The biggest barriers to online purchase? [Infographic]

Statistics on consumer psychology on Ecommerce sites

Have you ever wondered about which are the biggest consumer concerns that are a barrier to online purchase? For example, what is the perception if your website page is slow to load, what consumers actually think about your videos or if on-line vouchers affect the decision to buy. Of course, the best way is to ask consumer direct, by a panel of customers or through conducting a usability test. But as a quick alternative, check out the research we have compiled in the new Vouchercloud infographic on consumer buying psychology.

The findings tell you some of the ‘statistics and habits behind the clicks’: 31% of consumers would be more likely to buy a product after watching a video since it reinforces their confidence, and 41% would abandon the shopping cart if there were hidden charges.

More useful resources on e-commerce

• Ominichannel E-Commerce Satisfaction Drivers


• Improve conversions after the click


• Using Psychology to increase conversion


• Avoiding Conversion Trap Paths

from Smart Insights http://ift.tt/1eHBTJY

via IFTTT

A guide to running an effective Discovery process

How digital agencies and consultants can use Discovery to improve the value they deliver to their clients

Over the last couple of years I have seen an increasing focus amongst agencies on improving their client discovery projects. In this article, I describe a process I recommend to run effective discovery.

The post is aimed at marketing and in particular digital marketing agencies and consultants, but client-side marketing teams looking to review their position in the market may also find it useful.

More details on the questions to ask during discover are available in this client discovery process template I have developed for Expert members. You may also find the brand audit in the Smart Insights Agency Toolkit useful.

The term “Discovery” is not used universally, so let’s start with the obvious “what?” and “why?” questions.

What is discovery?

The term discovery graces a lot of agency process charts on pitches but what do we mean by it and what is its value? My view is that the purpose of the discovery stage of a project and the insight that is delivered from it ensures we produce marketing assets and campaigns that are relevant, engaging and effective for our (or our clients) audience and eventual customers.

Anthony Iannarino has a useful definition of client discovery :

“Discovery is about learning what your client needs, their strategic indicatives, their goals, and their outcomes. Discovery work is what allows you to neatly tie anything you propose to what your client needs and to tailor it to those specific needs”.

So, discovery is about collating and analyzing insights about brands, their competitors and most importantly, the characteristics, beliefs, behaviour and perceptions of their audiences. It should involve undertaking as thorough an investigation as possible (within real world constraints) of a range of research data that is pertinent to the engagement you are involved in.

By that I mean that if you have an open brief from a client (and subject to budget or your own pre-agreed time investment) you will look at ‘everything’, for example: the overall market, existing marketing initiatives and their efficacy, brand metrics, social network insights, existing customer, prospects or stakeholders and their personas

But more likely you will focus on discrete areas of discovery to serve a specific client brief or set of marketing objectives: ‘Market / marketplace discovery ‘, ‘social media landscape discovery’, ‘campaign effectiveness discovery’, ‘website /ecommerce efficacy discovery’ etc.

Why do discovery?

It’s simple, discovery enables agencies and consultants to formulate robust insights about the business of their clients that leads to well-written creative, content, technical and marketing (e.g. media / channel selection) briefs. This in turn should then lead to the best solutions possible, be they content strategies, SEO, website build initiatives or broader integrated marketing campaigns.

So, the aim of discovery is to eliminate hunches and subjective views and instead create sound, defensible rationale for the marketing approaches and proposals that will be subsequently discussed and implemented with clients.

The depth and breadth of activity undertaken within a discovery exercise should and will flex; depending on the requirement and timescales and budgets involved. But even if flex is involved you should always look to undertake discovery – even a ‘small’ site build or inbound marketing campaign requires some due diligence before launching.

Who should look after discovery?

The answer to “who?”, depends on the size and specialisation of the agency, but a Planner in larger agencies or a senior account handler will probably lead it with a good strategic (and organised!) head in smaller agencies. Their role is to act as the conductor of the orchestra, as it were, since will work with other team members to look at data / research sources, triangulate findings and ensure thinking is coordinated.

