Does this sound familiar? You are feeling pretty good about yourself because you know business blogs are a good thing to be doing and you have got a blog facility set up on your website. If you’re the organised sort you might have made a list of topics you want to write about. If you’re not perhaps you jumped straight in and started typing. Either way, if you knew exactly what you wanted to say there may have been steam pouring out of your computer while you downloaded every thought. If writing doesn’t come naturally, it may have taken you longer to pen the posts you knew you wanted to write.

However, once you’ve got that initial outpouring out of your head and your first posts are live, you relax a little. You return to the important day to day running of the business with every intention to come back to your blog, either at the scheduled time in your organised list, or when you have another hour or two to spare.

Shifting priorities

Before you know it, a few months have passed (where does the time go?!) and your business blog is out of date. You have the blogging tool ready to roll but it’s not being utilised, which means it won’t be generating the results you were hoping for. It’s so easy to do with blog updates and many other aspects of business. They are ‘nice to haves’ compared to looking after existing customers, dealing with new business enquiries or staying on top of your finances for example. There are often set deadlines with a lot of other aspects of running a company that can’t constantly be shifted forward in the same way marketing your offering can. However, just because it can be a moving target, doesn’t mean it should be. If you want results, consistency is key.

How often to blog?

There are different views about how many times a business should blog, but one thing everyone agrees on is that blogs should be consistent. One of the biggest deciding factors when it comes to frequency is what you want to achieve with your blog. Do you want to increase brand awareness? Do you want to increase inbound leads? Or do you want to position yourself as a market leader and a voice of authority in your field? Another factor to take into consideration is the size of your enterprise. Large, multi-faceted organisations can blog once or more every day, whereas smaller businesses might only blog once or twice a month.

Pace yourself

When deciding how often you are going to blog, try to pace yourself. This is where a plan comes in handy. You may feel like you have hundreds of ideas for blog posts, but you don’t want to use them all up in the first few months and be left with no new posts for the rest of the year. It’s the regular addition of content onto your website that helps with SEO rankings, so it’s important to spread your content out over time. Spending a few minutes listing down all your ideas for posts and thinking about when you would like to make each one live is a great way to manage this process.

As with so many things in life, spending a small amount of time planning up front, can really save you a lot of time in the long run. But most importantly, it can ensure your business blog achieves what you want it to achieve.

eCommerce sales in the UK have continued to rise over the years, growing from a market value of £513.5 billion in 2014 to £693 billion in 2019. The pandemic forcing more Britons to stay home has massively accelerated this growth, pushing retail eCommerce sales past 30% of total retail sales in 2020.

In the uncertain world that we all live in today, to say that promoting your online store is important would be an understatement. Capturing the attention of a digital audience, however, requires digital marketing know-how, and when it comes to getting a foothold in the search engine results pages (SERPs) there really are only two main marketing channels to explore: organic SEO and paid search or pay-per-click (PPC).

In this mini-guide, we’ll briefly explore the main tools at your disposal to help push your eCommerce sales and grow your brand online.

What is eCommerce SEO?

eCommerce SEO is the practice of improving the search rankings of your online store for a whole host of related search terms so that potential customers are more likely to find you whenever they use a search engine to look for relevant products. It includes tactics such as creating intuitive, navigable site architecture and using well-researched keywords in product and product category pages, as well as creating a whole host of informative supplementary content and guides to really demonstrate your industry expertise.

Whether it’s your home page or any of your product pages, all have a better chance of ranking high in the SERPs of search engines like Google if you apply eCommerce SEO

eCommerce SEO is vital for any business with an online store, as it drives organic search traffic and is an investment in building a brand’s digital presence.

Google Ads

Google Ads is Google’s advertising platform which allows you to display advertisements on their platforms, including Google Search Network. You have to pay Google for every action users take such as clicking on your ad (hence pay-per-click), but only then and not before.

