Summary
- It's crucial to rely on data for marketing decisions rather than just gut feeling, as 51.1% of marketing decisions are based on intuition, which can lead to costly mistakes.
- Enhancing your marketing strategy with data-driven insights can lead to faster growth and success, as seen in successful case studies such as NP digital's experience.
- To maximize conversion, brands should adapt to customer touchpoints and diversify marketing channels, ensuring a minimum of three channels for effective customer engagement, depending on the price point.
- Prioritize channels where you see higher conversions like paid social for B2C and paid search for B2B.
- SEO and email marketing deliver the best ROI, whereas social media, though popular, does not always equate to revenue.
- Understand the shift in consumer priorities, which now focus on quality, trust, and results rather than just price. Use this in positioning your products.
- Adapt to the evolving search landscape, where younger generations opt for social media for preliminary searches and the use of voice search is increasing.
- Include long-tail keywords in your SEO strategy to target informed consumers who use longer queries.
- Useful content formats beyond blogs can include tools and interactive formats, which increase traffic and engagement.
- Invest in building your brand for capturing traffic in branded searches and consider SEO as a long-term strategy for established businesses.
- Stay abreast of changes in the search intent landscape; half of all Google searches are informational, and that's where content should focus.
- Consider brand investment in non-branded words initially, but also optimize for branded searches as users often search directly for known brands.
- Understand that AI is not currently a magic pill for marketing, but can enhance efficiency in mundane tasks and data analytics.
- Use simple, authentic content formats as younger audiences connect more with relatable influencers and authentic content rather than highly polished ones.
- In email marketing, maintain a strict list hygiene and simplify email layouts for better deliverability.
- Ensure your ad spending accounts for multiple iterations; Google's and Meta's platforms still dominate but diversifying could uncover less competitive opportunities.
- Understand how to optimize content and ads for different audience segments for higher conversion rates.
Video
How To Take Action
I would suggest first using data for marketing decisions instead of guessing. Avoid costly mistakes by looking at facts. To make your business grow, use data-driven insights like those from NP Digital's success stories.
A good way to improve your marketing is by using at least three channels to reach customers. For example, B2C can use paid social, and B2B can use paid search. SEO and email marketing give the best results for your efforts.
Make sure your products stand out by focusing on quality and trust, not just price. Adapt your marketing to different ways people search online, like through social media and voice search. Use long-tail keywords to attract informed customers in SEO.
Think about sharing useful content. Besides blogs, tools and interactive content can bring people to your site. Build your brand to get more attention in searches.
Keep your emails simple and list clean for better results. Also, know when and where to post content. Videos work well, but keep them simple and real. Relatable content is preferred by younger audiences.
Try these tips to make your marketing more effective without spending too much time or money. Start with small changes, and watch how your business benefits!
Quotes by Author
"Marketing has evolved at a very rapid pace and things are changing so you got to continually look at the data"
"Organic social has terrible traffic it's that most people focus on likes and engagements and being cool and having more followers versus focusing on creating content for their ideal customer profile"
"Consumers connect with relatable influencers so it's not always about going after the massive a-listers out there"
"You want to balance not just data but also with your gut because you won't always be able to find data"
"51.1% of marking decisions are based off of a gut feeling rather than analytics"
Full Transcript
[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] he hello everyone thank you for joining us today today we're going to be breaking down 50 datadriven insights that'll help you with your Marketing in 2025 so let's Dive Right In and get started all right let's see so we're NP digital we're a global Ad Agency we see tons of data and insights um but working with companies all over the world plus we have a lot of software tools where we're aggregating data scraping the internet and seeing what's changing what's working what's not and we want to bring that to you today if you also need help with your marketing you can scan that QR code on the bottom left and it'll take you to a web page where you can fill out your information so my name is Neil Patel I'm the co-founder of NP digital today I also have Matt and Karen with me Matt do you want to give a quick introduction of yourself and then Karen you can go next of course yeah no thanks for having me Neil hope the audio and everything is going to be working great today excited to be here I'm I'm Matthew Sanchos I'm the chief product officer at npxl which is the small to medium business division of the Neil Patel digital umbrella um excited to be bringing a lot of just data packed information to you guys today around trends that are going to affect your 2025 marketing strategies hi everyone I'm Karen bellan I'm the BP of data and analytics at NP digital and my experience is in Innovation and marketing so I am using data and analytics to help Enterprise Brands get the outcomes they want by creating experiences that their customers need I also am excited to share the data and insights with you today these charts and stats are going to really help you as you navigate some of the complex challenges that are part of today's rapidly evolving marketing landscape 51.1% of marking decisions are based off of a gut feeling rather than analytics if you've been doing marketing for a really long time your gut's probably going to be directionally correct but even me I've been doing this stuff for 23 years now literally 23 years now and I still don't rely on my gut of course if I've done something 10 times I usually rely on my gut over data but for most marketing initiatives I still look at the data because what works what worked before may not work today marketing has evolved at a very rapid pace and things are changing so you got to continually look at the data and I'll give you a quick example of this with one of my earlier startups we used to make people sign up by logging in and registering by clicking sign up through Google or sign up with Google right you guys have all experienced that Google gives you permission people are good to go that one change increased our conversion rate by over 90% no joke change of business overnight if today I did it because my gut told me it worked in the past it wouldn't work as well you know think about 10 years ago there weren't as many privacy concerns are there as today so the reason I bring up this example is you have to look at the data and what once worked may not work today and although your gut will tell you directionally