In a recent survey by Statista, 86 percent of respondents reported using Facebook for marketing. That makes it the most popular social media platform for marketing—ahead of even Instagram and TikTok.

With more than 2 billion monthly active users, Facebook continues to be the most used social media platform worldwide. And if you add up all the Facebook-owned platforms, your audience size surges dramatically. 

But how do you optimise your Facebook ad campaigns? Is there a way to monitor the performance of Facebook ads beyond clicks and page views? Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to track conversions on your website and attribute them to Facebook ads?

That’s exactly what the Facebook pixel does.

Now called Meta pixel, it’s a useful tool to track conversions from Facebook and Instagram ads and optimise campaign performance. We’ll be using the terms interchangeably throughout this article.

Let’s dig deeper into what a Facebook pixel is and the step-by-step instructions to create it.

What is a Facebook pixel?

The Facebook pixel is a piece of code (JavaScript) that lets you monitor and measure the effectiveness of your Facebook ad campaigns. Once you install the Facebook pixel (add the website code or pixel to your website’s source code), it tracks the online activity of Facebook users who visit your website after clicking on an ad. 

That, in turn, helps you track conversions from these ads and create custom audiences for future campaigns. You can even implement retargeting ads to engage visitors who perform specific actions on your website, such as checking out a product or adding it to the cart.

How does a Facebook pixel work?

After you set up a Facebook pixel for your website or landing page, it gets triggered when a Facebook user clicks on your ad and reaches your web page. 

Then, the pixel creates a cookie and stores it in the user’s browser, which helps monitor their online behaviour. It also comes in handy for retargeting ads.

The best part? The more conversions that happen on your website, the better Facebook gets at delivering your ads to the right people.

What is a Facebook pixel used for?

This code is used to collect data for tracking conversions from Facebook ads, optimizing ads to improve their performance, building targeted audiences for future ads, and remarketing to people who have already taken action on your website. More specifically, you can use Facebook pixel data for any of the following:

Conversion tracking

Learn more about your customers’ journeys and see what types of actions they take when visiting your website after clicking through on your Facebook ad. It also allows you to track what types of devices they use when visiting your site or see if they switch devices after clicking through. This information helps you fine-tune your advertising strategy and calculate your return on investment.

Retargeting 

Show dynamic and targeted ads to people after they’ve visited your site. This may include ads for products they viewed, put in their shopping cart, or added to their wishlist without completing a purchase.

Creating lookalike audiences 

Use the targeting data gathered by Facebook pixels to attract more potential customers based on the likes, interests, and demographics of people who have already interacted with your website.

Optimizing Facebook ads for specific actions 

Dial in ads based on Facebook tracking pixel data for specific conversion events on your website. Without this data, you’d only be able to optimise for link clicks, but pixel data enables you to optimise for conversion events more closely tied to your business goals, such as purchases and sign-ups.

Targeting Facebook ads based on previous spend 

Facebook tracks who buys from your site and how much they spend. This makes it possible for you to automatically show your ads to those most likely to make specific value-range purchases.

Leveraging additional Facebook advertising tools and metrics

Installing the Facebook pixel on your site is the only way to advertise to custom audiences of site visitors and initiate web conversion campaigns or dynamic ads. Cost per lead or cost per conversion are among the additional metrics you can track with the pixel.

What can you track with a Facebook pixel?

Another advantage is the Facebook pixel enables you to gather data relating to 17 predefined events plus custom events you set up yourself. The standard Facebook pixel events (actions taken by your website visitors) include:

• Add payment info: A customer adds payment information during checkout and saves it to their account.
• Add to cart: A customer adds an item to their shopping cart on your website.
• Add to wishlist: A site visitor saves an item on your site to their wishlist.
• Complete registration: A customer completes a form on your site in exchange for premium content, your email newsletter, or other similar offer.
• Contact: Communications or contacts such as a phone call, SMS, email, or chat between a customer and your business.
• Customise product: A customer uses a configuration tool or other application on your website to customise a product.
• Donate: A site visitor donates to your organization or cause.
• Find location: A site visitor to search for a location they intend to visit, such as after a product search.
• Initiate checkout: A customer starts the checkout process on your site.
• Leads: A lead completes a form on your website with the understanding that they will be contacted by your organization.
• Purchases: A customer takes actions that trigger an order or purchase confirmation, a transaction receipt, or being sent to a specific page like a “thank you” landing page.
• Scheduling: A contact sets up an appointment to receive services or visit one of your locations.
• Searches: A prospect initiates a search for a product or other information on your website or when using your mobile app.
• Start trial: A prospect accepts a free trial of your product or service.
• Submit application: A lead submits an application for a product, service, or program you offer such as a credit card, job, or educational program.
• Subscribe: A customer initiates a paid subscription for your product or service.
• View content: A contact visits a specific product or landing page to view the content. This event is triggered by a pixel code placed on that page, but visitors’ activities while on that page cannot be captured by the standard pixel code for page visits.

You can capture additional details about standard events by adding extra code to your pixel, called parameters, to customise standard events. These parameters include:

• The value of a conversion event
• Currency type
• Content type
• Shopping cart contents

These additional details offer deeper insights about each site visitor.

If none of Facebook’s predefined standard events meet your requirements, you can create your own custom events to track. You can then use these custom events to define custom audiences for ad optimization or select the same parameters for both custom and standard events. 

How do you create a Facebook pixel?

