Showing posts tagged with: marketing
Happy New Year! Now is the perfect time to start thinking of resolutions to help advance your career in marketing. As the industry continues to rapidly evolve and expand, setting goals for yourself can help you stay ahead of the competition and achieve the success you desire. Here are some inspiring resolutions that marketing professionals can set for themselves in 2023.
Top 3 New Year's Resolutions for Marketing Professionals in 2023: Expand Your Network
Having a strong network of connections is essential in the marketing world. Making new connections can help you gain access to knowledge and resources that you wouldn't otherwise have. Make a resolution to attend industry events and workshops, join networking groups, and reach out to other marketing professionals whether that is online or in person!
Stay Up-to-Date on Industry Trends
The marketing industry is constantly in flux, with new technologies and trends emerging on a daily basis. Staying up-to-date on the latest advancements in the industry can help you stay ahead of the curve and be more effective in your daily work. Make a resolution to set aside some time each week to research the latest industry news and trends. A major trend for 2023 seems to be the importance of short 'snackable' video content. 'Gen Z' are the first generation to have grown up with the internet through their entire lives. Dynamic digital content is more important than ever to keep users engaged! 2023 will require expert strategy and focus, read more from Google experts in this interesting article on 2023 trends.
Focus on Self-Improvement: Upskilling
As mentioned above, it’s important to stay current on the latest techniques and strategies. The best way to keep up in the fast world of digital marketing is to dedicate time each week to research and study. Make a resolution to focus on self-improvement and invest in yourself. Take an online course, read industry publications, and attend seminars and webinars to stay up-to-date on the latest trends and strategies. Stay accountable by scheduling 30+ minutes a week on your calendar that’s dedicated to industry research. Take this time to read industry newsletters, or listen to industry podcasts to see keep up with the latest marketing innovations. Check out our previous blog post Upskilling: What Is It And Why It Is Important For Me
Realistic And Achievable New Years Resolutions
The new year is the perfect time to set resolutions that will help you reach your goals and become a better marketing professional. Make your resolutions to stay up-to-date on industry trends, expand your network, and focus on self-improvement. With these resolutions, you'll be sure to have a successful 2023 in the marketing world. As always, Dotgap are on hand to help you find your next job and progress your career in digital media. Get in touch today for more information.
The incoming cost of living crisis is set to be a bigger threat to businesses than the pandemic. Rising energy, food prices, petrol and the highest inflation in more than 40 years are affecting all of us in some way. When it comes to business, the marketing budget is often one of the first to be cut when an economic downturn hits. To those in the industry, this is very frustrating. Marketing is often seen as a discretionary expense, difficult to track and justify especially when a particularly good marketing strategy and expenditure is likely to be quite high.
This way of thinking is outdated and ultimately flawed. If businesses can keep marketing sustained during a recession, there are opportunities for brand growth during and after the economic downturn. This is good news for marketers.
Cost of Living Increases Force Businesses To Lower Budgets
The biggest challenge for all marketing businesses over the next few months will be brands cutting their marketing spend. There are many factors at play here, including a government campaign earlier in the year to ask brands to cut their marketing expenditure. It is well known that consumers believe cutting marketing costs is the best thing to do when face with a crisis. The government directive played up to this. What is for sure is that consumers believe that cutting marketing expenditure to drive prices down is exactly what brands should be doing. Obviously, this could have a huge impact on marketers.
Customer Confidence Crisis
As we head further into the cost-of-living crisis, customers perceptions of their own financial situations are worsening. The lower the level of consumer confidence, the less likely people are to spend money on non-essential items. This leads to a dip in economic activity and when people begin to be more careful in spending, the resulting drop in sales creates a drop in advertising ROI compared to before. This is why bosses look at marketing and advertising as the first place to cut back spend. Marketers should both be investing carefully in their own brands, and advising their clients to do the same.What Can Businesses Do? 
Businesses should be looking at reviewing all their spending during a recession. But when it comes to advertising and marketing, drastic cuts aren't the answer. You should look at filling gaps in the ad market rather than dropping out of it. When other businesses cut spend entirely, the whole market becomes less competitive leaving you ad platform space to fill!
- Reallocating your spend in this way means you can increase the return on investment by using platforms likely to give you better results
- If you aren't targeting your recession marketing, you are wasting money
- Optimising PPC and paid campaigns are an excellent way to get measurable results
- Paid search campaigns help you target customers who've already started the buying journey (more likely to buy!)
