Evolution, not revolution is the pragmatic approach to Digital Transformation

Businesses of any scale can generate huge quantities of data from their analytics – most of it with the potential to improve performance. But to realize that potential, to action the actionable takes time, focus and budget. This research from the Smart Insights Managing Digital Marketing report shows that many businesses are conscious that they are not spending sufficient time on planning and optimization. In organisations who have yet to embrace data as a vital marketing tool, getting buy-in for the resources to make it happen can be challenging to say the least. As a digital transformation specialist, I often work with people at the start of their journey to a digital direct-sell business model. For them it represents a…

Practices agencies should avoid when reporting digital marketing performance to clients, and tips for how to get it right

As marketers, and humans for that matter, we’ve all been guilty of committing (at least) one of the seven deadly sins in one way or another. You won’t have Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman hunting you down, but when it comes to marketing agencies, committing these reporting sins can be deadly to the agency/client relationship.

Deadly reporting Sin 1: Avarice

Otherwise known as greed, Avarice is a sin of excess. Clients want and need to know what their agency is doing to move the needle, but consistently sending them an overly-comprehensive reports can be a lose-lose for the client and the agency. Massive reports take agencies a lot of time to prepare, billable hours that could be better…

5 Steps to empower your team to set relevant digital marketing goals

Budget planning. It comes around every year like clockwork. Most CMOs or Marketing directors are pivotal to business planning in the first place, but even after the business plan is formed business goals need to be translated into useful information for the marketing team to formulate their own plans and marketing objectives. If done well, this is a really empowering exercise for marketing teams and gets people out of their day-to-day job and into thinking about the bigger picture, even excited about the year ahead (good for staff retention). The post below outlines the 5 steps I go through to ensure that the marketing department are aligned and facing the same way as the business leaders, it assumes business goals are set and that you are including your team in creating marketing specific goals…

Vision-setting examples for digital examples

When we discuss goal-setting and measurement for Internet marketing and Ecommerce, it's all too easy to start reviewing nitty-gritty measures from analytics like bounce rates, conversion rates and average order-value.

But if you do this, you fail to capture the big picture and create a long-term vision of how the Internet and other digital channels can really contribute to your business as a whole.

Using BHAG thinking can help you think out-of-the-box and think BIG.

BHAG stands for "Big Hairy Audacious Goal" and was popularised in a 1996 Harvard Business Review article by James Collins and Jerry Porras on Building Your Company's Vision.

Here are two examples of how companies define their long-term vision with BHAG.

Case study 1. How ASOS reports it's Ecommerce KPIs

Pureplay fashion retailer Asos has been very successful in taking on the established providers…

Applying Dave Brailsford’s philosophy of excellence to improve results from digital marketing

The recent announcement that Sir Dave Brailsford has stepped down as British Cycling performance director to concentrate on Sky team management reminded me of his famous philosophy for improving performance from his team and how it can be applied to digital marketing.

British Cycling describe his marginal gains philosophy as perhaps his greatest British Cycling legacy. The technique is encapsulated by this quote:

“If you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improved it by one percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together,”

Implementing his marginal gains approach initially led to success in Chris Hoy’s gold in the kilometre time-trial and Bradley Wiggins’ gold in the individual pursuit in Athens. More recently, multiple Olympic gold medals and…

An introduction to using the Balanced Scorecard for performance management in Digital Marketing

The Balanced Scorecard is a well known performance management tool. It suggests following a cause-and-effect logic to build a tree of business objectives moving from a financial perspective down to customers, process and education and growth, and then enriching the entire scheme with KPIs and action plans.

Who said that it is for international companies only? What about an Internet company that wants to manage its performance? I believe that the BSC framework will be very useful to focus strategic efforts on what matters.

Let's have a closer look at the marketing strategy of a business on the Internet. These will be some general thoughts that need to be adapted to the vision and mission of a specific company. So if you decide to follow these ideas then you must take them as a starting point for your own research and…

A guide to setting high-level goals to keep your marketing on track

The range of marketing channels available today and the rate at which they change drives to us to work longer, harder and more efficiently...  it can often feel like you are ice skating uphill. The challenge can seem even harder if realistic goals aren't set to base your plans around.  The lack of goals and just a constant, never-ending journey of 'change' can mean that we miss out on the rewards of achievement. My time spent as part of growing a marketing agency with smaller and larger multi billion dollar companies has taught me that both benefit businesses and staff benefit from moving to clearer goals.

Goals are different to objectives and KPIs

Even in my relatively short time in marketing (9 years), I have seen the rise of data, analytics, information and I…

We've all seen those lists of the world's 'Top 10 converting websites' and  thought 'what could I do to get my site to those stratospheric levels?'.

This post explains why you probably wouldn't want your site to be on one of those lists, and how you can change 'conversion rate' from a not-very-useful-at-all metric into a tool to help improve your site.

The post covers 3 simple issues every business needs to review:

What is conversion rate?Why isn't it the answer to all of the world's problems?What can you do to make conversion rate more meaningful?

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Take control by reducing WILFING and other timesappers

"Every action has an equal and opposite reaction" Isaac Newton And, of course every inaction has, well, an equal and opposite non-reaction. If we don't  work on the right marketing priorities, if we lack focus on the right marketing activities, then you won't get the result. After all, the world doesn't sit still because you're busy on something of (questionable) priority.

Busy - what does that mean?

It was only recently that the word 'busy' made me think how accurate a term it is for a lot of wasted time in marketing teams. A lot of marketers, me included, have and do spend time being busy - that's busy avoiding the priorities, avoiding doing the hard work. A few friends I have from Liverpool use the term "busy" as a negative term, meaning that…

Learning from Zig Ziglar and Marc Benioff

As a busy marketer working client-side, you'll often hear yourself - and others - talk about not having enough time. That there aren't enough hours in the day. I know from my own (sometimes painful) experiences, when I sometimes sit working on the wrong stuff at 1 AM, that this is rubbish - that we all get the same minutes in the day, it's how we choose to spend them that matters. I believe that it's a matter of focus.

The challenge of focus

Seth Godin recently wrote about FOMO (fear of missing out) and it really resonated from a marketing perspective. Passionate marketers often run themselves and each other ragged, worrying if we're all missing out on the latest insight, learning, app, model, idea, case study or news piece. I understand that, it's often…