Focusing your efforts on redesigning your brand identity is crucial for your startup’s success. Here are some tips that’ll help you head in the right direction.
With new businesses appearing almost out of thin air everywhere around us, there is no doubt that in order for your startup to reach your target audience and make a difference it has to stand out. While your startup’s product or service may be the one thing this world has been missing if no one ever hears about it, did it make a sound? This is exactly why your brand identity is so important.
A business’ brand identity refers to the ways in which your company is represented, what its values, purpose, passions and goals are. There are many advantages to creating a strong brand identity. These include your being able to develop a competitive advantage in the…
Massive mobile tech trends that will impact marketing this year
You want your small business to make it in 2017; you better be aware of the mobile technology trends that are redefining how companies sell and market their products, advertise, or directly operate on a day to day basis. Change and new technology can be intimidating, but the reality of the situation is that for every business that resists change, there are two of its competitors who are embracing it. If your company doesn't embrace the change brought on by mobile technology, your business will become a flip-phone in a smartphone world.
It’s a new year, so it’s the perfect time to try something new with your business, and a mobile app should be one of those things. Chances are, you are already reading up about the industry-specific trends that will affect you. Mobile apps are no different, except they are changing…
What is B2i marketing and how can it help you make your marketing smarter?
You’ve heard of B2B and B2C - But what about B2i? B2B marketers and strategists are quickly adopting this emerging trend that puts their businesses in direct contact with their clients’ end-consumers: from business to individual.
As the world becomes more interconnected, businesses are beginning to understand that they must think beyond the needs of their immediate clients and consider their clients’ clients as well. Sure, they still might sell directly to the CEOs, CIOs, and other C-suite executives. But their solutions must address their clients’ core needs, which always go back to the individual consumer.
Most people assume that the “I” in B2i is for “internet.” But B2i isn’t about online marketing. B2i demands a holistic view of a client’s business, especially as companies create new business models to…
Do You Understand the Company's Expectations on Your Digital Marketing Team?
"I now realize that my team and I did the exact contrary of what management expected from us." This could be the post-mortem quote of most digital marketing teams that got downsized or swallowed by another team. Truth is that finding the appropriate positioning for a digital marketing team is hard. Fortunately, this post helps you fulfill the two conditions for leading a new digital marketing team to success:
Positioning your team appropriately.
Linking your activity to business results.
Your First Task: Marketing Your Own Team
I remember discussing with the leader of a marketing team from a large European telecom operator. During our exchanges, we identified 7 other teams working on digital marketing topics in this mobile operator company! There were the corporate level teams, the country-level teams, the digital marketing and the traditional marketing teams, split by market: enterprise vs…
Key lessons from the Strategy and Innovation World Forum
Robert Jones, our research analyst and I headed off to London last week to go to the Strategy and Innovation World Forum, set up by World Forum Disrupt. The Innovation Directors were attending in force, and with talks from the global heads of innovation from Santander, BT, UNICEF, Vodaphone and other world leading businesses there were plenty of interesting lessons to be gleaned.
With over 32 different speakers over the two days of the forum, it would be a bit of an information overload, if I tried to convey everything that was discussed at the event. But it did offer some great insights into the cutting edge of innovation strategy, so I've tried to distil the top 8 talks into just a few bite-sized takeaways that you can learn from and implement when developing your own innovation strategy.
Setting Strategies for uncertain times - …
Chart of the day: customers delete smartphone applications mostly because the app is not useful
A study of over 2,000 app users found that users delete the app because it's either taking up too much space on their device or the app uses lots of data.
Bugs and dislike of the ads in the app were also issues for users, as well as too many promotional issues.
Key takeaways:
It's important to make app content relevant, as encouraging customers to download your app is the hard bit, keeping them in important. It's best not to just create an app, it needs to be relevant and useful, just having an app is not good marketing.
Source: MarketingSherpa Customer Satisfaction Research Survey
Sample: 2,400 consumers
Recommended resource: Read more about marketing your app or building your first app
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Our new guide shows you how to set up and optimise your tag management system
Today, marketers have a wealth of potential tools to manage their digital marketing as shown by the Smart Insights infographic wheel of digital marketing technologies organised around the RACE planning framework.
Yet this presents a challenge, since the number of tags on any one web page has increased, in some extreme cases into double-digits, the need for a more effective way to manage them has emerged.
This amazing array of tools and products will generally have one thing in common –they all need to be installed using a JavaScript tag, a simple pixel, or most likely both.
A Tag Management System is a method of replacing a multitude of tags with a single tag that effectively acts as a beacon for all.
The system has come about through the innovation of such tools and products and the need to quickly…
A new report shows over half of web traffic comes from bots
Ever year Incapsula release their bot traffic report, and every year I can't help but be shocked by quite how online traffic is comprised of bots. This year was particularly shocking but human traffic fell below the 50% mark, meaning that the majority of web traffic is now comprised of bots. And before you go thinking; 'that just must be wrong, how could there be that many bots?', the report analyzed 6.7 billion web visits across 100,000 randomly selected domains. With a sample size almost as large as the total population of the planet earth, it's likely that this finding is not far off the mark.
Bots aren't necessarily bad, many perform useful functions which the internet would not function properly without. However, the report also analyzed the nature of the bots, dividing them into the 'good bots' which provide useful functions, and 'bad bots'…
Chart of the Day: New innovative management styles and their predecessors
When we talk about managing marketing teams, the emphasis is usually on building up a culture which inspires devotion and innovation. When looking to change company culture managers often have a hard time getting people to align themselves with what they envision the culture should be. That's where I think this graphic can be really useful. It shows the key breakthroughs in the history of managing human collaboration, right from tribes to the most innovative organizations in the world.
The chart doesn't specify any examples of the final 'teal' tier of human collaboration. But I think examples like Valve and Spotify show how self-managing teams can be incredibly efficient and effective.
Source: Strategy+Busines
Recommended Toolkit: Managing Digital Marketing Teams
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How to make the most out of your company's data
Today’s corporate agendas revolve around the staggering amount of data available and the advanced analytics needed to gather, interpret and use such data. When it comes to Big Data and Advanced Analytics, things can get really tricky for a company not making the best of them.
A recent McKinsey report shows that businesses which are not able to leverage Big Data and which fail to achieve performing data management also witness an average of 14% in lost revenues per year. Surprisingly, oil companies, life sciences, and consumer goods make the top three industries where big data and advanced analytics are poorly managed, thus leading to financial losses.
As opposed to the McKinsey report, a study coming from MIT and Harvard Business School shows that companies focusing on big data management and advanced analysis witness an increase in revenue of up to 6%…
