Over two thirds of Facebook & Twitters users activity is on a Sunday, Have you go it covered?

Chart of the Day: Average share of weekly activity on Twitter and Facebook

So, here's the thing. Most businesses don't utilise social media effectively enough to generate a return on their efforts. But with a few simple tweaks anyone can make Social work for their business. Start by considering the following questions:

1. Which platform is right for your business and target audience?
Consider who your target audience is and find the right social media platform(s). If you are a B2B business Linkedin is probably the best place for you and Snapchat is better aligned to targeting under 23 consumers. Which a little research you can find the right audience for you.

2. What content are you posting? The Sell-Inform-Entertain balance
One area where businesses fall down on social is posting promotional content too often in their eagerness to push a sale through the channel rather than posting engaging informative content that builds brand loyalty. Look at your posts, would you click on them and do they make you feel? Is it 'meh', or do they inspire passion and action.

3. When are you scheduling the posts?

Once you have chosen your platform, created your content, added tracking codes (don't forget your social media tracking codes in Google Analytics) it's time to pick a time to set it free into the wild. But when should you send it? Monday, Tuesday...Friday?

This is the subject of today's chart of the day. Having worked with many companies on their social media, I have always found that most posts are scheduled during working hours Monday to Friday, 9-5, mainly for the obvious reason that it is when the marketing team is busy working at their desks! But, so are most other people, even your target audience.

In the latest Nielsen Social Media Report they break down the average share of weekly activity on Facebook and Twitter and you can see a clear spike of activity at the weekend. Particularly, on a Sunday which dwarfs any other day of the week. Will you be changing your scheduling habits to attract a greater reach to your business? It's particularly relevant to B2C marketing, but B2B marketing can benefit from some weekend activity too.

• Source: 2016 Nielsen Social Media Report
• Recommended Resource: Social Media Marketing Toolkit

source http://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/two-thirds-facebook-twitters-users-activity-sunday-go-covered/

How analyzing customer behaviour using personas can improve your B2B E-commerce strategy

Analysing your customers behaviour using buyer personas to improve your B2B E-commerce strategy

Is your B2B e-commerce strategy stagnating? If so, your buyer personas may be the weak link. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer that’s created by studying demographics, attitudes and buying patterns. Detailed buyer personas guide everything from product development to marketing decisions, improving your business’s ability to identify, cultivate and convert the best leads into loyal customers. However, companies often get lazy about their buyer personas. When demographics steal the spotlight, businesses overlook the complex motivators, attitudes and behaviors that influence how individuals shop online. 

The result: Your business wastes valuable resources investing in leads with a low probability for conversion, while missing out on higher utility leads.

The solution: build a smarter e-commerce strategy through an in-depth understanding of how buyer personas influence B2B purchasing behavior.

[Editor's note: Our Digital Experience toolkit provides several detailed examples of B2B Personas and an Excel template for creating your own pesonas]

How to Develop More Effective B2B Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are more than just a brief summary of your target customers. They are a fully developed, thoughtfully cultivated portfolio that helps you better understand your buyers’ needs, knowledge of your products and services, how your buyers consume media, which communication channels they prefer, who influences their buying decisions, and how they will respond to different messages. While most businesses develop B2B buyer personas, too many spend excess energy building the persona’s backstory and focusing on descriptive details that they miss the bigger picture.

Consequently, businesses end up with complex backstories that are better suited for actors developing a movie role than for businesses developing a base strategy and creative work. When developing buyer personas, businesses need to focus less on the personal habits of these personas and more on the motivating factors that influence how personas develop consensus, visualize objectives and manage professional obstacles.

In the age of e-commerce, how your personas behave online also matters. Recently, MasterCard identified five global online personas for e-commerce: passive users, proactive protectors, solely shoppers, open sharers and simply interactors. Rather than targeting a specific demographic based on the traditional markers of age, income and geography, MasterCard’s approach focuses solely on online behavior. “These personas are determined by behaviors, attitudes, and awareness regarding sharing personal information … essentially a new paradigm for merchants on the Internet,” says MasterCard. The implications for e-commerce are vast. Online retailers are best served when they build marketing campaigns based on shopper behavior, rather than demographic assumptions.

