Guidelines and research on how businesses can create a digital strategy
So, you know the importance of digital marketing is increasing all the time and you’re actively using it, trying to integrate it with your other marketing activities. Where next? How high can you reach? How about aiming high? Your competitors may well be. Can you reach digital nirvana?!
In 2015 we have updated our 7 Steps to Digital Marketing infographic to share the latest research from businesses who contributed to our Digital Marketing 2015 research report.
We hope you find the infographic useful and it helps you a little on your journey to improvement or even enlightenment, one step at a time!
To help you take the first steps, the first part of the infographic links to these articles explaining key techniques to kickstart your digital marketing
SWOT analysis for the digital…
and if not, why not?
There is only ever one pot of money for investments in marketing, so it can seem it is spread more thinly each year as you need to engage customers across more digital touchpoints. Worse still, the size of the pot may shrink as budgets are cut.
So, it's a challenging decision as to where to invest wisely. In our Managing Digital Marketing 2015 we did ask about investments in different types of media and developing digital experiences, but we also thought we would turn the question on its head by asking where the frustrations were with investment in time or budget. We asked respondents where they felt there was insufficient investment which highlighted some common frustrations.
You can see that respondents naturally felt there were a number of areas of underinvestment. That's…
5 core elements for your content marketing strategy and best practices for content outsourcing
According to Content Marketing Institute, more than 80% of B2B marketers and more than 70% of B2C marketers used content marketing for their online businesses last year. The results of this investigation have been published in B2B Content Marketing: 2015 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends ? North America and proved the fact content marketing tactics become a significant part of successful marketing strategy.
More than 50% of B2B marketers plan to increase content marketing spending in 2015; they are ready to accept the challenge and start awesome content creation, distribution, optimization, analyzing and managing. It often happens that content creation and development is not a core skill for a marketer, and it can be quite difficult to cope with. The…
Case study shows how digital tech and digital marketing techniques combined to boost visits to the Metro newspaper sites
We've seen a lot of interest when we have written about how to apply growth hacking to marketing, so I thought this was an interesting case study to share in outline. It's also a great illustration of the power of combining SEO, Content, Social media and Email marketing. The growth in uniques over a short time scale is dramatic to say the least!
The case shows how businesses can tap into the continuous demand for content via search engines and social media to grow their audience. In this case, the business is a news publisher who many other types of online brands must compete with for a share of audience. So similar principles apply for non-publishers since "Every Business is a Publisher Today" - or should think…
An agency view on the Digital Marketing Trends for 2015
Last year, more and more marketers hopped onto online and social media marketing, they embraced data and social media platforms to connect, listen, and engage with prospects customers. Companies were setting the agenda for their content strategy, resolving problems and providing relevant information along the sales funnel, through social media and video.
Mobile marketing reached a whole new level with Responsive Web Design, companies personalized the web experience and ROI tracking has evolved within the digital marketing landscape.
Given the extent of the changes last year, it’s right to ask what changes are coming in this year? While many commentators like Dave Chaffey have given their views on his digital marketing predictions for 2015, they often don't all look at the practicalities. To answer that question of the changes in digital marketing practices, we have created a summary of the views of our agency to check against…
The biggest gap is surprising..
Where are marketers most keen to improve their skills in digital marketing? Since all the tools in our digital marketing library are aimed at helping members improve their digital skills we were interested to know where people felt confident and where they want to top up their skills.
So we asked this question in our recent research looking at how digital marketing is managed in 2015. The chart shows that over half of respondents feel confident in their own skills or they know sufficient although there is still a huge appetite to learn 'across the board' as shown by the red bars:
We might expect from what's discussed online, that the gap would be social media, content marketing or strategy, but when looking at the highest percentage of those that need to improve their depth…
Alternatives for managing marketing technology systems
This new, independent research from the IAB and Winterberry Group reveals that Marketers are still divided over which technology will solve their key challenges - how to gather, merge and manipulate cross-channel data.
'Marketers are on a journey to unlock the power of their data by unifying it across desktop, mobile, CRM, email, point-of-sale and more.
Their vision is to create a seamless experience for customers, but many brands are stuck in first gear because of the complex and difficult task of connecting massive amounts of fragmented data,'
Mike Sands, CEO, Signal.
In this report executive-level marketers and key experts mainly from North America, working in the advertising, marketing, media and technology industries gave their views and goals for cross-channel marketing, and how to extract the value of data along with the challenges of technology.
Which systems do marketers prefer?
There was no clear preference of 'Integrated (stack-approach)' which manages…
The Smart Insights summary of digital marketing developments
This year we'll be continuing our summary of the 'must-know' developments in digital marketing, so they're available to our members to scan as a quick summary each month. January was a quiet month for changes on the main platforms. The main development to be aware of from January is that Facebook changed it's newsfeed to filter out 'promotional posts'. In this summary, we look at developments across the 5 key areas of managing digital marketing each month.
Strategy and planning
In our State of Digital Marketing infographic we summarised the techniques that work best in digital marketing today based on our Managing Digital Marketing 2015 research to be presented at the TFM&A 2015 event on the 25th and 26th February.
State of B2B Digital Marketing in 2015…
30 cutting-edge digital marketing tools and techniques to help grow your business
It’s my favourite time of blogging year, where we look ahead to what will be the major trends in digital marketing in the year ahead. I find there’s a real thirst for knowledge amongst marketers about the latest trends in digital marketing and Ienjoy reviewing the latest marketing techniques and technologies. For the past few years I have given my recommendations on the trends as I see them, based on reviewing innovation in marketing technology through the year, plus crowdsourcing what Smart Insights readers see as important for them.
Update for 2016 Digital Marketing Trends
Well, that's us nearly into 2016, so we have a new series of updates looking at the latest 2016 Digital Marketing Trends and we have been adding to our coverage of the latest trends:
Managing Digital Marketing 2015…
Review your approach to marketing with limited budget
How to build - Start-up Marketing 101
Recently, we attended Denver Startup week, which inspired us to create a short 'How To' Guide that digs into issues related to getting a start-up off the ground – building on the 'How to build requirements for an MVP' and our white paper on 'Tips every first-time entrepreneur should know.'
This article mamepecifically focuses on how to develop a marketing strategy as a start-up, with lessons learned from experts, as well as advice on tools of the trade and how to measure and analyze your progress.
15 Marketing tips for start-ups
Tip #1
The key advice that you always have to keep at the top of everything you do is:
Get your product out the door – with emphasis on speed over perfection. Your product doesn’t…
