How to optimize your marketing and media priorities for the year ahead
Smart Insights have launched their first 'playbook' in response to our members' feedback.
[si_guide_block id="98899" title="Download Premium Resource – Paid Media and Digital Advertising Playbook" description="A playbook to help you identify the steps you can take to ensure your integrated paid media investments are successful. This paid media planning guide will provide marketers with a structured approach to paid media planning to help exploit these opportunities while managing the risks."/]
What is a playbook?
Complex sports, such as rugby, cricket, and American football, often involve a huge amount of strategy and so it’s not unusual to find that the coaches in charge have a set of tried and trusted guides comprising the plans, strategies, and tactics to counter different scenarios that arise within a game. In American football they call these guides ‘playbooks’ and they include detailed notes, diagrams, and methods…
Our summary of sessions from #Effweek: Using a more insight-driven approach for marketing
This week I attended the main session of the IPA-arranged #Effweek, which is aimed at sharing best practices on improving marketing effectiveness. In this article I'll cover the main themes, report on the new effectiveness research unveiled at the event and give examples from FMCG brands, financial services and telecoms of how effectiveness is managed.
The theme of the conference was how to use evidence-based decision-making in our marketing investments to improve value for our customers and business outcomes, particularly for media investments.
Now in its second year, the conference theme was closely linked to what we aim to support marketers in achieving through Smart Insights, i.e. harnessing marketing insight to make better decisions by moving from reporting to learning, which is nicely summarised by this Insight-driven marketing visual from the Marketing…
Chart of the Day: The popularity of different martech stack components
You will know that our options for using online services to manage marketing and get insight have increased dramatically over the past few years. Scott Brinker's martech landscape now covers over 5000 martech options.
Our own Essential Digital marketing tools wheel covers what we see as 30 categories that are essential to a medium or large transactional e-commerce business that is serious about growth. Smaller businesses with less budget and less need for information sharing can benefit from lower cost or even free tools, but are not likely to have as many tools, but can still benefit.
Given this opportunity, it's become essential to audit your martech stack as part of digital strategy development. So when we completed our joint research about Managing Marketing with the Technology for Marketing event, we were interested to see the popularity of using…
What functions will a Chief Experimental Officer need to do to run hypothesis-driven experiments?
When “growth hacking” first entered the scene, it provided a fresh, practical approach to marketing. Smart engineers coded innovative solutions that generated free viral shares. Stories about Dropbox’s storage rewards for sharing and Facebook’s famous growth team became models for companies everywhere.
Eventually, though, too many marketers trying to cook up schemes in growth hacking ruined it. Startups piled on the trend, slapped the term on everything they could, and turned growth hacking into a spam technique. Coders took shortcuts to scrape addresses and send semi-personalized emails, lowering the quality of communication and letting nontechnical users further dilute the practice. Every entrepreneur who managed to put together some funding tried to hack success to justify the last round.
Today, growth hacking is at best meaningless, and at worst, a direct disservice to growth. We have too many options, not enough…
What works best in Digital Marketing today?
In our latest infographic, we show the importance of digital marketing to businesses today and the digital marketing techniques that marketers find most effective.
To create it, we blended the latest research from the best sources for digital marketing consumer adoption stats with the results from our latest Managing Digital Marketing 2017 report. It's structured in three parts: The Global Picture of consumer use; a review of benchmarks across the RACE customer lifecycle followed by research on the most effective techniques for managing Digital Marketing.
This research from Smart Insights in association with the TFM&A 2017 event explores approaches businesses use to plan and manage their investments in digital marketing. Findings and recommendations are grouped into 6 areas to improve the commercial contribution of their digital marketing.
Given that we're…
Chart of the day: Reporting the ROI of Social and Content Marketing proving difficult for marketers
As marketers we are constantly juggling more projects than seems possible at times - planning the next campaign, delivering the current one as well as all the BAU activity of Email, Automation, Social, linking with the sales team and meeting...oh the meetings. It can feel like your in a whirlwind even with the most well thought out plans but one of the most turbulent times can be when you need to report on the ROI of particular activities. How do you find the right data? Is it accurate? How should your present it? It's hard.
In a recent survey, TrackMaven asked marketers from 19 different industries what they were finding the most challenging when attempting to prove the ROI of their marketing. Of the many options, they could choose from attributing social and content to revenue leading the…
Do you work in SEO? This infographic maps out the skills you need to develop
SEO combines such a huge range of skills it is tricky to know where to start when looking to enhance your abilities. For those people looking to make a career in SEO, they need to make sure they're covering all bases and not neglecting any areas of their skills. If they focus entirely on outreach, they might lose some of their technical expertise, whilst if they do nothing but look at analytics all day they won't be building links.
If you're looking to move up the career ladder an exec to a manager to a departmental head, then check out this infographic to see what skills you'll need to focus on most at different stages.
If you're interested in developing your digital skills more broadly, did you know we have a free research report on digital marketing…
Which tools and sites do you use to keep up with digital marketing?
The idea for our new guide for marketing agencies ‘keeping up with digital’ came from a conversation that the Smart Insights team and I had earlier this year - around how agencies often struggle to ‘encode’ a way of refreshing their digital knowledge within the business.
Agencies that I speak to or work with will often say that they know that staying on top of all the opportunities that new or evolved digital technologies, platforms, media, techniques - and more - can help them and their clients.
It’s a ’good thing’ to do.
But they find it hard to put a structured approach to that together. Hence the guide.
As we worked on the new resource we realised that many of the most useful digital marketing sites and tools that we recommend are also relevant for other types of marketing…
Google reveals its 'secret formula' to how they plan, manage and optimize
In August Google launched re:Work, an initiative to share their management tools - such as how to run and set up meetings and setting goals.
It is more HR than marketing orientated but it is a vital process of any business - and we wanted to cover OKRs - a technique relevant to marketers which we explain below. If you go to the site you will see that Google have split their tools and guides into 4 sections: Hiring, Managers, People Analytics, and Unbiasing.
This type of 'behind the scenes' work is often overlooked but is a necessary process in any organization.
What has been released cover basic management process and tools, but as the Harvard Business Review have noted in their review of re:Work:
"Basic management practices…
Chart of the Day: How does use of Artificial Intelligence vary in different sectors
As with any new disruptive technology that is moving it's way up the hype cycle, Artificial Intelligence won't be uniformly adopted. It will be a better fit in certain sectors and for businesses of a particular type. As futurist William Gibson put it:
“The future has arrived — it’s just not evenly distributed yet.”
This new research from the McKinsey Global Institute is useful since it looks specifically about how AI and Machine Learning will generate value in the future. One finding, which mirrors our advice for marketers is that businesses should focus on using machine learning applications to support the marketing and sales process and acquire skills where needed in this area.
One example of the value that machine learning can generate in the report is about how Netflix has used a machine learning algorithm to personalize recommendations to its 100 million…
