Blog case studies

Blog case studies show the opportunity available to someone with a unique perspective on an area that is relevant to others. Successful blog are consistently supported with content that builds an audience and possibly monetary value.

People who make blogs into a business often start from the humblest of beginnings. It is their unique perspective on a particular topic, its relevance to others and the consistency of keeping the content fresh that makes them stand out.

They may make money from similar sources like affiliate marketing, sponsored content, ads, courses and event. But it is the differentiated way they discuss their area that turns their blog into a viable business.

Here are 12 blog case studies of small beginnings to super success.

ARTOFMANLINESS: Brett McKay founded the Art of Manliness in 2008 and has grown it into the largest independent men’s interest magazine on the web. It is a one-stop resource for actionable advice that covers every aspect of a man’s life: character, career, relationships, fitness, style, skills, and much more. Through weekly podcasts and articles, AoM tackles subjects from the philosophical and serious to the practical and fun. AoM differentiates itself from other men’s lifestyle media outlets in providing content that is intelligent, thoughtful, thorough, eminently useful, and clickbait-free. Estimated annual revenue is now $4,300,000.

COINDESK: Is the most successful cryptocurrency blog in the world, getting over 10 million visitors per month. It was started in 2013 by Shakil Kha, and then acquired by Digital Currency Group in 2016 for an amount rumored to be around $500,000. Today, they’re the go-to source for all news and updates in the blockchain world. They make money through advertising, publishing paid reports, and selling tickets to their conferences.

COPYBLOGGER: Started by Brian Clark with no more than $1,000 in seed cash, Brian worked incredibly hard to build an audience and help people. He engaged his audience and figured out exactly what they were looking for. And then he gave it to them. Brian Clark didn’t even have an idea for a product to sell. This approach led Clark and his growing team to launch Copyblogger’s Authority educational platform, its certified content marketer marketplace, and the StudioPress website builder for WordPress. Brian Clark has built CopyBlogger through partnership. Its parent company, Rainmaker Digital, serves more than 200,000 unique customers across its three brands and earns in excess of $12 million in annual revenue.

CREATEANDGO: Founded by Alex and Lauren (a former personal trainer and CPA), after first creating a health and wellness blog, they turned their attention to teaching others how to start a blog and make money at it in this one of our blog case studies. Last year, they earned over $1.66 million with a little less than $600,000 in expenses putting their blogs at over the million dollar mark in revenues. Books and courses account for the majority of revenue, followed by affiliate marketing, mostly for web hosting, email marketing and landing page building companies.

HUFFPOST: Started as “The Huffington Post” by blogger-cum-celebrity Arianna Huffington. It’s initial focus was on American politics with a decidedly liberal stance. It expanded to include a wide variety of other topics and localized editions. They’ve achieved this through pulling in content from a pool of individual bloggers and content creators. HuffPost makes it money from sponsored advertising revenue through banners and other digital ads across its variety of channels. It is by far the most successful blog of its kind, likely valued today at well over $1 billion, a great investment for AOL.” It is estimated Huffpost earns $1,40,00000 per month.

LIFEHACKER: Launched by Gawker Media and is currently owned by Univision Communications, the staff updates the site about 18 times each weekday, with reduced updates on weekends. The site bills itself simply as the site for “Tips, tricks, and downloads for getting things done.” Simple and straightforward, yet highly intriguing. This is one of our blog case studies because who doesn’t need help getting things done?). Daily page views are 2.2 million and monthly revenues are $198,975.

MAKINGSENSEOFCENTS: Started by Michelle Garter as a blog to improve her finances and keep track of her progress to teach others, Michelle managed to pay pay off her $38,000 student loan in 7 months following her own advice. She writes in-depth articles about earning extra income with side hustle and controlling emotional spending. She has developed courses and products to help others. She also monetizes her blog through affiliate marketing and ads. Michelle went from being in debt to earning revenues of $120,000+/month through her blog

MASHABLE: Started by Pete Cashmore in his Scotland home and quickly grew to be the go-to source for social media and tech news. Since then, the outlet’s focus has expanded a bit. But it emphasizes social media news and updates while growing its audiences significantly, thanks in part to pushing content out on a variety of platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Mashable is monetized by offering a variety of advertising formats. Because it has 45M unique monthly readers, certain authors may pay Mashable to be featured on their site. It is estimated Mashable makes $2,000,000 per month.

