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Seven step guide to turbo charge growth

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By Olivia Atkins

It can be difficult for SMEs to remain competitive today, but AdRoll’s new report ‘The Ultimate Guide to Growth’ provides a detailed step-by-step guide to help small to mid-sized businesses, solopreneurs and entrepreneurs to accelerate their growth. The robust report is split into seven categories with each providing case studies and takeaway lessons.

Identifying audiences

The report stresses the importance of marketers to first determine their ideal customer, knowing this then allows them to accurately target them. It cites various characteristics to look out for when compiling customer profiles and suggests that marketers should also tap into customer geographics and work on understanding their online behavioural habits. Empathising with their customers’ needs will help marketers to capitalise on their audience’s activity.

Understanding competitors

While getting to know your customers is important, the report also urges marketers to understand how their competitors operate, so that they can have a strong understanding of their positioning in the market. Marketers should conduct research and analysis on their competitors to work out where marketplace opportunities and threats lie, as well as keep a close eye on their opponent’s messaging.

Know your USP

Key differentiators set companies apart, so identifying these – no matter how big or small they are – is vital. The guide advises marketers to focus on your key attributes but encourages them to avoid concentrating on replicable differentiators such as new technologies or competitive prices as these can easily be beaten by competitors.

Marketing strategy creation

Marketing strategies should act as a roadmap for growing businesses with clear steps as to how to reach and engage new and existing customers. Working out the company’s value proposition will help. Marketers should consider where their customers are struggling and how they can help relieve their pain through the services they offer. They should then develop messaging to reflect this strategy, set attainable goals and create a realistic marketing budget to ensure that progress can be tracked.

Using marketing tactics

The marketing strategy set out earlier in the guide will provide marketers with clear business goals and budgets. Working out actionable tactics and which marketing channels to push marketing messages out on is essential. The report suggests looking at AdRoll’s digital advertising tactics and offers marketers the opportunity to sync up their e-commerce website with their growth platform to attract new visitors and convert existing prospects.

Creating content assets

Marketers should work out which type of content asset will suit their strategy best; the report provides pros and cons of using visual, written and ad content formats, with advice on how best to combine content assets to save on time and avoid duplication. The guide reminds marketers that ad sizes and formats also vary according to each platform, so messages need to be punchy and to the point for them to be effective.

Implementing and testing

Testing is one of the most important steps in the digital marketing growth journey. The report suggests that ads don’t need to be perfect before going live and encourages marketers to experiment with different renditions of ads to see how audiences respond. Various techniques for testing are listed, ensuring that marketers can get the most out of the experiments they do on ads, so that they know what to look out for.

Measurement

The guide advises marketers to build quantifiable KPIs and metrics that correspond to the business strategy and goals outlined earlier. Marketers should look at various analytics tools and work out which would best suit their business, but the report urges them to continue testing tactics to ensure that processes and information are consistently refined throughout the journey. Attribution models can also help marketers to gain better insight into consumer purchase habits.

Feature Image Credit: The Ultimate Guide to Growth report, with AdRoll

By Olivia Atkins

Sourced from The Drum

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Is app apathy hurting your marketing strategy?

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Are you reaching your audience directly through mobile apps? If not, there is a whole new digital market that remains, literally, untapped.

Content consumption is nearly universal on mobile devices in 2019, especially on apps. From Instacart to Waze, apps capture the attention of billions on a daily basis.Three of every four users not only say their phone is useless with apps, but default to using apps when they’re bored. Access to these app users is easily unlocked for mobile marketers, who have access to targeting capabilities that other advertising forms do not. The prevalence of in-app marketing is currently the biggest shift in the digital marketing industry especially in the rapidly growing Asian marketplace, and any brand or company not taking advantage could fall behind fast.

In an era of short attention spans, in-app advertising can attract consumers’ undivided attention in ways that billboards, television commercials, and radio segments cannot. Rewarded video ads trade users’ attention for an in-app reward, native ads integrate seamlessly into apps’ interfaces, and prioritised listings and branded promotions get products in front of potential consumers without being instantly tuned out like traditional marketing formats. Additionally, in-app ads tend to be the only ad on a user’s screen when they are shown.

Generally, audiences’ favourite apps are the ones they use most frequently. Audience networks help advertisers gain instant credibility by reaching consumers on the apps they actually use the most, rather than guessing or generalising based on less-specific data. By positively associating their brand to a potential customer’s favorite apps, marketers gain a leg up on competition trying less-refined target methods that reach digital audiences on the wrong apps and websites.

There is already proof that in-app audiences are the most valuable players to advertisers. They cost far less to reach than their desktop counterparts, while clickthrough rates for apps more than double those of the other major platforms. The fastest-growing app category right now is shopping, showing that purchasing decisions are happening more and more on mobile devices. Even if advertisers can’t always reach users on other companies’ apps, this trend only drives home that apps and the shopping process are now interconnected.

