Marketers love the potential power of Content Marketing! When you get it right, Content Marketing fuels many of the inbound marketing techniques like search engine optimisation, social media marketing, 'lead magnets' for site registration and triggered email sequences. In our recent research survey of content marketers, with HubSpot, Content Marketing was the top-rated as the technique to drive incremental sales. The results you can get with Content Marketing are not a secret. Many marketers are making content marketing work for them. Yet to do this is far from simple. It takes good quality planning and regular action to create and distribute content that builds brand awareness, familiarity and purchase intent. A weak process will gives you “me too” content. To succeed with content marketing you need a strategic approach with a solid plan, content calendars and outreach to create unique, highly shareable, valuable content.…

How do you get cut-through to reach and engage your audiences? With more options than ever to reach your audiences online, you need to invest your campaign budgets where they will make the biggest difference. You will know that integrating different communications techniques will help you grow, but how do you achieve that? A structured campaign planning process gives you the confidence to create winning campaigns and to use the same process in future.…

We all know that social media has become incredibly popular with consumers and rightly so! For businesses, social media marketing offers a great opportunity to use fans as ambassadors who share your content and recommend your business at a low cost. So it makes perfect sense that many companies are using social media tactically by posting updates to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Twitter. But few have a social media strategy which helps them use social media to support their business goals. Our experience is that social media works best when you have a more structured approach that's part of an integrated digital communications strategy…

Do you have a clear, integrated strategy for digital marketing? Our Managing Digital Marketing research report shows that, even today, nearly 50% of businesses still don't have a clear digital strategy. Lack of clarity in online marketing means that you probably don't have clear goals for digital marketing or the right KPIs to measure how well it's working for your business. Worse still, you may be investing in the wrong tactics, so your competitors will get further ahead. Smart Insights is here to help you Smart Insights membership helps businesses develop data-driven digital marketing strategies which help them compete better. Sign up as a free member to use the templates below from our Digital Marketing Strategy and Planning Toolkit to audit your use of digital marketing and identify priorities to improve effectiveness. Our paid membership plans offer in-depth guidance using our Learning Paths and Quick Wins covering all aspects of digital marketing.…

It’s now more than twenty-five years since the birth of the web, but many businesses are still at the early stages of a long journey to make the best use of digital marketing to stay competitive. An ongoing, proactive approach for managing Digital Transformation is essential to keep the largest businesses and brands relevant and competitive in the future. Think of what you could be missing if you don't have a digital transformation programme in place... You don't have a vision for how integrated digital marketing can support your business You don't have a strategy or roadmap to exploit digital media and technology You don't have the best resources or structure in place to compete You don't have a performance improvement based on the right KPIs to optimise marketing …

IF you know how to get it right, SEO is a fantastic way to drive quality visitors to your site who want to do buy from you now. We know, because we drive over one million unique visitors to Smart Insights each and every quarter using ethical SEO and content marketing best practices AND our visits are increasing 40% year-on-year. So, who do you turn to if you want to learn the basics of SEO and learn more advanced best practices? Our SEO guides aren't written by journalists or SEO spammers who just run blogs... Instead, our SEO guide and templates are written by experienced enterprise SEO consultants and client-side SEO experts who drive SEO for some of the biggest businesses like Apple, HSBC and Trip Advisor.…

Although organic search and social media are really appealing for for gaining visibility and traffic online at low-cost, they are often lacking in control and fiercely competitive. What's more, the big-six platforms like Facebook, Google, Instagram LinkedIn, Twitter and Youtube are looking to monetise their platforms, such that they are becoming 'pay-to-play' if you want to maximize visibility and response. We believe that to maximise the effectiveness of your online marketing, all businesses should review the paid media options available which we feature in detail in our digital media 'cheatsheet'.  If you don't advertise online already, we recommend you start with Google AdWords or Facebook while larger businesses will want to explore the Programmatic options.…

Marketing technology offers fantastic opportunities to grow your business using 'cloud services'. Yet with thousands of competing vendors it can be difficult to know which are the best solutions to form the 'martech stack' for your business. To help simplify your decisions about technology and create a long-term roadmap, Smart Insights offers members a range of resources to help you review your current and future use of marketing technology. These are structured around our RACE planning framework for the customer lifecycle, so it helps you take martech decisions based on marketing and customer communications needs. Our resources will also help you define the best marketing technology stack; the combination of different software services or tools used to run all marketing operations including customer acquisition, conversion, retention, team communications and to deliver market insight and reporting. In this toolkit we have a guide to the latest innovations across sectors and also sector-specific guides exploring the latest applications of innovation in…

Developing plans and strategies for marketing today is the most challenging it has ever been. There is an incredible and increasing choice of interactive devices, platforms and channels that potential customers use from smartphones and tablets to social networks and search engines. Investment in traditional channels such as TV, Print and Radio is declining, but they remain an essential part of integrated campaigns for many businesses. Yet the fundamentals of marketing planning remain the same. Regardless of the channels available we need to research customer needs and define a strategy develop winning brand propositions for different target segments and communicate them effectively. That's why at Smart Insights we have a dedicated toolkit and downloads to help you create an integrated marketing strategy.…

Running international marketing campaigns gives a fantastic opportunity to gain leads and sales globally. But it also adds complexity and additional challenges to every single market activity. From coordinating activity across multiple languages, tackling differing levels of brand, product or service awareness, social and cultural market differences as well as the demands of managing an international team. These are just some of the challenges that marketers need first to understand and then deploy the tools and techniques at their disposal to tackle them. Digital media and technology give you the opportunity to get your message across in different markets, but you need to work extra hard to deliver relevance for your international visitors. We can show you how, without you having to learn the hard way – through errors.…