NERDFITNESS: Cut from his high school basketball team in Sandwich, Mass, Steve Kamb hit the gym. To his surprise, he enjoyed working out. He wanted to create a home for people, like himself, who are kind of nerdy and are interested in fitness but are too self-conscious to go to the gym. Most of the firm’s revenue comes through online courses it sells through its Nerd Fitness Academy. The company also runs Camp Nerd Fitness, where several hundred people gather each fall for a fitness retreat held on a long weekend.  His monthly newsletter has 273,000 subscribers and annual revenue is in the seven figures.

NERDWALLET: Is a personal finance blog that helps people with personal financial decisions. They review everything from credit cards, mortgages, insurance, and all things finance. The affiliate commissions for financial products like these can get into the hundreds of dollars per referral. But what they’ve really mastered is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) understanding search intent. They create the best content and user experience depending on the keyword. These reason explain why they’re worth over $500,000,000.

SHOWMETHEYUMMY: When Jennifer started food blogging, her husband, Trevor, a professional photography, worked a full time. Later, they reversed role and now have a food blog that benefits from the skills of both. Starting with revenue of $28/month, four years later, revenue is at $46,000+/month. The blog makes money from affiliate marketing, sponsored content, ads and a video product that teaches how to set-up, shoot and edit a face-paced food video called Show Me the Yummy Digital Food Video Workshop.

TUTSPLUS: Founded in 2006 by Collis Ta’eed, Cyan Claire, and Jun Rundelivering, it’s been delivering outstanding tutorials and content to designers and developers from across the world for quite some time now. Today, in this one of our blog case studies, they offer a hub of useful content and a tremendous marketplace where 2,000,000 active buyers are searching for site templates and useful paid tutorials that they offer as part of their platform. They earn their income primarily through membership and commissions from sales of digital goods on their platform. TUTS+ revenue is currently estimated at $175,000/month.

Do these blog case studies help you see how blogs can be big business? And how, from small beginning, the potential for super success with the right topic, consistency and perseverance is there?

Best digital marketing case studies are meant to not only inform us on significant accomplishments for this year but to inspire us in the year to come.

A digital marketing campaign is an online marketing effort by a company to drive engagement, conversions, traffic and revenue. 

While the best digital marketing case studies demonstrate integration, depending on the unique aspects of the business, certain channels can stand out.

Here are the 20 best digital marketing case studies of 2018 to inspire in 2019 across the areas of content marketing, ecommerce, mobile, social media, UX experience and video.

CONTENT MARKETING

• LEVONO: Developed a digital content hub called “Tech Revolution” to deliver technical news and technology information to IT decision makers for best digital marketing case studies of the year in content marketing. They were able to successfully engage with their target audience through this content marketing hub. The leads generated via Tech Revolution, were routed to their website, based on which sales executives were able to readily connect with consumers. The digital content hub had more than 250 articles with 34 million impressions, 308 link clicks, and was visited by 1,70,000 new web users, In terms of financials, $300 million in sales was attributable to this initiative alone.
• HUBSPOT: Coined the phrase “inbound marketing.” The main reason HubSpot has grown so fast is because of their content marketing strategy. Their blogs are central to their content strategy: one focused on marketing, the other on sales. The goal of these blogs is to help HubSpot acquire traffic to their funnel. Content marketing has been one of HubSpot’s main growth drivers. It helped the company go from being funded in 2006 to a $75 million run rate public company worth over a billion dollars.
• STR SOFTWARE: Attracted large businesses with big budgets and long, complex sales cycles. So instead of investing thousands of dollars to acquire each customer, STR Software decided to to set themselves apart by developing a content marketing strategy. STR Software promoted their “University” extensively throughout their site, including on their homepage, sidebar, and other articles. They also used email marketing to promote it to their audience. They saw 54% increase in website traffic, 67% increase in pageviews and 10% conversion rate on forms, up from 1-2 percent on other forms.

