A manifesto and ten-point checklist for delivering more relevant online and offline communications
To gain the best results from integrated marketing communications needs a deep understanding of the multiple touchpoints that a brand has with its prospects and customers on its own sites, partner sites digital, and traditional media.
Integrate your marketing communications with the RACE Framework
To fully join up your marketing communications, you will want to consider the focus of your marketing strategy - do marketing activities happen independently, or within a sales funnel, or are they integrated with a structure focused around your customers' omnichannel experiences?
Use the RACE Framework to break this down further, what are the key messages and platforms at each stage of your customers' journeys? Which marketing activities are most efficient at meeting your objectives, what can scale up or down?
Integrated marketing is all about asking these bigger picture questions, and using these insights to plan integrated…
Repurposing content is an easy, often time-saving practice, that brings a plethora of benefits
Are you making the most of your content? Repurposing content – i.e. finding new ways to re-use your content – is an easy, often time-saving practice that brings a plethora of benefits.
From reaching a new audience to saving time creating new content and improving your search engine optimization (SEO), repurposing content is all about using data and insights to make your job as a marketer easier!
In this short guide, I’m going to show you how exactly you too can repurpose your content.
Set marketing objectives that align your content marketing with your company's business vision
There are so many components in a marketing strategy, it can be easy to lose track. But, to make the most of your content marketing, marketers know that integrating your content strategy with your existing marketing activity goals is a sensible way to strengthen the…
3 steps to creating an insight-driven digital marketing report
Monitoring, tracking and reporting on marketing campaigns is both an essential and valuable process that enables marketers to understand what works, what could be improved, and the overall impact on the business. What are the key performance questions in your digital marketing report that you need to drive your data-driven marketing strategy?
Introducing key performance questions
In 2014, marketing consultant Bernard Marr felt that organizations were often jumping straight into designing indicators before being clear about what they really needed to know. As a response to this ongoing challenge, he introduced the concept of key performance questions (KPQs) to bridge the gap between strategic objectives and KPIs.
According to Marr:
"Formed as a short, forward-looking and open question that directly relates to a strategic objective, a KPQ enables senior leaders to fully understand what…
What are the essential parts of a business plan template?
Understanding and creating different types of marketing plans and knowing when they are needed is essential to creating a thriving business. But it can be difficult to know which type of plan to use when and how best to structure them. In this article, we look at the essential parts of a business plan and show how to lay it out.
Our new, free PDF download detailing the different types of marketing plans will help you structure different types of plan and gives recommendations on how to make them effective.
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What is a business plan?
A business plan…
As a marketer, you believe in what you’re doing, but it’s difficult to measure results, so how can you measure marketing ROI?
When your company engages in many activities to improve results, it can be difficult to prove the effectiveness of some activities. That's where marketing ROI comes in.
Sure, you can spell out some figures like likes and shares, but how much did these metrics contribute to your company’s bottom line? If you can’t connect these activities to tangible returns, then there’ll be little justification in engaging in those tasks.
As a marketer, you believe in what you’re doing, but it’s difficult to measure results. Even more, you might be unable to claim the positive results if your company has invested in other strategies.
Take content marketing as an example. Even though 91% of B2B organizations invest in content marketing, only 35% of them measure its ROI. Among those…
Metrics are your marketing strategy scorecard. Track the right UX and CX KPIs to truly understand your customers' experiences of your brand
Metrics are the ‘scorecard’ of your marketing strategy. When these metrics, also known as key performance indicators (KPIs), are moving upwards, you’re winning the marketing game. When your CX KPIs are trending downwards, you’re on the losing team (at least for now).
You probably know your conversion-related KPIs by heart: metrics like conversion rate, revenue per visitor (RPV), and average order value (AOV). And on the acquisition side: cost per acquisition (CPA), return on ad spend (ROAS), and marketing qualified lead rate (MQL).
But, to get a clear sense of what matters most in your customers’ minds, you need to include CX KPIs (customer experience) in your scorecard mix.
These CX KPIs measure your prospects’ and customers’ perceptions of your brand, judged after several interactions, or ‘touchpoints,’ with both your online and…
Find out how to use different keyword research steps and techniques to inform your marketing themes and messages. Using keywords for research means giving your customers what they want
As one of the fundamental, foundational elements of effective search engine optimization (SEO), using keywords for research enables digital marketers to understand what consumers are looking for online and the potential opportunities to capture this interest and attention through the creation of relevant content and optimized user experiences.
Using keywords for research: campaign or always on?
SEO is often seen as an always-on, hygiene activity that is necessary before, during, and after campaigns but rarely seen as an integral part of a campaign itself. However although keyword research can be very useful for unearthing larger, more permanent content opportunities for an owned media presence, the process itself can also be used to help inform ideas, themes, and concepts for a campaign,…
Using tables and flow charts to visualize and plan automated email communications
Research shows that behavioral email communication is a powerful technique. Planning and optimizing an automated email campaign strategy empowers marketers and managers to follow-up online customer actions to help increase conversion to sale at a low cost.
Here are some common examples of event-triggered email sequences:
Welcome sequence for a new subscriber or lead to an email list
Welcome sequence for new customer (onboarding)
Reactivation of customers or subscribers who lose engagement
Abandoned shopping cart follow-up emails
Shoppers browse or search on a site but don't buy follow-up
Time to repurchase or replenishment emails
However, the technique is still used by relatively few companies. One barrier to setting up these event-triggered email sequences is the time it takes to specify the sequences if it's a new approach to the company or agency.
A great benefit of event-triggered e-mails is that once set…
You need better content marketing metrics - ones that your executive team really care about, calculate your return on investment (ROI) to demonstrate the value of content marketing
Data-driven digital marketing today relies on a lot more than just individual, unconnected metrics like click-through rates, cost per acquisition (CPA), and return on ad spend (ROAS). To justify investment, marketers must demonstrate to management and c-level decision-makers how these metrics translate to the bottom line. For content marketers, ROI measurement is more important than ever. But are you doing it right?
Keeping in mind the goal of marketing: to grow your business at the lowest possible cost. So, for brands whose growth depends on acquiring and nurturing leads, your content marketing (CM) metrics must align with that goal. Every activity you do, campaign you execute, or A/B test you run, needs to produce a solid return on your marketing time and tools investment…
How do you know whether social media is working for you? How do you translate comments and likes into ROI
Social media marketing has become the norm for businesses across industries and niches. It’s often hailed as one of the best digital marketing strategies – but how do you know whether it’s working for you? How do you translate comments and likes into social media ROI (return on investment)?
In this blog post, I will show you how to measure your social media ROI.
Why do you need to measure your social media ROI?
Like with any marketing practice, you’re investing time, money, and effort into your social media marketing strategy. So naturally, you want to know whether your efforts are paying off.
That’s not to say that if you’re not getting any clear ROI from social media that means you should quit it altogether; rather, measuring your social media success helps you understand what…