While MasterCard’s research focuses on B2C e-commerce, the same implication — that buyer behaviors, attitudes and awareness surrounding online shopping matter more than demographics — are just as applicable to B2B e-commerce. When building your buyer personas and analyzing customer behavior, be sure that they answer these important questions:

1. How well does this buyer know your product/service? Is this a new product or an improvement on an existing product within the marketplace? When buyers do know your product or service, are they familiar with only limited features or sophisticated users?
2. What impact does this product have on your buyer’s overall life? What points of impact does the product have? Does it save your buyer money or time, mitigate risk, or improve business outcomes?
3. What media do your buyers consume and how does this consumption influence the decision making process? Will your buyers prefer to get to know you through social media, email or your company blog? Maybe your buyer checks Facebook, Twitter and Instagram on a daily basis and only checks into LinkedIn once per week. However, time on Facebook equates to low-quality interactions (the occasional status like) while time on LinkedIn is a higher quality interaction (reading multiple articles, messaging industry contacts, etc.).
4. How early do they adopt new technologies? Early adoption and comfort with new technologies is especially important for e-commerce. If your buyers are used to a specific online shopping experience, like Amazon, they’ll expect the same ease of use for your website and may become frustrated if certain purchasing features are not offered.

Using B2B Buyer Personas in the Age of E-Commerce

Improving the online shopping experience for your clients starts with an in-depth understanding of what motivates these prospects to make a purchase, how prospective clients search for information and solutions, and what influencers play a role in the final decision. On average, B2B researchers conduct 12 sales prior to engaging with a specific brand’s site, with 73 percent of these searches originating from search engines. Once they find your website, businesses expect the same interactive, streamlined shopping experience that they are accustomed to receiving with B2C shopping. They don’t have time to waste searching for product information or comparing different solutions. When it’s time to buy, they want to confidently select a solution without wading through unnecessary or redundant information.

At the same time, B2B customers cannot simply click and buy as soon as they land on your website. The B2B buying cycle is now 20 percent longer than it was three year ago, according to Destination CRM. Why so long? Internal buying process complexity hampers efforts to streamline purchases. Nearly one out of every three B2B sales include at least five decision makers, and 70 percent include at least three decision makers. However, they’re not all in the C-suite: 81 percent of non-C-suiters report having a say in the decision making process. A better understanding of the motivators, attitudes and behaviors of these decision makers will improve your e-commerce strategy.

With B2B e-commerce predicted to top $12 trillion by 2020, every company is angling to maximize their share of the e-commerce pie. In order for your B2B website to be effective, it needs to meet multiple buyer needs, serving as both a sales tool to close the deal, and as an e-commerce site to simplify and streamline the purchasing process. By understanding what motivates and drives your target buyers, your business will be best positioned to capitalize on the booming e-commerce marketplace and customize your website to meet your buyers’ most pressing needs.

Thanks to Stephanie N. Blahut for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Stephanie N. Blahut is Marketing Director at Figo. You can follow her on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.

source http://www.smartinsights.com/persuasion-marketing/marketing-personas/analysing-your-customers-behaviour-to-improve-your-e-commerce-strategy/

Cloud-based Analytics is the Key to Real-Time Results

Leverage the power of the cloud to achieve better insights

The era of the cloud is in full swing. Cloud-based analytic platforms are driving automation and improving the predictive accuracy of marketing programs across all sorts of industries. With these platforms at their disposal, marketers can solve some of the key challenges that have daunted them for years, like connecting data, reporting, gathering insights, making decisions, and optimizing marketing programs.

In 2015, Gartner removed big data as an emerging technology trend, citing the fact that it has become prevalent in our lives and hence is no longer an emerging trend. Yet, McKinsey claims that less than 30 percent of the data’s value is being captured across industries. Big data’s applications will only grow as its true potential has yet to be fully tapped.