ECOMMERCE

• ENVELOPE.COM: Wanted to see if they could “rekindle the flame” and land some sales from hot leads using target followups in best digital marketing case studies for ecommerce. These are visitors who created an account and put an item in their shopping cart. So they tested out email sends at two alternate time lapses post cart abandonment; the first group sent the following morning at 11 a.m. and the second group 48 hours post cart abandonment. The emails sent after 48 hours delivered: 1) An open rate of 38.01%, 2) click-through rate of 24.71% and 3) a conversion rate of 40.00%
• RAW GENERATION: A company that makes drinking raw, unpasteurized juice from fresh fruits and vegetables more convenient. For their business, deal sites like Groupon, Gilt and Rue La La proved to be a major channel. After initially promoting on social media and getting no traction, Jessica, the founder was introduced to Lifebooker, a deal site. After promoting on Lifebooker, they hit a homerun. Once they discovered a marketing channel that working, they didn’t go seeking new marketing channels. Doubling down on the channel that’s working took ecommerce sales from $8K to $96K per month.
• BEARDBRAND: An Ecommerce store that sells beard oil and beard care products and that prides themselves in leading the movement for all the “urban beardsmen” of the world, chose not to put ads or not to put products on sale because they wanted their brand to be as consistent as possible in providing premium customer experience. Then focused on offering premium customer experience by using high-quality oils for beard care, high-end packaging, one-business-day shipping and offering no discounts on products. Within a year, they created an ecommerce business that went from $0 to $120K per month.

MOBILE

• CAROLINA PANTHERS: Wanted to elevate their ecommerce experience for their football apparel best digital marketing case studies for mobile. They enlisted the help of their official retail provider Delaware North Sportservice. One particular focus of the Panthers was to improve the mobile shopping experience. They not only looked at the desktop experience, but focused equally on the tablet and mobile shopping experience to be sure that customers would be able to navigate the site, find items, and checkout with ease –– no matter where they were shopping. Since the site has gone live, the Panthers mobile conversion rate, has increased 83%, with overall conversion rate growing by 37%.
• DUNKIN DONUTS: Launched a new text messaging promotion towards young adults in the Boston area. Via a local radio DJ, Dunkin’ Donuts advertised the text message promotion on-air and ran mobile internet ads encouraging people to opt-in to text message promotions. The result was 7,500 consumers opting in. 17% of participants forwarded or showed the text message promotion to their friends. 35% of the participants considered themselves more likely to buy lattes and coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts. 21% increase in store traffic occurred due to the mobile promotion. 
• ARGOS: The British retail major wanted to deliver a multi-channel experience comprising 14 combinations of order and fulfillment. The British retail major wanted to deliver a multi-channel experience comprising 14 combinations of order and fulfillment. Its multi-channel sales comprised over 50% of the total sales. 

