Improve audience understanding for more persuasive marketing campaigns in four steps

Gone are the days of randomly placing keywords and ranking for any term we liked. Today’s savvy marketer recognizes that in order to succeed in the Google search results, and more widely online, we need to forget old-school techniques of trying to appeal to the search giants and focus instead on our end user. Customer personas are a powerful marketing tool which enables us to better articulate our audience’s needs and complexities in a usable manner. Here, I’ll explain how to create useful marketing personas to guide your marketing strategy.

[si_guide_block id="83545" title="Download Expert Member resource – Persona research guide" description="This guide will help you build personas using the most appropriate research techniques. The research doesn't need to be lengthy or costly, as this guide explains."/]

Back to basics: audience demographics

…

The building blocks of an effective brand strategy

Since the turn of the millennium, more than 50 percent of Fortune 500 companies have suffered or failed due to digital disruption. With so many social media sites competing at nearly every turn, building a successful brand through digital marketing can be quite a challenge. Add ever-evolving platforms, like artificial intelligence, to the mix, and the challenge becomes exponentially more complicated. Technology and platforms that cater to users around the clock create a need for new business models that enable marketing to adapt appropriately. For example, apps like Instagram and Snapchat are highly reactive, meaning the old practices of curating and scheduling social media posts aren’t always viable. In many ways, successful marketing means successful storytelling. The goal is to expand the story to reach customers where they are. Therefore, the art of telling it will need to evolve if your brand is to withstand the test…

A detailed list of the best digital marketing tools we recommend to help you reach, act, engage and convert your target customers

Having the right set of software tools to manage data insights, content and digital marketing is essential! Without the right ones, you won't be able to create a strategy which reaches target customers and follower them through the customer journey - giving you insights into customer journeys, personas, conversion rate optimization and many more digital metrics essential to staying ahead of competitors. The digital tools we recommend will be categorized into our essential toolkits: Search Engine Optimization: Organic search Paid Search: AdWords Analytics Social Media Marketing (PR and influencer) Email Marketing / Marketing Automation Content Marketing The aim is to provide you with a list of the multitude of different tools available and a comparison of features for various industries, products or services. If used correctly, they can help streamline your…

Blockchain has revolutionary applications in marketing and will be good news for both publishers and advertisers

Blockchain has been a hot topic in the tech world ever since Bitcoins emerged from obscurity to become the obsession of nerds the world over around 2013. Marketers love finding shiny new technologies to distract them from their day jobs and have enjoyed hopping on bandwagons to prove their down with the latest trends ever since some bright spark realized that newfangled printing press things could be used to churn out flyers to promote the latest in powdered wigs and ruffs. But whilst marketers have been all over other trends, such as the growth of Snapchat or Live video, like a rash, they've yet to properly 'get' what the blockchain can actually do for them. I think this is in large part down to two key reasons: Blockchain is the result of mind-bogglingly clever cryptography and thus…

Chart of the Day: More than half of UK business owners unaware of incoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

We only have a year left before the GDPR is officially implemented on 25th May 2018. But the figures in today's chart are showing many businesses may be left with fines of up to 10 million Euros or 2% global turnover, unless action is taken. In the chart, we can see a massive 84% of small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) and 43% of C-suites are not even aware of the forthcoming regulation. [si_guide_block id="99357" title="Download Premium Resource – GDPR briefing guide" description="Our round-up of the best guidance on the latest European Union data protection and privacy legislation and how it affects you and your business Are you ready for the GDPR? The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679) comes into force in all 28 countries in Europe on 25th May 2018. It…

What digital marketers need to know about the GDPR

As a Data Protection Officer, one of the most common questions I am often asked by our customers and at networking events is, what are the impacts of GDPR on Marketing? Historically, the way we have obtained consent to personal information within digital and direct marketing has often been a grey area. The Data Protection Act 1998 was predicated around the Data Protection Directive (DPD), established well over 21 years ago.  It could not have possibly predicted, or have catered for, the digital age where big data has become big business.

[si_guide_block id="99357" title="Download Premium Resource – GDPR briefing guide" description="Our round-up of the best guidance on the latest European Union data protection and privacy legislation and how it affects you and your business Are you ready for the GDPR? The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679) comes into…

How to optimize your marketing and media priorities for the year ahead

Smart Insights have launched their first 'playbook' in response to our members' feedback.

[si_guide_block id="98899" title="Download Premium Resource – Paid Media and Digital Advertising Playbook" description="A playbook to help you identify the steps you can take to ensure your integrated paid media investments are successful. This paid media planning guide will provide marketers with a structured approach to paid media planning to help exploit these opportunities while managing the risks."/]

What is a playbook?

Complex sports, such as rugby, cricket, and American football, often involve a huge amount of strategy and so it’s not unusual to find that the coaches in charge have a set of tried and trusted guides comprising the plans, strategies, and tactics to counter different scenarios that arise within a game. In American football they call these guides ‘playbooks’ and they include detailed notes, diagrams, and methods…

Frameworks for measuring social media effectiveness

I am fortunate in that I get to spend a lot of time with clients on a daily basis and my current portfolio includes 86 agencies. One increasingly frequent topic of discussion at meetings is measurement, ROI and social media in particular. *For more guidance on social selling, check out our quick win, What is Social Selling and Why is it effective?, which includes detailed advice and activities on the B2B social selling platform LinkedIn. It will help you locate, connect and engage with mre if the right type of people and how to turn them into paying clients.* Amongst clients across varying sectors I see a lot of focus on owned channels, and I believe the potential of big data enabled by social media is often underutilized. What’s more, with in-house teams growing their own capabilities, agencies will need…

What works best in Digital Marketing today?

In our latest infographic, we show the importance of digital marketing to businesses today and the digital marketing techniques that marketers find most effective. To create it, we blended the latest research from the best sources for digital marketing consumer adoption stats with the results from our latest Managing Digital Marketing 2017 report. It's structured in three parts:  The Global Picture of consumer use; a review of benchmarks across the RACE customer lifecycle followed by research on the most effective techniques for managing Digital Marketing. This research from Smart Insights in association with the TFM&A 2017 event explores approaches businesses use to plan and manage their investments in digital marketing. Findings and recommendations are grouped into 6 areas to improve the commercial contribution of their digital marketing. Given that we're…

Chart of the day: Reporting the ROI of Social and Content Marketing proving difficult for marketers

As marketers we are constantly juggling more projects than seems possible at times -  planning the next campaign, delivering the current one as well as all the BAU activity of Email, Automation, Social, linking with the sales team and meeting...oh the meetings. It can feel like your in a whirlwind even with the most well thought out plans but one of the most turbulent times can be when you need to report on the ROI of particular activities. How do you find the right data? Is it accurate? How should your present it? It's hard. In a recent survey, TrackMaven asked marketers from 19 different industries what they were finding the most challenging when attempting to prove the ROI of their marketing. Of the many options, they could choose from attributing social and content to revenue leading the…