Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

With the Digital Content NewFronts’ second week taking place in recent days, digital marketing stats—like last week—were aplenty. Here are nine that caught our eye from across the industry.

Check out Mother’s Day video numbers, new social data and a rising retail star....

There are many new, intriguing data points, including Denny’s viral tweet, Snapchat and YouTube numbers, Facebook local and connected cars.

It was a stellar week in digital marketing stats, and here are the nine that really stood out:

1. If one tweet can sell a thousand Moons Over My Hammy, this is itDenny’s tweet on Wednesday represents a historic Twitter marketing achievement. The following message has garnered 108,000 retweets and more than 152,000 likes in the last couple of days.

The diner-style restaurant chain utilized a popular “zoom in” scavenger hunt meme to inspire such robust interest. How does it stack up compared to tweets of marketing lore? Well, it has surpassed the engagement seen by Arby’s iconic “Hey @Pharrell, can we have our hat back?” 2014 Grammys post....

I only really started caring about marketing (and the intersection of advertising, technology, and media) a couple years ago when I started at Contently as an intern. It’s been a never-ending crash course ever since.

Digital marketing changes rapidly, and it’s only getting more complex. As soon as you think you understand the space, you realize a minute later that you’re not even close.

This year in particular, with its many shocking pieces of news and trends, has upended many assumptions I’ve held about marketing.

Here are four of the most important trends that have changed the way I think about my job....

I've lived and breathed and thought about this space every single day, and here's the sad conclusion I've arrived at: digital display advertising doesn't work.

I think it's safe to say that digital display advertising has never lived up to the promise and the hype. Since the very beginning, advertisers have been obsessed with finding ways to get people to click on their ads. They've worked with an array of ad creation platforms and embraced programmatic methods so that the right ads get in front of the right people, and yet the click-through average across all platforms and methodologies is .06 percent.

This means that for every 1,000 times an ad is shown, it is clicked on only .6 times. This means that for the average digital display campaign to get a single click, it needs to be served 1,800 times....

Are you ready to give content marketing the time, money and resources it deserves?

While your answer may be yes, it’s never easy to get up and running with a new marketing strategy. There are questions to answer, challenges to overcome and various tasks that need addressed.

With 88% of B2B marketers currently using content marketing as part of their overall strategy, neglecting to do so will put you in the minority.

As you get started, you’ll soon find a variety of ways to better research, plan, create and distribute content.

What I’ve created here is a list of content marketing tools that you’ll want by your side as you roll out your first campaign.

These tools cover the most important details you’ll need to address before you get started, as well as in the early days (and weeks) of running your campaign....

In summary, here are the key takeaways from the infographic below that tells us the latest shifts in digital advertising this 2017:

• Increased usage of mobile ad blockers
• Increased monetization of Google AMP and Facebook
• Instant Articles
• Revenue on desktop advertising will continue to level down; Mobile advertising will experience massive growth
• Google and Facebook continues to be the most utilized platform in digital advertising
• Programmatic advertising will gain more popularity
• Outstream videos will gain more popularity
• Increased utilization of Chatbots....

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) get almost 24 calls a month from marketing providers looking to sell them advertising or marketing products and services. Competition is fierce, and SMBs often have a difficult time choosing a provider.

Last month, I covered how the trend of fake online content leads to a general distrust of digital and online media. But the local digital marketing industry, especially in the area of SEO, suffers from its own share of issues that lead to a lack of trust by SMBs.

LSA (Local Search Association) conducted a survey to examine what challenges SMBs face when shopping for a digital marketing provider and what areas they feel are most important for marketers to address when trying to gain their business.

Below I discuss the results of the survey, data regarding client churn in the industry and ways in which marketers need to respond....

Our industry faces a well-known duopoly, with Facebook and Google commanding an ever-increasing share of digital ad spend, both in the U.S. and globally. I recently dug into the data and forecasts available, to better quantify (for my own benefit and hopefully yours!) just how much Facebook and Google are eating digital.

Global ad spend, across all channels (digital, TV, print, radio, outdoor, etc.) is growing annually on average by 5.6 percent from 2015 to 2020, and will reach $674 Billion from $513 Billion in 2015.

The U.S. market will represent 35 percent of the global ad market, reaching $234 Billion by 2020 with a slightly slower growth rate compared to the global average, at 5.0 percent from 2015 to 2020. This is expected as rapidly developing markets in the East and a growing middle class represent new markets on which advertisers can focus.

45% Of U.S. Ad Spend Will Be Digital
33 percent of ad spend in the U.S. was digital last year and that is expected to reach 45 percent by 2020. In real numbers, that’s a $60-billion market growing to $105-billion, with a Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 11.9 percent.

The growth of digital is more than 2 times higher than the growth of the overall ad market, which represents a tremendous opportunity for digital businesses. More people are accessing content online and more advertisers are spending their budgets online. Will the rising tide lift all ships?...

Okay, so there’s nothing at all original about a “marketing stats” blog.I know.

But, I do follow the digital industry closely and sometimes come across some pretty interesting stats.And seeing that businesses are gearing up for Q4, the holiday season, and 2016 planning, I figured I’d put together a few stats that might make you think about your marketing plans. So without further ado….

Consumers will only pay attention to you when they’re motivated to do so. Interaction and education along the buyer’s journey is the best way to gain their attention and keep it. Obviously, you need to understand your target consumers before you can offer something valuable or helpful to them, but, once you’ve gained their permission to market to them, you can be strategic about guiding them along the buyer’s journey and positioning offers at just the right moment. 

What is the Buyer’s Journey?

The buyer’s journey includes the steps that consumers take in the buying process. After buyers become aware of their needs and begin researching solutions, they generally proceed to three additional stages: Consideration, Recommendation and Purchase. These buyer journey stages map closely to the Lifecycle Marketing stages within the Sell phase: Educate, Offer and Close....

Consumers’ top purchase influencers are also their top sources of new product awareness, according to results from a recent Nielsen report [download page].

The study, based on a survey of 30,000 consumers across 60 countries, found that friends and family (56%) and TV ads (52%) are the leading sources of information about new products for consumers. These are also consumers’ top purchase influencers, according to studies by MarketingCharts and by Deloitte....