How to hire an amazing editor and save your brand from embarrassing gaffes and find your content groove

In today's fast-moving world of internet publishing, speed often wins over accuracy. While it may seem we're all getting more lenient with typos, misspellings, and obvious grammatical mistakes, the truth is that our mistakes are still noticed. Individual customer impressions matter, and, if the mistakes go viral, they could have a more amplified negative brand effect than ever before. Just ask the poor brands that ended up on this unfortunate countdown list full of "eggregious" mistakes "thier" surely not proud of. Hiring an editor brings about a host of benefits, including a reduction in writing and grammatical mistakes and an increase in high-quality content. Most brands and agencies don’t have an editor, but how many can say they haven’t missed spelling or grammatical errors? It’s not a 'nice' to have; it’s a must-have. [si_guide_block id="85104" title="Download…

What can we expect from the wearables market in 2018? These are the top wearable statistics to inform your 2018 technology and media innovations strategy

The wearable technology market is a hot topic of discussion among many marketers. But it still feels unclear for some brands how they can adapt their marketing strategy to this new trend. According to a report from Juniper Research, wearable advertising spend is estimated to reach $68.7 million by 2019. opening up new opportunities for marketers.

[si_guide_block id="79375" title="Download Business Resource – Marketing Technology and Media Innovations guide" description="The guide outlines 6 of the most important new technologies marketers should consider when planning for future investment in customer-facing marketing experiences and communications to encourage brand engagement and purchase. At the start of the guide, we also explain different planning techniques that will help you take the right strategic decisions when evaluating new technology investments."/]

Chart of the day: New research reveals that bloggers are getting results across a few metrics, whilst most are blogging less often than daily

Over 1000 bloggers took part in a survey for Andy Crestodina of Orbit Media, they were asked a range of questions about how often they blog, the types of media they use, blog promotion and whether blogs are delivering results for them. As in the B2B world (and even in B2C) blogging is such a commonly used technique, which often gets a lot of time from marketers, but does it work? The results are positive. Bloggers are blogging less often, most bloggers publish weekly rather than daily, but bloggers are spending more time than ever writing blog posts. The message "quality over quality" certainly seems to be true. Bloggers are not publishing loads of content for the sake of it, there is a clear focus on quality. Better, longer…

Most of these companies are dominating online, but where is all their traffic coming from?

Digital marketers, web specialists, and online-business owners alike have been seeking out digital solutions to serve their marketing needs for a long time now. Today, I’ll be diving into how some of the top marketing SaaS companies drive online growth. Specifically, I’ll be examining their sources of traffic. What makes this study interesting is that it will challenge each company's product offering. Each of the 100 companies that I included falls into a certain category such as SEO, social media, content marketing, web analytics, etc. Are these companies “eating their own dog food” or do they talk a big game about the benefits of their product without leveraging the “benefits” themselves?

Let’s break down how the study was done

First, I set out to collect 100 websites that fall into the marketing SaaS company category. Using both Alexa and Similar Web…

Chart of the day: Google trends reveals 55% more searches for Halloween than Christmas

Analysis of Google trends by Marley Hayley, has revealed that Halloween is more popular than Christmas in the UK. Related search terms to Halloween had 11.4 million searches, compared to 7.3 million related searches for Christmas related results. The data was for Halloween and Christmas 2016 - so let's keep an eye out and see how 2017 pans out once Christmas has passed. The analysis also found that Halloween was also more mobile than Christmas, with more people searching for Halloween related search terms on a mobile compared to Christmas. There is an expectation among marketers that Christmas is incredibly "mobile" and it probably isn't considered that more people would search for Halloween related search terms, compared to Christmas. However, data should be interpreted carefully, as…

Real change management requires more than just changing behavior — it’s dependent upon the critical process of changing the work environment to foster this behavior

At one time or another most companies will be challenged with overcoming a period of slow sales and growth. When companies are operating in a deficit the effects on its people as well as the business as a whole can be dramatic. Fear of redundancy, wage cuts and simply having to do more with less are all common challenges for employees that can lead to high levels of stress and anxiety. This physical and psychological trauma can prove to be especially problematic as employees operating at capacity for unhealthy periods of time become burnt-out affecting their ability to make good decisions. Mistakes can lead to tensions between teams, bringing people into regular conflict and contributing towards…

12 easy steps to making your business card a successful offline marketing strategy that integrates online marketing

At Smart Insights we focus on digital marketing channels, and how we can help our members plan, manage and optimize their marketing strategies. However, we also look at the effects of offline and online marketing integration to create a holistic strategy which leads to business success. Our lifecycle marketing model shows the integration of offline and online marketing across RACE planning framework. Do you give much thought on how your business cards are going to impact people before you give them out? You probably just place an order for a standardized one from your local office supplies store. What you may not realize is that you are sitting on potentially the most potent weapon in your marketing arsenal. Maybe it is time you start…

What are the next big changes to digital that will affect digital marketing strategies in 2018?

Recently on behalf of Smart Insights, I gazed into the crystal ball to forecast some marketing and branding trends for 2018. In this article, I am going to concentrate on five digital aspects which I believe will, in some way or other, affect just about everyone next year.

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To being with, as this chart by Smart Insights, in collaboration with TFM, demonstrates, more businesses than ever are putting digital transformation programmes in place. Yet still, according to Smart Insights, some 50% of businesses don't have an integrated Digital Marketing Strategy. For more trends covering how to integrate digital media and technology to increase the contribution of digital marketing…

How the 4Ps still work for product marketing

This article focuses in on the 4Ps, which are the core of the Marketing mix, applied to the product launch. Read our article on the 7Ps of the Marketing mix, if you want to explore the full 7Ps, which also includes customer service. [si_guide_block id="100244" title="Download Premium Resource – Product launch Playbook" description="Launch a product using RACE planning to structure your marketing activities. A marketing playbook defines the key messages, types of communications, best practices and optimisation techniques that should be used to maximise return-on-investment for different marketing objectives."/] Some have said that ‘the Internet and digital marketing change everything’, but the marketing mix – widely referred to as the 4Ps of Product, Price, Place and Promotion – was originally proposed by Jerome McCarthy in 1960 as explained in the Smart Insights free guide to Marketing models and frameworks and is still used…

B2B content marketing strategy for traditional and inbound marketing

The B2B buying cycle is a long, arduous process. It includes multiple stakeholders with different agendas and an aversion to risk lingering from the last decade’s financial difficulties. Couple the aversion to risk with the new trend of buyers researching extensively before contacting the seller and you get today’s B2B selling environment. It demands a change in strategy from your marketing and sales teams. Inbound marketing, a method of “pull” marketing, replaces traditional marketing's practice of appealing to the broadest possible audience in the hopes of capturing a single sale. Inbound marketing is more effective and substantially less costly than traditional marketing, and it meshes with new buying trends.

Inbound Marketing: The Definition

Inbound marketing leverages content marketing, email marketing, and marketing automation to build rapport and trust. Sellers nurture a relationship with prospects by offering valuable content that answers the most pressing questions from…