As with eCommerce SEO, your online store will benefit from Google Ads by appearing high on the SERPs, specifically in Google Search, with increased site traffic and potentially improved conversions and sales. The key difference is that paid ads are shown before organic search results, so they can get more immediate attention from people who use Google Search.

You get what you pay for with Google Ads, and you have to keep investing money into it if you want your ads to stay up. In this way, the ROI is very transient as it’s entirely dependent on you maintaining your click budget (unlike organic SEO where the investment takes longer to materialise but will give you longer-lasting results). 

Google Shopping

Google Shopping shows ads of products for sale on various Google channels, including Google Search, from online stores that take advantage of the service. People who click on a Google Shopping ad are directed to the product page of the seller’s online store where they can complete the purchase.

Convenience is one of Google Shopping’s major benefits, as you only have to submit product info and a picture for your ad. Google will take what you’ve provided and show your ad to the most relevant audience. 

A Google Shopping ad shows the product’s price and aggregate user rating for products with reviews. Such info is useful for qualifying leads, as those who click on Google Shopping ads already have set expectations and are more willing to make purchases.

Google Shopping falls under Google Ads, so it’s PPC that you also have to budget for to keep your Shopping ads running. 

Implementation

SEO and PPC are good on their own, but when they are both done together, the results can be outstanding. 

You can use Google Ads to test out keywords that you’re thinking of targeting for your eCommerce SEO efforts. Paid ads can quickly drive significant traffic to your site, which you can then check if that same traffic results in conversions for the keywords you targeted. Depending on the results, you can choose to use those keywords for your SEO or not.

Conversely, you can use the data from your eCommerce SEO keyword research to bolster your PPC campaigns by targeting keywords that you already know perform well. 

There are other ways to synergise SEO and PPC, but the core principle when using both is to use the data gathered from one method to inform and optimise the strategies for the other.

Measuring Results

For eCommerce SEO, the top three metrics to consider are the following:

 

All of these are available in Google Search Console.

Meanwhile, PPC campaigns measure:

 

Google Analytics lets you track all these metrics for your Google Ads campaigns.

Outreach and Link Building

Apart from on-site SEO and PPC campaigns, online businesses can also greatly benefit from being connected to a network of blogs and influencers within their industries. 

There is the broad benefit of building awareness for your brand when other websites and thought leaders mention your company on their platforms. It also has a more specific and material benefit of getting links back to your eCommerce store, which is important to improve your ranking.

You can start by researching blogs and influencers that cover the kind of products you sell and talk to your target audience. Build a rapport with them by commenting on their posts and interacting with their social media accounts genuinely. 

Over time and with an established professional relationship, you can then ask to contribute to their websites with a guest post and get a link back to your online store in return. 

Case Study: Bitcade

Bitcade is a Bristol-based retro arcade machine manufacturer that was lagging behind its competitors in online search before Superb Digital implemented PPC and SEO campaigns.

Superb Digital, an SEO agency in Bristol, started with a Google Ads campaign, putting up both text and shopping ads. Sales shot up by 181% at the end of the first month and another 30% after two more months with further improvements to the campaign such as reducing their CPA.

With the initial sales boost and confidence in their digital marketing, Bitcade greenlit a full eCommerce SEO campaign. 

We implemented on-site optimisation based on thorough competitor and keyword research, created a blog with rich, insightful content, building links with lifestyle and gaming bloggers, and overhauled the site design to make it more visually appealing and easier to use.

There were consistent increases in rankings and revenue for the first six months. This groundwork prepared Bitcade for the rise of digital purchases during the pandemic, resulting in a massive 297% increase in leads and a 370% upturn in revenue 12 months into the campaign. Suffice to say, Bitcade’s founder, Jack England, has been over the moon about the results and is continuing to invest in his digital marketing with us.

If you’re hitting a brick wall with your search rankings or have seen a recent drop then it could be time you engage with a reputable and trusted SEO agency. At Superb Digital we can help with your organic SEO and PPC campaigns, as well as other elements of your digital strategy.

Get in touch with us today and we’ll be more than happy to look into your online store (or any type of website for that matter) and put together a no-strings-attached quote.

