Sean Zinsmeister says, “Most marketing (and sales) teams have seemingly simple goals: identify your best customers, target prospects who look like them, facilitate a positive buying experience, and bring these prospects into your customer community. The challenge with this is that companies are faced with an onslaught of data, making it impossible to economically throw humans at each of the aforementioned objectives. Much business learning and many routine tasks can be done faster and better with automation and AI. People simply will never be able to sift through all that data at the same... [...]

Julie Joyce says, “I’m one of those people who thinks I can usually handle things by myself — I don’t need or want anyone’s help. It’s been tough for me to let go of that attitude when it comes to link building, but I’ve been doing much better lately after realizing that it really is beneficial to have more involvement from various people. Sometimes that extra involvement has been kind of forced on me. Sometimes I’ve had to beg for it. But all in all, I’ve slowly come to the conclusion that the best links we get these days come from working together with the client, their... [...]

Maz Nadjm says, “Simply put, a mental model is what the user believes about a particular system. This system doesn’t have to be a digital product or service, it could be anything from a supermarket store to the entire end-to-end journey of buying a car. A mental model is about more than just your product The customer’s mental model, fairly obviously, is the basis for their predictions about how a system will behave, and for the actions they ultimately take. These models are the product of previous interactions, both with the system at hand (if they have used it before) and with... [...]

Jeff Rajeck says, “Improving customer experience requires as much attention to how things work inside the company as how customers are interacting with the brand. What internal initiatives do marketers feel are essential for improving customer experience from within the company? To find out, we Econsultancy has conducted a a range of research, including a recent survey of over 300 marketers in India, Customer Experience Maturity in India in association with Epsilon. Here are the top three high-level responses to the question. 1) Improve internal collaboration Respondents were most enthusiastic... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “Today, Google has reaffirmed that 15 percent of Google searches done by users on a daily basis have never been seen before. Google said this back in 2013 and now has restated that metric as Google announced Project Owl this morning. Google wrote: There are trillions of searches on Google every year. In fact, 15 percent of searches we see every day are new — which means there’s always more work for us to do to present people with the best answers to their queries from a wide variety of legitimate sources. While our search results will never be perfect, we’re as... [...]

Jeff Rajeck says, “In a recent Econsultancy survey, we asked marketers whether they work to engineer mobile moments which reflect well on their brand. But what are ‘mobile moments’?  And what can brands do to be a part of them? Engineering mobile moments As part of a recent report about the customer journey in Asia-Pacific, Econsultancy asked nearly 1,000 marketers about their ability to insert their brands into ‘mobile moments’. The results indicate that around half of respondents felt that they did, in fact, engineer these ‘mobile moments’ which showed... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “Bing Ads rolled out three new features this week for Shopping Campaigns. Search term report at product level: Advertisers can now see which search queries triggered product ads a the product ID level with Product Search Term. This report will show whether products are triggering for appropriate search terms. But in the blog post, Bing Ads also points out that this report can help guide product title optimization in ways you might not already be thinking about, such as seasonal triggers: Example: If you’re selling personalized photo frames and you notice seasonal... [...]

Jeff Rajeck says, “Improving customer experience requires as much attention to how things work inside the company as how customers are interacting with the brand. What internal initiatives do marketers feel are essential for improving customer experience from within the company? To find out, we Econsultancy has conducted a a range of research, including a recent survey of over 300 marketers in India, Customer Experience Maturity in India in association with Epsilon. Here are the top three high-level responses to the question. 1) Improve internal collaboration Respondents were most enthusiastic... [...]

Maz Nadjm says, “We may not give it a lot of thought, but artificial intelligence is already part of our daily lives in a number of ways. When it works well, it makes our life slightly easier – from trying to anticipate our needs (e.g. Amazon’s suggested products or Netflix’s recommended shows) to preventing us from being victims of fraud (e.g. our bank’s fraud detection systems). As a result, our experiences as consumers and humans becomes more seamless and pleasant. It doesn’t take long to get used to this, to the point that some of us are now starting to expect a certain level... [...]

Rose Barnett says, “The boom in the B2B big data market (from a sub-$100m industry in 2009 to $130bn today) mirrors an enterprise-led scramble to invest in data mining, reminiscent of the California gold rush, accompanied by a similar media buzz. Although much is still written about the near-magical potential of data analytics for business, this fervour is now giving way to a more serious debate on where the real business value can actually be found. It’s clear that data prospectors are diverging into two camps: the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-not-yets’. A recent KPMG survey showed... [...]