- By using programmatic advertising, you can make this easier
Recession Can Be Managed With Good Marketing
Historically, businesses that continued to invest in their advertising saw more growth than those who didn't. Keeping up regular communication shows genuine interest and care for your clients. It also strengthens client connection. With digital marketing, there is also an expectation that a brand should share its purpose clearly, and include strong social responsibility communications to clients and employees.- Build new strategies
- Think outside of the box
- Invest in ideas that will provide the lifeline your business need
Our last blog post talked about diversity and why it is so important. This week we are diving into how you can improve your diversity through clever recruiting.
Having different perspectives and backgrounds in your team will contribute to new and more diverse ideas. This helps to drive innovation in your company. The development of a diversity recruitment strategy is one way to do this. On top of this, it is our belief that all companies should be striving for diversity regardless of business benefits. Building teams from qualified candidates regardless of their gender, orientation, race, religion, socioeconomic background, or disability is long overdue, and a step toward true equality in the workplace.
We recommend doing a diversity audit initially to see where you need to focus your efforts. You will probably find your HR department holds a lot of relevant information. However, an anonymous survey can be an invaluable tool for collecting information on diversity.
Let your employees know you are working to improve your diversity and need their help to build a diversity recruitment strategy. You can quickly and easily create anonymous online surveys using tools such as SurveyMonkey.
Spend time Auditing Job Ads
As an extension of the diversity audit of your company as a whole, you should spend time doing an audit of your previous job advertisements. Two main areas to consider are:- Language use: It is important to find ways to be more inclusive in your language to appeal to candidates from different backgrounds. Many advertisements have language geared toward a certain demographic which inadvertently excludes others.
- Qualification criteria: Consider less focus on specific degrees or schools and instead, concentrate on competencies. For example, critical thinking, or the ability to work as part of a diverse team.
Reduce Unconscious Bias with Blind Recruiting
Blind hiring allows you to gear all your vacancies toward unbiased processes from the very start of your recruitment process. By intentionally removing any details that can give the reader insight into the applicant's background, you can screen the applications on job-related issues only thereby reducing bias. CVs are edited to include only skills, and job-relevant experience and abilities. For example, age bias can be avoided by removing graduation dates and dates of previous employment and years of experience (as long as they are not relevant). All you need to include is what type of qualifications candidates have and how they rate themselves in the skills you set out in your advert. Try asking for them to rate experience as basic, intermediate, or expert for example. You could use screening tests to help remove unconscious bias like geographic, education, affinity or gender biases.
Agencies Can Help Improve Your Diversity
Another thing you need is a diverse talent pool to source candidates from. Focussing on only the sources that you know best can result in a talent pool of similar candidates and a lack of diversity. So, how can you make sure you are casting the net as wide as possible?- Consider using a recruitment agency. With their own pool of people each with their own candidates sing an agency can really help you with your outreach.
- Source your candidates from a variety of different places.
- Think about including internships to candidates from specific backgrounds.
Use Your Existing Employees' Networks
Try reaching out to some of the employees on your team who might be part of the demographic you are looking to hire. You can encourage them to share job advertisements with their networks and make sure you support them and provide them with the tools to promote your company properly. This approach is great for company culture and makes employees and candidates feel valued. Creating a diverse referral program is a great way to boost your diversity recruitment strategy.
There’s No Reason You Can't Improve Your Diversity
In short, there is no excuse. From both a business perspective and a moral one you need to be taking steps to make sure you have a diverse and inclusive working environment. As a creative agency it can propel your innovation and problem solving to new heights as well as making you and your product more relatable. Don't fall behind, get ahead of the pack and start today.
The world of PPC marketing is always changing and evolving. This allows pay per click advertising to constantly improve, but it is important for digital marketers to keep up with these trends. After all, these trends allow marketers to deliver more effective campaigns. But what trends can you expect to see this year? Here are six PPC trends to look out for in 2022.
1. PPC Trends To Look Out For In 2022: First-Party Data
Third party data used to be an essential metric for most digital marketers, but this is starting to change. Google recently announced that they would be phasing out third party cookies (most will be removed in 2023), but that doesn’t mean there won’t be analytics. Instead Google will be prioritising first party cookies, which can be used to create effective PPC campaigns.2. Better Segmentation
Targeting specific audiences has always been a big part of PPC advertising, but improved segmentation is making this type of advertising even more effective. Audience segmentation is possible through most newsletter services, and it is now becoming a part of social media advertising. This helps marketers to create more effective marketing campaigns across a range of platforms.3. New Advert Formats
New adverts formats are constantly popping up. Five years ago image advertising was extremely popular and video advertising was very rare online, but now video adverts are equally as popular. So you can expect to see more video advert formats in 2022 – and it is also possible new types of adverts will become more popular. For instance, audio only adverts may become more mainstream.4. Responsive Search Advert
Do you use responsive search adverts (AKA RSAs) in your PPC marketing campaigns? If you haven’t, now is the time to start. Responsive search adverts combine ad copy and images to create different ads for different target audiences, and this can significantly boost the effectiveness of your marketing campaign.5. Pulling It Back
Lots of small businesses experienced financial uncertainly over the last two years, and this will likely affect their advertising efforts in 2022. Many businesses will have a stripped back marketing budget, so campaigns may be more basic and simpler. This means that many digital marketers will be creating low-cost campaigns over the next year.6. Unexpected Trends
It is impossible to predict every PPC trend for 2022, so expect the unexpected. After all, PPC marketing is always changing! The most successful marketers understand this, so they will try to be adaptable, flexible and open minded.
