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How to succeed with marketing in a post-pandemic world

The last few months have been tough for businesses; logistical struggles and diminished customer purchase power have seen businesses of all sizes, and across a majority of sectors, feel the financial pinch. In these types of situations, many businesses turn to cut backs in marketing budgets in order to alleviate financial strain, but it’s often great digital marketing strategy which can help to deliver an upturn in business during difficult periods. 

Here Chris Attewell, CEO of leading digital agency Search Laboratory, argues why now is not the time to step back on marketing activity and offers expert advice for businesses looking to achieve success in a post-pandemic world through cohesive digital strategy… 

  1. Know when to press ‘Go’

With things seemingly much more normal in day to day life, a mistake brands need to avoid making right now is to switch their marketing activity on. Despite shops, restaurants and even offices opening back up, the customer journey in many sectors is still far from ‘normal’.

Knowing when to resume activity can be the difference between making and losing money. Too soon, budget is used with little results; too late, and you miss out on the initial flurry. 

Monitoring search impressions via Google Search Console is the quickest way to gauge when your industry is beginning to pick up, as it indicates rising interest in your products. However, as you can expect impressions to fluctuate daily, comparing the average number of daily impressions of the last three days compared to the last ten and twenty-one days will show if there is an upwards trend. 

2. Segment your pixel audiences and CRM lists

The pandemic has resulted in a lengthened sales cycle, meaning consumers are spending more time in the research phase and delaying purchasing. If you were tracking users who engaged with your website before or during the pandemic, use this time to segment them and know what messages you want them to see ready for when the market picks back up.

As lookalike and similar audiences are based on recent data, these lists may be skewed due to a different sales cycle during the pandemic. Instead, segment your pixel audiences or CRM lists to create user groups before and during lockdown and test the difference to identify different audience groups; you can then tailor the messages shown to each group for better performance.

3. Build an online local presence

Although travel restrictions within the UK have been lifted, many consumers are choosing to stay closer to home when it comes to eating out, shopping and undergoing leisure activities. For businesses where customers are required to go instore to complete their purchase, consider narrowing down the geo-targeting for paid campaigns to avoid wasting budget, and use this time to build a strong local SEO presence. Creating or updating your Google My Business listing(s) and getting listed in important local directories can help to boost your online presence for location-based searches, helping to drive more footfall as restrictions ease.

4. Create ‘soft’ conversions

While many businesses are already be seeing an uplift in web traffic and sales already, a return to pre-pandemic levels of sales may be slow. Adjust your expectations and set ‘soft’ conversions based on the current needs of your audience. Doing this allows you to measure success in a climate where customers are not buying as much or as often, and means you can still capture valuable data to inform your digital strategy. Consider how you can provide genuinely useful and engaging content that matches the needs of your customers and can be used to capture data and soft conversions – such as downloadable guides or webinars.

5. Optimise for long-term results 

The immediate future is uncertain, so use this time to focus on improving your long-term success. Ensuring your website is SEO ready now will help to drive organic traffic in the long run. Review your website architecture and speed, and current content and identify where and how you can improve technical elements of the site, and where you can improve or create content to make the site more relevant for your audience’s search queries and needs.

6. Fine tune your Google Analytics 

Google Analytics is a valuable tool which can be used to understand who your customers are, how they are finding you, and what they want from your business. Now is a great time to set up Google Analytics, if you haven’t already, to track customer behaviour and use these insights to develop an effective marketing strategy. Review the metrics you track – do they correlate to your current business goals? Ensure tagging and tracking is set up so you have access to all the data required to make informed business decisions moving forward. 

7. Join up your offline and online data 

Tying up online behaviour (how a user interacts with your business online) with offline behaviour (such ringing up a sales person, attending an event, shopping in-store) helps you to see how your online marketing activity leads to new customer acquisition and vice versa – insights which will help to shape an effective marketing strategy. If you have a CRM system, link it up with Google Analytics so you can track how users behave across the full user journey. Whatever the unique behaviours of your customers are, finding and measuring highly engaged users that have a higher rate of conversion is a relevant way of measuring successful sessions if sales are lower than they usually would be.

