Are you practicing always-on marketing, and if not, why not?

In the pre-digital era, marketing activities were planned in campaign ‘bursts’ around new product launches and promotions. My belief is that to be effective, digital marketing needs a change in mindset so businesses invest sufficient time and budget into continuously  optimizing ‘always-on’ activities which can be used in an integrated way to maximise visibility and conversion through the customer lifecycle.

What is always-on marketing?

Always-on marketing: A working definition

Always-on marketing means a planned approach to scheduling and optimizing continuous marketing activities which support customer acquisition and retention throughout the customer lifecycle. Consider the main types of digital marketing. Think about these key digital media I define in my Digital Marketing: Strategy and Implementation book. If you operate in a market where your potential customers are continuously searching for new products and services that you offer then you can't be competitive unless you continuously…

Conversions can be tricky things to keep on top of, and all businesses are different, so how will you know where to set the bar?

Failing to prepare means you're preparing to fail. Even if things are going well, it’s still important to carry some form of preparation, otherwise, how will you know when you’ve hit your targets? When it comes to the wide world of driving conversions, most websites will agree that the more they leverage, the better. While this is, of course, completely true, marketing strategies are complex and often expensive entities that require constant monitoring and plenty of funding. Due to this, it’s important to set goals and targets as you go, so you’re fully aware of when you’ve achieved everything you’ve set out to do and can successfully close your campaign. [si_monthly_campaign_blog_cta_banner id="150538"] Conversions can be tricky things to keep on top of, and all businesses…

Learn how we updated and improved our key membership pages to increase conversion and improve the quality of leads with simple customer-centric copy changes

To stay ahead of the competition, you need to keep monitoring and reviewing your key sales pages - are they converting, how much is it costing per user to convert and how can you improve conversions? At Smart Insights, we'll hold our hands up and admit our key Business Membership sales pages were due an update and so we started work on these at the beginning of the year. Here's how it went...

The problem

We had four landing pages that were designed to describe the value proposition of Business Membership and direct users to relevant pages to find out more: The overall generic filter page that is used to capture leads who would like to learn more about the different types of Business Membership, without delving too deep into…

While WordPress makes it easy to create a blog or website for everyone for free, it’s not always that easy and often webmasters end up making several mistakes

WordPress is one of the most trusted platforms for creating a website. Many people prefer this CMS when it comes to creating different types of websites, whether it's a blog, Q&A website, portfolio website, or an e-commerce website. WordPress offers good features for building and customizing websites, making it an easy-to-use option. While WordPress makes it easy to create a blog or website for everyone for free, it’s not always that easy and often webmasters end up making several mistakes. Due to these WordPress website mistakes, you can fail to get the desired results with your site. Even savvy WordPress users, who have been using it for years can make mistakes. [si_guide_block id="117353" title=“Access our Quick Win – How to create a successful blogging strategy…

Discover how AWA digital defied "best practice" to drive up conversion rates for a global car rental company

Discover Cars, a fast-growing car rental comparison and booking site, came to conversion rate optimization (CRO) agency AWA digital for help with increasing the profitability of their website. To Discover Cars, "profitability" meant an increase to both conversion rates and average revenue per session (RPS). Car rental sales are always important, but most of the RPS boost came from their highly profitable upsells, so maximizing uptake of these was key to getting the best ROI. Using their proven methodology, AWA started the deep research that defines its process before creating a roadmap of hypotheses and split tests. [si_guide_block id="27373" title="Website conversion optimization planner" description="Stop losing valuable leads and sales. Use our website conversion optimization planner to map out your next project and ensure you're getting the most of our your site…

CRO is an underrepresented specialty in today’s marketing industry and because of a general lack of understanding about the field of work, it often loses out

I attend and speak at some of the best digital marketing conferences all over the world and I can count on one hand, the number of sessions I’ve seen that offered quality content about Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). This marketing specialization always seems to fly under the radar in marketing circles. [si_guide_block id="27373" title="Download our Premium Resource – Website conversion optimization planner" description="Plan structured tests and experiments to improve results from your site."/] Yes, there are a number of great websites and resources dedicated to CRO. There are also some excellent CRO-specific conferences out there and I’ve attended most of them - but the real problem is this: The only people talking about conversion rate optimization are CRO experts at CRO conferences and CRO bloggers on CRO-specific websites.…

Social communities are the new conversion tools on the market

Social media can be an extremely powerful tool that can affect your conversion rate significantly. Done right, you’ll be hitting your goal conversion rate in no time. However, there are tricks of every trade, social media networks like Facebook and Twitter are not the most effective conversion tools anymore. So how about building your own personal social community? Driving traffic is not enough, you need the right tools to charm those visitors and turn them into customers. [si_quick_block id="49146" title="Digital media options cheatsheet" description="Use our cheatsheet to quickly see how social media platforms have changed over time and a detailed list of their capabilities."] Building your own social community will strengthen the relationship with your existing customers and affect the conversion rate significantly. Ultimately you will have more ways to engage with your customers and relevancy of your conversions.  Check out a few ways the…

10 simple test ideas for your B2B website, to increase conversions and improve the user experience, through user testing

User testing is the process of testing elements of a website to improve conversion, sales and revenues, as well as overall improving the user experience which brings for mentioned benefits. Being familiar with user testing is only half the battle, what do you test to make changes to improve the user experience for your customers?

Introduction to user testing

[si_quick_block id="111363" title="How to do Website User Testing to increase conversions" description="Explore reasons to do user testing, how to create a hypothesis for a test, and how to pitch user testing to your manager. We will also cover practical steps on how to write test scripts, how to carry out user testing, how to analyse results and how to interpret those results to make change happen."/]

In our new Quick Win - 10 things you…

Apply the customer-centric methodology that has doubled the sales of many websites

When we first launched Smart Insights nearly ten years ago, we chose a brand name that hinted at the power of using a data-driven approach for businesses to get more from their online marketing. For even longer, I personally have had a passion for helping businesses learn about the latest digital analytics techniques and best practices through my training, consulting and writing. Since we launched, in our member resources, I and our expert contributors have worked hard to share best practices with our members on using digital analytics with the aim of increasing their conversion rates. At the same time, we have worked hard to improve our member onboarding experiences and increase our own conversion rates to our free and premium memberships    So I’m delighted to review Making Websites Win, a…

Converting leads into paying customers is the undying challenge for marketing teams and e-commerce companies year after year

Every business wants to grow their revenue and reach, yet many still struggle to understand what the numbers actually mean and how to use them to boost sales. Thanks to advances in big data and analytical technology, marketers now have access to more consumer data than ever before. However, this only serves to overwhelm over 50% of marketers, in turn making their marketing strategies ineffective. [si_guide_block id="5676" title="Download FREE Resource – Digital marketing plan template" description="Our popular marketing planning template built on the Smart Insights RACE planning system."/] Since there is access to so much information within a business’s sales and customer data, marketing teams tend to feel overwhelmed and unsure of the best ways to apply it. While nearly every dataset has its…