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With the rise of so many digital options, the marketing landscape has become extremely complex. New buzzwords crop up every day and new tools promise to be the next best technology to drive growth. Despite all of this, the fundamentals of business haven’t changed. In fact, stepping back and reflecting on the basic goals of growth can often get lost when smitten by new powerful data-driven tools, automation rules and new social and digital options. While the tools marketers leverage today are often changing rapidly, what was true in 1950 is still true today when it comes to successful businesses. Every successful business needs new customer trials, proper and quality communication with its customers, and needs to maintain a positive reputation in its community.In a recent survey my company conducted with our client base of thousands of local businesses, we determined that the most successful businesses were focused on these three business fundamentals when making marketing decisions. We spoke with small business owners throughout the country in face-to-face interviews to learn about their time in business, positive and negative factors that influence their companies, marketing and customer loyalty, and more. While some used different tools to accomplish their goals, all were using some form of modern and traditional means to execute their strategies....
“It is not about doing ‘digital marketing’, it is about marketing effectively in a digital world.”
I really like this quote from Diageo CEO Ivan Menezes. It keeps the technology in perspective, relative to the consumer. It puts the onus on everyone, not just those with digital in their job title.
In contrast, many organizations treat it as “doing digital.” Some have even created a new C-level role called the Chief Digital Officer. Floating somewhere between a CMO and a CIO, McKinsey describes the CDO role as “Transformer in Chief.”
Giving “Digital” C-level focus appears to give “Digital” a high level of strategic priority, but it also treats it as a silo, distinct from the rest of the business. It can be heavy on hype and light on substance. It can obviate the responsibility of everyone in an organization to figure out how to do what they do better with digital technology....
If you are creating content for your website without a strategy or have clients who haven’t tracked any of their on-site content creation, it’s probably time for a content marketing audit. An on-site content marketing audit allows you to gather insight from work that has been done, determine work that needs to be done, and decide how to direct your future strategy. Go through the following steps to identify the best-performing content on your website from social media, link generation, user feedback, and keyword relevancy perspective and create a content audit template. Through this process, you will collect, review, and analyze data to produce actionable takeaways and build a strategic on-site content marketing plan for the future....
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....
Princeton psychologists learned that first impressions form in less than a second. Sounds crazy but it’s not. Even though we consider ourselves logical and modern human beings, the majority of our decisions are made by the ancient, instinctive subconscious part of our brains, sometimes referred to as our “reptilian brain.” That doesn’t mean that the quality of our decisions is lowered; some, like Malcolm Gladwell in Blink, argue that quick, gut-level decisions are actually better and save us time and agony. Let’s explore how emotions play into modern-day marketing and why....
As we’ve already outlined, your digital strategy is the series of actions you take to help you achieve your overarching marketing goal. Your digital marketing campaigns are the building blocks or actions within your strategy that move you towards meeting that goal. For example, you might decide to run a campaign sharing some of your best performing gated content on Twitter to generate more leads through that channel. That campaign is part of your strategy to generate more leads.It’s important to note that even if a campaign runs over the course of a couple of years, it doesn’t make it a strategy -- it’s still a tactic that sits alongside other campaigns to form your strategy. Now we’ve got to grips with the basics of digital strategy and digital marketing campaigns, let’s dig into how to build your strategy....
Both current and former customers of the outdoor-clothing company Patagonia, for example, are more likely to consider themselves quite knowledgeable when compared to other shoppers, yet less equipped with social skills than the Lord & Taylor crowd. People who shop at Hot Topic, which caters to a younger, more alternative demographic, see themselves as highly imaginative, while patrons of Jos. A. Bank, which sells men's suits and business casual attire, see themselves as leaders.
Overall, these distinct personality types reveal the power of marketing, if done right.
One report anticipates that the retail industry alone will spend $15.09 billion on digital ads in 2016, followed by $16.95 billion in 2017 — a 12% increase. While it's important to know the best location to place an ad, knowing the personality of your intended audience is just as crucial....
Perhaps most reflective of this has been the award-winning juggernaut of REI's #OptOutside campaign, which won the Titanium Grand Prix on Saturday. If for some reason you weren't one of its 6.7 billion media impressions, essentially the company closed its doors on Black Friday, encouraging its employees and everyone else to get out into the outdoors. Beyond the ad, starring REI chief exec Jerry Stritzke introducing the idea from a wide-open office, the brand also created a helpful online guide to hiking trails and other outdoor activities around the U.S.
By encouraging us to drop out of the annual shopping day, the outdoor retailer aims for more sales and brand loyalty. The company said the brand's social media impressions went up 7,000%, with 2.7 billion media impressions in 24 hours, while overall the campaign attracted 6.7 billion media impressions, 1.2 billion social impressions, and got more than 1.4 million people to spend the day outdoors. Meanwhile, more than 150 other companies joined REI to close their doors on Black Friday, and hundreds of state parks opened up for free.