E-Commerce is one of the world’s most lucrative industries. More than ever, businesses need to have an online presence if they want to keep their customers loyal to their products, services and brand. COVID-19 has only accelerated this need for organisations to get digital, put their product data online and offer a completely virtual service.

Of course, it’s easier said than done whether you’re a multi-national organisation or part of a smaller, specialised industry. Your main challenge is getting your product data from its source to your end user, quickly and accurately. And when your end user has the ability to interact with your product data in multiple ways, across any number of different platforms, that challenge grows in complexity.

So how do you manage this data flow? Having an effective Product Information Management tool (PIM) is key.

What is a PIM? And why do I need one?

A PIM centralises your product data information and assets, including product specification data and any associated media assets, before distributing that data to multiple sources. Put simply, a PIM ensures your data flow is as efficient as possible.

In manufacturing, for example, it’s typical for product data to originate from older, legacy systems, where it’s input at the factory during the production stage. Then, the marketing teams responsible for selling these products have the daunting task of translating this data – often manually – in order to get it online. This process then often requires manual intervention again, to keep it up to date.

Processing the data manually in this way creates a disconnect between the marketing data and the product datathey’re never in sync with one another. And that leaves room for error.

No more errors in transmission

According to Ventana Research, 46% of companies that don’t have one single source of product information, and instead, use Excel spreadsheets to manage product data.

This can be a serious problem. 47% of the above companies admit they often find product-related errors and almost 20% of those errors have a major detrimental impact on sales performance. PIM is the solution.

Your customers interact with your data on many different devices, through their desktop, mobiles, or even via their smart speaker. So, having an application with a modern Application Programming Interface (API) becomes essential in your data workflow.

By using a RESTful API your product data can be shared easily, as it’s exposed in a predictable, interactive format.

Breaking down. Rebuilding stronger.

But not all organisations can commit the time, resource or budget to completely overhaul their systems, end-to-end, all the way to the factory level. Instead, there are other options.

To alleviate problems caused by disparate, legacy data, you can break the process down into smaller, more manageable applications. This is known as having a microservices architectureMicroservices are dedicated applications which focus on one dedicated function: in this case, in consuming your legacy data, transforming it into an end-user friendly format, then injecting that data into a PIM.

This approach ensures your original base data is kept up to date, and maintains data availability even if there’s a breakdown in one part of the workflow or chain.

Using cloud services, such as AWS, we can leverage tools like SQS and Lambda to support a decoupled architecture. Not only does decoupled microservices architecture prevent potential data loss, and preserve service in the event of application breakdown, it improves performance by offloading queue management and data flow into the Cloud.

A final but essential consideration, no matter what systems and applications you use: data security.

Experimental product data can be incredibly sensitive, so keeping it secure at both the point of origin and in-transit is important, as is ensuring pre-production data doesn’t accidentally end up publicly viewable. A PIM provides protection by implementing strict workflows for your data.

Finding unique solutions for exceptional businesses

There are many applications and frameworks out there specifically designed as PIMs, and they range in price depending on the supplier and the size of your product data.

Likewise, every business has different workflows and product data structures. Once you include a legacy data issue you’re having, it’s rare that any off-the-shelf-solution will meet your requirements exactly. A custom solution is often the way forward. And this is where using a flexible framework, such as Drupal, has distinct advantages.

Drupal is an enterprise-level content framework with many applications. Traditionally it’s a content management system, but its latest version is much more than that.

Drupal has a powerful entity framework, allowing you to model almost any data. Its strong community – made up of real people struggling with the same challenges as you are – has developed countless modules and plug-ins to enhance functionality.

And what’s more, since Drupal is open source, there are no licence fees or user usage limits. So every penny of your investment goes where you need it: into solving your specific workflow and data modelling challenges.

No matter how large or technical your datasets, nor how specialised your business is, you deserve to get the most from your digital applications.