When it comes to finding the apps that will end up hosting others’ brands and companies’ advertisements, social media networks are also doing a lot of the work. Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter have their own audience networks that advertisers can utilise to expand their reach, and Snapchat is reportedly developing an audience network of their own right now too. Outside social media, Google and demand-side platforms also connect advertisers and monetised apps (apps where external ads can be placed) with available inventory. Today’s marketing experts have no shortage of ways to put content in front of those most likely to consume it.

Mobile apps also offer the most precise data that can be optimised to reach users. Mobile device IDs ensure ads can target any app on a specific individual’s phone rather than just the web browser app. Hyperlocal geotargeting lets location-specific advertisers, like event promoters or restaurants, only target people in a physical location close to or relevant to the product being sold.

Developments like Pocketmath’s AppGraph even empowers advertisers to target users based on the apps they already have and use. The term “customer relationship” is used frequently in 2019, but apps open up whole new strategies for marketers to reach their audiences at the right time and place to provide them an advertising experience that will provide the highest chance of a conversion and ultimate return on investment.

The digital marketing space can be overwhelming and imperfect. Users may find ways to block or filter in-app ads, while others may gradually avoid apps that serve ads from outside companies. But a trip into any coffee shop, salon, or food court will show an all-too-familiar scene of potential consumers on their phones scrolling, liking, and engaging with mobile content. Society has become app-reliant, and marketing strategies should act accordingly.

https://www.pocketmath.com/

Joanne Joynson-Hewlett is a seasoned adtech executive with over 10 years’ experience in managing and optimizing a company’s ability to balance profits and growth within the extremely fast-paced and competitive advertising and technology sectors. Combining a finance background and experience with rapidly growing companies, Joanne’s expertise and acumen in business development, business strategy, and strategic planning positions her employees and organizations for both short and long-term success. Recently elevated to CEO, Joanne has led Pocketmath’s funding and restructuring efforts while managing the day-to-day roles of her prior Chief Financial Officer position. A numbers guru, Joanne is always prepared with Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C within a rapidly changing industry. Combined with her passion for people, she has a deft understanding of how to best manage the complicated ecosystems of fast-growing companies from all angles.

Sourced from MarketingTech

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How Much Should You Spend on Social Media Marketing?

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By Adam Bornstein

Q: When it comes to customer acquisition, how important is paid social media compared with other digital channels? — John L., Houston

Social media has created a beautiful opportunity for entrepreneurs: It’s never been easier to get your message in front of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people. But if you want to reach all those people, it’s going to cost a lot.

It’s a simple case of supply and demand, and social media platforms are limiting the supply. Organic reach — that is, your ability to speak directly to the audience that chooses to follow and interact with your business — has dwindled to almost nothing. On Facebook, for example, organic reach touches less than 5 percent of your audience on average. Facebook simply doesn’t show your posts to most of your followers … unless you pay for the privilege. That’s one of the reasons why advertising inside social media has become increasingly expensive, as brands outbid each other in a competition for users’ attention.

That’s not to say you should stop using digital platforms altogether. Paid social is a hotbed of marketing insight. With just a small amount of cash, you can easily test headlines, imagery, and offers on different audiences. That’s valuable research. However, if your entire acquisition strategy depends on paid media, you could pay your way right out of business.

But there is another way! You just need to diversify. In the digital world, there are many ways to acquire customers: paid social, paid search, email acquisition, organic social, organic search (earning traffic through content), public relations, influencer marketing, and earned media. Start by identifying a few channels where you want to focus most of your efforts. (Ideally, at least some of those channels will not require the spend of ad dollars.) This way, you can test what’s working while building an omnichannel approach that will pay off down the road. 

At my marketing agency, we start with data and consumer insights, then use that to support tactics that allow clients to win at SEO through organic content. (Social media may be the ultimate toy for idle hands, but Google is still a business’s best friend.) Then we tie that to a strategy that makes it easy to acquire email addresses. Then we focus on paid social to amplify direct selling.

For example, we have one CPG client for whom we created 40 original articles, designed to drive traffic to its website. On the surface, this might not seem like a way to grow revenue. But within two years, those 40 articles allowed the brand to rank for more than 12,000 keywords (up from 2,000), landing in the top three Google results for nearly 400 different topics and searches.

This influx of traffic made it easier than ever to directly sell on the article pages and add thousands of email addresses to the company’s database, which they used for email marketing. This was a combination of smart SEO planning (knowing what keywords to target), strategy lead generation (creating pop-ups or other opt-ins to the site visitor), and positioning product offerings on specific article pages (like native ads that sold products related to the topic of a specific article). This way, the traffic was technically “free” — and so were the added emails, which we could now upload to social media platforms and directly sell to consumers with ads based on their known interests.

If you put all your eggs in the paid basket, you underestimate and undercut the long-term growth of your brand. And when you push on all levers at the same time, you make it increasingly hard to know which acquisition channels have the highest ROI. But when you diversify and segment your strategy, the opportunity for growth can feel limitless.

