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Best Analytics Tools to Use for Digital Marketing

Best Analytics Tools to Use for Digital Marketing

What are Analytic tools and how are they useful?

Analytics tools are software that helps businesses collect, process, and analyze data to understand their online performance and make informed decisions. These tools provide valuable insights into various aspects of a business’s digital marketing strategy, such as website traffic, number of visitors, the sources of traffic, and user behavior on the website.

Web analytics tools 

These can help businesses understand which marketing channels are driving the most traffic and make informed decisions on where to focus their efforts. These tools help businesses track and analyze data in real time, allowing them to make quick and informed decisions based on the latest data. This can help businesses stay ahead of the competition and make the most of their digital marketing efforts.

Social media analytics tools 

These are designed to help businesses track and analyze their social media performance. These tools provide insights into the reach, engagement, and impact of a business’s social media campaigns. Social media analytics tools can help businesses understand how their social media efforts are resonating with their audience and make informed decisions on how to improve their strategies.

Email analytics tools 

These are designed to help businesses track the performance of their email campaigns. These tools provide insights into email opens, clicks, and conversions, and offer a range of features to help businesses create and optimize their email campaigns. Email analytics tools can help businesses understand the effectiveness of their email campaigns and make informed decisions on how to improve them.

With so many analytics tools available in the market, it can be overwhelming to choose the best ones for your business. Here are some of the best analytics tools for digital marketing:

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a web analytics tool that provides insights into a business’s website traffic and user behavior. It is a free tool that offers a wide range of features, including audience demographics, acquisition channels, and real-time data.

One of the key features of Google Analytics is its ability to track and analyze website traffic. Businesses can see how many visitors they are getting, where they are coming from, and how long they are staying on their website. This can help businesses understand which marketing channels are driving the most traffic and make informed decisions on where to focus their efforts.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media analytics tool that helps businesses track and analyze their social media performance. It provides insights into the reach, engagement, and impact of a business’s social media campaigns.

Hootsuite offers a range of features for businesses to track and analyze their social media performance, including the ability to schedule and publish posts, track engagement, and measure the impact of campaigns.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is an email analytics tool that helps businesses track the performance of their email campaigns. It provides insights into email opens, clicks, and conversions, and offers a range of features to help businesses create and optimize their email campaigns.

Mailchimp offers a range of features for businesses to create and send email campaigns, including templates, A/B testing, and automation. It also provides insights into the performance of these campaigns, including the number of emails opens, clicks, and conversions.

SEMrush

SEMrush is a comprehensive analytics tool that helps businesses track and analyze their search engine performance. It provides insights into keyword rankings, backlinks, and paid search campaigns.

SEMrush offers a range of features for businesses to track and improve their search engine performance, including keyword research, technical SEO analysis, and backlink analysis. It also provides insights into paid search campaigns, including ads, spends, and performance data.

HubSpot

HubSpot is a powerful analytics tool that offers a range of features for businesses, including website traffic analysis, lead generation, and customer relationship management.

HubSpot provides insights into website traffic, including sources, behavior, and conversions. It also offers a range of features for lead generation, such as forms and pop-ups, and customer relationship management, including email and live chat.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is another popular social media analytics tool that helps businesses track and analyze their social media performance. It provides insights into social media metrics, such as reach, engagement, and sentiment, and offers a range of features for social media management, including scheduling and publishing.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact is another popular email analytics tool that helps businesses track and analyze their email campaigns. It offers a range of features for email marketing, including templates, automation, and A/B testing, and provides insights into email performance, such as opens, clicks, and conversions

Conclusion

Analytics tools are an essential part of any digital marketing strategy. They help businesses track and analyze their online performance and make informed decisions. The tools mentioned above are some of the best analytics tools available in the market and can help businesses of all sizes and industries.

We hope this article helped you learn something new and added value to your time. Want to stay up to date with the latest in digital marketing? Catch us on social media on our handles below and we’re there to help you.

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AI copywriting and PPC performance

AI copywriting and PPC performance

The fact that this technology works by feeding a system with loads and loads of data, setting up systems to help the computer analyze the input and generate fitting output from the existing data in a different language, makes it clear that AI is not here to replace humanity, instead, it works like smart storage or a smart encyclopedia to aid the work process and help people work faster. AI copywriting can simply translate to a productivity hiking mechanism in a simpler language.

What is AI?

AI, or artificial intelligence, refers to the ability of a computer or machine to perform tasks that would typically require human intelligence, such as learning, problem-solving, and decision-making. This is achieved through the use of algorithms and machine learning techniques, which allow the AI system to analyze and interpret data, and make predictions or decisions based on that information.

AI systems can be trained to perform a wide range of tasks, from recognizing objects in images and understanding spoken language, to playing games and making predictions. Some common applications of AI include image and speech recognition, language translation, and autonomous vehicles. 

One of the key characteristics of AI is its ability to adapt and learn from experience. This allows AI systems to improve their performance over time, and to handle more complex tasks. This technology can be applied to a wide range of fields, including healthcare, finance, transportation, and manufacturing, among others.

What is AI copywriting?

Machine Learning and AI opened a whole new world of ideas and techniques for us to experiment with. AI copywriting is the process of using artificial intelligence (AI) to create written content. This can be used for a variety of purposes, such as generating marketing copy, news articles, or social media posts. AI copywriting can be done using natural language processing (NLP) algorithms and machine learning techniques, which allow the AI system to understand and generate human-like language.

There are several benefits to using AI for copywriting. For one, it can save time and effort by automating the writing process. Additionally, AI systems can generate high-quality content that is consistent and free of errors. AI copywriting can also be personalized, allowing for the creation of customized content for different audiences.

