Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Practically any social media strategy has a resembling life circle.

Firstly you don't have a clue what's this all Twitter/ Facebook/Google+ is about and want to run away to cold-calling, constant spam emails and sales pitches like my-name-is-Jeff-and-we-guarantee-you-number-one-position-in-Google-in-two-weeks-or-your-money-back.

Then you're trying to do Social Media just as if it were any other old traditional type of Marketing, but the problem is that it's not old, it's not traditional and it's not straight-forward.

Eventually you learn how to do, what I personally call, the right thing and become more or less decent in Social Media, but that's not what I am going to talk about.

The transition from each phase is painful, scary and soaked with sweat. The goal of this article is trying to understand what we are or were all doing wrong on the second base (I mean SMM, not love affairs)....

In this post, we’re going to take a look at how you can create an online marketing plan for nearly any type of business.

We’ll examine how you can build a rock-solid plan, from the ground up and how you can adapt your plan, if changes need to be made.

By the end of this post, you should feel less overwhelmed and more confident about how you can take your business and market it online.

Since just about everyone uses some sort of social media site on a regular basis, almost every business can find its audience on one of them.

But it’s not easy to get those users to your site. That’s where a complete social media strategy comes in.

On top of that, it’s a great idea to have a social media marketing plan.  This is a 1-2 page document that outlines the most important parts of your overall strategy.

It’s a great way to make sure all your actions have a purpose behind them and to have something that will keep you consistent over time.

In this post, I’m going to show you a step-by-step process to create your own social media marketing plan....

In a recent SpiceWorks survey of content marketing, one major factor was found that separated the winners from the losers: having a formal, written content marketing plan with a clearly defined budget. This may sound basic, but the numbers tell a very different story. While 72 percent of businesses claim to have a strategy for content, only 30 percent actually have it documented.

Why is having a written plan and established budget so important? Consider this: 36 percent of businesses with a documented plan feel that their efforts are very, or extremely, successful, compared with only 11 percent of those who have not documented a plan....

One challenge mentioned recently is how one organization’s previous strategic planning processes did not work. This necessitates looking for new and better approaches.

This is not a unique situation. Many of you are likely finding your way to the Brainzooming website because you are searching for new ways to address strategic planning challenges.

As we developed the Brainzooming methodology inside the corporate world, our strategic planning did not always work as well as we planned (which is ironic). Sometimes the gap was about the planning itself. Other times it might be about the process steps or the leaders sponsoring the strategic planning process. Still other times, it involved challenges implementing the plan after we completed it....

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....

Looking to improve your marketing? Here are 11 metrics that you should be measuring to gauge your performance.

... Writing a marketing plan without doing a review of recent marketing performance is like using Google Maps without a starting point. Knowing where your marketing is today (that is, what it's doing for you today) is absolutely essential for deciding where you want it to take you next year.

If your CEO asked you today to start pulling together a report card for 2014 YTD marketing performance, what would you report on and how would you grade it?   In our primarily B2B world, here are some of the measures we suggest would make appropriate Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for assessing marketing performance:...