Nine out of ten marketers expect to increase digital marketing budgets in 2020, but how do you make sure your budget is effective?
Digital marketing has proven itself to be one of the most effective types of marketing. Email, social media, content marketing, search engine optimization - all of these tactics are essential to business success in 2020.
It’s probably why as many as 95% of organizations have increased their digital marketing budget in recent years – and why nine out of ten marketers expect that their budgets will grow in 2020 as well.
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That said, digital marketing is very complex and involves numerous strategies, all extremely important. As consumers increasingly expect omnichannel experiences and want to be able to reach brands on all their preferred channels, marketers have the big challenge of stretching out that budget for countless channels and strategies.
So how do you create a budget that…
A big part of running a successful agency is well-managed finances. Getting your agency budgeting right can make all the difference
Running an agency is no easy task.
You have to go on a tiring process to acquire the right type of clients that want the solution you offer.
At the same time, you have to hire employees to build the best team to render your services. On top of that, you have to put a system in place to ensure seamless collaboration between your team members for maximum productivity.
Of course: there’s also managing your agency's finances.
How do you budget your agency resources to maximize profits?
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1. Settle on a costing model
To budget your resources properly, you have to find the best costing model suitable for your agency. Using the wrong costing model for your clients could lead to losses.
Here are common costing models available to marketing agencies:
Fixed fee:…
Benchmarking allows you to see how well you are faring against your competitors, allowing you to pinpoint what you do well and where improvements need to be made.
Measuring your success is more than looking at how much traffic is coming to your site and what your conversion rate is. You can’t really get a true idea of how you are performing unless you compare yourself to your competitors.
‘How do we compare to our competitors?’ and ‘What does excellence look like?’ are questions you should be asking when developing your digital marketing strategy. While many companies are asking these questions, they may not know exactly what answers they are looking for.
In order to benchmark your performance against your competitors, you need to know exactly what you should be comparing and how to structure your review and recommendations. This is where our comprehensive benchmarking templates come in.
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Answering the real questions your customers are asking can form an important part of your customer retention plan.
Customers have questions. You have answers — or so they hope! By leaving any key questions unanswered, you risk:
Your prospects bailing out of your lead generation and sales funnels.
Your customers feeling like you know and care about them, and thus looking to do their business elsewhere.
Your bottom line revenues showing the effects of your customer neglect.
But by discovering these questions and addressing them proactively, you’ll stay one step ahead of your competition.
Now that we’ve established why it’s important to actively discover the top questions being asked — or thought of — by your prospects and customers, let’s dive into how to discover them.
Begin by discovering customer questions
A recent Harvard Business Review article states that acquiring a new customer is anywhere from…
Will smaller ad agencies end up ultimately trampled to death by yottabytes of Facebook and Google data?
Along with being reigning leaders of the tech industry, Google and Facebook run the most prominent advertising networks. The rest of the no-names pale into insignificance compared to the great and terrible Duopoly. Will smaller ad agencies end up ultimately trampled to death by yottabytes of Facebook & Google data?
"Who owns the information, he owns the world." This 300-year old quotation is more relevant today than ever. Like it or not, it is personal data and its quality that defines the success of advertising campaigns. Get the right data about the customer and this customer is likely yours.
Facebook and Google grew from unicorns into giant datavorous raptors that absorb all info about their users. No wonder they account for a combined 60% share of digital advertising in 2019. While such…
Content isn't really king, it's the kingdom. It is made up of various pieces that combine to create something greater: an effective content marketing strategy
You’ve no doubt heard marketers proclaiming that “content is king,” but that’s a vague and misleading statement. Really, a content strategy is more like the kingdom because it’s made up of various individual pieces that combine to form something greater. There are many different facets to an effective content strategy, and — unbeknownst to many marketing departments — there’s isn’t just one type of content that rules them all.
What content marketing ultimately boils down to is reaching your potential customers in a way that intrigues and engages them. Actually reaching them is the crucial first step, since you have to stand out from the crowd of 20 billion web pages that are viewed each month.
With so much content competing for views, it’s up to you to…
How do you maximize lead acquisition from your budget? Through budget planning.
Capturing leads is an important milestone in your quest to acquire more customers. As a result, it makes sense if you aim to capture as many leads as possible from your website traffic.
Unfortunately, generating leads is a big challenge for most businesses.
According to the State of Inbound 2018 Report, 61% of marketers believe their top marketing challenge is generating traffic and leads.
However, businesses continue to invest more money into lead generation. For instance, 53% of marketers allocate more than half of their budget to lead generation. Consequently, businesses expect to acquire more leads.
How do you maximize lead acquisition from your budget? Through budget planning.
In this blog post, you'll learn seven vital tips to help you plan your lead acquisition budget.
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1. Set…
Co-branding offers a huge range of benefits but partnerships shouldn’t be formed overnight with half-baked ideas
If someone said Nike, Sony and Doritos went into a bar and fell for their respective branding partners Apple, Ericsson and Taco Bell overnight, they couldn’t be more wrong. Co-branding partnerships, in reality, are anything but casual.
In a competitive market of homogenous products and services, brands are constantly vying for the spotlight, but it’s tough. Often brands lose out to new and innovative competitors, decreased brand equity, or simply disappear into obscurity. That’s why co-branding is such a coveted strategy, even for famous brands, as it can allow a company to maintain a strong brand identity, sustain customer loyalty and stay relevant.
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When it's time for execution, brand marketers and agencies need to be on the same page about what defines success. Here are three ways they can ensure precision control and usage of the right data to accomplish brand goals.
Brands and their agencies often have healthy disagreements about strategy. As a brand marketer, you might not always enjoy debates, but hopefully, you’ve seen that they can make your marketing so much more focused and compelling. That has certainly been my experience.
But when you shift from planning to execution, everyone needs to get on the same page about what success looks like. It seems like a no-brainer, but it’s much harder than you think because there are more people making decisions on your behalf than ever before.
If you mapped your team’s organizational structure, how would it line up next to your digital supply chain? On the…
Only 16% of companies focus on retaining a customer when all data points to the fact that acquiring a new one is at least five times more expensive.
In this modern digital world, with fleeting loyalties and diminishing attention span, brands and businesses are continuously trying to come up with new plans and ideas to keep their customers in the fold.
Today, this is largely driven by the data an organization can collect on its customers. Thanks to the proliferation of the internet and social media, much of this information is available freely. Brands are now studying customers’ behavior, expectations and motivations to learn more and more about what goes into their purchase cycle.
A large part of this is trying to engage with the customer once the purchase has been made. One common mistake that most brands (especially those in the e-commerce sector) make here is assuming that the customer will re-enter…
