Agile digital marketing: It's time to consider how focusing on agility can reenergize your marketing efforts.
As a marketer, you are probably familiar with the traditional waterfall process. This is where your team creates monthly, quarterly, and yearly plans comprised of a series of initiatives to launch throughout the year. While it is straightforward, this approach still makes it difficult to foresee the market pulse from 12 or even six months out. As a result, this lack of predictability can derail workflows.
[si_guide_block id="83709" title="Access Business Resource - Digital Marketing Centre of Excellence Best Practices" description="Learn techniques for launching or improving a Digital CoE"/]
True, the waterfall process has certain advantages, such as the ability to meticulously plan details, establish timelines, and delegate duties, but as a marketing professional, you should also consider using an agile approach. With agile digital marketing, your team works…
For marketers, there’s never been a more important moment to reconcile ethics and strategy
If you want a room of nerdy marketers to bicker and disagree, ask them for a definition of “strategy.” If you want to make the debate divisive and uncomfortable, pivot into the topic I’m going to address today (you’ve been warned).
Strategy has become a toss-out word. Perhaps you work in a business where every plan, initiative, operation, idea, and launch is labeled “strategic.” Don’t you want to roll your eyes when you hear that?! Behind that bluster, what do we mean?
A good definition of a word is one that speakers of the language intuitively understand and easily apply. Strategy defies good definitions, which is part of why we debate, discuss, and write articles about it. I’ll offer a definition that works well for me in the marketing technology world: Strategy is knowing today why and how you're…
Chart of the Day: What are the success factors for improving sales and marketing alignment
This research from the Content Marketing Institute and LinkedIn shows how the continuing popularity of content marketing in business-to-business (B2B) marketing has highlighted common flaws in the way organisations are structured to manage their content marketing.
The report starts by showing how changing buyer behaviour has demanded an increased focus on content marketing since, of prospective buyers:
92% start with an information search
53% find that going online and researching is superior to interacting with a salesperson
75% depend on social networks to learn about different vendors
90% won’t take a cold calling
The report goes on to compare the performance of highly aligned sales and marketing teams with less well aligned teams. Across the board, the highly aligned content marketing and sales teams collaborate far more frequently than the low aligned.
This chart reviews these success factors for alignment…
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.
[si_guide_block id="70611" title="Download FREE Resource – Essential digital marketing tools 2017" description="A free download giving our recommendations on tools for audience insight and managing digital marketing."/]
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…
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…
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.
[si_guide_block id="5605" title="Download our Premium Resource – Digital Marketing Strategy Guide" description="Global brands like Accenture, Canon, GSK and HSBC—and…
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.
[si_guide_block id="123142" title="Download our Premium Resource – Brand Campaign Launch Guide " description="Learn How to plan, launch, and review your campaign to achieve maximum results."/]
The benefits of effective branding
Increase recognition:Your branding needs to be consistent…
Compilation of abandonment rates and follow-up email conversion rates in retail, fashion, travel, finance and not-for profit
We recommend retargeting as an essential activity in our RACE framework customer lifecycle activities. That's because it can help boost both conversion to lead and conversion to sale conversion rates. This pair of charts focusing on email retargeting show it's worthwhile putting a range of retargeting tactics in place, regardless of the type of business.
Cart abandonment rates
This data is based on abandonment rates from Salecycle customers. It shows that the average cart abandonment rate is 75.4% with rates in some sectors such as travel and finance being even higher.
Following up on this interest with a reminder email (if you have collected it, which you should) is one way of increasing conversion, using a simple reminder or a more persuasive discount. It's worth testing which discounts…
