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5 Statistics that Define the Digital Marketing Landscape in 2014

5 Statistics that Define the Digital Marketing Landscape in 2014

statistics graphAccording to an infographic created by Bell Pottinger Wired (shown below), online retail sales in the United Kingdom are expected to increase by 10% each year through 2017. This growth isn’t unique to the U.K. Across the globe, online and mobile sales are on the rise, and the digital marketing landscape is changing to match that shift in consumer buying behaviors.

Using the statistics from the infographic, there appear to be five areas that brand marketers are prioritizing in their digital marketing plans in 2014 and beyond:

1. Mobile

We’ve reached the point in history where marketers need to develop “mobile-always” strategies and tactics. Mobile web browsing is on pace to grow by 50% this year, and 87% of connected devices will be smartphones and tablets in 2014.

2. Video

Visual marketing assets are increasing in value exponentially, and 86% of brands will add video to their websites this year. In fact, many brand marketers will prioritize video over social media in 2014. By 2017, the online video audience will reach 1.5 billion people, and approximately, “two-thirds of the world’s data will be video.”

3. Social Media

Brands need to be where their target audiences are, and that place continues to be social networking sites. In 2014, one in two brand marketers plan to increase their social media marketing budgets to reach the growing audience of social network users, which is expected to grow by 26% by 2015.

4. Content

Content is still considered one of the biggest marketing opportunities for brands, and 73% of business-to-business content marketers are increasing their content production and publishing in 2014 according to the data in the infographic. In fact, infographics will continue to grow in popularity in 2014. This year, 51% of B2B marketers will use infographics (up from 38% last year). Bell Pottinger Wired notes that infographics are the largest growing content marketing tactic this year.

5. PPC

Despite concerns related to pay-per-click advertising click fraud, it’s still one of the most popular digital marketing tactics. In fact, nearly three out of four (72%) of digital advertisers plan to increase their PPC spending this year.

digital marketing statistics 2014 infographic

Do these digital marketing statistics match with your brand’s digital marketing landscape in 2014? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Image: Wagner Magni

Crowdsourcing for Brand Marketing on Pinterest

Your employees don’t have to do all of the work in executing your social media marketing and content marketing plans. As you build your band of brand advocates who are loyal to your brand and drive word-of-mouth marketing to their own audiences, each one of those brand advocates is a brand marketing opportunity.

Don’t ignore your vocal brand advocates. Embrace them by reaching out and connecting personally. As you build a relationship with them, which deepens their emotional connection to your brand, you can crowdsource brand marketing from them. One of the most visual and interactive ways to leverage your brand advocates for social media marketing and content marketing is through Pinterest.

Crowdsource Pins on Your Pinterest Boards by Inviting Guest Pinners

Did you know that you can invite Pinterest users to pin content to any of the boards in your brand’s Pinterest profile? Just navigate to the board that you want to crowdsource images for, click the Edit Board button, and enter the names or email addresses of the people you want to invite in the Who Can Pin? field. Click the Invite button, and your invitation is on its way! Keep in mind, invitations can only be sent to other Pinterest users and you need to be following Pinterest users or one of their Pinterest boards to be able to invite them to pin content to one of your boards.

Encourage People to Pin Content to Your Pinterest Pin Boards

When another Pinterest user receives your invitation, they can choose to accept it or decline it. Boost the number of acceptances you get by emailing invitees directly or sending them messages through Twitter or Facebook before you send the invitation with a personal note explaining why you value them so much that you’re going to invite them to pin content to your boards.

Set Pinning Guidelines but Don’t Be Too Demanding

Keep in mind, you need to monitor your boards to ensure invited pinners are pinning appropriate content. It’s a good idea to give them some guidelines, but don’t make your guidelines so detailed and strict that they become intimidating or frustrating to Pinterest users. You need to give pinners flexibility, or they’ll be too afraid to pin anything to your boards.

Don’t Ignore the Social Media Law of Reciprocity

Finally, be sure to continually acknowledge active invited pinners. Reward their loyalty and make sure they always know how much you appreciate them. Furthermore, don’t forget that social media is a land of expected reciprocity. You need to spend time sharing, liking, and commenting on your invited pinners’ boards and social media profiles in order to reap the biggest rewards from crowdsourcing for brand marketing on Pinterest.

Image: Dave Dyet

Does Your Brand Website Need Live Chat?

live chatAdding a live chat feature to your website can improve customer service and reduce shopping cart abandonment rates. While not every customer that visits your brand website will want to use a live chat feature, there are many who will look for it. They’ll expect that they’ll be given multiple choices to get the help they need, and they’ll want the freedom to choose their preferred method for getting answers to their questions within the timeframe they require.

