More money than ever is being allocated to digital marketing budgets, as companies and brands try to launch social media campaigns, publish videos and create content.

But according to research by digital agency Greenlight, only 36% of digital marketers are confident that they are targeting the right audience with their campaigns.

The agency surveyed over 200 digital marketers from across the UK and found that 23% were not tracking their campaign spend at all.

“It is clear that many in the industry are...

We’re less than a year away from the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) taking effect, and by most accounts, many brands aren’t ready for it. Marketers, in particular, need to be out in front of the changes required for compliance because it is their job that will arguably be upended most by the legislation.

GDPR will redefine, and in some...

When your boss asks you how the online marketing efforts are doing, what do you say? “We’ve increased impressions by 30% and traffic is up 15%.” Do you know what that means for business growth? Does your boss?

Digital marketing is great for equipping businesses and marketers with the data to define their success and find unending opportunities for growth. Unfortunately, this also makes it incredibly difficult for marketing leaders to determine what truly matters to grow their company.

And yes, I say grow...

There is little doubt that technology has a role to play in streamlining and enhancing marketing production. However, from the decision to implement one of these systems, through to its implementation, there are five critical issues that need to be dealt with to ensure its successful deployment, adoption and usage.

Gathering the business requirements for such a solution can be a challenging task that can dictate the success or failure of a project.

The solutions available, digital asset management, content...

UK price comparison website Moneysupermarket.com Ltd has been fined £80,000 by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), for continuing to send emails to customers that had previously opted out.

The ICO is a regulatory body whose role is to upload information rights in the public interest.

Over 10 days in 2016, the company sent out a whopping 7.1 million to people who had actively asked not to be included in any further direct marketing.

The email the company sent was about the updating of...

Advances in technology mean that sales professionals should act more like business consultants, according to LinkedIn.

The findings have been published as part of the State of Sales 2017 study.

The survey of over 2,000 sales professionals and business decision makers shows that top performing sales people are the ones that take the time to understand a client’s business before making their initial pitch.

The...

Marketing departments, by their very nature, are populated by some very creative people. Ideas are the stock-in-trade and there is a process for taking those ideas from birth through to fruition.

The same is true in R&D, but what about other parts of the company -- the accounts department, or HR, for example – and what about partners and suppliers, don’t they too have great ideas and shouldn’t they be heard?

The fact is that organisations can tap into a battalion of potential...

The changing expectations of the customer is forcing many organisations to rethink how they market their brands, their goods and their services. How they are going about this could be referred to as marketing transformation. Akin to digital transformation, marketing transformation is concerned with bringing value to customers via a better and fuller customer experience (CX).

To provide better CX, you need to create a holistic and unified experience...

Reminiscent of the once popular magic eye pictures of the 1990s, the current martech LUMAscape is a colourful but confusing blur of point solutions, which have emerged onto the market over the years.

Regular visitors to Mobile World Congress and dmexco will know only too well that the number of new companies offering martech solutions has reached an all-time high.

But is it sensible for...

The digital marketing industry has been caught up in the midst of an on-going cross-industry digital skills gap over the last few years. With thousands of extra workers required to fulfil demand it’s imperative that the industry take steps to help close this gap from within.

Last year a Government report highlighted the gulf between the number of skilled workers in Britain compared to both the required sum and the state of the rest of the...

When it comes to accessibility and web design, you’d think it would be a matter of hand in glove.

After all, in the UK there are 2.7 million colour-blind people and 70% of the UK population wearing glasses. On top of this, 1 in 30 suffer with sight loss, and 10% of the UK population has dyslexia (4% with severe cases).

Unfortunately, however, this romantic notion of inclusivity just doesn’t reflect reality as a shocking amount of websites today aren’t built with their accessibility in...

I am often asked these days about our stance on transparency – the subject comes up in RFPs and has become the subject du jour in the same way as engagement, attribution and viewability.

As with these other trends, the term has been forced to carry more baggage than it was originally intended to.

Let’s recap on the transparency debate. It stems from the ANA Transparency Report of May 2016, which was specifically about...

I could never have been a wedding planner! As we waited for the first guests to arrive at our recent workshop, those familiar nerves emerged: would the promise of a free bacon roll be enough to get some senior marketers out of bed at 8:30am on a grey winter’s morning?

Fortunately, either those breakfast baguettes, or the promise of seeing yours truly deliver some cracking Pancake Day puns, saw us joined by marketing and CRM experts from Debenhams, Harvey Nichols, The Gap and 20 other retailers.

How to...

On any given day I’m continually answering emails and WhatsApp messages on my mobile, checking social media for breaking news and booking business trips on my tablet.

We’ve never been more connected than we are today, and we expect the brands in our lives to engage with us in exactly the same way – with personal, real-time communication across all channels.

We expect to be reached when WE want to be reached, HOW we want to be reached, and about the topics we care about.

This type of one-to-one customer...

Odds are, at some point, you’ve sat through a bad presentation. One with slides overflowing with text that a presenter is reciting verbatim.

This phenomenon is so well known that it has its own name: Death By PowerPoint.

The winces and thousand-yard stares that this phrase causes when uttered shows just how searingly evocative it is - people have been there. But PowerPoint gets a bad rap. 

It’s still the overwhelming market leader where presentation software is concerned and with good...

Step back for a minute and ask how it would feel to be a customer using your apps.

Would it be easy to learn what your app does? Would it be easy to get in contact with you to find out more? Would your after-sales care be a positive experience?

In the digital era, the ability to provide a positive customer experience (CX) is widely regarded as the ‘holy grail’ for companies of all shapes and sizes. A recent eConsultancy survey showed...

As marketing spend hits new highs, CFOs demand greater insight into ROI. With very different measures of value, there are huge opportunities for conflict between marketing and finance.

Where is the common ground? 

With a background as both CMO and CFO for organisations such as eBay, and now CFO for Optimizely, I like to think I’m uniquely placed to understand how best to overcome the natural tension between finance and marketing. 

In fact, consensus is not only possible, it is essential.

CMOs...

From segmentation and targeting to customer community confirmation

Traditionally, marketing always starts with segmentation—a practice of dividing the market into homogenous groups based on their geographic, demographic, psychographic, and behavioral profiles. Segmentation is typically followed by targeting—a practice of selecting one or more segments that a brand is committed to pursue based on their attractiveness and fit with the brand. Segmentation and targeting are both fundamental aspects of a brand’s...

It’s almost possible to hear the sigh from marketers around the country… as if there isn’t enough to fit into every day, they’re now expected to become a psychology expert too?!

Well, not exactly. But if marketers want to ensure their communications strategies thrive in 2017, they need to know a few things about cognitive biases. These mental tendencies have the potential to pose some of the biggest obstacles to ROI in the next 12 months, and the worse thing is, they can’t even...

(c)iStock.com/Pamela Moore

The start of any year always begins with some sort of review of where you’re at, how you’re doing against your objectives and goals, but most importantly, what your budget will be or where you stand currently.  One of the most expensive parts of the advertising cycle is production, so even though you may be looking at how you’re doing against agreed budgets, you should also pay extra attention to utilising the best of what you have. Here are a few ways to make...