There are several steps involved in Facebook pixel setup. If you already have a website and have activated Facebook Ads Manager, here’s how you can add the Facebook pixel code:

1. Go to Meta Events Manager and click “+ Connect data sources.” 
2. Select “Web” and click “Connect.”
3. Enter your pixel’s name and click “Create.” You’ll get a new pixel ID, which you can view in Events Manager.
4. Enter your website URL and click “Check” to look for partner integration setup options.
5. If your website is built on a Facebook integration partner like Shopify or WooCommerce, it will show up on the screen. Click “Next” and follow the instructions at each step for Facebook pixel setup.
6. If you don’t see a partner integration, click “Next” and choose between “Get Guidance” and “Do It Yourself,” depending on how you want to connect your data with Meta.
7. If you select the first option, follow the onscreen instructions to complete the setup. If you choose the second one, select your setup option and click “Next.”
8. Regardless of the setup option you choose, you’ll have the choice to check for a partner integration or do it manually. Follow the respective onscreen instructions to install the Facebook pixel code.

Meta Pixel Helper: At a glance

Facebook pixels are an integral part of every successful social media advertising strategy. However, for beginners who are new to the concept, installing the code and setting up events can seem complex.

The good thing is that you can use the Meta Pixel Helper / Facebook Pixel Helper to troubleshoot pixel-related issues. All you need to do is install its Chrome plugin. Then, you can check the following:

• Whether your Facebook pixel is installed properly
• Events the pixel is tracking
• How you can improve the pixel’s performance

Limitations of Facebook pixel (and how to overcome them)

The Facebook pixel relies heavily on cookies to track the online activity of Facebook users. With the launch of iOS 14 in 2021, it has become increasingly difficult for third-party cookies to collect and store data from Apple devices. In recent years, Google has also started taking active steps to phase out third-party cookies.

Does that render your Meta pixel ineffective? Not quite.

You can still use the code to track user activity and behaviour on your website. All you have to do is combine it with the Conversions API, which allows advertisers to send event data from their servers to Meta. 

With Conversions API, you can access data about website visitors even if the pixel doesn’t retain it. If you’re already using one of Facebook’s integration partners, you can turn the Conversions API on in a few clicks as well (without any coding).

Optimise your campaigns with Facebook pixel

The Facebook pixel is a valuable tool to track how users interact with a Facebook ad and what they do after clicking on it. Setting up a pixel is fairly straightforward, particularly if your website is built on a platform like Shopify. 

If you’re already using Facebook ads to promote your business, it’s high time to create and install a pixel to track conversions on your website and optimise your campaigns. Set your goals, plan your strategy, create your pixel, launch your ads, measure your results, and adjust as needed.

And to power up your campaigns further, try a CRM like Act!, which integrates directly with Facebook. Get a free trial of Act! today to see first-hand how it can help with Facebook ads. 

The post What is a Facebook pixel and how do you create it? appeared first on Act!.

Did you know that in 2025, the number of monthly users on social media channels in the US will surpass traditional television viewership? The reach of social media is growing exponentially making it an ideal and prime way to engage your target audience, but to do so, you must have an active social media presence.

That said, managing multiple social media accounts and creating a social media strategy with consistent content can be a lot to handle for a small business owner. That’s where social media marketing and management tools come in.

The right tools will help you stay organised, save time, and focus on growing your business. 

In this article, we’ll discuss four essential social media marketing tools that will help you generate awareness, attract leads, and boost sales for your small business. But first, let’s discuss why social media marketing and curating active and engaging social accounts is so important.

3 key benefits of social media marketing for small businesses

Social media marketing offers numerous advantages for small businesses, but these three stand out as the most important.

• Brand awareness: Roughly 500 million people use Instagram Stories every day. And that’s just one platform. Think about the kind of brand awareness you could build by using multiple social networks. 
• Cost-effective marketing: Compared to other marketing channels, social media is still one of the most affordable ways to promote your business, especially if you stay consistent and build a loyal following.  
• Audience engagement: Unlike traditional media’s one-way messaging, social media helps you engage, build connections, and become part of your customers’ daily lives.

Best social media management and marketing tools for small businesses

If you’re doing everything manually, social media can quickly eat up your time and energy. Using the right tools is essential to help you manage and automate all aspects of your social media marketing plan.

In our opinion, here are the four best social media tools that we recommend to make the process easier and more effective.

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a complete social media management platform for social accounts on multiple platforms. Whether you’re running a SaaS company or an e-commerce store, it lets you handle everything from a central dashboard without switching between apps. 

With its powerful scheduling tools and AI-driven content creation, you can easily plan and publish posts automatically. 

Hootsuite’s social listening and analytics tools provide insights into how your audience engages with your content, while also helping you spot potential influencers to collaborate with on marketing campaigns.

Key features and benefits of Hootsuite

• Publish and schedule: Plan your content calendar in advance.
• Social media analytics: Find your best-performing content and optimise your social media marketing strategy.
• Social listening: Stay on top of what people are saying about your brand.
• AI content creation: Automatically generate social media posts.
• Best times to post: Get recommendations on when to post for maximum impact.
• Engagement tools: Respond to comments, messages, and mentions from a single inbox.

Pros and cons of Hootsuite

Pros

• Employee advocacy: Empower your team to share approved content on their social media profiles.
• Social advertising integration: You can manage organic posts and paid ads from the same dashboard.
• Team collaboration features: Perfect for working with multiple team members.

Cons:

• Learning curve for beginners: The platform can feel overwhelming due to its wide range of features.
• Expensive: Hootsuite’s premium plans start from $99/month for one user.

2. Canva

If you want to stand out on social media and keep your audience engaged, you must regularly share high-quality visual content. Canva helps you design professional visual content for Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and other social networks without hiring a graphic designer. 

Its simple drag-and-drop interface, customisable templates, and AI-powered features make it easy for anyone, even non-designers, to bring their ideas to life with stunning graphics tailored for social media.