Research from LivePerson revealed that not including a live chat function on your brand website can cause far-reaching and long-lasting negative results. Here are some of the highlights from the survey of 6,000 consumers across the globe who shared what they expect from brand websites:

  • Online consumers won’t wait longer than 76 seconds to get help.
  • 88% believe that having a live chat improves their experience on a brand website.
  • 60% are more likely to complete an online purchase if they can get help from a real person via a live chat during the purchase process.
  • 41% would prefer to get help via live chat when they’re in the process of making a purchase on a brand website over any other customer service option.
  • 50% of online consumers want brand website purchase issues resolved in a single transaction.
  • 77% of online consumers want things done as quickly as possible when they’re on a brand website.
  • 78% of online consumers will return to a brand website (which means increased loyalty) if their needs are met in a simple and efficient way.

Furthermore, LivePerson identified three key stops along the online purchase path that are critical moments where brands must provide adequate help: when consumers have a question about a specific product or purchase (42%), when they have a problem completing an online purchase (35%), and when they have a post-purchase question (35%). Live chat is just one more way to meet the demand for customer service in a manner that more consumers are becoming comfortable with and actively using every day.

The trick to successfully implement a live chat feature on your website is to make it easily accessible without being intrusive. Automated pop-up live chat windows could annoy consumers so much that they’ll leave your brand website entirely. However, effectively placed links and messages that make it easy for a customer to open a live chat at anytime (particularly during those times that research shows they most often seek help) can significantly improve customer service, completed purchases, and loyalty.

Offer options and let consumers decide how they want to interact with your brand. Every customer service opportunity is a direct or indirect marketing opportunity, so let consumers control their buying experience, including choosing to communicate with your brand representatives via live chat.

Image: Flavio Takemoto

Which is the Social Media Brand Leader?

social media apps icons smartphone mobileFacebook has the most users around the world, but is it really the social media brand leader? In recent years, Facebook has rolled out a number of features that make the brand seem like a market follower, not a market leader. Instead, Twitter seems to be the social media brand that competitors want to emulate.

Facebook’s “follower” behavior brought Twitter features like @mentions and hashtags to the biggest social network, and now, Facebook has launched trending topics—another well-known Twitter feature. Facebook isn’t the only social media brand emulating Twitter. Last week, Tumblr rolled out @mentions, too.

Of course, these features are becoming more generic as more social media sites add them to their platforms. Adding a + sign before a Google+ user’s name to mention them in a post and including an @mention with an Instagram post (owned by Facebook) are just two more examples of Twitter features going mainstream.

As social media becomes more mature, we’re seeing more copying and less innovation. It’s a normal cycle, and until one of the current players in the marketplace launches a new feature that shakes up the industry (or a new player enters the market with something truly innovative), we’re likely to continue seeing this type of copying and improving (with the actual usefulness of the improvements up for debate and fairly subjective) among the leading brands.

Today, Twitter seems to be positioned as the market leader from an “under the hood” perspective. However, it’s not the market leader based on market share. In the long term, which will be more important? If you look at a brand growth story like Google’s history, the “under the hood” perspective is the one that matters, but tackling a Facebook audience of 1 billion people is a tough hill to climb.

In technology, innovation is the key to survival, and copying is a strategy that will end up failing in time. Which social media brand will be the leader a year from now? Two years from now? Five years from now? Or will there be a completely new group of social media brand leaders before the decade is over?

If recent trends continue, the social media industry is wide open for a new market leader.

Image: Jason Howie

Similarities and Differences Between Millennial and Boomer Shoppers

shopping people bags arrowsNew research from Radius Global Market Research reveals important similarities and differences between millennial and boomer shoppers. Brand marketers can use the data to find and exploit the best ways to engage with consumers throughout the purchase decision-making process.

The study surveyed a representative group of U.S. households during the third quarter of 2013 to analyze purchase trends among Millennials (defined as people between the ages of 18 and 32) and Boomers (defined as people between the ages of 49 and 67). Some of the key similarities and differences are discussed below.

What Matters Most to Consumers When Making a Purchase Decision?

Both Millennials and Boomers focus primarily on quality or price depending on the category they’re buying a product from. However, differences can be found within the four categories included in the study (apparel, big-ticket purchases like travel and electronics, packaged goods, and financial products). For example, Millenials ranked quality as the top factor in apparel purchase decisions while Boomers ranked price as most important.

Where Do Consumers Research Product Information?

Both Millennials and Boomers are likely to use a desktop computer to research product information online, but Millenials are more than four times more likely to do product research using a smartphone (60%) than Boomers are (14%). On the other hand, Boomers are twice as likely to search for information about products prior to making a purchase using newspapers and magazines (38%).

