5 Free Practical Chrome Extensions for Marketing

If you spend a lot of time online, you may already use browser extensions. Extensions are valuable tools that can save you time and increase your productivity.

A browser extension is a plug-in that extends the functionality of a web browser in some way. (Wikipedia)

Since Google Chrome is the most widely used web browser worldwide, I want to share my top five favorites that can make your marketing easier.

1. FEEDLY

Feedly is a news aggregator you can customize to collect marketing-related blog posts and news. When Google discontinued Reader in 2013, I chose Feedly to replace it.

This extension is not only ideal to keep abreast of marketing trends and news, it's excellent for sharing content in social media networks. You can add up to 100 feeds to your dashboard in the free version and create categories (collections) for easy organizing.

Some of my categories include:

Advertising

Branding

Business & Technology

Customers (for customer service, engagement, retention, etc.)

Graphic Design

Marketing (general)

Nonprofit

SEO

Small Business

Social Media

Writing

If you come across something interesting, but have no time to read it, there's a "Read Later" option. If you aren't using a social media management program, you can share your feeds to Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook.

In "Preferences," you can select whether you want to display your feeds as titles, cards, or in magazine format. You can also customize how you want your feeds sorted, how they appear (font sizes and styles, colors) and more.

Feedly has two free complementary add-ons: Save to Board Add-On for saving stories you discover on the web to your Feedly boards; and Follow RSS Add-On for following sources you discover on the web via Feedly.

The two upgraded paid versions offer more bells and whistles, but the free version is pretty darn good!

2. PDF VIEWER

I use PDF Viewer frequently. I find it especially valuable when I want to view marketing studies, reports, or any PDF file links online. Instead of forcing me to download files immediately, the extension opens a separate browser tab so I can read documents before deciding if I want to download them.

Options include:

Switch to presentation mode

Print

Download

Rotate

Find (search tool)

Next page, previous page as well as selecting specific page numbers

3. SAVE TO POCKET

I use Pocket for saving web pages, articles, videos, and images. It's valuable for reading later or keeping important information for future reference.

Once you set up an account, you can tag what you save and access your content easily. You can also "Explore" topics to discover new information. Unfortunately, "marketing" isn't a recognized topic, but these sub-topics (as well as many others) are available:

Business

Startup

Social media

Webmarketing

Analytics

Copywriting

Graphic Design

In addition, Pocket has a "Recommended" tab for content based on your saved urls. Try it out and see for yourself.

4. SIMILARWEB

SimilarWeb is a useful extension for in-depth website engagement, traffic sources, and site ranking information for any site you visit. You can find out how popular a website is and get an estimate of its traffic.

In the "Overview" tab, you'll find the site's global and country web rank as well as its industry ranking. It displays the site's engagement including last month's estimated visits, time on the site, page views, and bounce rate. Plus, there's a graph that shows monthly visits.

In the "Sources" tab, you'll see a bar graph outlining the site's direct, links, search, social, mail, and display traffic sources. In the "Geo" tab, you'll discover which top countries visitors come from. Data also include the site's top organic and paid keywords, top referring and destination sites, and similar sites.

Is this extension 100% accurate? All I know is the data doesn't always correspond to my site's Google Analytics. In fact, it gives me better results than Google does. So, when you use it, take that into account.

5. Zest.is

Zest is a newly launched kid on the extension block. It's a marketing content sharing platform started by three smart Israeli guys: Yam Regev, Idan Yalovich, and Tomer Lerner.

Once installed, it takes over your browser tab button. Each time you click on a new tab, you'll see a grouping of articles on a variety of marketing topics.Currently, topics include:

Affiliate

Automation

B2B

B2C

Blogging

Branding

Conference

Content

CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization)

eCommerce

Email

Growth

Influencer

Inspiration

Local

Metrics

Mobile

Nurturing

Onboarding

Paid

PR

Product

Referral

SaaS

Sales

SEO

Social

Strategy

Tools

Video

The extension has a search bar, sorting options, and two filters – for audio and video content. Anyone can recommend new content by clicking a link.

If you share aggregated marketing content in your social media networks, this extension will become your go-to app!

So, there you have my top five favorite Chrome extensions. Do you have any others that are useful for marketing?

