What annoys your clients the most when receiving an email?

Chart of the Day: Adobe Consumer Email Survey Report 2017

We are all guilty of it

As email marketers, we don't like to admit it, but we all do it at one point or another. We will annoy our customers. This is, unfortunately, part and parcel of email marketing, my little email geeks. You can't please all the people all of the time.

What do we do that annoys them?

So what annoys our clients? What are their pet peeves?

In our chart, we can see the main irk is getting emailed too often at 47%. This is no surprise. But what are the others? Let's look at the other top 3.

1. 32% are annoyed by too wordy/poorly written emails.
   This is a really good point. Long worded emails are boring and no one reads them. We need to write for emails, not an essay. Make your copy work for your clients.
2. 22% get emails urging them to buy a product they have already purchased.
   This is a common problem. It can be the data isn't available or dynamic content isn't being used.
3. 20% complain that an email offer makes it clear that the data held is wrong.
   We all sometimes fill out a form and just choose any information, correct or not. Surely we can't be held responsible for that? No, but it's up to us to keep our customer's data correct.

Final thoughts

You won't know what your clients think unless you conduct your own survey. So before you begin with your email marketing strategy, do your research - don't guess! Research may prove that emails should be short, but your clients may prefer long and detailed copy. Do the research and you may be surprised.

• Source: Adobe Consumer Email Survey Report 2017
• Sample Size: 3,028
• Recommended Resource: Email deliverability hub page

source http://www.smartinsights.com/email-marketing/what-annoys-your-clients-the-most-when-receiving-an-email/

How ecommerce can increase conversions with AMP

An easy, visual guide to help you implement AMP for ecommerce to increase conversions

E-commerce is all about creating an amazing shopping experience online for the visitor with the intention of getting them to click, convert, and become a customer.

With changes in consumer shopping behaviors, online brands have had to adjust how they market to prospective customers, as well as the user experience, to ensure an enjoyable experience.

The largest change has come from the adoption of mobile technology.  
There are more than 4.9 billion people globally utilizing smartphones, representing around 66% of the world’s population.

And as of January 2017, mobile phones accounted for 50% of internet traffic. That’s a 30% increase from last year alone.

That growth has triggered a need for more streamlined mobile shopping experiences, but not all brands made the jump right away. Without mobile-optimized sites, mobile users were experiencing high site loading times and having difficulty getting the information and items they wanted while on their phone.

That’s where Google stepped in.

In 2015, Google launched its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) framework to create web pages that load much faster on mobile devices. It was created as an open source initiative that would allow publishers and online brands the ability to ramp up the load speed and reduce wait times for online users.

This kind of optimization was already attainable with the right developers on hand, but not all brands have the resources capable of intensive remodeling of their sites in order to tend to the mobile experience.

Why AMP is Important

With AMP, it all comes down to speed.

Search engines like Google survive by the positive experiences of the user who can find the information they want/need quickly, without long delays. It’s in their best interest to make sure the user has the best experience.

That’s why site speed was added as a ranking factor. If your site takes too long to load, and your customers are bouncing, you’ll likely see that negatively impact your organic search visibility.

For online brands, you not only want to protect your organic search rank by creating a fast-loading experience, embracing AMP also improves conversions.

Check out the figures from this infographic shared by Kissmetrics:

The full data on the infographic reveals a few key things.

The big one is that roughly 44% of mobile users expect a site to load as fast as a desktop experience or faster. When that performance drops and you don’t meet expectations—guess what?

Prospective customers bail and may not come back.

What’s worse is that for every delay of just one second in your load time you take a 7% hit in your conversation rates because visitors start bailing.

If the average rate of cart abandonment is about 68%, imagine how that would be climbing if a large portion of your audience is on mobile and your site loads so slow they get impatient and leave.

How Accelerated Mobile Pages Are Implemented in E-Commerce

The visitors on your site come from any number of landing pages, from your homepage to product and categories, and even blog posts. While it’s important to optimize the visitor’s shopping experience, it isn’t necessary to implement AMP on every page.

Instead, look at the visitor flow through your site so you can visualize your customer journey or funnel and employ AMP at key points through the process.

This is necessary because AMP depends on simplified JavaScript and CSS and will limit or restrict some other CSS and JavaScript, such as no iframes and a lack of support for JavaScript library such as those used for loading reviews.

The simplified framework of AMP is what allows pages to load quickly. Paul Shapiro lays out the three elements of this framework in his post for Search Engine Land:

1. AMP HTML: A subset of HTML, this markup language has some custom tags and properties and many restrictions. But if you are familiar with regular HTML, you should not have difficulty adapting existing pages to AMP HTML. For more details on how it differs from basic HTML, check out AMP Project’s list of required markup that your AMP HTML page “must” have.
2. AMP JS: A JavaScript framework for mobile pages. For the most part, it manages resource handling and asynchronous loading. It should be noted that third-party JavaScript is not permitted with AMP.
3. AMP CDN: An optional Content Delivery Network, it will take your AMP-enabled pages, cache them, and automatically make some performance optimizations.

If you use a content management system such a WordPress and Magento, or e-commerce platforms like Shopify, you can find third-party plugins.

There’s an official WordPress plugin for AMP available on GitHub that you would upload just like any other WordPress plugin.

 

Key Benefits and AMP Element Implementation in E-Commerce

With the limitations of AMP, you won’t be able to use it where you have things like form elements and third-party JavaScript, but there are still plenty of opportunities for utilizing AMP in e-commerce throughout the customer’s shopping experience—just not in the checkout.

If you’re still not sure how or where to use AMP on your e-commerce site or how it could benefit you, here are some examples of AMP implementation.