For more help with your marketing, download our whitepaper: https://www.searchlaboratory.com/downloads/kick-starting-your-marketing-in-a-post-pandemic-world-whitepaper/

Will marketing become a remote working profession after COVID-19?

If you’ve enjoyed working from home these past few months, you might be in luck: remote working could be here to stay. Chris Stappard, Managing Director of Edward Reed Recruitment, explains why flexible and remote working could become the norm for marketing professionals after the pandemic has passed...

At the start of 2020, flexible working was viewed by many as a perk or a privilege — something that an employee might work their way up to after a few months or even years at a company. But then the COVID-19 outbreak hit, and all that changed overnight as businesses and agencies across the country were forced to start working from home full-time. 

Now, even though the lockdown is beginning to ease, most people are still working from their kitchen tables and home studies, and many marketing professionals haven’t set foot in an office building for over three months. With the government continuing to advise that those that can work from home, should work from home, it looks as though most businesses will be working remotely until at least the late autumn. 

But what will happen when the danger has passed, or a vaccine is found? I think there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that flexible and remote working may become the new normal for a lot of professions — including marketing. Here, I’ll take a look at just some of the reasons that the industry might embrace remote working. 

Employees have enjoyed working remotely 

There’s plenty of evidence to show that workers in most professions prefer remote working, but it’s especially popular with those in the marketing sector. Over 90% of marketing professionals say they prefer to have some say over how and where they work, according to a survey from Marketing Week. 

Employees cite all sorts of reasons for preferring remote and flexible working, including skipping the commute, being able to plan their working day around childcare and other personal commitments, and having a better work/life balance. It’s clear that this can be a much better way to work for employees and, as a result, they may be much more likely to petition their employers for this to continue after the lockdown is over. 

Flexible and remote working may help with recruitment 

Now that employees have enjoyed a taste of flexible working, I think it’s safe to assume that it may become a higher priority for workers when job hunting. And that means, if employers want to be ahead of the competition in the race for the best talent, they’ll need to build flexibility and remote working into new roles. If staff start to see this as the bare minimum, rather than a perk, employers will need to start offering it as standard if they want to find the best hires. 

It’s not just about offering an attractive workplace culture to prospective hires, though: it could make recruitment easier for employers, too. If staff can work remotely for some or all of the working week, then staff won’t need to live within commuting distance, removing the need for lengthy commutes or relocation. This would greatly broaden the talent pool employers have access to and allow companies to recruit staff at a national rather than local level. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is something that employers are keen to capitalise on after the lockdown has eased.

It can help cut costs and increase profit margins

Over the past few months, we’ve seen that it’s possible for businesses and agencies to operate efficiently while working from home. It just goes to show that remote working can be a productive and effective way to work, and that it doesn’t necessarily have to result in decreased output or a loss of profit. As a result, I expect that many businesses will be wondering whether it’s really necessary to spend a sizeable chunk of revenue on an office space anymore. This is especially relevant when you consider that the lockdown has been a tough trading period for a lot of businesses, so any opportunity to cut costs will look very appealing. 

In future, I think that marketing companies may make the switch to working remotely for most or part of the week, allowing employers to downsize their premises and save money. It may even become the norm for businesses to hire meeting space on an ad hoc basis for client meetings, removing the need for a private office space of any kind. 

Tools and software are improving all the time 

Remote working wouldn’t be possible without the internet and, these days, employers have more tech and tools at their disposal to maximise productivity during home working than ever before. Software like Skype, Zoom, Slack, and Microsoft Teams can facilitate meetings and collaboration between employees, and monitoring software can also be used to ensure that staff are using their time productively. 

The availability and affordability of these technologies means that businesses of almost any size can make the shift to home working with minimum fuss and expense. And, as employers have seen just how effective tech can be, I expect that they may be more willing to consider allowing staff to work remotely full-time.

Whether you’ve loved or hated working from home through the pandemic, I think we can all admit that things are unlikely to go back to the way they were before the lockdown any time soon. And, with many businesses starting to wake up to the benefits of remote and flexible working, I imagine it’s only a matter of time before this becomes the norm in the marketing world.  

Advanced TV: No longer a mystery with VDX.tv’s latest white paper

By VDX.tv

We believe in the power of video to deliver full and seamless experiences across all screens. That’s why in March 2020, Exponential launched new division VDX.tv – precisely to focus on tailormade video-driven experiences that captivate, compel and convert consumers on whichever device they are on.