Recommended for You

Webcast, March 15th: How to Scale Upmarket with Enterprise Field Sales

Author: Elaine Fogel

As an author, speaker, marketer, brand and customer experience evangelist, educator, and consultant, Elaine Fogel engages, entertains, and motivates audiences and readers with stories and lessons gleaned from her diverse career as a singer, educator, television show host, and marketing executive. In addition to contributing to Business2Community, she writes… View full profile ›

Source: 5 Free Practical Chrome Extensions for Marketing

TJ Group Marketing Corporation UK – New Website Launch (March 2017)

TJ Group Marketing Corporation is announcing the launch of the new website with new services available. It includes Marketing, SEO, Linkbuilding services, Consulting, Social Media Services, SMM, SMO, and More. The company provides marketing services for startups, small/medium size companies. Offer Quality Link Building Service and Affordable Professional SEO Services for individuals and firms. They also help B2Bcompanies accelerate sales with powerful marketing with improved interface.

TJ Group Corporation is a different type of marketing / SEO company. These 7 factors make the difference to decide the right marketing firm for your business. These are the main factors:1st We are business-to-business (B2B) experts2nd We embed3rd We combine innovation mindset, strategy, execution4th we aren't a "creative agency" but a corporation that look through global market, The great B2B marketing is not about pretty advertisements. We generate powerful sales results by focusing on lead generation and market awareness5th we are tactics-agnostic6th we are a complete marketing department solution7th we are pragmatic. We execute marketing for complex and technical businesses who often have not had marketing functions in the past. We understand how to operate on limited budgets, generate profits, and grow from there.

Official Website: http://tjgroupcorp.com/

Source: TJ Group Marketing Corporation UK – New Website Launch (March 2017)

Why Tech Companies Fail at Marketing (and How They Can Get Better)

It all comes down to knowing your audience.

Tech companies often fail at marketing because they take a fundamentally wrong approach to designing marketing strategy and campaigns. Subpar marketing means "me-too," uninspiring content on corporate blogs with insignificant social shares and superficiality from the target audience's viewpoint. Tech companies struggle to create strategic messaging to describe their products with undifferentiated messages, jargon and superlatives. Marketing drains significant resources on channel-oriented paid acquisition campaigns that have no market segmentation or lead to homepages or other generic pages.

These are just a few examples, but what's behind such failure? Part of the problem is not understanding what marketing is and what its goals are. The goal of marketing is to control perception and change the behavior of your target audience. Period. All marketing activities and every aspect of marketing falls under the goals of controlling perception, changing behavior or both.

In the last few years, I've spoken with over a hundred founders and marketing executives. When asked about marketing strategy, most of the time companies present some sort of Excel file (or other document) with a list of activities such as SEO, SEM, social media, content marketing, paid acquisition campaigns, PR, email marketing etc. Each channel might include a few generic marketing campaigns or just a laundry list of activities. So, why do so many tech companies fail at marketing?

Focusing on Channels Rather Than Target Customers

Successful marketing strategy starts with understanding your target customer, setting the right goals, creating effective messaging and only then deciding on the best channels to reach your targets. Knowledge of the target customer should drive your strategic messaging and content strategy. Both are essential in designing marketing campaigns.

The process of creating a marketing campaign is somewhat similar to cooking a nice meal for your family or friends. First you might consider their preferences. Then you think of the dish that you want to cook. Only then do you make a list of ingredients needed. In successful marketing, the channels are just the ingredients that come after you are clear on your target audience, your goals and your message.

Most companies start their marketing backward: Channels – > Segmentation  -> Customer -> MessageThis is how success marketing campaigns are structured: Customer -> Segmentation  -> Message -> Channels

Before designing your next marketing campaign, answer the following questions:

Who is your target customer?

Can you segment your market into meaningful segments such as verticals?

What messages do you want to use or test to influence your target customer?

What are the best channels for your marketing campaign to reach your target audience?

Going Wide and Shallow Rather Than Narrow and Deep

Companies rarely look into segmentation to achieve greater ROI on their marketing spend. Even when a company understands its target customer, it overlooks the fact that their target customers' needs and challenges might be very different depending on the vertical. For example, a sales manager in the pharmaceutical industry might have different needs, organizational structure or even goals than a sales manager in the hardware or media industry.

