The digital marketing universe has exploded at an unprecedented rate — and whether you like it or not, it shows no signs of slowing down in the years ahead.
To help you stay up to date on what matters in digital marketing today, we’ve put our competitive intelligence platform to work to surface the week’s top marketing stories and trending topics.
Here are this week’s top stories!
Facebook’s Prioritized Stories Urge Brands To Adjust Social Strategy
Facebook recently launched a new set of tools that gives users more control over what they see in their news feed. The four major changes enable individuals to prioritize which content they see first in their feeds, unfollow users, reconnect with formerly-unfollowed users, and discover new pages. The first of these changes is particularly important for brands, as new strategies will be needed to encourage users to select brand content as “prioritized stories” in their feeds.
Read the complete story from Business2Community here.
How Do CEOs Consume Content?
How do incredibly driven but incredibly busy CEOs manage to stay informed while running top companies? Quartz surveyed 940 executives to find out. The results: 75% of CEOs spend at least 30 minutes a day consuming content, and that the same 75 % do most of their news consumption in the morning. In fact, over 50% of the CEOs said they read news upon waking up or commuting to work, compared to the 5% who consume at night. The most common means of content consumption? Mobile devices (50%), followed by computers (30%). The least common channel? T.V with only 2%!
Read the complete story from brandchannel here.
Today’s Biggest Content Marketing Challenge (And How to Overcome It)
In 2015, 54% of B2B markets and B2C marketers cited “producing engaging content” as a top challenge. But to truly engage audiences with content, there is a balancing act between quality and quantity. Successfully navigating this balancing act requires research first and foremost. HubSpot suggest starting with the basics: understand who your audience is, what they’re looking for, where to find them, and how to deliver the most effective results.
Read the complete story from HubSpot here.
Mobile-Friendly Email & Landing Page Trends For 2015 [INFOGRAPHIC]
A joint study conducted by Litmus and Salesforce Marketing Cloud showcases a disconnect between consumer adoption of mobile devices and marketer adoption of mobile-friendly web design. With 48% of email opens occuring on mobile, B2C brands have realized the importance of adopting a mobile-friendly design for promotional emails, resulting in a 155% increase of mobile-friendly emails since October 2013. (Currently, 56% of all emails are now mobile-friendly.) But there’s a problem: 16% of mobile-friendly emails lead to websites that aren’t mobile-friendly. In fact, 52% of B2C brands do not have emails and websites that are both mobile-friendly, which creates disjointed subscriber experiences.
To fix this disconnect, work with your web team to adopt a mobile-friendly email template and website.
Read the complete story from SalesForce here.
The Inbound Marketing Economy
Marketers, the future looks bright! The Bureau of Labor Statics projects employment for marketing managers to grow by 13% between 2012 and 2022. Employment for digital marketers looks especially bright; since 2009, digital marketing job listings on Indeed.com have tripled, jumping from .1% to .3% of all job search results. But while demand for digital marketing skill sets is on the rise, the right talent is especially hard to find; 64% of recruiters report a shortage of skilled digital marketing candidates. Employers now value a proficiency in a wide range of disciplines, so marketers who cultivate diverse skill sets are better poised to gain an advantage over other job seekers, excel in their job role, and accelerate their career growth.
Read the complete story from Moz here.
How To Turn Customers Into Advocates With Event Marketing
Since acquiring a new customer costs 7x more than retaining one, customer retention and advocacy should be a huge focal point for every marketing organization. Events are one fantastic way to boost retention rates; however, organizing a successful event can be tedious and time consuming. In order to execute a successful event, NewsCred reminds us to work hand-in-hand with other internal teams — such as the brand and content teams — to ensure that the every event delivers a consistent experience.
Read the complete story from NewsCred here.
Want More Traffic To Your Website? Try These 5 Tools and Tips
Every marketer wants to save time and increase efficiency, and these 5 tips from HubSpot can help. For starters, learn to course-correct for dips in your website’s traffic by cross-checking the dates with Google algorithm changes. Another tip: find the most valuable keywords for your content by targeting high search volume and Cost per Click (CPC). You can also research competitors to expand your keyword set by targeting those that are not occupied by these competitors. The fourth tip shows you how to optimize your websites for international traffic through hreflang tags. Finally, HubSpot also shows you how to figure out which topics your audience likes by benchmarking performance against your competition and the industry average. (Hint: TrackMaven can help with that!)
Read the complete story from HubSpot here.
Facebook Now Lets You Restrict Who Views Videos By Age And Gender
Facebook’s fastest-growing business line — its video platform — now offers advertisers and publishers more control over who sees their video content. Users can now restrict audiences by age and gender, in addition to the location and language options currently offered. Similar to YouTube’s “unlisted” function, publishers can also opt to turn off third-party embedding, or house videos under a “video” tab separate from the News Feed. In fact, Facebook is currently testing “commercial break” ads that appear between a series of videos watched consecutively, suggesting that Facebook is looking to launch a fully-fledged video platform rather than letting videos float freely through News Feeds.
Read the complete story from Mashable here.
Want more marketing news? The TrackMaven Newsletter will bring you all the latest digital marketing and competitive intelligence content from our blog directly to your inbox. Subscribe to our Weekly Newsletter below!