VDX.tv enables brands to connect with their audiences in meaningful ways by providing bespoke video units and data to target only the most relevant audiences across all screens, from mobile, desktop and even OTT (Over-the-top).

OTT is a form of Advanced TV (a catchall term for any television content beyond linear television) that is on everyone’s lips but also one very new for many marketers. For those who are still uncertain about how to best leverage the benefits of Advanced TV, we set out to arm marketers with the knowledge to advertise across all screens with confidence.  

Our guide, entitled “Advanced Learning, How Advanced TV Can Drive Brand Results”, provides a detailed explanation of what Advanced TV is in all its forms, why it is important to consider and how it can help brands generate results. It also includes basic definitions of terminology used in a multi-screen world, data and examples of usage levels of OTT devices across European markets. 

Additionally, we’ve included eight reasons why Advanced TV should matter to brands and advertisers. These eight points cover: the growth of OTT service subscribers (already increased in the UK, with four in ten viewers claiming that online video services are their primary means of watching television and film), the impact of video, the ability to personalise and segment messages thanks to the use of data, the importance of offering an omnichannel experience across all devices, and lastly, the ability to drive results.

The Advanced TV guide can be downloaded here.

Content Compass: A tool to power your Performance Content

By Kate Birtwistle, New Business & Marketing Director at agenda21

There is so much content being published every day. But how do you know what content to produce for your brand, what’s going to be interesting and relevant to your audience, and what impact it will have on your business?

Digital marketing agency – agenda21 – have developed a tool which answers these very questions, and is revolutionising the way brands approach content marketing. By using the tool – Content Compass – brands are able to deliver competitive, empowered content that’s created from the aggregation of an entire market’s search data. Rigorously filtered to reflect specific topics, the tool speeds up the research and ideation process to help get quality content over the line and published faster.

Originating as an SEO tool, Content Compass allows brands to find, use and sort all their competitors (and their) search query and ranking data to help build relevant, authoritative pages that will out-perform competitors on the search engine results page (SERPs). It can also see where direct competitors are under-performing and where there are other opportunities for content production.

By taking advantage of these opportunities, Content Compass helps brands to grow online visibility both by targeting untapped searches for information and improving topic relevance to help their website rank when people search to buy their products or services.

How does it work?

High quality content strategies begin and end with data. Content Compass ingests a huge amount of information, such as search queries, volumes, ranking pages and position. Included in this is competitor data, which allows us to easily benchmark how a brand’s site is performing within their market sector for a specific topic or single query.

The tool also allows the flexibility  to analyse each competitor page and see exactly why it’s ranking well. What does that mean for brands? It’s a clear insight into best practice content for their specific industry, exposing what their competitors do well, and opportunities that competitors are missing, that the brand can then capitalise on.

What are the benefits?

  • Quick to understand topic areas, saving valuable time on laborious research – that’s more time than can be spent on creating brilliant content!
  • Richer volume of data available from a larger competitor set, sorted using machine learning
  • Find untapped opportunities and spot gaps for content insights
  • Data updated monthly, so we’re always using recent keyword data and accurate rankings of how content is performing

If you’d like to find out more about how Content Compass can help your content marketing and SEO, please contact Kate Birtwistle, New Business & Marketing Director at agenda21 – kbirtwistle@agenda21digital.com.

WEBINAR: Maximise your time and gain the competitive advantage

By Woven Agency

Thriving in business means maximising your competitive advantages. That could be offering something no one else can or investing in ambitious, talented people. It might even mean employing insights-driven and creative branding agencies – like us. 

But the competitive advantage you really can maximise, no matter how big or small you are, is how you use your time. Because the better you use it, the more it’s worth – and this is especially true for sales and marketing teams.

As a brand agency, we’ve worked with numerous sales and marketing divisions and we know that while they want to spend their time actually selling and marketing, all too often they can’t. Instead, they’re chasing cold leads, rearranging meetings, writing emails from scratch, or struggling to remember who said what and when to their clients.

These teams don’t make the most of their time, which means they don’t make the most of their talent.

To prevent this, we use a user-friendly and highly automated CRM (customer relationship management) platform called HubSpot.