SOCIAL MEDIA

• CHEVROLET AND BUICK DEALERSHIP: Castle Chevrolet & Castle Buick GMC turned to Facebook Advertising, targeting the campaign to Facebook users who were located within a few miles of their showrooms as well as those that lived near Castle’s top competitors. The ads featured a map that showed exactly how close Castle’s dealerships were to the audience. The three-month campaign generated 2,212 unique visits to the dealership website at a cost of $0.98 per click. 23 vehicle sales were directly attributed to the campaign, providing a 23x return of advertising spend.
• DISNEY: Came up with a wonderfully simple idea. For every photo that featured Mickey Mouse ears and the hashtag #ShareYourEars uploaded to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, Disney would donate $5 to Make A Wish Foundation. The campaign for best digital marketing case studies of the year was a huge success and Disney ended up donating $2 million.
• SHUTTERFLY: A company who flagship products are photo books, came up with a promotion to offer a free personalised ceramic mug. And the audience they chose to target in best digital marketing case studies for social media? Mothers with kids at home. Using Facebook’s Offer Claims feature, Shutterfly reached out to their target audience and distribute a unique, single-use offer code to each person who clicked its ad. The three-day campaign resulted in over 16,000 offers reclaimed. But crucially there were 8,000 additional purchases generated, resulting in an 11-fold return on ad spend.
• STATE BYCYCLE CO.: Came up with a number of ways to reach out to cycling lovers. One of the most popular is their weekly photo challenge, where State Bicycle Co. reward the follower who submits the best snap on a given theme (e.g. the winner of the “most beat-up bike” theme landed themselves a brand new ride). State Bicycle Co. also offer unique discount codes on ‘Facebook Fridays’ and encourage followers to like posts to reveal sneak previews of new products. Since 2013 State Bicycle Co. has grown its followers from 4,500 to 480,000. Today, 12 per cent of State Bicycle Co.’s website traffic comes from Facebook, at a fifth of the cost per click of other platforms. Best of all? State Bicycle Co. attribute $500,000 in annual sales to coupon codes and traffic from Facebook.

WEBSITE DESIGN & UX EXPERIENCE

• CONCORDIA PLAN SERVICES: An insurance provider, had a major problem for best digital marketing case studies in UX experience. Its three disjointed websites made it nearly impossible for users to find information and forms. As a result, customers resorted to calling support with basic requests, tying up support lines, causing customer dissatisfaction and increased support costs. They consolidated three websites and over 800 disjointed pages into a single 60-page user-centric website. The new website makes it easy for users to find information, resulting in a significant reduction of support calls and resulted in an improvement in 92% customer satisfaction.
