Applying PR Smith's SOSTAC® planning to digital marketing
SOSTAC® is a marketing planning model, originally developed by PR Smith in the 1990s to help marketers develop marketing plans. Paul is my co-author on Emarketing Excellence, so when we created this book it was natural to work together to show how SOSTAC® can best be applied to planning for digital marketing.
This new infographic, that I've developed with Paul and the designers at First 10, summarises the key issues to consider at each stage when developing digital marketing plans [click infographic to expand]:
See our more detailed post where we introduce how to apply the SOSTAC® template to Digital Marketing.
You can also find out more about the SOSTAC® approach for marketing planning in this Ebook: The SOSTAC® Guide - to writing the perfect plan V1.1 by PR Smith.
The "5S's and KPI's" refer to the…
24 checks to help focus your digital marketing budget
I've been reminded a few times during the last month that we're at "that" time of year. A time where many of us get our budgets reigned back for us (or we're at least asked to). It got me thinking that this might be a good thing to post about, so we wanted to create a list of pro-active budget improving, questions, ideas and checks - please add your thoughts in the comments, I am sure others will value your shared insight.
Plan for success
At times of budget cuts it's easy to cut the investment in the quality of your research and planning. Yet this is so important since helps get management buy-in when it comes to retaining budget and showing value of marketing to the bottom line. It's also vital to keep your communications customer-centric and beating the competitors. Otherwise the brutal…
Value: [rating=3]
Recommended link: New Media Age - Top 100 Interactive Agencies 2012 (Digital Magazine Download)
In this alert, relevant to larger UK companies who commission larger agencies, we’re flagging up the publication of this annual listing of digital agencies. It’s broken down into categories of marketing, technical and design and build agencies plus media buying agencies varying in fee income from £92 million for Sapient Nitro to £2.8 million for Unboxed Consulting.
A new feature this year was this regional breakdown, showing leading agencies outside London and the South East:
Also relevant to agencies and consultants who can see the fast growing sectors, an interesting KPI is efficiency which is income/staff - the best performers are around the £285,000/team member level. The report shows strong growth in performance in many agencies…
Using lifetime value models to set campaign investment levels
We think Lifetime value (LTV) models are a powerful tool to help businesses demonstrate the future value they can generate from marketing activities. It’s a much better approach to evaluate investment based on long-term returns from marketing activities rather than the short-term success of a single sale. As the inimitable Avinash Kaushik has said, setting marketing budgets without using LTV is like saying a relationship will be successful based on a one night stand.
Although the benefits of using lifetime value models are strong, in our experience, lifetime value is a technique that’s not used as much as you might expect or it should be. It seems it’s mainly a “big company thing”, more often used in sectors like financial services, retail or where direct marketing marketing has been practiced.
We think LTV models can and should be used in businesses of different…
Setting the right goals and KPIs for using internal company networks to support social business
Social networking has altered the way companies engage with their customers, changing their approach to areas such as customer service and brand management. Leading organisations have been taking the concepts of social networking and using them to transform the way they engage with their employees and partners, in areas as diverse as Sales, R&D, Communications and Marketing. Organisations are now adopting company or enterprise social networks on a much larger scale and company-wide initiatives are increasingly common. This results in a corresponding demand for provable success and measurable benefits. In line with this, the approach for measurement of business value of company social networks has also matured, comparable to how measures related to the web channel evolved from simply tracking the number of visitors to showing how those visits were turning into revenue. …
"From the trenches" advice from web managers
Managing a website relaunch is not straightforward, there are so many issues to consider from marketing strategy, customer experience to content strategy to the technical challenges of selecting and integrating different technology platforms and web services.
We recently saw just how many challenges there are when Larry Peterson asked this question on the Web Managers Group on LinkedIn:
“What are the top five things a web manager should take into consideration when redesigning and launching a new website?”
There was such a great response from the group that we thought it would be a good idea to summarise the common advice from the discussion here. Altogether, there were 20 key points, so let's get straight to them.
1. Define Vision, strategy, goals
This is “the concrete vision of where you want the site to go,” according to website transformation consultant David…
Customer over corporate-led communications
We're currently hiring at First 10. A friend asked me what kind of roles we're looking to fill. My response was, "two brand journalists". She was puzzled, "do you mean PRs", she said? "...aren't there loads of people in marketing who can write?" My response: "Not really, it's a different blend of skill-sets and a totally different motivation."
I embraced the whole idea of "brand journalism" via a book by David Meerman-Scott, I read 3-4 years ago, it's made increasing sense since. The way a journalist approaches an article is simply different from the way that somebody who is good at writing approaches an article. A brand journalist works inside the company across all content formats, writing and producing videos, blog posts, photos, webinars, articles, e-books and podcasts. It's about producing the content that is relevant to, that engages prospects and customers, which is something that Marketing Profs…
Six top tips for ensuring a harmonious agency:client relationship
Getting an agency or freelancer in to take care of your content marketing strategy can bean excellent way to get fresh ideas and expertise for your marketing strategy, as well as freeing-up your internal team. However, relationships between clients and their external partners often require careful management and mutual understanding.
Here are six absolute musts to achieving a harmonious working agency: client relationship:
1. Determine what you need and set clear objectives
One of the biggest challenges for any content agency or freelancer arises when a client doesn’t really know what they want, but has a very clear idea of what they don’t want.
To some extent, freelancers will be familiar with this and many have honed a technique to get the right information out of their clients. This doesn’t mean, however, that you can rely…
How engaged are users of different social platforms?
Back in June 2011, we shared an infographic showing what happens in 60 seconds in social media, now we're updating it with a new infographic from Social JumpStart. This one has some additions including Pinterest showing that for all our current interest in Pinterest it's nothing compared to YouTube. It's a pity they haven't included Google+ either.
It certainly summarises the challenges we face today as marketers and consumers of content today!
How do you find this - exciting? or scary? I find it both - to be involved in such a dynamic area, but which presents huge challenges in being first and getting cut-through. I created a companion post taming the social media firehose which shared ideas on tools I used to keep up-to-date.
Here…
Two apparently contradictory reports on UK digital ad spend
Two stories in the marketing press caught my eye recently because they appeared to contradict each other and each is from an impeccable source.
One set of figures comes from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) and the other from the Advertising Agency Register (AAR).
The IPA story states UK digital ad spend is still increasing and senior marketers expect this trend to continue.
Indeed, according to the respected IPA Bellwether report, online display spend forecasts were revised up 13.4% and paid search budgets revised up 14.9% during the last quarter of 2011. And this despite the fact that marketing chiefs are, overall, more pessimistic about the year ahead than they have been in nearly three years.
The second piece of news appears to contradict this picture.
According to the latest…