Another major use of this tech is in copyediting, AI has built-in tools to correct grammar and vocabulary. They can also offer beautifully fabricated rephrased sentences. This software is generally driven by loads of well-written texts such as dictionaries and books from famous authors. Some of the most famous pieces of tech among these are Grammarly and Quillbot.

AI in Digital Marketing

AI has proved to be unexpectedly useful in a lot of ways in digital marketing, specifically designed for these tasks, it’s pretty fast and accurate. Here are some of the most evident uses of AI copywriting.

Generating ideas

AI can help generate ideas for topics to write about, by analyzing data and trends to identify potential angles and topics that are likely to be of interest to readers.

Research Assistance

AI can help with research by quickly and efficiently gathering information from a variety of sources, allowing writers to focus on the creative aspects of writing.

Content creation

AI can be used to generate initial drafts of content, which can then be edited and refined by a human writer. This can save time and effort on the part of the writer, allowing them to focus on more complex or creative tasks.

Editing and proofreading

AI can be used to assist with editing and proofreading, by providing suggestions for grammar and style improvements, as well as identifying potential errors or inconsistencies in the text.

Personalization

AI can be used to personalize marketing messages based on individual customer preferences and behaviours. This can make the messages more relevant and engaging to the recipient, increasing the likelihood of conversion.

Optimization

AI can analyze data from previous marketing campaigns to identify patterns and trends that are associated with higher conversion rates. This can help marketers optimize their messages and tactics to improve their effectiveness.

Testing and experimentation

AI can be used to quickly and efficiently test and experiment with different versions of marketing messages and tactics, allowing marketers to identify the most effective approaches in a shorter amount of time.

SEO

AI copywriting can help with SEO and keyword selection by using natural language processing (NLP) to analyze a website’s content and determine which keywords and phrases are most commonly used and relevant to the site’s content. This can help the site’s content to rank higher in search engine results for those keywords, which can in turn drive more traffic to the site. 

Additionally, AI copywriting tools can help to generate new content for a website, using the same NLP techniques to ensure that the content includes the most relevant and effective keywords for SEO. This can help to improve the overall quality and relevance of a website’s content, which can also contribute to better search engine rankings.

Conclusion

AI copywriting can be used in digital marketing to generate high-quality, relevant content for websites and other digital platforms. This can help to improve a company’s search engine rankings and drive more traffic to its website, increasing its online visibility and ultimately leading to more sales and revenue. AI copywriting tools can also be used to analyze a website’s existing content and suggest improvements, making it more effective at attracting and engaging visitors.

Thanks for sticking with us until the end! We hope that this post was insightful and that it has sparked some new ideas for you. Be sure to find us on social media for more such relevant content, it’s free!

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First-Party Data – The Future of Digital Marketing

First-Party Data - The Future of Digital Marketing

The internet is more privacy conscious than ever. Some of the biggest tech companies have made the move to ban third-party cookies, which track people’s activity across the web. These cookies provided detailed customer information to advertising platforms and allowed businesses to create ultra-targeted campaigns. For those wondering how the ad campaigns will succeed without this data, the solution is first-party data. 

What is first-party data?

First-party data is information about your audience collected by your business. You don’t purchase or use insights from another business. Instead, customers directly provide you with their information. First-party data may be anything from customer emails to a record of different actions someone takes on your website, like purchases or content downloads.

You don’t need to manually track every interaction with your customers. Great tools exist to help you manage your first-party data. They are a customer relationship management system (CRM) and a customer data platform (CDP). Both of these technologies gather first-party data that helps you gauge where your potential customers are in the sales pipeline and how you can best interact with them to make a sale. CRM software offers you a way to track interactions between your team and your customers.

It is a Central location for remembering customer interactions like sales calls, deals won, and contact information. A CRM makes a huge difference for your sales team. A CDP helps you track the interactions a customer takes after they discover your business. This gathers information like website behaviour and user demographics to help you understand more about your audience. A CDP can help make your marketing strategy more personalized and effective. 

Why does it matter?

  • From a data compliance perspective, there is very minimal risk for business owners. 
  • From a quality perspective, there are a lot of questions about the likes of Google and the other conglomerates about the quality of the data that is accessible. 
  • From an accuracy perspective, as you collect it, you understand the quality of it, and then you know it is accurate because it is very much one-to-one. 
  • From a relevancy perspective, if you collect it in a correct way, and you use it correctly, you have greater insight into the relevance of the specific audiences so that you can use it later on in ways that apply to your business.
  • Cost-effectiveness – It is very cost-effective to use your data in your customer base because it provides a strong return on investment results.

Benefits of first-party data

  • Reach consumers who expect to hear from your business

It might be easy to tap into third-party data. But what you save in time and effort, you pay for in a lack of marketing effectiveness, especially as these capabilities start to disappear. First, party data is collected from your website visitors, email subscribers, and current customers. They have chosen to make a purchase, contact you, or take another action with your business.

Your marketing messages are likely to be welcome, not ignored – especially if it is useful to them in their journey to make a purchase. In fact, research shows that brands that use first-party data in their campaigns see improvement in their conversions, brand awareness, and other business metrics. 

  • Tailor the brand experience to your customers.

More than 60% of consumers expect businesses to use personalization. One study revealed that 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a company if they experience personalization. Using your customer data you can craft ultra-targeted ads based on different interactions with your business. You can send extremely relevant emails to people who fit your ideal customer profile.

You may even upload a list of contacts targeted with Google ads customer match. First-party data can lead to more successful, personalized campaigns for your business. 

  • Increase your marketing ROI

Targeting people who have shown significant interest in your business means you don’t have to waste money or time on irrelevant low-quality leads. You can focus your budget on the people who are most likely to convert with the highest customer lifetime value, leading to less wasted spending and a positive return on your marketing investment. 

How to collect first-party data?