While account-based marketing and account-based selling might come across as something new, the basic concept has been around for a while. Focus your selling and marketing efforts on a list of target customers with the highest potential Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). The true benefit comes when account-based strategies in sales and marketing are aligned.

Marketing based on target customer profiles segments the market into a few categories and creates a list of specific companies and people to go after. So for example, if you are selling to VPs of sales in organizations with over 20 sales representatives, you might segment and test the pharmaceutical market and software resellers. Then you would pick a list of 100-200 companies in each category. Needless to say that when you prepare your marketing campaign for each vertical, you need to design unique messages.

Ultimately, align your marketing and sales messages so that your target customer is exposed to your message a few times per day. In the morning, your sales team might send him/her an outbound email. During work hours your customer can be exposed to your ads on Linkedin and Twitter leading to a marketing asset that provides valuable insight. And at the end of the day he/she might see your retargeting campaign ad on Facebook or while reading the news. This unified 360-attack will allow you to spend your money efficiently and embed your company and message into the mind of your potential buyers.

Focusing on First-Touch/Last-Touch Attribution Models 

Do you understand the pattern of how your prospects interact with your content, your product and your marketing campaign before they become a customer? If not, you're missing a big picture. Look for overall patterns and a correlation between free trial signups and how many times a customer visited your website, consumed your contented or was exposed to your marketing campaign. It is not the first touch or the last touch that matters. It is about the number of times (pattern) that prospects are exposed before they signup or buy from you.

Marketing is not about picking channels and running broad marketing campaigns with generic messages. Successful marketing strategies start with understanding your target customer and designing effective messaging that resonates. Market segmentation helps companies to get maximum return on every dollar they spend. Instead of going wide and targeting the whole marketplace, figure out an effective way to segment your audience. Align your sales and marketing and design joined-up campaigns that allow you to reach your selected target of customers multiple times per day.

This article is courtesy of BusinessCollective, featuring thought leadership content by ambitious young entrepreneurs, executives & small business owners.

Source: Why Tech Companies Fail at Marketing (and How They Can Get Better)

Advertising and Marketing Products and Services on Web Radio

The world of technology is changing so fast. Radio technology has not been left behind to what it was several decades ago when all communication was transmitted via airwaves. Today, people can easily listen to their favorite radio station by streaming over the internet. The popularity of web radio is one which has been rapidly rising because it offers listeners more control and selection of the content that they what.

However, I have a small e-commerce store which usually sells general merchandise. My peak sales season is usually during summers. With that said, I usually ensure that by summer I have enough order in store to cater for the needs of the clients. Over the years, the growth of my business has been stagnating which has always raised concerned about the future of the business.

Nonetheless, I've always ensured that I embrace the best marketing strategies. For years I've been advertising online, on TV and also through the radio. The costs of advertising have been quiet and they usually eat much of the gross income. But there is no better way to attract potential customers like through advertising.

There is Massive Opportunity to Advertise on Internet Radio

Last summer was different. First, I decided to try advertising on online radio. Nonetheless, I wanted to try a new experience and see how it goes. I researched online for the best web radio stations to advertise on. I decided to try Pandora. It was a huge surprise for me.

Foremost, one thing that I realized while advertising on radio was the fact that the adverts are well targeted according to the various tastes and preferences of online listeners. It is a big plus because I able to find the right audience to market my products to. Finding the right target was easier. Once I did that, I was able to market to the audience economically, because they were the right buyers. This made marketing more affordable.

On the other hand, in contrast with advertising on traditional radio, web radio was quiet cheaper. I had my advertising costs reduced by almost have which meant better health and profitability. I could attribute this to the fact that web radios don't necessarily have to employ many people. Also no costly equipment are used hence making the costs quiet low.

That summer and also the following seasons, I ensured that I continued marketing on web radio. This has seen my business grow exponentially since then. I've been having massive sales throughout the years since then.

Education to Create Your Music and Marketing Strategy

However, there are some things that you need to know before you start marketing on web radio. First you need to know about the taste of your audience before you zero them in with your products. Their taste of music and the age is important. For instance, you can't just market an anti-aging cream to millennials. Your audience is the most important element of marketing on online radios.  A proper understanding of them enables you to tailor-make your ad and also to choose the best products or service to market to them.

