Benchmark your B2B lead gen activities against new research, which shows lead quality is the most prominent challenge for businesses
The State of B2B Lead Generation, a new report by Digital Doughnut, shines a light on the pain points of lead generation campaigns, helping to benchmark your activities in order to succeed.
Before taking a look at the performance of content types, it's vital to understand the maturity of your B2B lead gen campaigns.
1,042 marketers were asked to rate the maturity of different lead generation activities. 54% were confident in their capabilities stating that their content production and development was either "very advanced" or "quite advanced"."Very basic" activities include data verification and validation, measuring ROI and transferring data between CRMs.
The data shows that businesses still struggle with advanced lead gen activities. Not utilizing the opportunities available to you leads to…
Chart of the day: On Wednesday and Thursday last week, myself and Dave Chaffey presented at B2B Marketing Expo, In ExCel, London about auditing your Martech stack - and now new research has found that most think their marketing technology strategy is successful
Most believe their strategy is successful based on how they achieve their priorities in using martech, but there are significant challenges with data and integration across different platforms, as well as issues with getting relevant and reliable data. This could be due to a number of reasons such as a complexity of data as well as lack of training, skills, resource or time to help with these challenges.
Improving data quality is also an issue for marketers as they strive for better data and more accurate targeting.
Over half are also working on…
Chart of the Day: Social network popularity based on share of social media minutes
You will have noticed that Facebook isn't getting the best press at the moment with the latest lack of data privacy revelations... This is on top of the latest statistics showing that Facebook usage is declining in younger audiences according to eMarketer. This raises the question for marketers that if Facebook is declining in popularity in younger age groups, are there other social networks that warrant more attention?
The latest insight from the comScore panel in their 2018 Global Digital Future in Focus comparing the overall popularity of social networks by share of time (for December 2017), suggests the options.
Most popular social networks based on share of minutes
You can see this is a sea of Facebook blue, so this shows that despite the negative media hype…
Should you be using omnichannel marketing to boost customer experience?
It has now become vital for brands to inject their unique voice in every communications channel that they make use of, be consistent with pricing policies and promotional offers to avoid any confusions for potential buyers. More and more brands are wanting to move towards an omnichannel experience, integrating the offline with the online.
As Christina Dam, Product Marketing Lead of Square suggests, “A great omnichannel experience feels familiar to the customer, regardless of the channel.” Hubspot defines the omnichannel experience as, “the ability to deliver a seamless and consistent experience across channels, while factoring in the different devices that consumers are using to interact with your business.”
A 2017 ecommerce survey of 1,164 U.S. small and medium retail business owners, conducted by Square and Mercury Analytics, found that:
56% have a physical store
21% have a pop-up store, or pop-up at events
34% sell…
Chart of the day: social media apps are the most used apps
According to research by The Manifest, 39% of respondents said social media apps were the most frequently used apps on their smartphone. This was followed by gaming apps (10) and messaging apps (10%) and then retail apps (7%).
Most users are using apps to keep in touch with people via social media and messaging or to play games, perhaps while they on a car passenger or on the train to work. Peoples smartphones are assisting peoples lives by keeping them social whether that's on social media or via messaging apps, and phones are also entertaining people.
The research looked at wider mobile app uses and found over half (51%) said they use apps 1-10 times per day, though, in reality, people don't sound so this could be underreported.
The survey also explored why…
Chart of the Day:A comparison benchmark of add-to-basket rates with conversion rates?
Do you call it add-to-cart or add-to-basket? It depends where you are based - cart is most common in the United States, basket is more common in the UK and Australia.
Regardless of what you call it, adding an item to the cart is an important micro-conversion step to measure and benchmark for retailers. While it is common to compare conversion rates, naturally this measures the efficiency of the overall process including both category or product views, basket adds and checkout.
Add-to-basket rates give additional information about how appealing individual products are based on description and visuals on the product page. It shows intent to purchase by interactions with the site (Act in the Smart Insights RACE Planning conversion funnel). Google has several definitions in its Enhanced Ecommerce tracking and they neatly avoid the use of basket or cart. These measures include:
…
Chart of the day: Students don't think marketing offers the best career opportunities
Marketing has an image problem, we could struggle to hire the best talent if we don't position the industry better. According to a survey by Marketing Week and Unidays, just 3% of students believe marketing offers the best career opportunities when compared to business, finance, IT and other industries.
Students believe that medicine offers the best career opportunities but only 3% believe marketing does. The impact for marketing could be profound, marketing needs highly talented people not just from a creative point of view, but an analytical and technical point of view. We know that many businesses lack both marketing strategy and hands-on elements such as a lack of marketing automation skills. Marketers need to sell their career better.
A marketing degree was rated the lowest for setting students up for…
Chart of the Day: New research shows the dynamics of digital marketplaces
When creating a digital marketing strategy, it's important to use the analysis time to accurately understand the dynamics of your digital marketplace. In my articles and visuals on digital marketplace analysis, I show how a methodology for summarising the online marketplace from a customer perspective through creating a marketplace map. The example map from ZenithOptimedia in that article shows a practical tool to summarise opportunities to interact and influence with consumers through their customer journey.
How important are brand Ecommerce stores?
One of the significant business model developments facilitated by the Internet is that brands can now sell direct to customers (sometimes know as a the direct-to-consumer D2C business model) either through their own site, e.g. the Nike.com Ecommerce store, or through marketplace stores on Amazon or eBay.
This new insight compares the relative popularity of these marketplace options for consumers and…
Chart of the Day: A gradual transition from desktop-first to mobile-first for EU5 ecommerce?
comScore has recently released their EU5 report - detailing the ecommerce trends and benchmarks in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom.
Mobile reach vs. Desktop reach for selected products
In the first group we see that consumers are more likely to access retail sites across all product categories through a mobile device. In the second group, consumers are more likely to do so through a desktop device.
*"European countries divide in two groups: the mobilefirst group (by reach), which includes the UK and Spain, and the desktop-first (by reach) group which includes France and Germany. (Italy sits in the middle.)"
Top three retail sites, by % reach
Amazon is still dominating all ecommerce markets in the UE5.
Amazon's reach is 41% in Spain,…
Chart of the day: Amazon has become, quite easily, the dominant player in voice purchasing with 90% of all spending, according to research by OC&C Strategy Consultants.
The research also showed what customers are using home voice assistants for, which is shown in the chart below. Over 6 in 10 (62%) consumers in the US who took part in this survey, have bought something at least once using their voice assistant.
Most customers who use voice assistant for purchasing have bought electronics, entertainment-related products or grocery products. Clothing and furniture might be quite difficult to purchase, due to sizes and styles, as these categories are less popular. From experience, it's easier to ask Alexa to add butter (including brand name) to your basket than "oak coffee table" especially when you might not know what the coffee table looks like.
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