Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

When you think of the basics of marketing, you might be thinking: Okay, create an awesome website; design and send some cool emails; post strategically to social media; maybe supplement with some advertising.

But what about the principles behind your campaigns? When you're planning and doing all of these marketing activities, what motivates your decisions?

Today, the most successful marketers aren't just crossing items off their to-do lists; they're taking a holistic, adaptive approach to their marketing. They're elevating the customer experience, building personalized connections, adapting to the evolution of technology, attracting customers to them using inbound marketing, and more.

When marketers take this approach, they start creating a better brand experience and driving real business results. To learn more about the eight pillars of modern marketing,check out the infographic below from Olive & Company....

When town hall participant Karl Becker got the closing question in the second presidential debate, I was thrilled to see him ask the same question I had submitted to the openquestionforum.org the prior week. Some viewers may have laughed at the naiveté of our kindergarten-level suggestion to name something positive about your opponent. But not behavioral scientists.

It often feels impossible to change people’s minds on an issue. Most attempts to persuade backfire and make the gulf between groups of opposing views an even wider chasm, filled with toxic verbal sewerage. You’d think 21st-century educated humans might consider evidence and adjust their views accordingly. But behavioral science shows that the more facts and evidence you bring to the argument, the more adversarial things become for most humans, and the farther off you push any reconciliation.

There are many names for this phenomenon: confirmation bias; motivated reasoning; and backfire effect. Some of the earliest research into motivated reasoning even demonstrated that two rival groups watching the same video take away opposing conclusions.But what Karl and I were getting at is a tactic known as “affirmation.” It may be one of the only ways to begin to melt rigid opinions just enough to enable some flexible discussion. Here’s what it is and how it works — whether in politics, or at the office, or in negotiations....

I must have heard the words "we need to create a strategic plan" at least an order of magnitude more times than I have heard "we need to create a strategy."

This is because most people see strategy as an exercise in producing a planning document. In this conception, strategy is manifested as a long list of initiatives with timeframes associated and resources assigned. Somewhat intriguingly, at least to me, the initiatives are themselves often called "strategies." That is, each different initiative is a strategy and the plan is an organized list of the strategies.

But how does a strategic plan of this sort differ from a budget? Many people with whom I work find it hard to distinguish between the two and wonder why a company needs to have both. And I think they are right to wonder. The vast majority of strategic plans that I have seen over 30 years of working in the strategy realm are simply budgets with lots of explanatory words attached....

First, while this piece is about content marketing, it focuses on the “getting started” steps. A lot of people call these steps “content strategy.”

This article goes a little beyond that, getting to best practices and a few favorite tools.Kicking off any content marketing process starts with the strategy, then moves into some basic process planning.

This is how we do it at Portent:

- Existing content inventory

- Competitive analysis

- Drawing conclusions

- Building the “machine” around best practices, tools and people

#1 is the most mechanically-involved task, because you have to grab a lot of data and mush it all together. #2 is the shortest. #3 and 4 are the most demanding (for me, anyway) because I have to suss out impossible-to-automate marketing stuff that’s essential to success....