A review of the main web crowdsourcing services for marketing, design and development
These service sound scarier than than the title suggests. I'm sure many consultants, agencies and companies are using services such as Upwork and 99Designs already. But I thought these were worth grouping and sharing for those not in the know or so that others can be shared.
The crowdsourcing approach where you put your tender out to anyone who wants to bid tends to be much more cost effective. In this blog post I want to open your eyes to some of the potential with outsourcing, my experience of it and highlight some of the services you could utilise. The outsource / crowdsourcing industry is seeing huge growth as more business are willing to change their processes. Elance reported a doubling of the number…
What does it take to win with E-Business?
We believe that the secret to growing E-Business results in your organization is to benchmark to find a better balance between enablers, readiness and performance.
Why are some organizations able to repeatedly deliver results while others struggle to keep up the pace (or never reach it)? We think that high performance E-Business organizations have several things in common but most notably, they are better at balancing E-Business enablers, readiness and performance while using benchmarking to identify improvement areas.
We've developed the E-Business Monitor for companies to benchmark where they are now and get actionable insights on where to improve.
Why other E-Business benchmarks fall short
The last decade has shown a tremendous growth of online channels. Now, organizations find themselves facing tough questions concerning the effectiveness of their E-Business (including digital marketing and E-commerce).
Key questions faced are:
How…
If you're thinking of hiring an SEO or are an SEO - this is a must browse
Earlier in January, you may have seen a useful piece of research completed by SEOmoz that looked into the costs and service structure of SEO agencies.
I've included that below, but the main reason for this post is to alert you to this excellent summary by Dan Barker (one of our Expert commentators) which features the UK and, in my opinion, is far clearer and so useful.
You can checkout the full post and research on SEOmoz here.
Turning to the UK data, from Dan, the most interesting for me, which prompts questions you should ask of your agency are...
What services do you provide? Surprisingly few do content creation or promotion - surely a core 2012 SEO technique. A surprising number don't provide link-building recommendations
What charging models do you use? Fixed price is offered by 51.9%, so…
An infographic emphasising the future skills gap for "data scientists"
I blogged recently and mentioned the importance of new skills being brought into your marketing team, and especially people with computer and mathematical science qualifications being of increasing importance.
I noticed this infographic and thought it was useful for their emphasis of the importance of 'Data Scientists' to the future of companies. It seems there's a growing recognition of the value of applying data to marketing.
As you can see, it seems as if demand for "data scientists" will outstrip supply, indeed it already is. So that's an opportunity for getting an edge in the jobs marketplace. As you might expect, the main challenge isn't lack of tools, it's having the skills to apply them, to ask the right questions and for management to give a supportive framework where time is defined for analysis and decision making based on data.
…
Life’s A Pitch (Part 2 of 3): Writing a decent creative brief
Most people find writing a creative immensely difficult and more often than not, people make a bad job of it. This is designed to be helpful advice for all, regardless of whether you’re new to writing briefs or you’ve been in the industry for years. Like countless peers, I’ve spent years writing briefs. Moreover, in my various new business roles, I’ve received and written a vast amount of potential client/pitch briefs. In such instances, the brief is obviously the key to getting it right.
Whilst it’s important for agency-side parties to be usefully inquisitive, the work you receive will be a reasonable reflection of the brief you provide in the first place (i.e. get the brief wrong and the work represented will likely be shit). So with that in mind, here’s a simple guide to what that brief should consist of. …
A 5 step process using 90-day time-boxes to help implement your plans
The start of a new year always brings a period of reflection and forward planning. New strategies are created and exciting initiatives are launched. It's often the case though, that plans and strategies end up in drawers, little changes and businesses continue on doing the same old things.
I am lucky in that between working for both Smart Insights and First 10 I get to bridge both the creation of strategies as well as the implementation of them. At the moment I'm more involved at the implementation stage which is why I have decided to share our process for making the most of a strategy and delivering on your big ideas.
Running marketing services at First 10 often sees us managing multiple clients as well as multiple freelancers in different markets, positions etc but essentially we help clients run and manage…
Our framework for owning marketing success
Thanks for your comments and shares for our new Marketing Growth Wheel, it was good to see that many found this useful. We'll be going into more depth on how to apply this in our guides and templates for members in future. By way of an introduction, I wanted to explain a bit more about our thinking behind it; why there is a need for a planned approach to digital marketing, yet the majority don't have a plan.
Perhaps, the best way to explain the need for a planned approach to give you the right focus is through this...
A Typical conversation about digital marketing:
A person: "How do I get more traffic?"
Me: "Do you need more traffic?"
A person: "Yeah, of course, we always want more traffic!"
Me: "Hmmm, sure. Is that the priority though? Isn't the real question around commercial growth and the priorities in [digital] marketing…
More predictions for marketing using digital technology platforms in 2012
Wow: it’s 2012. Now thoughts naturally turn to the future. What might this year hold for the world of Digital Marketing? Of course none of us knows for sure. The rapid pace of change and the accompanying opportunities and threats facing players in the digital/tech space are, in large part, what makes it all so exciting. And hard to predict. But it’s always fun to guess…
I used to think that being a futurist would be quite a good gig; you know: fly in to somewhere nice, speculate a little about what might happen, pocket the fee, then fly out and keep a low profile elsewhere while none of it came true…?
I’ve realised though, that to do this you’ve really got to keep running (see George Clooney’s character in the excellent Up In The…
12 digital marketing fundamentals to get right in 2012
At the turn of the year, it’s always worth reflecting on the opportunities and challenges ahead to help shape priorities for marketing. In a recent talk for AdTech London, I identified 12 marketing trends, available in the Slideshare embed at the end of the post. In this post I’ll highlight some of the main opportunities and I've added links to our posts and guides to help you think through your strategy.
We've kept this post available on the blog for historical reference, for the most up-to-date marketing trends see our 2015 Digital Marketing trends predictions.
Most important marketing trend for 2012 : creating a cross-channel engagement strategy
We can be sure that there will be will be lots of announcements of exciting innovations and marketing trends in all of the search and social networks within in 2012. We look forward to covering them within our alerts, but they can…
Life's A Pitch (Part 1 of 3): The pitch process and agency selection
Identifying the need for a pitch
First thing’s first: Why have a pitch?
Your current agency relationship/s is/are tired. There’s nowhere else to go; the agencies you’re working with are all out of ideas and, as a result, your competitors are leaving you behind.
Attitudes. A very common reason for brands to decide its time to move agencies is as simple as a change in attitude of their incumbent – either arrogance, complacency, or just that they no longer come forward with new and exciting ideas or observations.
Relationships. Your account director’s gone, the creative director’s gone, the agency has changed hands and frankly, things just aren’t the same.
Dynamics of your brand. Your brand is moving with the times (as it should) and you’re mad keen to adapt to new consumer trends…