Make sure your customers know to process their information and what you will do with it once you have it. In addition, give people a way to opt out, if they only want some marketing messages or decide that they want none. A tried-and-true strategy to collect first-party data is to offer something valuable in exchange for customer information. 

Tips for gathering first-party data 

What can you offer people that makes them want to give you their emails, names or phone numbers?

Some strategies to gather this data include: 

  • Ask people to fill out an email subscription form on your website to receive a helpful newsletter 
  • Offer a rewards program in which people share their information to get special deals and benefits when they shop with you. 
  • Track customer information when they make online and offline purchases
  • Provide a unique piece of content to those who give you their contact information.
  • Sharing an information-packed webinar with people who RSVP via email.
  • Adding a contact form to your website that asks people for their information.

And with that we come to the end of this comprehensive journey, do let us know your thoughts and takeaways from it in the comments down below. Throw us a follow on social media on the below handles to stay updated. Till then, we’ll catch you in the next one.

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Cracking the best times to post on Instagram

Cracking the best times to post on Instagram

If you have been seeing a decrease in the number of views that you are getting and the number of followers you are getting on Instagram it is probably because you are posting at the wrong time. The best time to post on Instagram has recently changed and if you don’t update the time that you are posting, fewer people are going to see your content which means you are not going to be getting as many views, not going to get as many followers and you are not going to be able to take advantage of the organic reach. It is easier to grow on Instagram right now than it was earlier. 

Now is the best time to grow on Instagram, as it is fully monetizable. You can get paid just for uploading reels, and as long as you are posting at the right time, you are going to see a massive increase in both the amount of use and the number of followers that you are getting on Instagram. 

What does Instagram say about the best time to post?

The CEO of Instagram Adam Mosseri has said the following things:

  • Know where your target audience is located
  • Post before peak times
  • There is no perfect time to post. 

Does the time you post on Instagram matter?

Choosing the right times to post or publish your content is often said to maximize the reach and post engagement, which in turn helps in earning a great return for the marketing efforts. So, to think about the best time to post varies according to the industry, or the day of the week. 

3 Best times to post

  1. The first best time to post is from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. You need to make sure that you are posting at the general best times to be posting. Posting somewhere within this time frame should give you a boost in reach, views and engagement. There are two reasons why this time frame is effective. The first is that it covers lunchtime. People who are on lunch break, and taking a breather from their daily duties will check their phones while they eat. The second reason is that a lot of people’s morning schedules are hectic. 
  1. The second best time to be posting on Instagram is from 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. This is going to be the time frame that people are leaving work or school. To find out the general best time to post, to make your post go viral, you need to look at the best time to post for your specific account. For this, you need to go into your analytics, see when your followers are online, and begin posting during the time slot where the majority of them are online. You need to wait at least an hour in between each post unless you are doing a story post. 
  1. The next best time to post on Instagram is from 8 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. This is the time when we see a surge in app usage. You need to be posting at these times, for your followers’ time zones wherever they over-index, that is a time zone that you should be posting in when it comes to the best time to post specifically for your account.

Best time to post on Instagram according to the content

1. Instagram feed 

Wednesday – 11 am

Friday – 10 am – 11 am

2. Reels and IGTV

Monday – 5 am

Thursday – 5 am

3. Instagram Live

Monday – Friday – 11 am or 7 pm – 9 pm

4. Instagram Stories

Monday – Friday – 11 am – 1 pm or late afternoon.

As per the research done on over 30,000 different accounts on Instagram, by Sproutsocial, which is a social media management and intelligence tool, here are the best times to post. 

  • Monday- 11am
  • Tuesday- 10am- 1pm
  • Wednesday – 10am -1pm
  • Thursday- 10am-11am
  • Friday- 10am-11am

The best days to post on Instagram are Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and the worst day to post is Sundays. Loading up reels should be avoided. Posting too much on the story or posting too much on the feed, should be avoided. It makes people ineligible to be able to see your content, which means your reach is going to decrease. You need to be waiting on your feed, for at least an hour in between each post. You should only be posting one to four times a day on Instagram. 

Just because you are posting at the right time on Instagram doesn’t mean you are going to go viral. It doesn’t mean you are going to get more followers. It isn’t just the time you are posting, it is the hashtags that are used, the topic you are using, the length of your video, the sound that you are using, and all these other things that are going to combine to make your post go viral. The posting time is important, but it is not what makes or breaks the reel. Good quality content has great importance for it to perform well. 

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Content Marketing Digital Technology eCommerce Marketing Social Media

Cracking the best times to post on Twitter

Twitter

What is the importance of posting at the right time?

Twitter has been running its feeds since 2016, like other social media platforms on a popularity basis or an engagement, and not on reverse chronology. But now citing users’ feedback Twitter allows people to switch their feeds from top-ranked tweets to the latest post tweets in a click. A reverse chronological feed shows the Twitter users a tweet as they are getting posted. As time passes, more recent tweets would replace these on the top of the feed, and that is why you need to publish your tweet when most of your audience is online.

The average best time to tweet on Twitter?

Just like most social media, Twitter has no best time to post either. This is simply because different businesses have different audiences and so are their preferences and content posting time. But then you can always check out popular social media marketing companies suggesting when brands should post on Twitter. Twitter provides all the tools. Dig into your Twitter analytics. Your Twitter analytics provides a complete overview of your profile visits, tweet impressions, and other engagement factors. You can also use Twitter Analytics to track your progress over time and make new posting strategies accordingly. 

To make it easier you can also use Twitter analytics tools. Log in to your Twitter first and click the more button and go to the media studio. There you have to click on the insights button and then click on the audience. The graph provided by Twitter insights there shows when your followers and your audience are watching videos the most on the platform. In the graph each square represents an hour-long block, the darker the square the more active your audience is during that hour. There are also social media sites like sprout social that are dedicated to social media research. 

