11 Free Tools You Should Use for Effective Online Market Research

Now with digital marketing, effective market research is no longer limited to big companies with big budgets. Small and medium-sized companies can also perform extensive market research using free or affordable digital tools.

To help small businesses conduct market research using effective digital tools, here are 11 tools you should use:

1. LinkedIn: Use this professional social networking website to learn about the corporate backgrounds of prospects and find shared connections who might help make an introduction. Search LinkedIn profiles of competing brands and their staff to find connections to important clients and suppliers. You can also find employees who are about to leave their companies – they’re generally very active in updating their profiles or seeking recommendations.


2. Job Posting Sites: See which kind of job postings a company has. You can often figure out their business strategy or plans based on the positions they hire and which locations are hiring.


3. Wayback Machine: This tool shows historical snapshots of websites so you can determine how their brand or marketing strategy has evolved over time.


4. Data.com: Data.com is a crowd-sourced online business directory with information for more than 29 million contacts from over 4 million companies. You can find the contact information for key people you want to connect with by trading with other members.


5. Google Trends: Use Google trends to estimate product demand for a particular market and to assess brand awareness of competitive products or services.


6. Google Alerts: Set up Google Alerts to notify you whenever competitor names or keywords related to your industry come up on social media.


7. SEC Edgar’s Database and SEDAR: This website lets you find financial information and filings for public companies.


8. PRNewswire and PRWeb: Use PRNewswire and PRWeb to go through online press releases for news regarding your customers and competitors. You can even expand the list to do research on their customers and vendors.


9. WhoIS: Use WhoIS to find the contact information of the people behind microsites and content sites. Sometimes you may discover that a review site is actually another form of content marketing performed by a digital agency.


10. Quora: Check what kind of questions a company’s staff have answered or asked – on Q &A site Quora. This is a site where users are required to to register with their real names and user profiles.


11. Slideshare: Find corporate and individual sales presentations that staff members from your competitors have uploaded to share online.

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Author: Ray Wang

Ray Wang is the Marketing Coordinator at View full profile ›

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11 Free Tools You Should Use for Effective Online Market Research

Finding the right platform mix to maximise market reach: 5 things you should know

By David Graham on 16 February, 2016

Experienced digital marketers who have used social media marketing, email marketing and employee advocacy platforms know the pros and cons of each environment. They understand what works well and what doesn’t and how one environment’s shortcoming can be countered by another to maximise the benefits from their digital marketing efforts. In this context, I have provided five reasons how the above-mentioned platforms complement one another.

1. Your target clients’ preferences

You can have the best marketing plan in history and share the best content but you cannot force your target clients to use specific platforms. There are individuals who love Twitter but steer clear of LinkedIn and vice versa. There are those who are not interested in subscribing to your email newsletter, however they are more than happy to receive content from a known person through your employee advocacy platform. Find out where most of your clients and prospects are and engage and interact with them accordingly.

2. Who owns your content?

Imaging this scenario. A company decides to only use LinkedIn. Their thought leaders connect with clients and prospects and publish blog posts from the LinkedIn publishing platform on a regular basis. Overnight, the LinkedIn share price plunges, the company closes its doors, together with your staff member’s networks and your company’s collective thought leadership. It is best to keep all your content on your company website and/or blog.

3. Nurturing prospects

Social media platforms are great to make connections and get followers, share content and convert communities. They are not, however, good at enabling you to share and interact with targetted audiences in a private, personal manner. If you are attempting to nurture a few thousand prospects in a personalised manner, you have to do this individually on social media (direct messages on Twitter and messages on LinkedIn). An opted-in email channel, with categorised subscribers which can be filtered, can manage this easily.

4. Democratising to staff members

There are numerous case studies that bear testament to the fact that a well implemented and managed employee advocacy platform is highly beneficial for business-to-business and business-to-consumer companies. 1000 staff members each with an average of 100 social media connections represents a potential reach of 100 000 people. Daily posts on an employee advocacy platform results in millions of social media shares, likes, comments and impressions and results in increased brand awareness, offline engagement and revenue.

5. Open rates and social media feeds

All marketers know that irrespective of the channel used, only a percentage of your email subscribers, social media connections and staff member’s individual contacts will view your content. There are many factors that affect this. Even though an email reached an inbox, it does not mean it will be read. Global email open rates are around 24%. Social media followers and connections do not monitor their social media feeds on a continual basis either. A mix of your corporate social media posts, personalised email and shares by staff members with their personal networks will ensure maximum exposure of your company’s thought leadership.

Do you have anything to add? Do you have any comments? I welcome your feedback.

David Graham’s passion is business-to-business digital marketing with a specific focus on value networking and inbound marketing. He consults on business-to-business digital marketing strategy and execution, with an emphasis on building sales pipelines and generating new prospects More

Finding the right platform mix to maximise market reach: 5 things you should know

Identifying the Hottest Leads You Should Be Calling Right Away

Email marketing is an extremely powerful tool in converting your leads into loyal traders. It is not only a means of sending out promotions and waiting …

Identifying the Hottest Leads You Should Be Calling Right Away

CTR Vs. CTOR: Which Email Marketing Metric Should You Be Using?

When I say, “I’m an email marketer,” how does that make you feel?

Chances are high that you cringe, as you think of all of the emails currently clogging your inbox. Or maybe you grimace in solidarity, for you, too, are an email marketer with an equally swamped inbox. If it’s the latter, you know just how tricky and competitive the world of email marketing can be.

Just look at what we’re up against: Together, you, me and all of the other email marketers of the world send out 196 million emails every day. And of those 196 million, only about 20 percent actually get opened. Yikes.