If Cannes is the ad and marketing industry's Oscars, than this is arguably Best Picture. The Titanium category is meant to honor work that breaks new ground, crosses boundaries, and pushes the industry forward. The win adds to the campaign's Media and Promotions Grand Prix, picked up earlier in the week, and its run of wins at other industry awards like the D&ADs, and Best of Show at the One Show awards in May....
Social strategy. Digital strategy. Mobile strategy. Content strategy. Everyday we’re being urged to create a new strategy. But with all the chatter about new channels, it seems we may have lost sight of the concept of an overall Marketing Strategy. And this gap has huge implications for marketing effectiveness. The tactical programs we create need to rest on a single foundation, otherwise we’re just sending dollars out the door. Case in point, the biannual CMO Survey just released by Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, the American Marketing Association and Deloitte revealed that “marketers are expected to nearly double their social media spending in the next five years even though most can't show the impact of social on their business.”
Ya’ll as we say here in Texas, social media, direct marketing, public relations, advertising, etc., are not strategies -- these are tactics, and each of these tactics can potentially be deployed to support any number of strategic options. Marketers, I issue you a call to arms, it’s time to get serious about marketing strategy.
Marketing strategy, not a channel or touchpoint or tactic, is how your organization will achieve its mission. It is the critical link between marketing objectives and marketing programs and tactics. Your strategy selection (and just as importantly what is not selected) provides focus and enables your organization to concentrate limited resources on building core competencies that in turn create the sustainable competitive advantage needed to pursue and secure the best revenue opportunities....
Even a goldfish can pay attention for longer than most people can nowadays. The ever-decreasing human attention span is one of the the biggest challenges marketers are faced with today.
For those looking to conduct market research through surveys, the fight for our audience's attention can seem incredibly discouraging. How can you expect to improve participation rates when people can't sit still long enough to make it through your questions?
If you want to encourage participation and avoid diluting your data, you've got to find a way to make people want to engage with the content. To learn how, take a look at the infographic below from the folks at qSample. It'll walk you through four interesting and helpful things to consider when crafting your next online survey....
It was recently brought to The Drum’s attention that we are longing for long-form. The age of bite sized media is seeing a resurgence of its comfortable long form component, despite our attention spans shrinking into oblivion with a quick fix of 140 characters.
Facebook Instant Articles, the Guardian’s ‘The Long Read’, Snapchat Discover suggests that people are craving more insight into the things they are interested in rather than just flashes of information. The Drum Network asked its members what they thought about the resurgence of longform, and if they thought it was here to stay....
Two years ago, for the first time, the Direct Marketing Association put a number—$156 billion—on what it called the data-driven marketing economy (DDME) in the United States. Yesterday it released a follow-up report showing that data isn't just driving, it's speeding. It clocked in at $202 billion in 2014, a two-year increase of 35%, and it employed nearly a million people—650,000 more than it did in 2012.“
All of marketing, we estimate, is about $1.3 trillion a year in the U.S., so that makes data-driven marketing a little under 20% of the total," said Harvard Business School professor John Deighton, who directed the study for DMA with Peter Johnson, principal of mLightenment Economic Impact Research....
Marketers are constantly looking to better understand consumers and ultimately deliver an engaging experience. According to Q4 2015 research, many executives are using revenue metrics to quantify the success of customer efforts.
CMO Council looked at how marketing executives in North America quantify customer engagement success. More than a third of respondents said that revenue metrics, like customer lifetime value, revenues per customer and overall revenue increases, were the primary type of metric they used to measure consumer engagement.
Additionally, 30% of respondents said that campaign metrics, such as clicks, conversions, shares, traffic and web analytics, were the primary type of metrics they used. Fewer marketing executives said they relied on sales enablement metrics, service metrics and finance metrics to measure overall customer engagement success....
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Long before the Internet and direct-to-consumer advertising, the medical profession tried to reassure people about their health concerns. Remember “take two aspirins and call me in the morning?” Flash forward to today’s online “symptom checkers.” They are quizzes to see if someone has a certain disease and exhortations to see their doctor even if they feel fine. Once drug makers discovered that health fears and even hypochondria sell drugs, there seems to be no end to the new diseases, symptoms and risks people need to worry about. In fact, since drug ads began on TV, Americans take so many drugs it inspires satirical T-shirts like the one that says: “I take aspirin for the headache caused by the Zyrtec I take for the hay fever I got from Relenza for the uneasy stomach from the Ritalin I take for the short attention span caused by the Scopoderm I take for the motion sickness I got from the Lomotil I take for the diarrhea caused by the Xenical for the uncontrolled weight gain from the Paxil I take for the anxiety from Zocor I take for my high cholesterol because exercise, a good diet and regular chiropractic care are just too much trouble.” Here are some of the ways ads use fear to keep the public buying drugs....