You can go there and find the best times for Twitter global engagement, and there you can find the best times for posting. Check the date on the articles that you read, to confirm that you are looking at the most recent data for the best time. This is because the times that are the best to post on social media and Twitter specifically change almost weekly. The best day to post on Twitter is Wednesday and Thursday. And the worst day to make a post on Twitter is Saturday. The best time to post on Twitter is Wednesday and Friday at 9:00 a.m. In general Monday to Friday between 8 am and 4 pm are great times to post on Twitter. 

When to post on Twitter for the most engagement?

Considering the recent Twitter algorithms, engagement plays a pivotal role in tweet rankings. When something is posted on Twitter, the common goal that all brands have is to connect with their audience. If you wish to stand out among the tweets of all other brands, you have to be thoughtful, creative, and in harmony with your brand’s tone. 

Things to keep in mind

  • On average, the tweets that are posted between 2 to 3 am get the most engagement. The least amount of engagement happens during work hours i.e between 9 to 5 pm. 
  • The highest number of retweets and favourites happen between 8 pm and 11 pm.

Experts say that it is not a specific time like 8:00 a.m. or noon. You shouldn’t be tweeting during a specific time of the day, you should be tweeting throughout the day from morning to night, when people are sleeping, there are people all around the world. When you are sleeping someone else is awake. So why not tweet and engage? Business never sleeps. If you want to do well, be out there each and every single hour of the day. 

You can use tools like Meet Edgar which will make the whole process easier in which you can keep promoting your content 24/7, so that way you can generate traffic from social sites like Twitter even when you are sleeping. You need to be tweeting multiple times a day, ideally once per hour, and you need to be doing this seven days a week. 

The best thing to do is to test out different post timings using a Twitter scheduling tool. Here you will have to experiment. Try to post your tweets in the morning, noon and evening at specific times and see what works and what doesn’t.

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Data Analytics Digital Technology eCommerce Marketing

Broad Match #101

It can feel like we are always on high alert in the world of digital media, particularly in paid search, waiting for the next product announcement or new beta that will help us squeeze incremental performance out of our paid marketing budget.

Therefore, it may seem counterintuitive that the product that has been around since Google AdWords’ inception, more than two decades ago, will be the single most significant addition to your paid search program in 2022. That product is Broad Match.

What is the prize’s value?

Google’s internal research indicates that advertisers using broad match and smart bidding experience a 30% average conversion increase at a similar CPA. If your KPI is conversion value rather than conversions, for instance, the exact figure you hear will not deviate too much from this 30% mark, although the exact nature of the test may influence the quoted figure.

In order to provide our clients with the most effective solutions, it is our responsibility as an agency to carry out our own experiments that either confirm or disprove the claims made by our media partners. We have made significant investments in this capability at Brainlabs, and our “Hippocampus” database enables us to track the outcomes of all agency-wide tests.

Two significant findings emerged from our extensive recent testing of Broad Match.

  1. Google’s claims were supported by convincing evidence that we discovered. The median uplift we observed was +19%, which is not a figure to be laughed at even though it was just below the 30% mark.
  1. Perhaps even more intriguingly, our analysis demonstrated how much can be concealed behind an average. Not only did we observe a remarkable median uplift, but we also observed that broad match consistently delivered successful tests. Broad match emerged as the winning variant on 46 of the 54 tests we have documented. A success rate of 85 percent is almost unheard of in digital media testing given the wide range of external factors that can influence it.

But let’s step away from the finer points for a moment. You can’t afford to ignore that number, regardless of whether the increase is 19 percent or 30 percent, especially for a feature whose implementation requires almost no effort. The good news is that your budget doesn’t have to stretch as far as a 19% increase: Instead, you can use that added value to improve your CPA or ROAS goals by enabling broad match and maintaining your current investment.

Broad match is the only solution to paid advertising’s problems.

How did we arrive here?

It’s not hard to understand why broad match has earned a bad reputation over the years. In the past, the presence of a broad match in an account was a sure sign of a hands-off management style, which resulted in subpar results and ads served to users who were not even close to buying your product.

The rise of the broad match has been the story of steady and gradual technological advancement over time. Even though there is a lot of talk about it now, few people outside of Google’s engineering and leadership teams probably could have predicted how big a hit it would be more than three years ago.

In February 2021, there was a turning point if ever there was one. Google informed the industry in one of its most important announcements of the year:

The fact that the algorithm had fundamentally shifted away from syntactic matching to semantic matching was encapsulated in that small print. As a result of this change, broad match stopped being a firehose and became a really useful tool for accurately expanding your ad targeting.
The item upgrades haven’t halted there, and today, Google’s vision for wide match keeps on mirroring a gradual process of updates and execution improvements:

Using cutting-edge natural language recognition algorithms, continuously improving data quality and infrastructure, simplifying broad match management, updating the keyword prioritization process, and establishing a joint optimization process for creative, bidding, and keyword targeting. Of course, Google’s current approach to discussing broad matches with advertisers and agencies is anything but subtle.

One of the opportunities that consistently rank highly is the “upgrade your existing keywords to broad match” call to action, which can be found in the recommendations tab of Google accounts all over the world.

The steady stream of product modifications and enhancements will continue despite Google’s bolder communication strategy, with the possibility that many of them will go unnoticed for the most part.

When Is a Broad Match a Bad Match?

In paid search, auction-time bidding is table stakes, as you probably already know. However, this is especially true when the broad match is used. If you aren’t tailoring your bids in real-time with this Google Ads feature, a broad match will almost certainly result in you spending a lot of money on a lot of users who have very little interest in your product at the moment.