With odds like that, how do marketers know if an email campaign is successful? While an email’s open rate is a great metric of success, it doesn’t tell you the whole story. Here are the email marketing metrics should you rely upon to get an honest picture of how well your email marketing campaigns are (or aren’t) doing.

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Email Delivery Rate

The email delivery rate demonstrates how many of the emails you sent actually made it to their recipients’ inboxes without hard bouncing (being sent to an invalid email address – essentially unable to be delivered), soft bouncing (a temporary failure in sending), or to contacts that have previously unsubscribed. If the delivery rate sounds simple, that’s because it is simple. But just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s not important. The email delivery rate is a great way to keep an eye on how healthy your list is.

Email Open Rate

The email open rate is – you guessed it – the number of people that actually decided to open (and hopefully read) your email. The open rate can be measured in two different ways: 1) total number of emails opened divided by total delivered; or 2) total number of emails opened divided by total sent. But what does this number tell you? Well, if you see a lower than expected open rate, you may want to consider revising your subject line the next time around, because it wasn’t compelling enough to prompt action.

Email Click-Through Rate

By now you’re probably thinking, “Duh, the email click-through rate (CTR) measures those who clicked-through on an email – what is this chick thinking?!” Bear with me. I have a point and a purpose, and both, in my opinion, are worth your while.

But first, you’re right. The CTR tells you how many people clicked-through on an email message, and that can be calculated as number of people that click divided by…? Nine times out of 10, it’s divided by the number of emails delivered. However, the source of this number is not always clear, depending on the platform.

Which means we need to take a look at CTOR…

Email CTOR

CTOR stands for the click-to-open rate and compares the number of people that opened the email to the number that actually clicked.

What does that mean? Let’s say you send out two different emails, Email A and Email B. You send each to 100 recipients. Now, because you practice awesome list hygiene, you’ve already removed all of the emails that have hard bounced and unsubscribed from your contact lists, and by some stroke of magic there were no soft bounces, all 200 emails (100 A and 100 B) were delivered. Go you!

How did Email A do? Of the 100, only 10 people opened the email, and only 5 people clicked.

How about Email B? Of the 100, 50 people opened the email, and 10 people clicked.

CTR Vs. CTOR

The difference in CTR and CTOR might seem slight, but it’s important.

• If you’re looking at CTR, Email A has a CTR of 5 percent, but Email B has a CTR of 10 percent. So does that mean that Email B was more successful? Not necessarily.


• If we look at the CTOR of each, we find that Email A’s CTOR is 50 percent (5 clicks divided by 10 opens), and Email B has a CTOR of only 20 percent (10 clicks divided by 50 opens).

Essentially, the CTR takes into account all of the in-box actions. By contrast, the CTOR only includes the actions of those who have opened the email. Thus it isn’t skewed by reactions to timing, subject lines, “from” fields, etc. In short, it only measures the performance of the content of the email.

In a world where content is king, that’s definitely a metric worth looking at.

SO Which Is Better? 

That’s a bit of a trick question, because I’m not saying that the CTOR is better than the CTR, or that one paints a more honest picture than the other. What I am saying is that they analyze, represent and demonstrate two totally different things. Whereas the CTR shows an email’s overall performance (which truly is a culmination of many different factors), the CTOR only examines the success of the content within the email.

When you understand the difference, you can see that both metrics are incredibly useful tools to have tucked away in your email marketing arsenal.

But you shouldn’t forget about the delivery and open rates either. They may be oldies, but they are also goodies and are still around for good reason. Together, all of these metrics tell a story that will help you answer the following questions: Did your email get to the right place? Did your recipients actually open the email? And if so, did they click through?

Focusing on these numbers, you’ll be able to send emails effectively, email marketing friends of mine! And if you send emails effectively, just remember, not only might they be opened, but their links might even be clicked and clicked through.

Author: Kristen Patel

As a Marketing Manager, Kristen works with Quintain’s clients on every step of their inbound marketing journey. She brings to the table experience in social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing and retention marketing. Kristen graduated Cum Laude with a B.S. in International Marketing from Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts…. View full profile ›

CTR Vs. CTOR: Which Email Marketing Metric Should You Be Using?

Online Shopping Facts All Retailers Should Know Revealed in TrueShip's Newest Report

SCOTTSDALE, AZ, Oct 09, 2015 (Marketwired via COMTEX) — TrueShip (http://www.trueship.com) — the leading provider of ecommerce shipping software (ReadyShipper) and automated returns management solutions (ReadyReturns) — has just dropped a new report that reveals a bounty of online shopping facts that all retailers should be aware of.

Think tanks like ComScore are reporting that 78% of the American population over the age of 15 have made an online purchase in the past year alone. Conversely, gender spending differences are surprising relative; a stark change in previous shopping habits that were dominated by females in years prior.

In addition, recent reports have found that comparison shopping is on the rise, as consumers webroom and showroom to find the best deals locally and online. This is, of course, made more omnipresent by the biggest shopping holidays of the year, Cyber Monday and Black Friday. What’s more, the usage of digital coupons is at an all-time high, too, with reports showing that over 70% of mobile shoppers redeem them frequently.

TrueShip’s newest report covers online shopping facts, statistics and trends dating back to 2008, with detailed comparative analysis that includes years 2012 through 2014. It’s topped off with a detailed outlook for 2015 and beyond to help retailers better put into perspective just how big a juggernaut ecommerce has grown to be. Lastly, the report features an illustrated infographic that delivers the top 2015 online shopping statistics.

“By better understanding the ecommerce demographic, including shopper’s habits and trends from year to year, one can best prepare for the forthcoming holiday shopping surge and beyond,” explained Michael Lazar, Director of Online Marketing at TrueShip. “Our newest report delivers a wealth of information, charts, statistics and authority sources to help put retailers in the know.”

