Agility is the key to staying at the cutting edge of a changing industry
We live in a world full of ever-evolving technology. Marketers don’t have the luxury of relying on a single technique for very long. Things change quickly, from new products to innovative technology to customer expectations.
The days of keeping the same marketing techniques for years are over.
It’s a new era for businesses across all industries, and you must adapt quickly to survive the shifting ecosystem.
That’s where agile marketing comes into play.
What is Agile Digital Marketing?
The definition of agile digital marketing is notoriously hard to pin down, but Jim Ewel of AgileMarketing.net this definition:
Agile Marketing is an approach to marketing that takes its inspiration from Agile Development and that values
Responding to change over following a plan
Rapid iterations over Big-Bang campaigns
Testing and data over opinions and conventions
Numerous small experiments over a few large bets
Individuals and interactions over target markets
Collaboration…
While you may have thorough buyer personas sketched out for your customers, there may be one piece of the puzzle that you’re missing: behavioural psychology.
Behavioural psychology often dictates how people make choices, whether it’s what to order at a restaurant or whether to subscribe to a company’s email newsletter. Within your digital channels, you can incorporate certain principles of behavioural psychology into your strategy in order to keep your marketing customer-centered, engaging, and conversion-driven. This will help turn your website visitors into conversions.
Anchoring
This is a principle of behavioural psychology that guides people towards context clues when making decisions. Oftentimes, your audience is unsure about how much time or money they should spend on a certain product or service, and when that’s the case, they turn to context clues to help them decide and usually settle on a middle ground. Incorporate anchoring into your digital marketing strategy by adding an “extreme”…
It's all about the story...
It’s a jungle out there, dog eat dog, and unstructured data is proliferating at an exponential rate. As a marketer you have to be careful, you don’t want to get sucked into this digital Wild West, even the quickest out there could get stung.
Yet, there are opportunities to be had, little nuggets of 24-carat gold that can provide your business with a cutting edge worth millions. Sounds like an opportunity, right?
However, just as the prospectors found it tough trying to make a buck during the 19th century Alaskan gold rush so businesses are finding it increasingly difficult to make sense of how to make big data pay. So even at this early stage of its evolution businesses are asking, what does the future of big data look like?
Image/Copyright Source: wikimedia.org
There isn’t an easy answer but…
Web users are becoming paralysed by the psychology of indecision as a result of being faced with too many options to choose from
I believe digital marketers are offering too many choices to their website visitors. Visit almost any web page these days and you will be faced with a myriad of choices. You can choose to read something, or sign up for follow-ups, or perhaps watch a video. Alternatively, you could choose something else to click on, look at an advert or go to the menu and choose something else. What are you expected to do? There are just too many things to think about.
The situation is worse in e-commerce stores. You are faced with row upon row of products to choose from, probably from a selection of a dozen or more different categories.
Website owners and digital marketers appear to…
Does your website have a clean bill of health?
Unless you are lucky enough to have an external agency, it can be difficult to know where to place your resources and prioritise your efforts to ensure your website is optimised; which statistics to review for engagement, how to check if your visitors can use your navigation and the list goes on. This infographic from Mediavision is a good basic top-level checklist to help you with reviewing your website, though you will need to delve further into each area. It's not an exhaustive list since there are other ideas to include usability research testing, (eye-tracking) heat mapping tools, and we are sure more can be added to this planning list.
For more advanced marketers, you can check out our Digital Marketing Strategy Audit tools for Expert Members.…
Examples of creating powerful online value propositions
Today’s customers are experiencing an information avalanche with social requests, blog posts, real-time updates, news outbreaks etc fuelled by companies eager for our attention. Using digital channels to interact with their audience but not adapting their strategy of pushing messages out and expecting an instantaneous return on investment by measuring their digital channels as they measured their offline channel.
Brands are clambering on the digital band wagon but using the same techniques they used in a bygone era of broadcasting their message through buying up media space (Radio, TV, ad impressions) but it is no longer working: appealing to the masses means appealing to no one – rather, brands need to spend more time to get to know their audience and know what motivates their audience.
There requires a change in approach and change in tactic, brands need to be asking the question: Am I…
A tutorial showing how to use the keyword insights now available from Google Search Console and Google Analytics
Earlier this Autumn, as shown in this Smart Insights alert, Google made the step that many SEOs and digital marketers were fearing: the encryption of all organic search traffic. The dreaded (Not Provided) had already been creeping up steadily, but now it's approaching 100% making it impossible to see in the original SEO reporting in analytics which keywords from Google are driving visits and converting.
May 2015 update: Google has now renamed Google Webmaster Tools to Search Console.
Whilst we can argue about the rights and wrongs of this change, it means that we can no longer access organic keyword-level data in our web analytics solutions, such as Google Analytics and Adobe Sitecatalyst. This data is extremely valuable to digital marketers, since it allows us to:
Find…
Examples of using social media to promote your personal blog
Blogging without social media is now the digital equivalent of stranding yourself on a desert island. To promote yourself effectively and get the results you want, you need to find and connect with people who share similar interests and goals. The best social media strategy entices people to follow the link back to your main blog and check out your main content posted there.
Developing a personal brand using a blog together with social media has a slightly different approach depending on your niche and subject matter. Researching some basics about your target audience is an essential early step, and thankfully each of these social platforms has user-friendly search tools to help you. The essentials to note are average age groups and interests among the followers you want to target as potential blog readers.
Starting up a Personal Blog
The definition of 'personal' has become rather…
Strategies to enhance customer service levels across peak response
How capable is your contact centre when it needs to deal with unexpected peaks in traffic or even the normal throughput of customer interactions?
To a large extent the answer to that question will depend on the number of concurrent users the system can handle as defined by both the technology (and licensing) available and the number of staff on hand to take enquiries. And if the number of concurrent users is limited to say 50 an hour and number of customers seeking to contact the company amounts to more than that on a regular basis then you're going to have a problem in terms of customers left on hold or abandoning calls.
Clearly the way to solve the problem is to increase the number of concurrent users that the system can deal with but in the…
How many businesses have achieved a single view of their customers and prospects?
This new research reviews how successful businesses have been in creating a single view of their customers. It suggests it's becoming more difficult to gain full visibility of the path to purchase with today's omnichannel consumer experience and that businesses are still facing many challenges around data and the system infrastructure to support this. Marketers are aware of the importance of trying to move towards a fuller 360 degree view of their consumers, to capture and maintain information at every touchpoint throughout the buying cycle, and how a one-to-one personalised relationship marketing approach can generate return.
This global online survey from Signal, across 17 verticals. delves into these challenges which businesses are facing in the 'cross-channel world' and reviews how many businesses are adopting a single viewpoint of their customers.
How many businesses have a single view of their customer?
The survey identifies that although nearly half have…