You will also need to plan ahead appropriately. You need to know when it is the best time for your ads to be live. Most youth may for instance listen to music in the afternoons and in the evening. This is the best time to market products which target them.

Know When to Pre-sell

Also advertising when a new playlist or featured releases are live can mean a difference in your marketing strategy. This is the best time because there will be many listeners and your ad will reach a large population. The large the audience which gets your message, the more probable that you will make better sales.

It is also good that you always tweak your ads. This makes them different from each other and thus less likelihood that they will be boring. The most important thing however is to sell you brand. By letting the listeners get much acquainted with your brand makes it easier for them to identify themselves with it. This is an advantage because they might decide to purchase something from you even though you never advertised it.

It is always good to tweak you ads from time to time to make them less boring. Try to make them attractive according to the age demographic of your target audience.

Source: Advertising and Marketing Products and Services on Web Radio

Informatica Collaborates with Google Cloud on Marketing Analytics for CMOs

Marketing Analytics for CMOs

If you haven't seen it yet, I want to recommend the Informatica Naked Marketing blog series written by my marketing colleagues. In it, we give full details of how we built a B2B marketing data lake from the ground up. The data lake provides all our marketers, field marketers, and sales with valuable, connected data about our customers and prospects gathered from all their interactions with our website, digital content, digital advertising, and social media. The journey to the data lake wasn't easy; the biggest challenge was that our data was siloed in various apps, which prevented us from connecting a true end-to-end marketing journey.

Today, we have an exciting update on how we can help you address this data silo challenge for your marketing organization.

Informatica works with Google to serve marketers

Informatica is working with Google to help marketing professionals build a next-generation data-driven market engine in their organizations, with new capabilities in marketing analytics and data warehouse modernization. With Informatica, combined with Google Cloud Platform, customers can easily pull in marketing data from multiple CRM, marketing automation, and social systems such as Salesforce, Marketo, and Eloqua to augment their data from existing Google marketing services, and enable powerful end-to-end customer insights.

With Informatica's out-of-the-box cloud connectivity for Google Cloud Platform's, data analytics services such as Google Big Query, and recently announced Google Spanner (see our press release), customers can modernize their marketing data warehouse implementations and easily move to a hybrid or cloud-native marketing analytics environment.

The result enables CMOs and their team to address many of the biggest data and operational challenges in moving to a high performing data-driven marketing organization.

Becoming a data-driven marketer

My colleague, Anish Jariwala, Informatica's director of digital marketing strategy and analytics, led the creation of our marketing data lake and has worked with marketing data all of his career. He has some great insights to share about why it's important for marketing leaders to be data-driven, the challenges they face creating a data-driven culture and how best to do it. Below is what Anish shared with me in his own words:

CMO or (C-1) marketing leaders have to recognize the fact that over the last 10 to 15 years, marketing departments have turned upside down because of the amount of data their department collects in their individual marketing apps, such as web analytics, marketing automation, CRM and social. Also, this data is siloed, preventing marketers from mapping end-to-end customer journey that can create a true marketing impact.

Increasingly, CEOs and CFOs are asking CMOs for the spend accountability and show ROI on marketing spend. The simple marketing mantra is: do NOT spend money if you cannot measure it. Gone are the days of spending millions of dollars on marketing initiatives that aren't targeted and relying on a "spray and pray" approach.

I still recall one CMO interaction that I had when I worked at Marketo. The CMO mentioned that she had to show value to sales in eight weeks using the Marketo product. I bet this kind of communication has become common in the modern marketing apps-driven world. Every time, we fire up our Account Based Marketing dashboard in front of customers and prospects, the overwhelming reaction is: "Can we ever get there?" and "How long would it take?"

Marketing leaders have to foster a data-driven culture and promote data-driven unified insights for each and every marketing decision in their meetings. This forces marketers to find data to test their hypothesis. Also, the by-product of this approach is that marketers develop data analytical skills that increase their market value.

Execution has become a critical glue in digital marketing initiatives. If execution is an issue, you spend your precious resources—money and time—with delayed or no outcomes in sight. If you fail, you need to fail fast and adjust accordingly. Many marketing teams have a great vision but they fail in the execution phase.