Whoever leads the process, they are looking to:

• agree exactly what hypotheses or objectives are being addressed


• manage who is looking at what within the team


• triangulate the findings and resultant insight from the disparate research and data sources.

And are also keeping an eye on the timeframe and budget / resources that is being worked to, to create a robust, (and as mention earlier, defensible) rationale for the insights and proposals that will subsequently be discussed with client.

Charging and paying for discovery

Any discovery activity will take time (even if that may flex depending on the circumstances of the engagement), but even a shortened discovery phase should be costed out. The due diligence and thorough research that the agency will complete and the robust insights gained will only strengthen any campaigns or projects that are subsequently created. Agencies shouldn’t give away their thinking time for free in order to secure a ‘commodity’ service e.g. site builds, email production, SEO management etc.

That’s a perennial debate, up there with pitch fees of course, but one you should keep to when and where you can. Having said that, an amount of discovery will inevitably always be needed pre-sale e.g. at pitch stage or in order to recommend an overarching strategy. In that case you should invest a pre-agreed amount of time (normally agreed between the new business director and account director or board director etc.) for ‘discovery-lite’ – and stick to it. Demonstrating to your client or prospect that you have some robust initial insight based on due diligence / discovery will go a long way to selling in a solution. The level of investment you make (multiples of in-house time and / or any externally commissioned research) will depend on the potential long term worth of the client business to you.

Discovery workstreams

‘Discovery’ is a bit of a catch-all term for a range of separate research gathering and data assimilation workstreams and can involve things like desk research, face to face or distance interviews with client teams or customer groups and the use of different software platforms to mine information. Each piece of work can be substantial and in a larger agency may be completed by different team members, hence ‘workstreams’.

In the second part of this article, I will explain 9 activities that can form the workstreams for the discovery process.

from Smart Insights http://ift.tt/1ewnGPX

via IFTTT

Are Your Values Worth More Than Your Profits?

via Digital Strategy http://ift.tt/1but4pX

Where do you hope to develop your marketing knowledge?

What’s New in Marketing? January 2014

The end of January already! Does anyone not think that? The end of the month means it’s time for our regular roundup of the major developments that affect marketing and our pick of our advice on the latest practices.

When I speak with marketers I’m often asked “what’s new”, “what matters” and “what’s next” and “what matters” so I hope our summary helps answer some of these questions to save you having to sift through the content avalanche.

I also hear that it’s getting more difficult to keep up-to-date, so in our recent research on managing digital marketing I was curious to know how marketers found this. Of marketers completing the survey a majority (55%) found it challenging, with over a quarter (27%) stating that it had become more difficult recently. Nearly a quarter said it was easy – good for them – I’d like to know how?! We also asked in which areas marketers most wanted to develop their knowledge – you can see the results below.

Do let us know via the comments if there are any other areas you would like to know more about or contact us if you’re happy to share your knowledge and experiences with readers.

There was a fair level of interest approaching half across the board, many marketers are now confident in their knowledge of digital channels with nearly half (46%) saying they are confident, with in-depth knowledge or sufficient knowledge for what they need across different digital marketing techniques. However, there is still hunger for new learning, particularly in Big Data and CRM (62% want to improve their knowledge), content marketing (55%), digital strategy (52%) and social media marketing (48%).

I’ve acted on this already – as you will see from new advice on Big Data and Marketing Automation within our CRM and Email section below. You may also find the prompts from Katy Howell’s 14 practical marketing ideas for 2014 useful.

Strategy and planning

• Managing Digital Marketing 2014 – our new free research report in association with Technology for Marketing & Advertising exploring how marketers manage digital with practical recommendations. Dave will add to this at TFM&A 2014 where he will give a Keynote talk and 3 other seminar advising on how to review and improve digital marketing.


• 7 Steps to digital marketing nirvana – our new infographic summarising the research


• Marketing Technology options 2014 – if you don’t know Scott Brinkler’s Tech Landscape map – check it out to see how your use of technology compares!