HubSpot’s sales pitch talks about attracting more customers and creating life-long advocates of your brand. And it does do that. But the message, to us, is simpler – it helps you spend less time doing what you shouldn’t, and more time doing what you should.

It takes those time-consuming tasks that slow down and infuriate your sales and marketing teams and makes them a simple part of your process. 

Which means less time doing manual tasks and more time creating marketing strategies, meeting clients, producing amazing creative, and closing deals.

Or more time at home with your family or on the sofa with a glass of Chablis. Whatever works for you.

To us, maximising your time is a competitive advantage, and HubSpot let you do it easily. And because we’re a HubSpot partner agency – which means they officially recognise we provide great service to our clients through their platform – we help companies use their time more effectively and more profitably.

So, if you want your time to be worth more, contact us at https://woven.agency.

And if you’d like to learn more about HubSpot, you can register for our ‘Unboxing HubSpot’s Growth Platform’ webinar – a 60-minute webinar on 14th August hosted by Woven & HubSpot to take you through everything you need to know about how HubSpot can improve your business.

WHITE PAPER: Outsourcing Partnerships vs Service Providers

Webmart explores the differences between a partnership and service provider relationship, and how this can impact the result that marketing teams desire. The difference between a partnership or service provider can drastically impact the way a brands personality comes across in the end result. 

The following guide discusses an approach to finding and selecting the right outsource provider for you and your brand. And how a two-way, transparent approach can help build a long standing and productive partnership.

Plus, ways to ask the right questions to find a suitable partner for your brand. A partner becomes the extension of a marketing department that can offer advice and collaborate to get the most out of what is needed, so it is vital to find the right one.  

In addition, Webmart discusses how technology can help maximise the human, by automating processes that do not add any value whether they are done by a computer or a human. By using technology, this frees up a human’s time to focus on creativity, which will help boost performance further. 

To view the guide, click here, or get in contact with Webmart to discuss partnership opportunities on 01869 321 321 or enquires@webmartuk.com.

INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT: Woven brand engagement agency

By Hollie Denby, Head of Sales & Marketing, Woven

Successful branding? It’s about consistency.

As a brand agency with over 20 years’ experience, we know that every interaction with your brand is an opportunity to win a customer. Or lose one.

Businesses understand this when it comes to meetings or phone calls with existing or prospective customers. But they often drop the ball when they translate their brand into the online world.

A brand’s online experience matters as much as its offline one. A business that sells a great product and that has great people can still be undone by a poorly optimised website. It can still be hampered by unengaging email campaigns and a bone-dry social media presence. And it can still fall down due to lacklustre design and forgettable messaging.

Your online brand is a many-sided thing – a blog, a website, an Instagram feed, a banner ad, an automated chatbot. But however it manifests, it must always convey who you are: your values, your identity, and the benefit you bring to the world. 

This is what we do at Woven. We make sure you’re always at your best by putting who you truly are into everything you do. So that no matter how someone interacts with your brand – whether it’s offline or online – you know they’re getting the best possible version of yourself.

Because in a world where brands strive to be everywhere – online, on social media, in print and out of home – it’s never been more important for your voice to be interesting, different and – yes – consistent.

Find your consistent voice at woven.agency.

Google Analytics Segments Vs Filters

By Ben Johnston – Head of SEO & Data Analytics – ESV Digital

Learn the difference between Google Analytics segments and filters, what they are, how they work and when you would use each of them...

One of the most common questions I’m asked about Google Analytics is the difference between a segment and a filter and the main use case of each of them. I’m often asked why you would ever use a filter when a segment does the same job and vice versa.

In today’s post, I’m going to briefly run you through what segments and filters are, how they work and the reasons for using each of them.

WHAT IS A GOOGLE ANALYTICS SEGMENT?

A segment in Google Analytics lets you view your metrics based upon specific criteria, for example only organic or paid traffic. They allow you to change your data on the fly and you use the whole of the Google Analytics interface just focusing on that data and, crucially, they do not change your data the way a filter does.

A segment can be applied retroactively, so you can see how your organic performance was last year and so on, and you can also create your own segments based on certain specific conditions. You can even share those custom segments with other Google Analytics users.

