Looking to improve your content marketing outcomes? Capture share of mind with a data-driven B2B content marketing strategy that doesn’t cost the earth
The B2B purchase cycle is changing significantly - and so are decisionmakers, who are under more scrutiny than ever to ensure that the solutions they pick deliver ROI. This means they need to get up to speed fast on new technologies, new approaches, new solutions and more. It’s a tall order, which has led the average sales cycle for a B2B solution to increase by 22% in recent years, according to Kapost.
As a result, content is now playing a vital role. B2B decisionmakers are spending more than 57% of the purchase cycle engaging with content before they ever reach out to sales representatives. According to Forrester, on average a person consumes 11.4 pieces of content before making a purchase decision.
That’s…
Understanding differences in culture can help you build more effective content to reach beyond borders
You only need to travel abroad or spend time with people who don’t come from the same place as you to see the impact of culture. The way a person acts, interprets or responds to different situations will be, to a great extent, influenced by their own cultural context.
There are many examples of brands trying to take culture into account and unfortunately, the results are not always positive. Whilst some receive industry appreciation and sales uplifts, some are left writing official apologies.
[si_guide_block id="149616" title="Download our Premium Member Resource – How to market effectively to different cultures" description="Once you've learned how culture can impact your content, download our guide to create engaging marketing material that will resonate all over the world."/]
Toyota went to great lengths to integrate cultural differences and motivations into their communications, with their …
Making people click through your ad is just a small part of the whole marketing process, you also need a great landing page to get them to convert
Paid campaigns are considered to be the best choice if you want to drive quick results, as they really do get those results. However, paid ads aren't all about simply bidding on the right keywords. There are some other things you need to.
Making people click through your ad is just a small part of the whole marketing process. The next thing they face is your landing page – a web page you should create for the purposes of your advertising campaign. The effectiveness of this page will influence whether or not you achieve your business goal.
Quality landing page creation doesn’t require titanic efforts but it does need some research. The approaches you have to use will depend on your target audience and the…
... and what they might mean for 2020
Seasoned visitors to the Smart Insights blog will no doubt agree that there’s an abundance of, well, smart insights to take in on a daily basis. With digital and marketing constantly evolving, marketers have to work hard to keep up with the rapid pace of change and Smart Insights plays this role perfectly, providing up-to-date guidance, tips and advice on a huge range of topics.
There’s a handy function on the Smart Insights blog that lets visitors sort posts by both recency and popularity. But rather than talk about what others have found most interesting in 2019, I thought I’d outline some of the insights that have educated and inspired me this year and how they’re likely to influence my thinking further in 2020.
[si_blog_banner_cta]
Stories and stats that stood out in 2019
Looking back over the last twelve months, I was surprised by the breadth of…
The best digital marketing research across marketing channels - including SEO, PPC, CRO, social, mobile, martech, email, e-commerce, and UX - to help inform your 2019 marketing strategy
Because the state of digital marketing is always evolving, it is important to keep up-to-date with the latest research in your industry or marketing channel in order to stay ahead of your competition. However, it can be difficult to find the digital marketing research you need to help inform your digital strategy.
We first curated these stats in 2017, but during 2018 and 2019, we've been committed to updating this article using the best digital marketing research data sources, which the team at Smart Insights have found helpful and informative throughout the year. Hopefully, this will help you too!
[si_blog_banner_cta]
SEO statistics 2019
Total site visits produced by organic search…
Looking at what big B2C brands get right can help inform your strategy and show you what the next marketing trends are likely to be.
According to a recent survey, only 32% of B2C marketers thought that they were proficient in what they do. B2C marketing requires thoughtful strategizing and planning. It can also benefit from looking at what has worked for others and what hasn't.
In this article, we’ll take a look at some B2C giants and the lessons we can learn from them to improve B2C marketing strategies.
[si_guide_block id="57383" title="Download our Individual Member Resource – Website and e-commerce personalization guide" description="This guide is aimed at marketing managers involved with making the business case for personalization, looking to plan a personalization implementation or extend their use of personalization."/]
1. Amazon.com - the power of memberships
There are undoubtedly dozens of lessons that can be learned…
Reaching readers on multiple channels while still optimizing for online advertising is difficult
No matter what size you are, all publishers face significant challenges today. Reaching readers on multiple channels while still optimizing for online advertising is difficult. As your business scales up, these challenges get increasingly more complicated - and technical.
The UK publisher DailyFeed.co.uk recently faced this challenge as it attempted to scale its audience, engage readers and better manage its online advertising. Companies looking to grow can learn from the specific tactics DailyFeed used to scale its content offering to over 500 million page views in the past six months. In addition, it achieved scale in terms of readership, site engagement and usability for the workforce.
Most of the hurdles DailyFeed faced are common among all growing publishers. You also most likely face challenges with:
Need for a scalable content management system to allow the site…
Nearly 43% of all e-commerce traffic is organic, while just 26% of traffic comes from ads
"We don't need SEO. We use Adwords. It works better for us."
I’ve heard this phrase countless times over in the e-commerce space, but it couldn’t be further from the truth.
Nearly 43% of all e-commerce traffic is organic, while just 26% of traffic comes from ads. If you are focusing on PPC over SEO, you are missing out on a massive chunk of traffic.
Plus, as sites at the top of Google get 36.4% of search traffic, your e-commerce SEO strategy needs to be top notch.
[si_guide_block id="5750" title="Download our Individual Member Resource – Successful SEO guide" description="Our comprehensive guide to Search Engine Optimisation best practices isn't just for SEOs, the clear explanations mean that it can be used by marketers to ask the right questions to…
Content marketing includes more than articles. Videos can help increase engagement and leads, which is why you need to make the most of them
It used to be that content marketing meant just that - just content, with perhaps static images. Then along came infographics and animated gifs, which enlivened our visual experiences.
Well, those ‘static’ days of the Internet are now behind us, thanks to the growing popularity of videos in general, and video marketing in particular. According to a recent Cisco study, by 2021 82% of consumer internet traffic will be video. That’s a lot of bandwidth-sucking streaming.
Here are more compelling statistics from Demand Metric’s report 'The State of Video Marketing 2018,' courtesy of a recent post by Smart Insights' managing editor, Joanna Carter:
Some 67% of respondents use video on YouTube, while others use them on landing pages (57%), recorded webinars (55%) and…
Successful content strategies that stand the test of time have been built from the outside of an organization looking in. In other words, the prime motivation was to help and assist the needs of their audience
In 1889, Andre and Edouard Michelin founded a tyre company, Michelin, which has now become a globally recognized brand. It accelerated the automobile industry in a time when there were fewer than 3,000 cards where it was established, in France.
For the company to grow, it had to win the hearts and minds of this very small target market of motorists and find similar audiences keen to aspire to own their own automobile. It also had to offer some creativity and inspiration as to what owning an automobile would allow you to do.
One such creative idea was to inspire the idea of taking road trips and look at how these trips could be…
