Under pressure to deliver tangible digital marketing measurements? It's time to calculate your digital marketing ROI and demonstrate results

The fundamental formula for calculating your digital marketing ROI is:

ROI = (Gains from investment - cost of investment)/(cost of investment) × 100%

As a marketer, one of your main worries is how to prove the effectiveness of your digital marketing activities. To prove it, your boss wants hard numbers - so it's time to calculate your digital marketing ROI. Let me tell you this though: there’s no exact method that will capture your digital marketing ROI perfectly. It’s just difficult to quantify some of the activities you engage in. Having said that, you can still have an approximate value of your digital marketing ROI. This gives you insights into the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Apart from providing a figure to your boss, it helps you to adjust your marketing strategy to improve results. But to…

Practical steps marketers can take to enhance their curious instincts

Marketers are a naturally curious bunch and are keen to learn new skills to improve their marketing performance. To work in such a varied, multidisciplinary field, you have to be interested in everything from trends and consumer behavior to analytics and creativity. However, even marketers can get stuck in their ways. Depending on the organization in which you work, the business culture or ways of working, barriers can stifle or prevent curiosity from flourishing, which researchers at Harvard Business School believe prevent organizations and individuals to be at their best.   Merck is one organization that has taken it upon themselves to lead the way in cultivating curiosity. According to Stefan Oschmann, Chairman of the Executive Board and CEO of Merck:   “In the pursuit of human progress, the single most important trait is curiosity – the desire to learn, explore,…

Now more than ever it’s essential to amplify the impact of your digital marketing management. Here we show you how to do this by boosting both your operational and leadership effectiveness.

It’s essential to boost your management skills

Now, more than ever, how you prioritize and execute your projects matters for effective digital marketing management. Without operational discipline, you’ll soon find yourself staring at the backs of your competitors. In another Smart Insights article, I talked about how to boost the productivity of your team ( https://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/5-keys-to-work-from-home-success-during-coronavirus-times/ ) during these Coronavirus times. Here I focus on how to improve your productivity and, more importantly, your effectiveness as a leader.

Boosting your impact involves:

Prioritizing your marketing initiatives

Optimizing your marketing workflows

Outsourcing applicable work

Empowering your functional leads

I will drill into each topic below. …

How to become a better marketer: 6 marketing tactics you need to work on to stay relevant   With the rapid development in technology, many changes occur in the marketing scene within short periods. Therefore, as you're trying to execute the tactics you know, you're also in a constant quest to learn new things. Otherwise, it becomes difficult to stay relevant and achieve your goals. Even in marketing channels you know, changes are happening with time. For instance, 17 years ago, you only need to understand how to send blast emails to be a good email marketer. However, today, you need a deep understanding of automated email sequences just to get by. That said, you'll always stay relevant as a marketer if you keep up with important trends and apply them to your marketing campaigns. In light of this, here are 6 essential tactics to work on:

1. Creating and designing visual content

Over the years, …

How to navigate a 'squiggly career'

When many of us consider the word ‘career’, we think about climbing a corporate ladder and following a predictable, linear path to promotion. This was certainly my expectation when I entered the workforce after university; the advice was to join a company as a graduate trainee and move through the ranks to a senior role. But whilst the idea of a traditional career may still be the case for some, the last ten years has transformed many people’s professional working experiences and their expectations for what a career will provide. This is true across most professions, but especially true for marketing, where the rise of the internet, social media and digital channels has disrupted the traditional paradigm.

Navigating the ‘squiggly career’

In spring 2018, whilst I was in between jobs, I discovered a podcast called ‘Squiggly Careers’. Presented by Sarah Ellis and Helen Tupper, it covered a huge…

How to build a personal brand as a marketer: 7 effective tactics for personal brand building

As a marketer, building a personal brand can have a great impact on your success. Even if you work for a company, building your personal brand will prove a great benefit to your company as much as it will be to you. With a trusted personal brand, you have a unique position in your industry, the ability to influence a bigger audience and turn many of them into customers. As former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said, "Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool." But how do you build your personal brand as a marketer? In this blog post, discover 7 effective tactics you can start using today.

1. Understand your target audience

Trying to please everybody is the fastest way to pleasing no one. Therefore, you have to understand…

KFC's "Chicken Town" campaign demonstrates the value that can be found in imitations, as it looks to repair and enhance its brand image in some unexpected ways.

Have you ever been asked “Fancy a VFC?”, or found yourself in a YFC at 2am? KFC’s imitations can be found in most towns and cities. Indirectly, they've become one of its most powerful marketing tools, with fried chicken shops desperate to achieve the levels of success that KFC has managed.

It’s unsurprising that KFC has now decided to play on this in its latest campaign, where we take a Wild West-themed ride through “Chicken Town”.

Overwhelmed by the myriad of imitations, it’s clear that the driver of the cherry red Lincoln Continental is not about to be tempted by any of the imitations on show.

In this Campaign of the Week, we’ll take a look…

"Self-indulgent, poorly written shite" that screams "me! me! me!" before the needs of the customer.

Over the last few years, Oasis has released campaign adverts that play on the advertising industry. Calling out the behind-the-scenes thinking of adverts in order to appeal to what seems to be an edgier and cooler new generation who it thinks are tired and bored of adverts. But has it gone too far with the release of its latest line of adverts, by promising to stop all advertising if the brand hits its sales targets? It seems like a cheap gimmick to me that neither inspires nor impresses me to buy Oasis' drinks. Also, let's not forget that it's also probably a lie just to get people engaging/talking about its ads - will the brand really stop advertising? Let's take a look at its full #refreshingstuff campaign and why it's not really that impressive, or creative.

Adverts that calls out…

In its recent comparative advertising campaign, Google promotes its Pixel 3a model as a cheaper and higher quality choice over Apple’s XS, putting it side-by-side with the Apple product in a face-off of the tech giants.

Why beat about the bush in advertising when you can directly compare your own product to a competitor’s higher-priced and (in Google’s opinion) inferior one? We’ve seen examples of this kind of advertising for many years, from supermarket chains’ regular competitor comparisons to the “Get a Mac“ campaigns of the noughties. It appears that Google felt it was high time that this time round a company went after Apple. Indeed, Google has set its sights on Apple, with billboards and video ads from the Alphabet-owned company claiming that the Pixel 3a provides better quality low-light photography at a fraction of the…

Brand marketing needs to be engrained into the genetics of the brand

The Walt Disney Company has a long and interesting history that spans almost 100 years. It was founded by brothers Walt Disney and Roy O. Disney on October 16, 1923. Originally, the company was called ‘Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio’. At first, they established themselves in the animation industry before extending their interests to producing live-action films. The business has also operated using the names ‘The Walt Disney Studio’ and ‘Walt Disney Productions’. It didn’t take on its current name until 1986. After the success of the films, Walt Disney started building parks, the first of which was Disney World in Florida. He was a very clever man and even bought the land under multiple company names so that locals would not hike the land prices. That ingenuity spread into their marketing strategy and I'm going to show you how they…