what can work and whatnot you should still look at the data and relying on intuition can lead to costy mistakes um I deal with this all the time and my team at this point knows if they have something and they want to test it to bring me the data because data is less likely to lose you money it saves you a lot of time and it helps you grow faster and this is what's caused NP digital to be one of the fastest growing agencies and the reason we're one of the fastest growing agencies because our client results have been amazing hence so many awards I think last year alone we got like 34 award boards or something like that that Mike G was telling me um and it's because the data is working we're implementing what we're we're implementing all the trends in the data uh and it's affecting our client's strategy and based on that they're seeing faster growth So today we're going to be covering those 50 insights plus there's going to be a bonus one and these are some of the things we're going to cover and we're going to start off with Channel insights so let's Dive Right In all right channel insights so in this section I'll share charts for the number of consumer touch points the benefits of Channel diversity and the differences in Impact by Channel let's get started multiple touch points are a must today's complex customer Journeys involve many interactions across different channels the number of touch points the chart is showing increases with the price point and the minimum marketers should plan for is three for example when having a price point of $100 or less different channels have converting power diversify your efforts while making sure you've optimized the high converters which are paid social for B to C and paid search for B2B marketers see a high higher Roi as they add more channels though there is a point of diminishing returns as to add more channels continue to maximize each one to enjoy the benefits of a diversified mix in terms of Revenue paid ads SEO and email get the best Roi social media is popular but it's not always a money maker as you can see in the chart and traffic doesn't equal Revenue however SEO does deliver the highest share of traffic resulting in a high share of Revenue comparable to that of ads and and this one right here this is like a big mistake that we see companies make they just believe that you just get more traffic you make more money in theory yes but the traffic needs to be the right type of traffic going after the Right audience and it needs to be qualified now it doesn't mean that organic social has terrible traffic it's that most people focus on likes and engagements and being cool and having more followers versus focusing on creating content for their ideal customer profile great let's look at some consumer insights now I'll share some insights in this section into what consumers are looking for before they decide to make a purchase the top reasons marketers lose customers to their competition are differences in pricing quality loyalty rewards delivery speed and customer service and what consumers prioritize has change so instead of leading with price or discounts position your product as the best choice in the market by demonstrating Quality Trust results all right so let's dive into a few SEO insights so there's a lot of data that we've been aggregating across multiple Industries multiple client types both small businesses and Enterprise and there's a lot of good information in here so first and foremost we just want to point out that like most people may already understand search is continued to evolve year over-ear new new platforms are coming out new ways for searching are coming about and it's just evolving how search is occurring so first and foremost social media has now become a common search alternative for a lot of the younger Generations it often serves as a Discovery Channel that can inspire a Google search after so I think a lot of individuals start to look at this as not just social media versus Google but a combination of the two and seeing where in that funnel are people turning to either Source AI chatbots have also continued to grow over the last five to seven years they're used for quick answers to complex queries and they may inspire a Google search to verify the facts because a lot of AI chat Bots are not using sources when they're responding back to queries so as you can see in the chart to the left these are different ways that people are using search for questions online and search engines still continue to dominate a large percent of that but we are seeing new platforms rising and one thing to keep in mind is when we did the study in uh last year and we were doing the research the percentages add up to more than 100% it's because people are using multiple platforms to perform a search and what find is search is turning into what um and Matt will go on and this slide show showcases that as well but search is changing to what social media is so people are like oh is AI going to kill Google well did Instagram kill Facebook did Tik Tok kill Instagram did YouTube did uh YouTube kill Facebook and the reality is according to sprout social the average person uses 6.7 social networks per month okay it's not that they just have accounts on these networks they're using 6.7 social networks on average per month right so when you think about that search is evolving in the same way people are using search everywhere and if you're not everywhere you're missing out on a huge opportunity which gets into this slide that Matt is going to talk about yep I I love that point that you're making and it's exactly what Neil is saying here search is continuing to change we're starting to see just a little bit of that market share that Google used to dominate over the years I mean if you asked us five to seven years ago who are the major players in search we would have said Google being Yahoo and then the list would have really te tailed off after that but now you can see all of these different options and Google Now only holds about 18.8% of this total market share you'll see tools like Instagram meta by Snapchat um YouTube all starting to grow in that market share and it's exactly what Neil said it's not that people are just going to one of these it's that people are now going to multiple sources when they have a query to get as much information as possible yeah and that was the platforms that we can find data on but that's over 45 billion searches a day yep sorry about that there's not 45 billion people in this world it's a lot of people searching on multiple platforms to find what they're looking for absolutely absolutely so number 10 here voice search is the future not just for the near me type of search searches that people may be verbalizing to their devices but there's a lot of other ways that people are using voice search you have apple AI you have Google Assistant you have Alexa that can answer informational questions by accessing information on the web for you through these atome devices so there are a lot more ways that people are leveraging wearable technology their cell phones their devices in their homes to get information very quickly and we're starting to see Voice versus text becoming a lot more prevalent nowadays and you can see on this chart on the right how different age groups use the different types of searches so as as you start getting younger in these Generations they're starting to