Key features and benefits of Canva

• AI image and video creation: Use prompts to generate AI images and videos.
• Social media integration: Share your designs directly on Instagram, Facebook, and more.
• Collaboration tools: Work with team members in real time to co-create designs.
• Stock photos and icons: Access millions of stock images, icons, and fonts within the platform.

Pros and cons of Canva:

Pros:

• Affordable: Offers free and affordable premium plans with advanced features.
• Templates: Access a vast library of templates for social media posts, ads, and more.

Cons:

• Limited advanced features: Not ideal for those needing complex design tools like Adobe Photoshop.
• No direct scheduling: While it integrates with social platforms, Canva doesn’t have built-in scheduling like Buffer or Hootsuite.

3. Loomly

Loomly is an intuitive and powerful social media management tool designed specifically for all types of social media publishers including freelancers, agencies, small businesses and marketing teams. It helps you manage multiple social media accounts, design, preview and schedule posts, analyze performance, and engage with audiences and followers all from one dashboard. 

Key features and benefits of Loomly

• Post generation: Use templates and videos from its existing media library to create posts for numerous formats and share posts for preview and approval
• Post scheduling: Plan and schedule posts across platforms like Facebook, X, and LinkedIn.
• Content calendar: Get a visual overview of all your upcoming posts.
• Analytics and reporting: Track key metrics like engagement, reach, and audience growth.
• Audience engagement: Easily view, access and act on all comments and engagements
• Team collaboration: Assign tasks and collaborate with your team.

Pros and cons of Loomly:

Pros:

• Affordable pricing: Great value for businesses that need robust features without a hefty price tag. Scalable tiers so you only pay for what you need, when you need it.
• Bulk scheduling: Saves time by allowing you to schedule multiple posts at once.

Cons:

• No free plan: SocialPilot lacks a free plan, which may deter businesses with tight budgets.

4. Mention

Mention is a powerful social media monitoring tool that allows small businesses to track what’s being said about them across the web. It helps you stay on top of conversations, identify trends, and respond to customer feedback in real-time. That makes it an ideal solution for businesses that want to track customer sentiments and manage their online reputation.

Key features and benefits of Mention

• Real-time monitoring: Track brand mentions, keywords, and competitors across social media, blogs, and websites.
• Sentiment analysis: Understand how people feel about your brand.
• Competitive analysis: Track your competitors’ online reputation.
• Analytics reports: Get detailed insights into your brand’s web and social media presence.

Pros and cons of Mention

Pros:

• Comprehensive coverage: Tracks mentions across not only social media but also blogs and websites.
• Customisable alerts: Set up specific alerts tailored to your needs.
• Multi-lingual support Tracks conversations in multiple languages.

Cons:

• Limited integration options: Offers limited third-party integrations.
• Data limits: Depending on your plan, you may hit data caps for tracking mentions.

Build deeper connections with social media marketing platforms

The social media management tools we’ve covered will help you engage your audience and strengthen brand loyalty. 

But combining them with the CRM capabilities of Act! helps you turn positive interactions into tangible results, such as leads and new customers. This powerful combination helps you track user engagement and keep your sales and customer support teams informed. 

You’ll gain a deeper understanding of customer sentiments, allowing you to personalise your outreach and follow up more effectively. 

Why not try it out with your latest social media marketing software today?  Start your free trial now.

The post 4 Must-Have Social Media Marketing Tools for Your Small Business appeared first on Act!.

Did you know?

Act! offers highly rated and proven CRM & Marketing Automation solutions designed for small and mid-sized businesses of all industries. Millions of users worldwide have trusted Act! to grow their businesses, so you know you’re in good company and in good hands.

Try it free

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About this template

With key insights and best practices, this social media marketing guide will help you get started or optimise your existing social media marketing strategy.

In this guide, you will find:

• How to define your goals.
• How to choose the right platform for your business.
• Tips for improving utilisation of your social media platforms.
• The recommended sizes for creatives on social.

"The biggest way Act! makes my work easier on a day-to-day basis is it allows me to come into the office and have my day planned out for me. It tells me who to call, when to call them, and what to say."

Brent Sullivan, Loan Officer

Homeowner's Financial Group

The post Social Media Marketing Best Practices appeared first on Act!.

In an ideal world, your target customers would be upfront about why they engaged (or didn’t) with your latest marketing campaign.

But the reality? It’s starkly different.

You’ve got to decode their likes, dislikes, interests, and preferences and implement campaigns that resonate with them.

What if there were a way to eliminate this guesswork?

That’s where marketing analytics can be of help. Marketing analytics tools collect and analyse data from various sources to measure the performance of your marketing campaigns. And adding marketing automation to the mix can help you get things done on autopilot.

So how does it work? Let’s find out.

What is marketing analytics?

Conducting marketing analytics is the process of collecting, processing, and analysing data related to various marketing tasks. 

Typically, marketing analytics tools collect data relating to customer interactions from digital marketing channels like social media, email campaigns, and customer support tickets. They also use data from traditional sources, such as customer surveys, focus groups, interviews, and industry reports.

A marketing analytics workflow involves setting clear marketing goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) to help you achieve your business needs. Depending on your goals, you can track metrics like conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, and customer lifetime value.

With marketing analytics, you can pinpoint what’s working in a particular campaign (and what isn’t). Plus, you can identify seasonal patterns and trends in campaign performance. Based on these, you can make informed decisions and avoid related mistakes to maximise your marketing return on investment (ROI). This is particularly beneficial for business owners and SMBs with limited budgets.

Also, marketing analytics provide you with deeper insights into consumer preferences. You can create customer segmentation based on shared preferences and build personalised marketing strategies for each stage of the customer journey.

