Chart of the day: The majority of marketers say their content marketing strategy is effective and say their strategy is more effective than the previous year - but they also expect to produce more content next year than they are currently
The study showed that over 7 in 10 prioritised content delivery and distribution over the quality of content but 7 in 10 also focus on creating content with their audience in mind, rather than the brand. This highlights the pressure to deliver relevant content but produce as much content as possible and distribute it effectively, even if it means compromising on quality.
This is often a false economy. With so much content now available competition is extreme. Only by producing exceptional content can you cut through the noise.
The study also found that 7 in 10 marketers expect to produce more content next year…
Chart of the Day: B2B buyers are 26% more likely to use Twitter
Social Media can have a strong impact on B2B Buyers, as they are influenced by information they find on your business. It is important to understand which social networks these customers are using to view your content, but how you are integrating your social media strategy into your wider marketing plans? Research by Global web index found that 26% of B2B buyers are more likely to use Twitter and 28% will follow a business on social media.
Businesses who take note of this behaviour will be able to capitalise on the influence of social media and start to see a significant impact on growth and sales.
Explore how your business can make the most of Social Media with our range of guides, and templates.
Source: Global Web Index
Sample: Global Web index…
Chart of the Day: Consumers are Driving the Conversation for Technology Brands on Twitter
As marketers, we love to build inspirational campaigns to engage our target audiences and a large part of any campaign in 2017 will reside on social media. Alongside Facebook, Twitter is our go-to network for sharing campaign content allowing our followers to see our message and hopefully like, retweet and spread the word through their own words.
This varies massively from industry to industry where some campaigns can feel like you're pushing your message out more than your audience is interacting with the content, which isn't ideal.
According to research by Brandwatch, a massive 91.1% of all Twitter activity around technology brands (including new phone releases and the internet of things) was due to the Twitter community rather than the brand. From a marketing standpoint, this is exactly how you would…
Chart of the day: Digital Ad Spend grows at fastest rate in 9 years
Recommended link: Latest UK online advertising spend research - IAB
In April each year the IAB and PwC publish their regular survey giving full-year figures for online advertising in the previous year.
We recommend using this annual research on online advertising to benchmark your investment in online media with other organisations in the UK at a top level.
The main headline from this years analysis which should prompt review of which channels are being used to engage audiences is about mobile.
Driven by advertisers’ need to tap into people’s rising use of mobile to watch content, digital advertising grew at its fastest rate for nine years – by 17.3% to £10.3 billion in 2016 – according to the Internet Advertising Bureau UK / PwC Digital Adspend report. The last time annual growth was higher…
Chart of the Day: How to not get lost in your customer's inbox
Subject lines are important to email marketing, but they are a complete pain in the arse. (And don't get me started on pre-headers!)
I spend a good portion of my time toiling with subject lines. Testing how they look in email clients, making sure I don't include any spam words and working on the actual copy. A common practise email marketers use, is to include a promotion in the subject line, but does it have any effect? That's what the below chart discusses.
If we look at the average for all the offers compared to no offer at all, it's clear to see that the subject lines with no offer work better with the Click-to-Open (CTO) of 9.4% compared to 7%! This disproves what email marketers have done for years. But if we think about it, it's not surprising.…
Chart of the day: Facebook reach 1.9 billion monthly active users
Last week Facebook released its Q1 2017 results, reporting it has hit 1.9 billion monthly users as of the end of the march quarter. Their monthly active users have risen by 17% YoY, despite the rise in competition Facebook has seen consistent growth. What was surprising about this report was the rapid growth Facebook have see in the Asia-pacific region.
When comparing the two charts its hard to not notice the significant growth for the Asia-Pacific, with almost double the amount of monthly active users. This growth will be due to the focus Facebook have put on areas of lower connectivity, to reach their goal of building a strong global community.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO said "We had a good start to 2017,…
Chart of the Day: The most popular methods for measuring marketing performance
Marketing effectiveness has always been tricky to measure. Digital marketing isn't short on analytics, but there are so many different analytics tools and types of data that it can be highly confusing. One of the major issues is knowing which metrics to weigh higher than others when there are so many available.
A recent report from Trackmaven shows that marketers rank measuring content performance as the most important measure of marketing performance. This is followed by social media analytics and channel performance.
These are valuable concepts, but are they really the most important metrics? I worry marketers are confusing important with measurable. It's relatively easy to measure social analytics or using Google analytics to report on content performance. But does that really mean your marketing efforts are doing what they're meant to - sell more of your products.
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Chart of the Day: How the importance of mobile search varies by sector
It's often said that we're now well past the mobile tipping point where mobile accounts for more than half of site visits and searches. Yet this average masks a wide variation across sectors. For example, in B2B search is still dominated by desktop rather than mobile. At Smart Insights we see just 15% of our 500,000+ new organic visits are mobile.
This recently published research from Hitwise from the US and UK shows the difference in the percentage of mobile search by B2C industry sectors.
Mobile search share by industry: United States
Mobile search share by industry: United Kingdom
The main sectors where desktop is still relatively important are banking,…
Chart of the Day: What are the most popular automated emails?
Marketing automation is a great way to make email marketing more effective and the email marketer more efficient. This week's chart, that is displaying 2016 and 2017 data, is asking, "Do you send out automated emails based on the following triggers or behaviour?"
The most used trigger, "Subscription or sign-up to website" is at 44%, however, it's down by 2% compared to 2016. The trigger with the highest growth is the "Subscription due for renewal" which has grown to 18%. What's interesting is that 7 triggers were more used in 2016 and 3 in 2017.
So it's fair to say that more than half of these email marketers either don't have these triggers at all or they have to do them manually. I have done manual versions of all of these triggers over the years and it's fair to say that they…
Chart of the day: Research by Advertising Association and Warc finds that digital dominates UK advertising spend
Magazine advertising continued to decrease, whilst digital magazine advertising is expected to grow. Regional newspapers and Direct Mail see the biggest decreases, whilst digital formats are expected to continue their recent growht.
Some key highlights of the research include:
Ad spend in the UK grew to £5.8bn, representing 3.9% rise year-on-year
Overall for 2016 UK ad spend grew 3.7%, reaching a total of £21.4bn, this is also the seventh year of continued growth
Digital ad spend is up 13.4% to £10.3bn for 2016. 45.4% to £3.9bn. The report predicts mobile advertising spend will slow over the coming years (2017: +30.4% and 2018: +20.8%) as the current boom dies down.
Mobile accounted for 45.4% of that digital ad spend, meaning £3.9bn spent, however, the report predicts that mobile advertising…