Reduced Bounce Rates To Site Pages

Remember the bit above about how slow load times can make visitors bail on the experience? That impacts your bounce rate which is one of many ranking factors. One of the major benefits of AMP is reducing that bounce rate since mobile users are going to spend more time on your site, and view more content.

So that secondary benefit of improving load times is a bump in visibility. Your site will rank better than similar sites without AMP implementation.

Look at the two versions of this page to see how content is trimmed for efficient loading:

Improved Click-Through Rates in SERPs

One way Google lets users know about an optimized mobile experience is through the use of the AMP symbol. When a site has implemented AMP, the algorithm will display this symbol within the search results.

This symbol can help your content stand out in the search results, and once more consumers begin to recognize that AMP content loads faster they’ll be more likely to continue looking for that content in the search results.

Media Rich Page Optimization

Customers are most likely to land on your homepage and your category pages, but product landing pages or product detail pages are also a possibility just like any other page on your site.

If you’re linking to or grabbing referral traffic on media-rich pages you can implement AMP on these pages to improve image load time as well as how video is handled on mobile. Like images, there is a custom AMP tag for locally hosted videos in HTML5 called amp-video.

However, if you’re using videos hosted on YouTube like many online brands due then you would use a separate component called amp-youtube.

For other image-handling needs, AMP also has support for slideshows using amp-carousel as well as lightbox support with the amp-image-lightbox tag.

These can greatly improve the load time for homepages and category pages that often contain the most content and act as the most common landing pages for visitors.

Handling Detail Rich Pages

Any extra content takes time to load, even if it’s just text. If you have detail-rich product pages or information pages you can use the amp-accordion element to condense information until a visitor calls for it when it expanding the accordion or section.

Not only with this speed up load time but it improves the visitor experience by allowing them to only load or ‘jump to’ the content they’re specifically interested in.

CSS selectors can be even used to style the accordion element.

Customized Shopping with AMP

Conversion rate optimization should always be a priority for e-commerce brands, but not at the expense of the user experience, load times, etc. One always benefits the other. Thankfully, no sacrifice has to be made.

The amp-access element can be used to customize the content shown to users based on the status of the user, such as if they’re logged in or not. This allows you to personalize the shopping experience (which can improve conversions) while also trimming the load time for mobile users.

Conversion Optimization and User Experience Testing is Supported

With conversion in mind, you won’t have to sweat the simplification off CSS and JavaScript when working to improve conversion rates. The amp-experiment element is used to conduct user experience experiments such as A/B testing and multivariate testing.

This is a great way to see how individual page optimizations and AMP implementation are performing with your mobile users, so you know if your efforts are having a positive or negative impact.

Maintain Tracking Without Negatively Impacting Load Time

Any scripts that must be loaded can slow down the mobile experience, including tracking scripts. Running multiple analytics tracking scripts can compound this. The AMP analytics element streamlines tracking by taking the “measure one, report to many” approach.

There are two ways to implement tracking:

• The amp-pixel element is a simple tag that allows you to count page views and track users with a number of customizable variables.

• The amp-analytics extended component is the more in-depth analytics you might be more familiar with but requires a little setup to complete. It has built-in support for Google Analytics though for easy reporting once you have it in place. This is the best approach to track and measure user behavior and the performance of your content to continue improving the user experience.

AMP provides a basic demo of how some activities can be tracked.

Conclusion

While AMP does have some limitations that can make some tracking difficult, it’s highly recommended at key points in the buyer’s journey of your e-commerce site to optimize load times.

When you can improve the shopping experience and improve performance you will, without a doubt, improve the conversion rates of your online store.

Thanks to Emil Kristensen for sharing their advice and opinion in this post. Emil is the CMO and co-founder of Sleeknote, a company that helps ecommerce business owners capture and convert more leads without hurting the user experience.

source http://www.smartinsights.com/ecommerce/ecommerce-strategy/ecommerce-can-increase-conversions-amp-implement/

72 essential features of an ecommerce site [infographic]

A visual checklist to the essential features of an ecommerce site to ensure success

Your site needs to have quality products that attract customers and a user-friendly design to convert users into loyal and recurring customers.

There is already a well-established set of standards regarding the features of an ecommerce site. But a beautiful site with great products won’t ensure the success of your online store. You need to know which features are really important to convert your customers.

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Typically about 60 - 80% of customers leave ecommerce sites without making a purchase. And only 22% businesses are satisfied with their conversion rates. But by introducing the proper design elements you can lower this rate and increase your sells.

The following infographic by WebAlive shows 72 ecommerce features of an ecommerce site that is more or less crucial for its success. Apart from an improvement of conversion, the features mentioned in this infographic will improve the overall usability of your site.

Though each ecommerce site is different, you will find that the general features mentioned in the infographic are applicable to any ecommerce site. It presents the features on a page by page basis, visually showing the optimal placement of design elements.

Apart from the design, the infographic also refers to the crucial backend features that are necessary to ensure proper manageability of your online business. These features are fairly common in every standard CMS. But just like the design elements, the infographic will help you to determine which of the backend features are crucial.

Finally, it mentions some other features, like - responsive design, security, and page speed - which are must-haves for a modern ecommerce site.

Whether you are designing a new site or redesigning your existing one, this infographic will help to keep track of the essential features among other stylistic elements.

source http://www.smartinsights.com/ecommerce/ecommerce-strategy/72-essential-features-ecommerce-site/

Creating the best marketing mix for a product launch

How the 4Ps still work for product marketing

This article focuses in on the 4Ps, which are the core of the Marketing mix, applied to the product launch. Read our article on the 7Ps of the Marketing mix, if you want to explore the full 7Ps, which also includes customer service.

Download Premium Resource – Product launch Playbook

Launch a product using RACE planning to structure your marketing activities. A marketing playbook defines the key messages, types of communications, best practices and optimisation techniques that should be used to maximise return-on-investment for different marketing objectives.

