Why new artificial intelligence matters for business, from global trend to maximizing marketing and operations spend
AI has progressed quite away from its early beginnings, and its prevalence in modern business models has increased exponentially. Yet, despite this, our relationship with AI has been a tumultuous one, with ‘automation’ becoming something of a dirty word for traditional businesses. But AI is here to stay — and for good reason.
This rise in popularity of utilizing AI in business models comes in part from the development of machine learning and natural language processing. It’s this technology that gives AI the power, when utilized effectively, to aid businesses in numerous practical ways. From increasing staff productivity to boosting customer satisfaction, AI has the promise to meet business objectives at a fraction of the time and cost as with traditional methods like phone and email. Here, we’ll go through some…
6 emerging email and marketing automation trends to help inform your 2018 email marketing communications strategy
Email marketing continues to be a vital communications channel with the DMAs latest Email tracker showing that email receives 30 times return on investment on average. 95% of respondents rated it as 'important' or 'very important' to their organization.
Yet competition in the inbox for attention from email subscribers remains fierce as social media remains important and competitors optimise their approach.
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So, it's important to review the success factors to improving email ROI, which we summarise in this article with the help of the email specialists who kindly contributed their views and predictions on the trends which will be important in 2018. While some of these are not 'new' techniques, they are increasing…
Top 5 social media trends for 2018 you need to include in your marketing strategy, including predictions from 10 social media specialists
Brands are trying in more ways than ever to connect with audiences across a range of social platforms. It is becoming harder for brands to catch our attention as competition increases and our attention spans have decreased to 8 seconds. Each day users scroll through 300 feet of content, giving brands a very small window of time to grab the users' attention. Therefore, how can your brand start building ideas that work for the speed of feed? Here are five key trends we believe will have the biggest impact on your social media strategy in 2018.
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The most important trends and innovations across the customer lifecycle to inform your 2018 ecommerce strategy using the RACE planning framework
Knowing the key techniques to improve your conversion rates is vital to any ecommerce marketing strategy. We will be taking a look at the biggest trends in ecommerce marketing you should seriously think about adopting in 2018 to get ahead of your competition.
We have created a series posts on digital marketing trends 2018 across marketing channels including, email, social, search engine marketing, and an overall 100+ must-see marketing research 2017 statistics. Now, we will evaluate the biggest innovations and strategies that should be adopted in the ecommerce sector.
Smart Insights customer lifecycle model for retail and ecommerce, details the different customer touchpoints across the RACE framework for different 'type of customers: window shoppers, 1st purchase, repeat customers, and loyal…
20 Instagram statistics every marketer should know about for 2018
Here are the latest Instagram stats from 2017. Use these stats to inform your 2018 social media strategy and see how marketers are looking to expand their brands reach with Instagram.
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1. 70% of Instagram posts don’t get seen (Sprout social, 2017)
Before the Instagram algorithm update posts were ordered by featuring the newest posts at the top of your feed. Instead, the change brings about an algorithm-driven feed, which is now ordered by what you are most interested in. Brands, in particular, became concerned that their content might no longer be seen.
Consequently, your posts will now be ordered by how popular…
The latest trends and innovations using VR / AR and interactive video to keep an eye on in 2018
Video is by no means a new marketing innovation, but it seems to be on the rise and considered the number one content consumption channel. It is still regarded as a highly popular method to distribute content to increase engagement rates across all digital channels. According to HubSpot's State of Inbound 2017 report, video is the main disruptor for marketers, yet YouTube and Facebook video are the 2 most popular distribution channels that marketers want to introduce into their strategy in the next 12 months.
However, it is important that these trends that are most popular are developed further with new and innovating ways to keep consumers engaged.
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Social Media Essentials: The biggest changes in social last year and upcoming updates
Happy New Year to all our readers. Last year we saw some exciting social media updates here are our top 3:
Instagram rolled out their “paid partnership with” tag. Allowing influencers to clearly mark the image as paid and it will also do the same on stories. This feature was a great move on Instagrams behalf as it increases transparency on the platform and enforces the new rules being put in place by The Federal Trade Commission, who are looking to clamp down on social media campaigns that mislead consumers.
We also saw Twitter expand their tweets from 140 characters to 280. Their reasoning for expanding the character count was because, for those tweeting in some languages such as Japanese, Korean or Chinese, they require fewer characters than tweets in English or Spanish. Twitter believes that when people have more character they are…
How to integrate digital media and technology to increase the contribution of digital marketing
Please see our latest 2019 marketing trends posts for our most recent insights.
I feel fortunate to have followed some of the amazing major changes in digital marketing and technology over the last 15 or 20 years. I'm sure you will have enjoyed living through, following and acting on these changes too. Looking back, we've seen a phenomenal growth in the importance of organic, then paid search, then social media and more recently, incredible worldwide growth in mobile and particularly smartphone usage.
As well as this article, to help Smart Insights members, we also have a more detailed free download of the marketing megatrends, which are 9 digital marketing and martech megatrends that will help give you an edge in 2017.
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Your social media weekly update
Welcome to our weekly summary of what's happened in social media. We highlight the top stories to help you stay up to date with social media, here is what caught our attention this week.
Snapchat have released the Lens Studio, a free desktop app for students, creatives, and developers to help bring their Snapchat creations to life. When developers have created a Lens they are given a special Snapcode that they can share anywhere, which anyone can scan to unlock the Lens. Snapchat reported:
With the launch of Lens Studio, we’re excited to make Lenses more accessible to creators, and experiences within Snapchat more personal and diverse. We’ve seen how much more fun Geofilters have become since first inviting the community to create their own three years ago — and can’t wait to see what you build with Lens Studio!
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Chart of the day: Have we become generation 'Treat yo self'? Social media trend analysis reveals why and what we are spending our money on this Christmas
Have you ever been Christmas shopping but found you only bought gifts for your self? This is a common theme on social media this year. 'Treat Yo Self Day' originated from Tom and Donna off 'Parks and Recreation' and the day caught on.
According to one source shoppers are self-gifting more than ever in 2017. But what’s driving this behavior? Crimson Hexagon looked at the conversation on social media, to unveil the reasons why people shop for themselves and discover what they buy for themselves.
The conversation around self-gifting has significantly increased over the years, going from 6.9k total posts in 2010 to 63.4k total posts in 2016. Popular hashtags around…