• HEARTLAND SENIOR FINANCE: (HSF): Australia’s largest leading provider of reverse mortgages, enables seniors to release equity in their property to help them live better in retirement. They developed content around solving problem to use keywords their customers used in organic search. They created a drop-down widget on the homepage which led to optimized landing pages, each focusing on one of the reasons for taking out a reverse mortgage. They did systems consolidations to ensure they converted as many leads as possible. In just a few months, the saw: 1) 29.5% increase in page views, 2) 25.38% increase in new visitors, 3) 81.2% increase in returning visitors, 4) 71.95% increase in guide downloads (leads)  and 5) 19.94% increase in conversion rate. 
• STANLEY: Consolidated two separate brand web properties into one site. The process needed to mitigate traffic disruption, improve traffic, and increase organic search results. So they focused on increase search rank of top performing keywords as the key measurement of web design success. The results? Almost 40% of keywords Stanley ranked for were on the first page of organic results, and the company generated a 100% lift in revenue.

VIDEO:

• CHILI’S: Decided to run a digital campaign to raise awareness of its 3 for $10 deal. The plan was to capture people’s attention using a made-for-digital 15-second creative spot that highlighted one of the meals from the promotion. Form ads — a new TrueView for action format optimized for lead generation — create a sign-up form that enables viewers to submit their name and email right below a video ad. It’s a quick and easy process that doesn’t interrupt the viewing experience. The campaign ended up generating over 7,800 form leads, a valuable addition for a campaign focused on brand consideration.
• OVERSTOCK: Personalized each of the 15-second pieces of creative on YouTube. While the first half was one of several funny plays on a person’s name, the second half was tailored to a specific set of products, like furniture, dining, or bedding. Overstock regularly used search ads. If someone is browsing online for, say, a table, the company can serve up a relevant ad featuring tables. Using a new YouTube tool, Overstock was able to take this understanding of what customers were actively looking to buy and apply it to video. Overstock used TrueView for action, a direct-response format, placing a call to action underneath the ad that told people to “Shop Now” or “Save Big.” When viewers clicked, they were taken directly to Overstock’s website. The direct-response video campaign an 80% increase in the conversion rate compared to other campaigns.
• NAVY: Shot their first made-for-digital creative and personalized it for those audiences for best digital marketing case studies of the year. The creative was built into over 60 different 15-second and six-second video ads, all tied together with the tagline “Forged by the Sea.” Finally, they served the ads in a specific order, making sure each viewer saw more than one. People who saw the ads two or more times were 16% more likely to consider joining the U.S. Navy, and users who saw the ads at least twice were 19% more likely to search for U.S. Navy keywords on YouTube within three days.
• PEEL: Sells thin phone cases, with the major selling point being they’re both functional and stylish. They used Facebook video ads to help tell the story of what separates their products from everyone else. When one of your brand’s major selling points is aesthetics, little details conveyed in video proved critical to messaging. The campaign proved successful resulting in a 16x increase in revenue and 3x higher ROI in best digital marketing case studies for video.