At Proctors, our team of technology experts have been solving problems for specialist businesses across the globe: from tech behemoths like Panasonic, to niche industry start-ups. When it comes to talking data, you’ll want to talk to Proctors.

We’re more than happy to put our heads together with yours and discover the best solution for your business.

Does your blog need a strategy? Yes! I write blogs for businesses, but whether you have a business blog or a personal blog, it needs a strategy.

I come from a marketing background and have worked for full-service agencies for my entire 20-year career.  I’ve worked with businesses on a complete range of communications, from feature articles in trade publications to LinkedIn profile management, from entire suites of marketing materials to direct e-mail or postal campaigns. Working across so many channels it’s vital to have a coherent communications strategy that ties everything together. Messages need to be tailored to each channel, but all channels need to be portraying the same consistent company image. The same theory applies to blogging.

Consistency is key

Business blogs need an overriding strategy to ensure the messaging throughout remains consistent and on target. That’s not to say all blogs are saying the same thing, but while they all need to work by themselves as standalone posts, they also need to work as a series, for visitors who land on your blog, like what they see and want to find out more.

Here are some of my top tips for creating a strategy for your blog:

  1. What are your key messages – what are the key points you would like to get across to readers that land on your blog? Of course, each blog will be on a slightly different topic, but there should be an overriding message through them all. For example, do you want them to know that you’re a creative, reliable marketing agency? Or a professional but friendly yoga studio? When you think about your key messages, think about what makes you different.
  2. Who are you talking to? – The next thing to consider is who your blog is aimed at. No blog post, or any other piece of writing for that matter, will appeal to everyone because all readers will have their own preconceptions, their own views and their own ideas. However, if you are trying to sell a home improvement product for example, you know your blog needs to be aimed at homeowners and depending on the product, possibly homeowners with a certain level of disposable income. You will always deal with people outside of this core, but when it comes to writing your business blog, it’s useful to imaging you are writing for your average or ideal customer.
  3. Plan, plan, plan! – You may or may not be a planner by nature, but when it comes to blogging, as with any other communications medium, it’s important to plan out your content. If you have plenty to say you might think it’s easy enough to simply sit down and write. However, consider how balanced your content will be. A good blog for example should have a mix of personal posts focussing on people, behind the scenes messages and product posts, and it’s good to mix them up to keep things interesting. The risk with simply sitting down and writing is that you’ll end up front loading your blog with product information and no personality, or perhaps the opposite, depending on where your comfort zone lies. A simple list of content ideas set out in a month by month plan, is a great way to ensure a balanced business blog.
  4. Measure – Once you have set your blog strategy and you’re happily following your planned schedule like a well-oiled machine, don’t relax too much. Once the content is rolling out, be sure to measure its success. Are some posts getting a lot more views or engagement than others? If so, is it possible to add in any more of the posts people like? Whether you do it via stats or talking to your readers on a regular basis, stay in touch with what your target blog audience want to see on your blog. After all, its them you should be writing for, not yourself.
  5. Keep an eye on the competition – I’ve put this one at the end because I’m a big believer you should always focus your efforts inwards. I have seen first-hand the difference between companies that are focussed on the competition and companies that are focussed on providing the best customer experience. The latter are often more respected in their industries and have more loyal customers. However, there is nothing wrong with keeping an eye on your competitors to see what they are up to and what they’re talking about. Perhaps they are raising an issue you should be involved with, or perhaps they have taken an angle on a subject that you need to take issue with. Either way, it’s another important way of staying on top of current issues to feed into your overall blogging strategy.

Business blogs with a clear strategy not only run more smoothly, but also garner better results. Do you already have a blogging strategy in place and if so, how closely do you stick to it blog by blog?

Blogging for business is a hugely valuable tool – here are what I consider to be the top 5 benefits. Let me know if you agree.

