Skip to content

Posts from the ‘Marketing Strategy’ Category

26
Aug

How to become a digital marketing organization?

digitally empowered buyersBuyers today have become more digitally empowered than ever.

It’s changing their buying behavior, which provides new challenges to those aspiring a digital marketing organization.

In this blog post I’ll cover:

  • the overarching reasons why marketing must change to keep up with changing buyer behavior 
  • how certain marketers are trying to trick the system, without any chance to success
  • why marketers are loosing ground against the digital adoption speed of buyers
  • what roadblocks you need to overcome to become a digital marketing organization

And at the end of the post, I’ll cover

  • 19 specific changes you can make in terms of organization, technology and tools, so you can become a digital marketing organization.

Read more »

22
Jun

Social Business has now become Inevitable and Unavoidable

Social Business Change-is-InevitableWhen Facebook ended the “free love era”, they drastically scaled back the organic reach of brands. It seemed for many marketers as if history repeated itself.

For a few years they enjoyed the exposure the network brought. But today, if you want exposure, you’ll need to pay to play. For brands on Facebook, these are dark days. They can choose to spend more money to reach fans they had already accumulated in the past, but Facebook will likely decrease branded reach even further.

It isn’t long before other large social media networks will do the same.

What are brands to do when social media networks are choosing to reduce the freedom that brands can play on their networks?

The evolution of Facebook – signaling the era of Social 3.0

organic search decline - reason to go for social business

According to a new report from Simply Measured, the total engagement for the top 10 most-followed brands on Facebook has declined 40 percent year-over-year—even as brands have increased the amount of content they’re posting by 20.1 percent.

To understand a little bit on what’s happening, we need to go back a few years in the history of Facebook, and then look into the future of what is most probably going to happen. Read more »

30
Apr

9 Key Change Management Essentials for Epic Content Marketing

change management essentials for content marketing

What change is needed in an organization to be successful with content marketing?

Answering todays marketing challenges is a daunting task for most of us.

Not only is marketing increasingly becoming a digital environment, marketing itself is changing. Buyers demand value on top of existing products and services. They want you to inspire them, educate them, and entertain them.

Embracing a content marketing culture is the first step towards becoming a social business. It is the first step to creating marketing that people actually want.

It requires great, or small changes, depending on your current corporate culture:

  • from outbound to inbound
  • from self-centric to meaningful
  • from classic to digital
  • from art to science

Here are some of the key change management essential ingredients you need to take into account when changing a company towards a content marketing culture:

  1. assess your marketing maturity
  2. corporate and leadership alignment
  3. embed openness and authenticity
  4. embrace new customer centric processes
  5. employee activation and skills transfer
  6. internal communication
  7. quick-wins planning
  8. content quality gate-keeping
  9. embedding the change

Read more »

1
Apr

The Rise of Online Advertising, and why I don’t get it

online advertising - why is it growing?

On the one hand online advertising is growing, and on the other hand stats show they are not effective. Can someone explain?

For a couple of years I have been blogging to help others. Now has the moment come where I need your help!

My question is very simple:

Why do marketers keep advertising online, while clearly it doesn’t seem to be working?

And before your click away, no, this is not yet another blog post “yelling” to stop advertising, and to start doing content marketing.

This is something else, and I am merely trying to get my head around something.

And for this I need your help… Read more »

5
Mar

The Future of Advertising is Google’s “Don’t be Evil”

the future of advertising

Google’s über cookie

Marketers are trying to collect a lot of data, in a move towards big data. But Google and users are fighting against it : keyword not provided, cookie not accepted, location turned off, notification turned off.

On the other hand, we are leaving more data trails than we have ever done before. Even garbage cans are scanning our mobile phones to get the MAC address from your phone to understand how many times you came by (they’ve stopped that now due to protest).

Next thing is you’ll get an iBeacon  alert trying to sell you something because they know you’ll pass by on monday at 8u30.

