A matrix to help you review the tools, services and software that you use to manage digital marketing

As digital marketers we're certainly not short of tools to review and improve our marketing. There are many free tools available and certainly some that are worth paying for too. A recent Redeye/Econsultancy report on Conversion Rate Optimisation contained useful charts for considering the use of marketing technology to impact on bottom line and resource intensiveness. I compiled some of these charts into a matrix to help show where the opportunities lie for marketers who are assessing technology expenditure: As a digital strategist you can use this matrix to assess your current use of digital tools and plan new tools into your budget for future year(s). From the report we can draw that conversion optimisation technology is underutilised by organisations yet has the biggest chance of improving…

Applying PR Smith's SOSTAC® planning to digital marketing

SOSTAC® is a marketing planning model, originally developed by PR Smith in the 1990s to help marketers develop marketing plans. Paul is my co-author on Emarketing Excellence, so when we created this book it was natural to work together to show how SOSTAC® can best be applied to planning for digital marketing. This new infographic, that I've developed with Paul and the designers at First 10, summarises the key issues to consider at each stage when developing digital marketing plans [click infographic to expand]: See our more detailed post where we introduce how to apply the SOSTAC® template to Digital Marketing. You can also find out more about the SOSTAC® approach for marketing planning in this Ebook: The SOSTAC® Guide - to writing the perfect plan V1.1 by PR Smith. The "5S's and KPI's" refer to the…

What does it take to win with E-Business?

We believe that the secret to growing E-Business results in your organization is to benchmark to find a better balance between enablers, readiness and performance. Why are some organizations able to repeatedly deliver results while others struggle to keep up the pace (or never reach it)? We think that high performance E-Business organizations have several things in common but most notably, they are better at balancing E-Business enablers, readiness and performance while using benchmarking to identify improvement areas. We've developed the E-Business Monitor for companies to benchmark where they are now and get actionable insights on where to improve.

Why other E-Business benchmarks fall short

The last decade has shown a tremendous growth of online channels. Now, organizations find themselves facing tough questions concerning the effectiveness of their E-Business (including digital marketing and E-commerce). Key questions faced are: How…

Making analytics make a difference - our interview with David Sealey

How do you try to make use of your analytics? We all know that in theory web analytics tools give us fantastic insight to help us improve results for our digital marketing. In practice you need to know the right questions to ask and use the right reports and measures to find the answer. You also need to know the intuition to follow-up on a hunch. Every marketer and every analyst will have their own unique style. As a consultant I'm always keen to learn how others tackle a problem so I can learn from their ideas. In this interview, David Sealey of Design and Analytics Agency Quba shares his approach on how to avoid "analysis paralysis".

Current marketing challenges for 2011

Question 1: What do you see as the current major challenges faced by marketers and how can analytics help? …

Anyone who"has worked in an "in-house" B2B or B2C marketing environment likely understands what it means when there's so much to do that you might scream, yet commercial pressures from within the business are pushing even harder for results. To work effectively with these pressures, it's important to still get the marketing fundamentals right and avoid distractions which will divert you off track.  Here's what I've found are 7  de-railers that limit any chance of marketing success and my advice on how to avoid derailment!

1. Flying Blind

If you don't know where you are going you'll end up somewhere else. Operating without considered objectives and/or a means to measure progress, including web analytics, is essentially flying blind. You might have an activity list, but you don't have a plan. It's impossible to define success if you have no way to establish and track your objectives. Those objectives have to relate directly to…