For brands aiming to target consumers via social media, the tone they use for their message is vital. Fresh research is explored here by Andrew Watts, who discusses content marketing methods and shows which social media sales triggers work best – and why.
If you visit a website on your mobile phone and it doesn’t render correctly, it’s iritating – right? And it happens more than you think, as responsive web design on mobiles isn’t easy – even in today’s tech-driven world. So what should brands do to ensure the user experience isn’t spoilt by poor website performance? Eran Kinsbruner details a four-step strategy.
In this digital age, modern buyers have often already made their decision before they reach the salesperson. How do companies stay ahead of that trend? Marketers will need to be more involved post-sale, AI-powered solutions must gain traction, marketing content should improve and the traditional B2B salesperson must change, says Andy MacMillan – citing this year as the tipping point in the digitisation of B2B customer relationships.
Zheng Zhang explores the evolution of the ad tech ecosystem and outlines key features of this programmatic era. He highlights the challenges many advertisers currently face when aiming to achieve secure and efficient ‘easy advertising’ and advises that specific, emerging technologies can be leveraged, to advance solutions and diversify the user experience in a highly saturated market.
Marketing automation is being used increasingly to allow the social media team to focus on the quality of the marketing creative, targeted at the right audience, says Jeremy Wood, who champions end-to-end management as the ideal social ladder to reach the dizzy heights of customer engagement and insight.
Technology is only valuable if you combine knowledge of what you want it to achieve with the ability to interpret what it tells you. So says William Roberts, discussing whether CMOs aiming to bridge the Digital Divide should be optimising data and incentivising customer behaviour by aligning customer understanding with tech strategy.
Ranking high in search engine results pages (SERP) is important, but the main aim of your digital marketing strategy should be to leverage search engine optimisation in order to create real value for the user and to improve the user experience. Here are crucial SEO tips that explain how… and why:
High street sales figures make grim reading currently, as rising inflation is clearly impacting consumer spending levels. And, with household incomes failing to keep pace, there is little sign of an upturn for retailers – in the immediate future at least. But Peter Zeun argues that in these difficult times, when it is getting ever harder for retailers to persuade consumers to spend their hard-earned cash in store or online, putting in place the right customer engagement and retention strategies is increasingly imperative for any brand. So start now, scrutinise your CRM strategies and take control of the future.
Research shows that more than half of consumers stop buying after a poor customer service interaction and that 95% ‘share’ bad experiences – so what, if anything, are companies doing to stop customers ‘falling through the cracks’ in the multichannel experience brands are offering? And how can they improve that offering? Chris Robinson says they should start by looking to their lines of communication and ensuring their customers can easily reach them.
Are you aiming to deploy a successful social media strategy next year? As 2017 draws to a close, social media expert Luan Wise shares her marketing checklist for 2018 and reasons why it’s futile to focus on future trends.