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…
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…
Social media strategy and planning essentials
It’s important to know what other organisations in your market are doing on social media, to give you context for the current role social plays in customer communication. The aim of competitor analysis is to learn from the state of play and identify strategic opportunities.
Please note that I also advocate researching the wider market to learn what works from brands that have a respected social presence. They may not be directly relevant to you in terms of content or product, but the techniques and social platform tools they use to engage customers should provide useful insight.
This article looks at the types of competitor analysis you can and should be doing to help inform your social media strategy.
1. Audit scope of competitor activity
Your goal is to build a clear picture of how other organisations are currently using social media. This needs someone to spend time on…
Creating your social media strategy and tactical plan
Noun: Strategy / A plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim.
First, you need to understand what a strategy is, and isn’t it. A strategy should define the main aim of your social media presence and set the parameters for what it will deliver and how it will be delivered. It will be supported by a tactical plan that defines how the strategy will be delivered, including the channels, resource and budgets to achieve it.
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Tip – ensure your strategy is no more than 3-4 pages long. A strategy has to be concise and provide the governing principles that guide the plan.
1…
Improve your skills to become a 'T-shaped Marketer' via these free online courses and tutorials
When we look at where to focus our free blog content at Smart Insights, our main aim or filter we use is that the content must help digital marketers plan, manage and optimize their business results or improve their digital skills. This is also what our member content, in our guides focuses on too - starting with digital strategies and planning templates then more specialized marketing tactics like email marketing, social media, SEO, video and many more digital skills.
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Of course, there is a lot of great free, structured online courses around developing digital skills, so we thought it would help to share our thoughts…
9 Tools You Can Use to Spy on Your Competitors
Businesses that focus on their target audiences, ideal buyer personas and customer pain points are ahead of the marketing game. But they’re still missing a crucial step to success. Failing to thoroughly investigate what your competition is doing - and how they’re doing it - can leave you in the dark and in a permanent state of second place.
Fortunately, it’s not difficult to spy on your competitors. Simply studying their websites can give insights into what they’re doing right and wrong, and what you can do better.
Take it a step further, and go deep into your competitor analysis by searching for their backlinks, studying their email marketing funnels and researching what kind of paid and organic search keywords they’re focusing on. Need some resources to get started? Here are seven tools you can use to spy on your competitors.
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6 implications for selecting and managing today's and tomorrow's marketing technology
We've been sharing the latest Marketing Technology Landscape map by Scott Brinker, @chiefmartec for several years now. You've almost certainly seen one of the earlier iterations since it has been widely shared. I love it because it's a USEFUL infographic - it prompts marketers to review their current Marketing Technology and take action to improve their Marketing Technology Stack.
When I discuss it with marketers when speaking or training, it certainly has a big impact, not always in a good way... It prompts that "OMG how do I cope?" fear amongst marketers and business owners due to its complexity. But, for me, from a positive POV, it shows the opportunity of the many tools we have available to deliver more relevant, more personalised communications today. It's inspired the Smart Insights team to create our own Martech infographic which includes both insight and operational tools…
How to ensure you track performance against target
KPIs, we all have them, sometimes we set them for ourselves, often they are set for us! The question is, are the KPIs you are reviewing supporting your efforts into making the boat go faster? Are they translated from business goals or just a bunch of metrics someone thought they may as well stick on a weekly powerpoint dashboard because Google Analytics spits out a sexy graph?
This post explores how you can ensure you are using the KPIs that are helping you track performance in line with your business goals? KPIs give an integral pulse on the business that helps keep you be aware of what's really going on and they allow you to exert control to pull the right levers to keep on track according to what actually matters. For me, the key when setting KPIs for marketing and digital marketing is to start with the business goals.
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Why and how you should define goals vs objectives carefully?
I’ve found that goals and objectives are often defined and used differently within different companies or parts of a business and this can lead to problems when creating processes to track and improve marketing performance. This post gives a short summary of the difference between goals and objectives and why it matters!
Typically in businesses you see that objectives are specific, they cover the SMART or SMARTER criteria for objectives which make it possible to set specific targets for a time period and measure against these using sales or analytics systems. That’s the way it should be, I think, this is the de facto standard!
But in some businesses or some student case studies, “goals” are used to refer to specific objectives too. Perhaps it’s not helped that confusingly, in Google Analytics, goals are specific quantifiable metrics which are often used as…
Dave Chaffey talks with Grant LeBoff about how to correctly use Marketing Personas
Personas are a term that you often hear marketers discussing, but don't always completely understand. In this video, Dave Chaffey, our CEO and author of Digital Marketing, explains to Grant Leboff what personas are and how they can be useful when they have the details needed to show customer journey maps and content needs.
No headphones? - You can always read the transcript below instead.
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Grant Leboff: Dave, one of the things that I think people hear about in marketing and don't always completely understand what they…
