Online attitudes and behaviours

The largest global study into people’s attitudes and behaviours online. It's based on in-depth interviews with 72, 000 people across the globe. That makes it the most comprehensive existing study on global online behaviour....

TNS Digital Life

Smartphone usage and mobile attitudes

Google have released a cool data tool for viewing peoples smart phone use:
http://www.ourmobileplanet.com

Our Mobile Planet provides insights into smartphone usage and mobile attitudes.

You can create custom charts of mobile penetration, behaviour, activities, commerce and advertising
View by country and add filters such as age, gender and internet usage!

Brilliant tool to deepen your understanding of the mobile consumer and support data driven decisions in your mobile strategy!      

3 tips: lead nurturing

Tip 1: Use a combination of media at different points to catch their attention

• Email messages:
• Send a special, welcome email when they first respond thanking them and pointing them to additional resources e.g. white papers, product specs, customer testimonials / case studies, contact info for questions they have.
• Periodically alert prospects to new resources that might be useful to them, such as: webinars, appearances at events, new white paper
• Telemarketing
• Use inside sales or telemarketing trained in lead nurturing. Offer additional resources that will help them through the buying process and collect info to qualify them such as time frame for purchase, or details about company size and needs. Don't try to close the deal on the call
• Direct mail
• Use targeted mailings, such as a postcard, to promote new white papers or webinars. Postal mail, sent along with in email, increases registrations.
• Send attention grabbing mailings to top prospects such as printed brochures, targeted content, branded gifts
• Integrate with telemarketing. When identify more qualified prospect send customised pack to demonstrate how you can help meet their business needs or address particular pain points.

Tip 2: Quick response to web leads
Calls placed within 5 minutes of s web lead have the highest likelihood of making contact. Odds drop x 10 within 30 minutes and another 10 within an hour.

Tip 3: Use a lead scoring system

1. Work with sales to define highly qualified leads - what characteristics they are looking for in a lead
2. Determine a criteria to score each prospect e.g. number of touches and prospect activity, customer profile, qualifying info such as budget in place, time frame set, decision making authority.
3. Measure impact of nurturing activity - track leads in database as move closer to sales ready status. Record all touches and determine which helped move a prospect up. Monitor each prospects email activity to look for increases open and click. Monitor web activity to find visitors who suddenly visit more often, reading company of product info, or downloading additional white papers, case studies or other supporting material.
4. Close the loop with sales - track results of all leads passed to sales - weekly call or recording follow up sales activity in CRM. Determine which leads closed, dropped out and have no chance of sale, dropped out due to change in circumstance so go back into nurturing process.

5 tips to improve lead gen

1. Build solid relationships with sales - frequent, ongoing comms, work together to define a qualified lead, understand their sales process, typical obstacles and concerns.
2. Demonstrate marketing contribution to revenues - provide data to execs to prove effectiveness and create short and long term goals to get buy-in and build the business case.
3. Trust and relevancy - create messages that focus on your prospects needs and interests e.g. must show C-level that its a scalable solution that can drive sucess.
4. Build relationships through lead nuturing - focus on the people in the funnel not the process.Focus on prospects goals and potential benefits, such as reducing csts or improving operational efficiency to give them competitive edge.
5. Pay attention to most important metrics - identify metrics that give the best pictureof campaign effectivess e.g. lead/opportunity conversion rate will give a picture of quality of leads.     

Integrated campaigns using unusual gifts

An unusual gift can grab attention and emphasis a message so here's a simple plan:

1. Choose a client focused campaign theme and identify a gift that meets the theme Mail gift, along with postcard that identifies with the customer issues and reiterates your proposition, along with thought leadership to top prospects
2. 10 days after gift: send email to all prospects to reiterate issues and how you can help using theme to connect to gift and call to action inviting a 15-minute briefing with a sales person - no landing page just prepopulated email.
3. 2 weeks after 1st email: send email promoting how you can help them and how they get the most from your solution e.g. customer services team to help...
4. 3 weeks after DM: send follow up DM related to first DM with postcard that reiterates products value
5. Same week as follow up DM: reiterates product value and invite questions using a mailto link.

15 tips to better public speaking

Content is not king on stage, it's audience engagement...Here's 15 tips on behaviour, visuals &rehearsing:

Behaviour

1. Make eye contact - look at individuals in the audience one at a time for about 5 seconds each to keep your mind set on talking to individuals.
2. Lean forward and move around - 'ready position' will encourage you to move around and want  to talk to the audience.
3. Use gestures and facial expressions - movement catches the eye, the more you move the more your watched.
4. Vary your voice - your energy and excitement about the subject should be communicated through your voice.
5. Drop non-words - 'ums' and 'ahs' chop up your message so pause for a few second to gather thoughts.  
6. Dress for success - you're judged on what you wear, your hair, your jewelry. overdress when in doubt.

Slides & visuals

1. Light on text / heavy on images - use images to illustrate and support point.
2. Keep graphs simple - graphs should be 2-dimensional
3. Use black blank slides - shifts attention back to you after a key point and communicates closure of a section.
4. Go easy on transitions - no more than 2-3 different transitions and not every slide. Audience should hardley notice transitions as distract.
5. Follow 10-20-30 rule - about 10 slides, lasting no more than 20 minutes, font size 30 or larger.
6. Create a handout - if data-heavy, create handout that highlights the key findings so they can take away.

