Chart of the Day: How does your advertising budget break down compare to the average?
As we start the new year many marketers will have already been negotiating their advertising budgets for the coming year. Once approved the next major hurdle is to decide how to split that budget across the multitude of channels that are available. Search, Display, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest the is seemingly never ending, So how do you decide?
Today's chart of the day highlights that marketers like to hedge their bets when it comes to their marketing budgets, which is a good strategy, as it's risky to have "all your eggs in one basket".
As shown in the chart below the highest proportion of the budget is reserved for traditional advertising which makes sense when you consider the costs associated with Radio, Print & TV advertising. Now if we combine Social and Display you get a substantial 27% of the…
Chart of the Day: A conversion funnel example from the loans sector
A different format of chart for today, showing analysis and modelling for digital marketing rather than statistics on adoption or benchmarks.
The recommended Smart Insights approach for creating achievable marketing plans is centred on creating realistic forecasts of leads, sales and revenue in the year ahead based on conversion-funnel model spreadsheets with the contribution of different channels shown in this digital marketing planning spreadsheet.
This example shows how in some types of business, like the financial services sector, it's important to take into account multichannel behaviour as the decision will be influenced by different channels such as web-phone-branch and the customer journey will involve switching between them.
This is a useful visualisation that adds more detail to a ROPO analysis by breaking out different channels in each vertical bar and…
Chart of the Day: How email ROI compares to other channels
The below chart illustrates that email delivers a steady stream of return for your investment. Email is generally underrated in regards to investment compared to Paid Search (PPC) or the other channels.
In the chart we can see that 73% of respondents rate email marketing ROI as either 'excellent' or 'good', compared to PPC which comes out at 59%. These are impressive statistics, but imagine the results if email marketing received the same investment as the other channels or even it diversifies into tactical marketing automation.
One question I have with this chart, is how accurate the calculation of investment is in email? It can be difficult to calculate, because there are different factors attributing to a email send. But most importantly,…
Chart of the day: Celebrities and influencers on YouTube lead the way with earnings.
YouTubers with over 7 million followers are earning $300,000 on average, Facebook and Instagram accounts with over 7 million followers are also getting over half that amount too.
Even just 100 thousand followers on Twitter can lead to earnings of around $2000, but on YouTube an average of $12,500. Twitter seems to be on the cheaper end, whilst YouTube is the most expensive platform for influencer marketing.
Posts on Facebook can cost $75000 for influencers who have over 3 million followers.
Source: The Economist
Our expert level resource, Influencer Outreach Guide shows you how to use to find and monitor influencers using social media
Find out more about the rise of influencer marketing
…
Chart of the day: Case studies, best practice advice and how to guides are the most effective types of content.
A recent survey of over 600 B2B marketing professionals reveals what types of content they found to be the most effective. The report makes for interesting reading, and as the chart below clearly shows, case studies stand out as the most effective content type for B2B marketers. Best practice advice was extremely close behind, whilst how to guides and market trends were also judged to be effective.
Other types of content were found to be useful by less than a quarter of B2B content marketers. This shows that the 'hard sell' and listing product features is no longer effective, and providing information such as case studies and guides is now the superior tactic.
Source: B2B Content Marketing Report
Sample:…
Chart of the day: In a recent study on customer sentiments on virtual reality, by Ipsos MORI, they find that over 3 in 10 don't care about VR at all, and many think VR is just for gamers
VR devices are currently too expensive according to 66% of respondents and the majority (86%) would like to try VR before buying.
The key findings as shown in the chart above include:
Over half have an underground of what VR is and just under half are interested in experiencing it
6 in 10 believe VR experiences are made just for gamers
Most find the devices are too expensive even though there are cheaper options available
The research also found that over 6 in 10 (63%) of 16-24 year olds are positive of the technology, compared to just over 3 in 10 (33%) of those aged 55-75.
Over half of…
Chart of the Day: Transaction rates are higher among customers who receive multiple abandon cart emails
One of the first things you learn when you begin email marketing, is that email frequency is vital to your campaign. And abandon cart emails are no exception.
Experian Marketing Services (EMS), analysed over half a million abandon cart emails sent by several brands in July 2016.
EMS found that those customers who received multiple emails (4.6%) doubled their transaction rate. Compared with those who received the one email (1.9%).
Transaction rates are defined as the overall percentage of transactions as related to delivered messages (transactions/received) over the time period.
EMS also looked at the brands business rules and found that those subscribers who had a 24 hour suppression rule and who received two or more abandon cart emails within 7 days,…
Chart of the Day: Sainsbury's Stop Motion Animated "The Greatest Gift" races to 14 million views
Christmas is only days away - retail stores are competing for consumer attention with high profile multichannel marketing campaigns, all hoping that they can report a successful holiday period with increased sales in the new year. It seems that every year the competition to create the best Christmas advert - popularised by Coca-Cola in the the eighties with the Coca-Cola truck advert (still my favourite every year since) is getting fiercer. In the last few years the John Lewis advert has been the one that every other retail brand is trying to match - this year the retailer who is coming closest is Supermarket chain Sainsbury's with their Stop Motion Animation ad "The Greatest Gift" voiced by James Corden which tells the story of Dave, a hard-working and devoted Dad, who realises that the greatest gift he can…
Chart of the Day: Most businesses address just three or more market segments with their content marketing
Marketers who are focused on campaigns, creative and marcomms can get a narrow view that marketing communications (that's content, social, ads, SEO, outdoor, video, you name it) are actually only one part of the marketing puzzle. But the smart marketer knows that spending time to develop accurate buyer personas and properly plan different strategies for targeting market segments and buyer states is also crucial.
The results of a survey which asked over 600 B2B Marketing professionals about their use of content marketing shows that plenty of content marketers are wising up to the need to properly segment their market and target different buyer personas and stages with different messaging and content formats.
Half of the companies were addressing three of more market segments, whilst almost half were addressing three or more buyer personas…
Chart of the Day: An example of the 'Critical few' KPIs
To coincide with the release of an enhancement to our RACE digital marketing dashboard, today's Chart of the Day isn't published research around digital marketing. Instead, it's what I think is a nice, practical example of achieving focus through a marketing dashboard:
The visual dashboard above is a well-known dashboard example, taken from the well-regarded source of sharing approaches to managing Digital Business - the UK government's digital service.
Their article explains that when they're building a digital-by-default service like Carer’s Allowance, their team is continuously designing, testing and releasing changes to the live service to improve it and better meet user needs against critical KPIs of which standard usability measures like completion rate, user satisfaction and time to complete are…