leverage voice search more so start thinking of ways that you can be optimizing your content your videos whatever it may be to apply more towards how people are going to voice search this as opposed to just the traditional keyword queries when people are typing things into their devices yeah and if you have young kids you'll find that they search through voice first and that's what they've learned well we're all used to typing first because that's what the technology was when we started searching so you're going to see kids primarily use voice search as they grow older because that's what they're used to and they think what we do is crazy you know I know that sounds a little off-the-wall but seriously and because AI is integrating to all these voice devices the responses are getting better and better as well yep absolutely so some key Pages for organic traffic because because we're starting to see this shift a little bit as well I think over the last decade or two we've seen blog posts be just the absolute dominant media format but there are different media formats that are starting to take a little bit of the market share away from that so besides blog posts you need to start investing in other types of assets like tools homepage um information and also your product pages I feel like Neil has been talking about this for years this has been a little bit of his Cutting Edge in the market was not just creating a Blog and a video format and social media content but also trying to figure out what are the tools that he could either create from scratch or buy existing tools and optimize them and add more value to them over time and give people a reason to come and enjoy your brand so start thinking of ways that you could leverage tools out there because that can start to bring you a lot more traffic and qualifi qualified traffic search queries are also evolving so we're starting to see that these queries are starting to get longer over time as well so you'll see all the way back uh to 2013 and earlier that the amount of longer tailed keywords were a lot less frequent and now we're starting to see that anywhere from three to five keywords or five to eight keywords are becoming the norm for a lot more searches what that shows us is that people are becoming a lot more informed before they're approaching their device to make a query to make a search and so what that's showing us is that they they already have some level of information before they're making this search which is just making them that more empowered to make a conversion if they do find the right website so start figuring out ways to incorporate longer tail keywords longer formats of content into your marketing so that you can start coming up for these these more detailed search queries also 8% of searches are questions nowadays so we're starting to see this rise as well and and what you're going to see here are three different formats that we broke down how what and why type of queries these are the essential ways that people are going about making searches with different platforms that they're going about um apologies as teams continues to tries to pull up on my screen all right SEO strategies must focus on search intent um so what you'll see here are essentially half of all searches on Google are informational in nature one out of every three Searchers already have a destination in Mind by the time they're approaching their platform that they're going with whether it be um chat GPT whether it be Google whether it be uh bing whatever it is but essentially we break down four categories of search when individuals are coming to a platform you have informational navigational commercial commercial and transactional and what we're starting to see is that a lot more searches are continuing to go towards the informational route because people want to be informed before they make a conversion they don't want to feel like they're just being sold to they want to feel like they have made the right decision they've studied the the reviews the data that's out there and they're making the best decision for them you need to invest in your brand so building brand awareness can help you capture more traffic on Google I think a lot of people make this mistake of just focusing on their non-branded keywords and just continuing to optimize for that but individuals once they find a brand they're starting to do branded search and if they don't find your brand there towards the top it is going to hurt your traffic over time SEO is a long-term game and you have to start thinking about investing in SEO early if you're an established website to maximize those returns so as you can see in the chart to the left those are your orange bars so if you're an established website in your earlier years you will start seeing a good return on your SEO versus the blue websites which are a little bit newer those first two years are a little bit more of a grind you may not see a positive Roi but if you stick to it the results do compound and after two three four years you can start seeing some pretty incredible results in your Roi when it comes from SEO and one of the last things we want to chat about here with SEO is establishing eat I know we talk a lot about it in our different webinars and our content and eat does stand for expertise experience authoritativeness and trustworthiness and and we'll be one of the first to say it's it's not easy to establish eat and and there's a reason for that if your content doesn't meet these criterias you're going to struggle to rank on Google and and Google has designed their algorithm over the years for this on purpose because they want the Best Brands the best information the most authoritative the most trustworthy types of Brands to keep ranking at the top so make sure that you're focusing on these signals as you can see here on theart to the right there are a lot of different examples of pieces of ranking factors that you can focus on that can help drive your eat over time and GPT so now SEO does have to include how to optimize to to show up within a GPT whether it be chat GPT gemini or other types of uh conversational AI so these are a bunch of factors on the left that you need to start considering focus on your content quality the depth of that content and how fresh that content is continue to build Quality quality links and you'll continue to see yourself show up on GPT queries if you want your information to be scraped for GPT so content marketing so now we're going to dive into outside of SEO just content specifically what are some insights what are some D data driven pieces of information that we can bring you around 2025 strategies to help your content marketing so first here costly content doesn't always mean a better Roi so try to spend 20% of your efforts on content strategies with a quick payback period and 80% on the ones that produce a better long-term Roi so I love that this is that 8020 rule right and as you can see here blogs are still a format that can bring you a lower amount of initial inv M and a higher Roi or a higher traffic potential or conversion potential down the road so blogs case studies webinars video formats and also tools tools are obviously a little bit more expensive but over time the Roa that they can bring you is significant compared to the initial investment long form content is more memorable so we're seeing that when it comes to long for form