Making Decisions at the Speed of Business

Shifting to the cloud isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it proposition. It still comes down to the quality of your data — and your ability to gain insights from it. Cloud-based analytics platforms can’t solve data gaps or fix corrupt data. They can’t correct measurement errors or tell you which metrics to focus on. All of that still comes from you and your team.

Instead, these platforms allow you to measure and track KPIs and to continually expedite the gathering and reporting of whatever metrics you choose to track. From a marketing perspective, the key benefits of cloud-analytics centre on:

Real-time optimization

 By tracking customers, orders, or sales in real time, you can finally get away from those weekly or monthly KPI reports. Rather than waiting for the end of the month to set strategy, you can pivot your marketing execution almost daily, on the basis of up-to-date performance metrics. Instead of looking at past performance and tweaking future execution — with a big-time lag in between — you can finally start to optimize the present.

Real-time personalization

 By tracking customer engagement across channels at the time of transaction, you can also serve up the right content, experiences, or media impressions to the right person at the right time — and through the proper medium.

In the past, such personalization was driven by A/B testing, which can take weeks to find the perfect combination of message, offer, and call to action necessary for conversion. With cloud-based analytic platforms, such large-scale tests can be run constantly, allowing you to apply your insights without delays.

Real-time scoring

 Marketing organizations spend considerable time and effort building predictive models for campaigns. But with changing customer behaviors and volumetric data challenges, it’s often not feasible to update and deploy these static models in a timely manner.

By leveraging cloud-based modeling tools, you can make predictive models run constantly in the background. At any given time, the entire customer database is scored with all available data. You can access the information necessary to predict how consumers will respond to a given message and then adjust accordingly.

And with 86 percent of companies reporting increases in ROI through predictive marketing, cloud-based analytics platforms aren’t just something to throw on your road map a year from now — they’re essential to competing in the business world today.

A Competitive Lever

While speed, modernization, and simplicity of use are all important, one objective ranks higher for more than 47 percent of IT departments in large organizations: cutting costs. In fact, moving from static reporting to cloud-based solutions can lead to significant cost savings for most teams.

While marketers are eager to adopt cloud-based analytics to drive better insights and results, the key imperative for IT teams is to reduce cost and overhead across the enterprise. When marketing and IT teams work together to realize the benefits of better agility and lower cost, rather than work against each other, we often see rapid migration and adoption of such systems.

In addition to reducing overhead and cost, cloud-based analytics also drive democratization of data within organizations. KPIs and insights that were bound in spreadsheets and reports can now be accessed by anyone in an organization to unlock value. Such platforms can often be the key to breaking down silos among marketing, sales, operations, finance, and other teams within a company.

Take Finish Line, for example. The athletic apparel retailer combines online and offline data to better understand the touchpoints with its customers. By gathering and tracking everything from beacons and loyalty data to point-of-sale and social streams, Finish Line personalizes its interactions with consumers to not only convert, but also upsell.

With the power of the cloud, businesses can apply insights to market faster than the competition. In a 2015 survey, 57 percent of organizations saw improvements in decision-making after executing cloud analytics, with even greater improvement in collaboration and response time to customer requests.

Predictive analytics using real-time data connects marketing with sales, links operations with management, and even shows the company where to build its next stores. When properly utilized, it has the potential to drive transformational change across the enterprise.

3 Organizing Principles to Get Started

For organizations looking to drive value from cloud-based analytic platforms, here’s what you need to get started:

1. Set some data standards

In the road to actionable insights, if your analytics platform is your engine, then data is its fuel. After all, predictive models will only function as well as the data you feed into them. Make sure your input is as clean and well put-together as possible. After all, it’s garbage in, garbage out.

