[Editor's note: We now have more recent guidance for frameworks for digital maturity evaluation]
Chart of the Day: BCG's pathway to digital marketing maturity model
You probably know of Boston Consulting Group for their classic market prioritization matrix which we feature in our essential marketing models guide.
Well, they still continue as a consulting group and naturally work on digital transformation projects for which they share strategies via their blog. The latest, which I thought sharing is a simple assessment of digital marketing maturity based on organizational structure.
Most suited for larger organizations it shows the typical pattern from an ad hoc approach to digital marketing across a business characterised by innovation, but also inefficiency and wastage due to overlap or inexperience. To control digital marketing activities a centralized approach is then recommended, but as I have seen in many cases this then results…
What is 'extremely online' and how is it affecting children in Silicon Valley?
There’s a new buzzword on the streets: "extremely online." It means someone is constantly on social media. Whilst spoken in jest, it cradles a dark nuance. People are increasingly becoming addicted to ‘bottomless bowl’ apps. That term was coined by former Google designer Tristan Harris after a Cornell study found that people drank more soup when a bowl was constantly refilled.
Many apps are designed to deliver a continuous stream of ‘bottomless bowl’ content. Each screen-tap or swipe provides a morsel of satisfaction.
News feeds keep people scrolling. Snapchat and Facebook ensures they check-in to check-out what friends are up to. Twitter provides a stream of endless schizoid and paranoid views. Hook-up sites like Grindr or Tinder deliver streams of non-starter, photo-finish relationships.
For a growing constituent, life staring at smart device screens is beginning to feel like wasted time. Many are…
Use these techniques to help convert and engage customers into repeat purchases and brand advocates across the customer lifecycle
Being a marketer can be exhausting. As if it wasn’t hard enough to attract new customers, now everyone’s talking about optimizing the entire customer lifecycle. (We’re tired just thinking about it!)
If you’re trying to understand customer lifecycle marketing, grab a coffee and read on: we’re here to remedy your marketing overwhelm. In this blog post, we explain why you need to work across the entire customer journey, and how to do it well.
What is customer lifecycle marketing?
Customer lifecycle marketing is about making every touchpoint between a customer and a brand more profitable.
A customer’s lifecycle describes their journey through the buying cycle. It includes every interaction they have with your brand along the way. And covers every marketing channel those interactions happen on.
Creating a customer lifecycle marketing strategy helps you optimize each…
Research giving benchmark of most successful acquisition channels for retail
It's useful to know how your business compares to competitors in terms of the mix of online traffic. You can use the Google Analytics benchmarking feature for companies of a similar size and sector and that can be useful for arguing the case for reallocation of acquisition budgets, for example, more investment in organic or paid search.
It's rare for data to be published which compares your digital media mix, i.e. the relative importance of different traffic sources driving visitors to websites. So, I thought it would be interesting to share this data from US Ecommerce sites.
Location: US Retail
Date: Published Autumn 2017
Sample: Top 250 US retailers (so representative of common consumer behaviour)
Source: Adobe Retail Industry report
This retail visitor acquisition data shows that organic search is in the number…
Chart of the Day: Audience breakdown of the top 6 sites
We all know that sites owned by Google have a large traffic share of the total internet population, however, do you know the other top performing sites? New research by UKOM shows the top 20 properties by unique visitors.
As you can see, Google remains on top, with Facebook and the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) following behind in second and third place. It is interesting to note that almost half are news sites which gives an insight into the consumption of modern day news online.
Overall, Google reaches 97% if the UK online population.
However, UKOM also shows the breakdown of those top 6 sites to show that Youtube alone reaches more than all of Facebook's properties combined.
Source: UKOM - UK…
Chart of the Day: How OTAs reach online vacation buyers?
With the rise of online price comparison sites and review sites now offering hotels and flights for purchase, the competition for the ecommerce travel industry has never been so fierce.
So what are the top channels for reaching online vacation buyers?
Well, new research by Global Web Index shows that there is no one dominant channel that vacation buyers use to research and discover brands online. Therefore a holistic marketing mix of different channels is necessary to reach potential customers at different touch points of the research stage.
46% of respondents stated they discover brands via search engines, this yet only 34% discover vacations via brand/product websites. This shows that your keyword strategy needs to be based on user search queries "cheapest holidays to France" "best places to visit in Australia", rather than branded keywords, in order to rank your site and persuade them to buy.…
How to get ahead of the ecommerce competition by keyword research, referral marketing, competitor analysis and viral marketing
In this post, we'll outline 4 marketing growth hacks to help ecommerce business, the tools to achieve this and how to use them.
1. Keyword Research
Knowing better keywords to target is one way to achieve growth successfully. When you run keyword research there are a lot of words that’ll show up on the results, but not all of them will be a good choice for your niche, so you have to aim for the right one. Having the right keywords in your SEO strategy will give you better content and a high(er) chance to rank in search. Targeting the keywords your potential audience use to find you and your content will make you easier to find. But take note that that is not enough to rank, in other SERPs there are chances…
Chart of the day: PDFs are the best content type for attracting sign-ups on a landing page.
Participants were randomly assigned in an experiment by ConversionXL. The team then even did a complicated ANOVA (analysis of variance), but in brief: PDF, followed by web content is the best content formats when also compared with video, for attracting sign-ups.
Why? I can assume that although people don't mind watching videos, there is a scramble for the headphones on the office, or simply people would prefer to read something, in their own time. Here at Smart Insights, we host PDF resources and web-hosted resources, which you can read directly from our site, so as the person responsible for member content alongside our very own Dave Chaffey, I was very interested in this research.
What did ConversionXL conclude? They concluded that PDF's and web content convert much more…
The challenges marketers face overcoming the hyperbole and mysticism that surrounds machine learning and AI
The marketing industry is abuzz with talk of how marketing applications of machine learning and AI will make us more effective and change the way we do our marketing. The problem is that while we’re all keen to embrace innovation and get a competitive edge (which machine learning most definitely provides), for many of us it sounds inaccessible and beyond our typical marketing capability.
However, within the next five years, we believe machine learning will become an everyday skill that marketers will be expected to possess, built into our software and processes as standard. The challenge for marketers today is in overcoming the hyperbole and mysticism that surrounds machine learning and AI, to understand what it might mean to them.
It helps to first look at one of the main issues we marketers face - data. Too…
Chart of the Day: A survey of the effectiveness of organic and paid activities for charities including benchmarks for paid media, social media, and email marketing
This isn't brand new research, but since I know we have a fair few members who manage digital marketing for not-for-profits and charities I thought I would share it since I'm unaware of similar benchmarks in the UK. It's always useful to compare effectiveness and response of media with others in your sector and country. In this case, it's a really good report based on survey response from charities based in the US, but I think it's of wider interest.
There is a great deal of analysis in this report in individual graphs for each channel and for website conversion, but here we'll just cover the summary.
You can see that there is a useful analysis of fundraising which has a…