versus short form content individuals are retaining certain pieces of information a little bit more so what you'll see here is about 35% of people retain at least one piece of information from a blog or long long form piece of content that they consumed recently as opposed to a shorter form that maybe just didn't stick in their long-term memory as as long as they would have expected yeah so for this study we did something really interesting where we had a group of people watch um short form videos and long form videos and they were able to select the stuff that they actually wanted to watch right so they could skip Etc and what we found is the next day when we asked them you know uh questions related to the content they watch people didn't really remember much of the stuff that they watch when it came to short form and with a long form they had much better retention so it just shows you like short form is great to bring people in the door long form is great to not just gain their attention but to convert them into a customer so a combo of both is great short form to get the eyeballs long form to convert them into a customer beautiful so number 21 here a strong hook does make a make a massive difference so if you can't convince people to stay within the allotted amount of time on your website your engagement and conversions will eventually start coming in lower and the these are massive ranking signals for Google and other search engines and other platforms right so you got algorithms on Instagram you have algorithms on Tik Tok so it's it's all based on the engagement the initial engagement how long people are watching or how long people are staying on your pages for so the attention by content type is a is a massive factor and I I I love this study here because what you'll see here is this is the amount of time you have to capture their attention as soon as somebody starts engaging with your content so when it comes to a webinar you have just under five minutes to capture their attention if you don't capture their attention within that five minute window they're probably going to leave your webinar and as you can see moving down some of the ones I'm going to call out here if you produce case studies you have about 46 seconds to capture somebody's attention to see if they trust your brand with that case study a blog post 14 seconds that's literally the title of your blog post and probably the first two sentences if you're not becoming engaging enough within that short piece of content they're not going to remain on your blog so as you can see here very short attention spans you have to focus on grabbing their attention immediately numbers Drive results this is a cool way of taking the data from the previous slide and making it a little bit more actionable so what are the tactics that you could be incorporating that can make your headlines your content your webinars your videos a little bit more effective so as you can see from the chart on the right you have number based type of information datadriven type of information as you can see today's webinar is a heavy data driven type of webinar we're following we're eating our own dog food right so as we can see from the data here curiosity invoking call to action urgency scarcity these are all tactics that work and you have to start incorporating them into your titles and into that first part of any content you create your content should support the customer Journey so so try generating awareness with podcasts infographics blogs and short form videos Drive conversions with the white papers with webinars and case studies so essentially what this is saying is you have to continue to think of content in a funnel you have your awareness phase which may be more of your just quick attention grabbing it's the least timec consuming type of content your initial short videos your blogs um your Google business profile posts whatever it may be just that shortest form of content then from there you have your consideration a phase where you're now bringing them down the funnel and then your decision phase where you're hitting them with a lot more of the longer formats that really start to Showcase your expertise your trustworthiness from your brand right so the effectiveness of the different content types by the funnel stage as you'll see here so you have podcasts infographics and blogs like I said more awareness phase you have videos images and white papers is more of your consideration phase and then as you go down the funnel that's where you have webinars and case studies that take a little bit more time to Zoom but that's where people are finally ready to make a decision and that's where you're serving that type of content and then the different age groups and their preferences with content formats so this is pretty cool you'll see on the on the left axis you have your generations and then underneath you have the different content formats what you'll see as a consistent thread through every generation through every age that you have here um video formats seem to be the number one way that people want to consume content or information obviously with different Generations you then have different formats outside of that but if you can start to spend a little bit more time ideating how you can generate videos and these don't have to be highgrade um type of production or anything along those lines I think a lot of generations now are looking for authenticity in videos right they want to they want to maybe see it in your iPhone or smartphone format feel like it was just shot right at home and not in some perfectly produced studio so it doesn't always have to be to the nines there's a lot of different ways to produce video to start connecting with different audiences in different Generations as Matt said we see lowii content actually performing better than highly produced content just bust out your phone record keep it simple keep it real it does better from what we see majority of the time absolutely Google favors certain content formats so the Sur layout keeps changing year after year quarter after quarter so keep an eye on the types of content that rank for your key Search terms so when was the last time you punched in your actual own keywords that you're targeting and doing all this marketing for and seeing what's coming up on the Sur it's probably changed since the last time you've looked so it may not be the the typical Blue Links of blogs and articles it may be more images or video formats or it may be Reddit now we're starting to see Reddit popping up a lot more so start figuring out different ways to continue to increase your Omni Channel efforts and Omni um format efforts to figure out what is your audience consuming the most the most popular formats aren't always the most effective ones and this is where again all this data that we're showing you today it may apply to your industry it may not so for your industry it may not be video format it may still be white papers and ebooks and and whatever have you right so you have to understand what is your audience consuming what is your competition shooting out there for for your audience is it long form is it short form is it video is it written right so try and understand what's best for your industry and make sure you're optimizing based off of that and what you'll see is over the years we've seen long form video start to come down and short form video