For more information on how we're working with Google Cloud Platform, please check out our press release, website and come see us at Google Next (booth #520) in San Francisco from March 8-10th.

Source: Informatica Collaborates with Google Cloud on Marketing Analytics for CMOs

The Difference Between Tactics and Strategy in Marketing

"Have you tried a welcome mat? Those can 10x your subscribers!"

"Did you add social media buttons before and after your content? Those can double your shares!"

"Are you using embedded tweets for your social proof? Those can skyrocket trust!"

The internet is full of tips, tricks and tactics for how to get ahead with your online business.

The problem with these tips is that they're surface level. And this is why most people think marketing doesn't work. Because if you just focus on surface level shit, you'll, at-best, only see surface level results.

Having a mishmash of try-and-fail tactics isn't doing what you're marketing any justice at all. In fact, it's probably doing more harm than good.

Yet most people lack a strategy for their marketing efforts - the "why" of what they're doing, as it relates to a bigger plan. Those tactics listed above aren't necessarily wrong or evil or ineffective, but they should be the final action that results from both a greater plan and a reason for them happening in the first place.

Instead of chasing the latest and greatest tactics, consider first creating a strategy for your marketing. As in, what's the ultimate purpose and objective for what you're doing? Who do you want to reach?And how will what you're doing actually and honestly help them?

A strategy is the vision, or guiding light, for every action you take to get word out about what you do. A tactic on the other hand, is one single action you take. Tactics can come and go, based on trends or algorithms, whereas a strategy tends to stay the same.

Strategy is why you do something, tactics are how you accomplish each step you want to take. The two definitely have to work in tandem, but things tend to fall completely apart if you're only trying single, isolated tactics. Just like they would if you had a strategic plan but didn't do a damn thing to implement any part of it. For example:

Strategy:

Become a known industry leader in teaching web designers how to charge more money for their services.

Tactics:

Build a targeted mailing list of designers, organized by where they currently are in their journey and what they've purchased.

Drive designers to specific landing pages through outreach and interviews.

Use a welcome mat for first-time visitors only (i.e. don't keep showing it over and over again to returning visitors) with a great offer to join the mailing list.

Create content that's easily shared on social media and on platforms like Designer News, Hacker News, graphic design subreddits, etc.

See the difference? A strategy is the broad strokes of what you want to accomplish, and tactics are the specific things you try to get there. Without a strategy all those tactics are ok, but there's nothing guiding them.

Strategies are often sequential too, and work backwards:

I want to sell more of my product.

To sell more, I need a bigger mailing list of the specific type of people that would want to buy it.

To build a bigger list, I need to drive more targeted traffic to my site.

To drive more targeted traffic, I need to show up in places those people are currently spending their time.

To show up in those places, I need to do outreach so I can be interviewed or create guest content.

And so on, down the line. You start with your objectives and then work backwards through the steps. And then each step can have a tactic associated with it. And of course, if that tactic doesn't work, which happens with tactics sometimes, the strategy doesn't change, just the tactic does.

The other benefit of having an actual strategic reason for the tactics you employ is that you can focus on one at a time. If you're trying to do everything at the same time, you'll run into several problems.

First, it's hard to measure specifics when you're trying everything. Which of the tactics are producing the results you're seeing? If you aren't able to tell, then how will you ever learn what works best for your business?

Second, it's hard to do anything well when you're trying to do everything. A good plan implies simplicity, and simplicity requires focus. Do one thing at a time as it makes sense for where you're at in your strategic process.

Thankfully, doing one thing at a time, in a specific order, means you can create a process from it. That process can then be reused over and over--with both new products and relaunches of existing products. The process itself becomes a product asset, which you can then automate parts of.

So before you start trying (or keep trying) random marketing tactics you read on industry blogs, think about why you're doing them. Are they a part of your overall strategic plan? If you don't have an answer for that, start thinking about your strategy first.

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

Source: The Difference Between Tactics and Strategy in Marketing

29 Digital Marketing Statistics for 2017

The digital marketing industry has been growing for over two decades now and is expected to continue growing well into the future.

According to Statista, the U.S. spent $59.82 billion on digital advertising in 2015 and spending is expected to reach $113.18 billion in 2020!