Check that your enterprise or marketing data warehouses can feed data into your analytics platform in real-time. The goal is to drive 360-degree connectivity across all consumer touchpoints. Make sure to connect only those data sets that drive insights and impact the customer experience, not every byte of your warehouse. Certain data stores that are not mission-critical — and those that do not directly influence your marketing decisions — do not have to be fed real-time or linked to your analytical engine.

2. Measure what matters

Just because you can measure and report on something doesn’t mean you need to build a KPI to track it. Be specific and frugal with the numbers you report and track, focusing only on the core metrics that drive your business. Ask yourself whether a certain metric will help your team make better marketing decisions.

Remember that the more metrics you squeeze into your dashboard, the less likely it is that users will be able to focus on core KPIs. Keep it simple by measuring and managing only what matters. Building a dashboard with every metric conceivable will only end up confusing your audience.

3. Make decisions faster

Making faster decisions does not imply making hasty decisions, but most marketers need to shorten their test-and-learn cycles. Most managers don’t make bad decisions with good data — they make bad decisions with bad or missing data. As long as your analytical engine can deliver good data and insights, expect your team’s decisions to get better over time as well.

Good managers and executives are adept at looking at KPIs and deciding how to evolve marketing strategy based on insights. However, while they do this innately, it’s important to empower your team and partners to make bold decisions based on the data. It’s about being agile and applying insights from cloud-based platforms to drive future decisions.

In an era of disruptive technology, it’s not the big that will eat the small, but the fast that will eat the slow. Leverage the cloud to personalize, optimize, and predict the best way to interact with and market to your consumers.

Thanks to Vignesh for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Vignesh Clingam is the SVP, Decision Sciences at agency RAPP. Vignesh believes in the power of data to enrich the human experience. n.

source http://www.smartinsights.com/goal-setting-evaluation/web-analytics-strategy/cloud-based-analytics-key-real-time-results/

Is your social media campaign a disaster waiting to happen?

Live streaming offers great opportunities, but without planning, you could be flirting with disaster.

You wouldn't be alone if you hadn't winced once or twice because of a social media blunder you'd seen unfolding or read about in the press.

Perhaps you've spotted an offer that has gotten out of hand, seen an ill-thought-through initiative that's simply jumped on the bandwagon, or read about the totally inappropriate handling of a relatively simple error.

Whichever it was, social media mistakes are easily done without proper planning.

And let's face it, things move quickly in this industry.

With the constant conversation and rapid developments amongst the different platforms, it's pretty likely that you'll have missed an update before you've even finished your morning coffee.

So as we head into another year of exciting enhancements and who-knows-what new launches, we've launched a new free guide of 10 common social media marketing mistakes. We believe that it's even more paramount to have an effective social media marketing strategy in place to avoid mistakes that could be costly to your brand.

One notable trend that we feel requires strategic caution is in live video.

Facebook has been giving users the chance to 'go live' for a little while now, following closely on the heels of Twitter's acquisition of Persicope. Snapchat has also been an app used by brands to reach an audience with real time exclusive content, albeit suited to a younger demographic.

In December 2016, however, we saw the announcement that Twitter was testing a native offering known as 'Twitter 360' video that claims is not just connecting with a following, but is more about "letting them in to experience something". Users will be able to swipe up and across to change the angle of the view.

 

— Alex Pettitt (@Alexpettitt) December 28, 2016

We also heard the news was that Instagram would be rolling out live video and disappearing photos through its 'Insta Stories' feature. Both will be available to people who follow an account.

Great, we hear you say! More opportunities to get down and dirty with a brand and offer followers a reason to continue to take an interest in your brand.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, without proper planning of this functionality, we believe that these services could be a license to kill.

Imagine, for example, that someone in your organisation thinks of a good idea to start broadcasting live from your brand's profile. Whilst it's brilliant to be agile enough to capitalise on moments of buzz around a topic, what processes are in place to ensure the content is on brand? Might it cause controversy or offence? What happens if it gets out of hand? Who should really be responsible for the live broadcasting schedule? And with specific reference to the panoramic type functionality, who even knows what might be going on in the background that a user will be able to see?