start to take hold obviously you have things like um YouTube shorts you have Instagram reels you have Tik Tok that were a major contributor to this so again try and figure out what is going to be the most effective for your brand longer isn't always better for SEO and this is in regards of the written content here so there is a little bit of diminishing returns as you start going above 2,000 3,000 4,000 words of content again this is very dependent on your industry if you're in a fintech space or a SAS space or somewhere where you need to to be giving a lot of information then you may still be ranking very high by going 4,000 plus words but in a lot of spaces audiences just are becoming less and less attentative to long form content so pay attention to what's going to affect your traffic the best and what is the best way to just deliver that message don't just keep writing for the sake of writing just the spirit of the message if it's driven then stop writing at that point keeping content fresh does help SEO so creating new content is good but you also need to update your existing content regularly and I think this is a large part of what we do for not only our own blog at Neil Patel but also for a lot of our clients is we're not just constantly always pumping out new content for them we're also going back and refreshing old content on behalf of their efforts because we know that Google is constantly looking for edited sprued up content if it's outdated content getting rid of it and redirecting It Whatever whatever needs to be done to update that content to make sure it's the most relevant to today's information to your audience you need to make sure you're doing it so as you'll see here on the chart there is um a percent in growth of traffic as you're putting effort towards both of these buckets so find that balance for you is it 70% new content and 30% refreshing content or is it maybe about 60% of your time is refreshing old content and only 40% of your time is creating new content so what's that balance for your brand and you'll find that the older your business the more time you spend updating the newer your business the more time you just spend creating new content good point all right social media insights so video does perform best on social media there's a lot of studies that we've been doing around this we found that the videos that focus on how to or listicle type of information seem to outperform other types of videos but essentially video versus text based content there there is a pretty significant difference here what you'll see here is short form and long form video are outperforming the other types of content on social media as opposed to interviews and podcasts memes or user generated content consumers connect with relatable influencers so it's not always about going after the massive a-listers out there and spending hundreds of thousands on a post and just realizing if you don't have that budget you just feel defeated and you don't leverage influencers no there's a lot of different types of influencers out there there's there's a whole spectrum and consumers are starting to connect a lot more with the influencers that they can relate to the influencers that only have about 10,000 50,000 100,000 followers they're a lot more down to earth and they're a lot more uh collaborative with different brands so midsize and micro influencers may be the best result for your brand so try and find ways to to locate these midsize or micro influencers and as you can see here a midsize is anywhere between 100,000 to 500,000 followers and a micro is anywhere between a thousand to 100,000 there's a lot more micro influencers out there than you think and they're a lot more open to collabing with you and leveraging your message to Their audience to help grow and the smaller the influencer the more likely they are to do a performance-based deal which is much more profitable for you you know versus wanting a ton of money up front which is what the larger influencers want and the larger ones don't put in the effort in most cases compared to the smaller ones who really care and want to try because they want to keep doing it and get more business um because they don't have as many opportunities so we just see them putting in much more effort very well said all right number 31 the best times to post on social media so don't just post because you need to post and also try and figure out in your industry in your space how often are people posting and emphasize quality over that quantity right so if on this page you see that on Instagram it's best for you to be posting about four times a day around 10 o'clock around 2 pm around 5:00 pm and again around 7 PM don't just take that and run with it like do some research and figure out is that best for you are four posts a day doable can you still maintain quality with four posts a day or at some point are you just spitting out information and a bunch of AI created imagery just for for the sake of doing it and now it's hurting your brain right so find that delicate balance try and figure out what are the best times to post on social media based on when your audience is going to be on there when there're may be more receptive to um engaging with that type of content and hopefully converted social media is becoming the dominant channel for product Discovery half of Shoppers worldwide have used social media to discover products and almost 60% have used it to purchase something obviously we've seen um different platforms like uh Tik Tok and Instagram over the past two years actually add links that will lead you from a post to a direct product which have now made this a lot easier but again over time we're only going to see this grow in popularity so what you can see here is Instagram Facebook YouTube and Tik Tok are the four top platforms right now for bringing new eyeballs to a product and helping them convert social media campaign should be age specific so you have older audiences that are maybe highlighting around urgency more you have younger audiences that are maybe emphasizing around Discovery and then across all the demographics what you're seeing is you have to leverage some format of influencer strategically so as we can see here in the chart on the right you'll see this Common Thread right here in the orange where ease of purchase across everybody is also probably the biggest Factor right sure you can offer free shipping sure you can offer fast shipping in these other aspects but if if your experience for them to purchase from you is super simple if it's just literally the click of a couple buttons you offer things like Apple pay or you offer things like um break down this payment into a couple different installments for individuals who can't afford the full payment right now like these are all little micro aspects of your shopping experience that could drive much higher uh conversions because the experience is just so seamless different social channels deliver different uh clv so in the B2B space businessto business you want to prioritize LinkedIn X or Twitter and YouTube in the b2c business to Consumer you want to invest in YouTube meta and Pinterest so what you'll see here is the different social networks that generate customers with the highest lifetime value that's what clv stands for so you still have meta or Facebook Instagram Tik Tok YouTube LinkedIn Twitter Pinterest and Snapchat and what