The secrets to personal branding success
Good branding can make or break your success: it stands for companies, and it stands for personal brands as well. Nowadays, personal branding is more important than ever, particularly if you are an entrepreneur or solopreneur, or if you work in a company. In this blog post, I want to show you the best way to start building up your personal brand in 2017.
Why personal branding?
Personal branding has become almost a necessity in recent years, especially for people in certain niches. The reason for that is other people that you come into contact with, particularly clients and employers will likely also check your online persona.
By building up your personal brand, you’ll be able to put your best foot forward online – which will also influence your success in the real world as well.
As an entrepreneur, there are even more benefits to creating a personal brand.…
By
28 Feb 2017
How to build your content marketing strategy?
When the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) recently surveyed businesses about the state of their content marketing strategies, the findings were revealing – nearly two-thirds reported that their organisations did not have a documented strategy. However, for those working in the industry, this statistic wasn’t a great shock.
'I continue to look at that number and shake my head!' says Joe Pulizzi, Founder of the Content Marketing Institute. 'It doesn’t surprise me, though. I do speeches every week and I’ll ask them that question: how many of you have a documented content marketing strategy? And I’ve never gotten more than 40% of the audience responding ‘yes’, even in what I would call advanced audiences.'
Yet with the CMI study also revealing that those with a documented strategy were more effective in nearly all…
Crawl, walk, run: three steps to establishing an effective DMP
As digital marketers we're all too aware of the importance of data. For example, the typical fortune 1000 company that sees a 10% increase in data accessibility generates $65 million in additional revenue, whilst bad or poor quality data costs organisations as much as 10-20% in revenue.
Although Big Data is no longer a new area of interest for marketers, the constant change in trends and focus mean that we must always stay up to date, if not one step ahead, of the trends to ensure we hold a competitive advantage. Just consider the sheer complexity of data-related terms:
I recently attended a data-driven marketing event run by the Omnicom Group which gave me the opportunity to look at some of the insights and trends from those working at the…
Thinking like Sun Tzu to improve your strategic position
This is the second part to last week's interpretation of how Sun Tzu's Art of War can be applied to digital marketing.
Here I'll cover three ways in which applying Sun Tzu's Art of War can help develop your marketing or digital marketing strategy, starting with the 5 elements...
The 5 Elements to defining your strategic position
Sun Tzu defines five key elements to help understand your position that make total sense when applied to marketing too. Your strategic position is never strong or weak... it is only strong or weak in relation to something or someone else.
Mission or the way: This is what unites all of the people in the Army (organisation) and the customer. It helps everybody to share the same goals and objectives, it allows everyone to 'get real', to feel that what has been…
Tie your audience down with Anchor content
As the Smart Insights - HubSpot Content Marketing 2016 research shows, content now forms an essential element of nearly everything we do as marketers. Planning, creating and distributing great quality content is not just the domain of content marketers; it covers email, advertising, CRM and just about anything else we’re involved in. Content excellence is now so crucial to how we communicate and gain traction with consumers that it’s become an important priority for many marketers in 2016 and beyond.
Yet, despite its importance, gaining consumers' attention is becoming more and more difficult. In an attention economy, that’s become increasingly competitive, ‘content shock’ the incessant deluge of mediocre content that is blinding audiences to brands’ content efforts - means that content has to have genuine quality and relevance to achieve cut-through.
The rise of ad blocking software, the decrease in organic reach on…
The Art of Listening: Put your Influencers’ Needs Before Your Own
Today there are over two billion active social media accounts worldwide, growing by 12 percent in the last 12 months. For all the media hype that still surrounds the world of social networks, there is one thing people have come to accept: it’s not going anywhere.
Virtual networks are built on the illusion that everyone likes everyone, and everyone can be “friends.” However, what is truly needed in order for people to build meaningful relationships with each other is the synchronicity of shared experience. That’s because no matter how “friendly” your interactions may be, they are not in person.
One challenge organizations often encounter in implementing influencer marketing programs is taking those first few steps to engage with influencers. There’s often this moment of fear that you might not be following best practices, offending someone, saying the wrong thing –…
Chart of the Day: What challenges you when it comes to email marketing? Part 1 of 4.
For email marketers, there will always be aspects of email marketing that are a challenge. The below chart looks at the various areas that email marketers are struggling with. I will be doing a 4 part series of issues pertaining to email marketing.
We will be looking at the following during the course of the series:
Targeting & Segmenting
Subscriber list growth
Tracking results
Main email marketing goal.
There is no real surprise that "Targeting & Segmenting" comes up with the highest score of 40%. For most, the main issue will be the clients' data records. They will be inaccurate, out of date or incomplete. The more data you can obtain from your clients, that is relevant to your business, the more tailored you can make your emails. Segmented email campaigns have…
Psychology has a bigger effect on purchase decisions than you think
A while ago I was doing my monthly "Let's see what TED's been up to recently" session, and I came across an older one: Dan Ariely's Ted talk on irrational purchase behavior.
It's well-worth a watch (after, of course, you finish this article).
In it, he breaks down the delusion that our buying decisions are rationally made. He discusses the true influences and psychological factors which affect our subconscious - the real determinants for why we buy that pack of gum, why that T-shirt stands out, or why we decide we need a jacket we don't.
Ever gone into a store for a single thing and walked out with a full cart?
Psychology has a bigger influence on your prospective customers than you might think. Understanding how you can use psychology to influence buying decisions will make you a better marketer and…
In a survey by eMarketer, 84% of marketers said they would launch at least one influencer campaign within the next twelve months.
It’s no secret that the world of marketing has been somewhat flipped on its head in the last few years. What with the vast inbound advancements in social media, growing dominance of online content and ever-increasing desire of brands to be seen as approachable personas, marketing professionals have had to change and adapt faster than ever before. However, there is one group that has ridden this wave of change better than any other, and has subsequently found itself at the very top of the inbound marketing pile: influencers.
Using influencers in your marketing strategy can often seem daunting and expensive, with no guarantee of success. What follows is an exploration of this prominent trend, what we can learn from it, and how best it can be implemented for 2017.
What is…
Leads are only as good as your ability to know how to calculate their value
Lead generation isn’t as popular as other acquisition channels such as Straight Sale, CPC, CPI or CPA.
Why?
Because most people struggle to understand two important things:
How to do it properly
How to calculate its value
In this article, you’ll learn how to overcome these two obstacles and discover the information helping companies dominate their markets.
How to do lead generation properly
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has some excellent advice. He says: “We don’t make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.”
This is the most important thing to master if you want to do lead generation well. You must be customer centric.
Move away from a transactional mindset. Instead, think about repeat, retention-based sales. Doing this dramatically increases the lifetime value of…
