A media plan outlines the schedule of activity, what is going on, how much (or impressions) and the cost. Google Sheets or Excel are very handy tools for running this. They may not be as pretty but they are practical and effective. See this media plan template. You can also translate this into a presentation, as a lighter, prettier, simpler version. But building out your media plan in a spreadsheet makes the… Continue reading
Return on investment in digital marketing is a hot topic and isn’t one that is easily answered. At least not at first glance. A very simplistic view is what went in and what went out. i.e. We spent $500k on marketing. What did we get? The output or impact then has to be linked to the companies objectives. Which should have a dollar amount assigned to it. For example, we needed to grow the awareness of… Continue reading
Download our example and give it a go. It’s that simple. Here’s how you use it: Print it out. Fill it in.Take it to stakeholders, get their feedback.Adjust.Then chat with some peers, what do they think.Adjust.Then re-circulate with everyone. An effective content marketing strategy will make everyone’s jobs easier and ensure you are being productive and not just busy. Further reading on Content Marketing Strategy. Continue reading
Once you have established a succinct marketing strategy and objectives, establishing the return on investment is easier. You look at all your inputs, how much did you spend or invest in resources. Then look at the outputs. The proviso here, is often money is invested in a year but the return can be a multi-year payback. Which is often forgotten. That’s simple in principle. So how do you measure it? Often through a mix of measurement… Continue reading
When Isaac Newton established the first law of motion, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, he probably didn’t have content marketing in mind. But it’s a useful thought to have in mind when thinking about return on investment. Establishing ROI in three simple steps works like this: 1. You need to start with, what did we give the market, or what resources did we expend. 2. Identify to what end, what goals were you trying to… Continue reading
The classic question, how do I create good content for our website? Let’s get back to basics, customers and future customers visit your website with goals in mind. Jot these down. Then look at what content could help them achieve those objectives, faster, easier, more effectively. A way to work backward on this is to go interview a few customers to understand their purchasing journey. Why did they buy? What else did they consider? How did they… Continue reading
Good content does the job the marketer wants from it. Make sure you have an effective content marketing strategy first. This will help you understand if a piece of content is doing its job. So when creating your content, reference your strategy, will this content help deliver on that goal. Then once you have published it, check the data, are people consuming it. Are enough people seeing it? It is likely you will need to make one or two rounds… Continue reading
Go and download our example strategy doc. Fill it in. Follow the best practices in the spreadsheet. Then each month, update and revise this, continue to develop it. Build on it, simplify it and remove it. Continue reading
So you’ve nailed your content strategy and now you’re ready to implement it. You’ve got tons of creative ideas about how to reach your audience and boost your ROI. But you need some structure, a central place to hold all of the nitty-gritty details and a way to clearly visualize what is happening when. This is where a content calendar comes in handy. Essentially a content calendar is a tool to help you organize and plan all of… Continue reading
This is a little bit of an oxymoron, your provider of marketing metrics should do the tracking for you too. But how you track your marketing metrics is often by installing some additional code snippet, that enables the metrics provider to do the measurement. They will use this code, to record the measurements, then process it and show it in your dashboard. That is the simplistic explanation. Some systems are aggregators, and they pull in metrics that others… Continue reading
