Marketing agencies need to learn from tech leaders
Having spent ten years spearheading one of the UK’s leading dot com companies to digital success, Dave Heath is now shaking up the agency landscape by taking dot com thinking into agency processes.
Dave believes all companies should behave like a dot com; and an agency’s role is to help clients take a dot com approach to gain competitive advantage, especially where technology is core to achieving business goals – arguably in 2016 this is almost every company.
[si_definition title="What is it? Dot Com" description="A dot com company is a company that does most of its business on the internet, usually through a website that uses the popular top-level domain “.com”."/]
Some of the largest dot com companies are undoubtedly leading the field in digital innovation, delivering huge profits as a result.
Dot coms tend to act differently to multi-channel businesses that have added…
The 11 step launch marketing plan
The success of a startup will often depend on its approach to marketing. Unfortunately the vast majority of startup founders have little to no experience or marketing or managing a marketing budget. How do you deal with this dangerous contradiction? Well it's in the planning! Make sure that you’ve got your marketing strategy in line by applying this product launch framework.
There are a million articles out there on brand development, launch marketing, PR, viral videos and more. Reading them all would be a start – or you can check our tried and tested approach below!
The framework described below is typically rolled out step by step over 18 months. We hope it helps.
'In this world of intangibles and endless competition branding is everything.'
Phase 1 - Strategic Positioning, Brand and Web Presence
1. Strategic positioning (ad Early Adopter target market definition)
The first step in a successful brand/product…
Google's new shopping insights tool offers useful data to ecommerce marketers
It might feel too early for a lot of people but the holiday season has already started for the retail industry. Lights are being turned on by celebrities, merchandisers are arranging fancy new window displays, and a new Michael Bublé record is heading to the top of the charts. While the attention might be on the bright lights of every high street and shopping centers, the real winner will be the ecommerce industry with continued growth expected.
I was browsing for the must-have toys of 2016 and stumbled across an amazing tool from Think with Google - Shopping Insights. This tool is still in beta but has a wealth of data allowing you to explore trends and popularity of consumer products across the U.S.
As you…
Innovative First Car Quote project stalls just before launch
You'll know that Facebook is the largest social media network in the world with over 1.13 billion daily active users and 1.03 billion mobile daily active users. Advertising on Facebook has major advantages as companies can proactively target individuals based on their profile, that’s their gender, age, location and many other demographics. You can even target users based on their favourite TV programmes. Advertising IS Facebook’s business, looking at the revenue for the last quarter that was 6,239 billion US dollars, which represents a 63% increase since 2015.
Whilst Facebook captures more data than any other network, it has detailed policies on how the data can be used. It states “Advertisers are responsible for understanding and complying with all applicable laws and regulations. Failure to comply may result in a variety of consequences, including the cancellation of ads you have placed and…
Planning and optimising across the whole customer journey is the most effective way to win and retain customers.
Anyone who's worked for an Ecommerce business, or indeed just about any kind of business, will know that customer retention and re-activation is the key to driving consistent growth in profit.
Attracting entirely new customers at the top of the funnel can often become the focus of Ecommerce campaigns because you naturally want to get more and more people into that funnel to convert and thus make you money. But if you have not invested sufficiently in creating an engaging customer lifecycle which converts and re-engages your customers to tempt repeat purchases then attracting new customers will not be the most effective tactic. You should be focusing on improving the customer lifecycle itself.
I'm going to show you why with a nifty little tool I like to call maths.
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Digital Strategy moves into 2nd place whilst Branding advice becomes less sought after
Many senior marketers search for an agency starts exactly where you might expect, by searching.
Agency Spotter, which helps connect agencies and buyers have analysed their search traffic to reveal just what marketers are searching for when they are looking for an agency.
The results can be used to help agencies adapt their offering. The data reveals the services that were being searched for the most and the change over time.
Advertising, digital strategy, social media, as well as marketing strategy and mobile marketing stayed top consistently from 2014 to the first half of 2016. Searches for these terms didn't change much at all over this period, suggesting longevity of the needs for these services.
Branding, design strategy, eCommerce and communication design searches declined heavily over the period. Interest in user experience and email marketing also…
Plan your use of new marketing technologies to future-proof your business
Digital Marketing is constantly playing catch up with the latest new tech trends. This means that the only way to get great results from digital marketing and execute a successful digital marketing strategy is to be aware of the latest technology and be actively innovating by putting cutting-edge techniques into practice. Not doing so is a sure fire way to fall behind the competition.
The pace of technological change is not just relentless, it is constantly increasing. Where once it may have taken 10 years for a platform to achieve 50% adoption, now it may only be two or three- as you can see from the chart below. As these trends accelerate we could soon enter a time well new technologies decelerate so fast we measure the time for them to reach the masses in weeks and months rather than years and decades.
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Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality will transform from interesting gimmick to core marketing channel
Virtual and Augmented reality tech has already started to make waves in the world of marketing, but you ain't seen nothing yet!
According to research conducted by Goldman Sachs, the market for VR and AR tech is set to explode in size, reaching a combined $35 billion worth of revenue by 2025. This may sound like a long way off, but it's only 8 years away- which will go quicker than you think!
For marketers the really juicy segments in the chart are the retail, video entertainment and live events sections, which combined account for more than eight and a half billion dollars in predicted market size. There are a myriad of ways this kind of technology will prove a boon for marketers in all sorts of different industries - augmented reality dressing rooms for retail, showing prospects around a…
Bending The Budget: Adapting Your Marketing Budget To The Season
As marketing professionals, we’re beholden to the seasons – some times of year are simply better for sales than others. For this reason alone, it doesn’t make sense to evenly distribute your marketing budget across the year, but there are other relevant reasons you should be budgeting seasonally as well. When we pay attention to our target audience and the needs our products fulfill, we can make smarter decisions about marketing budget allocations.
Identifying Your Strategies
One thing you’ll need to take into consideration when breaking down your digital marketing budget each season will be the question of format. There are many different ways to build your digital presence, but they come with varied expenses.
Search ads – the ads that appear on search engines when someone enters relevant terms – often take up about the same portion of the average digital marketing…
A guide to the marketing job market for those looking to enter it
In a few months a new wave of fresh-faced college grads will start applying for their first real job. Some may have had internships or summer jobs in the past but this is a whole different thing. This is where your real career starts and it is something to be extremely excited about. I mean you have technically worked your entire life to get to this point.
What is not so exciting is that millennials like those college grads are having a tough time in the job market. Unemployment is at a steady 5% for the recent past. Wages are down 14% in a short ten-year time span and income inequality is rising. And do not even get me started on the explosion of college debt.
Plus the older generation think that we are literally the worst and should have…
