I saw a stat during a webinar the other day that blew my mind. “100 million hours of video are watched on Facebook every day”. One hundred million! To give you a little perspective, if you were to sit down and watch that linearly, it would take you a fraction under 11,416 years to get through them all. I can’t even begin to get my head around that.
Saying that, it is just after 8am and I have already watched six videos on Facebook…all around 20 seconds long, each one dragging me deeper in to the black hole of ‘pointless knowledge’. I need to know more! That’s right, I need to know how that lovely lady in Japan has solved her laundry woes by creating a hack that has revolutionised her life…it might make my life easier! Or I might just have another few minutes of my life sucked in to the Facebook vacuum! You can’t resist the draw, so imagine the power video can have when it actually provides something useful.
I’m so torn…we’re so compatible and definitely each other’s type on paper, but I’ve been doing my own thing for such a long time and getting along fine. Re-coupling is looming and I’ve got a decision to make…do I continue to go it alone and risk being dumped, or do I go for it and risk being mugged off? Time to gather round the fire-pit…
(For those ‘non-Love Island folk’: first of all, ‘you are missing out’, second of all, please stick with me as I will stop talking like a teenager and get to the point soon, but I am ‘like, sooooo loving this – LOL’.)
Decision time: “I would like to couple up with this person because we want the same things and although many people wouldn’t put us together, I think we could work really well and have a profitable future together; the person I would like to couple up with is…Sales”. Sales and marketing in a relationship? The nation is in shock! 
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Confession time…some of you may have seen this blog before. But, it’s still so relevant now that it’s worth sharing again. So here you are:
Marketing Expert No. 1:
Marketing is all about creating, appreciating, and inviting a change in mindset to garner better results. It is a form of art.
Marketing Expert No. 2:
Marketing requires repeat measurement and analysis, two words closely associated with science.
So which is it?
Every year the kind folk at Hubspot spend countless hours interviewing over 6200 marketing and sales professionals around the world, in different industries, at various levels of seniority from companies of all sizes…and the result? A thoroughly comprehensive report detailing benchmark data on the changing marketing and sales landscape. Gold dust to those in the industry.
However, it turns out that we are pretty kind as well, so we thought we’d let you have a copy too…but for those of you who are reading this between meetings, here is our take on some of their key findings… Read More
The fight to stay at the forefront of industry development and innovation can be exhausting, In the first quarter of 2018, there were 6,140 new android apps released through the Google Play store, every day. Leading edge or bleeding edge?
Of course, not all of these applications are suitable for business…although, after two years of GDPR prep, I could do with seeing if I can survive a term at Hogwarts (yep, there’s an app for that) as a bit of light relief! With new technologies developing at an incredible speed, it is up to businesses, not to be wooed by the latest app and maintain a focus on strengthening core routes to potential new clients. Read More
If you are into IT marketing as much as we are, then you have probably already fine-tuned your marketing strategy for 2017…
But wait! We have a few trends in the marketing space that will be making a big impact this year, so you should start thinking about them now to get ahead of the game. Read More
Inbound marketers use conversion paths to advance prospects through a sales and marketing funnel. To create a conversion path, decide which steps you want a visitor to take, then design content to support that conversion goal. Include your sales team in this process. Common conversion goals include collecting personal data, obtaining customer feedback, sharing industry information, and encouraging more social shares. You can write a series of blog posts, share a collection of resources or provide an online toolkit. Ask yourself, “How can we help our prospects get the information they need most at this stage in the relationship?”
There are four main parts to a conversion path/process:
- Content – This needs to be relevant to what your customers are looking for. Ask yourself, ‘What are our prospects looking for and how can we make this simpler for them?’
- Call-to-Action – It’s the way that your prospects are going to get to the landing page from your website and start the process. It’s the Key that unlocks the door! Because of this it need to do exactly as it says: have an action, so make sure you use actionable language and that they jump out of the page.
- Landing Page – This is the part where the conversion starts. So your landing pages need to present the benefits of your offer/content, remembering that you need to focus on the problem that you are trying to solve for your prospect!
- Thank You Page/Email – This marks the end of your conversion path. It’s the final tool you need to lead your prospect (website visitor) down your conversion path.
Here is a great example from Hubspot, they’ve got their piece of relevant content, made a persona-appropriate landing page and sent a thank you to the lead, all ready for the sales team to give them a call:
If you get the conversion path right, it’s pointing you in the direction of sailing your leads through the buyer’s journey!
So remember: Be fun. Be bold. Be creative!
For further reading please see how effective conversion paths work
The article I read today was so great about the hare and the tortoise that I just wanted to share it with you. Some of you may have read ‘Thinking fast and slow’ and I guess this article was along the same lines.
It was written by Stephen Guise, who’s website is http://deepexistence.com
He describes the site as providing ‘creative strategies for lasting change’. I find his style warm, engaging and thought provoking. I’d really encourage you to check out his site. For some reason, I can’t see the hare and rabbit story on there, so maybe it was only on the emails that go out. For that reason, we’ve created a quick page so you can read the whole thing, here. Read More
It’s that time of year again, isn’t it? Everyone is trying to finish up their last bits of marketing activity and decide what to do next year. We’ll all be busy presenting plans to the board, the sales operation or our boss – putting forward our case for budget and as usual trying to justify our existence!
It saddens me that still in so many companies marketing is seen as a ‘nice to have’ or a ‘must do’ rather than an essential part of driving the business forward – which is in fact what it really is! Ask most people which organisations they admire and two of the most often quoted are Apple and Virgin. These businesses are ALL about marketing. It’s perhaps the single biggest thing they do right. So why do we as marketers still struggle for airtime, or budget? Read More
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