The Final day of our Successful Content Marketing Series
Successful content marketing is an "always-on campaign" – to do it right, you need to keep up an ongoing flow of content, so you’re always there when a prospect wants to join the conversation or asks a question that you have the answer for.
Here are three easy ways to keep the content momentum going:
1. Explode your assets: When you create a big piece of content such as an industry report or an in-depth white paper, plan and structure it so that lots of little bits can be broken off and used independently in other channels to promote and amplify – tweets, blog posts, Google+ updates and so on.
2. Brainstorm series of ideas: Don’t just look for one-off ideas…
Evolution, not revolution is the pragmatic approach to Digital Transformation
Businesses of any scale can generate huge quantities of data from their analytics – most of it with the potential to improve performance. But to realize that potential, to action the actionable takes time, focus and budget.
This research from the Smart Insights Managing Digital Marketing report shows that many businesses are conscious that they are not spending sufficient time on planning and optimization.
In organisations who have yet to embrace data as a vital marketing tool, getting buy-in for the resources to make it happen can be challenging to say the least.
As a digital transformation specialist, I often work with people at the start of their journey to a digital direct-sell business model. For them it represents a…
An interactive map for your new digital marketing job role
Do you know where your digital skills and passions lie, but aren't sure which digital marketing role to target? NeoMam Studios have produced a fun infographic to help you map out your skills with suggested roles. Although it references apprenticeships it also prompts thoughts about the right type of role for more experienced digital marketers
This will be a useful tool to use in conjunction with our recently updated Digital Marketing Job Descriptions and Roles Template to guide you through the digital jobs maze to find what is right for you or to build up a role specification for a new digital specialist in your team.
As you clickthrough you will have the chance to click onto the 4 skills at the end of your mapping and be…
Day 3 in our 5 days to Successful Content Marketing series
In previous days in our series we have defined a vision and strategy for Content Marketing. Now, today’s the day to start thinking about who’s actually going to put all of this together. You’ll need to work out who does what in your content team, and how much time and effort you can realistically muster.
At its simplest, your content team needs to look something like this:
All of the above roles could be resourced in different ways, depending on the scale and ambition of your operation. In some cases, several roles may be filled by one person wearing several hats; in other cases, one role may be taken by a whole team or an outsourced agency.…
Practices agencies should avoid when reporting digital marketing performance to clients, and tips for how to get it right
As marketers, and humans for that matter, we’ve all been guilty of committing (at least) one of the seven deadly sins in one way or another. You won’t have Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman hunting you down, but when it comes to marketing agencies, committing these reporting sins can be deadly to the agency/client relationship.
Deadly reporting Sin 1: Avarice
Otherwise known as greed, Avarice is a sin of excess. Clients want and need to know what their agency is doing to move the needle, but consistently sending them an overly-comprehensive reports can be a lose-lose for the client and the agency.
Massive reports take agencies a lot of time to prepare, billable hours that could be better…
5 Steps to empower your team to set relevant digital marketing goals
Budget planning. It comes around every year like clockwork. Most CMOs or Marketing directors are pivotal to business planning in the first place, but even after the business plan is formed business goals need to be translated into useful information for the marketing team to formulate their own plans and marketing objectives. If done well, this is a really empowering exercise for marketing teams and gets people out of their day-to-day job and into thinking about the bigger picture, even excited about the year ahead (good for staff retention). The post below outlines the 5 steps I go through to ensure that the marketing department are aligned and facing the same way as the business leaders, it assumes business goals are set and that you are including your team in creating marketing specific goals…
3 actions to kickstart Digital Transformation
Take a deep breath, you’ve managed to get the senior team to commit to a digital project and your digital transformation journey has started. The next stage requires a sprint! A big leap forward to catch up with or leapfrog the competitors. Here are three actions you can take now:
1. Benchmark against the competitors
2. Listen to your customers
3. Build a team
1. Benchmark your business against the competitors
Benchmarking will identify the biggest gaps and generate a priority action list. There are many tools available to enable you to benchmark your digital marketing capabilities as part of strategy development.
Strategic Benchmarking Tool
One of my favourites is this strategic benchmarking tool. It doesn’t require a lot of effort, so it’s painless, although the questions are thought-provoking. You could ask several team members to complete and then compare results. Simply select your answer from a drop down box…
31 Predictions on the Future of B2B Marketing
Each year, through the year, I’m reviewing the latest trends and predictions for digital marketing to update Smart Insights members and to include in new editions of my books I’m working on. Looking to the year ahead, I have just updated my ideas on trends in marketing for 2015 with a focus on the latest software tools to help digital marketers - please take a look and vote on the most important trend for your business!
My reviews tend to span across all of digital marketing, so I was interested to see this compilation of predictions compiled by Lee Odden of TopRank Online Marketing focusing on the future of B2B Digital Marketing.
It’s curated by Top Rank Digital in association with Marketing Profs for their upcoming B2B Forum, so I was interested to take a…
How to create a marketing plan to launch your mobile app in three simple stages
Creating an app is a major accomplishment, but sadly not a guarantee of riches and rewards. If you want to make any money from your carefully crafted creation, you will need a solid and effective app marketing launch plan. Here is how you I believe you should create a plan based on my experience of app launches.If you want to make your app a success, promotion should start way before you’re ready to launch. It’s no good developing a beautiful app if no one ever learns of its existence, so it is vital to have a detailed plan in place of how to market your product and get it turning over a profit as quickly as possible.
Where to start with your…
A review of the latest digital marketing approaches for charities and not-for-profits
Digital marketing is now a core communications method for Charities and Not-for-Profit organisations (NfPs). Charity websites give a great platform as a vital communications channel to inspire and engage people, raise funds, provoke discussion and explain the benefits and use of services provided through fundraising.
Trends in digital marketing for charities?
The future direction of Digital Marketing for charities was discussed by Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights at a recent keynote delivered to the Comms Rewired conference organized by The Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations (SCVO) - the membership organisation for Scotland’s charities, voluntary organisations and social enterprises.
[slideshare id=39786189&doc=digital-marketing-trends-for-nfp-davechaffey-scvo-141002024327-phpapp01]
You can see in the Slideshare that Dave reviewed examples of how charities are using digital communications across the Smart Insights RACE planning framework. Dave recommended that content marketing should be a the heart of charity marketing. As our Inbound marketing blueprint suggests, this requires these 6 key actions Dave…
