Part 3 of "Life's a Pitch"
In previous posts in this series I wrote about my experiences of managing the agency to client pitch process and writing a creative brief. In the final part of the series I look at issues to consider when selecting the preferred agency.
It is not uncommon for clients to go about the pitch process in a less than ideal way, with problematic outcomes including having to ask agencies to re-pitch, or even not choosing any agencies.
Like many, I have experienced such issues on a number of occasions. A recent example of this would be with a cosmetic surgery brand, who invited us to a 3-way pitch, for their new hair transplant business.
We thought we'd done a good job; were told it was “the best agency pitch I’ve seen in 30 years” etc and then we waited… And we waited… And we waited… After 2 weeks…
Using the LinkedIn Skills feature for career development or identifying influencers
Update: September 2012. LinkedIn now has 10 million users in the UK, impressive for a country with a population just shy of 60 million. LinkedIn say that's four out of 5 professionals. To celebrate, LinkedIn have produced this nice infographic we thought we'd share with a reminder to check our tutorial below for how many are in each specific business category.
LinkedIn Skills will show you how many professionals share your skills and who are the major influencers in your sector.
This is a relatively new feature in LinkedIn that pulls data from its now enormous user-base to create both an interesting and useful tool.
In this post, I'll first take a look at how the size and growth of…
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17 Sep 2012
A small business campaign example shows which calls-to-action work best
Giulia’s family runs the popular Italian restaurant ‘Al Gatto Nero’, in Poole in the UK, and they get customer interactions with QR Codes every day.
Giulia’s goal is to spread the word about their delicious stone-baked pizzas. She decides to use QR codes to get more Facebook likes and more enewsletter sign ups. Good move!
As there are several places she wants to use QR codes, Giulia decides to use the Campaigns and Sources to track which places give her the best results.
She has already registered for a free account at www.freeqrcodetracker.com, so she logs in and starts by creating 2 campaigns:
Campaign #1: “Facebook – get more likes”
Campaign #2: “enewsletter – get more sign-ups“
Giulia now creates…
An infographic showing how to plan and manage inbound marketing
I'm a big fan of the inbound marketing model, sometimes incorrectly referred to by the narrower marketing activities of content marketing or social media marketing. Inbound incorporates both content and social media marketing and more.
Although there is a lot of advice available on best practice on inbound marketing activities, there isn't so much on how to manage it, so I liked this infographic from a US agency. I think it's a pretty good stab at the describing the end-to-end process.
It's a different take on the inbound marketing process to our inbound marketing funnel we published in February. It does miss a number of key activities (namely the importance of creative, a 'big idea' and outreach) by the nature of simplifying process for an infographic, yet crucially communicates the importance of leads and sales (step 4…
What are the common best practices, are best practices always best?
I was honoured to be asked to give this presentation for Manchester Manchester Metropolitan University Business School to launch the new Faculty of Business and Law, a stunning new £75 million teaching and research headquarters and business hub.
An updated, shorter version of the Manchester Business school deck was also presented to students and professionals at Leeds Metropolitan University and to an IDM Network evening in September 2012 which is included at the end of this post.
Leeds Metropolitan University presentation - November 2012
Manchester presentation - September 2012
We're often told to follow "best practices" in our digital marketing. In the talk I explore the value of this and some of the problems. How do we know what…
Shortcuts give you quick access to your favourite reports and customisations
Importance: [rating=1]
Value for user: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Google Analytics Support Page
I’ve just been taking a look at this new Google feature. Although it doesn't involve a new report or big change to the interface, I think it’s worth sharing as a mini-tutorial since it could save you hours of time across the year if you know about it. I’ll certainly be flagging it up prominently on training courses.
What are Shortcuts?
Shortcuts simply remember your settings for an individual report. They’re like Favourites or Bookmarks for reports. Any Standard or Custom report can be added to your shortcuts but Goal reports, Real-time and Intelligence reports are excluded.
How do you set them up?
This is easy, for the report your currently viewing, just select the “Shortcut (Beta)” option from the options at the top of the report you want saving.
Here I've set one up…
How Facebook Test and Improve
It’s interesting to see recent details of how Facebook are now testing changes to their experience and ads using the vast amount of data at their disposal. I’ve been taking a look and thinking what this means for smaller businesses without this data and resource.
Facebook recently disclosed in a briefing on how it uses Big Data that its system processes a mind-boggling 2.5 billion pieces of content and 500+ terabytes of data each day. It’s processing 2.7 billion Like actions and 300 million photos per day, and it scans roughly 105 terabytes of data each half hour.
I’ve been reading about how they manage this in the Facebook engineering blog in this post by Andrew (Boz) Bosworth who is the Director of Engineering at Facebook and is naturally from Harvard and FWIW looks a cool dude!
…
Presentations on Mobile and Digital Strategy from two On The Edge conferences in 2013
10 Mobile marketing mistakes you can avoid through creating a Mobile Marketing Strategy
In this presentation to On The Edge Digital Marketing, London in October 2013 I covered 10 common mistakes and a 10 step plan to help marketers work through a mobile strategy. I hope these are helpful, see Rob Thurner's Smart Insights guide to developing a digital mobile strategy for more detail.
Avoiding the 10 most common mobile marketing mistakes from Dave Chaffey
Global digital strategy
The next two decks are from similar talks by Dave Chaffey in 2013 reviewing 8 key factors to to focus on to help deliver business growth from…
There were no major updates on the major digital platforms this month; perhaps the most significant was the announcement that Pinterest has opened free access to all and developed new mobile services which could further spur adoption.
I’d pick our first alert on the new content streaming services as the most interesting topic of discussion for this month, it shows how digital communications platforms continue to evolve.
I’ve summarised the updates on what’s new in the standard five areas to make it quick for you to scan what’s new.
Strategy and planning
The co-founders of Twitter unveiled two new social websites - This alert by The Drum simply says they’re called Medium and Branch and are currently invite only - one to watch. If this sounds insignificant, ReadWriteWeb says “we’re witnessing another sea change in Web publishing” - take a look at this summary by Richard MacManus for 5 reasons why web…
Google+ with Google Apps, a platform for business?
I've written recently about Google+ as the true social network and so it's particularly fascinating to read this announcement today about Bringing Google+ to Work - it's a very exciting step for Google considering their already significant progress into Cloud based business applications - something that we already use across Smart Insights as it turns out.
A new business specific feature set
1. Private sharing
Google Apps users (people running Gmail for business email, Calendar and Docs) get more control over the content they post to Google+. Simply mark it as 'restricted'. These posts become private to your organisation and can never be re-shared with anyone outside. You still get the flexibility to share it with specific partners or colleagues outside the organisation as well if you choose.
Video meetings integrated with Google Apps
Thanks…
