…
A content marketing funnel acts as a guide for your prospects and leads. It shows them the specific steps they need to take before purchasing your product or service
According to Demand Metric, content marketing generates three times more leads than outbound marketing and it’s about 62% less costly. As a B2B brand, if you want to attract more leads to your business and spend less to do so, you should leverage content marketing.
[caption id="attachment_148039" align="aligncenter" width="550"] [Image via Demand Metric][/caption]To do this effectively, you need a content marketing funnel. A content marketing funnel acts as a guide for your prospects and leads. It shows them the specific steps they need to take before purchasing your product or service. It also helps your business get more qualified leads.
In this post, you will learn how to create a…
