How Melbourne Metro made a public service video marketing ad creative instead of doom and gloom
In 2012 Melbourne Metro needed to promote rail safety in a campaign that had to resonate with their rail users in a video marketing campaign. It was something that would usually take the form of an informative safety display ad which would not envoke much of an active response from viewers. Not this time.
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The Play
McCann, Metro's agency, decided to go down the route of entertainment, writing some hilarious lyrics to a song about all the dumb ways to die—such as poking a grizzly bear, selling both your kidneys on the internet or using your privates as piranha bait—to underline the message…
Chart of the Day: Public are largely unfamiliar with purchasing through chatbots
Chatbots are a viable option for companies who want to be ever-accessible to their customers. Able to help with common problems such as late deliveries or changing profile information, chatbots can always elevate more complex tasks to a human representative if need be. One task that customers aren’t ready to trust chatbots with is making a purchase.
Research by SUMO Heavy has found that just 11% of people have tried making a purchase through a chatbot, with just 5% saying they would do so again. A quarter of people said they were not open to trying it and 43% said they were unfamiliar with the concept altogether.
When reading this data, it's important to distinguish the different platforms that chatbots can be provided through. Chat services available directly on a…
It was great to see the interest in our recent digital transformation webinar: Benchmarking your Digital Future (now available on demand).There were so many questions, from strategic to practical, that we couldn’t get to them all on the call, so we promised to share them via our blog.
Before we get into your questions, I want to share a questions I asked attendees, What are your plans for digital transformation? which is a similar to this question in our previous ‘Managing digital marketing research report’.
Popularity of Digital Transformation projects
This is very similar to what we found on the poll in the webinar where around a third of the attendees have plans to start a project within 12 months and a third of attendees have recently…
Research into customer expectation and behaviour, quality and delivery method, when it comes to content marketing
B2B customers in the digital age have greater access to information. They are actively researching solutions and providers before engaging with a salesperson. As a result, content marketing is becoming more prevalent and receiving lots of investment.
The interest in content marketing, however, has created tough competition and higher customer expectation. How can you make sense of all the trends in the content marketing world and make sure that your strategy will bring in results?
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Here are seven…
Social media strategy and planning essentials series
This is part 6 of my Smart Insights 12 part social media series. In the last part we looked at the role of content in social media; in this blog, I discuss how social needs to work as part of your overall marketing plan, not in isolation.
The role of a marketing calendar
Most organisations have a marketing calendar that outlines the key campaigns for the year, typically broken down into monthly cycles. As with the content calendar, I discussed in the previous article, this helps define the big campaigns, the key messages, promotions, CTAs and the channels through which they will be delivered.
Social media needs to align with this calendar. Typically the most successful campaigns are executed across multiple channels simultaneously, promoting the same core message, albeit with a slightly different execution in each channel e.g. paid search campaigns typically use product and offer…
Demand generation should be a core component of a Blue Ocean Strategy - instead it is frequently confused with either brand awareness or lead generation
Demand generation is a critical theoretical component of the 'new' marketing- a catch-all term for the kind digital marketing which relies on inbound techniques and new platforms, all underpinned by the 'Blue Ocean' strategy first popularised by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne just over a decade ago.
But the term has become confused and diluted, with marketers overly keen on fashionable buzzwords using it in a similar way to 'growth hacking', a term now associated with so many marketing techniques it has lost all meaning and value.
Defining Blue Ocean Strategy:
So what is demand generation precisely? To answer that question we first need to explain the concept of 'Blue Ocean Strategy', which the whole concept of demand generation depends on.
Blue Ocean Strategy is the idea that companies can thrive not…
To make the benefits of online marketing more concrete, let’s consider some common goals for auto dealerships
The automobile industry has come a long way — and not just in terms of technology. At the beginning of the millennium, those looking for a new car would typically go around town trying to find the right model at the right price. But according to research from Google, the customer journey has become much less physical. Questions about product affordability, suitability, and ranking are increasingly being resolved during online micro-moments.
If you’re in the automobile sales market, the message is clear: with car shoppers spending less time exploring dealerships firsthand, digital marketing is gaining more importance in capturing their attention and business. To make the benefits of online marketing more concrete, let’s consider some common goals for auto dealerships — and how digital tactics fit…
Social media strategy and planning essentials series
This is part 5 of my Smart Insights 12 part social media series. In the last part, we looked at the role of organic vs paid social media and touched on the importance of content. In this blog, I discuss a sensible way to approach content planning for your social media channels.
Social media networks support multiple content formats and there has been rapid growth in the use of interactive formats, for example, carousel ads on Facebook. This flexibility of format (text, image, multi-image, video, carousel etc.) gives marketers the ability to experiment with different types of content to gauge how best to attract and engage social users.
If people are the heartbeat of social media, content is the blood. It’s your content that people see and respond to, and that communicates your values and messages.
But what content works? How do you plan what to…
Chart of the Day: Strategies and practical factors that support growth of a business - new research
The Ansoff matrix growth drivers
The Ansoff matrix model is a classic marketing model featured in our free top marketing models guide.
Although developed in the 1960s, Ansoff is still useful for considering, at a top level, the strategic initiatives that a business is taking to increase its competitiveness in a sector through identifying new revenue opportunities.
This new research based on the views of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) in large US organizations is interesting since it translates the theory of Ansoff into practice, showing how businesses are investing in the four quadrants of Ansoff.
You can see that a market penetration strategy of selling existing products or services into existing markets has the largest investment. This is building on existing strengths and is fine, with the…
Brands across all industries need to rethink their mobile experiences to focus on speed
A study by Google Research found that the average load time for a landing page on mobile is 22 seconds on an average 3G connection, while over half of your visitors will leave if the page takes longer than 3 seconds.
As consumers, we expect to have access to what we want when we want it and having to wait is not acceptable in a world where Amazon Now can anything from Groceries to the latest Playstation games to your door within two hours. So, how do the top industries fair when it comes to giving their potential customers what they want at the speed they expect.
Not very well as it goes. The Finance industry seems to be the best of a bad bunch with the Automative industry in the UK lagging behind with a miserable 12.3 second load time.…
