The secrets to personal branding success
Good branding can make or break your success: it stands for companies, and it stands for personal brands as well. Nowadays, personal branding is more important than ever, particularly if you are an entrepreneur or solopreneur, or if you work in a company. In this blog post, I want to show you the best way to start building up your personal brand in 2017.
Why personal branding?
Personal branding has become almost a necessity in recent years, especially for people in certain niches. The reason for that is other people that you come into contact with, particularly clients and employers will likely also check your online persona.
By building up your personal brand, you’ll be able to put your best foot forward online – which will also influence your success in the real world as well.
As an entrepreneur, there are even more benefits to creating a personal brand.…
Do You Understand the Company's Expectations on Your Digital Marketing Team?
"I now realize that my team and I did the exact contrary of what management expected from us." This could be the post-mortem quote of most digital marketing teams that got downsized or swallowed by another team. Truth is that finding the appropriate positioning for a digital marketing team is hard. Fortunately, this post helps you fulfill the two conditions for leading a new digital marketing team to success:
Positioning your team appropriately.
Linking your activity to business results.
Your First Task: Marketing Your Own Team
I remember discussing with the leader of a marketing team from a large European telecom operator. During our exchanges, we identified 7 other teams working on digital marketing topics in this mobile operator company! There were the corporate level teams, the country-level teams, the digital marketing and the traditional marketing teams, split by market: enterprise vs…
Key lessons from the Strategy and Innovation World Forum
Robert Jones, our research analyst and I headed off to London last week to go to the Strategy and Innovation World Forum, set up by World Forum Disrupt. The Innovation Directors were attending in force, and with talks from the global heads of innovation from Santander, BT, UNICEF, Vodaphone and other world leading businesses there were plenty of interesting lessons to be gleaned.
With over 32 different speakers over the two days of the forum, it would be a bit of an information overload, if I tried to convey everything that was discussed at the event. But it did offer some great insights into the cutting edge of innovation strategy, so I've tried to distil the top 8 talks into just a few bite-sized takeaways that you can learn from and implement when developing your own innovation strategy.
Setting Strategies for uncertain times - …
Chart of the Day: New innovative management styles and their predecessors
When we talk about managing marketing teams, the emphasis is usually on building up a culture which inspires devotion and innovation. When looking to change company culture managers often have a hard time getting people to align themselves with what they envision the culture should be. That's where I think this graphic can be really useful. It shows the key breakthroughs in the history of managing human collaboration, right from tribes to the most innovative organizations in the world.
The chart doesn't specify any examples of the final 'teal' tier of human collaboration. But I think examples like Valve and Spotify show how self-managing teams can be incredibly efficient and effective.
Source: Strategy+Busines
Recommended Toolkit: Managing Digital Marketing Teams
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Too Many Tech Options = Random Acts Of Technology
If you blink, a dozen more marketing technology providers show up. Just 5 years ago, about 150 providers could hang their hat in the marketing tech sector. Today, we count more than 3,500 marketing technology providers. With so many choices to choose from, it’s no wonder random acts of technology happen more often than not.
What’s A Random Act Of Technology (RAT)?
A RAT happens when companies throw technology at problems without a strategy. In sales and marketing, it’s one of the top reasons marketing technology ends up flopping. In research conducted in 2016, Ascend2 conducted research into application of marketing technology. They found insufficient strategy as a top barrier to achieving success with marketing technology.
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Chart of the day: marketers salaries vary by sector, with a huge £23,000 difference between gambling and Education.
Research into marketing salaries by MarketingWeek suggests that marketing is still often understood and is seen as a cost rather than as an investment.
Agency and consultancy wages are also just second bottom on the list, whilst gambling and gaming takes centre stage right at the top.
Gaming and gambling was found to be the highest paying sector for marketers with an average salary of £63,409. This was followed by consumer electronics with an average salary of £56,901 and utilities which has an average wage of £56,716.
The MarketingWeek Career and Salary Survey found that the education sector earn the lowest average annual salary at just £40,117. Those in the charity and not-for-profit sector have an average salary of £42,915, however education came joint with IT as the sectors where marketers are happiest.
The survey…
Marketers should plan for every scenario, rather than only the most likely one
2016 is behind us. Marketers have their eyes set firmly on the year ahead, and will be currently drawing up their marketing plans and strategy documents for 2017. However, the vast majority of these plans will actually only plan for 1 scenario: business as usual.
It makes sense to plan for business as usual, after all, it’s impossible to predict the future so it wouldn’t make sense to base ones marketing plan around an event which may or may not happen.
Consider the following:
- The future is not pre-determined or predictable
- If it were, there would be no point taking action today, because it would have no effect on the future.
- Full information about the future is never available
But precisely because the future cannot be predicted, you shouldn’t only plan for one scenario (businesses as usual), but rather should have…
Agencies can use data to plan for the coming year, and to improve digital marketing services
You don’t have to search far to find information about the marketing budgets of the mammoth corporations, like Proctor and Gamble and Verizon. However, the typical US marketing agency has small business clients with small budgets—details about the marketing budgets of these smaller businesses is hard to come by.
For the past two years, HubShout has surveyed small to mid-size marketing agencies and the data from the surveys shows where their small business clients are investing their dollars, and how much they’re investing in each service. The survey of 200 professionals who deliver online marketing services to small businesses provides plenty of data that is useful for small to mid-size digital marketing agencies. In addition, this article provides helpful tips on selling and improving digital marketing services.
First, Get a Piece of the 28 Million
The…
Chart of the Day: How does your advertising budget break down compare to the average?
As we start the new year many marketers will have already been negotiating their advertising budgets for the coming year. Once approved the next major hurdle is to decide how to split that budget across the multitude of channels that are available. Search, Display, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest the is seemingly never ending, So how do you decide?
Today's chart of the day highlights that marketers like to hedge their bets when it comes to their marketing budgets, which is a good strategy, as it's risky to have "all your eggs in one basket".
As shown in the chart below the highest proportion of the budget is reserved for traditional advertising which makes sense when you consider the costs associated with Radio, Print & TV advertising. Now if we combine Social and Display you get a substantial 27% of the…
Chart of the day: In a recent study on customer sentiments on virtual reality, by Ipsos MORI, they find that over 3 in 10 don't care about VR at all, and many think VR is just for gamers
VR devices are currently too expensive according to 66% of respondents and the majority (86%) would like to try VR before buying.
The key findings as shown in the chart above include:
Over half have an underground of what VR is and just under half are interested in experiencing it
6 in 10 believe VR experiences are made just for gamers
Most find the devices are too expensive even though there are cheaper options available
The research also found that over 6 in 10 (63%) of 16-24 year olds are positive of the technology, compared to just over 3 in 10 (33%) of those aged 55-75.
Over half of…
