How to survive digital transformation

I'm not sure we should be encouraging people to think of digital transformation as armageddon scenario, but then again it does bear certain similarities. It's hard work, and keeping your team united is key to success (or that's what I'm lead to believe by all the survival movies I've seen). When you're working on a digital transformation project, anything that can go wrong probably will. It's a difficult task, so it makes sense to get some help. In fact, Gartner research shows that digital transformation initiatives only have a 30% success rate, so most fail. To make sure yours doesn't, it might be wise to have a read of tfm's new  Digital Transformation Survival Guide. Thanks to tfm for publishing this infographic. If you want more advice on managing the digital transformation process, expert business members can download our …

The average marketing budget spends 48% on advertising, but how does it breakdown?

Not too long ago, broadcast and print reigned supreme, taking up a huge quantity of the advertising budgets. Then, along came the internet and began to shake things up. The ability to accurately measure how adverts were performing was all too enticing and we have now seen a shift in favour of digital, with an average of 64% of the advertising spend. Percolate, recently conducted a survey of over 300 enterprise U.S. CMOs, VPs, and Marketing Directors, to dig a little deeper into the hidden costs of marketing.  

Search Ads

Search Advertising, refers to the adverts that appear on the results page, (usually near the top) when a user types a query into a search engine. This takes on average 12% of the budget and can be…

Write better copy to get better results

I once had a tarantula walk over my hand. The experience comes to mind every time I face a blank piece of paper. A rising sense of panic…paralysis…a prickle of sweat. Sound familiar? So I thought I’d share the practical tricks I use to write email marketing copy. Not so much the intricacies of word choice or paragraph structure, but the process of actually getting the job done and done well. Your tips are also welcome!

1. Define the recipient

The writing process needs a framework to proceed in: a real or implicit briefing…the whos, whats and whys of the task. Who will get this email and in what context? Have they undertaken some specific action (like registered for an event)? When will they get the email? How does this email fit, conceptually and in terms of timing, with other emails or related marketing campaigns…

How to structure your thinking when planning for the future

You can't predict the future. I don't care how smart you are, how prestigious the Univeristy you got your MBA from is, or what your horoscope said. The top economists never saw the 2008 financial crisis coming. The top political commentators didn't think Donald Trump would win the Republican nomination. Even the pollsters couldn't get the result of the 2015 UK general election right, and they were only having to predict what would happen the next day. So given that you aren't going to be able to work out what will happen in future, you shouldn't base your business planning on a single scenario, which we can broadly define as 'business as usual'. Instead, you should plan for multiple scenarios, which will allow you be more responsive to future changes that will impact your business. But how do you know what scenarios to plan…

Marketers can expect greater slice of the pie in 2016

The latest data from CMO.com's 2016 survey shows a healthy increase in the percentage of firms revenues going on marketing. This is good news for marketers, who will be able to use the additional funds to try new campaigns and hopefully deliver the all important ROI which will lead to CFO's being more willing to devote big chunks of company spending to innovative new digital campaigns that it can be hard to get buy-in for. It's worth considering what might be behind these changes, and the implications for marketers: Explanation 1: It's the economy stupid One explanation for the current trend may just be that economic recovery is giving firms more to spend, and much of this spending is headed towards marketing. The reason for this may be greater competition for attention…

Using Cause-and-effect or Ishikawa fishbone diagrams for marketing analysis and management

If you’re involved with managing Ecommerce, there are many inter-related marketing activities that are important for success. With the increasingly complex range of channels companies use for communications today and alternative customer journeys on site, mastering best practices is helpful to make best use of each channel or digital marketing technique and how it integrates with other channels. I first started to use Ishikawa diagrams  when I was responsbible for managing software development teams where we used them to identify the potential cause of problems and minimise bugs. As I got involved in digital marketing I was reminded them when I heard Sam Decker, then responsible for Dell’s consumer web site, explaining how Dell used this as part of their Six Sigma thinking to improve operations, content, design, analytics, and P&L management. This technique seemed to me to be…

Using social listing to respond to your customers before they contact you

Let’s put the wonders away for now. Let’s talk business. How do you know what people say about your company? How do you detect unhappy customers who don’t tell you in your face that your product sucks, but make sure the universe (or, in most cases, Twitter or Facebook) knows about that? Finally, how do you find people interested in the subject relevant to your business in real time and engage them before someone else does? Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to social listening.

What is Social Listening?

Social listening allows you to discover what people are saying online about your brand, product, competitors or any specific topic in real-time. You get instant notifications that allow you to act upon your mentions immediately. It’s super easy. …

Bigger text ads, separate device bids, responsive display ads and new ads on Google Maps

As expected, there were plenty of big announcements at the 2016 Google Performance Summit. AdWords was the star of this year’s show and Google revealed a string of big changes coming soon to the platform. There’s a clear push towards mobile with these upcoming features and plenty of reason to be excited. Here’s a quick run through of the biggest headlines to come out of the Google Summit.

1. Text ads are about to get a whole lot bigger

The most intriguing announcement from Google is that text ads are going to be bigger than ever. Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) will allow you to write two headlines of up to 30 characters, instead of the current single headline and 25-character limit. You’ll also have up to 80 characters for the newly extended description block, up from two 35-character…

Over a half a billion Smart Phones will be sold in Africa between now and 2020

Digital marketers by definition focus on areas where people are connected.  The tech revolution started in the US, and quickly spread to Europe and then on to Asia. Now there are more smart phones, internet connections and ecommerce purchases made in Asia than any other region. Unfortunately, Africa has frequently missed out on the potential of the digital revolution, and because of this it has remained a small market (in relative terms) for digital marketers, and hasn't received an awful lot of attention. That should be starting to change. As the chart below shows, not only are phone shipments to Africa increasing considerably, to over 200 million units a year (that's the combined population of the UK, France and Germany!) but they are also becoming mostly Smartphones. Smartphones ownership means internet access, ecommerce potential and social media use. Digital marketers should take…

Creating an International Retail Ecommerce Plan : Defining the Pros, Cons and 10 Steps to Start Planning

The UK & the US are very strong markets from an online trading point of view: the US is second in the world, and the UK third in the world in retail sales according to Emarketer. That’s a wonderful position to be in, but also means they are fairly saturated, with a high-level of competition from local and international competitors. One of the big opportunity areas for small/medium e-commerce businesses is therefore in international sales. While international sales are vital for UK-based pureplays like ASOS, Wiggle and Zalando and many of the big online pureplays take selling overseas hugely seriously, it’s still a relatively untapped market. For example, it’s more common for continental European retailers to focus cross-border than for UK businesses to do so. And yet, the US & UK’s…