Techniques to increase Facebook 'Likes'

Boosting engagement across different social media networks is a concern for many marketers today, even though the commercial objectives may vary for different types of brand. In Facebook the aim will be to increase 'Likes' or new Fans though ultimately leading to improved brand awareness or increasing sales from new or existing customers.

The success of a Facebook update to achieve these goals can depend on many factors, including time of postings, content. This infographic from KISSmetrics reminds us of this. Remember that, as for all marketing channels, 'testing' is key as the sector and audiences vary across businesses.

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Which factors are the main reasons for shopping cart abandonment?

Cart Abandonment specialists, Cloud.IQ have released a new infographic with some fascinating findings regarding how and why our customers are abandoning their purchases and how we can leverage this opportunity to generate more sales. Some stats of interest: 88% of online shoppers who abandon online purchases before completion are open to being emailed by retailers afterwards.. 35% actually say they will actively welcome these emails For every £100 spent on driving customers to the site, only £1 goes into converting them To see all the stats and the full infographic, view it here.  …

Which email clients should we design and test for? 2014 update

It's important to agree the target email clients you want the email to be displayed in when briefing an agency to develop a new email template or enewsletter layout. Of course, large volume senders will want the email to render in all, but for smaller businesses it's OK to target and test a smaller number. Traditionally the main email clients to target were the main webmail services plus different Outlook versions. Hotmail Yahoo! Mail Gmail Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010 B2B marketers would have added different versions of Lotus Notes and Blackberry with Gmail becoming more important through time amongst professionals. In 2014 this is radically different - you also need to think really seriously about how emails will render on different mobile platforms. This 2014 infographic has the data published from their clients for the whole of 2013 - it's from the excellent Litmus…

Research shows how just-in-time content can re-engage abandoning visitors

When it comes to bounce on B2B landing pages, the numbers are depressing. Marketers put a lot of time and energy into these crucial pages, and research says the large majority of businesses depend on landing pages as part of their lead-generation strategy. Yet the majority (more than 50%) of traffic will bounce, perhaps never to return. The waste and inefficiency can be HUGE if landing pages aren't optimised or other relevant content isn't available. [Editor's note: This post reviews different ways to measure engagement and explains bounce rate and typical benchmarks if your not familiar with it. Bounce rates for blogs can be in the range 60-80%, so it's worthwhile designing the blog to encourage some of these visitors to engage more]. Much of the time spent developing effective landing pages focuses on content optimization and enticing calls-to-action (CTAs) to grab…

Best practices for online form data capture

Lead capture forms need to minimise data collection, but of course you do need profiling info to qualify the lead so you can follow-up with relevant content or contacts. So it's difficult to get the balance right between sign-ups vs data collection for lead generation. Often this balance isn't right as analytics shows campaign targets are not attained with bounce rates too high.

The Marketing Ninja from Singlehop has produced what we think is a useful infographic summarising the issues to boost form conversion which collates different advice on best practice for increasing form conversion including how to test your form, which buttons to use and more.

 

To make this post more useful, we asked The Marketing Ninja for details of resources for form best practices so you can follow-up on…

The most popular jobs in digital marketing show what employers are looking for

We showed in our recent review that digital marketing is now bigger than Internet marketing based on searches for knowledge and services related to digital marketing. As demand for digital marketing has grown, so has the number of specialist digital jobs needed in companies and agencies. Google Trends shows us that searches for Jobs in Digital Marketing has overtaken Jobs in Internet Marketing and continued to grow through 2013.

What is the talent gap between digital marketing jobs and resources

Earlier in 2013 we created the second infographic in this post showing the most in-demand online marketing jobs based on LinkedIn skills and the popularity of online marketing jobs in the UK. We have now added this related infographic which shows the Talent gap between…

Content marketing Survey on B2B marketing

The Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, undertook a survey sponsored by Brightcove, to ask over 1,200 B2B Marketers in the US the key marketing tactics from last year and to discuss their focus for 2014.

 'Heading into 2014, many B2B marketers are feeling more confident than ever about the effectiveness of their content marketing strategies,' said Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute and author of Epic Content Marketing. 'Though the industry is still in the early adoption phase of content marketing, it's clear that many are seeing success and are continuing to increase their tactics and devote more resources, and budgets, to producing great content experiences.'

Key content marketing survey findings included:

93% of B2B organisations are using content-based tactics and 73% are producing more content than the previous year.86% have someone who oversees content marketing strategy30%…

6 illnesses B2B (and other marketers) may suffer from

No I don't mean "sick" in a "down-with-the-kids" way, just "ill". I like useful infographics, that's our bag, but really like this one since it's useful and funny - well to me anyway. These look like common ailments across sectors...

Kudos to g2m Solutions - I like the way they integrate it with a B2B Healthcheck CTA on their site, although not on the infographic. If you're looking for treatment, Rene Power also has his infographic showing 7 Steps to a Brilliant B2B Marketing Plan.

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Does the Conversation Prism help or hinder understanding of how to manage social media?

You might have seen the Conversation Prism has recently been updated to version 4 by Brian Solis? It’s always been a very useful reference to me - if only to help realise the potential of social media marketing, and the opportunity beyond that of Facebook and Twitter, the platforms that dominate social media plans.

Is it useful or confusing?

I read this post where the author, Richard Stacy, implies that graphics such as the Conversation Prism add to the confusion somehow. Stacy’s argument is a great insight that social media is an opportunity to evolve your marketing away from ‘channel and message’ (traditional media) and instead to a ‘behaviour identification and response’. Stacy identifies 4 simple options for how a brand can be mentioned in social media: People saying nice…

Simple ideas to review for more impactful Pinterest, Google+, Facebook and Twitter Posts

We like useful infographics that prompt you to think about the way you do things and change them. Myclever Agency have designed a 'clever' (excuse the pun!) practical infographic to showcase how to create the perfect social media post and timings for engagement, across Pinterest, Google+, Facebook and Twitter, gathering insight from sources available on Bitly and Salesforce.

One size doesn't fit all for different networks, so it's interesting to see their point-of-view on how you should communicate differently through the different networks. Their infographic addresses key points for layout, content, CTA across the different platforms to leverage engagement and social sharing. We like it as it's simple and most of all practical.

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