Digital marketing is one of the best ways to advertise your business – but that doesn’t mean that every campaign will be a success. Some business owners poorly manage their marketing efforts, and this means that certain campaigns can end up being a waste of money. Thankfully this is avoidable; you just need a results-driven marketing strategy. Here’s how to create a successful results-driven marketing strategy.
1. Define Your Business And Your Goals
The first thing that you need to do is define your business and your goals. Write down a brief summary of your business and the services you provide, and then write down your current goals for the company. Maybe you want more loyal customers, or maybe you want to expand to a new market – either way, writing this down will make it much easier for you to create a clear marketing strategy.2. Create A Buyer Persona
Next you should create a buyer persona for the people you want to target. Ask yourself these questions; where do they live? How old are they? What gender are they? Do they have interests and passions? What do they value? What needs do they have that you can help with? Answering these questions will make it easier for you to create a high-quality campaign that actually appeals to your target audience.3. Set Clear Expectations
Now is the time to set clear expectations for your campaign. Use analytics to track your general website and social media engagement, and then review previous campaigns to find out how successful they were. This will help you to set realistic, attainable goals for your current campaign. For instance, if you average 50 sales a week and previous campaigns have increased sales by 5%, you will understand that it is probably unrealistic to expect a 200% increase in sales from your next campaign!4. Set Lead Generation Tactics
There are lots of different forms of lead generation. Some of the most popular include; Content marketing (blog posts). Email marketing (newsletters). Social media marketing. Search Engine Optimisation. Paid search (PPC). Networking events. In person marketing (posting flyers, handing out flyers). Remember that the world of digital marketing is always changing, so you may want to consider trying new lead generation tactics for optimum success.5. Check Out The Competition
You may also want to check out your competition to see how they market their products (especially if they are more successful than you. Ask yourself these questions; What lead generation tactics do they use? What does their newsletter look like? Do they have a blog? If so, what do they blog about? What is their unique selling point? Why are their customers loyal to them? This will make it easier for you to refine your marketing strategy.6. Track Your Campaign
Finally it is important to track your campaign. There are lots of ways to do this; you can look at the overall sales revenue since the campaign started, or you can look at costs per lead. Over popular options include online marketing ROI, overall conversion rate, social media traffic, lead to customer conversation rate and traffic to lead ratio. This will show you which parts of your campaign were successful (and which were not!).
The digital marketing industry is always changing. Every year new trends emerge, and some of these trends completely transform the digital marketing landscape. So if you work in digital marketing, you may want to keep up with current and emerging trends. Here are five digital marketing trends you can expect to see in 2022.
1. Digital Marketing Trends You Can Expect To See In 2022: Multichannel Marketing
In the past digital marketers would only use one or two channels for marketing (such as a website and an email newsletter), but in modern times multichannel marketing is far more effective. Most digital marketers use a wide range of platforms to advertise, including a website, a newsletter, a blog, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tiktok and LinkedIn. This can feel overwhelming, but an integrated approach tends to reach far more people, so campaigns tend to be much more successful.2. AI Digital Marketing
AI technology grows more popular with every passing year, and 2022 will be no different. More and more marketing techniques (such as analytic tools) are being automated. In fact, AI can now even provide marketers with improved keyword suggestions! This tends to improve overall marketing efforts, so it is important for digital marketers to embrace AI technology if they want their career to thrive.4. Chatbots
Voice activated support (such as Alexa or Google assistant) grow in popularity every month, and now many websites have a handy chatbot that can answer user queries. This technology is proving to be very successful for a few reasons; it automates customer service, and it improves overall website efficiency for users. This is because the chatbot can answer queries 24/7, so people never have to wait long for a response.4. Mobile First Digital Marketing
More users than ever before are using mobile phones to get online. In fact, recently mobile users overtook laptop users for the first time! For this reason it is important to prioritise mobile first digital marketing. All campaigns should be fully optimised for both Apple and Android devices, so make sure you only use responsive, mobile-friendly content in your campaigns.5. Inclusivity
The final digital marketing trend you can expect to see more of in 2022 is inclusivity. More and more digital marketing campaigns are focused on making people feel included and welcome, and this benefits both the advertiser and the audience. Audience members feel like they are cared for, and research has found that inclusive campaigns have increased sales and customer engagement. So if you want to improve the success of your campaigns in 2022, focus on inclusivity!