Social media marketing

• Creating a social media strategy for B2B marketing – Rene Power gives 4 examples to inspire B2B marketers


• Options for ad targeting on Facebook – a great review of the options from Marie Page

Search marketing

• Should we stop guest blogging – Yes or No? – This was the biggest platform development in January 2014 – all content marketers should read our take on 5 reasons you should continue guest blogging and 10 actions you should take given Matt Cutt’s latest advice affecting content marketers.


• Hiring the right content creator for your business Content is at the heart of SEO in 2014 (as it always has been), so you need to have the right resources in place.

User experience, analytics and conversion optimisation

• Digital strategy for a multichannel retailer an in-depth case study from Sajjad Bhojani, Head of Multi Channel Marketing at Dunelm.


• How to run a successful conversion rate optimisation programme – A great tutorial by Dan Croxen-John of AWA Digital


• A tutorial with examples and ideas of testing retail value propositions – Matt Lacey of PRWD shares his experience.


• 10 practical tips on responsive design – our most popular infographic of the month

Email marketing and CRM

• An introduction to using big data for Marketing – a short series to help readers get up-to-speed on digital marketing – see also our Guide to Marketing Automation


• The most popular email clients Which email clients should we design and test for in 2014?


• Email campaign tracking in Google Analytics – Our tutorial and examples shows you how to setup what some email marketers miss.

This summary was created by Dave Chaffey of Marketing strategy advice site SmartInsights.com.

from Smart Insights http://ift.tt/1bdxtNX

via IFTTT

Marketing technology in 2014 : You need to take control

6 implications for selecting and managing marketing technology today

Wow! Scott Brinkler @chiefmartec is a real enthusiast to even attempt to map the technology landscape. He’s done a good job since his latest 2014 Marketing technology landscape provides a great framework to help managers think through the best technology to improve their marketing and to review the leading technology vendors in each category. It’s a retina-burning graphic, which doesn’t look great on a blog, but if you click to expand you can see its value and impact – it prompts you to ask “How do we make sense of this – what does it mean for us?!“

How do you find this? Is it scary to you because of the potential expense and business case preparation? Not to mention the challenges of managing implementation and integration of these systems. Or is it an opportunity to use technology to compete and create more relevant engaging customer experiences than your rivals.

The tool is useful in its own right, but I think it’s useful to not just think “wow!” or “scary”, but think of what the complexity and range of options in technology means for how you manage marketing using technology, so I will explore this also in this post.

Categories of marketing technology

The first implications of this “infographic like no other” is that when you’re reviewing your approach to using technology, it’s useful to audit your technologies across these 6 categories and the 42 subcategories

The six main categories to review are described like this by Scott:

1. Marketing Experiences — more specialized technologies that directly affect prospects and customers across their lifecycle, such as advertising, email, social media, SEO, content marketing, A/B testing, marketing apps — the “front-office” of modern marketing.


2. Marketing Operations — the tools and data for managing the “back-office” of marketing, such as analytics, MRM, DAM, and agile marketing management.


3. Marketing Middleware such as DMPs, CDPs, tag management, cloud connectors, user management, and API services.


4. Marketing Backbone Platforms such as CRM, marketing automation, content management, and e-commerce engines. [These are quite different in their application, so need to be reviewed separately].


5. Infrastructure services such as databases, big data management, cloud computing, and software development tools.


6. Internet services such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter that underlie today’s marketing environment. [How you integrate with these key platforms]

Selecting the best marketing technology

Beyond this, there are many other implications about how you select technology or make recommendations to your clients. The answers will vary a lot by type and size of company, but the implications are similar. Technology is a significant marketing investment, so it needs a structured, not piecemeal approach.

A solid business case and review approach is needed. Define a process and template for technology business case that avoids wastage and duplication and prioritises the technologies that will give the biggest returns. In larger companies this needs to be centralised to a great degree to avoid maverick purchases.

A technology roadmap is required as part of digital strategy. Starting from scratch, it would take years to implement these technologies. A technology roadmap helps prioritise and make it achievable.