  1. Boosts SEO – with an increasing number of people vying for attention online as more businesses turn to online sales to survive the pandemic, it is even more important to rank highly in those internet search engines. A constant stream of fresh content on your website is more likely to get your business noticed and help it stand out from the competition.
  2. Generates leads AND conversions – a business blog generates leads by encouraging more people to visit your site on a regular basis. But it is useful in the next stage too – by offering useful advice it can encourage people to buy from you. People want to work with people they trust (read more) and if you have a whole host of useful information on your site, it builds trust and encourages people to take the next step and place an order.
  3. Generates content for social media – yes it needs to be edited to suit each channel, but blogs can help generate content for your LinkedIn profile, Instagram, Facebook and even Twitter. Often simply the headline or first couple of sentences can be quickly adapted to create content for Twitter and more often than not, you can create numerous tweets from one blog by selecting various facts and useful information and posting them as individual tweets. Generating content for social media is in itself a time-consuming task, so being able to draw on original content from another source unique to your business is a huge help.
  4. Positions your brand – a business blog should be an integral part of your overall marketing strategy. It should reflect your brand beliefs and values, just as any other part of your marketing communications does. It should let visitors to your site know what kind of company you are and how you can help them. Simply by having a blog with free tips and advice, visitors will assume a level of authority and in turn be far more likely to want to build a relationship with you.
  5. Free marketing – OK, so maintaining a business blog isn’t free, it’s either an investment in your time and/or resources, or it costs money to outsource to a dedicated blog writer. However, generating a regular blog provides an ongoing opportunity for others to share your content. Think about it, if one blog post is shared by just 5 people and they each have 100 followers, that’s 500 more people that have seen your brand than would have otherwise. Hopefully more people will share and each person that does will have more followers, so the opportunity for this additional free marketing is huge.

It’s not easy to build and maintain a business blog, it takes time and effort either from your in-house resources or external support, but with these benefits and more, it is a worthwhile investment.

 

Once you’ve taken the important step to set up a blog on your company website, it’s important to keep it up to date to maximise its benefits. But it’s not always easy to think of things to say. Here are my top tips for generating new content for your business blog.

 

  1. Talk to your customers – the more feedback you can get from your customers about their experiences, good and bad, the more food for thought you’ll have for your blog. You don’t need to name them, but for example if they tell you that all other suppliers have been slow to respond to them and your team communicates really well, you could do a blog on the importance of good communication.
  2. Subscriptions – in my experience, there is an online newsletter for just about everything these days! Whether it’s a news and current affairs update, an industry specific round-up or a bulletin about your personal hobbies, reading new content on a variety of topics can help to spark new ideas.
  3. Customer case studies – your blog should give readers a rounded overview of your company and why you’re different from your competition. They should reflect your personality as a business and what better way to do this than by giving your customers the air time to talk about their experiences of you. You can do this by letting them write their own if they have time, or by doing a 5 minute interview over the phone with them so you can write it for them. Getting their approval before it goes live, of course.
  4. Research – sometimes we have an idea of what we want to say, but we don’t have the facts to back it up. Or we want to ground our thoughts in some real statistics. A session of online research can help you gather all the information you need. Sometimes it can take a bit longer, but often you can find a useful snippet in no time and the result is a more interesting and useful blog.
  5. Guest writers – some blogs you may have seen will invite guest writers to feature on their blog. This gives your readers a slightly different experience with a fresh view and a new voice. Also, other people will always be able to think of new things to say based on their own experiences.

 

Of course, thinking of what to say is only half of the battle. Then you need to find the time to put pen to paper or more likely fingers to keys! If you know just what to say and you need help writing it, or maybe you need help coming up with some of the ideas too – maybe an external blog writer can help?

Clubhouse is the social media network that’s taking the world by storm. Despite only launching in April last year, the app had 8.5m downloads at the end of February 2021 and users including the likes of Elon Musk (@elonmusk) and Mark Zuckerberg (@zuck23).

Drew Benvie (@drewbenvie), social media expert and founder of Battenhall, joined a Bristol Creative Industries event to share tips on how entrepreneurs, marketers and other creatives can use the app to grow their profile. 

Here’s a summary of his advice. 

Why is Clubhouse causing a stir?

