Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

As digital communication continues to explode more organizations are recognizing its importance within the marketing mix. In order to develop strategy and allocate resources business leaders need to understand the effectiveness of their existing digital initiatives. A great way to do this is to conduct a digital audit – a study of your brand’s digital presence (on its own and in relation to your competitor set) across six key areas: Reach, Architecture, Content, Conversion, Integration and Measurement.

Before launching the digital audit it’s important to establish basic criteria with respect to rating status, structure and performance. To help guide next steps set up a simple decision filter that will aid in prioritizing your findings. One simple way to do this is to assign a color coding systems as follows...

Here’s a specific example of how we are leveraging our attendance at a conference to create value and interest in our current and potential clients.

Our company focuses upon Cybersecurity, and there is a conference called BlackHat that has become a mecca for hackers, hackivists, and those who are involved in the security industry. Many of our customers are under budget constraints and can’t attend conferences,

so while going to training and seminars at the conference this year our security engineers will be leveraging social media to make sure that our customers and followers can virtually gain access to the latest trends and exploits....

Recent research from the Centre for Retail Research (CRR) predicts that one in five retail stores on the high street will close in the next five years – in addition to the ongoing shop vacancy rate of 14.1%. But there's signs that the future doesn't need to be all about reducing store or staff numbers to boost finances.

Many retailers are adapting their model to shoppers’ changing habits and desires - taking advantage of technology to improve the instore experience and improve profitability. In doing so, they may be inadvertently reshaping the role of bricks and mortar shops....

Instead of relying on cheap spam emails, marketers need to embrace strategies that really work....

Digital's ROI is better than the ROI on analog marketing for one reason: Because it is cheaper. Cheaper equals more emails, which in turn equals more noise. Nearly 145 billion emails are sent daily and, of that, 94 billion is spam. Banner ads, pop ups, and other forms of intrusion marketing are growing and becoming more invasive. This is only going to get worse.

There are two opportunities to improve this. First, by focusing on the 'return' portion of the ROI equation, not just the investment, we can use the power of digital to be more effective, not just cheaper. Second, we need to fundamentally re-think digital marketing. Digital can both shrink the path to purchase — and in some cases it can eliminate or even reverse it....