With online buying and pickup in-store options higher than ever, CMO attention must also accelerate digital and omnichannel content marketing strategies. Before the pandemic, less than three-fourths of the top ten retailers out of 125 had been employing omnichannel best practices. The annual study was started five years ago, and the latest discovery revealed that best practices were only being used by 66% to 73% of the top ten, a decline from 2018.

While the study excluded innovation and features like AI (artificial intelligence) and AR (augmented reality), it looked at, and assessed factors that it believed should be standard for well-run omnichannel and digital programs. As such, it viewed and ranked companies across three categories – web, mobile, and cross-channel.

There are plenty of things that go into successful local marketing campaigns, but we managed to boil them down to the few most important ones that businesses should be focusing on. Between research and insights from industry experts, up-to-date and accurate business location data is one of the key elements for a local marketing campaign.

This means that businesses first have to assess the details of all local data points, including the name of the business, the address, the business hours, and the contact information. This element is then followed by effective landing pages and search optimization, keeping track of ratings and online reviews, and finally, paid search and social advertisements.

Today, media coverage is an important metric in assessing the success of marketing and communication initiatives. Regardless of the social media platform on which content is relayed, getting the right media coverage brings satisfaction and pride to marketers.

Despite media coverage being key, achieving the required result requires some effort and the right strategy. Since media coverage isn’t a one-and-done exercise, several strategies go into achieving the right coverage and using the coverage in effective relationship building and sales marketing.

2030 will be an important year for a couple of reasons. For starters, every boomer in the U.S. will be over 65 years of age, meaning that 20% of our entire population will have reached retirement age. It will also mean that millennials will be approaching 50 years of age. They and Generation Z will make up most of our workforce. These facts, along with the findings of a study into how the customer experience will be evolving by 2030 give a hint as to how brands might begin preparing to meet these upcoming challenges.

Analytics software firm SAS partnered with Futurum Research in May 2019 to survey more than 4,000 consumers, tech professionals, and marketers. They discovered five key areas of technology they felt would drive the evolution of customer experience by 2030. Here’s the five.

In his October 9, 2016 blog about the Baltimore Ravens fourth-quarter loss to the Washington Redskins, former NFL player Dan Birdwell threw in this quote: “You have to play this game just like somebody just hit your mother with a two by four.”

Game or what’s since evolved into gamification perked up again during the pandemic with so many people quarantined at home. Since 1984, companies were urged to use gamification to improve employee engagement and get workers to more clearly define their goals. It was viewed as a novel way to keep score and get more frequent feedback from employees.

According to some digital media pundits, less than 2% of customers actually make a purchase upon their first visit on a site. This is where remarketing and retargeting come in: both tactics are designed to help businesses reach back to customers who have shown interest in their brand.

That said, it’s easy to confuse the two when devising a digital marketing strategy. Here is a guide to understanding the difference between the two, and advice on how to use these tactics to re-engage with site visitors.

When it comes to understanding the potential of virtual reality, brands and their marketing teams seem to have barely brushed the surface. Storytelling is everything in the contemporary branding world, and many businesses are beginning to look to evolving technologies to stay ahead of the game. With North Face shooting footage of a climb in Yosemite National Park to transform the shopping experiences of shoppers in New York and San Francisco, here’s a guide to help take your 2019 campaigns to new heights.

As more consumers are spending more time online and on social media, digital PR has become a necessity for most brands. For many, though, the jump from traditional PR to digital PR has come with some confusing and challenging hurdles. That’s not surprising given how similar – and how different – digital and traditional PR can be.

Traditional PR employs strong, directed, precise communication built on a foundation of carefully-constructed relationships with key journalists and other opinion-makers. It’s imperative to know the right people in the right way, so when there’s a message to disperse to a target audience, there’s a member of the media gladly willing to be a brand megaphone.