It’s an excellent way for today’s small businesses to gain an edge over competitors and build a meaningful and positive customer experience that fosters strong relationships with existing and potential customers by meeting their specific needs.

Modern marketing analytics tools even offer predictive functionalities that let you forecast future trends and devise an action plan to achieve the right outcomes. Tracking and measuring the right metrics is integral to deriving meaningful insights from marketing analytics. It’s also crucial to clean, format, and validate the data gathered from different channels.

The challenges of marketing analytics

Despite its benefits, many companies have been slow to adopt marketing analytics. A recent Gartner survey revealed that marketing analytics only influenced 53 percent of marketing decisions. 

One of the roadblocks to the adoption of marketing analytics workflows is the lack of quality data. Manually entering data into analytics tools is time-consuming and error-prone. 

Marketers at small and medium-sized businesses spend most of their time integrating inconsistent data from different sources and compiling reports to understand user behaviour instead of doing what they’re good at—creating campaigns that drive results.

Then, there’s the issue of cognitive biases among marketing decision-makers. In the same Gartner survey, a third of the respondents revealed that decision-makers cherry-pick data so the results support their preconceived notions.

What if there was a way to streamline the process of collecting and analysing data and having confidence in your decision-making? You’ll be relieved to hear that marketing automation tools help you do exactly that plus so much more.

Why you should automate marketing analytics

Automating marketing analytics involves the use of technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning to streamline repetitive tasks, such as:

• Collecting and processing data from multiple sources
• Visualising the collected data and generating reports
• Extracting actionable insights to optimise marketing efforts

Integrating marketing automation and analytics gives marketers more time to focus on improving campaign performance. With marketing automation software doing the groundwork, you can devote more time to creative and strategic tasks.

The best part?

Marketing automation tools are designed for scalability to handle large volumes of data. That means you can increase your analytics workflows without jeopardising efficiency and simplify campaign management.

Automated workflows also minimise human error and provide more reliable and accurate insights. Plus, marketing teams can track campaign data in real time and make necessary adjustments to optimise performance.

How to automate campaign performance tracking and analysis

Start with outlining clear goals and maintaining quality data. Next, integrate data from different sources into a centralised dashboard. A CRM (customer relationship management) platform, with built-in marketing automation capabilities and extensive third-party integrations, can come in handy here.

The best marketing automation tools can connect multiple sources of customer data, including:

• Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram
• E-commerce platforms like BigCommerce and Shopify
• Sales and marketing tools like Eventbrite and SurveyMonkey
• Customer service solutions like Freshdesk and Zendesk

With these CRM integrations, you get a complete view of new, existing, and potential customers, including their purchase patterns and service history. You can automatically move information between the CRM system and third-party apps to ensure that the data is up-to-date and error-free.

Also, with a user-friendly, fully integrated marketing automation and CRM platform, you can leverage numerous lead management strategies such as lead scoring, cross-channel marketing campaigns, and response-driven lead nurturing workflows. It also comes in handy for creating landing pages and web forms for lead generation and doing A/B testing to identify the best-performing versions.

Additionally, if you opt for an integrated CRM and marketing automation platform, it’ll provide real-time campaign performance metrics, such as open rates and bounces. Adding this data to a visualisation tool like Power BI or Tableau can help you generate reports and extract actionable insights.

Most marketing automation platforms offer built-in dashboards and customisable reports to help you monitor relevant metrics. From drag-and-drop builders to drip campaigns and sales funnel tracking, they come with a bunch of tools to help you scale your marketing campaigns. 

Besides CRM and marketing automation software, it’s also a good idea to use predictive analytics solutions. These tools use machine learning models to forecast future consumer behaviour and purchase patterns.

Supercharge your marketing analytics with Act!

Automated marketing analytics offers several benefits to businesses, including improved accuracy and efficiency. With a marketing automation platform like Act!, you can create a centralised repository of customer data from various sources and launch tailored marketing campaigns. 

Plus, you can track real-time campaign performance metrics and use Act!’s suite of third-party integrations to turn your data into meaningful, actionable insights.

Start your 14-day free trial to see our platform in action and then choose from our various pricing plans.

The post Automating Your Marketing Analytics: How to Do It Right appeared first on Act!.

Did you know that 59 percent of marketers believe artificial intelligence (AI) will revolutionise the marketing industry? 

Based on what we’ve seen since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, it’s hard to challenge this opinion. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Bard, Gemini, MidJourney, and many others have transformed how marketers think and approach their decision-making and work. 

Still, most experts agree that consumer AI technology is still in its early days. It will only get better from here, playing a vital role in digital and conventional marketing. 

In this article, we’ll give you a glimpse into the future of AI in marketing and evaluate some of the strongest trends shaping how brands engage with their audiences.

AI in marketing today: An overview

Marketers have been using AI-powered tools in marketing for years. However, the emergence of generative AI chatbots and content-generation tools has made AI technology more accessible than ever.

According to SimilarWeb, ChatGPT had over 550 million visitors in May 2024. Another study shows that users spend an average of 13 minutes and 34 seconds per visit on ChatGPT.

We’re talking about just one generative AI tool. Numerous AI chatbots and AI-driven tools are leveraging this technology for various forms of content production and changing the marketing landscape.

From image and text generation to personalisation and analytics, AI is empowering marketing teams to scale their efforts and find innovative ways to engage their audiences.

E-commerce companies are using AI-powered product images, brands like Coca-Cola are creating AI-powered ads, and we’re even seeing AI models earn thousands of dollars on Instagram and other social platforms.

