How Marketers can use Google Zero Moment of Truth model

I first had the idea for this blog 2 years ago. Man oh man, take a second to consider how the landscape has changed over the past 3 years… Every other business is an app start-up, Vine withered and died, the leader of the free world uses Twitter to start wars and robots are taking over the feckin’ world.

Yet still, there are plenty of marketers who don’t know about Google’s ZMOT and one thing still remains true: one of the biggest challenges facing marketers today is how to keep up with their customers.

With the above in mind, I thought it was worth refreshing and reposting this blog for those marketers who are still trying to find that sweet-spot between permission-based content marketing and driving conversion online.

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Audit your marketing technology stack with the 6Cs to refine its capabilities and prove its return on investment

Do you know the stackies? They're an informal contest arranged by Scott Brinker, creator of the marketing technology vendor landscape where different companies visualise their marketing stacks in different ways. Here are the latest martech stack entries. They're presented in vastly, different ways from this superbly visual example... to this more structured approach of the 5Cs of Martech - which looks like the inspiration for the new 6Cs of Martech featured at the end of this article. You can audit your marketing stack against any of these ‘stackie’ entries. The structure of some of the examples like the second one prompted us to think whether there was a simple, practical way of visualising or…

Use NPS follow-up insight to convert Detractors and Passives

The ability to quickly gauge your enterprise’s overall health with a single NPS score is useful to let you know whether you need to make any changes. However, a lone NPS score is not enough to tell you what changes you need to make. The Net Promoter Score has become a popular customer loyalty metric, but you need more than a simple measure of the likelihood of receiving customer recommendations to help you identify organizational problems in enough detail to chart a course for corporate success. That’s why the metric’s proponents are now recommending you ‘close the loop’ with follow-up questions that get to the root of your customers’ neutrality or lack of satisfaction.

‘Close the loop’ with a NPS-integrated solution

Enterprises looking to transform their Net Promoter Scores into actionable insight should be considering…

Plan, manage and optimize your Google AdWords campaigns with this new template for managing your PPC marketing

Google AdWords is a fantastic way for businesses of all sizes to drive relevant visitors to their website generating new enquiries or online sales. The beauty of AdWords is that it is really flexible and puts most of the control into your hands, so no matter which products/services you are selling you can get started within an hour or two even with the most modest of marketing budgets. And here is where the many problems of AdWords start and why some businesses miss out because a quick trial fails since they don't work to optimise their campaigns... "While it is very easy for anybody to set up and run their own AdWords campaigns, it is also just as easy for your campaigns to take a life of their own, spending your hard earned marketing budget on driving…

Too Many Tech Options = Random Acts Of Technology

If you blink, a dozen more marketing technology providers show up. Just 5 years ago, about 150 providers could hang their hat in the marketing tech sector. Today, we count more than 3,500 marketing technology providers. With so many choices to choose from, it’s no wonder random acts of technology happen more often than not.

What’s A Random Act Of Technology (RAT)?

A RAT happens when companies throw technology at problems without a strategy. In sales and marketing, it’s one of the top reasons marketing technology ends up flopping. In research conducted in 2016, Ascend2 conducted research into application of marketing technology. They found insufficient strategy as a top barrier to achieving success with marketing technology.

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How to create a digital knowledge centre which facilitates your digital transformation and helps you delight your customers.

The way brands are being built is being re-shaped. This is in large part due to consumers’ digital habits; by-passing brands completely and opting for the likes of Amazon, Google or Tripadvisor to satisfy their needs and requirements as the tools of discovery for users. So what can brands do when their market may be ripe for disruption? Start with why you exist and how you can migrate your offering, through digital transformation, in becoming a brand of authority and trust. Authority and trust are two key assets brands can build a distinct unique selling point. For brands that operate in a competitive marketplace, how the brand is perceived to a wider audience can be used as an advantage, in becoming a knowledge centre for your industry sector.

Brands as Knowledge Centres

So what is a knowledge centre? It’s…

Marketers should plan for every scenario, rather than only the most likely one

2016 is behind us. Marketers have their eyes set firmly on the year ahead, and will be currently drawing up their marketing plans and strategy documents for 2017. However, the vast majority of these plans will actually only plan for 1 scenario: business as usual. It makes sense to plan for business as usual, after all, it’s impossible to predict the future so it wouldn’t make sense to base ones marketing plan around an event which may or may not happen. Consider the following: - The future is not pre-determined or predictable - If it were, there would be no point taking action today, because it would have no effect on the future. - Full information about the future is never available But precisely because the future cannot be predicted, you shouldn’t only plan for one scenario (businesses as usual), but rather should have…

Adapting the Growth/Share Matrix to Marketing

The Growth/Share Matrix is a business strategy tool that's been around for years, but it remains a useful way to think strategically about where you make investments and allocate company budgets. Although it's a general business strategy tool, it can be very useful for thinking about allocating marketing spend and so it is as important for marketers as it is for boards making big strategy decisions. The model is also known as the BCG model, the acronym of the group that created it. The model involves mapping business divisions or products across two key dimensions; Market Share and Market Growth, which then maps them into one of four quadrants. Products/Divisions operating with low market share in a low-growth market are dogs, those operating with a high market share in a low-growth market are cash cows. Divisions or products serving a high growth market but without…

Use our new Digital Marketing metrics Google Docs reporting Spreadsheet to see your key marketing metrics at a glance

For Marketing, Digital marketing or e-commerce managers, the first week of the month is always a frantic one launching new campaigns, monthly dashboard reviews and on top of that you need to report the performance of your marketing to the internal stakeholders (the boss). Hopefully, it's a good news story, but if it isn’t, that just adds to the workload, identifying what went wrong and putting plans in place to turn things around. This is where you need to practice the art of analytics, to quickly create a report or dashboard with a subset of key metrics covering all marketing activities in an easy to understand format for rapid review and recommendations for upcoming activities? But how do you create a dashboard for reviewing digital marketing performance to compare different…

How data, technology and changing consumer expectations are shaping the marketing mix

The advancement of so many transformative new technologies over the last five to ten years is shaking up the modern marketing world. From the emergence of wearable technology, to chatbots and mobile payment apps, disruption is taking place nearly everywhere we look. All of these technologies have the potential to give marketers new opportunities to meet and surpass consumer expectations. However, this is only possible if marketers can keep their skill-sets up to date and look at ways to integrate new ways of working into existing processes, for example through an effective digital transformation agenda. The technological advancement we’re seeing is not linear. Instead, it is occurring rapidly in the form of major leaps, with consumers and pioneering tech companies leading the change: Many businesses are struggling to keep up and it’s…