You can apply a segment to your Google Analytics like so:

Click the Add Segment button and you’ll see the list of pre-configured ones. As you can see, there’s a lot to play with and with the ability to import new segments from the Google Analytics gallery and create your own, there’s plenty of flexibility there to investigate your data from a variety of perspectives.

Segments are great and an essential part of your Google Analytics arsenal, but they’re not without their weaknesses.

Weaknesses Of Segments

As handy as it is being able to alter your data on the fly, there is inherently some lost functionality compared to filters. Firstly, there is less flexibility in what you can do with a segment than a filter – you cannot exclude a specific IP address or series of IP addresses with a segment, for example.

They also have a habit of triggering sampling within Google Analytics, where the data shown in a report is less than 100% accurate. If your dataset is small, you should be OK, but segments do bring this on much sooner.

WHAT IS A GOOGLE ANALYTICS FILTER?

A filter is applied to a Google Analytics view and permanently changes the way that the data is collected for that view, rather than changing the way it’s reported on the fly. Unlike a segment, a filter will not change your data retroactively.

Filters offer a great deal more functionality than segments – as well as just replicating the capacities of segments, which would be prudent if you have a high amount of traffic, you can also make sweeping changes to the way your data is collected, processed and reported. You can use a filter to rewrite the URLs in your page reports, for example, or to double-check the hostname or simply to exclude a section of traffic which you know is not relevant (your own team, for example, or bots). You can also unleash the power of regular expressions to really take control of your data.

Filters are a far more powerful solution than segments, but they don’t offer the same flexibility. You would use a filter for a specific task within a reporting view (excluding your own office’s traffic, for example), rather than using it to check the performance of a specific metric in most cases.

Weaknesses Of Filters

With the power of filters comes responsibility in their use. They permanently change the data in a view from the moment they’re applied to the moment you remove it. There’s no going back. They also can’t be applied retroactively in the same way a segment can. It’s this permanence, plus the additional Google Analytics knowledge required to set up a filter that is the key weakness of them.

In line with best practice, you should always have a completely unfiltered “All Website Data” view, to ensure data continuity and to use for checking that your data is coming through properly. You should then have other filtered views depending on the kind of requirements your site has.

At the very least, we suggest having the All Website Data view and a view which filters out your own IP address and the IP address of any partner agencies/ other offices etc, although we would typically go much deeper than this with a Google Analytics setup.

WHEN TO USE SEGMENTS & FILTERS

A segment is the best way to isolate a certain metric, channel or device in your reporting view and apply that to your historic data. If you want to see how many people have come to your site over the last three years from Facebook on their tablets, a segment is the way to go.

If you need to permanently change the way your data is collected, such as excluding your IP address, removing bots, or rewriting your URLs so that they’re easier to read in reports, you’ll be looking for a filter.

The key thing to understand about filters vs segments is that there is really no “vs” at all. They’re different tools for different tasks and a good setup uses them together. For most reports, you’ll be relying on segments to isolate and highlight different metrics, but to ensure that your data is as clean as it can be, you’re going to need filters to be involved.

Unsure of how well your Google Analytics setup stands up to best practice? Get in touch with ESV Digital and let us see what we can do to help. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter for the latest updates.

WHITE PAPER: Direct mail for e-commerce brands in a digital world

By Webmart

The argument over whether digital marketing or direct mail is the most effective to engage customers is widely contested. There is a variety of research that suggests that one is better than the other. However, at Webmart, we believe that the channels should be used together to complement one another to get the most out of the marketing mix, increase brand awareness and boost performance. 

You will, no doubt, invest a lot of time, effort, and money into optimising your digital presence as an e-commerce brand. After all, your business is online, it makes sense to invest in ensuring your online presence is as strong as it can be, but achieving cut through can be challenging! With the support of mail, the value of your brand awareness can be enhanced and cut through can be increased. Direct mail can be incredibly effective in increasing the brand value and growing an online presence. 

With the ever-changing environment in these uncertain times, the digital market is becoming more saturated as digital use goes through the roof. Which is great news for e-commerce brands, but the cut through rate to get the reader’s attention is even harder to grab. 75% of people that have used digital for the first time have suggested that they will continue to use it when things get back to “normal” (McKinsey Digital, 2020). Which means that there is an even greater opportunity to encourage new prospects and customers onto e-commerce sites. 