However, AI technology isn’t the one-click magic many believe it to be. An extensive survey of over 1,000 B2B marketing professionals found that 54 percent of marketers who don’t leverage AI either lack training or understanding of this technology.

This can hamper their growth and ability to compete because to create engaging AI content that’s not only accurate and engaging but also drives conversions, marketers need to understand how it works.

How AI enhances marketing efforts: Examples & use cases

So what exactly is the role of generative AI in marketing? Let’s discuss a few real-world examples.

Idea generation for marketing campaigns

Marketers are always looking for creative ideas and angles to engage their audiences in different ways. AI drastically accelerates this process by helping you generate unlimited ideas within seconds.

A study conducted in late 2023 found that 51 percent of marketers use AI tools to brainstorm new topics for their marketing content. 

You can use AI to find unique blog post ideas or new angles for your website copy, generate ideas for article titles, or get suggestions for email subject lines.

Content creation

Marketers frequently use AI-powered tools to create blog posts, articles, social media posts, emails, case studies, and other content marketing assets.

Act! AI Writing Assistant is an excellent example of this technology. 

Act! users can now generate accurate and engaging content for their landing pages, emails, articles, and marketing assets with complete control. You can personalise your content, tailor it to your brand voice, and translate it into multiple languages for better audience targeting.

For example, if you need a webinar announcement or a script for an upcoming video training, you can use Act! AI Writing Assistant, which is powered by OpenAI, to generate copy with just a few prompts. 

This technology accelerates content creation and reduces production costs, allowing you to launch new SEO and marketing campaigns quickly.

Designing websites and landing pages

Generative AI technology allows marketers to create new websites and landing pages with just a few prompts. Using AI-powered site builders, you can easily generate designs and customise their content to fit your marketing needs.

Automating customer interactions

AI chatbots and support assistants have become a critical part of modern customer engagement strategies. These tools use AI and machine learning to understand user issues and respond with natural language in a conversational tone.

Studies show that 35 percent of consumers believe AI chatbots can resolve their issues most of the time. When done well, chatbots can reduce support costs, enhance customer experience, and provide marketers with priceless user insights to improve future marketing campaigns and conversion rates.

What’s next for AI in marketing: Trends shaping the future

AI systems have disrupted conventional and digital marketing. But the future of AI in marketing is even more exciting. Here are a few AI marketing trends to look out for in the coming years.

Advanced personalisation

Advanced AI technology will help marketers move toward hyper-personalisation in all aspects of marketing. This means delivering highly customised content, offers, and experiences to individual customer segments based on their demographics or unique preferences and behaviours.

To keep up, brands must invest in AI tools capable of deep data analysis and personalisation. Investing in an integrated CRM and marketing automation platform can help you ride these changes. 

A fully integrated CRM and marketing automation platform tracks user activity at different stages of the marketing funnel and gives you the insights to make data-driven decisions and personalise your marketing message, email copy, sales pitch, and customer interactions.

Realistic content generation

Future AI models will be capable of generating highly realistic and human-like content, including text, images, and videos.

Their quality is already quite impressive. With improvements in natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, the quality and engagement of marketing materials will continue to improve.

Marketers will increasingly use AI in advertising as well. From product image creation and ad copy to automated bidding and algorithm-based audience targeting, the use of AI in digital marketing will help brands reach their audiences more creatively.

However, ultimately, these advancements will make it harder to stand out from your competition. Everyone will be able to use these technologies to achieve a minimum level of content quality.

To navigate this challenge, you need to master AI prompt engineering and understand how you can add value to AI content to make it more credible and engaging for your audience.

Real-time customer journey mapping

In the not-so-distant future, AI will enable real-time mapping of customer journeys, allowing marketers to understand and respond to customer interactions instantly. This can lead to more agile and responsive marketing strategies.

Again, an integrated CRM system can prove vital in tracking customer journeys and giving you the insights you need to respond to changing market demands.

Deeper behavioural insights and predictive analysis

All digital marketing platforms track customer data in different ways. AI marketing tools will be able to better interpret customer behaviour and provide users with deeper and more actionable insights.

AI algorithms can also use this data for predictive analysis to forecast future market trends and understand customer behaviours, helping marketers make faster decisions and stay ahead of the competition.

To take advantage of this, you must enable integrated user tracking on your website, apps, social platforms, and other digital assets. Without an integrated tracking system, your data will have holes, making its recommendations less reliable.

Embrace the use of AI in marketing to grow your business

Generative AI is any marketer’s dream technology. By fully embracing the AI age and getting hands-on with modern marketing tools, you can accelerate content creation, schedule repetitive tasks, leverage predictive analytics, and build much more meaningful relationships with your audience.

Act! is the perfect partner on this journey, empowering you with a full-featured and seamlessly integrated CRM and marketing automation platform, an AI Writing Assistant, and customer journey tracking tools.

Try Act! for free and experience the power of AI marketing.

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If you want to take your content marketing strategy to the next level, you’ll need a plan.

A key part of any content marketing plan is a content calendar. This tool helps your business manage all its content marketing efforts.

Using a content calendar doesn’t have to be complicated. You just need it to contain the information necessary to put your strategy into action.

To help, we have produced a completely free content calendar template that you can use to organise your content marketing throughout the year. Download it here.

In this article, we’ll look at what a content calendar is, as well as how you can use our free template.

First Up, What Is a Content Calendar?

A content calendar (or editorial calendar) is the place where you plan and organise your business’s content marketing strategy.

It contains all the basic details about each piece of content you will create, including how the content fits into your content marketing plan, and practical information like deadlines and who will write, edit, and publish the content.