With 8.5m downloads compared to Facebook’s 2.8bn active users, Clubhouse “is teeny weeny as a social network”, Drew says, but due to the high profile nature of its users “it’s really starting to turn heads”.

Drew believes Clubhouse sits in a space between social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Tik Tok and audio/video platforms like YouTube, Spotify and BBC Sounds. “At first I thought this is going to change social media,” he says, “people are going to start listening to things instead of writing or reading, but actually the data suggests it’s increasing use of other social media, and it’s also not really cannibalising mainstream audio or video. It’s kind of complementing that too.”

Drew says what excites him about Clubhouse is that “anyone can rock up, it’s really them and it’s unscripted”. That includes high profile people. Drew was hosting a room (we explain what that is below) about social media and Damian Collins MP (@damiancollinsmp), the former chair of the Parliamentary committee that grills big social network bosses, showed up to listen and then asked to speak. The next day he joined again. 

How to get started on Clubhouse

Clubhouse is an app on which users host, listen to and participate in audio groups, known as rooms, where typically one or more moderators host live discussions. 

Clubhouse is currently only available on iPhones and iPads. You also need an invite to get access. Speak to someone you know who’s on Clubhouse and ask them for one.

Once you’re in, set up a bio. You can add whatever you like including links to your Twitter and Instagram accounts. You can follow people on Clubhouse but there’s no messaging functionality within the app. 

In terms of what username to pick, Drew recommends your real name as Clubhouse is all about real people having conversations. 

The Clubhouse algorithm is still “a bit ropey”, Drew says, so to find interesting people to follow select topics that you’re interested in and look for interesting people talking about those topics.

Clubhouse connects with your phone address book so it will show you your contacts already using the app. 

When you follow someone, click on the alarm bell icon in their profile and you can select to be notified always, sometimes or never when they speak on the app. 

Joining and starting a Clubhouse room

Rooms (sometimes known as events – see below) are where the conversations take place. All rooms are live and they are not recorded so you can’t replay them (although lots of people are secretly recording rooms and uploading videos to YouTube such as this one with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg). At this point in Drew’s talk, an attendee said she was in a room with Brad Pitt!

To get used to the app, join rooms that look interesting to you. A room has three tiers; a stage with the people speaking (some of whom are moderators), people being followed by the speakers and everyone else.  

Everyone not on the stage is muted and you can’t speak. If you want to speak, you can raise your hand and a moderator can invite you to the stage. Moderators can also remove people from the stage or from the room completely. 

It can be nervewracking to speak for the first time but hang out in rooms that appeal to you and when you’re ready and have something to say, raise your hand and speak succinctly.

Your followers can ‘ping’ you to join a room. Exit a room with the ‘leave quietly’ button. 

Rooms can be:

The app will show you rooms based on who you follow and the topics you’ve selected. 

If you click ‘start a room’ and select the type, it will go live instantly. 

If you want to schedule a room for the future, Clubhouse describes that as an ‘event’. Create one by clicking on the calendar icon at the top of the app. 

Joining and starting a club

Clubs are anchors for your activity on Clubhouse. They are like what Facebook business pages are to your personal profile. It allows people to follow a theme. There are thousands of clubs covering all sorts of topics including social media, artificial intelligence, movies, public speaking, comedy and start-ups. Within a club, individual rooms are created to have live conversations. When a room goes live, you’ll be notified. 

When you get on the app, click the magnifying glass icon top left and you’ll see lots of clubs to follow.

To set up your own club, click on your profile image at the top right of the app and then the + next to the icons of clubs that you are a member of. 

Growing your brand and profile on Clubhouse

When starting a room or a club, Drew recommends planning with other people to maximise exposure. When someone is co-hosting with you, make them moderators. 

Listen to rooms to pick up best practice moderator skills such as introducing the show/room/event (they are called all those things!), welcoming people to the stage and keeping the conversation flowing. 

To build momentum, it’s a good idea to host a room at the same time every day, week or month. 

