How are businesses investing in digital media
Which digital media give the best 'bang for your buck' is a question that we constantly ask as marketers. Which online marketing techniques give us the best cost-per-acquisition and drive the best volume as suggested by our Content Distribution Matrix which can also be used for a wider digital media effectiveness review and to prompt testing of new online media options.
How are businesses investing this year in digital media?
Our Managing Digital Marketing Research in association with TFM&A also sheds light on this by showing changes in how businesses will be allocating their digital media spend. The research has shown the ongoing importance of the core digital marketing channels with similar levels of effectiveness reported for 2014:
Email marketing was rated as highly or very effective by 51% of respondents followed by SEO (45%) and Adwords (34%). Organic use of social media wasn’t far behind with 33%, but…
How to make your contest promotion more effective
There are a number of factors that will impact conversion rate for a contest campaign. In this article, I will talk about conversion rates for contests specifically. Keep in mind however, the general principles outlined can be related to coupons, samples, loyalty, email, content and other types of digital promotions.
Note: Specific examples provided below have been sourced from Qoints’ repository of digital engagement and performance data.
Conversion Rate Optimization 101
No matter how many consumers you reach online with the message to enter your contest, some will drop off the radar during their engagement with the promotion before fully completing the entry process, or converting. When thinking ahead to the end of your promotion and how many full conversions you’d like to have when it’s all said and done, you can build a stronger case for choosing certain tactics over others.
The first consideration…
Retail examples showing how to bring the on and offline worlds together through social and mobile channels.
I have been following the retail industry as businesses plunge or dip their toes into the omnichannel waters. Some are certainly doing some revolutionary, original campaigns using technology which I'll look at here - do share others you like!
This blog posts sums up my favourite case studies from retailers with some thoughts on how this will impact the modern marketing department’s strategies, as technology drives change.
How are retailers tackling the on and offline world?
Consumers are using multiple devices, screens, and channels to make purchases, but you know this already. Retailers still get a huge chunk of sales in their bricks and mortar outlets, for example clothing and footwear brands in the UK 44% of purchases are done in store*.
In store doesn’t provide the same level of data as their website or digital marketing activities. They will only…
Ideas on getting more creative in our marketing
What makes the difference between a good company, and a great one? Creativity. Fostering a culture of creativity in your business and your life will allow greater innovation, more effective problem solving, and a genuine competitive edge. When technology has made certain skills a commodity, it’s the creative, individual human elements that distinguish a successful business.
How to drive your creative marketing?
If you’re looking to inject some creativity into your life and your business environment, then take note.
1. Make your time work for you
William Blake, visionary poet and inspiration for many a creative type, put it simply: 'Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.'
Figure out how your brain and body’s natural rhythms work, and as best you can, listen to them and work with them rather than fight against them. Plan your day around your own…
Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly
Yes, even now Christmas is being hijacked by people like me - hence the headline. And it’s this marketing exercise of Christmas that especially fascinates me.
The marketing started in 300AD when in the Rome of the Emperor Constantine (recently converted to Christianity) the celebration of Christ’s birth was made to coincide with Saturnalia. The feel- good of a great blow-out got the Christian bandwagon rolling along nicely.
This coincidence of celebrating Christ’s birth and roll-out-the barrel party time continued happily until typically the mean old sod, Mr Austerity Cromwell banned Christmas. Back to normal and a lot more when Charles 11 returned to England.
Enter the four great apostles of Christmas early in the 19th century, first Washington Irving…
An introduction to Attribution Modelling
In a bid to connect web users with great content (and generally make the world a better place) Google is constantly tweaking its algorithm and filling SEO managers with dread.
Updates like Penguin and Panda have altered the fabric of search entirely. The things that used to take your website to Page 1 simply don’t work anymore. But don’t believe the harbingers of doom just yet: SEO isn’t dead… it’s different.
There are plenty of ways to understand your SEO effectiveness and so boost your rankings and improve the visibility of your site. An important part of the process is attribution modelling,
What is Attribution Modelling?
Attribution modelling is a system which can help you get the most from your marketing mix.
Modern web users are smart and they don’t always purchase the first thing they see online. Often, they don’t buy something…
Plus three ingredients that you can combine to create a powerful name and strap line
The name you select for a brand, product or service will clearly have a major impact on how prospects and customers perceive your service, but what are the options for choosing the best name? There are lots of ways to name a business, a service, or a product. The addition of a strap line can take the name a little further. From nonsensical words, like Google, to highly descriptive names, like Compare the Market – there are just so many ways to think about naming! Whilst it's true that naming is a bit of an art and today we are often constrained by domain name availability, there are certainly a few issues to consider to guide you to choose a name that can work much harder for you.
1. Nonsense names – e.g. Google
The benefit of a name like this is that once you’ve lodged…
Why is attribution modelling important?
Ever since its birth in the mid 1990s, online advertising has been lauded as the most accountable advertising medium ever, but it has taken a while to live up to the promise... The early days of measuring online display campaign effectiveness based on click-through rates alone seem excruciatingly painful to recall for example!
Fast forward to 2014 and the latest online media spend figures show that digital media spend has increased dramatically, with predictions that Digital media will account for 75% of all marketing spend in 5 years. With this kind of money comes a responsibility to ensure media spend isn’t being wasted, or at the very least to find ways of explaining how just much value is being derived from it.
More advanced digital marketeers have started looking towards attribution modelling to help better understand what their budget is doing for them and how it can be made to…
It looks cool, but how should you use insights from attribution to improve media spend?
With the growing maturity in analytics tools and the geniuses at Google and other analytics services working to improve them, it is great to see attribution modelling data and insights now widely available. But availability of these tools doesn't equal use, indeed the Smart Insights Customer Experience Management report shows that while we're pretty good at reviewing engagement with websites, email and social media through hurdle rates, the use of attribution is languishing way down at the bottom of methods of assessing engagement.
[Editor's note: To help shed some light on the what-why-how of attribution modelling and as part of our mission to make analytics more actionable, we asked Hugh Gage to write a…
A review of alternative call tracking techniques and systems linking to a contact centre
In the online world, it should be much easier for marketers to understand customer behaviour. Although online advertising is still evolving, it’s cheaper than offline marketing; ecommerce allows for instant conversions; and online it is possible to track real time results via impressions and clicks.
However, although the internet may be great for building smart customer profiles, businesses should not neglect the importance of human contact in the customer journey. A recent study found that 64% of people get frustrated when they can only interact with a company online.
The phone, the unsexy cousin of the click, is still the strongest lead source for the majority of businesses. Therefore one of the biggest challenges for online marketers is in connecting…