Practice & rehearsals

1. Practice in front of people - practice first 3-4 times (but don't memorise as you loose meaning), read notes before speech then get tips and practice eye contact.
2. Record your presentation - video or audio so know how come across: how look at people, whether leaving pauses, how hear voice, using hands, leaning forward. 
3. Keep rehearsal shorter - on stage you add content, interact with audience, field questions etc so rehearsal will always be about 75% as long.

Email optimisation: Email Images & Buttons

A split test by Philips Norelco’s email marketing team resulted 79.4% more 'Buy Now' button clicks.

Both versions had identical subject lines, offers, and copy but the winning design used

• a button colour that contrasted with the rest of the page
• images that didn't distract from the offer
• an image of the product, as it would appear on a store shelf, vs. the product itself helping put recipients in a shopping mood. 

http://whichtestwon.com/archives/12413

Content to inform the B2B buying decision

Content used to inform decisions when researching a market

Content used to inform decisions when researching a product

Research by Marketing Automatation Software Guide

Infographic: the state of the internet, right now

Brilliant use of animated, constantly updating infographics, which contains some mind-blowing stats about the size and growth of the web.

For example, in the 60 seconds, Amazon sold 4,423 items, and $1.6m was spent on e-commerce. During the same period there were 331 new internet users out of a total of 1.97bn worldwide.

Click on the link below to see more...

http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/7773-infographic-the-internet-worldwide

Facebook marketing - 10 tips

10 tips to getting to make sure you're in the news feed:

1. Ask Questions
2. Post Games and Trivia
3. Interact with Fan Engagement
4. Incorporate Wall Sapplets
5. Incorporate Relevant Photos
6. Relate to Current Events
7. Incorporate Videos
8. Post Content for Time-Sensitive Campaigns
9. Include Links within Posts
10. Be Explicit in Your Posts

Landing Page Optimisation: best page elements to test

MarketingSherpa have analsyed the top page elements that rank most consistently as having a “very significant impact” across different CTA's:

1. Direct lead gen: The highest performing element is the form layout at 44 percent
2. Incentivized lead: The highest performing element is the body copy at 41 percent
3. Ecommerce: The highest performing element is the image content at 43 percent

Internet marketing statistics

A great presentation with internet statistics showing the need to change marketing from one way to real-time dialogue. Key take outs:

1. "Make people want stuff e.g. Educational ebooks, how to videos, online calculators, planning tools, answers to common questions"
2. "Be Generous - the more you give, the more you get, build trust and credibility & good will, increase ~ of pages and inbound links"
3. "Rock your keywords - http://www.hubspot.com/internet-marketing-tips/detailed-keyword-tips
4. "Give great directions - relevant landing pages, clear call to actions, compelling offers"
5. "Invest wisely - if it don't make dollars, it don't make sense" 

Transform Your Marketing

View more presentations from HubSpot Internet Marketing

Optimising the use of images

Three key ways to increase the strengths of images:

• Relevance – choose images that have a direct implication of value for the actual product or service.
• Reality – choose images that help the visitor see the core value of the product e.g.
• Relative weight – images should draw the natural eye-path of the visitor and thus bring more force to the value communicated by the image. Image weight must be used sparingly, as too many competing graphical elements will only confuse the visitor.

View the webclinic replay learn how to optimize the design of your homepage.

Getting the most out of Stumbleupon

Unlike Digg, or del.icio.us, you don’t need hundreds of votes to start getting traffic to your blog. Only two or three votes can result in hundreds of visitors to your blog or a single blog post. He's a summary from a  article I read:
1. Browse for ideas
A quick series of stumbles can be a good way to get your ideas. If you want to view results only from the topic you blog about, you can select this in your profile.

2. Locate great links
Connect with users with similar interests to open up a large collection of great links for you to explore.
3. Connect with readers
If you notice the same users repeatedly stumbling your articles then take the time to add them as friends, or message them to show your appreciation.

4. Connect with other bloggers
Voting for pages on blogs you admire. The more traffic you send to them the more likely they’ll be to investigate your profile and discover the face behind all that extra traffic.

5. Build your personal brand
When you're the first user to vote for a site ('discover' it), a link to your profile image and details will appear on the vote page for that item so make sure it's a good one as if your item goes viral then you’ll receive a lot of exposure.
View the full article here: How to get the most from StumbleUpon

Digital strategy - driving customers into your online presence

A good diagram showing the numerous channels available to drive customers into the online marketing funnel and how to engage and bring them closer to your business.

Digital Strategy

Persuasive marketing

Brilliant article about how to persuade your audience to take action. Top picks:

1. Inconvenience the audience by creating an impression of product scarcity
8. If a call to action is motivated by fear, people will block it, unless call to action has specific steps.
22. How to impress a potential customer with credentials without being labeled as a show-off?
4. Ads quoting negative behavior en masse reinforces negative behavior.

http://www.moskalyuk.com/blog/yes-50-scientifically-proven-ways-to-be-persuasive/1624

Levering Social Media

A great easy to read guide showing the value of each social channel in terms of:

• Customer communication
• Brand exposure
• Traffic to your site
• SEO
  





Download PDF version of chart