Feature Image Credit: Federico Gastaldi 

By Adam Bornstein

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

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What this global B2B marketing chief has to say about transformation

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HCL EVP of sales and marketing shares how he’s worked to transform the IT service company’s brand, marketing and collaboration approach.

Marketing can’t just be about classical marketing principles today, it has to have a higher-level purpose and be the glue adhering an organisation together, HCL’s Arthur Filip believes.

“You have to fill in the gaps and be the lubrication between a lot of different engine parts,” the global EVP of sales and marketing of the technology services behemoth says. “We’ve really adopted this mentality in our team.

“We don’t just do all the things expected of us; we also get involved in many other areas to support and keep the company moving in the right direction.”

Getting there meant working closely with the CEO, and putting a hand in strategy through to tactics with each major HCL business leader.

“I have specific managers day-to-day interfacing with these leaders and I interface with them formally and informally,” Filip tells CMO. “We know these business leaders don’t care about eyeballs onsite either, or MQLs. It’s about revenue and satisfaction growing, if they can attract more customers in the market, if partners want to work more with us, and if customers want to testify on their behalf. I’m constantly reminding the team that’s our goal.”

Filip joined HCL in 2016 initially as VP of sales, and was tasked with a sales transformation remit. Nearly 18 months ago, he also took on the marketing leadership position. The role comes off the back of more than 25 years in the information technology space, working in sales, strategy and business unit leadership positions for the likes of Microsoft, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard and IBM.

Filip says his approach was always going to be to transform by putting the customer first. “I came in working for the CEO to lead the company’s sales transformation effort. I was an instigator and spark plug but it took all leaders coming together to do that,” he explains.

“We were doing a good job but what we’d realised was that with our biggest customers, where the relationships are just so large and complex, we needed to be even more bespoke and put in more red carpet treatment for those clients.

“At the same time, we’re constantly attracting new clients and it’s a different sales model and motion. We had to think about care and feeding of the sales force, more delineation between sales motions, and how to get granular in our thinking not only about every country, but cities and industry segments.”

Filip focused on honing the new business team and client partner model, and says he’s worked to create a super-class of relationship leaders globally. As leader of the marketing function, he’s since instigated a transformation aimed at taking advantage of HCL’s global footprint while also making sure it’s sympathetic and respond to local cultures and market needs.

“We are very woven into all the sales and business units, from strategy and brand down to how we work with clients on a daily basis, conduct events, marcomms and run analytics throughout the company,” he says of marketing. “My aim was to bring our great marketing leaders together to orchestrate as a team, looking at both global and local challenges we had.”

One of these hurdles was functional break-ups and discrete ways of doing things. “People had their own sciences and crafts to practice, whether it was our internal digital agency, brand team, content team,” Filip says.

“A lot of my focus has been to eliminate stovepipes, and to get the leadership team to take on each other’s challenges. We changed a lot of in-house metrics so we sink or swim together, along with the sales team and rest of the company.”

The biggest change has been around what ‘success’ is with HCL’s customers and in turn, their customers.

“It’s manifested exponentially in how people are working together and teaming together to orchestrate strategy through to specific campaigns,” Filip says.

Filip is also a big believer in getting teams around the table and solving it together. “It was painting the case for everyone –bring all talent together and we can look at the overall experience we can create for customers, and the type of data, analytics and view forward we can bring to the company,” he says.

Marketing strategy

HCL’s big emphasis is on its ecosystem, and Filip and the team have been overseeing internal and external celebrations marking the company’s milestones in different regions. The ‘global to local’ initiative includes celebrating 20 years in the A/NZ region, 30 years in the US and 10 years in the Nordics.

Another emphasis is on telling the stories of how HCL has worked with customers over its 42-year history.

“There are so many human stories where we helped clients be successful in so many communities,” Filip says. “Figuring out how to bring some common denominators together and our heritage, which is not just one country but people from 144 nations, for more of a common story and purpose, is key.”

This has to be a two-way street, rather than corporate reigning down on the local market, Filip says. “It’s an opportunity to both learn and share together and take best practices from different countries, cultural elements and customers to weave into our global brand,” he says.

“We have been known as a strong tech company and innovator, and a world-leading engineering services company, with very strong IT services. We’re the fastest growing company among the top 10 largest tech services companies globally, for eight quarters globally. Customers are buying into the value proposition; it’s now about bringing the whole story together.”

Corporate social responsibility plays a big part here. HCL has always focused on helping all types of people disadvantaged in life. As well as allowing its 137,000 employees to work with platforms they choose to further that cause, and sizeable investments into innovation labs and teams, HCL runs a number of diversity-oriented programs. One of these is Women Lead Australia, a one-to-one mentoring initiative now in its third edition this year.

“Diversity, from boardroom down, has become a key thing for HCL and we know the industry has to get better at this,” Filip says of the ICT sector. “It’s about very disciplined programs – from metrics, to every executive to specific hardcore board-driven programs – and we’ve made good progress. But we’re hungry for more.”

AI and B2B customer power

Filip also acknowledges HCL’s customer base is getting broader and more complex as every enterprise becomes reliant on digital and technology.

“Today, in every relationship it’s still primarily the CIO, or the chief digital officer, we’re dealing with, but the CMO, sales, line-of-business heads and CEOs are also getting involved, especially in strategic decisions. It’s really a collective fabric and that is how we’re trying to enhance our relationships,” he says. “Our goal is to bring our experience into bear to help marry the business problems with the technologies.”

Alongside strategy and partnerships with world-leading tech providers, this increasingly sees HCL tapping into the power of artificial intelligence (AI) via internal R&D, algorithms, partnerships and proprietary methodologies. HCL also partners with 20 companies on overall customer journey as well as how it thinks about markets to not only predict but run and govern its business.

“AI gives you specific technology through partners but also the power to create things you can’t see yet,” Filip says. “We’ve used basic AI to take care of repetitive tasks, speed up different parts of the customer journey. We’re now brainstorming with in-house labs on how we totally redefine how marketing is conducted within the organisation.”

A big area of focus is helping customers better predict their journey with their customers. “The better we get at that, the stronger our marketing is and the more value for the rest of the business,” he says.

Filip also agrees B2B marketers have the biggest ground to catch up on personalisation and says it’s clear enterprises relationships are far more one-to-one than many would previously have credited.

“Having just a relationship with a CIO or 2-3 procurement people, you’ll never be successful. In a very large organisation, there could be 2000 people you need to interact with to truly get a pulse on things and understand what truly makes them successful,” he points out. “If you don’t have those relationships, points of view, data elements around it and the technology to support it, I don’t know how many can remain successful in the next couple of years.”

Helping make this a reality is teams like digital, content and thought leadership along with external communications all working together with common purpose on accounts, Filip says.

“People do now speak in terms of the account, how we help crack the code in the account plan, and create an ecosystem experience that brings together the local community, government players, education players, business partners and we all solve a problem together,” he says. “It’s been a part of our culture; now we’re really doing it from a marketing perspective.”

In terms of ongoing priorities, Filip highlights HCL’s four core pillars of innovation, education, diversity, and CSR and sustainability.

“You’ll see us weave in everything from arts and sports, and the EQ side into our business,” he says. “One of our philosophies is human potential maximised and you’ll see that in campaigns, because that is what we stand for.”

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Sourced from CMO from IDG

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Marketers Must Reshape How They Build Trust And Loyalty For Their Brands

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By Benjamin Herrmann

Customer trust and brand loyalty are inextricably linked, essential to long-term business success, and tougher than ever to gain and retain. With all the breaches, hacks, and misuses of customer data in recent years, customer trust is low. And with the proliferation of digital channels making upstart competitors a mere millisecond-click away, loyalty is precarious, as well.

This reality, along with digital channels becoming the norm in buying from and interacting with both B2C and B2B customers, means that it’s mission critical to reshape the way you’re building customer trust. In the digital landscape, brands need to focus on tapping into the right customer data in a way that is mindful and doesn’t cross boundaries of privacy, while also prioritizing transparency and individualized support tailored to each customer.

Here are three best practices you can use in your marketing strategies to build customer trust and lasting loyalty in the digital age.

1. Respect privacy and avoid “creepiness” when personalizing experiences

“Customers are done with creepy; don’t be creepy,” Alex Atzberger, president of SAP customer experience, said at the 2018 SAPPHIRE NOW conference. “Without consent, don’t personalize.” He couldn’t have been more right.

Personalization plays a major role in thoughtfully engaging customers, but when it isn’t handled with care, brands can lose favor with customers who suspect their privacy isn’t being prioritized. New laws around data governance, such as GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act, help give customers an extra layer of security, but the responsibility still lies with brands to create personalized experiences without being creepy or crossing any lines with the consumer.

The challenge is that we have access to more data than ever, especially customer data around specific behaviors and preferences. It’s natural as a brand to want to make use of any and all data you can access to create a better user experience, but respecting customer privacy must be the top priority. Plus, the better results will come from identifying and acting on the right data, rather than trying to make everything you can get your hands on into something actionable.

Mastering personalization is about showing each individual customer that you’re committed to and respect the relationship they have with your brand.

2. Maintain transparency and keep it consistent across your organization

Transparency should span across every aspect of business, but when it comes to building digital trust with your customers, price transparency is always an important practice. It supports a connected customer experience, adding long-term value by giving your customers the ability to explore pricing options before making purchasing decisions. Be upfront about costs throughout the buyer journey (e.g., taxes, service fees), so customers aren’t seeing them only at the end when it’s time to make a purchase. This way your customers can understand exactly what they’ll be buying and for how much before heading into the final transaction.

Giving your customers trial periods with products also plays an important role in transparency. Many consumer products are set up in this way, from cars to clothing to even food – these items are set out in a way that lets customers view them and try them before they buy. Apply the same principle to B2B products, such as software.

When implementing digital purchasing options into your customer journey, always include trial options. Your customers can use this opportunity to properly evaluate whether or not a product meets the challenges or needs they are seeking to address without needing to make a purchase first. They can then make better, more confident purchasing decisions, which also supports long-lasting trust in your brand.

3. Be helpful along the entire customer journey

Support – especially with digital sales that lacks face-to-face interaction with a sales or service representative – should always be ready and available before, during, and after purchases are made. Customer service takes many shapes: sometimes it’s in-person, other times it’s over the phone or via online chat, and sometimes it’s simply in the background, providing support without the customer realizing it’s there.

B2C companies already focus on support as part of the entire customer journey and experience, infusing the same customer support systems they have in person into their digital platforms. This is a model that B2B companies can use for digital sales and e-commerce, as well. In fact, B2B brands should be held to a higher standard in supplying customer support from a digital perspective, as these customers are used to the high-touch services of a vendor’s field sales team.

Even though your customers want quicker, more seamless online options, you shouldn’t let service levels drop because the customer is no longer working with someone directly. Your customers will still expect your guidance and support throughout their digital journey, through the transaction process and beyond. It’s important to show your customers your commitment to their experience along this path, allowing trust to take shape as you do this.

Customer trust is gained – and kept – by aligning goals. Your customer’s goal is to solve a problem, improve a process, transform their business, etc., and your top goal should always be to support customers along their path to achieving their goals. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to building trust, especially in digital interactions, but incorporating these best practices into your overall marketing strategy is a great starting point.

By Benjamin Herrmann

Connect with Benjamin Herrmann at @bherrmann81 and on LinkedIn.

As head of digital commerce for SAP, Benjamin Herrmann is responsible for developing the digital direct sales channel at SAP across products, professional services, and education. Dedicated to helping customers become best-run businesses, Herrmann has established himself as a leader in B2B digital business models. Prior to his current role, Herrmann was senior director of strategy for SAP Portfolio & Pricing, where he ran board-level change programs. He also worked as an enterprise business architect and lead business architect in the Business Transformation Office for PricewaterhouseCoopers, and served as a lecturer on Information Systems at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management.

Sourced from D!gitalist

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Make Your Content Marketing Strategy Useful – Do It in Visuals

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By Nadya Khoja

Imagine you are in a meeting, furiously taking notes as the marketing manager speaks and shows a slide deck to review your brand’s content marketing strategy. Or you receive an email with several bullet points touching on the strategy. And what about those quick conversations when your manager stops by your desk and tells you about an element in the strategy?

Retention of what you’ve seen and heard in any of those scenarios is difficult.

To ensure that all involved understand your content marketing strategy, you need to document it in an easy-to-digest format. Text-dominated documents or presentations with a few reference images thrown in don’t work well. Create something that will remain in the minds of your team members and colleagues.

It’s easier and quicker to absorb visuals. Using them to communicate your content marketing strategy is the best way forward. Here are a few ways visuals can effectively convey your strategy.

Using visuals to communicate your #contentmarketing strategy is the best way forward, says @NadyaKhoja. Click To Tweet

Lay the groundwork

To get colleagues and upper management better acquainted with using your content marketing strategy, break it down visually.

The mind map below clearly outlines the aspects of the strategy, including suggested tools, how to set goals, and how to conduct effective meetings. This single visual gives its viewers a clear road map of what to expect and how to proceed, without you having to speak at length or give a presentation on the subject.

Click to enlarge

TIP: Print the strategy mind map and place it in meeting rooms so everybody can see how powerful visuals can be in conveying information.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Want More Productivity? Make Your Strategy Visual

Paint the big picture

With an accepted understanding of the power of visually communicating strategy, your first step is to create a visual that effectively shares the company’s primary goals – where the company is going and why it wants to get there.

Use a simple flowchart or mind map to convey this information. This visual contains important information with a long-term impact on your team. It rarely leads to immediate action unless broken into smaller projects and tasks.

Make this visual easy to read by using contrasting colors for the background and text. However, avoid using too much text as that negates the use of a visual. Instead, employ numbers, graphs, charts, or diagrams to convey the big picture. Bite-sized information is easier to retain.

You also should create a visual for your marketing team’s goals. Use more detail, maybe even use an infographic that outlines what the aims are for each month, quarter, or year.

Create an infographic for the marketing team’s goals for the month, quarter, or year, says @nadyakhoja. Click To Tweet

Look at this simple mind map for digital marketing. It clearly outlines what the team is meant to achieve. You can customize mind map templates to include numbers the team has to hit or to highlight components that require immediate action.

Click to enlarge

TIP: A simple graphic using icons and limited text immediately captures the imagination of those viewing it and gives them more incentive to work toward the goals.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

Plan a project

Now you need to show the team how to accomplish the previously illustrated goals. This is where you bring in your project planning and management skills.

Project timelines are an excellent way to visually convey to your team what its tasks are and when they must be completed. The strategy workflow below details the tasks and time allotted for each. Note the minimal use of color to ensure that the focus is on the information. The icons also give a quick visual to remember the tasks to accomplish.

Click to enlarge

Project timelines are a great way to visually convey the team’s tasks and deadlines, says @NadyaKhoja. Click To Tweet

A Gantt chart is another visual template you can use to show your project strategy. The simplified chart below clearly shows which team members are needed at which stage of the project, as well as what their tasks are for which field. The contrasting colors minimize any confusion about their roles. The calendar layout makes it easy to understand when and who is involved in the activity.

Maps and charts impart important information easily to your team, eliminating the need to use complex Excel sheets or long presentations.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Want Better Content Marketing Management? Try One of These Tools

Involve the team

At this point, get your team involved in communicating visually. Ask them to create personal strategies using visuals to detail their goals and how they intend to achieve them.

Creating these personal visuals will not only help them retain the strategies they have been seeing but also help organize their activities. As you know, writing things down the moment you hear them is an excellent way to recall information, and plotting tasks into visuals is even more effective.

For content marketers, a simple mind map like the one below works effectively to help retain what you need to achieve. In turn, it also will lead you to organically generate content ideas efficiently.

With the tasks in place for the team member, a personal Gantt chart (like the one below) gives individuals a way to plot their activities and timelines.

Visual mind maps and timelines keep people on track and give them a quick reference to see while working. They make a manager’s job easier as team members have a degree of autonomy and responsibility to complete their tasks and projects.

Develop your strategy picture

In a work climate where pressure is high and time is short, making it easier for everyone to absorb the company ethos and understand the tasks in front of them will lead to more efficient workflow. Using a visual strategy in the marketing team is an excellent way to obtain top performance from your team and eventually lead to your business achieving its goals.

Get the best visuals in the content marketing industry. Attend the world’s largest content marketing event Sept. 3-6 and view (and hear) presentations from over 100 in the industry. Register today using code CMIBLOG100 to save $100. 

Feature Image Credit: Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

By Nadya Khoja

Nadya is the director of marketing for Venngage, an online graphic design software. She also runs a web-series called Drunk Entrepreneurs. Follow her on Twitter @NadyaKhoja.

Other posts by Nadya Khoja

Sourced from CM Content Marketing Institute

 

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Five Mistakes You Are Making When Creating Video Content

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Your video content proves your work dynamically, hence it should be a priority to make sure it’s well produced and adds to your marketing strategy.

Producing engaging video content for your business can widen your customer and audience reach. If done right, it serves as an effective marketing tool to enhance your brand’s market presence. Your video content proves your work dynamically, hence it should be a priority to make sure it’s well produced and adds to your marketing strategy. Here are five mistakes that companies often make when they go about creating video content:

1. Producing poor quality video The days of relying on your phone and producing a shaky poor quality video in the name of “authenticity” are gone. The audience now expects a more polished viewing experience. Don’t forget that your video content is an extension of your brand. Produce a poor quality video, and the audience will start to believe you are promoting a poor quality service or product. Perception is reality.

2. Ignoring the importance of sound Audio comprises 50% of your viewing experience. Poor audio can result in your audience giving up on watching the video all together. Make sure to pay attention if filming in public areas. Can an alternate location be used? Is it time to invest in a microphone to ensure smooth sound? The answer is, probably, yes!

3. Over-selling Companies need to remember that viewers tune into video content online to be informed or entertained, not to be sold to. Companies that force their brand and product throughout their video content are unlikely to see the ROI that they need. The most googled terms are “how to” and “how do I,” which means your video content will have the highest engagement if it is answering a question and providing knowledge, as opposed to directly promoting your services.

4. Expecting too much from one video This is when you believe you’ve produced one great video, and you don’t understand why sales haven’t flooded in. Like with most things, this takes time, and video content needs a consistent strategy. It can take 2-3 months to start to see an uptake in your video content. The more visible you are, coupled with the more knowledge you share, will ensure that when clients are ready to pay for your service, since you are at the forefront of their mind.

5. Talking about everything you do in one long video Your video content should never feel like a shopping list. This is not an opportunity to talk about everything you do in one video. A better strategy would be to create shorter 30 second to one-minute videos, each focused on one topic. The average audience online retention is currently at one minute and 40 seconds, and it is consistently getting shorter. That coupled with the optimum durations for different platforms means that in most cases, 30 seconds to one minute and 30 seconds is sufficient to get your message across.

This article was developed in collaboration with Young Arab Leaders (YAL), a pan-Arab, non-profit organization that seeks to promote modern leadership and entrepreneurship among Arab youth, men and women, with a view to improving the socio-economic situation in the Arab world.

As a YAL member, Reim El Houni notes that the caliber of events she has attended with the organization has been unmatched. “They provide exclusive opportunities for members to get up close and personal with some of the UAE’s most influential businesswomen and men, offering insight into industries that you may not normally be exposed to,” El Houni says. “Their events are exclusive and highly curated and are always worth the time investment. Whether it’s their Power Lunches, or their Executive Meetups, you’re guaranteed to walk away with a new perspective and insight into the world of business.”

To learn more about YAL and be a part of its network, check out yaleaders.org. 

Feature Image Credit: Shutterstock 

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CEO, Ti22 Films, dubai ON demand, Fusion Digital Content

Sourced from Entrepreneur Middle East

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5 Outstanding Ways To Use Personalization In Your Email Campaigns

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By Steven Bowen

Email marketing is being utilized for targeting large audiences for a long time. It has been a fruitful way to create new customers and extend the brand reach. The organizations use email marketing tactics to promote their brands and services and persuade customers through it. The design and elements of an email is paramount to achieve the goals of successful email marketing campaigns. The content you put in emails can make or break the success of your campaign.

In addition to content, personalization has become a key ingredient in creating top-of-the-class emails these days. This is also known as one-to-one marketing or marketing to individuals tactic for email marketing. Thankfully, you can personalize emails according to the target audience and send specific messages that suit their interests. By doing this, you can build better emails that would have a greater positive impact on your marketing campaign. Following are five effective uses of personalization that boost your email marketing efforts.

 

  1. Customize images

One of the awesome ways to increase click-through rates is by customizing images for the customers. You can personalize the images according to different customer profiles and data. For instance, you can customize the content according to different locations for customers if you have location data. By personalizing images, you can build emails more effective and result-centric.

  1. Personalize content

When creating your email message, you need to be careful with the words you use and the overall tone of the message. The message you create for email should be compelling. You can personalize the subject lines of your emails to ensure better click-through rates. The better the content you write the greater response you will receive. By personalizing the content, you can make the content more attractive.

  1. Custom product recommendations

Your target audience might be interested in products recommended in the emails. However, product recommendations should be based on personal preferences or be relevant to their past purchases. You can incorporate the recent browsing or purchasing history of your customer in email marketing in collaboration with the email service provider.

  1. Customize cart abandonment messages

No business wants to have increasing cart abandonment rate. However, the marketers can strive to reduce the cart abandonment rate by creating personalized cart abandonment emails. By creating and sending these emails may increase the conversion rate and  allow the marketers to re-capture the customers that left earlier. These tailored emails work as an effective reminder for the customers.

  1. Provide personalized offers

By personalizing the offers and deals on your products or services, you can improve the click-through rate of your emails. It increases conversion rate. The customers like offers & deals and when they want to buy a product, it might be useful to show the right offers and deals based on every individual customer. It will make them to buy products from you. There are endless possibilities for personalizing the offers.

Best practices for email personalization

There are lots of benefits of personalization that can be reaped by following the best practices. Following are some of the best practices for personalizing email marketing.

Collect relevant details

In order to personalize the emails in the right way, you must first understand more about your customers. Obtain the relevant information about your customers and understand their preferences. Know who your customer are and how you can serve them effectively. You can conduct survey and ask questions from people to understand them. However, you must not overwhelm audience with tons of questions, simply ask specific questions.

Segment the audience

You can divide your audience into different subgroups based on the location, demographics, customer type, etc. Like if you have a clothing retail shop, you can segment your audience based on gender and add images of people wearing clothes into the email.

Add more elements

When it comes to personalization, marketers often think it of including the recipient’s name. While it is a good aspect and a great start, it is only one element of personalization. So, you need to tailor it further by adding custom content into the email as per the preferences and tastes of your recipients.

Understand the behavior

By looking at the behavior of your recipients, you can understand what factors to include and not include to create effective emails. When you send emails, some customers may not show interest, others show interest and some find your emails engaging. Ascertain the behavior of recipients and then send emails accordingly.

Mind the quantity

You must be careful when dividing your audience into different segments as too many of them can be difficult to manage. Make a broad segmentation and also decide what type of emails you will be sending to specific audience. You won’t like to overwhelm your recipients with too many emails which you could send if there are unmanageable number of segments. On different stages of email marketing, you can try to ascertain what emails and segments your recipients best respond to and then send emails accordingly.

Don’t create negativity

Often recipients get promotional emails immediately after viewing products with subject lines like “We saw you are looking…”, it creates a negativity in recipients’ mind who feel it like their privacy is invaded. There must be some time between product viewing and the receiving the email with a positive subject line.

Wrapping up!

Though email marketing is an effective way for creating new customers and reaching a large audience. Now, personalization make emails more attractive and compelling by letting marketers add a personal touch for every recipient. By creating custom content, adding custom images and do other customization, marketers can make emails more persuasive and improve their click-through rates. With the power of personalization, marketers can design emails that are tailored to the needs and requirements of every individual recipient that provide them a great experience and delight. The marketers can include offers and deals tailored to the requirements of individual customers through personalization.

By Steven Bowen

Steven Bowen is associated with No-Refresh, which is a prominent company providing custom designer tools. The company offers different off-the-self web-to-print designer software for several products. Steven has a good flair for writing and he loves to compose informational and quality articles and blogs for his audience. He writes well-reached and quality content on this area of interests.

