Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) came a long way in 2019 and they are going from strength to strength. So what's in store for them in 2020?
2019 was a pivotal year for the Customer Data Platform industry. It experienced a number of important events, including:
The continuation of rapid growth that saw revenue near €1 billion, new funding exceed €400 million, and the number of vendors increase by 40%.
The industry saw its first big wave of consolidation, including:
Acquisitions of CDP vendors by enterprise technology firms (Mastercard bought SessionM, Dun & Bradstreet bought Lattice Engines, Informatica bought Allsight, Acquia bought AgilOne).
Acquisitions by CDP vendors of other firms (Amperity bought Custora, Leadspace bought Reachforce, Netcore bought Boxx.ai, Manthan bought RichRelevance).
Asset sales by CDP vendors who couldn’t survive independently (Radius, Stride, Mintigo, IgnitionOne).
Industry analysts including Gartner and…
Content marketing that makes use of SEO should be a core marketing strategy for any e-commerce company
Are you looking for a way to systematize your e-commerce content marketing? Would you like to be able to more easily delegate the keyword research and content creation tasks to one of your subordinates? Would you like to turn all of this into a standard operating procedure that can be used over and over again?
In this post, I'm going to walk you through an overview of a very specific process that can be used by e-commerce companies for their SEO and content marketing. At the end of the post, I'll point you to a number of pre-made standard operating procedures that you can easily download for customization and use within your e-commerce business so that you can more easily convert your target audience into customers.
Content marketing strategy
Content marketing that makes use of SEO should…
Use a selection of these tools to boost the quality of the content you write
Writing relevant and user-friendly content is harder than it seems. You need to ensure that your text reads clearly and with no mistakes in order to maximize the impact of your message. It’s a real balancing act, which is why a range of content writing tools have been developed to ease your writing journey. Here are 29 of the best online content writing tools to help with all manner of different writing challenges, such as grammar, spelling, writing for SEO and copy editing.
1. Hemingway App
Hemingway App is a very practical application which assesses the readability of your writing by analyzing things like grammar, vocabulary, punctuation and sentence structure. The clever software points out any weaknesses in the text and offers appropriate corrections to enhance it.
2. Readability Test Tool
This readability tool allows you to test a variety…
Without the right tools to help, you can’t create amazing content and you won’t be able to truly understand your audience and their preferences and interests.
Digital marketing – and, consequently, content marketing – and digital tools have a very close relationship. Without the right tools to help, you can’t create amazing content, consistently; you won’t be able to truly understand your audience and their preferences and interests; you won’t be able to produce more results in less time – digital marketing tools are really that essential.
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In this blog post, I’m going to talk about the must-have content marketing tools that you need to get right now.
What kinds…
A call to action (CTA) is just a fancy marketing term for a button that entices the user to take a desirable action, taking them further down the conversion funnel
Have you ever signed up for an online subscription service (Netflix, Spotify, you name it) or downloaded a free resource from somewhere?
Well, your "action" was the result of an effective call to action. These seemingly straightforward buttons are an integral part of a marketer’s toolkit. They can make or break your conversion game, and be the difference between converting a lead and losing a potential client.
A well-crafted call to action is a boon for both parties.
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A review of 2 social sharing count tools showing which competitor content types are most popular
Part of the process of defining a content marketing strategy for your business is to evaluate the performance of your competitors’ content marketing and SEO efforts. The insight you can glean from what both direct and indirect competitors are doing will allow you to build a picture of the type of content activity, strategies and tactics that are working for others in your industry and what, as a result, might best work for you. In short, a competitor analysis can tell you:
The content types and ideas getting most traction measured by number of shares or backlinks
Content gaps in your plans compared to competitors, evaluated using the Smart Insights content marketing matrix for examples
Competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, and the opportunities and threats from the wider market - a …
A content audit can reveal growth opportunities, clean up low-quality content and help you create better-performing articles
As an agency, you already know that great content is a powerful marketing tool.
But are you really putting all your content to good use?
If you’ve been around for a while, you likely have older articles and blog posts that are neither bringing you traffic nor amplifying your brand.
At the same time, you also probably have some "superstar" content that makes up a chunk of your traffic profile.
And in-between, you have a handful of middling content pieces that never quite reached their full potential.
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Removing, redirecting or improving this content can set you up to win new business in…
Chart of the Day: How good is your use of campaign tracking codes?
As this post on campaign tracking in Google Analytics shows, Google's UTM tracking codes provide an excellent way to see which of your marketing channels and content is influencing site visits, leads and sales. This week we have launched a simple tracking code generator for Google Analytics marketing source codes to make it quicker for members to generate these.
Yet, when consulting or training I find that many businesses don't fully track their inbound marketing activities, especially their content marketing where content is shared by email or social. This chart, from joint research by Smart Insights and HubSpot of content marketers in Europe also suggests room for improvement in tracking of content marketing.
You can see that fewer than half of businesses are able to track ROI or track links to content from other…
6 Great Content Curation Tools
They say that content is King. If that’s the case then curation has to be, at the very least, a Baron or something. Actually, scratch that. Content curation, when it’s done right, can be king too.
One need only think of products and features like Reddit, Facebook Trending or Twitter Moments to see how important content curation is to the general public. Cutting through the noise of clickbait and subpar content marketing is extremely difficult, and that’s why effective content curation can be so valuable.
Short On Time? Curate!
If you have the time, creating your own content is a powerful way to drive traffic to your site. One need only look at the stats for proof of that:
Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates 3x as many leads
Year on year growth of site traffic is almost 8x higher for content marketing…
New tools for outreach, video marketing, market segmentation and more
In the ever-evolving digital world, keeping up with the tricks of the trade is crucial. Marketing is no longer a one-way communication from brands, but a dialogue between brands, customers, influencers and various other stakeholders. To ensure that your brand is a part of this conversation, you need to stay on top of the game with your digital media strategy.
Throughout this year, brands will see a confluence between traditional and digital media channels as there will be parity in the kind of messaging planned for both kinds of outlets. More brands will look for ways to share data from paid media with real-time content across channels in a similar manner.
Further, there will be a greater need to generate more relevant and shareable content for all digital platforms, so that it consistently drives traffic to your landing pages and websites.
Here are the…