These are all key questions that we address as part of our social media marketing toolkit.

Understanding your current situation in light of social media objectives is an important step in the correct planning of how, when and why you should be using the channels for branded communication. They also throw up the importance of what to do if any issues arise.

So if you want to give yourself the best chance of not being the next social media PR disaster we're reading about (in real time), read of our new guide to avoiding social media mistakes. 

source http://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/social-media-strategy/social-media-campaign-disaster-waiting-happen/

How well integrated is your digital marketing?

It seems you either have what it takes... or not

When speaking to businesses about their marketing, integration is a common challenge, whether that's integration of comms, technology or teams within a business.

The latest Econsultancy / Adobe Digital Intelligence briefing sheds some light on how many businesses have achieved integration. It's encouraging to see that nearly half of businesses can confidently state:

Digital Marketing permeates most of our marketing activities

Kudos to the businesses that say that digital permeates all our marketing activities or that they are 'digital first'.

It's less encouraging to see that this figure hasn't changed much over the last 3 years. What's more, integration is severely lacking in nearly one-fifth of companies say that digital marketing is 'very much separate'.

• Source: Digital Intelligence 2017 briefing
• Sample: 14,163 respondents globally (64% client-side)
• Recommended Smart Insights resource: Managing a Digital Marketing Centre of Excellence - Explains how a DCoE or Marketing Centre of Excellence can improve integration and quality of digital marketing throughout a business

source http://www.smartinsights.com/traffic-building-strategy/integrated-marketing-communications/well-integrated-digital-marketing/

Dave Chaffey on how to use personas for Digital Marketing

Dave Chaffey talks with Grant LeBoff about how to correctly use Marketing Personas

Personas are a term that people often hear about in marketing, but don't always completely understand. In this video, Dave Chaffey, our CEO and  author of Digital Marketing, explains to Grant Leboff what personas are and how they can be useful.

No headphones? - You can always read the transcript below instead.

Grant Leboff: Dave, one of the things that I think people hear about in marketing and don't always completely understand what they are and how useful they can be, is this idea of ‘personas’. Perhaps you can explain a bit more about that for us.

Dave Chaffey: Yeah, for sure, personas, I'm a big fan of them, but they're not without their problems if you don't get them right. I first heard about them working with HSBC over 10 years ago, and they weren't really used at that stage. Where I think they're most useful is that they allow you to give a customer-centric view of the website. So rather than someone's opinion about the content and the customer journey, you're putting them in the context of a real person. Around that time actually, 2005, I saw the example of Dulux the paint brand, and how they used them. They identified six different audiences, actually five of them were female, because they found through their research that that's who has got an opinion on paint.

What they would do for each of those personas is they'd think through how they consumed media online and offline, what sort of sites they like, really getting inside their mind, how they search. A good practice is to have a primary persona where it's often, not most important by volume, but the person that you most need to get it right for. With Dulux, their primary persona was Penny, and she wanted to do something amazing, something creative with her flat, but she wasn't sure where to start. What Dulux did was then to think about the customer journey and the content that would support that.

I think if you still go to the Dulux responsive site you will see this message, "Be inspired," and this was a message for that persona to guide them through how they could do something amazing, and to get them to buy into the brand.

Grant Leboff: So for a business that wants to go down this route of looking at personas and starting to become more customer-centric in that way, would you advice the first thing to look at their customer database currently and start to identify those personas? How would they start the journey?

Dave Chaffey: That's right, you can look at the customer profiles that you've collected and try to group them. Usually we say around three to ten is representative, so in Smart Insight as our personas, we might have a size of a business from small, medium, large, but we also layer on the roles. So one persona we have is for the digital marketing manager, another one would be for an agency owner who's looking to improve digital marketing in their agency and for their clients. When you're at that stage of three to six, you really need to go out and talk to people directly, we can't tell this through the analytics, it's got to be more personal. That means that it's not a cheap activity to get right, but the depth of insight you get really allow you to develop more relevant content.

