Re:Think Innovation author Carla Johnson warns content marketers about brainstorming without doing anything to prime the work.

Omitting the critical preparation step, she says, prevents fresh inspiration. It can also lead to ideas that lack the proper audience focus, don’t align with your content strategy, and fall outside execution capabilities.

To help marketers avoid that trap, Carla developed an approach to generating valuable, viable innovation ideas. She calls it the Perpetual Innovation Process (PIP).

PIP shifts your team from their legacy thought patterns to surface novel ideas and manifests them into actionable marketing. It also builds a path around the pitfalls of traditional brainstorming.

Here’s what the process involves and how you can use it to bring more exciting, innovative ideas to market.

While 64% of marketers say they are as productive working from home as in the office, less than half have received any form of virtual training during lockdown.

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Lockdown has undoubtedly changed the way we work from in person pitches to Zoom calls but this hasn’t impacted productivity, with the majority of marketers (64%) noting that they have been as productive, if not more so, working from home.

Of the 500 UK brand marketers answering the fourth round of an exclusive survey conducted by Marketing Week and its sister title Econsultancy, nearly 59% also agree that remote working inevitably encroaches on work/life balance, despite the rise in productivity, with 61% admitting they work more hours when working from home.

Perhaps surprisingly given this, the majority of people (66%) don’t agree with the statement that they can’t wait to get back to the office. It will be good news then that that nearly half believe that even if Covid-19 is over remote working will be very common (48%) or somewhat common (35%).

The majority of marketers have not found remote working more challenging except when it comes to creative collaboration, With nearly half (45.5%) citing this as more challenging compared to the 31% who  said no change and 13.4% who found it easier.

In contrast, 53% found meetings were more productive online.

Despite these changes, most found not much difference between being at home and working in the office, with campaign coordination (50%), vendor and contract management (50%), communication with senior staff (38.5%) and accessing databases (67%) all experiencing the same levels of ease.

Even so, marketers would like to see more resources on both working from home and upskilling. Some 51% note they haven’t received extra resources on best practice, with just 23% offered it and 10.6% saying it is planned.

This is the same for virtual training (43.8%, with 35.2% offering it) and training about working remotely (41.3%).

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This appears to be a missed opportunity given that 33% think it is critical to  rapidly train the workforce to be effective at working remotely, while 41% deem it important.

This is the same when it comes to upskilling staff, with 55% thinking it is important and 26% critical to upskill workforces through virtual training and similarly for providing effective on-demand learning resources for remote workers (53% say it is important).

Marketers are split 47%/53% on whether their organisation has a clear theory on how its sector is going to evolve post-lockdown.

However, 84% do  think lockdown has emphasised the importance of digital transformation. A further 82% have found new ways of working they believe might help in the future, including new processes (65%), and product and service innovations (53%).

If you market your products and services across different countries, you likely encounter the discussion of global vs. local or standardization vs. localization. There is no one-size-fits-all answer. The delicate balances are dictated by:

 

  • products
  • organization structure
  • roles and division of responsibilities
  • management preference and budget allocation

 

If the products are heterogeneous, messaging and creative development of campaigns will naturally tend toward more customization. If the budget is more centralized, assets are likely to be managed at the corporate level. In addition, headcount, roles, and responsibilities can also influence the balance of global vs. local.

These days, more than ever, engagement is key to digital marketing. Algorithms reward engagement and interactions, audiences are more likely to see and respond to content based on engagement. If you’re not generating a level of interaction, you’re limiting your potential in a range of ways, especially on social media. 

I mean, it is called ‘social’ media for a reason. 

The same is also true for B2B organizations – according to a CMI report, 71% of B2B companies say that the main focus of their content marketing efforts is to generate engagement. 

 

By Judith O’Leary, managing director at Represent

 

According to Hubspot, 47% of buyers engage with 3-5 pieces of content before directly engaging with a company. What does this mean? It means that content is key to any digital marketing strategy. By having a clear approach to all aspects of your content creation, your business will be in a much stronger position when it comes to engaging and converting leads to customers.

By Helen Edwards, columnist at Marketing Week 

 

The best marketing practitioners develop strategies based on sound theory, but they are pragmatists when it comes to driving it through.

 

Two things make marketing difficult: theory and practice. Of the disciplines around the boardroom table it can be the stickiest in study and the thorniest in application.

What makes marketing theory so tormenting to grapple with is its diffuse and protean contextual backdrop: the swirling chaos of markets combined with mercurial human behaviour. Where are the enduring truths?

“It is not the strongest  of the species that survives, nor the most inteligent, but the one most responsive to change’  Attributed to Charles Darwin

Marketing is not a complicated subject but there is still confusion about what it is or isn’t. Successful marketing relies on a combination of a LONG-TERM STRATEGY and SHORT-TERM ACTION PLANS. To achieve this, one must research evaluate and establish the goals ( or objectives) and determine which activities can be used to achieve them : these are marketing tactics… F. Reynolds GREAT MARKETING

According to the Gartner Group, 80 percent of your future profits will come from just 20 percent of your existing customers. That means the revenue sources you’ve been trying to find are most likely sitting right under your nose, waiting to be nurtured and cultivated. Customer retention and customer acquisition don’t have to be two parallel lines that never meet. In fact, when done right, customer retention campaigns can actually bring in new business. How? Through word-of-mouth and referrals, of course.

 

A study showed that satisfied customers tell nine other people about their positive experience, while dissatisfied customers are likely to talk about their negative experience with 22 other people. These numbers tell us that customers talk, and they talk more if they’ve been treated badly.

CMO, by Adobe

The design heats up in subtlety : typography, colors and visuals warm hearts…

The colors in 2014 are innovative because we are talking about new neutral and soft panoply of colors, full of oxygen in contrast to the brands that are to the point with bold and warm color schemes.

Others have followed the recommendations of Pantone who said “Radiant Orchid” as the color of the year. (Cadbury was the first to renew its packs in that direction).

Webdesign, besides the dish, the blocks, the parallax scrolling on sites that have already invaded our screens, the trend is to use typography ultraflat design and handwritten condensed. Ex: “Open“, “Transat“, “Duase” The buttons are big trends to simplify the “call to action” in the context of responsive design. The visuals are a priority and the quality of our photos determines the perceived value of your site.

Les Echos