To help with this, many brands are utilising traditional channels like direct mail to achieve that cut through and improve the performance of their digital campaigns. For example, mail recipients spend an average of 31% longer engaging with the brand’s social media content and remember the online content for longer by an average of 44% (MarketReach/Neuro-Insight, 2018).

Download Webmart’s whitepaper to understand how direct mail can help to increase your ROI on campaigns, and how we use the levers approach to make sure that best practice is achieved to enhance direct mail campaigns for e-commerce brands.  

Priorities for marketers amid a global pandemic

By David McGeough, Director of International Marketing, Wrike

Around the world, businesses are adapting their strategies to reflect the COVID-19 era. For some this means pivoting to a blanket e-commerce approach; for others it has meant creating completely new content hubs and microsites.

Whatever the changes may be, relevancy has never been so important. Your audiences want to know exactly how you are responding to the current challenges and how you will come out the other side.

Now, more than ever, marketing departments are being tested. Previous plans must be replaced, budgets must be cut, and teams must try to maintain the same level of productivity while working remotely.

Stay connected, keep collaborating

Most workforces have now been logging on from home for around nine weeks. During this time, we’ve all had a chance to adapt to our new working routine, finding alternative ways to stay connected with our colleagues.

This has quickly brought to light the importance of collaboration, and how much we take for granted being in close proximity to team members. No longer able to ask someone a question at their desk or get campaign updates in daily face-to-face meetings, we’re relying on technology to bridge the gap. Regardless of where employees are based, marketing teams need to be able to quickly and easily see the status of a task, know the latest developments, and have full visibility of crucial deadlines.

Not only do these tools and platforms need to boost collaboration, they also need to bring every aspect of a campaign or activity under one umbrella. This means should external agencies, freelancers or third-party suppliers be involved, everyone is on the same page and knows what to expect.

With technologies such as work management platforms helping businesses maintain productivity away from the office, many organisations will continue their remote working policies in the future.

A spotlight on ROI

As the pandemic continues to transform the economy, many businesses are experiencing a severe decline in revenue. Inevitably, this has had a knock-on effect internally, with multiple departments taking a hit.

Despite marketing playing a key role in promoting products and services, as well as ensuring the right audiences are being targeted, it’s unsurprising that the vast majority of teams are having to work with reduced budgets. While we’ve seen the same happen as a response to previous recessions – including those in both the 1990s and late 2000s – it has led to certain campaigns being put on hold or cancelled altogether.

It has also resulted in an urgent focus on performance, with a need to understand exactly what activity is having the most impact, and what can no longer afford to be a priority. Marketing teams are using this time to analyse every tactic and platform being used to uncover the return on investment they are getting.

Under close watch, marketers will be forced to transform the way they work in order to find their feet. This will mean getting creative, working with what they already have, and injecting innovation into every activity. This approach won’t just be critical for the current climate, but for those that want to thrive when the economy begins to rebuild.

Preparing for the new normal

While it’s easy to be consumed by the negative impact of the ongoing crisis, this period provides a unique chance for marketing teams to deploy different tactics and learn new skillsets. Employees that usually focus on events, for example, can transfer and develop their skills for digital webinars or conferences. As a result, teams will be better set-up to deal with the changes we are set to see post-pandemic.

If teams are willing to properly analyse the results of their campaign audits under new budget restrictions, they will end up with insights that improve their strategies both now, and in the future. New tactics, tools and ways of working will be replaced by more efficient, streamline and effective methods, without teams having to lose out on the collaboration that is fundamental to marketing success.

Taking a step back could turn out to be extremely positive for innovation. Despite recruitment being on hold, it’s very likely that we will see an increased demand for certain skillsets, such as digital media. The teams that are willing to adapt are the ones that will come out on top, having used this time to rethink product offerings, key audiences and technologies.

Short-term, KPIs and priorities for marketing departments will continue to fluctuate as businesses become more cautious with their money. The longer-term impact will likely be different; however, it is still too early to say how. COVID-19 has forced every marketing team, on a global scale, to consider how they spend and invest their money. Those that have been able to streamline and readjust to the new normal will find it easier as we begin to come out of this.