Read the guide at: http://www.trueship.com/blog/2015/10/08/these-onli ne-shopping-facts-will-blow-your-mind/#.VhggnitrmUk.

A wide assortment of related guides and white papers can also be found at: http://www.trueship.com/blog.

About TrueShip

#ShipSmarter – TrueShip is the original architect of multi-carrier ecommerce shipping software. ReadyShipper shipping software integrates into the most widely used shopping carts and online marketplaces. It is an easy-to-use order fulfillment solution designed to save e-retailers time and money.

Start a 14-day trial of ReadyShipper shipping software by visiting: http://www.TrueShip.com/products/ReadyShipper.

About ReadyReturns

#ReturnsHappen – ReadyReturns is a customer-facing, plug-and-play, self-service online product returns software solution. It integrates into virtually any website without any programming. ReadyReturns lets customers make returns from a website by filling out a simple form and printing the return shipping label. E-retailers set the rules of the returns, including things like return shipping and restocking fees.

Start a 30-day trial of ReadyReturns by visiting: http://www.TrueShip.com/products/ReadyReturns.

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Press Contact
Michael Lazar
Director of Online Marketing
Tel: (877) 818-7447
Email: support@trueship.com

SOURCE: TrueShip

mailto:support@trueship.com

(C) 2015 Marketwire L.P. All rights reserved.

Online Shopping Facts All Retailers Should Know Revealed in TrueShip"s Newest Report

Should You Change Your Facebook Display Picture?

Prime Minister Modi’s visit to the US coupled with his meeting with CEOs of tech giants like Facebook, Google, SAP and Microsoft have initiated a wave of great hope and aspiration in the burgeoning tech savvy Indian populace. As a follower of current affairs and a conscientious citizen of the country, my initial reaction was similar, this notwithstanding my ideological leanings.

As I logged into Facebook on Monday morning, I found a barrage of updates of people changing their Display Picture (DP) to the Support Digital India theme (similar to what people did when gay rights were legalized in the US).

This mass behavior pattern on social media piqued my interest and I decided to unravel it further. Honest to my intellectual integrity, I wanted to first know what changing of my DP meant and whether it had any repercussions, hidden or otherwise.

This isn’t a sociological discourse on unraveling ulterior motives, but reading about this social media initiative did unsettle me and I’ll tell you why. By innocuously changing our DP as a mark of patriotism, you are giving consent to Facebook’s Internet.org campaign. That’s right, the same initiative against which Nikhil Pahwa and team launched a nationwide signature campaign, AIB made a video which went viral and people from all walks of life objected to on the basis of defeating the purpose of a free undistorted internet.

What amazes me is this paradox of public opinion – while on one hand there is vehement opposition against the internet.org initiative as it challenges the fundamental tenets of net neutrality, on the other hand creating your DP using fb.com/supportdigitalindia is in effect supporting this very demon.

This probably is a master marketing stroke by Facebook. Alternatively, there may be a correction statement that is released publicly when this issue does gain critical mass. For now though, one thing’s certain – tech based marketing campaigns are easily mobilized, especially when flavored with large doses of patriotism, and the debate on internet neutrality is here to stay for a while.

Should You Change Your Facebook Display Picture?

In Bloom: Why you Should Consider Interflora's Affiliate Programme

Interflora are proud to be the UK’s largest and most experienced delivery network with over 1500 talented florists working to deliver ‘wow moments’ every day. 

Name: Interflora Affiliate Programme 

Contact: Peter Potter

Email:  Peter.Potter@interflora.co.uk

What are some developments that Interflora have seen during the past 18 months that puts them ahead of their competitors?

In 2014 Interflora.co.uk launched a new affiliate attribution model, the mechanism for rewarding affiliates for orders generated by their marketing activities.  We took the decision to change the attribution model to ensure the rewards were being received by those affiliates adding the most value to our customer journey and those who align to our strategic objectives.

How did the old attribution model work? 

The previous attribution model which had been in place since the program launched was a ‘Last Click Wins’ model, still the most common attribution model used by merchants.  The LCW model rewarded the full commission for a completed sale to the affiliate who had the final interaction at any stage during the purchase process.  We recognise this could lead to certain affiliates having their cookies overridden by other affiliates who interact later in the journey.  Our analysis found that wasn’t the fairest reward mechanism and did not necessarily reward the affiliates adding the most value. 

How did you decide on the new attribution model?

Our primary objectives were to ensure that we work with affiliates that add the most value to Interflora and provide them with an attribution model that rewards them, more fairly! 

At first we analysed our affiliates performance and identified which affiliates drove the most value and which affiliates were best aligned to the strategy of the business. This was a great starting point.  We then analysed prior performance against a number of different attribution models to ensure we found the one that would achieve the objectives above. 

How does it work? 

The new ‘Last Click to Basket’ attribution model is similar to the previous model, but affiliates are rewarded on completed orders if they had the final interaction before an item was added to the basket.  Our analysis found that affiliates that influence a customer to add an item to the basket provided the most valuable interaction and they should be rewarded if the customer went on to purchase.

How has this affected affiliates? 

It’s a simple model and was introduced to reward affiliates who can drive quality traffic to the Interflora website (for example – content, cash back and closed networks) – these sites have enjoyed the additional commissions they perhaps once missed out on due to cookies being overwritten by interactions after the basket stage.  Obviously affiliates whose first interaction with a customer happens when they bounce from the Interflora site after they have entered the basket have seen a dramatic drop in commission payments.  

Why join the Interflora affiliate program? 

If you can support Interflora by promoting our brand in the appropriate manner, can drive quality traffic and encourage customers to purchase, then you can rest assured that you will be rewarded more fairly for your efforts.  It’s also worth noting that Brand and Direct clicks are ignored if they occur after the Affiliate click and we have an extremely fast approval process.  