This helps your content marketing effort in several ways:

• Your content calendar helps you implement your content strategy. By having all the content you will produce clearly laid out, you can see where any gaps in publication may occur and ensure all your content is working towards your business goals.
• A content calendar also helps keep everyone organised. You can include deadlines, so you know when tasks need to be done by and what stage they are currently at. It can be a good idea to share your content calendar with your team so everyone knows exactly what they have to do and when.
• Planning your content in advance and making a record of what needs to be done can also help you stay more consistent in your content marketing efforts. You are far less likely to be late with a piece of content, or worse—completely give up—if you have everything laid out and planned weeks or months in advance.

How to Use Your Free Content Calendar Template

Before creating your content calendar, you should create your content marketing plan. We have an article about how you can do that here.

When you create a content marketing plan, you’ll define why you want to produce content as well as what your goals are. This will help when it comes to deciding what type of content you want to produce.

Once you have your plan, you should begin to populate your content calendar with the content you will create. This can be everything from social media and blog posts to videos, case studies, and more.

Our content calendar contains the following sections. Here is what you should include in each section:

• Date: The calendar is split into weeks with a separate entry for each day. This is the due date for the content. We have also included a section for the content publication date. There should be enough time between these two days for you to make any edits or changes and ensure the content is publishable. You don’t need to release content every day. Producing one great piece of content every week is better than publishing below par content every day.
• Title: Here you can fill in the title or working title you’ll use for your content.
• Content-Type: This is the form of the content. Types of content you can create include blog posts, white papers, and videos.
• Status: The status section helps you keep an eye on where in the production stage you are at; from planning all the way through to publishing. Be sure to keep this section up to date.
• Media entity: Write down where you will publish your content.
• Writer, author, and owner: Who is in charge of each section of the content creation process? Share your content calendar with your team if possible so they can all see what they need to do.
• Persona: Each piece of content should be created with a specific customer persona in mind. You can read more about creating customer personas in our content marketing strategy article.
• Funnel stage: Which stage of your customer acquisition funnel is the content designed to help with? This helps ensure everyone knows the goal of the specific piece of content. 

Download it here and begin planning your content marketing strategy now.

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The stats around marketing automation make a compelling case for its use. Studies show that effective automation can improve productivity and increase marketing ROI. Yet, there are still plenty of businesses that aren’t taking advantage of this technology because they are unsure whether they are ready to automate their marketing processes. Are you ready for marketing automation?

While the benefits of marketing automation are clear (read this if they’re not), marketers and business owners must still take steps to ensure their company is ready for marketing automation before beginning to use it.

In this article, we’ll look at some of the factors you should consider before beginning your marketing automation strategy. We’ve also produced a handy worksheet you can use to check if your business is ready for marketing automation (as well as the steps to take if you’re not). You can download it here.

Is your sales process suitable?

Take a look at your sales processes and see if they will benefit from marketing automation. Do you use an inbound strategy? Do your customers spend a long time in the sales funnel gathering information before making a buying decision? If so, your customers likely have multiple interactions with your business before making a purchase.

Marketing automation can seriously improve this type of sales process because it:

• Reduces the amount of time spent sending emails to clients at earlier stages of the sales funnel
• Automates communications as clients take steps and move further down the funnel, e.g. clicking on a link in your email multiple times or visiting a particular product page

Marketing automation can also be used in shorter sales funnels as well, in outbound marketing. For example, B2C eCommerce stores or other businesses that typically have a short sales cycle, can send customers a reminder email when they add a product to their basket but fail to make a purchase.

Either way, if you’re considering marketing automation, be sure your sales process is can be automated.

If you generally use outbound cold-calling or only sell to a small number of high-value customers, you may need to make changes to your sales process to experience the benefits of marketing automation. 

Do you have access to quality marketing and sales content?

Businesses should ensure they have the materials required to use marketing automation effectively. This can include case studies, blog posts, and whitepapers. You will provide this collateral to customers as they move through the buyer funnel. These resources will educate them about the value of your product or services.

Having a quality selection of materials at hand can drive meaningful interactions between customers and your business. Ultimately, this means that when the time comes for marketing to pass the lead to sales, the leads will be better qualified and more valuable.

Of course, all is not lost if your business doesn’t have this kind of material. It just means you’ll have to spend a bit of time creating useful content. Even if you don’t end up using an automated marketing solution, you can still use this material in your sales process.

In summary:

Companies have to take several steps to implement an effective automated marketing strategy. This can be time-consuming at first as you build these processes. The good news is that once your business has set up the automated processes, you’ll have a lot less to do. Instead of manually performing each marketing interaction, you’ll be able to focus on analyzing how customers connect with your business and optimizing your sales process accordingly.

However, if you are currently pressed for time and resources, it may be better to wait for a more suitable time to introduce a marketing automation strategy.

Marketing automation is a vital tool for many businesses and marketing teams. It can help small companies do more with fewer resources, ultimately leading to more sales. If you think you’re ready for marketing automation, download our guide to marketing automation for more information about how it can help.

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What digital marketing channel has an ROI of 3500%, is entirely under your control, and can be leveraged whenever you want to drive sales?

Email marketing, of course.

Unlike SEO or social media, your email marketing success doesn’t rely on automated algorithms or ever-changing content policies. It is among the most affordable digital marketing channels because once you convert a website visitor into an email subscriber, you have free, unlimited (mostly) access to your recipient’s inbox and the license to build a long-term relationship.

So, it’s not surprising, then, that 78 percent of marketers chose email as their most effective marketing channel in a recent survey.

But how do you measure the effectiveness of your email marketing and track its business impact? In this article, we’ll discuss email marketing key performance indicators (KPIs) and how tracking them can help you measure your email ROI.