Access the Product launch playbook

Some have said that ‘the Internet and digital marketing change everything’, but the marketing mix – widely referred to as the 4Ps of Product, Price, Place and Promotion – was originally proposed by Jerome McCarthy in 1960 as explained in the Smart Insights free guide to Marketing models and frameworks and is still used as an essential part of formulating and implementing marketing strategy by many practitioners.

I’ll cover them in the order of Product, Price, Place, and Promotion since that’s how I remember it and it’s a logical order to cover creating a plan.

Product

We start with product since that’s what we’re launching. The product variable of the marketing mix refers to characteristics of a product, service or brand. Product decisions should be informed by market research where customers’ needs are assessed and the feedback is used to modify existing products or develop new products. There are many alternatives for varying the product in the online context when a company is developing its online strategy.

So, to keep our product launch customer-centered we have to consider audience too.

Understanding your audience:

• Your audience should have been considered as part of the new product development process. As part of the launch campaign, it’s worth revisiting this and considering the factors that will affect the buying decision. If you don’t have personas summarising your audience, you should create buyer personas to help tailor your message to the audience.

This should happen at an early stage in new product development. It’s fundamental to understand who your product is for and how it will appeal to them. The earlier you define this the better, since your launch communications plan needs to define key persuasive messages for your audiences to encourage them to buy the product.

Here are five factors to consider about new online product buyers:

1. Digital product buyers REALLY understand how the web works. They demand product content that delivers PERSONAL value – quickly.
2. When it comes to online, buyers rule. Your new product marketing should be highly tailored, featuring esteem-driven messages.
3. Branding is king but ‘comparison’ governs. Today’s consumer instantly compares competing brands – irrespective of size of company or heritage. Therefore, ensure your brand are values are clear and reflected throughout your content.
4. Buyers talk. From blogs to Tweets, forums to ranking sites, users love the power of the web. It lets them vent anger or bestow praise on products. Harvest the positive comments –and you have a powerful community supporting your marketing. Address valid negative comments, and you demonstrate authenticity and care plus you can adjust the product or message accordingly. The key is to success is to continuously manage expectations and hone your message.
5. Users become buyers in stages. Before writing emails or building product sites, think about the entire customer journey:

How do people typically make purchase decisions in your space? Over what length of time?

What assurances can you offer before expecting them to buy? These should be delivered at different points in the buying process.

Specifically, what do they need to know before they reach that point?

Understand your personas by building conversations which match your target audience’s journey towards eventually buying your product.

Will it sell? 

From a marketing perspective, the most pressing product question is simply will your new product sell?  Success calls for the right choice of online channels providing the appropriate platform to explain your product’s points of differences (as opposed to unique selling points).

These points of differences include: what kind of add-ons or downloadable services are available to keep a product fresh and relevant (until an entirely new iteration of a product needs to be introduced.  Or how a product (such as a new kind of photo manipulation software) is saved and the storage implications to customers.  For example, how much space each photo-project takes up on mobile devices, whether the projects are displayed pictorially or otherwise?  Can projects be easily curated according to genre, date… and so on… Each variant holds the promise of being another point of difference that sets your new product apart.

The importance of brand identity and development

Without a strong brand presence, your product can feel indistinctive.  An online brand is imbued with character and personality – both of which need to be reflected throughout your digital strategy.

Whilst features and benefits explain WHAT a product is and does, a brand offers a sense of ‘WHO’ it is.  Such humanizing of product enforces emotional connections which in turn gives even a simple product a discernible personality, or makes a complicated product more accessible, pertinent and understandable.

The frailer your emotional product connection, the greater the need to promote its points of differences (traditionally – USPs) and conversely, the stronger the emotional connection, the less the urgency to highlight product points of differences or USPs.

Having established the ‘WHO’ behind the product, keep checking that your personality remains consistent.  (Nobody trusts unstable personalities).  Brand solidity can be expressed via colours, shapes, tone of voice, styling, corporate philosophy, and so on.   When considering the brand personality for your launch, think beyond simply describing your product.  For example, GoPro camera could easily describe themselves as a compact mobile video recorders.  Instead, the brand describes itself as “an experience sharing company.”

Pricing

Thanks to the web, the biggest shop window in history fits as comfortably in a pocket it does on a large screen.  Increasingly, in many categories, before every other consideration such as online reviews, product quality and brand value has been taken fully into account - buying often boils down to price.  Depending on pricing levels, it may be worth testing whether you show a pricing matrix or not.

Whether it is via official price comparison sites, or casual ‘live’ price checking of different product suppliers, digital opens opportunities for a myriad of marketing pricing tools.  For example, product introduction email campaigns can feature voucher codes or cashback offers.

In exchange for paying a commission fee, affiliate marketing partnerships open opportunities to market products via third-party websites.  Commissions needn’t just be conditional on sales.  Arrangements can be agreed for payments triggered by click-throughs or other actions.

It is often argued that selling online is cheaper for suppliers than via traditional high-street retailing.  However, once a product has been added to site’s shopping cart, distribution can be expensive – especially when consumers expect delivery to be included in the price.  Buyers also expect that your product can be bought via all major credit cards, PayPal as well as Android or Apple payments.

Online or offline, it is still cheaper to retain an existing customer than recruit a new one. Yet, unless behaviours are ingrained (such as buying books on Amazon) online customers tend to be particularly capricious.  Consequently, any strategy regarding a product launch needs to consider issues such as future customer relationship management and lifelong value. 

Place

In the bricks and mortar world, ‘location, location, location’ is everything. Typically, for offline channels, the aim of Place is to maximise the reach of distribution to achieve widespread availability of products while minimising the costs of inventory, transport, and storage. In an online context, thanks to the ease of navigating from one site to another, the scope of Place is less clear since Place also relates to Promotion and Partnerships. Online, for a retail page, it’s about page, picture, and parcel. You need to have the right stock levels.  Customers are online – but is your product in-stock?