Grant Leboff: How are they utilized ... You are in the business, because you can imagine a team gets together, looks at the database, puts them, they're six or seven personas together, how do they then manifest themselves through the business so that people start to understand where that is in the digital marketing team, the customer service team…  How have you seen that done well?

Dave Chaffey: Right, okay. I've often seen it done badly where you've got digital or web design personas, but they haven't mapped to segmentation or targeting elsewhere in the business. The first thing is they need to be multi-channel personas across the board, and then it's just including them within the whole planning and campaign management process, so when you're kicking off a new campaign, you do start with the business goals, but you include the personas at an early stage, and you try and build the content to engage that audience and to develop the right messaging for the different personas. That can then cascade into the different channels. We are going to target this persona in search marketing or social media, or emails. It's developing a more personalized content for each of those personas, so doing a mapping activity really.

source http://www.smartinsights.com/persuasion-marketing/marketing-personas/dave-chaffey-use-personas-digital-marketing/

What is a Digital Marketing Centre of Excellence and why do you need one?

How brands can use a Digital Marketing Centre of Excellence to improve their results from digital

Since digital marketing is so complex and changes so fasts, many businesses can be left floundering in their use of digital marketing if they don't have the right investment in digital marketing skills and best practices. It's challenging since 'change is constant', audiences move to new channels, platforms change their algorithms and consumers start using ad-blocking tech or become 'banner blind'. Because of the pace of change, many brands lack experience in dealing with the kinds of problems posed by digital marketing in 2017.

This often leads to disappointing results from digital marketing, which can then create a suspicion of digital and a failure to properly invest in the new emerging technologies and channels which will be powering growth in the years ahead.

These challenges have led to many brands utilizing a Digital Center/Centre of Excellence in order to concentrate knowledge and learn important lessons which can be applied across the business. This article explains what they are and gives some reasons why you might need them.  We're also interested to know your take on them. Since they require a large commitment they tend to be only for medium to large businesses, so it's unclear how many people use them. Do let us know whether they are relevant for you or your business with this quick poll.

What are Digital Centres of Excellence?

The Digital Centre of Excellence (DCoE) is an organisational design response taken by an ever-increasing number of businesses. The role of a Digital CoE is to maximise the potential opportunities of digital media and technology to meet the multichannel marketing goals of an organisation by encouraging adoption of best practice in deploying relevant digital media, experiences, insight and technology across an organisation.

Accenture recommend that a digital center of excellence should bring together the following attributes:

A digital centre of excellence should be versatile, and will be useful for a number of functions. We've marked out some of the key functions of DCoE will be useful for across the Smart Insights RACE framework.

Smart Insights Business members can learn more in our guide on Best practices for a Digital Marketing CoE.

Why do you need a Digital Centre of Excellence?

There are many reasons why your business may benefit from creating a digital centre of excellence.  Here are 10 we think are important. A DCoE can...

1. Define and own overall digital strategy across business and manage projects to build new features into the site.
2. Build up a detailed knowledge of the businesses audience, and help channels better target their key market/demographic.
3. Focus on strategic projects which marketers working on BAU campaigns may not have time to - e.g. setting up a contact sequence for marketing automation
4. Run structured tests / AB multivariate which are a specialist job
5. Encourage adoption of digital marketing - evangelise
6. Update whole business on changes in digital marketing - like our cheatsheet - and test some of the latest techniques
7.  Audit all your martech platforms and break out of channel-based group think to concentrate on business goals.
8. Align the marketing strategy with the brand purpose, rather than letting brand purpose be lost in the day to day work of the marketing department.
9. Home in on the brand's unique selling point and better align the strategy to enhance the brand's USP.
10. Prevent digital teams wasting time by charging off to use every new marketing channel, and can instead make strategic decisions about where to invest resources, i.e. proper digital governance.

source http://www.smartinsights.com/managing-digital-marketing/digital-marketing-centre-exellence-need-one/