To join the Interflora affiliate program, please click here.

In Bloom: Why you Should Consider Interflora"s Affiliate Programme

Methods and Tools Every Publisher Should be Using

In the world of affiliate marketing there are still many areas that require improvements. Affiliate networks offer a wide variety of tools for publishers and also give advice on how to optimise sale commissions. However, that is not enough if you really want to be competitive. In this article you will find some technical advantages that I think every publisher should have in order to generate more leads and sales. Of course, not every company has a team of developers available, but many tools exist online to improve your performance.

Conversion tracking

First up is conversion tracking for landing pages, deals, products and/or advertisers. Observe your traffic sources and ads and see how they perform. You can do this by using existing tools or services like Voluum. Personally, I both use this tools in addition to a self-developed tool.

Also, make sure that you know from which page of your website a conversion or (e-mail) subscription originates, so that you can optimise it when necessary.

Dead links detection

Broken links won’t make you any money. Manually looking and finding dead links takes a lot of work and effort. Also, a system to let users report broken links is not optimal, as broken links on your most remote pages won’t easily be discovered. Best is to can create your own tool that automatically finds broken affiliate links and replace them. There are also some WordPress plugins and other dead link checkers to help you cope with this problem.

Self optimising website based on performance

Self optimising websites or landing pages can explain themselves in many ways. Some websites automatically push their most popular deals or products forward to their homepage, where other websites categorise on search metrics. This saves a lot of time on sorting things out and it also improves financial performance. Work that you would normally do manually, after having to analyse the traffic and clicks on your site, can not only be done automatically but also continuously.

A/B testing based on conversions

A/B testing allows you to split traffic on your website, so that visitors experience different web page content or designs on version A and version B of a page, while you monitor visitor actions to identify the version that yields the highest conversion rate.

Most (performance) marketers are optimising by the amount of clicks. But it’s better to make the technical connection to be able to optimise on the amount of conversions. That’s because a high number of visitors clicks could just come from confused visitors. So try to close this blackbox.

Technical SEO done right

Although many of you have the skills and knowledge to do SEO, doing SEO right is actually quite hard. Of course, it’s important to have a fast website and have sitemaps available in html and xml, so a search spider can crawl and index your website.

When you are not a developer, there are many tips on how to improve technical SEO. Think about keeping your site free from cloaking, using redirects, and URL structure properly and preventing duplicate content.

Automatic quality checks on content

Another thing that can save you lots of time when done automatically, is checking and updating your content. Personally, I like to use a tool that checks sites for duplicate content. Make sure you are connected and make use of as much automatically generated data as possible. Doing things manually on a regular base is your big enemy for productivity, it should only be allowed when you want to do something special.

Automatic SEO checks on pages

A great tool to automatically check your SEO is Yoast. Actually Yoast is a game changer to boost your SEO. It’s a plugin for WordPress that can easily improve your SEO, even when you have moderate knowledge of it. The tool checks if your website is SEO-proof and will give you tips on how to improve your site SEO.

Methods and Tools Every Publisher Should be Using

Top 5 Inbound Marketing Metrics You Should Be Measuring

Marketing is marketing, right? Wrong. Outbound marketing and inbound marketing are entirely different ball games. Outbound marketing is all about getting in front of your potential customers – whether they want you there or not – and inbound marketing is all about bringing your potential customers to you.

Can you guess which approach is more effective? [Hint: That was a rhetorical question!]

In order to be a successful inbound marketer, you need to recognize that success with inbound marketing cannot be measured in the same way as the success of outbound marketing. I mean, think about it – unless you’re running an additional outbound advertising campaign, very rarely will you be considering traditional outbound metrics such as your cost-per-click (CPCs) as benchmarks for success.

Instead, with inbound marketing you have so many other indicdators to consider, from website visitors, to lead acquisition, to conversions, and more.

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So… The question is, if you’re not measuring what you previously considered a key indicator, what should you be measuring?

New Business from Inbound Activities

This where the rubber meets the road when it comes to inbound marketing. Point blank – have you generated new business as a result of your inbound marketing activities?

Unlike many outbound marketing activities, you can actually measure the ROI of inbound marketing in a way that is concrete and objective thanks to the magic of the internet. There are plenty of ways to do this manually using tracking URLs, Google Analytics, spreadsheets and the like, but why go to all that effort when today’s marketing automation software platforms make this so simple? Here at Quintain, we use HubSpot to measure the impact of our inbound marketing activities. With Hubspot’s Sources Report, this is very easy to understand. You can see exactly how your website visitors found you, including who’s coming in from organic search, from social media, from email marketing referrals and even direct traffic.

The beauty of the Sources Report is that it doesn’t just tell you where your visitors came from, it also tells you how many of those visitors converted into leads, and then into customers – and it breaks it all down by channel. If you’re doing your inbound marketing effectively, you should be seeing inbound results under all sources but direct traffic.

As your business makes its transition from outbound to inbound marketing, it will start seeing results, specifically in terms of the quantity of leads and the cost of customer acquisition (COCA). According to Demand Metric, inbound marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing, yet each dollar spent on inbound marketing generates 3 times as many leads as traditional marketing.

Wow.

Website Traffic to Lead Ratio

It’s fair to say that if your website traffic is increasing, and you’ve strategically included numerous calls to action (CTAs) around your site, you should be seeing your leads increase as well. If you’re not satisfied with your overall visitor-to-lead conversion rate, take a look at the conversion rates of individual pages on your website. Start with your best performing pages – the ones that attract the greatest number of visitors. Ask the following question:

• Do these pages have calls to action?