• Page:  Is your website accessible?  Has it been optimised? Is the content coherent and helpful? For example, do you offer Live Chat to handle customer questions?
• Picture: Is your product fully discoverable using tools like 306° pictures or video?
• Parcel:  Can your product be dispatched quickly and efficiently (either direct from you or via a partner?) More broadly it links to promotion techniques like affiliate marketing or co-marketing.

Promotion

Many startups launching new products may be short on funds for paid promotion, so choosing when and how to invest is a difficult decision. Let’s quickly review the options as I see them:

• Organic search (SEO) – offers free/low-cost traffic, but takes time to get traction unless your product launch is part of an existing site with domain authority
• Paid search (Google AdWords) – while this will be too expensive for many startups due to competition and bid inflation, it’s worth looking at the cost of AdWords Remarketing. This is usually more cost-effective and you can use reminder ads to encourage people to return to your site ton boost conversion.
• Organic social – this will be a core technique for many startups as they will be keen to build a community and gain advocacy
• Paid social – a similar argument applies to AdWords. Re-targeting through social ads has relatively high ROI.
• Public Relations – This can be a low-cost approach, but only if you have the media contacts and know how to run an outreach programme.
• Affiliate marketing – Affiliate marketing is mainly relevant to retail or subscription products. It’s value in product launches is limited since affiliates are interested in the number of clicks out from their sites and earnings per click, so they are likely to want to keep with trusted, established brands that drive volume.

For search, I recommend creating a search demand analysis. Decide how you will target audiences needs by using Google Keyword Planner to calculate the number of visits based on search volumes for different keywords. A spreadsheet for gap or demand analysis which also helps compare actual visits post-launch against numbers of searches.

Download Premium Resource – Product launch Playbook

Launch a product using RACE planning to structure your marketing activities. A marketing playbook defines the key messages, types of communications, best practices and optimisation techniques that should be used to maximise return-on-investment for different marketing objectives.

Access the Product launch playbook

source http://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/online-marketing-mix/creating-best-marketing-mix-product-launch/

Google site speed benchmarks

Chart of the Day: How does your site compare to these benchmarks?

Website performance, as perceived by the download speed for pages by users, has become more important with the increased adoption of smartphones which typically have lower bandwidth connections than desktops. This research from Google on the impact of page load time shows why speed matters!

Recent research by Google has shown that the recommended average user perception of acceptable download time to page load is two seconds, while for the average European website it is around eight seconds.

Google and others have much guidance on how to improve site download speed, yet achieving fast download speeds has become more challenging with the widespread adoption of responsive website design (RWD), which adds to the page weight of HTML and Javascript code for a page since both desktop and mobile rendering instructions need to be provided. The multiple calls to different tracking and martech tools can also decrease site performance.

Actions to take

Benchmark your site or clients sites using Google's own tools such as which give instructions. Google's Services like this are all useful:

• Test my site
• Page Speed

It’s worth noting that innovation in the protocols used for transmitting data can help site performance too. HTTP/2  is a major revision of the HTTP network protocol used by the World Wide Web for data transfer between web browsers and servers which is potentially faster and is being rolled out at the time of writing. The majority of sites are now using secure ‘HTTPS’ protocol (denoted by the padlock symbol in the browser bar). Google is encouraging sites to use https since it is more secure and it favours secure ‘https://’ sites when ranking sites.

• Source: Google Speed benchmarks
• Sample: Undisclosed, Google internal data
• Recommended toolkit: Digital Customer Experience

source http://www.smartinsights.com/user-experience/website-performance-availability/google-site-speed-benchmarks/

Top holiday benchmarks to track this season

67% of companies that don't hit their multi-year Black Friday average will fail to hit their multi-year rest of the holiday season average

The days are getting shorter and all of the decorations are out. You know what that means. Pumpkin and maple flavored everything and your massive holiday season to-do list just became more urgent. The NRF 2017 Holiday Playbook reports that more than half of holiday shoppers start researching potential purchases in October or earlier.

With the holiday shopping season fast approaching, there is no time to waste. eMarketer expects digital commerce to climb 15.8%, even while total retail growth will slow this holiday season. Make sure your eCommerce engine is firing on all cylinders because there is a lot at stake.

The Monetate Labs team studied four years of holiday data and uncovered important correlations between Black Friday, Cyber Week and the rest of the holiday season. 67% of companies that don't hit their multi-year Black Friday average will fail to hit their multi-year rest of the holiday season average. Cyber Week sales have even more predictive power and are your best indicator if you are on track to succeed or need midseason course corrections.

Download Monetate’s 2017 Holiday Guide now to learn what to prepare for this holiday season.

It’s not enough to know where your business is trending. You have to adjust strategy based on what you learn. Traditionally, that has meant relying on discounts, but that is not your only option. Personalization allows brands to influence shopper behavior and reduce dependence on discount strategies.

Tailoring experiences is an essential element of maximizing revenue during the holiday shopping season. That means taking into account past purchase and browsing history, but also the depth of information that you have at your fingertips for even first-time holiday shoppers. That includes where the shopping experience originated, on-site browsing behavior, time of day, geographic location, and weather conditions--to name just a few considerations.

• Start with user intent. Why are your shoppers coming to your site? Are they looking for store locations or checking the status of an order? Leverage their behavior to anticipate their needs.
• Think through the user experience. Minimize distractions, highlight top items, and make the checkout process as seamless and easy as possible. This will help set you apart from the competition.
• Integrate your channels. Your shoppers don’t think about your marketing channels as mobile vs. in-store; in-store vs. catalog. It’s just you and your brand. Consider the different needs of shoppers visiting from a mobile device, but ensure that the transition across devices is seamless.

