I found this infographic very interesting and useful. Thank you LaunchGrowJoy.comfor sharing this.
Although traditional marketing and advertising campaigns are still effective, many programs and companies are now relying on digital marketing tools and approaches to implement their marketing strategies. In the vast digital realm, it can sometimes be difficult to identify which program, tool, network or approach to leverage to meet your objective. Marketers sometimes feel that they have to do it all or risk losing out on an opportunity, but marketing is about finding the right strategy and the right approach to reaching brand objectives and this concept has even more weight when it comes to digital marketing.
Web Analytic Tools
Analytic tools, like Google Analytics can provide valuable insight into the success of your digital marketing campaigns. From tracking the click-through rate (CTR) of a digital ad campaign to monitoring website traffic, using web analytic tools to keep track of your numbers helps you identify what works and what doesn’t. Compared to more traditional, non-measurable types of marketing, campaigns that have tracking ability can deliver better reporting structures that help marketers hone in on where to focus their efforts. In the world of web analytics, more integrated solutions are now being offered, such as Optify, Hubspot, Acton to name a few, allowing for an integrated approach to measuring the effectiveness of your digital initiatives. A word of caution here: Tracking and analytic tools doesn’t necessarily achieve more effective results! Strategy and creative still play the most significant role in achieving objectives.
Email Marketing
Email is still one of the most efficient and effective ways to engage your customers and prospects – if you use the tool in a creative or informative way. When it comes to attracting new clients and maintaining great relationships with exiting ones, email marketing campaigns can be very effective. Companies can take advantage of email campaign managers like Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor for their easy-to-use editing features and subscriber management tools to help them stay connected with customers and deliver campaigns like newsletters and promotional blasts. More recently, inbound marketing is more utilized as a term and a tactic. Rather than just pushing information out, the more effective strategies that push information out with an intent of initiating engagement onto your website, with the ability not only to track open and click through rates, but also to evaluate where potential customers go… and to capture their information.
Digital Advertising
Now more than ever people are spending more time online and on social media networks, either on their computers or their mobile devices. Digital advertising is a way for companies to reach more consumers and get measurable results. However, with the onslaught of so many digital ads, all with the new trinkets, bells and whistles, internet browsers are getting wary. Impressions still matter when assessing digital properties. The beauty of digital advertising still remains its targeting flexibility. With many digital spaces, as with Facebook ads, companies can target specific locations, interests(psychographics) and consumers with more precision than traditional advertising could ever offer. You can slice and dice niche markets to the minutia. Again, I have to say, the ability to achieve the performance you set is based on your strategy, creative and execution.
Social Media
This one is obvious – you can’t ignore the giant marketing prowess of social media. With a vast variety of tools and promotional possibilities, social media has emerged as arguably the most powerful marketing tool in today’s digital universe. From Facebook, to Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest, the social media giants offer companies a valuable and effective way to reach consumers on a more relatable, engaging and exclusive level – with the ability to track and measure all efforts.
Many companies are just starting to explore the digital marketing possibilities available to them and shifting from traditional to digital campaigns. I would add a word of caution here, to approach marketing as it always has been approached, integrating parts of all channels to make a better whole. It goes without saying that Digital Marketing is one area that cannot be ignored – digital is where the customers are and where the future of marketing is evolving and as marketers it’s important to own that space.
What digital marketing tools and efforts does your company apply? And where do you see the future of digital marketing going?
There was a time, in the world of advertising and marketing that when it came to B2B marketing, the strategies were quite different from B2C marketing techniques. However there’s a shift that is occurring in the marketing world and it is all because of the emergence of the digital platform and yes, social media.
Now more than ever, companies are focusing on content marketing as a way to carve out their position in the marketplace, support their SEO initiatives and build valued relationships. Content marketing is a straightforward concept but only successful if it is properly executed.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is a strategy that leverages the creation and sharing of valuable industry-related information. Its objective is to help your company position itself as a thought leader and to ultimately generate sales. Much a like a Professor publishes reputable papers in her field that add to her credentials, content marketing can help make your company a go-to resource; an expert in its field. It’s a way of educating clients and potential clients about the field.
