Learn how the PESTLE analysis model can help you assess your business’ place in a variety of environments
PESTLE is one of a well-known series of acronyms used in business and marketing planning which summarizes how to review the broader forces, sometimes known as the 'macro-environment', that can shape a business.
What does PESTLE stand for?
PESTLE stands for:
Political
Economic
Sociological
Technological
Legal
Environmental
These are the contexts that a business should assess itself against to review competitors, markets, and the situation in which an organization finds itself.
Environment Factors affecting a business - Source: Chaffey and Ellis-Chadwick - Digital Marketing, Strategy, Implementation, and Practice
[si_guide_block id="65204" title="Digital marketing models guide" description="We rate PESTLE analysis as one of the top 20 marketing models which we feature in our digital marketing models guide. To learn about more models you can use to effectively assess your…
The 5Is model from Forrester can help to structure your digital marketing
Forrester is a well-established market research company focusing on business applications of digital technology and media and over the years, the team from Forrester have developed a number of models that we can apply to digital marketing. Occasionally they extract insights from their research and share in the form of a blog article. In 2007 they created a measure of engagement which was termed the 5Is although their focus was on 4 specific elements beginning with the letter ‘i’.
What are the 5Is?
The 5Is stand for the level of involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence an individual has with a brand over time.
The concept was based on research conducted by Forrester where they concluded that the traditional marketing funnel was dead and they proposed ‘engagement’ as a new metric. Engagement as a term had been discussed by many scholars as far…
An example of reviewing your marketing capabilities using the McKinsey 7S framework
The McKinsey 7S model is a useful framework for reviewing an organization’s marketing capabilities from different viewpoints. Developed by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman during their tenure at McKinsey & Company in the 1970s, this model works well in different types of business of all sectors and sizes, although it works best in medium and large businesses.
The 7S model can be used to:
Review the effectiveness of an organization in its marketing operations.
Determine how to best realign an organization to support a new strategic direction.
Assess the changes needed to support digital transformation of an organization.
What are the elements of the McKinsey 7S model?
In summary, the McKinsey 7Ss stand for:
Strategy: The definition of key approaches for an organization to achieve its goals.
Structure: The…
What can an ancient text do to help your digital marketing?
Sun Tzu's The Art of War is a widely studied piece of literature, so communicating its principles from reading it feels a little like learning to drive a car by watching a movie with a car chase in it.
What I'd immediately remembered (from reading it 9-10 years ago) was that the book itself is short and powerful. Each chapter layers onto what was taught in an earlier chapter.
Despite the title indicating otherwise, it's part science and part philosophy; it centres around the idea of winning without conflict, by competing based on position, not through 'warfare'. This is immediately powerful and relevant to marketers with experience in brand or marketing strategy.
I think that you can summarise the whole book (very crudely) with two questions:
How do I use information that is available to…
Demand generation should be a core component of a Blue Ocean Strategy - instead it is frequently confused with either brand awareness or lead generation
Demand generation is a critical theoretical component of the 'new' marketing- a catch-all term for the kind digital marketing which relies on inbound techniques and new platforms, all underpinned by the 'Blue Ocean' strategy first popularised by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne just over a decade ago.
But the term has become confused and diluted, with marketers overly keen on fashionable buzzwords using it in a similar way to 'growth hacking', a term now associated with so many marketing techniques it has lost all meaning and value.
Defining Blue Ocean Strategy:
So what is demand generation precisely? To answer that question we first need to explain the concept of 'Blue Ocean Strategy', which the whole concept of demand generation depends on.
Blue Ocean Strategy is the idea that companies can thrive not…
Creating your social media strategy and tactical plan
Noun: Strategy / A plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim.
First, you need to understand what a strategy is, and isn’t it. A strategy should define the main aim of your social media presence and set the parameters for what it will deliver and how it will be delivered. It will be supported by a tactical plan that defines how the strategy will be delivered, including the channels, resource and budgets to achieve it.
[si_guide_block id="82119" title="Download our Free Resource – 10 common social media marketing mistakes" description="Avoid the pitfalls that limit engagement with your target audience by taking a look at our Free guide on some of the most common social media mistakes."/]
Tip – ensure your strategy is no more than 3-4 pages long. A strategy has to be concise and provide the governing principles that guide the plan.
1…
Developing a Joined Up Approach to your Social Media and Customer Communications
In this post I show how we use different tools and plugins for our different social platforms to let software services take some of the key pounding out of online publishing.
Here is my summary of our process and the tools we use. We're always interested to learn about new tools or other approaches, so let us know if you have other suggestions.
The diagram shows the approach we use on Smart Insights to support content sharing across the main social networks while minimising the resource needed. We aim to publish two to three posts daily as a target, balancing advice and updates on major developments in digital marketing. These are posted to our blog and then we use tagging of topics in different categories to surface the advice in…
The EAST framework combines behavioural economics with other sciences and psychology to truly understand and influence behaviour change
Behavioural economics is nothing new in marketing, having been a fundamental industry discipline for the past few decades, but there's a new kid in town and it's behavioural economics, supercharged.
Behavioural Insights (BI) has long been a tool for Government departments to improve the design and implementation of public policy, with its umbrella spanning research into behavioural economics, sciences and psychology.
Its aim is to understand and influence behaviour change among citizens by:
Simplifying processes
Removing unnecessary steps
Making services more user-friendly
We think it translates perfectly into marketing too when improving and enhancing customer experience.
Nudge and learn – a winning approach
Much like in conversion rate optimisation (CRO), services are streamlined by testing subtle changes to the design, content, timings, and navigation of websites, letters, emails, forms and other methods of communication with citizens.
Something as simple as changing…
Our summary of sessions from #Effweek: Using a more insight-driven approach for marketing
This week I attended the main session of the IPA-arranged #Effweek, which is aimed at sharing best practices on improving marketing effectiveness. In this article I'll cover the main themes, report on the new effectiveness research unveiled at the event and give examples from FMCG brands, financial services and telecoms of how effectiveness is managed.
The theme of the conference was how to use evidence-based decision-making in our marketing investments to improve value for our customers and business outcomes, particularly for media investments.
Now in its second year, the conference theme was closely linked to what we aim to support marketers in achieving through Smart Insights, i.e. harnessing marketing insight to make better decisions by moving from reporting to learning, which is nicely summarised by this Insight-driven marketing visual from the Marketing…
How Personalization, Segmentation, and Optimization work together to create a seamless customer experience
There are three different levels to delivering personalized customer experiences: optimization, segmentation, and 1-to-1 personalization. Many of the ecommerce marketers we speak to are already using one or two of those approaches but haven’t considering how they relate to one another-so we developed a visual we call the Monetate Personalization Pyramid to help visualize the relationships between these three layers.
In this article, we’ll talk you through the Pyramid from the bottom up. If you want to find out more, sign up for Smart Insights and Monetate's Getting Personalisation Right: 10 Best Practices to Improve Conversion webinar.
Optimization
The base level of the pyramid is optimization. This describes the process of testing different approaches, analyzing the results to identify the top-performing design, and then implementing the winner. You'll know this…