Think about this for a second how addicted we are to our mobile devices and how addicted we are to using cool technology like Google. In many ways you could say Google knows us better than our wives or our husbands because all the stuff we put in there lasts seven years.

Google’s über cookie is coming

Google is in a way walking a very thin line. On the one hand they claim to protect our privacy (keyword not provided), but on the other hand Google is reinventing the bowser cookie into an über cookie: AdID.

The stuff you browse on your laptop and the stuff you browse on your smartphone could all be lumped into one big profile on you. Advertisers will be able to tap into this information, because that’s where the money comes from for Google. Some even speculate that Google will connect your online behavior with your real profile.

Read more »

18
Feb

The rise of Smart Content Marketing

smart content marketingContent marketing is changing from an art to a science. That’s what I talked about at an event a few days ago.

The event is called Trends Night, and is organized by STIMA, the largest independent marketing industry organization in Belgium.

The event featured a couple of excellent speakers like Bart De Waele (@netlash), Hakim Zemni (Insites Consulting, @hakimzemni), and Norm Johnston (Mindshare, @ntjohnston).

Admittedly, no big international names, but what they said was pretty interesting. You can find their presentations on Slideshare:

And I spoke about:

Content marketing is becoming smart content marketing. And in general, marketing is transforming from an art to a science, or something in the middle if you will. 

Here’s why… Read more »

20
Jan

How to Embrace Digital, Social and Content as a Company?

20131113_Embrace_Digital_Social_and_Content_as_a_company_Slideshare_version_pptxThe reactions where heartwarming. Although I knew I had a nice story, I didn’t expect these fantastic reactions.

A couple of week ago I presented to around 60 B2B decision makers. The topic was basically about the biggest challenges of marketers today, and how they can solve these challenges.

When I posted a trimmed down version of my presentation on Slideshare, I got another happy surprise. It got voted “presentation of the day” on Slideshare. I think that’s pretty cool. And that my friends, as you can imagine, made me a little bit proud and totally made my day.

Here’s what I presented… Read more »

7
Jan

Digital Marketing Trends for 2014

digital marketing trends 2014As marketers, we have to “do” a lot. Just when we have social a bit under control, we need to do mobile. And just when we have our first “responsive” website ready, also this doesn’t seem to be enough. Nay, now it’s all context, big- data, gamification, customer experience and collaboration.

Pfffff.

It’s not easy today for marketers. And it won’t become any easier. How should a company deal with these changes? And how do you create new opportunities? Read more »

18
Dec

Which Content is Most Relevant to Your Buyers?

yodaProviding enough relevant content to buyers is one of the biggest concerns of marketers today, according to a recent study of CMI.

But how do you know which content is relevant to your buyers?

Showing business value is not differentiating

Building buyer insight is an important activity of marketers, resulting in buyer persona descriptions, or buyer insight maps as I often call them. Based on that buyer insight, content is created that shows the business value of your products or services.

The problem is that your competitors are doing the exact same thing. Read more »

10
Dec

How do you become a C-Level Digital Marketer?

C-level digital marketer

RU Ready for C-level?

I was really impressed. On his business card it said “Chief Social Media Officer”. He worked for a rather big, international company.

He told me he was busy with an impressive social media project, and was full of “influencer marketing”, “sentiment analysis” and “advocate” marketing. They were active on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest.

Wauuwww.

Just until I asked him how many tweets per week he was getting from customers. Then it became quiet. “Euhh, one or two” he answered. “But we are only starting to be active” he added quietly.

When I checked their Twitter stream just now, their latest Twitter post dated of one month ago. LinkedIn hadn’t been updated the last year, and they had 18 followers on Pinterest.

Everything is difficult in the beginning, you think, and it takes a while to grow a following, right? They had been active for 5 years on Facebook.

And when I check what they publish on online, mainly promotions and news about their own company and products, then it doesn’t surprise me they only have a handful of followers. Read more »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »