Why you need a plan to defend and improve your online reputation
In an online world of viral news articles and social media, your brand’s image is something that can quickly be affected by even the slightest misstep. That’s why protecting your brand’s reputation is more important than you’ll ever realize.
The Significance of Your Online Image
It’s easy for us to forget that the internet is still a relatively new business channel. When we look back on the history of the internet in 25 or 30 years, 2017 will still look very much like the Wild West. Rules are still being developed, concepts are just now being understood, and what works isn’t always clear.
But when you cut through all of the unknowns, it doesn’t take an advanced degree to recognize the importance of maintaining a strong online image. Information spreads fast online and you have to keep up.
The internet gives everyone a…
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02 Mar 2017
Multiple channels has led to a 'siloing' of marketing processes which is detrimental to your brand
As the number of channels used by customers has proliferated, so organisations have felt the pressure to keep in step with their customers. But although the need to adapt to customer preferences is vital, it has become increasingly apparent that many channels are being bolted on with little or no consideration for how they are integrated with the rest of the organisation.
In many cases, there is double trouble, as this sub-optimal channel support is also the action of a department that has decided to bypass the rest of the organisation in a bid to fast-track channel support. This means that we’re not just seeing evidence of the all-too-common operational silos, but are also witnessing channel silos being built on top.
Channel silos can take the form of:
Siloed marketing channels. Customers receive marketing messages across…
How to boost the effectiveness of your content marketing with properly mapped buyer personas
If you want to maximise results from your content marketing strategy, it is essential to map your buyer personas to the buying cycle. This is executed by delivering the right content, to the right people, at the right time.
If your business is B2B, your content marketing strategy is crucial to your success because 64 percent of B2B customers will engage in upwards of five blogs prior to purchase. However, a mere five percent of marketers believe their content marketing strategy is moving in the right direction, according to Top Rank Marketing.
Blogs, videos, ebooks, case studies, and infographics are all invaluable content marketing assets. And you want these content marketing assets represented in each stage of the buying cycle.
To make the absolute most of your content marketing strategy, you need to develop your buyer’s journey. This allows…
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28 Feb 2017
How to build your content marketing strategy?
When the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) recently surveyed businesses about the state of their content marketing strategies, the findings were revealing – nearly two-thirds reported that their organisations did not have a documented strategy. However, for those working in the industry, this statistic wasn’t a great shock.
'I continue to look at that number and shake my head!' says Joe Pulizzi, Founder of the Content Marketing Institute. 'It doesn’t surprise me, though. I do speeches every week and I’ll ask them that question: how many of you have a documented content marketing strategy? And I’ve never gotten more than 40% of the audience responding ‘yes’, even in what I would call advanced audiences.'
Yet with the CMI study also revealing that those with a documented strategy were more effective in nearly all…
Crawl, walk, run: three steps to establishing an effective DMP
As digital marketers we're all too aware of the importance of data. For example, the typical fortune 1000 company that sees a 10% increase in data accessibility generates $65 million in additional revenue, whilst bad or poor quality data costs organisations as much as 10-20% in revenue.
Although Big Data is no longer a new area of interest for marketers, the constant change in trends and focus mean that we must always stay up to date, if not one step ahead, of the trends to ensure we hold a competitive advantage. Just consider the sheer complexity of data-related terms:
I recently attended a data-driven marketing event run by the Omnicom Group which gave me the opportunity to look at some of the insights and trends from those working at the…
Thinking like Sun Tzu to improve your strategic position
This is the second part to last week's interpretation of how Sun Tzu's Art of War can be applied to digital marketing.
Here I'll cover three ways in which applying Sun Tzu's Art of War can help develop your marketing or digital marketing strategy, starting with the 5 elements...
The 5 Elements to defining your strategic position
Sun Tzu defines five key elements to help understand your position that make total sense when applied to marketing too. Your strategic position is never strong or weak... it is only strong or weak in relation to something or someone else.
Mission or the way: This is what unites all of the people in the Army (organisation) and the customer. It helps everybody to share the same goals and objectives, it allows everyone to 'get real', to feel that what has been…
Be alert to the danger of new government Digital Economy bill
Its hard to believe, but digital marketing may be at its most critical point to date. Day-to-day it continues selling services and products, and maintaining purchasing loyalty while many of those involved are unaware of why a government bill could change everything forever.
The act is nearing its final phase of Westminster consideration before Royal Assent is the Digital Economy Bill, and the element of danger in what is wide and far reaching legislation is a section that instructs the Information Commissioners Office to produce new direct marketing guidelines, which incorporates anything to do with consumer data relating to digital marketing.
This in itself may seem fairly innocuous until the background is considered. The ICO will be instructed to produce new recommendations for ministers to consider. But it knows and understands acutely that the…
The biggest technology trends emerging this year
For organisations of all shapes and sizes, it’s crucial to stay ahead of the latest digital and technological advances. To help you do this, we’ve looked ahead at those trends that will have a major impact in 2017 - and beyond…
2016 saw significant technological advances in a number of different areas (as we discussed in a post on the Box UK blog towards the end of last year). It doesn’t look like this rapid rate of change will slow anytime soon - so what will everyone be talking about in this year? Here are some of the trends we expect to see dominate:
‘Digital Transformation’
Addressing one of the most talked-about trends in recent years, digital transformation may be fast becoming an overused and increasingly vague term - but with four generations now in the workplace and collaborating across all sorts of projects, digital is…
Chart of the Day: Online spend surges whilst spending on newspaper advertising slumps
GroupM predicts that global marketing spend will reach an impressive $1 trillion dollars this year. But that increase in spend isn't evenly distributed across marketing mediums.
It varies considerably from country to country, so it's worth breaking down the spend across the major economies. Brazil is the only country with digital ad spend falling. This is due to the country being in the grips of the worst recession it has experienced since the 1930s.
Elsewhere the trends are broadly positive, especially for digital. We're seeing large increases across the board, with digital ad spend surging by an impressive 30% in India and a strong 15% in the UK. The USA is by far the largest mature economy with the biggest ad market, and digital spend is still increasing by a healthy 9%. TV ad revenue is also growing, though at a…
Leads are only as good as your ability to know how to calculate their value
Lead generation isn’t as popular as other acquisition channels such as Straight Sale, CPC, CPI or CPA.
Why?
Because most people struggle to understand two important things:
How to do it properly
How to calculate its value
In this article, you’ll learn how to overcome these two obstacles and discover the information helping companies dominate their markets.
How to do lead generation properly
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has some excellent advice. He says: “We don’t make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.”
This is the most important thing to master if you want to do lead generation well. You must be customer centric.
Move away from a transactional mindset. Instead, think about repeat, retention-based sales. Doing this dramatically increases the lifetime value of…