Corporate chief marketing officers (CMO) should also come to appreciate the connection between authority and accountability. That’s according to a new survey conducted by Accenture Strategy that found the CMO is the most likely member of the executive team to be fired when a company fails to hit its growth target. Is this fair? Absolutely — when you ask the CEO. The survey results reveal 50 percent of CEOs view the top marketer as the primary driver of “disruptive growth.” This involves launching products into new areas, expanding service models or increasing revenue through inventive approaches to data. Yet, the more than 800 CMOs who also participated in the same study spend only 37 percent of their time on innovation. The majority of their effort is focused on managing traditional marketing activities....
If you’ve been in marketing for more than a hot second, you’ve no doubt heard of the Buyer’s Journey. What you might not know is that this journey has dramatically changed in the last decade. 67% of the buyer’s journey is now digital. Today’s buyer is up to 90% of the way through their buying journey before they reach out to the vendor.Interactive content is front and center in this digital shift in the Buyer’s Journey. As companies produce more and more content in order to satisfy today’s self-guided buyer, only the most engaging content will stand out and get noticed. Why does interactive content stand out in the sea of content online today? Because it doesn’t talk at buyers – it talks with them. There are interactive content types for every stage in the Buyer’s Journey: Awareness, Evaluation, and Decision-making. However, it plays an especially important role for both the buyer and the business in the Awareness stage....
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....
A new European study on human behaviour suggests that people can be divided into one of four main personality types — with 'Envious' being the most common.
The new research, carried out by a team of researchers from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and the universities of Barcelona, Rovira i Virgili and Zaragoza, Spain, presented 541 volunteers with hundreds of social dilemmas and asked them to report on what they would do in each situation.
Participants had to make decisions based on individual or group interests, which would lead to either collaboration or conflict with others.
The decisions also had different consequences depending on what another participant involved decided to do, with Anxo Sánchez, one of the authors of the study explaining, "Those involved are asked to participate in pairs, these pairs change, not only in each round, but also each time the game changes. So, the best option could be to cooperate or, on the other hand, to oppose or betray ..... In this way, we can obtain information about what people do in very different social situations."
The researchers then created a computer algorithm to analyze the responses and classify participants into personality groups based on their behaviour.
The results showed that the majority of the participants — 90 per cent — could be divided into just four basic personality types, Envious, Trusting, Optimistic, and Pessimistic.
To build influence through social media requires a more strategic and thoughtful approach. The idea is to leverage social networks to reveal your personality, passion for what you do, and your unique perspective in a way that helps your audience learn something new, solve a problem, and achieve more. When you build influence on social media you make a human connection and resonate with your audience. You will magnetically attract the right people who trust you and they will naturally seek out your products and services. When you operate with a build influence mentality as your social media foundation, the 7 rules below can help you take your strategy to the next level...
Marketers spend a lot of time trying to nail down abstract concepts. They're tasked with turning brainstorming sessions and comments sourced during focus groups into campaigns that sum up everything about a brand's identity in a neat, tidy, and most importantly, interesting way.
But what if a consumer could walk into a room and fully experience your brand with all their senses? Pop-up events offer just that -- the chance for consumers to get up close and personal with their favorite companies in a truly immersive setting.
In their simplest form, pop-up events are temporary retail spaces that give companies the opportunity to sell their products in an environment completely designed and controlled by them. Since they're temporary, they offer a relatively low-cost and low-commitment way for companies to take creative risks, generate buzz, and introduce their brands to new audiences.
Consumers love the lure of exclusivity, and brands love the unmatched opportunity for experimentation. To inspire your next branded experience, we've curated a list of 15 innovative and visually stunning pop-up events....
You want to be writing the right content, right?
I mean, if you're not getting anything out of your blog, why are you (or your content creators) spending hours researching, writing and formatting?
This article will break down the 10 most important pieces of content and how they can be used in combination to attract readers, generate leads, nurture those leads into signups and those signups into upgrades....
The way I see it, demand generation is the direct opposite of the old-school cold-calling approach. It's the process of turning cold leads into warm leads, then guiding those warm leads down your funnel towards a sales conversation. And for those who fall out of the funnel, it's the process of establishing regular touch points with them until they (a) become customers or (b) tell you to get lost.
What demand generation is not is a campaign. The goal of demand generation is to establish relationships, some of which can go on for months or even years before the prospect is ready to enter a sales conversation....
Online, everything is a competition. If your website isn’t healthy enough to compete, you lose, which in many cases affects the profitability and viability of your business.
If you want your business to win the online marketing race — or at least place in the top 10 — you have to train for it.
Here is a five-point training regimen that will help you whip your website into shape and be a true contender in online marketing...
In this post, I’m going to show you 5 marketing tactics that are effective for most businesses.
The only catch is they can be difficult or scary to do.
I’m going to break them down as much as possible so that you can determine why they might scare you and what you could do to overcome that fear.
This is going to take a lot of honesty on your part, but if you’re willing to give me that, it could have a huge impact on the success of your marketing....
To help define your strategy and execute a social media plan, we’ve put together the following 10 questions that you should ask yourself so that you can dive in, rather than abandon ship.
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No matter the changes in technology, small businesses can benefit from new customer trials, strong communication with loyal customers, and a positive brand image.