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Posts tagged ‘organization’

30
Mar

How to Keep Up with Rapid Change in Marketing?

marketing_change_-_how_to_keep_up_with_change_in_marketing

 

Marketing is changing rapidly. Do you also have the feeling that marketing has changed more in the past 2 years than the past 50 years?

Marketing is changing faster, I agree. Even stronger, most marketers today feel overwhelmed with the speed of change happening in the job we are passionate about.

On top of that, marketers do not have a clear consensus on what areas to focus on in the future. And when they want to introduce new marketing innovations into the organization, they hit resistance to change, lack of budget and lack of skills.

In this blog post I want to cover the following:

  • The entire history of marketing and technology through time: how fast are things going?
  • Why you need to go faster when introducing change,
  • How you can speed up the introduction of these changes into your organization.

Okay, let’s get started… Read more »

17
Apr

The CMO’s Guide to Digital Marketing Organization Structures

CMO_guide_to_digital_marketing_organization_structures

Digital is everywhere. As a result, the pressure on leadership is increasing to redesign the marketing organization structure towards more customer centricity, customer experiences, data driven and personal marketing.

Marketing leadership is reacting by investing in new concepts such as content marketing, inbound marketing, marketing automation and (big) data marketing. But without the right organization, any of these new concepts is set for failure.

But today’s modern marketing organization is complex, and requires purposeful planning and a combination of talent, technology, and consumer insights in order to have a positive impact on the company’s bottom line.

In this blog post, I want to explore how you can structure your marketing organization, and answer the following questions:

  • what skill-sets and profiles do you need?
  • what organization structure do you need?
  • what new functions and teams do you need?
  • how will departments work together in new agile ways?
  • how do you structure for content marketing?
  • how do you organize for agile marketing operations?

Read more »

30
Sep

5 Big Fundamentals of Digital Marketing Transformation

charles darwin_digital marketing transformationTransforming a marketing organization to embrace digital marketing requires change. Some companies seem to make this transition seamlessly, and other are struggling.

The dream of agile marketing operations, 1-1 marketing, digital customer experience, intelligent marketing technology and digital customer journeys seem to be impossible to reach.

What are some of the big fundamentals driving digital marketing transformation?

In this blog post I discuss 5 critical “must-do’s” to get organized for Digital Marketing Transformation.

 

But organizing for digital marketing transformation is not without its challenges…

Read more »

30
Jul

What is Quality Content that Really Works?

engage with content quality“We buy our blog posts 500 EUR a piece” he told me the other day. “What kind of blog post are that?” I asked. He was buying 10 of these blog post a month, on average 500 words per blog post.

Aaargh.

That’s probably the worst approach this marketing manager could take towards content. The output he gets by aiming for 500 words articles is just horrible. It’s usually a “one-pager”, with one single meaningless graphic, pulled from a stock-photo website. Others might tell you that you need 1500 word articles, because these are going to make you end-up higher in search-engines.

I say, that’s crap. Don’t believe them.

Blog Post Summary

In a world filled with content, and decreasing user attention, this kind of simple approach to content is just not going to cut it.

With this post I want to show you, “once and for all”:

  • what content quality really is about,
  • how Google treats good and bad content quality,
  • how consumers and customer in general spot quality content,
  • how long quality content should be,
  • and finally how you can get organized for content quality.

Now let’s get started, and explore the world of quality content…
(oh, this starts to feel like a rant, but don’t worry, this is not going to be a rant!)

Read more »

28
Apr

Organizing for Content: A Detailed Overview

organizing for content marketing

Organizing for content can be complex, very much similar to controlling a complex swarm-system, just like the swarm of birds in the picture.

Luckily you can get organized to control the complexity of content marketing.

In this blog post I want share in detail, using examples and best practices, how small, medium and large organization can get organized on different levels for content marketing:

  • Strategy
  • Organization
  • People
  • Processes

Read more »

28
Jan

A step-by-step guide to Content Marketing Excellence

When digging into the world of content marketing, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the 17 million hits on Google with best practices.

People are definitely searching for help, and they are overloaded with data and best practices. But still, we are starving for insight.

Where do you start?

 

content marketin strategy searches in search engines

A simple search in “Soovle” reveals the top search topics on content marketing in the major search engines.

Read more »

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 »

10
May

How to show Effective Marketing Leadership?

What does it take to run a marketing organization effectively?

What does it take to be an effective marketing executive?

“In many businesses (especially in B2B), the marketing department is an order-taking, tactical function that runs on the hamster-wheel of demand generation, trying to keep up with “client” orders for new collateral, press releases, case studies and, at times, marketing-qualified leads (MQLs).”

This is a quote from Robert Rose. You can find the quote on many blogs on the Internet.

It’s quoted this often because many marketers recognize the situation. Somehow they end up in a spin of trying to solve problems all day, and deliver on the internal demands. They are hard working, and provide a lot of output.

But it’s never enough. Read more »

5
Feb

The Concept of INTERNAL Content Marketing for Employees

internal content marketing

Image source: http://workasone.wordpress.com/2011/04/18/delete-dilemma/

This post explores the idea of using Content Marketing to increase internal efficiency of employees.

Employees of B2B companies are under pressure. Everyday everyone of us must consume a massive amount of content. We need to interpret that content, rework the content, and deliver output to others.

The number of information channels we need to manage is increasing every day. Not only the classic channels like e-mail, phone calls, or paper mailings are putting us under pressure.

Society itself drives us to join the social media networks around us, for private use, but increasingly employees need to be active on professional social networks.

The effect of this to many is an overflow of information, where employees are missing crucial pieces of information which they need to function within the organization, project or strategy.

The concept of INTERNAL content marketing

The basic principle of content marketing is to have methodic approach to understanding the business issues of buyers. It is also about providing insight and answers to their business issues through creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to a clearly defined target audience, with the objective of driving sales.
OK, let’s cut that sentence short : understand buyers, provide answers that help them through content, to sell more.

Everyone in your company has special needs when it comes to content.

They have different interests, and will only listen to what helps them in their daily work. They might see the general broadcast messages of the management that tries to get them aligned with special programs or strategies. But as in many companies, there are so many programs and strategies being communicated that they’ll only listen with “one ear”, or miss it all together.

What if we would apply the principles of content marketing to the benefit of an internal organization?

Read more »

29
Jan

How to show Thought Leadership in your Industry ?

How to create thought leadership

image source: http://b2b-marketingblog.activeconversion.com/

It’s interesting to be a thought leader and show thought leadership.

But how do you get organized, from a marketing and company perspective?

Michael Porter or Treacy and Wiersema have learned us about product leadership, operational excellence or customer intimacy, and the relevancy to the strategy of companies.

(Michael Porter, Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors – 1998), later revised by Treacy and Wiersema with their Value Disciplines model (The Discipline of Market Leaders – 1997), now taught in nearly all business school programs, and which crops up at least once at every business conference.)

When B2B buyers seek out to buy a certain solution, I believe that in many cases they are not buying a product, but they are buying the vision of the company, and the people behind that vision.

That’s why any company, no matter which “Porter” strategy you have, must have a clear vision about the new solutions of the future. Solutions that give your buyers the competitive edge they need to survive in todays economy, while believing that your company will remain to provide you with future products that will keep giving him that competitive edge.

The objective of thought leadership ? If you get your thought leadership strategy right, customers will see you as a go-to source of expertise, your new products or incremental improvements will find easier acceptance, you’ll stand a good chance of bolstering product price (which is critical in many industries where commoditization is at work), and you’ll attract talent more easily.

The real definition of Thought Leadership

Read more »