Sourced from Promotion World

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6 Outdated Marketing Tactics You Need to Leave in the Past (Where They Belong)

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Promotional-only social media, paper-based marketing and poorly produced videos are on the “no-no” list. And who can forget that “Domino’s Forever” campaign?

Marketing is complex. With seemingly endless techniques, how do you reach and resonate with your audience? First things first: You need to know what you shouldn’t do. Last year, “Domino’s Forever” was a campaign created by a Russian Domino’s franchise. If customers tattooed the Domino’s logo on their skin, they were told, they’d get 100 free pizzas yearly for 100 years.

Initially, that strategy worked big-time: Although it may sound strange to us, hundreds of customers jumped in and started getting those tattoos. Yet, even as images of their freshly inked images flowed in, Domino’s imposed restrictions on its offer. Suddenly, the tattoos had a size limit; and only 350 newly tattooed people qualified for the reward. As you might guess, people were outraged.

Bad move, because customers who feel wronged don’t soon forget.

There’s science behind that statement: According to reporting in the Washington Post, “Research shows that memories for negative experiences are more vivid than those for positive experiences …” And those Domino’s customers certainly chalked up a negative experience.

So, if you’re the marketer, remember: It’s hard to make a good impression on a customer but really easy to make a bad impression, especially when it comes to marketing. Here are some moves not to make in marketing that date back to the past and shouldn’t still be with us in the present.

1. Trying to serve people en masse

Every person is unique, and you need to cater to that fact. Gone are the days of blanket personalization. According to a 2017 State of Personalization report by Segment, almost half of customers surveyed said they would likely be repeat buyers  because of a personalized shopping experience.

If you’re not already collecting data on your customers and using it to target specific demographics through your marketing efforts, it’s time to start. Doing the bare minimum, like addressing a customer by his or her first name when you send a promotional email, simply isn’t enough anymore.

2. Putting ink on paper

What happens with most of the mail that comes to your house? What if a company, religious group or other organization drops off a brochure at your residence … do you read it? Chances are, you don’t.

That’s why experts are moving away from brochures and other paper-marketing techniques. Print marketing is expensive, time-consuming and often ineffective. Digital, on the other hand, can be fast, effective and cost-efficient.

3. Committing video production faux pas

Have you seen This Is a Generic Brand Video by Dissolve? If not, it’s worth watching. The video provides insight into the types of video marketing that don’t add up to much. Videos with stock content, vague business words and optimistic background music are outdated and overproduced.

“As percentages go, 91 percent of customers have watched a video about a product or service they care about,” Rohan Sheth, founder and CEO of GrowRev Digital, wrote in a blog post. If nine out of ten of your customers watch your videos, they need to get real value out of the content they see. Otherwise, they’ll stop viewing and start taking their business elsewhere.

4. Creating promotional-only social media

It’s easy to lose customers because of social media, especially if you use it only to advertise. Sure, marketing on social media is successful: According to Sprout Social, 77 percent of consumers are more likely to buy from the companies they follow on social media. But making money should never be your sole purpose on the app.

After all, customers abandon brands that are overly promotional on social media. Before you think about social as an advertisement, consider how you can use it to drive engagement and strengthen your brand’s following.

5. Moving away from email

Some think email marketing is dead, but the jury is still out. According to a blog post by Keala Kanae, co-founder and CEO of AWOL Academy, “As a business owner at the current times, don’t let the social media frenzy trick you … email marketing isn’t dead … Undoubtedly, marketing your services or products by email can be a quick, manageable and cost-effective method of reaching new clients and keeping the existing ones.”

For example, think of Dell’s MarketingSherpa Email project. Thanks to a GIF-focused campaign, the company increased its revenue by 109 percent. Over email, Dell sent animated images that enticed viewers and led them down the sales funnel.

6. Failing to go beyond the basics

When it comes to analytics, the more the merrier. You’re probably already using some analytics to review your marketing efforts, but there are likely many techniques and metrics you’re not yet putting to good use.

Digital marketing is constantly changing, which means there are more analytics you can put into your marketing strategy than ever before. You may believe that the measures you’re currently using are fine, but they can likely be much better.

The more you study analytics and put them to use, the better your ROI will become.

Another thing: Don’t let outright marketing mistakes happen.

Customers may forgive, but they don’t forget; just ask H&M. Last year, the retailer published a photo of an African American child wearing a hoodie that read, “Coolest monkey in the jungle.” The reaction on social media was swift and angry.

And, though the advertisement was posted in one country, it quickly gained traction around the world. Afterwards, H&M hired a “diversity leader” to try to disprove accusations that the company was at worst racist and at best oblivious.

Related: How Many of These Video Marketing Mistakes Are You Making? 

Needless to say, making it in today’s business world is hard enough without bad marketing. Although outdated marketing tactics won’t always be detrimental to your brand, they certainly won’t help, either. Luckily, with a sound marketing plan, up-to-date tactics and some creativity, you can give customers what they want and improve your bottom line simultaneously.

Feature Image Credit: NurPhoto | Getty Images 

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Founder and CEO of A Life With Health

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

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