However, in the opposite direction of that logic, it is essential to recognize the value that some of those queries that appear to be more fragile bring to the table when combined with smart bidding. We can easily read a search query report, find a few questionable examples, and overreact as humans: We must exclude these queries because they will almost never convert for us!

However, as long as those users have a probability of conversion that is not zero, you are justified in serving an advertisement by setting an appropriate low bid. To be clear, we are not advocating completely hands-off handling of search query reports; you will still need to employ some human judgment. However, if you’re after performance, you should try to give the algorithm as much freedom to optimize as you can handle.

Focusing on the wrong metrics is another common error. After implementing broad match, your paid search account’s dynamics will change, but that’s okay because the numbers you care about will be moving in the right direction. If everything else is equal, switching to a broad match should typically result in the following changes to your campaign metrics:

It is true that some of these numbers are negative, and the less confident marketers in the room are already asking, “Why are my CTR and conversion rate going down?!?”It must be driving less qualified traffic through the broad match!”But the point is that you’ve added value and increased conversions with that additional traffic, and your CPA and ROAS haven’t changed because your bid strategy has paid less for clicks.

Lastly, being able to direct Google’s automation in the right direction is becoming increasingly important. Remember: An algorithm will optimize solely with the intention of achieving a conversion objective. Therefore, you should be prepared to see an increase in low-quality customers if you haven’t developed a conversion goal that is sophisticated enough to distinguish between your most valuable and least valuable customers.

That could mean MQLs that never turn into sales or one-time customers who never return for more purchases, depending on your business. This trade-off can be mitigated by sharing first-party conversion data with Google.

Conclusion

You have every right to be skeptical of broad matches as a mature, world-weary PPC marketer. Make an effort to overcome that, and keep in mind the steady advancements in machine learning.

Keep your attention on the goals of your marketing while you undergo that mental shift, and ideally, consider ways to advance these goals to better target your most valuable customers.
However, the most important thing is to act immediately—do not let the 19% increase pass you by. It would not be an exaggeration to say that broad match has reached the point where we would consider it an essential component of your search strategy. If it isn’t on your list, figure out how to bring it to the forefront and start testing right away.

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Content Marketing Digital Technology eCommerce Marketing Industry Insiders

How to Lead Your Digital Transformation with Marketing 2023

Digital Transformation in Marketing

Every marketer wants to create a better customer experience. The prospect or consumer experience is key to not only conversion and increased revenue, but also customer loyalty and advocacy, so this is what makes or breaks your business.

The Marketing Evolution: The Leadership, Transformation, Skills, Challenges & the Future study found that 71% of senior marketers and 61% of mid-tier marketers are responsible for their organization’s digital transformation.

Yet, according to The 2021 State of Digital Transformation, only 23% of CMOs are supporting digital transformation, with more IT taking the lead.

However, that is not the case as the leader and her team are perfectly positioned to play an active role in the transformation. This blog validates the skills and knowledge that will level up your marketing to accelerate and execute some of the best digital transformation strategies.

Why is a marketing manager best suited to lead?

The role of the marketing team is to inform, influence and transform. This requires unique skills and broad insight into how companies and clients work. When it comes to creating a digital transformation strategy, marketing leaders can step back and look at the big picture. Create a vision of where your company is and needs to be.

This applies to the company as a whole and its functions, not just marketing. Because digital transformation must focus on the entire customer lifecycle, not just part of it.

Know Your Customers Your job is to keep up to date with new trends and developments. This includes not only technology but also customer needs and behaviours. This is important for any business when planning scenarios and looking to the future.

The importance of customer experience cannot be ignored either. Customers are becoming more sophisticated and demand a consistent and seamless omnichannel approach across all touchpoints across the organization.

So when your customers click on your social media post to learn more about your new product, make sure the next touchpoint is related to that product (such as a custom landing page) and mentions your brand. Otherwise, you will quickly lose your customer’s attention.

Understanding Data

Marketing leaders rely on data. This can help you make better decisions, whether it’s paid advertising performance or conversion rates.

There may be vast amounts of data, but it’s the ability to uncover critical insights for your business. You need data that drives performance, leads, and sales. Your marketing team can help your business get there.

Developing a strategy for digital transformation requires not only understanding business data, but also the entire ecosystem. Do you know what your competitors are doing? What is your industry overview and what are the key developments over the next 12 months?

Market research and forecasting are part of the CMO’s job. It’s about assessing the external environment and understanding how companies fit into it. This allows you to improve where it matters and focus on areas that may be underdeveloped or under-resourced within your organization.

Soft Skills

Technical knowledge and skills are essential in today’s work environment, especially in marketing. But it’s not the whole picture.

Equally important are soft skills, also called power skills. This includes behaviour, personality traits, and work habits. It also helps form diverse and agile teams. This is essential to any digital transformation process.

According to ‘The Future of Work:

2022 Global Report’, the top skills employers are looking for are soft skills such as reliability, flexibility, problem-solving and teamwork/collaboration. Other Soft His skills include creativity, innovation, curiosity and persuasiveness.

What Every Marketer Should Have:

1. Agile Strategy

Agility is essential to digital transformation. It helps companies respond to internal and external changes. This rapid pivoting capability helps maintain or improve customer engagement and fosters employee harmony by creating productive and engaged employees.

This is why a marketing leader and his team should adopt agile strategies. But what does that mean?

Enterprise agility is not just about delivering products and software, it’s about how a business is structured, operated and behaved. It’s about establishing deep connections, new directions, and operational flexibility.

2. Enterprise Agility

This should not only focus on being customer-centric, it should also focus on internal talent. Optimizing skills and knowledge through simple upskilling with continuous learning and integrated agile thinking.

Ultimately, it is a holistic and integrated view of the entire business environment, where everyone is working towards a common goal and ready to adapt as needed.

How do you make a difference?

