Strategic marketing is a key part of ensuring you achieve your business growth goals. Lead your team to accelerated growth through digital marketing

It has been a challenging year for marketers, with market uncertainty, reduced budgets, and huge shifts in the marketing mix. One common element for all businesses is a renewed focus in 2021 on digital marketing to accelerate business growth. SME marketers familiar with the 5 stages of business growth, first coined in the Harvard Business Review in 1983, can cite the stages as: Existence Survival Success Take-off Resource Maturity Notably, success takes the form of both Success-Disengagement and Success-Growth. The strategies outlined below support owners/marketing managers during the Survival, Success-Growth and Take-off stages of their business lifecycle. Large companies or corporations are typically more removed from the 'survival' mindset, although of course this year that has sadly not been the case for all. Rather than starting from scratch,…

Marketers can no longer afford to make 12-month marketing plans and review them annually. The agile approach of marketing enables them to review the performance of their campaigns every 2 weeks, recalibrate the process and iterate accordingly

There was a time when marketing was fairly simple. If you covered print, radio and television, your marketing campaign was in good shape. Marketing plans were made annually and were rarely changed. With those simpler days gone, marketing is evolving at a supersonic pace. Most marketers still work on quarterly plans. However, in this digital world, a lot of change happens in 90 days. Marketing teams need to respond accordingly. For example, team one measures, iterates and recalibrates their process every two weeks instead of a quarter. Team two only adjusts their plan every quarter. Team one is 543% faster and delivers 6x more often. Sounds efficient, right? While agile methods deliver at this rate, traditional marketing won’t allow you…

A list of digital hacks and tools for full-stack marketers

First of all, think through your most tedious, low-skilled, weekly tasks. If you find them cumbersome, chances are, other marketers are bound to have felt the same frustrations as you. It's likely that, somewhere in the world, someone created the technology to help themselves and others overcome whatever the challenge at hand is. I always look at pain points as opportunities and so if there's ever something that takes a while to complete, its easy to find a solution (or a hack as some might say). In the below article, I've combined a list of marketing tools and chrome extensions that I regularly use to automate a few of my daily activities, to be more efficient and to get results faster. That's what being a full-stack marketer is all about. Getting stuff done, and getting results. "The full-stack marketer is multi-skilled. However,…

Make a living doing what you love, or at least get paid to do what you would be doing anyway

Far too many people have resigned themselves to the fact that their jobs aren’t enjoyable. For these people, their jobs are an unfulfilling but necessary evil in their lives. Of course, we have all had jobs like these in the past. Very few people are fortunate enough to leave education and enter straight into their ideal role. However, things don’t have to be this way. There is no reason that earning an income cannot be an enjoyable and worthwhile pursuit.It is simply a case of identifying what it is that you have to offer the world, and how you can render your skills and talents for money in a way that makes you happy as a person. We all, hopefully, have hobbies and interests. These are the recreational activities that we use to…

Chart of the Day: Innovation and market expansion take backseats to refining existing products and services

Research from The CMO Survey shows that American CMOs are heavily focussed on their own markets, rather than broadening into new ones. Asking over 300 marketers about their spending strategies over the last 12 months, companies from all sectors put the majority of their spending on existing products/services in existing markets. Only roughly one-quarter of these marketers’ budgets were put towards new products, with even less going towards their efforts in new markets. This near-tunnel vision is explained when looking at what the CMOs believe their customers see as top priorities for the coming year. ‘Superior product quality’ (33%) and ‘excellent service’ (23%) topped these replies, both seeing increases from 2017, with ‘superior innovation’ coming in at 15% (no increase from 2017). The percentage spend of marketing budgets on…

What functions will a Chief Experimental Officer need to do to run hypothesis-driven experiments?

When “growth hacking” first entered the scene, it provided a fresh, practical approach to marketing. Smart engineers coded innovative solutions that generated free viral shares. Stories about Dropbox’s storage rewards for sharing and Facebook’s famous growth team became models for companies everywhere. Eventually, though, too many marketers trying to cook up schemes in growth hacking ruined it. Startups piled on the trend, slapped the term on everything they could, and turned growth hacking into a spam technique. Coders took shortcuts to scrape addresses and send semi-personalized emails, lowering the quality of communication and letting nontechnical users further dilute the practice. Every entrepreneur who managed to put together some funding tried to hack success to justify the last round. Today, growth hacking is at best meaningless, and at worst, a direct disservice to growth. We have too many options, not enough…

Up your slack game with these time-saving tools

What better way to boost marketing and sales productivity than using a productivity tool? Slack now has over 4 million users, and many marketing and sales tools have used that opportunity to reach more users by building integrations. The good news for marketers and sales personnel is that you can now get more work done without having to leave your Slack channels. This article summarises what you can do with these 10 great Slack integrations.

GrowthBot

I’m beginning with GrowthBot because it is a severely underestimated chat based marketing tool that can help you with content ideas, keyword research and monitoring your competition. Once you have integrated the tool, you simply have to say “Hello” to have it suggest a dozen or so questions that you can then use as queries. Some interesting questions are “What…

Qualitative analytics are the next frontier for cutting edge marketers

It is 2016, and things are not what they used to be. Taylor Swift and Tom Hiddleston broke up, Cristiano Ronaldo actually won something with his national team, and growth hacking has become something of an oxymoron. Growth hacking, specifically app growth hacking, a term that used to describe doing things differently in order to give your app extra momentum for growth, has been chewed up, washed out and clichéd into oblivion. All the tactics, strategies and methods developers have been using have been thoroughly analyzed and reported, and nowadays – everyone’s using it. Well, if everyone’s using it, it’s not really ‘hacking’ any more, is it? As if time stopped when we learned how to use social media, word of mouth, or paid-to-free campaigns all with the goal of increasing downloads for our apps. And that really is what the focus of…

Growth Hacker Marketing Report by Ryan Holiday - Book Review covering 4 key areas of focus for Growth Hacking

A little while back Dave Chaffey asked in a Smart Insights post, "What can businesses learn from growth hacking". This post introduced the Growth Hacking approach and how it originated in startup online businesses and explained how more traditional businesses are creating growth hacking roles to support conversion optimisation. In this post, I'm adding more depth through a review of a Growth Hacking book I've been taking a look  at recently. In Growth Hacker Marketing, Ryan Holiday explains more on this new approach which is being applied from the in the marketing departments of the smallest businesses to the largest blue-chip organisations. It prompts questions about how traditional marketing departments operate. According to Google Trends, the rise in searches associated with this new skillset is on the rise, could…

How to use Growth Hacking to get real results

The growth hacking approach (also referred to as ‘agile marketing’ and ‘growth marketing’) has generated a lot of excitement as a dynamic approach to boost awareness, lead generation and conversion. Sean Ellis, a marketer and entrepreneur who has worked for companies such as Dropbox and Eventbrite, devised the term ‘Growth Hacking’ in 2010. Originating from Silicon Valley, growth hacking has successfully been used to build high-growth companies such as Hotmail, PayPal, Twitter, Airbnb, Instagram and Uber. Ellis says: “Startups live and die by their ability to drive customer acquisition growth…[they] are under extreme resource constraints and need to figure out how to break through the noise to let their target customers know they have a superior solution for a critical problem…the best growth hacks take advantage of the unique opportunities available in a connected world where digital experiences can spread rapidly.” Growth hacking is…