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One challenge mentioned recently is how one organization’s previous strategic planning processes did not work. This necessitates looking for new and better approaches. This is not a unique situation. Many of you are likely finding your way to the Brainzooming website because you are searching for new ways to address strategic planning challenges. As we developed the Brainzooming methodology inside the corporate world, our strategic planning did not always work as well as we planned (which is ironic). Sometimes the gap was about the planning itself. Other times it might be about the process steps or the leaders sponsoring the strategic planning process. Still other times, it involved challenges implementing the plan after we completed it....
When you think of the basics of marketing, you might be thinking: Okay, create an awesome website; design and send some cool emails; post strategically to social media; maybe supplement with some advertising. But what about the principles behind your campaigns? When you're planning and doing all of these marketing activities, what motivates your decisions? Today, the most successful marketers aren't just crossing items off their to-do lists; they're taking a holistic, adaptive approach to their marketing. They're elevating the customer experience, building personalized connections, adapting to the evolution of technology, attracting customers to them using inbound marketing, and more. When marketers take this approach, they start creating a better brand experience and driving real business results. To learn more about the eight pillars of modern marketing,check out the infographic below from Olive & Company....
When town hall participant Karl Becker got the closing question in the second presidential debate, I was thrilled to see him ask the same question I had submitted to the openquestionforum.org the prior week. Some viewers may have laughed at the naiveté of our kindergarten-level suggestion to name something positive about your opponent. But not behavioral scientists. It often feels impossible to change people’s minds on an issue. Most attempts to persuade backfire and make the gulf between groups of opposing views an even wider chasm, filled with toxic verbal sewerage. You’d think 21st-century educated humans might consider evidence and adjust their views accordingly. But behavioral science shows that the more facts and evidence you bring to the argument, the more adversarial things become for most humans, and the farther off you push any reconciliation. There are many names for this phenomenon: confirmation bias; motivated reasoning; and backfire effect. Some of the earliest research into motivated reasoning even demonstrated that two rival groups watching the same video take away opposing conclusions.But what Karl and I were getting at is a tactic known as “affirmation.” It may be one of the only ways to begin to melt rigid opinions just enough to enable some flexible discussion. Here’s what it is and how it works — whether in politics, or at the office, or in negotiations....
As we’ve already outlined, your digital strategy is the series of actions you take to help you achieve your overarching marketing goal. Your digital marketing campaigns are the building blocks or actions within your strategy that move you towards meeting that goal. For example, you might decide to run a campaign sharing some of your best performing gated content on Twitter to generate more leads through that channel. That campaign is part of your strategy to generate more leads.It’s important to note that even if a campaign runs over the course of a couple of years, it doesn’t make it a strategy -- it’s still a tactic that sits alongside other campaigns to form your strategy. Now we’ve got to grips with the basics of digital strategy and digital marketing campaigns, let’s dig into how to build your strategy....
A content marketing strategy works as your guiding light when it comes to the planning, production, promotion, and measurement of content. Taking the time to create a solid strategy might seem like more work up-front, but it will reduce your workload over time and make your content more effective.
Now (before you start) is the time to think through your objectives and build a content marketing strategy that will elevate your social media efforts to the next level. We’ve put together a helpful walkthrough that will guide you through each step of the process...
In a recent SpiceWorks survey of content marketing, one major factor was found that separated the winners from the losers: having a formal, written content marketing plan with a clearly defined budget. This may sound basic, but the numbers tell a very different story. While 72 percent of businesses claim to have a strategy for content, only 30 percent actually have it documented.
Why is having a written plan and established budget so important? Consider this: 36 percent of businesses with a documented plan feel that their efforts are very, or extremely, successful, compared with only 11 percent of those who have not documented a plan....
When I went rock climbing for the first time, I had no idea what I was doing. My friends and I were complete newbies about ropes and rappelling and every other bit of jargon and technique that goes with climbing.
Developing a social marketing plan is sort of like rock climbing. Here's a basic checklist to help you get started....
The 16-page guide Content Marketing Institute published on documenting your strategy can certainly help you get started. But, once you’ve gone through the initial documentation process, you’ll need to know how to implement that strategy — and keep it updated on an ongoing basis.
While you will want to follow your strategy closely in order to keep your content marketing focused on your organization’s goals, it should also be flexible enough to account for new insights and information you receive as time goes on. There is no specific template you can use to build a strategy; but below, we share some guidelines you can use to determine what elements should stay consistent and what will likely evolve:
Your goals and mission should be sticky
The first two things you need to identify when building your strategy are the goals and mission of your content marketing program. Coincidentally, these are the same two that should change very little....
This week’s topic is about creating a one-page business strategy plan for your business. When you are starting a new business endeavor, it is always recommended to write a business plan. A business plan is an essential roadmap for business success. However as a small creative enterprise or solopreneur, it can be difficult to complete all the elements of a traditional business plan and can the process can feel overwhelming....