• Are the CTAs related to the topic of the page on which they are placed?


• Are they appropriate given the various stages of the buyer’s journey?


• Are they placed appropriately and designed with eye catching colors?

Understanding which CTAs to offer visitors is critical. You don’t want to place your Bottom of the Funnel offer on a Top of the Funnel page, regardless of how heavily trafficked it is.

Landing Page Conversion Rates

This may sound redundant – after all, aren’t landing pages the pages that convert your website traffic into your leads? Yep, that is true. But landing pages are in many cases more powerful than typical website pages. I like to think of landing page visitors as members of a captive audience. After all, according to Marketing Sherpa, 42% of offer-related graphics on landing pages aren’t clickable and 16% of landing pages don’t have navigation bars. That means that when your visitors are on your landing pages, they’re kind of stuck there, unless they choose to actually exit your page or they convert on your offer.

So use that real estate wisely:

• Make your landing pages easy to read


• Make them colorful – interesting not gaudy


• Make them direct

Essentially, do what you can (test, test, test!) to see what leads to the highest visitor-to-lead conversion ratio.

Lead to Customer Conversion Ratio

This seems to be the hot topic lately, and it goes back to the fact that outbound and inbound marketing are so different. Outbound marketing, though annoying if you’re on the receiving end of the efforts, ensures that a company’s salespeople are going only after qualified people – it’s whether they want the product or service that is unknown. Inbound marketing is the opposite; you know your audience interested, and you can watch them gobble up the content that you’re producing… But you don’t know that they are qualified or they’re even planning to purchase in the next few months.

Or do you?

If you’re not happy with your lead to customer ratio, make more of an effort to qualify or even score your leads (use this template to set up lead scoring). Understand whether they’re Marketing Qualified (MQLs) or Sales Qualified (SQLs), and begin to nurture them. After all, According to Forrester Research, companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% lower cost.

Marketing-Influenced Customer Revenue

While it’s great that inbound marketing is growing your site traffic and boosting your gathered leads, is inbound actually bringing in revenue? After all, at the end of the day, that’s what marketing – whether outbound or inbound – is all about. While marketers (myself included) will say that marketing’s all about satisfying the needs of the consumers, it’s not. Marketing is all about growing your business through an increased customer base. So unfortunately, at the end of the day, it really all comes down to revenue. But lucky for you, businesses that blog (the core of inbound) are 13x more likely to enjoy positive ROI.

The inbound marketing metrics outlined in this post are the best ways to get started. From here, there are plenty of other metrics you can track – but getting the basics established is the most important part.

Author: Kristen Patel

As a Marketing Manager, Kristen works with Quintain’s clients on every step of their inbound marketing journey. She brings to the table experience in social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing and retention marketing. Kristen graduated Cum Laude with a B.S. in International Marketing from Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts…. View full profile ›

Top 5 Inbound Marketing Metrics You Should Be Measuring

When Donald Trump brags about his Facebook success, it's a sure sign you should be skeptical

Workers began removing the large letters spelling out the Trump name from the shuttered Trump Plaza casino in Atlantic City last year. (Mark Makela/Reuters)

The (maybe) presidential campaign of D. J. Trump issued a highly Trumpian news release in response to news that his announcement  Tuesday made a big splash on Facebook.

“Trump Smashes Social Records Following Presidential Announcement,” it yelled. “3.4 million Facebook users in the US generated 6.4 million interactions regarding the launch of his campaign, the highest by far, among all 2016 GOP candidates.”

Why? Because “Mr. Trump has a tremendous audience across the country,” as the news release notes — with probably more accuracy than it intended.

In general, how something does on social media is a bad way to gauge success. In politics? It’s especially dumb, as we’ve noted before. We’re comparing apples to cameras to a 1973 Deep Purple LP when we pit Donald Trump launching  Tuesday afternoon against Martin O’Malley launching on the weekend against Hillary Clinton launching a campaign that starts off 14 miles in front of the competition. And then we’re using that comparison to try and predict tomorrow’s lottery numbers. This is the first contested presidential campaign in which Facebook is so dominant. We have no baseline of comparison in politics.

What we do know is that online fame seems to help. The extent to which campaign launches generate interest from individual Facebook users and get “interactions” on the social platform is loosely correlated to how active the candidates already were on Facebook — or at least how much interest they got. We compared user interest and interactions within 24 hours of the launch to how many followers each had on Facebook the day of the announcement, and voila. (Clinton is in italics because data from the day of her launch was not available. Instead, we used today’s figure.)

As we noted before, the two people getting the most attention on Facebook last fall were Clinton and Ted Cruz — numbers 1 and 3 around Trump on the users/interactions scale. (Notice, too, that Trump “smashed social records” — in the sense that he did worse than Clinton.)

Clinton, Trump and Cruz are outliers. Or maybe Rand Paul and Mike Huckabee are; they didn’t do as well as you might have expected given their high follower counts. It’s hard to say, because we don’t really know what this means. It is not the case that Trump did a lot of organizing around Facebook; it is pretty clear, too, that not all of those interactions were of the “hey, I’m voting for this guy” type. It’s just … a number. It’s bigger than the number for the Nikon, but smaller than the number for “Who Do We Think We Are,” (to continue the joke from above).

Here’s one real thing we can look at: How those interactions compared to candidates’ standing in the polls. We compare the Real Clear Politics average from seven days after the launch to the number of interactions in those first 24 hours. There’s essentially no link at all.

(Notice, too, that we had to take out Hillary Clinton and the Democrats because they’re on a different scale of support. Another way in which comparing Clinton to Trump is tricky!)