What is the objective of content marketing?
Taking on content marketing as a strategy is a way for your company to attract and convert potential clients into clients, and clients into repeat buyers of your products or services.
What are the types of content?
Here are a few examples content marketing material examples that your company can develop and implement.
Regardless of what form your content marketing materials take, the real success or failure of a content marketing strategy relies on the content itself. If the content is not written well, properly executed and compelling then the efforts simply won’t pay off. Create strong content and you will begin to see results. If the content is strong enough, customers may not even look at it as a marketing sell technique.
Do you leverage content marketing as a strategy? What materials do you produce?
Or I should say, “Grow Brand Grow!” I often say that I see a Brand in terms of a life – it’s a natural! We speak of Brands as having a product life cycle, we speak of their maturity and we carefully have to nurture them.
In the height of social brand awareness, in today’s communications sphere, the concept of Brand as a living being has never been more true. Not only does Brand have to have a consistent presence through visual media, but it now has to have a consistent brand voice throughout it’s consistent platforms.
In the era of fast turnaround, communications technology is easy to fall into the momentum of constant change. It’s easy to react rather than reflect, assume rather than do research and actually know. We’ve gravitated from too much research and analysis to no research and quick fix strategies that fail in the long term. Don’t get me wrong, for tactics such as promotions and campaigns, quick analytical reference is fantastic to allow for tweaking and changing details. Although, from a Brand strategy and Brand development perspective, changing quickly is often not optimal. If Brand is not resonating with your audience, then quickly changing the tone and approach might not be the answer. But I digress.
The real subject of this post is to speak about Brands and Brand Evolution. Evolving Brands in today’s world can be a minefield. It’s important to be consistent with tone and voice, but also engage and add value. Prior to social media, Brands had to maintain a steady course in how they visually presented themselves to their audience and how they spoke to them through broadcast channels.
Today, the spectrum of Brand Personality has been broadened substantially: thanks to Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Twitter, to name only a few. It’s not about presenting Brand in a one way flow. Today interaction is key. Traditional channels of advertising, or rather, as I like to term it classic advertising channels may still set the tone but new channels of advertising and engagement build intimacy with the audience. It is because of this intimacy that a Brand’s evolution pace is quickened. This challenges corporations and businesses to “engage” their Brand while having the ability to hold their position and evolve almost each and every day – while staying the course.
Working on Brand marketing as we do – being as close to the Brands that we work on and with – we tend to forget that our audience is not as intimate with our Brand, regardless of the new engagement channel. We are closer to our audiences than ever before, but still, they need a little more time to get to know it. Resisting the temptation to change it, to add to it is the hardest part of branding – even in today’s world.
Social media usage is no longer limited to people just being social online; it is now a major tool for marketing business and brands. As social media becomes more important for businesses, most incorporate it within their brand marketing, and in turn want to make a good ROI.
With the “newness” of social media come many unanswered questions, naturally on the results garnered by engaging in social media… on ROI, on value and on measurement.
A deciding contributing factor on results and value is a social media tactic that continues to divide opinion – namely whether or not business should venture into automated engagement. Automating social media activities is arguably a very controversial topic.
Many believe that you should never automate your social media activities because, after all, it’s supposed to be social. There is also a fair share of businesses that believe automating to be effective and less time consuming.
In today’s day and age it can be very tempting for businesses to automate their social networking workloads. After all, one less thing to constantly worry about!
Recently there has been an increasing range of softwares hitting the market that allows you to schedule and manage your tweets, Facebook posts, and LinkedIn profiles, etc. In theory this means that you can simply set up these programs to manage your posts and then sit back and relax. It sounds perfect in theory but there are a number of potential drawbacks like irrelevancy or insensitivity.
