Five ideas to help supercharge your marketing brief

The ability to write an effective marketing communications brief can be the difference between a campaign that comes to life and generates the results you’re looking for or one that misses the mark and leaves your audience cold and indifferent. The IPA outlines three reasons why marketers should write a brief: It leads to better work. A good brief helps ensure that there is clarity around the goals and objectives of the campaign meaning an agency can focus their efforts in the right direction It saves time and money. Efficiencies can be made by helping agencies to get to the right ideas more quickly first time round rather than changing the goalposts several times during the process, all of which costs time and money on all sides. It makes remuneration fairer. Make it clear from the start what exactly is expected of the agency and how success…

Tips on how to create a non-profit marketing plan with limited funds

Non-profit organizations face one of the biggest digital marketing challenges of all: having limited funds or no money at all. Nonprofit organizations have to operate and thrive in marketing their cause without spending a substantial amount of money. This is difficult because bigger organizations have the funds to spend on online advertizing. You can develop a marketing plan that helps navigate the unique challenges of nonprofits, and keep the nonprofit’s budget, objectives, strategy and other important considerations in perspective.

Creating a Nonprofit Marketing Plan

Objectives

What will the proposed marketing efforts achieve? Objectives can include big-picture goals such as educating the public about core issues and connecting with public figures or politicians. Make your objectives as concrete as possible, for example: Grow your list of email subscribers Increase membership by 25% amount Promote X, Y or Z service Make sure your list of objectives is in…

Internal links are important for ranking high on search engines

As a lanky teenager, basketball was always my sport of choice at school; I scored three pointers for fun, towering above my classmates to effortlessly send the ball sailing into the net. (Or at least that’s how I like to remember the pinnacle of my sporting achievements.) Now, as a seasoned SEO professional, I’m reminded of my days shooting hoops when I come across websites that neglect to build internal links. It may sound a strange analogy, but hear me out. Placing an internal link from one page to another is like a free throw, a simple chance to score points unopposed. Links give you a chance to direct website visitors to related content, while, in the background, they also point search engine bots in the direction of your most important pages,…

How to engage your audience with a customer-focused relationship

It seems to be a trend in the world of digital marketing: Brands are leaning heavily on their product instead of their customers. Coca-Cola recently rebranded its Coke Zero product to Coca-Cola Zero Sugar, abandoning advertisements about the experiences of people drinking its beverages in favor of a product-oriented focus on ingredients and taste. Coca-Cola believes this product-centered approach will drive sales and create a loyal culture of followers, but this mindset runs counter to human behavior. An overemphasis on the bells and whistles of a product might work in some industries, but people are far more likely — to the tune of a jaw-dropping 269 percent, according to one study — to do business with companies that take their needs into account. Think about the last time you tried to buy a car.…

A study from market research company Forrester found that more marketers are focusing on performance-based marketing. Performance marketing is “the new normal,” according to Forrester. Performance advertising is a competitive differentiator today; it will be table stakes tomorrow. What is performance marketing? Performance marketing uses clearly defined and measurable business objectives as the basis of payment or optimization. This includes cost-per-action (CPA) models, such as affiliate marketing, and programmatic ads that optimize based on real-time performance metrics.

How Performance Marketing Works

The Basics

The CPA model of payment is critical to understanding how performance marketing works. Advertisers and marketing companies are paid only when a specific action, such as a sale, lead or click, is completed. This model is what separates performance marketing from other forms of advertising. In traditional advertising, fees are paid up front and do not depend on the success of the ads. Advertisers in performance marketing only pay for successful…

Chart of the Day: 21% of respondents characterize Sales and marketings relationship as either misaligned or 'don't know' - part 5 of 10.

For a working, thriving business you need a working and thriving team. If your teams aren't happy and working together, it's going to lead to a very disjointed business. Both teams need to work in sync to run smoothly and reach business goals.

How would you characterize your company's Sales and Marketing relationship?

Only 22% of respondents believe their company's Sales and Marketing relationship is 'tightly aligned' and have a service level agreement (SLA) in place, whilst almost half (44%) say they are generally aligned.

How would you characterize your company's Sales and Marketing relationship? (by seniority)

It is interesting to note that when this question is dived…

Use predictive modeling to give your campaigns an edge over competitors

The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization’s 2015 State of Search Industry Report provides several valuable insights derived from both marketer and agency practices over the past year. The most useful conclusions center on three forms of advertising: paid search, social media, and display media. In general, marketers were more confident in managing paid search advertising efforts in-house, whereas social media advertising was a responsibility better left to outside agencies. This shows how marketers are often more comfortable managing “tried-and-true” tactics as opposed to navigating the more complex and fast-paced landscape of social media advertising. Throughout the report, a continuous theme emerges regarding success in measuring return on investment. For a paid search campaign, it’s a relatively easy task because the data and tools used to properly interpret those data are…

Working with your HiPPO

Data / analytics can be both liberating and restrictive but the one thing it will always do and do well is ensure we remain commercially focused. I was at a clients HQ for the first time 2 weeks ago and this quote summarises my belief about business and why being commercially minded is fundamental to success: “We need freedom to shape our future; we need profit to remain free”. This quote is the one thing that can unite teams if understood and even help with the subject of my blog post. I spent a lot of my junior marketing days in data analysis tools like Omniture & Google helping to craft my story of how me / my team were performing and to show our contribution to the business, it rarely went as I expected in the early days, but I learnt and learned fast, here are 5 ways I found to help me that I…

A visual summary of Smart Insights members' conference

Well that's a relief! I think it's fair to say our first conference went pretty well judging by the Twitter comments and other feedback. Many thanks if you attended the event and got involved in the sharing. I've compiled a quick "best of" starting with some general feedback and then looking at highlights of individual talks. If you're an Expert member of Smart Insights and weren't able to attend, we'll be making the slides available on the site next week, we'll let you know :) It was great we had a full-house and I was delighted to see attendees from many industries across Europe and beyond - I spoke to Smart Insights Expert members from Denmark, Ireland, Switzerland, Italy even Australia! and I think there were more countries besides. مؤتمر رائع جدا بحضور أحد أهم خبراء #التسويق_الإلكتروني في العالم @DaveChaffey #digitalimpact2014 …

Integrating online marketing into marketing communications is the key to success & longevity

The head of the world’s largest PR firm, Edelman, declared recently that the marketing industry has its business backward. That marketing has a “short-term and broken model”.  And, he’s saying, it doesn’t have to be this way. Where brands could originally only reach and stimulate consumers through advertising or promotional marketing, we’re seeing brands such as American Express, Coke, Red Bull and Dove all creating content rich stories, integrated into much wider campaigns, to enable connections in consumer news feeds. Annoyingly Edelman is pointing to “marketing” but referencing the advertising model specifically, but the point is still great if viewed in a wider context.

“I see the emergence of a new paradigm, which is ‘communications marketing’ instead of ‘marketing communications.’”

Richard Edelman, CEO, Edelman

Of course Edelman is encouraging a PR or journalistic mindset of ‘communications’ vs…