This article was written to educate you and your colleagues about:

Industry demographics

Trending platforms and marketing channels

Impactful digital strategies and tactics

Conversion Rate Optimization

In 2016 about 22% of businesses were satisfied with their conversion rates (Econsultancy, 2016).

However, for every $92 spent on acquiring leads, only $1 was spent on converting them (Econsultancy, 2016).

What This Means For Your Business

Even though conversion rate optimization has been around for the past decade it's still an under-utilized strategy for many brands.

Action Step

There are dozens of resources online about conversion rates and how to improve them…but some quick advice?

It's about user experience.

Conversions rates tend to be low when businesses don't take the time to understand their customer psychology; what they want, how they want to buy, how they want to be spoken to, how they can be reached, etc.

For example, including a call to action button instead of a text link can increase conversion rates by as much as 28% (Campaign Monitor, 2016).

It's also good practice to run tests on what kinds of sales pages and tactics convert the most customers and compare your numbers to past campaigns.

Click here to read Referral SaaSquatch's article on how to increase conversion rates!

(Source)

Content Marketing

72% of marketers say relevant content creation was the most effective SEO tactic (Ascend2, 2015).

When it comes to driving revenue, 41% of marketers surveyed say that webinars are an effective tactic (DemandWave, 2016).

In 2016, 67% more leads will be generated by companies with an active blog (Sprout Social, 2015).

93% of organizations use social media content as their main content marketing tactic (Content Marketing Institute, 2015).

What This Means For Your Business

There's a consensus in the content marketing world that high-quality content is the best content because it builds trust with the audience and builds authority.

If your customers trust and look to your brand as an expert, traffic, referrals, SEO, visibility, sales, and much more will improve.

If you want to improve your blog you have to really care about the content that you are producing.

Action Step

Use tools like Buzzsumo and Co-Schedule to up your content marketing game.

Buzzsumo is a database that informs you of the hottest topics being talked about in your industry. Using Buzzsumo will help you publish relevant and useful content that your audience is searching for.

Coschedule is a content marketing planner that helps you stay organized so that you can be consistent with your content marketing efforts.

Example: HubSpot is a great example of a software company that has a strong content marketing strategy.

Their blog provides their audience with useful, well-written and visual content, plus they post every few days to keep their readers engaged.

(Source)

Rich Content

Infographics are liked and shared on social media 3X more than any other type of content (Mass Planner, 2015).

4X as many customers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it (Animoto, 2015).

65% of senior marketing executives believe that visual assets (photos, video, illustrations and infographics) are core to how their brand story is communicated (CMO Council, 2015).

Recommended for You

Webcast, March 15th: How to Scale Upmarket with Enterprise Field Sales

59% of Instagram users are on the platform daily, including 35% who visit several times a day (Pew Research Center, 2015).

21% of Americans age 12 or older say they have listened to a podcast in the past month (Pew Research Center, 2016).

48% of marketers plan to add YouTube to their content strategy in the next year (HubSpot, 2016).

What This Means For Your Business

Consumers are overwhelmed with content displayed in all shapes and sizes and delivered in several different forms.

That's why images, infographics, and videos really stand out in 2017.

They are a great way to capture your audience's attentions and make a statement.

Furthermore, images, infographics, and videos are easily clickable and shareable and they can easily go viral.

Action Step

If you haven't already done so, your first step in 2017 should be to add visual content to your website!

Instead of writing to your audience, create a quick explainer video that describes your product or service.

Marketing guru, Neil Patel created the ultimate guide to creating a killer explainer video.

Example: Dollar Shave Club, used video storytelling to grow rapidly when they launched the following entertaining video as an introduction to their service.

Another action step, if you have the resources, would be to think about planning a YouTube channel for your brand.

Youtube is a great way to get really personal with your customers. Plus, it's just plain entertaining!

THINX, the women's underwear company and online retailer, launched a YouTube channel that features a variety of social influencers reviewing their product.

Email Marketing

You are 6x more likely to get a click-through from an email campaign than you are from a tweet (Campaign Monitor, 2016).

Transactional emails have 8x more opens and clicks than any other type of email and can generate 6x more revenue (Experian).

What This Means For Your Business

When a lead submits their email or signs up to your newsletter, they are inviting your brand into their life.

It's a sure sign that they want to find out more about your product/service, business news, discounts, promotions, and more.