The most effective brands use all the tactics and tools of personalization at their disposal and track key benchmarks to ensure they are reaching their goals. If you want to learn more about preparing for this holiday season, download Monetate’s 2017 Holiday Guide for more insights and useful tips.

They also have the 2017 Holiday Guide Checklist for an easy cheat-sheet to reference!

source http://www.smartinsights.com/customer-engagement/customer-engagement-strategy/top-holiday-benchmarks-to-track-this-season/

Building a story for your content marketing strategy

Case studies on global brands and how they've created a story to support their content marketing strategies

According to a recent CMI survey, just 37% of B2B marketers and 40% of B2C marketers have a written content marketing plan in place. At the same time, content marketing continues to become more mainstream as a recognized channel to help brands communicate, story-tell and convince their own audience and prospects.

Download FREE Resource – Digital marketing plan template

Our popular marketing planning template built on the Smart Insights RACE planning system.

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But there is a growing challenge - there appears to be a lack of true understanding as to what and how content can help meet the many different types of organizational objectives? In many examples, the reason why so many content marketing strategies fail is because there simply is no business case.

Where a number of content strategies fall flat is that they run right into the tactical elements of content marketing e.g. blog posts, videos, whitepaper downloads, PDFs – these are all fine to do but the mindset we are looking to change is to start with an organization vision or unique selling point (USP)

It’s clear that brands need to be offering a USP – a reason for connecting and adding a utility to support their audience needs…something that users will go and search for..a service that helps the brand stand out from the competition and supports their wider business goals.

So how do you start to even build a vision?

Your organization's vision should help support your content strategy which helps to articulate who your organization is and what it stands for - this requires total organization buy-in.

So think about bringing together all the various departments and internal functions that are currently creating, and have a remit or requirement to create, content that is distributed outside of your organization.

You need to question and understand each internal dept with the following questions:

1. What is it they are trying to do?
2. What is their requirement for this content being produced?
3. What is the pain point they are trying to address?

By doing this, it will help you identify your business purpose and the role content will play in meeting your one overall vision. From here, this should help you define better what it is you as a business is actually trying to fulfill.

For example, are we considering a content marketing approach to help with the objective of building a subscribed audience? Or is it to grow more leads or maybe to win more customers? Or, just for brand awareness?

What’s missing with the majority of content marketing initiatives is a lack of strategy or a framework from which to follow that connects the organizational objectives to the content marketing approach.

A great example of a global brand that has positioned itself around a story in building a subscribed audience is credit card company AMEX and the launch of their online Open Forum.

This is a platform built by AMEX to bring together small business owners where they can connect and discuss with others the challenges they have in running their business.

AMEX is not "selling" on Open Forum, more providing a platform that answers burning questions of start-ups and SME’s in running a business. Their website provides some key indicators that it has been built and tailored for their audience first:

1. Site navigation

Their site navigation relates to 5 sections that resonate with their target audience – e.g. how to build my business team, how to manage money and how to get customers

2. Building a subscribed audience

There is a clear call to action associated with their content pages for business owners to sign up and receive valuable business advice. As well as signing up with email, there is also an option to sign up with your LinkedIn profile – a clear sign it’s considered their business persona.

It's a great example of building on the AMEX brand name and the types of audience and communities it resonates with

Question: Is there a similar community your brand could be helping or could be building your story from?

Purpose & Goals

Start to think about building a business case before launching into the more tactical element of content marketing (question for your organization: – "if you literally stopped what you were doing in terms of launching blog articles, social media activity etc, would anyone really miss you?")

Building your brand around a story is an essential ingredient to help not only position yourself within a market but also help build a common vision and buy-in from across your organization.

One of my favourite examples comes from Nathan’s Famous – a hot dog restaurant chain based in the USA

If you happen to be in Coney Island, on July 4th you’re probably there to celebrate something very different - the Annual Hot Dog World Championships.

Legend has it that this annual celebration commenced in 1916 after four people decided to prove to one another who was the most patriotic by who could eat the most hot dogs.

Fast forward to 2017 and the competition is going from strength to strength attracting thousands of spectators who witness the showdown that takes place at Nathan’s Famous, the hot dog restaurant responsible for the birth of this very American eat-off.

As well as playing host since 1916, Nathan’s Famous sponsors the event and has the important task of replenishing the participants with as many hot dogs as they can stomach.

The aim of the challenge is to see how many hot dogs you can eat within a 10 minute period, complete with bun.

Nathans Famous has become synonymous with this annual food challenge and has helped define their business and in doing so, creating a key differentiator through storytelling and delivering global brand awareness. This has now turned into an annual event, every July 4th – the World Hot Dog Championships, which is now broadcast on ESPN since 2004.

Is it a success? – you only have to ask ESPN, they are in the 7th year of broadcasting the event through their digital channel and at the same time, creating a brand from nothing for Nathans.

So take a look at your business and get into the spirit of research. Identify and dig into the history of your organization – what was the history and the reason for it be established? What was the purpose of the founder and what were their motivations?

An organization’s history and background are valuable assets and an opportunity to use as a unique selling point when looking to differentiate your brand – is there an opportunity here for you to build an opportunity through storytelling that can elevate your brand to build a voice?

Thanks to Simon Swan for sharing their advice and opinion in this post. Simon is head of digital and has worked for brands in the private and public sectors, overseeing their digital strategies and transformation. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.

source http://www.smartinsights.com/content-management/content-marketing-strategy/building-story-content-marketing-strategy/

How to structure a product launch campaign

How to plan your product launch using the RACE planning framework

You are working during one of the most entrepreneurial eras in history. Thanks to digital media, launching a product to a global audience has never been so manageable. Equally, competition has never been as fierce.

