Aligning your sales and marketing teams is one of the easiest ways to grow your business.

In most companies, marketing and sales teams don’t collaborate very efficiently. But that shouldn’t be the case. After all, they’re both trying to help the company grow, right? The only difference is that they try to achieve this goal in different ways. While your marketing team tries to raise awareness about your brand and generate leads, your sales team aims to close deals. [si_guide_block id="79857" title="Download our Business Resource – Sales and marketing integration guide" description="This guide will give you practical recommendations, based on real-world examples, showing how to get your sales and marketing teams working together more effectively."/] In the end, they’re essentially working towards the same thing. This is why getting them to work together can do wonders for your company’s growth. You’ll see: Lowered sales costs. More cost-efficient marketing. Shortened sales cycles. Increased conversions. Here’s how…

The theory, principles and practices of agile ways of working

Over the last few years, I have consistently heard and seen references to the terms ‘agile’ and ‘scrum’, most notably in a technology and project management context. However, more recently this has found its way into mainstream working environments, and I’ve noticed more and more people talking about agile in memos, emails and even job ads. Take this example from a leading financial services provider: “Our organization is currently embarking on a significant move towards more agile ways of working, giving our colleagues more accountable freedom than ever before and far more opportunity to make a difference to our customer experiences”. But what does ‘agile working’ mean and why has this become so prominent?

A history 80 years in the making

‘Agile’ is a mindset, a set of beliefs, principles and way of thinking. In the early 2000s, Carol Dweck popularized…

The concept of caution in digital marketing

We’d like to hazard a reasonable guess and assume that not many people reading this article are trained soldiers. It’s likely that none of us has actually seen battle at all unless it’s at home when the toilet seat is left up! (But that’s a whole different conversation.) So when we talk about the concept of firing bullets, then cannonballs in a business setting it’s totally reasonable to expect a sea of blank faces and some uncomfortable muttering about confusing metaphors. [si_guide_block id="5605" title="Download our Individual Member Resource – Digital marketing strategy guide" description="Discover how our digital marketing strategy guide will help you to succeed quickly and more easily."/] However, the concept of firing bullets first, and then cannonballs, is a critical element of business in general, and more specifically, of digital marketing.

Defining the concept of bullets then cannonballs

While we’d love to lay claim to this exceptional…

5 ways to develop a better marketing automation strategy

In the age of automation, it’s easy for businesses to rest on machine efficiency while eschewing strategy. After all, if you can use a few software programs to send your emails, schedule your social media, and initiate Push notifications, why not use all of them? The underlying theory is maximum outreach, maximum results, but that simply isn’t true. Instead, businesses would do better to narrow the scope of their automation practices and develop a well-focused strategy that focuses on meaningful contact rather than just maximum contact. Employ the programs at your disposal, but don’t overwhelm your customers. [si_guide_block id="144584" title="Free Guide: Win more customers" description="Learn how to create an integrated marketing communications and automation strategy with our free guide, written in partnership with Salesforce."] For a digital marketing strategy that drives sales home, consider these five tips. With the right suite of programs and a…

The 5 key steps for hiring an agency that’s right for your business

As readers of Smart Insights will know all too well, digital marketing is a vast field with many different elements and nuances. From media planning and strategy, through to SEO, CRO, and UX, digital marketing is constantly evolving and keeping up with all the trends can be very time-consuming. Many companies opt to bring marketing expertise in-house, which can be advantageous for keeping a grip on resourcing costs, maintaining control and building a strong team for the future. However, there are also pitfalls to this approach, mainly around the attraction of creative talent and the lack of an independent, outside perspective that agencies bring to a creative brief. Having worked both agency and client-side throughout my career, I believe there are many benefits to working with an agency to partner on strategy, campaign planning, and capability building. However, the…

Marketers need to become even more agile to reach their audience with the right message, at the right time and through the right channel

The world of DevOps is evolving, with more and more enterprises integrating this approach into their overall operations. This does wonders for the technical operations of your business. But it is also useful for marketers as well. The point of DevOps is to increase efficiency, productivity and agility. It streamlines the build, development and launch process, infusing key data and insights into each step. [si_guide_block id="74453" title="Download our Business Resource – Growth hacking guide" description="This guide explains all of the elements needed to ‘growth hack’ your way to increased sales (with a limited budget)."/] Marketers can learn a thing or two from this shifting mindset. Marketers need to become even more agile to reach their audience with the right message, at the right time and through the right channel. DevOps requires…

UK desktop ad viewability improvements, Google's first-price auction rollout, Facebook's political ad policies changes, YouTube's inappropriate content removal update

This week has brought with it the news that the UK is seeing great rates of desktop ad viewability, with viewability reaching a record high in the second quarter of the year - great news for digital advertisers! In other advertising news, after months of testing, Google is set to start rolling out its new first-price auction rollout, which has reportedly had good results so far. Facebook is also making changes to ad policies, this time relating to political ads and those that tackle social issues. These changes are aimed to provide greater visibility over political advertising ahead of the 2020 US elections. Our final big news story is the week is that YouTube has provided an update on its efforts to remove inappropriate content from the platform, with thousands of hate speech videos being…

A study reveals that 94% of the marketers surveyed see personalization of the web experience is vital for business success.

When you plan your website, you think about things like design, web copy, and calls-to-action. This isn't wrong, but your competitors are doing the same thing. If you want to create a true connection with visitors and do something most of your competitors aren't, you should consider marketing personalization. If you're wondering what personalization is, the answer is simple enough. [si_guide_block id="57383" title="Download our Individual Member Resource – Website and e-commerce personalization guide" description="This guide is aimed at marketing managers involved with making the business case for personalization, looking to plan a personalization implementation or extend their use of personalization."/] According to Newco, Personalization is one of the biggest trending topics when it comes to marketing and data trends. Essentially, it refers to using the information…

The right tools can make it easier to plan your marketing strategy but also improve the results you get from your activity

Leveraging tools can help you plan your marketing strategies more easily, but they can also help you improve your plan’s results. But there are so many tools today that it can be difficult to pick the right ones. Meanwhile, picking the wrong tools would lead to waste of money – and precious time. [si_guide_block id="5605" title="Download our Individual Member Resource – Digital marketing strategy guide" description="By using the comprehensive, easy-to-follow strategies in this guide, you really will take your results to the next level."/] In this blog posts, I've compiled five useful tools that can help you plan your marketing strategies; you’ll not only find some useful planning tools that you can use for all of your marketing plans, but also tools that target specific marketing strategies:

1. Trello

Despite …

Marketers can expand relationships between existing customers and their brand at a lower cost than attracting new clients

Don’t you just hate it when someone only shows up when they want something? You know the type; the fair-weather friend who is suddenly chummy after weeks of absence because they want to call in a favour. It’s a social etiquette faux pas that can act as an important lesson for marketers because businesses do it too. [si_guide_block id="128440" title="Download our Business Resource – Travel industry example marketing planE" description="This example digital marketing plan has been created as both an example for you to learn from and a template to edit with your brand's targets and strategies."/] The relationship between a brand and its customers is all too often transactional and stilted, with companies only getting in touch when they want to sell a product. This is a trap that travel marketers should avoid for…