Leading and embracing change can be difficult. But in today’s fast-paced environment, you have no choice. The pandemic shows how quickly the external environment can change without warning, and how we respond can make or break our success.

There are five easy steps: 

1. Listen

This focuses on listening to customers and employees. Take an interest in customer feedback, such as reviews and phone calls, and involve customers in surveys and focus groups. Create a feedback environment for your employees and hold regular meetings to gain insights.

2. Evaluate

Focus on business objectives and relate to KPIs. Then use the data you want to see where you can make the biggest changes. Empower marketers with the information they need to make informed decisions, rather than waiting for more data.

3. Implement 

Educate your team and prepare for change. Each team member should know what, when, and what is expected of them to achieve it. This includes providing training where necessary and being able to discuss the ‘why’ for further development.

4. Execute

This is how you execute your decisions and follow up with your team. This phase asks for you to communicate the firm’s expectations and identify early adopters.

5. Iterate 

Commit to the changes you are making and bring the team along. If you made any changes, go back and repeat these steps for subsequent changes. Change is hard but ultimately worth it.

Conclusion

And with that, we come to the end of this brief journey, hoping that by now you have a rough sketch of the strategies and plans to ride this wave of digital transformation that’s committed to last at least this decade. See you in the next one, catch us on our social media handles below.

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Digital Technology

The Publishing Industry Landscape in the Digital Age

The Publishing Industry Landscape in The digital Age

Needless to say, books are the backbone of human history and knowledge. In fact, the first-ever text written dates back to 3500 BC! And here we are in the world of eBooks and documents, or are we?

Recent studies show that eBook sales have flattened and printed book sales have only boosted with the rise of the digital era. With physical books outselling eBooks, there’s been a 2.1% rise in the printed book industry valuation over a year from 2017 to 2018. 

What does this trend tell us? Are the advancements in the tech world still lacking, or is it a mysterious driving force pushing our generation into this publishing renaissance? Analysts believe that among many other factors, this trend is being driven by the absolute pleasure a reader gets by having a new book in their collection.

With the advancements in the publishing sector and budding artists, readers are attracted to these beautiful-looking books that are just much more than written texts or stories. They’re buying an off-screen, immersive experience.

“The book lover loves to have a record of what they’ve read, and it’s about signaling to the rest of the world. It’s about decorating your home, it’s about collecting, I guess, because people are completists aren’t they, they want to have that to indicate about themselves” says Meryl Halls, managing director of UK’s Bookseller’s association.

Let’s dive deeper into this interesting world of digital publishing. We’ll be breaking this down into five simple parts:

  1. Digitizing Publications
  2. Diversifying Marketing 
  3. Busting the rivalry myth
  4. Role of Amazon
  5. Author’s blueprint to Marketing 

Digitizing Publications

While the eBooks market doesn’t seem to cannibalize printed books, digital publishing seems to take different turns over the years. Chris Lavergne, the CEO of youth culture magazine, documented that even when he had more eBook units sold, the printed copies generated over 7 times more revenue. 

This simply tells that the market for printed books is diverse and generates more revenue. When writers like J.K. Rowling say that they still love to write by hand, it’s quite obvious that readers still love reading from matt papers with a distinctive scent.

Nowadays with the availability of features like Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), budding authors can publish their own books independently. But with the rise of this eBook revolution, rises bigger problems.

With the sheer amount of books constantly being published, the readers will have a blitz of content at their disposal, and eventually, the value of eBooks will decline. A testimonial to this is the 4.5% decline in eBook sales in the first quarter of 2019.

Diversifying Marketing

While 2012 marked the start of a constant decline in the sales of the Amazon Kindle tablet, there’s a new format of books that the population seems to enjoy, and the sales for which only seem to skyrocket.

With the upcoming audiobook platforms like audible, people are having the liberty to multitask while they relish their prose of choice. This draws a new scape of possibilities to the upcoming era of digital publishing.

Diversifying your marketing strategies and using a mix of all the present-day technology can help you reach your target audience. The period we are living in, has seen an upsurge in e-marketing tactics and makes it way easier to advertise, market, and distribute your content.

The most evident & successful example of hybrid marketing is the journey of Penguin Random House. Penguin has been the household name to readers for generations starting all the way back in the 1930s. The brand has shown constant growth with time.

With the emergence of the audiobook culture, penguin launched their own podcast and earned a listening time of 13 million minutes. Swiftly ranking in the top 30s charts of UK podcasts. Similar strategies of hybrid marketing have been implemented by independent sellers by teaming up with distributors and vendors.

Busting the Rivalry myth

After considering the distinction between the digital age of publications and the traditional market for printed books, is it really worth considering this as a rivalry? According to many experts, digital books just serve as an extension of the publishing industry.

If the example of Penguin Random House isn’t enough to convince you that all the channels are serving the same audience, then this statement by the CEO of McGraw-Hill might surprise you. He stated, “maintaining both print infrastructure and digital infrastructure means lower margins, or say a larger readership.”

Digital publishing has its own cons too, it makes it easier for people to get pirated and even free copies of books, but the worst part is they get circulated and affects the sales of eBooks massively. If this issue is somehow taken into account and solved, we could see a new scape of users.

Role of Amazon

Amazon first started as an online book store and later turned into an e-Commerce giant. Something that hasn’t changed over the decades is the love-hate relationship between publishers and Amazon.

It’s a wonderful place to establish your own online store and start selling, but with a big audience comes bigger competition, the sheer amount of sellers present on the platform makes it exceptionally difficult to compete with the bigger sellers that might overshadow your small store.

Author’s blueprint to Marketing 

For individual authors to grow and build an audience for themselves, they need to be prudent marketers. An alternative to this could be having a former audience on social media platforms. Humble the poet and Ravinder Singh are great examples of this.