you'll see here is that on B2B versus B Toc you'll see different uh variations of customer lifetime value all right my last section here and you won't have to hear me speak as much anymore email marketing so number 35 in email marketing less can be more so strict list hygiene and segmentation are absolutely key still to this day no more than about four emails a week is what we're finding to be that sweet spot and keep your your email simple I think I think Neil does a phenomenal job of this and this is mainly for deliverability into almost every platform so if you're if you're spending a lot of time creating High High Fidelity images and and a lot of just graphically designed emails that may be great for a good chunk of your audience but a large part of your audience may not even be seeing that email because it maybe hit their spam folder or a lot of those elements just didn't come through so the email came through broken so keeping your emails just simple text based and a link can make sure that your emails are delivering to the highest amount of inbox percentages so what you'll see here on the chart to the right are a lot of different key factors in email marketing that's still to this day are some of the highest factors to help you drive the most Roi from your email efforts send time optimization does increase your open rate so just like social media we talked about before in email marketing there are certain times of the day and certain times of the week that if you send around those times you're going to get the best open rates so send your most important emails from Tuesday to Thursday between 9:00 AM and 12: PM in your audience's time zone That's The Sweet Spot the inbox is not a billboard so good email campaigns deliver value and help build a relationship what you're going to see here down at the bottom is a chart where individuals are leveraging email marketing as just a billboard to just blast uh affiliate information products press announcements webinar invitations without any sort of context without any sort of warming up and what you'll see is that the emails that actually get the highest open rates and the least amount of unsubscribed and the least amount of complaints are the ones that are more informational helpful so your welcome sequences your support emails your thank you emails your reminder emails these are the ones that are causing people to unsubscribe the least so take that for what it's worth diversifying organic channels is key to driving email optins content marketing generates three times as many leads as traditional marketing so what you'll see here is the organic tra channels that are driving people to sign up for either your your newsletter or for any sort of email communication are still Google number one Facebook YouTube Pinterest and it starts tailing off if you start as you start going deeper into social media but again try and find ways to leverage these platforms to get people to sign up for some format of email communication with you all right paid advertising so in our paid advertising charts you will learn how marketers are making their paid advertising profitable making campaigns profitable requires testing in our study over 78% of marketers said their paid ads aren't profitable you can anticipate going through at least 14 different creatives before getting to scale depending on the platform on Facebook it's 61 so definitely get comfortable with iterations in your creative talking about platforms Google and meta rule the advertising gain when diversifying platforms use this chart to find an opportunity to break through on ones that are less competitive they have a lower percentage of AD spend and have a higher retention per user a longer time spent those platforms may not drive as much volume but they can still produce a high Roi due to being less competitive add success is measured in conversions and conversion rates will vary by Channel cost per click and cost per impression help you understand the ad cost of a sale but what matters is the ad conversion rate and how many sales that translates into words impact your paid media Roi words like best easy limited have a high click-through rate and low cost per click in paid advertising and that's good the key to making ads work is to think beyond the ad itself you can make the most of your advertising budget by applying a mix of these proven strategies if you already have a funnel like Matt talked about great job add multiple payment options which he also mentioned have those to incorporate an email drip for your non- buyers which was part of our email section all right cro conversion rate optimization so this section is full of charts to help you with applying colors psychological and ux principles and website features that help you improve your conversions color can impact conversions certain colors work better for specific specific Industries like blue for finance and Tech or green for health and wellness ctas need to pop so you want to make sure that you're focusing on the color as well as the contrast blue green and red can really stand out on the screen clicks don't always correlate with conversions so you need to use multiple psychological triggers to increase your conversions and several of the ones listed here can be combined like the different strategies I shared earlier combining these different triggers can help you with your conversion rates forms are about balance so make sure you want to make sure you have enough form fields to assess your lead quality however not so many that it discourages people who need your product or service from filling out the form if you find yourself needing more than form four form Fields consider testing a form where you expose two form fields at a time to make it easy for the um for your customer to convert yeah and ideally with form Fields what we found is you know if you're not asking enough information you may get a high conversion rate from a lead visitor to lead but then the lead to a close or revenue is going to be really terrible so you you have to look at the whole funnel conversion rates so from visitor to a closed deal and look at each stage and one of the stages may have a lower conversion rate but if your overall conversion rate is higher for to close deal by asking for more form Fields just keep that in mind so you can always run a split test with that good Insight all right look at this mix of large and small tweaks we can make to improve conversion rates even seemingly small tweaks like improving load time can have a big impact testing copy that addresses the reasons people may have to not convert also helps you increase your AV testing wins yeah back in the day Amazon did a study it was like for every second delayed in low time we have we lose x billion dollars it was something ridiculous none of us are the size of Amazon but nonetheless it just shows you that low time super important because if an established brand loses that much revenue um for a low time it means you know all of us who don't have a strongest brand as Amazon in theory we should see a higher number percentage wise yes and Brands like Amazon are also famous for their ux improvements because these ux improvements can increase so many um so many sales in throughout the whole funnel including reducing car abandonment so combine we're talking about combining all these strategies so combine as many of these ux elements here as