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. That’s what 3H’s Chief Creative Officer, Miriam Hara always says!
I tend to agree with this stance as I think social media shouldn’t be automated. What’s the point of using social media if you’re not being personally social? It’s like owning a Ferrari but getting a chauffeur to drive it…does that really make sense? Social Media is a thrilling channel for business to be part of. It’s fresh, it’s exciting, its very now.
It’s all about being current and staying relevant
If you’re not writing your tweets in real time, you are not taking into account what’s currently going on in the world. More importantly you can’t engage in real time. The very aspect of automation takes you out of the engagement that most brands want to harness!
It only takes seconds to turn something bad into something good… or vice versa. If there’s something relevant in your industry… or a controversy that breaks out that touches your business and brands… you want to be tweeting about that.This could have a serious impact on your company’s reputation and social standing, and sometimes there’s no coming back on top. You must take this fact into consideration that your posts are sensitive and relevant to current affairs.
Is it human? Or not?
As if this isn’t already an issue, you don’t’ want your posts or tweets being mistaken for spam! Think this through. If you have taken the time to set up a blog, develop content for that blog, established a Twitter account, then why take the shortcut on the last step and peeve off the people have taken the time to follow you and make them feel that they aren’t worthy of timely conversation.
Spread the social around!
The bottom line is that you need to look at your social media strategy and determine the approach that’s right for your business, not someone else’s. If you are a small business, with not too many employees and a lot of workload, automating your social media can be very attractive… However, I would caution against it. Social Media should be part of your business’ culture… it’s part of your business’ voice. So spread the social around! It doesn’t have to be one person who is solely responsible. If you’re a business owner, it’s a great way to develop rapport with your employees as well as with your customer’s communities.
After all, that’s what social media is all about!
I’d love to hear what you think.
Do you automate or schedule any of your social media activities? Why or why not? Do you think this approach helps or hurts a business?
When you hear someone say the word Pinterest, what comes to mind? In most cases your probably thinking stay at home mom, or even your grandmother. Am I right? The service is a little more than a showcase of favourite recipes and clothes.
Things have changed. Many businesses are taking advantage of Pinterest’s highly visual platform to build brand awareness and enhance their reputation. Yes, another social media platform your business needs to be present on…I can just hear the collective sigh out there! Don’t despair. Leveraging Pinterest for your business, and establishing your presence, your promotions, and share-able content creation is easily doable. Before outlining the first you must be convinced that your business needs to be on this platform.
So why use Pinterest?
Many businesses have finally jumped on the Pinterest bandwagon. The main reason is Pinterest does something no other social media does. It presents consumers with images in a simple, fast and easy to consume manner. Brands embrace it because it tells a compelling story that allows for interpretation for each consumer, thus starting a one-to-one conversation.
1. Establish your Presence
One of the strategies for using Pinterest is to first make sure you are projecting the right business image. This can’t be stressed enough. Keep your profile professional, this includes your photos, name, pins and so on. All these aspects directly reflect your business, so it’s important to follow these guidelines.
2. Picture Promotions
Many businesses today are taking full advantage of Pinterest for a number of reasons. Many people are now making use of promotions. To start utilizing Pinterest for business promotion is simple. Just organize a promotion for your fan base, and make sure it provides them an incentive to post their own images of your products. You can also use your Twitter and Facebook pages to market your promotion beforehand to grow your community.
3. Content
On Pinterest it’s important that the boards you create reflect your business or area of expertise. This can either make or break your success of your marketing campaign. It’s key in choosing boards that are related to your niche, and it wouldn’t hurt to follow brands that are related to your business.
Summary
Pinterest platforms user base is growing exponentially, which means it’s time for more businesses to take the plunge, and get started. Here are some key words of advice: Put your best foot forward through sharing valuable images and video. Remember, the old adage… a photo is worth a thousand words… and a very powerful marketing tool.
What do you think of Pinterest? Can your business benefit from it, and how? I’d like to know.