Define your email marketing campaign goals

You can’t measure success unless you clearly know what you want to achieve. This is why the first step in measuring email marketing effectiveness is setting the right goals.

Here are a few possible goals for an email campaign.

Traffic generation

You can use an email campaign to drive traffic to a new blog post, promote an event, or create awareness. Businesses with large and engaged email lists rarely worry about website traffic generation because they know it’s just an email away.

Lead generation

If you’re running a webinar or launching a new offer, emailing your subscribers about it is one of the best ways to generate leads and quickly fill your pipeline.

User engagement

To grow a healthy email list, you must regularly engage with your target audience through value-packed emails that share free knowledge and help your subscribers solve problems. Sharing free email content establishes your authority, strengthens your relationship with your subscribers, and turns them into loyal followers, ultimately translating into sales and referrals.

Sales

Have a new product launch or annual Black Friday Sale? Nothing drives sales faster than a targeted email to an engaged list.

Feedback

Are you looking for audience insights or curious about how users feel about your brand? Send them an email survey to gather more feedback than you can handle.

Email marketing KPIs: 9 critical performance metrics to track

Depending on your goals, you can track various email marketing performance metrics to measure success. Here are the most commonly used email marketing metrics.

• Delivery rate: This is the percentage of emails successfully delivered to your subscribers. For example, if you send a campaign to 100 subscribers and it reaches 80 of them, the deliverability would be 80 percent.
• Bounce rate: The opposite of delivery rate, this measures the percentage of emails that couldn’t be delivered. You’ll want to ensure your distribution list is current if you experience a high bounce rate.
• Email open rate: This represents the percentage of subscribers who opened your emails in a specific campaign.
• Click-through rate (CTR): If your email has call-to-action links, CTR shows the percentage of subscribers who clicked it.
• Conversion rate: This metric represents the percentage of subscribers who took your desired action.
• Unsubscribe rate: This rate shows the percentage of subscribers who opt out of your email list after a campaign.
• Revenue per email: If you’re running a sales campaign, revenue per email shows the average sales you drive for every email recipient.
• List growth rate: This shows the rate at which your list grows in a specific period.
• Forward rate: The percentage of subscribers who forward your email to their contacts.
• Return on investment (ROI): Email ROI differs from revenue per email. It considers all the costs of an email campaign and measures its profitability and business results.

Every metric in this list gives valuable insights into your email campaign performance. But to drive business insights, you must view different KPIs together. For example, a high email open rate doesn’t tell you anything about your campaign’s impact unless you align it with CTR and conversion rates.

How to measure your email marketing success KPIs

Knowing the most critical email marketing KPIs isn’t enough unless you actively track and measure them to extract actionable business insights. Here’s how you can truly measure the success of your email campaigns.

Use an integrated CRM system

Conventional email marketing software allows you to manage subscribers, send email campaigns, and track key performance metrics. However, it rarely helps you measure the true impact of email marketing on your business performance.

This is where an integrated CRM and marketing automation system like Act! can be a game changer.

An all-in-one CRM and marketing automation platform tracks your customers’ engagement and records their interactions with your business, allowing you to see the full impact of your email campaigns. It also gives you tools like email automation and landing pages to run integrated marketing campaigns so no customer data falls through the cracks.

Suppose a subscriber visits your landing page through an email campaign but doesn’t immediately take action. If they have a change of heart later and visit your site directly to buy your offer, a conventional email marketing tool won’t record this as a conversion.

But if your CRM tracks every user engagement, it will tie the conversion to the relevant subscriber, allowing you to measure the real impact of your campaigns.

Choose your success KPIs carefully

As a marketer, you should focus on the most important metrics that align with your campaign goals.

For example, if your campaign aims to upsell existing customers to a higher plan, the most relevant email KPIs to track are open rate, CTR, conversion, and ROI. However, if the goal is to get user feedback, the only relevant email metric is response rate.   

Perform A/B tests to enhance performance

Measuring campaign performance without context often leads to inaccurate results. This is why A/B testing is critical to the success of your email marketing strategy.

For example, if your campaign open rates are low, you might believe your subscribers aren’t interested in your email. But you’ll only know the truth when you test multiple subject lines to see if they all return low open rates. You’ll often find a better-performing subject line by testing different variations. 

Segment your email list for better insights

Tailoring your email campaigns to different segments of your subscribers helps you track more accurate email performance metrics.

For example, your campaign results can be skewed if you sell multiple products on your site and all your customers are on the same list. Instead, you’ll get more accurate insights if you segment your list based on products and send tailored emails to users according to their interests and past purchases.

Most email marketing tools allow you to segment your list at the opt-in stage using tags. However, you can create segments later as well.

Tracking email performance is the first step

Tracking the performance of your emails and focusing on the key metrics gives you the insights you need to improve your campaigns and reach your goals faster. This becomes much simpler when you have an integrated email marketing automation, lead generation, and CRM system like Act! to help you.

Why not try it out on a few email campaigns? Sign up now, and start your 14-day free trial.

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Do you know the biggest difference between successful and failed marketing campaigns?

Data-driven decision-making.

Modern-day marketing isn’t about following your gut feeling or pursuing ideas from the top of your mind. If you want your marketing campaigns to hit the mark every time, you must rely on accurate, reliable, and comprehensive data.

But what exactly is data-driven marketing, and how does it work? In this article, we’ll explain data-driven marketing strategies with examples, explain why they’re important to small and mid-sized businesses, and share tips to help you get started.

What is data-driven marketing?

Data-driven marketing is the practice of using solid, reliable, and in-depth customer data instead of personal opinion or gut feeling to devise a marketing strategy.