Drew says speaking in a room tends to grow your following by around 10% of the room’s total participants. You’re also likely to pick up followers on other social networks if you’ve included links in your bio. 

You can’t send someone a link to your profile on Clubhouse but you can send them a link to an event you’ve planned. 

People are also using other social networks to promote events such as this Twitter account for The Good Time Show, which is part of Good Time, one of the most high profile clubs on Clubhouse. An event with Elon Musk in that club broke the app!

Building safety into your network

In Clubhouse, you’re talking to strangers and you’re listening to strange conversations. There have been reports of trolling and harassment so Drew advises being safe by not allowing random people to speak in your rooms or letting them be moderators.  

Build your brand audio strategy 

Other social networks are already taking on Clubhouse. Twitter Spaces is live and Facebook is rumoured to be building an audio product.  

“A wider brand audio strategy on audio is something I would absolutely recommend you start considering if you think Clubhouse is interesting for you,” Drew says.

Think about why your audience would want to engage using audio and harness influencers across Clubhouse. 

Clubs and people to follow on Clubhouse

Drew Benvie runs ‘Trending’ which has a room discussing the latest social media trends every Tuesday and Thursday at 11am GMT.

He also recommends ‘9am in London’ created by Abraxas Higgins (@abraxas), one of the most followed UK Clubhouse users. His club hosts a daily “no agenda” room at 9am GMT. 

You can follow Drew on Clubhouse at @drewbenvie and members of the Bristol Creative Industries team, Alli Nicholas, Dan Martin and Chris Thurling, at @allinicholas, @dan_martin and @christhurling. 

If you’re a Bristol Creative Industries member who’s on Clubhouse, let us know by following us or sending us a tweet.

Adopting the right mindset is critical to success

With less than a decade left to achieve Vision 2030, many organisations in the KSA region have successfully embarked on the journey to digital transformation. This is especially true when it comes to internal operations, streamlining workflows and taking administrative tasks online.

Some, though, will have found the task of transforming their marketing functions much more challenging.

The reason? Internal, administrative processes are fundamentally different to marketing tasks, and will require a different mindset to succeed.

Why digital marketing transformation is different

Internal processes are typically clearly defined, as are the roles of users. When it comes to digitalisation, the objective is to automate repetitive administrative tasks providing greater efficiency and transparency. For many internal operations, the IT environment is well-defined, and the success of moving away from legacy processes to new software, programs or processes relies simply on ensuring their robust, secure implementation.

In these circumstances, transformation projects can involve long development cycles and large capital budgets, and traditional IT project management frameworks are often appropriate.

But compare this with the role of marketing. Just as with other internal processes, any new technology needs to enable your team to efficiently operate at scale and to integrate securely with your CRM and ERP systems. But here the similarity ends.

Understanding marketing’s focus

Marketing technology connects your team to a constantly evolving audience with developing needs and preferences, and a fast-moving, innovative technology landscape where today’s new attractions quickly become old news.

Your marketing team’s focus is on optimising your commercial impact across all points in the customer journey. They rely on multiple digital channels, new media techniques and real-time data to connect with their audience and outpace the competition.

In short, speed and accuracy are of the essence, and your team needs to operate consistently and efficiently at scale.

You need the foundations of a good marketing automation system. But in the fast-moving world of marketing, the ability to innovate, test and learn is vital for competitive advantage.

Given these drivers, applying a traditional, large-scale IT approach to marketing digital transformation is doomed to failure. In fact, the stories of organisations who’ve tried and failed are widely publicised. For those still battling on, by the time their project is complete the media landscape and their audience will have moved on, with more nimble competitors steps ahead alongside them.

Adopting a marketing mindset

Marketing transformation can’t be viewed as a capital project with a start and end date. It requires a framework environment to enable a constant state of innovation, enabled by minimum viable products (MVPs), deployed in test-and-learn sprints.

It might sound counter-intuitive, but the framework anticipates and accepts a certain level of failure. However, it also ensures you integrate successful innovations to create an evolving, interoperable, open ecosystem over time.