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In this post, we’re going to take a look at how you can create an online marketing plan for nearly any type of business.
We’ll examine how you can build a rock-solid plan, from the ground up and how you can adapt your plan, if changes need to be made.
By the end of this post, you should feel less overwhelmed and more confident about how you can take your business and market it online.
First, while this piece is about content marketing, it focuses on the “getting started” steps. A lot of people call these steps “content strategy.” This article goes a little beyond that, getting to best practices and a few favorite tools.Kicking off any content marketing process starts with the strategy, then moves into some basic process planning. This is how we do it at Portent: - Existing content inventory - Competitive analysis - Drawing conclusions - Building the “machine” around best practices, tools and people #1 is the most mechanically-involved task, because you have to grab a lot of data and mush it all together. #2 is the shortest. #3 and 4 are the most demanding (for me, anyway) because I have to suss out impossible-to-automate marketing stuff that’s essential to success....
Going into a strategy meeting today that is sure to be a snoozer? Even if you are going into the meeting with the same old people, the same old topics, and the same old expectations to just get a strategy done and put into a notebook on a shelf so you can go back to doing what you’ve always been doing, there is hope! Here is a way you can turn a typical strategic thinking exercise into something new and fun that both adds variety to your strategy meeting AND could trigger some new ideas to get our strategy out of a rut!...
Design is an important part of shaping the user experience, but it's the strategy behind the website that will make it work. Before you start creating design concepts, there are a few fundamental questions to consider first.
Taking the time to discuss these big-picture considerations with your sales, marketing, customer service and leadership teams will ensure everyone is on the same page before you start creating new pages. Here are seven essential questions that should be part of that discussion....
We are all early adopters now,” James McQuivey said to a rapt audience at the recent Forrester Research 2015 Forum for Marketing Leaders. “Welcome to the era of hyperadoption.”
McQuivey, a Forrester VP and principal analyst, defined hyperadoption as rapid and simultaneous uptake of new behaviors. He asserted that in just a few years we'll all be quick to do things that in the past we might have taken longer to try—if we would've even tried them at all—because we thought they were weird or were concerned about trying them.
“But isn't adoption hard?” he asked rhetorically. Consider, he said, how long it took electricity to be adopted. “Yes, people resist a new order of things,” McQuivey said, “even if it's awesome.” But that time lag is shortening. In 1999 Forrester asked consumers, “When will you go online?” Thirty percent of those who said never did so a year later....
Creating a marketing plan without performing a proper digital marketing audit can cause you to invest in unnecessary initiatives and to overlook gaps in your current strategy. Many marketers forgo performing an in-depth audit because it can be an intimidating and time-consuming process.
Being so closely involved with your marketing on a daily basis often makes it hard to have an objective idea of where you stand. This article will attempt to outline a plan to help you objectively examine your online presence across multiple platforms and help you optimize your efforts using the latest tactics and best practices....
Alright Jim/Jane, you have five minutes. Don’t waste my time…
”*GULP* If put on the spot, could you impress someone with your social media campaign idea? While they may sympathize with the benefits of creative flair and imaginative campaigns, CMOs still have a board to satisfy who are demanding record-breaking results… and they were demanding them yesterday. You need to speak their language and present a campaign idea that will tick all the boxes.
The precise way you go about pitching an idea to your CMO, or other higher-up, will depend on both the company and your position within it. Keeping these key points in your head will give you a fighting chance of getting the green light for your golden idea....
Looking to improve your marketing? Here are 11 metrics that you should be measuring to gauge your performance.
... Writing a marketing plan without doing a review of recent marketing performance is like using Google Maps without a starting point. Knowing where your marketing is today (that is, what it's doing for you today) is absolutely essential for deciding where you want it to take you next year.
If your CEO asked you today to start pulling together a report card for 2014 YTD marketing performance, what would you report on and how would you grade it? In our primarily B2B world, here are some of the measures we suggest would make appropriate Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for assessing marketing performance:...
The CMI team took time recently to brainstorm some outside-the-box ideas for strengthening content marketing strategy and business overall with a concept called the "10 Percent." An often-overlooked part of this strategy was the 10 Percent.
The 10 Percent was something we at CMI have talked about for years but never executed… until now. While we were in San Francisco this week for our Executive Forum conference, the CMI team held a staff meeting where we set aside time to discuss our own 10 Percent initiatives.
What is this 10 Percent? It’s spending one-tenth of our time and resources on the wild, the crazy, the seemingly unrealistic ideas we have, and making them part of our content marketing strategy. When we asked Jonathan about this, both Robert and I assumed that the 10 Percent is where the costly creative programs come from. Not so, according to Jonathan. Actually, these are the least expensive programs. For the most part, Jonathan said, these programs actually were not time-intensive in relation to the other content marketing they were creating and distributing....
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Rev up your strategic planning with 13 key questions.