Chart of the Day: As Twitter's active users stagnate, WhatsApp becomes the front runner
Twitter was once a fast-growing social media site and the darling of marketers everywhere. But it has fallen on hard times of late, as growth as stalled.
This chart from Statista shows Twitter only managed to gain 31 million additional users actively utilizing the platform monthly over the past two years. Whereas Facebook has seen over 467 million join. This is impressive for a platform once considered to have plateaued. But the biggest of threats is WhatsApp. The instant messenger platform presents a massive opportunity for marketers. Companies such as Just Eat and BBC are just a couple of the brands who are successfully using the platform to enable instant customer service and highly targeted marketing.
With this in mind, do marketers need to adjust how they spend their social marketing budget? And would investing in growing platforms…
Chart of the day: Market research budgets have been cut whilst marketing budgets are being sustained
Market research (increasingly referred to as "insight") budgets are taking another cut this year, according to research by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, whilst marketing budgets overall have not grown. As few as 8% of respondents signaled growth in their insight budget whilst just over 26% of respondents indicated marketing budget growth. The analysis shows it's the worst prediction for market research in over four years of data collection.
One reason for the fall in budget could be that businesses are using non-traditional research methods, doing fewer large-scale annual research projects and instead focusing on more cheaper, innovative techniques, such as the use of research communities, online focus groups and cheaper providers such as Survey Monkey Audience, Ask You Target Market and Toluna Quick Surveys, rather than using…
Chart of the Day: New research reveals that the vast majority of small businesses have only a basic understanding of SEO
A recent survey by Higher Visibility asked over four hundred and twenty small business owners about how well their internal teams understand SEO, and the results paint a rather dire picture for the state of SEO in small enterprises.
180 business owners (over one-third) either didn't know or reported that their team had no understanding of SEO. While over half of respondents said their team only possessed a basic understanding of SEO. In today's competitive SEO landscape, a basic grasp really isn't going to get you very far. If you want to effectively harness the power of organic search then you need to be using the latest techniques and not making any SEO mistakes, which those without a deep knowledge of the subject are likely to make.
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Chart of the Day: Digital Advertising, Content Marketing and Social Media are the most sought after skills in 2017
Research by McKinley Marketing Partners highlights the wide range of skills digital marketing teams need in 2017, varying from SEO and project management to Email and Analytics. There are a few front runners for being the most in demand skills for businesses in the USA.
Digital advertising and content creation, curation and strategy are highest in demand. Social media, email and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) were close behind, highlighting the importance of an overall digital media strategy that makes the most of the content bring produced. SEO, Advertising & Social would not be very effective and very boring without a steady stream of high-quality engaging content.
Interestingly Project Management is at rock bottom as the least sought-after skill but without a well-structured project plan to support the marketing strategy you will quickly find that the final product of all your hard…
Chart of the Day: Research shows the importance of social networks to B2C online publishers
It's really interesting to see which digital marketing channels drive the most traffic or sales in different sectors. In retail, this compilation of top online sales channels shows that organic and paid search, email and affiliate channels dominate, with each contributing more than 10%. It's surprising that when using 'last click' attribution the contribution of social media is sub 5%, although this is an average of all categories and we can expect that in some retail categories like fashion, the percentage of sales from social media will be higher.
This research of traffic sources across large publishers who use the Parsely traffic reporting platform shows a very different pattern.
The first chart shows that search (orange) is the largest external traffic source, but with social not far behind (purple). Note that this traffic source breakdown is unusual…
Chart of the Day: After all your hard work creating your email, do you know if it arrived at its correct destination?
Firstly, let's make sure we know exactly what deliverability is.
If our marketing email arrives in the subscribers' inbox, that is a successful delivery. However many things could affect our emails deliverability, like Internet Service Providers (ISPs), bounces, spam issues to name a few.
In today's chart, the question asked, "How do you monitor and improve deliverability?" It is good to see that the majority do monitor it in some form. 37% test messages for the spam score and optimize before sending. Although still, 28% say they do nothing.
You need to monitor your deliverability. For example, if you are having high bounce rates, it could mean your domain is on a blacklist somewhere. And ISPs take notice of reputable blacklists like SpamCop.
With deliverability, you don't want to be complacent.…
Chart of the day: Content marketers are changing the social metrics they use to judge their content
Social Media Matrics, such as Facebook shares, video shares and retweets on Facebook are becoming increasingly important for measuring content marketing success.
Recent research by Newswhip found that there are some social metrics which are becoming less important, such as Facebook likes and Instagram likes.
The research shows that shares are overall becoming much more important than light-touch interaction, such as "likes". Marketers value shares far higher and measure the success of their content on such metrics as they represent more important engagement and reach.
In the same study, they found that a lack of people resources and financial resources (lack of budget) are the biggest barriers to social content distribution.
Source: Newswhip
Sample: 250 publishing, PR and Marketing professionals
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Advertising revenue for Snapchat predicted to rise 2873% in the next 3 years
With over 150 million people using Snapchat each day to message friends and catch up with the latest celebrity news, it's primed for marketers to target the 18 to 34-year-old (41% of users) demographic with advertising. According to Statista revenue through advertising is set to rise to over 1.7 billion by 2018, which is truly phenomenal but still has a way to go to rival Facebook's $5.2 billion in the first quarter of this year.
Source: Statista
Brands that are utilising the growth of the Snapchat platform are increasingly joining forces with high-profile influencers to place their products in front of the increasingly difficult to please demographic of 18-34 year olds.
One of the most recognisable marketing activities are the sponsored lenses, which instead…
Charts of the Day - New Research shows how mobile dominates digital minutes, but multiplatform use is huge as well
You will know that in most consumer marketing sectors, in most countries, we're well past the mobile tipping point where mobile web usage is more important than desktop measured by number of site visits.
Another way of looking at the importance of mobile is looking at the mobile share of digital minutes. This is measured by the large, international panel providers like comScore and in their latest report on Mobile’s Hierarchy of Needs they have a report that shows the importance of mobile in all countries.
So it's no longer a case of asking whether mobile marketing important, we know it is! It's now a question of using the statistics to understand how consumers behave when using different types of mobile devices,…
Chart of the Day: What is the most popular type of email marketing communication?
In email marketing, there are so many different ways to communicate with your client. But which are the most popular? And if they are popular, does that mean they are correct?
In today's chart, it is unsurprising that most use newsletters at 74%. This is a simple way of keeping clients up to date with news or content and has been an email marketing standard for many years. However, some simple additions to your communications strategy could make dramatic differences. For instance, having a multi-step automation for new subscribers/customers, reactivation emails and automated triggers through a client's lifecycle require a bit maintenance, but only 26%, 10% and 18% of the users surveyed actually use these in their strategy.
It's always good to know what others are doing in…
