Do you, or does your organization, use SOPs for digital marketing activities?
You may not have heard of SOPs, since the technique seems to be more widely used in the US and in markets where the sales process is more technical (think E-commerce or B2B rather than consumer brands and smaller businesses). But I believe they are a powerful technique that any business in any market can benefit from. They are particularly useful for agencies and consultants to use when working on client activities. In a larger team, in particular, they can help achieve consistency of approach and results by everyone following best practices and can support training of less experienced team members.
What is a Marketing Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)?
So, what is an SOP? In short, an SOP defines a repeatable procedure for how a business process task should best be completed by defining a series of steps or sub-tasks.
In marketing,…
It’s not enough to create buyer personas and leave them getting dusty on the shelf. Find out how to apply customer personas to inform each stage of your marketing strategy
What are marketing personas?
Customer or buyer personas are fictional people who represent target customer segments. Personas are used by marketing teams to segment and target key demographic, psychographic, and behavioural traits of their target audiences.
The term ‘user personas’ is also commonly applied when analyzing particular online users’ behaviours, such as website experience (CX, UX) or in response to marketing automation (e.g. email or mobile campaigns).
Why create customer personas?
By researching and creating customer personas, we as marketers, managers, and business owners can gain valuable insights into our buyers’ preferences, motivations, pain points, and online behaviours.
Persona-based marketing techniques enable businesses to tailor their digital marketing campaigns and always-on…
Why use a framework to create an integrated marketing strategy?
I believe that implementing a digital marketing strategy framework to follow is essential to ensure the success of your integrated marketing strategy. Importantly by agreeing on a marketing plan structure during the planning phase, you can ensure the buy-in from your team and business to support your integrated marketing strategy.
Applying a strategic framework creates a system to make your plans easier to understand and gives a way to assign specific metrics to monitor, manage and measure the performance of your integrated marketing strategy.
The RACE Framework
We've created the RACE Framework and subsequent RACE marketing training to empower marketing leaders to take a data-driven, customer-centric approach to planning, managing, and optimizing their marketing strategies. By using this structure for your planning, you can integrate all your marketing activities across your key omnichannel customer touchpoints, to strengthen your reach, interaction, conversion, and engagement.
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Audit your digital media effectiveness to build stronger campaigns and an efficient marketing funnel
Reviewing your use of digital media is a crucial starting point for creating or optimizing your digital marketing strategy. But how do you tune in and prioritize what's working, and what isn't, without getting lost in vanity metrics?
At Smart Insights we recommend using VQVC to consolidate and streamline how you measure your digital media. This mnemonic shows how volume, quality, value, and cost help you pull out different elements of your marketing activities. Read on to find out more about VQVC and other important digital media planning techniques
Moreover, do you really understand how and when each of your key marketing communications is being received by your target audience? Our RACE Framework helps hundreds of thousands of marketers around the globe track and optimize their key digital media, to get the best results possible, without breaking the bank.…
From the obvious tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini to the less obvious like Perplexity, Pi, Poe and more!
As you'll know, 'GenAI' rose to prominence with the launch of ChatGPT from OpenAI in late 2022. Since then, many other less well-known tools have been released that have some advantages over ChatGPT, so should be considered by any 'AI-assisted marketer'.
In this article, I will recommend 10 plus tools to consider, looking in particular at how marketers can use them for writing marketing plans, such as annual marketing plans or campaign plans. We will also look at how many marketers are using generative AI for writing plans and caution against being overly dependant on AI for planning. To be the 'devil's advocate', I will ask should we be using these tools at all?!
How widely is generative AI and ChatGPT used in marketing?
ChatGPT has been widely adopted…
Actionable steps across the pillars of digital marketing from our recent report
Digital marketing today is complex and it’s inevitable it will get more complex in the future as new technologies and platforms emerge. Take the huge adoption and interest in Open AI ChatGPT, as an example. Marketers also have to contend with the complexity of the many channels we need to track in our analytics such as organic and paid search, social media, display, and email marketing.
September 2024 update
We have just published our Future of Marketing report and summarized the 10 main trends in our 2025 digital marketing trends article.
March 2024 update
Here we'll update readers on the latest developments in digital marketing relevant to marketers.
The best AI tools for marketers?
At the end of the article, I recommend different Generative AI tools beyond ChatGPT and show how widely they have been adopted. I have recently written a new update asking…
We all know marketing in tech is done differently to other industries, but what makes a great technology company marketing plan?
The IT and High-tech industries are well-known for innovation. But having a great product is only half of the work of a successful go-to-market strategy. Now more than ever, it's crucial for marketers to step up and add value, to help differentiate and stay ahead of the fierce competition in the sector. How do you do that? Read our steps to creating a winning marketing plan for your technology company.
Structure your technology company marketing plan with our RACE Growth System
Insights from LinkedIn's global B2B Technology Buying survey show many decision-makers are active in all stages of a new technology purchase; including problem identification, vendor research, shortlisting, and purchasing. This means technology marketers need to implement an omnichannel approach to planning their tech marketing.
After all, your buyer may discover you while…
Guidance on the latest digital media legal compliance legislations for social media and online marketing
As marketers, we create social and digital content which are published across a diverse range of media. From mobile apps, AMPS, and websites, to emails, social posts, videos, texts, and display ads - we strive to meet our customers in the most appropriate ways in their online/social media spaces.
Right now, in digital marketing - change is constant. So, whilst we grapple with the latest social media channels and content prompts, sometimes the due diligence processes which were so prominent in traditional publishing, can be hurried/missed.
However, your digital and social media content, whatever format you're using, must still meet the national and international legislations for both the channel type and the countries you trade in. Otherwise, you could risk penalties, restrictions, or legal action in more severe cases.
Digital media laws for businesses
Businesses who regularly check in and…
Playbooks empower marketing teams to improve performance from within
As marketing managers, directors, and heads of marketing, we are responsible for researching and developing marketing strategies that contribute toward our business goals. This means we are continuously scanning our marketplaces, tracking our progress, and reacting to change.
In well-integrated marketing teams, individuals are also contributing to shared marketing activities which, when combined, move the team closer to shared goals.
But, while we know what that looks like from a strategic 'top-down' approach, how can teams set up practical infrastructures at a tactical level? And how do we best track and record our marketing 'business as usual'?
That's where playbooks come in - a grassroots approach for managing marketing ops. As playbooks focus on the doing, they are designed to be used by marketing specialists who are responsible for the execution and tactical development of their dedicated…
What are the most popular free and paid marketing writing assistant tools using generative AI for creating content?
2023 was a rare year in marketing, where the latest martech innovations we discuss crossed over into the mainstream. Of course, this has been prompted by the huge interest in ChatGPT, not only for marketing, but in many other applications.
For 'hands-on' marketers seeking to take advantage of the latest AI-based tools for generating content and copywriting, there are now quite a few options which I'll recommend at the end of the post.
In previous posts, I have reviewed how to use the free version of ChatGPT for marketing and covered the latest updates to ChatGPT relevant for marketers.
Smart Insights Business Members can also read more about how to start use ChatGPT collaboratively in our new Quick Win: How to use ChatGPT for marketing, covering AI marketing planning, strengths and weaknesses of…