possible to reduce the decision fatigue from your customer and to prevent them from hesitating to purchase so ux change is just simply mobile optimization will help you create a checkout experience that guides your users guide your customers toward checkout completion if and again if you can focus on content that gives consumers the information and is transparent so that they can feel compelled to purchase they will be less likely to abandon their cart after having added something to it that's what this chart is sharing here so um that's it for our 50 take it away Neil for some bonus insights and we have a bonus one so let's go over the bonus one we got AI insights here so look you know a lot of marketers are using Ai and they believe that it's a magic pill more than 50% of marketers are using AI to support copyrighting email social media search it isn't a magic pill really right even though a lot of people believe it is and it's getting pitched that way it isn't in its current form right I'm not saying the technology won't improve and get better but in today's form in marketing it cannot solve everything that you're looking to do and when we look at the ROI for AI and marketing it's not in the stuff people are talking about everyone's talking about I'm using it to create content or videos really a lot of it the ROI is coming from things like cost savings and automating mundane boring tasks it's not actually coming from doing things like creating you know crazy content it's coming from things like data and analytics and chat Bots to get people through objections when they have support so think about the ugly stuff and when you use AI for some of those ugly things that aren't as visual we're seeing a much higher Roi when it comes to marketing and human written content you know a lot of people are like oh we got to end up writing AI based content we did a study with I believe it was 744 articles uh I forgot how many websites half of them were AI half of them were human written and after you know a good amount of time we looked at over a 12- month period but AI generated content was on average generating 5.5 4X I mean a human generated content was generating 5.54 X more traffic from search organic than human generated content I mean sorry ah tongue twister here that human generated content after a period of 12 months was generating on average 5.54 X more organic search traffic than AI generated content sorry about that so humans one here now this doesn't mean you can't use AI to help you with your content creation we're just finding that it's just creating the same regurgitated information over and over again and it doesn't do as well from a search and ranking standpoint and it lacks a lot of the elements from e e a which Matt talked about earlier and when we look at paid ads we did a quick um experiment and this was with Facebook ads and what we ended up finding out was human generated ads converted better than AI generated ads but then when we took the human gener uh human winning variations and then hey a had AI spin up more variations of that we found that the winning combo was humans combined with AI really won um and it just shows AI is great but when you combine it with humans it typically performs much better so you know we presented a lot of stats and data there's so many things here that we presented on it's hard for all of you guys to get to all of it um you'll find our slides and our decks on YouTube and our social profiles like X um where we did this presentation it'll be live and recorded there for you but just pick a few of the holes that you saw based on the data we presented focus on improving them one at a time and over time you should see your results your Revenue your traffic go up and what I recommend is go after the channels that are the most effective and the least difficult to execute on first right there's a lot of different opportunities you have but go after the low hanging fruit first because that's where you're going to do the best in essence you know to wrap it up you want to balance not just data but also with your gut because you won't always be able to find data and when you combine both of them you should have a winning strategy on your hand if you don't have a ton of experience don't rely on your gut as much just as a FYI I'm not saying your gut's terrible it's just it's not going to perform as well if you don't have tons of experience within the marketing industry and if you want to know where to find a lot of these stats you can go on our social profiles like X Instagram um I post a lot of them there we're going to end up creating a page on the NP digital site to break down a lot of the stats and data um also keep in mind that uh if I know people are probably wondering where we're getting a lot of these stats and data a lot of it's from surveying our own analysis we have our own tools scraping a lot of data um you know from the web and analyzing and crunching it and then figuring out where patterns are looking at analytics data and aggregate right when you're um aggregating a lot of different sites you're end up able to see a lot of data and Trends and see what's working and what's not once once this page goes live on the website I think our goal with this guys is to not make you wait till these webinars to always access these data points we want to make these data points accessible to you at any point in time we're very excited for this initiative there's going to be a lot of different marketing Trends analysis charts all types of sta statistics that we're going to be uploading to this page on our website yep if you want to work with us scan the QR code you can book a call and we would love to work together to help you grow we work with both smbs and Enterprise companies um throughout the whole world and we have an upcoming webinar on 3x in your SEO traffic with AI we talk about some hacks and strategies that we've used that work scan the QR code if you want to attend it hopefully we'll see you there as well all right Colin let's having some q& a q and a good stuff lots of questions Neil about where to find stuff so thank you for for answering that before um I popped on so question Neil and know the answer to this but just want to clarify so we should always try to go with data and not our gut feelings right you you you should look at the data and combine it with your gut um data usually will be the one that wins but you can't always rely on data and the reason I say that is remember I broke down the example when we started about kiss metrics and how I use the sign in with Google the data showed that it was converting 90 plus perc better but things change over time the data can't take into account that over time people had privacy concerns and some of those things won't work as well so it's the combination of gut which I I don't like the word gut as much as experience so I would combine experience with data is a winning combination there you go next question so Karen it's gonna go to you but Neil Matt chime in um what indicators do you use to segment audiences that make convert at a higher rate and have higher return on ad spend like any Silver Bullet there or just thoughts Karen well one of the things that I'm working on with our clients right now is creating opportunities on their websites where folks can self-identify to give us a little bit more data around which audience they belong to based on our