Chart of the day: social media marketing and content marketing budgets are expected to increase more than any other channel in 2017
Marketers were asked to indicate whether particular types of marketing would either stay the same, increase or decrease in a survey of over 3,000 client-side marketing professionals. The findings show the importance of social, content and personalisation within marketing strategies and budgets.
Personalisation and video marketing are also big priorities for marketers.
Display advertising and paid search are expected to have the biggest decreases (13% each) whilst affiliate marketing budgets are the most likely to stay the same.
Previously we might have expected content marketing to have been top, but social and content are the power duo. This isn't surprising as social media keeps pushing its way to the top of marketing plans. It's also good to see email marketing is at least maintaining…
Chart of the Day: Smartphones aren't killing TV
Those of us accustomed to reading marketing reports are used to the idea that mobile is killing TV, and that TV is an ageing dinosaur destined to limp along for a while till it's finally declared dead.
But the data reveals a more interesting picture. Time spent on mobile devices is growing fast, but it's not having a negative impact on TV viewing. TV viewing is shifting very slightly to video on demand and away from live TV, but TV viewing as a whole has held up solidly over the past 3 years.
Time spent on smartphones has more than doubled, but this seems to complement rather than compete with TV viewing. The lesson is simple - rapid mobile growth is happening, but it doesn't mean old mediums are dying.
Source: Nielsen Total Audience Report for the 4th quarter…
Chart of the Day: How businesses are promoting their content
Content marketing is the mainstay of many marketing strategies for both small and large companies. We can spend hours thinking up a theme our audience would be interested in and once you have found it, more hours are spent writing the content, finding accompanying imagery plus there is the possibility that you will need a little design help to turn your page of words into an ebook, white paper, infographic etc. By the time you have completed your brand new piece of content you have to get to work promoting it so that you can attract as many readers as possible. But how do you do this?
Linkedin and BrightTalk surveyed over 600 survey B2B marketing professionals and found that the most popular channel for promoting their content was through social media. This makes sense as it doesn't require any budget- only the marketer's time…
Chart of the Day: New Smart Insights research comparing how businesses manage their email marketing activities
Email marketing remains one of today’s core customer communications channels with analytics showing that, for most types of business, alongside search marketing, it is one of the main drivers of customer acquisition - for generating new online sales and leads. While the beauty of email marketing is that you can quickly start by sending promotional emails and newsletters, businesses will only get the full potential delivered by their email service providers they choose if they deploy marketing automation.
In a major, global research project with our partners GetResponse, Content Marketing Institute and Holistic Email Marketing, we were interested to see how many businesses are taking full advantage of email marketing capabilities. The free research report Email Marketing and Marketing Automation Excellence 2017 was published this week and included the views of over 2,500 marketers - thank…
Chart of the Day: We all know we should send targeted email marketing - so why aren't we?
"Good advice is always certain to be ignored, but that’s no reason not to give it."
― Agatha Christie
From being young we are given good advice like, "don't eat mud", "fire is hot" or "don't eat too many sweets". I don't know about you, but I still ate mud, burnt my finger and binged on sherbert. Now we are adults, we are still given advice and email marketing is no different. We know that targeted marketing has a better Return on Investment (ROI) and engagement rate, but why don't we all do it?
In the below chart, we see that a plurality of companies across almost all industries still have no targeting and everyone gets the same message. Publishing and media seem to be the worst, at 56%. Whereas Online Advertising Network has 28% using…
Chart of the day: Marketers aim to measure video and other digital media performance with cost per acquisition
Most use site traffic and ROI to measure performance, but marketers expect to continue to use site traffic, ROI and also use cost per acquisition.
Only half of marketers measure using ROI, which means there is a heavy reliance on using site traffic as the main measurement. Overall there is a lack of ROI measurement and sales lift per ad dollar spent is also low at just 3 in 10 using this method, with 4 in 10 expecting to use it within the next 2-3 years. Measurement is often an after-thought and doesn't get the resources required to use advanced metrics such as calculating ROI, and therefore relies on cruder metrics such as site traffic. This is a false economy,…
Chart of the Day: Social Media spend has always fallen well below predictions
Making predictions is easy. Identify a trend and extrapolate to your heart's content. So long as you don't actually check what you predicted against the real world data when the time comes, then you're in the clear.
Except when some killjoy comes along and goes and plots your predictions against what actually happened for four years in a row and found your predictions were consistently overshooting reality.
That's what happened when the CMO survey asked 388 top US marketing execs about their actual and predicted social media spend. The CMOs consistently predicted higher social media spending than was actually the case, and if they were meeting their predictions they would be spending close to twice as much on social media marketing as they are at current.
So why is this? It could…
Chart of the Day: The amount of time people spend using messaging apps in Europe, Latin America & Asia has grown by up to 10 times that of the USA
In a recent report by ComScore measuring the percentage of time the average user spends using messenger apps versus all other mobile activity found that people outside the USA, UK and Canada spend significantly more of their time on mobile using these apps. The messenger apps included in the report were the 5 key apps globally, Facebook messenger (with over a billion installs on Android - who doesn't have this on their phones), WhatsApp (and this one), Line, WeChat & QQ messenger.
These 5 apps share 1.4% of all mobile minutes in the USA and 2.3% in the UK, but when you compare that against 15.8% in Mexico and 14.9% in Indonesia the difference is staggering.
…
Chart of the Day: Share of Smartphone vs desktop retail sales
As our regularly updated stats on mobile trends shows, we are now well past the tipping point where mobile visits to consumers exceed desktop visits, at least for consumer brands and e-commerce sites (B2B is quite different). Yet while smartphone usage has been climbing dramatically in all countries, the same can't be said for smartphone conversion rates which are typically only one quarter to one third of desktop conversion. Mobile conversion varies on many factors related to buyer behaviour and culture in different countries, but the effect has been the same in different countries with the mobile share of retail e-commerce transactions being less than 50%.
Yet this percentage mobile commerce transaction figure is climbing too and the latest research from Criteos' retail customers in different countries shows that in two, the UK and Japan it now exceeds 50% with Australia and…
Chart of the Day: What is the comparison of segmented vs non-segmented campaigns
Segmentation is an important tactic every email marketer should be using.
Firstly, what is list segmentation? List segmentation is when you segment (or split) your subscriber list based on your chosen criteria. E.g: if you want to only target clients in London, you would build your list, and instead of choosing everyone, you would only include those clients whose city was London. This means everyone outside of London wouldn't receive the email. You can make your list very specific and more relevant to your client (making sure that the email messaging reflects this, of course) but it will also make your dispatch list smaller. Segmentation is pretty standard with all Email Service Providers (ESPs) and they will have documentation of how to set them up for your campaigns.
In the below chart, the results are unsurprising. We…
