Assessing the 2021 landscape: Commerce aligned with social set to rocket as brands truly digitise

If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that massive disruptions can happen overnight across industries, with customer communication responsibilities from marketing to care often falling to the social media marketing team. The trends we at Socialbakers have seen take shape this year -- from increased usage of social messaging to recruiting niche influencers to help expand social reach -- are likely to grow in the coming year as more and more customer interactions happen...

14 December 2020 | Advertising

The ‘cyber five’: Prepping search strategies for peak retail

Black Friday and Cyber Monday, previously competitor sale days, now look set to emerge as one event - a giant ecommerce extravaganza - thanks to increased ecommerce uptake among consumers. The five days from the American Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday 26th November through to the following Cyber Monday are now dubbed the ‘Cyber Five’. This year, it will bring a host of new elements for search marketers to consider. 

Gleaning as much insight as possible into your...

19 November 2020 | Advertising

How to stop spending money on paid search and get noticed organically

Paid search advertising is a digital marketing tactic that remains popular today. Its appeal largely stems from its pay-per-click model that guarantees that advertisers pay for actual traffic rather than mere visibility. But how effective is advertising on popular search engines like Google and Bing?

Teknicks surveyed more than 1,000 internet users to get a better sense of how they find what they’re looking for online. Their answers suggest that search engine advertising - and...

3 September 2020 | Advertising

Know your data – and your limits – before utilising automation to drive campaign ROI

Brands are sitting on millions of pieces of data about customers and their behaviours – and yet many marketers are still failing to effectively apply it to their digital comms.

As a result, it’s leading to an array of lost opportunities. But why is that the case when organisations are exposed to even more ways to analyse their performance, speak to audiences on a deeper level and positively impact business growth?

Perhaps organisations aren’t providing marketing...

20 July 2020 | Advertising

Happy holidays? Why festive planning is earlier than ever this year

Brands love reaching their most passionate customers. As a former retail CMO myself, I get it. When you reach early planners, you reach the CEOs of the household—an audience that buys and spends more. Reach them first, and you have a shot at being their first choice when it’s time to shop.

And yet, for as long as marketers and advertisers have been prioritising planners, they’re making some seriously incorrect assumptions about this key audience right now. I heard from a CMO...

7 July 2020 | Branding

Get ahead of the game: Why ‘earned data’ could be the future for marketers

As a marketer, I always question the wisdom of organisations coming up with their own ‘categories’ or catch-phrases because, as a general rule, there are more than enough of them, and making new ones stick is risky and expensive. But, despite the fact that the advice of my SEO consultant is that it might take a year or more before anyone searches Google for ‘earned data’, I still think it’s worth the investment. And here’s why.

Third party lists have been the bedrock...

29 May 2020 | Customer Experience

Five key digital marketing strategies during Covid-19: Redefining and redeployment

While nobody can predict  what a post-coronavirus reality would look  like,  one thing is certain for marketers: digital channels are more important than ever. Online channels now play an increasingly crucial role, as people continue to self-isolate and spend more time online. In Italy, for instance, once the government introduced country-wide quarantines in mid-March, online traffic spiked 30%.

Today, we are seeing similar trends occur globally. In  these sensitive...

28 April 2020 | Best Practice

How to reach local audiences with your existing content strategy: Four in-depth methods

Consumer behaviour is trending toward on-the-go mobile shopping.

A 2018 study by Uberall revealed that 69% of smartphone users rely on their devices for shopping. Among those in that group, 82% had customised their searches to be “near me.” Data released in 2017 confirmed this trend: Four in five consumers want search results and ads to be customised to their local area, and half of smartphone shoppers visit a local store within a day of their...

23 March 2020 | Advertising

Stop hurting yourself, SEO: Why the industry needs to get its house in order – quickly

Opinion Marketing is coming to terms with a new world order. Until last year, that looked like a gradual but fairly smooth transition. In 2019, two of its industries took a beating.

One was advertising. The other was SEO. While the advertising industry was being attacked, by and large, by aggressors outside its control – an increasingly fragmented media landscape, its own increasing fragmentation, budget and time pressures and a shift in the balance of power between client and...

11 March 2020 | Advertising

How marketers can stay one step ahead of the voice search trend: A guide

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you have probably heard or seen somewhere that half of all searches this year will be conducted through voice-enabled devices, like Siri or Amazon’s Alexa. But did you know that:

30% of these searches will be done without a screen? Voice search queries include three to five keywords and are longer than text-based searches? 20% of UK consumers use voice search devices multiple times a day?

Clearly, voice search is no longer just...

22 January 2020 | Advertising