Do these best digital marketing case studies in 2018 provides inspiration for 2019? Does your business need direction in digital next year?

Artificial intelligence case studies demonstrate the many ways companies are using AI to increase sales, productivity, speed, efficiency, segmentation, targeting, compliance, conversions, create new products and, of course, generate significant business growth.

Artificial intelligence is the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.

These artificial intelligence case studies show AI’s breadth, innovation and business return.

Here are 9 artificial intelligence case studies that show companies the money.

1. ALIBABA GROUP: Is a Chinese multinational conglomerate specializing in e-commerce, retail, Internet, AI and technology. Among companies is our artificial intelligence case studies, Alibaba uses AI to help map the most efficient delivery routes. Works quite well! And Alibaba claims that smart logistics have resulted in a 10% reduction in vehicle use and a 30% reduction in travel distances.
2. AMAZON: Alexa is one of Amazon’s most popular and most famous AI product. It helps drive the algorithms that are essential to Amazon’s targeted marketing strategy. AI allows Amazon to predict what products will be the most demanded to provide customized recommendations based on customer searches. And according to rejoiner, Amazon’s recommendation engine drives 35 percent of total sales.
3. COCA-COLA: Coca-Cola Amatil is the largest bottler and distributor of non-alcoholic, bottled beverages in the Asia Pacific. Coca-Cola Amatil was relying on limited and manual measurements of products in store, as well as delayed data sourced from phone conversations. Coca-Cola Amatil sales reps used Trax Retail Execution image-based technology to take pictures of stores shelves with their mobile devices; these images were sent to the Trax Cloud and analyzed, returning actionable reports within minutes to sales reps and providing more detailed online assessments to management. Coca-Cola Amatil gained 1.3% market share in the Asia Pacific region within five months.
4. COGNIZANT: Is a multinational corporation that provides IT services. Cognizant Digital Business has developed an AI-driven machine learning solution for the compliance function at a leading healthcare services provider that parses doctors’ notes entered into the organization’s electronic medical records (EMR) to identify potential drug-seeking behavior. Opioid dependency is devastating for patients and their families. In our artificial intelligence case studies, Cognizant’s system uses text analytics and an advanced machine-learning algorithm to mine physicians’ notes and electronic medical records. alerts doctors during patients’ visits when a pattern of at-risk behavior is identified. So far, 85,000 at risk patients have been identified through this system with savings to organizations of $60 million.
5. GLOBAL TECH LED: Is a LED lighting design and supplier to U.S. and international markets, specializing in LED retrofit kits and fixtures for commercial spaces. The company used Google Analytics’ Smart Lists in our artificial intelligence case studies to automatically identify Global Tech LED prospects who were “most likely to engage” and to remarket to those users with more targeted product pages. They used Google’s Conversion Optimizer to automatically adjust potential customer bids for increased conversions. Remarketing campaigns triggered by Smart Lists drove 5 times more clicks than all other display campaigns. Traffic to the company’s website grew by more than 100%, and was able to re-engage users in markets in which it was trying to make a dent, including South Asia, Latin America, and Western Europe.
6. JD.COM: Beijing-based JD.com partnered up with Siasun Robot & Automation Co Ltd. to use automation technology, such as robots, to improve warehouse operations. The key idea was to improve the speed and efficiency of product sorting and delivery in warehouses, cutting down the costs and increasing revenue.   According to Techemergence, after implementing this new initiative, a number of online orders reached 1.26 billion in 2015 (double the amount of orders in 2014) and approximately 85% of those orders were delivered within two days. Unfortunately, JD.com aims to use Artificial intelligence to reduce the number of employees from approximately 120,000 to 80,000 over a decade to increase efficiency, by reducing manual work and therefore increasing profit margin.
7. PETER GLENN: has provided outdoor apparel and gear to individual and wholesale customers for over 50 years, with brick-and-mortar locations along the east coast, Alaska, and South Beach. Peter Glenn used AgilOne Analytics for advanced segmentation abilities included data on customer household, their value segment, and proximity to any brick-and-mortar locations. Peter Glenn saw a 30% increase in Average Order Value (AOV) as a result of its automated marketing campaigns.
8. RAKUTEN: Japan’s largest e-commerce site, Rakuten, continues to invest in AI to better predict customer behaviors as it is critical to the e-commerce success. Right now, with their Rakuten Institute of Technology, they are able to analyze their 200 million products to forecast sales with a high degree of accuracy. Now they are also capable of segmenting buyers more accurately using real-time data.
9. UNDER ARMOUR: An American manufacturer of sports footwear and apparel,  built a UA Record™ app was built using the IBM Watson Cognitive Computing platform. The “Cognitive Coaching System” was designed to serve as a personal health assistant by providing users with real-time, data-based coaching based on sensor and manually input data for sleep, fitness, activity and nutrition. The app has a rating of 4.5 stars and grew revenue for Connected Fitness accessories by 51% to $80 million.

