To give your business the best chance of success, you need to invest in marketing skills. For a simple reason: marketing provides visibility for your products and converts customers.
Having said that, investing in marketing skills goes beyond just buying marketing tools and hoping for the best. Those tools will only be effective when your marketers have the training to utilize them effectively.
Accelerating learning is one of the most important organizational factors in business growth, and a crucial step to being 'future-ready', according to McKinsey's 2021 study. Of course, for managers, holding on to skilled employees is also important. Future-ready companies recognize that talent is their 'scarcest form of capital'.
In this blog post, you’ll find 10 vital marketing skills that your business should start investing in today.
1. Interpersonal relationship skills
Even though a lot of marketing is done online today, marketers still end up interacting with their co-workers and…
Working from home does require a certain approach to be effective, but if you get it right, you can build an effective remote marketing team
With more of us working from home than ever before, use these top tips to build a remote marketing team so you can keep your team on track and meet your KPIs.
There are many benefits for all types of organizations, from small startups to large marketing teams to work remotely, including:
We are in the midst of a digital skills gap, meaning you may need to search harder to recruit the expertise you need for new roles
Research has found that employees are 77% more productive when they work from home than at an office.
Businesses can slash their overhead by doing without office space.
Modern technology makes virtual collaboration and communication a reality.
Marketing teams, in particular, are well-suited to…
Custom landing page examples and best practice advice. Always use your data to inform your digital marketing strategy
Discussion of web design in companies who don't know the power of a strong landing page still often focuses on the homepage. But savvy companies who are effective in their traffic building know that many visitors reach the site on other landing pages.
These include both standard website page templates like category or product pages and custom landing pages dedicated to maximizing the conversion of leads when using inbound marketing techniques like SEO, Google Ads, and social media to drive visitors to a site.
Whether you use standard page templates or dedicated landing pages will depend on your sector. For retailers or travel companies, it's impractical to create bespoke landing pages for each category and product. However, for business-to-business service and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) businesses, dedicated pages are still commonly used to maximize conversion. In other…
Unravel your customer journeys with Google Analytics clickstream analysis on forward and reverse paths
I don't know whether you have heard of the forward and reverse path clickstream analysis technique? It's a shame path analysis isn't so well known as say funnel analysis, since it's a strong analysis technique to help understand customer journeys on a site to identify inefficiencies.
Clickstream analysis can be used to review the quality and value of your REACH marketing activities, as well as informing crucial decision-making in the ACT and CONVERT stage of your customer conversion strategy.
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What is clickstream analysis?
Clickstream analysis is the strategic analytical activity of reviewing the order of URLs visited and the actions taken during your customers' journeys on your site. By analyzing their forward and reverse 'path' you can track patterns and trends in your conversion funnel, towards your goals.
In Google Analytics, use the "Navigation Summary" for paths…
Under pressure to deliver tangible digital marketing measurements? It's time to calculate your digital marketing ROI and demonstrate results
The fundamental formula for calculating your digital marketing ROI is:
ROI = (Gains from investment - cost of investment)/(cost of investment) × 100%
As a marketer, one of your main worries is how to prove the effectiveness of your digital marketing activities. To prove it, your boss wants hard numbers - so it's time to calculate your digital marketing ROI.
Let me tell you this though: there’s no exact method that will capture your digital marketing ROI perfectly. It’s just difficult to quantify some of the activities you engage in.
Having said that, you can still have an approximate value of your digital marketing ROI. This gives you insights into the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
Apart from providing a figure to your boss, it helps you to adjust your marketing strategy to improve results. But to…
Strategic marketing is a key part of ensuring you achieve your business growth goals. Lead your team to accelerated growth through digital marketing
It has been a challenging year for marketers, with market uncertainty, reduced budgets, and huge shifts in the marketing mix. One common element for all businesses is a renewed focus in 2021 on digital marketing to accelerate business growth.
SME marketers familiar with the 5 stages of business growth, first coined in the Harvard Business Review in 1983, can cite the stages as:
Existence
Survival
Success
Take-off
Resource Maturity
Notably, success takes the form of both Success-Disengagement and Success-Growth. The strategies outlined below support owners/marketing managers during the Survival, Success-Growth and Take-off stages of their business lifecycle.
Large companies or corporations are typically more removed from the 'survival' mindset, although of course this year that has sadly not been the case for all. Rather than starting from scratch,…
Three essential steps to kickstart Digital Transformation
Digital Transformation is a focus for many organizations right now and as you can see from the Google Trends search volumes, it's increasing in popularity recently. As with any change within an organization, there are many challenges, so once you've identified digital advocates in the organization, it's time to map out the journey.
In recent months, several companies have mentioned to me that their CEO is committed to digital, but they're having challenges at middle management levels, where it's harder to gain commitment. This can be easier if there is a clear plan shared with all. You can, as many do, call this your digital roadmap, it describes where the business is now and where they're going.
There are several models available, for example, Dave Chaffey recommends the Carnegie Mellon Capability Maturity Model (CMM) in his post 'Using capability maturity models to…
Strategic analysis of an organization is an essential factor when it comes to formulating a plan for the smoother working of your company
Strategic analysis refers to the process of researching an organization and its working environment to formulate a strategy. There are many other definitions of strategic analysis with a different perspective. But they all involve a lot of common factors.
What is strategic analysis?
Strategic analysis of an organization is an essential factor for planning and optimizing your marketing strategy. With the help of strategic planning, you can align and achieve your marketing objectives with your business' overall vision.
Improvement is the one constant in any company. You need to keep improving your organization. So, to educate yourself, you must periodically conduct strategic analysis. This will then help your organization to plan ahead and determine which areas need improvement.
We've got marketing solutions to support you and your team to conduct and implement…
Perhaps the most important step and also the biggest challenge for any marketer is to build a strong market orientation
Let's talk about market orientation. It’s perhaps the most significant section of your marketing strategy as you look to create a formal, documented paper where you intend to formally "introduce your customer to the organization". Strong businesses put the customer first. That's why we recommend you apply the RACE Framework to improve your customer journeys.
Market Orientation sits before strategic thinking or the creation of a segmentation strategy or even the decisions to be taken on how your brand will be positioned. Yet it seems to be one of the most difficult tasks in terms of getting total organizational buy-in.
A recent Harvard Business Review entitled "Why CMO's Never Last" highlighted the concern that CMO's are
"not given enough authority to do what's expected of them and also they are led down a marketing…
To earn the respect of your executive team, you need to speak their language - and this means ROI. Discover how marketing ROI calculators can demonstrate your customer acquisition efforts
ROI is the KPI your executives care most about. When it comes to speaking the language of C-level executives, return on investment (ROI) is the Super-KPI that matters most. Other metrics commonly used by acquisition marketers — such as cost per acquisition, conversion rate, and engagement — while useful, don’t fully account for both sides of the ROI equation. That's why you need to use a marketing ROI calculator to show the value of your marketing.
In this post, I first define how to calculate Marketing return on investment. Then I share how to arrive at valid revenue and cost estimates for three top customer acquisition channels: SEO, PPC, and content marketing.
How to Calculate Marketing ROI
The Harvard Business Review, in its 2017…
