LinkedIn is not as far ahead of the rest as you might think.
HubSpot has launched their yearly State of Inbound 2016 report, providing us with some great insights into the latest trends and growth of inbound marketing.
This year their report is looking to showcase not just the current state of - but also the future of - Inbound Marketing.
One of the charts that caught my eye is the one below. It can be found on page 115 of the report if you're interested. It highlights the preferred channels of communication marketers and business owners like to use for both personal and professional purposes.
It is somewhat unsurprising to see LinkedIn as the preferred choice of professional communications. After all, it is a social network intended to help you build and engage with…
Did you know this data is available? Many don't!
In a couple of recent consulting workshops with our members, I've recommended this report Google Analytics report (shown below), but the marketing managers I was working with were unaware of it and, more to the point, they thought they were really useful. I find similar in training workshops too.
What is this data and why is it useful?
The chart shows that you can see the Male / Female breakdown for your site visitors and you can also see the age breakdown too. It's useful for both B2B and B2C.
It becomes more interesting when you compare it to the profile of traditional customers acquired by other channels - this prompts questions as to whether you are reaching new audiences online or similar audiences.
The data…
Greater public trust in search engines only reinforces the importance of SEO
It's the morning after the night before. For those political nerds this side of the Atlantic who stayed up well into the early hours to watch the debate between the two candidates to become the leader of the free world, I can only say well done.
Among the barbed questions, infantile bickering and rude interruptions, discerning observers may have noticed one thing missing. Objectively verified facts. Sure the candidates bandied around plenty of statistics, but sometimes what matters more is not the statistic but its source. And even is a statistic is technically correct, it may be incredibly misleading. For example Donald Trump's repeated claim that 52% of African American's are unemployed includes all those who are in school, college, staying home for childcare, volunteering or retired. Hardly everyone's definition of 'unemployed'.
The fact a candidate to be president of the richest, most powerful nation on earth…
Many businesses are trying to integrate digital and traditional marketing, but only 1 in 20 have achieved full optimisation.
Today's chart of the day comes from our 2016 research into managing digital marketing, which asked 1096 marketers from around the world about their experiences of managing the challenges of digital.
One particularly important finding from the report was the poor state of integration between digital and traditional channels. There can be no doubting that this is important. Customers increasingly spend their time online and assess content digitally, making digital marketing ever more important. Yet some brands are starting to think traditional channels have become under-rated as a result and starting to question if they've over-invested in digital.
Whether one channel is more important than the other is an irrelevant question; clearly both are of immense importance and which one is more important will vary between businesses. The key thing is that they should…
In today's innovative economy, businesses need to embrace digital transformation to stay ahead.
According to new research from The Economist, Britain and America are the most innovative major economies. This is great news for the economy as a whole, but it means businesses within the economy can't afford to be complacent. With increased innovativeness comes increased competition for established businesses. Thus they need to embark on digital transformation programs if they haven't already. Staying still is not an option.
It is also interesting how China is 'punching about its weight' when it comes to innovation plotted against GDP per capita. This again should be a warning to major brands to expect stiff competition from China's emerging digital champions, who are using the lessons they've learnt appealing to price-conscious mobile consumers in their home market. Both East and West can learn from each other.
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It was long thought that having the keyword in your domain name would help you in the SERPs. Is this actually the case?
Ahrefs have done some stellar research into the On-page ranking factors in 2016 and have found many interesting nuggets.
Back in 2012 Google rolled out an updated intended to bring an end to high ranking, low-quality Exact Match Domains (EMDs). Since then, the scurry to find high volume, keyword rich domains has somewhat diminished. But does have an EMD still impact the SERPs?
As evidenced in the data, there is a clear jump between position #1 and #2 which suggests that either the EMD update is no longer in effect, or something different is going on.
First of all, the phrasing used by Matt Cutts himself was "Minor weather report: Small upcoming Google algo change will…
As an industry, how are we finding the process of recruiting new talent?
We recently conducted some research where we asked over 700 professional marketers about their current digital skills, how they wanted to develop and what trends they saw in the industry. That research resulted in our Digital Skills report 2016 which you can find here.
When we asked "How easy is it to recruit people with the right amount of digital skills based on the experience of your organisation?" we got quite an array of answers.
On initial inspection, it clear to see that, the digital marketing industry finds recruitment more troubling than easy. Whether this is as a result of unreasonable expectations, or a flaw in the system we are using, it's something to be conscious of when looking for your next hire.
Looking at the…
Email retains its position as one of the most powerful marketing channels
It's two chart's of today instead of one today, for the simple reason that I couldn't include one without the other. One is great news for marketers, the other for consumers.
The good news for marketers is that ROI from email remains extremely strong. Long regarded as one of the most cost effective marketing channels, it's lead over others shows no sign of falling away.
Email thus remains a key channel for investing in for 2016 and 2017, with newer tactics like personalization, dynamic content, and embedded gifs & videos helping to increase engagement on the part of users.
The worry of course is that the effectiveness of email will cause marketers to ruin it with overuse. As more and more attempt to use the platform users will feel increasingly bombarded…
The current state of the digital marketing skills landscape.
The results from our survey of over 700 marketing professionals are in! The responses have allowed us to develop a picture of the current state of digital marketing skills. They come from across the UK and US, but were predominantly from UK marketers, so help us to accurately understand the digital skills landscape of the UK marketing industry in 2016.
Marketers tend to fancy themselves as fairly skilled in strategy, content marketing and social media marketing. Although interestingly no one area had over 50% ranking themselves as skilled or highly skilled, and a considerable 38% also said they wanted to improve their strategy and planning skills. This was the skill marketers were most likely to say they wanted to improve.
At the other end of the spectrum, there is a real shortage of more technical expertise like coding, mobile marketing and graphic design. A…
Benchmark your use of B2B automation to find out the most effective techniques
Given that Marketing Automation is now an established technique, business-to-business marketers know the power of using marketing automation to send more relevant communications to nurture leads while also saving costs and time.
The rise of marketing automation has been extremely rapid, so in our latest research survey on the effectiveness of B2B Marketing Automation we're keen to see how your efforts are turning into results. If you work in B2B marketing - Take our Survey and get a free report.
To help identify changing practices, we're doing a re-run of the survey which we did last year and we would be grateful for your input this time around also. Last year we saw that many businesses are at an early stage in using Marketing Automation and are interested to see how this and the marketing automation techniques used have…