Our product launch campaign playbook will guide you through the process of how to successfully launch your product online.

Download Premium Resource – Product launch Playbook

Launch a product using RACE planning to structure your marketing activities. A marketing playbook defines the key messages, types of communications, best practices and optimisation techniques that should be used to maximise return-on-investment for different marketing objectives.

Access the Product launch playbook

It considers how to avoid common pitfalls encountered when launching a product and how to promote your online launch. These pitfalls commonly involve missed opportunities to reach or persuade your audience through the customer lifecycle. This visual shows all the potential interactions that can be used during a product launch across the touchpoints of the customer lifecycle. Use it as a visual checklist of what’s required.

The reason we created our launch plan guide is simple, it’s a common ‘use-case’ in marketing. All businesses create new products or new propositions to increase revenue and appeal to different audiences. It’s particularly relevant for startups when they first launch.

Planning helps you explore potential opportunities for your launch, define aims and prepare your launch timeline.

Creating a campaign plan empowers you to prioritize resources in a logical and effective order.  With a product launch, as with so many issues related to business, whilst you can plan for most eventualities, you should also plan for the unexpected.

How to structure your campaign plan

You may know the Smart Insights RACE Planning framework which covers five parts which are essential outcomes of a marketing or digital marketing plan, they’re Plan – Reach – InterAct – Convert and Engage an audience. For this Playbook, the framework is broken down into 25 more detailed activities for you to review in a checklist format. For each of these 25 activities there we recommend specific actions to take and resources and tools giving more details.

The five parts of RACE planning will help you:

• Plan your launch
• Reach your market
• Act through encouraging participation
• Convert by turning casual surfers into customers
• Engage by turning casual customers into loyal advocates

Plan for the worst

With so many variables, it would be foolish to suggest you can always be fully prepared for anything. However, by reviewing the risks and defining steps to mitigate them you will be able to remain in control of each stage of your launch, even if the unexpected happens, you’ll be ready to respond to it coolly, rather than react on the spur-of-the-moment.

Your vision and how to reach it

Depending on your intended market, you will need to develop a clear all-encompassing vision. Each aspect of your product launch vision is supported by a substantiating statement.

Example – consumer

To become the bestselling maze-building gaming app.

Every maze is based on highly accurate maps of some of the world’s most popular actual mazes.

Example – B2B

To become the most trusted online small business accounts software platform you can buy.

Our software package has been developed in partnership with each of USA’s top three small business accountancy practices.

Having crafted these statements, it's time to consider ‘how to get there’ strategies:

Example – consumer

To become the bestselling maze building gaming app.

Every maze is based on highly accurate architectural drawings of some of the world’s most popular mazes.

PLANNING:

• Develop brand awareness.
• Design a social media strategy.
• Create a viral marketing campaign.
• Agree budgets, targeting appropriate audience, testing and metrics.

Example – B2B

To become the most trusted small business accounts software platform.

Our software package has been developed in partnership with each of USA’s top three small business accountancy practices.

PLANNING:

• Build a personalized email strategy.
• Implement online PR campaign.
• Create online small business advice platform.

Agree budgets, targeting appropriate audiences, testing and metrics.

What is it? Who are you? Where are they?

You are intimately familiar with every aspect of your new product.  However, the same cannot be said for your prospective markets and audience.  Initially the most important of these markets are ‘early adopters’, particularly where you are launching into a relatively new product category.

During the first phase of your planning, beyond simply considering what your product is, think about how and where it fits on the ‘radar’ of your early adopter marketplace.  This is crucial.  Not only does it help ensure the features and benefits of your product are understood, but importantly, it sends out a signal that helps early adopters distinguish your offering against competitors who may produce a similar product.

From the outset, your phased campaigns need to incorporate distinctive messages which help early adopters justify making a purchase - whilst at the same time empowering them to tell others just how brilliant your product is, and why they are proud to boast being amongst the first to own it.

Creating a campaign timeline

Draw up a timeline covering the build-up, launch, and post-launch, mapping each stage against benefit messages aimed at specific markets, along with benchmarks against which you can explain any value propositions against competitors.   Keep in mind that your online (consumers) first concern will always be whether your marketing helps them make informed decisions and choices.

When developing your timeline, consider how you can work with potential influencers early on.  Online, this has far-reaching implications that extend to how and where you promote your product. For example, which influencer blogs should you have in your sights?  How about podcasts and trusted journalist reviews…

Using tracking KPIs to review audience engagement

It will help to define launch performance indicators for an agile launch. When launching a new product, as with any campaign, you will want to define success criteria, but it’s particularly important for a new product launch since uncertainty means you will need to adjust your approach

Key performance indicators include:

• Video downloads.
• Infographic downloads.
• Brochure downloads.
• Click Through Rates
• Volume-based KPIs
• Total revenue from customers acquired through online marketing.
• Cost Per Lead.
• Customer value.

(Calculated by the average sale per customer x the average number of times a customer buys per year x the average retention time in months or years for a typical customer.

Building the option to update or upgrade a product over time can enhance your income revenue stream).

• Mobile leads, traffic, and conversion rates.
• Social media traffic and conversion rates.
• Organic traffic.
• Landing page conversion rates.

Download Premium Resource – Product launch Playbook

Launch a product using RACE planning to structure your marketing activities. A marketing playbook defines the key messages, types of communications, best practices and optimisation techniques that should be used to maximise return-on-investment for different marketing objectives.

Access the Product launch playbook

source http://www.smartinsights.com/traffic-building-strategy/campaign-planning/structure-product-launch-campaign/

How to structure an effective digital transformation plan

What are the essential parts of a digital and digital transformation plan?