If you take advantage of this invitation and send strategic, valuable and consistent, emails, you will develop better customer relationships and increase your brand's reputation.

Action Step

Open rate is highest when companies send 2 emails per month (Database Marketing Institute).

About 53% of emails are opened on mobile devices (Campaign Monitor).

These statistics give a good idea of what you can do to take full advantage of your email marketing:

Don't abuse your subscribers inbox: Send no more or less than 2 emails per month

Design your emails to be mobile-friendly: This way subscribers can make purchases right from their phone

Social Media Marketing

93% of shoppers' buying decisions are influenced by social media- because 90% trust peer recommendations. But only 14% trust advertisements (#Socialnomics 2014).

57% of consumers say they'd be somewhat or very influenced to think more highly of a business after seeing positive comments or praise online, and 16% say they only share positive reviews on social media (Direct Marketing).

For 2016, Instagram is the top social channel marketers plan to invest more advertising in (72%), followed by Facebook (61%), Pinterest (41%), Snapchat (36%) and Amazon (34%) (MediaPost).

66% of organizations say that LinkedIn is an effective social media platform (Content Marketing Institute, 2015).

90% of young adults—ages 18 to 29—use social media (compared to just 35% of those over age 65).

1/3 of millennials say social media is one of their preferred channels for communicating with businesses.

What This Means For Your Business

You must be active on social media!

You don't have to use Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter (although it's definitely not a bad idea), but you should use at least one of the social media platforms to reach your audience.

If your target audience is millennials, then using social media is a no-brainer.

Linkedin is highly effective for B2B marketing platform that more and more companies are utilizing to position themselves as a thought-leader and influencer in their industry.

Action Step

Allocate some of your budget towards reaching out to influencers on social media platforms.

Social Influencers are 2017s version of celebrity endorsements; consumers are listening and ready to purchase any product their favorite Youtube or Instagram star recommends.

Another good action step, is to take the time to answer comment sections. Doing so shows that you care about your customers, increasing customer engagement and brand equity.

Example: Sharpie utilized social media to turn their everyday product, a sharpie, into a commonly used verb!

Sharpie is a master at Twitter but also makes good use of their blog and Instagram.

Sharpie uses social media to increase customer engagement, loyalty, and satisfaction by displaying the art that customers make using Sharpies. They also display contest, promotions, and case studies to inspire their audience to get creative and get involved!

This is Sharpies current Twitter display picture – Sharpie Extreme featuring extreme rock climbers!

(Source)

Mobile Marketing

80% of internet users own a smartphone (Smart Insights).

Tablet devices account for the highest add-to-cart rates on e-commerce websites at 8.58% (Smart Insights).

The percentage of companies optimizing email for mobile devices increased by 22% in 2014 (Adestra).

63% of local businesses surveyed said they plan to invest in a mobile-friendly website in 2016 (ReachLocal, 2016).

Messaging apps are trending as they offer innovative and engaging ways to reach targeted audiences.

What This Means For Your Business

Consumers are constantly using their phone to compare products, to search companies, and to use their social media.

If your businesses digital efforts are not mobile-friendly then forget any chance you had of consumers browsing your website, purchasing a product, or even looking at your Instagram via their phone!

Furthermore, if you have the resources, it's a great idea to think of a mobile application that is specific for your business and is fun for your audience to use!

Action Step:

Format your website so that it translates well to mobile devices:

Set your image width to 100% so that they are automatically re-sized on mobile devices.

Use word-wrap on your text

Use extra spaces cautiously

Checkout SaaSquatch's ultimate guide to mobile marketing.

Example: Chipotle recently created a successful digital campaign that involves a videogame called 'Cado Crusher where users have a chance to win free chips and guacamole.

The rules of the game involve players having to smash the guacamole ingredients that Chipotle actually uses in their recipe, while excluding the ingredients that they don't.

The game is mobile friendly and coupons are delivered via SMS text.

(Source)

Wrapping Up

As digital marketing continues to become a priority for enterprises and small businesses we'll see the industry continue to evolve at a faster pace. Digital marketing teams will need to build core strengths with media buying platforms, branded content production, and social commerce campaigns or they'll quickly get left behind in today's digital age.

Source: 29 Digital Marketing Statistics for 2017