technology

With 2016 now just weeks away, marketers are turning their attention to new year planning with a new study revealing the biggest trends and anxieties marketers will face in the coming year – with social commerce topping the list.

The study of 100 UK marketers by digital marketing agency Greenlight, suggests that more than half of marketers (52%) believe that social commerce will be the most rapidly growing trend in 2016. This is closely followed by location-based marketing technology for 49% of respondents, and predictive targeting for 43% of those surveyed. The growth of wearable technology was backed by 39% of respondents.

Personalisation is likely to be a key driver in 2016, with 42% currently using location targeting to personalise their marketing and a third targeting by age group and another third by intent – such as purchase history. However, the survey also showed opportunity for improvement with more than a quarter (27%) currently not targeting by location, age group, intent, socio-economic group, religion, or sexual orientation.

Concern was revealed about the dominance of tech titans such as Yahoo! and Apple with 57% worried about their use of data, 32% concerned about becoming over reliant on their services, and 25% concerned about the cost.

However, the marketers surveyed also said such companies supported their online retail strategy. 86% of marketers said that Google helped them deliver on their aims whilst 71% considered Facebook a friend to online retail. 69% said the same of Twitter.

As marketers look to what skills they need for 2016 respondents identified a number of skills priorities. 59% said data analysis, 52% better content optimisation skills, 45% a better alignment with the sales team, 42% greater financial modelling and budgeting, 40% improved SEM and SEO competence, and the ability to code for 23%.

Andreas Pouros, COO and co-founder at Greenlight, said marketers had to consider what they were after. “Before investing consider your next move carefully. Question whether new tools and services will really impact your business and how much value investment in these areas will deliver. Marketers also need to make sure they have the skills to handle new technologies,” he said.

Resources: marketingtechnews.co

When trying to understand where to put digital marketing investment and budget, it is crucial to understand which route to market is the most effective for your customer base since you don’t want to be wasting investment on a path your customers don’t often tread.

A new study by TextMaster and Similar Web suggests that when broken down by country direct traffic dominates over other methods of accessing brands such as search, referral or social with direct traffic the highest for German customers.

And yet for online dominant industries such as fashion, mobile apps and news and entertainment it is search traffic that provides the biggest generator of visits over direct hits. The research shows that for apps search traffic generates nearly half of all visits (46%). In fashion a third of visits come through search traffic and for news and entertainment 29%. Paid search generates the most amount of traffic for fashion companies at 14% whilst for news and entertainment the amount of traffic is minimal at only 0.43%.

Broken down by country the number of internet users using search engines to find fashion websites was highest in both the UK and France at 42% and 39% respectively.

The success of display ads meanwhile differs according to both industry and country with the method the most effective for driving traffic in Italy. For the fashion industry display ads generate 7.36% of traffic compared to only 1.23% for entertainment.

The study also showed the role of referral traffic with the method twice as important in the US at 30% than in the UK which hit only 16%.

Despite social increasingly being adopted by the fashion industry the research found that whilst social networks generated 19% of traffic for the news and entertainment industry for fashion it was minimal at 5%. However across industries it was Facebook that topped the chart as the top social network as driving most traffic.

Resources: marketingtechnews.co

Today’s buyer wields more power than ever before. They enjoy access to more information and are better informed about your company and products. Not only this, but they are more knowledgeable than ever before because they spend more time doing self-guided research.

The art of the cold call is dead to today’s buyer – they have fortressed themselves from intrusive sales tactics. They expect salespeople to have some knowledge of what they are interested in, and looking for.

It’s amazing to think that more than half of buying decisions are made before a sales team even gets involved. However, that doesn’t mean sales can step back and let marketing handle it all on their own. In order to win the hearts of buyers, sales and marketing must work hand in hand.

 

Sales and marketing learn to play nice

In the business world, marketing professionals and salespeople often struggle to collaborate or agree on anything. They question each other’s methods and love to play the blame game around the quantity and quality of leads versus the timely and professional follow-up on those leads. That doesn’t need to be the case. In fact, there’s a relatively simple solution to get everyone on the same page. The key is a new hybrid model that blends marketing and sales.

 

What is ‘hybrid’?

In science, hybrid refers to anything derived from heterogeneous sources, or composed of elements of different or incongruous kinds.

That simply means creating something by combining two different elements. This is what marketers and sales professionals must do. It’s time to blur the lines separating these two functions and have them learn from the other’s strengths.

 

The convergence of sales and marketing

So how does this merger of sales and marketing manifest itself? Well for one, sales professionals these days have to develop super-human senses. They must be tuned in to social channels, email opens, website visits and any other potential buying signals.

Sounds an awful lot like marketing, doesn’t it? Your potential buyers are a powerful force and they won’t wait around for you. That means marketing and sales teams have a very short window when it comes to responding to engagement. Potential buyers will visit a website, download content, and move on. Their interaction is recorded by marketing and passed on to sales.

The problem is that currently this process takes a couple of days…or longer! Would you still be interested in purchasing something from a department store if a sales attendant said they’d get to you in a few days? Not likely.

Sales and marketing must work closer together to make sure the way leads are handed over is as fast as possible.

 

Recipe for sales and marketing alignment

The need for a hybrid sales and marketing team is evident, but the real question is how can these teams work together to meet and exceed customer expectations and deliver on business objectives?

Here are a few simple steps to follow:

• Listen intently to buying signals and personalise messaging to suit the buyer profile and the stage of their buying journey
• Plan and build common objectives and compensation models as a team and make performance against those objectives highly visible
• Specialise your lead qualification, prospecting and sales teams
• Add structure and accountability into the lead management process – be sure to “mind the gap” for handoffs between marketing and sales teams

The era of functions operating independently in separate silos has ended. Engaging immediately and intelligently with qualified leads is more important than ever, which is why organisations need an intersection of sales and marketing.

Resources: marketingtechnews.com