Utilizing the audience an author has on social media is a great way to headstart your career as an author but it should be known that the process can be tedious if you aren’t familiar with the needs and likings of your target audience.

Almost every city has its homegrown publishing house, it is getting easier to automate and personalize the experience an author is willing to publish and distribute. Hybrid marketing opens up new pathways for reaching your desired audience.

With a unique approach and talent, you can always have hopes of putting out your words into this widespread passion of reading and collecting books. As evident as it is, Books will never go out of trend- they are a culture to relish and preserve. And if you are willing, you are welcome.

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Digital Technology

Growth Hacking #101

Growth Hacking #101

“Growth is important, and most great companies take it seriously” quotes Adam Nash, the CEO and co-founder of Daffy. Growth hacking means figuring out one specific goal and then tackling it with all cylinders firing.Scaling growth hacking is like scaling any business. Growth hackers are really good at doing technical things, being creative, and exploring new things. 

3 things to know before starting hacking your way into growth:

  1. Who are your customers?

It is necessary to figure out what channels your customers are using.

Five different strategies

  • Integrations

If you leverage their user base, you can grow yours. 

How to optimize integrations?

  • Integrations have to make your product better
  • Measure your conversions and revenue 
  • Discover valuable integrations
  • Ask users about integrations
  • Make your partner pages awesome.
  • Work Emails

Everyone has to have an email account. If you can figure out how to tap it, you can definitely get a huge customer base quickly. When people put in an email, you want to try to entice them. With emails, you got to optimize onboarding. It is not that difficult to get people to put in their emails. Good onboarding is important. You have to optimize the onboarding and continually tweak and test it. Without doing that, you will get a big drop-off from emails. It’s all about onboarding. 

  • Embeds

When you are doing the embeds, you have to give people a reason why they should embed. You can’t get people to embed your product or service if there is not a good reason why people should embed it. 

How to optimize embeds?

  • Make it as much easy as possible to embed.
  • Track how well your embeds convert
  • Test relevant call to actions
  • Optimize for search but don’t obsess.
  • Powered by

This option can play a major role in influencing the customer to sign up for your domain and be a part of your customer community. Hence optimising this gesture is of great importance. So test and ready your copy top call action to occupy and make your website fully functional with this feature. Also, make sure to optimize and provide a smooth experience while directing to different pages. It would also be very helpful for you to analyse and study the trends of the users and consumers in your website and these landing pages, their clicks, conversions and LTV. 

  • Free Tools

When you are doing free tools you need to map it out to the customer decision making. You want to educate your prospects a lot of the best free stuff out there like ebooks and information, how to use products, how to get more value out of a service, whatever it may be anything that benefits your user, built a lot of goodwill and it causes them to spend more money with you, tell other companies, friends, about your product and service. Finally, you also want to measure and optimise for revenue. 

  • Think about what you can repurpose
  • Educate your prospects
  • Test your ideas minimally
  • Measure and optimize revenue
  1. Find what’s best for your product

Things to know while starting a business

  • Knowing what you are getting into
  • Keeping a winning mindset
  • Knowing how much is coming in
  • Organizing growth
  • Diversifying

Focus is the most important thing. Keep working on what works.

  1. Some major tactics you need to be aware of:

Growth hacking strategies

  • Shift to high ticket sales

In your industry, you need to figure out who is buying a high ticket and what you can create and package together that gives a high-value high return offer for your clients. If you even just shifted from being low to a mid-price point and went to high-end sales, you would have more loyal customers, you would like your customers better, and it would be so much easier to increase your sales in the short time frame.

  • Revamp your sales scripts

Scripting gets stale, it gets old and if you watch your sales scripting you will see that it works really well for a while and then all of a sudden it becomes a little bit less effective. If you never had sales scripting in the first place you absolutely need to get it, and if you have had great sales scripting, that has worked really well in the past but is not converting as well right now, it just needs an update. 

  • Build a sales system

Your sales system should be telling you who needs to be called and who is ready to progress to the next lead stage. It should be telling you what is your tracking for the month and what the deals are that are in the pipeline so that you know that sales are coming. 

  • Build a sales team

At times the sales owner would not be able to manage everything. So if you want to dramatically increase sales, get an appointment setter to call and schedule qualified conversations for you. 

  • Call every single lead that comes through your business. 

If you want to dramatically increase your sales, call every single lead that comes through your door. Outreach is very important. Never wait for the sales to reach you. Make sure that you go out and get them. 

  • Converting Ad Creatives by Artificial Intelligence: When you’re scaling up using Facebook ads, testing various audiences with different creatives becomes key. Certain challenges come along with it. So make sure you create high-converting creatives for yourself.
  •  Your Competitor is Your BEST FRIEND: There’s no denying the fact that you learn a lot more from your competitors than anybody else. You might not like them but the best business lessons can be learnt from them. 
  • Find the best Color Combination:The biggest reason why some landing pages don’t convert is the colour combination. Colors have their language which is true in the case of landing pages.
  • Grow with Technology: It’s pretty well-known that if you want to win high-paying clients, your research work on them before pitching, needs to be super strong and what’s better than pinpointing their weak points. To identify the weak points or suggest better ways to get more leads or sales, you can understand the technology they are using on their websites.

Growth hacking as we have discussed here will come in real handy if you wish to boost your brand and its reach. To scale growth hacking as a skill using multimedia resources would be a very choice. Making a shirt video explaining how to go about certain activities pertaining to your brand or tutorials or other interesting content is a very simple way to scale growth hacking as a skill. Set your system up in a way that is occupied for scaling and add elements into your product that will give it a certain zest and feel that will surely make it viral in an instant. With more desired features added, your product will surely shine in the market. Iterate about the things you want to the customers but in a new and fresh way each time. The goal is to keep the customer happy and satisfied. Also, try to get VIP customers onboard manually giving them that special attention making the VIP service more relevant and worth having. With such a mindset you should be able to reach the aim and goals that you aspire to achieve in no time through growth hacking.

