Social media strategy and planning essentials series

This is part 7 of my Smart Insights 12 part social media series. In the last part we looked at aligning social media with other marketing channels; in this blog, I discuss what resources you need to manage your social media marketing and how you scale a social team sensibly. To frame the conversation, you need to find answers to the following questions: How many people do you need and in which roles? What business processes are required? What KPIs should you use and what resources do you need to measure them? What tech and tools are required for your social media plan? How do these resource demands change in the next few years?

Approaches to resourcing

There are two main ways to plan your resourcing: Bottom up You’re governed by the resource currently at your disposal, so you shape your scope of work around this. For example,…

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…

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…

It is one of the most significant parts of the business world in today’s era. But, it is usually tough to predict the future of the e-commerce market

But, still, experts have predicted recently that 2018 is going to be a great year for e-commerce. They have proposed some trends which are definitely going to work in the upcoming months of the year.

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Just have a look!

1. The Material Design

Material design is nothing but the ultimate concept of building such websites which are entirely based on rich contents that are vibrant, trendy, and serves all the needs of any business. Moreover, this trend has already reached up to the peak and thus it is expected that it will get a high rise in the…

Where to place your online ads: How to use scripts to filter your ad placements to select the most effective

This article is useful for those who would like to place advertisements on sites across the Internet, e.g. on YouTube, forums, mobile apps, and sites devoted to a similar subject. When you are using different targeting on the Google Display Network, Google selects placements for ads automatically, except placements added manually. After a short period of time, you can find interesting statistics, which shows that some placements perform well and some not so well for you. [si_quick_block id="124322" title="How to set up a Google Display Network campaign" description="Unlike search ads, which are text only, ads on the GDN can use a combination of text and images, and can be static or included animated elements. Learn how to start taking advantage of the Google Display Network with this quick win."] Try the following guidelines…

Three tools and frameworks to shape your brand’s positioning

Defining your business or brand’s value proposition is one of the most important tasks you will undertake as a marketer. A clear, differentiated value proposition is what will enable you to communicate to prospects and customers the overall benefits you have to offer and why you are better option when compared with your competitors. The value proposition is an articulation of the overall position your brand occupies in the marketplace from your customers’ point-of-view. Although you will always start with an internal view of how you want to be perceived, the customer will ultimately make a final decision. I’d therefore like to look at three practical frameworks that can be used to develop a brand proposition that will keep the customer front and centre.

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Does your business have what it takes to make the customer-centric shift?

To be a market leader, customer-centricity needs to be embedded within every facet of your organization. Modern companies need to truly understand what their customers and prospects expect, so they can deliver a customer experience that meets, and ultimately exceeds these expectations. The highly fluid nature of interactions across online, mobile, in-store, and customer service channels makes understanding customers more challenging than ever, yet vital to effective customer engagement. With new market entrants disrupting the landscape every day, companies need insights in real-time to capture the constantly evolving needs of their customers, and be able to accurately predict what they'll ask for next. The pace of innovation needs to be accelerated in order to outperform and differentiate yourself from your strongest competitors.

Understanding the ‘why’ behind the ‘what’

Therefore, you need to go beyond transactional data and unlock the attitudes, emotions and…

Find out how strong branding adds value to your business, and how to get started when it comes to building your own brand

Branding. The word is often thrown around in conversations about marketing, but what does it really involve and is it worth the effort? Broadly speaking, branding is the sum total of anything you use to differentiate your business from the competition, while also creating a unique identity that is recognizable and elicits an emotional response from prospective and existing customers. It’s essentially every strategic move you make towards crafting your image, and includes everything from your logo and brand colours right up to your tone of voice, tagline, product offering, and customer service.

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The benefits of effective branding

Increase recognition:Your branding needs to be consistent…

Introduction

Technological changes are one of the leading advocators to shape customer value. They are characterized by a process of social technological variations, rooted in different disciplines e.g., economics, sociology, and psychology. It implies that the competitive advantage is increasingly shaped by the management of the polysemic nature of the customer value. This crossroads of understanding drives how shoppers use various channels (offline, online, and mobile) across temporal stages (pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase. In this holistic playfield, we are attempting to simplify this discipline by seizing a definite space of instruments of measurement. As such, “digital factory” can be simplified by structuring meta-themes, articulating a “software of the mind” for digital practitioners. This is an expression coined by a Dutch Management Professor Geert Hofstedewish, designed in the context of culture, to provide a guide for humans on how to think and behave. Metathemes are researched and practitioner theoretical factors assembled and organized vertically and horizontally…