Do these artificial intelligence show you the money? Are you ready to see how AI can be used at your company?

Segmentation is the process of defining and subdividing a large homogenous market into clearly identifiable segments having similar needs, wants, or demand characteristics.

The importance of segmentation is that it allows a business to precisely reach a consumer with specific needs and wants. This enables the company to use resources more effectively, make better strategic marketing decisions and realize new revenue streams.

Four basic factors are required for effective market segmentation. They are:

1. Clear identification of the segment
2. Measurement of its effective size
3. Accessibility through marketing efforts
4. Dedication of company resources

Whose done it well? Here are 6 segmentation case studies that opened up new revenues for brands.

1. BUSTEDTEES: Ecommerce retailer BustedTees has a global customer base. It used to send all of its emails at the same time of day. The company segmented its email list by time zone then set its campaigns to be delivered at 10 am local time. BustedTees added an extra layer of segmentation using past data on individual open times to develop a personalized send time for each subscriber. The results were:
   • 8% lift in email revenue overnight from personalised send time.
   • 17% increase in total email response rate.
   • 11% higher clickthrough rate.
   • 7.6% increase in post-click site engagement.
2. CANON: The quick rise of Smartphone cameras was eclipsing the development of the digital camera market. The kids segment was an under-developed market. Canon was trying to extend its target segment from parents-to-be to parents with kids, targeting mainly 5-9 years old and their parents. Dubbed Kidictionary, a three months contest asked participants to interoperate an ordinary word in a creative way through photography, and then to share online and social media. In order to drive better engagement, the company planted the seed via key opinion bloggers and online advertising to draw eyeballs. The campaign website pulled in 3,559 (64.3% ) new visitors and 1,976 (35.7%) returning visitors. In total, the site recorded 5,535 visitors per month and over 180 visitors per day. Total submission on the “Kidictionary” reached 344 and 348 users.The campaign gained 40% market share on low-end DC compared to last year.
3. DOGGYLOOT: Flash sale site Doggyloot segments and personalises its emails based on the type of dog that its customers own, so people with big dogs get different emails to those who own a terrier. In order to collect this information the company offered incentives to its existing email list if they shared their dog’s size and birthday. The campaigns segmented into three groups based on dog size, and yielded results:
   • Open rate up 10.2%.
   • Clickthrough rate is 410% higher than average.
   • Contributes up to 13% of daily total revenue.
4. JOHNNY CUPCAKES: Clothing retailer Johnny Cupcakes had an email list of 80,000 customers. However, the data was incomplete and everyone received the same marketing messages. In order to make its emails more effective, Johnny Cupcakes initially used vendor software to mine additional information from its customers’ social profiles. It was then able to find out data on gender, customer interests, brand preferences and media habits. For the first time the business could run a product launch campaign with separate emails for men and women who had expressed an interest in baseball. This fairly simple segmentation resulted in:
   • 42% increase in clickthrough rates.
   • 123% increase in conversion rate.
   • 141% increase in revenue per campaign.
5. LEGO: By carefully targeting its intended audiences and using the social media platforms where these consumers actively participate, the Lego Group was able to effectively reach its customers and offer them the kind of online experience. The company used six distinct personas to categorize their customers based on purchase and usage rates: These six personas ranged from consumers who were highly involved with the Lego Group’s products, such as those who helped shape product design to those having no experience with the brand. By actively engaging these people and giving them special attention, the Lego Group stood the best chance of encouraging them to be the company’s most ardent advocates. The Lego Group became the world’s fourth largest toy manufacturer, capturing approximately 6.9% of the global market share of toy sales and continues to sustain a high growth rate, as well as showing a net profit of about $688 million dollars for the year.
6. ROYAL CANADIAN MINT: By identifying key characteristics of high-value new and existing customers, the Mint wanted to create custom models to develop effective up-sell and cross-sell strategies throughout the consumer lifecycle. By turning to PRIZM and TKTK the Mint was able to score the best unaddressed admail segments as having the highest concentrations of those prospects and top performing segments. These same insights also helped the mint develop messages that would resonate with those consumers. The data analytics helped the Mint add 140,000 new customers in a single campaign. The Mint was able to identify 15 percent more prospects for major coin purchases—and predicted higher revenues over the next year.

To these case studies convince you of the effectiveness of market segmentation? Is your brand ready to realize new revenue streams through segmentation?

Digital marketing case studies show how businesses and brands produce great results with the benefits of digital targeting, media selection and data analytics.

Here are a few reasons why companies are moving in this direction.

• 86% of women turn to social networks before making a purchase (Alist daily)
• 49% of organizations do not have a clearly defined digital marketing strategy (Smart Insights, Managing Digital Marketing research report)
• 40% of marketers say proving the ROI of their marketing activities is their top marketing  challenge. (HubSpot, State of Inbound)

Here are examples of companies large and small, B2C and B2B to help spark great content, creative thinkingand execution at your organization, 12 inspiring digital marketing case studies that prove ROI.

