A content marketing funnel acts as a guide for your prospects and leads. It shows them the specific steps they need to take before purchasing your product or service

According to Demand Metric, content marketing generates three times more leads than outbound marketing and it’s about 62% less costly. As a B2B brand, if you want to attract more leads to your business and spend less to do so, you should leverage content marketing. [caption id="attachment_148039" align="aligncenter" width="550"] [Image via Demand Metric][/caption]To do this effectively, you need a content marketing funnel. A content marketing funnel acts as a guide for your prospects and leads. It shows them the specific steps they need to take before purchasing your product or service. It also helps your business get more qualified leads. In this post, you will learn how to create a…

As regular SEO techniques improve your global ranking, local SEO improves the ranking of your brand in your area, helping those who live close to your location find your business easier

Local SEO represents a series of steps that allow your content to reach online users that live close to your business. As regular SEO techniques improve your global ranking, local SEO improves the ranking of your brand in your area, helping those who live close to your location find your business easier. It is a strategy that every local brand crafts according to the number of locations they operate in, as opposed to global SEO that includes the use of techniques with worldwide metrics in mind. More than 50% of users that perform local business searches end up visiting the local office within a day. A well-implemented local SEO strategy allows users to contact you or get important…

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Affiliate marketing can provide a lot of benefits for e-commerce businesses, but only if you get it right

According to recent studies, 81% of brands rely on affiliate links because they involve very little investment. Affiliate marketing, an appropriate marketing solution for every e-commerce store, involves an affiliate signing up to an affiliate program offered by a retailer to first promote and then sell their products on a formulated commission-based payment model. This affiliate, usually a publisher, is poised to promote such products and services using a unique link that sends traffic to the company’s website. If the target lead purchases the product, a percentage of the sales is then paid to the affiliate. [si_blog_banner_cta] Essentially, affiliate marketing can be seen as expanding one’s marketing team by employing the services of third-party companies, which are paid only when the leads are converted and successful sales made. In a world where marketing strategies…

It doesn’t matter whether your business is big or small, if you’re not generating quality leads, your business is doomed to fail

High-quality leads are the lifeblood of any thriving business. It doesn’t matter whether your business is big or small, if you’re not generating quality leads, your business is doomed to fail – after all, how are you going to keep growing and evolving if there’s no new business coming in? Unfortunately, getting quality leads is one of the areas that marketers find most challenging. In fact, 59% of marketers say generating quality leads is their primary challenge, according to research conducted by the B2B Technology Marketing Community on LinkedIn. But generating quality leads doesn’t need to be a complicated process. [si_blog_banner_cta] All you need to do is work on your marketing ninja moves and have a few tools in your arsenal that will help you identify leads that come with a…

What guides, templates, examples and Quick Wins have our members found helpful in 2019? We've taken a look at this year's most popular Smart Insights resources

Over the last year, we’ve updated and created new guides, templates, presentations and Quick Wins in order to help you better develop your marketing skills. We always aim to provide the most up-to-date information and advice to enable you to grow your knowledge, while our practical approach means you can easily put this knowledge to use. No matter what your membership level, business or personal goals, we’ve aimed to provide you with a broad range of resources to help you achieve them. So, whether you’re trying to improve your skills, upskill your team or grow your business, you’re all set with the support of Smart Insights. You’re not the only one either, as this year has seen a huge number of people making use of our guides,…

Only 34% of marketers report being comfortable with the idea of customer lifetime value, and even those who get it struggle to market across generations

"Know your audience" is Marketing 101, so why do so many marketing leaders miss the mark when appealing to their bases? Even when a brand is successful, it often struggles to maintain that appeal in the long run. Your brand’s customer lifetime value strategy is crucial, no matter what industry you’re in. Unfortunately, only 34% of marketers report being comfortable with the idea of customer lifetime value, and even those who get it struggle to market across generations. They get lost in the myriad details of the marketing process without realizing it’s an audience’s culture — not one of the countless formulaic solutions that work only on paper — that maintains its loyalty. [si_guide_block id="59989" title="Download our Individual Member Resource – Customer onboarding guide" description="Online…

Putting the right measures in place to achieve excellence in 2020

There’s little doubt that 2020 is going to be a big year for marketers (although I appreciate we say this every December!). If you’re intending to start the New Year on the right foot, it's important to be clear on what you’re looking to achieve and to gain buy-in from everyone in the business. Whilst your marketing strategy will outline the activity you will and will not carry out over the next year, underpinning this plan will be your objectives. There are three main sets of objectives to consider: Business objectives, e.g.: Increase profit growth by x% Increase market share by y% Marketing objectives, e.g.: Increase sales by x% Increase brand recognition by y% Campaign objectives, e.g.: Increase frequency of consumption by x% Increase household penetration by y% Your overarching business objectives set the tone and cascades through to the marketing and…

When hyper-personalized emails miss the mark, they aren’t just ineffective — they’re downright unsettling.

To assess the effectiveness of personalization, my company conducted a real-world experiment. We paid a couple thousand dollars for a couple hundred hyper-personalized emails and then measured their successes against a similar number of generic and relevant emails. As it turned out, those run-of-the-mill emails performed better than the personalized ones by a substantial margin. Why is that? Well, the truth is that most marketers believe that they know who their target audience is, so they integrate that knowledge into an approach that uses personalized emails that they feel is most effective. When these hyper-personalized emails miss the mark, they aren’t just ineffective, they’re downright unsettling. According to a RichRelevance study, despite mostly enjoying personalized experiences from brands, up to 75% of US consumers deemed most forms of personalized business communications…

Getting website personalization right is hard and I bet you are sick of being told otherwise

I don’t blame marketers for trying to tell you differently of course. It’s immensely frustrating for them too – knowing just how valuable personalization can be and knowing that it will, in time, become a necessity, rather than luxury, for all brands to offer a personal experience to their customers. Still, industry folk are frequently told we should be getting on board with web personalization and the many different approaches to execution that have been proposed over the last few years. But (and it’s a big but), rarely does anyone address the fact that most businesses have one or more fundamental and significant blockers in place preventing personalization success (more on this later). [si_blog_banner_cta] It's akin to asking a member of the public to take part in the World Championship triple jump competition and preparing them by showing…