The magic of creative briefs

Back in the days when I was a young, ambitious advertising executive, I once spent a whole week learning how to write a creative brief. Yes really – a complete full-on Monday-Friday in a hotel, up at 7, bed in the small hours and non-stop presentations, lectures and exercises in between.

Why did they think it worth it?

It must have cost the ad agency I worked for a fortune, but they knew it was worth it. A good creative brief produces thoroughbred creative work. A poor one leads to work that looks like an old donkey. It gets cobbled together and then gets chopped and changed as everyone’s thinking develops on the hoof. (There’s nothing like some finished design work to make people realise, “What we really want to say is…..”)

Why it’s still worth it

Last week, I was reminded again of just how powerful a well-written creative…

We love this quality infographic - well worth 5 minutes to read through it - it's great to see the inbound model becoming more popular with marketers too. A few highlights of the infographic: People are opting out of our lists - email and phone 86% of people skip TV ads Inbound marketing costs less than interruptive outbound

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We've posted before about the importance of persona's and understanding the consumer properly, your consumer, well enough over getting lost in tactics and techniques first. This info-graphic again re-enforces how it's this - not "social media", "content marketing" or "SEO" that has to come first. Ask the right questions and design social, contact and channel strategies around that. Who is my consumer (or persona type)? Where are they, online more specifically (we covered this broadly in our digital radar)? What motivates them to be interested in my industry, why do they care? How do they consume content, and what do they value, in terms of topics and formats - how do I map that? Why will they care for my brand in their world, what unmet needs to they have that I can help solve? When you know your consumer, everything else can fall in to place. By breaking consumers into persona types…

How to apply the marketing mix to develop online marketing strategies

We often hear that the concept of the marketing mix isn’t so useful any longer in this era of customer-first. But I believe it is still highly relevant today as a framework to develop digital marketing strategies. In this post I’ll take a look at situations where I have found it useful to develop and refine customer propositions.

Why the online marketing mix still matters

The marketing mix is a conceptual framework, and as such it is useful since it enables a common language to be used in the planning, execution and measurement of a number of coordinated activities that deliver the desired marketing outcomes. Customer centricity demands that organisations becomes a lot better at collecting and reacting to customer insight and adapt their offering to best suit an ever growing number of narrowing customer segments – ever approaching the ideal of…

Why communications need to change even more to truly engage online audiences

In this post I'm going to take a look at what makes social media different from the media choices that have come before.  Only through understanding the differences between social media and more traditional media can we really take advantage of its benefits. I'm aware that for a lot of readers, I am about to teach my grandmother to suck eggs, I wanted in this series on social media to take it one step at a time, so these ideas follow on from my first post, how to convince your boss about social media. In this post I'll summarise the changes in communications which I think we all need to think through to be more successful in our online marketing. With the rise of web 2.0 we have effectively entered a new era of media use. Gone is…

Facebook features heavily - but Twitter a surprise?

Value/Importance: [rating=3] Recommended tool: Add This Services

Important if you value sharing in different global markets

We thought it would be useful to share this free tool available from Add This, the company behind one of the webs most popular sharing bar. Remember that companies such as Add This (and ShareThis whom we've mentioned before) track a lot of data surrounding the use of their social sharing tools. The service that we're referencing here enables you to look at the usage of share services by country. Some key observations Facebook dominates, as you would expect - but not necessarily for B2B Twitter is second and surprisingly important in the UK in particular - companies who just share via Facebook or Google+ only are missing out Email - despite social sharing "forward to a friend or colleague"…

Evaluating technology options for innovation in marketing - know your hype cycle

I'm noticing a lot more innovation roles in larger organisations recently. It's great to see companies investing in understanding technology and marketing trends to try to create a roadmap for prioritising and implementing innovative digital technologies for marketing applications. If you're involved in digital strategy, you'll be constantly making judgements and doubtless arguing with colleagues about which innovations are most relevant to  your organisation. Here are a couple of tools to help.

The Gartner Hype Cycle model for technology innovation

You may well know the Gartner Hype cycle since this has been published for over 10 years I think - here is the latest one, with this post from Gartner giving more detail.

Gartner Hype Cycle 2011

Gartner's latest Hype Cycle was released in August 2011. This is an interesting release since they have more detail of how the audience…

“Listening and Engaging in the Digital Marketing Age” - a report, from Forrester.

The full report from Forrester, commissioned by Dell, is available to read and download from Dell's micro-site, which is here, the up-shot is that companies that launch listening and digital engagement initiatives are rewarded with improved customer satisfaction scores, loyalty and brand metrics. Only 50% of companies surveyed (US sample) feel that social media is a core function in their business, however they do feel that their efforts are serious despite only 6% of companies saying that their social media functions are very integrated in the business. “Listening and responding to customers is so basic and fundamental. The emergence of social media elevates how companies can act on the feedback they get from customers,” (Karen Quintos, senior vice president and Chief Marketing Officer at Dell) We've read and summarised the…

Is Pleasure from "Gamification" a new dimension for marketing? I've heard the word "gamification" many times this year; it's a concept that is undoubtedly getting more and more attention within marketing. Admittedly, I've previously felt that this could be just another fad, relevant in some markets, that gamification isn't relevant to most companies. My perspective until now was that gamification is simply about badges and points, great for start-ups and hot new tech companies like, Farmville, Zynga, Foursquare but not useful for everyday marketers. Having spotted some information around the demographics of social gamers this week, I was really surprised. With a little more research what appears is a whole new world with an awful lot of opportunity for the right brands. According to research presented from Social Games Observer: "The study confirms the strong appeal…

Be mindful of the content marketing trap

A lot of my recent posts, and indeed a lot of what I read at the moment, are focussed around content creation and content marketing. I for one have been promoting it as the last bastion of marketing, an area where you can really and genuinely create the inbound effect and be valuable to your customers and users at the same time. A colleague mentioned Doc Searls (of The Cluetrain Manifesto fame) during a conversation yesterday and it prompted me to remember that content alone is a dead end for real engagement and it's an easy trap to fall into. Indeed, much of the content and social media marketing that we see and hear about seem to have a very linear goal, to end with a Facebook Like or a click, or for the SEO focussed…