1. BRITISH TELECOM: Managed to save £2m per year by routing around 600,000 contacts per year through social media instead of its call centres. This also improved the customer experience, as these people preferred to deal with BT via social instead of phone or email.
2. CLEAN & CLEAR: Used Snapchat to help raise awareness of its Morning Burst facial cleanser among females age 13 to 24. Clean & Clear partnered with Snapchat to run animated Snap Ads that reached the right people at the right time. Clean & Clear used Snapchat’s Lifestyle Categories to optimize its Snap Ads between Stories campaign and reach Snapchatters more likely to be interested in beauty. Clean & Clear’s Snap Ads and Filters campaign generated an 11.2% lift in Aided Awareness (5.5X higher than Millward Brown Norms) and a 7% lift in brand favorability (3.5X higher than Millward Brown Mobile Norms).
3. CREME EGG: Switched ad spend from TV to Facebook in this example of digital marketing case studies. A seasonal social media campaign invited people to ‘Have a fling with Crème Egg’ on Facebook, created a long series of one-off posts that fed into an overall narrative across the three months. Facebook matched TV in driving brand consideration for a third of the cost increasing sales by 7% as a result.
4. FISHER TANK: A welded steel tank constructed with a sales cycle of 12 months to several years. They used an Inbound Marketing approach would attract more (and more qualified) prospects to their website and give the company a chance to demonstrate how they think and what they do. They developed a more visually attractive site, and one that was a magnet for search engines. They included calls-to-action to download content of interest and value to prospects (primarily engineers, owners and facility and project managers) and integrated a blog with social sharing abilities, established company social media profiles, and optimized the site with the right long-tail keywords to get Fisher found in more searches. As a result, 1) website traffic increase by 119%, 2) quote request increased by 500% and 3) drove up the value of qualified sales opportunities by $3.4 million.
5. HCC MEDICAL INSURANCE SERVICE: Infographics have been overused in recent years, but they’re still an effective medium for content marketing.HCC Medical Insurance Services (HCCMIS) managed to increase blog traffic and email revenue using an infographic aimed at its travel customers. Compared to its normal sales emails the infographic achieved a 96% lift in email revenue, while on Facebook the post that featured the graphic had more than 2,000 interactions compared to an average of 10.Overall HCCMIS’s blog post featuring the graphic achieved 3.9m views, of which 90% were new visitors.
6. IBM: trained its sales people to use LinkedIn and Twitter, and also gave them access to a content calendar so they had relevant things to share. In this example of digital marketing case studies, the program resulted in 4x more sales year-on-year, though there are a few caveats to take into account.
7. KLM: Noticed, from one of its employees, that a lot of people were asking about social payments, so they spoke to KLM’s IT and accounts teams to see if it was possible to set it up.This resulted in a new social payments tool, which cost €3,500 to setup and now takes €80,000 per week in sales.
8. MANN FAMILY DENTAL: A comprehensive family care and cosmetic dentistry practice, wasn’t generating leads that would convert to patients. The creation of a blog on their website saw an immediate rise in phone calls. They used social media to strengthen and increase that organic referral web by engaging with their patients on Facebook. They focused on long tail keyword with local geographic terms. Mann Family Dental saw a: 1) 270% increase in web traffic 2) 10X increase in leads and a 3) 50% increase in patients generated from the website.
9. NEUTROGENA: Used shopping basket data to identify competitor products loyal customers were already buying that were within their own range. Neutrogena knew they had a loyal base of customers, but 75% of shoppers were only buying items within a single segment of the Neutrogena range. They created a “product pairings” campaign delivered through video, banner ads and coupons to drive sampling. Consumers were targeted based on their personal buying habits. They saw an Increase in incremental sales with 18.1 million households reached and a  £5.84 return on advertising spend (ROAS).
10. NILLA WAFERS: used Facebook to reinvigorate its Nilla Wafers brand and boost sales. A study showed Nilla Wafers sales increased 9% in test market locations among consumers who saw Facebook ads versus a control group of consumers over the course of a five-month campaign. The Facebook ad campaign for Nilla Wafers also was able to reach 11.3 million households through 190 million total impressions (16.8 impressions per household).
11. SNICKERS: Targeting fat-fingered typists, this clever search campaign from Snickers used misspelled words in Google keywords to capture hungry office workers’ attention during the working day. The chocolate bar brand managed to reach 500,000 people within just three days of launch, without any seeding and for less cost than bidding on brand keywords.
12. W HOLLYWOOD: Knew their luxury condominiums were expertly-crafted. Vibrant homes in the L.A. spotlight are eye-catching to many people. They created a lead-generation strategy which included SEO and Facebook ads to drive engaged visitors to the site. Google AdWords campaigns targeted specific areas within the California region and other cities where qualified lead potential was determined. The campaign resulted in: 1) 115% increase in conversions from Google Adwords, 2) 63% increase in site visits from SEO and 3) 1,800 goal completions from Facebook.

Do these digital marketing case studies inspire you? Did they prove ROI to your satisfaction? Could a creative digital marketing program help increase business in your organization?