Data-driven marketers use customer relationship management (CRM) software and various user-tracking platforms to gather real-time data from multiple customer touchpoints, including websites, landing pages, mobile apps, chatbots, and email marketing campaigns. This helps them understand how users engage with their brand, what content or products interest them most, and what motivates them to take action.

Why is this important? When you understand user behaviour, you can create tailored marketing campaigns that speak directly to their pain points and drive higher conversion rates. Research shows that personalised digital marketing campaigns backed by reliable data deliver a
five to eight times higher ROI than traditional marketing and generic advertisements.

Data-driven marketing examples

Curious? Let’s look at a few real-world examples of how businesses use data-driven marketing:

• Email personalisation: Through accurate data collection, you can create personalised email marketing campaigns that respond to customer behaviour. For example, if a user has previously purchased a product, you can automatically send them updates on new variants and models.
• Product recommendations: Instead of showing users generic products on your website, data-driven marketing allows you to use their past behaviour data to display the products they’re most likely to buy.
• Dynamic content: Using data insights and analytics, you can show website visitors content that’s closer to their interests instead of bombarding them with irrelevant posts. This enhances your content marketing efficiency and improves lead generation.

4 benefits of data-driven marketing for SMBs

Whatever form it takes, data-driven marketing offers numerous benefits for SMBs. Here are just a few.

1. Optimise marketing costs

When you have the correct data, you know exactly whom to target with your marketing campaigns, where to approach them, and how to design a personalised marketing message that engages your audience.

This allows you to optimise your marketing costs by focusing on your most profitable channels and diverting resources from avenues that aren’t driving results.

2. Understand real customer needs

The most critical business benefit of data-driven marketing is that it allows you to understand your target audience‘s real motivations, needs, wants, fears, and aspirations. The more data you collect across the customer journey, the easier it becomes to predict audience behaviour and design solutions they’ll willingly buy.

This can transform your business and allow you to focus all your marketing efforts on resolving your customer’s actual pain points and becoming their favourite brand by making informed decisions.

3. Craft compelling stories

Marketing is all about storytelling. With in-depth data, you know what stories appeal to your audience and inspire them to take action. As a result, you can craft a consistent brand story that drives results all the time.

4. Boost conversions

When you understand your audience’s needs, personalise your campaigns, and craft stories around their pain points, conversions are inevitable. The more data sources you have, the easier it becomes to target your audience and convince them to take your offer.

3 data-driven marketing mistakes to avoid

Despite its many benefits, success isn’t a given with data-driven marketing. If you want data-driven strategies to drive results for your business, avoid these mistakes.

Focusing on vanity metrics

Vanity metrics inflate your ego and make you feel good about your brand. Metrics like the number of pageviews on your site or likes or shares on your social media posts are great for brand awareness but shouldn’t divert your focus from data that drive business results.

For example, what’s the conversion rate from pageviews to sales? Or the number of downloads resulting from a Facebook ad campaign? When tracking data points, make sure you focus on the ones that actually matter to your business.

Missing context

Marketing data without context can be misleading. You must look beyond numbers and determine their meaning for accurate decision-making. For example, an unusually high number of pageviews on a blog post doesn’t always mean you should cover that topic more frequently. Sometimes, an article can go viral when an influential social media account shares it.

Similarly, an email with a low open rate doesn’t mean its subject or content wasn’t optimised. Maybe it wasn’t the right time to email your customers.

Before relying on numbers for your marketing strategy, be sure you understand what they mean.

Not responding to data trends

Sometimes, data do not validate your beliefs or personal preferences. This is when you must be flexible and willing to let the data guide you toward a course correction. When numbers indicate that your direction is off the mark, respond by reevaluating your strategy instead of remaining rigid.

4 tips to grow your SMB with data-driven marketing

By now, we hope you’re convinced of the importance of data-driven marketing and ready to dive in. Here’s how you can use data-driven marketing to grow your business

1. Define your data-driven marketing goals

What exactly do you want to achieve from your data-driven marketing campaigns? Are you looking to increase your email open rates, boost your landing page click-through rate, or find which Facebook ad copy to use? Clear goals allow you to set the right benchmarks to evaluate your campaign’s success.

2. Use an integrated CRM and automation tool

To collect data across your marketing funnel, you must use analytic tools like a CRM that monitors your existing customers and helps you track your landing page traffic and leads via data analysis. Act! CRM allows you to set up your demographic data, automate your marketing funnel, and closely monitor customer behaviour. Your marketing team can use it to create landing pages, generate leads, and get a complete customer engagement history across your digital assets.

3. Create audience segments

Segmenting your audience according to their demographics, behaviour, needs, or metrics helps you tailor your marketing strategy and craft the right messages. The deeper you dive into your data, the more trends you’ll see. For example, you can segment all users with specific recurring issues with your product or customers who purchase a specific product bundle every time. As you identify more audience segments, you can zoom into their specific needs to create personalised marketing campaigns and customer experiences.

4. A/B test your strategy

Data shows you direction, but testing tells you what’s working. Before making any marketing decisions based on a dataset, test and validate your findings.

For example, if the data tells you that people are bouncing off your landing page, test different variables to find the reason. They might be bouncing because your opt-in form is too long or it’s placed below the fold. Conversely, they might be distracted by the visuals or unclear headlines on your landing pages.

You can only find the real reason by changing these variables and A/B testing them one by one.

Data-driven marketing is the need of the hour

Your customers are online and use different platforms to find your products and engage with your brand. By tracking their behaviour and collecting data, you can understand their real needs and craft more engaging marketing strategies that drive conversions.

With Act!, you can do it all in just a few clicks. Start collecting and leveraging data insights now with a 14-day free trial. No credit card or download is required.

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