So how does it work?

Every development is planned, managed and measured by its potential and actual impact on Return-On-Investment (ROI).

Mapping the mindset to the process

Discovery and planning are vital parts of the marketing transformation process. They create the vision and framework for everything you do.

While it would be a mistake to adopt small innovation sprints at the expense of thinking big, with your vision and framework in place, you can then narrow your focus down to a few key marketing processes.

By assessing the points in the customer journey that will produce the greatest commercial impact, whether through efficiency or improved customer acquisition and retention, you can create a prioritised roadmap of development sprints.

Avoiding perfectionism (the enemy of innovation)

It’s at this point that many projects falter.

Once you’ve prioritised your starting innovations, there’s no doubt you’ll come across a number of cases where your system needs full integration and complete end-to-end interoperability to work optimally.

Resist the temptation to achieve the perfect system!

Instead, you need to focus on the minimum viable product (MVP) you need to test the innovation and measure its ROI.

The MVP approach may well require additional manual processes to start with, but it will put your innovation in the hands of your users quicker, and prove (or disprove) its commercial return against a smaller investment.

Conclusion

The push for modernisation from Vision 2030 is a bold, ambitious aim. To achieve it, marketing must have a clear vision for what the ultimate customer journey looks like, and how technology can facilitate it.

Success doesn’t rely on a large capital budget to create the ultimate, perfect machine: It lies in an agile framework, enabling a constant state of ‘test-and-learn’ innovation. An attitude which champions flexibility, evolution and growth is key, as is a commitment to innovation and a focus on ROI.

This shift in mindset can often be the biggest cultural challenge for an organisation to overcome. That’s why at Proctors, we work closely with our clients across the KSA region – and the world – helping them to achieve success and avoid the pitfalls which cause stalled or failed digital marketing transformation initiatives.

Get in touch with us and let’s talk about how we can innovate your marketing strategy.

One of the highly recognised awards in our industry are the annual UK Search Awards.

We were nominated a few years ago we felt a little overwhelmed when we sat in a room of well known brands competing to win.

At the end of 2020 we were quietly confident that our results for selling holidays in a Pandemic with our client, Aria Resorts would be a pretty strong entry in the Best Use of Search category.

And, well we did and…. [drum roll] Won Best Use of Search! Well done Launch Online.

“The results from Launch Online have been nothing short of staggering – Launch has exceeded our already high targets, and helped us deliver record breaking results. These results were achieved during unprecedented times, but they are what the team strives to deliver every day.” Aria Resorts

Dr Matthew Freeman, Reader in Multiplatform Media at Bath Spa University, has founded Immersive Promotion Design Ltd., a new marketing consultancy for the world of Extended Reality. It supports Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) businesses to better communicate with their audiences about the magic of immersive content. 

The company builds on sector-development research funded by StoryFutures Academy and Bristol+Bath Creative R+D, and brings together expertise from the BBC VR Hub, Limina Immersive, StoryCentral, Raucous, Bath Spa University and beyond. Last year the team partnered with The National Gallery, Anagram and Studio McGuire to build research-led and audience-tested promotional campaigns for live VR and AR experiences. This led to the creation of new promotional strategies, prototypes, industry bibles and teaching resources for how immersive experiences can be better marketed to today’s audiences.

Talking about Immersive Promotion Design’s success so far, Matthew said: “Many people have recognised the enormous potential of immersive technologies like virtual and augmented reality to transform the creative industries as we know them. Up until now, however, the immersive sector has struggled to reach bigger, more mainstream audiences – the kinds of people used to streaming Netflix but not yet interested in VR headsets.

“The challenge is obvious: How do you communicate the magic of being in a VR experience via social media, posters and trailers? Immersive Promotion Design Ltd. provides a step towards establishing a new promotional language for VR and AR, opening the door to a bigger, more diverse immersive audience. We are very excited to see where this journey takes us.” 

Visit www.immersivepromotion.com to find out more.