What Source Is the Biggest Influence on Purchase Decisions?

When it comes to finding information about products that people trust enough to actually make a purchase decision, Millennials rank word-of-mouth (including all forms—offline, online, social media, and so on) as the most influential source across all four categories in the study. For Millennials, search engines also ranked as one of the top three most important purchase decision influencers in all four categories.

On the other hand, Boomers only ranked word-of-mouth as the most important purchase influencer in two categories—financial products and big-ticket items. For Boomers, word-of-mouth ranked as the third most influential source for apparel purchases and didn’t rank in the top three at all for purchase decisions related to packaged goods. Instead, the study found that Boomers are often most influenced by traditional ads and suggestions from salespeople.

Using the information from this study in combination with your own research data about your customers’ purchase paths, you can create more effective, integrated marketing plans that leverage the right opportunities to connect with consumers at the best times, in the best places, and with the best messages and offers. If you don’t already have the data you need to effectively track your customers along the purchase decision path, invest budget dollars and resources into collecting and analyzing that essential data. Your marketing programs will improve and the number of completed purchases will increase as a result.

Follow the link at the beginning of the article to learn more about the study results.

Image: John Manly

2 out of 3 Online Shoppers Abandon Their Shopping Carts without Paying

eccommerce online shopping cartAccording to data compiled by Baymard Institute, the average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate is 67.89%. That means more than two out of three people leave products in their online shopping carts before they complete their purchases, and that means companies are leaving a lot of money on the table.

Why do consumers leave online shopping carts filled with products? Studies over the past few years have found that unexpected costs, slow shipping, high-priced shipping, and poor return policies are cited most frequently by online shoppers around the world.

For example, a 2012 study by Forrester found that the number one reason consumers abandon online shopping carts (44%) is because shipping and handling costs are too high. Similarly, two separate studies by comScore conducted in 2013 and 2012 revealed the following:

  • Nearly 90% of online shoppers have placed items in their shopping carts and left the site without making a purchase.
  • Two out of five customers abandon their shopping carts because of slow delivery estimates.
  • Nearly half of online shoppers will not wait more than five days for packages to be delivered.
  • Online consumers are less likely to abandon shopping carts if shipping costs and delivery times are communicated early in the online shopping experience.
  • More than three quarters of online shoppers have added items to their shopping carts to qualify for free shipping.
  • More than 60% of online shoppers look at a retailer’s return policy before making a purchase.
  • 65% of consumers will shop more with a retailer if they offer a hassle-free return policy.

Looking at shopping cart abandonment from a different perspective, SeeWhy tracked online buyer behavior to learn how time-to-purchase and value-in-cart affect abandonment rates. SeeWhy found that 72% of ecommerce site visitors will buy within the first 12 hours, but the average time delay between a buyer’s first visit and purchase is 19 hours. The breakdown follows:

  • 30% purchase in less than 20 minutes
  • 50% purchase in 20 minutes to 1 hour
  • 60% purchase in 1 to 3 hours
  • 65% purchase in 3 to 12 hours
  • 72% purchase in 12 to 24 hours
  • 80% purchase in 1 to 3 days
  • 85% purchase in 3 to 7 days
  • 95% purchase in 1 to 2 weeks
  • 100% purchase in more than 2 weeks

SeeWhy also found that people who have made a purchase on a specific site in the past are far less likely to abandon their shopping carts on that site in the future than new customers are. This isn’t surprising but did you know that the tipping point for cart abandonment happens at $100? SeeWhy found the following abandonment rates based on the value of items in the shopping cart:

  • $0 to $100 cart: 78% abandonment
    • $1 to $25 cart: 85% abandonment
    • $26 to $50 cart: 75% abandonment
    • $51 to $75 cart: 63% abandonment
    • $76 to $100 cart: 59% abandonment
  • $101 to $250 cart: 52% abandonment
    • $100 to $150 cart: 78% abandonment
    • $151 to $200 cart: 42% abandonment
  • $250 to $300 cart: 70% abandonment
  • $300 to $350 cart: 70% abandonment
  • $350 to $400 cart: 73% abandonment
  • $400+ cart: 85% abandonment

In recent years, studies have also shown that retargeting through advertising and remarketing through email are both very effective in bringing consumers back to complete transactions they’ve abandoned online. Deliver the user experience (i.e., product images, easy site navigation, no site registration required, easy price comparisons, reviews, and secure transactions) and the buying experience (i.e., clear, affordable, and fast shipping as well as easy return policies) that consumers want, and you should see more ecommerce transactions completed.

Image: Svilen Milev