All-in-one vs Best-of-breed solutions. One approach to reduce complexity is to use all-in-one solutions such as the Marketing Cloud services that many of the large technology companies like Oracle, Salesforce and Adobe are now offering. But these may be overkill for some businesses who may be best using simpler tools, for example, an email service provider rather than a full blown marketing automation system.

Open source options can give significant savings. Open source can give significant savings in some areas such as content management or video hosting. But savings in licensing need to be offset against potential lack of support.

Businesses need to get the value from technology. Implementing the technology is just the start. If a technology isn’t used by the business to get the value from it, then that’s bad management, not the fault of the technology.

Change management and education are as important as the technology. None of these technologies work without human intervention or intelligence. Customisation is needed, so encouraging ongoing adoption is key, although not all technology vendors support this as well.

from Smart Insights http://ift.tt/1e20gYl

via IFTTT

Should we stop guest blogging now? Yes or No?

5 reasons you should continue guest blogging and 10 actions you should take given Matt Cutt’s latest advice affecting content marketers

Alert importance: ★★★★★

Recommended link: Matt Cutts: The Decay and Fall of guest blogging for SEO

If you work in SEO, the biggest development so far in 2014 is Matt Cutts of Google’s clear guidance for marketers to cease guest blogging. But Guest blogging isn’t just an obscure SEO tactic, it’s used by many media sites and brands, so many businesses who practice content marketing will be affected by this.

His new post this week starts with this seemingly unequivocal piece of guidance:

“Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company”.

He then gives this example of what he calls an unsolicited Spam email, similar to many who run a blog today receive daily:

So that’s clear, many marketers will think if they just read the headlines or many other blog posts that, they should simply stop guest blogging. Actually, no, I think that’s bad advice, as I’ll explain.

I say clear, but that’s relative to some of his previous obfuscating comments at conferences and in Google’s webmaster videos. It’s not so clear any longer, since he added this key footnote, because of the hundreds of comments on the blog, implying that quality guest blogging is fine if the quality is there. The key comment added is:

“I’m not trying to throw the baby out with the bath water. There are still many good reasons to do some guest blogging (exposure, branding, increased reach, community, etc.). Those reasons existed way before Google and they’ll continue into the future. And there are absolutely some fantastic, high-quality guest bloggers out there. I changed the title of this post to make it more clear that I’m talking about guest blogging for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.

I’m also not talking about multi-author blogs. High-quality multi-author blogs like Boing Boing have been around since the beginning of the web, and they can be compelling, wonderful, and useful“.

But credit where credit’s due, it’s useful to have this guidance, particularly when many SEOs have been expecting a change for the last year or two even. We now know to be aware, to beware.

This latest announcement is close to my heart since I’m often asked when speaking or training ‘what’s works best in SEO since the latest algorithm update?’. Over the last couple of years quality content marketing and guest blogging have often been two of my core SEO recommendations, particularly at B2B conferences. We publish (high quality, generally well-received) occasional guest posts almost daily on Smart Insights as well as regular posts from our multi-author panel of Expert commentators. Less commonly we selective guest blog too on sites which fit our audience profile.

There has been a huge discussion on his blog and every blog that comments on SEO, most just discussing the rights and wrongs and interpretation of the guidance. But most reading will be wondering should we stop, either writing or publishing guest posts? To help you take the decision I’ll present the side for continuing guest blogging, here’s my take – 5 reasons why you should continue and I offer 10 practical actions companies can take.

5 reasons you should continue with Guest posting

• 1. Google’s guidelines suggest high quality relevant content is fine. Cutt’s posts calls out poor quality guest posts and in his final footnote states that high quality guest posts are still fine. If you’re writing or publishing guest posts that have all the signals of quality in terms of social shares, comments and back links from other sites, you should expect that you won’t be penalised based on previous Google anti spam approaches. Google has given specific guidance warning against many other techniques in the past like using directories, press releases, even infographics in the past


• 2. Guest posting has been a highly effective inbound marketing technique, particularly for B2B marketers. It can help businesses create quality content at a relatively low cost which generates significant traffic over time, while helping writers raise awareness and showcase their talents and those of their companies. To date it has benefited both parties for SEO. Google are raising the issue now because it works so well. So you will likely lose potential site visits and business if you stop now.