If you’re wondering how these figures correlate to rate of change in poll numbers, we actually get some correlation — stronger correlation than between followers at launch and the number of interactions. Cruz saw the biggest jump after 14 days and the most interactions within 24 hours. Rubio saw the second-biggest jump … but fewer interactions than Rand Paul, who didn’t see as big an increase in the polls.

But Paul was doing better anyway. And Cruz announced first. And all sorts of other things that come into play in polling. This is a classic correlation/causation conundrum.

We also have a smaller data set. We’ll see what happens with Trump. Maybe he’ll prove the validity of the last graph, jumping up in the polls. Perhaps he’ll end up more like the graph above it, staying mired in the lower tiers of the Republican candidates.

The ferocity with which Trump pushed out those Facebook numbers, though, reminds us that we have these numbers because of marketing: Marketing from Facebook; marketing from Trump. And for that reason, if no other, it’s very much worth defaulting to skepticism.

In short: We don’t know what Facebook numbers mean, if anything. So we should stop pretending we do.

When Donald Trump brags about his Facebook success, it"s a sure sign you should be skeptical

Why brands should tap into micro-moments

Marketers need to change their playbooks to more effectively reach hyper-connected Asian customers and get them to transact, Simon Kahn, CMO at Google Asia Pacific, said in an interview with Marketing.

Asian countries continue to dominate the rankings for the highest smartphone penetration.  Globally,  Singapore claims the second spot with 88% penetration rate while other Asian countries dominating the rankings are: Hong Kong at 79%, Taiwan at 78%, South Korea at 83% (see charts below), Google’s latest consumer barometer insights revealed.

When it comes to m-commerce, Thailand tops the chart with 31% of its online shoppers using their smartphones to purchase new products.  Malaysia ranks fifth at 20% with Singapore closely following behind at the sixth spot with 18% of online shoppers buying new swag on their smartphones(see charts below).

From a shopper marketing perspective, Asians tend to do more with their phone, reflecting a major behavioural shift that marketers need to be attuned to. Even search on mobile has become a primary platform for Asian users; for example, in Japan mobile search surpasses desktop queries.

The high usage of phones also means that consumers have the expectation of finding information that is both useful and easily available for them.

Touting them as “micro-moments”, Google highlights the key moments that should matter most: the I want-to-know, I want-to-go, I want-to-do, and I want-to-buy moments.

These are times when consumers need to learn, discover, watch, find, or buy something and t hey reflexively turn to the closest device (usually a smartphone) to act on that need. Asia’s embrace of the smartphone has made micro-moments more important to marketers here, more than in any other region, according tot Google.

I-want-to-do moments

I-want-to-do moments are those moments when you want know to how to curl your hair, fix a bike, or bake a cake. These moments can be incredibly valuable for brands and there are more of these moments in Asia than in the West.

In the Philippines, 55% of smartphone users and in India 53% smartphone users watch online videos to learn something new, compared to just 22% in the US.

Kahn cited an example from Unilever India’s “Be Beautiful” YouTube channel — a hub for beauty tips and tutorials, and Nestl, which also tapped into this behavioural shift by featuring cooking videos on their YouTube channel.

I-want-to-buy moments

I-want-to-buy moments describe those times when consumers pull out a smartphone to compare prices or look up reviews — even when shoppers want to buy offline.

Capitalising on this trend, A didas started using location information in their online ads to direct shoppers to their stores. This trend is evident in Malaysia, where 91% of mobile searches lead to further action – whether 3 it’s looking for more information, or purchasing a product or service. In Singapore the figure is 84%.

I-want-to-go moments

Consumers also turn to their phones for local information and immediate answers. 41% of Indonesian smartphone owners turn to mobile when they have an immediate need

to find a local business while in Malaysia, 76% of purchase related conversions happen within 5 hours and 33% within an hour of a mobile search.

Citibank is one of the brands realized this I-want-to-go moment and started using a location-aware app as a key part of their online marketing strategy, Kahn explained.

Brands can leverage Asia’s micro-moments by firstly identifying the micro-moments that are relevant to your business across the entire consumer journey at various points in time. Brands should deliver on consumers’ needs at the right moment. Context should define your content across channels and devices to build seamless experiences for the moment.Lastly, brand’s should make sure their websites are optimised for mobile to ensure the consumer’s best mobile experience.

Why brands should tap into micro-moments

What Every Business Owner Should Know About Email Marketing

Email marketing has long occupied a strange place in the content marketing landscape. It is perpetually underrated, perhaps because it’s not as flashy or simply not as new as Facebook marketing, Pinterest marketing, YouTube marketing, and the like. Underrated though it may be, study after study confirms that email marketing is an essential tool for small businesses—and that in fact, it may be the most potent online marketing tool of them all.

Of course it is only potent when used properly, and to that end Search Engine Journal has a great new read: Some essential points about email marketing, gleaned from some thorough HubSpot data collection. The points made in the article are all worthwhile, but, for all the small business owners out there, we will affirm the following points in particular:

• Mobile matters. How do most people check the bulk of their email? Through their smartphones. Mobile use has increased 400 percent since 2011 alone, making it a must for marketing emails to be formatted for mobile.


• HTML is the way to go. When using an email platform, it’s preferable to use an HTML base rather than a text one, as it allows for emails to include bold, italicized, and colorful text; a majority of consumers prefer these more eye-catching emails.


• Consumers are using email filters more and more. Knowing what the filters look for is essential.


• Consumers don’t necessarily reject all marketing emails, but they are picky about what they save and what they delete. Offering attention-grabbing subject lines that convey immediate and actual value is the key. Make it clear that you’re not just talking up your brand; you’re offering something customers might truly be interested in.

For small business owners, email marketing is a must—and you can perfect your email marketing measures by checking out all of this impressive and illuminating data.