Digital or online marketing is any form of marketing that involves using online channels for goals of acquisition and retention. It also includes digital technology and use of data to target audiences more precisely with personalized messages. Since creating awareness and achieving conversion still commonly involve offline channels such as a call-centre or in-store, digital marketing plans need to define integration between channels using techniques like customer journey mapping.

Download our free PDF download – Understanding different types of marketing plan guide

This download and our other free templates is for anyone who wants to improve their knowledge of marketing planning with a few to gaining more senior roles.

Access the Understanding different types of Marketing Plan

The purpose of a digital marketing plan is to define how to compete more effectively with digital marketing. Its scope of a digital marketing plan is typically annual, but a digital transformation plan will typically be longer since this involves creating long-term roadmaps for implementing new technologies and ways of working. Digital media and technology offer new channels to market, so a digital transformation strategy is a channel strategy. This means that a digital strategy:

• Understand the channel.
  Your strategy should be informed by customer online behaviour and preferences. In particular, understand which intermediary sites influence purchase and how your customers switch between the channels.
• Set objectives for future channel contribution.
  This includes specific monthly targets for both direct (online) sales and indirect (offline) sales.
• Identify and prioritise target audiences.
  As with traditional marketing, targeting the right audiences or personas is key. Digital media enable you to micro-target.
• Encourage usage of the channel.
  You may still need to communicate the benefits of using digital channels to encourage switching and enhance your brand.
• Create propositions to emphasize the differences.
  This includes differences between online channels and other channels.
• Support integration between channels.
  Although you want to emphasize the differences, that doesn’t mean the channel shouldn’t be integrated. Customer journeys should be seamlessly integrated.
• Review how competitors use the channel.
  Understand their targeting and propositions, where do they excel?
• Develop channel partners.
  Find the key players and influencers in the value chain or ecosystem and form strategic partnerships.

Selecting the best mix of digital media to meet your goals of customer acquisition and retention is a large part of a digital marketing strategy. There are a variety of paid, owned and earned media assets that fall within digital marketing, including, for example, your:

• Online brand
• Website and potentially mobile apps
• Blogs
• Automated email communications, promotions and e-newsletters
• Social media channels
• Digital advertising
• Online PR
• Partner co-marketing and affiliate marketing

A digital marketing plan provides a clear picture of how the combination of different media supports an organization’s goals and objectives. The purpose of a digital marketing plan is to ensure that digital marketing activities are relevant and timely in the achievement of your organization’s objectives, that they can be implemented with available resources and that they are capable of creating and sustaining a competitive position online.

In a large organization, a digital marketing plan may be part of a number of integrated marketing plans, specific to individual parts of the business.

When to use it?

Digital marketing planning is an effective way of strategically organizing your digital marketing tactics and effectively measuring their success. A digital marketing plan provides clear strategic targets for what you want to achieve from your online marketing activities. Implementation can provide numerous benefits:

• Clear and agreed targets including a roadmap of changes to people, process and technology needed for digital transformation
• Clear and agreed targets including a roadmap of changes to people, process and technology needed for digital transformation
• A competitive edge and increased share of the market through better use of digital media than competitors
• Valuable customer insights and analytics such as popular content, demographics, devices used and buying behaviours
• A powerful online customer value proposition to achieve differentiation, customer engagement and to encourage loyalty
• Reduces the likelihood of duplication, particularly in larger organizations
• Provides your organization with the agility to catch up or stay ahead
• Measures how many people are engaging with your content and how many qualified leads are being generated

An effective digital marketing plan will enable you to distinguish behaviour patterns and trends throughout your customer’s journey, providing you with the ability to make informed decisions and improvements at every stage of this journey.

What should be included? / How should it be structured?

A digital marketing plan typically includes:

• A review of your organization’s digital capabilities
• Setting SMART objectives to grow online leads and direct online or indirect offline sales
• Defining the digital marketing methods to be invested in
• Defining the resources required for digital marketing

A useful tool for reviewing and defining your digital marketing capabilities and resources is the SOSTAC structure which we explain in our 7 steps strategy guide.

Introducing SOSTAC®

To make sure your digital marketing plan has all the essential features, I recommend the SOSTAC® structure developed by PR Smith—Dave Chaffey’s co-author of the printed book Digital Marketing Excellence.

SOSTAC® is a great framework for structuring business, marketing or digital marketing plans since it’s relatively simple and logical, so it’s easy to remember and to explain to colleagues or agencies. SOSTAC® is a strategic planning process framework that gives you a clear structure to work through to create and manage your plan.

This chart from Digital Marketing Excellence summarises what should be included in each part of a SOSTAC® plan.

So, what does SOSTAC® stand for?

Situation analysis means ‘Where are we now?’ For digital marketing planners, questions include:

• Which digital channels are being used by our customers?
• How are our competitors meeting the needs of our target customers?
• Which digital marketing tactics are they using?
• How can we stand out from our competitors?

Objectives mean ‘Where do we want to be?’

• How do we ensure alignment with our business’ goals and key performance indicators?
• What are the top-level goals 5 Ss (Sell, Serve, Speak, Save and Sizzle)?Here we can build specific and measurable digital marketing plan targets. Good objectives are quantified against timescales e.g. to increase our conversion rate by 5% per month, to generate 100 new online leads per quarter.

Strategy means ‘How do we get there?’ Strategy summarizes how to fulfill the objectives. It is the shortest part of the plan, but arguably, the most important, as it gives direction to all the subsequent tactics. It answers questions including:

• How do we position ourselves in order to gain a competitive advantage?
• How will digital marketing plan targets be achieved?
• What messaging, technologies and channels will we use?

