Our benchmarking platform Beacon allows firms to compare their marketing performance across website metrics, content marketing, social media and email performance. The ultimate goal: to make better marketing decisions informed by data.
Last week we met with our Beacon members for the first of our quarterly user group meetings this year. We generally meet shortly after quarter-end to review the data and insight from the previous three months, talk about what’s coming up and focus on a particular theme or topic.
Digital marketing data trends from Q1
We shared some of the trends from the recent quarter and beyond, talking through why these might have occurred and what we can take from the insight. A few sneak peeks on what we talked though during this session include:
- Trends in website traffic: this has declined and plateaued, over the past 12 months. Signs show it could be on the rise again;
- Traffic to product pages: this continues to grow, with thought leadership traffic making small gains;
- The main sources of website traffic;
- The average number of LinkedIn posts per business day;
- The dominant theme for thought leadership articles; and
- The most popular day in the week for publishing articles in March.
Implementing video best practice
We also shared interesting stats from video research we recently conducted. We found that of the 26 videos sampled:
- 46% were market outlook/commentary videos, 31% were sustainability focused and 23% were product focused
- Only 12% had a call to action, 35% had captions, and 65% had share buttons
- The logo/animation intro time averaged 3.5 seconds – this is not too bad
With video being such a big area of focus across the industry, it’s interesting to see that some best practice for getting the most out of your video content is not being implemented. A lot of this comes down to time and resource – the extra parts needed to get these elements properly published.
As a group we always discuss and look at what areas of the platform we can continue to develop to add more value for member firms. One of the big areas identified as a priority for the next quarter is to develop the content engagement data and insight.
If you’re interested in becoming a member of Beacon, you can find out more and get in touch here.