Author: Amanda Clark

Amanda E. Clark is the president and editor-in-chief of Grammar Chic, Inc., a full-service professional writing and editing company. Amanda is a published ghostwriter and editor, and currently under contract with literary agencies in Malibu, California, and Dublin, Ireland. Since founding Grammar Chic in 2008, Amanda, along with her team… View full profile ›

What Every Business Owner Should Know About Email Marketing

Businesses Flock to Facebook Mobile Ads: Should Yours?

Facebook is on a roll. Recently released Q4 2014 earnings show full-year revenues of $12.47 billion, a 58% year-over-year increase. Most of this growth is driven by ad revenues, which reached an all-time high of $3.59 billion for Q4 alone, and specifically mobile ad revenues, which represented 69% of total Q4 ad revenues. This is a far cry from the spring of 2012, when the world’s biggest social network openly acknowledged it had a mobile ad monetization problem. Shortly thereafter, Zuck and crew did an about face and went all in on mobile. And they’ve been cashing in ever since.

At first a few and then a lot of businesses followed suit and flocked to Facebook mobile ads. Their investments have enjoyed varying levels of success, where success is often credited only after intended campaign objectives have been realized. From what I’ve experienced firsthand and read from others, it seems as though companies using Facebook mobile ads for the purposes of high-level branding and engagement (to drive top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) awareness) are seeing the highest ROI, although the picture is a bit more complex than this.

One thing is for certain: a lot of businesses are truly bullish about Facebook mobile ads. This blog is meant to help you decide whether yours should be too.

Facebook Mobile Ads are Hot

Facebook mobile ads are hot, I mean really hot. In each of the past seven quarters, mobile ads accounted for over 90% of Facebook’s revenue growth. Driven by 745 million daily mobile users (34% increase year-over-year), mobile ad revenues hit nearly $2.5 billion in Q4 2014 alone.

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Photo Credit: Facebook

Indeed eMarketer predicts that by 2017 Facebook will derive 75% of its total revenue, or $13.64 billion, from mobile ads. If these numbers come in anywhere close to the mark, it’ll make buying mobile ads on Facebook a much more expensive proposition.

Right now, the majority of Facebook’s mobile users (123.1m) come from the US. However, eMarketer believes this will change in coming years, with India overtaking the US by 2018, and countries like Indonesia, Mexico, and Brazil emerging as major centers of Facebook mobile activity.

Overall, it’s probably safe to assume that Facebook mobile ad revenue is heading north for the foreseeable future. New findings from Kinetic Social, a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer, offer anecdotal evidence as to why this is the case.

In an analysis of its clients’ Q4 2014 advertising campaigns on Facebook and Twitter, as reported in SocialTimes, mobile accounted for 49% of ad buys. Moreover, CTRs for mobile were nearly 4X those of desktop. Previous studies show Facebook mobile ad CTRs as much as 13X higher.

So Facebook’s mobile users are clicking on ads. But are they becoming leads or customers?

Are They Converting?

The answer, in short, would seem to be a resounding “no,” or perhaps more accurately, a “not really.” This is in accordance with the findings of a report issued last month by Marin Software as reported in Adweek which noted that, while 63% of clicks on Facebook ads came from mobile devices in Q4 2014, only 34% of conversions (i.e. leads or purchases) were generated on smartphones and tablets. In the same period, Marin found that Facebook’s desktop ads enjoyed a 1.1 percent conversion rate, while its mobile ads reaped a mere 0.3 percent conversion rate.

The study also revealed how unfavorably Facebook’s mobile ad click-to-conversion performance compared with Google search ads, which enjoyed near parity at 39% of paid clicks from mobile devices to 31% of purchases from ads on mobile devices. Moreover, the study found that paid search on Google and other engines achieved a 10.1% conversion rate for desktop ads and a 6.6% conversion rate for smartphones and tablets – much higher than Facebook’s respective 1.1% and 0.3% conversion rates.

Long live search.

Takeaway

So what’s the bottom line? What conclusions can we glean from a single blog and an admittedly highly limited data set? At this point, what information we do have suggests that your brand may want to use Facebook mobile ads to generate top-of-mind awareness and branding at the TOFU stage, while investing in paid search advertising to drive MOFU and BOFU lead generation and conversion. This of course is a gross generalization that may not neatly apply to your specific situation: as always, your business objectives and intended target audience(s) should be the primary drivers of all marketing initiatives. Moreover, this calculus could change on a dime with any number of new inputs from the consumer or producer (in this case, Facebook) side of the equation; such is the nature of marketing in the digital age. With that said, the data would seem to support the logic of this approach for your business.

Author: Chris Horton

Chris Horton is a Content Creator and Digital Strategist for Minneapolis-based Integrated Digital Marketing Agency SyneCore Tech. An avid tech enthusiast, Chris has written extensively on a number of topics relevant to the growing Marketing Technology industry, including SEO/targeted discovery, inbound, content, social, mobile, apps, online branding/PR, and Internet trends. Chris’… View full profile ›

Businesses Flock to Facebook Mobile Ads: Should Yours?

Why Recruiters Should Be Using Video for Recruitment Marketing

If, like me, you’ve been searching YouTube for the last fortnight just to stay up to date with this season’s Superbowl advertising, then you’ll have noticed first hand just how successful video marketing really can be.

Google has confirmed that 2015 is the biggest year yet for brands and marketers to reach Superbowl fans around the world on all sorts of online devices – desktop, mobile, games console and connected TV.

Now, your recruitment marketing campaign might not necessarily include a case of ‘bad lip reading’ or some ‘puppy love’, however, there’s plenty of tactical advice to take on board from our video online marketers across the pond.

