5 key themes of Modern Marketing innovation
Innovation is a concept that is referenced regularly in marketing content: from blog posts to keynotes, it is widely acknowledged as a critical ingredient for success in the digital age. Yet, for all the importance attributed to innovation, it is rarely analysed or explored.
We decided to take a closer look to understand how marketers perceive innovation both inside and outside their own organisations. How do marketers define innovation? What are the main enablers of innovation? Do they feel their own marketing is innovative? We wanted to answer these questions, and more, to understand the key drivers and challenges. We went about doing this by surveying the attendees of our 2014 UK Roadshow in London. This group was made-up of senior-level marketers, representing a wide variety of sectors; both consumer and business-to-business.
The Five Key Marketing Innovation themes
From the survey results, we distilled five key themes,…
Which 'Demandgen' channels and content marketing techniques are most effective for B2B marketers?
Allocating budget and resources to the right channels is always a challenge, even after fully analysing your personas, past campaigns and competitor activity. Properly defining demand generation and then integrating into your strategy is key to developing a future-proof marketing plan.
The B2B Demand Generation Report from marketing technology SoftwareAdvice.com explores what companies are investing in to 'fuel their Demandgen'.
Which are the most effective channels for generating high quality leads?
This four quadrant presentation can help prioritise your focus according to your business goals. For generating high quantity and quality leads, Trade Shows, Referral Marketing and in-house email marketing were the best channels. Bear in mind, that this is from a sample of 200 B2B marketing organisations in the United States.
Which content…
Our monthly round-up of the main developments in marketing
The main platform developments this month were Twitter Digits and the relaunch of Facebook Atlas which we report on in our Social Media section. We also heard about Google's reinvention of email through Inbox - although there's not much to report on just yet, we'll have to see when it officially goes to Public Beta - request your invite here!
Strategy and Planning
This month we’ve been focusing on an aspect of Digital Marketing that you don’t hear discussed very often, but we think will be discussed a lot more in the future as more businesses start to get the fundamentals of digital marketing right. That’s Digital Marketing Optimization - check out our post for why we see it is important and how the best results will go to those businesses who succeed in getting People, Process and Tools to work effectively…
By
October 29, 2014
Re-imagining the recruitment process in a digital world
Using digital to provide a human touch
In relationships between two people, the person instigating the break up may feel they may have little to lose, especially in the early days of the relationship. 'You never return my phone calls, my emails. You never told me why you don’t accept me for who I am? I just get voicemail. Tell me why you don’t love me.'
Unnecessary behaviour
This behaviour appears to me, to often also manifest itself in the HR recruitment processes of companies. Even in a digital age when a prospective employee could also be a customer or even a shareholder. They could be left thinking that if this is how they treat their prospective employees then this is how they might treat their current employees. Worse still, it could mean they walk away as a customer or shareholder.
Marketing Directors and Customer Service Directors are…
My top 10 tips to help you secure your digital marketing graduate job
There’s something nostalgic about looking back at your time at University – especially when looking to offer advice.
Like that one time you were stranded in the library preparing for your last exam. Or the time you were rushing to print your coursework and realised you had run out of print credits. Frustrating at the time, but when you look back, there’s always a lesson learnt.
University offers so much, yet it’s often under utilised by students. This is sometimes only realised by graduating students when it’s too late to seize those opportunities.
So this is me, who has been there, done that, passing the baton of advice on to any Under-grad or Post-grad students who may be considering their future in digital marketing. The following tips are lessons I…
An interactive map for your new digital marketing job role
Do you know where your digital skills and passions lie, but aren't sure which digital marketing role to target? NeoMam Studios have produced a fun infographic to help you map out your skills with suggested roles. Although it references apprenticeships it also prompts thoughts about the right type of role for more experienced digital marketers
This will be a useful tool to use in conjunction with our recently updated Digital Marketing Job Descriptions and Roles Template to guide you through the digital jobs maze to find what is right for you or to build up a role specification for a new digital specialist in your team.
As you clickthrough you will have the chance to click onto the 4 skills at the end of your mapping and be…
Our round-up of the latest advice and developments in digital marketing with a focus on customer experience and trends this month
This month we published The Managing Customer Journeys Report 2014, a new research report in conjunction with Ecommerce Expo. It’s a free download for all members via our Customer Experience Strategy page which also contains details of the talk and this visual to help you assess your approach to managing customer experience.
We were keen to commission this research since, with the increase in the complexity of the path to purchase across Paid, Owned and Earned media it’s becoming more difficult and more important to manage customer experiences!
It focuses on approaches to managing customer experiences and suggests how businesses are progressing across these experience management maturity levels.
Digital Marketing Trends 2015 - Dave Chaffey’s annual prediction of the marketing trends that will be important in…
#DigitalImpact2014 transforming your digital world
Our showreel gives the vibe of our first conference held in London on 17th September 2014 based on Smart Insights members who attended, speakers and partners.
In a previous post, we gave a visual, Twitter picture summary of the recent Smart Insights Digital Marketing conference. In this post, I've summarised what I thought were the most useful insights from listening to the speakers, linked to more detailed posts from some of the speakers. I listened to speakers from start-ups to large corporations sharing best practice, their mistakes and insight into how we can manage digital transformation; from planning, to managing and optimization.
My colleague Dave introduced the conference, by sharing key models (PR Smith's SOSTAC® and Smart Insights RACE) on how to plan for digital transformation through structured models. He showed how John Lewis ranks as the No…
By
September 17, 2014
A look at academic research on change management with a digital lens
"You can't do today's job with yesterday's methods and be in business tomorrow" - Peter F Drucker
The current Mrs Sealey and I sat down recently to watch Captain America: the Winter Soldier (my choice). It's a great action packed film that sets things up nicely for the forthcoming Avengers 2 movie. It occurred to me during the film that Captain America is a leader of change. He identifies threats and handles them with help from the ensemble cast. He removes corruption, replacing it with new alliance with the vision and mission to do right.
Let me segue into the main topic of this post; accelerating digital transformation (definition). I've had the good fortune in my career to work for or with digital leaders who are attempting to do something new and brave. One thing that is common about…
Digital Impact Conference 2014, Wednesday 17th September 2014, Central London
We're in the final countdown to our first conference in London and looking forward to meeting everyone who has booked. Thank you if you have registered! The final confirmed programme is below.
We have just 8 tickets remaining, so it will be a "full house". If you haven't registered, but are now able to attend, then we would, of course, like to welcome you - please register via Eventbrite which has details on discounts for Smart Insights members that are still available.
Here is the final, confirmed programme for the day.
You can also download a PDF of the programme here
Smart Insights Digital Impact Final Conference Programme.
Finding the venue
Of course, you know how to use Google Maps, but we have found that the venue needs careful navigation to…