When it comes to small business marketing, the internet is one of the most successful avenues - and yet many small business owners avoid hiring a digital marketing employee. This could be due to a few reasons; maybe they have a tight budget, or maybe they don’t think that digital marketing is worth spending money on. Either way, this can cause a big problem. Here are four reasons why every business needs a digital marketing employee.
1. Why Every Business Needs A Digital Marketing Employee: It Will Expand Your Reach
There are over three billion people using social media, which accounts for nearly 40% of the world’s population (yes, really!). As so many people are now using social media on a daily basis, it is easy to reach a wide range of potential customers you would never connect with without digital marketing. With just a few strategic social media and blog posts you can connect with thousands of new people, helping to expand your reach.2. You Will Get Advanced Analytics
A good digital marketing employee will track the progress of their campaigns with advanced analytics (such as Google Analytics, Instagram Business Insights or Open Web Analytics). This will show them which campaigns are succeeding and which campaigns aren’t, so they will be able to alter future campaigns for greater success. This means that you will keep getting better and better results from your digital marketing campaigns. See our digital marketing jobs here.3. It Is Cost Effective
Research has found that digital marketing is one of the most cost effective kinds of marketing, especially when compared with traditional marketing (such as print or TV). One of the best examples of this is PPC advertising (pay per click advertising), as you will only pay once a user clicks on the advert. This will improve your ROI (return on investment), which is ideal for small businesses with a tight budget.4. Digital Marketing Is Flexible
Another great thing about digital marketing is how flexible it is. There are so many different techniques and ways to reach your desired target audience; you could start an email marketing campaign, you could pay for a Facebook advert, or you could sponsor a YouTube or Instagram influencer. There are so many options; you just need a digital marketing employee to help you achieve your goals. Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, click here to check out more of our blog posts.
Do you want to stay ahead of the digital marketing curve? Do you want to further your career? If so, it could be beneficial to check out a digital marketing podcast in your free time. Digital marketing podcasts are useful, fun and free, and listening to just one a week could help you to advance your career. However there are lots of digital marketing podcasts out there, so it can be difficult to decide which one to listen to. Thankfully we are here to help; here are 5 interesting digital marketing podcasts that could further your career.
1. 5 Interesting Digital Marketing Podcasts That Could Further Your Career: Marketing School with Neil Paten & Eric Siu
Neil Paten is well-known in the marketing world for co-founding global companies such as CrazyEgg and QuickSprout, as well as his successful marketing website NeilPatel.com. His podcast features co-host Eric Siu, who is also a marketing expert, and every podcast has useful, relevant marketing advice for 2021. The podcasts are also fairly short, so you can easily listen them during a work-out or a commute.2. Social Media Examiner Podcast
The Social Media Examiner is a fairly well-known marketing website, and they recently started a podcast with the same name. There are two episodes per week that are around 40 minutes long, and every podcast comes with useful tips and tricks to help with digital and social media marketing. There are also interviews from industry professionals, as well as digital marketing success stories.3. Online Marketing Made Easy
Online Marketing Made Easy is a useful podcast hosted by Amy Porterfield that makes marketing simple. Every episode ends with a clear call to action to help you improve your digital marketing campaigns. We think that this podcast is very inspiring, and the call to action at the end will definitely help to motivate you!4. The GaryVee Audio Experience
Gary Vaynerchuk (who is probably better known as Gary Vee) is a digital marketing pro, and every episode of his podcast comes with actionable, practical advice. He mostly covers social media marketing, online marketing and entrepreneurship. So if you are a business owner or marketing manager, this podcast could be perfect for you. One of the best things about the GaryVee Audio Experience is the quality of the advice. He is an expert in his field, and it would cost hundreds to hire him for an hour of consultancy – but this podcast you can discover valuable insights for free!5. Marketing Over Coffee
Marketing Over Coffee is a fun, casual podcast that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Each episode is only around 20 minutes long, so it is very easy to listen to one while you’re on the go, and hosts John Wall and Christopher Penn are interesting and insightful. The podcast covers SEO marketing, social media marketing, email marketing and copywriting, so it is ideal for bloggers, online marketers and website owners.
The world of digital marketing is constantly evolving and changing, so if you want to work in the industry it can be beneficial to keep up-to-date with the latest trends. This is especially true if you are looking for a new job, as the skills that landed you your last job may no longer be as relevant. Of course this doesn’t mean that you won’t be able to find new work; it just means that you may need to brush up on some skills. Here are four digital marketing skills that will help your career to thrive.