So if you’ve been wondering whether you need to apply any of your efforts towards video for recruitment marketing – TOUCH DOWN! You’ve started along a winning path.

Here’s why video will not only make your brand stand out from the crowd, but it will also help you attract a whole new one!

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1. 
   

   Higher engagement

   
   

Video is the best form of content for evoking emotion, and has been proven to impact customer decision-making. Audiences are about ten times more likely to embed, share, engage with and comment on a video – so what better way to showcase your company, your people, your values and your culture than through the medium of video?

2. 
   

   Improved SEO

   
   

By adding a fully optimized video to your website you will increase your chances of a first-page Google result by 53 times. Currently, the number of traditionally built websites massively outnumbers indexed video assets, which means you have a legitimate chance to increase your presence in search just by adding video into the mix.

3. 
   

   Increasing video technology

   
   

Technologies are leaning more and more in favour of the video marketer, creating further reasons to include video. For example, look at Facebook’s recent addition of auto-play, featured videos and playlists. Facebook now accounts for 60% of all video shares and direct video uploads online.

Converted? Well then here are a few top tips to help keep you ahead of the game when planning your recruitment marketing video:

1. Determine your main reasons for creating a video. Do you want to attract people who are the right fit for your team, showcase the company culture, or simply advertise a job role? Once you have established the purpose of the video then you can really start to think about the best creative approach.

2. Who will feature in your video? Are they comfortable in front of a camera? It really can be quite daunting. I have a lot of experience in front and behind the camera and I know that it is really important to make your employees feel as comfortable as possible. To help with this, keep the format simple, using a series of questions that will best reflect their personality. If it’s authentic content you’re after (which, by the way, is what people most want to see), then provide your employees with a brief insight into the theme of the interview but without revealing the final questions until they’re in front of the camera.It’s also worth considering filming in an environment in which they feel comfortable. I recently came across a great culture video series by an American company called Plasticity Labs. The series is called Meet the Plasticity Team and each video wonderfully showcases an employee’s individual personality as well as the company-wide culture. The series has been filmed in locations that not only ease the interviewees’ nerves but also reflect their personality on camera.

3. Live action is not the only ingredient to a great recruitment video. Check out this fun video from Dropbox, which tells their company story in a really unique and very entertaining way, by ingeniously using puppetry and employee voiceovers. Even better, this can be quite cost effective as voiceover recordings save a lot of money on production and production crew.

4. Finally, let your budding actors know that a blooper is just as valuable as a perfect take – a bloopers reel is good extra content for the viewers.

Hopefully you’re raring and ready to go and make a recruitment video that’s right for your company and your employees. Remember: focus on attracting the right crowd, stay true to your brand values and you really cannot go wrong.

Why Recruiters Should Be Using Video for Recruitment Marketing

3 hot email companies you should follow

It’s a brand new year. And it’s a new opportunity for you to take your email marketing to another level of sophistication and effectiveness. With that in mind, it’s important to remember that great email marketing doesn’t begin and end with your email service provider (ESP). No doubt about it, having the wrong ESP is like that hangover you woke up with on New Year’s day — it’s hard to get rid of, and it makes everything else hurt. But even if you’ve got the right partner, you still need to pay attention to other companies in the email marketing ecosystem. This is where a lot of the innovation is happening today — innovation in testing, in content, and in measurement.

You owe it to your email marketing program to pay attention to what’s happening in the competitive space, if only because many of these innovations will eventually work their way into the platforms of the major ESPs. So to start your email year off on the right foot, here are three companies that I am paying close attention to in 2015.

3 hot email companies you should follow

Internet of 'Sharing' Things should be new focus in 2015

The often-referenced Internet of Things (IoT) movement is expected to make big strides in 2015. For those of us in the marketing world, it is now being referred to as The Internet of “Sharing” Things. That’s an important distinction, as this initiative begins taking its first real steps in the weeks and months directly ahead of us.

We’ve looked at the potential impact the IoT will have on consumers with regard to how the notion of more and more connected devices will enhance their lives, but the real value for marketers comes in how the IoT will change the way consumers share what is happening within their IoT lives. With an infrastructure of 75 billion connected devices by 2020, if you think folks are sharing a lot of info now, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

“As a marketer you’ll soon have a more complete understanding of the consumers’ ‘buying journey’ and how they feel about a product or brand after purchase,” began Seth Greene, a former consumer tech industry marketer and current blogger on all things IoT. “With so many more connected devices, marketers will have access to a more constant stream of consumer data and the sharing rate of data between consumers will rise exponentially as they spend more hours per week interacting with connected gadgets.”

Think back to the initial emergence of Facebook and how marketers were at first reluctant to target consumers using social media. When you look at the sharing that is typically happening on social media now, it’s still mostly about smartphone uploads of pictures and videos from a “day in the life” of the user. In the coming IoT world, where posts and shares will be regularly generated by the devices themselves, marketers will be preparing for new ways to communicate with entirely new online communities that will develop, centered solely around the users of these particular devices.

“IoT devices in the social media framework will become marketer’s gold,” Greene added. “Countless new and emerging trends will become trackable and the ability to reach customers and social communities that had been previously unreachable will become an entirely new source of their marketing energies.”

If a recent Gartner prediction that the impact of connected smart devices has already added some $1.9 trillion to the global economy in 2014 is accurate, the fast emerging Internet of “Sharing” Things space will surely have the marketing world scrambling in 2015.

Imagine some 75 billion connected devices by 2020 — it’s a difficult number to comprehend, but the one thing that should be easy to understand is the time to start “sharing” your marketing story within the Io(s)T world should start now.

This article is part of Allvoices’ series on ad:tech, the largest, longest-running digital marketing and technology event.

Internet of "Sharing" Things should be new focus in 2015