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Digital Technology

QR Code Marketing

QR Code Marketing

What exactly is a QR code?

The QR stands for quick response. They’re essentially squares with black and white symbols on them. Every QR code is unique and holds encrypted information like a website link, product landing page, promotional details, coupon, or other information. Whenever someone scans the QR code with a smartphone or tablet, the code reveals the encrypted information, taking the user to the desired destination. This is very similar to that of a barcode, but it can hold more and different types of data. 

How to use QR codes for marketing?

To have a successful marketing campaign, you have to know who it is you’re marketing to. Whether you’re conducting a survey or poll, asking people to sign up for an email list or taking orders, it’s important to get information from customers through some kind of an online form.

The most common purpose of a QR code is to direct users to a specific landing page. This page could have a sign-up link, a campaign page, or even a product catalogue. The possibilities are virtually endless. Make sure your QR code directs users to your campaign’s landing page rather than a home page. This way, users don’t have to navigate to the correct page. Also, make sure your website is mobile-friendly, as many users will be scanning on the go. Make QR codes fun and exciting by including instant coupons, freebies and offers. Instead of having a customer clip a printed coupon, you can create a QR code that saves the offer directly to the user’s mobile wallet. Users can then easily provide the digital coupon during checkout at a physical retailer. You can also direct QR scanners to an online store. Instead of asking them to manually enter a promo code, you can set it up so the discount is already applied at checkout.

Promotional QR codes are very versatile. You can integrate them into print ads, direct mail, or even a giant billboard. A whopping 92% of consumers consider online reviews when they’re searching for local businesses. So turn your biggest customers into your biggest advocates? Simply include a QR code on product packaging along with a brief message encouraging customers to scan the code and leave a review on platforms like Yelp. Throwing in a freebie for leaving a review won’t hurt either. Use QR codes to incentivize customers to download and use your branded apps. Context is key here the QR codes direct users to apps that complement the ad or printed material where the code appears. 71% of shoppers report that digital billboards grab their attention more than online ads do. Pairing outdoor spaces with QR codes can enable innovative marketing ideas to flourish. 

What’s great about using QR codes in your marketing campaign is the convenience of tracking and reporting. With web analytics and other campaign measurement tools, you can easily track the number of scans over time, capture geographic data, and gather additional info to measure your return on investment.

No matter how you decide to integrate QR codes in your next marketing campaign, they’re a great way to promote interaction and engagement, not to mention super efficient.

You can drive data collection from an online form, direct customers to a website, or deliver instant coupons, freebies and offers. You can also direct customers to social media pages, download or launch apps from QR scans, and even conduct scavenger hunts. Whichever way you choose to use QR codes, one thing is for sure your customers will have a unique experience. 

Five tips- How to integrate QR codes into your marketing strategy?

  1. Determine where the QR code should go. So what landing page or page on your site or where do you want the user to end up when they use the QR code? What’s that destination? Figure out what that URL is.
  2. Take that URL and create a Trackable URL from it. One way to do this is to add a simple ref code to the end of your URL. To do this, simply add a question mark, reflected by whatever you feel, which will help you identify the campaign. This is a really important step because you’re going to track the performance of your QR code, and without doing this, you won’t be able to do that.
  3. Generate your QR code. There are many free QR code generators. Just go to Google and search QR code generator and you’ll find several tools. Pick one that you like. Use the Trackable URL, paste that in there, and generate the QR code. By doing this, the QR code will fire that URL that you created when somebody uses it.
  4. Once you have generated your QR code, download that image and add it to your marketing materials or your ad campaign so that it’s in your TV commercial or on your flyer or wherever you want it to be, so somebody can use it.
  5. Track the performance of your QR code over time in analytics. So within analytics, because you created that Trackable URL, you’ll be able to see the performance. You’ll be able to see how many people use the QR code, how many people landed on your landing page, how long they stayed, if they converted, if they became a lead, if they made a purchase, everything. That’s the beauty of using the Trackable URL. Now you can track the performance of things like print materials, flyers, direct mailers, TV commercials, and brand campaigns of all sorts by using your QR code, you can then track the performance if you use the Trackable URL.

Some ways you can use QR codes in marketing campaigns.

  • You can boost brand identity because QR codes could impact retention, loyalty, and brand advocacy. By providing creative, convenient ways to use your codes, you can reach the right people on their terms. 
  • Brands can now customize QR code designs, including their colours, CDAs and frames. After personalizing your QR code to fit your brand, you can then drive traffic to your website, link them to Google Maps, or send them to social media accounts. 
  • You can increase brand transparency because QR codes can help drive that transparency. Manufacturers and brands must be transparent about what’s in their products and how it’s made. By placing codes on packages, wrappers, and containers, brands can make it simple for consumers to click through to find out more about the product. This transparency promotes engagement and also builds trust and improves brand reputation.
  • Increase Customer Engagement- Empowering customers to pay on their terms not only makes life easier but can also help increase engagement.
  • QR codes can avoid the situation of customers carrying cash or cards and enable convenient and contactless point-of-sale transactions.
  • What most folks care about the most is generating more leads. What’s important to keep in mind here is being cohesive with the customer journey and adding value. It’s great to get more leads, appointments, phone calls, and all those bottom-funnel metrics that we all care so much about. But maybe it’s adding value somewhere at the top of the funnel that shortens that customer journey and leads to a higher lifetime value.

Are QR codes still relevant?

They’ve been around for years, and marketers have debated whether they are the next big thing or are nearing extinction. Many businesses are trying to keep their daily operations safe and contactless. And it turns out QR codes are the solution.