• 3. Many major marketing sites use the technique. The comments to Cutt’s article mentions Moz, Marketing Land, Mashable and the Huffington Post, for example, which led him to add the footnote. When they stop guest blogging then I’ll start thinking about stopping more seriously.


• 4. Google’s algorithm updates are generally accurate in identifying quality content. Given the announcement we can expect an update penalising or filtering poor quality posts. The latest announcement warns:
  

  “Given how spammy it’s become, I’d expect Google’s webspam team to take a pretty dim view of guest blogging going forward”.

  
  

  As as Joost van de Valk of Yoast observed – of 200 sites he or his team has reviewed with a penalty, they invariably deserved the slap they received, with just one or two exceptions.

  
  


• 5. Google authorship will show the credibility of guest writers. Google has developed Google Authorship markup which will help it to assess the credibility of authors based on their reputation in Google+ and the blogs they write on. If your already using this and have quality writers, the risk is much reduced.

So, perhaps, like us you’ve decided to continue to publish guest blogs, or guest post yourself, if so, it’s time to get serious and do it right by Google. Here’s what I recommend right. Do let me know other suggestions or if you disagree.

10 actions you should take if you’re continuing guest blogging.

• 1. Update your guest blogging quality criteria if you’re a site owner. We have very tight guidance to ensure quality posts are produced. Many of the recommendations below can be explained in your blog quality guidelines.


• 2. If you blog on other sites, only select quality sites which follow similar guidelines. Check examples of other posts carefully – would you accept them on your own site? Do they have signs of being shared carefully.


• 3. Ensure the quality of posts by only accepting or creating high quality content. The test is, will it be shared, commented and naturally linked to by blog readers?


• 4. Think carefully about the type and frequency of links in a guest post linking back the site of the blog author. For example, we don’t accept links to product pages targeting keyword rich anchor text, but will link to a limited number of of relevant posts. Keyword rich anchor text links in an article, often out of keeping with the theme looks like a red flag to me and it will to Google already. We encourage links to relevant posts on our site too, to balance links out.


• 5. Think about how you use links in the post bio area. Matt Cutt’s suggests in the comments to his post that all links back to the site should be no followed in his “ideal world scenario”. In the real world, we won’t do this unless it’s essential, since we believe our content is high quality, so why shouldn’t we credit our authors who give their time to produce high quality content? In future, consider adding no follow links to anchor text links in the article or bio, but as many have pointed out, how will you apply this retroactively to 100s or 1000s of guest posts?


• 6. Build a team of regular writers, either staff or external writers who have a good level of credibility and authority in Google’s eyes. On Smart Insights, these writers are our Expert commentators. Reduce your reliance on Guest posts and obvious signs that you produce many of them.


• 7. Select authors who are established on Google+ and use Use Google authorship. They don’t need thousands of followers, but if they’re in 50 circles that’s better than none.


• 8. Prepare for an algorithm update targeting poor quality guest posts this year. It’s difficult to see how Google could automatically penalise guest posts, but the warning presages a change, my money is on a major update to Panda or Penguin – you’ll hear about this no doubt!


• 9. Monitor your SEO traffic weekly or even daily. Use a tool like Google Analytics Intelligence to be alerted if traffic falls by 5–10% compared to the previous week and then act straightaway.


• 10. Start or refine your paid search or paid social ads programme. Google’s SEO restrictions get stricter each and every month, so you must be in position to minimise the impact of Google’s algorithm changes using other inbound marketing techniques. If guest posting is your only content marketing technique, that’s risky.

So that’s how I see it at the moment, the short answer is no you don’t need to stop guest guest blogging! How do you see it? Will you ‘adopt a wait and see’ approach. I’ll be certainly watching changes to Google’s comments carefully, and watching how other sites manage their guest posts.

from Smart Insights http://ift.tt/1bYG4Vn

via IFTTT

Morning Improv

via Digital Strategy http://ift.tt/1mp88CB