Tactics are the details of strategy. They highlight on a digital marketing plan exactly which tactics occur when. Your chosen tactics should support and adhere to your customer’s journey. Examples of digital marketing tactics could include, for example:

• Content marketing
• Social media marketing
• E-mail marketing
• Online PR coverage
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing
• Native advertising
• Affiliate marketing
• Inbound marketing

I recommend you consider these 6 options defined in this diagram. In reality you will specify more detail for each channel as listed in our Digital media cheatsheet, which gives a succinct summary of the main organic and paid media options on Google and in the social network.

Action is the detailed planning of tactics. Who does what, when and how? What processes and activities are required to make things happen?

Control identifies what you need to measure when and what happens. The Control section of the plan ensures you know if you are succeeding or failing – and you can make adjustments– before it is too late.  How you measure the success of your digital marketing activities will be based upon the overall marketing objectives detailed in your marketing plan.

To help you plan your digital marketing tactics effectively, the RACE Planning system will provide you with a simple framework.

Why use RACE for planning and managing digital marketing?

RACE is a practical framework to help manage and improve results from your digital marketing. Ultimately it’s about using best practice across digital marketing techniques to get more commercial value from investments in digital marketing. It will help simplify your approach to reviewing the performance of your online marketing and taking actions to improve its effectiveness.

Although SOSTAC® provides a superb framework for structuring a plan, I recommend that a digital marketing plan combines it with the Smart Insights RACE planning framework since:

• RACE is practical and action-oriented – it focuses on tactics you can implement in your digital marketing communications and on your website and mobile apps
• RACE is customer-centred – it follows the established customer lifecycle of relationship building or marketing funnel from creating awareness; generating leads from new prospects; converting prospects to sale online or offline and encouraging loyalty, repeat sales and advocacy such as social sharing.
• RACE integrates performance evaluation – It defines KPIs that digital marketers should include at each stage for setting targets and reviewing results using analytics and summary dashboards.

What is RACE?
RACE covers the full customer lifecycle or marketing funnel from:

(Plan) > Reach > Act > Convert > Engage

There is also an initial phase of Plan involving creating the overall digital strategy, objective setting and plan.

RACE consists of four steps or online marketing activities designed to help brands engage their customers throughout the customer lifecycle. This infographic shows the goals for each part of RACE and how you can measure them.

1. Reach.
   Reach involves building awareness and visibility of your brand, products and services on other websites and in offline media in order to build traffic by driving visits to different web presences like your main site, microsites or social media pages. It involves maximising reach over time to create multiple interactions using different paid, owned and earned media touchpoints.
2. Act.
   Act is short for Interact. It’s a separate stage from conversion since encouraging interactions on websites and in social media. For most businesses, the main aim of Act is to generate online leads. So, it’s about persuading site visitors or prospects take the next step, the next Action on their customer journey when they initially reach your site or social network presence. It may mean finding out more about a company or its products, searching to find a product or reading a blog post.You should define these actions as top-level goals of the funnel in analytics. Goals can include “Viewed product”, “Added to Basket”, “Registered as member” or “Signed up for an e-newsletter. Act is also about encouraging participation. This can be sharing of content via social media or customer reviews (strictly, part of Engage).
3. Convert.
   This is simply conversion to sale, online or offline. It involves getting your audience to take that vital next step which turns them into paying customers whether the payment is taken through online Ecommerce transactions, or offline channels.
4. Engage.
   This is long-term customer engagement and communications that is, developing a long-term relationship with first-time buyers to build customer loyalty as repeat purchases using communications on your site, social presence, email and direct interactions to boost customer lifetime value. It can be measured by repeat actions such as repeat sale and sharing content through social media. We also need to measure percentage of active customers (or email subscribers) and customer satisfaction and recommendation using other systems.

The Smart Insights Multichannel Marketing Growth Wheel infographic gives a visual view of key planning activities that are needed as part of the process of producing an integrated digital marketing plan.

A solid digital marketing plan has:

• Clear, realistic goals which you can be confident of hitting
• The best strategy to achieve these goals against your competition
• Sufficient details of the tactics and actions needed to translate the strategy into action
• A method to check you are on track with your plans

Which type of business is it most suited for?

A digital marketing plan can be a valuable asset to any organization.  Regardless of what you sell, a digital marketing plan will enable you to:

• Develop customer personas
• Establish customer needs
• Craft valuable online content

How your digital marketing plan is implemented will differ, depending on whether you are a Business to Business (B2B) or Business to Consumer (B2C) organization, for example:

Online lead generation tends to be the goal of B2B organizations, so the focus of your marketing plan will be attracting and converting quality leads via your website and digital channels for your sales teams.

Providing an enhanced customer journey tends to be the focus of B2C organizations, so the focus of your marketing plan will be attracting prospective online customers and converting them, without the input of a sales team.

How does it relate to other plans?

Digital marketing activities work best when integrated with traditional marketing and response channels. Organizations should therefore have a separate digital marketing plan, which is integrated into an overall marketing plan. As recognized in 10 reasons you need a digital marketing strategy in 2017, this ensures that digital marketing is fully aligned and becomes part of business as usual.

Dave Chaffey, CEO and co-founder of Smart Insights, notes that the creation of digital plans often occurs in two stages:

“First, a separate digital marketing plan is created. This is useful to get agreement and buy-in by showing the opportunities and problems and map out a path through setting goals and specific strategies for digital including how you integrated digital marketing into other business activities.

Second, digital becomes integrated into marketing strategy, it’s a core activity, “business-as-usual”, but doesn’t warrant separate planning, except for the tactics.”

Thanks to Sarah Cowman for sharing their advice and opinion in this post. Sarah, Managing Director at The Yorkshire Marketing Agency, is an award-winning Chartered Marketer. Sarah holds over 10 years’ experience in implementing results-driven marketing and communications strategies, plans and campaigns. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.

source http://www.smartinsights.com/manage-digital-transformation/digital-transformation-strategy/structure-effective-digital-transformation-plan/