Chart of the Day: A case study shows how integrating these channels increases purchase
This chart of the day is a little different from the typical insights we have about consumer and business use of digital media and tech. It fits with our current integrated marketing theme, showing how two channels can be more powerful than one. We know that is the theory of integrated communications, but you only get to see the reality when a 'hold-out' test is run for a campaign with a control group who saw one media type only. These are rarely published, so this isn't new, but the principle still applies.
Here's the test design, you can see that some of the audience of the retailer who ran the test just got to receive an email (the control group), others were served Facebook ads, but the interesting group are the combined 16% who opened emails and…
Don't let your digital marketing campaigns fall foul of these mistakes
The great thing about making a mess of a digital marketing campaign is that, with the benefit of hindsight, it becomes clear which actions were a mistake and which contributed to a winning campaign.
In this article we share some examples of 'epic fails' that we have seen, and yes, if truth were told, we might have just had an up close and personal experience of some of them.
1. Leaving it to the boss to decide your Digital Marketing Strategy, i.e. – Ego Marketing
The boss is not always right! Come on, repeat after me “the boss is not always right!
Their input is necessary and important, however, they aren’t the ones who are being held responsible for your Digital Marketing Strategies. You are the one that is supposed to know better in this regard, but sometimes the Boss just can’t help it ……
It seems you either have what it takes... or not
When speaking to businesses about their marketing, integration is a common challenge, whether that's integration of comms, technology or teams within a business.
The latest Econsultancy / Adobe Digital Intelligence briefing sheds some light on how many businesses have achieved integration. It's encouraging to see that nearly half of businesses can confidently state:
Digital Marketing permeates most of our marketing activities
Kudos to the businesses that say that digital permeates all our marketing activities or that they are 'digital first'.
It's less encouraging to see that this figure hasn't changed much over the last 3 years. What's more, integration is severely lacking in nearly one-fifth of companies say that digital marketing is 'very much separate'.
Source: Digital Intelligence 2017 briefing
Sample: 14,163 respondents globally (64% client-side)
Recommended Smart Insights resource: Managing a Digital Marketing Centre of Excellence -…
How to select the very best agency for your business.
So you want to hire a marketing agency. But how do you find the one that will deliver what it promises? What are the things you should ask and, most importantly, what are the answers you want to hear?
Here are some of the answers to these questions and insider tips on hiring agencies (and not regretting it afterward) from the perspective of a marketer.
Before You Begin
First things first. Before you start asking questions, answer a few yourself. You need to be able to get at least a general idea on the budget and your marketing goals.
What do you expect to achieve? How much are you willing to pay for…
Get more from TV ads by optimising them for greater engagement
Online video advertising can be an expensive and time consuming investment, but what factors will increase engagement to avoid viewers from skipping the content or just plain ignoring it?
A study carried out by Hub Entertainment Research investigated what it takes to maintain engagement with online TV content, they surveyed 1206 participants who have broadband at home and watch five or more hours of online TV content every week.
The research used MaxDiff analysis, therefore the greater the number the larger the impact on engagement.
The research found that having a greater control of the ads, the ads being more relevant and targeted as well as being able to control the ad load could lead to increased engagement.
Earning points and getting promotional rewards for watching the ads led to increased engagement.
Ads should be more…
How Trade Shows can thrive when combined with Digital Marketing
Trade shows were once the cornerstone of one’s calendar. Before the days of Google Hangouts, Skype and in fact e-mail, trade shows were a hub for industry professionals to network and for businesses to launch initiatives which they hoped would keep consumers and competitors talking for months to come. As Lima Curtis discussed in her article, what made trade shows so special is quickly being surpassed and made irrelevant in the digital age. Despite this trend, trade shows for pretty much every industry imaginable continue year on year and hundreds of thousands of people annually clear a space on their calendar to attend.
So when products and services can be launched in an instant online, fellow professionals can be contacted with the click of a button and all of…
New report shows most effective attribution methods according marketers
What should be the top 3 priorities for people working in analytics for marketing?
Attribution, Attribution, Attribution. Without attribution, what's the point of measuring anything? You might be able to say traffic is up, or traffic is down, but you won't have the slightest idea why, or what to do to change it.
But attribution isn't easy, it takes a lot of knowledge and some clever tech to get it right. For those looking at improving their existing attribution methods, it is helpful to know what top marketers find the most effective way of achieving accurate attribution.
A new report from AdRoll can go some way to providing the answers. By asking a mix of client-side marketing professionals and agency marketers (75% in-company, 25 % agency) in the UK, France, and Germany, they discovered what types of attribution marketers found the most effective.
Algorithmic came top of…
A true omnichannel strategy makes the most of offline not just online
Consider the main ingredients to a sale when a customer is in your place of business. You have product placements that suggest what a customer should buy, education on the products and services you are selling, the ability to experience your brand firsthand, and most important, people available to educate buyers and make a sale. All these make up the customer experience, and digital is just another component.
Clearly, bricks-and-mortar businesses that aren’t yet capitalizing on their digital channels were successful before the internet took over their industries. There are reasons for that success, and those can give you an edge over your internet-born competitors.
Digitizing Your Offline Strategy
A successful online strategy shouldn’t be a matter of abandoning old tactics and replacing them with a trend. It should…
The average number of connected devices per consumer is 3.64
When we think of communicating with consumers through digital devices we know that mobile devices have become far more important in recent years with many businesses seeing more than 50% of consumers website sessions on mobile devices. This growth has led to the 'mobile-first' philosophy, yet we should remember that consumer usage is more complex than this. Many consumers and households are multi-platform, using a combination of smartphone, desktop and tablet devices.
This ownership is shown by this 2016 data which shows and average of nearly 4 devices per person. So typically that will be desktop, phone, tablet plus other devices such as connected TVs or consoles. Another survey by Pew Internet showed that 36% of Americans own a desktop, tablet and smartphone.
So a clear implication of the…
Preventing churn is key to improving revenue
For subscription-based businesses like SaaS companies, churn rate is a crucial metric that determines overall performance. Simply put, churn rate is the rate at which customers cut ties with your service during a given period. This percentage gives you a clear idea about your customer retention, which is an important factor defining a company’s success. Looking at the below chart you'll see that the lower the churn rate, the better your business is performing.
Importance of Churn Rate in SAAS
Churn rate is easily one of the most essential metrics when measuring the performance of SaaS businesses. Totango reports that the fastest-growing companies will reduce churn rate less than 5%. For SaaS companies, a lot of time and money is spent on acquiring customers. Since this investment pays off over time, the…
