Category: marketing

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Digital marketing needs to clean up its act

(Does) digital marketing need to clean up its act(?)

P&G’s Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard said what many digital marketers have been thinking for some time now. “The days of giving digital marketing a pass are over…It’s time to grow up. It’s time for action.” [We don’t] “want to waste time and money on a crappy media supply chain.”

Almost immediately after reading that, I came across an article, 10 Things I Hate About Digital Marketing by Jerry Daykin.  Skeptically, he points out many of the potential pitfalls of digital.

What do you think?

“Digital is all around us and there’s never been a more exciting time in marketing. There’s also never been an easier time to completely waste your advertising budgets. Digital transformation is creating huge new opportunities to reach consumers and drive business objectives. But if you blindly believe everything you read in a marketing headline, or see presented on an event stage, you can easily be led astray.

[You might also like, “What are the Greatest Concerns for Marketers Now?”]

“The digital industry is sadly still full of misinformation, misguided gurus, false perceptions and perhaps even a few deliberate crooks. With so much constant change it’s hard for anyone to keep up. But in general, the traditional rules of marketing all still apply…”

In the same post: “The answer to how much content you need to make is nearly always dependent on how much you can afford to promote to a big enough audience. That’s why content isn’t really king, it’s a democratically elected president which can win hearts & minds only if it has enough of a campaign to get started.”

Read the rest of the post HERE.

 

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Marketing Challenges: What are the greatest concerns for marketers?

I guessed number one of the marketing challenges correctly. See if you agree with this Hubspot post – updated to reflect recent business marketing research.

7 of the Top Marketing Challenges Marketers Face Today

Every marketer faces different challenges. Although we typically share similar goals, some teams are stuck on hiring top talent, while others are having trouble finding the right technology for their needs.

[Also, read, “Want to Create a Fantastic Social Media Proposal?”]

Whatever the case may be, there’s always at least one area that you can stand to improve. In other words, there’s always room to optimize the various components of your strategy and turn your marketing into an even more effective revenue generator.

Curious about what kinds of obstacles other marketers are up against?

To learn more about the challenges marketers face today, download the free 2016 State of Inbound report here.

We polled thousands of marketers on the challenges they face, as well as the tactics they’ve used to meet those challenges head-on. Here are some of the most common challenges marketers reported struggling with … and their solutions.

The Most Common Marketing Problems We Face, According to the 2016 State of Inbound Report

According to our report, generating traffic and leads and proving ROI are the leading challenges marketers face. Here’s a look at this year’s data:

SOI_blog_X-Top-Challenges-1.jpg

Image Credit: The 2016 State of Inbound Report

Let’s go through each of these top challenges and how marketers can address them.

Read the rest HERE

Written by Lindsay Kolowich | @

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Outstanding free marketing tools you need to know about

Free Marketing Tools… and More

The amount of free marketing tools and information available for marketers, entrepreneurs and those bootstrapping a business is fantastic. However, it can be overwhelming to keep track of everything you might use now or down the road.

After creating a comprehensive list of essential free tools for Entrepreneurial Marketing students, (available HERE) one student did a little extra research. She found an incredible list. Big shout out to these folks. It is a terrific resource and pretty well organized for everything from business, marketing, design & code, and productivity to learning.

Click HERE for the list. The updated list contains new tools for website, branding, invoice, image editors, email management and more.

IF nothing else, this is a great way to get familiar with the free tools available and help you to nail done the services you might want to pay for. There are some paid services I use regularly and perhaps those can be covered in a separate post.

Again, don’t forget to visit the list of free marketing tools on this site.

Finally, enjoy! If you have any questions on which tools I’ve used and might be best for you please contact me. Or leave a comment below.

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Want to know more about that website? Use these free tools.

For Free Insights on Digital Market Intelligence

 SimilarWeb is a fantastic digital market intelligence tool. Get an idea of how other websites are doing with a quick traffic overview and similarweb-logosnapshot of any website’s referrals. The free version also inlcudes search, social, display, content, audience, similar sites and mobile apps.

Now, thanks to a heads-up from the folks over at Meltwater, here’s another great tool to discover impressions/reach on a site. It’s called Hypestat. Plug in the website and it pulls the daily/monthly breakdown of Unique visitors, pageviews, Alexa ratings and the value of the site in ad revenue dollars.

Pro tip: For a quick average of reach you might get by placing content on the site. Simply take the number of unique visitors and multiply by 30.

Here’s to numbers!

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Marketing: How to step outside the ‘bubble’

Photo: Serge Melki from Indianapolis, USA

Countless times in marketing strategy meetings, I have heard sentences beginning with and/or containing “I” or “my.”

“I wouldn’t respond to/click on that.”

“My friends and I thought the idea was great.”

“That’s how I would do it/buy/respond.”

Not wanting to invalidate a personal POV, especially from a boss or executive, many stay silent. And then carry out marketing plans according to the leader’s —sometimes personal— experience and wishes. [The ‘marketing’ department is then basically relegated to the role of a Kinko’s store – taking orders and creating collateral].

You can see the problem here.

We’re not marketing and selling to our (I’ll borrow Kissmetrics’ term here) “HiPPOs” (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion), we are attempting to message our customers. They are sometimes two very different things.

[Or Avinash Kaushik coined the term. See also: Digital Marketing Analytics: Avinash Kaushik]

Jamie Oliver’s story about trying to change eating behavior outside his cultural norm is a perfect example. It took some time to get to know the customer. And, of course, so should you.

SO the next time you hear an “I” or “My” in a marketing meeting, try to see if you can’t change the subject to the customer, based on objective research.

Referenced article is Eat Your Peas: A Recipe for Culture Change via Strategy+Business

Photo: First Time Bubble by Serge Melki