research and our understanding of who the Brand's audience is so for example if you have if you're you you have an academic audience and a professional audience there may be opportunities to get more OAS at different seasonality times from your um academic audience for example or just seeing the differences in the type of content that your audience is accessing to provide additional signals for your segmentation to create the best Roi and the best messaging awesome I don't know if Neil Matt if you had anything to to add on there but I think that was a great response thank you Karen um Matt can you explain a little more detail you you threw out sort of tools and there were a chart or two um that referenced tools is that like is that a linkbait strategy thing you know can you just explain a little bit more about why tools might be valuable for for most Industries whether it's B2B or B Toc for sure for sure yeah no matter what the industry is if you're going to be investing in tools I would say it's not for the link bait I think the last thing you want to do is either buy or create a tool that is very low quality you don't really put the effort into it to create a good user experience and now you're driving traffic to it and then people just don't ever want to return the the whole goal of of leveraging a tool is to provide something to your audience to your industry that's useful that's helpful that makes them want to keep coming back that makes them want to talk about it it becomes a buzz in the industry where people want to link back to it people want to uh share it with their friends and send them a link to it you know so that that's the goal of the tool is to be helpful um it may not be a big um Revenue play it may not be how you're uh acquiring a lot of your Revenue so it may be something where you're like hey I'm kind of gonna take a hit on how much I've invested on this tool because by making it this helpful I'll start converting customers through my actual business so there's a lot of different ways to think about it but I think the last way to think about it would be link baby got it awesome thank you while we have you Matt there was a question about how to we get this often actually how to optimize for voice search yes um the viewer said we show up organically via like a traditional Blue Link or maybe a snippet but not at all on voice and then in parentheses Alexa any oh mine just of course lit up but any yeah any any tips or tricks yeah so I would say it depends on what space you're in for the Alexa for the for the Google home um any of those type of devices usually those devices the areas that you want to focus optimization on are kind of more local based so your Google Business profiles your Bing places your Yelp if you could really spend time adding more information to your descriptions maybe putting together Google posts on your Google business bus profile um those would be ways to help increase like local type of searches on Alexa on a national scale those are going to be incredibly difficult at that point you're just talking about trying your best to rank at the top of Any Given serp or any zero click area for Google or any of these other search engines where it's either the zero click right at the top or the people also ask section if you can start getting into those areas by optimizing um kind of tldr sections in your content so kind of summarizing whatever is about to happen below right up top um optimizing your meta tags your titles your descriptions your headers I think a large part of this is header optimization with content right below it um these are all different tactics to help you rank for voice search and then again remember voice search is a lot more longtail it's not these short tail phrases so if you could start finding with tools like answer the public if you could pop in a shortterm phrase and then find all the longtail phrases of it look if your content is actually optimized around those to see if voice search could start becoming a lot more um just a bigger opportunity for traffic for you awesome thank you so much Matt so Neil this one comes up and we've got two minutes left so we'll try to get through at least two more this one comes up a lot you know is there a definition you know of long form content versus short form in in both written and video forms so yeah easiest answer for video format is just look at the platforms they'll tell you what their definition is of short versus long because based on the upload criteria short form may have to be under a minute some are two minutes some are a minute and a half it depends on the platform um and then the long form is usually the other bucket but typically long form you want it at least 5 minutes but we're really seeing results better for 10 plus minutes it doesn't need to be 20 but we see 10 10 plus is really the key um as for text based content typically we see short form is like under a thousand anything long form is usually above a thousand for most cases just generalizing here awesome and then one last one um speaking of tools Matt Neil Karen I mean I can pile on too do you know of a good tool to check for efficient the efficiency this is a tough one of headlines titles subject lines Etc was going to say you know Uber suggest has AI writer and it does a really good job of proposing different headlines and titles based on keywords that you really want to go after I don't know if if Matt Neil or Karen you had you know any other magical tools that that you love um to help with efficiency when it comes to creating you know good strong headlines titles subject lines Etc I would I would say for me it'd be a combination of two things like one rather than going into like external tools to just try and find like what are the hottest titles right now I would more go into like search console like go to your own search console and go through all of your different pages that have content whether it be product pages or actual blog posts and just see what is performing like what is gaining Impressions what is gaining traffic what is moving your keyword rankings and determine it based off of your own audience and then from there take that data put it into like an Uber suggest or answer to the public to now create you additional questions or phrases based on some of that information and so now you're basing it off of just your own personal data and what your audience is reacting towards as opposed to just external data sources yeah great answer and and I'll just y i I agree with that or or you could just go on social media and see what's hot right now and you can repurpose some of those headlines even if they're not in your industry to something that's more for your industry um but I agree with Matt as well um call I I was just going to say like if you've got some funds you know paid search is always a great place to test things quickly to see you know which headlines or descriptions work because it's the same serp at the end of the day and if it works in paid search chances are you know it might work in in organic search as well so that's another thing to maybe test and try cool awesome well thank you guys for your time really appreciate I know we went a little bit over thank you team and for everyone if you're interested in working with us check out NPD digital.com and we look forward to seeing you on our next webinar thank you all you so much bye [Applause] [Music] he
