Influencer Marketing is on the rise. Are Social Media Star's part of your strategy for the year ahead?
Earlier this week Google announced that it had acquired FameBit, a technology platform company that specializes in connecting creators and brand for sponsorships and paid promotions.
In light of this acquisition, I thought we could look at the growth of the term influencer marketing in today’s Chart of the Day. There is no denying that the term has experienced incredible growth over the last 2 years and it doesn’t look like it will slow down anytime soon. And with a suggested bid of £5.73 per click and a competition score of 0.76 in Google AdWords, competition from influencer marketing platforms and Agencies looking to connect brands with Social Media stars is increasingly ferocious. As you can see from the chart below, there has been a 1000% rise in people searching for influencer marketing solutions…
New research shows most businesses now have digital strategies, but many are developed only within 'silos' and not implemented company-wide.
We poll our members every year asking about their digital plans. Our 2016 research into managing digital marketing found 47% of businesses are doing digital marketing without any kind of digital marketing strategy. It's interesting to see how this compares to digital strategies more broadly in larger organisations.
Harvey Nash and KPMG surveyed over 3,300 Cheif Information Officers and Technology Leaders about IT management, in the largest survey of its kind in the world. Their findings related to digital strategy make for interesting reading, and corroborate closely with the results of our survey into digital marketing strategies. 42% of businesses surveyed by Harvey Nash and KPMG didn't have a digital strategy in place at all in 2016, similar to the 47% we found without a digital marketing strategy this year.
Interestingly, many of…
What metrics are EMEA email marketers using to measure their campaign performance?
Following on from the launch of the "Wowing with Contextual Email Marketing" - Email Personalisation report yesterday, I found it interesting how marketers measure the success of their email marketing activities. No matter what type of dynamic content, contextual personalization or segmentation used, the metrics used are largely the same.
Most marketers use the basic metrics to measure success
78% of marketers are using Open Rates and Click-Through Rate
58% are using conversion rate
1 in 3 are using "sales value per 1000 emails"
Every other metric is used by less than 29% of email marketers
For more insight into the state of email personalisation in 2016, download your free copy of the report from our partners MovableInk.
The report also includes:
Which campaign types drive the most revenue. Welcome series, birthday promotions…?
Which…
Many businesses are trying to integrate digital and traditional marketing, but only 1 in 20 have achieved full optimisation.
Today's chart of the day comes from our 2016 research into managing digital marketing, which asked 1096 marketers from around the world about their experiences of managing the challenges of digital.
One particularly important finding from the report was the poor state of integration between digital and traditional channels. There can be no doubting that this is important. Customers increasingly spend their time online and assess content digitally, making digital marketing ever more important. Yet some brands are starting to think traditional channels have become under-rated as a result and starting to question if they've over-invested in digital.
Whether one channel is more important than the other is an irrelevant question; clearly both are of immense importance and which one is more important will vary between businesses. The key thing is that they should…
After teasing us for many months, Google has finally confirmed Penguin is running again. But this time, as part of the core algorithm.
Importance: [rating=5] For all webmaster and SEO's.
Recommended Link: Google Webmaster Central Blog || SEO Guide
What is Penguin?
First announced way back in April 2012, the update was introduced as a way of tackling black-hat SEO techniques that were being used to artificially boost the rankings of a page. It particularly looked to target companies and agencies who were buying and obtaining links through link networks.
It impacted approximately 3.1% of search queries in English, and resulted in some high profile sites falling down the search engine results page (SERPs), some even dropping off completely.
What's the difference this time around?
This is the seventh incarnation of Penguin and the first in 2 years and it's quite a big one.
Whereas…
As an industry, how are we finding the process of recruiting new talent?
We recently conducted some research where we asked over 700 professional marketers about their current digital skills, how they wanted to develop and what trends they saw in the industry. That research resulted in our Digital Skills report 2016 which you can find here.
When we asked "How easy is it to recruit people with the right amount of digital skills based on the experience of your organisation?" we got quite an array of answers.
On initial inspection, it clear to see that, the digital marketing industry finds recruitment more troubling than easy. Whether this is as a result of unreasonable expectations, or a flaw in the system we are using, it's something to be conscious of when looking for your next hire.
Looking at the…
Marketers know the strategies that are most effective but have trouble implementing them.
For me the most interesting finding from our recent research into digital skills wasn't that only 14% of marketers think their any good at mobile marketing, or that there is evidence of a major skills gap with employers reporting difficulties hiring for a number of digital marketing roles. From my perspective the single most interesting finding was the huge disconnect between what marketers think are the most effective strategies for improving digital marketing effectiveness across their organisation, and what the organisations are actually doing.
The chart below shows what over 700 marketing professionals think are the most effective methods for improving digital marketing effectiveness across their company. We see that top is a planned approach which uses analytics and continuous optimisation, and bottom reactive unplanned approach. Only 14% thought the unplanned approach was effective.
…
Top digital marketing talent will be even more highly sought after in 2020
The World Economic forum has just published a new report into the future of jobs, looking at what the job market will be like in 2025. Spoiler alert: It's going to change massively. So, do you want the good news, or the bad news?
Bad news- over the next few years 5 million jobs will be lost to automation.
But the good news is pretty exciting for marketing professionals. The skills for which demand will most increase are skills which digital marketers have been working on for years, and marketing jobs are set to increase considerably.
Marketing specialist jobs are set to grow by around a fifth between now and 2024, as is demand for software developers, market researchers and computer systems analysts.
Sales related jobs are also in the top 5 most rapidly growing areas of employment. The report specifically mentions…
Over 40% of all ecommerce orders are driven via search (Organic+Paid)
While the US economy continued to grow at a snail pace of 1% in Q2 of 2016, one sector that is bucking the trend is ecommerce. Research from Custora shows us that online revenue from the ecommerce industry was up 8.9% compared to the previous year.
Breaking this growth down by marketing channel is where things get interesting.
It should come as no great surprise that search dominates the marketing mix. But what is surprising is the decline in revenue driven by Organic Search coupled with the 2.3% increased share for Paid Search. Why could this be? Are ecommerce brands experiencing a negative effect from any recent Google algorithm changes or just combining their search strategy by using SEO for reach and PPC to drive the conversion? I'd love to hear your theories in the comments below.
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Almost half worry about ad blockers, but even more find multidevice measurement an issue
Programmatic advertising is growing fast, but it still has major faults. It now accounts for over 2/3rds of US digital media buys, but the reality is bots are racking up fraudulent ad views. They account for between 3 and 37% of all fraudulent ad views (the stats in this area are so murky it's impossible to know where between those two extremes the true figure lies), and reportedly are costing marketing over seven billion dollars this year.
Fraud is thus a big concern for those buying programmatic slots, as is ad blocking, which has increased markedly now that mobile ad blockers are becoming more prevalent. Interestingly though, they are not the problem which most concerns senior ad buyers.
Multidevice measurement apparently presents the biggest challenge, which makes sense given the impossible task of accurately measuring ROI without being able…
